andrewcriddle

The author of Refutation of All Heresies describes his face-to-face arguments with Callistus and refers to Callistus as born about the same time as him. He might in theory be lying but he certainly claims to be a contemporary of Callistus.

(The surviving manuscript of the relevant part of Refutation of All Heresies is Parisinus Supplément grec 464, a 14th century manuscript now in Paris previously at Mount Athos.)

Andrew Criddle

avi

Thank you Jay. I appreciate your comments throughout this thread, very interesting.

I like your style, very encouraging, yet thoughtful. It is both positive, and stimulating. Fun to read, as always! Thanks again.

I do take issue, Jay, with your agreement here, with Andrew, on this question of Dr. Riley's opinion. I do not deny him his right to believe whatever he wishes, but, I do prefer data to opinions. Hippolytus' tract: Philosophumena, also known, perhaps more appropriately, as Refutation of all Heresies, in ten books, of which the first three are either entirely missing, or partly missing from the original Greek version, apparently still extant today.

In the middle of the 19th century, in 1842, books iv to x were found in a monastery. Where are they today, Jay? Don't you think it would be interesting to learn the date of authorship of these 7 manuscripts?

Here's an idea:
FIRST: let's find these seven Greek manuscripts;
THEN, let's inquire how the date of origin of these seven manuscripts was established, and by whom.

After we learn something about the raw material, then, we can line up, for or against Dr. Riley's hypotheses. He is using arguments based upon Grammatical analysis, presumably based upon these seven books discovered in 1842, to conclude that Tertullian did or did not have a copy of Hippolytus' ten books, written in Latin or Greek.

Too much conjecture, too little data, for my taste:


I observe Eusebius' hand, in everything. How do we know, Jay, that the 7 books of Hippolytus, discovered in the monastery in 1842, were written by Hippolytus, and not by Eusebius?

avi

avi

Thank you for this Andrew, much appreciated.

OK, so, now I am beginning to see the light.

We are discussing Tertullian's analysis, based upon the supposition that he possessed a copy, in Greek, of Hippolytus' tract, Refutation of All Heresies, a collection in ten volumes, which supposedly summarizes the thoughts of Hippolytus' presumed mentor, "Irenaeus".

Thanks to Andrew, we now know that the seven extant Greek volumes representing Refutation of All Heresies, all in "excellent" Greek, originate from the 14th century.

Hmm.

Wow.

Andrew, do you think Tolstoy was present at the Battle for Moscow in 1812? Tolstoy certainly describes, vividly, many arguments, among various adversaries.....I confess, I no longer recall whether or not these disagreements were face to face, but at least some of them were sabre to sabre.

avi

andrewcriddle

Books iv to x survive in a single manuscript Parisinus Supplément grec 464, a 14th century manuscript now in Paris previously at Mount Athos. Book i, a short history of Greek philosophy, circulated separately and survives in several manuscripts. However, this book does not allude to Irenaeus.

Andrew Criddle

andrewcriddle

AFAIK no one is arguing that Tertullian had access to Hippolytus' work. Hippolytus quotes Irenaeus. Tertullian had access to Irenaeus and hence to a text which now survives in its original Greek mainly as quoted by Hippolytus.
War and Peace is fiction. Are you suggesting that Refutation of All Heresies is fictional. If so why ?

Andrew Criddle

avi

Thanks for asking, Andrew.

Yes, I believe it is entirely fictional, with a large cast of characters, not unlike War and Peace.

I chose War and Peace, because it refers, while a work of fiction, to real life people, and I suppose, though I do not know, but I imagine, that some of these characters in the Christian literature, may have been real people, too.

Paul is a good example. Was he real? I don't know.

Tertullian, another guy I don't know about....

Hippolytus, even more uncertain.

Irenaeus, the most mysterious.

We seek to learn and discover the truth, but, we may fail, for, perhaps, there is no truth, only fiction.

I am reminded of that mosaic, which we discussed earlier this year on the forum, ostensibly a mosaic representing JC, but actually a mosaic portraying Lord Constantine. The BBC was describing it as a portrayal of the saviour, himself. Strange, because the Jews, and from them, the Muslims, do not accept the notion of portrayal of famous persons. They prefer anonymity, especially for the most significant founders of the religious tradition.

That feature, anonymity, is in conflict with our Latin/Greek heritage, which seeks to label, and quantify, and identify every last thing in sight. The Jews (and therefore, the Muslims, and Christians) contrarily, prefer ethereal spirits, ghosts, demons, and things invisible, unknowable, and uncertain.

I don't like the spirit world, or the world of vampires, alchemy, demons, gremlins, and ghosts.

I like the world of clocks and chemistry and calculus. Mundane, profane, vulgar, visible, and viable, these are the attributes I prefer, rather than the ephemeral, imprecise, uncertain, and unclear......

Mystics, and schemers, and soothsayers, and priests of all denominations, with their hands out, and their pockets awaiting money, are not the sort of folks with whom I seek association.

That's why, in a nutshell, I describe the entire corpus of Christian literature as fiction.

avi

aa5874

IT cannot be said Hippolytus quotes Irenaeus when NO quotes can be found in "Refutation of ALL Heresies".

And further it can be shown that Hippolytus in "Refutation of All Heresies" CONTRADICTED Irenaeus in "Against Heresies"

This is an example of a MAJOR contradiction.

"Refutation of ALL Heresies"
In "Against Heresies" the writer under the name Irenaeus claimed Marcion used parts of gLuke and the Pauline writings.

"Against Heresies" 3. "Against Heresies"3 The writer called Hippolytus CONTRADICTED Irenaeus in "Refutation of ALL Heresies" 7.17.

It is CLEAR that the writer under the name Hippolytus used a source that CONTRADICTED Irenaeus and further in "Refutation of ALL Heresies" there are more details about so-called Heretics and far more Heretics that are NOT found in "Against Heresies.

It is mere propaganda that Hippolytus quoted Irenaeus.

No such quotes can be found.

Hippolytus CONTRADICTED Irenaeus.

mountainman

Hi avi and all others,

Divide and conquer.

Many people are now convinced that the referential integrity of the Canonical Christian literature is not conducive to any sensible ancient historical perspective and that we are dealing with a fiction of men rather than a truth of any separate god.

However many people who have not studied the non canonical "Christian literature" are unaware that the entire corpus of Christian literature has two very distinct sides - just like a coin. Christian currency has the canon (esp the "Gospels and Acts" as the heads, and the "Gnostic Gospels and Acts" as the tails.

The set of all the available evidence and the logic of the situation we find ourselves in is this:

1) At some LATE point in history the canonical books were authored AND published in Greek.
2) At some LATER subsequent point in history the non canonical books were authored and published in Greek then Coptic and Syriac.

The study of the "Gnostic Gospels and Acts" reveals that they were authored as popular fiction stories which cobbled together in various combinations and permutations the people and events of the Canonical Gospels and Acts, in much the same way as the canon was fabricated from the Greek LXX.

In the 21st century when National Geographic beat the Vatican's centuries old stranglehold to the ownership of the intellectual property rights in the newly discovered "Christian related literature", in this case the Gnostic Gospel of Judas, all reports mentioned two separate date estimates. The first given was usually the 21st century C14 citation of 280 CE (+/- 60 years) and the second given was usually the reference to Irenaeus, via Eusebius, in the 2nd (or 3rd) century.

We can separately question the appearance of the NT canon and the NT apocrypha in ancient history. Ignoring for the moment the NT canon, the reasons by which everyone here and elsewhere appear to be convinced that the Gnostic Gospels and Acts were not a product of the 4th century, is because of such references inserted into "Irenaeus", and subsequently, the possibility that we have some "early datable papyri fragments from Oxy".

Questioning the referential integrity of Irenaeus with respect to the ancient history of the Gnostic Gospels and Acts can be approached with a crowbar and the following fulcrum. What does it matter if Eusebius (via "Irenaeus") was lying and purposefully retrojecting in his "Church History" the literary battle between the faithful orthodox canon followers and the followers of the popular Gnostic HERETICAL renditions of the AUTHORIZED canon?

Divide and conquer.
Heads and tails came from the mint of the same epoch.
The tails has been C14 dated to the 4th century.
Heads = Constantine's Bible.
Tails = The Gnostic's (ie: the Gentile's) Mockumentary.



[GNOSTIC ONE LINER]


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DCHindley

Hi Jay,

Thanks for taking this in the direction of investigating historical conclusions rather than what normally goes on here.

From what I am gathering from a little Google research, the proposals for the date of the Latin translation are as follows:

Erasmus, the editor of the editio princeps of Latin Irenaeus (1526), apparently expressed no opinion about the date of translation of the Latin version of Irenaeus.

Joannes Ernestus Grabe published an edition of Irenaeus in 1702, which proposed that Tertullian quoted Irenaeus from the Latin translation. This opinion was confirmed by Réné Massuet, who re-edited Grabe's edition in 1710.

Theodore Zahn, in the article "Irenaeus" in Real-Encyklopädie (ed. Herzog. 1854-68), expressed the position that the age of the translation "needs renewed investigation. For the opinion of Grabe and Massuet that Tertullian already used it c. Valentinianos is disputable" (that English translation comes from F. R. Montgomery Hitchcock's book Irenaeus of Lugdunum: a study of his teaching).

Brooke Foss Westcott & Fenton John Anthony Hort, in The New Testament in the original Greek, vol 2, Introduction & Appendix (1881/1896), express their opinion as follows:

Were indeed Massuet's commonly accepted theory true, that the Latin version of Irenaeus was used by Tertullian, the biblical text followed by the translator [FWIW, this is the "western text" of codex Bezae] would take precedence of all other Old Latin texts in age. We are convinced however, not only by the internal character of this biblical text but by comparison of all the passages of Irenaeus borrowed in substance by Tertullian, that the Greek text alone of Irenaeus was known to him, and that the true date of the [Latin] translation is the fourth century. The inferior limit is fixed by the quotations made from it by Augustine about 421.

I am a little concerned about this, because W&H's Greek NT did not follow the western text at all, and I wonder if this dating is used to avoid a difficulty in diminishing the possible importance of the western text. For those who don't follow this kind of thing, the "western text" is a somewhat longer version of the Greek text of Acts and some other books, which is controversial for several reasons, because of whether the western text is an expansion of the traditional text, or the traditional text is a contraction of the western text.

R. A. Lipsius, in his article "Irenaeus" in the Dictionary of Christian Biography, (1911), bucks this trend of casting doubt on the possibility that Tertullian used the Latin translation, and says:

We possess it entire in the Latin version only, which, however, must have been made from the Greek original very soon after its composition, since the Latin was used by Tertullian some ten years after, in his tractate adv. Valentinianos. Its translator was a Celt (witness the barbarous Latinity); probably one of the clergy of Lyons. Most of the original work being now lost, the slavish literality of the translator imparts to his version a very high value. Many obscurities of expression, arising in part from a misunderstanding of the Greek idiom, admit an easy solution when translated back into Greek. Beside this Latin version, which appears to have soon superseded the Greek original in the Western church, there was a Syriac translation, of which numerous fragments are extant …

The article also expresses some info about date of composition:

Against Heresies was written in Gaul. (Irenaeus says so expressly, lib. i. praef. 3, cf. i. 13, 7. We follow Massuet's division of chapters.) The date of composition is determined iii. 3, 3, in which he speaks of Eleutherus as then twelfth in succession to the apostles on the episcopal chair of Rome (νῦν δωδεκάτῳ τόπῳ τὸν τῆς ἐπισκοπῆς ἀπὸ τῶν ἀποστόλων κατέχει κλῆρον Ἐλεύθερος). According to this, the third book was written at the earliest a.d. 174 or 175, at the latest a.d. 189 (cf. Chronologie der röm. Bischöfe, pp. 184 sqq.). The commencement and completion of the work were possibly some years apart, but we cannot put the date of bks. iv. and v. so late as the episcopate of Victor (189–198 or 199). We may tentatively assume 182, the mid-period of Eleutherus's episcopate, or (since the first two books alone appear to have been written immediately after each other—cf. the prefaces to bks. ii. and iii.–v.) we may propose from a.d. 180 to 185 as the date of the whole work. To assign a more exact date is hopeless. That Irenaeus wrote as bishop, and not earlier than 178 as presbyter, is by far most probable, though it cannot be drawn with absolute certainty from the words of the preface to bk. v. to which Massuet appeals.

Hort later wrote an article, "Did Tertullian use the Latin Irenaeus?" in Nouum Testamentum sancti Irenaei episcopi lugdunensis (ed. Wm Sanday, 1923), that defended his early 4th century dating.

DCH (back to work ...)

aa5874

One does NOT have to be a rocket scientist or scholar to SEE that the author called Tertullian USED a source that CONTRADICTED the author of "Against Heresies".

This is "Against Heresies" 3.3.3 It is CLEAR in "Against Heresies" that it was the APOSTLES, LINUS, ANACLETUS then CLEMENT.

Now this is in "Prescription Against Heretics"

So, according to this writer it was PETER then CLEMENT.

It is extremely CLEAR that the author called Tertullian USED a source that CONTRADICTED "Against Heresies"