Huon

The apocryphal Acts of John are not the Acts of the Apostles.

Toto

It is an English idiom. Pete writes as if being placed on the Index was a great achievement, like "making" the team or the honor roll.

Huon

Thank you, Toto.

mountainman

Dear Huon,

The apocryphal Acts of John are not the Acts of the Apostles - this is certainly the case however we need to understand that there must exist some relationship between these two texts, and in general between the canonical literature and the non canonical literature. In order to explain the ancient historical truth of christian origns one will need to explain not only the canon and its history, but also the non canonical (the new testament apochryphal corpus of literature) as well --- at the one and the same time.

The canon and the apochrypha are two sides of the one coin - they are heavily inter-dependent and obvious present narratives, sayings and events of the one and the same series of characters. The state of the nation at the moment is that we are scrutinising and discussing the canonical side of the coin, because that has been overwealmingly the most conspicuous and in-your-face since day one (whenever that may have been in an ancient historical sense). When is the picture to be balanced? When are we to examine the whole evidence in an integrated sense?

Thankyou for raising this issue.
Best wishes,



Pete

mountainman

Dear Toto and Huon,

Sorry about any unclarity here. The fact that Gibbon's name was placed on the Librorum Prohibitorum in respect of his publication in ancient history concerning the rise and fall of the Roman empire is significant. The truth hurts those who would have things otherwise. Fortunately this evil evil conconction of (originally) Constantine's (yes - he must have had a hit list of forbidden books, and we know people may have been executed for the possession of these books) ceased operation in the year 1966.

Best wishes


Pete

Huon

The apocryphal Acts of John (son of Zebedee) contain this curious detail :
This naïve story belongs to what is called Docetism (dokesis, "appearance" or "semblance") by the Catholics. In France, a council of Orléans in 1022 burnt thirteen Cathars for denying the reality of Christ’s life and death. I doubt that Eusebius of Caesarea could have written (or authorized) this twaddle.

mountainman

Dear Huon,

We have discussed the term "docetic belief" before as a euphemism for "belief of a fictional jesus". IMO by introducing these so-called docetists Eusebius and his continuators thereby were able to class anyone who actually though that Jesus was fictional, into a class of authodox christian heretics. Your cite above only confirms this reading,

My thesis has it that the author of this NT apochryphal text was not Eusebius but was a satirist of the canon, and perhaps Arius of Alexandria. You appear to be compelled to call this "twaddle", and my response is to ask you whether you think that the twaddle is actually satire, written by an author who was a non-christian satirist of the authority of the canon. Is this a literary attempt to make a joke. to make fun of, to ridicule, to jest at, to hold up for laughter, etc the virgin birth of Clark Jesus Kent at Krypton, a small suburb of Nazaron, in the outer Vega cluster?

I will repeat that I think that it will be determined and verified by future scholarship that the entire corpus of the new testament literary is perceivable to be characterised by satire, and/or parody and/or burlesque, and that it (the entire corpus of NT apochrypha) was authored after the year 324 CE as a polemical political seditious act directed against the authority of Constantine and his new Roman testament for and on behalf of the new Universal church that he had established and laid the foundations of at Nicaea.

I leave it as an open challenge for anyone in this forum to pick any of the NT apochrypha (even at random) -- particularly the non canonical Acts -- and if we were to go through the text, we would be able to identify myriads of these "strikingly twaddlesome references", and the signature of satire. April Deconnick has already covered this base with the Gospel of Judas. I challenge you to name your text (with the exceptions of simple lists of sayings without an integrated narrative, such as gThomas).


Best wishes,


Pete

patcleaver

There aren't any. We do not have any writings of Celsius. We have writings allegedly by Origin that claim that Celsius wrote things. There are lots of similar writings allegedly by Origin that are known forgeries.

There are documents allegedly written by Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny, that mention Christians or Crestians, but they might be interpolations or forgeries or they might really be about some other group (such as Essenes) who were not followers of Jesus of Nazareth.

There are no non-Christian documents that mention Christians or any Christian documents that are C14 dated before 325 CE except the Gospel of Judas which is C14 dated 290 +- 60 years.

mountainman

Arnaldo Momigliano makes the comment that Eusebius may possibly have been of Jewish descent.

Huon

This is an optimistic thesis. One could also consider the author of Acts of John as a sort of moron writing seriously, with his own bunch of silly theories about JC. (The "official" theories of the canon are not really better, IMO, of course).

The jewish story about JC son of Panthera is clearly a satire. And the jewish anti-christian origin of the story is clearly identified.

It is not the same situation with Acts of John.

And there is no religion centered on Clark Kent.