patcleaver

Eusebius did not invent Christianity because Christianity was invented at the first Counsel of Constantinople 380-385.

Until the Nicene Creed of 381 was created and adopted, the core set of beliefs that Christian denominations use to define a Christian did not exist.

It is not reasonable to claim that anyone was a Christian before 381. There is no reason to believe that anyone believed all the things in the Nicene Creed of 381 until after the creed was written and people were forced to repeat it.

andrewcriddle

FWIW 0212 the fragmen from Dura-Europus is translated in Evidence of Tradition (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Theron as I've replaced the italics and plain text in Theron with square brackets for reconstructed text. It seems a clearly Christian document.

Andrew Criddle

spin

The evidence for this generalization? None.

Just the fact that it was a common christian trope and you've got no evidence that it was a common "pagan" theme.

Just that it is part of the christian tradition and you've got no evidence that it was a common "pagan" theme.

I guess that you can argue from silence for one of these issues, but you have four in conjunction, well five if we include the baptismal font. Ockham makes you a bloody mess.

I'm happy to recognize bias.

Did you look at the last page in the work which has the complete text in Greek? Did you look at the page that Ben C pointed interested parties to? Did you look at the transcription provided by Andrew Criddle in this thread? Answer to all is t hat you couldn't be bothered. As long as it wasn't stuck under your nose, you could ignore it.

Of course it is. You've got your eyes nailed shut. I'd have to jimmy them out first.

Next comes crap about the gospel of Judas, which contains the following gem:
Why are you talking about something you haven't had the decency to read? You were pointed to securely datable indications of christianity. You have attempted weasel them out of christianity first by conjuring up some unstated but as yet unknown religion that was responsible for the conjunction of the elements from the building in question from Dura Europos, second by not reading the text of the fragment found there. Now you change the topic.

So you also admit that the Dura evidence falsifies this Constantinian conspiracy. The theory is not a matter of attempting to fit data, but to explain away data.

The tendentious field of palaeography has simply been denied and ignored. When used properly it works from datable texts to provide rough estimations as to when scripts were used. The mountainman theory is that scribes around Eusebius were able to consciously forge scripts from earlier eras without any orthographic theory to back it up, though there would have been no reason to do so at the time. This rates a strong DOH! on the stupidity scale.

It involves creating fantasy scenarios for the literature which represents earlier communities living as christians in conflict with the environments and with other believers. What is the point of Basilides, Valentinus, Ptolemy and all those other heretical figures in this fantasy retrojection, when they are trying to invent a new state religion? Why is the pre-Eusebian Tertullian made to be the spokesman against the equally non-existent Marcion, when T. is portrayed as Montanist???

It involves creating religious tropes which we see are temporally specific. Messianism died in the ancient world with Shimeon Ben Kosiba in 135CE.

There are many other issues of data that need be explained away, but there is not one fact, not one that has been evinced in favour of this conspiracy theory -- oh, bar mountainman's awful blundering interpretations of what Julian said and his abuse of the arian controversy.

This hypothesis is as convincing as a restaurant selling beef soup by waving a cow's shank over the water.

When was the last time I responded to a post by mountainman?? When his conspiracy theory has been falsified a number of times, it seems quite vain to say, "yes, but let's look at some other aspect". It's like the man, being told that the bird he'd just sold was dead when sold, saying "beautiful plumage!"


spin

patcleaver

Thanks, Andrew
Yes it does sound Christian.

I thought Aramathea was a fictional city.
"Kingdom of God" is another fictional place.

"Joseph good righteous" sounds like a fictional name.
We never heard of this "disciple of Jesus"

from http://www.usp.nus.edu.sg/victorian/gender/salome.html

In Christian mythology, Salome was the daughter of Herodias and stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee in Palestine. Her infamy comes from causing St. John the Baptist's execution. The saint had condemned the marriage of Herodias and Herod Antipas, as Herodias was the divorced wife of Antipas's half brother Philip. Incensed, Herod imprisoned John, but feared to have the well-known prophet killed. Herodias, however, was not mollified by John's incarceration and pressed her daughter Salome to "seduce" her stepfather Herod with a dance, making him promise to give her whatever she wished. At her mother's behest, Salome thus asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Unwillingly, Herod did her bidding, and Salome brought the platter to her mother.

from http://net.bible.org/dictionary.php?...s&word=Zebedee

ZEBEDEE [SMITH] (my gift) (Greek form of Zabdi) a fisherman of Galilee, the father of the apostles James the Great and John (Matthew 4:21) and the husband of Salome. (Matthew 27:56; Mark 15:40) He probably lived either at Bethsaida or in its immediate neighborhood. It has been inferred from the mention of his "hired servants," (Mark 1:20) and from the acquaintance between the apostle John and Annas the high priest, (John 18:15) that the family of Zebedee were in easy circumstances. comp. (John 19:27) although not above manual labor. (Matthew 4:21) He appears only twice in the Gospel narrative, namely, in (Matthew 4:21,22; Mark 1:19,20) where he is seen in his boat with his two sons mending their nets.

from http://net.bible.org/dictionary.php?word=salome

SALOME [SMITH] (peaceful). 1. The wife of Zebedee, (Matthew 27:56; Mark 15:40) and probably sister of Mary the mother of Jesus, to whom reference is made in (John 19:25) The only events recorded of Salome are that she preferred a request on behalf of her two sons for seats of honor in the kingdom of heaven, (Matthew 20:20) that she attended at the crucifixion of Jesus, (Mark 15:40) and that she visited his sepulchre. (Mark 16:1) She is mentioned by name on only the two latter occasions. 2. The daughter of Herodias by her first husband, Herod Philip. (Matthew 14:6) She married in the first the tetrarch of Trachonitis her paternal uncle, sad secondly Aristobulus, the king of Chalcis.

Salome [EBD] (perfect) (2.) "The daughter of Herodias," not named in the New Testament. On the occasion of the birthday festival held by Herod Antipas, who had married her mother Herodias, in the fortress of Machaerus, she "came in and danced, and pleased Herod" (Mark 6:14-29). John the Baptist, at that time a prisoner in the dungeons underneath the castle, was at her request beheaded by order of Herod, and his head given to the damsel in a charger, "and the damsel gave it to her mother," whose revengeful spirit was thus gratified. "A luxurious feast of the period" (says Farrar, Life of Christ) "was not regarded as complete unless it closed with some gross pantomimic representation; and doubtless Herod had adopted the evil fashion of his day. But he had not anticipated for his guests the rare luxury of seeing a princess, his own niece, a grand-daughter of Herod the Great and of Mariamne, a descendant, therefore, of Simon the high priest and the great line of Maccabean princes, a princess who afterwards became the wife of a tetrarch [Philip, tetrarch of Trachonitis] and the mother of a king, honouring them by degrading herself into a scenic dancer."

mountainman

Dear Andrew and Ben,

From the above, and from Ben's page on this document it appears to me that in the greek language the word JESUS is an abbreviation (and/or perhaps a nomina sacra) - is this correct?

Best wishes,


Pete

spin

Don't you get tired of this sad linguistics?

Much of the material which forms the Nicene Creed well before its first statement in 325. The creed of 381 was a revised work. Is there anything in the first that you wouldn't consider christian or not enough to be christian??

Lactantius lived under the persecutions against christians he wrote about from Diocletian to the coming of Constantine. These christians may have been unitarians, binatarians or trinitarians, but sectarianism is no sign that a religion didn't exist but that it existed long enough to splinter. Arius was not trinitarian, but he points to a christianity which existed before him when the distinction was not meaningful, a christianity that was less well defined, but christianity nevertheless. Christianity is a religion whose central premise is based on the salvific act of Jesus dying on the cross for the sake of believers. This is Paul's message, though the name "christian" almost certainly didn't exist in his time.

Empty semantics is not a convincing means of dealing with the history of the religion we undertake to understand. That's what your artificial boundaries seem to be to me. You might find the distinctions comforting, but you don't confront christianity or its history that way.


spin

mountainman

Dear Toto,

I have it that Eusebius forged the canonical literature under sponsorship. This invention used stacks of existing raw materials - codices and scrolls available in the libraries of Rome c.312 to 324 CE. If when I have been stating Eusebius invented the canon "from the whole cloth" I did not mean to imply he created this without raw materials. We all know the relationship between the canon and the greek of the LXX for example, and the LXX was around and available since c.250 BCE in the greek.


If I had to give a name to that other religion, it would have to the set of collegiate religions operating in the empire via the custodial administration of the ancient temple complexes and networks prior to the arrival of Constantine's military machine in the eastern greek speaking Roman empire c.324 CE. The academic name of the religion must involve pythaoreanism and/or neopythagoreanism and platonism/neoplatonism. The common name is simply pagan. (The name by default, 324 CE, if one did not subscribe to Constantine's conditions).

The best supporting statement in regard to this aspect is the following extract from the book entitled Apollonius of Tyana the Nazarene,
by Dr. R. W. Bernard (1964), and specifically the chapter entitled Part 3: The Controversy Between Adherents of Apollonius and Jesus, in which we find the following:

The people who preserved this extant, earlier religion, were the greek academics, and the lineage of the pythagoras and plato, such as Porphyry of Tyre who followed Plotinus, and Iamblichus who followed Porphyry. The figure of Arius of Alexandria needs to the thus perceived (politically) as just one of these extant ascetic academic greek speaking priests - perhaps of Apollo or of Asclepius - the preservers of Euclid et al. However, one must understand that Arius was the first and the final resistance against the new initiatives of Constantine. The empire stood behind the words of Arius, over the words of Constantine and his political continuators, for over a century in its embracing what is today known as the Arian controversy. (The canon is fiction).

Best wishes,



Pete

spin

Christ, you've finally looked at the text.

Gawd, that's tragically bad linguistics. If you don't know anything at all about Greek why pretend to comment?? The name Ramoth is known in the LXX as Aremoth. The town you are dealing with is transliterated as ArimaQaia in Greek. The /aia/ ending is a common Greek place name desinence. There is nothing about cities or god in the name except in English based ruminations.

Umm, in Greek, adjectives are normally placed after what they qualify.

But you have plainly heard of "a man being a member of the council from Aramathea a city of Judea by name Joseph" who matches someone so named in Mk 15:43.

From here on you go further and further off on a tangent into cloudcuckooland.


spin

Toto

Gospel of Judas - text in pdf format.

It's all about Jesus, who is not identified as Jesus of Nazareth, but is clearly the Christian Jesus.

mountainman

Dear Toto,

First, does the original text use the name of Jesus in full or, in fact, does the original text of this gJudas employ and abbreviated form of the name of Jesus? I believe this to be an important question, since the abbreviated names for Jesus, and for Joshua for example, are exactly the very same two letters (in the greek). I have made some notes on nomina sacra here.


Secondly, as a separate issue, April Deconnick has assessed this text to represent a pagan satire/parody against the canon.

Best wishes,


Pete