Ecrasez L'infame

I've finally found time over the break to read Detering's Fabricated Paul. I then read every post on the relevant II thread (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=141720). The thread is brilliant - I think I enjoyed it more than the book. (There's links to a free English translation of the book in the thread).

As pointed out on the thread, it seems inescapable that 1 Clement follows the epistles. This is because Clement refers to Paul, his travels, his missionary work, his being persecuted, and - vitally - some of his letters, most clearly 1 Cor. Since Detering is trying to place Paul around AD 140, it follows he also needs to show that the usual date for Clement (end of first century) needs bumping by some 50 years.

Here's a cogent summary of the reasons for the usual date from the thread (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showpost.php...5&postcount=41) :

What reasons has Detering for such a late Clement? (page numbers from the English PDF).

1) Until recently, scholarly opinion was that 1 Clement WAS late - "today one regards them as authentic, but how long can one do that? The price of such documents tends to rise and fall with the scholarly market..." (p76, quoting J Haller).
2) 1 Clement appears to be a theological essay or sermon, not a letter - if for no other reason, it's too long. Yet it purports to be a letter addressing a local political crisis; so why the deception? "The situation in which the author intervenes with the pen, the party conflict in Corinth, required great haste! If he wanted to accomplish something with his writing, he could hardly sit there and spend weeks or months drafting a writing whose size surpasses that of many ancient books... [by which time] the situation... could be entirely different, and his writing hopelessly out of date." (p76 & 78). Moreover, the text only addresses that political problem - remember, the ostensible reason for Clement writing at all - two-thirds of the way through (p78).
3) The party conflict in Corinth lacks concrete detail and probability, and seems to be simply lifted from 1 Cor. (p79-80).

Detering answers or would answer truthofchrist12's points as follows:

4) The "repeated misfortunes" are, in the full quote, "sudden and repeated misfortunes." Detering, citing Van den Bergh van Eysinga, considers this a "conventional apology... employ[ed] to give his writing the appearance of an authentic letter." Detering objects particularly to the word sudden: "according to the operative Roman law, persecutions did not usually arrive overnight." (p81)
5) "Clement" does not claim that he is the historical Clement, Bishop of Rome. That is a later tradition. "Clement" does not identify himself at all.
6) If many of the first Christians were dead by AD 95, even more would have been dead by 140!

As a final support for a late Clement (not an argument - that would be circular), there is the odd fact that out of all the surviving early documents, ONLY 1 Clement and the letters of Ignatius mention Paul's epistles, and only those two and Acts mention Paul at all - all the way up to Marcion. As Jake Jones puts it (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showpost.php...3&postcount=45)

(Jake also adds some of his own arguments for a late Clement).

Of course, Detering is a mythicist, and all this makes me think of an odd work I read a couple of years ago by another mythicist, Alvar Ellegard. Ellegard argues that the historic person who founded "Christianity" was a "teacher of righteousness" who fl about 100 BC. Ellegard is Detering time-shifted - where Detering sees (for example) Paul talk about churches already being established for some time, and concludes that we must bump Paul forward, Ellegard takes the same evidence, accepts the conventional dating of Paul, and deduces that we must bump the "big-bang" founding of Christianity back by the same amount.

In particular, whereas Detering must have a fifty-year later than usual 1 Clement (or else his thesis collapses), Ellegard tries to have 1 Clement shifted thirty years earlier, to the mid-60s of the first century. (He tries to do this because he holds that the language of the Gospels do not match that of other first century texts, and so must be latter).

Here's his case for an early Clement (from his book, Jesus 100 years before Christ, 1999, p36-45):
A) The style and language of Clement is more like Paul than Acts. The word "Christian" is not used, for example, and he uses "apostle", not "disciple". (p36)
B) The main scholarly reason for dating 1 Clement to the 90s is a complicated deduction from Euserbius. Ellegard claims Euserbius may have had an agenda here, and repeats the oft-cited low reliability of Euserbius (pace Steven!): "he is far too prone to resort to hearsay and downright fabrications, if it suits his purpose." (p37-38).
C) 1 Clement refers to the Jerusalem Temple in the present tense, meaning it must be pre-70. (p39)
D) He refers to Peter and Paul being in "his own generation". (p39)
E) The "repeated misfortunes" are more likely to refer to the Neronian persecutions after the Great Fire than to the persecutions of Domitian, since the latter were not nearly so extreme and were directed at all Jews, not at Christians specifically. (p40)

All these arguments are excellent, tho' I lack the knowledge to check them ((E) sounds particularly unlikely, to my ears). Oddly enough, I think that the arguments support Detering more than Ellegard: for example, A) just means Clement and Paul were roughly contemporaries - and that could have been in AD 140 as much as AD 65. As for B), Euserbius could have altered the chronology downwards as well as upwards. C), D) and E) sound to me very like someone trying to remember the exact order of events that happened before they were born (try remembering the exact order of Presidents or prime ministers in your parents' lifetime - not easy, eh?)

In short, I find Detering more and more plausible - though I find it unfortunate that one mythicist relies on a non-conventional dating in one direction, while another does the same in the opposite direction. That doesn't seem to be the way for a new science to progress.

Ted Hoffman

I think that is a good presentation of the two positions. I am however not satisfied that you have dealt with point (C) which favour's Ellegard's dating.

Ecrasez L'infame

No, I don't think so. Suppose "Clement" was writing in 140, but pretending (for whatever reason) to be writing in 95. Then he's asking himself questions about history before he was born - which emperor? which persecution? Temple already destroyed or not? - and he's sometimes coming up with the wrong answers. In our time we have a number of structures to hang our knowledge of history on - for example, our simple date system (none of this "15th year of Tiberius" stuff), and realistic films and TV documentaries that evoke a period for us. "Clement" had none of that.

In fact, if an early date for 1 Clement is ruled out, then C) is a strong point FOR Detering.

Robert Loughrey

Ted Hoffman

This would be less parsimonious and you would be assuming what you should be proving: which is that Clement wrote after the temple destruction - whereas his mention of the Temple as if it is still standing is inconsistent with that assumption.