aa5874

If there were NO Christians before the 4th then how did they suddenly and expectedly become victorius in 312 CE??

If Christianity started when Constantine was Emperor then Christians would have ALWAYS been victorius from the very start.

If the Christian religion started under the Emperor Constantine then what vengeance would they have.

Christians were NOT victorius BEFORE the 4th century. For hundreds of years Christians were unjustly hated and abused.

It is clear that the Romans HIJACKED the Christian religion and then attempted to RE-WRITE the History of the Jesus cult with their MUTILATED Canon.

The dating, authorship and chronology of the books in the NT Canon have been rejected by Scholars.

Duvduv

So let's say the original format involved a guy named Joshua/Yeshua/Yesoos (as a corruption of a Greek pronounced Yesuas) and it was purely coincidental that unknown to them at the time, the Jews had a story about a Yeshu Pandera from the days of Jannaeus. It is more than interesting that the apologist writers ("Justin" and "Origen") did not even bother to argue the point with their ostensible Jewish opponents that the Jesus of the canon was not the same guy as the the Yeshu of the Jews, thereby eliminating the libel of Yesoos having been born illegitimately since they and the Jews were not even discussing the same person.

Then for some strange reason they LATER decide to add to gospel stories a nativity story that identifies Yesoos as having been born from someone named Mary (=Miriam) and not Sally or Gloria, who was betrothed to Joseph (=Pandera), and not someone name Edgar or Barry, which only evokes the Jewish claim that in fact they were worshiping the son of the adultress from the days of Jannaeus. Again, neither Origen nor Justin raises the distinction between the NT Yesoos and the Jewish Yeshu in their debates.......

mountainman

[irony]


It was a miracle


[/irony]

mountainman

I think the evidence is such that Toledeth Yeshu may have been authored originally in Greek after Constantine raised the Bible to the Holy Writ of his empire. It may be a savage 4th century satire against the Life of Jesus. Christianity is from the seed of a Roman soldier and not some god.




They may have retrojected 4th century politics into the mouths of earlier authors. There is little if any evidence outside of Eusebius for the appearance of any heretical books. The entire collection of new testament non canonical texts have manuscripts in Syriac, Coptic, Latin and even Manichaean, but not earlier than the 4th century.

aa5874

WHAT MIRACLE??? CHRISTIANS APPEARED FROM NOWHERE AND THEN BECAME VICTORIUS WITHOUT HAVING TO FIGHT A BATTLE???

There was NO Miracle. It is just like Justin claimed.

The Jesus cult was a BIG JOKE since the 2nd century and they were hated and abused by the very Romans.

The Romans HIJACKED the Religion of the Jesus cult of Christians and re-wrote their history.

In the 1st century and up to 150 CE there was NO NT Canon with four Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, Pauline and non-Pauline Epistles.

It was the Memoirs of the Apostles that was read in the Churches on Sundays.

First Apology LXVII

Duvduv

I know that the Toldoth is a mishmash of Jesus and Yeshu material, but the underlying storyline is what would have been known to Jews which ended up in the Talmud, i.e. the magician Yeshu with his five disciples, the son of Miriam and Pandera. This story is never raised by the apologists.

If the talmudic version were just meant as satire in the fifth or sixth century it surely would have included many more features pertaining directly to the NT or perhaps even ignored the story entirely for fear of retribution.

tanya

Hi Pete, you may be correct, but, I think accuracy requires acknowledgement of three ancient manuscripts which may date from third century: P45, P46, and P47.

Some have claimed a second century date for P52.

The point is, we have no solid evidence for the existence of Christianity, prior to 4th century, but, that clarity cannot translate into assurance that there existed prior to that point in time, no nascent movement, similar to what we call today, Christianity.

Yes, the Dura Europos crude paintings and graffito, on the "house church" adjacent to the Jewish Synagogue, and mysteriously surviving, buried papyrus fragment of Tatian's "DiaTessaron", located proximate to the site of excavation of the synagogue, may well have an explanation other than a third century existence, but, we cannot dismiss the data as spurious, simply because it appears so flimsy, and of such mediocre provenance.

There appear to be too many clues pointing to a genuine Christian tradition, in existence before Constantine, to accept the notion that Eusebius created the "apostolic fathers'" many texts.

Duvduv

Considering that the first Nicaean Creed says nothing about parentage of the Christ it makes me wonder in light of Mountainman's comments whether the nativity story was actually not originally part of the belief system but intended to lampoon the religion by evoking the idea of illegitimacy from the Jewish tradition of Yeshu but was adopted into two gospels without realizing the original intent. Otherwisewhy specifically would a Mary and Joseph be chosen, especially since the parentage and date of execution were the only elements that were similar between the stories of Yeshu and Jesus .

sotto voce

Big deal. Filth beats filth in the fight to protect filth. It was the army that fed the parasitic, that sheltered the lascivious.

Rightful because he protected filth.

So they had been around for some time.

This is repetition of egregious error, perhaps propaganda, in the title. Before this thread was started, it was repeatedly said here, without a single syllable of direct controversion, that the NT canon has never been decided. Each person decides for himself or herself, it was said. And this is palpably true, because the papist OT canon is not the same as that of any other body; not even the Orthodox accept the Vatican's version. So nobody but Catholics recognise the Vatican's authority. There is no authority to decide these things, there never has been. The absolutist mind is at a great loss here.

But there is no question that some who find the moral 'restrictions' of the gospels and of Paul's letters extremely irritating seek to place all Christians under a human authority who can and indeed does modify the NT's demands to be less 'cramping of style', in practice. So even 'bright', righteous, rational, scientific self-styled atheists look round for the nearest human authority to act in this role, and they pick on popes of criminal memory, idiotic medieval superstitions and all! What comedy, what black comedy.

Catholics, of course, are not ungrateful for this support, though they of course never say so. They even take a feeble swipe at 'atheism', now and again, just to show that absolutists and skeptics are not such good bed-fellows. Catholics, of course, have their own customary re-writing of history, their smearing, to do. It is not at all difficult to find Catholics in protected forums plainly asserting that it was their own criminal perversion of Christianity that 'decided' on the NT canon, with clear implication if not explicit claim that Protestants owe a debt to their criminal cult. Protestantism, that was largely precipitated by Catholic crimes, of course. All very ironic.

This nonsense is all perhaps just as one might expect. But these are not really ideas that deserve recognition in Freethought and Rationalism, are they. Unless by way of contempt. Unless that title is a cynical one.

No, we don't. The main question that has plagued the minds of Catholics since I asked it some decades ago is, how did the RCC, that supposedly wrote the NT, take until the Council of Trent to finally come to a conclusion about what it had written? Or at best until the Council of Carthage of 397? That's a long time, minimum 300 years, to decide what everyone else decides in milliseconds. The obvious explanation is that the Cardboard Cut-out Church did not exist before Constantine's 'conversion', so could not decide its canon before then! And perhaps subsequently it was hoping that its own authors would eventually be accepted as divine writ. But in vain. A pretty stupid expectation, I hear you mutter, but then Roman stupidity was legendary. Low cunning, that was the Roman standard.

You're wondering what is the secondary question that troubles Catholics? You should be, anyway. Well, you notice that Catholics quote the likes of Irenaeus, 'Clement', Ignatius and Justin as authorities. All of whom lived, allegedly, before Carthage, and before Trent, so their works were up there for consideration. So the next question is, why were the works of these importantly quoted authors not canonised? There have been pathetic excuses for these omissions, but a convincing answer has never been supplied.

Of course, one way out of it would be to allege that the church simply did not exist before Constantine, wouldn't it. Off-the-wall, but worth a try, in the right circumstances.

Duvduv

If the Chi-Rho belief in Yesoos [altered from Yesooas] did not originally have a nativity element, then it is not surprising that the first Nicaean Creed makes no mention of Mary until it got added subsequently in the gospels intended to be a parody relating to Yeshu Pandera but accepted as authentic.

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible; and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten of his Father, of the substance of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance (homoousios) with the Father. By whom all things were made, both which is in heaven and in earth. Who for us men and for our salvation came down [from heaven] and was incarnate and was made man. He suffered and the third day he rose again, ascended into heaven. And he shall come again to judge both the living and the dead. And [we believe] in the Holy Ghost