Sheshbazzar

Ahhhh, some real Skepticism at last! Great! Wonderful! and Terrific!
But I expect that you may be biting off a bit more than is possible to chew.
Mountainman has been struggling to support this postulate for years.

To me, it seems reasonable that there were active christ cults long before Eusebius and gang got their bloody mitts on the beliefs and traditions and forced their particular form of domatic Christian Orthodoxy upon the world.

But you are invited to be just as skeptical as you can possibly be, just take care that you not get sucked into putting the cart before the horse.
Remember if you will;
"The Gospels" (as written books) did not create or influence the church, but the (Roman) church created the influence of The Gospels.

eta.
To be fair however, The Gospel, that is the beliefe in the oral and reported (documented) "good news" or "the Gospel"
is what went into the fore-end of the creation of the orthodox Christian and "catholic" church,
and out the other end of the church's digestive processes, came the "THE Gospels" horse-shit.

Sheshbazzar

Oh, by the way, I do not at all allege "that all the documents up to that time... were supplied by Eusebius".
There were plenty of old religious documents to work with by the time Eusebius & Co arrived on the scene.

aa5874

Well, just tell me if Eusebius had nothing at all to do with the writings of Clement. Who really wrote the letter to the church of Corinth using the name Clement?

You claim that Clement did not quote directly from the gospels, but it must be noted also that Justin Martyr, believed to be writing in the middle of the 2nd century, did not quote any passages from the letters, or Acts of the Apostles, yet he mentioned the "memoirs of the apostles" which appear to be similar to the Synoptics.

And there is the Diatessaron of Tatian, similar to the four Gospels, which appear to have no identified author.

The "memoirs of the apostles" may have preceeded the letters.

andrewcriddle

One problem with the idea that Paul originally wrote consistently Christ without Jesus (or alternatively consistently Jesus without Christ), is that I find it hard to see our existing texts of Paul with their various forms (Jesus Christ, Christ Jesus, Christ and Jesus) arising as a single revision of such an original. I think one would have to envisage a more complicated process involving for example the conversion of an original Christ into Jesus in a large number of places followed by conflation of the texts resulting in the readings Christ Jesus and Jesus Christ.

I would expect such a complicated process of revision to have left far more evidence in the textual tradition of Paul than the limited variation between the titles of Jesus Christ that actually occurs.

Andrew Criddle

Sheshbazzar

Likely some guy named Clement. Why would you think otherwise?
Yes, so?
Yes, so?
By "the letters" to which particular "letters" are you referring?
Do you mean the so-called New Testement books commonly called "The Gospels" of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?
If the answer is yes, then yes, I believe that the "memoirs of the Apostles" (which were few in number, and none have survived) preceded, and were the prototypes for the books that latter became known as "The Gospels", That however, does not mean that these "memoirs of the Apostles" read the same as those latter fabricated books called "The Gospels".

Sheshbazzar

"You claim...." ?
As I pointed out earlier, the "claim" does not originate with me.
I have taken the time to read "The Epistle of 1 Clement" and have verified the accuracy of the statement for myself.
If you read it and also determine the statement to be accurate, does that then make it your claim?
Please, feel free to present a quotation from 1 Clement that is an -exact quotation- from any of The Gospels.

Sorry, but as you phrased it, it sounds like you are insultingly implying here that I am inventing the claim. I would hope that this is not the case.

aa5874

It is likely that people had names in the 1st century, but was there a bishop of Rome named Clement who wrote a letter to some church in Corinth?

I don't think so.

It would appear that there was a time when so-called Jesus believers were involved in forgery and fraud.

I mean the letters of the letter writers called Paul, Peter, James, Jude and John.

And I would only expect the "memoirs of the Apostles"to be similar to the Gospels since some re-working may have been necessary.

Sheshbazzar

OK, that helps, certainly you are free to skeptically dismiss any existence of an actual first century Bishop named Clement as the actual writer of the epistle known as "1 Clement", but I (and others) must wonder what you gain in doing so?
I agree with you that there was a time when so-called Jesus believers were involved in forgery and fraud. I believe it had been going on for years, ever since the day that the first of these "stories" began to be circulated.
But if you reject 1 Clement as being an actual first century witness to the changes and alterations, where do you move it? and on what basis?
Professional scholars have studied it for millenia, and having carefully examined its internal evidences, virtually unanimously concur that it is consistent with first century political and religious conditions.
Say you would rather place it somewhere in the 2nd or 3rd century, do you have a strong enough grasp on ancient history and the workings of textual criticism to use the internal evidence to defend that re-dating in opposition to all previous scholarship? I know I do not, and can see nothing to be gained by such an undertaking.
Much better to leave it securely lodged right where most respected historical scholarship says that it belongs, because from that early position it testifies that even Rome, the greatest and most important church of 1st century Christianity did not have any copies of "The Gospels" for Clement, the 4th Pope of the Christian church to quote from.
Moving Clement of Rome further ahead in time would only serve to weaken our arguments against the inventions of the Christian religion.
At the least I would separate Paul's (genuine) writings from these others, as being of a recognizably earlier strata, to me he is much involved in the original inventing of the heavenly christ figure, one that was essentially transcendent and non-human. The others more or less deal with a more developed theology that came about with and after the addition of the "memoirs of the Apostles" and "The Gospels".

There is no easy way to untangle what the church cooked-up,
To take Christianity apart is like trying to -unmake- a Mulligan stew, where beef, mutton, pork, rabbit, skunk, 'taters, carrots, turnips and so on were all thrown into the pot and simmered together for generations.
One can either swallow what they serve, picking through it or not, but certain to get sick, or just toss out the entire mess.

DCHindley

Just answerin' the man's question. Analyst will have to supply the answer by slogging through all the passages with Jesus, Christ or Lord, in all their glorious combinations, laid out, compared, contrasted, and set in relation to what we know from other sources.

My take on this when I initially tried to save some "Jesus" in "original" Paul was that it seemed too thouroughly connected to "Christ" material to have been independent of it.

DCH

DCHindley

Mr Criddle is correct that if there were multiple reactive layers (e.g., "Jesus", then "Lord Jesus", then "Jesus Christ", then "Christ", etc), only a fairly complicated transmission history could explain that, for which there is almost no textual evidence.

Still, I think David Trobisch has already shown that all textual variants can be explained as derived from the NT as usually transmitted, meaning there was no competition between collections of Paul's letters, or catholic letters, or of Gospels, etc, before being published in the groupings and orders usually found.

If they (the gospels, or the pauline letters, or acts and the catholic epistles) had been collected as usually assumed, that is by scattered Pauline house churches or Christian congregations who lovingly collected those available to them, each redacting them for publication in their own unique way, until enough were in circulation for competition to select the best of the best, where is the textual evedence for this?

DCH