DCHindley

When CCEL first made scans available of these early Christian writers in the 90s, they were full of scanning errors (sometimes several pages long) and lacked the footnotes and indexes. I have noticed that recently they have done a commendable job of improving them by re-scanning them with better OCR software, and including the things above that their first scans omitted.

You still have to deal with the fact that the translations are often old as mold. In the case of the ANF series, these were translated in the mid 19th century in Scotland, and the commentary is often preoccupied with the theological battles between Protestant vs Catholic scholarship of that day. I also noticed that when the sources seem to quote OT & NT scripture, a conscious effort was often made to bring it into conformity with the AV (KJV) rather than reproduce their peculiar readings. They also reverse the order of the final two volumes of the series (vol 9 was the index to vols 1-8, and vol 10 was a supplemental volume with Christian apocrypha etc, while CCEL make vol 10 into vol 9 and volume 9 into vol 10 so the index is at the end even though it does not cover the supplemental volume).

DCH

ChristMyth

I don't have any issues. The subject of early christianity interests me as well but my budget usually doesn't allow me to obtain the better translations in book form. If those found over there on ccel were somewhat reliable (and free), I was going to download a few and start reading.

If, however, it would have been worth my time, I was going to skip it and look for alternatives.

mountainman

Make sure you read "The History of the Christian Church" by Eusebius. This is a document that cannot be skipped by anyone seriously engaged in the research of "Early Christianity". The reason for this is very very very very very simple. Its the only "history" that has ever been written and which has been preserved to the present day. Practically every single scholar who has ever mentioned it believes that it was authored by Eusebius between the years of 312 and 324 CE - three hunded years after the events it purports to describe.

spin

I have already pointed out that this is false.

False presupposition. The translators of the new testament section of the NRSV are not christians? Raymond Brown is not a christian? Jerome Biblical Commentary not christian? Try again, but get over your blinkers.

Pot standing in front of mirror seeing kettle.

I don't think a freethinker would waste the effort reading the typings of a bunch of chimpanzees expecting one day to read Hamlet. We've seen what the monkeys do.

But yes, a freethinker would [try to] read all points of view from all qualified authors not only those who tell him what he wants to hear. Your problem here is that you think your unqualified bunch should be read. Bruce has some historical credibility in his time, but retrospect makes the blinkers transparent. The others of your list I mentioned have earned no respect points for neutral analysis.

You have such a limited "us/them" world. Others here have called you on the gullibility of your espoused position. You fundamental bias will not allow you to accept that someone can read a religious work and understand it without committing themselves to the necessary belief contained within the work. You want to tell me you can't read about Judaism, because you don't believe it... Hey, wait a minute, your religion stole the works of the Jewish religion and now call them christian. Cheap trick isn't it? You won't even defer to the Jews for understanding their own religious texts better than you.

Surely you can see that bias makes it difficult to understand any text for what it says, because the biased person -- in your sense of the term -- wants it to mean something rather than trying to understand what it actually says.

And before you try to return to the no neutral positions argument, it misses the point. Everyone is culturally and educationally shaped to have biases, but these aren't the indicators of the lack of neutrality you are arguing. You are saying something equivalent to no men are able to read Jane Austen because "all books are influenced by which side the author is on" -- to use your strange sentiment. With this you dismiss the entire field of literary criticism.

The reader has a job when reading a work: understand as much as one can of the necessary context to appreciate the value of the work. When a scholarly essay, let's say a piece of literary criticism, goes to a peer-reviewed journal, before it is published it has to be read by people who know the specific field. The editor accepts that those people are sufficiently versed in the relevant context to be able to evaluate the essay.

Part of the scholar's task is to tackle their own biases, where possible to neutralize them, not simply to acknowledge them and be ruled by them. The apologist by necessity is ruled by their biases. As such they offer nothing of value to the reader whose responsibility is to understand the work.

Sure it's fine to read everything: Had we but world enough, and time....


spin