Freethought & Rationalism Archive

IamJoseph · 07-17-2009, 02:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mountainman

Quote:

Originally Posted by IamJoseph

All writings appeared a few short centuries after the emergence of speech.

The codex only became widespread in the fourth century.

My quote was directly from NHC 6.1 "The Acts of Peter and the 12 Apostles" where the author makes the point that both this person -- the main person in the text called Lithargoel, the mysterious "Pearl Man" - carried a book cover. The cover of the codex carried by Lithargoel is similar to the cover of the codex carried by Peter the Apostle.

Why did Lithargoel and Peter carry around different books?

And the fact that the author presents these characters as
carrying around codices suggests that either the author
was writing in the fourth century when the codex technology
boomed, or that the author was a gifted prophet of technology.

I know of no books in 1st C CE. The dead sea scrolls, dated 200 BCE to 150 CE, are all in scroll form, one being in copper but still rolled up as a scroll. Since the Gospels is in latin, one has to see what word is used, and if it refers to scroll, later translated as book in english.

rcscwc · 07-17-2009, 04:46 AM

Quote:

I know that the Hindhi script is 99% the same as the hebrew - in alphabet design and word meanings. I know that the Jews interacted with India 27000 years ago, being embedded in the Persian army which did enter India. However, I still see the Gospels as a totally Roman/Greek invention, and not having anything to do with Jews - not even the Hellenised Paul. One only has to study pre-christian Rman and Greek archives.

99% same? Hebrew has only 22 characters, Hindi has 52, Roman has only 26.

You mean 2700 BC. What is zero between friends?

Jews first came to India at least 300 BC as traders.

rcscwc · 07-17-2009, 05:55 PM

Among Indiab scripts, Gurumukhi has the least number of characters, but even there it has 35 of them.

Lógos Sokratikós · 07-17-2009, 06:50 PM

Wikipedia:

Quote:

The Aramaic alphabet is also the most likely ancestor of the Brahmic alphabets of the Indian subcontinent, which spread to Tibet, Mongolia, Indochina, and the Malay archipelago along with the Hindu and Buddhist religions. (China and Japan, while absorbing Buddhism, were already literate and retained their logographic and syllabic scripts.)

See also:

Genealogy of scripts derived from Proto-Sinaitic

But this says next to nothing about language origins and religion.

There was interbreeding of religions. The Christ birth myth has undeniable Iranian influence, mostly obvious by the presence of the pagan priests called the magi. The trinity might be of Hindu origin (the trimurti), but still, I don't know how much trinities were a common pagan idea.

mountainman · 07-17-2009, 11:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lógos Sokratikós

The trinity might be of Hindu origin (the trimurti), but still, I don't know how much trinities were a common pagan idea.

Except that the New Testament Canon was written in bad greek not bad sanskrit, and that the Holy Trinity as a fixed dogma concept was not mentioned until after the Council of Nicaea, c.325 CE. Thus the concept of a "Holy Philosophical Trinity" was integrated from the Greek academics to whom the New testament was pitched, at the time it was pitched around or after the year 325 CE.

Here is the Holy Trinity of the Greeks at that time ...

The Metaphysics of the Greeks

History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell - 1945
p.292

"The metaphysics of Plotinus begins with a Holy Trinity:
The One, Spirit and Soul. These three are not equal,
like the Persons of the Holy Trinity; the One is
supreme, Spirit comes next, and Soul last.[2]

[2] Origen, a contemporary of Plotinus and
had the same teacher in philosophy, taught
that the First Person was superior to the
Second, and the Second to the Third, agreeing
in this with Plotinus. But Origen's view was
subsequently declared heretical.
THE ONE is somewhat shadowy. It is sometimes called
God, sometimes called the Good; it transcends Being.

THE NOUS "SPIRIT" - offspring/reflection of the ONE.
includes mind - the intellect.

SOUL - offspring of the Divine Intellect. It is double:
there is an inner soul, intent on NOUS, and another,
which faces the external.

premjan · 07-18-2009, 06:34 AM

Brahmi may have been derived from either Phoenician or Aramaic.

mountainman · 07-18-2009, 05:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by IamJoseph

Quote:

Originally Posted by mountainman

The codex only became widespread in the fourth century.

My quote was directly from NHC 6.1 "The Acts of Peter and the 12 Apostles" where the author makes the point that both this person -- the main person in the text called Lithargoel, the mysterious "Pearl Man" - carried a book cover. The cover of the codex carried by Lithargoel is similar to the cover of the codex carried by Peter the Apostle.

Why did Lithargoel and Peter carry around different books?

And the fact that the author presents these characters as
carrying around codices suggests that either the author
was writing in the fourth century when the codex technology
boomed, or that the author was a gifted prophet of technology.

I know of no books in 1st C CE. The dead sea scrolls, dated 200 BCE to 150 CE, are all in scroll form, one being in copper but still rolled up as a scroll. Since the Gospels is in latin, one has to see what word is used, and if it refers to scroll, later translated as book in english.

The Nag Hammadi Codices have been carbon dated to 348 CE (+/- 60 y).
Many commentators, thinking that the "Early Christian Action" happened
prior to the fourth century try and argue that the texts inside this
series of 12,13 books may have been authored well before the 4th CE.

The text "The Acts of Peter and the 12 Apostles" which explicitly
mentions that the christian apostle Peter carried around with him
a book, the cover of which was similar to the cover of the book
which was being carried around by the main character of the story,
the Pearl Man Lithargoel, whom everyone thinks MUST BE JESUS,
cannot have been authored until the age of the codex.

This to me suggests that the author of TAOPATTA was living
in the fourth century, as the carbon dating of the physical codex
in which the story is contained itself suggests.

Toto · 07-18-2009, 05:10 PM

Codex

Quote:

The basic form of the codex was invented in Pergamon in the third century BCE. .... The Romans used similar precursors made of reusable wax-covered tablets of wood for taking notes and other informal writings; while codices of parchment or papyrus appear to have been widely used as personal notebooks, for instance in recording copies of letters sent (Cicero Fam. 9.26.1). The pages of such notebooks were commonly washed or scraped for re-use; and consequently writings on codex were considered informal and impermanent. The first recorded Roman use of the codex for publishing and distributing literary works dates from the late first century AD, when Martial experimented with the format. At that time the scroll was the dominant medium for literary works and would remain dominant for secular works until the fourth century. Julius Caesar, traveling in Gaul, found it useful to fold his scrolls concertina-style for quicker reference[citation needed], as the Chinese also later did. As far back as the early 2nd century, there is evidence that the codex—usually of papyrus—was the preferred format among Christians. . . . . The earliest surviving fragments from codices come from Egypt and are variously dated (always tentatively) towards the end of the 1st century or in the first half of the 2nd. This group includes the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, containing part of St John's Gospel, and perhaps dating from between 125 and 160

It seems that a mere reference to a codex cannot date the work to the 4th century.

mountainman · 07-18-2009, 08:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto

Codex

It seems that a mere reference to a codex cannot date the work to the 4th century.

The C14 corroborates. Here is another article about the use of the codex in the period in question. From

THE “META-DATA” OF EARLIEST CHRISTIAN MANUSCRIPTS1
L. W. Hurtado
University of Edinburgh

Quote:

The Codex Format

The first matter to note is the Christian preference for the codex over the roll, a phenomenon evident already in our earliest identifiably Christian manuscripts.3 This preference is all the more striking in comparison to the wider general preference for the roll-format in the second and third centuries CE, particularly for “literary” texts, that is, writings of literary, philosophical, or religious significance. Outside of Christian circles, this wider preference for the roll only began to shift to a preponderance of codex manuscripts in the fourth century CE and later.4

We may use some data helpfully compiled in the Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB) to illustrate this.5 Taking into account the catalogued “literary” manuscripts dated from the third century BCE through the eighth century CE, identifiably Christian rolls amount to 2.7% of the total number of rolls (3,033), whereas Christian codices amount to 73% of all the total number of codices (3,188). Codices (of all provenances) amount to about 5% of second-century manuscripts and about 15% of third-century manuscripts. But when we turn to manuscripts of Christian provenance, the codex is clearly the favourite book-form. For example, in the Leuven database overall, at least 91.6% of copies of New Testament writings are identified as codex form, and only 1.1% are rolls (and of the latter, it seems likely that all, or nearly all, are actually opisthographs, re-used rolls, the copies likely prepared for personal study).6 Among all second and third-century NT manuscripts (our earliest), the percentage of codices is at least as high.

By contrast, of all manuscripts of Homer (third century BCE through seventh century CE), 62.8% are rolls, and only 18.5% identified as codices. For manuscripts of Euripides (third century BCE through eighth century CE), 65.9% are rolls and 17.9% are codices.7 If we were to confine our attention to copies of these texts dated no later than the third century CD, the preponderance of rolls over codices would be even greater. All the data support the commonly-accepted conclusion held among scholars acquainted with ancient book-production that the roll was overwhelmingly the preferred format for any text considered of literary, philosophical, or religious significance, the codex generally reserved for “documentary” texts (e.g., account-books, notebooks).

It is, therefore, all the more noteworthy that early Christian circles particularly preferred the codex for those writings that they regarded the most highly and treated as “scripture”. Though all pre-Christian (i.e., unquestionably Jewish) copies of “Old Testament” writings are rolls, the copies that are of uncontested Christian provenance are all (or nearly all) codices.8 So, this suggests that the equally strong Christian preference of the codex for writings that became part of the New Testament certainly does not indicate a lack of esteem for these texts. Indeed, it probably reflects their emerging scriptural status, with a strong preference for the codex format for these writings that matches the equally strong Christian preference for the codex for Old Testament writings, which unquestionably functioned as scriptures for at least the main body of Christians of the time.

This Christian preference for the codex was exercised particularly in copying their scriptural texts, but was by no means restricted to such texts. That is, the codex format does not by itself indicate that the text copied was treated by its user(s) as scripture. But it does seem that the codex was particularly strongly preferred by early Christians for their scriptures. So, copies of Christian text in a roll format are noteworthy (and the later the manuscript, the more noteworthy), for it probably means that the text was not regarded (at least by the copyist who produced the manuscripts, or the party for whom the manuscript was copied) as having scriptural significance.

Early Christians certainly did use the roll format for some texts, such as religious treatises, and some liturgical and magical texts. In their indispensable study of the origins of the codex, Roberts and Skeat cited 118 Christian copies of writings other than OT texts and those that became the NT, 83 of which were codices and 35 rolls (three of these opisthographs).9 For instance, the sole two manuscripts of Irenaeus from the second to fourth centuries are rolls. Of the earliest catalogued manuscripts of Clement of Alexandria, one is a roll, one a codex, and one a fragment of unidentified book-form. Of the LDAB catalogued manuscripts for Shepherd of Hermas, twenty-two are codices (mainly third to sixth centuries CE), and four (among the earliest copies) are rolls. Of the three Oxyrhynchus fragmentary copies of Gospel of Thomas (early/mid-third century CE), one is a codex, and two are rolls (one a re-used roll or opisthograph).10

Christians certainly did not invent the codex, and, to be sure, we even have a few examples of the codex used for “pagan” literary works (but parchment codices, often of small size, whereas Christians appear to have preferred papyrus codices). But Christians do seem to have been particularly active in experimenting with, and developing, this book-form. Among earliest Christian codices, we have examples of the single-gathering (or single-quire) book (all the sheets arranged in a single stack and then all folded in half, e.g., the Chester Beatty Pauline codex, P46, originally comprising 52 papyrus sheets, and the Bodmer Gospels codex P75, originally comprising 36 folded sheets), and multiple-gathering constructions with quires of various numbers of sheets (e.g., P45, made up entirely of folded single-sheet quires, or P66, made up of quires of varying numbers of sheets). This suggests to me that in this period (late second and early third centuries CE) Christians were themselves pioneering in the more serious use of the codex book-form. Their experimentation with these various modes of codex construction would not have been necessary had the codex already been well developed for book copying.

It is easier, however, to demonstrate that early Christians preferred the codex-format than it is to provide a convincing explanation for how and why they came to do so. Proposals tend to fall into one of two types, which we may label as “pragmatic” or “semiotic”. I am not persuaded, however, that any of the several proposals about the supposed practical advantage of the codex is successful in accounting for the wholesale Christian preference for this format.11 “Pragmatic” proposals include suggestions that Christians may have been attracted to the codex because it allowed use of both sides of the writing material, thereby saving on the cost of copies. But careful attempts to calculate costs of copying texts suggest that any actual savings that might have been gained by use of codex format were not significant.12 Furthermore, to anticipate other data discussed later in this presentation, the rather wide margins and line-spacing in many earliest Christian manuscripts suggest that the copyists were not particularly concerned to save the amount of papyrus used. The Australian scholar G. H. R. Horsley has proposed that Christians preferred the codex because they were from lower-educated circles more accustomed to dealing with documentary texts than literary ones, the codex thus seeming to them a more familiar book-form.13 But this seems to me unconvincing. To cite one reason, I fear that it presupposes a somewhat over-simplified view of the socio-economic level of early Christianity in the first two centuries CE.

What will seem initially a more plausible suggestion is that the codex was favoured because it may have been more easily transportable (perhaps carried in a pouch across one’s shoulder), something perhaps attractive to a religious movement that obviously devoted a lot of effort and resources to networking trans-locally among various Christian circles. Was Christianity the only movement in which trans-local use of texts was a feature? And, in any case, were Christians somehow uniquely able to perceive such advantages of the codex that seem so obvious to some moderns but somehow escaped others in the second and third centuries CE? Anything is possible, but I confess that this seems to me a counter-intuitive.

What I have called the “semiotic” proposals include the suggestion that the Christian preference for the codex represented a move to identify and distinguish Christian copies of texts. That is, the preference for the codex may exhibit part of what we may think of as an emergent Christian “material culture” in the second century CE.14 I recognize that this goes against some current views that it is inappropriate to distinguish “Christianity” in that early period, but those who have argued such views seem to me not to have taken account of the evidence to which I point here.15 Certainly, the preference for the codex seems to be a convention among Christians already in the second century, one of a few phenomena (others of which I discuss shortly) pointing toward emergent Christian conventionalizations at a time when we generally assume nothing but diversity. My purpose here, however, is not to engage fully this larger historical issue, but merely to point out that the sort of data that I highlight here need to be considered in dealing with the larger question of when and how “Christianity” may have emerged as an identifiable entity, and how it may have expressed itself (verbally, visually, and physically) in the earliest period.

IamJoseph · 07-18-2009, 10:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mountainman

The Nag Hammadi Codices have been carbon dated to 348 CE (+/- 60 y).
Many commentators, thinking that the "Early Christian Action" happened
prior to the fourth century try and argue that the texts inside this
series of 12,13 books may have been authored well before the 4th CE.

The text "The Acts of Peter and the 12 Apostles" which explicitly
mentions that the christian apostle Peter carried around with him
a book, the cover of which was similar to the cover of the book
which was being carried around by the main character of the story,
the Pearl Man Lithargoel, whom everyone thinks MUST BE JESUS,
cannot have been authored until the age of the codex.

This to me suggests that the author of TAOPATTA was living
in the fourth century, as the carbon dating of the physical codex
in which the story is contained itself suggests.

It is disturbing there is no proof of anything in the Gospels - even for the sake of what are totally genuine believing christians, and even for the terrible things inflicted upon others by this scripture's allegations. It is an absurd situation which has plunged humanity into chaos and wars and the same is reflected in Islamic scriptures. Everywhere these two religious doctrines stepped there were horrific mass murders.

For me, this codex does not mean anything whatsoever - the fact it is alledgly claimed to be written by Jews, means only a Hebrew document of the contemorary kind, with authors named who can be historically identified, will suffice. There is no excuse for no proof whatsoever of anything claimed in the Gospels considering the period of its setting.

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07-17-2009, 05:55 PM	#33
rcscwc Banned Join Date: May 2008 Location: New Delhi, India. 011-26142556 Posts: 2,292	Among Indiab scripts, Gurumukhi has the least number of characters, but even there it has 35 of them.

07-18-2009, 06:34 AM	#36
premjan Obsessed Contributor Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: NJ Posts: 61,538	Brahmi may have been derived from either Phoenician or Aramaic.

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