angelo

Eusebius is one of the most important and 'biased' early historions of Christianity.[ 260-340 ce.] It seems that the further one distances from Jesus actual supposed existence, the more the myth grew. That hints that the whole episode is no more than a fable that grew as time wore on and more myths were attached to it until Jesus became god himself. Sorry for the slight off topic post. But it places Eusebius with the rest of the early church fathers, quoting hearsay.

lpetrich

mountainman's theory implied that Eusebius employed a whole gaggle of scribes who were running all over the eastern Mediterranean, interesting Xian references into LOTS of existing documents.

Bear in mind that that was not now, when it is almost absurdly easy to insert some text into a document that exists as a computer file. Not only did the Internet not exist, computers did not exist, and printing did not exist. So it was necessary for Eusebius's scribes to copy over all those accursed documents, carefully inserting references to Xianity as they went.

Even documents that referred to Xianity in extremely derogatory ways.

Like Lucian of Samosata in his Passing of Peregrinus portraying the worshippers of a "crucified sophist" as hopelessly gullible. And in his Alexander the False Prophet describing Alexander of Abonutichus as calling Xians "atheists" along with Epicureans.

And Apuleius in his Golden Ass describing the baker's wife as someone totally vile who follows some blasphemous cult of an "Only God" that denies all that is true and good.

And Fronto describing the early Xians as practicing sex orgies and baby sacrifices, complete with eating the sacrified baby.

And the author of the Alexamenos Graffito showing someone worshipping a crucified man with a donkey's head, with the caption "Alexamenos worships god".

And Athenagoras defending his fellow Xians against charges that they were atheists who practiced "Oedipodean intercourse" (incest) and "Thyestean feasts" (cannibalism).

Eusebius must have had a remarkable team of fakers...

mountainman

Two issues here:

1) Eusebius employed nobody. Think of Eusebius as a well paid slave. Constantine employed Eusebius, and whatever was required by Eusebius as an editor-in-chief of Constantinian political propaganda to be effective. Scribes, with respect to the warlord and military supremacist
Constantine, were exactly like soldiers: an expendable commodity.

2) The Christian references in documents which we see today are not to be
explained in totality by the Eusebian fiction postulate. For example, the
Tacitus reference is cited as being a 15th century forgery. The papal forger
Braccioloni is clearly not to be conflated with Eusebius. DO you understand what I am saying? Could you acknowledge these two issues.



Between Eusebius c.337 CE, when the Boss went to the underworld, and the present day stand a long succession of very powerful and influential christian emperors, christian bishops, christian ecclesiastical historians, and the sum total of forgeries enacted after Eusebius in the name of christianity is mind boggling. I hope you take this into account somewhere. Eusebius had continuators pouring out of every generation, and still does.


Continuators spread out over almost 1700 years and at the top of the pyramid of power. Constantine was a mocker and a fraudster. All he was looking for was the authenticity of a history, any history at all would do this task, for his new and strange religion. He deployed legions of fictitious christian apologetic authors and their pagan detractors (such as Celsus) in order to give his new and strange religion some credibility - any credibility - for those credulous enough to believe COnstantine. He sponsored scribes to forge and interpolate extant authors, such as Lucian.

Everyone in Constantine's epoch -- all the pagans (since there were no christians) -- knew full well that COnstantine was just another robber despot, trying to flog fiction for power and influence. I believe that this pagan reaction underlies the Arian controversy. A belief of UNBELIEF in the new and strange testiments published by Constantine.

The problem was that the emperor cult was supported in the emperor's court from day minus seven and continued to receive this prestige through all subsequent christian emperors. The remarkable team of fakers known as the fourth and fifth century authodox christian clergy, such as Cyril and Augustine and Jerome continued the creation of invented fiction, filling in holes, and writing refutations about common public opinion, and burning any material that got in the way of the business of the church, tax-exempt, and big.

The history of christianity is an imperial scam. The ancient historian Robin Lane-Fox writes a great deal about how Constantine himself is shown to be a fraud at least twice over in an analysis of Constantine's Oration at Antioch to the (IMO pagan) saints.

Nobody likes to admit they have been taken in by a n effective fraud. Therefore there is great resistance to even contemplating the Eusebian fiction postulate. Life with an HJ is not a complicated thing which many people can live with. But what they dont want to entertain is the unsettling notion that the belief may be in error, on the basis of an ancient perpetuated fraud by person with too much power.

Best wishes,



Pete Brown

Doug Shaver

Not only that. For his theory to work, they also had to create a whole corpus of Christian documents out of whole cloth -- AND use arahaic (for them) handwriting so that 20th-century paleographers would be fooled into thinking they'd been written a century or two before Eusebius's lifetime.

lpetrich

Including some who advocated very heterodox doctrines, like Origen's belief in universal salvation. Even devils, he thought, can someday be saved.

And why would a Roman Emperor concoct a religion based on the sacred books of some less-than-loved and troublesome subjects? If a Roman Emperor wanted to concoct a new religion, he might want to build it on some religion with more prestige, like Rome's traditional religion. He could then sing to himself

Give me that old time religion
...
It was good enough for Numa
It was good enough for Cato
It was good enough for Scipio
And it's good enough for me

Jeffrey Gibson

And Syriac and Coptic and Boharic and Sahidic and Latin -- and manage to have them buried in Egyptian sands and squirreled away in monasteries and other places.

Jeffrey

Civil1z@tion

Let's assume you're version of events fits the evidence as well as the Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher who got exagerrated over time. Even assuming that, the massive conspiracy necessary for this forgery would be far more complex than the other answer. So using Occam's Razor, I would have to accept that some guy named Jesus did exist in the first century CE unless you have evidence which cannot be explained by the "real Jesus" hypothesis and is explained by the "Eusebius made it up" hypothesis.

Furthermore, Jeffrey brings up a good point on the Gnostic gospels which have recently been found. For instance, the Gospel of Judas text we have has been carbon dated to ~280 CE. So assuming the previous mentions of the gospel as heresy by Iraneus in 180 are forgeries, you're theory would have to postulate that within 8 years of the mastermind behind this Christianity forging effort, Constantine, being born, (he didn't become emperor until 306CE) a rival version of Christianity was formulated then crushed and its documents hidden.

This brings up yet another point. There would certainly be large numbers of writers who would know the real history, why couldn't at least one of them done the same thing the gnostics and hidden his work before its destruction? All it would take would be one document hidden in some cave for archeologists to find which says that all the history was a forgery and your theory would gain a huge amount of plausibility. As far as I know, no search document exists.

TedM

Now you guys who know more than me are doing something I like: Listing what must have happened in order for the Eusebian Postulate to be true. Probably deserves a thread dedicated to it, so that everyone will clearly see how unreasonable the Postulate is.

ted

Jeffrey Gibson

Pete has claimed -- and no doubt will claim agan and again ad nauseum -- that there are writers who have said this very thing: Julian and Arius.

Unfortunately, Pete has utterly misunderstood what Arius was all about and has to resort to the crank's tactic of claiming interpolation and distortion and censorship to get Julian to say what he wants him to say.

Jeffrey

lpetrich

I don't see the point of having a separate thread for that; this thread does fine for discussing the absurdities of his position.

And there are lots of them.

To see what I mean about just one of them, try duplicating a book with pre-Gutenberg technology some time.