mountainman

1) What language was it originally written in?
2) What audience was it originally written for?
3) What pagan concepts does it deal with?
4) What pagan symbolism does it employ?
5) What language was it originally widely published in?
6) What audience was it originally widely published for?
7) Which pagan first widely published it?
8) What was the political situation at the time of wide publication?
9) What happened to the political situation after publication?
10) What happened to the pagan academics, priests and physicians?
11) What happened to other literature after NT publication?
12) How was the new testament received on the planet Earth?

Toto

Koine Greek

That is a question of heavy academic debate.

What do you mean by pagan? Hellenistic?

Not as much as the later church

Koine Greek

See 2)

Why would a pagan publish scripture?

In any case, thought you believed that the term "pagan" does not refer to anyone who existed before Constantine.

What was the political situation in the Roman Empire at any given time? Dictatorship contested by other would-be rulers, leading ultimately to societal collapse.

More of the same.

It's not clear if you are talking about the individual NT books, which were in existence before Constantine, or one of the compilations that C. ordered. In any case, I don't think that the publication of the canon was a cause of much of anything, compared to other church actions and the general collapse of Roman society.

Some of it survived, some didn't.

Do you have a serious topic for discussion?

Perhaps you should start by deciding on a definition of pagan. Are you including Homer, Socrates, Caesar, Seneca, Cicero, and the like? or the local priest of Apollo?

dog-on

A better question would be;

Could Christianity, (in the form we all know and love), have likely been developed if the Hebrew scriptures had never been translated into Greek?

I believe not...

Joan of Bark

Hey, dog-on, good point. I'll have to give that one some thought.

mountainman

With distinct Romanisms?


Was the new testament apocrypha was written to make people laugh? It does not look too serious to me. Did pagans laugh? Did "early christians" laugh, or do they appear as a more formal nation of men? One might almost say that the christian writings displayed a very Roman gravitas.


Yes. Egyptian, Parthian, Indian, Celtic, Druidic, etc.

How central is the pagan Logos of Heraclitus Jonus?

With Romanisms?




Eusebius uses the term in his "history" a number of times ...

Constantine was a thug war lord.



The period of the "Five Good Emperors" (yes, another euphemism) appeared stable enough, and certainly assisted to support the "Second Pagan Sophistic" and revival of the greek literature writing for the period 150-250 CE.


Chronology is an essential ingredient of any "history", even the pagans.

Constantine executed pagan priests left, right and center. Sopater got executed for holding up the winds bringing the grain fleet to Constantinople c.335 CE. The pagan academics Porphyry and Arius had edicts to burn their writings and their followers. Do publications today thrive by physically destroying their opponents?

Yes, its a mixed bag that survives. What makes it interesting is the new stuff that keeps turning up and waving little flags at us saying that we may not understand the bigger picture just yet. For example, Nag Hammadi and the earlier influx of Syriac texts, etc.


All these people according to Eusebius, who was the first to start using the term under orders of Constantine (as far as I am able to tell), were pagans. A pagan is defined simply by the unique characteristic that they do not call themselves a follower of Jesus the Galilaean.

It seems to me that, as outlandish as the thought may at first appear, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that the new testament, inclusive of its apochrypha, were written by pagans. Can you think of any specific evidence off-hand, apart from that covered in the twelve questions above, by which it might be established that pagans could not have written the new testament corpus in antiquity?


Best wishes,



Pete Brown

aa5874

Christianity may have precceded Jesus the Christ. I can find no link for the Christians mentioned by Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny the younger to Jesus the Christ.

The word Christian may have been a word used just to differentiate between "orthodox" paganism and followers of any other heretical doctrines.

Based on Against Heresies and Justin Martyr's extant writing, Christianity did not need the Septuagint. Marcion developed a brand of Christianity, whose Christ was not from the God of the Jews, according to Justin.

mountainman

Hey there dog-on.

Yeah I do think that your question has a great deal of merit. Thanks for asking it, and answering it as you have.

If I might contribute, I'd say that the key figure for your question is the figure of the author Origen, whose Greek of the Hebrew scriptures was probably used by Eusebius in the fourth century. If the writings of Origen on the Hebrew scriptures were not available to Eusebius, things may have been different.

TWe know he was probably an ascetic. However the answer to the question, was Origen a pagan? is not without its affirmative support in the considering a number of issues such as:

1) The cointrovery between Eusebius' christian "Ammonius Saccas" and the ancient historical neopythagoean of the same name.

2) The Origenist Contoversies of the 4th and 5th centuries at the end of which process, Origen himself was declared a heretic.


Best wishes,


Pete Brown

schilling.klaus

some parts are originally in Latin,

those apochrypha have been perverted and corrupted for entertainment,
but were originally serious writings by pre-Catholic Christians

absolutely central, the Logos is the subject of Christianity

the NT ,as a Roman Catholic work, is full of Stoic Romanisms.
Non-Catholic writings are mostly Alexandrine and Syriaque.
thus contain more coptisms, aramaisms, and so on.


no doubt about that

only those who couldn't get assimilated,
as was the case in Germany around 70 years ago


Klaus Schilling

Clivedurdle

Does Eusebius use the term pagan or do we have poor translations? I thought pagan was a later fourth century term of abuse invented by xians. Is it used loosely like Byzantine?

mountainman

My guess is that the translators are accurate,
and that Eusebius takes the cake for the priority
use of the term "Pagan" in his Ecclesiastical
Pseudo-History (in a number of places).


These people followed Eusebius.
Here is Robert Lane Fox' ....

Fox appears to be unaware of the Eusebian usage
of the term. My position is that the term "Pagan"
and the term "christian" entered the world together,
and during the fourth century, no earlier.

Best wishes



Pete Brown