neilgodfrey

For me dating the gospels is part of the trick we first need to do before we can know where to begin if we want a reasonably secure historical construction. And if we can't do that without treating the source documents in a way no modern historian would ever dream of treating modern documents, if we can't agree on the authors or provenance or even the purposes and nature of many of the documents, and if we have to fudge normal rules of what constitutes historical evidence, then how can we even begin to do real history of christian origins?

I personally don't know how to get past textual, literary, rhetorical and theological studies of the documents -- just to get shifting glimpses into what may have been. That's not quite history, though. :banghead:

rlogan

Preliminary note: Yuri commented on the complete forgery of the Ignatius epistles earlier. Thought this was a nice piece on that:

http://www.depts.drew.edu/jhc/KillenIgnatius.pdf


Amaleq13, the first comment is not off-topic at all.


Each of us does, or should have, a working paradigm that has an entire corpus of interconnected judgements on strands of "evidence", and we do our best with the "argument from best explanation" for the whole.

Apologists masquerading as critical thinkers date Mark to one minute after the destruction of the temple, feign skepticism with a partial interpolation view of the Testimonium Flavianum, embrace spurrious epistles with a defense that they did not swallow them all, prattle on about fictitious first century persecutions and so on.

At the base of that proud pyramid though is the comic book hero coming back from the dead and in all manner performing logically and historically impossible feats, surrounded by a cotier of witnesses providing a linear succession of testimony to the extant gospels.

I really marvel at the pretense of scholarship in thrusting the burden of proof on the skeptic for what is, at the core, an outright fairy tale. Such "scholars" are fond of pontificating on pedantic minutiae, apparently, while belief in the easter bunny is what they are defending.

Maybe they think one can pretend otherwise. But if you strip away the ridiculous mythical material, what is left? There's nothing to follow, really. The whole point of the religion is that Christ is crucified for "us", not that there was anything outstanding about his ministry per se.

The miracles and all are the very basis for crowds gathering around him. No miracles - no crowds. No big bang. There is some other origin.


Uber-cool skeptics must contend with this entire class of material that is founded upon a fiction and be frank about what this means for the forged "history" of Christianity.

And, in short, because there is no gospel Jesus - there is no Peter or linear succession from disciples of any kind. The early epistles of Paul sans Jesus in the flesh can be seen as an evolutionary step in the final iteration of Christianity.

An understanding of the tremendous evidenciary importance of forging the TF, epistles of every sort, and indeed the entire gospel replaces the ridiculous stance that we should take Christian writings at face value until "proven" otherwise.



neilgodfrey has pointed out this is not history. No kidding. It is more similar to a criminal investigation. In particular, an investigation of organized crime.

The gospel stories are frauds. There are important elements for solving the crime such as motive, means, and opportunity - not naiively relying on the testimony of the mafia that committed the crime in the first place.

So we must begin with motive. Why were the gospel stories created since they are not true? Vork and others have put forward the importance of consolidating disparate "Christ" movements. It was under the guise of a linear succession from Jesus to the disciples to the second century "bishops", as it were, of the nascant central church.

It is a crime that can be committed all the better because all of the alleged witnesses are long dead. This is the matter of opportunity.

Putting forward a 70 CE date has some real problems in getting away with the crime since thousands of alleged "witnesses" and tens of thousands of one-step-removed witnesses are still alive, but nowhere to be found.

And who has the means? An impoverished and illiterate "follower" of a fiction? Such a person does not even exist, let alone the ludicrous idea of poor illiterates affording scribes and such. No, this is a job that takes some wealth.


Putting forward the 70's vs the second century is belief in the easter bunny instead of acknowledgement that a long standing organized fraud has been operating.

S.C.Carlson

Some of Papias's comments on Mark had already been plagiarized by Victorinus of Pettau, who died before Eusebius wrote. It is unlikely, moreover, that Victorinus could have been the source for Eusebius because he wrote in Latin and Eusebius's knowledge of Latin and Latin works was very poor. In addition, Victorinus was a chiliast and Eusebius loathed that theology.

I'm not quite sure what you are referring to here.

Stephen

Rick Sumner

Where? To be sure, Paul boasts of calling Peter on his failure to eat with Gentiles, but then, Peter is only doing exactly what Paul himself boasts of doing elsewhere--being "all things to all people."

Besides which, such a disagreement could hardly be called a radical theological divide, any more than disagreement between Rabbis is a "major theological divide." On the core of Paul's message, he's keen to point out that "I or they, so do we preach."

Regards,
Rick Sumner

andrewcriddle

I think I posted this suggestion in another thread some time ago.

IF one regards the claim that Mark got his information from Peter as historically implausible then the most plausible reason why Papias should have thought this is that he had read 1 Peter (See Eusebius Ecclesiastical History book 2 ch 15) and deduced that since Mark is described there as a member of Peter's team, Peter must have been the source of Mark's information.

Andrew Criddle

Vorkosigan

Where? Only two things have come down to us, the commentary on revelations and creation of the world. The latter is said to be based on Papias.

Catholic Ency on Papias
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11457c.htm

"The cause of the loss of this precious work of an Apostolic Father was the chiliastic view which he taught, like St. Justin and St. Irenaeus. He supported this by "strange parables of the Saviour and teachings of His, and other mythical matters", says Eusebius. We can judge of these by the account of the wonderful vine above referred to. His method of exegesis may perhaps be estimated to some extent by a fifth book with the original ending of Victorinus's commentary on the Apocalypse, as published by Haussleiter (Theologisches Litteraturblatt, 26 April, 1895); for both passages are evidently based on Papias, and contain the same quotations from the Old Testament. Eusebius was an opponent of chiliastic speculations, and he remarks: "Papias was a man of very small mind, if we may judge by his own words". It would seem that the fragment of Victorinus of Pettau "De fabrica mundi" is partly based on Papias."

One could just as well argue that Papias is based on this. Papias is a strange figure. everything he says is wrong and contradicts what others say, and what evidence tells us, and some of his quotes look invented.

Vorkosigan

andrewcriddle

FWIW there is a passage in Irenaeus Against Heresies that seems very similar to Papias and is probably derived from him.
Andrew Criddle

S.C.Carlson

It from Victorinus's commentary on Revelation, In Apoc. 4,4. Unfortunately, the only version of the commentary on-line, the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation, is based on Jerome's recension of it, which "corrected" Victorinus in various ways, mainly to remove Victorinus's chiliasm.

The verson that prior to Jerome's edition says this for Mark:

This overlaps with quotation of Papias as presented by Eusebius, with portions corresponding to Victorinus in bold:

NB: The Greek I have rendered by "anecdotally" is literally "for the needs" and could support the Latin's in munere. Getting from the Latin expression to the Greek, on the other hand, is harder to do.

Well, the possibility that I'm exploring is whether the non-bolded portions of Papias's testimonium are actually Eusebius's in-line commentary in an effort to domesticate Papias's remarks for his own needs. I suspect that Papias's remarks were a little too candid for the orthodoxy of Eusebius's day.

Stephen

S.C.Carlson

I would agree. By the way, I would also argue that Victorinus is not dependent on Irenaeus for his use of Papias because he preserved the "not in order" bit that Irenaeus lacked.

Stephen

Vorkosigan

Thanks, Steve and Andrew, things are a little clearer now.

Vorkosigan