Steve Weiss

What you say is correct, but even if there were libraries full of detailed sources rather than fragments here and there of even allegedly eyewitness accounts about a so-called historical, biblical Jesus it doesn't take any scholarship or great insights to reject a miracle-working, resurrecting man/god and the mythology around him.

mountainman

None of the questions at post # 67 are old.




References please.





What did the heretics think?

Are we sure they were fairly represented?





Without a job?






Perhaps this is just dogma?


What sort of UNBELIEF (see citations above) are we to ascribe to the Antichrist Arius?

mountainman

Do you think there may have been any people at the time of Nicaea who had read Porphyr's publication of the Enneads of Plotinus. Out of interest, have you read this? Plotinus writes about the Supreme Being, and the "One Spirit Soul"? He also writes:



I cannot follow why Toto seems to think "There was a different conception of "reality" in those days." Has Toto read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations (or via: amazon.co.uk)?

Certainly the vast majority of people were uneducated, and only a few somehow became educated. The modern era is characterized by a far greater percentage of people being educated - literate: able to read and write. The modern era is characterised by a return of the Greek intellectual tradition after sixteen hundred centuries of suppression by the christian heresiological church.


The evidence I have cited in items above relating to an unbelief in Jesus is sourced from the very small percentage of educated people in antiquity. The common people followed the leaders. The leaders at Nicaea were predominantly pagan.

"“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.".

The evidence I have cited is sourced by wise people around Nicaea,
who regarded the religion as false, and the Jesus story as unbelievable.


Would we describe these wise ones as Platonists or Docetists?
And did it really matter to wise philosophers such as Sopater?



.

Doug Shaver

I'm not arguing that it is or isn't. From the historicist point of view, though, it almost has to be a strictly modern notion.
You have cited evidence that can be interpreted that way. Different interpretations are not necessarily unreasonable.

I agree with the historicists up to a point. I agree that nothing in the historical record shows unambiguously that anybody in antiquity denied the existence of any historical Jesus.

Doug Shaver

Dillon, John. The Middle Platonists: 80 B.C. To A.D. 220. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977.

Doug Shaver

Have you read anything else?

This is pure bullsh!t, Pete. There is all the difference in the world between "educated" and "able to read and write." In the modern era, "the vast majority of people" are no more familiar with any Greek intellectual tradition than were the masses in antiquity. Even the average college graduate nowadays couldn't begin to tell you the difference between a Stoic and an Epicurean, or between either of them and a Pythagorean.

Sheshbazzar

The dog did not bark in the night. Why did the dog not bark in the night?

Where did that dog (of opposing opinions) go? The prints of his struggle with these intruders are still all over the ground. They killed and buried the dog first

That dog was the first victim of these thieves and murderers. They knew they had to silence its voice.

The going rate, in a profession that has proven lucrative to the dishonest and clever from the day of its inception.

Follow the money, its not flowing into the pockets of atheists and agnostics.

Diogenes the Cynic

Also Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, who specifically describes a belief in a"spiritual body" (soma pneumatikon).

Sheshbazzar

And? Is that supposed to make it invalid?
The idea that Jeebus was only an 'Obscure wandering preacher' is also a strictly modern notion.
From the historicist point of view, does that make the modern notion of a Jeebus that was really NOT famous, but an 'Obscure preacher', also invalid?

The notion that 'Paul' was not the actual author of all of the 'Pauline' Epistles is also a modern notion,
Does that, From the historicist point of view, serve to make this modern notion also invalid?

Killed 'em all off and destroyed all of their writings, and left a record of doing so.
Thus the you find the party that has confessed to its crimes -in writing- to be innocent.

mountainman

There is a curious text called "The Acts of Andrew" (Eusebius is a witness to it) in which Andrew banishes the seven savage demon dogs from Nicaea.


Andrew takes the old man's most precious possession, his son, and runs off with a new student zombie.

What a scam.






I'd rather go to a U2 concert. Or even a walk on the beach or in the hills.