mountainman

Re: Joe Atwill's "Caesar's Messiah" ...
The epoch we are examining is ancient history, and the example
provided by Carrier is not conducive to the type of power structures
which were present in the ROman Empire between 000 and 325 CE.

We are talking about a time when one person "at the top" may have
had absolute and supreme imperial and military power, a king of kings
if benevolent, or a malevolent despot at the toher extreme.

Theories of history involving the fabrication of the new testament
writings by Roman Emperor's are not necessarily reliant upon what
we would in the modern world call "conspiracies", because these
figures of history commanded an "absolute power" which cannot
readily be translated into today's political environment. (Or rather
the picture could be painted, but it wouldn't look good).

I have for some time now attempted to present an alternative
hypothesis and theory relating to the history of antiquity, in
which the literary tradition for "the tribe of christians" is actually
created in the fourth century under Constantine.

Many posters have categorised such a theory as "conspiracy",
whereas in actual fact there need not necessarily be any
conspiracy at work here, only the decrees of someone who
has absolute dictatorial power, at the same moment in history
when the Constantine Bibles were written out, published and
bound with velum.

I can understand the need for objective assessment.
Both spin and Carrier provide disclaimers - this is healthy.
Just in case

mountainman

Spin and Jeffrey use the word conspiracy alot.
They constantly insinuate that the question
Did Constantine Invent Christianity?
implies some "conspiracy".

Conspiracy to me means a partnership
literally "breathing together".

Constantine may well have not worked in
any form of partnership, but simply gave
orders to be carried out.

A contemporary historian describes
Constantine, in the last decade of his
life (ie: 326-337 CE) as:

"a ward irresponsible for his own actions"
and not as "a conspirator".

Toto

The conspiracy that seems inprobable would be the concerted effort to create all the Christian literature and pretend that it came from an earlier era. Constantine might have commanded this, but it would take an army of well educated scribes to pull it off.

Constantine may have had absolute power in some sense, but he was limited by the technology and social structure of the day. Being a dictator or a mafia don is not as easy as it might look.

spin

So mountainman has cut and run, leaving his empty claims about Julian by the way and has started another vacuous thread to trumpet his naff conspiracy theory, which he bolsters with a bit of etymology. Doh! mountainman, if you can't deal with real issues, why start new threads? Everyone who's been on this forum more than two minutes knows what you're on about. You are not adding anything. You haven't come up with one piece of substantive evidence which gives even the hope of your stuff being correct.

Julian is less than no help to you, because he assumes that Jesus and Paul existed, that the Galileans have been around for 300 years, that the early converts were of so little importance that the cult was worthless, that Jesus was a subject of the Romans. Your sad attempt to say that Julian didn't mean (hey, he was only being rhetorical) it is unbecoming.

Most conspiracy theories have some apparent evidence to wave in the eyes of the credulous.


spin

mountainman

Constantine had an army already, of many tens of thousands of men.
When he took Rome in 312 CE he inherited whatever wealth that city
may have had within its walls, plus the wealth available to him as its
militart commander, from the entire western Roman empire. This
included a number of mints.

For Constantine to assemble an army of educated scribes, and
appoint an editor-in-chief is by no means unimagineable.


He was not limited by the social structure of the day because
we know without a doubt that he irreversibly altered it as has
been outlined in this thread entitled:

Constantine in brief: highly intelligent supreme imperial mafia thug

* Breaking of Traditional Political Order
* Separation of Military and Civilian management
* Dismantled the Praetorian Guard
* Newly created Civil Service posts
* New Personal Taxation initiatives
* New Personal and Geographical Restrictions
* Breaking of Traditional (Hellenic) Religious Order
* Building of Churches (Basilicas)
* Personal Appointment of his Bishops
* Plunder of traditional Hellenic temples and shrines
* Execution of Hellenic priest/philosopher and others ...


See also this article