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Originally Posted by mountainman
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Originally Posted by la70119
What else could it be?
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Read the description of the inscription. The original inscription to Prosenes had nothing to do with Christianity. Prosenes himself is reported by some accounts to have been the manager of the imperial gladatorial games. How is is that we are conjecturing that the manager of the imperial gladatorial games was a christian?
WTF?
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icardfacepalm:
I thought I made it clear I was referring to the addition made by Ampelius which is right peculiar. I know the original is flat out not Christian. It is he, Ampelius, that had the secret inscription made,
Prosenes receptus ad deum (Prosenes received before God). Well which god could it be, since the deity in question was not named?
He could have been a Jewish proselyte or a
gerim (a god-fearer), except the inscription is in Latin, and not Hebrew??? It's not as if Judaism was illegal then. :huh: Well maybe proseletyzing
to Judaism was...
I've read the whole original inscription and the added one together with the explication by Peter Lampe. The Christian add-on inscription is very discordant with the non-Christian original. I mean, what Christian would sponsor gladiatorial games, anyway??? It's like a modern Muslim sponsoring female mud-wrestling. It seems to me that Prosenes and his freedman Ampelius went out East as ordinary Panhellenes and caught a religious mind virus while out East. Possibly, they became Christian -- then known as ChrEstian.
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The answer seems to be provided with the added inscription "welcomed before god" which was scratched on the original NON CHRISTIAN inscription to Prosenes by another later hand.
One explanation is that it may have been scrawled by a person who had lost their father or mother or brother or sister to the gladatorial games, perhaps as food for the wild beasts. Whoever wrote that Prosenes was "received before god" might be commenting that Prosenes would be judged for his crimes against humanity, in his capacity as the manager of the games.
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What really doesn't make sense is why would Prosene's body be shipped back to Rome in an expensive sarcophagus at great shipping cost when it could have been cremated out East and the ashes sent back in an urn? Even the Emperor Caracalla, when he was killed in a campaign against the Parthians, was cremated and his ashes sent back to the City in an urn (Lampe, p. 332).
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There are many possibilities why someone would scrawl this "received before god" and not all of them automatically denote we are looking at a comment by a christian mind.
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Sometimes, no matter how much we try, it is impossible to get "out" of the Christian "box". Because there is a lack of evidence for an alternative hyposthesis.
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All the more reason to critically question the identification, especially since it most likely derives from the efforts of Pope Pius IX and his trained archaeological lap dog Giovanni de Rossi ....
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Originally Posted by Graydon Snyder
"The real founders of the science of early Christian archaeology came in the 19th century:
Giuseppe Marchi (1795-1860) and Giovanni de Rossi (1822-1894)...[the latter] published
between 1857 and 1861 the first volume of "Inscriptiones christianae urbis Romae". Pope
Pius IX moved beyond collecting by appointing in 1852 a commission - "Commissione de
archaelogia sacra" - that would be responsible for all early Christian remains."
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Ad hominem attacks will get you no place, even though I know about the RCC's scheming to get ahold of all evidence for early Christianity and the like. When Israel took over the Qumran Scrolls project, their scholarship and rate of translating the fragmants put the RCC to shame.
05-29-2012, 12:39 AM
