Duvduv

Do we rely on Eusebius as if he were speaking from Mt. Sinai? Everything is with a huge grain of salt when referring to a biased church party man propagandist who is hardly an objective source about anything.

There is no information at all about this person called Irenaeus allegedly of the 2nd century who allegedly wrote Against Heresies. With full awareness of 4 gospels and Paul only 30 years after Justin was said to write nothing about any of them?

But scholars accept the traditional view as if it were the "gospel truth" (excuse the pun).
Much more likely that the Irenaeus writings were mainly put together by the Byzantine establishment in the 4th century or even fifth.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Doug,

Yes, it is frustrating how often a text's narrative setting date is confused with creation and/or publication date. This is more reprehensible than ever when we know with certainty that so much of the Hebrew Scriptures were written hundreds of years after the times they purport to describe.

stephan huller

From memory Acts also appears in Ignatius. This is certainly true for the longer version but I think it is also true for the 'long' recension.

maryhelena

Ignatius quotes Acts

http://www.ntcanon.org/Ignatius.shtml

Ignatius

Mag. 5:1

Yes, everything is coming to and end, and we stand before this choice -- death or life -- and everyone, will go "to his own place". Once might say similarly, there are two coinages, one God's, the other the world's. Each bears its own stamp -- unbelievers that of this world; believers, who are spurred by love, the stamp of God the Father through Jesus Christ. And if we do not willingly die in union with his Passion, we do not have his life in us.

Acts 1:25

Acts 1:23-27

maryhelena

Hi, PhilosopherJay

All we have in the setting of the gospel narrative is the end point - the time of Pilate. The beginning is ambiguous. And, for the ahistoricist/mythicists, since there was no historical gospel JC, that beginning is an open question. Tertullian tells us that there were Christians in the time of Augustus, 27 b.c. to 14 c.e. Before Pilate and the gospel narrative associated with him.

Jewish history relates the death of Antigonus, in Antioch, in 37 b.c. Tied to a stake/cross, scourged, slain/beheaded. Time-wise - from that date until the publishing of Antiquities, about 95 c.e. (and it's 'history' of Salome and Philip - a story contrary to gMark and gMatthew) is over 130 years. 130 years of history for the writer of gLuke to put together his 'twist', his symbolic re-telling of that history, in his JC narrative and in Acts.

aa5874

It is completely illogical that Ignatius quoted Acts 1.25 when there is NO contextual similarities in Epistles to Mag. 5.1.

If you persist that Ignatius quoted Acts 1.25 because it contains the phrase to his own place then he also quoted 1 Samuel 5.11.

1 Samuel 5:11 KJV It is most obvious that Ignatius did NOT quote Acts 1.25 at all since the passage has NOTHING whatsoever to do with Mag 5.1

Adam

Geisler is so extremely far Right that he basically cannot be trusted, but nevertheless that link gives solid arguments that I include (at least by link to my earlier articles in Noesis) in my thread here with over 600 posts, Gospel Eyewitnesses

http://www.freeratio.org/showthread....306983&page=23
in which Post #555 presents the case for regarding the Proto-Luke portion of Luke as factual without any particular reason for doubting. In my thread I presented my thesis that seven eyewitnesses gave written records about Jesus. (Plus there was an eighth I thought presented too much apocalypticism that was his own presumptions from his background in Qumran and with John the Baptist.)

To present some new information I had planned to introduce in a new thread, here's my philosophical approach:
Bible criticism is thought of as a scholarly historical enterprise, but is properly philosophical as well. We need a starting point to our search for knowledge. How do we know? That is the study of epistemology. Implicitly this proceeds from authoritarianism by citing authorities or by proclaiming the Bible to be inerrant. Many start with external criticism based on what early church fathers said about the gospels.
I propose a new starting point. To reach Descartes’s dictum, “I think, therefore I am”, we must find some place in the gospels where an individual starts from his own knowledge. This point occurs in John 12 where Jesus comes for dinner to Bethany in the home of Mary and Martha and (and apparently also of John Mark). The Passion Narrative is widely recognized as the written source underlying the gospels, but the writer has to have known Jesus from earlier to be among his followers in what occurs in John 18 and 19. The individualistic standpoint of this writer may go back no farther than these few days earlier when Jesus came in John 12:2. This was also Lazarus’s house, which may be why some scholars have suggested Lazarus as being the Beloved Disciple and/or the author of the Gospel of John (or a source in it). But Lazarus was already well known to Jesus (11:3), so his own eyewitness story would have to start much earlier, and it does not seem to. Tentatively let’s work with “the disciple known to the high priest (18:15-16) as this “I am” source who is telling us all he knew about Jesus for the next week, starting with John 11:54, 12:2-8, 12-14a, 13:18 or 21, and 13:38. The Passion Narrative in John 18 and 19 is told very simply, quite unlike what precedes it. We can easily accept this as proving that the historical Jesus was arrested tried, and crucified.

Toto

This comes up first on a google search, but it doesn't seem connected. The newadvent version of Ignatius' Letter to the Magnesians does not list this as a quote.

There are some other claims that Ignatius quotes Acts at this link, but not well explained.

Even if there is some similarity in language, how would you know that Acts is not quoting Ignatius?

stephan huller

Pervo (Dating Acts 17 - 20) thinks that Acts was witnessed by Polycarp's Letter which in turn references the Ignatian corpus. It shouldn't be surprising that Acts would have been included in the Ignatian corpus given that Ignatius fits within the Antiochene Church which Acts is clearly promoting. My contention would not be that any of this proves that Acts is any older than the middle of the second century. The similarities come from Irenaeus.

maryhelena

Who knows - maybe Ignatius had been reading the Gospel of Judas and had somehow decided that there is a place for everyone....:devil1: