spin

I was just wondering about the Latin tradition, you know, Tertullian and his reems of legal Latin, Cyprian and the innumerable synods at Carthage dealing with lapsed believers, etc. Did Eusebius write them as well? -- I mean he was not known as able to write in any Latin let alone good legal language. Perhaps Jerome, who could have been in on it, wrote them. Maybe Augustine who brought those who were followers of Tertullian's teaching back to the Latin church fold invented them as part of his contribution to Eusebius's conspiracy. Did Eusebius invent the Arian heresy, squabbling over whether the father, son and holy ghost were "like one" or just "one", Arius and all his predecessor, Lucian of Antioch. This latter we are told by Jerome produced an edition of the LXX based on his analysis of the original Hebrew which was still available in Jerome's time. Seems pretty obvious Jerome was somehow involved in the conspiracy.

What are we to make of Marcus Aurelius who casually mentions the christians in 11,3 of his Meditations? Or Lucian of Samosata who parodies his Peregrinus becoming a Galilean? Or even Pliny the Younger who has trouble with Christians, as is also mentioned by the apparently fictitious Tertullian?
Oh, wake up, Ockham. This holy wine has quite a lasting effect. Give him a slap.


spin

Chris Weimer

And I thought the conspiracy theorists in PD were bad. I guess when it comes to religious bias, anything goes. A truly sad day for all BC&H when this lunacy can actually be applauded. But then again, they those who agree oddly enough don't even know Greek, Latin, and seemingly not even English. Τι εστιν αληθεια?

yummyfur

Forgot to add, Constantine was only sole emperor for 12 years.

Constantine's children divided his realm and were not loyal to each other. Constans was overthrown by non-Constantinian Magnentius, who ruled for 13 years his portion. And finally Julian(the one you like to qoute) the last Constantinian Emperor, disliked Christianity. Valentinian who followed him(after Jovian's less then one year rule), was not from Constantine's family, his father Gratian had all his land confiscated by Constantius II, because of his possible support for Magnentius. Why would he want to continue this fake religion?

yummyfur

It's rather easy spin, if you get your mind working the rightTM way. The earliest manuscript for Meditations are 10th century, the first mentions of them are by Themistius in 364, a pagan senator, this must have been part of Julian's failed(because he died in battle in 363) plan to create his own fake religion based on the fake musings of a beloved old emperor. See how easy this is

Chris Weimer

Bah, all of you are wrong. God created the world, including all our thoughts, and Satan made all the evidence point to an old earth, but really we were all born last Tuesday.

(The saddest part is that there is about as much evidence for Last Tuesdayism as there is for mountainman's "theory", if it can even be called such.)

mountainman

We view Tertullian as one of the Eusebian literary profiles,
where Eusebius either wrote the literature of Tertullian or
acted as editor-in-chief in the harmonising of literature
generated by other writers in the fourth century, which
would become known as Tertullian.

There appears to be no real doubt that some of the ecclesiatical
literature could have been generated by others after Eusebius.
For example the Tacitus reference is quite late.

If the fabrication of the Galilaeans was a fiction of men,
and was implemented out of the whole cloth by Constantine
then the Arian heresy is the reaction of the empire against
this initiative. The words of Arius, which we are told caused
Constantine to call the Council of Nicaea ...

that there was a time when he was not...
that he was made out of nothing existing...

The implementation of christianity and the Arian heresy
are two sides of the same coin.

Whatever happened after the death of Constantine and Eusebius
is speculative, and did not relate to the commissioning of the new
and strange religion. Some gaps could have been filled. Sir Isaac
Newton makes some scathing remarks about the behaviour of the
bishop set against Arius, Athanasius.

Interpolation.

Wholesale fourth century non-de-plume, could have been Eusebius
or another under his editorship.

Pliny's reference to christians is simply an interpolation by the
fourth century scribes under Constantine who wanted to get
some decent priority dates in the literature in regard to the
first appearance among men of this new and strange religion.

It served to cast doubt upon the natural Arian assertion of the time
that Constantine's new god was new and fabricated.



Pete Brown

mountainman

Fake heresies showed the true believers how all the previously
embraced philosophies of the empire had been overcome by the
one true tribe of christians. The herecies calumnified the platonists
and pythagoraeans.

Constantine wanted to appear at arms length so he could
induce men to believe in the new religion through his own
independent support of it. If Constantine supported this
ancient religion of the Hebrew sages, then it was alright
for the attendees of Nicaea, and they signed on the dotted
line.

OTOH, if the empire knew the new religion was simply an
imperial fiction, supported by the emperor, some would
follow the emperor, and some would oppose the emperor.

By setting a great (and fictitious) distance between the
implementation of the new religion (via interpolation of
the first century Josephus for example) the empire is
then presented with a choice to believe, and
not an imperial command.


For display at Nicaea, to induce the attendees to believe the inference
that there were christians on the planet before the council of Nicaea.

At the time of Nicaea, our thesis is that Constantine had been looking
at the eastern empire for the last 12 years, planning towards the time
when it would become his. In the period 312 to 324 CE, Constantine
was able to prepare the literature in the western empire, and implement
a beta version of christianity in Rome, but he would not physically
implement the new religion in the east, until he had the eastern empire.

He sent the new literature into the eastern empire leading up to
the year 324 CE, and this resulted in the Arian controversy.

The purpose of the preparation of the coptic versions of literature
was to demonstrate to the attendees of Nicaea, who were from the
eastern empire, that there existed a history of christianity in Egypt,
written in the native language of Alexandria, clearly depicting the
literary activity of "the tribe of christians" in antiquity in the east
of the Roman empire.




Pete Brown

yummyfur

This would cause some problems for your theory, as Constantius II was a devout Arian, it was his forcing of his Arian teaching on young Julian, as well as his treacherous ways, that was probably an important motivation for Julian's strong dislike of Christianity.

If Constantius II is a devout Arian, and Valens, Valentinian's brother and co-emperer was also an Arian, why the hell did "Christianity" take hold, if Arianism is a rejection of Constantine's fake religion?

mountainman

Supreme from 324-336CE. However he was emperor of the western
empire from 312 CE and prior to that of Briton from 306. Let's then say
that he had direct access to the literature preservation processes
in the western empire from 312, and for the entire empire from 324 CE.

And from 306 CE, he would have had the power of commanding
inter-library transfers.

The fact that Constantine sponsored the creation of christianity
was deliberately suppressed by Constantine, as outlined above.
Perhaps only Eusebius knew the full story. Noone else need
have known this "unutterable fact".

Consequently, when Constantine drops off the perch, what happens
to this knowledge is uncertain. Perhaps it was passed on, but
perhaps it was not passed on via Constantine. Perhaps it was only
passed on via Eusebius. But to who?

What I am trying to say is that there is no reason to think
that the empire knew it was a fake religion, because Constantine
did such a good job selling it to the empire at Nicaea. Perhaps
certain of the fifth century bishops however had some idea,
but this is not central to the thesis.



Pete Brown

spin

Eusebius didn't write in Latin, matey. Why do you think he was able to produce the quality of Latin found in the Tertullian texts?? Why did this literary profile of Eusebius -- as you call him -- become a Montanist and then, finding them not strict enough, setting up his own religious brand??

That doesn't help you with the bulk of the literature. There are scads of material from Clement of Alexandria, all tendentious stuff. What about all the Justin material with its attitude. How does the effete Eusebius come up with these personae when he can't overcome his own contorted style??

Speculation is no help when you are supposed to be a bit beyond the mere speculation stage. You are rabbiting on as though this was it and here you are merely speculating.

Yep. But really what about them? Do you have anything meaningful to say about them? Or are you just going to hope that you can take a few out of context like these?:

Yeah, Arius believed that Jesus was not the same stuff as god. He was a created existence, so there was a time when he was not. All well known Arian stuff. Arius believed in some sort of creatio ex nihilo.

What does this signify in your theory, that the Arian tradition that came from Lucian of Antioch was actually written by our mate Eusebius? With the amount of material you conjecture him writing, he wouldn't have had time to go to the toilet, let alone eat, drink or sleep.

Newton lived a little after the time.

You mean that the basic concept which the christians reflected was also interpolated, or that just the mention of christians was interpolated? Have you read the text? Which bit is interpolated and what is your reasoning?

With your total lack of coherence, someone else can come along and just as rightly propose that Eusebius was just a nom-de-plume of some other later writer. You obviously have no tangible understanding of Lucian of Samosata.

One of the things that I have not found out yet was whether Constantine was ever really christian. I know that he was a believer in Sol Invictus and that the symbol he had put on those shields was a symbol of the sun with rays in four directions.

This position you seem to espouse is as solid as water in a paper bag. It creates fantastic excesses, such as widespread conspiracies with teams of writers pumping out reems of fabrications to create earlier fictitious religious scholars who had complicated religious conflicts, wrote with individual literary styles, were involved in petty squabbles of no lasting import, heresies, whose collected works reflect an evolution in christian thought, whose meetings showed how they dealt with problems.

I wonder now if anyone else will attempt to hold your hand so that you can quietly drop this nonsense, when you so calmly overlook the literary heritage which came before Eusebius which you so blithely put into his hands.

As poor DeForest Kelley often had to say to Captain James Kirk, "He's dead, Jim."

There is no magic bullet. The Eusebius idea may have been a brief flicker in TH's brain, but he apparently realised how complicated it would make things and quietly dropped it. Occam's Razor says that if there are two ways to explain something (and all its manifestations), you choose the simpler way. The non-theist knows that god complicates the world so much that the concept is unreasonable. I think your support of the Eusebius conjecture is analogously unreasonable.

I can imagine that you will go on believing the idea, but we are attempting to be scholarly about our approach to our analyses. It's not what you believe, but what you can show through evidence. You are spending your time in this thread doing contortions like our fundamentalist visitors to defend what seems to us to be the undefendable by conjecturing why all the problems to the theory should be put aside. Conjecture is an insufficient response here. You are not showing how it can be a productive theory. It is not giving us any new insight.

The only reason why the bird was sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been nailed there. And don't give us any crap about it muscling the bars if it hadn't been.


spin