mountainman

Dear aa5874,

The key evidence is not just "book". Let me shine the spotlight on the coptic text an english translation of which is preserved as follows:
In a physical sense we are dealing with a description of a codex book with a cover, not a scroll. This was a new technology in antiquity which became accepted in the fourth century. The bindings of the codices of at least some of the books of the Nag Hammadi haul have been created with paper records of the early to mid-fourth century, and the spine of gThomas in the NHC apocryhal books is radio-carbon dated to 348 CE plus or minus 60 years.

The contents of the Nag Hammadi library have yet to be interpretted as pagan history in direct opposition to Eusebius and the One True Monotheisic State Roman Universal traditonal "church".


And isn't that a very curious state of affairs. Eusebius would like us to be believe that Paul wrote fourteen letters which were true, and that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote four obituaries to a dead god, but as an historian of the epoch of christian origins he cannot even tell us the name or names, or even the heretical sect or sects, which were responsible for authoring these most wonderfully illustrious Hellenistic romance novels concerning the "Travels of the Apostles" and their Miraculous Encounters outside of the canon.


Particularly concerning the Therapeutae written about by Philo. Who were these people whjo are described as ubiquitous in the ROman empire by Philo? Where do the therapeutae fit into the story of "early christian origins"?

The historical document known as the Historia Augusta was perhaps designed as a supplement series edition to the Historia Ecclesiastica. Which four collegiate authors, and scriptora, authored this fourth century monstrous political fiction?

Rest assured that Eusebian continuators luxuriated in the same tradition of fabrication -- Damasius, Augustine, Jerome (and Rufinus) and Cyril. One of Augustine's claim to fame was the confabulation of the Manichaeans and the followers of the historical Mani (the Sassanid Persian prophet who trecked to India just like Apollonius) with the "christians" and the "followers of jesus".

The name of "Leucius" is offered as the name of the author of some of these NT non canonical books and a surname "Charinus" is identified in the ninth century by Photius. Accoording to Eusebius Matthew wrote Matthew, John wrote John, Luke wrote Luke and probably Acts, and Mark wrote most of Mark and finally Paul wrote 14 letters of Paul. So many books!

But the non canonical books were also supposedly named. Does Eusebius know the author of the non canonical books? The author is a heretic! His name is anathema! What did Constantine order in respect of the memory of his own son Crispus? That his memory be blotted out? Like the memory of Porphyry and Arius of Alexandria (also according to Constantine)?

Eusebius refuses to name any name to be associated with the NT non canonical books because it is a politically sensitive issue. His purpose is not to advertise the opposition, but to promote the orthodox. He is not an historian, he is a well paid polemicist.


Best wishes,


Pete

aa5874

But are we dealing with writings that are also fiction? An anonymous writing claiming someone had a book cover does not help very much at all if the veracity of the story is uncertain.


I hope you see the clues or the parts that can help you put the jigsaw puzzle together.

Once you know what Eusebius would like us to believe then perhaps you can find out what Eusebius is likely to have written.


I think you have just isolated one of the fabricated stories of Jesus believers by Eusebius.

The Thereaputae as described by Philo did not have anything to do with Jesus of the NT.


Once you know who Eusebius was and know what he did, perhaps you can find out what he wrote. Your description of Eusebius appears to be reasonable.

Eusebius was advertising for and defending the orthodox, so it is reasonable to assume that wherever we find material that promotes orthodoxy it was written by them (the orthodox).

And if material is found that does not promote the orthodoxy, then it was written by others.

gentleexit

ok

Hostile? Typical language for the time - actually on the milder end. Just name calling. No "vomited forth his own impiety" ala Theodoret et al later. That's how they wrote. Characterize the cited, cite it. Judge them by the citations. The bile is just dressing.

Hold on now. You're assuming he created rather than quoted that letter, that he put "if you can call him a man" in Josephus. Just because he quoted it, doesn't mean he made it. By all accounts, he didn't assemble the library he used.

As he admits in the introduction to his history, he did lack early sources but that very admission and his preference for quotation over exposition talk to transparency, not blatant fraud.

Call back to Porphyry. Tell him the news. Plotinus hated gnostics but his pupil's polemic against the Christians proper was renowned as the most effective and he died before Constantine rose in Britain.

As for ...
yep. Most telling.

mountainman

Dear aa5874,

Eusebius job was to sell the history of Jesus to the Greek populations of the eastern empire at that time when they were about to get a vote at Nicaea in order to decide what monotheistic state religion everyine wanted to have. It was all fair and above boards. Christianity won hands down. Eusebius convinced everyone that Jesus was the historical new god, and that the christian religion was neither strange nor new.

The new testament non canonical books are all about Jesus and the apostles, and are called Gospels and Acts just like the canon. There is no doubt that the apocryphal narratives mimic the canon. The canon was probably introduced by Constantine with great gravitas (seriousness). He closed the opposition religious churches and temples and forbade anyone to practice the old traditional customs. He turned the backbone of the eastern Hellenistic civilisation on its head.

I think that it is reasonable to believe that in such a political environment it was natural for anti-christian literature to have been authored. In the sense that the NT apocryphal tractates mimic the authority of the canonical narratives, they are anti-christian in a political, seditious, resistance-mode, dissedent manner. First there was the canon in all its seriousness. Then along comes Jones ... a host of witty adventure romances, full of action and wonderous miracles.

Everything until then had gone to plan. The orthodox destroy and prohibit use of the traditional churches and temples, and in some cases the army at the disposal of the orthodox raize the temples to the ground. The books of the new testament had been published and distrubuted far and wide. An impressive list of new monotheistic state christian basilicas had been eracted (over pagan shrines), and business was looking good. All was in hand, he people were being taxed heavily --- and they had the bible.

But some clever dipstick had written some outrageously funny travelling tales of the main characters in this heavily serious religious Holy Flaming Writ, and the stories were immediately very popular with the population. The common people could see the joke in them. The common people may have laughed out loud when they read the non canonical books --- or when the tractates were read out loud, or even performed for the public.

Eusebius lets slip that the pagan's polticial resistance to christianity included having "The Acts of Pilate" read out by schoolchildren. What is the Acts of Pilate? It is an opportunity for a gnostic anti-christian to declare through the mouth of Pontius Pilate that Jesus performed healing by means of the power of the Healing god Asclepius. Is this what the canon tells us about Jesus' healing powers? The Acts of Pilate IMO was a grass roots resistance to the emergence of 4th century christianity as a selected "state religion".

Best wishes,


Pete

mountainman

Dear gentleexit,

The bile is fourth century christian dressing, and was backed with the vitriol of the christian emperor's best troops. It was hostile to non-conformists. That is, it was hostile to anything which was not christian. Eusebius represented the orthodox position, and he clearly defined that specific non canonical acts and gospels were to be deemed as "heretical". Strangely, he canno provide any names for the author(s) of these tractates, even though he admits they were being written in his time. (See Acts of Pilate). What does this tell us? To quote Carrier, Eusebius is either inept or a liar.


I follow Ken Olsen's "Eusebius fabricated the TF".

But what does Porphyry actually tell us about the NT non canonical corpus? He does not mention it at all. Do you think he was aware any of it existed? This only serves to indicate that perhaps the whole lot of it was written after the fateful year of 324 CE, when christianity hit the fan of the empire, as an academic and literary response of the docetic gnostic Hellenistic culture to the wonderful fictive narratives of the NT canon.


Best wishes,



Pete

mountainman

Dear aa5874,

The Eusebian mooted link between the "Essenes" and Jesus followers has been thrashed to death with the DSS. No such link exists. Philo mentions both the essenes and the therapeuae as "religious communities", but I have seen little publicised scholarship on the therapeutae. Who were they and how they fit in to the jigsaw puzzle of "fraudulent christian origins" is a mystery at the moment.

Best wishes


Pete

aa5874

How could Eusebius convince everyone? It is virtually impossible for Eusebius to have acheived such a thing, not even Gods have accomplished such feat.

Now, to show that Eusebius could not convince everyone, there was Julian the Emperor.

In his book Against the Galileans, he called the Galileans a monstrous lie yet he never mentioned that Eusebius fabricated the Galilleans.

There would have been Pagans alive all over the Empire who would have told Julian that before Eusebius there was never any God known as Jesus.

All the pagans who participated in the Council of Nicea who were alive could have gone to Julian and told him that there was never any God called Jesus until Eusebius introduced Jesus at the Council.

All the pagans who were alive and especially those who attended the Council could have told Julian that there were no writings at all about a God called Jesus until Eusebius first introduced this Jesus and stories about him.

Since there is no mention whatsoever by Julian about the God called Jesus as being first introduced in the 4th century, it is likely then that the Jesus stories were in cicurlation before Eusebius, before the Council of Nicea and before all those who attended the Council.

mountainman

Dear aa5874 and others,

While I agree with practically all that you have written above, it is not my intention in this thread to argue about the historicity of the canonical Jesus and in regard to the early witnesses to the authorship and chronology of the NT canon. This discussion thread is deliberately focussed on arguments related to early witnesses to the authorship and chronology of the NT non canonical texts.

For the purposes of this discussion therefore, I am happy to concede to the assumption that the NT canon texts existed before Constantine. It makes absolutely not one iota of difference to the discussion related to the NT non canonical texts.

Below I have loosely paraphrase of your last statement which was originally in regard to the NT canonical corpus, to make it apply to the NT non canonical corpus:

Does Julian mention the NT apocyphal corpus?
Since there is no mention whatsoever by Julian about the NT non canonical texts as being first introduced in the 4th century, it is likely then that the non canonical Jesus stories were in cicurlation before Eusebius, before the Council of Nicea and before all those who attended the Council.

Eusebius (and others in the fifth century) may certainly have had control over the books which went into the new testament (orthodox canoniical literature), but we know that they had little or no control over the authorship, popularity and preservation of the books which were not so bound into the new testament.

IMO an examination of the Nag Hammadi codices confirm the suspicion that these books may well have represented a secret haul of "forbidden new testament apocryphal tractates". Non canonical books. Heretical works which were being sought out by the orthodox for destruction and censorship. Hidden (apocrypha) stories --- hidden because of their extremely sensitive political nature at that epoch commencing c.324 CE.

You mentioned earlier aa5874, quite rightly, that these NT non canonical works were "also just fictions". Well yes, or course they are. They are recognised by scholarship as being Hellenistic romance narratives written for the common public, with whopping monstrous stories occurring at every turn, totally over-shadowing the corresponding canonical narratives in exaggeration and creative imagery. But who are the main characters of practically the entire non-canonical series of books (which did not make the bible)? They are Jesus and the 12 Apostles plus Paul and others whom Paul has introduced, such as Titus et al. The author(s) of non canonical books cleverly mimic the canonical narrative-characters, and exaggerate everything.


The author(s) of the NT apocryphal corpus (at least the gospels, acts) intersperse their own opinion, teaching, observations, wisdom literature, etc amidst their narratives. They are perceived by scholarship to be at times heavily and clearly "gnostic" (not christian), and in many places shockingly "docetic". It was a heresy in the fourth century not to profess mutual belief in the belief of the emperor. What the emperor said was law. What the emperor believed, his subjects believed. If Eusebius and Constantine said that the new religion included the belief in the historical jesus, then that belief was required to be professed and declared back to the emperor if he so desired it. Professing a belief contrary to the belief of the emperor (who was also the Pontifex Maximus) was to be considered an act of treason against the emperor. Evidence of "lese majeste" trials exist clearly in Ammianus and in the Theodisian Codex --- we may not rest assured that people were not interrogated over their beliefs.


Summary Argument

1) We may assume that the new testament canonical books were authored as early as the second century, in accordance to the assessment of modern scholarship on the chronology of the canon.

2) We argue that it is more reasonable to think that the new testament non canonical books (as an entire corpus) was written as a wave of Hellenistic gnostic academic polemical popular romance literature created as a response to the canon being raised to the supreme "Holy Writ" over and above the preservation of their own authors (back to Pythagoras and Plato et al).

3) That is, we argue it is more reasonable to believe that the entire corpus of the new testament non canonical literature was written after the year c.324 CE, and that the information supplied by Eusebius in his history, has been interpolated into his history, for the purpose of disguising the political situation which was unfolding c.324 CE. The NT canon was more supreme that Porphyry and Pythagoras and Plato. Christianity, ahead of all the myriad Hellenistic temple cults and major (pagan) religions, was getting the vote as the official Roman state church. The non canonical churches were closed and/or destroyed. The canonical basilcas were erected over their foundations. That NT apocrypha, as the final dying words of Hellenistic academia in resistance mode, were authored after the momentous socio-political-religious events c.324 CE.


Best wishes,


Pete

aa5874

I do not agree that all non-canonised NT writings were written after 324 CE once it is assumed that there were canonical writings in the 2nd century.

When I look at your chronology of the list provided for non-canonical writings, based on the writings of Justin Martyr, I would tend to place "Acts of Pilate" somewhere in the early 2nd century.

Now, your chronology do tend to support my tentative theory that the "memoirs of the apostles" preceeded any gospels called according to Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. And that there were no book called Acts of the Apostles or any letters from any writer called Paul that was considered sacred before the writings of Justin.

In a previous post you mentioned that Eusebius did mention writers called Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and the letters of the writer called Paul.

Now, I have made some assumptions. If there were writers called Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, before 324 CE, before Eusebius, then I am going to expect to see some activity with these writers' name before Eusebius mentioned them in 324 CE, so I will look in your pre-Eusebius list and see if their names appear anywhere.


Pre- Eusebian list-325 CE

The Acts of Andrew and John (*H)(2nd-3rd)
The Acts of Andrew and Matthew (*H)(2nd-3rd )
The Acts of John*(*H) (2nd-3rd)
The Acts of John the Theologian*(3rd-4th)

It will be noticed there is no activity at all on the names Mark and Luke, they seem to have no impact on the pre-Eusebius time period.

Now, if I look post Eusebius, all of a sudden, there is activity for Mark and Luke. Mark and Luke do have some post Eusebius impact.

Post-Eusebius-325

The Acts of Mark(4th-5th)
The Acts of Luke(4th-5th)

My tenative theory is that the name Mark and Luke may have been from the 4th century or some very late date or were not known to be writers until sometime in the 4th century.

Ben C Smith

Please consult my pages on the gospel of Mark and the gospel of Luke. The attestation lists on those pages can help you decide how best to go about silencing Papias, Irenaeus, the Latin prologues, the Muratorian canon, Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, and Victorinus.

Ben.