mountainman

Drews is described in this source as a German philosopher, writer and important representative of German monist thought, and wrote the work before WW1. Your extended description of Drews as a Nazi/pagan and a belligerent proponent of mythicism reveals some bias on your part. I take it that you are not impressed by those who refuse to confess that Jesus had appeared in the flesh - and explore the antithetical hypothesis to "Jesus was an historical figure".



Dont you understand that his arguments throw a non neglible doubt on the authenticity of the 15th century manuscript itself. The publication of the recently discovered Tacitus manuscript was contested in the 15th and subsequent centuries.


That quote about Philo was taken directly from Blavatski (as the notes below the summary show). Philo is not a witness to the existence of Christians - he is silent on the matter. But his text is not silent on the existence of some class of people he calls "theochresta", who were NOT Christian. The overall claim of the article at historyhuntersinternational is that these are in fact sources for "Chrest" prior to the 4th century, but none to "Christ".



Claims relating to its forgery were made at that time. In respect of the origins of christianity I do not find claims of forgery insignificant, because they are legion, and I do not think that such claims are appropriately addressed by simply ignoring them.




The Pliny Letter suddenly appears in the sedimentary deposits of commentary upon commentary in the 15th century, never before mentioned by any christian in over one thousand four hundred years. You do understand that the manuscript was "lost"? You dont see any integrity problems with any of this from an independent perspective?



The argument of the author of the article is the vacuum of evidence for the pre-4th century mention of "Christians". Are you arguing that P.Oxy 3065 mentions "Christians"?





Dont you see the fundamental role that has been played by De Rossi in this case? Dont you understand that De Rossi was employed by the Vatican? Dont you understand that De Rossi's integrity is questionable? We dont have to question the Pope, just De Rossi.






The author's claim is that you do not have this physical manuscript record from the epoch prior to Nicaea, or for that matter prior to Sinaticus. Perhaps the recent Manichaean finds dated to the end of the 4th century are the earliest that explicitly use "Jesus", but these use "Chrestos".



Chrestos appears first in the archaeological record -this is the clear finding of the article cited. "Christos" does not appear in the evidence physically until very late. Therefore if there is a play of words going on, "Chrestos" was originally being played with to form "Christos" and not the other way around.





Do the appearance of the fish and anchor symbol on imperial coinage certainly indicate a Christian provenance? Were fish and anchors Christian? Do you expect me to believe this without any evidence except the books of the canonical new testament which we know were lavishly published by the victor of a massive Roman Empire war?




You are the one either asserting or defending the reality that these Christian texts took over the imagination of the Roman Empire any earlier that the warlord Constantine turned up on the doorstep to Alexandria. To do that you need to point at some Christian art or archaeological relics or other such evidence which indicates the presence of such Christian thinking in the physical record before the 4th century. Graydon Snyder did his best. Are you going to cite an example from Graydon Snyder to support your case?








Arnaldo Momigliano perceived the Biblical Historians as the insiders, and the anciet historians as the outsiders. The professional insiders in the business of New Testament history seem to have some additional information not openly available to the casual enquirer in the field. I have often wondered what this additional evidence may have been, apart from its hegemonic reverence.



Have you been following the 21st century case of the Israeli Police Dept aganst Oded Galan? What renovations did the Pontifex Maximus Pope Damasius make to the Vatican and Roman catacombs in the later 4th century in order to start the "PETER WAS HERE IN ROME" tourist industry?





Snyder believes that one of the sarcophagi lids depicts an infant Jesus with John the Baptist. Do you want to see this picture.



No I will not ignore the evidence.




Thank Christ for that.

mountainman

Eusebius did his writing 312-324 CE during a massive war. His propaganda was used in the war, and after the war was widely published as an authority. Eusebius and the barbarian warlord Constantine collaborated. IMHO we need to ask the question "What if Eusebius was commissioned to lie". We need to answer this question as best we can, given the evidence in our possession. IMHO there is no pseudo-scholarship in the asking and the answering of this question. Politicians and despotic military leaders are not averse to the telling of lies, and the publication of mass disinformation.

Maklelan

You're not asking the question "What if," though, you're asserting the conclusion "it is," even though you've not considered both sides of the question, have presented no positive evidence for your conclusion, and have given us no reason to even take seriously the question "what if." All you've done is appeal to arguments from silence and quite limited and pedestrian textual anomalies. That's where the pseudo-scholarship comes in. You blow small considerations way out of proportion and then draw irresponsible and incredibly broad conclusions from those observation. The silly notion that "Chrestos" was the original Christ, and that Christianity was invented out of whole cloth in the fourth century is not only not fully investigated, but is flatly precluded by an informed analysis of the actual data. That's another example of your pseudo-scholarship. You can produce nothing even approximating an informed or objective analysis of the data, which is why you have to continually dodge most of what I say. You've produced no scholarship of any kind, and I don't anticipate you ever will.

Maklelan

Of course it does. Anyone who disagrees with you is obviously hopelessly biased. Are you not aware of Drews' Nazi leanings?

I couldn't care less if someone doesn't believe jesus appeared in the flesh, or explores the notion that Jesus wasn't an historical figure. If someone belligerently tries to argue that Jesus was demonstrably not an historical figure, and that Christianity is based on fourth century Roman propaganda, then they're simply deluded. I've been around the block enough to know those theories simply don't wash. I think I've already shown numerous times over that your "exploration" is severely hindered by your lack of skills and resources and by your profound ignorance of the primary and secondary sources.

I understand that that's his intention, but he certainly doesn't succeed.

And I'm sure you've thoughtfully weighed the evidence for and against the authenticity of the manuscript, rather than just presupposed it is spurious because it fits your dogmatism.

Then you need better sources.

He also died before anyone thinks Christians made it into Egypt. You don't have the foggiest idea what kind of argument you're making.

And that overall claim is phenomenally ignorant and dogmatic.

I'm not ignoring them, I'm just aware of what they're based on, am not particularly convinced by them, and prefer to go with the academic consensus. How many times do I need to respond to the same amateur and naive arguments before I can just move past them? 5? 10?

Well, as with most texts like this, we have fragments of the texts preserved in earlier writers. When we uncover a later manuscript that aligns closely with the preserved portions from those earlier texts, we can be sure we have at least a moderately faithful manuscript. Tertullian, for instance, quotes repeatedly from Pliny, and there are only limited variants between his quotes and the Π manuscript. I already pointed out that Symeon's quotation of Abercius' epitaph comes from the tenth century, but it is almost identical to the actual inscription, discovered much later.

Did I say it mentions "Christians"? You have quite a big problem with avoiding actually addressing arguments when they complicate your dogmatism.

What do De Rossi's putative biases have to do with the analysis of the text since then?

As I've shown, they repeatedly refer to Jesus as the "Anointed One," or "Christ."

That's a ludicrous conclusion. The messiah motif dates to centuries before Christ, and that motif is fully incorporated into the earliest Christian texts. As I've shown, Sinaiticus unquestionably refers to Jesus as the Christ.

I'm not referring to a fish appearing wit an anchor, I'm referring to a fish appearing with a virgin, appearing with bread and wine, appearing with a reference to baptism, appearing with the "good shepherd." You can't find a single non-Christian text that conflates all these Christian motifs in a non-Christian context.

I already showed that Snyder disagrees with you regarding Abercius. Do you mean you want me to quote him? You can't look it up?

Absolutely, and that is facility with the languages and a willingness to actually read the texts.

I've already pointed them out to you.

This is just an evasion.

What is that supposed to prove?

You're being dishonest. You've already flatly ignored numerous pieces of evidence.

Toto

Drews, who died shortly after Hitler came to power, does not appear to have been a Nazi. (Nazi sympathies of various degrees were common among many German theologians of his time and place.) His work was not based on Nazi ideology and should be not be casually dismissed based on guilt by association, and more than works by, say, Mircea Eliade.

The only online source I know of:

Klaus Schilling's summary in English of Bernhard Hoffers' April 2003 Lecture [in German] about Arthur Drews

Maklelan

There are many people who would disagree with that assessment, but I'm happy to engage Drews' views for someone who will actually listen. His main problem is his dependence on Frazer-era views about the dying/rising god and the confusion of cultural translatability with a genetic relationship. Ideas about the Jesus tradition being derived from the Adonis or Attis myths are exclusively associated with that myopic tendentiousness, and the lines of distinction have to be blurred quite substantially for the borders to run together to the degree that Drews insists. That worldview has been obsolete for much longer than I've been alive, and I don't think it's necessary to rehash the details of its demise. Interested parties are referred to Jonathan Z. Smith's Drudgery Divine or Marks S. Smith's chapter on dying and rising gods in The Origins of Biblical Monotheism.

Doug Shaver

Your HO is beside the point. Any answer to "What if P?" is irrelevant (except maybe as a plot device for speculative fiction) until we have good reason to think P obtains.

Duvduv

I am rather confused about the whole issue concerning "cosubstantiality" and the trinity leading up to the disputes and decisions of Nicea in 325 and thereafter.

Why was this particular issue so important? Presumably if they thought they had an apostolic tradition there was nothing to work out if it was an essential element of their faith one way or the other.

Was it because a tradition ascribed to Tertullian somehow was preferred by more bishops than others? IF (and I say IF) all the groups had all the epistles and gospels, then presumably they could see that this was never a heavy subject in any of those texts UNLESS some were more "obsessed" about the phraseology in GJohn more than any other text or issue.

And if it was so obvious from GJohn ("I and the Father are One") why was there a debate at all since the Arians would also have had GJohn?

If Constantine and others of the elite preferred the Arian interpretation, then what political motivation could there have been to fight about it? If the Athanasius group could overcome Constantine who favored the Arians, then how is it that the "orthodox" took control of the political regime?

Here is a quote supposedly from Arius, but I am not sure I understand how he took into account the statements from GJohn:

Some of them say that the Son is an eructation, others that he is a production, others that he is also unbegotten. These are impieties to which we cannot listen, even though the heretics threaten us with a thousand deaths. But we say and believe and have taught, and do teach, that the Son is not unbegotten, nor in any way part of the unbegotten; and that he does not derive his subsistence from any matter; but that by his own will and counsel he has subsisted before time and before ages as perfect God, only begotten and unchangeable, and that before he was begotten, or created, or purposed, or established, he was not. For he was not unbegotten. We are persecuted, because we say that the Son has a beginning, but that God is without beginning.
—Peters, Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe, p. 41

Maklelan

The christological controversies arose as a result of the appropriation of a Platonic worldview for purposes of framing and promulgating Christianity within the Greco-Roman world. As Christianity interacted with Gnostics, Jews, Greeks, and Romans, they found rhetorical value in adopting some philosophical ideologies, and in opposing others. The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, for instance, developed out of interactions with Gnostics and Greek intellectuals regarding the feasibility of the resurrection of a decayed body. At first the argument was that if God could create a human out of a drop of semen, he could certainly reconstitute a human body from decayed material. This was later correlated with the creation of the earth, but the Platonic view of creation out of preexisting material was unpalatable because it implied material that was coeternal with God. This conflicted with philosophical readings of the hyperbolic biblical claims that God created "all things." He couldn't have created "all things" if there was preexisting stuff. The assertion was then made that God created the universe ex nihilo, and so he could reconstitute a human body from the same.

That brand of philosophical monotheism that restricted their views of creation also complicated their view of Christ. How could they venerate a second being beside God? In Jewish eschatological tradition this wasn't so big a deal, but within a Platonic ontology it was prohibitive. Christ had to be conceptualized in a way that didn't conflict with the notion that God is an ontological and moral superlative, and thus can only be one and must stand apart from all other existence. The answer was found in positing a "person" as a subunit of a "being." Multiplying the "persons" within a single "being" made it possible to assert one God and three distinct personalities. This led to questions about how the three persons related to each other within that being. The biggest question was whether or not Christ was coeternal with God or if he was one of God's creations. Emanation was popular for a while (Tertullian, for instance), but it meant there was as time when Christ was not really Christ. The idea of a created and inferior Christ did not sit well with his conceptualization as God, and it was asserted that a created being could not save all of humanity. How he was generated from God while still being coeternal with him was the primary question that catalyzed the debate of Nicea.

Duvduv

But isn't it true that if they all had all the gospels available they all would have seen the same statements in GJohn that claimed the clear deification of the Christ, especially "I and the father are One." So if they had that text, then how did Paul of Samosata and Arius develop a different idea, or did they not accept GJohn?

In any event, the other sources did not unequivocally make this an element of belief in the Christ, including the epistles. So when someone was accused of "Heresy" what were they heretical against?

I presume then that Romans 9:5, Colossians 2:9 and Titus 2:13 were post-Nicean interpolations. Same thing for Chapter 48 of the Dialogue with Trypho:
“And Trypho said, "We have heard what you think of these matters. Resume the discourse where you left off, and bring it to an end. For some of it appears to me to be paradoxical, and wholly incapable of proof. For when you say that this Christ existed as God before the ages, then that He submitted to be born and become man, yet that He is not man of man, this [assertion] appears to me to be not merely paradoxical, but also foolish."