Toto

I don't know of any mainstream apologists who address the issue. JPHolding has a rebuttal somewhere to Earl Doherty's comments on the silences of these authors, but he's not mainstream

Duvduv

You mean that in all of Christian history no one bothered to "explain" anything concerning the unusual statements of Athenagoras or Theophilus??!

Toto

What is there to explain, for a believer? These are early church writers, but not part of canonical scripture, so they are not assumed to be inerrant. There are no contradictions, just a failure to mention the historical Jesus where modern researchers would search for him.

Besides, apologists these days are primarily Protestant, and Protestants don't place much importance on the early church fathers. Many Protestants think that Jesus' original message was lost by the early church and only rediscovered by Martin Luther and/or the translators of the King James Bible.

Duvduv

Shows what I don't know since I am not a Christian and never was. I never understood that about Luther, etc. I always thought that Lutheranism was effectively Catholicism without the Pope.

But on the matter of Theophilus or Athenagoras, an apologist would probably want to explain why a person could be a Christian without knowing about the Christ. If one were to ask a respected Christian/Church leader, what would he say about this?

Toto

He would probably accuse you of making an argument from silence, and that would be it. He would then avoid your questions.

aa5874

But, such a statement makes very little senseand is HIGHLY illogical if it is made by a Christian/cHURCH Leader.

It is those who claim Theophilus was a follower of Jesus Christ who arguing from BLATANT SILENCE.

Theophilus of Antioch was UTTERLY SILENT on Jesus Christ.

Duvduv

An argument from silence is a pretty good starting point. So if such clergyman doesn't accept the argument from silence he must be able to offer an alternative explanation. Same thing for the dreaded argument from silence in the epistles.....

Toto

Why are you picking at this? If you really want to know, you can go read apologetics. But I can tell you that there are no good arguments. The apologists claim that Paul wasn't interested in the historical Jesus, or that he didn't want to concede any points to the apostles who did know Jesus, or some other lame excuse. They claim the same about the other church fathers.

But please stop posting these half digested observations. What is your point?

Duvduv

How was it that the Judeophile Christians who were so fond of the Hebrew Scriptures failed to notice that the Scriptures say nothing directly about resurrection from the dead, and that Jews rely on the oral traditions of the Oral Law??

Who managed to work the emerging Christian ideology together with ideas emerging from very same "Pharisees" or rabbinical Jews who they claimed to oppose so strongly in relation to rituals, and as Justin called them, "superstitions"??

Surely they could have found another way to present their Savior without resort to oral traditions. I presume that over time it was those of the literate class who sympathized with the Jewish teachings who moved the Christian movement to adopt the "Pharisee" description of resurrection simply to justify their claim that their religion was superior to Judaism.

Duvduv

I am simply trying to get at the kernel of the issue of the emergence of the Book of Acts, that's all, describing a "Paul" who is different from the Paul of the epistles in a book that does not know of the gospel stories.

And no, I do not consider myself a believer (because that's what it amounts to) of Tertullian or Eusebius at all. Their words are not holy writ (excuse the pun) in my book about the history of the Christian sect(s).