GakuseiDon

My interest has always been the first few centuries, and more about the text than the physical evidence. But I am surprised by the lack of physical evidence coming out of the Third Century.

Yes, agreed. Pete does often invade threads that aren't really related to his theory, driving threads into tangents. I think there is a definite place for him here, but I just don't want to see him in every thread.

mountainman

That's a very limited and misleading statement. There have been the equivalents of the "J.O." in practically every generation. One need only assemble an index of fraud concerning "christian" history by century to see that although many things have been put forward as genuine, century by century by century ...., nothing has been chosen, and stands the test of skeptical scientific scrutiny to this day.

The question is if we are dealing in something which is supposed to be "genuine" according to << INSERT YOUR FAV. AUTHORITY HERE>> why is it there have been so many forgeries. It's not as if there's been only one or two frauds. Its been an endless procession, and most of it has been manufactured by various genious PR managers in the church, such as the relic business, the bones of the saints, the biscuits of the transfigured and the fragments of the holy cross.


When did the business of Christian fraud commenced? I think it commenced with Constantine & Eusebius. They provided a good blueprint for the centuries of forgeries which followed them in the "business". The imperial power offered to the new Roman state religious structure guaranteed the new official religion could officially exclude all heretical sects, by the sword. The new business was very valuable to those who had ambition. A few generations after Nicaea, nobody could be sure what Emperor Julian was talking about, because Cyril had repossessed the books of Julian, and had prepared an official refutation "Against Julian".


That's false. There are many literary treasures from that epoch which have survived. Philostratus, Galen, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, Porphyry - even the Persian sage "Mani". Outside of the literature there exists an abundant wealth of inscriptions and papryi, architectural structures, art, sculpture, coins, funerary ornaments, trinkets, etc, etc. The only problem is, as you have stated, there is nothing openly "Christian" waving its hand from the possible line-ups of evidence before us.


You always seem to forget the military aspect, which is integral to the theory.
Three examples to think about are the warlords Ashoka, Ardashir and Muhammad. Also, the forgery was "covered over" by the later 4th and 5th century "heresiologists". Finally, I am concurrently explaining the appearance of the non canonical gospels etc.


This is FALSE. We have discussed a large variety of Theories of the History Christianity involving Fraud & Fiction. Spin has even listed a few on his recent chart. The position of fraud does exist "out there", and is best described IMO, by the final and 8th category in the R.G. Price's Jesus Myth Spectrum ....

Sheshbazzar

I live on a bowl shaped steep hillside and get practical demonstration of how Christianity developed every time it rains.
The runoff from the East five acres joins the runoff from the West five acres, and is supplemented by several streams from the large hill to the North, at the base of the hill all of this muddy water comes together to rage through one large culvert.

So it is with the religion of Christianity, the large runoff of ancient messianic Judaism, joins the large runoff of the Hellenic Mystery religions, and these muddy 'waters' are joined by dozens of lesser rivulets, but rather than coming down a hillside, they join and come down to us through time to appear as the stream of 'history'.

The Romans were the famous aqueduct builders who gathered together and channeled these waters. Constantine and his Dept. of Public Works went to work and built the walls of a mighty aqueduct or 'culvert' to contain and to direct the 'flow' of all this religious muddy water.

And just like in nature, you can walk up and down in this 'field' or in that 'field' of history, or follow any 'stream' or rivulet up this hill, or up that hill, and you are never going to locate any particular source for that funneled and detritus filled torrent at the bottom.

avi

wow....

just excellent.

avi

Toto

Look, man - we know that these are forgeries because all of this material has been worked over by reputable scholars, some of them secularists, but many of them practicing Christians. These scholars have not labeled everything in Christian history to be a forgery.

Are you trying to argue that because there are many forgeries in Christian history, that everything must be a forgery?


1. We don't have the original first or second century manuscripts, so by your dating method all of those literary treasures were written in the fourth century or possibly the middle ages.

2. There are Christian amulets dating to the third century. There are the Dura Europa frescos. But since those put your theory to the test, you refuse to see them as Christian.

The evidence is entirely consistent with a small Christian presence in the Roman empire in the third century.

How are these even remotely similar? Did Ashoka invent Buddhism? Did Ardashir invent Zoroastrianism? Did Mohammed invent a religion based on a supposed historical character from three centuries before?

You assume that a pre-modern dictator would have a totalitarian power to impose an ideology on a pre-modern population, without the access to mass communication and control that modern totalitarian dictators use. But even modern dictators have been unable to stamp out traditional religions.

Your so-called explanation of the noncanonical gospels does not explain anything. It is clearly just an ad hoc prop for your main theory.

You are the only one claiming that the gospels were based on intentional fiction and forgery in the fourth century. This is the only theory that is disproved by physical evidence of Christianity in the third century.

mountainman

Since you mentioned that argument I would say that we should not realistically expect
to find any good apples at the bottom of a very large barrel of rotten apples.


"Know a tree by its fruit"

My argument is that Constantine commissioned Eusebius to oversight what Emperor Julian
later refers to as "the fabrication of the Christians", which involved not only the
production of the new testament canon, but also two separate histories: the history
of the Roman Emperors ("Historia Augusta") and the history of the nation of Christians
and the "Apostolic lineage" of their church ("Historia Ecclesiastica") to the time of Nicaea.

My hypothesis is that both these works are mockumentaries. That is, they are
intricate fabrications utilising hundreds of "Fake documents" and citations to authors
who never even existed. Fake sources were not a new practice in antiquity, but what is
novel however, is that both works invent sources to disagree with them.

The perversion of the literature by Constantine was accompanied by the burning of the works
of the chief academic philosophers of the Roman Empire at that time: Porphyry, who preserved
Euclid and Plotinus et al. Also burnt were the books authored by Arius of Alexandria,
the only known contraversialist to have made any sort of peep when Constantine asked
for signatures on the dotted line of Canonization for his "New Testament".


My dating methods are being applied to literary material where the authors
are a bunch of totally unknowns using Koine Greek, writing away their new testament
canon in an as yet unknown century, more likely the second that the first.

Philostratus, Galen, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, Porphyry and "Mani" all shared
a great deal of refential integrity and are corroborated in multiple sources
and we can be assured these were "historical authors" who lived and breathed
in history.

The same cannot be yet said for the Gospel authors.




Got a link?




Some people have bad art taste. They cant help it. Art appreciation is like that.
But as far as evidence for the implied fact that the painter had scenes of the
new testament in his or her mind when he prepared the murals, I see this
implied fact as ambiguous.and not necessarily true.



So the manistream postulate, which has not be skeptically examined, would have us believe.
But I am chalenging this unexamined hypothesis, that there was a nation of christians
before they appeared in 312 CE along with a miraculous victory of Constantine.



Each provide a study of how warlords used religion for various purposes.
There can be no dispute that Constantine used the Christian religion
for his own political purposes, which appeared to be in negating the
power of the traditional Graeco-Roman religions.



The Roman army itself had an extremely efficient communication network within its territories.
True they did not have email or chat or FB, but they did have fast horses and a network
of garrisons.

The argument is that after Constantine secured military supremacy over the commander of the
eastern forces Lucinius, and had acquired his gold reserves, Constantine commenced a
systematic lock down and control of the major cities Alexandria, Antioch, Pergamum.
(Rome was already secured). This totalitarian power extended to ordering the army
to destroy the most ancient and highly revered pagan temples in the empire, and
to prohibit their use. This prohibition was enforced by the presence of the army.

A religious vacuum was immediately created by this despotism.
Christianity as the "Reserved and Privileged Religion" appeared in this vacuum.



The fact is that Constantine started stamping out the traditional Graeco-Roman religions
and the job was just about complete by the end of the century.



Edwin Johnson's "Antiqua Mater: A Study of Christian Origins" (1890) hints at this.
Joseph Whelas's "Forgery in Christianity (1930) is more explicit.
Dr. R. W. Bernard's Apollonius of Tyana the Nazarene (1964) explicitly mentions Nicaea.
PRF. Fernando Conde Torrens' "Simon Opera Magna" (2005) apparently makes the claim in Spanish.
R.G. Price's Jesus Myth Spectrum and Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ allows for the possibility.


And as far as these two theories go ....

Joseph Atwill's Caesar's Messiah - The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus (2005)
Francesco Carotta's Jesus was Caesar - On the Julian Origin of Christianity – an investigative report (2005)

perhaps they are right, and Constantine found "Jesus Material" in Rome in the year 312 CE.



What physical evidence?
You mentioned amulets?

stephan huller

But I presume that you are also arguing that the first, second and third century Church Fathers were falsified by the same conspiracy. Why then is there such a hostile tone to Irenaeus's Against Heresies if it is a mockumentary? And why is the description of SOME of the heretics so believable like those of Mark (the Marcosians)?

I will stand by the report on the Marcosians as basically accurate in describing a second century heresy. I don't think you are even familar with this sect. I will challenge you to prove that this report was invented out of scratch with no basis in reality.

How then can you be certain that the description is inauthentic if you have never read it? I doubt you have ever read ANY of the five books of Irenaeus's work (other than glancing through Book One). By what basis have you decided that this book and each of the hundred or so works of the ante-Nicene Church Fathers were composed in the fourth century rather than the second and third centuries? Wouldn't that require individual studies of each book - i.e. Irenaeus's Against Heresies, Proof of the Apsotolic Preaching, Justin Martyr etc. - to properly make that assertion? How can you just snap your fingers and say 'they were all created in the fourth century' without proofs from the works themselves?

This is madness once again. It would be like going to buy a used car and the salesmen tells you - it was made last week at the factory. Where's the proof? Forget the theory. Where's the evidence to back this up from the documents themselves?

All you have done is said that they MUST have been written in the fourth century to suit your theory.

mountainman

The Abercius inscription has a complex reconstruction history but at the end of the day Abercius is a follower of the Good Shepherd, present in motifs 1000 BCE. If any deity were to be invoked it would not be Jesus but Hermes.



The argument is that the church fathers were fabricated.
You want some dates? Between 312 and 324 CE.



Because Eusebius, the "mockumentary master",
was hostile against the "vile Gnostic heretics".
Irenaeus IMO is Eusebius retrojecting orthodoxy.


We are dealing with highly skilled professional story tellers, rhetoricians and propagandists.
See Aristotle's Three Modes of Persuasion in Rhetoric .

Take some notes. You might even say sorry to Transient and others.
It's like a holy trinity of manners.

Ethos ... Appeal to the audience's sense of honesty and/or authority
Pathos ... Appeal to the audience's sense of emotions
Logos ... Appeal to the audience's sense of logic

The Emperor Julian describes the compelling believability
of the fabrication in these terms ...............

"Though it has in it nothing divine,
by making full use of that part of the soul
which loves fable and is childish and foolish,
it has induced men to believe
that the monstrous tale is truth."

Toto

So you are trying to argue that the existence of some forged documents proves that all were forged?


Referential integrity? You think this is a relational data base? Are you admitting that there is more evidence the gospels were written in the second century than the fourth?

We had this discussion before on this thread. Amulets that you can't explain


In other words, when presented with evidence against your theory, you just deny it for no reason that you can articulate. You refuse to recognize obvious themes, you hold it to an unreasonably high level of proof, or lack of disproof.


No, you are not challenging it. You are just repeating the phrase that you are challenging it, but you have not articulated a coherent theory.

There is no dispute that Constantine used Christianity. The fact that Constantine used Christianity is of no support to your theory. Like those other military dictators, Constantine appropriated an existing religion.

stephan huller

But Pete, let's make this clear. You haven't actually read all the ante-Nicene texts. What your really offering up is the POSSIBILITY that all the first, second and third century literature MIGHT have been developed as a result of this conspiracy. You haven't actually made yourself familiar with the actual material line by line, word by word. There might still be something in the thousand plus pages of material that you haven't actually read that might make you change your mind at least theoretically