Kapyong

So, you haven't actually read the NT, (OR Earl's books either?)

Because right there in the NT is mention of Christians that did NOT believe Jesus came in the flesh (1 John.)

Not to mention the other writings that describe Jesus as a PHANTOM (Basilides etc.)


Earl is right - you've never actually studied the JM case, nor the early Christian writings for that matter.

Your argument amounts to :
"I don't believe it".

(Not to mention your CHANGING the words of Paul to suit your bias.)


K.

ApostateAbe

There is no need to make a point about what I fail to read. I have read the New Testament, but that doesn't mean I have it memorized. I do not deny that there were gnostics, and I do not deny that the later Christian writers found in the NT reflect that dispute. But, I was specific with my claim--the gospels and the Pauline epistles (I should have said the synoptic gospels, though the gospel of John doesn't contain such evidence either). At the times those writings were composed, gnosticism apparently did not exist. The First Epistle of John is generally dated to the beginning of the second century or very shortly before. We do see plenty of Christian writings that demonstrate the explicit proto-orthodox theological opposition to gnosticism, and they seem to be almost entirely in the second century or later. 1 John is one of them, so it seems to be a big problem for those who claim that gnosticism preceded the proto-orthodox view that Jesus was a human being. You have to rearrange the established dates and time line, which takes evidence, not just assertions, or at least it should.

ApostateAbe

Kapyong, I am also a little curious about what you mean when you put in parentheses that I change the words of Paul to suit my bias. For example, I think that "born of a woman" means a baby comes out of a woman's vagina. Would that be an example of me changing the words of Paul to suit my purpose? If not, then what do you mean?

J-D

It's evidence of his intense hostility, and thus evidence that Arius's position was opposed to Athanasius's. It's not reliable evidence of what that position was. Being so hostile to Arius, there is every reason to doubt that Athanasius would give a fair and accurate account of him.

mountainman

The evidence from Athanasius at face value suggests that Athanasius is presenting a story in which Arius is presented as a satirist, in the sense that he is playing down the role of Jesus in the whole scheme of things. Athanasius quotes a verse from Arius' writings which is a description of the passion of Jesus on the cross. Arius writes not that the sky was darkened when Jesus purportedly drew his last and final human breath, but that the Sun himself, impatient with the entire drama being enacted, withdrew His Light and made the day sunless.

Arius shifts focus to Helios.
Jesus becomes but a backdrop.

Athasanius is shocked and horrified at this expression!
For Athanasius, Constantine's Jesus should be at the very center of things!
Jesus had to come first!
Thus Athanasius 3 times recounts Arius to be a disgusting satirist.
This is on the surface of things, according to the textual evidence.

It is an element of the available elements of evidence to make the effort to reconstruct what the position of Arius (and Athanasius ) was. Other elements of the data include Constantine's Letters to Arius.

Yes of course - such is political reality!

However there is further evidence suggesting other people about that time thought Arius was a filthy little underserving heretic because he wrote wrotten meters about Jesus. In fact there was an entire empire-wide controversy over this issue. What is the historical truth of these events? In order to approach this question we need to examine the referential integrity between all the elements of the available evidence.

J-D

All the available evidence, yes. And all the available evidence includes the evidence of the existence and the doctrines of the Arian churches of the fifth and sixth centuries. That evidence disproves your theory.

gurugeorge

Check Walter Bauer's "Orthodoxy and Heresy", the "smoking gun" is in the fact (as Bauer has it, anyway) that when you find orthodox writers first writing about their ministry, they everywhere complain of finding ALREADY ESTABLISHED "heresies". This requires no shifting of timelines or anything like that, it just requires taking the orthodox at their word.

We know "heretical" works were destroyed, so we can't say for sure that the extant orthodox texts are even representative of the earliest Christian texts. The synoptics can all be comfortably dated post-Diaspora, and we must suppose the cult was going before that (even if only as a small affair). Even in the Nag Hammadi stuff, which is relatively later, there are traces of earlier phases (e.g. of Jewish proto-Gnosticism from within the first century CE).

Some even quite orthodox scholars have found flashes of Gnostic-like language in Paul. We also have the testimony of both the orthodox and the the Gnostics that Paul was the "apostle of the heretics"; both Marcion and the Valentinian line claimed descent from this mysterious "Paul" fellow.

Putting two and two together, the original form, seeded and spread by "Paul", was mystical, visionary and mythical (which of course doesn't necessarily imply they didn't think their beloved mythical entity lived on the earth at some point! - it just means there's no internal evidence of a human being known personally by any of them, which is what the HJ case requires); after the diaspora the Roman/Alexandrinian strand, perhaps seeking to unify a disparate movement (Gnosticism tends to fragmentation), invented the idea of Apostolic Succession, which required a more strongly historicised element to the Jesus story. But this was a minority position at first - most Christians were "heretics" from that point of view, and it took a long while to bring them into the fold, and many still remained outside. The last remnant of the Gnosticisms that did toe the party line is the late "docetism" within orthodoxy.

According to Price, Acts is itself a bit of another kind of "smoking gun" here - it splits the ACTUAL first spreader and main missionary of Christianity to the gentiles - "Paul", "Saul", "Simon Magus" - into a "good" version (Saul/Paul) and a bad version (Simon Magus). The "good" version is meant to throw a bone to those who decide to toe the party line and go with the orthodoxy, the "bad" version is the same man, but seen through the lens of being the founder of those who remained opposed to orthodoxy. The linking material can be seen in the Pseudo-Clementines (which I think is an abortive version of something that was meant to do the same thing that Acts did), in which the "heretical" Simon has some biographical elements identical to "Paul"'s. Of course we don't know what the "letters" originally were, but there does seem to be some sort of core voice in them, and there are interpolations (as well as whole fabricated letters) that are definitely orthodox in tone, which seems to leave the proto-Gnostic strand as the very thing that has to be guarded and hedged about by the interpolations.

Summat like that, anyway. But the key is definitely Walter Bauer's insights. It simply cannot be the case that what we have come to call "orthodoxy" was the first form of Christianity, if they already found "heresy" established wherever they went. Their peevish complaints, ironically, give the game away.

ApostateAbe

Thank you, gurugeorge. I know nothing of Walter Bauer's views. If his specific arguments are easy to summarize with evidence, that would be cool, but I know that they can be wordy and convoluted.

Toto

Orthodoxy and Heresy is available online

http://jewishchristianlit.com/Resour...er/bauer01.htm

gurugeorge

There's a compact summary that nearly fills a chapter of Ehrman's "Lost Christianities" - unfortunately I don't have a copy any more, otherwise I'd have been happy to type out some key points (Ehrman also outlines some counter-arguments, and points out errors Bauer made, but comes out in favour of Bauer's argument overall, and thinks it's very important). Ehrman also outlines Bauer's argument in "The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture" but I haven't read that. Other than that, "Orthodoxy and Heresy" itself is online here.

I've struggled through a few chapters of it, and it seems well-argued, but I'm not a scholar, so can't really judge (plus it's pretty old so I'd have to be familiar with the scholarship around it to be able to tell how opinions have changed since the 30s). I provisionally trust people like Ehrman and Price though, so I'm going with it for now. Roughly, Bauer goes through the evidence about the main areas of early Christian activity and finds:-

1) In Edessa, orthodoxy wasn't established until the 3rd century CE (even later than Marcionism) and didn't finally win out over heresy until after Constantine.

2) In Egypt, early Christianity seems to have been in fact syncretic (Barnabas, Clement, Origen) and orthodoxy wasn't firmly established until Demetrius (late 2nd century).

3) In Asia Minor, the letters of Ignatius and Polycarp suggest that the orthodox were in a minority, struggling for survival.

4) Rome has a clear and stable orthodox majority by the second century. It gradually builds authority and influence by (basically) bribery and ecclesiastical pressure, in Corinth, western Asia Minor, and Antioch.

So, as I say, my interpretation of this (taken together with other bits and pieces) is that the "Apostolic Succession" was invented to rein in the divergent bunch of early Christian lunatics, and (most importantly! ) to get them securely paying dues, etc. The key invention is that some of the early apostles knew personally the Jesus of whom they preached, knew him as a human being, and that they were (natch) the ones who eventually ended up with the Roman line of bishops (via "Peter", who is I think another invention, a conflation with Paul's Cephas, and probably representative of post-Diaspora Roman Jewish Christians who presented to their fellow early Roman Christians as having some sort of closer connection to the origins than the ones who had been seeded by "Paul"). It's this idea that's the kernel of the strong historicization of the Jesus myth, as it gets developed in the synoptics (all the action there is between 70 and 150 CE, I think). The key argument is neatly outlined by "Peter" in the Pseudo-Clementines: surely it makes more sense to follow people who heard the gospel from the horse's mouth than to follow a mere visionary? But, in reality (as I propose) the earliest ones (especially, and most obviously - even in his own words - "Paul"/"Saul"/"Simon Magus") were "mere visionaries" - that's all there was to it, to begin with, and that's why it was IMMEDIATELY so divergent to begin with. There was no person anybody knew, just some visions and mystical experiences, some perfervid scripture-poring, and a sort of conglomerate mysteries-influenced Jewish soter deity (NO DOUBT an entity they believed had existed on earth at some recent-ish time). (Why Jewish? Jews were cool at the time - I mean circa the pre-Diaspora time when the religion was first developing - just like Tibetans are cool nowadays. They were respected as having an ancient religion.)

The idea that the first apostles knew Jesus PERSONALLY was the invention, purely for the purposes of establishing an Apostolic Succession for the newfangled orthodoxy, and it's the driving force behind the illusion of a historical Jesus (as we would now deem it - i.e. an ordinary human being) that's assumed to be found in the texts - of course, as I say, and as must be borne in mind, many early Christians may have considered their superhero-Jesus to have been "historical" and to have had a fleshly aspect! But not necessarily all - divergence again).