Roger Pearse

None whatever. Even if Eusebius were the greatest genius that ever existed (the inevitable corollary of statements being manufactured by MM), it would nevertheless be evident today.

Forgeries always smell of the age in which they are written, rather than that of the one to which they supposedly belong. Stephen Carlson, in his book on "Secret Mark" put this very well. Paraphrasing and abbreviating and ignoring all the nuances, the reason is that if they don't address some urgent issue of the age in which they are really written, they won't be read. Indeed why forge them at all, unless there is some burning reason? That reason is unlikely to be the same as the urgent issues of yesteryear.

Thus forged vases that the Victorians thought typically ancient today look typically Victorian. It's hard to see the smells when the world smells like that; easy when times change and the smell of the times with them.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Gamera

Further, if I understand MM "theory" correctly, Eusebius is a Constantine-related forgery that reconstructs (or really generates) a non-existant Chrisitian history from scratch, but references writers such as Origen, who lost out to the Constantine putsch, and who must have been made up by Eusebius, or some other Constantine shill, but we've actually found works of Origen, so that the Constantinians not only forged the corpus of an author to create the history of Christianity, but they also forged writings of those whom they wanted to expunge from that constructed history in any case.

Seems a bit implausible.

mountainman

You are going to enjoy reading Jay's book, and its in depth
discussion of what Jay calls the "ET" or "Eusebian Tell". There
have been a number of threads here about this already.

Essentially, Jay describes how it may be perceived that not only
does Eusebius appear to leave a writer's nuance, or quirk, in the
literature which is purported to be his own, but also leaves such
signs in the quotations of others, such as Tertullion. We are left
with the impression that Eusebius is writing Tertullion's literature.
Jay provides quite a number of separate examples of this.

Another suggestion, earlier here, was stylometric analysis of the
entire corpus of "christian literature", which will probably happen
sooner or later.

However, noone here appears to have done a tremendous amount
of research concerning Constantine, and assumes that this Roman
emperor is just sitting on thr sidelines, cheering on the christian team,
after having selected them to be the favourite religion of the empire.
Supreme imperial mafia thugs generally do things for a reason, and
basically the question needs to be asked, rather than Constantine
serving Eusebius (which is assumed for the sake of "christian history")
we have the quite possible alternative, that Eusebius (along with
everyone else at the time - no exceptions) was serving Constantine,
and Constantine was not what you would want to call a good person.


Best wishes,



Pete Brown

Toto

Pete - I don't think that Jay Raskin would support your idea that Constantine or Eusebius created Christianity out of whole cloth. He sees Christianity as evolving from earlier narratives and forces. Ironically or not, his method dates some aspects of the gospels and Christianity earlier than you might expect.

gstafleu

Looking forward to it .

I don't have any problem with that--but that doesn't mean Eusebius created Christianity from scratch. Witness the 5000 pages that Roger says cannot possibly be fakes. If you want to argue that Eusebius acted on Constantines wishes/dictates I can see that. If that then means that Eusebius' works, and especially Historia Ecclesiastica, are (very) biased and misrepresent history, I can see that too. But I can't see that he created each and every bit of antenicene christian literature from scratch.

He took an existant, and likely quite diverse, religion and molded it to his purposes. But he didn't create the whole thing himself. What is up for discussion I'd say is how much he molded it. How much of what is thought to be historical is in fact Eusebogus? Probably more than orthodoxy thinks. But not all of it.

Gerard

mountainman

Origen is a special case due to his chronology in the period
being (more or less) the last of the presumed christian authors
in the period of antiquity being reviewed by Eusebius (0-312 CE).

I have no problem with Origen existing, and being a very scholarly
figure in relation to the LXX, which had been around the empire
for centuries, and probably sat, along with the Dhamapada, the
writings of Apollonius of Tyana, and other works, in the great
libraries of the then Roman empire (eg: Alexandria).

The "MM Theory" states that the new testament related portions
of Origen's literature (ie: any writings which references the Eusebian
Trade Marked "Tribe of christians") were fabricated by Eusebius
in situ at the library of Caesarea, where Origen's "genuine literature"
(philosophy and the like) was purportedly preserved.

This theory thereby explains a number of issues related to the big
problems which arose concerning "Origenistic doctrine" and the need
for later christian apologists (historians?) such as Rufinus, having to
mention that the writings of Origen had obviously been perverted by
Arian heretics. EG: See this thread

This provides the text of Rufinus, in his Epilogue to Pamphilus the
Martyr's Apology for Origen Otherwise the
Book Concerning the Adulteration of the Works of Origen.
Addressed to Macarius at Pinetum a.d. 397.

We see Origen perhaps as a real author of antiquity, but due to his specialist
field being that of the LXX, (ie: the Judaic/Hebrew traditional writings,
called the Old Testament, only when Constantine grafted and bound
his new fiction to it), he was targetted by Eusebius to become a doctrinal
mouthpiece for a (ficticious) pre-Nicene "tribe of christians", and the very
new and very stange literary testament which was attendent thereto.




Pete Brown
Authors of Antiquity

mountainman

Yes, thanks Toto, I understand some of Jay's position, and in this
thread above made a reference to his conviction relating to this
Eusebius, whom he calls the Master Forger, with an emphasis on
the master, rather than the forger.



Pete

mountainman

Hey, everyone is entitled to opinions and research.

Well, my approach is that I think that it is expedient to first rule out
the possibility that the whole fabrication was indeed not a fiction
composed by wicked men immediately before Julian came to power.

It should be reasonably clear cut. You do understand that the complete
statement of fiction must necessarily include all the books of the new
testament which were bound under order of Constantine, to the LXX,
sometime, but not too far after, the Council of Nicaea.

My approach is to first ask the question what real hard evidence
do we have for the Eusebian "tribe of christians" in antiquity from
an historical perspective and from a scientific and archeological
perspective as being existent anywhere on the planet in the pre-
Nicene epoch.

If you were to sit down and write out a list of citations from carbon
dating tests, archeological reports on buildings, inscriptions, grafitti,
on surviving monuments and statues and art, coins used by the empire,
and other sources of historical data, we should find some evidence
that this hypothesis is wrong. I have collated such evidence here.

Thanks for the dialogue gstafleu, but I believe it is first quite necessary
to rule out the possibility that the fabrication of the new testament (out
of the whole cloth, and along with its attendant "mass of literature")
was in fact a fiction composed by the wicked Constantine, and the
wretched Eusebius, for the sake of plundering the Graeco-Egyptian
(pagan, if you prefer) traditions and temples, and establishing a new
common Roman religious order that would celebrate life in the empire
within a Constantinian basilica, rather than on a hill, or in a grove of
trees, such as the grove of Abraham, referenced in this thread.

I maintain that the theory is falsifiable, and emminently refutable.
Clearly, if someone were to sacrifice a small portion of any one of the
many papryii fragments, currently dated by paleographical methods
(ie: handwriting analysis) to the pre-Nicene epoch, to scientific carbon
dating testing, and such test vindicated the attestation to the writings
of christian literature before the Council of Nicaea, then the hypothesis
is subject to refutation.

However, in the interim period we will make a prediction that all such
carbon dating in the future (there are only 2 results now) will yield a
date after Nicaea.

I am happy to ride the wild hypothesis, and see where it takes me.
If it is shown to be false, by scientific or archeological evidence, then
I will go back to the farm, like Diocletian, and grow tomatoes.

Best wishes,



Pete Brown

PhilosopherJay

Hi Peter,

First let me thank Toto and you for recommending my book, Evolution of Christs and Christianities.

It does present evidence that much of what is taken as the standard or scholarly history of Christianity is really an invention of Bishop Eusebius. However, it also suggests that there were many forms of Christianity before him. It suggests that we can roughly place them by century:

!st Century: purely Jewish forms of Christianity which suggest that the Jewish God will send or select a person to be an anointed (Christ) King and take back the land of Israel from Roman domination. This form seems to have ended with the defeat of Bar Kochbar circa 136.

2nd Century: Greek Heretical Christianity which mixes all kinds of old and new myths in with Jewish scriptures in a mulititude of different ways.

3rd Century: Roman Apologetic Christianity which developes Christianities with stoic and apocalyptic outlooks. It is meant to appeal to cosmopolitan and wealthy aristocratic sensibilities in a time when the overextended Roman empire is crumbling.

It is not until the 4th Century and the time of Eusebius that we get the Rome-centered Imperial type of Christianity. This is what Eusebius propogates by essentially giving it an imaginary three century history. Here Christ is the Son/Hero/Founder/Savior of God's eternal Church. (If it is a view suggested by Constantine to him or by him to Constantine is an interesting question.)

In a sense, if we credit Eusebius with creating Christianity ex nihilo, we are fulfilling his wish of erasing the first three centuries of Christianities. We are starting Christianity with the Imperial Roman type of Christianity, albeit in the Fourth Century, rather than the first, as he proposed. I'm afraid if we do this, we will also not be able to see his cleverness in not only altering certain passages, but in mislabeling, erasing and rearranging other passages in historical works that opposed his viewpoint. I think we can separate out what say Tertullian wrote from Eusebius' revision of it.

On the other hand, I think starting with the idea that Eusebius created Christianity, as you suggest, is probably a good corrective to the dominant paradigm that Eusebius essentially reported a true history of Christianity. Only with a careful study of what contradicts and clearly opposes that history will we be able to see what Eusebius built upon.

Warmly,

Philospher Jay

countjulian

OK. Then why doesn't Libanius or Zosimus or Ammianus Marcellinus or any of the many pagan writers who lived after Constantine mention the fact that Christianity was really an invention of the 4th century, or even hint at it? Early church records record hundreds if not thousands of heresies, where did they all come from? Are telling us that every pre-Eusebian mention of Christianity by pagan writers is fake? Sounds more and more like the rantings of A.T. Fomenko to me.