mountainman

Thanks for the POV on the scratchy record types. They seem incapable of addressing and examining the logic outlined. See below.

This point about Asclepius is actually secondary to main argument from logic. Allow me to re-state the argument. I will continue to restate this argument until it addressed by the scratchy record types if they are capable of understanding the argument. To date I have seen no evidence that any of these respondents understand the logical argument. (The following summarised from post # 36)

Comparing mainstream and alternative logic on the history
of the early 4th century "Acts of Pilate" mentioned by Eusebius


The Mainstream Logic - is this Dogma? (Where is the Evidence for this position?)

Mainstream carrying the scratchy record types with it currently operates under a series of hypothecise a, b, c and d, namely:

(a) An The Acts of Pilate is mentioned by Eusebius during his lifetime.

and

(b) this does not survive - we are not looking at it.

and

(c) Another totally different "Christian" Acts of Pilate was authored in the later 4th century

and

(d) this "Christian" text (c) does survive - we are looking at it.




The Alternative Logic - there is only one Contraversial Anti-christian Text



(a) An The Acts of Pilate is mentioned by Eusebius during his lifetime.

and

(b) the text (a) does survive - we are looking at it.

Which is more believable?

What evidence does mainstream have for the additional two hypotheses or for their position over the alternative logical position above? There is no evidence at all as far as I can see for these additional hypotheses that the mainstream story-line on the "Acts of Pilate" seems to be following along it time-honored grooves.

If anyone has evidence for the mainstream position other than simply repeating the claims as though they were true, then go ahead and cite the evidence.

I have a right to continue to ask for evidence for a so-called logical and occupied mainstream position without being abused by self-professed know-it-alls. Inability to cite evidence is an indication that the position is questionable.







It's true that Christians adopted Asclepian temple foundations for their basilicas.

stephan huller

What a stupid argument. If it was discovered a church was built on the remains of an outhousr we could conclude Christians worshipped shit?

mountainman

Try addressing the logic outlined above against the OP without citing youtube and truckloads of images.

Toto

Much against my resolution not to reply again, Pete, there is no logic in your position.

The document described by Eusebius, full of blasphemy against Jesus Christ, does not resemble the document that we have.

You can either explain this by the idea that Christians destroyed the document described by Eusebius and forged a competing document, which is consistent with everything we know about early Christianity, or you can assume that Eusebius was too stupid to know what he was reading.

But you think that Eusebius was so smart he could invent an entire religion out of whole cloth.

There is no logic in your position at all.

DCHindley

Remember it was you who made a series of statements about what you think is relevant and them brought up the Blackwell Companion series, particularly the one by Potter on the Roman Empire, as if these bring things to a higher plane of credibility. All I was doing is to demonstrate that Potter's Companion to the Roman Empire does not always support you. To be honest, I never heard of it before this thread.

Now I did search a bit deeper, and it seems that central archives were not well attested in ancient Greece and Rome. There were central archives for some proceedings of official bodies (particularly the senate) conducted in Rome itself (although they may have at times dealt with provincial issues).

Republican Rome also featured citizen rule with annual magistracies, it dispersed record-keeping responsibility among various officials, it shared with the Greeks the notion of divine guardianship of state resolutions, and it faced similar technological challenges, both in publication and in archiving. Notwithstanding these similarities there is much that is unique in the Roman experience, particularly so as Rome became an empire and its gradually attenuated structural similarities to the Greek polis vanished altogether. Though developments in the practice of records management can be traced throughout Roman history, the sharpest divide is perhaps to be found at the critical point when the Principate was established and the notion of what constituted public records underwent a paradigm shift. More than one institution in the Republican people had archival functions, among them the Aerarium, the state treasury. The Aerarium was under the guardianship of the god Saturn and was located in the god's temple at the western end of the Roman Forum, at the foot or the Capitoline hill. On the human level, the treasury was the responsibility of the annually elected quaestors, relatively junior officials. In addition to housing the state's supplies of bronze, silver, and gold, the Aerarium was also a depository for certain state records. Financial records such as public contracts or lists of public debtors — records that had an obvious connection to the state treasury — could he found there. But the Aerarium also housed laws and senatus consulta (resolutions of the senate). Indeed, the latter were not valid until they had been formally deposited in the Aerarium, a procedure known as delatio ad aerarium.

Many records, however, that might be thought to be part of a state archive were not deposited in the Aerarium. Most notably the papers kept by annual magistrates such as consuls or praetors — their commentarii, or daybooks — were not transferred to an official depository but were retained by the magistrate after he left office and stored in his private tablinium, his home office.

...

Neither the Metroon nor the Aerarium, for example, stored citizenship records, because such records were kept elsewhere; only under Marcus Aurelius was a centralized registry of births maintained at the Aerarium. Other institutions — army units and priestly colleges, for example — stored their own records, and of course the Roman provinces maintained extensive records of their own administration.

(Gagarin, Michael & Elaine Fantham, eds) The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, Volume 1, (OUP 2009)

In Berhard Palme's Roman Litigation – Report of Court Proceedings, v 02, NFN Imperium & Officium Working Papers, there is a description of what extracts from the commentarii of a court proceedings contained:

An original official journal with court transcripts is preserved in W.Chr. 41, col. III 17–30 = Sel.Pap. II 242 (Eleph., 232 C.E.). One could have an excerpt drawn up, for private or official purposes, concerning a single causa from the commentarii of the respective office bearer (ἐξ ὑπομνηματισμῶν or ἀντίγραφον ὑπομνηματισμοῦ τοῦ δεῖνος), which rendered the relevant passage in full wording. Practically all case transcripts from litigious proceedings before Diocletians’ reign are such extracts from the official journals. Their composition and form follow defined patterns which, despite highly differing detail of the individual documents from the middle of the first until the end of the third century C.E., remained representative (Coles, 1966, esp. 29–54).

These admittedly are from civil proceedings, not criminal. However, I am going to assume (oh gawd, drawing of inferences is strictly verboten in your mind!) that criminal trial commentarii were similarly structured.

A transcript is structured in four formal sections:

(1) Introductory formulae: Reference to the commentarii, from which the transcription is extracted: Name and title of the office bearer and date of day suffice to identify the exact section. The causa is stated by the very names of the contentious parties (a πρὸς b);

(2) Body of the trial in which the actual trial, from the opening speech of the plaintiff (or his lawyer) through to the judgement, is rendered. The parties’ pleas and objections as well as the remarks of the judge are recorded in oratio recta. In each case the speaker is introduced by the calling of the name, though at the first mention of the lawyer or witness the role this speaker has will be explained. The presiding official, who was already mentioned in the introduction, will from then on only be referred to with his title (e.g. strategus) or a simple name. It is not until the period during the late Severan dynasty that it becomes customary to refer to the judge with a full form of address (SB I 5676 [Herm., 232 A.D.]). The direct addresses are commenced with εἶπεν, though this introductory verb is often omitted by the end of the first century and from the middle of the third century nearly regularly abbreviated and expressed with: εἶ(πεν).

(3) The judgement (κρίσις) is the most important part of the transcript and is always begun on a new line. It is rendered in oratio recta which, especially at the beginning of the second century, accentuated the complete and literal rendition. The authority of the judge is emphasized by his full form of address.

(4) Concluding section: Following the verdict, further administrative measures can be referred to in a very succinct way. The official certification, from the beginning of the second century, by the ἀνέγνων ("I have read / checked it") of a clerk follows frequently and this same clerk would have checked the transcript, or perhaps the subscriptio (ὑπογράφη) of the scribe would have performed the same purpose.

Altogether transcripts dating from the Imperial period are thus not a judicial record per se, rather simply records of the activities and decisions of a public officer. P.Oxy. I 37 (Text 1) and P.Fam.Tebt. 19 (Text 2) may be considered typical examples from the early and middle Roman Empire.

If the Roman administration in Egypt was anal about recording every detail of financial transactions (to make sure excise taxes were paid and accurate valuations of real and movable property for the levying of property taxes were performed) and civil litigation, then why should we assume, as you seem to do, that the Romans paid not a whit to recording trials of those who might disturb the political stability that allowed tax collection to exist?

DCH

LegionOnomaMoi

Yes, and I said as much:



Here's what I said:
But either you misunderstood why I referred to it, or misunderstood what you read:

The point of such documentation was clear (see the next page): "Overall, the Roman administration tried to document - and thus control - every aspect of economic life by recording in detail the people, land, and livestock." This is what we have much evidence of from trash heaps: Receipts, references to legal proceedings, and the occasional decree or similar official document. If you look at the discussion of the responsibilities and powers of Roman prefects and procurators in that same paper. In fact, there is a discussion of extant documents concerning a messianic figure and Jewish revolt. Only it wasn't the Prefect writing to anybody, nor even the strategos, but citizens writing to the strategos. Despite the fact that we do have not only documemtns concerning legal proceedings, but even prepared speeches for court cases by professional orators, what we lack is any evidence which supports the idea that we would expect Pilate to write about someone he executed.



It depends on the trial. For some we have a note, while on the other hand we have On the Mysteries and certain works by Antiphon. The status of the individual (especially the ability to pay for "defense" which usually meant witnesses and legal advice) made all the difference in the world. You have to remember that there wasn't really a distinction between criminal and civil trials, as a citizen could bring forth a suit for anything from being cheated to murder of a family member. Socrates was executed by the state beacuse of the suit brought by Miletus, not state action in and of itself. But we aren't dealing with a suit, or even a Roman citizen. There is no money involved, nor is there any good reason I can see (given our evidence) to view the execution of someone of low SES who could very well cause problems during a time when that was the last thing anybody wanted as somehow something to document while sending soldiers out in force was not. According to our accounts, Jesus had neither the support of the Jewish elite nor the Roman elite. Why would Pilate think an execution worthy of sending out a notice or seeing that any documentation was preserved? Even the kind of documentation which was created usually wasn't preserved, unless the the issue it involved still mattered (in a world where even a wealthy individual could suddenly become a slave simply by being abducted, making sure you had documentation of property and payments was rather important).


We have no indication whatsoever that any such administration was "anal" about recording legal proceedings. Cicero tells us that Rabirius was charged with an unlawful execution of a Roman citizen, but was immune from prosecution because he acted under a senatus consultum ultimum, which protected severe actions like executions which were carried out because of threats to public order. But the laws which involved such protections, or the right of the people to approve or reject executions (lex Sempronia de provocatione) did not extend to Jews from Galilee. Nor do we have much in the way of indications about trial records even for these proceedings (that is, trial records or documentation created by public officials). And as for tax, the documentation is specific to the tax collection itself, not to executions of people who may have potentially caused problems for collection in general via revolt or something similar.

mountainman

The logic I have been attempting to demonstrate is all about the manuscript tradition of "The Acts of Pilate" works sufficiently well such that we may both assume that Eusebius had possession of the canonical books of the new testament before 312 CE.

The question to be addressed is why mainstream has conjectured that the text before us entitled "The Acts of Pilate" must be an entirely different text that Eusebius comments upon which he also calls "The Acts of Pilate". You have essentially stated the mainstream position above:

The document described by Eusebius, full of blasphemy against Jesus Christ, does not resemble the document that we have.

We will assume that Eusebius was involved in the preservation of the canonical books of the NT and that he had strong opinions about the appearance of other books of the heretics. He states at the opening of his "Church History" that those who authored the non canonical books were to be regarded as fierce wolves unmercifully devastating the flock of Christ.

These other books were "full of blasphemy" because they were common and popular romantic narratives which took bits and pieces from the canonical books and cobbled these together with novelties and wonderful narratives.


Although the author of "The Acts of Pilate" is not named by Eusebius, it is only reasonable to think that he would class this person who through innovative literature has like a fierce wolf unmercifully devastated the flock of Christ by writing this story in the early 4th century.

My argument is therefore that we dont see the text before us "The Acts of Pilate" as blasphemous in all ways because we dont understand Eusebius's political position enough.

The logic is that if we can see that this present text "The Acts of Pilate": is in fact blaspemous in all ways simply because it is a novel and innovative story about the Descent of Jesus into Hell, authored by two zombie scribes named "Leucius" and "Charinus", and which was NOT REQUIRED by the authodox canon following people whom Eusebius represented.

The logic is that Eusebius is witnessing the appearance of yet another "Gnostic Act" which he elsewhere classes as heretical, and moreover many of which are associated with the name of "Leucius Charinus". The Acts of John, The Acts of Peter, The Acts of Paul,
The Acts of Andrew, The Acts of Thomas ... these are texts which Eusebius would consider as "blasphemous in all ways" because he knows that they were authored and circulated by the heretics.

The logic is that we do not have to conjecture the authorship of another "Acts of Pilate" and the destruction of the first, which itself is problematic. For example if the original Acts were circulated to schools in the empire, the many copies this involves may provide a good reason for its preservation.

DCHindley

Not to neglect you MM (no offense, but I usually block you, although once and awhile I do look at your messages) but yes, I am open to the possibility that Constantine had purposely tampered with the text of Josephus to make it impossible for the year of the "suffering" of Jesus indicated in the Acts of Pilate published during Maximinus Daia's rule, to be true.

Some additional information about the war between Maximinus and Constantine. After the natural death of Maximinus Daia in 313/314, Constantine & Licenius joined to have his memory damned:

Eusebius Church History 9.11.2. For Maximinus himself, being first pronounced by the [western] emperors [Licenius & Constantine] a common enemy, was declared by public proclamations to be a most impious, execrable, and God-hating tyrant. And of the portraits which had been set up in every city in honor of him or of his children, some were thrown down from their places to the ground, and torn in pieces; while the faces of others were obliterated by daubing them with black paint. And the statues which had been erected to his honor were likewise overthrown and broken, and lay exposed to the laughter and sport of those who wished to insult and abuse them.

I'm finding it difficult to determine whether Maximinus was formally condemned by the Senate (Eusebius only says that the remaining emperors decreed he was bad, baaaad, making the damnatio "de facto," not by a decree of the Senate). This would have to be around early 314, but regardless of Licenius' position on Christians (didn't really like them, being himself a good pagan), Constantine was in charge of Italy, southern Gaul and Africa.

If part of this damatio of Maximinus, at least in areas under Constantine's control, included obliteration of even the possibility of his propaganda being true, then it might make sense of Eusebius' hint that at least some folks doubted the text of Josephus as it stood when Eusebius wrote his Church History.

Unleash the critics!

DCH