archibald

And stringbean,

Just to recap. There is documentary evidence. Quite a klot, by the standards of ancient history. It is not first hand, and it is not proof. I never said anything to the contrary.

And lest I be thought of again as the sort of person who doesn't like to post citations, here's a summary of the documentary evidence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df9nKRvlmkY

Please bear in mind that I am not suggesting the documentary evidence is conclusive.

J-D

You're not by any chance trying to have it both ways, are you?
Even if there are, so what?

Stringbean

Confusion seems to be your specialty apparently....that and word twisting....:wave:

stephan huller

I don't know why personal attacks seem to be on the rise here. There is no reason to play the man. There are so few people in the world who care about the same things as we do. We should treasure the opportunity to engage one another. Well, everyone except two or three notable exceptions ...

stephan huller

That's just a broad sweeping statement - like 'you can't find love in a bordello.' It does happen. I am sure somewhere there is a happy couple who stayed married for fifty years after one of them really paid for the first date.

J-D

If a document contains statements which contradict each other, that reduces its value as evidence, but not necessarily to nil. If a document contains statements which are not independently corroborated, that reduces its value as evidence, but not necessarily to nil.

Sheshbazzar

The question is, just how reliable is 'Paul' as a witness to anything?
How much of the writings and statements attributed to 'Paul' actually originated with an original Paul (Shaul the Hebrew) and how much of the text is the product of pseudo-'Paul's' simply stuffing their words and theology down his throat.
Certainly it is a broad and sweeping statement.
One that careful investigation of these texts increasingly shows to be an accurate assessment.

stephan huller

Oh God, not this again. Even if the New Testament is likened to a comic book there are 'fake' comic books. We all basically agree (or mostly agree) that there are at least some layers of corruption. I don't know how someone would prove that its all fake to the core any more than it is all true to core. There are layers of forgery in the New Testament. The question is what lies beneath. I say, 'they' (the editors of the NT) could have invented their own religion from scratch it was all fake to the core. Why take over and corrupt a body of literature? The answer must be there is something 'authentic' or original beneath the layers of forgery. Otherwise why not start by creating something from scratch?

mountainman

A good detective might start with the Codex Vaticanus and other items of evidence and assess the first known and undisputed major publisher and only then start to work backwards down that long and untrodden pathway called Eusebius.

aa5874

Do you really BELIEVE the Church when it claimed or implied "Eusebius" wrote ALL of Church History"?

Do you really think that the whole Roman Empire EMPLOYED a single man to re-write the history of the Jesus cult?

It most likely would have been a whole ARMY of people over several years.

It would seem to me that One may have used the name Origen, the others may have used used the names Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Clement of Rome, Papias, Ignatius, Polycarp, Irenaeus, and Eusebius.

It is NOT the authenticity of "Church History" that is most significant it is the CONTENT.

"Church History" CONTAINS the reconstruction codes of the TRUE history of the Jesus cult.