spamandham

Ok, I skimmed through the thread. In that thread, you compare Jesus to Apollonius - a point I accept as too coincidental to be coincidence. The syncretisms you mention in regards to Paul are not addressed there, and I'm not versed enough in Apollonius (or maybe even Paul :yikes: ) to know what similarities you are referring to.

mountainman

At the risk of going off-topic spam&ham , here is my response:

Between Eusebius in 337 CE (when the Boss went to the Underworld) and the present day, stand many powerful christian emperors, christian popes, christian bishops, christian polemicists, christian redactors, christian forgers and christian censorships by fire and brimstone. You will note that the Librorum Prohibitorum - list of banned books by the Vatican - operated continuously from the 15th century to the year somewhere around 1966.

The key early crew were Jerome, Augustine, Rufinus, and Cyril. These guys inherited the fiction from the Boss, and it was indeed worth a veritable fortune, and worth securing "for business".

I have been remiss in the past, as perhaps has been Philosopher Jay, in ascribing to Eusebius some of the things which were done by later generations of those who inherited "The COntrol of Christendom". One classic example that springs to mind is the Tacitus reference, which I had attributed to Eusebius, but which in all likelihood did not enter into the arena of scholarship and attestation until the fifteen century as is outlined below:


Thus, Eusebius started it, but did not finish it. That job was left to many successors. All they had to do was censor it was fiction. See my article on the censorship by Cyril of Julian and of Nestorius.

If you focus attention on the "mutilated bible" and forget the apocrypha, which number in the scores - of totally really downright weird weird stories - then all might appear dreamy. But the problem is to explain the appearance of the entire genre of new testament literature, and to explain why Eusebius has so many integrity problems with his chronology, and characters, and all the other false-signposts on his long and lonely road of ecclesiatical history.

My explanation is simple. Constantine's canon hit the empire 324 CE. The apocrypha (ie: the non canonical, or non-Constaninian stories) were then written as polemical literary reaction to this authority commencing 324 CE and featuring the pagan polemicist logician and ascetic priest Arius of Alexandria. For the next few centuries more stories, by various parties, were added to the list of the apochrypha (non canonical works), some of which were simply written to expand the christian theme, others to expand ascetic themes, gnostic themes, literary excursions, etc. The result is a total mess of literature sparked by an imperial forgery (IMO).

Best wishes,


Pete Brown

spamandham

Damn! You had me 7% convinced that Eusebius invented it all, but now I have to consider a 1500 year conspiracy instead of a 130 year conspiracy! :grin:

mountainman

Note that (IMO) the conspiracy was restricted to simply censor and hide the fact that the fourth century canonical stories were fiction. The conspiracy was housed in the imperial court. The Greek academics were then shown to be wrong with respect to the christian heritage, by fire and brimstone, since the preservation of the church was real. Knowledge of this conspiracy may well have been lost at some point. It is not necessarily the case that the VAtican, and other authorities, have any real idea of their pseudo-historical heritage.


On the other hand, there was no conspiracy to create and invent the canon. The Boss just decided he did not want to kow-tow to the Greeks (Hellenistic culture), especially since their temple structures (collegiate and tolerant) were very rich in gold, treasure, art, sculpture, silver, etc, etc, etc.

He had his army to enforce his agenda. That is all he needed.


Best wishes,


Pete Brown

aa5874

This is mind boggling to me. All religions invent characters and they must. Christianity is no difference.

Religions invent Gods, devils, angels, people, natural disasters and history. Show me a religion and I will show an invention. Who invented the angel Gabriel, the Holy Ghost and Jesus?
The same people who invented Paul.

You're dreaming if you think Jesus, the disciples and Paul are not inventions.

mountainman

There was an old discussion here, and a similar one here.
Acharya has an article.

These may do to start with.
Best wishes,


Pete Brown

Toto

I would just like to point out that most of the similarities pointed out here (and a good number of the similarities in Acharya's article) are between Apollonius and the Saul/Paul figure in Acts. The Acts character is most likely fictional or loosely based on one or more evangelists. This would not make the writer of the letters fictional.

aa5874

How can canonised fiction or canonised multiple characters claiming to be the same person be ignored as having no weight with respect to the fictitious nature of the epistles?

Once fiction has been detected or deduced in the history or the identification of Paul, then the veracity of the origin and content of the epistles must be brought into disrepute.

How can fiction and truth exist together, and canonised and never challenged? We have no indication that any of Paul's acquaintances ever objected to Acts or any of the epistles that were not from Paul.

We have no known written objection by the Churches to Acts or epistles that were not from Paul. There has been no known objection from the Church fathers, including Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen or Eusebius.

There is no known objection from the family of Paul about Acts or epistles that were not from Paul.

This is the clearest indication by far that the name Paul was fabricated and was unknown.

Paul had no family, no friend, no convert, no Church official, to defend his good name. Not even Paul made an appeal on his own behalf.

Here we have a pack of lies and multi-characters using the same name being published and canonised and no-one defended Paul, not even Paul himself.

Paul is total fiction and so, too are the contents of the epistles.

spamandham

Assertions are not the same as argument.

You lump Paul in with Jesus and 'the twelve', but they are distinct. Paul is not a part of the gospel story, and unlike Jesus or 'the twelve', we have writings attributed to Paul that are not filled with magic and fantasy, but are instead fairly ordinary. All the evidence points to Paul being a real person, albeit somewhat delusional.

You've taken a single fantastic story out of Acts - a book written much later than Paul by someone who clearly never even met him, someone who was clearly trying to syncretize Pauline tradition with the catholic tradition - and blown it all out of proportion to conclude that Paul was fictional. Do you apply this same absurd standard to every historical figure that some later writer makes BS up about?

As to which of us is "dreaming", I'm willing to let others decide that. Perhaps Paul is a fictional character, but if so, it hasn't been demonstrated in any reasonable way.

spamandham

It might be helpful if you laid out a timeline for when you think these various works were originally penned. By most standard datings, Paul and anyone who knew him would have been long dead by the time Acts was written.

Since the death of Elvis, people have written many unbelievable stories about him that obviously never happened. Yet, I'm reasonably convinced he was historical.