Duvduv

Look, Toto, the Christian sect claimed it was an outgrowth of JUDAISM in JUDEA among JEWS in the FIRST CENTURY and a SUCCESSOR religion. It only stands to reason that those sources referring to Jewish life in those days have significance for the context being discussed. Why do I have to keep repeating myself?
And you can engage me in actual discussion ANY TIME you want. I have in fact been doing so for months on a variety of topics.

Toto

Christians claimed to be the true expression of the Jewish scriptures as of the first century. The Talmud is a separate and later development from some of the same traditions, but Christians have never valued the Talmud or the Jewish interpretation of their own scriptures.

Perhaps you need to pay more attention to your communication style.

Duvduv

But surely analysts/scholars would want to weigh all the facts of what is stated where and when and by whom. CONTEXT is everything. No one could convince me that the whole discussion about the emergence of a Christian sect in the first or second century is believable based entirely on the claims of biased church sponsored spokesmen who wrote apologetics, heresiology, homilies and commentaries in the 4th and 5th centuries, and entirely ignore the fact that not a single Talmudic or midrashic source mentions anything about such a sect in those days.

But if it's claimed by the sources granted a kashruth certificate by the Church, then even secular scholars will accept these claims.
By way of example........There is not a single mention of a man named John the Baptist in Judea in the first century a single traditional Jewish text, which tells me that the likelihood of his existence is close to zero.
Yet the conventional wisdom attributes historicity to this name as if he were as real as George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.
Not to mention a Paul if not a Jesus, and a Justin, Irenaeus, etc.

Besides, so much ink is spilled analyzing the texts of the NT, and so little ink analyzing the content of books of those apologists so revered by scholars. Deconstructing the writings of a "Justin" or a "Irenaeus" is just as important as deconstructing the epistles or gospels.

Chili

Not a fraud but a correction because the early church was an abomination that was driven by the fire of hell.

You forget about the narrow gate that is real, but is not the highway to perdition that self proclaimed Christians entertained then and still do today, . . . some dancing, some singing, some shouting and all of them worshiping the Lord . . . and that is totally the wrong thing to do.

Here again "follow me" does not mean "worship me" and they deserve persecution if that is the Emperor's wish by design. Like he is not a persecutor but understands their error and that grants him the power in force.

And yes, they are totally opposite to Eusebius' church, for which reason I always maintain that Catholics and Christians are going in opposite directions, and Christians always wonder why Catholics are going that way, since to them 'bible thumping' is the only way, which to us is the yeast of the pharisees, and hence, I call the Gutenberg press a giant yeast factory.

And the Jesus cult is a Jesus cult without spiritual empowerment, except via Lucifer to signify that their little light keeps dying on them, and so they are a new breed of lost 'son of God' (child of Ir-ra-el) on their own, also in their promised land waiting for their Jesus to come again . . . . and will bomb the wrong country time and time again making sure that 'their Jesus' can land in the so called 'holy land' that is also supposed to be a state of mind instead of a piece of land, just as Na-za-reth is the little big city of God by tradition inside the mind of a Jew . . . and do you not see?

And for 2000 years those same people now claim apostolic tradition to John 6.66 when they first parted company with the real Jesus and 'knowingly' follow his brother James in Mark, and will read a thousand times that he went back to Galilee with his eyes half open and so still half shut, or he would go to heaven instead.

But then Mark is written to charm the mind of intellectuals and so they put him First and the rest are copycats in error, while in the error in Mark is not there by accident, but on purpose, in detail, to compliment Luke and John as opposite to it. And wouldn't you know? Luke and John both go straight to heaven instead, which again is a state of mind until the second death do us part.

And of course the Jews knew all about this and had every right to be upset with them, as they are an embarrasment to the whole world, and in insult to Judaism for sure. Be reminded here again of Matt. 28:64 where the Chief priest, this time, cautioned Pilate that this final imposter will be worse than the first -- that a Christian will never understand either.

No matter how right you are in your propositions, you fail to rationalize myth and explain the error that prevails in Christian domain. Not as a preacher, but as somebody who can explain why there is not history in the Gospels that is worth looking at today.

Toto

There are other sources that show the existence of a Christian sect in the second century. There is Lucian of Samosata's parody of Christianity. There is the disputed reference by Tacitus. There is the account of Pliny. And there is the church at Dura Europas in the third century. It's not a lot, but there is enough there to convince almost everyone except Pete that Christianity existed before the fourth century.

It is not clear why you would look to the Talmud or midrashic sources for evidence of Christianity before the fourth century. These sources are hard to date and hard to interpret. There was also a time, apparently, in the middle ages, when Jews felt the need to go through all these texts and remove anything that might cause offense to Christians.

You keep making this complaint. Please give specifics or stop repeating it.

There is a section on John the Baptizer in Josephus, one of the few surviving sources for the history of Judea in the first century. The description there is sufficiently at odds with the gospel description to allow most historians to assume that he was a real person. Frank Zindler disagrees.

So your example is not really very good if you are trying to show the problems with secular scholarship.

"Paul," Justin and Irenaeus left writings. That is usually enough to qualify as historic.

Modern scholars do not revere the church fathers. Most scholars today come out of a Protestant tradition, and the fathers are too Catholic or obscure or obviously bizarre.

But what do you think would be the result if scholars spent more time on the church fathers?

Duvduv

Why do you keep challenging me with empirically unproven claims? Tacitus and Pliny were produced by the monopoly holders of documents, that is, monks in monasteries in the 14th or 15th century in one manuscript. Remember Giacondo etc.?? Not to mention good old Justin.

Needless to say, the homilies and commentaries on the "epistles" of "Paul" are even internally dated by the Church (i.e. Chrysostom) starting around the end of the 4th century, in the days of all the products of apologetics. We have already repeated ad nauseum the CONTEXTUAL problems with a second century Justin, and the CONTEXTUAL problems elsewhere, including the unknown Irenaeus of "Lyons."

Josephus is FULL of questionable issues and we have discussed that ad nauseum. Masada is a joke. Vespasian the Davidic messiah is another joke. And the Jesus and Baptist references are a joke. There is no evidence that Josephus' writings existed anywhere outside of Church control, and therefore the idea that it was tampered with or invented among church writers as forgeries cannot be ignored except by those religiously devoted to the sacred nature of 1st century authorship of Josephus.

There is no proof about "Paul"......about his epistles. No proof anywhere that they were sent out to any communities or that they were received by any communities, or any evidence that any communities existed in those places in the first or second century. I have discussed that the epistles could just as easily be COMPOSITES with insertions in parenthetical phrases and some other insertions in otherwise monotheistic-friendly letters from elsewhere.

So I simply say that none of these elements are mentioned in a single Midrashic or Talmudic source at all, and you bark. You and I both know that secular scholarship never dissects the works of the apologists the way they do the NT texts, which is a huge loss, and they are not troubled by the CONTEXTUAL issues.

All a doctrinist can do is dismiss one's arguments or challenges to the conventional wisdom and ignore the substantive issues while calling names.

Why not just tell me that you are NOT interested in my postings and don't bother to read them??

Chili

Toto you have to see John as the onset of melancholy, or the involutional part that is persistent, to remove Joseph's desire to look for 'greener grass' as the wily carpenter he once was, and so Elizabeth was 'pregnant' before Mary, and that was the sign that prompted Lord God to seek release from God as first cause governing here the bare naked animal man. And so, it was time to spin a cocoon, you might say.

So whether there was a John or not is not important as long as he is real inside the suffering soul so he will not be tricked by a one night stand event.

To this end Jesus said that 'the stones would cry out' or something like that, to say that there was a great degree of earnesty here.

Opposite this then is John in Mark peddling 'repent and believe' as an alternate to the real thing.

Notice here that Elizabeth was pregnant in Luke she went in seclusion and resigned from her determminate cause in the mind of Joseph the Jew, and that prompted Gabriel to deliver the Annunciation to Joseph.

Toto

Yes, there are difficulties with the sources, but there are still scholars who work with them. I have posted some critiques of Tacitus, but the Pliny reference appears much more solid, and Lucien of Samosata is exactly what you would expect from a critic of this new religion.

If you are going to reject all of these documents without even considering the likelihood that they can be used as sources, how can you rely on the Talmud? Why is that source to be trusted?

You haven't actually discussed this - you have alluded to the possibility. But you have not taken that to the next step: you have not discussed what that means, or what history can be derived from it.

I could recommend a book by Harold Leitner on the Formation of the Christ Myth. Search for some prior discussion in the archives if you are interested.

Bark?

Once again, why should the Talmud be treated as a superior source? Are you aware of the textual difficulties there?

I am the moderator and I don't have the option of not reading your postings. You are using up bandwidth on this forum, and I am responsible for enforcing the terms of use. And you keep touching on interesting issues, but then you don't delve into them or engage with them - you just post some bitter sarcasm.

I don't know that you have ever read any of these secular scholars that you continually put down for not delving into the CONTEXT of their work, or what specific criticisms you have.

Duvduv

I am certainly not the only one using bandwidth around here.
And I don't understand your point about the Talmud and midrashim. I don't like to repeat the fact that Christianity claimed itself the successor or fulfillment of Judaism, so Judaism is the standard against which the claims of the Christian sects are to be measured in addition to the fact that the rabbinic Talmudic texts are relevant to the timeline associated with the conventional view of the emergence of Christianity, which would be the adversary of the religion it claimed to succeed.
So the contents of the Talmud are quite relevant, as is its context.

I have read enough to know that as a whole the field does not seem to be particularly concerned about credibility of claims or texts in relation to the context in which texts are said to exist or to be authentic.

Toto

Rabbinic Judaism dates to the second century. Do you have any evidence that Christianity claims any relationship to Rabbinic Judaism? Are you assuming that Rabbinic Judaism is identical to all earlier forms of Judaism??

How exactly are "rabbinic Talmudic texts are relevant to the timeline associated with the conventional view of the emergence of Christianity" ??

The conventional view of the emergence of Christianity is that it originated in the first century and separated itself from Judaism around the end of the first century. I might put those dates in the second century, but there's still not a lot of room on the timeline for Rabbinic Judaism to influence Christians.