stephan huller

The Greek term 'logos' never entered Aramaic to the best of my knowledge.

Marcion, Mani, Mohammed perpetuated a Semitic paradigm for Christianity where Jesus was the herald of the messiah.

"The kings of the earth prepared themselves, and the rulers met together against the Lord and his Messiah." (Psalms 2:2)

The LORD says to my Lord: "Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet." (Psalm 110:1)

Your theory that Christianity was invented in the fourth century represents a European clinging on to the European paradigm. The rise of Mohammed represents the end of half a millennium of the persecution and the repression and the restoration of the original paradigm that you can't seem to recognize existed in Egypt, Syria and through out the Middle East from the beginning.

That accounts for his success. The people awaited for another like the one originally pointed out by Jesus. Many went over to Mani but ultimately Mohammed 'did the deed' as they say. I don't know how we reject this other history just because it isn't agreeable to our presuppositions.

mountainman

Marcion and Mani were not supreme military commanders who lead large victorious armies to revolutionise monotheistic religious practices in various empires. One needs to examine the three warlords:

The Religions of the Warlords Ashoka, Ardashir and Bullneck

Ashoka (who converted to the Buddha) and then converted his Indian empire to Buddhism,

Ardashir the Persian King of Kings who created the centralised state monotheistic religion c.224 CE of Zoroastrianism in the Persian empire, and

Constantine who forced the state christian religion (whether it was authentic/legitimate or not) upon the Roman Empire

As far as the creation of centralised state monotheistic religions by supreme military commanders go ....
Muhammad simply followed Constantine, who followed Ardashir, who followed Ashoka, etc, etc, etc
One feature common to the last two military commanders is that they ordered for the execution of satirists against their religion.
These last two despots would not tolerate people laughing at their ideas.
Absolute power and supreme authority is common to these last three "Book Warlords"

stephan huller

They might not have been warlords but they adapted a Semitic doctrine of Jesus coming to announce someone else as the Christ. One could argue that Constantine tapped into this same formula (or adapted it the way his mother adapted the story of Protonice). But we look foolish when we imagine fourth century writers 'inventing' earlier witnesses from the first, second and third centuries.

All things are theoretically possible in some sense but some things are also more probable (much more probable) than others.

If police went around entertaining every theoretical possibility for how someone came to their death all murders would be unsolved.

mountainman

That's correct, we look very foolish.
Life is life - we should expect anything.
The motto is "Be Prepared".

There is a precedent for this sort of stuff.
Check the Historia Augusta
Here is an extract ...

stephan huller

But the Historia Augusta didn't invent a non-existent author and a non-existent religious tradition to accompany these exaggerations. That's the difference.

PS I don't think the Historia Augusta is alone. Most of the histories have corrupt passages or more commonly - have whole sections removed by the monks that edited them. Look at Tactitus's history. Critical sections are removed. Dio has no history of Antoninus Pius etc.

mountainman

But the Historia Augusta invents hundreds of non-existent authors and even invents other forged sources to disagree with them. This is exactly the sort of thing that we can see here in "Christian Origins" between the "orthodox who-would become canon followers" and that other group and collective of unbelievers and worse. That is "the vile gnostics" and other "docetic heretics". Retrojection of fake sources, and other fake sources to disagree with them, is precisely what we see with Eusebius, and the Gnostic heretics that Eusebius had to deal with in realtime c.324 CE and thereafter.




The hypothesis that the Historia Augusta and Eusebius's "Historia Ecclesiastica" were manufactured in the same scriptoria is not without its merits. The HA is a mystery waiting to be solved.


One must also examine in equal mindedness the insertions of references and the burning/destruction of books by the christians. We should observe the simple fact that effectively c.334 CE the Christians gained a supreme and absolute power over the preservation of literature through their connection with the emperor Constantine. Certain books belonging to at least a certain number of authors were ordered to be burnt.

But the Christians also immediately began a program of systematically inserting a web of references, into existing books
with the Testimonium Flavianum perhaps at the center of the web. Many books were "slightly" interpolated.
How many books were interpolated? -- perhaps many, here and there. Perhaps as many as was required
in order to "Christianize" the earlier centuries, with the "Nation of Christians which is extant to this day".

The publisher of the "Church History" of Eusebius and the "Historia Augusta" and the earliest 50 Bibles
was perhaps just the one person. After all, this publisher controlled the empire with his barbarian army.
He obviously assumed control of the scriptoria just after he assumed control of the MINTS.
We know he assumed Lucinius' gold reserves c.324 CE

The publisher was in fact the "Pontifex Maximus" himself.
Perhaps another reason why he thought he had the "right" to publish books about religion and god.


Certainly, the publication of "Gnostic material" from that epoch left the cities.
It followed the mass exodus of those who would become desert monks from the Christian controlled cities.
And the Greek was preserved in Coptic and Syriac ---- and this stuff is still turning up.
Who was Lucius Charinus?