jakejonesiv

Hi Malachi,

These are interesting observations.

Toto has a good review of the issues here.
The Passion Narrative and Philo The density of meaningful parallels seems to indicate a connection between the two texts.

The Mock King was a ritual that was widespread in antiquity. Arthur Drews, The Christ Myth, The Sufferings of the Messiah, has a high level discussion of it. That is, about 50,000 feet: the same level as Frazier in the Golden Bough, The Roman Saturnalia

Jake Jones IV

mountainman

The specialists are not plural - there is only one.
And the name is Eusebius, in whose writings alone
all references are "preserved".

What we know as these "Malachi-FACTS" are 100% Eusebian.
They are not facts, but assertions within a theological
romance. Eusebius purports to write literature which he
(and his followers) call "history", but it is certainly not.

For example, we have George Long, in the translation of
Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations" saying this:

"Our extant ecclesiastical histories are manifestly falsified
and what truth they contain is grossly exaggerated."

And for the period from 100 to 300, there is only one "history"
and one "historian" Eusebius. These wild fantastic claims that
I see floating around here, related to "christian facts"
are not leaving any sensible impressions.



Pete Brown
Authors of Antiquity

Clivedurdle

Are you arguing Philo is a xian invention?

http://www.torreys.org/bible/philo&beg.html

mountainman

No, that christianity is a Constantinian invention which
heavily borrowed for its "wisdom sayings" from the
reports of Philo, Josephus and others on the order
known as "the Essenes", such as comprehensively
catalogued here.

And futhermore, reasonably clearly, as is evidenced in
the threads: Influence of Buddhism on Christianity? and
Is Christianity western BUDDHISM?? (thx again for this
ref btw), that the Essenic philosophy and practices
were descended from the east.



Pete Brown

Clivedurdle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapeutae

Was Eusebius wrong? Only if we accept the alleged timeline of the life of Jesus!

Xianity really does look like a cobbled together superstitio taking ideas from all over the place!

mountainman

The ecclesiatical history literature of Eusebius was written
immediately after Constantine had secured Rome and the
western empire as his, and had sent Maxientius' head through
the streets of Rome, and "to Africa as a warning".

Eusebius was Constantine's propagandist. My modern history
knowledge is lacking, but did Hitler have a person appointed to
generate literature for his regime, and if so, what was the
relationship of the genre of the literature, to the genre of
the dictatorial regime?

"It is, I think, expedient to set forth to all mankind
the reasons by which I was convinced
that the fabrication of the Galilaeans
is a fiction of men composed by wickedness.

Though it has in it nothing divine,
by making full use of that part of the soul
which loves fable and is childish and foolish,
it has induced men to believe
that the monstrous tale is truth."

--- Emperor (360-363 CE) Flavius Claudius Julianus (the Apostate)
"Against the Galileans" remains of the 3 books,
excerpted from Cyril of Alexandria, Contra Julianum (1923)"


Constantine pulled the ancient world off its foundations
because he wanted more and more absolute power.

That the roots of the history of christianity is al fiction
of wicked men, as described above by Julian, is one thing. IMO,
I will qualify Julian to charge that its inception was perpetrated as
an imperially sponsored fiction, and thrust down the throat of the
Roman empire (for the very first time) in 325CE, at Nicaea, as a package
- of historical change, against the warnings of Arius:
"There was time when he was not"
"He was made out of nothing existing"
"He is subject to change and alteration"

The words consistent with a very brave man, highly skilled
and exceedingly clever in disputation (and you needed to
be so to go AGAINST Constantine, on account of
whose same and very words, the historians inform us, the
council was called. He did not want to lose his life, but Arius
disputed the integrity of the fabrication of the Galilaeans
at the time at the time of the implementation of "christianity"
by Constantine, the basilia builder extraordinaire, the highly
intelligent supreme imperial mafia thug dictator, etc.

There is a boundary in the history of antiquity which I have
termed the pre-Nicaean Epoch, and before this boundary
the future historians of antiquity will not be forced to be
apologetic to christian dogma, because christianity, as defined
in the books of the new testament, by its non-canonical books,
by its abysmal and wretched "Ecclesiatical Histories", by the
purported and fraudulently interpolated references to anything
christian in the literature of antiquity, simply did not exist at
all prior to the time of the visit of Maxientius' head, on the
spike of Constantine, travelling "to Africa as a warning".(312CE)




Pete Brown

jgibson000

Could we leave off with this "Eusebius wrote the NT nonsense" and get back on topic, please?

Or to put it another way: assuming -- as most without a hobby horse to ride do -- that the books of the NT were written roughly between 50 and 150 CE, does the claim that NT writers, and in particular the Gospel authors, knew and used Philo, have any merit?

Can (or as it looks now, will) "Malachi151" (groan) back up his claims in this regard? Can/will he tell us if he is certain that the themes (allegedly) in Philo that he finds paralleled in the NT are peculiar to Philo and do not occur/appear anywhere else in ancient Jewish literature?

Is it really the case, as he asserts it is, and can he actually show us through citation, that his claim about the NT writers having read and used Philo is something that we find widely supported by Philo and NT scholars?

Jeffrey Gibson

Chris Weimer

Jeffrey, just put him on ignore, if it bothers you that much. It's what I did.

Malachi151

I don't know Greek, so no I can't offer that level of analysis, nor do I even think its relavent, because I'm not claiming, nor has anyone, that Mark COPIED from Philo word for word as he did from the Septugient, but rather that he and John were influenced by Philo, so textual analysis isn't going to matter here, especially since the writing style of Mark and Philo are compeletely different.

Yes I have read many of the works of Philo, in fact some of the parallels I listed are ones that I noticed myself. Of course, I've read only english translations.

About "the Word", for example:

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/book16.html

This is just one example of many, I've read about 5 different uses of "the Word" by Philo. I'm not going to go through and mine every work of Philo I've read in the past 2 years to build a case here, that's not my interest.

Obviously I can't do that, no one can, since its imposisble to say what all the potentialy lost books said. I'm simply working from the works that we have available to us. Its always possible that soemoen else wrote things similar to Philo, either independently or based on Philo, and that Mark read that instead.

What I said is this:

We do know for a fact that the early Christians, as early as the second century were reading Philo, they quoted him and we have found works of Philo in various collections. I said that we have "good reason to believe" that the gospel writers read Philo, not that we "know if for a fact".

I have provided what I feel are those good reasons. I'm not going to dig up every specific quote, you can find much of it yourself via quick searches, the others you can learn about yourself by reading Philo (in Greek if you so choose!)

Chris Weimer

Usually the surest way to understand dependence is by linguistic analysis. You don't need to read Philo to get an idea common around the entire mediterranean, as Vork and others have been trying to explain to you. Yet you continue to ignore this. Why?

Then you should still have no problem citing your research like a proper scholar.

Regarding "the word", Philo himself borrowed the idea from earlier Greek thought, undoubtedly the idea was not limited to Philo. And that you're using John as your backbone for this is not healthy - there's way too many problems with the reliability of John to make a case against all early Christian writers depending on Philonic ideas.

If you're not interested in actually doing the work, how can you ever expect to be taken seriously?

Fallacy. Jeffrey said "corpus of ancient Jewish writings" which always implies that which is extent. How you inferred lost Jewish writings is beyond me and very unprofessional.

The earliest Christian you have is Clement of Alexandria, a Christian in the same locality as Philo, and you expect us to take that as a general statement that early Christians read Philo and harbored his collection? And you still don't have any reason at all to believe the Gospel writers (which ones, anyway?) read and depended on Philo.