aa5874

So, what is a variant of Paul's letters? Those with Jesus or those without?

If it cannot be established what the letter writer wrote originally, then no variant can be truly identified.

And if is claimed that "the church of 180 was more centralized and united that it had been before or after", was this finding based on information that was suppressed?

If the church suppresed information, then the information we have today about the church itself may be erroneous, giving the false notion that they were centralized and united when they may have really been fragmented and weak.

Sheshbazzar

Your obsevation brings to mind these;

(the "so also [is]" is crudely contrived in English)

And there are more similar examples. The term "Christian" by definition means "anointed ones", and of them it is also said ;
It hangs together, but that in itself is no indication that the claims have any basis in reality.

boneyard bill

I don't see how you can put forward a theory of interpolation without some kind of evidence. It won't do to put forward the argument simply because you need it to support another thesis.

But I don't think this particular argument is in need of such a thesis anyway. From what I understand, the name "Jesus" or "Yeshua" in Hebrew means "savior." So the term, "Jesus Christ" means "savior messiah" and I don't see why it couldn't be argued that the two words combined constitute a title rather than a name and a title.

Of course, there are other problems with the mythical Jesus thesis. I think this is a minor one even if one assumes that "Jesus" is a name.

patcleaver

Documents are not self authenticating. There is no presumption that a document is not interpolated or fictional or forgery. The proponent of any document has to provide evidence that the writing is reliable before it should be relied upon.

We do not have the originals. We do not know what they originally contained. We know that they contain interpolations.

Paul's epistles were not mentioned until Eusebius. There is no evidence that they ever circulated before the 4th century. No copy of Paul's epistles have carbon dated before the 10th century. There is no reasonable evidence that the epistles attributed to Paul were written before the 4th century.

Most of the epistles attributed to Paul are believed to be forgeries, and there is no reason to think that the rest are not forgeries.

Still, for someone to honestly claim that the originals did not contain the name Jesus, and that all references to Jesus added later, they would have to provide evidence that its true. What is the evidence for that claim?

Analyst

Here's my thought: Paul could have been, seems to have been, writing about a mythical messiah. If so, he wouldn't have had a name, Jesus, just a title, Christ. It's unlikely that the phrase Jesus Christ would have been edited to Christ. I can conceive, however, that the term Jesus could have been altered to Jesus Christ in several places.

As has been pointed out previously, Christ cults/groups were not uncommon, and Paul's literature likely sprang out of the current religious thought of his period, rather as the Book of Mormon sprang out of the current religious thought of Joseph Smith's time.

Toto

Just stop there. Paul's epistles were mentioned well before Eusebius. What is the basis of this claim?

Doug Shaver

In all the extant manuscripts, he says both.

Possible? Yes.

Probable? Let's see some evidence.

Sheshbazzar

Always a problem, as just about every early church writing that is ascribed to a time before Eusebius, is "authenticated" by reference to Eusebius's and the latter church's writings and "quotations". There seem to be no actual surviving canonical manuscripts that date back to the times when they are alleged to have actually been written, in general circulation, and well known.
And almost everything we do have that is allegedly from that time, has been supplied to us by documents provided by Eusebius and the post-Nicean "catholic" church.

This is the problem that I briefly touched on back in post #14. Clement of Rome, who is by church tradition, allegedly the 4th Pope of the "catholic" church, writing from Rome to the church in Corinth, evidently did not have any copies of the so-called "New Testement" writings at his disposal, for although he uses some similar sounding language in his writing, he never once directly quotes even a single verse as it is found in the latter canonical works, even those New Testement books that are supposedly in wide circulation, and at the very foundations of the church's teachings, and of all Christian doctrine, and which if so, Clement would have been hearing, carefully reading, and accurately committing to memory, all through his rise to that most prominent position.
Now how does one explain that in light of Christian church acceptance of Clement as being an authentic example of an early "Church Father", one whom by Catholic teaching, was the head man over the entire Christian church?
Number one man in the entire Christian church, and evidently even he doesn't have a single actual NT book in his possession from which to draw his words, or to instruct others out of by saying; "have you not read what Matthew wrote in...."?
(Not even so much as a reference to the more general "Memories of the Apostles" as they are referred to latter on)
Of course he doesn't, because they have never seen, heard, or known of any such authoritative New Testement books either.

Richard Carrier noted in his "Formation of The New Testament Canon"
Thus it seems far more likely that the writings of Clement and of other early Christian church fathers, were latter combined with one or more Jewish "sayings" documents to produce those documents called The Gospels, and these, along with the heavily modified "Pauline" and "pseudo-Pauline" epistles, fabricated over the next three centuries, became the official canon of the "Christian Scriptures"
Which was then presented to a gullible world (with the edge of Imperial Roman swords) as all being legitimate literary works from the first century.

Of course all of this is to be weighed against claims like rhutchin's, that quite disingenuously imply that there were so many copies of the NT in circulation within the first century that it would have been an "enormous" task to make any changes.
No, the very fact that few deviations from the canonical forms can be found, to me, points to a late date of composition, at a time when The Church could both create and maintain a stringent control over the contents.
If the Gospel stories had originated in truth, and by way of recitation, and by means of natural, free and unfettered distribution as it is claimed to have been done, hundreds of widely varying texts would normally be expected to have resulted.
The church did not need to engage the Herculean task of seeking out and destroying great numbers of earlier "non-conforming" Gospel texts, simply because such developed texts had never existed in the first place.

It is time to, at long last, put the horse in front of the cart.
The Gospels did not create or influence the church, but the (Roman) church created the influence of The Gospels.

Analyst

I'm trying to 'expand' the possibilities to the widest selection before narrowing or eliminating any. I'm not saying this is the 'one true' way the books were written. Maybe there are references to Jesus which cannot be construed as interpolations?

aa5874

If all the documents we have from that time were alledgely supplied by Eusebius, then why do you think it is true or likely to be true that Clement wrote anything, that Clement was a bishop in Rome and there were jesus believers in Corinth as stated by Clement?

All documents from Eusebius must be challenged, their authenticity or veracity cannot be assumed.

I do not think the letter writer called Clement wrote in the 1st century, perhaps sometime in the second to the fourth century.