mountainman

Dear Toto,

One might also reduce the number of witnesses,
as did Mohammad and his followers with Islam.

Operating sophisticated spy networks was the mainstay of many ancient rulers and military commanders. Gathering intelligence is a tricky business and the ancients did it the same way as we do it today. They send out a number (lets call the number four) spies or scouts into new territory and these scouts and/or spies are then either asked for an account, which is recorded and the accounts compared. The Greek "episkopos" (bishop) also means "spy".


What then are the apochryphal gospels and how do you explain them? How many of the non-canonical gospels (and acts) were authored? Where is a cohesive and integrated mainstream explanation for the appearance of the entire canon + non canon series of literature?

You are examining the canon out of context with the rest of the non canonical literature, and are engineering a momentous conclusion, admitted shared by most mainstream thinkers, that the canon existed early, in some unknown century, possibly the second. However when you examine both the canon and the non canonical writings as a unified phenomenom called early christianity you quickly perceive that many of the non-canonical texts have been securely dated to the ground of the fourth century.

What for example do you think the Nag Hammadi codices tell us about christianity around the middle of the fourth century? How are these related to the canon?

Best wishes,


Pete

J-D

Muhammad did not incorporate four different parallel versions of any events into the Quran. Joseph Smith did not incorporate four different parallel versions of any events into the Book of Mormon. The parsimonious explanation of multiple different parallel versions of the same event is multiple authorship.One would not assign multiple agents to spy on the same events. That would be a waste of resources, and would also make the mission less secure. One would send each spy on a different mission to observe different events at different times and places. Thus the expected product would not be separate eyewitness accounts (identical or not) of the same events.Different authors producing different versions.No, nobody is suggesting that the canon existed in the second century. What is being suggested is that most or all of the material subsequently incorporated into the canon, as well as much material later rejected as non-canonical, existed in the second and even the first century.But there is no reason to regard the whole of those texts as a single unified phenomenon. On the contrary, they are obviously disparate. Even those parts which were incorporated into the canon only became a unified phenomenon as a result of that process of canonisation.Don't play Socrates.

Toto

Just for the record, επίσκοπος in Greek is usually translated as "overseer".

mountainman

Dear J-D,

Muhmmad reduced the number of witnesses to one.


But what what would you do if you could not (heaven forbid) trust these spies? You of course would trust your spies, but others might not.


Best wishes,


Pete

J-D

I am not sure whether you imagine that these statements somehow support your case. I cannot conceive of any way in which they do.

avi

Though I don't disagree with the thrust of your argument, Doug, i.e. that the ancients likely did not introduce variation into the texts of the new testament, in order to satisfy some statistical preconceptions, I do wish to submit that our feeble understanding of the magnitude of the creative genius of the ancient Greek mathematicians is deplorable:
The key word here is mean.

As you acknowledge having considerable familiarity with the history of mathematics, I am sure you know of Eratosthenes, who wrote the following regarding the "mean":

avi

I post this web site for the benefit of that handful of forum members who, like me, are ignorant of many things, including Greek.
To my narrow minded way of thinking, three of these four words, depending on context, could correspond to "spy".

Doug Shaver

You can imagine whatever you like. I'm sticking with the evidence.

Doug Shaver

I would not have the foggiest notion how to quantify that sort of agreement. Neither would you, and neither would Eusebius.

If I were to attempt such a fabrication, with the intention that educated people would think all four accounts were authentic, then I would vary the writing styles and the specifics of incidental details. I would not introduce the kinds of contradictions that are evident in the four gospels. Not any. There would be zero contradictions.

Toto

An overseer or guardian or bishop is someone who watches from an official capacity. A spy watches from hiding. The only common element is the watching.

I don't know what this has to do with anything, but Pete is in the habit of using his own vocabulary. He is asserting an ancient practice of sending out multiple spies and expecting only 80% of their reports to be consistent, but he has produced no evidence of this.