mountainman

Why dont they teach this sort of stuff in theological college?

We have texts written about the christian religion which purport it to have existed prior to the fourth century, but we have no unambiguous, readily cited archaeological evidence to substantiate this.

On the other hand we have texts written about the Healing God Asclepius in antiquity by a variety of authors starting with Homer, and at the same time we have literally scores of archaeological supporting evidence and sites, temples and shrines to this god right across Italy and the Roman empire.

The only reason apologetic BC&H scholars take no interest in non-literary historical citations, is because none of these exist with respect to christian origins --- the question needs to be asked, why is this?


Best wishes,



Pete Brown

mountainman

On the contrary it is a logical conclusion that, if Jesus, the twelve and Paul of the NT are indeed fiction, then we are dealing with fraud, and the fraudulent misrepresentation of ancient history, at some point between the second century and the fourth. And hence the valid question: "Did Eusebius swindle Constantine?" (ie: maybe the Boss was innocent)


Best wishes,



Pete Brown

Amaleq13

I suspect it is simply a matter of not being high enough.

Sheshbazzar

The Boss mght have been a lot of things, but the word "innocent" would be about the last word that would come to mind.

mountainman

It depends on what one is prepared to believe about the evidence. There are a number of scattered references in the apocryphal acts of the apostles in which the christian apostle needs only to cross himself once, and the entire military forces of the enemy, and its leader, are pushed backwards, and utterly defeated. What if this were actually true?

What if Eusebius came from the planet Krypton, and was a fourth century Clerk Kent, and the reporter for Constantine's Daily Planet? Would The Boss value such a weapon? Did Eusebius have any power over Constantine at all? Clivedurdle has already posted the archaeological reference to the early fourth century Italian meteorite crater.

Best wishes



Pete Brown

Ben C Smith

Your own preferred reconstruction of Christian history is almost as likely as this Eusebius-was-from-the-planet-Krypton scenario.

Almost.



Ben.

aa5874

But did Jesus pass or use the planet Krypton as a rest-stop on his way to heaven when he was taken up through the clouds as reported in Acts?

mountainman

OK, so maybe this is more like Gandalf and Tolkien.

But the fact remains, I am not the author of the assertion
that battles were won on the basis of faith. If a Christian
Apostle has such awesome unearthly power, who is not
going to become a christian instantaneously, on the spot.

Christianity was big business racket in the fourth century.
What is it nowdays? Just the same? Stories, like Superman
and your man Jesus H. are not dissimilar. The questions that
remains concerning the genre of fiction are straightforward.
Eusebius was no super-clerk kent. The Boss gave him scriptoria.

Best wishes,



Pete Brown

DCHindley

Ben,

It sounds like Gamera's talking about "Death of the Author" (1967). Per Wicki, it is "an essay by the French literary critic Roland Barthes that was first published in the American journal Aspen. ... It argues against incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of text; writing and creator are unrelated.

...

In his essay, Barthes criticizes the reader's tendency to consider aspects of the author’s identity—his political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes—to distill meaning from his work. In this critical schematic, the experiences and biases of the author serve as its definitive “explanation.” For Barthes, this is a tidy, convenient method of reading and is sloppy and flawed: “To give a text an Author” and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it “is to impose a limit on that text.” Readers must separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate it from interpretive tyranny (a notion similar to Erich Auerbach’s discussion of narrative tyranny in Biblical parables), for each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. In a famous quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a “text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations,” drawn from “innumerable centers of culture,” rather than from one, individual experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the “passions” or “tastes” of the writer; “a text’s unity lies not in its origins,” or its creator, “but in its destination,” or its audience.

No longer the focus of creative influence, the author is merely a “scriptor” (a word Barthes uses expressly to disrupt the traditional continuity of power between the terms “author” and “authority”). The scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work and “is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [and] is not the subject with the book as predicate.” Every work is “eternally written here and now,” with each re-reading, because the “origin” of meaning lies exclusively in “language itself” and its impressions on the reader.

...

Michel Foucault also addresses the subject of the author in critical interpretation in a response to Barthes's death of the author theory. In his 1979 essay "What is an Author?", he argues for the term "author function", which essentially fills what some critics see as the void left by Barthes's theory."

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

I guess Wiki has its uses at times. This article is fairly good.

Re Foucault, and possibly the source of spin's "Foucault 101" comment, from another somewhat more obtuse site:

"Foucault says that a writer's particular individuality is canceled out by the text, by writing, because we now see "writer," or "author," as the function of language itself.

...

So why does Foucault say the author is "dead"? It's his way of saying that the author is decentered, shown to be only a part of the structure, a subject position, and not the center. In the humanist view, remember, authors were the source and origin of texts (and perhaps of language itself, like Derrida's engineer), and were also thus beyond texts--hence authors were "centers." In declaring the author dead, Foucault follows Nietzsche's declaration (at the end of the nineteenth century) that "God is dead," a statement which Derrida then reads as meaning that God is no longer the center of the system of philosophy which Nietzsche is rejecting. By declaring the death of the author, Foucault is "deconstructing" the idea that the author is the origin of something original, and replacing it with the idea that the "author" is the product or function of writing, of the text."

http://www.colorado.edu/English/cour.../foucault.html

Barthes 101 anyone?

DCH

patcleaver

Most narrative literature is fiction, so fiction is the default. Its fiction unless you can verify that it true.

The four basic genres are fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama. Anyone who has taken any course in literature should know that.

The actual intent of C.S. Lewis is irrelevant for determining the genre of his works. All that matters is whether the person classifying one of his works believes that its fiction, non-fiction, poetry or drama based on the contents.

gen·re [zhahn-ruh; Fr. zhahn-ruh]
–noun
1. a class or category of artistic endeavor having a particular form, content, technique, or the like: the genre of epic poetry; the genre of symphonic music.
2. Fine Arts.

a. paintings in which scenes of everyday life form the subject matter.
b. a realistic style of painting using such subject matter.

3. genus; kind; sort; style.

Literary genres are just classifications or types of literature. If you have some literature that you want to classify then you just look through the existing definitions of genres (their attributes) and find the best fit. If there is a group of literature that does not fit well in any existing genre then you just make one up a new genre with attributes that generally fit the group – just like other classification scheme.