Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Clivedurdle · 09-10-2010, 01:54 AM

I wonder if we have had a repeat in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of what was going on in the second century CE.

Robert Owen. and many similar people, set up utopian communities. It looks like similar dreamy ideas were going on in the second century - wealthy benefactors creating dreamy perfect communities and needing rules of behaviour.

This all makes the Christ even more mythological. Communities need symbols, and the cross is an ancient and very powerful one. Add in some looking at the dawn, and then some just so ing and the moral tales to make the community work get put down to a saviour Christ.

mountainman · 09-12-2010, 10:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stephan huller

[Against Marcion 3.6]

[I]So then, since heretical madness was claiming that that Christ [i.e. Jesus] had come who had never been previously mentioned, it followed that ....

This church preserved orthodox propaganda via the otherwise totally unknown Marcian would suggest the obvious that the major expected Christian heresey was denial that Jesus ever appeared in history.

Quote:

it had to contend that that Christ was not yet come who had from all time been foretold: and so it was compelled to form an alliance with Jewish error, and from it to build up an argument for itself, .....[snip]

This is but one rhetorically charge possibility.

Quote:

Where was Marcion then, that nauclerus of Pontus, the zealous student of Stoicism? Where was Valentinus then, the disciple of Platonism? [Prescription 30]

The literature of the stoics and the Platonists and the Greek poets and the Hebrew people may have been plagiarized for political purposes.

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09-10-2010, 01:54 AM	#11
Clivedurdle Contributor Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: London UK Posts: 16,024	I wonder if we have had a repeat in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of what was going on in the second century CE. Robert Owen. and many similar people, set up utopian communities. It looks like similar dreamy ideas were going on in the second century - wealthy benefactors creating dreamy perfect communities and needing rules of behaviour. This all makes the Christ even more mythological. Communities need symbols, and the cross is an ancient and very powerful one. Add in some looking at the dawn, and then some just so ing and the moral tales to make the community work get put down to a saviour Christ.

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