stephan huller

But hatred is a reliable commodity. Let's suppose this thread was somehow to have survived to the year 3000 and for some reason I cannot even fathom, scholars decided to piece together what was going on here. It would be the WORST possible explanation of the evidence that our hostility was a result of an artificially contrived twenty first century conspiracy designed to 'trick' people into believing that there actually WAS evidence for Christianity before the Council of Nicaea.

Some moronic scholar could explain this discussion by means of the fact that non of us were real people, that this was a 'parody' of an internet dialogue, but it would be the wrong. explanation of the phenomenon.

Toto

On the contrary, what you call a "hypothesis" is based on knowledge of textual transmission through copying. The likelihood of any particular text being the original has to be small.

This is backwards. I would expect Christian apologists to shade the truth about their own history, to invent precedents and claim earlier authority. I would expect them to distort the views of their opponents, but not to invent opponents that had not existed.

This is just a convoluted way of saying that the date of the earliest manuscript that we have as the date of the composition of the work, which you claimed was a misrepresentation of your opinion. :huh:

spin

Then you have a totally incomprehensible way of stating it. Look again at you agreeing "that THOSE specific documents were most probably generated sometime within the C14 range":

YES, agree, THOSE PARTICULAR manuscripts/codices were likely produced after Nicaea, because, the C14 data suggests that the Papyrus plants were harvested after Nicaea.

That clearly is not the same notion as "sometime within the C14 range". You agreed that they "were likely produced after Nicaea", ie "the last 15 years of the date range".

I have no control over the disjunction between what you say and what you intend, but clearly they are two different things, if they appear to contradict each other as they do in these two posts.

The C14 data (and I was specifically talking about the Gospel of Judas) does not in any way suggest--to use your words--"that the Papyrus plants were harvested after Nicaea".


spin

mountainman

The OP is the origin of the Gnostic Gospels. We have two separate C14 dates for gJudas and the gThomas (NHC) which establish that the Gnostics must have been manufacturing codices containing "Gnostic Gospels" on or around the Council of Nicaea.

The question is, were these Gnostic publications simply collections of older texts that had been desmodromically copied for centuries, or were they representive of original 4th century authorship? Arguing on behalf of scholarship, you are asserting that the answer to this question is that they are just scribal copies of earlier material.

Scholarship's assertion or knowledge or hypothesis is of course based upon centuries and centuries of the traditional of the acceptance at face value, the references to the "Gnostic Gospels and Acts" in Eusebius, Tertullian and Irenaeus. The consequent mainstream presumption is thus that we must be dealing in scribal copies, since these texts were mentioned by the early christian heresiologists as extant before Nicaea.

I think this mainstream presumption is questionable, for a great many reasons. I think it is just as likely that these expensive exemplars of the 4th century codex technology contained original material authored in the 4th century, originally in Greek, but preserved later in Coptic and Syriac, as a literary and technological reaction to the momentous event of Nicaea. The Gnostics lampooned the Canon - the "Constantine Codex".


My argument is that the Gnostic authors historically existed between the post Nicaean controversies over the Canon which were not resolved until 367 CE. I am arguing that the Christian Heresiologists (not apologists Toto) retrojected mention of the Gnostic works into their "Church History".

Your expectations are confounded in the 4th century "Historia Augusta", where both the sources and their opponents are invented. If the (imperially sponsored?) fabricators of the 4th century "Historia Augusta" could invent non existent people, and invent other non existent people to oppose them, then so could have the 4th century (imperially sponsored?) Christian Heresiologists.





Interesting quote

From www.c14dating.com:

stephan huller

Let's be accurate about the information, Pete. The way you carry out these little tricks are what frustrate the rest of us. This is a stupid argument. It doesn't help your case. I sometimes think that your rigidity doesn't let you see the big picture. The gnostic writings weren't created in the fourth century. How do we know that for certain? Well beyond the anti-heretical writings of Irenaeus et al there is also Plotinus (c. 204 - 270 CE) who wrote a treatise called Against the Gnostics:

This theory doesn't work. Give it up. You are embarrassing yourself.

avi

You were correctly focused on the OP, whereas I was addressing the tangential issue of whether one is permitted (I don't think so) to assign a date of composition, upon learning the range of dates assigned to a particular papyrus document.

I was oblivious of whether the documents were discussing abc or xyz, I was simply responding to what I had perceived as a potential misinterpretation, regarding the distinction between the C14 established date for the harvest of the papyrus, and the date when an author first puts ink to paper, a date which, further, is not necessarily, in my opinion, the same date that the scribe recopied the template to another surface, even though, that new sheet of papyrus could have represented plant material grown decades, even centuries before the scribe's activity.

That was the reason for which, in my initial response, I emphasized THESE, in bold, with attribution assigned to my highlighting.

This distinction (i.e. C14 date for harvest of papyrus, versus actual date of authorship versus date of copying/forging) is most significant, in my opinion, when reflecting upon the "miraculous" find of a sheet of papyrus, discovered at Dura Europos, not by careful excavation by a trained archaeologist, but rather by a workman, who reached down into the surface soil, to pluck out a gospel-like document, situated superficially, largely intact, without significant destructive loss, despite Hopkins' report of so much rainfall in the Autumn of that year (1931?), that other papyrus documents disintegrated instantly upon disinterment. It was Hopkins himself, who acknowledged that interpretation of the suite of rooms defined as the house-church, depended upon "miraculous" discovery of that particular papyrus document, the C14 date of which may well be 1800 years earlier, but the composition of which, could easily have been 1930.

avi

mountainman

stephan, do you know what you are talking about here? The following gnostic writings are presently catalogued by mainstream academics as being authored in the 4th or the 5th centuries .....

Gnostic Gospels and Acts, etc
KNOWN to have been authored in the 4th/5th centuries

The Acts of John the Theologian 4th
The Acts of the Martyrs 4th
The Death of Pilate 4th
The History of Joseph the Carpenter 4th
The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew 4th
The Gospel of Nicodemus 4th
The Gospel of the Nativity of Mary 4th
The Correspondence of Paul and Seneca 4th
The Correspondence of Jesus and Abgar 4th
The Acts of Polyeuctes 4th
The Gospel of Gamaliel 4th
The Gospel of the Twelve Apostles 4th
The Acts of Pilate 4th
The Acts of Thaddaeus 4th-5th
The Acts of Peter and Paul 4th-5th
The Gospel of Bartholomew 4th-5th
The Acts of Philip 4th-5th
The Acts of Simon and Jude 4th-5th
The Acts of Luke 4th-5th
The History of John 4th-5th
The Acts of Mark 4th-5th
The Act of Peter 4th-5th
The Acts of Bartholomew 5th
An Arabic Infancy Gospel 5th
The Gospel of Thomas - A 5th Century Compilation 5th
The Acts of Barnabas 5th
The Acts and Martyrdom of Andrew 5th
The Acts and Martyrdom of Matthew 5th
The Acts of Timothy 5th
The Acts of Titus 5th
The Acts of Matthew 5th

Stacks and stacks of Gnostic writings were getting pumped out by Gnostic authors in the 4th century.


Classic example of gnostic writing created in the fourth century

The classic case of the 4th century Gnostic Gospel is the "Gospel of Nicodemus" in which is found The Acts of Pilate in which our Canon Man Jesus is presented to the Jews by Pilate as being a healer who heals by the power of the son of Apollo, the Graeco-Roman healing god Asclepius. I think that could be taken as something akin to religious slander.

Moreover, it begs the question as to whether the Gnostics had anything to do with the vast priesthoods of Asclepius in 324/325 CE, when Constantine utterly destroyed the most ancient and highly revered temples to Asclepius in the eastern empire. Or vice verse. Relegating the healing power of Jesus to the healing power of the traditional healing god Asclepius, was a very political subject at that specific time.

"Leucius" and "Charinus" in the Acts of Pilate

The name of "Leucius" which is attached to the "Leucian Gnostic Acts" in the mid to late 4th century, for centuries cursed and sworn at by Christian bishops and Roman Emperors as the "Disciple of the Devil", and surnamed "Charinus" by the late Photius (who almost chokes trying to find derogatory terms for this Gnostic author) --- first appears in the "Gospel of Nicodemus". The text tells us that the work was written by two scribes. These two scribes write each a copy of the book simultaneously under inspiration as the outrageous events unfold, and after putting pens down and counting the lines to find two exactly identical accounts (think of the canonical gospels), the two scribes --- called Leucius and Karinus - disappear in the middle of court before everyone's eyes in a blinding flash.

So who was this chief Gnostic author Leucius Charinus, responsible for the authorship of the "Leucian Acts"?
Maybe it was Marcion?


I take it you did not read a word I said about how I am treating Irenaeus, Tertullian and Eusebius in regard to their reliability to report on their sworn religious opposition?



It cannot be assumed that the "Gnostics" who were the historical authors of the "Gnostic Gospels and Acts" were the one and the same "Gnostics" whom Plotinus may have been addressing.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

The mainstream theory itself is embarrassing. It proposes continuous authorship by generations and generations of unknown Gnostic heretics during three or four centuries (the 1st or the 2nd, the 3rd and the 4th). Not only are the Orthodox Canon Preserving Christians a "green" underground and highly archaeologically inconspicuous sect, but a second "green" underground and highly archaeologically inconspicuous explicitly heretical sect is supposed to have lived in parallel. Can't anyone agree that this mainstream reconstruction is preposterously unlikely.

Besides the paleographic attestations, the only evidence that the mainstream paradigm has in its favour are the literal handful of statements made by Eusebius, Tertullian and Irenaeus, about the authorship of a small number only [See Post # 21] of the non canonical books of the Gnostics. The mainstream paradigm is completely aware that the rest of the Gnostic books - the balance for which we have no early "attestation", were authored during the 4th and 5th centuries. Hello?

Roger Pearse

<snigger>

spin

I guess that you can happily conclude then that the whole aside about C14 helping date the Gospel of Judas after Nicaea has been both a waste of our time and simply misguided. And why do you suddenly want to bring in another tangent--the Dura Europos information--after the failure of the C14 stuff, especially when you show such totally misunderstanding of the material? If we went through that once again, we'd probably end with you suddenly recycling the C14 stuff. Let's just stop with the resolution of the gJud C14 data as being totally unhelpful for the mountainman folly.


spin

mountainman

I have adjusted the C14 results to conform to 280 CE +/- 60 years and have added a red line to show Nicaea. A post Nicaean date for gJudas is neither misguided or ruled out of the question by the results as shown. The upper bound, according to the results is the year 340 CE. Last time I checked, this was after Nicaea.