Toto

Pete - you have already posted all of these talking points, but you still have not been able to connect them to a coherent theory.

So there was a tetrarchy - that might conceivably explain why someone decided that there should be four gospels, but it doesn't explain four contradictory gospels, or the particular pattern of contradictions and copy and paste.

And asking "What if Eusebius was instructed by the incoming regime to openly lie ..." does nothing to prove that Eusebius was in fact instructed to lie, and that he went ahead and manufactured a fake history for Christians.

Why don't you read Richard Carrier's work on Baysian statistics, and do a formal exercise. What evidence would you expect if Eusebius wrote Christian history from scratch? I don't think that it matches the evidence that we have. Contrast this with the idea that Eusebius did some spin doctoring of existing stories and Christian texts, which the evidence does appear to support.

mountainman

This practice would be very difficult to achieve as an obscure green religious sect scattered and persecuted even by Roman Emperors for century and after century.... the amazing thing is that the Gnostic heretics also copied this practice. So we effectively have two (or more) feuding groups, the orthodox and the gnostic heretics, squabbling for centuries without altering the practice of these fundamental nomina sacra.

How could this be? Do we find the nomina sacra on inscriptions before the 4th century? What does Graydon Snyder have to say about the Vatican's impressive list of inscriptions?






Eusebius is happy enough to compare Constantine to Moses and would have been quite aware that the code name for Constantine's Jesus was the same nomina sacra code name for Moses's "lieutenant" Joshua.

Who authored and published the Hebrew Bible if it was not Moses?

Toto

It wasn't just the same nomina sacra, it was the same name.

mountainman

In a half decent world for Christ's sake .... we are not talking about the modern world but the utterly ruthless and Draconian antiquity of the year 325 CE (the culmination of a massive East-West Civil War in the Roman Empire), and attempting to reconstruct the modus operandi, actions, motives, etc of the supremely victorious warlord Constantine the Great Fascist

Toto

We've hit Godwin's law. Pete loses.

mountainman

I did this in 2007, but the theory was rejected by the JHS.
Here is the theory and here is the JHS referee report.


I have done this. I am awaiting his new publications to see how he handles negative evidence (i.e. fabrication and forgery). I am aware that Bayesian equations can be used to represent both postive and negative evidence, and am interested to see whether Carrier explores this path.


The reaction to Negative evidence. If in fact the events described by the Eusebian evidence did not happen then we must expect to find evidence for a massively turbulent social controversy in reaction to the fabrication. What do we find at Nicaea? We might also expect that the controversy was HUSHED UP in later generations. What was the thesis of Charles Freeman's book "AD 381"?

Let me cite another description of negative evidence from
The Dog in the Night-Time: Negative Evidence in Social Research

George H. Lewis and Jonathan F. Lewis
The British Journal of Sociology
Vol. 31, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), pp. 544-558
(article consists of 15 pages)
.




There is a great resistance to examining the negative evidence against the Christian Origins historical paradigm.


The problem is that :

(1) the positive evidence is predominantly Eusebian, and
(2) the negative evidence is predominantly ignored.

mountainman

Historically before Godwin's law was Draco's law.

Duvduv

Why was the Nicaean Creed of 325 devoid of any hints of the gospels or epistles as compared with the second creed a scant 45 years later, which hinted at the gospels with mention of Pilate AND a reference from 1 Corinthians? Were these two markers of Pilate and Jesus according to the Scriptures unknown by the Council of 325??!
Were Irenaeus' references to the 4 gospels from the 4th century leading up to a consensus about the gospels by 381 rather than from the 2nd century as traditionally believed ?? Were Tertullian and Origen or parts of the writings of all three from the 4th century rather than from the late second century and early third century?? I believe it is very very likely.

mountainman

These were details to be found in the Operations Guide. Nobody was interested in looking at this because the focus was on Jesus himself, and whether he was to be classified as "similar in essence" to concept of the One Supreme Deity (as the people in Alexandria c.325 CE understood the term) or whether Jesus was to be classified as the "same in essence" to this pre-existent concept of the One Supreme Deity.

THE GNOSTIC IOTA of DIFFERENCE

The Common English phrase 'not one iota of difference',
is used to signify a meaningless distinction
(literally - "not even a small difference").

Same or Similar? 'homoousios' or homoiousios' ?




In 325 CE Jesus himself was under the spotlight.
Everything else was in the shadows.
You could hear a pin drop.




So do I.

I also think that Eusebius was telling the historical truth when he wrote:

"the sacred matters of inspired teaching
were exposed to the most shameful ridicule
in the very theaters of the unbelievers.

I think the locals gave Constantine's Bible the thumbs down.
And they were appropriately chastised.

DCHindley

Wasn't the council of 381 the one that also decided on the books of the Christian canon? The first one in 325 was held to find a compromise creed between competing factions (Arians and proto-Orthodox). If so (and since this is off the top of my head I could be wrong), I would not be surprised at all that the 2nd one would include phrases from the newly canonized scriptures as it tweaked the confessional formula.

FWIW, the emperor moderated the debate. Although both he and his advisor Eusebius had Arian leanings, it was Constantine (probably through the advice of Eusebius and maybe others) who suggested the compromise wording which, slightly modified to be acceptable to both most Arians and proto-orthodox, became the Orthodox confession.

DCH