PhilosopherJay

Hi Roger,

I am sorry I did not convince you. It convinces me and that is enough for the moment.

I think we can go further.

Here again is my reconstruction of Tertullian's original text:

Quote:

Come now, you who would indulge a better curiosity, if you would apply it to the business of your salvation, run over the apostolic churches, in which the very thrones of the apostles are still pre-eminent in their places, in which their own authentic writings are read, uttering the voice and representing the face of each of them severally. Achaia is very near you, (in which) you find Corinth. Since you are not far from Macedonia, you have Philippi; (and there too) you have the Thessalonians. Since you are able to cross to Asia, you get Ephesus. where the Apostle John was first plunged, unhurt, into boiling oil, and thence remitted to his island-exile!See what she has learned, what taught, what fellowship has had with even (our) churches in Africa! Since, moreover, you are close upon Palestine, you have Jerusalem, from which there comes even into our own hands the very authority (of apostles themselves). How happy is its church, on which apostles poured forth all their doctrine along with their blood! where Peter endures a passion like his Lord's! where Paul wins his crown in a death like John's

Note the connection that Tertullian makes between Ephesus and North Africa/Carthage where he is from: "See what she has learned, what taught, what fellowship has had with even (our) churches in Africa." Tertullian was a Montanist all his life (not just in the last years as some have sort to prove), so if he is connecting his own Montanus churches to Ephesus, we may expect that there is a connection between Montanus and Ephesus.

This appears to be the case. There is a lot of information gathered on Montanus at http://abacus.bates.edu/Faculty/Phil...montanism.html

Especially interesting is the material from Apollonius, the Bishop of Ephesus taken from the fifth book of Eusebeus' Church History. Eusebius claims that Apollonius wrote against Montanus. However, note that most of his quotation from Apollonius is dedicated to a denunciation of someone named Alexander and that this denunciation seems to be a direct quote from Mantanus' prophetess Priscilla. This leads us to believe that far from denouncing Montanus, Apollonius was a follower and supporter of Montanus. Apollonius most likely wrote in Support of Montanus and Eusebius, through clever, selective editing, has completely reversed this fact.

It seems that Montanism spread directly from Apollonius in Ephesus to Tertullian in Carthage, North Africa. perhaps from there it reached Rome.

Note this from Wikipedia:

We may suggest that a layer/edition of the Gospel of John was written by Montanus. It entered the corpus of the Catholic Church at Rome through him. If we see the other gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) as being connected to Marcion's gospel, we may see that the four gospels of the New Testament have in them traces of the war between the heretics Montanus and Marcion. The synthetic results of this war appear to be the creation of Catholic Apostolic orthodoxy in the Third and/or Fourth centuries. We may say that Catholicism is a synthesis of Montanus and Marcion ideas and that Christian Orthodoxy comes from the Post-Heretical age of Early Christianity.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Jeffrey Gibson

And your eveidence for this is what?

Jeffrey

Roger Pearse

I'm afraid that I require *evidence* of interpolation. Otherwise any ancient text can be made to say anything, by selective omission in this way.

Well, please don't go around asserting it as fact.

Convenience should usually be a contra-indicator when discussing such things.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

PhilosopherJay

Hi Roger,

The direct evidence is the twisting of facts that would logically have been known to the writer, without any indication that the writer is presenting new facts.

Let us say that we see a newspaper story that says, "President Bush returned to the White House today in Baghdad." We know that the White House in not in Bagdad, but in Washington D.C.. The written statement would not convince us that the White House is in Baghdad. Instead, we would assume that the original passage said, or was meant to say, "President Bush returned from Baghdad to the White House in Washington D.C. today."

By doing this, I am simply giving my general knowledge of the world precedence over what is directly stated on the paper. It is a normal process by which all people operate everyday.

If we did not operate this way, the world would be a rather absurd place. For example, when a character on my television says, "Stop, put up your hands or I'll shoot," I do not stop and put up my hands. I understand that the command has to be put in the context of everything I know about television and the human world.

In the same way, I know that I cannot take what is written in an ancient text as truth or at face-value. I have to subject it to the test of my full spectrum of knowledge.

Now, I do agree with your statement that "any ancient text can be made to say anything, by selective omission." Besides selective omission, isolated changes of significant words can also be made to text to get it to say anything. That is precisely what I contend is the case here with the statements, wherein texts of Tertullian suddenly place Paul and Peter in Rome, in stark contrast to everything he and all people of his time period and before have written and appear to have believed.

As far as my methodogy being convenient, I wish it was. Using it, I have often discovered propositions that have forced me to drastically revise my whole understanding of great swatches of history and redo/undo rather involved textual interpretations. The process is quite tiring and forces me to check and recheck many other facts for confirmation. This creates greater troubles as I often discover new and more startling propositions that surpass the original discoveries. I try to present only some of the most edifying results of the research, certain that other will duplicate and develop the results by their own future researches.

Incidentally, many many hours (days, weeks and months really) of this research was carried out on your own wonderful Tertullian website. I therefore owe you a debt that I can hardly hope to repay.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Johnny Skeptic

I require evidence that the New Testament does not contain lots of interpolations. Otherwise, all ancient texts would be innocent until proven guilty, and there is no way that you are going to agree with that.

If a God exists, the most important issue of all is his motives. If a God exists, and wanted to communicate with humans, how would he probably try to accomplish that goal? I assume that he would communicate the same messages telephathically or verbally to everyone in the world, thereby tending to discourage dissent instead of encouraging dissent.

You will no doubt say that you do not want to discuss God's motives, but please be advised that neither you nor any other Christian became a Christian without first considering God's motives. You have said that you are more interested in patristic studies than you are interested in Biblical criticism and history, but your interest in patristic studies is surely primarily if not solely based upon the motives of the early church fathers, meaning that your position is surely that if Jesus did not rise from the dead, the early church fathers would not have had any reasonable motives for writing what they wrote. In addition to your interest in the motives of the early church fathers, you also have to be interested in the motives of God since you believe that one of God's motives for sending Jesus to the world was to save people from their sins, and that it was that motive that accounted for the motives of the early church fathers to write what they wrote.

You will not be able to get away with claiming that your interest in patristic studies and other ancient literature is entirely academic, and that the motives of God and the early church fathers do not have anything to do with why you make posts at this forum.

Since you are naive, you are not aware that the Bible rests lock, stock, and barrel upon the character and motives of God, not upon anything that the early church fathers wrote.

Jeffrey Gibson

How many is "lots"? And how do you know that it's whatever number you say "lots" is?

And why do you think, as you apparently do, that the admission that a writing is interpolated is evidence that it was interpolated at any given place?

How on earth would you know (assuming god exists) what God's motives were, let alone that "the Bible" rests on them?

Are you actually saying that there would not be a NT text unless there was a god?

Seems to me that if anyone is naive here, it's you.

Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

How wonderful, even assuming that your knowledge of the present world is great and you are not engaged in one huge use of fallacy of the appeal to personal incredulity.

But knowledge of the present world and of how people in the present age do things is irrelevant when it comes to determining what is and what isn't an interpolation in an ancient text.

It's knowledge of the way ancient people thought, as well as an impeccable familiarity with the canons of ancient rhetoric and composition and the rules of grammar and syntax of the languages in which ancient writers wrote, that is.

And you have shown over and over again that you have little to no knowledge of these things.

So why anyone should trust what you say about the ancient world, let alone on the matter of what was good and bad compositional style for ancient writers, and what for them was and was not a contradiction, what is and is not an interpolation, etc., etc., is beyond me.

Jeffrey

mountainman

Hi Philosopher Jay,

Some interesting analysis. If we were in a Classicists Discussion group then perhaps Jeffrey has a point, since there are a whole host of different authors of antiquity each speaking across the centuries from various locations. But we are here in BC&H, and in one sense, with respect to the historiography of christianity, there is only one ancient source for the NT literature: Eusebius.

Eusebius is a fourth century singular. There were not two preservers of the prenice christian history, there was only the one editor-in-chief. Eusebius does not present as an author with integrity. Just how much of Tertullian is simply Eusebian embellishment cannot be ascertained, but what may be ascertained is that there must have been a purpose for the interpolation and/or forgery of Tertullian.

Are missing pieces of the jig saw puzzle of the historical jesus revealed in the data found in Tertullian? Of course. Eusebius has all this material on his desk in the very political fourth century. The question is what is he doing with all this material? What information is being retrojected? And why?

The objective question is: "Why should anyone trust Eusebius"?


Best wishes,


Pete Brown

PhilosopherJay

Hi Huon,

Thanks for this. It is quite interesting.

It does seem that Betty's translation negates the effect of Tertullian prescribing a specific itinerary for specifically situated heretics moving from Corinth, Philippi, Thessalonki, Ephesus and Jerusalem. He makes it seem that Tertullian is advising heretics to actually check out the original epistles of Paul. Assuming the accuracy of Betty's translation, it would be odd that Tertullian believes the Church in Rome actually had a copy of Paul's original letter. However, we should always keep in mind that Tertullian is a rhetorician and truth and facts matter much less to him than what supports his argument.

Still, if we look later on in the passage, Betty's translation provides us with even more solid proof that Rome has been substituted for Jerusalem:

Tertullian did not hold that "all Heresies have originally gone out" from the Church in Rome. Note that the passage is coming after 32, which Betty translates this way:

Note that Tertullian does not hold that all Churches come from Rome or all heresies come from Rome. Rather, churches come from the Apostles and thus they come from Jerusalem. He makes the specific point that Heretics do not come from the Apostolic Churches. How can Tertullian suddenly contradict himself and say that the heretics come from the Church of Rome only a few passages later? The passage (36) only makes sense in Betty's translation if we assume that Tertullian was originally talking about the Jerusalem Church and the Apostles and heretics in Jerusalem, and not the church in Rome

Thus, Betty is at least as clear as Holmes, albeit in a different part of her translation, that the text has been interpolated and the word "Rome" has been substituted for "Jerusalem".

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Roger Pearse

But I do agree with it, as far as transmission goes. It's not ideal, but the alternative is raging subjectivity.

All the best,

Roger Pearse