Chili

I may be a bit naive but did people actually bring their fattest animals to church on Saturday and burn them in those temples? Kind of like and overcooked barbeque and everybody went home hungry?

Duvduv

What is the source for Pliny's letter??

rlogan

A good question to ask of all our source material, and I do not recall at this time, other than to say some years ago this correspondence was the "Eureka!" moment for me when I had satisfied myself of its authenticity at the time. It doesn't seem to be in question, and there are a number of compelling reasons to accept it. I encourage you to look into it and form your own opinion, because I think it the most decisive of all evidence on the history of early Christianity.

Trajan shows no knowledge of Christians in his response. Furthermore, Josephus travelled between Rome and Jerusalem so it is a corroboration that it existed in neither place at the time.

Josephus writes these two great works with dozens of persons named Jesus, and in greater detail than the forged Testimonium Flavianum. One is a guerilla fighter who leads a division of fishermen and other heavy-trades types against the Romans and is tricked into a parlay eventually & captured. Another is the son of a high priest. My favorite is the Jesus is taken by Pontius Pilate, interrogated and tortured, and let go because he is merely a harmless kook, not subversive of the Empire. This Jesus is running around yelling "woe is Israel" incessantly. He is killed by a stone thrown from a Roman Seige engine, so I mean really squished like an ant. He dies yelling those words "woe unto Israel", so there is huge irony in this guy.

Since Josephus details all these guys at greater lengths than that TF paragraph, so idiotic with the "ten thousand" miracles claim regarding Jesus Christ, we can be assured there is no Jesus cult arising in Jerusalem's orbit prior to the 90's CE. The TF is inserted by someone to fabricate a history. So you look for motive, means, and opportunity - and the result is Eusebius via the power of Emperor Constantine.

Take that as a premise now, and ask how Christianity arose. From front to back - every book - the Bible is a pious fraud. Look to the person who first "found" the documents and you have your forger. The first Christian Bible is found in the hands of Marcion. It is a collection of letters of the legendary Paul.

How can a whole collection of letters be found by someone who does not have one addressed to himself, and does not live in any of the places they are supposedly sent? Why are these letters obvious liturgical devices, not letters? Duh. Because Marion, or his predecessor, simply wrote them. Marcion also wrote a point-by-point contradiction to Hebrew theology. His "Paul" discovers his theology by revelation - not by learning from someone else. So Paul's letters are ground zero for that branch of Christianity, and Marcion is our source. They are appropriated by the Rome branch in the end, which is how the Bible developed historically, as you can see from Genesis onward with its "doublets" plainly contradicting one another because they represent traditions of competing sects that were merged.

With this insight, now read the beginning of Mark: "The beginning of the Gospel..." Mark is telling you in the first sentence that he is introducing something for the first time in writing. The ending of Mark explains why nobody has ever heard the story before. It ends with the women leaving the burial cave and they "tell no-one because they were afraid". So this is how Mark explains away why there is no pre-history of a historical Jesus: It happened, but nobody noticed.

Markan Theology differs from Pauline Theology, but they have a common core, and that is a Christ who absolves us from our obligation to pay God (The Temple) our first fruits of the field, firstborn livestock, change our money into Temple coin and get screwed on the exchange rate, etc. These are desperately poor people by our standards and every sheaf of wheat they must give to the Temple is a serious burden on them.

So their insight is to eat that sheaf of wheat themselves. Why give it to the Temple? Why bother even walking a couple of miles to it when they can stay right at home, or step into their immediate neighbor's house to chow down?

You can understand the Eucharist is whenever you sit down with your family to a big meal and a couple beers. Ask any sentient human whether they would rather do that, or pay to watch rich people they despise eat and drink it themselves right in front of them while they go hungry.

The official Temples, both Roman Gods and Hebrew, base themselves on punitive principles of "original sin" and constant obligation for expiation of sin through sacrifice and attendance at official religious functions. You literally bow down before these authorities. You are bad, pay up and kiss our butts. Fun, right?

There is a century of war between the Jews and the Romans, and it is the people who suffer twice because you pay for the war, which destroys the city, and you have to rebuild that too in addition to paying taxes for the soldiers who are mooning the attendees at Temple.

This is a great explanation for the meteoric rise of Christianity, and Pliny's letter is absolutely critical to understanding this. He says Christianity spread like wildfire and cut across all social classes. What are they doing? Eating their own food instead of giving it to richer people. Staying at home or at most stepping over to a neighbor's place.

Why are they doing this? They believe in a Christ who absolves them from all that obligation to authority: Hypocritical, arrogant, rich, lazy authority. They are going to operate in a world of just dealings between themselves and ignore The Man to the best of their ability.

This comes before any literature arises that unites secret cells of Christians into networks spanning across regions. That's why Pliny is the first one to discover them and why they are unknown to Emperor Trajan. If there were written scriptures, Pliny would have found them.

So therefore what you have is an invincible core belief in this handy Christ who intervenes on your behalf, to free you from the bad guys, and different literature arises from regional hubs like Rome and Sinope once a critical mass of the population has been reached: too many people for the Roman State to suppress any longer.

If you pursue the Argument from Best Explanation for the history of Christianity, then Pliny's letter to Emperor Trajan is the singlemost important document we have. This document on the face of it is clearly genuine for want of all the telltale signs of forgery. It is not audacious. It is not advanced to us by the person forging it. The case it makes answers a lot of decisive questions in a powerful way: there is no contemporaneous evidence for a Jesus Christ in the reign of Pilate because it didn't happen. The epistles of Paul are pious forgeries from the Marcionites who followed a celestial Christ and the Gospels arise elsewhere, maybe not Rome itself but eventually centered there.

There's no answer to be found in dating all this alleged literature circulating pre-90's CE and Josephus' ignorance of it. Pliny's ignorance of it. Trajan's ignorance of it by 112 CE. But by the time we get to Marcion traveling to Rome to make a bribe of 200,000 sesterces to the Rome Church in 142-143 CE you have 30 more years, a full generation, of this unstoppable meteor in operation. Two generations since the first flame was lit. In one generation Pliny discovers it, and the first suppression effort is launched, and Christianity is beaten back for a time. In one more generation though, it cannot be stopped.

That meant enough money to produce forged manuscripts for liturgy in assemblies of much larger people. The Emperors cannot kill all the taxpayers. So the Emperors tolerate Christianity for its sheer size. Marcion is a shipping magnate and therefore one of the richest men in the empire. Of course he can afford scribes and build churches.

On the Rome side of things the initial Gospel of Mark with it's anonymous arisen Jesus is embellished to make it consistent with parishes who wrote up Luke and ultimately that audacious Matthew where Jesus is the most famous person who ever lived, and great multitudes see him in the arisen state.

Marcion is rejected by Rome. The Pauline and Gospel camps cannot be merged. The Book of Acts must be dated post-143 by a long margin. Paul never meets any disciples until Acts is written. Marcionites continue to operate independently of Rome for many years, and the Book of Acts represents the final triumph of Rome over Marcionites.

Pliny-Trajan in 112 CE allows us to reject the whole paradigm of first century dating to texts. That sure explains a lot!

Duvduv

Sorry, maybe I missed it but where was Pliny's letter found?

mountainman

The manuscript of Pliny's letter was serendipitously "found" in the 15th century. However this manuscript has subsequently been "lost".

Pliny_the_Younger#Manuscripts

Duvduv

Who says the letter (or any others of his letters) are even authentic? For that matter how did Ovid's or any other letters get preserved? In the archives of the Vatican? I am not familiar with the histories of such documents, but in terms of the "correspondence" between Pliny and Trajan around which so much debate is turning about Chrestians or Christians, what is the basis of determining its authenticity? Where did he find it, and is it too convenient that a church priest should happen to find a letter that "establishes" the existence of Christians in the time of Trajan?!

I am surprised that such a "discovery" is not rejected out of hand by modern scholars by virtue of its discoverer.
Scholars are still rejecting the authenticity of the Zohar discovered by Rabbi Moshe de Leon in the 14th century, arguing that he wrote it!

Toto

Pliny's reference to Christians was part of a longer set of correspondence link.

Few have challenged the authenticity of this letter because, IMHO, even if completely true, it does nothing to settle any burning question. It does not prove the existence of Jesus, and it does not paint an especially flattering picture of Christians. Which tends to indicate that it is authentic.

However, this is from the archived class notes of Darrel Doughty

mountainman

If Acts is dated after Pliny, then it would perhaps provide evidence in support of the existence of christians earlier than the claim in Acts, that the term "christians" was first used in Antioch.



But does it evidence the existence of Christians?


This tendency and indication - that it provides an authentic reference to the existence of "Christians" - arises only by invoking the criterion of embarrassment, the logic of which has been disputed.



Thanks for these references and notes. Interesting discussions.

rlogan

Giovanni Giocondo, for one. Thanks Toto for link and info. Always on top of it.


Duvduv seem to be somewhat new here and a lot of these topics have been hashed out before, including this and Tacitus & whatnot. There is a search function and I apologize I can't act as your secretary. This is a Eusebius thread and there are long threads on this in the archives.

Your suspicion is understandable, but misguided in this sense: The Pliny-Trajan correspondence is fatal to the myth that Gospels and epistles were in circulation during the first century, especially when combined with Josephus' works and the complete lack of any mention by numerous other historians. The church was desperate to inject a false history in the early first century, and look at how obvious that TF forgery is. Sheesh. This one - wow talk about radically different in terms of being completely reasonable and fitting in with a lot of other important clues.

Toto - nice to see you. I do respectfully ask what you mean by the Pliny-Trajan correspondence not being flattering. I think it is an outright rejection of the historical Jesus Big-Bang theory. But you may mean in a different sense.

I do think it answers some critical questions, namely the nonexistence of first century texts nor significant practice of Christianity. Naturally, people keen on preserving the myth of first century Christianity and texts pooh-pooh this correspondence. I don't think we should fall under their spell. This is a high Roman Official doing the first investigation into the secret society of Christians in 112 CE and reporting his findings to his Emperor.

There is no historical Jesus. You just can't explain that away. If there had been a historical Jesus executed by pilate, these Christians would have told Pliny. We're supposed to buy into Christians being willing to die for their faith in this Historical Jesus, but oh the two deaconnesses he tortures along with all the laypeople - nobody mentions it?

aa5874

Based on Justin Martyr, the claim that there were Christians may have ZERO to do with Jesus.

Theophilus of ANTIOCH claimed he was a Christian yet wrote NOT one thing about Jesus in THREE BOOKS to "To Autolycus".

Athenagoras of Athens claimed he was a Christian and did NOT mention one thing about Jesus in his "Plea for the Christians".

Justin Martyr STATED that even Magicians were called Christians since the time of Cladius, since 41-54 CE.

The followers of Simon Magus and Menander were called Christians and even the Basilidians, the Valentinians, the Marcians and the Saturnilians.

The Pliny letters do suggest that a Jesus cult was UNKNOWN by Pliny was UNKNOWN in Bythnia, and UNKNOWN by the Christians up to 110 CE.

The Pliny letters appear to confirm that Pliny himself was NOT aware in his ENTIRE LIFETIME of the BELIEFS of Christians.

The Pliny letters tend to show that the Pauline, and Iganatius letters are historically and chronologically bogus.

And it is even more remarkable that Pliny KNEW Tacitus and Suetonius but yet KNEW ZERO about a Jesus called Christ.

From the Pliny letter we can now say that the JESUS STORY was most likely INVENTED or UNKNOWN in the START of 2nd century WITHOUT any reasonable doubt.