mountainman

Does anyone think there was much censorship going down during the period of the implementation of christianity as the Roman state religion during the fourth century?

WIKI on censorship

Best wishes,


Pete

mountainman

Now lets re-read the intended idea here. People are going to die by some horrible gruesome death in 30 days as determined by a ticket tied around their hand. Do you think the ticket with the number on it was tied by chains of steel so that the intended victims could not remove their death warrant? Do you think that people incarcerated in such a manner would not simply at some stage resort to removing their ticket representing the days they had to wait for their appointed death? Do you think that people really were drug induced enough not to figure out that they could actually remove the ticket tied to their hand by severing the tie? This is a parody on The True Believers of Andrew and Philip. Is it not a reasonable position to consider that these monstrous tales were invented by some clever and wicked gnostic pagan academic priest, in a bitter and twisted polemical insult to the canon, and to the credibility of the new testament history, at some epoch back then?



Best wishes,


Pete Brown

andrewcriddle

IF one wished to take this weird stuff seriously, then one could suggest that people in the prison without a ticket were killed immediately, ie the ticket protected you from being eaten but only till its expiry date.

Andrew Criddle

mountainman

Dear Andrew,

We are discussing the new testament corpus. I take this seriously. You have done enough background reading to understand that these non canonical texts are in no manner harmonised to the canon in any explicatory fashion. I am suggesting such a possible explanation - and a very simple and natural explanation. Whoever the author was he clearly states that the christian apostle Matt does nothing to help the poor and needy and afflicted in prison, he does not talk to them, he does not comfort them, he does not cast his eyes on the poor people who are being killed daily around him. What does Matt do?


The entire NT Apochryphal corpus rings of totally weird and imaginitive polemical romance fiction - and a parody - against the (imperial-state-level) christian ministry at the time if its authorship. The all-important Q: When was it authored?

Best wishes,


Pete

mountainman

Did Matthias in fact have any understanding (to take away)?

Best wishes,


Pete

mountainman

Dear Andrew,

In our capacity as ancient historians are we not bound to take this weird stuff seriously --- since it remains in its own right as evidence of a prior epoch. Do we have a choice in this? I dont think we do. WE have ignored it because it is truly weird. But the fact remains we need to try and explain it all in some form of cohesive and integrated theory. Who authored the apochryphal texts is as equally as important as the question who authored the gospels and the acts and paul's letters.

Are they not the opposite sides of the same coin? Or am I mistaken?

Best wishes,


Pete

Toto

I think you are mistaken.

It may not, in fact, be important who wrote the gospels, but we know that they were used by communities and reflected their understanding of their religion.

The apocrypha appear to be imaginative products of individuals, not necessarily liturgical documents. We have no indication that they embody any school of thought or any community, with perhaps a few exceptions.

andrewcriddle

It might have been better if instead of saying take this weird stuff seriously I had said treat this weird stuff as realistic narrative.

Andrew Criddle

mountainman

Yes, that does make the task more specific, however it involves the assumption that the over-all and generalised genre of the non canonical new testament literature is narrative. And I would argue then that it is possible to establish that the genre of the non canonical new testament literature is not narrative, but in fact a hostile and satirical, sometimes parodic, polemic. Perhaps I might be so bold as to describe the genre of the apochrypha as seditious polemical and satirical stories (against the canon).

Either way, this corpus of new testament literature is the literal flip-side to the award winning 45 of the canon, and we must assume that all this literature was written by real people in the world at one point in time. More specifically we have narrowed the epoch down to perhaps the second and third and fourth centuries of the common era in the Roman empire. We require a cohesive explanation for the entire corpus of NT lit. They represent ancient historical documents generated by real people, irrespective of the narrative and/or polemical content and historicity of the characters depicted in the canon and in the apochrypha.

Best wishes,


Pete

mountainman

Well I will defend what you think is a mistake. I believe it is not only important, but in fact I believe it is critical, the knowledge of the authors of the literature in our possession. This criticality is involved not in the internal textual criticism of the texts, but in the external relationships between the authors of the texts and the ancient history of the Roman empire.

Furthermore, we have no real evidence that the gospels were in fact used in any community prior to the fourth century, with the exception of the literature tendered by Eusebius which makes this claim, and with the exception of the conjectures associated with the analysis of handwriting on papyrii fragments by paleographaphic "experts" which are in the large derived from the site of the city of Oxyrhynchus, and which city ancient historians know to have boomed and be over-flooded with a population of people in the mid fourth century (ie: the rubbish dumps bloomed in the mid-fourth century).



The same may be said of the canonical documents.

Again, on the contrary, the entire might and authority and integrity of the whole of christendom branded these texts to be heretical. That they were written by the disciples of the devil, that they were written by people whom the christians of the time referred to as aliens.

The apochrypha are characterised by their reception in history. You are I am sure very much aware of the contents of Decretum Gelasianum dated c.c.491 CE


The Decretum Gelasianum is a listing of the canonical texts of the new testament and a list of the apocrypha, which is substantial in it length, and attracts the wrath of the late fifth century Papal Council. It is usually acknowledged that some of these works may have been listed a century earlier, by Pope Dasius. This is a far more expansive list than that recorded by Eusebius.

It is important to understand the comments made by Eusebius with respect to this class of texts now referred to as the non canonical new testament literature.


The Decretum Gelasianum makes explicit reference, for example, to .... all the books which Leucius the disciple of the devil made (This refers to a series of about 5 of the non canonical texts). This of course also represents a Hit-List of officially heretical books, and as such is recognised as a forerunner of the Vatican's Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Vatican Banned and Prohibited Books) which operated continuously from the sixteenth (following the invention of the printing press) to the twentieth centuries. In the mid twentieth century, the index of banned books had included over four thousand six hundred books, one of which was Edward Gibbon's monumental work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The precedent for the preparation of a Hit-List for Censorship (destruction by fire, etc) of heretical books (and authors) commenced with Constantine in the year 325 CE. The Decretum Gelasianum thus represents a pre-Gutenburg proto-type of the Librorum Prohibitorum, and additionally, an extension of the political hit-lists of Constantine.


Additionally we have the only two C14 citations available for the NT corpus of literature specifically associated with two sets of non-canonical texts. These C14 citations represent the only fixity in a floating morass of conjecture based on the literature of Eusebius. Unfortunately, those who subscribe to the chronology of Eusebius cannot point to any extant archaeological citation from the prenicene epoch to support their claims.

Here's a question for you in an attempt to bring the conditions of the fourth century as an analogy to the twenty-first century. Suppose George Bush decides the world is better off if everyone converts to Scientology, and manages by some means to convince all the US heads of state, etc. Let's just suppose that he obtains (by some means) the power to implement this idea by means of the control of the administration by the army.

Given this situation, where the people cannot fight back against the military, do you think there would be any literature attacking the position of the authority by means of stinging satire and parody, written by totally unsatisfied civilians who did not share Bush's (hypothetical) vision of the efficacy of Scientology. And then we see the administration using censorship in an attempt to silence the source of the humorous polemic against them, because authoritarians lack a sense of humor about their authority. See the WIKI entry on Censorship Implementation.

To conclude, the historical reception of the apochrypha are characterised by their political censorship by the christians, commencing formally with the exchanges between Constantine and Arius, further details documented by Eusebius during the life of Constantine (or shortly thereafter), and a subsequent two hundred year period in which christian emperors persecuted the non-christians of the empire. This militaristic persecution is definintely to be associated (retrospectively) with censorship of the apochryphal new testament texts. The academic commentary upon the survival of the Nag Hammadi codices supports this position.



Best wishes,


Pete