Roger Pearse

Rather a lot of gnostics were docetists, so I am not sure what is being said here.

I'm wary of this word "tradition". I fear it contains nonsense. You see, I don't know what people understand by the word "tradition" -- chinese whispers? -- but surely we have no such vague concept before us? For what we have, surely, is a collection of texts. We need only ask what they say.

Irenaeus, in the passage you cite, says that Polycarp knew apostles, and he then goes on to recount what Polycarp says about John. Eusebius of course has other sources as well. Tertullian tells us that John appointed Polycarp as bishop (De praescriptione haereticorum 32:2) Irenaeus in the letter to Florinus, quoted by Eusebius, says:

I don't quite see the force of the argument that Irenaeus was not allowed to say "Polycarp was instructed by apostles" but had to say "Polycarp was instructed by apostles and specially John", or else he wasn't instructed by John. He wasn't concerned to answer such an objection.

No doubt other sources exist, but I'm on the run -- sorry.

Not sure that I understand your point, but glad that you agree with me.

Indeed so.

Such vague statements seem unfortunate to me, since few of the teachings of Valentinus can be so understood. Presumably he is talking about Marcion, who pretended to be following Paul.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

spin

rightwing, you are breaking the rules of this forum. Yours is a simple statement of faith which has no place where evidence is the rule.

What's worse is that this sort of outburst doesn't allow your other efforts to be taken seriously, which is surely not your intent.

If you want to proselytize, find a street corner. If you want to discuss the bible using the rules of this forum, go find yourself some evidence that must be considered by your interlocutors. If you want to participate in general religious discussion we have a forum for that as well.

This forum is about biblical history and criticism and the food of the forum is evidence and nothing but.


spin

spin

A small selection:

1. the whole world was flooded about 5000 years ago.
2. the Mesopotamians were of African descent.
3. the Jews and other Canaanite peoples are unrelated.
4. the same story of the patriarch passing his wife off as his sister is used three times, twice with the same dupe.
5. the Jews conquered Canaan.
6. Davidic Israel stretched from Egypt to the Euphrates.
7. the Jews were always monotheistic.

That's without touching Daniel or the new testament.

The scientific notions of repeatability and falsification don't seem to come into your considerations, ie you don't know enough about the issues to be taken seriously.

This is you thinking you can assume things, such as the entity you imagine as the devil, and expect that people will take your thoughts based on those assumptions as meaningful. You are wrong. You do not consider your audience, so you are not really trying to communicate.


spin

spamandham

How many of this vast majority have published papers critically questioning the existence of Jesus?

Scholarly opinion only has meaning when the subject of opinion has been subjected to sufficient scholarly analysis.

arnoldo

Rightwing, do you have any comment on a possible answer to a question you asked earlier?

Clivedurdle

Hebrews backs Arnaldo here where Jesus is explicitly called our Great High Priest.

Snag is that Hebrews (with Revelation) to me are conclusive of the mythological nature of Jesus

(I'm using the criminal law use of conclusive - beyond reasonable doubt).

aa5874

And, I am not concerned with what people believe when they have failed to produce evidence for their beliefs.

I am looking for evidence, not baseless belief.

Now, the NT and church writers have presented Jesus as a mythical God/man. These are the facts.

Jesus is probably the best documented myth.

spamandham

It's a bit like watching a train wreck. You know can't really do anything about it, but you feel compelled to try anyway.

Doug Shaver

People who believe there are no errors in the Bible.

I say they are almost the only ones who think we have contemporary eyewitness documentation for Jesus because, with exceptions too rare to make a difference, they are the only ones who think the gospels were written either by eyewitnesses or in reliance on eyewitness testimony.

How is that relevant to an analysis of the documentation regarding Jesus?

Same question.

That is what Christians have believed about Paul for a very long time. Christian belief does not make a fact.

Why should they? Your factual statements are not relevant to the issue raised by the OP. Your relevant statements have not been proven factual.

Solo

What is being said here is that the gospel of Peter is not considered gnostic.

No Roger, that would not be enough. We need to understand where the texts originate , how they relate to each other, and what was going on in the world and the church at the time the documents were supposedly written, and at the time they were presented.

The passage you refer to says: "There are also those who heard from him [Polycarp] that John, the disciple of the Lord, going to bathe at Ephesus, and perceiving Cerinthus within, rushed out of the bath-house without bathing, exclaiming, “Let us fly, lest even the bath-house fall down, because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within.” (Adv Haer, iii, 3).

Sure does not sound to me like evidence that Polycarp was John's disciple. Why would not Irenaues, who was tutored by Polycarp in his youth, rely in the only mention of John-Polycarp relationship on a saying by others ? You do accept, don't you, that John - who among other things would have been the witness of Jesus' transfiguration - would have had access to ample oral transmission ? How probable is it then that the only mention of John in Polycarp's writing is a single quote of 1 John, and that Irenaeus own hand fails to corroborate the relationship ?

My point was that the letter to Florinus comes from Eusebius and that Irenaeus's own writing fails to support it.

It is a forceful argument, Roger, make no mistake about it.

What you would have us believe is that Polycarp was under John's tutelage, and received the teachings of the Lord from an eye-witness to the ministry and a close confidant of Jesus and failed to mention it when dealing with the docetist menace. Chapter vii of his letter to the Phillipians quotes 1 John 3:4 (without naming him as author) in attacking the docetist position: "For whosoever does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, is antichrist.” That`s odd, isn't it ? Here is Polycarp who personally knew John, and would have presumably heard not just a repeat of John's written litanies but personal accounts of the old days with Jesus on the road, and yet somehow, somewhere he fails to deliver a single mention of them. It would have sufficed to say simply: 'do not listen to the docetists. They are talking nonsense ! I knew a man who was Jesus' companion and walked with him into Jerusalem.'
Instead, we have nothing from Polycarp himself, and from Polycarp's pupil we get a stange tale of John's running away from a bathhouse, instead of confronting the liar face to face !

The other thing of course is the letter of Florinus which Eusebius uses to confirm an unbroken link back to the living Jesus. The part which a thoughtful student finds perplexing is the assertion of Polycarp's accounts which he gave of his intercourse with John and with the others who had seen the Lord. Again, if Polycarp related 'all things in harmony with Scripture' to Irenaeus [as per Eusebius H.E., v., 20], then the formula 'seen the Lord' rings hollow and false. Polycarp quoted from Matthew, ergo must have known the apostolic authority came from Jesus' appointment during his lifetime. So the twelve's authority (and John's specifically) did not come from 'seeing the [risen] Lord' but from having been asked by Jesus to keep him company.

Jiri