mountainman

A recent article explores the components of the package
which was hypothetically described by Emperor Julian as
"the fabrication of the Galilaeans".

These components of both fiction and wickedness are
outlined by modules as follows:

Module (1): Texts bound within the "Constantine Bible"
Module (2): Text support, service manuals, tools, horror stories, etc.
Module (3): Texts described as {Non Canonical/Apocryphal/pseudepigraphal}
Module (4): Prenicene historiological citations re: "tribe of christians".
Module (5): Text creation, preservation, perversion in antiquity.
Module (6): Burning and destruction of textual petitions at Nicaea.
Module (7): 4th century book-burning; destruction heretical texts, heretics.

The full article is available here

mountainman

Been there. Done that as a draft specification of the package.
The link to the article is above.
Care to provide some feedback?

jgibson000

Three questions that I hope you won't hold in hostage:

1. When Julian refers to "the Galileans", whom does he have in mind?

2. What is the actual word in Julian's text that is translated above as "fabrications"?

3. Was this word used in Julian's time exclusively to mean what you seem to think it means -- i.e., "fictions"?

JG

spin

You do not do what I asked. Here is what I said:

What exactly is the fabrication of the Galileans -- and I don't just mean what you want it to mean --, can you demonstrate what the fabrication of the Galileans is? If so, what is it and explain how you know.

Would you care to demonstrate what the fabrication is from the source material? The text as you know simply says:

It is, I think, expedient to set forth to all mankind the reasons by which I was convinced that the fabrication of the Galilaeans is a fiction of men composed by wickedness.

Let me help a little. Julian, assuming the existence of both Jesus and Paul, writes of the Jewish god:

But that from the beginning God cared only for the Jews and that He chose them out as his portion, has been clearly asserted not only by Moses and Jesus but by Paul as well; though in Paul's case this is strange. For according to circumstances he keeps changing his views about God, as the polypus changes its colours to match the rocks, and now he insists that the Jews alone are God's portion, and then again, when he is trying to persuade the Hellenes to take sides with him, he says : "Do not think that he is the God of Jews only, but also of Gentiles : yea of Gentiles also." Therefore it is fair to ask of Paul why God, if he was not the God of the Jews only but also of the Gentiles, sent the blessed gift of prophecy to the Jews in abundance and gave them Moses and the oil of anointing, and the prophets and the law and the incredible and monstrous elements in their myths?

Julian is critical of Paul's fickleness here. "[I]t is fair to ask of Paul why God... sent the blessed gift of prophecy to the Jews in abundance and gave them Moses and the oil of anointing, and the prophets and the law and the incredible and monstrous elements in their myths?" Here he wants to ask Paul about the Jews' myths. Asking Paul about myths is separating the figure of Paul from the myths, such that the fabrications are what for example Moses spreads, but then also what Jesus and Paul spread as well.

He assumes Jesus's existence here:

Yet Jesus, who won over the least worthy of you, has been known by name for but little more than three hundred years: and during his lifetime he accomplished nothing worth hearing of, unless anyone thinks that to heal crooked and blind men and to exorcise those who were possessed by evil demons in the villages of Bethsaida and Bethany can be classed as a mighty achievement.

This is nothing to do with fictitious information being toyed with fir argument's sake. It pinpoints Jesus to an era and assumes that there was such a figure. There is no undercutting of that existence. He repudiates Jesus for his low aims. He doesn't repudiate Jesus as myth, fiction or fabrication.

Julian doesn't support your assumptions about the text. He contradicts them. He assumes the existence of those you want to be included in the fabrication.

Your modules don't deal with anything tangible. You need to get to the issue not assume it.

It should seem obvious to anyone who reads the text that Julian understands both Jesus and Paul as real figures, the instigators of the christian fabrication.

So, please do your job: show exactly what the fabrication is that Julian is talking about, such that it is other than what I have indicated from the text.


spin

spin

Here's where Julian starts to analyze the fabrications of the Galileans:

But that not only the Galilaeans of our day but also those of the earliest time, those who were the first to receive the teaching from Paul, were men of this sort, is evident from the testimony of Paul himself in a letter addressed to them. For unless he actually knew that they had committed all these disgraceful acts, he was not, I think, so impudent as to write to those men themselves concerning their conduct, in language for which, even though in the same letter he included as many eulogies of them, he ought to have blushed, yes, even if those eulogies were deserved, while if they were false and fabricated, then he ought to have sunk into the ground to escape seeming to behave with wanton flattery and slavish adulation.

He goes on to look at the fabrication of the Galileans when they claim to be taking over the god of the Hebrews. He looks at the Galileans' fabrication about the virgin Mary based on a poor reading of Isaiah.

Continuing his analysis of the Galileans' fabrications, Julian writes:

But why do I discuss at length these teachings of theirs, when we may easily see whether they have any force? For they assert that God, after the earlier law, appointed the second. For, say they, the former arose with a view to a certain occasion and was circumscribed by definite periods of time, but this later law was revealed because the law of Moses was circumscribed by time and place. That they say this falsely I will clearly show by quoting from the books of Moses not merely ten but ten thousand passages as evidence, where he says that the law is for all time...

Never does he question the existence of Jesus or Paul or of early Galileans. He repudiates their doctrines as false, fictitious and as fabrications. This doctrine originated with Paul and that doctrine originated with John. Plainly they didn't originate, in Julian's mind from Eusebius or Constantine.

Julian accuses the Galileans of fabrications and he outlines these said fabrications. The claims of mountainman about Julian are just plain false.


spin

jgibson000

What do you want to wager that to get around this falsification of his claims, Pete/"mountainman" will say that Julian was taken in by Eusebius' cleverness and his forgeries? Or perhaps he'll go on to claim that Julian's work is also a Eusebian forgery?

Jeffrey

Amedeo

Julian is certainly an important theorist -- to be studied -- about Christianity being an invention (fabrication) of the Galileans, but whether this was due to the wickedness of the Galileans [ their being the early "Hebrews/Haburi" in the alleged sense of brigands/bandits] is another story.

Julian can be presumed to have been acquainted with the Gospels, but, in view of what he thinks about Saul/Paulus, he must have had no idea about the composition of the Gospels. He sees fickless or inconstancy in Paul: Was his God the God of Israel or the god of mankind? My answer to him would be: Both. Paul's God was the God of the covenant with Israel, but, IN THE COURSE OF TIME, according to Paul's actual thought, God chose to become the God of mankind. {{It was according to this divine despensations that various Christian theologians have thought of the three Ages of God: that of the creation [of the Father], that of the incarnation [of the Son], and that of the fulfilment after the apocalyptic end [of the Spirit].}}

It was indeed Paul that founded the catholic [universal] Church, in contradistiction to the ancient People [Israel], while he saw himself as "the Jew of Jews." {{ In some posts, I explained why Paul really became the apostle to the Gentiles, but this is a side story which does not negate the historical outcome, that the Gentile Christians were recruits into Israel, and that the new or Pauline Israel coincided with mankind.}}

My point is that Julian did not quite understand Paul and that, therefore, he never imagined that the Gospel-composing was not simply a collection of anecdotes about the life of Jesus: Paul's theology had influences on some written parts of the Gospels; and the Greek writers/redactors also made interpolations from the pagan Greek religions. In conclusion, the Gospels contain Galilean inventions [such as the personality of the Jesus-messiah I have described elsewhere] and Greek inventions in the years 0-200 A.D. or so. For instance, the John Gospels contain the Orthodox-Catholic theology of Jesus which is simply a Greek invention. But, around 325 A.D., there was no such a thing as critical history of Christianity, and Julian will write in ignorance of the contributions that early Greek theologians made to Scriptural Christianity -- the only "solid" Christianity one could only refer to. For, around 325, the actual Christians were as diverse as Arius and the Graeco-Roman Trinitarians who also maintained the double nature of Jesus [fully human and fully divine].

Julian's view of Constantine -- which I have not studied in full, seems quite correct. I know that by his edict of 313, he unleashed the Christian mobs on all that was cultural in the Roman world. His victory over the Roman Maxentius in 312 was the greatest disaster for culture and civic civilization in human history.
Theodosius was to make Christianity a state religion in the Roman empire -- a barbarism which still inspires the Christians in America and around the world, as it inspired Medieval Christianity. The Illyrian Constantine established the religion of Jesus the king (contrary to the earlier pietistic religion of world-renunciation), that was to reverberate into the Crudasers who for a while regained the kingdom of Jerusalem, and into the warrior-monks (The Templars) who were commissioned to find the lost Ark of the Covenant. The Medieval Papacy has two keys in its emblem: the key of spiritual power and the key of temporal power. (See medieval European history for the struggle between emeprors and popes over supreme temporal power.)

(When in the 13th century, Francis of Assisi preached Christianity, people spoke of "A NEW RELIGION;" it was no longer the Constantinian religion of "the cross and the sword." At least Italy was converted to the new religion and unleashed the renaissance of devotion to the world and to beauty./ In the early 14th century, the poet and Christian Dante sided with the Ghibellines or pro-emperor faction, and wrote a defense for the separation of "church" and "state." Manetti was first to write on the Dignity of Man, in contradistinction to the innate worthlessness of man upheld by Pope Boniface VIII, who harked back to the Psalmist who begged forgiveness of God for having been conceived in sin. The Renaissance gave up the religion of the Cross [suffering and abjectness to be carried on one's shoulders] and the Sword, once for all, at least in Italy.)

spin

While the latter possibility is cute but naturally irrelevant, the former I can't imagine our mountainman attempting, he's always had a soft spot for Julian. I think he'll go for denial: he'll say that I, spin, can't see what Julian is actually doing, or somesuch unsustainable position which he will defend with Larsguy47 style tenacity, down to letting it drop for a while and then later repeating the same stuff as though nothing had been said previously.


spin

jbarntt

From the URL referenced by the OP:

This is a remarkable claim, given that a handful of the Pauline epistles are considered genuine, the existence of a fragment of The Gospel Acccording to John dating to the first half of the second century, and Marcion's use of The GA to Luke, in the mid second century.

spin

Sorry, we've been all through this "remarkable claim" by mountainman who goes into denial about archaeological evidence as well as any evidence for literary forms of christianity prior to the time of Eusebius, saying that it is all the production of Eusebius and other writers hired for the purpose, just as the palaeographically dated biblical fragments from Oxyrhynchus were forgeries by Eusebius et al. who would have known the palaeography of earlier writing forms.

We have to hold him down long enough for him not to squirm away and throw up another smokescreen, such as the webpage purporting to resolve all the problems of this conspiracy theory.


spin