EarlDoherty

You are making a mountain out of a molehill. The very fact that Tertullian could use Felix rather than condemn him shows that these people were not perceptive. The very fact that they could accept, without revising wholesale, the epistles of Paul which said nothing about the Gospel Jesus and simply read the latter into him, shows that they were not "careful" in how they interpreted texts. Can you possibly look at the irrationality and naivete of early Christian writers and impute any such things to them?

The contradication, the "evident denial" is (supposedly) apparent to us because people like me are not afraid to point them out. The closest thing to a realization of the problem in traditional scholarship on these writings was J. Baylis (I think it was, I'm not going to trouble to track it down), who at one point voiced the opinion that Felix "almost seems to deny" the HJ in his effort to do such-and-such.

Those scholars didn't accept those passages as outright denials; you and others here don't either. Why is it such a surprise that later Christian commentators would do the same and simply read into them what they wanted to see there? We also have no way of knowing how much they might have scratched their heads, or lay awake at night, wondering how Felix could have expressed himself quite as he did, or why Theophilus gave a very misleading definition of "Christian", before getting up in the morning and deciding it would be nice to have a document like that, so well-written and philosophical, something that could rival the pagan philosophers. Gee, he must have been talking about our Jesus of Nazareth. Full speed ahead.

Earl Doherty

EarlDoherty

I can't believe this. Where is the icon for tearing one's hair out?

Do you really believe that this is a "saving qualification" on Theophilus' part? That he deliberately put in "from intercourse" in order to signal to the Christian reader that this rules out Jesus (or rather, rules him in)? That he would have relied on such readers to recognize such subtlety? Besides, these writings were not directed at Christians. They were not meant to assuage the sensibilities and quiet the antenna of heresiologists like Irenaeus. They were directed at pagans. Do you think pagans would have recognized such subtle qualifications? That such things would have rescued them from pagans who would have regarded such remarks by apologists as contradicting or denigrating their own religion?

Please, Kevin, give me a break. It is this kind of thing, this appeal to, if not invention of, obscure and minute hair-splitting considerations that no normal person would even think of (only desperate apologists who are searching for anything that could remotely be used as a counter), which renders debates like this fruitless, because it shows that people like me will never be allowed any headway, that our arguments will never be allowed to make any impact. I am on the verge of putting you in the same category as Don, a complete waste of time.

Especially as you are intimating that I am somehow suppressing these things--on this one occasion, even though I didn't do so on another! I suppose I should be flattered that you consider me perceptive enough to have recognized this as a dangerous threat to my argument and thus cut the telltale words, but really... For me, the idea of "begetting" was sufficient to rule out God's begetting of Jesus through the Holy Spirit and make this a contradiction.

And anyway, how do we know the Holy Spirit didn't have intercourse with Mary? How did he impregnate her? And how do we know Theophilus believed in a virgin birth? He certainly says nothing whatever about a human Jesus. For all you know, he may even have subscribed to Paul's Romans 1:3. Jesus was of the seed of David, I thought? How did David's seed get in there?

And furthermore, you may be right. I never thought of that. Irenaeus was so perceptive, his antennae were so fine-tuned, that given his own beliefs in what was non-heretical, he may have read this passage in Theophilus, and took Theophilus as being similarly orthodox and never recognized this as a denial of the human historical Jesus. He might well have thought, anyone who could be that subtle must have been equally subtle everywhere else and was really talking about our Gospel Jesus. Welcome to the fold, Theophilus.

(Lacking a suitable icon, I'd better point out that the foregoing paragraph was meant to be facetious.)

Earl Doherty

krosero

I think, Earl, that here you are just slipping into calling your own conclusions "facts" and using them, in a circular fashion to support your own conclusions. That's exactly what it is, when you claim that the orthodox were not perceptive (which is bordering on offensive rhetoric, the way you constantly barrage ancient and modern Christians as unperceptive), then use the "fact" of Tertullian's use of Felix (and the "fact" that it was an unperceptive use), and the "fact" that Paul was unperceptively misused, as evidence that the orthodox in general just misunderstood your group. I'm sorry, but this is nothing but a frustrated appeal for others to see the "facts" of your case and to use them as support for your individual claims. You want to support your claim that the orthodox didn't perceive the Logos-group clearly? Then do it with arguments, not by dragging in the controversial "facts" of what happened with Tertullian/Felix on the one hand and Paul on the other, to say that the case is cinched. The ENTIRE claim for misunderstood texts, from Paul straight through Felix, is under question, and it will not do to say that because misunderstanding occurred as a "fact" in one instance that the other instance is also demonstrated.

A board like this should have a field day with such "arguments." You are slipping simply into self-certainty and the rhetoric of conviction, from which you repeat over and over what you believe.

You like to compare modern Christians with ancient ones in a number of ways, and here you do it again, saying that modern Christians who merely, in your eyes, want to see an HJ, are the same as the ancient orthodox who simply wanted to see the HJ in these documents. Well let's grant you that they wanted to see that their movement was spreading: everyone WANTS to believe that they have friends. Seeing a document from a stranger, sure, you'd WANT to believe that it was from a friend. But the next thing is confirmation. I've spoken about that already: any approach made to these authors would have quickly confirmed that Jesus was not present in any way in their theologies, and would make them unorthodox; and would identify their Logos-philosophy as unorthodox, But these Logos-Christians seemed to share ideas and perhaps even texts (even if only as allegories) with the orthodox even then, so the orthodox would want to keep these people identified as unorthodox, would not want to forget it, anymore than they wanted to forget that Gnostics who seemed in every external way to hold the orthodox truths were actually unorthodox and to be censured as such.

What you don't get is that the orthodox would have been as suspicious of these documents as you are. You like to group yourself among those few who suspect these documents as unorthodox, but you fail to see that the orthodox of the time would have been deeply suspicious of any documents from others who called themselves "Christians."

Kevin Rosero

krosero

This is some of the most outrageous writing I've ever seen from you. Do I think that "from intercourse" qualifies as a saving qualification? Of course I do. As a Christian, no less attuned than ancient apologists to the difference between Christianity and paganism, a phrase differentiating God's Son from the "sons of god" who were begotten from intercourse is an obvious qualification. The phrase "from intercourse" stands out immediately to my eyes, quite to the contrary from your suggestion that I had to look for it in any way -- much less that I was striving to slit hairs in order to find it.

How did you put it? "invention of, obscure and minute hair-splitting considerations that no normal person would even think of (only desperate apologists who are searching for anything that could remotely be used as a counter)."

This rhetoric cannot be denounced enough, and I reject it categorically as appropriate to these discussions.

Earl, I asked you for qualification and said that it looked like some kind of conscious suppression of important data NOT because I think that you do that. (I asked you for your explanation, after all). Ever since encountering your arguments I have never thought that you operated that way. I actually have a good deal more respect for you than that, and have tried as much as possible to figure out how it is that you could hold such diametrically opposite opinions from my own. I actually could not figure out how you would slip over what looked to my like an obvious qualification, sitting right there in the sentence where a qualifying phrase would go (and not a qualification that I had to search widely for or do any hair-splitting to produce), and just apparently ignore it. And it looked like you were discounting it even as a POSSIBILITY, because all your rhetoric about this passage is that it is smoking DENIAL (and you're still hanging onto that rhetoric).

Why did it seem to me inexplicable that you missed or erased this qualification? Not from disrespect, but because you have constantly said that context is everything. I've seen the way you carefully differentiate statements in the MJ authors from similar statements in the HJ authors -- you did it through very detailed consideration of the context. I have not found your treatments of the context convincing, but anyone can see that you do care a great deal about context, or at least that you consider it a lot.

Yet more times than I can count, you have told us that the saving qualifications are not in the Logos-apologists no matter how hard one looks. But this one was sitting right there, requiring no explanation from me because I saw it as obvious -- so I could not believe that you just skipped it over.

So what am to make of it when you not only take out a qualification (it is even, grammatically, a qualifying phrase), with an ellipsis, and when challenged as to why you left out the context, you come back with a post stating that this qualification is worthless and not even worth considering?

I see no reason why someone like Irenaeus would not have regarded as orthodox any statement to the effect that the Son of God was not the same as the sons of gods begotten from intercourse, that he was not begotten as they were. As to what the pagan readership would have thought, that is a better question. (But note -- you have a good QUESTION, not an argument justifying the ignoring of context). You ask how the pagan readership could have known that this was different from Jesus. Well first of all, it's unclear just how much the pagan readership knew about Jesus. But they did know that the Christians were worshipping an invisible monotheistic God (Felix's antagonist scorns the fact that this God is invisible); and when a Christian spoke about this invisible God begetting a Son, I don't think it's farfetched to wonder just how immediately they would have made a parallel between the way this God begat a Son and the way that their visible gods begat children through physical contact with women.

Moreover, they could have known more about Christianity than its monotheism and its invisible God. You ask how we know that Theophilus' audience knew about the virgin birth. Well let me say first off that we don't know it for sure, and can't know something like this for sure. So to hell with your assertions that we're all just reading the HJ blithely into even a document like Theophilus and sailing ahead like there's no problem. That sort of rhetoric demonstrates conclusively that you do not understand your opponents even in a basic manner and that there is no point in continuing -- especially because in my last post I have already put you on notice that such arguments from scorn are entirely out of line, and confirmed that there is a silence to be dealt with. Why else would we be here, if not to implicitly acknowledge that the problem is interesting and worth considering?

Matthew, the gospel which has a virgin birth, is the gospel that Theophilus seems to know best (Ben listed the points of contact above). That gospel was the most popular among the Church Fathers; and as Ben pointed out, it reputedly originated in Antioch. You will not let us assign Theophilus to Antioch, because you dismiss any report from later Christians (and particularly anything from Eusebius) with a wave of the hand -- but that has to stop. You are going to have to give us something else explaining how later Church writers could have thought to retroactively assign Theophilus to an important office as bishop of Antioch, as successor to Ignatius, if they knew nothing about him; somehow explain to us how other apostate Christians were remembered and long mistrusted, but this guy goes unnoticed by the orthodox of his time, and was simply adulated by the later church despite their nothing about him; or else he was noticed by the orthodox in his own time, but the memory of his heresy is forgotten in the third century, so that eventually he becomes a saint.

It was around the time of Theophilus, too, that Celsus was telling a story about Mary's fornication, which can easily be imagined as a reactionary polemic against the story of the virgin birth (a story made known by the best-known gospel of the time).

Whether Theophilus' immediately audience knew of the virgin birth is unknown, but I don't think that the Christian claim that their invisible God sired a son through a virgin female was so unknown to pagans that an apologist who contrasted the Son against pagan gods born "of intercourse" would have seemed self-condemning to them.

So go ahead, tell me that this is all irrational and not worth considering.

Show me your character.

Kevin Rosero

Ben C Smith

I suggest you try Skeptik. I have an index of (most of) their Greek and Latin texts on my site. Both Justin and Theophilus are included.

This is an oversimplification. Without the name John we have παντες οι πνευματοφοροι, εξ ων λεγει. This makes little sense. We need an expressed subject for λεγει in this case, even if something as vague as τις or εις.

The interpolation of the name John would have to involve a little bit more than a single name slipping in from the margin. Something had to have been removed (unnecessarily, I might add, since one of whom, John, says would make sense).

Ben.

Ben C Smith

I was surprised to find this on an earlier post in this thread:

The only gospel? Anywhere near?

But, my friends, the tone is getting shrill.

Ben.

krosero

It is time, I think, to de-escalate this. Earl, I will be posting a reply to your last long post, and after that I'd like you to have the last word (if you wish). I'd like to do that because it was I who was pushing for a debate, and you took the time to participate.

I see a number of problems here which I think can only get worse. Firstly, the topic is too wide, and I think that you saw, as I did not, that the topic was going to be too big to discuss; and it has even ranged beyond the topic which you foresaw, namely the second century apologists.

A subject this big demands careful consideration and even research, but quick posts on a debating thread do not do it justice. It is not only exhausting to do it this way (I have written nearly as many words as I did in my long essay, which took months to write; no one can keep up this pace, as you've seemed to hint a few times), it also means that important points will get lost when these long posts are being read, or that they won't be made clearly, since we're producing long posts relatively quickly -- and then we just get misunderstanding, and time wasted in clearing it up. Meanwhile big questions are being asked that should be considered at leisure.

If a manageable topic were to come up in our debates, Earl, as one did for you and Don, then I would be pleased to have a formal debate in which thoughtful essays could be written and there is no chance of heated escalation. Obviously what I want to do anyway is to write long essays, as you can all see , so this is not the place to have the debate I wanted. I'm sure, now, that when I dropped my long essay on this site in March, it received little response for a simple reason: forum threads are not made for such huge subject matters.

I think, then, that the heatedness of the recent exchanges can only grow worse.

TedH, I am not trying to blow you off, and if you have any questions you still want to ask me at this point, please feel free to do so. But I am basically done here and I think it's time to de-escalate. The problems here are general and nothing to do particularly between me and Earl.

My apologies to both of you for any disrespect; it was not intentional.

Kevin Rosero

krosero

According to the translation you give above, Theophilus is saying that the Son is not one of the sons of gods begotten “from intercourse.” That’s a perfectly orthodox statement. You paraphrase it as “a son fathered on a mortal woman,” apparently because you’re trying to highlight a contradiction against God fathering Jesus through Mary, a mortal woman.

I’m serious: is there something in the Greek original that is more properly translated as “a son fathered on a mortal woman,” rather than the text you used, “sons of god begotten from intercourse”?

Is there is a plain word for sexual intercourse in the original?

Here you use another strange paraphrase: “born of woman,” as if to say that Theophilus is denying that the Son he worships was born from a human mother.

I might as well ask again: is there anything in the original Greek that should be better translated as “born of woman”?

But we’re not saying that because he mentions one thing, then the other is present also in the text. There is a silence on Jesus (on L.A., in your analogy). My argument has been about whether there is a “denial,” a logical contradiction. Hence the importance of finding out whether Theophilus was denying a birth “from intercourse” or denying, in your paraphrases, a Son “fathered on a woman” or a Son “born of woman”.

(Note that if he is denying the latter things, his theology could still be docetic, and not the Logos-religion that you have in mind. In your posts from Friday you talk about hair-splitting, but to my mind nothing could be more important than reading the texts precisely).

I am not sure that the incarnation in Jesus would have been more of a philosophical problem than saying that God walked in Paradise. How many pagans, when they heard of the crucified man being worshipped, would have thought that this man was supposed to confine God in a place? If he was known as some sort of son of God, well, a son does not confine the father to a place – and that is why Theophilus says to Autolycus that it’s not God we’re talking about when we say that he walked in a paradise, but an offspring, his Son/Word.

Theophilus had said that God was not “confined in a place” (II, ch. 3); that’s the philosophical no-no, as you say. He then says, quoting or paraphrasing Genesis: “And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (ch. 21). In the next chapter he addresses the seeming contradiction that “walking” raises, because it seems as if he’s saying that God himself walked in Paradise. Hence he clarifies that it was not God, but God’s offspring, the Word, taking on the “person of God, and conversing with Adam.” He ends that chapter with the general assertion that the Word can be seen and heard when sent to a place (though by then he is no longer talking about Paradise specifically and there is no suggestion that Adam actually saw God’s Word in Paradise; the story about Adam had specifically said only that he heard).

It is not Christian doctrine that Jesus confined God to a place. It may be Christian doctrine that the Son is equivalent to the Father, but that is later Trinitarian thinking – and even then there is no claim that God, being confined to the Son, actually left heaven and was confined for a time to Jesus’ body.

A brief analogy. Which is more self-contradictory within Christian doctrine, the idea that in Genesis, God came to Abraham and ate a meal with him, looking like an ordinary man – or the idea that God’s Son died on earth? Which one of these two scenarios seems like the greater contradiction of the Christian idea that God, in Theophilus’ words, “is not contained, but is Himself the place of all?”

I think the former. But that’s just me.


Some of your arguments are better than others, and this is one that honestly makes me shrug my shoulders. It’s one thing for Theophilus never to bring Jesus in throughout his work; it’s another to say that in the middle of a very long section concentrating on Genesis, creation, and the Flood, he should have mentioned Jesus just because he had alluded vaguely to “all” that God determined upon.

I have never argued that Irenaeus himself knew them. What I tried to do was to imagine the orthodox as a whole, having some kind of interaction with your group. I have not heard you deny that there was interaction; what you have done is to stick to the extant documents, while presenting any attempt to imagine the relationship of the two groups, beyond the extant texts, as fantasy. I think it’s right to give the extant documents pride of place, but I think it goes too far to say that all else is useless speculation. What your emphasis does is tell me that you’re a certain kind of conservative historian (no insult intended there). It also tells me that you’re working from the tradition of studying individuals, as distinct from a social historian who tries to reconstruct as much as he can about the everyday lives of entire groups.

I had a history professor in college who impressed upon us that we have to try to imagine the past. And he was just the person to do it, because he was not a New Age sort of person and did not possess the type of mind given to fanciful speculation; he accepted no nonsense and was actually a very conservative man. But he thought it was essential to try to imagine, for instance, the ordinary thoughts that Christians and Jews might have had about each other in their ordinary interactions during the Middle Ages, as anti-Semitism spread. In the spirit of that sort of imagination, I gave you some thoughts that an orthodox Christian might have when hearing about an apology from another Christian, from your group. I think my thoughts were hardly outlandish, and your quick dismissal of them as “fantasy” does, at least, tell me what kind of historian you are – but no disrespect intended.

There, that emphasis again on the individual (Irenaeus), when in actuality both the orthodox and your Logos-group were spread out widely (and philosophers tend to concentrate in big cities, and to talk to one another).

When I present the orthodox as curious about other Christian documents, I think I’m on solid ground. This is from Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities:

I seriously doubt that this sort of group could have missed the Logos-group as you’ve defined it.

I don’t assume that that particular document has a genuine salutation or that it made it to its intended recipient. Again, I don’t want to restrict myself to the individual. I do assume that the Logos-group wrote documents of this kind and that most letters do find their way to the recipient.

And note also that in the body of the text of Athenagoras, not the salutation, there are indications that the text was written to a public official with authority over “Christians”. Athenagoras opens his Plea by referring to “your empire”; and he closes with this:

Back to Theophilus:

Yes, it would be interesting to know the Greek word.

But whatever he means, even if you’re right, my point still stands: the orthodox who knew Theophilus’ group and its unorthodox doctrine would know that they (the orthodox) stood condemned as among the “heresies.” It does not matter how wide Theophilus is casting his net: he would still be seen as condemning the orthodox as heretical.

It is no “fact” that Tatian disparages Gospel stories as myth. Quite the opposite.

What are the Greek originals behind “mythical accounts” and “narrations”? You think he believes allegorically in a gospel story? What, then, does it mean to “announce” that God was born in the form of a man? (Another interesting place to check the Greek word).

As I mentioned in my last reply to you, there is a silence, and I am actually surprised to see you referring to our arguments as if they merely stated that there were no problems to deal with. This particular silence you mention from Theophilus is one such problem. One possible explanation that comes to mind is that Theophilus, who shows a concern for demonstrating the antiquity of his religion, finds no problem in mentioning an ancient and admired figure as Solomon, but would rather not mention Christianity having a recent beginning in a controversial figure. The silence in this case would be intentional.

That does not mean that I’m convinced that he had to be silent for these reasons, or that I don’t see that other apologists like Justin are okay with mentioning Jesus. But it does suggest that there are possible reasons for the silence which may have held sway in the mind of Theophilus (and I have to have respect for the fact that we will never know his private thought – thus I don’t specifically say that he must have had specific reasons, but neither do I say that he cannot have had any reasons). The silence seems odd to me, but not unambiguously irrational – certainly not “perverse.”

I have actually explained several times now that the Diognetus reference is by a different hand. Each time I have asked you to clarify what is going on, since in your debate with Don, you claimed that even the second hand of chapters 11-12 does not have a historical figure in mind. That would make him some type of MJ author, so I don’t know why it’s being shunted aside like this. To add to the confusion, you now offer that it could have been written by an HJer, Hippolytus. That raises some interesting questions. How can an HJer write a document that apparently has no historical figure in mind? How can he write one that does not even mention “Jesus” or “Christ”?

Meanwhile, the original author does not mention the Logos and shows no familiarity with the Logos-doctrine, but he is one of your Logos-followers. But the second hand does mention the Logos. And he has, you claim, no historical founder. Is this not, then, a sixth Logos-follower?

I know that you cannot answer everything I write (or even half), but it would not be difficult to try at least to address my direct questions.

It’s one thing if phrases are floating around the Christian world without attribution. Personally I’d like to see an argument to that effect. It’s been argued with Jesus, by suggesting that sayings from the culture(s) in which he lived were later attributed to him. But here we have two phrases that apparently, unless you can show otherwise, did originate with Paul. So your argument here is that these phrases LOST any and all attribution and began floating independently.

An analogous example of this is NOT Theophilus referring to Jesus’ Gospel sayings without attribution, because that's under dispute. We don’t know that he didn’t know these phrases as spoken by Jesus (though we do know that he regarded them as spoken in the Gospel; there is some attribution).

Your Logos-philosophers, you have said many times, did not come out of the Pauline Christian tradition and had virtually nothing in common with it. But here we have two out of six (?) Logos followers borrowing two phrases that they liked from Paul, though without knowing who the phrases came from: “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up,” and “this corruptible (and dissoluble) must put on incorruption.”

I think you sense that they cannot have known where the phrases came from, because it would seem strange for them to call the apostle of a tradition that they disagreed with “the apostle.” It seems anachronistic, like something that an ecumenical-minded Christian might say about the leaders of other denominations; or like a detached historian today might call Muhammad, “the Prophet.” If they did admire Paul but not his savior and his religion, valuing him as a philosopher, then why do they not call him a philosopher instead of calling him an apostle (and giving the appearance of valuing a Christ-worshipper as “the apostle”)?

You are actually showing a parallel development between Athenagoras and the HJ tradition. Those other authors that you show mentioning “the apostle” are all HJ. Your first author listed is not even a later writer: Irenaeus and Athenagoras are dated to nearly the same time, both around 180. So Athenagoras refers to Paul as “the apostle” around the same time that the HJ communities start to do so. Interesting.

If you can find such a convention in the ancient texts, then we’ll have something. These are painfully modern expressions, from English; you’ve given us nothing else. What you need is an example of an ancient author using such a phrase as “the apostle” to point to nobody in particular; even better if you can come up with the exact phrase, “the apostle.”

It is much easier to imagine that these phrases came to Athenagoras and “Diognetus” because the phrases came out of their own Jesus-tradition, which valued Paul and called him “the apostle” at the very same time that the undisputed HJ authors were starting to do so.

And if that is the case, then they are either Pauline mythicists or Christians who located Christ on earth: in the latter case they might be docetists or Gnostics or orthodox. If they’re Pauline mythicists, they show that that tradition was still alive at the time of the heresiologists – and that the orthodox just didn’t notice this tradition still claiming Paul and his letters for a heretical form of Christ (though they were up in arms about Marcion doing so).

And if they’re Pauline mythicists, you have a case where Jesus Christ is being worshipped but his name not mentioned by two of his apologists. A silence for your model to explain.

(And by the way, your model already has that silence to explain, since you believe that Tatian, and possibly Theophilus, interpreted the Gospel allegorically. Well, unless you tell me that their “Gospel” had nothing to do with any stories about Jesus Christ, then what you’re telling us is that they valued these stories about Jesus Christ greatly but still did not mention the central character).

If Athenagoras and the second author of “Diognetus” located Christ on earth, then two of your apologists become historicists, and we have to ask again: if they could produce these texts without mentioning the name, then is it possible that the other Logos-followers are doing the same? Athenagoras does not even have the other apologists’ vague allusions to an incarnated figure; he is as silent an author as you have. So if he could be silent about Christ and still worship him … well, I hope you can see why this is an interesting case.

TedH, take note: this argument of mine about Athenagoras and “Diognetus” is the one I had made earlier and which you thought was missing in your last post to me. You asked me to make an argument and not to simply ask where Athenagoras and Diognetus located the crucifixion, and you wrote “mea culpa”, but you still said that I had made no argument. It’s there, the whole argument about Athenagoras and Diognetus. Check my posts again. I’ve merely repeated the argument here.

None of this shows what you claimed, that “some” (who said one thing) implied that there were “others” (who did not). It’s just vague language that Felix’s antagonist uses. You’ve now translated “Et qui” as “And whoever says.” How is that any more support for your argument than “some”?

I have no idea why you tell me that the situation with the modern-day President could never happen. It was crystal-clear what you were telling us: that it could never happen, and that the second-century counterpart, under the HJ model, could never happen, because the HJ model’s reconstruction of the situation is perfectly analogous to the fictional one with the President.

But this is how I see you constructing your analogy.

1) You have concluded that the second-century apologists had no historical founder, and that they are entirely silent about any such figure. You have concluded that if they were HJ, they would have been deceitful leaving him out (as you believe they have, since you take such instances as Tatian referring to God in the form of a man, or other such instances, not to refer to a historical founder). You have also concluded that some of the apologists did not just leave out the HJ, but poured scorn on him.

2) You illustrate this situation in the modern world, but unfortunately you substitute the founder of Christianity, not with George Washington or anyone analogous, but simply with the present-day office of the U.S. Presidency. In place of the apologists’ philosophical arguments, you substitute a professor whose modern-day apology for the U.S. is filled, in modern journalistic style, with information about the mechanics of the U.S. government (“workings of Congress, Senate and House, the crafting of legislation,” etc.), which would practically compel him to include some factual information about the executive branch. You include a variation in which some other professors heap scorn on the U.S. Presidency, since that is what you believe happened with Jesus in the second century. Still other professors will slip out of the analogy with the political system altogether to talk directly about the President as a religious savior; you describe them as locating him in the sky and not breathing a word about earth or incarnations, since you believe that the apologists had only a heavenly God.

You know where we have disagreed with you on all your arguments about the apologists (the ones appearing in step #1), and that that is why I regard your analogy as a perfect illustration of what you believe rather than an illustration of what is self-evident in the data. That you cannot step outside of your own conclusions and see them as interpretations – that you openly call your conclusions about the apologists the only reasonable ones – is remarkable.

And your analogies have a limited power to illustrate, because you consistently place them in the modern period, in a world that has changed considerably. The ancient world has disappeared, not only in its particulars but to a significant extent in the way that people thought and wrote. You seem to like modern scenarios in which the analogous texts (or reports) would have to be in a modern style: information-rich, journalistic, or simply prosaic (ie, not religious or philosophical). You like doing that, I suggest one more time, because you have a tendency to see the ancients in a rationalistic light, or to judge them against a modern rationalistic standard. I know you will disagree, but that is what I see here consistently.

Why didn't you at least keep the analogy in antiquity and posit a Roman historian who described all the apparati of Roman government while leaving out the emperor. That situation could at least be directly compared to an apologist of the time.

Kevin Rosero

Ben C Smith

Yes, there is. The phrase is υιους θεων εκ συνουσιας γεννωμενους. The word συνουσια, literally being with, means intercourse (not always sexual; it can mean social intercourse or the conversatory intercourse between a teacher and a student, but here, with γεννωμενους, the sexual meaning would be the obvious choice).

In 2.14 the phrase is what we would expect, λεγω δε των αιρεσεων. This is the usual word for heresies.

Ben.

EarlDoherty

I don't know where this came from. Maybe I confused it with another apologist. Maybe I confused it with Joe Blow.

Not only is the tone getting shrill, and that includes me, but I think we're all just spreading ourselves too thin, trying to do too much on too many threads at a time. I know I for one am making short-cuts, not looking up finer points, etc., etc., trusting my memory (a bad thing to do). I need a rest. I may not withdraw completely, but I'm not going to try to answer everything. I don't need last words in every case, and audiences can judge for themselves.

Right now I need to soak my eyes and take an aspirin.

My best to everybody, regardless of my occasional tone. We're all adults, and we're all intelligent, otherwise we wouldn't last a minute in this snake pit.

Earl Doherty