Adam

How about that--mountainman is right. He said "Epiphanius" in his post #70, but spin asked for the quote from "Eusebius" in post #72.

Yet it's all kind of irrelevant--Epiphanius just recounted every school of philosophy however pagan as "heretics". Who cares what a fanatic like Epiphanius thought anyway?

mountainman

Those who are interested in 4th century political history.

Do you think Constantine was a fanatic as well, and if so, is it important to care what was thought inside that head above the bull neck?








εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

stephan huller

This is so dumb. "The Jews" are also on the list. "The Hellenists" too. What does any of this prove? How does any of this help Pete's submoronic theory? The Arians were explicitly identified as "Jew-like" in the writings of Athanasius. Nowhere are the Arians condemned as Platonists. How would that even be possible? <edit>

spin

Here's the problem: you didn't give a citation at all. You just claimed someone said something. There was no way from what you said for anyone to check your claim. If you'd said, Epiphanius Haer. Bk 1.7 (or whatever it was) you would have been following the forum guidelines. However, you just made a claim without automatically supplying an exact citation, a useless act you have so often done. The reader needs to know exactly where each new piece of data comes from and I for one get tired of not knowing where things come from. You have an obligation to correctly cite all of your sources. The forum needs you to fulfill that obligation.

My complaint here was about you, mountainman, violating the guidelines.

mountainman

The literature tends to support the idea that the nation of Christians was defining itself by existent groups - philosophical etc - which they would accept only under the classification of heretics. Theodosius in 381 CE makes this proclamation in a summarised form:

: 'We authorise followers of this law to assume the title of orthodox Christians; but as for the others since, in our judgement, they are foolish madmen, we decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious names of heretics.'

And Arius was explicitly identified by Athanasius as the 'harbinger' of the antichrist.

That is a very seriously submoronic card to play in the game by this suspicious source "Athanasius", who oversighted the manufacture of canonical bible codices under Constantius, and graced planet Earth with the invention of "Christian hagiography" with his stirring bullshit epic about "Saint Anthony" c.360 CE.



You are confused.

The scanty and suspicious materials of ecclesiastical history seldom enable us to dispel the dark cloud that hangs over the first age of the church. -- Gibbon

εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

mountainman

What don't I understand about this reference? Be specific.

I have supplied the forum with a citation that Toto claims has nothing to do with anything Arius did when the citation has been extracted from "Vita Constantini" and the chapter CHAPTER LXI headed: How Controversies originated at Alexandria through Matters relating to Arius

Is it not reasonable to think that (1) Arius is somehow involved in this ridicule of these sacred matters of inspired teaching at that time in Alexandria, and (2) that these sacred matters of inspired teaching is a reference to the canonical books of the bible.


Here is the quote in context ...





εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Sabine Grant

:blank:

ETA from Never: posts consisting only of bickering split and moved

spin

The above has nothing to do with the discourse about what you claimed Eusebiuspiphanius said. But what Epiphanius said was the topic of the following (which you removed from its context and used for a copmpletely different purpose):

If you'd done the right thing in the first place and cited your source, we wouldn't be doing this tango of confusion.

Let's go back...

This is your initial claim:

Epiphanius classified Platonists as heretics.

I asked you for the citation. I wrongly wrote "Eusebius", which you corrected but didn't give a citation for. I then asked you again for the citation and I got no response until #107, which I responded to:

I don't know how to make this point more clearly than the above post. You simply made a claim about Epiphanius, which you didn't give a citation for. You have since given a citation in another context.

I just want to know what you base your bullshit claims on when you drop these decontextualized pearls, because when someone makes a claim we must be in the position to be able to check where it comes from. Sometimes you do give citations. Other times you don't. We each know what we want to say, but without citations we don't actually say them.

I try to supply a citation for every new datum I introduce here.


With all these side issues and requests for clarification we have got away from the fact that you have made no progress in your attempt to demonstrate your claims that Arius was not a christian at all and that when writers claimed that he was a christian heretic they are lying.

Your process has been to assert an initial position and when challenged with difficulties you add new assertions in an attempt to explain away those difficulties. Then further assertions and yet more assertions. This is a classical case of argument by assertion, which is forbidden by the guidelines. Not only do you have no evidence for your case(s), your response to evidence is either to assert its invalidity or to assert its being misunderstood. You provide new readings that don't derive from the source, but from your need to construct consistency with your prior claims. When shown to be inconsistent with other sources then you assert invalidity of those others.

Your initial assertion regarding Eusebius inventing christianity was falsified when you were made acquainted with the data from Dura Europos. Instead of doing what you promised and stopped the unsupported claims now falisified, your behavior was like something out of the Matrix scene when they were shooting at Neo on the rooftop: remarkable swerves that would do the stunt director proud. So we cannot trust you to be aware of the reality concerning the evidence we are analyzing.

For some reason you seem to think that your finding that ignorant people thought Ammonius was a christian, that there was also a pagan Origen and that there were other Anatoliuses, somehow helps you claim that Arius the christian is just Arius the Neo-Platonist warped by christian apologists. You imagine that Nicaea involved a conflict between christians and pagans and to get there you cherry-pick your sources, ignoring most and reinterpreting a few to arrive at your desired conclusion.

You have supplied no evidence that Arius was not a christian. Your only response to a cited source indicating that Arius held positions within the christian church was to assume that it is propaganda. Why? Because you want it to be. You have no better reasoning.

In order for you to maintain your original conspiracy theory that Eusebius invented christianity, you've had to create more conspiracy theories such as at Dura Europos--the diatessaron was seeded there and the interpretation of the frescoes is somehow a christian conspiracy--or this one about Arius, who has been conspired against to make him appear to be christian in all the sources when you, mountainman, know he is not.

There is not a skerrick of evidence to support any of your claims. You are just as empty-handed as when whoever it was all those years ago suggested the idea that christianity could have been invented at the time of Constantine.

All these years and no progress should tell you to stop fucking around with this nonsense and do what you promised: give it up.

stephan huller

Tim Vivian once raised the question of whether Arius was an Origenist or not (Peter of Alexandria, pp. 110-126. see also Grant, "Theological Education at Alexandria', p. 188f). But no one has ever, ever, ever, ever suggested that Arius was not a Christian. The idea is fucking absurd. But Pete the mountainman by raising these ridiculous assertions drags anyone who challenges him into the manure with him. Tim Vivian has rightly critiqued the work of Barnes and much of traditional scholarship on the anti-Origenism of Peter in his work. Vivian argues against a strict understanding of competing Origenist and anti-Origenist successions in Alexandria, and questions some of the works attributed to Peter by Barnes. But to go where Pete wants to go is just silly. It makes the whole forum appear dumb.

Indeed we should consider Arius's opponent Athanasius's indebtedness to Plato from E. P. Meijering book Orthodoxy and Platonism in Athanasius: Synthesis Or Antithesis? A sample passage:

The link is here - http://books.google.com/books?id=398...ood%22&f=false. The argument is very clear. Alexandrian Christianity was always rooted in Platonism. The understanding went back farther than Arius or Athanasius, back to Origen, Clement and even Justin Martyr. Of course you start out with the premise that there was no Alexandrian tradition beyond Arius so you see him simply as a Platonist. But this is idiotic. It has no basis in fact and it is a waste of time even speaking to you about this stuff because you have no interest in actually learning anything.

Clivedurdle

Lee Smolin in Time Reborn http://leesmolin.com/writings/time-reborn/ I think argues that (these are my thoughts as the cardinal trying to express what the Pope said!) that Physics and Maths have made a category mistake about time, assuming it is emergent from something timeless.

I understand this way of thinking was formalised by Plato - this is a false world, the real world is outside the cave.

Christianity is a wondrous amalgam of these timeless ideas with many many ideas from all over the place, that got a very important supercharge when an Emperor made it a state religion - but he wasn't that enamoured with it, allegedly mumbling to his Bishops on his death bed - you better be right! (I read that somewhere!).

I wonder would a history of ideas approach help here?