mountainman

Both the Historia Augusta and Eusebius's Church history introduce fake sources and fake (forged) documents. The Letter of Jesus Christ to Agbar, the forged "TF", the letters of so-called early apologists to Roman Emperors and even the considered official responses in letters by those Roman Emperors to the hitherto unknown apologists.

However the key characteristic relating the two works IMO is the invention of fake sources which purposefully disagree and argue with the earlier fake sources. The following from livius.org on the "HA":

The parallel in "HE" is in the invention of the heretics (and pagans [eg Celsus]) who argue against orthodoxy in the centuries leading up to the Nicaean orthodoxy. The way I see the true history as developing is that when the orthodoxy of the centralised monotheistic state was being enforced there were naturally many great controversies and many heresies against it. But perhaps the greatest heresy was to be found in the authorship of popular books that related incredible narratives about Jesus and the Apostles, namely the whole host of gnostic acts and gnostic gospels.

Eusebius and those who in the following centuries preserved his work asserted in sources such as Irenaeus that these books were authored in the 2nd century, and not in the 4th century when the orthodoxy hit the fan. They invented pre-Nicaean heretics and retrojected the controversies over the so-called heretical gnostic gospels and acts into their pseudo-history.


The Historia Augusta is more of a novel and a fiction than a history and facts and it can be therefore classified as a pseudo-historical account. My argument is that the Church History is precisely of the same genre.

Extracted from livius.org on the "HA":

The senatorial audience preferred novels and fictions, not history and facts

Of course this means that the Historia Augusta is not reliable as a source for these lives, but it is a very valuable source for those who want to reconstruct the values and ideas of the the senatorial elite of ancient Rome. The pagan senators were obviously credulous people, who preferred a vie romancée and were not interested in real biography. They liked novels and fiction, not history and facts. This literary taste is older than the Historia Augusta: the first example from the Roman world is the vie romancée of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus, which is in turn inspired by the Education of Cyrus by Xenophon.

When the Historia Augusta is dated is a question not without its controversies, but one of the options being discussed is that it may have been written during the rule of Constantine, since it is dedicated in part to Constantine. Therefore it cannot be out of the question that the Church History and the "Historia Augusta" were both produced in the same imperially sponsored scriptorium, for the edification of the senatorial audience of the 4th century.




εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

mountainman

And the argument for the Historical Jesus is somehow superior to the Fictional Jesus? I don't buy this at all. You and others may but I do not trust the 21st century church and I certainly do not trust the 4th century church.

Someone bent our received history after Nicaea. There is a massive hole in evidence for the period 325-353 CE and when the political history of the Roman Empire resumes with Ammianus we have attestations to imperial Christian state inquisitions of the pagans in which "numbers without end" were tortured and executed on account of their "religious fraud".



εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

mountainman

Detail of the 11th century copy of Annals, the gap between the 'i' and 's' is highlighted in the word 'Christianos'.


There is also the matter of the Pliny Trajan letter exchange mentioning "Christians" which was suddenly "found" in a tenth book of Pliny and published by Giovanni Giocondo, but was just as mysteriously and suddenly "lost".



εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Sheshbazzar

Then they were forging writings whose content shot some of the most fundamental claims of the 4th and 5th century church right in the foot.

It doesn't make any sense that Eusebius or the 4th and 5th century church would forge writings by one whom they accounted as being an early Saint and Martyr, that would contain material that directly countered the most important claims made by 3rd, 4th, and 5th century church authorities.

It might be explicable if Justin and his writings were being heavily trounced by Eusebius and Co. and continuators, as with their many other paper 'heretics' of dubious historicity. But Justin is held up as a Saint and Martyr, yet Eusebius and latter church writers, with few exceptions, just skirt around any mention or discussion of these 'heretical' points of Justin's writings that are so damaging to the claims of he Orthodox church, and then his works quietly 'disappear' for a thousand years.
And recovered, even to this day stand as a witness against the fundamental claims of the 'Holy Roman Catholic Church', and 'Pauline' Christianity.

Jeffrey Gibson

A gap is not an addition. In any case, is this MS from the same monastery that preserved Justin's Apologies?

Jeffrey

Sheshbazzar

The 'editor' likely thought he was fixing a mistake. 'Adjusting' one single letter to conform with the most common spelling is on a far different level than composing and inserting entire paragraphs into an ancient text.

Jeffrey Gibson

Not to mention composing and publishing several hundred separate writings in different languages, genres, and anachronistic literary styles but then not incorporating them into the spurious history that one composes sources for. Where's all the extra but complimentary Historia Augusta literature that's similar to the numerous writings from the EC fathers writers that, if the author of the AH was really doing under state supervision and support what Eusebius reputedly did under Constantine, we should have expected to also have been produced by him?

Jeffrey

mountainman

When Eusebius wrote my claim is that there was no church, there was no orthodoxy and there were no earlier claims. Eusebius wrote under the inspiration of a newly established freedom. He wrote during the Christian Revolution and the Fearless Leadership and sponsorship of Constantine. He was not to know what orthodoxy would become after his death.

His job was to act as Constantine's codex supplier, and to tender a thesis in ancient history for the Greek reading senatorial class explaining and making legitimate the new and strange codex religion for the pagan empire. This so-called history featured fake dates, faked sources and other faked sources to disagree with them, and abounded in fake documents, such as Justin's Apology to the Emperor, and the Emperor's Rescript to Justin, the Letter of Aristeas, the Letter of Jesus Christ...

In the year 381 CE Theodosius established orthodoxy by imposing as law on the empire the Nicaean Trinity but our earliest sources for Nicaea, from the 5th century, one hundred years afterwards, do not mention any trinity. What happened at Nicaea - the second most important event in the history of Christian origins - has disappeared from the record.

Eusebius could not have known where Constantine's Chrestian or Christian monotheistic state tidal wave was taking the pagan empire. He was in the back office pumping out the codices and forging documents. The life-raft mentality which followed the wave at some point put Eusebius's Church History on the list of books to be buried and made apocrypha.

IMO JUSTIN MARTYR: (c. 100-165): Saint, Martyr, a foremost Christian Apologist was a small cog in a large forgery mill.



εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Duvduv

Incredibly, as far as I could tell, no one so far has been interested in discussing the implications of these important points made by MM.

Sheshbazzar

With all due respect to mountainman and his opinion, and I count him as a friend, it must be recognized that his opinion is a very unconventional 'outlier' position among Biblical and historical scholarship.
Without getting into the arguments pro and con of his views, one must weigh the likelihood that thousands of other scholars have been in error in these matters.

It's up to the individual if they are convinced enough by his arguments to want to climb aboard his cart.
For the present I am content to just walk along and observe what holes it might fall into and in what direction it is headed.
Always interested in whatever interesting and supported information he has to offer, but not committed to his theory.