After 20 Years Plus of Flogging His Theory How Many Here at the Forum Believe Mountainman?

[Leucius Charinus]

Idea (2) - Evidence of systematic Christian identify theft suggests Arius may not have been a Christian, but in fact a Platonic theologian, and may be identified with the Gnostic Leucius Charinus (i.e. Arius authored at least some of the NTA)

If I look at suggestions like this, I am a bit surprised regarding that black&white thinking that lurks behind such suggestions.

Did you miss the note? That before you approach idea (2) you have to evaluate idea (1). If idea (1) fails then we don't get to idea (2). I accept that. Without accepting idea (1) as true, idea (2) is nonsensical. This I can understand too. (2) is contingent on (1).

Idea (1) is that the NTA (incl NHL) have post Nicene composition dates. If idea (1) is in fact true then it logically follows that idea (2) is probably also true. The question therefore is whether idea (1) is historically true or false.

Idea (1) - The NTA Gnostic Gospels and Acts (including the NHL) were authored 325-336 CE as a reaction to the Constantine Bible.

The traditional chronology for the NTA/NHL is an almost three century span from the 1st century (sometimes as late as c.150 CE) through to the end of the 4th. The alternative idea (1) has a controversial avalanche of codices being created in a relatively short time span in reaction to the authority of the Nicene Church that had just been politically (and militarily) established by the lawful Pontifex Maximus and Emperor Constantine c.325 CE.


I don't expect anyone to accept this proposition without convincing arguments and evidence.

[Ulan]

Did you miss the note? That before you approach idea (2) you have to evaluate idea (1). If idea (1) fails then we don't get to idea (2). I accept that. Without accepting idea (1) as true, idea (2) is nonsensical. This I can understand too. (2) is contingent on (1).

No, I didn't miss the note. My comment considered idea (2) on its own merit, which is even if you somehow managed to get idea (1) to work. Of course, we may differ on the definition as to what we accept as "Christianity".

[neilgodfrey]

Imagine Socrates was a fictional person invented by Plato. No historical Socrates. Our later manuscripts include a play, The Clouds, by Aristophanes that pokes fun at Socrates. Another manuscript collection contains very different philosophical discussions from those of Plato, these by one claiming to be Xenophon. Is it likely that a later authority for some political agenda would have been responsible for forging the Aristophanes and Xenophon literature just to try to establish the fact that Socrates was historical? Surely there would be much easier ways to undertake such a program if there were such a program to establish the historicity of Socrates.

Would that analogy be a fair comparison with what you are proposing re Jesus and the time of Constantine?

Are you portraying Plato as one of the disciples and Aristophanes and Xenophon as a pair of "church fathers"? Or are Aristophanes and Xenophon (along with Plato) a pair of canonical authors ? I don't quite understand

Does it make a great difference? If so, I may be misunderstanding the import of your argument.

Let's imagine Aristotle as a church father referring back to an earlier Plato/Socrates in the "tradition"; Aristophanes as a critic, maybe a Josephus figure; and Xenophon as a supposed contemporary, a la Paul.

So the comparison it to be between two lineages?
And whether we can rule out forgery of either lineage?

(1) Socrates, as found in the canonical books of Plato preserved and annotated by the apostolic succession of the ecclesia of the Platonists.

(2) Jesus, as found in the canonical books of Paul and the Gospels which were preserved and annotated by the apostolic succession of the ecclesia of the Christians.

There is a big difference between these lineages in terms of the political power they wielded at various epochs in antiquity. The import is that power corrupts and thus substantially increases the risk of fraud / forgery. This has always been the case. Anyway appreciate the arm chair experiment. Thanks.

I was thinking of the possibility of forgery in the creation of the earlier figure, not so much in terms of an argument based mostly on claims of a certain lineage. Why would such lineage myths not be fabricated as early as the second century? Or are you saying that we have no evidence that they were created before Constantine?

[Ulan]

I get the impression that you are proposing what is in fact a "perfect crime" that was so cleverly and so comprehensively organized that not a single clue was left to be found that would lead to doubts. Is that a fair description?

If various authors were manufactured to appear to have witten in early times and to have thereby corroborated one another, would we not have expected to find some kind of friendly or hostile reference to the Seneca-Paul correspondence prior to the fourth century -- to remove the risk that they were really late documents?

This is the main issue I have with the whole proposal. What purpose does fabricating such a corpus of different works actually serve? Who is this directed at that a simple one paragraph lie wouldn't suffice? It looks as if it's suggested that this whole effort was done to convince 19th-21st century theologians that the history of the church is fully accounted for. For reasons. What a foresight!

[neilgodfrey]

I get the impression that you are proposing what is in fact a "perfect crime" that was so cleverly and so comprehensively organized that not a single clue was left to be found that would lead to doubts. Is that a fair description?

If various authors were manufactured to appear to have witten in early times and to have thereby corroborated one another, would we not have expected to find some kind of friendly or hostile reference to the Seneca-Paul correspondence prior to the fourth century -- to remove the risk that they were really late documents?

This is the main issue I have with the whole proposal. What purpose does fabricating such a corpus of different works actually serve? Who is this directed at that a simple one paragraph lie wouldn't suffice? It looks as if it's suggested that this whole effort was done to convince 19th-21st century theologians that the history of the church is fully accounted for. For reasons. What a foresight!

Even aimed at fourth century audiences, it leaves me with the impression that it is far too much over-kill to do the task at hand, with far more effort and content that is necessary to achieve the task, and the problem of trying to imagine such total control over all voices to ensure they worked in the same direction and the total elimination of all voices raised against the effort. Those are the thoughts that hold me back from delving further into the proposition.

[Ulan]

That's basically what I meant. For the 4th century, the Eusebian "Church History" as extension of Acts would have been sufficient to finish that task. Everything else looks completely superfluous to me. For the rest, you could just conjure the typical apologetics you sometimes find even today: everything was burnt during the persecutions, the last of which conveniently just happened before Constantine took office. Problem solved.

[Leucius Charinus]

Idea (1) - The Gnostic Gospels and Acts were authored 325-336 CE as a reaction to the Constantine Bible

It has to be allowed that most of the texts you're referencing have no explicit mention of authorship or date. So, for many of these texts, it's at least possible (if not probable) that they were produced in the timeframe of the mid 4th century. Therefore, at least some of these hypotheses of date, when regarding individual texts, will have a certain kind of respectability due to the fact that they can't be disproven.

///

Idea (3)- Constantine commissioned the fabrication of the New Testament and its history 312-324 CE

This re-ordering was accompanied by the note:

• It is important to note that idea (1) is to be examined first.
  Secondly, idea (2) is to be examined. Finally, idea (3) may be
  approached, and examined only after review of ideas (1) and (2).

http://mountainman.com.au/essenes/

The problem of course (as I see it) is that most researchers are only interested in determining the provenance and authorship of the NTC literature. Hence SA (this thread as an example) and others won't take any account of this note and just want answers to questions about Idea 3. It is difficult indeed almost impossible to disentangle exploration of the NTA (ideas 1 and 2) from that of the NTC (idea 3).

I think there are bigger problems. I'd say that a most significant problem with this approach to (1) is that you can't address it first, even if you wanted to. Certainly you could try to address it before (2) or (3), but nobody is going to follow you on (2) or (3) anyway, so that's not what I mean by not being able to address it first. What I mean is that historical investigation, especially when we're talking about the difficult topic of assigning provenance and dating to texts and artifacts, generally goes from the most specifically dated and provenanced to the least.

Since the gospels, acts, dialogues, and treatises that you're mentioning generally have little to no explicit indication of genuine authorship or date, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to start with them. We would want to start with other things that are dated more specifically and try to build some context for the time period that we're talking about. Only then would we try to piece together where other texts and artifacts fit within that kind of chronology.

So you may be more interested in exploring these texts and your hypothesis about when they were written, but you're not going to make any headway if you start there. You've bitten off for yourself a very ambitious project that you would need to undertake first. That project is to work your way through all the other literature of the ante-Nicene period, especially that with an author attached, and place them historically.

I kind of did that some time ago.

Authors of Antiquity
http://mountainman.com.au/essenes/article_029.htm

You would need to be able to do more than express your personal doubts about them, or ask others to show something about them, or mention the dates of their manuscripts, or make idiosyncratic remarks on other texts such as pseudo-Seneca or pseudo-Isidore, or fulminate against a system of oppression that produced them and/or the unscientific nature of pretty much everyone else involved in the disciplines of history and scholarship. You would need to shoulder a certain level of burden of proof to rebut the presumption that other historians and scholars have some idea of what they're doing here. You would need to show that there's something significant that everybody else is missing (and to repeat, the date of the manuscripts isn't, that's just how it is) about these texts, something that shows that they were most likely produced at a later date.

So you're missing your idea (0) that you can go through all these other texts and show that they were most likely produced in the fourth century or later, referring to the texts that have more explicit indications of authorship and date that are regarded as ante-Nicene by contemporary academics. For each of these texts, the work required is significant. Individually and for each of these authors, at the very least (the very least), I would expect the equivalent of a minimum 30-50 page journal article establishing a new thesis regarding them. There's no alternative here, no shortcut. This is just the reality of taking up a quixotic approach to history. There are many windmills to be tilted against.

Aside from a few NTA manuscripts dated to the ante nicene epoch by paleography in isolation (arguably later), the "early" chronology for NTA texts are being controlled almost entirely by attestations in the "early" heresiologists. Irenaeus as a witness to the Gospel of Judas and the Secret Book of John. Serapion via Eusebius as a witness of the Gospel of Peter. Tertullian as a witness of the Acts of Paul. And so on.

An approximate summary of this is as follows:

Name of Heresiologist (No. of attestations to NTA texts)
Eusebius, Constantine's "Worldly Advisor" (5);
Origen, one of two in antiquity (5);
Irenaeus, the pious Bishop of Lyons (4);
Clement, the pious Bishop of Alexandria (3);
Tertullian, the pious Bishop of Carthage (2);
Justin Martyr, the pious Martyr and Foremost Apologist (2);
Serapion (1); and
Hippolytus (1).

The Idea (1) - that the Gnostic Gospels and Acts were authored 325-336 CE as a reaction to the Constantine Bible is partly based on an overall assessment of the NTA texts themselves. These are themselves called "Gospels" and "Acts" and "Revelations" and so on and I'd contend that they were all authored in response to the "Gospels" and "Acts" and "Revelations" and so on in the NT canonical books. Is this contention sound?

The question becomes when.

[Leucius Charinus]

I get the impression that you are proposing what is in fact a "perfect crime" that was so cleverly and so comprehensively organized that not a single clue was left to be found that would lead to doubts. Is that a fair description?

If various authors were manufactured to appear to have witten in early times and to have thereby corroborated one another, would we not have expected to find some kind of friendly or hostile reference to the Seneca-Paul correspondence prior to the fourth century -- to remove the risk that they were really late documents?

This is the main issue I have with the whole proposal. What purpose does fabricating such a corpus of different works actually serve? Who is this directed at that a simple one paragraph lie wouldn't suffice? It looks as if it's suggested that this whole effort was done to convince 19th-21st century theologians that the history of the church is fully accounted for. For reasons. What a foresight!

Even aimed at fourth century audiences, it leaves me with the impression that it is far too much over-kill to do the task at hand, with far more effort and content that is necessary to achieve the task, and the problem of trying to imagine such total control over all voices to ensure they worked in the same direction and the total elimination of all voices raised against the effort. Those are the thoughts that hold me back from delving further into the proposition.

The proposition that the NT apocryphal corpus is a post Nicene literary avalanche of reaction to the NT canonical books allows that NTC books to have been composed in any century you'd like to nominate. ie 1st or 2nd or 3rd. There is no conspiracy here. Forget any 4th century NTC.

The orthodoxy wanted total control over which of the Jesus stories to be the authoritative set. We know the Christian orthodoxy destroyed and burnt the NTA corpus. This in my view was the conspiracy of the Nicene church. That is to remove the authorship of the NTA from the time period in which the NTC was first politically circulated during the rule of Constantine. They wanted to do this because it was not a good look for the NTC.

To effect this IMO the orthodoxy fabricated the heresiological narratives. Logically we can separate out the material in "church history" between what relates to the NTA and what relates to the NTC. Elsewhere I have referred to these as EH7 and EH1 respectively.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9998&hilit=classes

Sub-Classifications of 3) The literature of Ecclesiastical History (EH)

EH1 - Orthodox history - doctrines, preservation of NTC, creeds, lists of bishops, "patristic" commentaries, expositions, sermons, apologies, testimonia, the "Church Fathers", etc; this subclass contains ancient information related to the NTC (Class 1)

EH2 - Christian Persecutions by Roman emperors - political history;
EH3 - Martyrology;
EH4 – Hagiography;
EH5 - Cult of Saints and Martyrs;
EH6 - Holy Relic Trade;

EH7 - Heresiology - Heresy, Heresiologists, Heretics, Heresiarchs and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. This subclass contains ancient information related to the NTA (Class 2)

My point is that allowing the EH1 material to be legitimate, the EH7 material is best explained as a pseudo-historical fabrication - a conspiracy - to cover over the historical truth that the NTA corpus of literature was a post Nicene literary avalanche composed 325-337 CE. This explanation I'd argue is consistent with the surviving evidence. The church may have told the truth about their own history, but they lied about the heretics who wrote the NTA books.

[Leucius Charinus]

That's basically what I meant. For the 4th century, the Eusebian "Church History" as extension of Acts would have been sufficient to finish that task. Everything else looks completely superfluous to me. For the rest, you could just conjure the typical apologetics you sometimes find even today: everything was burnt during the persecutions, the last of which conveniently just happened before Constantine took office. Problem solved.

Problem solved until an avalanche of NT apocryphal books appeared. The problem is the provenance of the NTA and I wish to solve this problem by proposing that the NTA are a response to the strong post Nicene orthodoxy and that Christian heresiological narratives were completely fabricated. (Note the above posts: the NT canonical material can be from the 1st or 2nd centuries). The proposition is that the NTA books were written by non Christians - the final voice of the Hellenic civilisation prior to Christianisation c.381 CE.

Of course, we may differ on the definition as to what we accept as "Christianity".

Yes this could be true. Also on the definition as to what we accept as "Christianty" prior to Constantine, during his rule, during the rule of his son and through to what is was after the edicts of Theodosius c.381 CE. In my book there was a Christian revolution between 325-381 CE.

I suggest that the NTA books were a product of the pagan resistance.

[neilgodfrey]

The proposition that the NT apocryphal corpus is a post Nicene literary avalanche of reaction to the NT canonical books allows that NTC books to have been composed in any century you'd like to nominate. ie 1st or 2nd or 3rd. There is no conspiracy here. Forget any 4th century NTC.

The orthodoxy wanted total control over which of the Jesus stories to be the authoritative set. We know the Christian orthodoxy destroyed and burnt the NTA corpus. This in my view was the conspiracy of the Nicene church. That is to remove the authorship of the NTA from the time period in which the NTC was first politically circulated during the rule of Constantine. They wanted to do this because it was not a good look for the NTC.

To effect this IMO the orthodoxy fabricated the heresiological narratives.

If I understand your position, you seem to be saying that the non-christians produced "apocryphal" works to counter the canonical books being promoted by the "Nicene church" -- and that the Nicene church also, in addition to burning those books, organized persons to produce the works known to us as the works of Irenaeus, Tertullian etc that were attacking the arguments in those apocryphal works. Is that a fair summary of your view?