Peter Kirby wrote: ↑Sun Jun 11, 2023 8:56 pm
Leucius Charinus wrote: ↑Sun Jun 11, 2023 5:50 pm
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.
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Leucius Charinus wrote: ↑Sun Jun 11, 2023 5:50 pmIdea (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.