That's a loaded statement.
It also ignores the fact several people are now dating the canonical writings in the mid 2nd century in relation to writings attributed to Marcion
- Vinzent, Klinghardt, BeDuhn, Tyson, etc.
What I am proposing is to do more than lump all those texts into the same category as you do there.Bernard Muller wrote: ↑Wed Sep 20, 2017 10:25 am ... as also the Didache, gospel of Thomas, epistle of Barnabas, 1Clement, Cerinthus, Papias, Ignatian letters, epistle of Polycarp, apologies of Aristides & Quadratus, Epistula Apostolorum, Basilides, Cerdo, Marcion, Valentinus, Justin Martyr's work, and more.
You're being disingenuous in doing that. I do not 'post-date Ignatius, Marcion, and a few others there.
To say Basilides, Cerdo, and Valentinus a good evidence of belief in Jesus Christa as saviour is disingenuous. Papias may reflect pericopes more than texts.
Most of those passages have significant doubt.Bernard Muller wrote: ↑Wed Sep 20, 2017 10:25 am That's because you reject the pertinent passages in Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny the Younger.
Papers by Ken Olson, Paul Hopper, and Feldman cast significant doubt on Antiquities 18 (the TF).
Hopper, P (2014) “A Narrative Anomaly in Josephus: Jewish Antiquities xviii:63,” in M Fludernik & D Jacob, eds., Linguistics and Literary Studies: Interfaces, Encounters, Transfers, de Gruyter; pp. 147-169. Available here viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1237
Olson, K (2013) A Eusebian Reading of the Testimonium Flavianum
Feldman, L (2012) 'On the authenticity of the “Testimonium Flavianum” attributed to Josephus', in: E. Carlebach and J. Schacter (ed), New Perspectives on Jewish Christian Relations, Brill; 13-30
A very recent recent paper casts doubt on Pliny the Younger (and reminds us of past doubts) -
Enrico Tuccinardi (2017) 'An application of a profile-based method for authorship verification: Investigating the authenticity of Pliny the Younger's letter to Trajan concerning the Christians'. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 32(2) 1 June 2017; pp 435–447.
- Abstract
Pliny the Younger's letter to Trajan regarding the Christians is a crucial subject for the studies on early Christianity. A serious quarrel among scholars concerning its genuineness arose between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th; per contra, Plinian authorship has not been seriously questioned in the last few decades. After analysing various kinds of internal and external evidence in favour of and against the authenticity of the letter, a modern stylometric method is applied in order to examine whether internal linguistic evidence allows one to definitely settle the debate.The findings of this analysis tend to contradict received opinion among modern scholars, affirming the authenticity of Pliny’s letter, and suggest instead the presence of large amounts of interpolation inside the text of the letter, since its stylistic behaviour appears highly different from that of the rest of Book X.
https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article-ab ... method-for