The amount of people who temper their theories with a healthy respect for the corruption, dishonesty and outright fraud of the church and the literary sources which it has preserved are few. I just ask that ideas can be discussed and examined in an objective manner and within the bounds of the historical method.Peter Kirby wrote:The number of people that give any credence to your phony history can be counted on one hand. The number of people who know your personal history is a little wider and encompasses this entire forum. Hence the underwhelming amount of interest in your thesis.
No it is most certainly not arbitrary. One of the key criteria of the historical method is that any given source may be forged or corrupt. I am totally within the limits of the historical method to treat as corrupt the literary sources preserved by one specific organisation. This organisation became political at Nicaea and in conjuction with the emperor (or vise verse) published the Bible. The Nicaean Church preserved the sources known as "Eusebius", :Origen", "Irenaeus", "Hippolytus", "Tertullian", etc. One self-serving political entity had a throttle hold on the publication and preservation of literature with effect from the year c.325CE.Your exclusion of the references to these texts on other sources is completely arbitrary.
Therefore my excluding the references from the church fathers is the exclusion of one source, and is thus NOT arbitrary. Moreover in a very real political sense, the orthodoxy were the political enemies of the gnostic heretics, and the gnostic heretics were the political enemies of the orthodoxy. It is quite justifiable to simply exclude any secondary source (in this case the Nicaean church organisation) as a reliable source of information about people who were their political enemies.
EXAMPLE: Clementine literature already discussed.Oh, and yes, all the references to the Gnostics in the ante-Nicene literature were planted there by their enemies. Because that totally makes sense.
The Clementine literature was authored in the 4th century, but Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil interpolated "Origen" to lay a false trail....
- It was long believed that the early date of the Clementines was proved by the fact that they were twice quoted by Origen. One of these quotations occurs in the Philokalia of Sts. Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil (c. 360). Dr. Armitage Robinson showed in his edition of that work (1893) that the citation is an addition to the passage of Origen made by the compilers, or possibly by a later editor. The other citation occurs in the old Latin translation of Origen on Matthew. This translation is full of interpolations and alterations, and the passage of Pseudo-Clement is apparently an interpolation by the translator from the Arian Opus imperfectum in Matt.[4]
There have been a series of recent publications that seriously question the upper bounds associated with the palaeographical dating of these manuscripts and on the basis of these I reject your assertion. The most recent of these articles suggests that a 4th century upper bound date is not beyond the realms of possibility for these manuscripts from Oxyrhynchus. So again, I reject this suggestion. If you want to further discuss these articles you have my attention.Your dismissal of paleographic methods of dating manuscripts from Oxyrhynchus (several from the second and third centuries) is entirely self-serving.
For example:
Early New Testament Manuscripts and Their Dates: A Critique of Theological Palaeography: Pasquale Orsini & Willy Clarysse [2012]
- Early New Testament Manuscripts and Their Dates: A Critique of Theological Palaeography
Pasquale Orsini & Willy Clarysse
Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 88 (2012): 443-474.
Abstract
The date of the earliest New Testament papyri is nearly always
based on palaeographical criteria. A consensus among papyrologists,
palaeographers and New Testament scholars is presented in the edition
of Nestle-Aland, 1994. In the last twenty years several New Testament
scholars (Thiede, Comfort-Barrett, 1999, 2001 and Jaroš, 2006) have
argued for an earlier date of most of these texts. The present article
analyzes the date of the earliest New Testament papyri on the basis of
comparative palaeography and a clear distinction between different
types of literary scripts. There are no first-century New Testament
papyri and only very few papyri can be attributed to the (second half
of the) second century. It is only in the third and fourth centuries
that New Testament manuscripts become more common, but here too the
dates proposed by Comfort-Barrett, 1999, 2001, and Jaroš, 2006 are
often too early.
13. The Limits of Palaeographic Dating of Literary Papyri: Date/Provenance P.Bodmer II (P66): Brent Nongbri [2014]
- The Limits of Palaeographic Dating of Literary Papyri: Some Observations on the Date and Provenance of P.Bodmer II (P66)
By Brent Nongbri, Macquarie University [2014]
Abstract
Palaeographic estimates of the date of P.Bodmer II, the well-preserved Greek papyrus codex of the Gospel of John, have ranged from the early second century to the first half of the third century. There are, however, equally con- vincing palaeographic parallels among papyri securely dated to as late as the fourth century. This article surveys the palaeographic evidence and argues that the range of possible dates assigned to P.Bodmer II on the basis of palaeography needs to be broadened to include the fourth century. Furthermore, a serious con- sideration of a date at the later end of that broadened spectrum of palaeographic possibilities helps to explain both the place of P.Bodmer lI in relation to other Bodmer papyri and several aspects of the codicology of P.Bodmer II.
Even your vaunted C-14 dating, with Codex Tchacos (ca. 280 +/- 60 years as you know), is massaged and manipulated to achieve preconceived ideas.
I did not perform the C14 dating or publish the final report for the tests. The data is the data. Therefore what precisely do you mean by " massaged and manipulated to achieve preconceived ideas" ?
LC
