Indisputable Historical Facts About Early Christianity

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Jax
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Re: Indisputable Historical Facts About Early Christianity

Post by Jax »

Ben C. Smith wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 3:25 pm
Jax wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 3:17 pm Ok, my stab at it.

1: the name of the Christ is only known as an abbreviation in the early Christian texts.

2: There are no Jewish of Aramaric Christian writings in early Christianity.

3: The original language of the early Christian texts is koine Greek.

4: Petros is not a proper name.
#2 and #3 are highly controversial.
Oh? Are there Jewish and Aramaric Christian writings associated with early Christianity? I am aware of only Greek texts.

5: No Christian writings have been found in the caves at Qumran.
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Jax
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Re: Indisputable Historical Facts About Early Christianity

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John2 wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 3:56 pm 1. According to Josephus, there were Jews during the first century CE who rejected the oral Torah, agreed with "Pharisaic notions" (like resurrection of the dead), believed that "one from their country should become governor of the habitable earth," and were renowned for enduring suffering and death.

2. Josephus calls this a "fourth philosophy" of Judaism.

3. Christian writings present Jesus as living in the same time and place (Galilee) and having the same characteristics as Fourth Philosophers.

4. Josephus mentions Jesus and his brother James in Ant. 20 and places them in the first century CE.

5. So either Jesus and his followers existed and were Fourth Philosophers or someone invented them and gave them the same characteristics as Fourth Philosophers (and interpolated them into Josephus).

6. in either case the root of Christianity is the Fourth Philosophy.
5 and 6 are not actually facts but rather speculation and conjecture.

2 is a non sequitur of 1.

3 is not a given.

4 correction, Josephus mentions several Jesus' and James', equating them with the Jesus and James of the NT is conjecture without evidence.
John2
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Re: Indisputable Historical Facts About Early Christianity

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Jax wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 4:12 pm
5: No Christian writings have been found in the caves at Qumran.

Not all Christian writings use the word "Christian," and Acts says Christians were first called such in Antioch. And there are DSS writings that have the same characteristics as Christianity, particularly the Damascus Document, which mentions a place called Damascus and rejects the oral Torah and believes in a "new covenant" and the coming of a singular Messiah (and says "they will see" God's "yeshua" at the End Time, which is Jesus' name), and as Lim notes, "the [Dead Sea Scrolls] sectarians and early church were the only ones to have used the concept of 'the new covenant' from the prophecy of Jeremiah. Other Jews did not comment on 'the new covenant' nor did they use it in their writings."

And since it also mentions (and is hostile towards) a figure I think resembles Paul (in that they rejected the written Torah), I think it is not out of the realm of possibility that it was written by the kind of Christians who are said to have opposed Paul (in his letters and in Acts) and were called Ebionites after 70 CE (for which reason I call them proto-Ebionites).
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Ben C. Smith
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Re: Indisputable Historical Facts About Early Christianity

Post by Ben C. Smith »

Jax wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 4:12 pm
Ben C. Smith wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 3:25 pm
Jax wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 3:17 pm Ok, my stab at it.

1: the name of the Christ is only known as an abbreviation in the early Christian texts.

2: There are no Jewish of Aramaric Christian writings in early Christianity.

3: The original language of the early Christian texts is koine Greek.

4: Petros is not a proper name.
#2 and #3 are highly controversial.
Oh? Are there Jewish and Aramaric Christian writings associated with early Christianity? I am aware of only Greek texts.
I must be misunderstanding what you mean for #2. I took "Jewish of Aramaic" to be a typo for "Jewish or Aramaic." And yes, on the usual reconstruction Paul is a Jewish Christian, as are several other authors of NT books. Thus, Paul's writings would be Jewish Christian. (The most common other writings thus posited are Matthew, the Didache, Mark, John, James, and the Apocalypse.)

As for the original language (#3), one sees hypotheses floated all the time that many of our NT materials go back to Semitic originals, especially Q and other gospel texts posited behind the canonical few. I myself have argued that at least some of the sayings in the gospels go back to Semitic originals.
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Ben C. Smith
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Re: Indisputable Historical Facts About Early Christianity

Post by Ben C. Smith »

Or maybe by "Jewish" you meant "Hebrew?"
John2
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Re: Indisputable Historical Facts About Early Christianity

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Jax wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 4:21 pm
John2 wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 3:56 pm 1. According to Josephus, there were Jews during the first century CE who rejected the oral Torah, agreed with "Pharisaic notions" (like resurrection of the dead), believed that "one from their country should become governor of the habitable earth," and were renowned for enduring suffering and death.

2. Josephus calls this a "fourth philosophy" of Judaism.

3. Christian writings present Jesus as living in the same time and place (Galilee) and having the same characteristics as Fourth Philosophers.

4. Josephus mentions Jesus and his brother James in Ant. 20 and places them in the first century CE.

5. So either Jesus and his followers existed and were Fourth Philosophers or someone invented them and gave them the same characteristics as Fourth Philosophers (and interpolated them into Josephus).

6. in either case the root of Christianity is the Fourth Philosophy.

...

3 is not a given.



Alright, I'll change "Christian writings" to "the NT gospels." I'll give you that the time and place of Jesus isn't (as) clear in other Christian writings, but he was still someone (or something) who is said to have endured suffering and death and to have resurrected (a "Pharisaic notion") and was believed to be (or would soon be in some form) "governor of the habitable earth."

4 correction, Josephus mentions several Jesus' and James', equating them with the Jesus and James of the NT is conjecture without evidence.

But it says in Ant. 20 that Jesus was called Christ, and my first guess as to who that could be is the Christian Jesus, especially given that his brother James' death resembles the death of Jesus' brother James in Christian writings.
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MrMacSon
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Re: Indisputable Historical Facts About Early Christianity

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The main fact I can come up with is
  • the earliest know texts are the letters of Paul, first knowledge of which is tied to Marcion
I think it's up for debate whether Paul's reference to an euangelion / evangelion - good news - a gospel - is to a text or just to a concept based on selected passages LXX
  • If Paul's evangelion was actually a written text, was it just selected LXX passages or did it include other information or concepts?
  • Would Paul have written it, or did someone else?
I agree with Stephan that what is attributed to Celsus in Origen's Contra Celsus could be key, as might be some of the commentary in Justin Martyr's extant texts.

Though we don't know what the memoirs / memorabilia / euangelion / evangelion that Justin refers to are.

Determination of the veracity of the proposals that some or all of the canonical gospels post-date the Euangelion attributed to Marcion might help establish other lines of inquiry (I think I have seen Ben write in passing that that proposal is highly likely).
  • If the Marcionite Euangelion is determined to have primacy, it would seem its provenance and basis would seem to be a worthy focus.
    • Moreover, it would be interesting to contemplate or try to determine the texts that may have contributed to or been the fore-runner/s to the Marcionite Euangelion and relationships of those texts to the Pauline texts and also to early apocrypha and pseud-epigraphical texts.
Last edited by MrMacSon on Wed Apr 21, 2021 6:42 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Indisputable Historical Facts About Early Christianity

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If you permit weird Russian conspiracy theories, then nothing about ancient times is without controversy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko)

The new chronology is a pseudohistorical conspiracy theory proposed by Anatoly Fomenko who argues that events of antiquity generally attributed to the civilizations of the Roman Empire, Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt, actually occurred during the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years later.

The theory further proposes that world history prior to 1600 AD has been widely falsified to suit the interests of a number of different conspirators including the Vatican, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Russian House of Romanov, all working to obscure the "true" history of the world centered around a global empire called the "Russian Horde".
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Peter Kirby
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Re: Indisputable Historical Facts About Early Christianity

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Regardless, I have generally found that people do accept that the works of Eusebius were actually by him, and most do not dance in the moonlight of suspicion when it comes to the history of early Christianity from the fourth century and forward.
Charles Wilson
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Re: Indisputable Historical Facts About Early Christianity

Post by Charles Wilson »

Jax wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 3:17 pm3: The original language of the early Christian texts is koine Greek.
AND
Jax wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 4:12 pmOh? Are there Jewish and Aramaric Christian writings associated with early Christianity? I am aware of only Greek texts.
Here is a real problem for the Early Christian Scholars out there and it - perhaps predictably - occurs at the start of Christianity.
Suppose you have a collection of writings centered around the Middle East and Rome, in multiple languages.

Is this a "Gospel" yet?
No.

Suppose you wish to create a story around a character and a group of people who speak and are intimately familiar with Hebrew and Aramaic.
You pull together and collate a number of pages of text, beginning a Framework for your story, written in Greek, with the other pages laid out between this Framework.

Is this a Gospel yet?
No.

Someone notices that there is a Word-Play: There is a Hebrew word for "Lamb" which is found in the OT. That word is " אמּר ". It is "Immar" and it is exactly the same word as "Immer", a group found in the Groups of the Temple Worship Apparatus. You begin to map out a story. Some friends, who are really irritating, know a little History and start calling out a Phrase "Behold the Lamb-of-Yah". They laugh. They're very sophisticated.

So you write a story with all the little secret parts. Your part is written in Greek with some difficulty. Your part has expanded but there are many sections that are in Aramaic. It reminds of what you heard about that book "Daniel". Someone asks you to include a section from a Latin Text. It involves a Latin word "Soudarion". What a pain. "OK. Sure." You lay out a small Latin part at the end of your story.

Is this a Gospel yet?
No.

You translate this into a completely Greek only Manuscript with the Loan-Words and Word-Plays hidden. After all, "Lamb" in Hebrew is not the same as "Lamb" in Greek.

Is this a Gospel?
YES!!! It is now.

Though this is a Toy Analysis, you may find the Aramaic Bible Groups, the Latin Loan-Word Groups and other Groups as well who will expand Linguistic Analysis until you become sorry that you ever brought up the subject.

Was it never a Gospel until it was written solely in Greek? Why? Why not?

Jes' wondrin'.

CW
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