Hans, I can't even tell exactly what alleged claim allegedly by smartcooky you think you're ranting against, because I don't see where you ever said exactly what it is or where he actually claimed it. All I see him claiming is a set of yes/no answers to those three questions based on the Nicene creed, which you're acting like is not really his actual claim. So, what is, and where was that, and how was his boiling it down to those three questions not a concession of the errors any of his other previous claims that you seem to still be ranting against? And if that is in fact all he's claiming, then what's this other stuff you're ranting against from somewhere else, and why?
* * *
dejudge...
You don't have to be a biblical scholar to find out that there is no corroborative historical evidence anywhere to show that any so-called Pauline Epistle was written between 50-60 CE.
Well, you do at least need to have done more digging into the history of it than most people do. Most places we casually look, we get the general impression that the experts' consensus is that Paul wrote in the 50s, Mark was written around 90, and other canonical gospels were written after that up to sometime in the first quarter or so of the second century. If there is evidence that these dates are earlier than reality, it must be somewhere that most people don't look. (And what you've given us here does not make it appear that you have found anything to really contradict the general impression anyway.)
But in any case...
Historical evidence is necessary to argue for an HJ.
Simply going along with what would appear to be the general conclusion of historians rather than digging to find how that might be wrong is not participating in a conspiracy to support religious claims that that those conclusions don't even support anyway. You're treating the idea of slightly earlier origin of some books of the Bible as if it were an argument for historicity of Jesus, which it simply is
not.
And on the timing of those books and your arguments that they are later than we thought...
The character called Saul/Paul is not found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the works of Philo, Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny the younger.
There's no reason why he would be.
- The Dead Sea Scrolls belonged to a separate community that didn't care about what the people we would now call Christians were doing or saying. Jesus and the gospels aren't in there either. It's Old Testament stuff (their version of the Old Testament). There's a bit or two that might mention Christians, but from an outsider's cursory point of view.
- Philo died in 0050.
- Josephus wasn't concerned to dig for what would have been such obscure details of the inner workings of the doom cults beyond just barely mentioning that they existed. Even someone who accepted the Testimonium Flavianum as real wouldn't have any reason to expect him to have ever had anything to say about Paul.
- Tacitus and Suetonius didn't care about who the big names in Christianity way off in the east were or the content of any arguments between them (which is all the Epistles were), because they were writing about Rome. They only mentioned that Christians even existed when that was part of one of the stories about Nero.
- Plinius was a lawyer who wasn't very familiar with Christians and wrote about them only to ask what to do with them in court. That's not exactly a thorough analysis of the thoughts of contrasting Christian authors/leaders.
People who argue Pauline Epistles were composed between 50-60 CE generally use Acts of the Apostles a known work of fiction in which Saul/Paul's conversion was fabricated .
The allegedly fictional nature of the writing (whether or not it also included pieces of reality along with the fiction) does not affect its timing.
It must also be noted that even the author of Acts made no claim at all that Saul/Paul wrote any Epistles to any Church anywhere and there is not a reference to a single verse from any Epistle in Acts.
OK. Why would they have needed to talk about that? The Epistles were letters to church leaders. Acts is about the act(ion)s of a group of people including Paul. Why does a book about stuff that some group of people did need to mention that one of them once wrote a letter to somebody else who isn't even in the story?
Christian writers in the 2nd century like Justin Martyr, Theophilus, Aristides, Athenagoras, Tatian and Municius Felix had no idea that there was a character called Saul/Paul and wrote nothing at all about him or used his Epistles.
This might be getting somewhere... if we have any reason to believe that Christians at that time, particularly those who weren't in the churches which the letters were addressed to, would/should necessarily have been circulating them and mentioning them in their own writings. What fact that I'm unaware of contradicts the possibility that the letters had been written by then but just weren't so famous yet, or were known but didn't seem to need to be commented on?
The Wikipedia article you provided is riddled with baseless claims, dates and propaganda to support the HJ argument.
OK, that's just flat-out either lying or delusional (possibly of the paranoid/conspiratorial kind?). No matter how many wrong claims it might contain (none of which you have debunked yet), it's perfectly clearly
not trying "to support the HJ argument".
The earliest existing manuscripts of the so-called Pauline Epistles P46 are dated by paleography circa 175-225 CE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_46
There is simply no existing manuscripts of Acts dated to 90AD. The earliest manuscripts of Acts are dated by paleography to around the mid 3rd century and later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_45
One of those is described as "early", and the other is described as "
one of the oldest". Neither is described as the earliest/oldest one.
To debunk an earlier date, you would need to find where that came from and counter that, not just find something else that happens to be a bit later.
Saul/Paul is a total fiction character fabricated as a witness to the non-historical resurrection.
Claiming that somebody who was never supposed to have witnessed that event was invented to be an alleged witness to that event does not help your credibility.
Except it is my understanding that Marcion of Sinope in and around 150CE had created a biblical canon which included Luke and half of the Epistles. And others in this thread have said that by 150AD, Marcion was considered a heretic. How do we square this?
If Marcion was a heretic then he would not have gLuke and Epistles which completely contradict his teaching.
There is nothing stopping anybody from saying that a book is "canon" while not agreeing with the contents of that book (especially if the contradicting bits of that book weren't in it yet at the time and the original core had no such contradiction... but also even if they were and it did). We're surrounded by that phenomenon all the time today.
It is total nonsense that the character called Paul was the earliest writer of the Jesus stories because it is claimed in Galatians he had revelations from a supposed resurrected dead.
Those two things don't contradict each other.
You also have no corroborative historical evidence at all to show that Paul was actually a figure of history in any century.
The Epistles under the name of Paul are products of fiction, forgeries and false attribution
From what I've seen before, most historians say about half of the Epistles are later fakes but not the other half. Whoever wrote the other half, we might as well call that person "Paul". What do you know of that contradicts that?
The Wikipedia article dated ACTS to be around 90AD. I'd like to see a timeline that lists probable dates for each of the books of the New Testament and cites for each.
You can put together a list yourself. Each book of the New Testament has its own Wikipedia page, typically with the generally accepted date of origin in the first sentence or in a little box off to the right and several inches down. And the one on the Epistles covers all of them at once.
