Would the apostolic fathers have had motivation to lie ?

[Susheel]

I was going back to my interpretation of this quote in the OP:

"Apparently there is a whole "who would die for a lie" argument that gets kicked around a lot. "

I took it to mean those who would voluntarily go to their deaths for a lie.

 

[Gazpacho]

For an example of how the whole process goes down, how messiah figures can show up one day and gain a following in particular circumstances, and how this poses a challenge to the state, read up on the origins of the Nation of Islam in the 1930s. While there are some unresolved questions about the founder, there's also just enough of a paper trail to reconstruct the outlines of his life.

 

[Craig B]

AlaskaBushPilot

To clear up possible confusion about Josephus and his references to "Jesus" you would do well to refer specifically to the Testimonium Flavianum at Antiquities 18.3.3, which is an apparent reference to the Jesus of Christianity, and note that it has been dismissed as a later interpolation since the days of Voltaire.

Because some, even respected, writers (astonishingly) take it seriously to this day. I suppose they've nothing else that even looks like a historical Jesus, so they make do with that.

By the way, it isn't impossible that there was a person underlying some of the gospel material. Wandering preacher, causes disturbance in Temple during a festival, gets whacked. But it's of little moment whether such a person existed or not.

 

[pakeha]

Short answer, yes.

 

[Greediguts]

They tell no-one because they were afraid.[/i]

At what approx. time do you feel Paul's letters were written? (Plus, what do you mean when saying "the letters of Paul came first, forged in Marcionite circles." Do you mean they created new letters to add to an already existing body of work, they added content to Paul's letters, they created the character of "Paul", or...?) Placing gMark at 130 CE is one of the latest dates I have ever seen. According to your timeline, when are the other gospels written?

"There is no earthly Jesus in this new secret religion." How does Pliny's letter prove this? Also, Pliny mentions people stating they had been a Christian three years prior (or even many years prior, "some as much as twenty years") but gave it up. How "new" do you think this cult was in 112 CE?

 

[I Ratant]

You've got a few misconceptions here. First, we have no way to be absolutely sure that there even was a Jesus. On balance, I think he probably did.

Next, the four Gospels were written several decades after this Jesus guy supposedly was executed.

Any stories about what he said or did are most likely just myths that developed in the decades after he was executed.

.
In "Free Inquiry" this month....
"Is There Independent Confirmation of What the Gospels Say of Jesus?".. by George A. Wells..
.
In summary, there is no contemporary evidence for his existence, just later (much later) compilations of legends and later additions to histories of the times, which stand out as inserts, and not by the authors of the histories.

 

[bikerdruid]

.
In "Free Inquiry" this month....
"Is There Independent Confirmation of What the Gospels Say of Jesus?".. by George A. Wells..
.
In summary, there is no contemporary evidence for his existence, just later (much later) compilations of legends and later additions to histories of the times, which stand out as inserts, and not by the authors of the histories.

link, please?

 

[Gazpacho]

"There is no earthly Jesus in this new secret religion." How does Pliny's letter prove this?

The phrase "a hymn to Christ, as to a god" suggests that it doesn't, and the doctrine of an earthly messiah was already in place by then.

 

[I Ratant]

link, please?

.
You gots to buy the magazine...
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=fi&page=all_articles
.
The gist is that prior to the 3rd Century CE, there was no mention of Christ as we've come to know of him in the literature of the church, nor any in any of the contemporary histories.
Enthusiastic editors made things up and altered older histories to fit the biases of their times.

 

[Craig B]

gazpacho

You raise interesting issues.

The phrase "a hymn to Christ, as to a god" suggests that ... the doctrine of an earthly messiah was already in place by then.

See Pliny's letter no. 10 to Trajan at http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/pliny.html
where Pliny refers to people worshipping "Christ" as God, or "a god". But no reference to the name or person of Jesus. He's saying: these people have turned a messiah figure into a god, which of course is far from being a Jewish doctrine.

That is, any concept of a messiah previously known to Pliny could only have been the standard Jewish concept, which was entirely and absolutely "earthly". So of course the "earthly" doctrine was in place by then. Previously, no other messianic doctrine had ever been in place! But now, here we have people who have divinised this conceptual figure, to Pliny's surprise and contempt. But that doesn't necessitate that Pliny accepted the historical existence of any person whom these sectarians identified as the "christ" = messiah = anointed one.

A divinised messiah doesn't necessarily imply an earthly Jesus. To the contrary; if the Christians of Bithynia had started to identify a non-existent person "Jesus" as the messiah, they would have been impelled to divinise (or at least "supernaturalise") this entity because there would have been no historical person like, say, Simon bar Kochba, to give their messiah an earthly content.

Pliny's main concern was whether or not these Christians constituted an unauthorised club or association (illegal under Trajan), and their religious doctrines he dismisses as merely "depraved, excessive superstition", in which he displays no philosophical or intellectual interest.

 

[dude]

First, I want to thank you guys as you've all been very receptive an helpful, but (there's always a but isn't there ?), I'd appreciate it if you indulged me a little further.

Can you be more specific about the motivation to lie ? Would the early church (Say around Clement's time) have had ,say, property,funds, or political clout that it'd want to hang onto ?

Is it possible that their works were fabricated altogether or altered after the fact to tow the party line ? (I'm not too sure of the dating methods)

Were there heretics who claimed to have met the apostles ?

Is there a history of cults fabricating miracles to keep their movement going ? (I've hear of people "reinterpreting" things like the rapture dates before).

 

[Gao]

Before I begin, let me state that I'm an atheist. If it were proven that Jesus didn't exist, it would have little impact on my life, and I have no need to defend the Gospels or anything.

Probably the most important resource for the nonexistence of Jesus Christ of the New Testament is found in the unadulterated writings of Josephus Flavianum, General of the army defending Jerusalem against the Romans in the seige of CE 70. He wrote both a History of the Jews and Jewish Wars. In the first, there are over 20 Jesus' mentioned, none of which bear any resemblence to the fictional Jesus. The closest example actually was tortured by Pontius Pilate and discussed in detail by Josephus. He's just a kook running around Jerusalem crying "Woe is Israel", and Pilate lets him go. He is killed by a boulder launched by a Roman Seige engine.

While it's fine that you don't believe the Testimonium Flavianum to be authentic, you really need to address it if you're going to talk about Josephus and Jesus. For those who don't know about it, it's a brief paragraph found in Antiquities that discusses Jesus, but talks about him in some odd ways that sound rather Christian. My understanding is that most scholars think that it's just an altered passage, not an entirely inserted one. You need to present some sort of argument for complete insertion if you really want to argue that Josephus did not mention Jesus.

In addition, you still need to deal with the other passage in Antiquities that references "James, the brother of Jesus, called Christ." That's pretty much universally considered authentic, and it's referenced pretty early elsewhere. Again, you're going to need a pretty good argument for this being an insertion before you can state that Josephus never, ever mentioned Jesus.

And even if you were correct that it were certain that Josephus never mentioned Jesus of Nazareth at all, so what? Jesus was probably another run of the mill apocalyptic preacher/faith healer, but with a rather populist message. If he really didn't do any miracles, then why expect much of a mention? Did Josephus routinely go on about every minor so called prophet around? You might be able to argue that the lack of mention of widespread miracles, like the unnatural darkness upon Jesus' death, is a good sign that they didn't happen, but it's rather hard to argue that the lack of mention by someone who wasn't necessarily interested in what Jesus was doing is particularly damning.

The first positive evidence that Christianity exists is found in the exchange between Pliny the Younger, prefect during the reign of the Emperor Trajan, 112 CE.

This is well after the accepted dating of most of the New Testament, so this is almost certainly false.

There is no earthly Jesus in this new secret religion.

And your evidence for this is...

Seriously, the NT documents all predate this letter, and they point towards belief in an Earthly Jesus. Heck, we know that Tacitus used Pliny the Younger as a source elsewhere (for the Vesuvius eruption, which Pliny had witnessed), so it's quite possible that he used Pliny for information on Christians, and since Tacitus mentions that "Christus" was crucified under Pontius Pilate, this indicates that the Christians of Pliny's day did believe in a physical Jesus. Even if Tacitus didn't get that information from Pliny, he didn't write that long after that letter, so it's probably still the case that those Christians believed in a physical Jesus.

But it is spreading like wildfire, and taking people and money away from the establishment religions. Pliny says it is a huge problem, but by persecuting them he temporarily checks the spread.

Money wasn't really the issue. The problems came from meeting in secret and not worshiping the state gods. Pliny was worried that this could be the basis for an insurrectionist group at some point. Keep in mind that this sort of thing was considered such an issue that Pliny was denied permission to start a fire department where he governed for fears of how powerful such an organization could get. It seems the only reason that Trajan is allowing it to exist is because having people persecuted for anonymous accusations is worse for the area.

The letters of Paul came first, forged in Marcionite circles. By around 130 CE it looks like the gospel of Mark is put together, which is taken completely from the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), mainly Isaiah.

This is far later dating than I've ever heard from anyone. Please present your evidence for everything you claimed in these sentences.

When Christianity is first introduced as having a real person in its history (the epistles forged by Marcion have a celestial, not earthly christ),

Again, present evidence that these epistles were from Marcion and didn't refer to an earthly Christ.

it has to explain why nobody has ever heard of this superstar Jesus before. It's because despite cheating death, the women are too afraid to tell anyone. So the Gospel of Mark arises out of the mist to tell this story, with nobody even willing to take credit for the writing of it at the time.

Or it was simply to hide the fact that the resurrection story was new, even if Jesus was real. Or perhaps it had a literary purpose.

There is no chain of anyone who met any earthly Jesus. The alleged apostle Paul is emphatic he had a vision on the way to Damascus, not that he met Jesus in person.

We have James' letters as well as Paul describing meeting James and the apostles. We have claims from early church fathers that they were only a couple layers removed from the sources. You need to deal with these things rather than just state that no chain exists.

The proto-catholics in Rome are the ones who started the legend of the immediate disciples, and most importantly Peter so that they could claim title to the religious throne: the Papacy.

But since those disciples are in Paul's letters, the Gospels, and Acts, they can't have come from Rome if Marcion was involved in their composition. Or are you claiming that Marcion started the Roman church?

The crazy diversity of early Christianity was suppressed for over a thousand years, beginning most importantly with the Emperor Constantine who declared Christianity the official Roman religion. Their first great council was at Nicea in 325, and by the end of that century they had completed several others that resulted in the official canon.

The councils were not about cannon at all. The books that are now part of the NT were already generall the most popular books and widely accepted books. The council of Nicaea was about affirming what was already widely believed as well as some rather specific matters that don't really concern this discussion, not about creating a religion from scratch or anything. You'll notice that only a tiny handful didn't agree with its results.

The Marcionites could not be defeated so they were co-opted with the inclusion of doctored letters of the alleged Paul and other forgeries in that name.

What? The letters of Paul were considered extremely important as early as the second century, and they were quite popular. Please actually research things before you make bizarre claims like this.

So the Marcionites are represented by the Pauline letters and the Proto Catholics are pushing the gospels. They are merged through the forgery of the book of Acts, which has Paul supposedly meeting the Jerusalem disciples.

And your evidence for this is...

There was no martyred peter or paul, and for that matter there was no Jesus Christ either.

Why do you say this? You've presented a much more bizarre, convoluted story than simply acceptence that both of these guys existed. Paul is particularly strange, since there's nothing inherently supernatural or strange about the guy aside from claims of a vision of some sort. Why do you think it's more likely that he was entirely made up?

What started Christianity can be found in the very first mention of it in the historical record: the Pliny/Trajan exchange.

But there's barely any discussion of what they believed there. How can you use that to determine what they believed?

They said **** the church. **** having to buy sacrificial animals for the authorities. We are going to eat together in our own homes and give nothing to anyone but ourselves. They pledged not to lie or steal or bear false witness too, but the main thing was keeping the fruits of their own labor instead of giving it to the rich and powerful in the name of God. That is why Christianity could not be stopped in the early going.

What? Do you actually know anything about either the early church or religion in the Roman empire? The persecutions were never about money.

So what the Roman state authority did was co-opt it instead of trying to suppress it. They made it a state monopoly religion and used it to control the people. That is meant in the most literal sense because every single person had to register in a Church Parish, and the religion became the law.

It's far more complicated than that, with various levels of toleration and persecution before Theodosius made Christianity mandatory. Heck, you even had Julian the Apostate in the middle of the fourth century trying to bring paganism to the forefront again, banning Christians from teaching.



To be brutally honest, it doesn't look like you've actually researched these issues at all. You've made some very bizarre claims and presented absolutely no evidence for them whatsoever. And you completely avoided the issue of why this particular Jesus story would be made up in the first place. Jesus obviously didn't fulfill what was believed to be messianic prophesy, with the Gospel authors rather awkwardly trying to fit him in arbitrary OT verse, claiming that those were the actual prophesy. Why do that rather than make up someone who fulfilled the prophesies better? And then the whose clearly false contradictory stories about Jesus being born in Bethlehem, yet being called a Nazorean. Why not just have him be "Jesus of Bethlehem" and not bother with that nonsense if you're just making it up? And then there's the crucifixion, which we can confirm was considered embarrassing in the early days of Christianity (Municius Felix specifically brings it up as a criticism in his Octavius, and he answers rather awkwardly by avoiding talking about the crucifixion as much as possible). Why make up something that's considered so degrading if you're making up a religion from scratch? Basically, most of these points make plenty of sense if Jesus was a real guy from Nazareth who got killed, but whose followers still claimed that he was the messiah, but it doesn't make much sense to make up from scratch. If you want to show that Jesus never existed, you're going to have to come up with a plausible reason why this story would have come about despite these odd issues, and you have not done this.

 

[Gao]

Can you be more specific about the motivation to lie ? Would the early church (Say around Clement's time) have had ,say, property,funds, or political clout that it'd want to hang onto ?

It wouldn't have been political clout, but there would have been some level of property and funds at local churches. However, I think that the most important factor is people. Isn't the power over a large group of followers motivation enough?

Is it possible that their works were fabricated altogether or altered after the fact to tow the party line ? (I'm not too sure of the dating methods)

It's of course possible, but it's possible of any ancient work. You'd need to get more specific with which particular books you want to look into if you want to look into the evidence for this sort of thing.

Were there heretics who claimed to have met the apostles ?

It's complicated. One particular issue is the Gospel of the Hebrews. According to some church fathers, the apostle Matthew originally wrote a Gospel in Aramaic with Hebrew letters, and this was translated into our surviving Matthew, though it's now agreed that our Matthew was based largely on Mark, Q, and some other sources. Many of these father identified this Hebrew Matthew with a work called The Gospel of the Hebrews, which we only have a few fragments of. This work was not considered cannon by most groups, but Jerome said the Ebionites considered it cannon, and they denied a virgin birth. So as convoluted as it is, one may be able to make the case that it's possible that Matthew wrote a work that denied a virgin birth.

As you can see, these issues are actually quite murky much of the time, unfortunately.

Edit: It's probably worth pointing out that plenty of apocryphal, heretical Gospels took the names of apostles and often directly claimed that their authorship. Since this practice was so common in the second and third centuries, one may be able to argue that there's no reason to think that it was any better in the first.

Is there a history of cults fabricating miracles to keep their movement going ? (I've hear of people "reinterpreting" things like the rapture dates before).

Miracle claims in general were pretty common back then. Even Augustus Caesar was said to be the child of Apollo, and Nero was said to have transcended death. Keep in mind that people in general weren't that skeptical back then, and they had few good sources. Also keep in mind that we don't have what the apostles actually believed: we have what unknown people decades later said they believed based on unknown sources. You'll actually notice that things like the resurrection get more elaborate over time, with the earliest story (Mark) just being an empty tomb. These apostles could have died for significantly more mundane claims than what the Gospels put forth.

 

[CurtC]

That is, any concept of a messiah previously known to Pliny could only have been the standard Jewish concept, which was entirely and absolutely "earthly". So of course the "earthly" doctrine was in place by then. Previously, no other messianic doctrine had ever been in place!

Didn't the jews consider Cyrus the Great to be a messiah?

 

[Resume]

Yes.

as to the op.

 

[Craig B]

Gao

I agree with much of what you say, but may I take issue with you on alleged Josephan references to the Christian Jesus in the Testimonium Flavianum (TF) and elsewhere?

Earlier authors dismissed the whole TF as fictitious. See http://www.ftarchives.net/foote/crimes/c4.htm

Gibbon says that this passage "was inserted into the text of Josephus between the time of Origen and that of Eusebius," and "may furnish an example of no vulgar forgery." Dean Milman can only suggest that "this passage is not altogether a forgery, but interpolated with many additional clauses," But ... Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian and Origen, never cited this passage in their controversies

even in a hypothesised shorter form, stripped of the impossibilities in the TF as it now stands, Foote means

although they were well acquainted with the writings of Josephus, and could not have overlooked such a favorable testimony to Jesus. Origen, indeed, distinctly says that Josephus "did not believe Jesus to be the Christ." The inventive genius of Eusebius first lighted on the passage, in the fourth century. ... The passage is now generally abandoned. Bishop Warburton called it "a rank forgery, and a very stupid one too." Dr. Giles also condemns it as "a forgery interpolated in the text during the third century by some pious Christian, who was scandalised that so famous a writer as Josephus should have taken no notice of the Gospels or of Christ their subject." And De Quincey, in his essay on the Essenes, emphatically says that "this passage has long been given up as a forgery by all men not lunatic."

The pre-Eusebian authors who comment on Josephus do not tell us that he wrote anything whatever about Jesus. If even a "TF lite" had been before their eyes, why didn't they tell their readers about such a thing? It's not as if they had an abundance of references to Jesus in the pages of pagan or Jewish authors, and thought that their readers would be bored or sated with them. They had none. Nothing in Philo, nothing in Justus of Tiberias.

Also, the TF interrupts the flow of the narrative. Remove it, and the chapter reads much more naturally. A discussion of outrages perpetrated by Pilate is immediately followed by an account of another similar disaster which befell the Jews. TF, in any possible form, is an intrusion.

As to the "brother of Jesus", look at the context within the passage Antiquities 20.9.1.

But this younger Ananus, who, as we have told you already, took the high priesthood, ... [and] assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and ... delivered [him] to be stoned: but ... such as were the most uneasy at the breach of the laws, they disliked what was done; ... [so] king Agrippa took the high priesthood from him, when he had ruled but three months, and made Jesus, the son of Damneus, high priest.

Remove as an obvious Christian interpolation the "who was called Christ" and we have a simple tale. A certain James is killed by order of a rogue high priest. The king deposes the priest and, to rub it in, appoints the brother of his victim, called Jesus, to take his place. That's why Josephus tells us earlier that the victim had a brother called Jesus.

There are numerous people called Jesus in Josephus' works. More than a dozen, maybe up to 20, depending on the number of multiple references to the same person. I have a list, if you want it. It was a common name.

 

[Gao]

Believe it or not, I'm actually in agreement with you about the TF probably being a comlete interpolation, though I'm not as certain about the other passage. My main issue was that the poster simply glossed over the fact that there's any controversy at all and acted as if it's a complete certainty that Josephus didn't say anything about Jesus at all. If he had given a detailed argument like you did, I probably wouldn't have said anything.

 

[bikerdruid]

.
You gots to buy the magazine...
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=fi&page=all_articles
.
The gist is that prior to the 3rd Century CE, there was no mention of Christ as we've come to know of him in the literature of the church, nor any in any of the contemporary histories.
Enthusiastic editors made things up and altered older histories to fit the biases of their times.

cool....and interesting, thanks.

 

[Mudcat]

I think you're looking at it all wrong. If a person is convinced that people will better served by what they know is a lie than there's a real possibility that they will give their life for that lie.

 

[Gao]

.
In "Free Inquiry" this month....
"Is There Independent Confirmation of What the Gospels Say of Jesus?".. by George A. Wells..
.
In summary, there is no contemporary evidence for his existence, just later (much later) compilations of legends and later additions to histories of the times, which stand out as inserts, and not by the authors of the histories.

What evidence do they present of this? For instance, Tacitus quite clearly references Jesus at the beginning of the second century, as does Celsus at the end of that century. While the latter was a work against Christianity that we only know about due to Origen's response (and it should be noted that no where does it indicate that Celsus ever doubted Jesus' existence), but the Tacitus passage hasn't been questioned by any serious historian to my knowledge, and the ironic punishments the Christians were given according to it only really make sense if the author of that passage knew about the layout of Rome during the first century.

As for independence, John is widely considered independent from the synoptics, and the Gospel of Thomas is quite independent from both of them. We don't just eliminate all sources from Christians. After all, who else would you even expect to write much about Jesus? It's still data that needs to be dealt with, even if it's problematic data.