Real biblical scholars, the scholars willing to take a scientific view of the Bible know that the Pauline epistles and Acts comes before the Gospels.
No, Acts was written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke, so it does not predate the Gospels.
Paul's letters predate the Gospels (and Acts). But the authors of the Gospels had not read the letters of Paul, or if they had, they show no knowledge of them. The Gospels and Paul therefore represent independent sources for early Christianity. There are lots of theological differences between them.
Also, I recently found in a local community college library a book that is available nowhere else; not amazon, not any other library; it's called from Daniel to paul; it's dated to 1960 if I recall correctly. It has much the same view as Robert Eisenman; Robert Eisenman doesn't not refer or know about it. The college is called Grossmont college. Point is that this Herodian viewpoint has been independently arrived at.
Well, great, but that isn't evidence for its truth - any more than the independence of (say) Matthew and Paul is evidence for the truth of Christianity!
Religion not a conspiracy? You must not have read 'The Golden Bough' either! In it, Frazier shows evidence that religion is a little bit of a socio-political generalization of a previous past about magic(a kind of pseudo-science).
No, I haven't read
The Golden Bough - there's too much contemporary scholarship to keep up with to spend time reading century-old stuff. However, if religion is a sort of pseudo-science, that doesn't make it a conspiracy. A conspiracy is a deliberate fabrication. Now there have been religions that were deliberate fabrications; the cult of Glycon comes to mind. But if you're going to say that
all religions started this way - Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism, Judaism, etc. - then that's conspiracy theory territory, because there can't possibly be any good evidence for such a vast sweeping claim. You haven't even given any evidence at all for this being the case with Christianity.
More? I take it you haven't bothered to read my "Gospel of Truth" yet!
I did skim through it, in fact. But I'm only going to deal with what's presented in this thread as I don't want to get swamped.
But, I'll pick out one quote,
"Diodorus of Sicily is interesting here because hes b.c. time and notes that hell is made up to keep people inline(book 1.2.2 -For if it be true that the myths which are related about Hades, in spite of the fact that their subject-matter is fictitious, contribute greatly to fostering piety and justice among men,)." There's other quotes from others back then that indicate much the same idea for the use of religion. And I have some other quotes at the end from Eusebius as well.
Yes, certainly the idea that religious beliefs were invented as a cynical exercise is an ancient idea. But that doesn't make it true. Diodorus of Sicily, as far as I know, doesn't present any actual evidence to back this claim up. It's a bit like the famous argument of Euhemerus, that the gods were originally just normal people, and they got mythologised over the centuries until everyone forgot that they were human beings and thought that they were gods. This too is an attempt to give a naturalistic explanation for the origins of religion. But note two things about it: first, it's incompatible with the theory that religion began as a conspiracy; and second, Euhemerus gives no evidence for it. It's just an assertion. The same with Diodorus, and, I'm afraid, the same with you. Evidence that other people believe something is not evidence that that belief is true.
Here's some recent other stuff that might be of interest to you Plotinus,
"I recently got interested in reading "The Jesus Wars". I periodicaly check out amazon books to see what books are suggested by others. I had noticed this book before, but for various reasons, including just being tired of reading biblical stuff and wanting to read other stuff, well, I didn't buy it. Recently, I rechecked it out; read some reviews, and noticed something that picked my interest in it more than ever. If was remarked that Alexandria and Antioch were the two main centers of the Christian religion fighting around 400 A.D. to determine what Christianity really was.
And how is that relevant to what we're talking about? Whatever was going on in AD 400 has no bearing on what was going on in the first century. Moreover, it's a daft over-exaggeration to say that Alexandria and Antioch were "fighting to determine what Christianity really was"; the supposed tension between them at that time revolved around arguments about (a) what exegetical method to use in interpreting the Bible, whether allegorical or typological; and (b) how to relate the divine and the human parts of Christ to each other. However, I think that both of these controversies are way overblown; there was no practical difference between allegorical and typological exegesis, and everyone pretty much agreed on how Christ was constituted, they just disagreed over what to call the bits. Not only that, but the notion that these controversies were all about Alexandria on the one hand and Constantinople on the other (I don't know why you say "Antioch") was exploded decades ago. After all, the most "Alexandrian" theologian of them all was Gregory of Nyssa, and as far as I know he never went near the place.
I still haven't read the book(I'm still reading another book; althiough, I'm thinking I can go ahead and knock out "The Jesus Wars" quickly enough after reading another book which I should be able to read quickly enough), but something else about it made me rewatch John Romer's "Testament". The whole "how four patriarches, two kings" and so on fought for what christianity was to be. In the second to last episode, at the very beginning, John Romer is in Ravenna. There is a tomb, a Christian one of a female Roman ruler. I can't get what John says her name is - a Galla something. The major thing I noticed that got me kind of excited was the names of the Gospels in the artwork. It doesn't just say "Gospel of Mark". It doesn't say gospel at all, but that doesn't matter. It has the four gospels named. Mark is spelled Marcus. I thought, maybe that name spelled the way it is could lead to some historical person - the author of the Gospel of Mark. What Marcus guys do we have? By now, you know where I'm going. I checked out Marcus Aurelius's wiki.
I'll just mention a few curiosities I found in his wiki; He's a major stoic philosopher. Everyone wants to know why/where the Stoic philosophy could possibly have come from; well, maybe.
Another curiosity is that Justin Martyr seems to mention him in his famous First Apology. That's two pretty big pieces of evidence beyond his name which anyone would just laugh off. So, that's three interesting correpondences."
Some more of note just from the wiki, Mr Aurelius also is a bit of a Homer epics scholar as well. There was recent excitement from some author about correspondences between Homer's epics and the Gospel of Mark. I haven't read it, but considering Mr Aurelius is also a Homer epics scholar apparently, that's another piece of evidence for my recent idea.
I'm sorry, but this is out-and-out crazy, and I suspect that you know it really. Marcus Aurelius lived a century after the time when Mark's Gospel was written, and he persecuted Christians. There's not a trace of Stoic philosophy in Mark's Gospel. Justin Martyr mentions him because he's writing
to him to plead for clemency on behalf of the Christians. And "Marcus" was a common name in antiquity. Mark's Gospel is so-called because Christians in the second century believed it had been written by John Mark, an early Christian who appears in Acts (chapters 12, 13, and 15).
I don't know what supposed correspondences there are between Homer and Mark, but given that pretty much anyone who spoke Greek in the first century would have read Homer, you don't need to find any "Homer expert" to explain these correspondences.
Could one assume that Christianity is a democratic religion, or a religion that was brought about by infighting and bribery? There are a lot of interesting conspiracy scenarios out there regarding early Christianity. None of them are going to bring down the Religion known as Christianity.
Much less those who do not regard Christianity as a religion.
There was certainly infighting in early Christianity, though I don't know of any evidence of bribery. But then there always is, in any movement, especially after the first or second generations have passed on and people have different ideas about what direction to take things. Just look at the Franciscan order, for example, or the Soviet revolution.
However, I'm struck by an interesting thing about this new wave of conspiracy theories. In the past, anti-Christian polemics typically focused on the
differences between the different strands of early Christianity. This idea had its roots in early nineteenth-century German scholarship on the New Testament, such as that of Baur, which argued that there was a major split in the early church between those who wanted Christianity to be a branch of Judaism (the followers of James) and those who wanted it to go beyond Judaism (the followers of Paul). The theory was that this great division has been whitewashed in the New Testament as we have it, especially in Acts, which presents Paul and James as good friends; but the cracks are still there if you look hard enough. And so the traditional belief of Christians that the apostles faithfully preserved the message of Jesus and wrote it reliably in the New Testament is false; the New Testament is actually a hodgepodge of competing voices, a shouting tumult under which the real voice of Jesus is barely discernible.
But now the new conspiracy theorists are saying the exact opposite. Now we're being told that the New Testament speaks with a single voice, that of Paul. Paul, it turns out, invented the whole thing, and not only wrote the letters attributed to him but somehow inspired all of the other New Testament writings as well, even the ones that disagree with him.
The new conspiracy theory seems to me much less plausible than the old one. The old one was based on real scholarship and the real fact that there was, actually, quite a lot of disagreement between the early Christians, which we can see recorded in the New Testament - although probably not as much disagreement as the old conspiracy theorists thought. The new conspiracy theory is actually more like traditional Christianity, in that it thinks the whole New Testament is in basic agreement and speaks with a single voice. It feels very odd to read anti-Christian polemics that are insisting on these traditional Christian beliefs that modern scholars reject.
." There's other quotes from others back then that indicate much the same idea for the use of religion. And I have some other quotes at the end from Eusebius as well.
