I must have missed it, could you point it out again?
I said that the date of AD 33 (your fact no. 1) was not found in any Gospel, and the identification of the principal characters (your fact no. 3) was not the same even in the canonical Gospels.
I don't know of this "dictum" or where it appears in Aristotle. I didn't realise that you thought Aristotle was an infallible authority as well. If I were in a lighter mood I might ask you if there are
any ancient authors who you don't think were infallible, since we've already got the New Testament, everything in the Nag Hammadi library, and now Aristotle. Fortunately, though, I'm not.
Why should we assume they are not?
Because the ideas and language in them are inconsistent with the ideas and language in known authentic works or from the relevant period, mainly. Also the absence of earlier manuscripts doesn't help either.
Scholars don't "assume" that texts are inauthentic. Indeed it might surprise you and others who think that scholars are all godless bundles of cackling inconsistency, determined only to destroy everything they can lay their hands on, to find that scholars often follow the reverse principle of assuming that what the text says is true unless there is any reason not to. Thus, many scholars are prepared to suppose that the letter of James is authentic simply because there's no particular reason not to.
As I said, I don't know the provenance of what you call Aristotle's "dictum", but even if we take it as a good guide, you seem to have overlooked what the "benefit of the doubt" means. It doesn't mean we assume that what the text is saying is true. It means that we don't just assume that what it's saying is false. If there's reason to suppose that it's false, then there's nothing in the "dictum" to say we can't think that.
Your methodology appears to follow the wholly un-Aristotelian method of assuming that everything in the text is definitely true. In fact I'd say that much of your reasoning here seems to follow another of Aristotle's "dicta", from
Poetics 1460b:
Aristotle said:
Next, supposing the charge is "That is not true," one can meet it by saying "But perhaps it ought to be"...
If a person signs their name to a document, it is good enough in a court of law but not good enough for 'higher criticism' it would seem.
Well, show me a copy of (say)
The Gospel of Philip that's got Philip's signature in it, and another manuscript bearing what we know for certain is Philip's autograph, and show that they're in the same handwriting, and then your analogy might make some sense.
In neither historical scholarship nor in a court of law does the fact that a piece of paper says on it "this is by Philip" prove that it's by Philip, unless there's some means of verifying the attribution - such as by handwriting. And in both historical scholarship and a court of law, if there are good reasons to suppose that the piece of paper was not in fact written by Philip, then no-one is under any obligation to suppose that it is.
Pseudonymity was not used anywhere in the New Testament or the Nag Hammadi. There is not one shred of evidence for this at all.
I'd like to know how you can prove that there is no pseudonymity in either the New Testament or the non-canonical texts.
There is masses of evidence for pseudonymity in many of these texts. The evidence usually boils down to three main kinds:
(1) The ideas do not match those found in authentic texts.
(2) The language does not match that found in authentic texts.
(3) There is evidence that it was written at a later date.
The more evidence of this kind there is, and the more striking it is, the stronger the case for saying that there is pseudonymity.
Do you have any historical evidence?
I would appreciate a citing of some source so that we have more than just your opinion.
Well, first let me restate my question to you, which you ignored. Then perhaps we'll know exactly what we're dealing with here.
Do you believe in
any ancient pseudonymous texts? I mentioned the letters of Paul and Seneca. Do you believe that these are really the work of the apostle and the philosopher - that they really corresponded with each other? I also mentioned the works of Dionysius the Areopagite. Do you believe that these are genuinely the work of a first-century Christian, a convert of St Paul?
Or again: do you think that the treatise
De mundo, which bears the name of Aristotle but which is an eclectic work containing ideas current in the first or second centuries CE - hundreds of years after Aristotle was alive, and including Stoic ideas which didn't exist in his lifetime - is really the work of Aristotle? Or how about the
Epinomis, written as a sort of appendix to Plato's
Laws and explicitly contradicting them? Do you think that that was really written by Plato?
If you think that any of these texts were not really written by the people whose names they bear, then we can have a discussion about why you're prepared to accept that they are pseudonymous but not any of the gnostic or New Testament texts. If, on the other hand, you think that they must all be by the people they claim to be by, then we'll need to work out in a bit more detail why.
Let me say it again - I do not use ambiguous texts because we cannot verify its source as authentic.
We can, and you agreed, verify the source of the New Testament and I would add the Nag Hammadi.
I agreed to no such thing. I said only that the text of the New Testament has been reliably transmitted. I didn't say that we know who wrote it.
You can't use the word "verified" with such loose abandon in this kind of context. It could mean all kinds of different things, as this illustrates here. If you want to use the word "verified" to mean "the text hasn't been irretrievably altered by later copyists", then I'm more than happy to say that both the New Testament and the Nag Hammadi texts are "verified". If you want to use it to mean that we know who wrote them or that what they claim is true, then I am not.
In your opinion of course. To me it sounds like a master of truth who holds the keys to the universe itself as well as the simple - public - Sermon on the Mount.
That is interesting: do you, then, think that all the teaching attributed to Jesus in the Nag Hammadi texts is not only stuff that Jesus really said, but actually
true?
Do you also believe that Jesus really didn't leave footprints, or blink, or have genitalia, as the author of the Acts of John says in the passage I quoted above?
Paul`s writings differ from John`s and Luke. That does not mean the authors are lying as to authorship.
Paul doesn't contradict John or Luke. John or Luke certainly offer very different portraits of Jesus, and this is one of the reasons why most scholars think that John's Gospel does not give a very authentic picture of the real Jesus (on the grounds that Luke is probably closer to the real Jesus, for various reasons). As for authorship, neither the Third nor the Fourth Gospel makes any claim to authorship.
Someone risking their life by writing the book itself is not impressive evidence?
In my world it is.
How on earth can you know that the author of the Gospel of Mary was risking his or her life by writing said book? Where do you get this from?
I'd remind you that our text of that Gospel comes from the fourth century, a time when no-one was risking their life by writing Christian books, even heretical ones.
You're arguing in circles again, taking your conclusion as one of your premises. You're making "This author was risking his/her life to write this book" as a premise, which supports "This author was telling the truth". And that in turn supports "This author was really who he claims he/she was", which in turn supports "This author was risking his/her life to write this book." You can surely see why this is a poor argument.
I did not say they were an "independent tradition." I said they were external to the scripture that has not been seen for almost two thousand years.
Well, what is it you're trying to argue then? This isn't making any sense. If they're not independent of the canonical Gospels, but take information from them, then what use are they as evidence? You can't point to the incredible agreements between them and the canonical Gospels, because these are explained by the fact that they copied the canonical Gospels! What good is it that they're "external to the scripture" or that they haven't been seen for sixteen centuries? How does that make them better historical sources?
In addition - if they are not written by the apostles (as you claim) then we have hundreds more of confirming eyewitnesses.
No, because if they're not written by apostles, but by people only claiming to be apostles, then what reason is there to suppose that they're written by eyewitnesses at all?
Unless you conclude they are all, all of the hundreds and possibly thousands of eyewitnesses all lying.
I would say that in the case of the texts, they're not eyewitness, and that they're writing pseudonymously.
In the case of the first Christians who actually had the resurrection experiences, I would certainly not say that they were lying; I would say that they were obviously sincere, but in my opinion they were probably mistaken.
I wish people wouldn't think in such dichotomies all the time. Some people have such a black-and-white view of the world that the only possibilities they can countenance are (1) someone telling the perfect truth, and (2) someone telling an outright lie. These are not the only possibilities.
Paul quotes Jesus and the apostles use the same sayings showing a uniform and cohesive rendering of the common sayings amongst early Christians. These are smattered throughout the New Testament and the Nag Hammadi.
Yes, Paul apparently quotes Jesus a fair few times, mainly on ethical and eschatological matters. The fact that he is apparently independent of the Gospels (and vice versa) is a strong argument that these traditions are very ancient and very probably authentic.
The fact that the Nag Hammadi texts quote the same things proves nothing other than that their authors had read the New Testament.
You do not know that and in fact, the authors say otherwise, you are guessing.
It's a pretty good guess, though. How do you know it's not true?
It's all about the weight of probability. Which is more likely as an explanation for the appearance of material from the Gospels in the Nag Hammadi texts:
(1) The Nag Hammadi texts were written by apostles, somehow using the technical vocabulary of gnostic myths of the second and third centuries CE, and expressing key gnostic beliefs such as the multitude of Aeons in the Pleroma, the non-humanity or non-suffering of Jesus, and the evil and disorder of the physical world and its creator; and they do not appear in the New Testament, even though the early Christians held apostolic authority to be one of the key tests for canonicity, because the Christian church other than the gnostic sects uniformly rejected these texts on the grounds of being heretical and non-apostolic, two judgements in which they were mistaken.
(2) The Nag Hammadi texts were written by gnostics in the second, third, and fourth centuries.
I say that (2) is much more probable than (1). The only argument you've given to the effect that (1) is more probable than (2) is, basically, that we should believe an author when he identifies himself. I can't say anything more to that until you've answered the question about whether you believe that any texts are pseudepigraphal at all.
Apples and oranges. You are talking about a single author writing a single series of books.
That's not relevant to the argument at all. You're arguing that if a later text agrees with an earlier one, this is evidence that the events they described really happens. Fleming and Faulks are certainly a counter-example to that principle. If this isn't the principle you're appealing to, then please explain what principle you
are appealing to. The more explicit you make your argument the easier it is for everyone.
Here we have a set of two libraries of books written by multiple authors and all cohesive.
Two libraries, yes; many authors, yes. All cohesive? I say not, given the examples I've already provided of the very different viewpoints of the different books. Even if they were cohesive, that would still prove nothing if the later authors had read the works of the earlier ones. It would show only that they agreed with those earlier authors (at least on those elements that they quote with approval). It wouldn't show that any of this material is actually true.
Why? Because I believe the authors according to the rule of thumb of the historical method?
What rule of thumb? To believe everything a text says? When did that become the rule of thumb of the historical method?
To say "we know that this text is written by an apostle because he says so right there in the text itself" is so breathtakingly naive it's hard to take it seriously. If you really do mean it seriously then I must return to the same question I asked before - whether you believe
all such self-identifications.
It would seem the historical method is handy and dandy unless applied to scripture - then - all bets are off? How does that make sense?
It doesn't make sense, but then it's not actually the case.
Biblical scholars study the biblical text in precisely the same way as all textual historians study their texts. There's no difference. If you can give me an example where mainstream biblical scholarship operates in a different and more biased way from mainstream non-biblical scholarship, then we can have a meaningful discussion about your complaint here - but until you do that it's nothing more than a baseless complaint.
You are right of course, I had a brain fart.
I meant the Lost Books of the Bible and other sources that cannot be verified. I include the NT and Nag Hammadi as solid histoically and verifiable.
I don't know what you mean by "Lost Books of the Bible" - everything that was ever in the Bible is still in there (at least, in the Catholic Bible), and anything that had even a remote chance of being in the Bible but wasn't has never been lost. If you're talking about the Nag Hammadi books, they never had any chance of being in the Bible and have nothing to do with the Bible as far as date and composition go.
As for "solid historically and verifiable", as I said before, those are very vague terms.
Was it a fundy conspiracy that saw two thousand years was the ripe time to spring their clever trap?
I don't know what you're trying to say here.
If you're implying that the Nag Hammadi books would, if true, confirm fundamentalist Christianity, I suggest you try the experiment of showing the passages from them that I quoted above to a fundamentalist Christian and seeing what he says.
No it does not - unless you assume hundreds and thousands are liars.
I wonder, it makes more sense to you that they were all deluded, hundreds and thousands?
Where are you getting this "hundreds and thousands" from? I thought we were talking about the extra-canonical texts such as the Nag Hammadi literature. There aren't hundreds and thousands of those.
Does it make sense to me that the authors of these books lied about their identity? Absolutely. People did that all the time in antiquity. If you doubt me, just have a look in the Bible:
2 Thessalonians 2:1-2 said:
As to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we beg you, brothers and sisters, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as though from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord is already here.
Here, the author warns his readers away from other letters that are spuriously attributed to him. This is especially interesting because a majority of scholars (not all) believe that 2 Thessalonians itself is spurious: if this is so, then we have someone pretending to be Paul, warning people not to be taken in by
other people pretending to be Paul! It's especially interesting if the letter he has in mind is 1 Thessalonians, which is universally accepted as genuine - in that case, the fake Paul is trying to warn people away from the real Paul.
Let's set that aside, though, and assume that the author here really is Paul. It doesn't really matter. The point is that, whoever he is, he warns people against letters written by imposters. This indicates that such letters existed. So there's nothing at all odd about thinking that the Nag Hammadi books or others were spurious in this way. We know that such things existed.
Also, you continue to use prejudiciously emotive and pejorative language. It's not necessarily the case that pseudonymity is "lying". As I said before, it was a common practice in antiquity and did not necessarily involve an attempt to deceive. People then did not think as we do now. When someone wrote in the name of another author, they may well have been simply trying to say what they thought that author would have said if he'd addressed this topic. This may be the case with some of the writings attributed to Plato. Alternatively, they may have been trying to summarise the teachings of a particular author, and so write under his name to express the idea that it's his teachings they are expressing. Paul's letter to the Ephesians (which most scholars believe is not by Paul) may well come under this category. Or they may have been writing as a sort of rhetorical exercise: imagining a situation in which a certain author wrote about something and writing it themselves, just to practise that kind of writing. Remember that ancient education revolved to a large extent around rhetoric and mastering different styles of writing; being able to ape another author was an important element of this. The correspondence of Paul and Seneca probably falls into this kind of category - certainly it's hard to believe anyone ever thought it was genuine, although Jerome apparently did.
Does this kind of thing count as "lying"? Perhaps you think it does, if the only possible categories you acknowledge are "truth" on the one hand and "lies" on the other. But that is not a very historically sensitive way of looking at it.
You are contradicting yourself again.
First you say they are Gnostic and use completley differing language and word images and do not sound anything at all like Jesus and are therefore moot.
Now;if they are different and describe the same historical events they would provide value to authentic recounting.
Couild you choose a position please?
Certainly. The gnostic texts take their basic setting, including characters and so on, from the Gospels. They also use teachings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels as the basis for some of the teachings they attribute to him. We can see this from the fact that they sometimes quote the Gospels word for word. Here's an example from the Gospel of Philip:
The Gospel of Philip said:
"Flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God" (1 Co 15:50). What is this which will not inherit? This which is on us. But what is this, too, which will inherit? It is that which belongs to Jesus and his blood. Because of this he said "He who shall not eat my flesh and drink my blood has not life in him" (Jn 6:53). What is it? His flesh is the word, and his blood is the Holy Spirit. He who has received these has food and he has drink and clothing.
The text clearly quotes 1 Corinthians and John's Gospel. (There are other quotes from the New Testament in this text.) This indicates that the author had read the New Testament, or at least the books that he quotes. So he was not writing independently of them; if he says things that corroborate them (such as these sayings), we cannot take him as an independent witness, because he's just copying what he's read.
However, in the other material that these texts present, where they give teaching that is not found in the New Testament, which uses technical terminology and ideas that did not exist in the time of the New Testament, and which directly contradicts key New Testament teachings such as the goodness of the world, the creative powers of God, and the true humanity and suffering of Jesus, we can see that they date from a later time and a very different context from the world of the New Testament. They come from the world of late ancient gnosticism. That is a world which had incorporated some teachings of the New Testament and of early Christianity but which had developed these ideas or introduced new ones that the first Christians, including the authors of the New Testament, would not have agreed with.
Even if you disagree with this assessment, I hope you don't think it's self-contradictory.
Again; could hundreds of people conspire to do that?
Probably not, but who said they did? First, we're not talking about hundreds of people. In the case of the Nag Hammadi library, we're talking about a couple of dozen texts from more or less the same community. I can certainly believe that their authors "conspired", as you put it. Even better, I can believe that the later authors consciously wrote in the same tradition, and developing the same ideas, as the earlier ones, creating a consistent body of writing for that community. That's no "conspiracy", that's just the normal process of writing in a particular tradition that many religious communities do. (Compare, for example, the writings of the medieval Victorines - different authors and different ideas, but common themes that were obviously important to that community.) If you think this is a wildly unlikely hypothesis I'd be interested to know why.
You missed the point; It cannot be dated to 2-3 centuries after Jesus, it was clearly composed centuries before.
Plato's
Republic was written before the time of Jesus. The redaction of Plato's
Republic found at Nag Hammadi, however, was not. But why does it matter?
It proves that not all of the books in the Nag Hammadi were composed centuries after Jesus. Therefore; we must go by the authors and historical crosschecks.
Certainly - no-one would dispute that. I'm not saying that these books cannot be apostolic simply because they came from a library that was somehow incapable of containing books from the apostolic era. I'm saying that study of the contents of the books show that they do not come from the apostolic era. This is what the vast majority of scholars say. Why should I disagree with them? Until now, the only people I have ever heard saying otherwise, either online or anywhere else, are conspiracy theorists of the "blood and grail" variety who think that these books tell the "real" story of Jesus and early Christianity and prove that the "official" New Testament and the "official" story of Christianity is all a lie, probably made up by Constantine, and which is undermined by the "real" story of the gnostic Gospels. I've never encountered anyone before trying to argue that they're real and authentic
and yet actually corroborate the canonical Gospels.
The days of citing Aristotle as an infallible authority against a contrary opinion ended some time in the seventeenth century, you know. Give me reasons, evidence, and argument, not unreferenced quotations without any explanation.
Fiction and nonfiction are assigned different numbers in the Dewey Decimal System.
That is certainly true, but it doesn't address what I said. If there's an argument lurking behind that cryptic comment, please make it explicit. I'm not going to waste time engaging with arguments that I'm supposed to guess. I've taken the considerable time and effort to try to state as clearly as I can why I think the things I think; you might show the same courtesy towards me.
That is all you see?
You are familiar with the words of Jesus are you not? "Having eyes, they see not."
This is not an argument.
The early Christians had a secret decoding and transmitting device beyond time and space?
They knew that two thousand years was the time they needed to bring out their vast conspiracy?
I don't see an argument here either.
There is only one - and one only - contradiction in the resurrection story. That is what the women saw at the tomb.
The real question is, if they truly saw angels and a pulse of radiant energy that opened a gateway, like a wormhole, what would you expect them to see?
I don't know what they'd see if Captain Kirk were standing there either, although I suppose it's possible they'd mistake him for the gardener. Again, I detect no argument or presentation of evidence in what you've said here.
It is not reasonable to assume thousands of people are deluded and conspired to fabricate at risk of life and limb; especially considering the mountain of literal evidence.
I don't know what you mean by "literal evidence". I have also indicated that you're jumping the gun by assuming that the authors of all those texts, authentic or spurious, were risking their lives to write them. And finally, I've also indicated that your dichotomy between "truth" and "deliberate fabrication" is a false one on two levels. Regarding the original religious experiences that underlay belief in Christ's resurrection, it is a false dichotomy because people might have been sincere but mistaken, as many people demonstrably are about many things, religious and otherwise. Regarding the claims to authorship by texts such as the Nag Hammadi texts, it is a false dichotomy because in antiquity writing under someone else's name was not necessarily regarded as fabrication in the way that we would think of it today.