_random_
Jewel Runner
I was referring to my post earlier:
That was the interpretation my New Testament professor offered, and I found it convincing enough. Although I suppose "chiasmus" might not have been quite the right word there.
[RD] Ask a Theologian V
- Thread starter Plotinus
- Start date
That was the interpretation my New Testament professor offered, and I found it convincing enough. Although I suppose "chiasmus" might not have been quite the right word there.
kiwitt
Road to War Modder
Did Constantine create Christianity? - this thesis seems to think so - http://www.mountainman.com.au/essenes/thesis.pdf
It's about as plausible as this.
The thesis is ingenious but it doesn't even begin to make its case. The author spends a lot of time dismissing the archaeological evidence for pre-Constantinian Christianity. I'm not competent to evaluate the success of this dismissal. But even if he's correct, he's not entitled to conclude that pre-Constantinian Christianity didn't exist. He still needs to explain why his theory is a better explanation for the literary evidence, and he doesn't do that. The overall argument is along the lines of "X is unproven, therefore Y" and "The evidence is consistent with Y, therefore Y" - and these are classic conspiracy theory ways of arguing.
The closest he comes to a positive argument for his theory, as far as I can tell, is his claim that the first references we have to Bibles (Old and New Testaments) bound in a single codex are post-Constantine. He claims that if Christianity were older than Constantine we'd have references to such Bibles from before. This is a staggeringly weak argument. First, it's not obvious why early Christians should be expected to have bound the Bible in such a way, except that we in modernity are used to thinking of the Bible as a single book; he's anachronistically projecting modern expectations onto antiquity. Second, such volumes would have been very expensive, and pre-Constantinian Christians were not known for their wealth. Third, codices were not very popular before Constantine anyway - they only became as popular as scrolls at the beginning of the fourth century.
He wants us to believe that, on Constantine's orders, Eusebius of Caesarea masterminded the forging of all "pre-Constantinian" Christian literature, from the New Testament onwards. This is obviously an intrinsically highly implausible claim which requires some pretty good evidence to support it, but as I've said, he gives barely any evidence at all. He doesn't state who he thinks actually carried out this work of forgery (surely not Eusebius single-handedly?) or how they did it. Most damningly, he does not (and cannot) explain why, if all the pre-Nicene literature was forged on Constantine's orders, it doesn't reflect Nicene Christianity. For example, why would the texts fraudulently assigned to Tatian of Syria and Tertullian teach that there was a time when the Father generated the Son, which is contrary to Nicene Christianity? Why do we not find, in Tertullian's writings, an insistence on the power and authority of the emperor as the true representative of God, as found in Constantine's own Oration to the Saints? Why, indeed, do Tertullian's later writings attack the Catholic Church and support Montanism? Why would a Eusebius commissioned to support a cult invented to back up Constantine's military power - a feature of his rule that the author repeats constantly - have invented Tertullian's On the Crown, which denounces the military and insists that no Christian would ever join it? Why would Eusebius and his team invent this stuff when they could have invented stuff that supported Constantine's own views much more consistently? Why would they have written the Book of Revelation with its stinging attacks on the Roman Empire when they were trying to create a mythology to support the authority of that very empire? And so on and so on for pretty much every pre-Nicene text.
Rather extraordinarily, the author is prepared to accept that Origen was a real person who really wrote commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, but thinks that all of his commentaries on the New Testament (and presumably his voluminous doctrinal works) were forged by Eusebius and co. No-one who has actually read Origen could possibly think this, because Origen's Old Testament commentaries are full of distinctively Christian material. The forgers would have had to rewrite them quite extensively. Moreover, absolutely no textual evidence is given to support the claim that (say) Origen's commentary on Genesis was written by a different person from his commentary on Matthew. It's simply asserted because the theory demands it. That again is classic conspiracy theory thinking.
Interestingly, the author is familiar with Rufinus' claim that Origen's works were interpolated by heretics, but that doesn't support his case at all. Rufinus thought this because Origen's works contained ideas that didn't match Rufinus' own notions of orthodoxy. The "interpolations" that he removed from his translations were not the references to Jesus (or whatever) but claims about the resurrection body and the salvation of demons. Rufinus certainly didn't think that most of Origen's works were outright forgeries - if he had, he wouldn't have spent so much time translating them.
I rather enjoyed the section where the author ingeniously asserts that Arius was condemned not for teaching that the Son is not consubstantial with the Father but for trying to expose all of this fraud. He makes out that the Arian catchphrase "There was a time when he was not" refers not to the divine generation of the Son but to the invention of Jesus by Constantine. Unfortunately even the most casual glance at Arius' Thalia shows that Arius believed not that Jesus was a recent fabrication but that God the Father created the Son before the beginning of history. There is no textual evidence at all to support the author's interpretation of Arianism, and he doesn't try to give any. Moreover, he's obviously unfamiliar with recent scholarship on Arius, which has overturned the old view of him as a "logician" - which the author repeats here. He rather extraordinarily accuses Constantine of having Arius poisoned and says nothing of the fact that Constantine planned to rehabilitate Arius, something obviously inconsistent with his theory. He also has nothing to say about the continued existence of Arianism or the many, many councils that were called to deal with it between Nicaea and Constantinople. Were these later Arians also trying to expose the literary fraud? Or had they misunderstood Arius, just as everyone today supposedly has, and were genuine Christians where he wasn't? The author has nothing to say about this. He also has nothing to say about the fact that Constantius II was largely sympathetic to Arianism and that the councils he called produced more or less Arian creeds that were hostile to the creed of Nicaea. How could that be, if Constantius was simply following in his father's footsteps of building on the fraud perpetrated at Nicaea?
The author also does not explain (or even acknowledge) the existence of movements such as the Donatist church, which rejected Constantine's authority and rejected the rest of the Christian world for allying itself to him. If Constantine invented Christianity, how could there be sizeable bodies of Christians who regarded him as an opponent of true Christianity? The author thinks that all pre-Nicene church history, including the persecutions of Christians at the hands of Diocletian and other emperors, was faked. But if that is so then the pre-Nicene history of Donatism, including its origins in disputes about the authority of bishops who capitulated to the authorities during the Diocletian persecution, was also faked. Why would Constantine and his lackeys invent the history of a Christian movement hostile to themselves? At what point did Donatism actually come to exist, and how did it happen?
So in short, the whole thing's a conspiracy theory that falls apart as soon as you look at the details even of fourth-century church history.
That sounds nearly as ludicrous as the Phantom Time Hypothesis.
(And of course Plotinus ninjas me in a much better fashion.
)
kiwitt
Road to War Modder
Thanks for that. It makes it very clear it is a some sort of conspiracy theory. That is why I posted it here as opposed to a new thread.
How well do you think Taleb's principle of minority rule can be applied to religion? He mentions Christianity, but only briefly, to show how it outcompeted paganism.
Some elements of it seem plausible, particularly the point about Islam spreading because the child of one Muslim parent is Muslim, while other religions are less vigorous because they don't have that rule (although surely Catholicism does?). But I don't think it really explains how the supposedly greater intolerance of Christians compared to pagans would cause pagans to convert to Christianity. The notion that pagan Rome was quite tolerant of Christians and only persecuted them because they were so annoyingly exclusivist is implausible and rather old-fashioned (it was popular among classicists of a bygone era who hero-worshipped the Romans a little too much), and I don't understand how anyone can claim that the fourth-century church had no orator as good as Libanius, "not even close" - John Chrysostom? Ambrose? Augustine?
John the Goldenmouthed, the virulent antisemite? Oh yes, he was good.
It seems to me the agitating minority concept completely ignores the fact that Christianity became the official state religion, which made it relatively easy to 'outcompete' the pagan religions and cults. Another point is that, while Christianity did survive there to the present day, former Christians more or less en mass converted to Islam after the Muslim conquest of much of the former empire. This might have something to do with the more tolerant attitude of the new occupants as compared to the previous Christian intolerance - which was not just limited to pagans but to the unorthodox as well.
It seems to me the agitating minority concept completely ignores the fact that Christianity became the official state religion, which made it relatively easy to 'outcompete' the pagan religions and cults. Another point is that, while Christianity did survive there to the present day, former Christians more or less en mass converted to Islam after the Muslim conquest of much of the former empire. This might have something to do with the more tolerant attitude of the new occupants as compared to the previous Christian intolerance - which was not just limited to pagans but to the unorthodox as well.
I think it's anachronistic to call Chrysostom, or any other ancient, "antisemitic", as his objection was to Judaism as a religion rather than as a race or culture. But whether he was an antisemite or not is irrelevant to the question whether he was a good orator or not, which was the sole point at issue. I don't see how anyone could assert that Chrysostom didn't even come close to Libanius as an orator.
This isn't quite accurate. It took much longer than people usually suppose for Christianity to dwindle in the Muslim-conquered areas. Christians remained well-off members of society for centuries.
Last edited:
I wasn't arguing that though. I appreciate your mild judgement on poor John, who was forced to argue against Jews. I'm sure his audience also understood the fine distinction between The Jews and what he orated should be done with them, and that it should not be viewed as antisemitism, but as an argument against Jewish religion only. While the term antisemitism is modern, its history is not. It matters little if it is religiously inspired: from an early date it shows already the irrational elements that culminate in the atrocities committed over the centuries against the 'different' Jews. Oratory such as John's was in fact so successful that antisemitism continues til the present day among various nations. So, as said, he was good. If you read Cicero on oratory, you will see that its'not about being rational, it's about swaying the emotions of the audience. But all the oratory in the world would not be effective if state and church chose not to support it. The reality is, states often did - starting with the late Roman empire. And if the state collapsed, as it did in the West, the church continued the tradition. The church and preachers such as John the Goldenmouthed. Calling this 'antijudaism' is underestimating its longranging effects. Effects that still haven't disappeared, even when church and state have updated their views on such matters.
I realize that calling such oratory (about which there was nothing august, if you read any orator on the subject) antisemitic may sound anachronistic, but antisemitism - unlike racism or nationalism, which are purely 19th century inventions - is not really a modern thing in itself. Theologians and sociologists may make the distinction between antisemitism and antijudaism, but on the common man (again until well into the 19th century largely illiterate) such distinctions are easily lost. It is also striking that the stories told about The Jews in part reflect what was told about early Christians: baby sacrifice and cannibalism in particular. The idea that The Jews killed Our Lord can even be traced back to one gospel, where it is difficult to see that the story about the Jewísh crowd shouting 'Let his blood come upon us and upon our children!' when supposedly confronted by a Roman governor with the choice between the 'criminal' Barabbas and Jesus to be released (an improbable motif in itself, but what common person would point that out?) is antijudaic rather than simply anti-Jewish. And that's what antisemitic means: anti-Jewish - not antijudaic. A preacher as Chrystomos, knowing his audience, would then not make such a distinction either: he would not argue against Judaism being a misled religion, he would defamate The Jews. And that, being an orator, is exactly what he did.
Seeing as I mentioned Christianity survives til today, how is it not accurate? By the way, it's usually the less well-off that are attracted to conversion, as Christianity's own history amply shows.
You may be right about the distinction between polemic against Judaism as a religion and polemic against the Jews as a people being blurred - although I would point out that in antiquity Judaism was more evidently a religion than an ethnicity than it is today, because there were plenty of people who were Jewish by ancestry but Christian by religion. Indeed it may have been the case that most Christians were Jewish right up to the time of Constantine, and many may have continued to observe the Jewish Law (we hear, for example, of kosher Christians in second-century Gaul). So I think that to Chrysostom and his audience, "Jews" meant people who followed the Jewish religion rather than members of a particular race - and what he actually says about them (i.e. rejecting Christ despite having the prophets etc.) reflects this. And that is different from what we think of as antisemitism in modern times - e.g. to the Nazis, being Jewish had nothing whatsoever to do with what one believed, and everything to do with who one's ancestors were. This isn't to defend the ancient anti-Jewish polemic, it's just to say that to see it as one and the same thing with modern antisemitism is anachronistic.
Now of course the anti-Jewish polemic of ancient Christians ended up having terrible long-term effects. But in itself it was no different from the anti-Christian polemic of ancient pagans that you mention - or, for that matter, the anti-pagan polemic of ancient Jews. All these groups had members who denounced and demonised each other vigorously. The Christian anti-Jewish polemic ended up having the most catastrophic effects because the Christians ended up in power and the Jews continued to exist. Had the power structure turned out different it wouldn't have happened that way.
So, yes, you can say that (for example) the anti-Jewish polemic of John Chrysostom is worse than (say) the anti-Christian polemic of pagans described in Minucius Felix's Octavius, or the massacre of Jews at the hands of pagans described in Philo's Against Flaccus, or the Jewish anti-pagan polemic of Wisdom 13-16 or the Sybilline Oracles III, in that it had much more disastrous consequences in later history. But does that make it intrinsically worse? Again, this isn't to defend what Chrysostom said - but it is to say that it's wrong to single him out as some kind of specially awful person.
For example:
Sybilline Oracles III.43-54 said:
That's a Jewish polemic against pagans. What Chrysostom said about the Jews is pretty much the same kind of thing, and much the same as what the pagans mentioned above said about the Christians. In the context of the times, what's the difference? Aren't they all as bad as each other? If Europe had ended up converting to Judaism rather than to Christianity, wouldn't we today be condemning texts like the above as the source of centuries of anti-pagan violence, and arguing that the subtle distinction between paganism as a religion and paganism as an ethnicity is irrelevant?
This may seem like whataboutery - I'm saying that anti-Jewish polemic was OK because everyone was at it - but that's not the point I'm making. Of course it wasn't OK. But I do think it's wrong to fasten on just one kind of religious bigotry as somehow intrinsically worse than all of the other kinds.
In that you talked about "more or less en masse" conversions. That implies a much more dramatic and swift large-scale conversion than I think actually happened.
I agree, and that's why I am not arguing that at all. What I am arguing is that antisemitism has ancient roots.
The only reason why he would be special, would be as a gifted orator. Meaning he was speaking to the general public, and not to fellow academics in an intellectual discourse. But I already pointed to anti-Jewish tendencies being present in the NT. And, more importantly, they were never edited out. Sometimes having a Holy Book has advantages for the historian and philologist.
An argument out of what could have been? I already mentioned the prime difference between the one side and the other being that the one (Christian) side got the support of official state and church. But I'm appreciative of your recognition that theological debate (because that is what this, in essence, was) could be as vile as oratory - despite their august eptithet.
I am looking at it from the historical perspective, yes, and that would be with the benefit of hindsight. But that's always how we look at the past. Without hindsight there would be no past to look at. I didn't argue it was intrinsically worse, nor that it was worse than that of pagans and Jews. The only reason why antisemitism was worse, because it never stopped. Not even today.
Fair enough. The fact remains that predominantly Roman/Greek Christian areas turned into solid Muslim areas. But I agree this would not have been an overnight process; it took centuries - just as the conversion to Christianity did before. The difference being that Islam did not convert at the point of a sword, or with the support of the state: Muslim intolerance entered the picture much, much later.
What do you think of Teilhard de Chardin? I know he's very popular among eschatological theorists, but I'm not sure how secular philosophers have received him.
Have there been any attempts to justify prayer as a rational action? There has been no evidence from studies of its efficacy, and it doesn't seem to figure into rational calculation:
Have there been any attempts to justify prayer as a rational action? There has been no evidence from studies of its efficacy, and it doesn't seem to figure into rational calculation:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb said:
Last edited:
I have an employee who prays every day that our new company accountant will find a better job and take it. She sees it as win-win.
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
What are the Beatitudes. I have seen several commentaries, but nothing that rings true.
J
J
Gary Childress
Student for and of life
Hi Plotinus,
My attention was drawn recently to Ephesians 6 where it says:
I apologize if this has been brought up before but I didn't see it listed in the prior discussions...
Basically it sounds like the Bible is condoning slavery. My question is, as a people who now understand the horrible effects of slavery, is there any reason why we as conscientious citizens of the world shouldn't throw out the Bible as a morally reprehensible book? Maybe just keep it around as an interesting historical piece along side the Egyptian Book of the Dead or something? I realize that generations have grown up and grown old centering their lives around it and it would be a crushing blow to many to have the rug pulled out from under them. But doesn't the fact remain that the Bible is an immoral book? Shouldn't future generations be saved from making the same mistake of reading, believing and centering their lives around it?
Or is the Bible not so bad as one might think? I mean how can any God worth worshiping condone slavery, presumably with the full knowledge of what effect it had on the victims and everyone involved?
NOTE: I saw where it was discussed whether or not Jesus approved of slavery but are we to really take any of the Abrahamic religions seriously anymore given all the bloodshed and strife associated and apparently condoned in their books? I mean, as a white person in the US, I can't imagine any other moral reaction I should have to such a passage.
Thanks and sorry for a semi-rant/questions.
My attention was drawn recently to Ephesians 6 where it says:
I apologize if this has been brought up before but I didn't see it listed in the prior discussions...
Basically it sounds like the Bible is condoning slavery. My question is, as a people who now understand the horrible effects of slavery, is there any reason why we as conscientious citizens of the world shouldn't throw out the Bible as a morally reprehensible book? Maybe just keep it around as an interesting historical piece along side the Egyptian Book of the Dead or something? I realize that generations have grown up and grown old centering their lives around it and it would be a crushing blow to many to have the rug pulled out from under them. But doesn't the fact remain that the Bible is an immoral book? Shouldn't future generations be saved from making the same mistake of reading, believing and centering their lives around it?
Or is the Bible not so bad as one might think? I mean how can any God worth worshiping condone slavery, presumably with the full knowledge of what effect it had on the victims and everyone involved?
NOTE: I saw where it was discussed whether or not Jesus approved of slavery but are we to really take any of the Abrahamic religions seriously anymore given all the bloodshed and strife associated and apparently condoned in their books? I mean, as a white person in the US, I can't imagine any other moral reaction I should have to such a passage.
Thanks and sorry for a semi-rant/questions.
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
Don't worry. The event has come and gone.
Maybe something broader on Matthew.
J
Maybe something broader on Matthew.
J
