Mythicists met by 'Ignatius'

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
Giuseppe
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Re: Mythicists met by 'Ignatius'

Post by Giuseppe »

You are right probably, even if I wonder how could Ignayius be so idiot to the point that he references *twice* his objector to the same text (the Old Testament), though knowing in advance that the objector had already dealt with it.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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DCHindley
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Re: Mythicists met by 'Ignatius'

Post by DCHindley »

The word that is being variously translated Public Records or Archives is ἀρχείοις, from
LSJ wrote:ἀρχεῖον , τό, neut. of an Adj. ἀρχεῖος, α, ον : ῾ἀρχή II):—
A. town-hall, residence, or office of chief magistrates, Hdt.4.62 (dub.), Lys.9.9, X.Cyr.1.2.3, Isoc.5.48, Arist.Mu.400b16; “τὰ ἀ. καὶ βουλευτήρια” D.10.53, cf. IG2.475.21, al., OGI268.18 (Nacrasa, iii B. C.), PGrenf.2.30, al. (ii B. C.).
2. τὰ ἀ. public records, archives, prob. in SIG684.7 (Dyme, ii B. C.), cf. D.H.2.26, PTeb.397.19 (ii A. D.).
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/mor ... i\#lexicon

The records being referred to here are the kind to be found in the local town hall, or at best, a regional hub of something, possibly as big as a province to just the HQ of a military unit.

Why couldn't these fine folks have been suggesting that unless it is something affecting their locale directly, it is not important to them? There were no "public libraries" in the Roman empire, except maybe private libraries, or libraries dedicated to Senate business, state sanctioned cults related to Roman culture, and few others, in Rome itself. Locally, some folks ran off circulars to pass around town periodically to gossip about who was seen with whom and doing what.

I do not see anywhere that Judean holy books were described by this word, or there would have been a note of it in LSJ.

DCH
davidbrainerd
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Re: Mythicists met by 'Ignatius'

Post by davidbrainerd »

Giuseppe wrote:You are right probably, even if I wonder how could Ignayius be so idiot to the point that he references *twice* his objector to the same text (the Old Testament), though knowing in advance that the objector had already dealt with it.
I imagine the same as happens today.

A=Christian arguing for virgin birth.
B=Christian arguing against virgin birth.

B: The OT doesn't prophecy Jesus to be born of a virgin.

A: Yes it does, Isaiah 7:14.

B: That's not about Jesus. Look at the context.....

A: You're wrong, you're ignorant, you don't have spiritual eyes to see. The prophecy is not addressed to Ahaz but to the house of David.

B: Ahaz is the house of David in this context.the child had to be born then to be a sign to Ahaz his enemies wouldn't assasinate him. We already went over this. The child was probably Hezekiah.

A: You're so blind. How can Hezekiah take the spoils of Samaria as a baby? Will he lead an army with a rattle? [A Tertullian argument]

B: Duh. The king of Assyria takes the spoils not the baby.

A: But it says the child will be called Immanuel.

B: was Jesus called Immanuel?

A: He wasn't literally named Immanuel, but he is God incarnate, the meaning of Immanuel--God with us. And that's why he and only he could take the spoils as a baby--because he's God.

B: Actually Immanuel means God IS with us, and the child born back then was to be a sign to Judah and the house of David that "God IS with us" because he won't let our king be assasinated. And again its the king of Assyria who takes the spoils.

A: You're wrong.(Followed by imaginative new way to twist the passage or a renewed attempt to use one of the previously defeated twistings)

These types of arguments can go on forever because the orthodox party thinks they can tire the opposition into submission.
Giuseppe
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Re: Mythicists met by 'Ignatius'

Post by Giuseppe »

Ignatius (supposedly the bishop of Antioch but actually a Christian from Philippi) wrote,
around the year 150 at the earliest, that the birth of the Christ has been unknown to Satan; the
devil was therefore less well informed than the evangelists. Ignatius also added that people
objected: “That which I do not find in the archives, I do not believe in the Gospel”, attesting
then that today’s skeptics had second-century predecessors.
(Georges Ory, Analysis of Christian Origins, p. 41, my bold)
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
lsayre
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Re: Mythicists met by 'Ignatius'

Post by lsayre »

Giuseppe wrote: Sat Jul 01, 2017 4:43 am “That which I do not find in the archives, I do not believe in the Gospel”
This appears to me to be a potential admission that "inspired" manuscript alteration and/or "inspired" manuscript fabrication was rampant in those days.

Either that, or an admission by the author of Ignatius that the gospels he had available to him contained material that he felt was already corrupted.
Giuseppe
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Re: Mythicists met by 'Ignatius'

Post by Giuseppe »

The perentory answer of Ignatius (“It is written”) is the same given by Pilate: quod scripsi scripsi. The sense is identical: against sinedrites who denied that Jesus was the “king of the Jews” (Christ) – a marcionite point -, Pilate confirms it again. But the difference is that while the Fourth Gospel (at least in the Pilate’s answer) addressed polemically Marcionites masked as sinedrites, Ignatius is addressing real Jews. That is the true reason Pilate’s presence was never really embarrassing but theologically necessary in a canonized gospel, more than any accusation of deicide: it confirmed that, for the same Lex Romana (decisively more persuasive than any Jewish oracle), Jesus was “the king of the Jews”.

If you (Jew and/or Marcion) deny that Jesus was the Christ, then you go directly against the Lex Romana who confirmed that Jesus was crucified as "Rex Iudaeorum".

That is final decisive evidence that the Earliest Gospel was written during a period when the Jewishness of Jesus (his being son of YHWH) was going to be contested. What better than the same imperial sentence can resolve the question once forever?

The next apologist who says that Pilate couldn't be removed from the Gospels despite of the embarrassment provoked by his role as final killer of Jesus, will oblige me to put hand on the gun.

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Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Mythicists met by 'Ignatius'

Post by Giuseppe »

I agree entirely with Reinach about this point:

Christian docetism therefore seems very clearly a way of reconciling the Christian idea of the divine and spiritual Christ, without which there is no Christianity, with a Jewish x. In what way could this x be formulated by the Jews, whose pernicious influence these docetic Christians suffer? Evidently so: "The Jesus of whom you speak to us was not a descendant of David; he was not a son of Mary; he did not come into the world; he did not eat or drink; he was not baptized by John; he was not crucified at the time of Pilate and Herod; he is completely unknown to us". This was not docetism, for the very idea of a "docetic Jew" is absurd, but the diffuse denial of Jesus' existence in the time when Christians placed his life and death.

The radical docetism of the Christians of the first century is therefore a compromise to respond to an insolent denial that took place, which was significant, not in Ephesus or Alexandria, but in the very theatre of Jesus' earthly activity, not one or two centuries later, but almost in the aftermath of his death.

"Yes," said these docetists to the Jews, "you did not know Jesus in the flesh, for the reason that he did not exist according to the flesh; but the apostles and the crowds of the faithful heard him, they saw him; they saw him on the cross at the time of Pilate; they saw him risen. He was a divine ghost, an ethereal and all spiritual being whose eyes have seen, whose ears have heard his voice, but who could not be grasped with his hand".

In the presence of the denials of the Palestinian Jews, it seems that Christians had a simpler way to make them shut their mouths without resorting to the subtleties of docetism: it was to add, in support of Jesus in the flesh, testimonia, authentic documents, for example an act of the synedrium or the report of Pilate. Why did they not do so? I hesitate to answer; but perhaps there were no authentic documents, or perhaps they had not yet dreamed of producing others. This would explain many things: the antecedence of docetism in relation to the Gospels, as Saint Jerome knew; the clearly anti-docetist nature of our four Gospels, even of the Fourth; the Church's susceptibility in this matter and the condemnation of the Gospel of Peter, because isolated signs of docetism were found there.

The author of an excellent life of Jesus according to the apocrypha, Mr. Walter Bauer, says that there is no trace in early Christian or anti-Christian literature of that paradox already familiar to Voltaire and rejected by him, of those who deny the historical reality of Jesus. In fact, if such subversive texts had existed, the Church would not have allowed them to reach us, except in the slums of Jewish literature, where Toledoth's stupid calumnies rightly seemed harmless. But it seems to me impossible not to conclude, as much from the assertions of radical docetism as from the reproach made to docetists coming from Judaism, the existence of a Jewish party, contemporary with the apostles and still powerful at the beginning of the 2nd century, which declared that they knew nothing about Jesus. Once again, those were not docetists, intoxicated by the idea of the divine Christ, but people who were resolutely hostile to the idea of the divinity of Jesus and who also contested the earthly Jesus. Docetist judaized in giving up believing in the Jesus of the flesh; they christianized in affirming the spiritual Christ even more strongly. To these dangerous men, Ignatius still preferred the circumcised, who, without believing in the divinity of Jesus, at least admit that he existed and died under Pilate. Ignatius is right; he is right again when he cries out, "If it is an appearance what has been done by the Lord, then why have I offered myself up to death? To suffer with him all I endure!"

It will perhaps be objected that Docetism was born in Palestine because the Jews, while waiting for the glorious Messiah, were more scandalized than the Gentiles by the ignominious death on the cross. But it would have been enough, to answer them, to admit that the crucified Christ was but a ghost, who had stripped his mortal body at the moment of the Transfiguration. Now, the texts of Saint Ignatius prove that this radical docetism applied to the whole life of Jesus, from his birth until his death. Therefore, it is not the "scandal of the cross" that could suggest this.

The conclusions I have just set out are serious; they seem to offer the equivalent of a 1st century Palestinian document that would support Benjamin Smith's intransigent skepticism. I am asking only to see them discussed and refuted; I respect and listen willingly to theologians; I only ask them to answer me with arguments, not offenses, because I already owe to their liberality a large collection of the latter and because I need the former to enlighten me.

(freely translated from "Questions on Docetism", in Revue moderniste, 1912, p. 184-188)

Reinach asked himself why the Christians of Ignatius's time didn't invent testimonia à la Testimonium Flavianum to "prove" the Jesus's historicity by that early time, since it was already threatened. Reinach's solution was to interpret the Jewish docetism as a form of naive Christian compromise with that early skepticism. Ignatius could only attack both Jewish docetists and anti-Christian skeptics without real arguments.

While I accept fully the Reinach's explanation for the origin of that (otherwise unexplained) "Jewish docetism", even so, differently from Reinach, I know now the answer for the surprising Ignatius's reaction (the absence of real evidences, even of forged evidences, in support of Jesus's historicity), because it describes a trend that will show itself definitely in our Gospels (only, see the repetition of the "titulus crucis"): by simply insisting on the Jesus's death by hand of Pilate, Ignatius had his desired "It is written!" even more than his skeptic adversaries could desire. The introduction of Pilate in the myth was a masterstroke: the same form of death - a Roman crucifixion - suggested an identity for Jesus:

1) the Romans crucified so-called "kings of Jews".
2) the Romans crucified Jesus
3) therefore: Jesus was THE King of Jews (= THE Christ).

You could still continue to deny that identity - accusing that Jesus was only a false messiah, a false king - but you couldn't deny more the FACT of the crucifixion by Pilate: Jesus EXISTED because the accusation against him - sediction deserving crucifixion - was sufficient to give him an earthly identity otherwise unknown before that time.

The conclusion is inevitable:

Without Pilate, Ignatius would have really been forced to invent testimonia de nihilo à la Eusebius.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Mythicists met by 'Ignatius'

Post by Giuseppe »

The titulus crucis resembles a similar inscription on the temple:


The cloisters [of the outmost court] were in breadth thirty cubits, while the entire compass of it was by measure six furlongs, including the tower of Antonia; those entire courts that were exposed to the air were laid with stones of all sorts. When you go through these [first] cloisters, unto the second [court of the] temple, there was a partition made of stone all round, whose height was three cubits: its construction was very elegant; upon it stood pillars, at equal distances from one another, declaring the law of purity, some in Greek, and some in Roman letters, that "no foreigner should go within that sanctuary" for that second [court of the] temple was called "the Sanctuary," and was ascended to by fourteen steps from the first court. This court was four-square, and had a wall about it peculiar to itself; the height of its buildings, although it were on the outside forty cubits, 1 was hidden by the steps, and on the inside that height was but twenty-five cubits; for it being built over against a higher part of the hill with steps, it was no further to be entirely discerned within, being covered by the hill itself.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/tex ... tion%3D190

If Jesus was the true Temple, then the titulus makes it clear his membership to the "Jews" (genitive possessive: Jesus is king property of the Jews), just as the physical inscription on the temple had made it clear the exclusive Jewish property of the old temple.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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