Peter Kirby wrote:The single most obvious common sense objection, all particulars of the evidence and other bogus assumptions aside, is still that it makes no sense for a massive and deliberate falsification and fabrication of documents aiming to prove that your opponents came about two centuries before they actually did.
Fifth century orthodox imperially sponsored victors wrote the history of Nicaea and the Christian revolution of the 4th century. The motive was to retroject the massive controversy over the Bible into an earlier epoch, and therefore claim that the controversies were old. I have described a political situation in which the Constantinian Christian state had dictatorial control over the preservation and destruction of literature. Massive and deliberate falsification and fabrication of documents were the modus operandi on both sides of the conflict. The anti-Imperial resistance against the Christian revolution fabricated Jesus stories. The imperial orthodoxy fabricated a pseudo-history for their appearance. It took the heat off the reality of the history the controversy over the reception of the Bible at Alexandria in Constantine's rule. The orthodoxy did not want to document this controversy. The less controversy the better the canonical books would look. So they made the controversy an old one. They had an almost monopolistic control of the cities and as a result the literature of that epoch.
Above I have attempted to provide a motive for this massive fabrication.
What would have happened on the hypothesis-- and to use a Bayesian model, I'm giving it a 99.5% conditional probability of having happened-- is that the opponents of this literature would have pointed out its VERY recent origin, KNOWN to people in the fourth century, which necessarily damns it in the ancient world, while pointing out the superiority of their own, more ancient literature, attributed to first century apostles.
IMO that is precisely what happened. The opponents of the gnostic unofficial seditious Jesus STories were the imperial canon following orthodoxy which was backed by the Emperor and his army. Eusebius keeps saying "and just the other day another text has turned up". When he describes the appearance of the Acts of Pilate c.304 CE he is actually describing its appearance c.325 CE under Constantine. There is a grass roots resistance, and Constantine stamped it out in no uncertain terms. The superiority and more ancient priority of the canonical books is continually advertised by the orthodoxy. The inferiority and less ancient priority of the non canonical literature is attacked. It was banned and prohibited to be read in church or to be even preserved.
NOBODY made this claim in antiquity, and ALL of them on record made the claim that this heresy started from the second century or earlier, SHOWING beyond a reasonable doubt that literature such as the Gospel of Peter and so on DID NOT come from the fourth century.
Unless the orthodoxy, who preserved the records, lied. The orthodoxy stuck dogmatically to the story that the "War of Jesus Books" started in the 2nd century and not as a result of Constantine publishing the official Jesus Codex. This Big Lie has become history. This is what the OP is exploring.
If the orthodoxy lied then we would not expect to find any primary evidence before the 4th century. We have discussed this evidence but disagree about how it can be interpreted in terms of probability.
You mentioned Bayes. Background evidence supporting my contentions here must include the
Augustan_History. This has been discussed in other threads. It is humorously styled a "mockumentary". It employs lavish use of hundreds of forged documents and bogus identities. It is a real fabrication. And a real pseudo-history.
Indeed "they" did attempt to make the heresy look recent, if "they" are the ones who wrote the books of Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, and so on, but the tactic that "they" took was to argue that this heresy DID NOT APPEAR before, approximately, the reign of HADRIAN, shortly after the death of the last APOSTLES, according to them, when it would have been MORE EFFECTIVE and MORE PERSUASIVE to claim that the literature appeared in the FOURTH CENTURY, if that is what did happen.
Unless they wanted to take the heat off the scale of the controversy in the 4th century. In which case how do they do that? The gnostic literature was already at large and at loose in the world and the orthodoxy had no control over it except to burn it whenever they could find it. They needed to ameliorate the controversy because they did not want to advertise any controversy over the general reception of their own sacred codex in the Roman Empire. And the associated destruction and prohibition of the pagan religious cults and practices.
I have provided some political reasons here as to why "they" opted to fabricate an early date for the appearance of opposition books.
Against this we have heard some noise about nomina sacra and the works of Origen, several of which were indeed edited and revised (as is well known) after he was branded a heretic, which can account for the occasional insertion of foreign material but which in no way supports the hypothesis of a deliberate fourth century falsification regarding the question of the age of the non-canonical literature. Hopefully there is something better than that to hang a hat on, but you shouldn't really expect it, since it never happened.
We don't know what happened. What happened shall always remain hypothetical unless there is some compelling evidence to the contrary. I am earnestly committed to examining and evaluating the evidence FOR and AGAINST various hypotheses.
All other theories for the origin of the non canonical texts follow Eusebius and the church organisation. When Eusebius et al and the church organisation are temporarily gagged all the manuscript evidence points to a 4th century origin for the authorship of this material.
None of this relates to the history of the canonical books.
The OP is about the history of the heretical books.
LC
