Vanish wrote: ↑Thu Dec 21, 2023 4:31 pm
ebion wrote: ↑Thu Dec 14, 2023 5:47 pm
Our coherent answer, with some of your list, in the
Early Christian Ebionaen Canon. Our answer is a little more rigourous in having criteria for inclusion.
It is also a graded canon, not a simple in/out.
Follow the thread and see what you think.
The other question is regarding the Pauline letters - I don't understand why everything except Acts has been immediately axed. I understand that the authorship of
some letters is under dispute, but Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon are all considered solidified as legitimately written by Paul, no?
Is the argument for their removal that the Ebionites rejected Paul and would thus reject all letters believed to be written by him, aside from Acts purely as a historical source? And if so, then wouldn't the inverse be true, where the above-mentioned books would be excluded and the "under dispute" books would then be potential for inclusion in the canon?
The reason I came to this forum is that I wanted to answer the question:
Is there any trace of "Paul's" letters before Marcion? The question grew out of reading Detering et.al. As you may know, Marcion was the one who said he "found" Romans, and then put out his collection of the letters, with a version of Luke. But there is no trace of Paul's letters before Marcion, so after a lot of debate called
MarcionOrLater, I concluded that the Paulines were written by Marcion, by which I mean either Marcion or his followers or even his mentors.
Marcion was a huge thing in his day: he rated 5 books by Tertullian. And to me, most western evangelical christianity today is pure Marcionism: washing their hands in the blood of a dead God. That link above will take you to the trail of discussions in the forum so you can followup there for yourself. In a nutshell: there;s no trace so the Paulines were not wriiten by Paul, and hence we refer to them as the Faulines.
This explains the fact that Paul's theology is decidedly anti-Christian, so it feels good to throw them out
of our canon, and some churches who have them in their canon, downplay him. This does not mean he didn't exist, so we distinguish between "Paul in Acts", and the false Faul of the Fauline letters. We see Acts as
a trial brief to a Roman (pagan) procecutor. trying to get him off, because of the disasterous consequences for the Christians if he was convicted )religio Illicita_. But the Ebionaens were right in viewing him as an apostate not an apostle, as Acts clearly shows.
Paul's/Shaul's/Faul's theology came in handy at Nicea for Constantine, because it supported his agenda.
Constantine was a pagan and turned the Churchians into minions of his Mithras/Molech cult:
- Saturday into Sunday
- Passover into OEaster
- Hebrews into Heathens
- The patriarch of the Romans into the Pontifex Maximus
- And then the Churchunists turned Paul from an apostate into an Apostle
The bishops at the Council of Nicaea didn't have much choice: Constantine drafted the resolutions - nobody voted against him, and the 5 bishops that abstained were banished from the Empire. He built his new city of Constantinople around a pagan monument to Sol Invictus with his face on it
after the Council of Nicaea.
Douglas del Tondo, writes well on this. He is the author of
the videos I posted links to. He asks the question
Was Paul the Apostle Jesus Condemns in Revelation 22:
I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars: (Rev. 2:2 [KJV])
which we answer affirmatively. His research is excellent, and I find a wealth of good new information engagingly presented in his videos. He is amongst the best at deliniating how Constantine made the Churchunists what they are today. Acts is history as shown by
Mauck in his book "Paul on Trial".
I build on del Tondo's work to go further and show that the Faulines are
MarcionOrLater, not the Paul in Acts.
Vanish wrote: ↑Thu Dec 21, 2023 4:31 pm
Either way, the canon I'm attempting to put together is a bit later in history - if the Apostolic Fathers and their contemporaries were creating a canon with the info we have now, which books would they consider necessary for inclusion into the canon?
There are a number of reasons we don't go later than Nicaea/Nag Hammadi:
- Anything after Nicaea is contaminated by the fear of what will happen to you if you go against the Emperor (a slow and painful death.)
- The rewriters like Rufinus started soon after Nicaea, rewriting whatever they could lay their hands on by 'translating" the Greek into Latin and destroying the originals.
- The rewriters like Rufinus also rewrote the Apostolic Fathers like Origen, and censored or burned the books or people like Vigilantius.
- The non-canonical Trinity and the non-Ebionaen Virgin Birth got deeply entrenched.
- The Church of the East split off from the West about that time (2nd Council of Ephesus, 431 AD), and as it looks like the New Testatment was originally written in Aramaic, it may better to avoid anything Western after that.
- There are enough gems in Nag Hammadi to keep us busy for a while.
- Throwing the Faulines out, as the Ebionaens did, creates a lot of room for Early Ebionaen Christianity to come through.
We're following up
The Problem of Paul and Marcionism in a new thread to pull together the many people over the centuries that have concluded that the Faulines are anti-Christian and belong only in Marcion's canon.