Arguing Against the Church Fathers

[schillingklaus]

Of course those were the same people, and it proves that Christianity was not yet an exclusive club, regardless of what apologists like Ehrman try to force us to believe.

Plutarch is used massively by the scribblers of the New Testament. So the sermon on the hill top is using many of Plutie's biographies as examples of virtue and morality. Paul's falsely so-called epistles are late forgery, as already proved by van Manen. Carrier and Doherty are only pseudo-mythicists as they foolishly believe in historical pillars and pre-seventy Jerusalem Christian origins; this way, they lead many people astray. Modern scholarship is corruption incarnate.

Carrier only abuses Bayesian inversion in an abstruse manner.

[Secret Alias]

I would like to know what justification there would be for completely ignoring the Church Fathers. I know mountainman's idiotic theory. But outside of that why would be for instance ignore evidence of the holocaust in order to 'help the theory that there was no holocaust? Why would we deny evidence for human beings landing on the moon in favor of a moon landing? Why would we ignore evidence for a heliocentric universe in favor of the idea of all the stars in heaven revolving around the earth? Why would we ignore the evidence that dogs can't speak in favor of the lone lunatic who claims that his German Shepherd really speaks German? Not getting what value this discussion is to be honest.

[GakuseiDon]

I would like to know what justification there would be for completely ignoring the Church Fathers.

I don't think we can ignore them, but we can certainly question their accuracy. When it comes to trying to look at earliest Christianity, do you trust the Church Fathers? The impression I got when reading through Tertullian's attacks on Marcion was that his attacks were so devastating that I didn't trust that he was representing Marcion accurately. The problem is that we only have the texts that we have, and they have gone through a selection process that restricts extant texts to those that are convenient to 4th Century CE Christianity, which is that orthodoxy is validated by apostolic succession through Peter and Paul.

[Secret Alias]

I am not advocating 'accepting' the Church Fathers. But surely (a) there were second and third century witnesses and (b) they have something to tell us about early Christianity. I don't see this as a controversial opinion ... except at this forum.

[Leucius Charinus]

I appreciate your reply but it doesn't answer my question, I'm afraid. I remember one criticism of Dr Carrier's use of Bayes Theorem was that, rather than start with a controversial topic in history like historicity/mythicism, he should have started with some non-controversial historical topics in order to provide examples that show the power of the technique when used for history.

That's a fair enough observation.

I'd raise the same criticism for your approach: when you refer to ancient non-Christian texts, do you do so after evaluating them in the same way that you'd want ancient Christian texts to be evaluated?

Yes I believe that I do with the caveat that Christian literature as a series of story books held to be authoritative place it in a class of literature that is entirely different from all other books, and series of books in antiquity.

If you don't, that's fine. For myself, I don't question that, say, Paul's letters generally attributed to him were written by Paul around the 50s/60s CE. That is, I'm assuming that that is the case. I'm willing to accept that it might be wrong, and if scholars come to some other conclusion then any of my own thoughts about early Christianity would need to be revised. But it's an assumption I'm happy to work from.

My position is to question the historical existence of Paul and the authenticity of any of his epistles. I too am willing to accept that rejecting the historicity of Paul could be the wrong path nevertheless I am inclined to argue that it is necessary to explore it. Others have done so. As a result further questions naturally arise that would lead towards shaping any reconstructions of early Christianity (without Paul). From what I have noticed such a treatment of Paul generally puts early Christians into the 2nd century at the earliest. This leaves us with the testimony of the "Early Church Fathers" as the chronological background tapestry.

More importantly, I found that Carrier and Doherty regularly side with modern scholarship on things like dates, attributions and interpolations, so I can assume modern scholarship is doing something right.

Modern scholarship agrees with the theses of Carrier and Doherty on many issues and elements of the argument. And vice verse. We can assume modern scholarship is doing something right but there's really no guarantees. Modern biblical scholarship carries with it its own basic list of assumptions and propositions held to be true but which have never been critically and skeptically examined since antiquity.

Lets take the writings of Plutarch and Paul. Both were writing around the same period. Both writings survive via similar copying processes. Both had pseudepigrapha attributed to them. If you were going to use the writings of Plutarch in an argument, how would you analysis their provenance before you felt safe enough to use them?

It would depend upon the purpose of the argument and the claims made on both sides of the argument. The writings of Plutarch and Paul were used in completely different ways after they supposedly wrote. We could say that until the 4th century the writings of both had the possibility of being found in the Greek section of Roman libraries - public and private. After the 4th century Paul was preserved ad nauseum in the Imperial library and likely read to the civitas, whereas Platonist writings essentially suffered suppression (for a thousand years) in comparison.

The theological agendas of the two authors is important to gauge. And gauging the use of their writings in subsequent theological agendas between antiquity and the present day. My position is that theological agendas and political agendas can both give rise to fraud. Those trying to reconstruct the history of Christianity must be aware of the use of pious fraud. For example the Nicene Christians circulated for more than a thousand years the writings of Seneca, prefaced with the forged letter exchange between Paul and Seneca. What were the 4th century Christian regime thinking?

[Leucius Charinus]

I would like to know what justification there would be for completely ignoring the Church Fathers.

This is an arm-chair experiment SA. Relax
https://www.britannica.com/science/Gedankenexperiment
No need to go ballistic.

Imagine if you will that we didn't have the writings of the church fathers and yet in the 20th century there is still the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices. How would we explain the contents of the NHL without the church fathers? As a thought experiment what can be said about the NHL - assumed to be from the mid 4th century - without reference to any earlier heresiologists.

[Leucius Charinus]

I would like to know what justification there would be for completely ignoring the Church Fathers.

I don't think we can ignore them, but we can certainly question their accuracy. When it comes to trying to look at earliest Christianity, do you trust the Church Fathers? The impression I got when reading through Tertullian's attacks on Marcion was that his attacks were so devastating that I didn't trust that he was representing Marcion accurately. The problem is that we only have the texts that we have, and they have gone through a selection process that restricts extant texts to those that are convenient to 4th Century CE Christianity, which is that orthodoxy is validated by apostolic succession through Peter and Paul.

We can also question the integrity of the transmission history of manuscripts from antiquity which were supposedly authored by church fathers such as Tertullian, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Hippolytus and the like. What is the earliest extant manuscript for each of these "Church Fathers"? If the answer to this question does not set off the alarm bells what will?

[Secret Alias]

But your "counter-theory"

1. Eusebius cites or knows Origen contra Celsus
2. In contra Celsus Origen cites Celsus
3. Celsus cites or knows Justin, Hegesippus etc
4. As such if Eusebius forged the New Testament he also necessarily forged "the Church Fathers" to show how his (Eusebius's) New Testament should be interpreted

Yet you show consistent hostility to the Church Fathers when, in your crazed conspiracy theory, "what the Church Fathers say" is MORE rather than less authoritative. Eusebius necessarily forged BOTH the NT and an exegesis of the NT (= the Church Fathers) which makes the Church Fathers ABSOLUTELY AUTHORITATIVE. Yet your ignorance of Eusebius, his citations of "the Church Fathers" make you behave like they are independent forgeries. They can't be.

[Leucius Charinus]

The proposition is that Eusebius produced both the NT and the initial version of "Church History" which was populated by the Church Fathers who attest to various readings of the canonical NT (NTC). But we may never know what was in that first version of "Church History" because those who preserved it over the centuries made additions to it, modified it and deleted bits of it to serve their own time period. The notion of "independent forgeries" enters the fray after Eusebius went to the underworld and during the transmission of Eusebius and the Church Fathers by the church [industry]. Supposedly the earliest extant manuscript of Eusebius' "Church History" is a Syriac manuscript from the mid 5th century although I have reservations about that specific claim.

You continue to ignore the third large class of Christian literature outside of the NTC and the Church History Fathers. That being the NT apocryphal (NTA) literature which neither Eusebius or the Church Fathers had any political control over. Mainstream Christian origins theories without exception employ the testimony of the church fathers. The first quotation or reference to various NTA texts which are located in the "datable works" of the church fathers such as Irenaeus, Tertullian or others is used to represent the terminus ad quem (latest possible date) for various NTA texts such as the Gospel of Judas and the Acts of John. This process is legitimate and used by classical source criticism. However the proposition is that these references have either been forged or interpolated into these "Fathers" centuries after the supposed dates of the "Fathers" in order to obscure the actual dates of authorship of the NTA literature. More importantly this obscures the political context of the NTA authorship which in all likelihood can be naturally expected during the rule of Constantine when the NTC became a political instrument in the Roman empire. Nobody had any concerns about the NT until 325 CE. The primary and physical evidence for the NTA literature has a massive accumulation in the mid 4th century. Why?

Forgery of manuscripts from the "Church Fathers" after Eusebius is obvious and cannot be denied. One example are the Symmachian forgeries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmachian_forgeries

Another good example is Pseudo-Isidore where dozens of manuscripts in the form of letter exchanges between bishops of the first three centuries were completely fabricated. If this massive 9th century Latin forgery mill was not previously exposed we would all be citing the claims made by the "Church Fathers" in these forgeries.

Who Was Pseudo-Isidore?
A Brief Introduction to an Ancient Problem
https://pseudo-isidore.com/introduction/


By the Pseudo-Isidorian forgeries, scholars understand a vast and influential corpus of legal materials assembled by unknown clerical agitators in ninth-century Frankish Gaul. The attribution to Pseudo-Isidore is a mere convention, for the documents themselves adopt a variety of pseudonyms and historical perspectives. While forgeries abound in the Pseudo-Isidorian corpus, they stand alongside many authentic texts that the forgers have merely compiled. Other items have been corrected, interpolated or otherwise revised. The most imposing constituent of the forgery corpus, known as the False Decretals, was also the most widely read. At its heart lie nearly one hundred pseudonymous papal letters, or decretals, masquerading as the correspondence of popes from Clement I, Peter’s successor, through Gregory the Great. The Pseudo-Isidorians did their work in the archiepiscopal province of Reims, in the several decades preceding 850. New research has shown that they used the library of the monastery of Corbie on the Somme. Corbie scribes also produced some of the earliest and most important manuscripts of the forgeries. Though we know where and approximately when the Pseudo-Isidorians worked, their identity remains a deep historical mystery.

Pseudo-Isidore’s origins lie in the ecclesiastical and legal maturation of the western Frankish church under Louis the Pious and Louis’s son and youngest heir, Charles the Bald. With the reforms inaugurated by Charlemagne, bishops in the Carolingian empire enjoyed a steady growth in their influence. As the political stability of the Frankish empire deteriorated after 830, however, the episcopate found itself subjected to new and unfamiliar pressures. An unsuccessful coup against Louis the Pious prompted the deposition of many prominent clerics, including the emperor’s milk-brother, Archbishop Ebo of Reims, at the 835 Council of Thionville. The Carolingian civil war that followed Louis’s death in 840 only deepened the uncertainty faced by the Gallican and the German episcopates. Pseudo-Isidore responds to these forces in several different ways. He strives to shore up the legal protections afforded bishops by enhancing or outright inventing a wide variety of procedural protections for accused prelates. Taken together, Pseudo-Isidore’s procedural program extends de facto immunity to accused bishops everywhere. The forgeries also seek to subordinate the Frankish church to the legal oversight of the Roman papacy. While Pseudo-Isidore’s view of a Rome-centered Christendom was an ideological conviction that he shared with some of his contemporaries, Rome also functions within the forgeries as a distant venue for appeals at the margins of Carolingian political power. By expanding the legal jurisdiction of the papacy, Pseudo-Isidore hoped to withdraw accused bishops and their trials from the influence of Carolingian rulers and the provincial synod. Finally, Pseudo-Isidore seeks to establish the near-absolute authority and autonomy of bishops within their own dioceses, and to protect the property of their churches from the depredations of the lay nobility.

The earliest item associated with Pseudo-Isidore has been known to scholarship as the Hispana Gallica Augustodunensis, or the interpolated Hispana. The Collectio Hispana is an authentic two-part canonical collection from Visigothic Spain. Part I provides conciliar decrees from the Council of Nicaea (325) through the Second Council of Seville (619); Part II consists of papal decretals from Pope Damasus I (d. 384) through Gregory the Great (d. 604). This Spanish collection became known to the forgers in the form of a peculiar and corrupt subtype known as the Hispana Gallica. With the interpolated Hispana, Pseudo-Isidore struggles to correct the textual defects of the Gallican Hispana available to him; alters with understatement and delicacy several items of conciliar legislation and one papal decretal; and contributes a small dossier of three decretal forgeries in the name of Pope Damasus I. Only one complete copy of the interpolated Hispana has come down to us. It is Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 1341. It was copied by Corbie scribes in the middle of the ninth century.

At some later date, the Pseudo-Isidorians produced a collection of what purports to be capitulary legislation, or secular laws issued by Carolingian rulers. A fictitious person named Benedictus Levita, or Benedict the Deacon, claims in a strange preface to have assembled these so-called False Capitularies from documents that he found on deposit at the cathedral archive at Mainz. He says that he did his work upon the order of archbishop Otgar, “bishop of Mainz at that time.” While Benedict is an invention, Otgar is a real figure, and he died on 21 April 847. “Benedict” therefore wrote his preface after this date. The False Capitularies run to 1,721 separate paragraph-length items, in the standard accounting; they are divided into three books and three or four appendices. While the entire framing narrative of Benedict’s preface is fictitious, many of the snippets that Benedict assembles are at base perfectly authentic. Some pieces have even come from genuine Carolingian capitularies. Among the items on hand in the collection are excerpts from the interpolated Hispana.

The False Decretals were also assembled after the interpolated Hispana. They carry another fictitious preface, this one signed by Benedict’s counterpart, who gives his name as Isidorus Mercator, or Isidore the Merchant. The name is an amalgam of Isidore of Seville and Marius Mercator, and though it is this preface that has lent the name of Pseudo-Isidore to all of the forgeries, the Isidorian pseudonym occurs only here and only once. The decretal forgeries are, for the most part, intricate textual mosaics compiled from hundreds of authentic biblical, legal and historical sources. As in the False Capitularies, the forgers rarely write their own Latin, though Isidore presents his sources in far more heavily processed and digested form than Benedict. The False Decretals circulated only as a series of expansions to the interpolated Hispana. The enlarged collection consists of three parts: Part I contains sixty decretal forgeries from Clement I through Melchiades. Part II is nothing more than the conciliar decrees of the first part of the interpolated Hispana. Part III then provides the papal decretals from the Hispana, enhanced by dozens of additional decretal forgeries.

The False Decretals alone reached a wide audience. Today nearly 100 manuscripts are known. The manuscripts transmit several versions of the False Decretals, which are still discussed according to the nineteenth-century classifications developed by Paul Hinschius. The fullest version, in three parts, is known in four variant forms termed A1, A/B, B and C. A short version, A2, provides only some of the prefatory materials from the Hispana, the sixty decretal forgeries in Part I, and an initial sequence of decretal forgeries from Part III. Modern authors also discuss the so-called Cluny Version, a subtype of A1 which omits the conciliar material in Part II. Crucially, Hinschius developed these classifications solely by comparing the contents of the manuscripts he studied. They do not proceed from a stemmatic analysis of textual variation. In all likelihood, a text-critical approach would gather A/B, B and C together in one branch, while likely discerning several different branches in the overbroad A1 category, with which Cluny and A2 are associated.

Many long-form decretal manuscripts conclude with a series of appendices. One of these is a précis of Pseudo-Isidorian procedural provisions that, according to a fictitious rubric, Pope Hadrian I gave to Bishop Angilram of Metz. It is known as the Capitula Angilramni. Another such appendix, only recently unmasked as a Pseudo-Isidorian concoction, amounts to a series of lightly enhanced excerpts from the Council of Chalcedon. It is called the Excerptiones de gestis Chalcedonensis Concilii, or the Chalcedon Excerpts. Other minor forgeries, among them the so-called Collectio Danieliana and a decretal in the name of Pope Gregory IV, circulated apart from the major constituents of the forgery corpus.

Scholarship on the Pseudo-Isidorian forgeries has reached a crossroads. The traditional view held that the False Decretals drew on the False Capitularies as an intermediary source. Benedict’s preface, with its implied terminus post quem of 847, therefore seemed applicable to the False Decretals as well. Together with the first glimmerings of an indirect tradition in 852 (very probably) or 857 (certainly), scholars thus placed the forgery enterprise between 847 and 852/7. This drove them to read Pseudo-Isidore in light of the pontificate of Archbishop Hincmar of Reims, who from his consecration in 845 became one of the most assertive, learned and influential clerics of the Carolingian era. Pseudo-Isidore’s mild antipathy for archiepiscopal jurisdiction therefore became a sign of his opposition to Hincmar. This traditional view fell out of favor with the turn of the twenty-first century, as Klaus Zechiel-Eckes announced that he had discovered three manuscripts, two of them from Corbie, which Pseudo-Isidore or his secretaries had annotated in the course of research. This discovery confirmed older indications of ties between Corbie and the forgery enterprise.

/// [snip]

[neilgodfrey]

Lets take the writings of Plutarch and Paul. Both were writing around the same period.

If the writings of Paul were composed in the early second century, yes, both were around the same period. That's important because some topics found in Paul's letters do address concerns of the second century (e.g. glossolalia, judaizing) and we have no independent attribution of those letters until the second century.

Both writings survive via similar copying processes. Both had pseudepigrapha attributed to them. If you were going to use the writings of Plutarch in an argument, how would you analysis their provenance before you felt safe enough to use them?

There is primary evidence for Plutarch: an inscription at Delphi witnessing to his Roman citizenship.

The details in Plutarch's writings embed him in the late first and early second century among known historical persons and his reception history is further witness to his person and place in history.

Paul, on the other hand, comes to us without any clear or consistent clarity about his own personal background and is the subject of contradictory mythical tales from the second century.