Arguing Against the Church Fathers

[GakuseiDon]

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.

Can you clarify what you mean by "held to be authoritative"? Do you mean by modern scholarship or by Christian theologists? If you mean "by modern scholarship", in what way is ancient Christian literature held to be authoritative?

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.

Do you think that, based on what we know about Plutarch and the time he wrote, it is reasonable to view the extant writings of Plutarch as representing pretty much what Plutarch himself wrote, even if we can't be certain?

What I mean is: we don't have an eye-witness to the writings of Plutarch, someone who stood over his shoulders to verify that Plutarch was the one writing that particular text. It's the same with all the other ancient authors, including Paul (assuming he existed in the First Century CE). But I think you'd agree that it is reasonable to grant the assumption that Plutarch was the author of the letters that modern scholarship has attributed to him?

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.

Surely that awareness has existed for a long time? Modern scholarship already has views on the Pastoral letters, the Book of Hebrews (which as early as Origen was suspected as not being written by Paul), pseudepigrapha attributed to earliest Christian apologists like Justin Martyr and Tertullian.

I agree that we need to consider the theological and political agendas of the authors when evaluating their writings, though those agendas must be derived first, usually from the writings themselves. For me, a Fourth Century CE agenda of creating Christianity by forging a history of a mish-mash of conflicting texts is much less likely than a Fourth Century CE agenda of taking conflicting texts and creating a mish-mash of "orthodox" history. (Then again, I'm just an amateur on the topic of history so my opinion is not worth much)

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?

I guess they assumed that Paul and Seneca existed, and someone thought it was a good idea to have them communicate. If your theory is correct, forgers wanted to place Paul in the time of Seneca, wrote letters by Paul that had barely any indication of Paul writing in that time, then decided to forge letters by Paul writing to Seneca. The latter seems less likely.

[GakuseiDon]

Do you think that, based on what we know about Plutarch and the time he wrote, it is reasonable to view the extant writings of Plutarch as representing pretty much what Plutarch himself wrote, even if we can't be certain?

What I mean is: we don't have an eye-witness to the writings of Plutarch, someone who stood over his shoulders to verify that Plutarch was the one writing that particular text. It's the same with all the other ancient authors, including Paul (assuming he existed in the First Century CE). But I think you'd agree that it is reasonable to grant the assumption that Plutarch was the author of the letters that modern scholarship has attributed to him?

Just to expand on this point, the idea that a whole category of ancient writings (not just the Church Fathers!) being forged is used by a number of theorists. I found this interesting article by a person interested in the topic of fake history that describes a number of their theories:
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/ ... dnt-exist/

Hardouin, writing around 1700: Most early pagan and Christian writings were fiction made by Benedictine monks in the 13th Century CE:

In the year 1696, Hardouin published a very strange monograph titled Chronologiae ex Nummis Antiquis Restitutae, or Chronologies Restored from Ancient Coins, in which he claims that the vast majority of supposed ancient Greek, Roman, and early Christian texts are, in fact, complete forgeries and that many supposed events in ancient Greek, Roman, and early Christian history never really happened. In 1729, Hardouin published a shorter work titled Prolegomena ad Censuram Veterum Scriptorum, in which he further expounds this conspiracy theory.

Hardouin maintains that the Iliad, the Odyssey, Herodotos’s Histories, the comedies of Plautus, the writings of Cicero, Horace’s Satires and Epistles, Vergil’s Georgics, and Pliny the Elder’s Natural History are the only “pagan” texts that are truly ancient. He insists that all the other ancient “pagan” writings are medieval forgeries, along with nearly all the writings of the Christian church fathers.

Hardouin maintains that an impia factio, or “impious faction,” of Benedictine monks who opposed the true teachings of the Roman Catholic Church deliberately forged the vast majority of ancient texts, as well as references to those texts in later texts, in the thirteenth century CE as part of an elaborate plot to undermine the true teachings and supreme authority of the church and promote deplorable heresies in its place.

Johnson, writing around 1890: the history of Christianity was forged by monks in the 13th Century CE:

In 1887, [Edwin] Johnson published an anonymous book titled Antiqua Mater: A Study of Christian Origins, in which he asserts that neither Jesus himself nor any of the apostles ever existed and that Christianity did not emerge until the time of the Antonine Dynasty in the second century CE, about a century later than it really did...

In his book The Rise of Christendom (published in 1890) and his book The Pauline Epistles: Re-Studied and Explained (published in 1894), Johnson claims that Jesus, the apostles, early Christianity, the church fathers, the church councils, and the entire period of human history spanning the years from late antiquity to the thirteenth century CE—roughly seven hundred years of history, making up the vast majority of the Middle Ages—never really happened.

Instead, Johnson insists that Christianity actually emerged in the thirteenth century CE and a vast conspiracy of monks (mostly those of the Benedictine order) somehow secretly and deliberately fabricated all the surviving Christian texts, artifacts, and monuments from before that time, as well as all the surviving ancient Greek and Roman texts that mention Christianity, in the period that mainstream historians know as the Late Middle Ages.

Baldauf, writing around 1900: ancient Greeks and Romans never existed:
...

Possibly the first person to outright claim that ancient Greece and Rome never existed at all was the obscure Swiss writer Robert Baldauf, a contemporary of Edwin Johnson, about whom almost nothing reliable is known. In 1902 and 1903 respectively, Baldauf published volumes one and four of an intended four-volume work in German titled Historie und Kritik.

In these volumes, Baldauf observes similarities among classical Greek and Roman texts written by different authors and later medieval and Renaissance texts. Mainstream scholars and historians are generally able to explain these similarities quite easily. They hold (almost certainly correctly) that Greek and Roman authors drew on common literary tropes and traditions and that ancient Greek and Roman literature influenced later medieval and Renaissance literature.

Baldauf, however, claims that neither the ancient Greeks nor the ancient Romans ever existed, that the Early Middle Ages never happened, and that all surviving works of ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian, and early medieval literature were totally fabricated by Italian humanists during the Renaissance as part of an elaborate conspiracy.

Morozov, writing around 1920s/30s: all of human history before the 16th Century CE never happened:

The next most influential proponent of the conspiracy theory that ancient Greece and Rome never existed was the Russian communist revolutionary and polymath Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov (lived 1854 – 1946), who, despite being seemingly unaware of Hardouin, Johnson, and Baldauf’s writings, took the conspiracy theory further than any of them.

Between 1924 and 1932, Morozov published a work in seven volumes, originally titled The History of Human Culture from the Natural Scientific Point of View and later retitled simply Christ. In this work, Morozov propounds the thesis that all of human history before the sixteenth century CE never happened, or at least not as it is described by mainstream historians.

Fomenko, writing after 1970: the Jesuits fabricated all of non-European pre-modern history (including Chinese!) in the 17th and 18th Centuries CE:

This brings us to Anatoly T. Fomenko, the most famous contemporary proponent of the conspiracy theory that ancient and medieval history never happened. Fomenko was born in the Soviet Union in 1945 and earned a PhD in mathematics in 1972. He subsequently established himself as a respectable mathematician, becoming a professor of mathematics at Moscow State University and a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences...

He holds that all of the events of ancient and medieval Mediterranean and European history that really happened actually took place between c. 1000 CE and c. 1600 CE, that all ancient and medieval texts, monuments, artifacts, and artworks were either deliberately forged during the Renaissance or created during the Late Middle Ages and misdated to ancient times, that the European Jesuits deliberately fabricated all of non-European pre-modern history and all the documents and artifacts associated with it in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that the pre-modern history of China is a Jesuit fabrication based on the supposed pre-modern history of Rome and Byzantium.

The author finishes with Donna Dickens, who has been creating TikTok videos in the last few years where she lays out her theory that the Roman Empire never existed.

No doubt all the above authors would cite theological and political agendas to support their theories. So it gets back to my question: how confident are we that the letters genuinely attributed to Plutarch were actually written by Plutarch?

[GakuseiDon]

Do you think that, based on what we know about Plutarch and the time he wrote, it is reasonable to view the extant writings of Plutarch as representing pretty much what Plutarch himself wrote, even if we can't be certain?

What I mean is: we don't have an eye-witness to the writings of Plutarch, someone who stood over his shoulders to verify that Plutarch was the one writing that particular text. It's the same with all the other ancient authors, including Paul (assuming he existed in the First Century CE). But I think you'd agree that it is reasonable to grant the assumption that Plutarch was the author of the letters that modern scholarship has attributed to him?

Just to expand on this point, the idea that a whole category of ancient writings (not just the Church Fathers!) being forged is used by a number of theorists. I found this interesting article by a person interested in the topic of fake history that describes a number of their theories:
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/ ... dnt-exist/

Hardouin, writing around 1700: Most early pagan and Christian writings were fiction made by Benedictine monks in the 13th Century CE:

In the year 1696, Hardouin published a very strange monograph titled Chronologiae ex Nummis Antiquis Restitutae, or Chronologies Restored from Ancient Coins, in which he claims that the vast majority of supposed ancient Greek, Roman, and early Christian texts are, in fact, complete forgeries and that many supposed events in ancient Greek, Roman, and early Christian history never really happened. In 1729, Hardouin published a shorter work titled Prolegomena ad Censuram Veterum Scriptorum, in which he further expounds this conspiracy theory.

Hardouin maintains that the Iliad, the Odyssey, Herodotos’s Histories, the comedies of Plautus, the writings of Cicero, Horace’s Satires and Epistles, Vergil’s Georgics, and Pliny the Elder’s Natural History are the only “pagan” texts that are truly ancient. He insists that all the other ancient “pagan” writings are medieval forgeries, along with nearly all the writings of the Christian church fathers.

Hardouin maintains that an impia factio, or “impious faction,” of Benedictine monks who opposed the true teachings of the Roman Catholic Church deliberately forged the vast majority of ancient texts, as well as references to those texts in later texts, in the thirteenth century CE as part of an elaborate plot to undermine the true teachings and supreme authority of the church and promote deplorable heresies in its place.

Johnson, writing around 1890: the history of Christianity was forged by monks in the 13th Century CE:

In 1887, [Edwin] Johnson published an anonymous book titled Antiqua Mater: A Study of Christian Origins, in which he asserts that neither Jesus himself nor any of the apostles ever existed and that Christianity did not emerge until the time of the Antonine Dynasty in the second century CE, about a century later than it really did...

In his book The Rise of Christendom (published in 1890) and his book The Pauline Epistles: Re-Studied and Explained (published in 1894), Johnson claims that Jesus, the apostles, early Christianity, the church fathers, the church councils, and the entire period of human history spanning the years from late antiquity to the thirteenth century CE—roughly seven hundred years of history, making up the vast majority of the Middle Ages—never really happened.

Instead, Johnson insists that Christianity actually emerged in the thirteenth century CE and a vast conspiracy of monks (mostly those of the Benedictine order) somehow secretly and deliberately fabricated all the surviving Christian texts, artifacts, and monuments from before that time, as well as all the surviving ancient Greek and Roman texts that mention Christianity, in the period that mainstream historians know as the Late Middle Ages.

Baldauf, writing around 1900: ancient Greeks and Romans never existed:

Possibly the first person to outright claim that ancient Greece and Rome never existed at all was the obscure Swiss writer Robert Baldauf, a contemporary of Edwin Johnson, about whom almost nothing reliable is known. In 1902 and 1903 respectively, Baldauf published volumes one and four of an intended four-volume work in German titled Historie und Kritik.

In these volumes, Baldauf observes similarities among classical Greek and Roman texts written by different authors and later medieval and Renaissance texts. Mainstream scholars and historians are generally able to explain these similarities quite easily. They hold (almost certainly correctly) that Greek and Roman authors drew on common literary tropes and traditions and that ancient Greek and Roman literature influenced later medieval and Renaissance literature.

Baldauf, however, claims that neither the ancient Greeks nor the ancient Romans ever existed, that the Early Middle Ages never happened, and that all surviving works of ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian, and early medieval literature were totally fabricated by Italian humanists during the Renaissance as part of an elaborate conspiracy.

Morozov, writing around 1920s/30s: all of recorded human history before the 16th Century CE never happened:

The next most influential proponent of the conspiracy theory that ancient Greece and Rome never existed was the Russian communist revolutionary and polymath Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov (lived 1854 – 1946), who, despite being seemingly unaware of Hardouin, Johnson, and Baldauf’s writings, took the conspiracy theory further than any of them.

Between 1924 and 1932, Morozov published a work in seven volumes, originally titled The History of Human Culture from the Natural Scientific Point of View and later retitled simply Christ. In this work, Morozov propounds the thesis that all of human history before the sixteenth century CE never happened, or at least not as it is described by mainstream historians.

Fomenko, writing after 1970: the Jesuits fabricated all of non-European pre-modern history (including Chinese!) in the 17th and 18th Centuries CE:

This brings us to Anatoly T. Fomenko, the most famous contemporary proponent of the conspiracy theory that ancient and medieval history never happened. Fomenko was born in the Soviet Union in 1945 and earned a PhD in mathematics in 1972. He subsequently established himself as a respectable mathematician, becoming a professor of mathematics at Moscow State University and a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences...

He holds that all of the events of ancient and medieval Mediterranean and European history that really happened actually took place between c. 1000 CE and c. 1600 CE, that all ancient and medieval texts, monuments, artifacts, and artworks were either deliberately forged during the Renaissance or created during the Late Middle Ages and misdated to ancient times, that the European Jesuits deliberately fabricated all of non-European pre-modern history and all the documents and artifacts associated with it in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that the pre-modern history of China is a Jesuit fabrication based on the supposed pre-modern history of Rome and Byzantium.

The author finishes with Donna Dickens, who has been creating TikTok videos in the last few years where she lays out her theory that the Roman Empire never existed.

No doubt all the above authors would cite theological and political agendas to support their theories. So it gets back to my question: how confident are we that the letters genuinely attributed to Plutarch were actually written by Plutarch? How confident are we that the letters written by the Church Fathers were actually written by those Church Fathers?

[Leucius Charinus]

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.

Can you clarify what you mean by "held to be authoritative"? Do you mean by modern scholarship or by Christian theologists? If you mean "by modern scholarship", in what way is ancient Christian literature held to be authoritative?

The Christian NT canonical (NTC) literature was held up to be 'holy writ' - divine and authoritative - by the Christian emperor's of the 4th and subsequent centuries. This authority was quickly proliferated into the law codes of the Roman empire. Christian bishops soon had the ability to over-rule the decisions of magistrates. Quite obviously the authority of the NTC literature became supreme. In that inconvenient position it remained for many long (and dark) centuries.

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.

Do you think that, based on what we know about Plutarch and the time he wrote, it is reasonable to view the extant writings of Plutarch as representing pretty much what Plutarch himself wrote, even if we can't be certain?

What I mean is: we don't have an eye-witness to the writings of Plutarch, someone who stood over his shoulders to verify that Plutarch was the one writing that particular text. It's the same with all the other ancient authors, including Paul (assuming he existed in the First Century CE). But I think you'd agree that it is reasonable to grant the assumption that Plutarch was the author of the letters that modern scholarship has attributed to him?

Here the discussion resolves to a comparison between the historicity of Paul and Plutarch. In an above post Neil has outlined primary and secondary evidence we have (or don't have) for both. Paul is not attested outside of the Christian tradition with the exception of the fraudulent letter exchange with Seneca. IMO the identification of fraud contributes negatively towards historicity. That half the letters of Paul are deemed inauthentic is a troubling fact.

[GakuseiDon]

Do you think that, based on what we know about Plutarch and the time he wrote, it is reasonable to view the extant writings of Plutarch as representing pretty much what Plutarch himself wrote, even if we can't be certain?

What I mean is: we don't have an eye-witness to the writings of Plutarch, someone who stood over his shoulders to verify that Plutarch was the one writing that particular text. It's the same with all the other ancient authors, including Paul (assuming he existed in the First Century CE). But I think you'd agree that it is reasonable to grant the assumption that Plutarch was the author of the letters that modern scholarship has attributed to him?

Here the discussion resolves to a comparison between the historicity of Paul and Plutarch.

Well, no it doesn't, with regards to the question I'm asking about Plutarch. How do we know with reasonable confidence that Plutarch wrote the letters that are generally attributed to him, in your view?

[Leucius Charinus]

Do you think that, based on what we know about Plutarch and the time he wrote, it is reasonable to view the extant writings of Plutarch as representing pretty much what Plutarch himself wrote, even if we can't be certain?

What I mean is: we don't have an eye-witness to the writings of Plutarch, someone who stood over his shoulders to verify that Plutarch was the one writing that particular text. It's the same with all the other ancient authors, including Paul (assuming he existed in the First Century CE). But I think you'd agree that it is reasonable to grant the assumption that Plutarch was the author of the letters that modern scholarship has attributed to him?

Just to expand on this point, the idea that a whole category of ancient writings (not just the Church Fathers!) being forged is used by a number of theorists. I found this interesting article by a person interested in the topic of fake history that describes a number of their theories:
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/ ... dnt-exist/

Hardouin, writing around 1700: Most early pagan and Christian writings were fiction made by Benedictine monks in the 13th Century CE:

In the year 1696, Hardouin published a very strange monograph titled Chronologiae ex Nummis Antiquis Restitutae, or Chronologies Restored from Ancient Coins, in which he claims that the vast majority of supposed ancient Greek, Roman, and early Christian texts are, in fact, complete forgeries and that many supposed events in ancient Greek, Roman, and early Christian history never really happened. In 1729, Hardouin published a shorter work titled Prolegomena ad Censuram Veterum Scriptorum, in which he further expounds this conspiracy theory.

Hardouin maintains that the Iliad, the Odyssey, Herodotos’s Histories, the comedies of Plautus, the writings of Cicero, Horace’s Satires and Epistles, Vergil’s Georgics, and Pliny the Elder’s Natural History are the only “pagan” texts that are truly ancient. He insists that all the other ancient “pagan” writings are medieval forgeries, along with nearly all the writings of the Christian church fathers.

Hardouin maintains that an impia factio, or “impious faction,” of Benedictine monks who opposed the true teachings of the Roman Catholic Church deliberately forged the vast majority of ancient texts, as well as references to those texts in later texts, in the thirteenth century CE as part of an elaborate plot to undermine the true teachings and supreme authority of the church and promote deplorable heresies in its place.

Johnson, writing around 1890: the history of Christianity was forged by monks in the 13th Century CE:

In 1887, [Edwin] Johnson published an anonymous book titled Antiqua Mater: A Study of Christian Origins, in which he asserts that neither Jesus himself nor any of the apostles ever existed and that Christianity did not emerge until the time of the Antonine Dynasty in the second century CE, about a century later than it really did...

In his book The Rise of Christendom (published in 1890) and his book The Pauline Epistles: Re-Studied and Explained (published in 1894), Johnson claims that Jesus, the apostles, early Christianity, the church fathers, the church councils, and the entire period of human history spanning the years from late antiquity to the thirteenth century CE—roughly seven hundred years of history, making up the vast majority of the Middle Ages—never really happened.

Instead, Johnson insists that Christianity actually emerged in the thirteenth century CE and a vast conspiracy of monks (mostly those of the Benedictine order) somehow secretly and deliberately fabricated all the surviving Christian texts, artifacts, and monuments from before that time, as well as all the surviving ancient Greek and Roman texts that mention Christianity, in the period that mainstream historians know as the Late Middle Ages.

Baldauf, writing around 1900: ancient Greeks and Romans never existed:
...

Possibly the first person to outright claim that ancient Greece and Rome never existed at all was the obscure Swiss writer Robert Baldauf, a contemporary of Edwin Johnson, about whom almost nothing reliable is known. In 1902 and 1903 respectively, Baldauf published volumes one and four of an intended four-volume work in German titled Historie und Kritik.

In these volumes, Baldauf observes similarities among classical Greek and Roman texts written by different authors and later medieval and Renaissance texts. Mainstream scholars and historians are generally able to explain these similarities quite easily. They hold (almost certainly correctly) that Greek and Roman authors drew on common literary tropes and traditions and that ancient Greek and Roman literature influenced later medieval and Renaissance literature.

Baldauf, however, claims that neither the ancient Greeks nor the ancient Romans ever existed, that the Early Middle Ages never happened, and that all surviving works of ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian, and early medieval literature were totally fabricated by Italian humanists during the Renaissance as part of an elaborate conspiracy.

Morozov, writing around 1920s/30s: all of human history before the 16th Century CE never happened:

The next most influential proponent of the conspiracy theory that ancient Greece and Rome never existed was the Russian communist revolutionary and polymath Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov (lived 1854 – 1946), who, despite being seemingly unaware of Hardouin, Johnson, and Baldauf’s writings, took the conspiracy theory further than any of them.

Between 1924 and 1932, Morozov published a work in seven volumes, originally titled The History of Human Culture from the Natural Scientific Point of View and later retitled simply Christ. In this work, Morozov propounds the thesis that all of human history before the sixteenth century CE never happened, or at least not as it is described by mainstream historians.

Fomenko, writing after 1970: the Jesuits fabricated all of non-European pre-modern history (including Chinese!) in the 17th and 18th Centuries CE:

This brings us to Anatoly T. Fomenko, the most famous contemporary proponent of the conspiracy theory that ancient and medieval history never happened. Fomenko was born in the Soviet Union in 1945 and earned a PhD in mathematics in 1972. He subsequently established himself as a respectable mathematician, becoming a professor of mathematics at Moscow State University and a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences...

He holds that all of the events of ancient and medieval Mediterranean and European history that really happened actually took place between c. 1000 CE and c. 1600 CE, that all ancient and medieval texts, monuments, artifacts, and artworks were either deliberately forged during the Renaissance or created during the Late Middle Ages and misdated to ancient times, that the European Jesuits deliberately fabricated all of non-European pre-modern history and all the documents and artifacts associated with it in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that the pre-modern history of China is a Jesuit fabrication based on the supposed pre-modern history of Rome and Byzantium.

The author finishes with Donna Dickens, who has been creating TikTok videos in the last few years where she lays out her theory that the Roman Empire never existed.

No doubt all the above authors would cite theological and political agendas to support their theories.

An interesting list of "Fake manuscripts" theories.

Each and every one of the theories above listed from all these authors, and the proposition that I am exploring here, are diametrically divergent on a simple and critical point. Their theories are immediately capable of being refuted, and my proposition capable of being supported, by science, in three letters.

C14

I cite scientific agendas to support my theory. A number of fragments from Christian related manuscripts have been given to the scientists in the radiocarbon lab. The C14 results demonstrate that the evidence tested cover a date range over the 4th century. So you can draw a line through all the above theories because the Christian manuscripts (Gospel Judas, NHC I, etc) existed in the 4th century.

OTOH these same C14 dates support a terminus ad quem of the 4th century for Christian literature, which is my prime proposition. This has been on the public record via a referee report from the Journal of Hellenic Studies for the last 15 years.

http://mountainman.com.au/essenes/thesi ... eports.htm

[Leucius Charinus]

Here the discussion resolves to a comparison between the historicity of Paul and Plutarch.

Well, no it doesn't, with regards to the question I'm asking about Plutarch. How do we know with reasonable confidence that Plutarch wrote the letters that are generally attributed to him, in your view?

Plutarch as a writer has primary and secondary evidence which has a reasonable state of referential integrity with respect to the core historical record (all other evidence) of that time period. Therefore we may have some reasonable confidence that Plutarch wrote the letters ascribed to him.

[GakuseiDon]

Plutarch as a writer has primary and secondary evidence which has a reasonable state of referential integrity with respect to the core historical record (all other evidence) of that time period. Therefore we may have some reasonable confidence that Plutarch wrote the letters ascribed to him.

The first statement doesn't lead to the second one. Yes, (1) Plutarch existed and (2) he was known as a writer. But that doesn't lead to "therefore we may have some reasonable confidence that Plutarch wrote the letters ascribed to him". It seems to me that the reason why we today ascribe those letters to him is because earlier writers traditionally assigned those letters to him. Similarly with the Church Fathers: the texts we have have been traditionally ascribed to them. Whether those later writers were correct or not we can't know with certainty. That's something we today have to accept (perhaps with the assumption that earlier writers knew something we don't) and work from there.

[GakuseiDon]

Each and every one of the theories above listed from all these authors, and the proposition that I am exploring here, are diametrically divergent on a simple and critical point. Their theories are immediately capable of being refuted, and my proposition capable of being supported, by science, in three letters.

C14

I cite scientific agendas to support my theory. A number of fragments from Christian related manuscripts have been given to the scientists in the radiocarbon lab. The C14 results demonstrate that the evidence tested cover a date range over the 4th century. So you can draw a line through all the above theories because the Christian manuscripts (Gospel Judas, NHC I, etc) existed in the 4th century.

Fair point.

OTOH these same C14 dates support a terminus ad quem of the 4th century for Christian literature, which is my prime proposition. This has been on the public record via a referee report from the Journal of Hellenic Studies for the last 15 years.

http://mountainman.com.au/essenes/thesi ... eports.htm

That's an interesting read. What was Angus Bowie responding to? Was it to a submission of the JHS, or to your website, or something else?

[Leucius Charinus]

Plutarch as a writer has primary and secondary evidence which has a reasonable state of referential integrity with respect to the core historical record (all other evidence) of that time period. Therefore we may have some reasonable confidence that Plutarch wrote the letters ascribed to him.

The first statement doesn't lead to the second one. Yes, (1) Plutarch existed and (2) he was known as a writer. But that doesn't lead to "therefore we may have some reasonable confidence that Plutarch wrote the letters ascribed to him". It seems to me that the reason why we today ascribe those letters to him is because earlier writers traditionally assigned those letters to him.

This is an example of the type of evidence which I referred to above as having a "reasonable state of referential integrity with respect to the core historical record (all other evidence) of that time period." Plutarch is part of a few networks.

Similarly with the Church Fathers: the texts we have have been traditionally ascribed to them. Whether those later writers were correct or not we can't know with certainty. That's something we today have to accept (perhaps with the assumption that earlier writers knew something we don't) and work from there.

My position is different. We do not have to accept a source as authentic if there are suspicions that the source is either forged or corrupt. The entire collection of the church fathers was first gathered together by Eusebius, who just happens to be the editor-in-chief of the first official Greek NT Bible codices in the Roman empire. From then on the collection was curated by the hierarchical network of the church [industry].

So I am inclined to provisionally treat the church fathers as a single source and double check them by searching for any evidence external to the church which corroborates their claims. This evidence should exist.

There's not much corroboration / support from the archaeological evidence And this corroboration / supporting evidence doesn't appear to be found within the class of evidence = non-Christian literary witnesses to the existence of early Christians. For some reason the church, the NT and the church fathers or the Christians were not mentioned by the non-Christians. Supposedly independent witnesses were fabricated.

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