Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

to Stephan,

So, according to you, the authors of 'Acts', the three Pastorals, Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Clement, Ignatian 'to the Ephesians', Epistula Apostolorum, Polycarp's epistle, 2 Peter were not Catholic users of Paul OR or they wrote after Irenaeus?

I am saying Irenaeus is our source for these texts.

Do you mean Irenaeus fabricated these texts?

Cordially, Bernard

There were no limits on what and when and how the Holy Spirit spoke to Irenaeus. When pagans cited the Ezra story it was meant to prove the Torch was a forgery. Irenaeus embraced the composition by Holy Spirit. Would all Christians have embraced the story? No only the ones embracing and promoting falsified texts. The honest ones would either deny Ezra wrote the Torah or denied the Torah. No honest intelligent person could believe an Ezra-composed Torah was written or the same as the one written at the time of Moses. This sort of exculpatory evidence is admissible in court and often decides cases (for better or worse).

The texts are corrupt and Irenaeus is the likely suspect though he certainly did not corrupt all of them nor was he the only one corrupting texts. Paul even accuses his contemporaries of falsifying scriptures. My point, again, is the situation is hopeless

That right, because you cannot get around logic and reason, with your personal fantasy.

Either that or you're not very smart. I will let each come to their own conclusions

outhouse wrote:Your puzzle does not look like the picture the evidence paints.

Well, if you don't accept Luke/Acts borrowing from Josephus maybe it's not even the same evidence, the same puzzle or the same picture.

For example: are the pastorals and Acts big forgeries contra Marcion and pro apostolic succession? I just stumbled again over 2 Cor 11:25-27. Surely Luke used it for Acts 27:27-28:5, right? But... It is not in Marcion. I think there was a first edition (and redaction) of 10 epistles of Paul also adopted by Marcion, but how different were they from the received ones?
Why would Marcion keep all the stuff about Lucifer and cut out 2 Cor 11:16-12:6, including the entirely unobjectionable struggle of Paul? And then why would he keep the struggle in Col 1:24-29? It doesn't make sense...
On the other hand it makes perfect sense for 2 Cor 12:7 to follow from 2 Cor 11:15, they are even surrounded by two parallel reference to Satan, there's no more that conflicting "boasting/no boasting" and "fool/no fool" that makes it almost unreadable.
Who is that guy he met from 14 years before? It reminds of the 14 years in Galatians 1. Is this an oblique reference to the Apocalypse of Peter? It may have been a recently published and extremely popular text at the time of Marcion, how did it end up in the Muratorian fragment if it was so late? And how did Acts end up in our canon?

The real question is - why isn't the situation hopeless with respect to the scriptures. The only reason why we as a society "accept" these writings is that faith clouded the reasoning of our ancestors (and the fact they were morons bullied by a much smarter and better educated ecclesiastical organization). There are no good reasons for continuing to abide by archaic faith based reasonings.

Secret Alias wrote:The texts are corrupt and Irenaeus is the likely suspect though he certainly did not corrupt all of them nor was he the only one corrupting texts.

On top of lacking the opportunity (too late and too far from Rome), i doubt Irenaeus was so smart... He's unable to see that even in the orthodox recension he swears by Paul doesn't believe in a bodily resurrection and Marcion was right on that issue (AH 1.27.3 vs. 1 Cor 15:44). It doesn't take a conspiracy when the blinders of faith can suffice. But there was a conspiracy going on in the second century, several of them i would say: who believes that the long established Valentinus became an heretic because he was refused the papacy, and not the reverse?

It's not a conspiracy if it's one person corrupting texts. There were limits on what he could corrupt as sections of material were read in the liturgy. The individual passages NOT the underlying literary context which was unknown to the laity

Secret Alias wrote:The real question is - why isn't the situation hopeless with respect to the scriptures. The only reason why we as a society "accept" these writings is that faith clouded the reasoning of our ancestors (and the fact they were morons bullied by a much smarter and better educated ecclesiastical organization). There are no good reasons for continuing to abide by archaic faith based reasonings.

The last thing I would ever do is let apologetics get in the way of my view.


Reading Paul is to know Pauls community, and his followers pseudepigrapha.


Your trying to make a case the text evolved in a higher degree known or accepted, not a bad avenue to explore, but you need to make a better case for it them you have, if you want to go against the best professors out there.

Secret Alias wrote:It's not a conspiracy if it's one person corrupting texts.

Funny thing Marcion is earlier, and we know he did just that, and we know down to sentences and words he redacted because everybody and their brother complained about his text.


BUT MAGICALLY everyone and everybody is silent for Irenaeus, not a church mouse raises a peep, as well all know he stood up for the popular text he valued AS IS.


Where are the complaints ?