The Christian creeds are so obviously anachronistic
Funny that, I read them as a logical conclusion from and development of the texts!
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The Christian creeds are so obviously anachronistic
willhud9 wrote: I know that Paul of Tarsus wrote many letters to different cities, we have several of them.
Onyx8 wrote:As far as I have ever heard there are no witnesses of Jesus either christian or non, only hearsay.
MrFungus420 wrote:
About twenty or so years after Jesus is supposed to have died.
He was not a witness to Jesus...he just had a hallucination vision.
spin wrote:Onyx8 wrote:As far as I have ever heard there are no witnesses of Jesus either christian or non, only hearsay.
(The word "witness" was being used in a somewhat different sense as "witness to a notion of the witness's era". We tend to use "eye witness" when we want to make the distinction.)
Onyx8 wrote:spin wrote:Onyx8 wrote:As far as I have ever heard there are no witnesses of Jesus either christian or non, only hearsay.
(The word "witness" was being used in a somewhat different sense as "witness to a notion of the witness's era". We tend to use "eye witness" when we want to make the distinction.)
OK, its nice to define words before using them if one is not going to use the common definition.
IanS wrote: No I don't think so. That would make it the oldest document in the entire Jesus saga by far.
Nicko wrote:IanS wrote: No I don't think so. That would make it the oldest document in the entire Jesus saga by far.
So? Most of the scholarship that I have seen reaches this conclusion. The "Pauline" documents were the first to be set down in writing. Because they were letters. It was not for some time after this that manuscripts written in Koine Greek appeared that later became that basis for the 'Apostolic' gospels. Bart Ehrman is one of the most accessable sources for this sort of thing.
IanS wrote:Because Paul is thought to be the earliest of the writers, and may have been copied by later writers, it is important to know what date we actually have for the information that we read in Paul (ie that is not, 50-60AD, but apparently some time significantly later ... how much later?).
spin wrote:IanS wrote:Because Paul is thought to be the earliest of the writers, and may have been copied by later writers, it is important to know what date we actually have for the information that we read in Paul (ie that is not, 50-60AD, but apparently some time significantly later ... how much later?).
It is difficult to date Paul. The one independent means that I've seen attempted is the use of the story of Paul being let down the wall of Damascus during the time when Aretas had control of the city (2 Cor 11:32). This Aretas was the king of the Nabataeans and there were a number of them. The apologetic use of this material believes that it was Aretas IV who reigned during the first half of the first century. However, Damascus was ultimately under Roman control at the time and Nabataea (ie Petra) was outside the Roman empire, so a Roman Damascus being under the control of a ruler who was not a Roman vassal is ridiculous. Yet there was a time when Aretas III had control of Damascus just prior to the initial Roman intervention into Syria, ie before Pompey's forces arrived in 65 BCE. If there is any veracity in the basket story, then Paul would be dated a century earlier. Now there is a lot of apologetics as to the Aretas story, which imagines that Caligula gave Damascus to Aretas IV (just check out the last paragraph of this [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aretas_IV_Philopatris"]Wiki crap[/url]), but it has no historical basis.
If we sweep the basket story under the carpet, I think that there may be a vague indication that Jerusalem was stable and relatively free to enter, suggesting a time before the Jewish war and most certainly before the Bar Kochbah period after which no Jews were allowed into the city. There is no sense that Jews were personae non gratae in Paul's dealing with Jerusalem, which would be the case after the Jewish War.
IanS wrote:What concerned me was a rather different question. Namely - what date do we have for the first readable copies of what Paul was supposed to have written?
The point being - although religious sources always like to claim the earliest possible date for documents such as Paul and the Gospels, eg typically claimed as circa 50AD to 100AD, if in fact all we have from the earliest copies are just some fragments (if even that), then it's very difficult if not impossible to have much if any idea of what Paul or any of these authors actually wrote.
Instead all we can know is what we read in the more complete copies made by unknown authors (presumably themselves Christian believers) from about the 3rd or 4th century onwards.
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