Posted: Dec 21, 2021 7:11 am
dejuror wrote: If you admit that church sources are forged or corrupt then you must also admit that writings attributed to Eusebius are probably manipulated and could have been written far later.
Absolutely. The writings of Eusebius were preserved by his continuators in the Nicene Church industry. However unambiguous evidence for the existence of the NT writings and the presence of the Christian cult appears by the mid 4th century. This unambiguous evidence includes the oldest Greek Bible codices, archaeological evidence of basilicas, the upper-bound dating of papyri fragments, inscriptions, art, coins, funery relief and radiocarbon dates (Gospel of Judas).
There is Lucian of Samosata c 125-180 CE who mentioned people called Christians in the “Death of Peregrine”.
This statement needs to be qualified by the conditional statement that it is not a later forgery. We have plenty of evidence to suggest that many works were forged in the name of Lucian.
Among the eighty-two works of Lucian known to A.M. Harmon (Loeb, 1913) at least fifteen forgeries are listed, some of which are clearly Christian forgeries (e.g., Philopatris)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philopatris
No cigar.