(March 1, 2013 at 5:22 pm)Minimalist Wrote: But what you are looking for is more akin to a scorecard at a modern ball game.

I'm talking of court records for convicted criminals and punishments on the lines of -

Sextus - murder - arena

Crispus - Christian - mines

Punishments for plebians

Quote:Plebeians were scourged or sent to work in the mines. During the empire, one could also choose to be sent to the arena. Since scourging and working in the mines often meant a slow lingering death, the choice of the games seemed a kinder solution to some. There is contradictory evidence of whether a citizen could be given a death penalty but, in effect, many of the punishments that members of the lower classes received were a sentence to death.

Nobody would have bothered to copy this kind of record to preserve it so maybe it's just bad luck that nothing like this has been found as yet. As far as I know so far, anyway. I mightn't be using the right keywords for google.

I suspect this is probably more accurate.

(March 1, 2013 at 6:07 pm)Minimalist Wrote: I suspect this is probably more accurate.

You're probably right. From what I've found so far, edicts got recorded but the Roman authorities don't appear to have kept an accurate count of how many Christians were caught and punished. Or maybe they did and the records were destroyed because there weren't as many victims as the Christian historians wanted for their gory accounts.

Diocletian Persecution

Quote:Although the persecution resulted in the deaths of—according to one modern estimate—3,000 to 3,500 Christians, and the torture, imprisonment, or dislocation of many more, most Christians avoided punishment.

Modern historians like G. E. M. de Ste. Croix have attempted to determine whether Christian sources exaggerated the scope of the Diocletianic persecution.

Any details, such as names of individuals and their fate, were provided by Eusebius so I think they can be disregarded.

Let me get back to being serious, though. What about the Didache? It is generally considered a primitive work - one of the earliest - c 100 AD which puts it within 10 years of Pliny and at most 20 of Tacitus/Suetonius.

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/te...tfoot.html

Yet, with all its bullshit, it never mentions "jesus" ( or mary, joseph, pilate, yada, yada, yada....)

It was so primitive that they left it out of the bible!

(March 1, 2013 at 6:53 pm)Minimalist Wrote: Let me get back to being serious, though. What about the Didache? It is generally considered a primitive work - one of the earliest - c 100 AD which puts it within 10 years of Pliny and at most 20 of Tacitus/Suetonius.

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/te...tfoot.html

Yet, with all its bullshit, it never mentions "jesus" ( or mary, joseph, pilate, yada, yada, yada....)

It was so primitive that they left it out of the bible!

I went to the commentary section which quotes various opinions.

Quote:A. D. Howell-Smith writes about the Didache (Jesus Not a Myth, p. 120):

The simple Christology of Acts confronts us again in the so-called Teaching of the Apostles, a composite work, of which the first six chapters seem to be a Christian redaction of a Jewish document entitled The Two Ways, while the rest is the work of several Christian writers, the earliest belonging to the first century and the latest perhaps to the fourth.

I found further information in the Jewish Encyclopedia - it's from 1906 but what it says about the Jewish origins of the first six chapters will probably be good enough.

Quote:A manual of instruction for proselytes, adopted from the Synagogue by early Christianity, and transformed by alteration and amplification into a Church manual.

As a matter of course, this Jewish manual could not be used in its entirety by the Church from the moment when she deviated from Jewish practises and views. Just as the Shema' Yisrael in the saying of Jesus (Mark xii. 29) was dropped by the other Gospel writers, so was the whole first part of the "Didache," dealing with monotheism, tampered with by the Christian editor. The whole book has fallen into disorder, and much of it is misunderstood and misinterpreted by Christian scholars, who judge it only from the point of view of the Church. The fundamental ideas of the "Didache" are indisputably Jewish. The teaching of the "Two Ways," the one of life and the other of death, runs as a leading thought throughout Jewish literature.

As the Didache is an instruction manual for a community there would be no need for any kind of biographical details to be included. Later Christian writers mentioned Jesus in 9:3, 9:6, 9:9 and 10:2 and "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" turns up in 7:2. The writers didn't think it necessary to add the name, Jesus, anywhere in the first six chapters, though. Back to the Jewish Encyclopedia.

Quote:the words "through the Twelve Apostles," which assume that the word "Lord" refers to Jesus, are a Christian interpolation.

I think this could explain it because the word, Lord, is used a lot from Chapter 8 and it's obviously referring to Jesus in the later writings.

Paul also used the word, Lord, so I decided to go back to him and the question of authenticity where his epistles are concerned. I thought this was particularly important because First Corinthians has many references to Jesus and crucifixion.

Quote:The name "undisputed" epistles represents the traditional scholarly consensus asserting that Paul authored each letter. However, even the least disputed of letters, such as Galatians, have found critics.[11] Moreover, the unity of the letters is questioned by some scholars. First and Second Corinthians have garnered particular suspicion, with some scholars, among them Edgar Goodspeed and Norman Perrin, supposing one or both texts as we have them today are actually amalgamations of multiple individual letters. There remains considerable discussion as to the presence of possible significant interpolations. However, such textual corruption is difficult to detect and even more so to verify, leaving little agreement as to the extent of the epistles' integrity. See also Radical Criticism, which maintains that the external evidence for attributing any of the letters to Paul is so weak, that it should be considered that all the letters appearing in the Marcion canon were written in Paul's name by members of the Marcionite Church and were afterwards edited and adopted by the Catholic Church.

So, if Jesus and crucifixion were later additions, what was the very first version of Christianity about? There are umpteen ideas about the origins of Christianity but which one is right?

I had another look at Antinous and Alexander the Great in Post #268.

The pagans liked to follow a formula where their deities and heroes were concerned. The question of whether Jesus was based on a real person or completely fictional could be irrelevant here - either way, deified Jesus would have ended up exactly the same.

Maybe asking if there was a real Jesus is like asking if there was a real King Arthur. Nobody will ever know the truth so both are inexhaustible subjects for books and speculation.

The legends of Alexander the Great make me wonder about some of those divine heroes. "Heracles won the weight lifting competition five years in a row. Only a son of Zeus could have done that." A few centuries later, the five times weight lifting champion had been all over the Greco-Roman world having mythological adventures.

Anyway, back to Jesus. The Roman Centurion knew who he was.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AejZxaYkekM

I have no doubt that apologists will come up with all sorts of reasons to dispute the didache...that's what they do with anything that is inconvenient to their bullshit.

But it does exist and was referred to by Eusebius so it was known in antiquity which, at the end of the day, is more than one can say for the Tacitus passage that they love so.

BTW, that movie was puke-inducing.

(March 2, 2013 at 12:53 pm)Minimalist Wrote: I have no doubt that apologists will come up with all sorts of reasons to dispute the didache...that's what they do with anything that is inconvenient to their bullshit.

It doesn't really tell us much about the first days of what became Christianity, though, so people will probably speculate for decades.

1: The first Christian communities didn't believe that their Messiah was the son of God/God incarnate.

2: "We need some rules so these will do for now because we're used to them."

(March 2, 2013 at 12:53 pm)Minimalist Wrote: But it does exist and was referred to by Eusebius so it was known in antiquity which, at the end of the day, is more than one can say for the Tacitus passage that they love so.

I did some more research on the Tacitus passage looking for unbiased opinions. Some think it's genuine. A couple think it's mostly genuine but ideas differed on what might have been changed. One thought it a fake. Looks like this will keep people speculating for decades as well because it's unlikely that any more copies of the book will turn up.

(March 2, 2013 at 12:53 pm)Minimalist Wrote: BTW, that movie was puke-inducing.

John Wayne's wooden declaration that Jesus really was the son of God made up for it.

I think the movie is most memorable for the approach of - "Let's have as many big name Hollywood stars in it as possible and try to outdo The Longest Day." TGSET wins out over TLD for Star Trek fans because it had Spock's father in it.

(March 1, 2013 at 10:07 am)Confused Ape Wrote:

(March 1, 2013 at 9:27 am)EGross Wrote: I think they stole that from the Midrash of Abraham

Would people in 7th Century England have known about interpretation of texts in Judaism, though?[/uote]
Ah, 7th century. Maybe the Jews took it from them? There is also a Chinese story of a guy who was invulnerable to gire, his brother to water, and his other brother to the axe. I guess lots of culturs like these stories.

(March 1, 2013 at 10:07 am)Confused Ape Wrote: [quote="egross"]circumsized Jewish male who married gentile women who had children with her tries to pass by Abraham he grabs the guy, puts a foreskin on from the ones he collected, and tosses the guy into the fire! (A not-so-subtle anti-intermarriage story).

When did that story first appear? Was it at a time when there was a lot of intermarriage going on?

The story is in a collection that was published around the same time as the Council of Nicea, perhaps a bit earlier. And it is possible that there could have been later edits to Berashit Rabbah as well.

I left out that Abraham was to do this at the "end of days", since, at that time, there was no heaven/hell that Kabbilistic Judaism would be introducing several centuries later.

As far as intermarriage, the Book of Ezra shows it was a big problem whenever Jews were in exile or lived among non-Jews. Most likely this was a warning.

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(March 2, 2013 at 1:33 pm)Confused Ape Wrote:

(March 2, 2013 at 12:53 pm)Minimalist Wrote: BTW, that movie was puke-inducing.

John Wayne's wooden declaration that Jesus really was the son of God made up for it.

I think the movie is most memorable for the approach of - "Let's have as many big name Hollywood stars in it as possible and try to outdo The Longest Day." TGSET wins out over TLD for Star Trek fans because it had Spock's father in it.

I read a while back that the director, not at all impressed with John Wayne saying "Now.. I... know... that... he... was... truely... the... son... of... God!" said, "John, can we gat some awe into that line?" Whereupon John wany repeated the line in the next take:
"Awwww... Now.. I... know... that... he... was... truely... the... son... of... God!"

Worst actor of all time.