(October 3, 2019 at 1:28 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: Who said anything about a forgery? We dont even use that word when we refer to magic book. We call them interpolations, and there are plenty.
The point, is that it's not surprising to find that the pauline establishment document of christianity matches the early christian documents we find, that were produced by the pauline liturgical apparatus. Controlling the flow of that information and establishing a unified theology were exactly what the proto christian authorities were doing at the time. Document production would explode shortly thereafter, as the christians captured the roman state, and wouldn't you know it..those docs match up too.
It's not a forgery when you faithfully repeat the version of the story your predecessors founded your subcult on, lol.
That is a more nuanced view that may well be correct, but some atheists I've encountered seem to think that manuscripts are corrupted in various ways or even think that translations are sourced in other translations. We should be capable of better than such cringeworthy ignorant assertions.
I do not know that the early Christian era was dominated by Paul and his adherents, given that the gospels authored much later than his screeds are so at odds with them. I have tended to view Paul as a gnostic-leaning aberration whose writings were popular but in conflict with the evolving orthodoxy. He was effectively neutered by being reframed ... by the simple device of ordering the eventual canon of scripture with the gospels first. Thus all his prattling about "celestial Jesus" could be reinterpreted as "positional truth" because readers already had absorbed the narrative of the Miracle-Working Flesh-and-Blood God-Man.
But perhaps you question the generally accepted dating of the authorship of Paul's corpus and of the gospels, maybe even relative to each other. While I have no skin in this game anymore, having left the faith a generation ago, I would simply point out that dating of authorship has nothing really to do with the dating of manuscripts. Authorship dating is a function of lower criticism acting on all available manuscript evidence, regardless of its dating. That's how we date, e.g., Homer's authorship to hundreds of years before the dating of the oldest known manuscripts of his writings.
Of course, many (not all) of the people who care about these topics when it comes to the scriptures, work for or are funded by religious organizations and so, who knows, maybe the scholarly consensus begs too many questions / assumes too much. I have tended to stick with it however because the content of the NT is such self-contradicting fabulist nonsense that there's no real need to expend energy debunking the generally accepted provenance of the manuscripts or the authorship.
It is, of course, an interesting point of discussion. But one must keep in mind, at the end of the day we are discussing documents full of bullshit anyway.
