For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[Confused Ape]

Two points you both need to consider are:

1- At a time when barely 10% of the population could read at all there was probably 1% that could read/comprehend advanced philosophical/historical/theological texts at all. The audience for what they were writing was limited. The vast bulk of the people were told what to do - and what to believe - orally.

We are considering the fact that there was a specialised audience for the books and talking about the people who could read. 1% of everyone in the area covered by the Roman Empire was still a lot of people and there were a number of competing factions. If Faction A was trying to fool everyone else it's members would have to operate on the assumption that the other factions had men with the same level of expertise as themselves.

2- On the morning of Oct. 27, 312 xtianity was a suspect doctrine recently the victim of Diocletian's persecution. By that afternoon they had backed the winning horse at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and were duly rewarded for their support by Constantine.All of this crap about Constantine seeing signs in the sky and having his troops write xtian bullshit slogans on their shields came from two xtian writers, Lactantius and the ubiquitous Eusebius.

Which is just the kind of thing that an emperor sympathetic to Christianity would want to hear. Everyone loved stories about signs and wonders etc so he wouldn't have been very pleased if accounts of the battle hadn't assigned any to him.

The paperwork explosion of xtianity begins after 312.

Does that mean more people were able to read and write advanced stuff then or the 1% were extra busy?

Whether or not Eusebius actually forged documents ( why bother?) or merely took oral traditions, edited them to suit his current need, and wrote down what he wished, is unknown and will probably never be known.

Forging a few documents would be useful for fooling some of the 1% who could read if his faction was going to fool others. There's still the question of why Eusebius's faction should invent a bishop etc.,though, just to produce First Clement which doesn't say that Paul was beheaded and Peter crucified when Eusebius recorded this as being known in his time. What would be the point?

Somebody wrote First Clement at some time but it would be for a reason which had a point to it.

How much better for the world had Maxentius won the battle and gone on to exterminate those xtian fucks!

What became the Christian world would have remained pagan but the pagan Romans weren't exactly gentle hippie types. It could also have led to modern atheists being unable to believe in all the pagan deities and religions which the majority of the population still believe in.