You say that, but it's just wrong. You seem to think that there's some sort of central "Christian monk" organization that tells this group or that group what to copy and what not to copy. But in fact, through the first three hundred years of Christianity, it was at best a loosely bound collection of people who claimed to share a common religious tradition (even though there were lots and lots of different beliefs within that tradition).

This is why we still have evidence of Gnosticism and why there's evidence of the Arian controversy. We also have the dead sea scrolls, which show that things don't just "rot away."

I thought you were working from first principles and not a narrative. Oh wait, you just suck at history. So I could pretty much ignore the rest of what you have to say, but I'll keep going at it anyway.

There really wasn't much "blasphemy" until beliefs started to get codified 300 years after Christianity was started. So it's not at all clear that you even know what the words you're using mean. And again, you seem to think that there was some sort of well-oiled machine that told this person or that person what to copy and what not to copy. That just shows your utter ignorance about history, because that's not what happened.

Again, you just suck at history. Guess what? We have lots of stuff written about Mormonism and the Mormons that isn't sympathetic. Despite the Mormon church's centralized organizational structure that tries to limit the flow of information about Mormonism (something that early Christianity didn't have), there are people discovering things about Mormonism that stand in contrast to what the church claims. There are even discoveries by Mormon scholars that run contrary to those claims who are subsequently removed from the church. But this happens, and we have evidence for it.

So all of this stuff that you're pulling out of your rear end just shows the quality of the stuff you pull out of your rear.

It's funny what people can come up with when they "think it through" but have no grounding for the things they're thinking through. If you just "think it through" without having any grounding in physics, you could convince yourself that time travel is possible through the use of a flux capacitor.

So continue constructing your own historical narratives and pretending like they're first principles. I can't stop you from doing that. It's very hard to convince a conspiracy theorist that we landed on the moon, despite all of the evidence (direct and indirect) that shows that we have.

From what I remember from the History of Rome podcast about the Council of Nicea one important point of contention was the question whether Jesus has always existed ("co-eternal") or if only came into existance at some later point in time. That to me seems an important disctinction because the latter view implies a hierarchy and separate entities while the trinity can be understood as three aspects of the same being.

Really a great question but predicated on whether or not God and/or Jesus came about before time itself existed, or even if both/either are bound to it? I mean, in that area before time, "when" is a bit moot.

Here's a link to additional reading:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tr...y-history.html

for what it's worth, I think that the point of view of the eastern Christian theologians who are mostly responsible for the trinitarian doctrine is often somewhat different from the way it is presented and understood in the west. Partly this represents cultural differences between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.

I wrote a (probably too long) overview of this for another forum last year, which I will shamelessly link :P

http://www.religiousforums.com/threa...dition.174432/

Indeed, I meant to say after the 200s / after the 3rd century (and of course amalgamated in the Council of Nicaea) Fwiw; the churches did indeed brand each-other as heretics, so your later point on "set orthodoxy" is somewhat simple. Even Arius himself refers to those who disagree with him as "heretics" in an early letter, so there was schism.

The Ante-Nicene Period (leading up to the first council) would see most of the major churches come to a consensus of sorts often referred to as Proto-orthodox Christianity, and by the end of the 3rd century the reigning view of this precursor to set orthodoxy was indeed that Jesus was divine.

Divine can of course mean many things, in my post I used it to mean "being God".

What are the chances of the following being true:

The Marcionites invented Christianity

The Romans (according to Joseph Atwill) invented Jesus

The Gnostics already believed in the Logos but it was the literalists that inserted a fictional Jesus into the Logos slot

Less than 1%. The textual evidence doesn't fit the hypothesis at all.

I wasn't familiar with this, but a quick perusal suggests less than 1%. Cf. Carrier's (a fellow mythicist) rebuttal.

I'm not sure this is specific enough to attach a probability to. "The gnostics" is a bit fuzzy, there were different sects at different times. However it seems difficult to make sense of. Jewish gnosticism pre-dates Christianity, but the earliest Christian texts don't seem very gnostic. John's logos isn't enough to me to call him gnostic. The gnostics appear to borrow from John (and from Greek philosophy, as John appears to have been doing) rather than the other way around.

It seems more likely that early Christianity both influenced gnostics and was influenced by them than that Christianity arose from strictly gnostic sources. In the same way that there seems to be influences between Christianity and Neoplatonism but I wouldn't call the one the source of the other.

I do actually think there is a non-trivial probability of some kind of mythicist position being correct, I just don't think "Marcion invented Christianity" or Atwil's conspiracy are at all likely to be true. I would grade it like this:

It is absolutely the case that the gospels are "mythology" (which doesn't mean just "false") -- they aren't histories, they don't faithfully record the historical happenings of one Jesus of Nazareth. Some of the gospel myth may be based (however loosely) on events that happened, but certainly not everything

I think that it's easier to make sense of early Christianity by positing some historical charismatic figure (e.g. Ehrman's "Jewish apocalyptic prophet") upon whom the gospel stories are based than by positing an entirely mythological Jesus. It's more parsimonious. But that doesn't mean it's impossible that Jesus was entirely mythicized. There's just not really enough evidence to confidently decide. It just seems more likely than not that he wasn't. If he was, I don't think we have nearly enough information to confidently assert that it happened in some particular way, as Atwil does or in terms of the Marcionite hypothesis.

My problem with Carrier (as an example of an academic mythicist) is that his method is silly. He masks the dubious subjectivity of his priors by impressing the non-mathematically-inclined with the use of a bayesian framework. It's a sleight-oh-hand.

Nevertheless, he's right that the mythological elements in the gospel stories don't exist in a vacuum, they are similar to other myths. This shouldn't seem unexpected, I don't think, whether there was any historical Jesus or not.

How would you arrange the following chronologically?

Ehrman's apocalypticist Jesus (sandwiched between John the Baptist and Paul the Apostle)

Johananite logos theology

Ebionite Jewish Bias

Marcionite Gentile Bias

Christian Gnostics

Catholics

Obviously I got the last one right.

Granted, the Romans didn't invent Christianity. But could Atwill be correct in that the Flavian period Romans may have promoted Christianity in order to pacify the Jews with a peace oriented relligion?

I'm not really an expert. You could probably make this chronology yourself with wikipedia, and so a grain of salt is probably recommended.

By definition if you accept Ehrman's hypothesis then Jesus is first.

Johannine-flavored Christianity and the Ebionites may arise around the same time, or the Ebionites could be somewhat later. The author of John is probably late 1st century, and the Ebionites exist by at least 140 or so. If we can accept some of Paul's epistles and Acts as telling us anything historical then the conflict within Christianity about the Jewish law arises very early, with the Ebionites reflecting just one point of view on the question.

Marcionism and Christian gnosticism appear to be slightly later in the 2nd century, although given Jewish gnosticism the roots of the latter are probably older. But most of the extant gnostic texts are dated to the 2nd-4th century. There are "gnostic" ideas of a sort in John and even in Paul, but not the more fully developed theology of later gnostics.

I'm not sure there's a single obviously correct way to date the origins of "catholicism", especially if it's supposed to be distinct from eastern orthodoxy, taking into account differences in culture between the Latin west and the Greek east. But it seems fair enough to put the roots of both as entities distinct from other Christian groups in the 4th century with the first councils and the empire, and to say they begin to meaningfully separate by the 6th century, thinking of theological differences between (for example) Augustine and Greek church fathers.