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I'm not "assuming", I'm drawing conclusions from the evidence we have. Early-church writings include a significant number of letters between groups spread a gr

I'm not "assuming", I'm drawing conclusions from the evidence we have. Early-church writings include a significant number of letters between groups spread a great distance geographically. The disputes they talk about aren't just between groups in the same city, but between distant groups, and ideologically diverse groups. This didn't particularly change between the first century and the second century, either. It's not like e-mail was invented in between those times to speed up communication. When certain disputes start showing up in the writings, suddenly, at the end of the second century, it's reasonable to conclude that they were new disputes and not disputes that had already been hot-button issues for a century and a half. Also, don't skip over the rest of my post. It's actually fairly significant that the canonical gospels talk about people and places and name them correctly (archaeological digs show Simon was the #1 Jewish male name in first-century Palestine, and there are 9 different Simons named in the canonical gospels, each one carefully distinguished -- Simon Peter, Simon the tanner, Simon the Zealot, etc. The authors of the canonical gospels show a clear personal familiarity with first-century Palestine, as if they had actually been there.) Gnostic gospels generally don't name people and places outside of some tiny core group. This is a hallmark of being written from a distance, by a non-eyewitness, based on pre-existing characters. It's significant that the canonical writings and many other early-church writings reference issues like the Roman occupation, Samaritans, and divorce, and heavily quote from Jewish scripture, while writings like the gospel of Judas and the gospel of Mary do not. It's significant that the canonical and other early writings show specific hallmarks of different sects of Judaism (not just in what they argue for, but in what they argue against, or even in the vocabulary they use -- John and Hebrews, for example, both talk about the "logos" but use it subtly differently.) Likewise, it's significant that among the gnostic writings, there's a clear progression/development of thought from the Gospel of Thomas to the Sethian writings, and detectable influences from known historical characters like Valentinus. It's easy for someone who hasn't studied the topic to overlook these sorts of things, but there is actually a great deal of scholarship from both believers and non-believers about minute details in these writings. These aren't mysterious, unknown, could-subvert-our-understanding writings like the Da Vinci Code and similar works imply. Most of what comes out of scholarly analysis is fairly dry stuff, showing a clear development of gnosticism as a follow-on movement to Christianity.

Retric 10y ago
I am not defending any set of documents. My point which you seem to be ignoring is You can only trace what you have documentation for. So A: it's got to be written down. B: It's got to have a reason to be written down. C: It's got to be preserved. D: It's got to be preserved without being edited. E-Z: etc. Further, none of this was directly recorded. It was recorded by a group with a tradition of making things up. It was further preserved by a chain of people with various vested interests. For any other group of documents the assumption would be they have an accuracy approaching zero. Assume there are groups A-Z. You have documentation from A talking to Q, Q talking to L, K talking to P. How accurate a picture can you get from that? Well, you can get the language correct... probably.
- lotharbot 10y ago
  I'm not "ignoring" your point, but disputing its correctness. You can only trace what you have documented in some way or another. But it's not necessary that it be written by friendly sources. For example, you can learn that there was a group teaching that circumcision was required for Christians because some of Paul's writings criticize that group. That doesn't tell us that they were wrong and Paul was right, or even that Paul's characterization of them was totally accurate, only that Paul thought them noteworthy enough to criticize. What we know of early Christian documents is that they preserved not merely their own positive teachings, but criticisms of other groups. The writings we still have involve a fair bit of back-and-forth. They involve what might be called either "criticism" or "nuancing" of other parts of the same collection of writing. They involve criticism of teachings of other groups. My contention is that they, either directly or indirectly, preserved every truly-early variant of Christianity that had enough followers for anyone to care -- that, in essence, there isn't a big enough gap in history for a group like the gnostics to have existed and been significant prior to around the mid second century. Because there's no criticism of those ideas, and for a group that loves to criticize, that would be way out of character. And the documents are well-enough preserved to have not lost that. It's not, as some suppose, that there's a sketchy chain of preservation that we can't follow, and out the far end many centuries later comes a document we can't trace; instead, there's a broad spread of preservation by a bunch of different Christian communities on three different continents, who spoke different languages, and we can trace what sort of changes happened over time from different communities. We don't have to suppose a chain of accuracy-destroying alterations; we can establish fairly high certainty of most of the New Testament at least near the end of the first or start of the second century. Which is different from saying "proven eyewitness accounts" (though there are some things that point toward the accounts being written by people familiar with 1st-century Jewish culture in Palestine; one of the reasons I keep bringing up the names used in the canonical gospels is that they don't match Jewish diaspora names, but instead Palestine-region Jewish names, from the first century.) There are entire scholarly journals about this stuff. I don't mean "Christians convincing themselves"; there's a good mix of Christian and non-Christian scholars who study Biblical manuscripts and Biblical archaeology and so forth, and there's fairly broad agreement about the various sects that existed in the first couple of centuries. There's disagreement over who was "right", of course, but not particularly over which groups existed or were significant.

Retric 10y ago

I am not defending any set of documents. My point which you seem to be ignoring is You can only trace what you have documentation for. So A: it's got to be written down. B: It's got to have a reason to be written down. C: It's got to be preserved. D: It's got to be preserved without being edited. E-Z: etc. Further, none of this was directly recorded. It was recorded by a group with a tradition of making things up. It was further preserved by a chain of people with various vested interests. For any other group of documents the assumption would be they have an accuracy approaching zero. Assume there are groups A-Z. You have documentation from A talking to Q, Q talking to L, K talking to P. How accurate a picture can you get from that? Well, you can get the language correct... probably.

lotharbot 10y ago
I'm not "ignoring" your point, but disputing its correctness. You can only trace what you have documented in some way or another. But it's not necessary that it be written by friendly sources. For example, you can learn that there was a group teaching that circumcision was required for Christians because some of Paul's writings criticize that group. That doesn't tell us that they were wrong and Paul was right, or even that Paul's characterization of them was totally accurate, only that Paul thought them noteworthy enough to criticize. What we know of early Christian documents is that they preserved not merely their own positive teachings, but criticisms of other groups. The writings we still have involve a fair bit of back-and-forth. They involve what might be called either "criticism" or "nuancing" of other parts of the same collection of writing. They involve criticism of teachings of other groups. My contention is that they, either directly or indirectly, preserved every truly-early variant of Christianity that had enough followers for anyone to care -- that, in essence, there isn't a big enough gap in history for a group like the gnostics to have existed and been significant prior to around the mid second century. Because there's no criticism of those ideas, and for a group that loves to criticize, that would be way out of character. And the documents are well-enough preserved to have not lost that. It's not, as some suppose, that there's a sketchy chain of preservation that we can't follow, and out the far end many centuries later comes a document we can't trace; instead, there's a broad spread of preservation by a bunch of different Christian communities on three different continents, who spoke different languages, and we can trace what sort of changes happened over time from different communities. We don't have to suppose a chain of accuracy-destroying alterations; we can establish fairly high certainty of most of the New Testament at least near the end of the first or start of the second century. Which is different from saying "proven eyewitness accounts" (though there are some things that point toward the accounts being written by people familiar with 1st-century Jewish culture in Palestine; one of the reasons I keep bringing up the names used in the canonical gospels is that they don't match Jewish diaspora names, but instead Palestine-region Jewish names, from the first century.) There are entire scholarly journals about this stuff. I don't mean "Christians convincing themselves"; there's a good mix of Christian and non-Christian scholars who study Biblical manuscripts and Biblical archaeology and so forth, and there's fairly broad agreement about the various sects that existed in the first couple of centuries. There's disagreement over who was "right", of course, but not particularly over which groups existed or were significant.