The Possible Conspiracy of Appolonius the Nazarene of Tyana

Logarock

Gryphon66

Logarock

Gryphon66


However, I must also say that while I do not believe that the Constantine's Council of Nicea "invented" Jesus Christ ... there's a really decent argument to be made that the Orthodox Religion that came out of the deliberations of the council is what formed the basis for the Roman Church and the Eastern Church and subsequently all variations of Christianity. I think that would make an interesting "conspiracy" topic, IF AND ONLY IF we could all deal with the information reasonably and leave our egos and bias at the "door."

Ok so the Nicea Council didn't invent Jesus but influenced the basis of all variations of Christianity. Fine. Then none of the subsequent results of the council has anything to do with the historic record of the early church and the life of Jesus written well before the council. By that I simply mean that anyone can pick up Acts, Mathew, Mark, Paul and read it for themselves, take off the orthodox or otherwise glasses and read what it says for themselves. And you can thank anti orthodox people for that many who were burned at the stake or were killed otherwise. Any scriptures not included as official works are also available for viewing.

You can't use the Biblical texts to prove the validity of the Biblical texts. We ignorant and uniformed folk call that tautology. There have been plenty of proven forgeries in the "historic record of the early church" (See Bart Ehrman's fine article Here) to make any of the scraps of physical evidence suspect. Most manuscripts date to Fourth Century and later, which dovetails precisely with the Nicea thesis.

Do you have evidence to consider, or shall we agree that it is a matter of the facts versus your unsupported beliefs and leave it at that?

What you want to do is make a postulation without considering that it may be answered in the writings of one of Christ disciples. Restricting this information is not part of a whole discussion. Certainly for reasons that you won't apply to known works of fiction you still want to bring that fiction to bear on to eye witness testimony. That's called intellectual dishonesty. Intellectual dissonance.

You simply cant remove documents from the table of debate, bring in some outside information and subject the removed documents to the other. Further you want to remove documents that were at least subjected to a body, a council of learned scholars, but then ask that a commissioned fiction, subject to the fancy of the writer and his publisher, largely plagiarized, be given some standing as a challenge. Where I come from that called bull s#it.

New Testament scholars overwhelmingly agree that the gospels as we have them are not written by the individuals whose names were added years if not centuries later, i.e. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. (e.g. Charles H. Talbert, "What Is a Gospel?" The Genre of Canonical Gospels pg 42, and others) They are not reliable eyewitness accounts. (Source).

Yes, it is quite reasonable to exclude the Biblical texts themselves as proof of the veracity of the Biblical texts.

The only intellectual dishonesty here is an attempt to make belief sound academic, and you're merely throwing in "dissonance" for good measure. Your "council of learned scholars" would have had an agenda before them PARTICULARLY at Nicea. The Emperor Himself called them and virtually held them hostage until things were written to his satisfaction. You can't change historical fact because it doesn't conveniently square with your religious beliefs.

Further, it is against the T&C of ATS to try to avoid the profanity filtering as you do here. Talk about dishonesty.

Enjoy the thread that you've derailed and your ignorance of the premises of the discussion.