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Author: Shooting Shark   Date: 4/30/2022 7:30:37 PM  +5/-2   Show Orig. Msg (this window) Or  In New Window

Ps. Your statement is factually wrong about The text you posed.


these date to 180-225 AD and my be viewed online from the University of Michigan library. 


You can now hold one of University of Michigan's most valuable possessions in your hands.


Well, sort of. 


Thirty of the rarest, earliest leaves of the Epistles of St. Paul, dating from 180 to 220 AD, have been digitized and turned into an interactive app usable on iPhones and iPads.


"What's especially important is the direct experience with the ancient world," Arthur Verhoogt, acting archivist of the library’s papyrology collection, said of the app, called PictureIt: EP.


 


There are many implications concerning this document .


1. The fact it was purchased in the 1930s feom an antiquities dealer in Egypt is remarkable enough. It apparently survived in the hands of monks for thousands of years -- but not so surprising in that these letters Paul wrote to the churches he started ( Corinth, Ephesus, etc) were widely copied and circulated-- even at a time when such texts were expensibe to create and hard to preserve-/ this speaks to the large volume of written texts that existed in the ancient world, as compared to the relatively few that survive concerning even Roman emperors and Ancient Greek philodophers.


2. The implication that people who knew Paul within one generation of his life wrote these letters is compelling. Paul was about 60 whe he was beheaded in Rome. These fragments fate as early as 180 AD., within 120 years of Paul's death. That implies there were many such copies in the possession of the early churches, churches which preserved and copied them at great expense because they had originally been founded by Paul's ministry throwout Asia Minor. 

There is a church in the town I live in in NH that predates the "War of Norther aggression / War of the rebellion"(civil war) by some 30 years. In the building is a carefully maintained framed series of pictures and names of every minister that has served there sine 1832. there are people who attend that church today in their nineties, or as far removed from the first minister of this church as Paul was from those  copies of his letters above.


The fact there was no printing presses -- hand copied letters -- implies the degree these people took Paul's ministry seriously. For Paul to have been a literary invention who never existed, that myth woul need to have been created by the generation that knew "Paul" personally, and would have needed to sell that idea to their small town neighbors. That would be virtually impossible for many reasons. The churches Paul started stayed in the same location, suffered persecutions, and survived later attempted  purges ( Diocletian 303-305 AD ) during which possession of these letters was a capital offense. yet the survived in such niumber they would exist in 1930 to be bought and survive in U of M


Try to convince the ninty year olds in this small town church in NH their founding ministers were a "literary creation" and never existed!


And one more thing. there were 11 other apostles whose actual lives are implied by their ministries as well, though less well documented than St Paul. Paul was the minister to " the gentiles" and as such had a much broader recognition in the pagan world. Constantines ecentual recognition of that fact, the rapid and widespread  faith of Christianity in the early 4th century led him to establish the Council of Nicea-- where the first formal consolidation of what would become Christian orthodoxy ( however divided in opinion) took place. These debates and doctrines focused on the extant writings of the Ante-Nicean fathers which were very wide spread. 


You sir, are not a scholar.


You are a propagandist. 


and a self-referent, crypto secularist.


Useful idiot! 


 


 


 


 

 
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(No Subject) +6/-4 Shooting Shark 4/30/2022 1:17:15 AM