Who said anything about “divinely created”? Here is the point- there are no , repeat NO references about that so called Gospel until found in 1896. Not in the Decretum Gelasianum, not in the Dead Sea scrolls, not in any early Christian commentary.
Tht does say much about when it was written. It says LOTS about how important or controversial or accepted it was.
Nope. I hang my argument on the fact that no where was it mentioned anywhere until found in 1896. It wasn;t like “Hmm, there are many mentions to such a gospel, but we have not found the text”. Nope- nothing, nada. Not in any ancient work ever,
Just like your searching found. It is not considered an important document.
The Gospel of Thomas was earlier, and despite the fact it is non-canonical, it is considered important. Finding an actual copy in 1945 was an important moment. It didnt quite rewrite history, but is is well studied. It is even possible that it was dropped from the canon- not as it was a obvious forgery or fake, but due to the fact it doesnt contain much that the 4 Gospels don.t
Okay, I believe that you’ve quietly switched topics over from dating of the documents to the question of how much weight we should give them? Does this give us a better view of the early church or is it just something that one woman said once and, as Peter is said to have said, she or the person who wrote this story was lying?
Before we get to that question, though, let’s first address your underlying logic.
Your idea, as I understand it, is that any important thing would be well documented and well attested to. If it isn’t, then it must not have been an item of importance. Rather it would be some niche, crackpot idea that was thought up and put down by some looney, and never relevant to anything.
So, let’s see how that theory works in modern day.
In the 90s, Russia applied to join NATO. During the Bush years, NATO and Russia trained and fought together to defeat ISIS and other terrorist groups. Russian asked to be accepted into NATO, without having to go through the whole rigamarole that all the lesser countries have to, so an independent arm and chain of command was set up inside NATO to allow them to move up the ladder. They were kicked out when they kidnapped Crimea.
Donald Trump loves and supports gay people.
Donald Trump initiated and successfully saw through Project Warp Speed, to create a vaccine against COVID in record time.
California is working forward, as fast as possible, to allow the government to lock up and forcibly medicate the chronically homeless.
Ronald Reagan and the Republicans brought you our current asylum laws.
Nixon and the Republicans gave us Roe v Wade.
I’m not sure why the first of these isn’t particularly well known and pretty well never mentioned by anyone. The latter ones, on the other hand, are largely verboten because they go against the popular wisdom of who is for what, and cognitive dissonance won’t allow anyone to entertain that idea that we all live in opposite land.
Now these are just some random samples floating around in my mind (hence the similarity across the pack) but I can also recall instances of parents with kids, where the parent is asking some question (“Where did I put my ?”) and the kid is answering the question, and yet the parent keeps muttering and asking the question for five minutes before giving up and moving along.
To be sure, there are cases where important things are well documented and well attested. I don’t know that I’d say that it’s the rule, though. It’s not difficult to find examples of groups ignoring embarrassing things, uncomfortable things, or just getting swept away in other concerns. I can easily imagine Mary saying that Jesus told her that she was one of his special apostles and the big pack of men largely deciding that she was cuckoo and ignoring her because, “Women.” That doesn’t mean that Jesus didn’t actually say it. Your theory doesn’t carry much weight.
As to whether or not Mary’s Gospel should be taken seriously, that depends on the dating and which group seems the most likely to have produced it.
Ultimately, the question we want answered is, “What’s the most faithful representation of the teachings of Jesus?” Personally, I’d peg that to Jesus’ actual followers - but the ones who rejected Paul’s takeover - which puts us with the Nasoreans/Ebionites who fled Jerusalem for Pella.
As best I can tell from watching the regions that the apostles (minus Peter and Paul) converted - Egypt, Syria, Albania, India, and the territories between - during the first and second centuries, that religion likes to include large angels that tower over the land and the followers should practice asceticism. Paul’s letters to this region are full of criticism of asceticism, saying that only priests need to practice it. We have notes that the original version of Matthew started with a giant angel and Christianish leaders from Syria (Alcibiades and Mani) include these in their teachings as well.
From notes on hereticism by early Roman Church aligned writers, talking about the Hebrews, Nasoreans, and Ebionites, we know that they held John the Baptist and James the Just supreme.
These groups seem likely to have been vegetarian or encouraged it.
The Gospel of Mary seems likely to have come from Syria, which is the central region of this group. We know that this group rejected Paul and the attempt to join with the gentile church - which would mean that they would have a questionable connection with Peter.
I don’t know that we can safely put the Gospel of Mary in with them, but it does work well with what we would expect.
I was more thinking about the fact that a discovery of something from 22K years ago perhaps could be said to predate ALL history, not just American (“history” being a term that I understand to refer to things that were written down based on contemporaneous accounts).
Well, yes. History - the academic discipline - deals with written records, archeology/paleontology digs in the ground. The is a certain overlap: who gets dibs if the stuff dug up is a document?
History has a tendency to say more about the time it is being written, rather than the time or place it depicts. In the late 19th century, nationalism was all the rage and historians were oh so busy inventing glorious pasts for the newly formed nations. Today the focus is on women and “ordinary people,” since history has for a very long time been busy with wars and kings. The problem for historians is that very few scribes bothered to write down details about the lives of women and OP, because preserving accounts was not deemed important.
That is not to say that academic history is without merit of course. Just that those writing and publishing are products of their own times and that will influence the output.
as for @DrDeth - I know that you know that we can all scroll up to see what you wrote earlier in the thread, it’s not very long.
Regarding the Gospel of Mary you posted:
and this
To which I responded:
And you come back to say:
Your argument is that the scrolls were not discovered until 1896. You bolster that argument by referring to a very obscure document that gets all of four (4) lines in Britannica. And that IS a weak source for your position.
Did you read post 11? I clarified that I was not talking about modifying existing knowledge but rather a discovery that radically alters our perception of how things are or were.
Except one of those lines is: “recognized as reflecting the views of the Roman church at the beginning of the 6th century”. So it is reasonable to argue that as the Gospel of Mary was not included in that document (even in the part of the document that listed non-canonical books) it was not around then.
Also this is all irrelevant to the OP. Unless you are arguing from the point of view that the events of the life of Jesus are the most important events in human history, which I assume you are not? Then Christianity and it’s doctrine are just an important part of history because of the influence they’ve had on human society. Whether or not the gospel of Mary was around in the early years of Christianity and considered canon, it had almost no influence on the Christian church during the centuries Christianity had a huge influence on human society. So there is no way it’s discovery (or rediscovery) in 1896 rewrote history.
I’m not an expert on this but in the book Sapiens the author argues that homo sapiens were around 30,000 years ago but they existed in the same cognitive rut as Neanderthals and other human species, with the same tools, techniques and skills for thousands of years. It wasn’t until much later that they evolved language and the capacity for communicating abstract ideas, and thus the ability to coordinate in massive numbers - and it was around this time that megafauna were extinguished. For example in Australia, where we have evidence of human activity, they were likely killed off by homo sapiens burning shit down so they could cultivate plants and attract specific types of animals. Not pointy spears but strategic planning, which had become possible for the first time in human history.
Did you mean 300,000 years? 30k years ago make no sense, because at that time Neanderthals already were extinct, and homo sapiens definitely had developed language much earlier.
Yes that’s what I meant, I think as recently as 30,000 years ago was what the Author calls the Cognitive Revolution.
The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. What caused it? We’re not sure. The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language. We might call it the Tree of Knowledge mutation. Why did it occur in Sapiens DNA rather than in that of Neanderthals? It was a matter of pure chance, as far as we can tell. But it’s more important to understand the consequences of the Tree of Knowledge mutation than its causes. What was so special about the new Sapiens language that it enabled us to conquer the world?*
It’s a really interesting book, and the first I’ve read of its kind, so these are new ideas for me.
I’m really not an expert in this field, but I can’t accept that humans developed speech so late, and this is the first link I find on the development of speech from a genetic perspective, which dates it around 150-200k years ago.
So the key difference here is that I think the book Sapiens is distinguishing between speech and the ability to communicate abstract ideas in a way that creates shared fictions. Fictions like religions, myths, governing ideals, laws, etc.
It’s entirely possible that we could speak much earlier than this, but the argument is that, if we had conceived of something in our imagination, we had no way of expressing it to others until the Cognitive Revolution.
And the evidence is I guess the fact that around this time, we started seeing artistic depictions of things that didn’t really exist, for the first time in history. Like a figure of a human body with a lion’s head, dated about 40,000 BCE.
I’m not sure that pairs well with the idea that coordination of activities requires a higher level of communication.
Bee waggle dance and crow descriptions of enemies are examples of animals who do not seem to have reached this point, communicating information that allows the team to coordinate activities.
Pack animals (e.g. wolves), also, have methods of signaling each other how to coordinate a hunt.
If I had to peg the great megafauna extinction on humans, I’d probably think that it was the invention of some tool that made us particularly adept at hunting.
Pointy sticks go way back, as well as clubs and the like. I see that rope looks likely to have been invented around 50-35,000 years ago, which seems like the sort of development that may have ratcheted up our hunting abilities by quite a bit. This also seems to be about the same time period that the bow and arrow came into existence.
Couldn’t it just be the two of them (humans and megafauna) being in the same place for the first time thanks to a land bridge (relatively) suddenly joining two continents? I don’t see why humans would have to be better hunters or have better tools to kill animals just because they are larger than the ones they are accustomed to killing.
I haven’t particularly researched this but, as I understand it, we see the megafauna collapse across all of the continents (e.g. including Australia). Even if there’s a connection between Eurasia and the Americas, and a connection between England and Europe, I’m not aware of any hypothesized landbridge down to Australia.
Think about what is required to make people cooperate with each other in a way that honors fictions like, say democracy. You have to be able to talk about abstract ideas in a persuasive way, in a way that appeals not just to your tribe but to anyone else you want to work with. It’s not just about telling someone what to do, it’s about selling them on an idea.
I did that in post 15. The date of it’s writing is about 100 years or so after John died- so like I said- it was written at a time where no one who had met or seen Jesus was still alive.
The Point about it being unknown in Ancient times is to show that- it was unknown in ancient times. The issue here - “Did the discovery of this document re-write history” and the answer is no- or very little. Even today it is little known and not much discussed. It also has nothing very erthsaking or original. It is just another of many fake gospels.
That is not an argument, that is a fact- per wikipedia- The Gospel of Mary is an early Christian text discovered in 1896 in a fifth-century papyrus.
Until 1896, there was no mention of it.
And yes- the Decretum Gelasianum-
Is an important document, that lists all the canon and many “books” “not to be received” aka- Apocrypha. It does mention many other false Gospels- * The Acts of Andrew, of Thomas, of Peter, of Philip, and of Paul and Thecla.
The fact that this fake gospel is not mentioned in the Decretum Gelasianum is not conclusive in of itself. The fact that No ancient Christian or other writer even mentions it.and that it was totally unknown until its discovery is.
Now if you think the fake gospel was well known in Ancient times- let us see a cite. Got cite?
One would not expect a Christian book to be mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls, true.