Freethought Nation

Chrest Magus

We also know – as we discussed in Archaeology of the earliest canonical gospels – that Jesus Christ does not appear until the 2nd century of this era.

Though Jesus Christ is a fabrication...

"We do not yet have first-century papyri discussing Jesus of Nazareth….

"For the balance of the first century and the first third of the second, not a single archaeological artifact attests to the existence of the Jesus-centered Christianity in the whole of the empire. During this same period no evidence for any of the higher religious offices dedicated specifically to the Christian church are to be found in either the archaeological or historical record. We are therefore justified on the basis of these conclusions to dispense for the moment with both an historical first-century Jesus and his church."

--David, History Hunters International, "Acts of the Chresmologoi: the Role of Oracles and Chronicles in the Creation of Divine"

"Not a single artefact of any medium—including textual—and dated reliably before the fourth century can be unambiguously identified as Christian….

"There are very many texts claimed to be Christian and composed before the fourth century, though the documents themselves are not dated to that early period. We have found no text before the fourth century which mentions either Jesus Christ, or the term 'Christian.'

"The earliest fragments and codex of the New Testament pre-date the fourth century, though nowhere in them have we found the key word Christ. Many biblical scholars claim that they do, but our visual inspection of them fails to find a single such usage of this term. We have been unable to find a single text transliterated correctly in this regard….

"As there are gospels and other texts of a religious character, so there is archaeology for places of worship and many artefacts: none spell Christian. Claims that any are Christian are, in fact, a matter of opinion only and we disagree with all such opinions."

--John Bartram, "The vacuum of evidence for pre-4th century Christianity"

"For myself, the history of Judea in the first half of the first century does not allow a Jesus Christ."

--John Bartram, "Archaeology of the earliest canonical gospels"

"The question becomes: what was this first-century form and how did it transition in the second and third centuries CE into what later periods recognize as Christianity? The heart of this explanation, given the current state of the archaeological evidence, must explain plausibly why second-century Christianity was compelled to invent or develop a first-century prophet or Son of God."

--David, "Acts of the Chresmologoi: the Role of Oracles and Chronicles in the Creation of Divine Men"

"We have been in error, accepting the view of biblical scholarship and Christian tradition which dates the canonical gospels to the early period of the Roman empire."

--John Bartram, "Mani and Authorship of the Canonical Gospels"

"The non-canonical Gospel of Judas has been radiocarbon dated to 280 CE +/- 60 years and I now declare that the canonical gospels in their near-final form likely belong to this period.

"Here is how I reached this position:

"In The vacuum of evidence for pre-4th century Christianity, I presented our findings from surveying the archaeology of this period: there is no clear, unambiguous use of the term ‘Christ’ (including ‘Christian’ and ‘Christianity’) in any medium, before the fourth century. One must note that Christ is translated as Messiah, the annointed.

"In Archaeology of ‘Chrest’ I presented various artefacts that mention ‘Chrest’, ‘Isu Chrest’ and ‘Jesus Chrest’. One must note that Chrest is translated as Good.

"With no archaeology – and this includes texts – for Christ or Christianity before the fourth century, there is no Christian Church: no offices and officers, including Popes; no churches; no iconography of Jesus Christ. The Good Shepherd motif is Panhellenistic, specifically of Hermes Kriophoros.

"The warning for this Christian vacuity comes from Josephus, whose chronicles fail to describe even a nascent Christianity. He makes references to the Sadducees, Jewish High Priests of the time, Pharisees and Essenes, the Herodian Temple, Quirinius’ census and the Zealots, and to such figures as Pontius Pilate, Herod the Great, Agrippa I and Agrippa II. Regardless of the disputed reference to “Jesus, who was called Christ”, Josephus is an important source for studies of immediate post-Temple Judaism and the context of early Christianity, yet says nothing of it: this is so unlikely as to be almost impossible.

"When Hadrian invented the cult of his Antinous, he created masses of good archaeology for us to find: an entire city, temples, very many statues and even the obelisk describing how Antinous was made a god. Though Christianity claims to be empire-wide and with many adherents belonging to the Greco-Roman elite, it has nothing. That is another impossible position. We can prove that the first-century miracle worker Apollonius of Tyana existed, but not that anyone was Christian until the fourth century."

--John Bartram, "Mani and Authorship of the Canonical Gospels"

"As well as the danger of relying on texts which do not exist, there is the massive problem of known texts which have been 'lost' (such as the declarations of loyalty to Diocletian from every town and city in the empire) and the enormous quantity of texts which Christian scholars and the Christian Church admit to being forgeries. Between the destruction of important texts and inscriptions, and the admitted dishonesty for Christian texts, a scholar is faced with the unedifying task of investigating a religion which, down to its roots, is riddled with lies and fakery."

--John Bartram, "Mani and Authorship of the Canonical Gospels"

Tertullian (c. 160 – c. 220 AD) wrote in the Apologeticus, addressed to the Roman magistrates

http://www.tertullian.org/anf/anf03/anf ... P267_68508

Chapter III.

[1] What are we to think of it, that most people so blindly knock their heads against the hatred of the Christian name;.....

[5] Well now, if there is this dislike of the name, what blame can you attach to names? What accusation can you bring against mere designations, save that something in the word sounds either barbarous, or unlucky, or scurrilous, or unchaste? But Christian, so far as the meaning of the word is concerned, is derived from anointing. Yes, and even when it is wrongly pronounced by you "Chrestianus" (for you do not even know accurately the name you hate), it comes from sweetness and benignity. You hate, therefore, in the guiltless, even a guiltless name.

A new fragment of the beginning of the Gospel of Mark has been identified, which was probably enclosed in an amulet and likely dates to the third century. Like several other important witnesses, it lacks the phrase "Son of God" after "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ." But, unlike any other manuscript, it has the definite article "tou" before "Christou."

Chrestians before Christians? An Old Inscription Revisited
by Erik Zara, ThD

In the 18th century the Italian historian Lodovico Antonio Muratori collected many ancient inscriptions in the work Novus Thesaurus Veterum Inscriptionum. Amongst them, one marble inscription, originally from Rome,1 has puzzled some scholars. The inscription, an epitaph, given the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum identity number CIL VI 24944,2 reads:

D. M
M. T. DRVSI . PATERES
PRIMICINIO3. QVI VIXIT
ANN. XXXXII. DIES VII

FAVSTVS. ANTONIAE. DRVSI. IVS EMIT. IVCVNDI. CHRESTIANI. OLL4

According to Dr. Heinrich Chantraine, the stone cutter severely disfigured the text and it is “nicht sicher zu heilen.”5 “D.M.” is an abbreviation of “Diis Manibus”, “to the gods of the underworld”, and has been said to indicate that the grave was a pagan’s grave.6 The text, being difficult to interpret as it is missing “essential” words, could be interpreted as saying that M. (and) T.7, the father/fathers8 of Drusus, dedicated the tomb to his/their first born9 son, who lived for 42 years and seven days, and Faustus, the son/slave/freedman of Antonia, the daughter/wife10 of Drusus, bought (emit) the right for the urn (with cremation ashes) to be put in a certain columbarium or other burial place (jus oll.),11 from Jucundus, the Chrestian.

“Antonia” has often been interpreted as referring to Antonia Minor (36 BCE - 37 CE),12 the daughter of Mark Anthony the triumvir, and mother of the emperor Claudius. She was married to General Nero Claudius Drusus, from (18 or) 16 BCE until he died in 9 BCE.13 Faustus has been regarded as a freedman14, servant15 or slave16 of Antonia. It is not possible, based only on the information given, to conclude with absolute certainty that the Antonia and Drusus in the inscription actually are the famous Antonia and Drusus mentioned above.17 “Jucundus Chrestianus” has by some been interpreted as referring to a Christian person, who no longer needed the right to put his urn in a certain place (because Christians did not cremate their dead) and thus sold this right to a pagan.18 Jucundus19 (meaning pleasant, delightful or agreeable20), was by Dr. Johann Sepp thought of as one of the earliest Christian believers in Rome.21 Others believe that Chrestianus (perhaps deriving from the Greek word chrêstos, meaning good, useful, and service-able22, which was a common name23) was the person’s proper name.24 If Chrestianus is not a servant’s name, it could be referring to a person belonging to the new religion (i.e. Christianity), Dr. Marta Sordi concludes.25. Dr. Joseph B. Lightfoot has stated, regarding Chrestianus, that the name is improbable and that it is not known to have existed, and the name is rarely used, and seems unused in the 1st century CE.26

Regarding the dating of the inscription, it has been said that it cannot have been made later than 37 CE, the year Antonia Minor died.27 Dr. Martin Karrer, who seems to agree about this dating, calls the inscription the earliest documentation of the word Chrestianus,28 a word non-Christians used, referring to Christians, in the days of Tertullian (very late second century).29...

...On the whole, no indisputably Christian inscriptions seem to exist, which can be dated to earlier than about 200 CE, and most Christian epigraphs are from the 3rd century or later.38

In the earliest extant complete bible, Codex Sinaiticus (4th cent), the Greek words are even spelled [chrestianou], [chrestianon] and [chrestianos], i.e. Chrestian/Chrestians....

Since indeed no usage of the apparently very uncommon proper name or cognomen Chrestianos or Chrestianus, in Rome, during the life time of Antonia Minor, or the rest of the first century, can be confirmed, and since no known group seems to have been called Christiani or Chrestiani before 37 CE (and the Christians did not call themselves Christians until later, in their own documents), I conclude that the inscription, if correctly interpreted and dated, probably refers to something else.50 Perhaps Jucundus was a part of a group called the “Chrestians”, but as no external evidence in support of such a notion exists, I will leave the subject without further conclusions about the meaning of the word Chrestiani here.

Some (like Richard Carrier, Ph.D.) have recently (autumn 2008) argued that earlier scholars like Harald Fuchs have erred, when they asserted that the word Christianos (Christians) originally was spelled Chrestianos (Chrestians), i.e. with an “e” instead of the now present “i”. This view seems to be generally accepted, and is repeated in textbooks.6 I will not detail all the arguments regarding the subject, but only mention a few. An argument in favor of the Chrestianos-position has been that the “ri” in the word is written in a different way than the “ri”-combination usually is, in the manuscript. Against this, it has been claimed that the scribe only “goofed” by writing “i” in a different style compared to what he normally did after the letter “r”. Georg Andresen found in 1902 that there is an (unusual) gap between the “i” and the “s” in the word, and that this has been over bridged (in fact under bridged) by a hyphen, which led him to believe that the “i” was corrected from an original “e”. According to Andresen, the “bulb” of the “e” filled out the now empty space.7 Others, like Carrier, have claimed that the space isn’t that unusual, and that the letter thus not of necessity was altered.

Harald Fuchs asked the then-director of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Dr. Teresa Lodi, to examine the document. She wrote to him: «The "e", written originally, of which there are still signs left at the erased area [Italian: rasura], was changed into "i" taking out the upper circle and the horizontal line, while the remaining part was corrected, in my opinion, with the same ink and the same hand, towards an "i". Another hand added the dot above the "i" and the hyphen between "i" and "s"»8 I have not found any examination of the original manuscript refuting the conclusions made by Dr. Lodi, but still her study is at least 58 years old, and the technique has since become better....

When I got an ultraviolet photograph of the manuscript, I could see that the change of the “e” into an “i”, was clearly visible. The traces of the erased “e” can be seen...

For the sake of clarity, I will add that this particular manuscript of Annales does not contain the name Chrestus. No evidence of any alteration of the word “Christus” can be found in the ultraviolet photograph.

Consequently, to get rid of the rumor [that Nero ordered the fire], Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus [i.e. Christ], the author of the name....

τὰ λοιπά μου κλύουσα θαυμάσῃ πλέον,
οἵας τέχνας τε καὶ πόρους ἐμησάμην.
τὸ μὲν μέγιστον, εἴ τις ἐς νόσον πέσοι,
οὐκ ἦν ἀλέξημ᾽ οὐδέν, οὔτε βρώσιμον,
οὐ χριστόν, οὐδὲ πιστόν, ἀλλὰ φαρμάκων
χρείᾳ κατεσκέλλοντο, πρίν γ᾽ ἐγώ σφισιν
ἔδειξα κράσεις ἠπίων ἀκεσμάτων

Hear the rest and you shall wonder the more at the arts and resources I devised. This first and foremost: if ever man fell ill, there was no defence—no healing food, no ointment, nor any drink—but for lack of medicine they wasted away

μὰ Δία οὐχ ὑπὸ φαρμάκων χριστῶν ἢ ποτῶν οὐδὲ ὑπὸ ἰοῦ τινος διεσθίοντος

anonymi epigrammatici
εἰς τοὺς ἁγίους Ἀναργύρους τοὺς εἰς τὰ Βασιλίσκου
τοῖς σοῖς θεράπουσιν ἡ θεράπαινα προσφέρω
σοφία τὸ δῶρον. χριστέ, προσδέχου τὰ σά,
καὶ τῷ βασιλεῖ μου μισθὸν Ἰουστίνῳ δίδου,
νίκας ἐπὶ νίκαις κατὰ νόσων καὶ βαρβάρων.

The non-canonical Gospel of Judas has been radiocarbon dated to 280 CE +/- 60 years and I now declare that the canonical gospels in their near-final form likely belong to this period.