I did go ahead and read the text and I certainly found it interesting. However there seems to be a discontinuity between the first six chapters and the rest of the text.
It seems like the first six chapters could indeed be from the first century CE or perhaps even a bit earlier than that, and to me that part reads like a wholly Jewish work, though a rather Qumran-flavored one, a la the Zoroastrian-inspired Light/Dark dualist rhetoric (that later mainstream Christianity eagerly ran with).
The issues for me start immediately in chapter seven we suddenly get very familiar (to us today) Roman church jargon being used for the first time, then consistently throughout the rest of it. (1) There was no mention of Jesus in the first six chapters and now all of a sudden he's present. (2) Baptism, which was never a Jewish practice, is mentioned. (3) And we see Trinity being namedropped. I don't believe the Trinity doctrine came into Christianity until the approximate time of Origen in the early 3rd century, owing probably to the Alexandrian metaphysical scene, where Platonic philosophy was being syncretized with new religious sects and philosophical schools. As far as I can tell, the Trinity is Platonic in origin, not Jewish.
So in summary, this might sound quite harsh, but I think the rest of the text may have been a work of 4th or 5th century church scribes, perhaps one of those acts of 'pious forgery' whereby the scribes took a fragment of a really old work and weaved their own theology into it via a lengthily interpolation they did a semi-convincing job of mimicking the original work's style in the added-on sections. That or they mutilated the rest of an older existing text; any theological elements in an older work that would have openly contradicted the post-Nicene theology would have been edited out and they would have most certainly burned all copies of the original unedited manuscripts. This is probably why today we can't find any Gospel manuscripts predating the 4th century.
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2020-10-04 04:34 am (UTC)It seems like the first six chapters could indeed be from the first century CE or perhaps even a bit earlier than that, and to me that part reads like a wholly Jewish work, though a rather Qumran-flavored one, a la the Zoroastrian-inspired Light/Dark dualist rhetoric (that later mainstream Christianity eagerly ran with).
The issues for me start immediately in chapter seven we suddenly get very familiar (to us today) Roman church jargon being used for the first time, then consistently throughout the rest of it. (1) There was no mention of Jesus in the first six chapters and now all of a sudden he's present. (2) Baptism, which was never a Jewish practice, is mentioned. (3) And we see Trinity being namedropped. I don't believe the Trinity doctrine came into Christianity until the approximate time of Origen in the early 3rd century, owing probably to the Alexandrian metaphysical scene, where Platonic philosophy was being syncretized with new religious sects and philosophical schools. As far as I can tell, the Trinity is Platonic in origin, not Jewish.
So in summary, this might sound quite harsh, but I think the rest of the text may have been a work of 4th or 5th century church scribes, perhaps one of those acts of 'pious forgery' whereby the scribes took a fragment of a really old work and weaved their own theology into it via a lengthily interpolation they did a semi-convincing job of mimicking the original work's style in the added-on sections. That or they mutilated the rest of an older existing text; any theological elements in an older work that would have openly contradicted the post-Nicene theology would have been edited out and they would have most certainly burned all copies of the original unedited manuscripts. This is probably why today we can't find any Gospel manuscripts predating the 4th century.