Michael J wrote:Where is the positive evidence that Eusebius made up Christianity? The fact that we don't have the documents that he says he references isn't evidence as we don't have a lot of documents about anything prior to that time.
The early christian fathers had no compunction against interpolations, deletions, or making up stuff out of whole cloth, and there are ample examples of each. This makes all early christian writings suspect. But as you note, we can't just reject the personages and works Eusebius mentions without a compelling reason. (We only know of Celsus via Origen, and no one doubts that Celsus existed.)
The trouble is, what seem to be
prima facie corroborating witnesses often are not. So we have Eusebius telling us about Ireneaus telling us about Polycarp. This merits caution, though not rejection out of hand.
It seems implausible that Eusebius' history of the church is a complete work of fiction, even conceding that he may have included some fictional figures who he assumed were real. So,
pace Michael Gray, the existence of (real) early church fathers, so upset with the heresy of (a real) Marcion that they wrote at length against it, indicates the existence of a Markan gospel no later than the 2nd Century.
What did all of these Bishops believe before Eusebius made up Christianity? Why did they just meekly agree to go along with the fiction?
From what I understand, fragments of gnostic manuscripts predate the canon. Many competing cults existed; the trinitarian cult in Rome eventually eradicated the others. The mysterious fact that early christians were known as "followers of Chrestus" (i.e. 'the good', not 'the anointed one') may hint at an original cult alien to what we now conceive of as 'christianity.'
Also with the manuscripts. Not only do modern scholars have to be either incompetent or part of a vast conspiracy, the scribes who wrote the mss hundreds of years after they are currently dated had to be smart enough to write using the correct style on the correct material of the time (why not write in the style of 60AD?). Not only that they had to make sure that fifteen hundred years later would have the number of documents we would expect to find as Christianity grew.
Not entirely sure what you're asking here. Some general observations:
1) As the majority of biblical scholars are believers, one could well describe them as forming a "conspiracy" to date the gospels & mss to fit their
a priori conclusion re. the timeline of the Jesus narrative;
2) Interpolations are usually detected precisely because the scribes did not write in the style & vocab of the original author;
3) Michael Gray correctly noted that interpretation of mss via letter forms, etc. is subject to bias. My understanding is, skeptics, using the same tools & methods, date the extant mss later than believers, placing their origin just a little after the Nicene merge/purge, or even centuries later;
4) Modern discoveries of purged, heretical gospels have undermined the neat, orthodox timeline of the evolution of christianity;
5) Before the Council of Nicaea, there was a profusion of gospel versions and assorted apocrypha, befitting a fluid and diverse agglomeration of christian sects. The number of documents we have today is far fewer than we'd expect.