Early Christian Writings

I wonder about the accuracy of critical text methods like the ones that have been used to putatively reconstruct the Q document and to argue about authorship and dates. Have these methods ever been validated against a ground truth that the arguers didn't know about beforehand? Like, have we ever philologically reconstructed a text from other texts, and then found exactly that text buried somewhere? Or even something close to it?

In the case of Q, you could argue that the Gospel of Thomas validates that there were texts of that kind (sayings gospels) floating around, but Thomas doesn't match the content of Q.

Outside biblical scholarship, another area where people have tried to reconstruct what is going on in ancient texts is the Chinese classics, especially the really cryptic ones like the Yijing. But whenever some actual ancient manuscript gets dug out of an old grave or a bog, it seems like it just brings up more questions and complications, instead of validating anyone's theories.

Compare to the philology methods that people use to reconstruct ancient languages. These have been validated pretty well. For example in the 19th century linguists were able to deduce that the Proto-Indo-European language must have had guttural consonants not found in any extant language, and then later when the Hittite language was decoded, the guttural consonants were right there. The theory was validated on held-out data. Has this ever happened for critical methods for discerning authorship and sources and missing texts?

Reading the early Christian church leaders was enlightening, as a member of an evangelical church. My church didn't really have any answers when I asked why our practices/beliefs diverged so intensely, which was somewhat disappointing. The writings of the early Christian leaders are filled with Greek philosophy, genuine debates about theology, and a ton of wisdom for both believers and unbelievers.

Anyone, Christian or atheist, who has any interest in the Science Vs Religion debate as it has existed since Darwin should look at "Against Celsus" by Origen. It provides a fascinating example of a well educated Roman philosopher and a well educated Christian Platonist philosopher arguing with each other.

This has been a source I’ve referred to on and off for years. It’s really interesting to read some things that don’t show up in our everyday Bible. Including things that were considered not canon by the early church. I enjoyed reading the translation of the Shepherds of Hermas. It was not the easiest to follow, but in a sense it was a very popular allegory like Pilgrim’s Progress was centuries later!

Personally, i like occasional non-tech links like this ..

It’s interesting that they’re organized by date. On an intuitive level, that makes sense. But so many of the dates are hotly debated, and reorganizing the list would produce such a different impression, that it’s a surprising choice.

I am not a scholar of such things, but a quick glance at the documents I am familiar with suggests that the date ranges represent uncertainty within the compiler’s point of view. That’s reasonable, but when it’s linked out of context it’s not immediately obvious that it doesn’t reflect the range of debate in the broader secular scholarship, let alone secular and conservative religious scholarship taken together. So caveat lector.

That said, the breadth of documents linked here is really impressive.

Most people don't realize this but Paul is the earliest known Christian writer and the earliest surviving source for the Gospel. His letters also independently corroborate not only Jesus' existence as a real person (in addition to secular sources), but also that Jesus' close followers genuinely believed they met Jesus' resurrected form. Since Paul's witness is dated to within 3-5 years of Jesus' death, this also shows that the Gospel didn't develop as a myth/legend, but as something people genuinely believed who had personally met Jesus. It's a fascinating story of a Jewish religious scholar who hallucinates on the road to Damascus, has a sudden complete change of heart, and ends up transforming Christianity from a local Jewish cult into a worldwide religion.

Another fascinating topic in biblical study is the criterion of embarrassment, where the early Christian writings left in bizarre and unflattering events that members of a cult would generally leave out. The most obvious example is the crucifixion itself (considered by Jews to be extremely shameful and cursed), the repeated unflattering presentation of the disciples (portrayed as regularly confused, lacking in faith, petty about status, falling asleep at critical moments, even rejecting Jesus at the end), even Jesus' own despair when he was publicly humiliated and executed, crying out asking God why he was forsaken. This is in contrast to Islam, which has Jesus rescued and replaced at the moment of execution.

I started exploring Christianity from an archetypal or psychological lens last year, and have found it really rewarding. I've put in thousands of hours of westernized Buddhist oriented meditation (I think "Pragmatic Dharma" is the term), and ultimately found it and the communities attached to it cultures of avoidance that loses something in its detachment of meditation technology from its larger context. I also grew up vaguely Presbyterian and hated it, so this was a great moment for me to reclaim my heritage on my own terms.

I started with various books of the Nag Hammadi collection, reading the excellent Meyer translations, and started noticing some metaphors that felt like "hidden signposts" in the text (and had some relevance to some ideas in Buddhism). Gospel of Thomas and especially Gospel of Philip felt like they map quite well to non-dual ideas in Buddhism.

I decided after some explorations of gnostic text to jump back into the gospels, wondering if I noticed the same kinds of hidden signposts there. I started this exploration during a trip to London with my wife, where I went and hunted down a copy of Bruce Rogers's amazing Oxford Lectern Bible at the Church of England reading room. What a beautiful bible -- it's so forward thinking that it feels like it was typeset last year, but while it is a beautiful piece, the King James translation of the bible is pretty incomprehensible. This little journey led me to the Sarah Ruden translations of the gospels, and as soon as I read them I felt the same kind of resonance.

This all eventually led me to Cynthia Bourgeault's amazing "The Heart of Centering Prayer," which explores the non-dual kind of ideas in esoteric Christianity and lays out the practice of centering prayer as a basis of Christian spirituality. And I would remiss if I didn't mention Jacob Needleman: Esoteric Christianity was good, but his "Money and the Meaning of Life," really helped me put my own relationship with money in perspective.

This is all a long winded way of saying: Christianity has a rich set of amazing spiritual resources, but they need to be consumed in a sort of non-literal way, where you're meeting the authors in the same mind as they were when they wrote the text. I'd also note that this kind of reading is not scholarly, the point isn't to find the right answer but to impute a larger meeting by meeting the author with your own struggles.

We live in a time that is committed to a materialist reductionist mindset, but I believe that humans are naturally mystical beings, and that we leave a lot of real meaning on the table when we reduce the world down into solely material order.

Rob Burbea explored these ideas (largely inspired by James Hillman's concept of "soulmaking") in his soulmaking dharma (https://hermesamara.org/), the idea being an extension of emptiness: if all is fabrication, why wouldn't we make meaning that is beautiful?

I'm sure I'm coming off quite a bit rambly, but it's very exciting to see such a resource on the HN front page. If you read my comment and feel any similar excitement, please check my profile and feel free to email me!

One of the most curious things about Christianity, is how most of the sauce in the plate doesn't even come from the figure their very religion is meant to be based on. The idea that followers of a religion about a figure, are spending most of their time talking, reading and doing stuff unrelated to the figure they meant to follow is such a human thing to do.

After 2k years of divergence, what is there in common with that figure. Can't read or speak his language, experience his culture or the geopolitics of his world. Everything is seen through 2k years of subjective lenses that people with various goals give to you.

At what point, do you call it a day or focus on the Gospels exclusively? Because that's arguably as close as you can get to him. Everything else seems secondary accounts of secondary accounts and people claiming to have authority to speak on behalf of someone who can't refuse that anymore.

How is this technology related?

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Who cares? It. Is. Not. Real. Time to stop coddling religion. All religion is politics and all politics require force to power. Stop caring about nonsense.

Why is this being presented to the HN community?