Christian or not Christian, im wondering why we haven’t overturned every single nook and cranny in the holy land Asia minor Egypt Arabic etc in search of anything even a shred of some of the earliest texts, hopefully that we can date to the first century.
I mean there HAS to be something first century still lying around right? It can’t be said we looked enough and we’re good to go! Unless Mark Paul Matthew and Q were pretty much the only dudes writing theres got to be tons more. Why not give it a shot before something happens to destroy any more texts? We should be combing every single thing so much as slightly resembling an early house of worship for evidence. Are we REALLY stuck forever with just 7 of Paul’s letters? That just seems depressing and defeatist
RM said
Christian or not Christian, im wondering why we haven’t overturned every single nook and cranny in the holy land Asia minor Egypt Arabic etc in search of anything even a shred of some of the earliest texts, hopefully that we can date to the first century.I mean there HAS to be something first century still lying around right? It can’t be said we looked enough and we’re good to go! Unless Mark Paul Matthew and Q were pretty much the only dudes writing theres got to be tons more. Why not give it a shot before something happens to destroy any more texts? We should be combing every single thing so much as slightly resembling an early house of worship for evidence. Are we REALLY stuck forever with just 7 of Paul’s letters? That just seems depressing and defeatist
Christians destroyed any writings they deemed to be heretical so we’re lucky to have what we have. It’s highly unlikely that any proto-orthodox writings exist and if there’s anything else out there it’s probably non-orthodox like the Nag Hammadi library.
JAS said
I think the greater loss has been to time and the elements. We have a lot of texts which were considered heretical. It may also be just bad luck that some texts we might like to have simply did not get copied or distributed enough to survive.
Christians in the late Middle Ages admitted they burned translations of the Bible into a “Romance” language so it stands to reason they’d have zero concern about burning books deemed heretical. We do have a lot of texts, but it’s mostly out luck that they were kept hidden until after the Catholic Church diminished in power.
cstu said
JAS said
I think the greater loss has been to time and the elements. We have a lot of texts which were considered heretical. It may also be just bad luck that some texts we might like to have simply did not get copied or distributed enough to survive.
Christians in the late Middle Ages admitted they burned translations of the Bible into a “Romance” language so it stands to reason they’d have zero concern about burning books deemed heretical. We do have a lot of texts, but it’s mostly out luck that they were kept hidden until after the Catholic Church diminished in power.
I have no doubt that books were burned, the question is whether or not every copy of said books were burned. Such suppression is not as easy as it may sound, especially in days when travel and communication was more limited.
As JAS pointed out you don’t need to conduct organized book burnings (although undoubtedly such things happened occasionally) to suppress texts. In a “copy-on-demand” culture most texts were destroyed through simple neglect. The idea of the “Dark Ages” is overblown but the age was dark enough when hundreds of copies of the Book of Hebrews were meticulously copied while the works of Sappho and Aristarchus rotted on the shelves!
Stephen said
As JAS pointed out you don’t need to conduct organized book burnings (although undoubtedly such things happened occasionally) to suppress texts. In a “copy-on-demand” culture most texts were destroyed through simple neglect. The idea of the “Dark Ages” is overblown but the age was dark enough when hundreds of copies of the Book of Hebrews were meticulously copied while the works of Sappho and Aristarchus rotted on the shelves!
Very true. We are lucky to have remaining copies of Plato and Aristotle, and even some of their work undoubtedly was lost as well. One of Aristotle’s major texts survived only in Arabic until it was “rediscovered’ and translated back into Latin or Greek (not sure which).
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