The point isn't even dabatable. Do you need me to copy and paste the salient points of that thread (I'd rather not) or will you just admit to your disingenuousness now?
You could have just stated that you cut and pasted CE. CE quotes Eusebius like he knew something and was reliable. Let me give you a hint about His reliabiltity. Michael Grant wrote "Constantine the Great: the man and his times" under the Scribners label. He Is High on history and mediocre on fluff. I picked the book up about a week ago. And he flatly says as a historian exactly what most historians say, "If we are to understand Constantine at all, we have to read Eusebius - with a grain of salt. We read much prais of the emperor; and in his Life, which was Eusebius' last work, the praise swells into full-scale, highly coloured, romantic ecomium, marred further by interpolations and additions.."(p.4) on the same page within a few sentence, he goes on: "Unfortuneately, however, Eusebius was not only a mediocre stylist but a depressingly unobjective historian. Despite his occasional touches of scholarly caution, and his refusals from time to tiem to believe improbabilities and lies (notably in the matter of Constantine's 'vision'), he falsified the emperor into a mere sanctimonious devotee, which he was not, and showed himself guilty of numerous contradictions and dishonest supressions, and indeed erroneous statements of fact, or untruths. For even if not deliberately fraudulent, Eusebius was indifferent to precision, for example in relation to chronology, and his quotations from sources are often inaccurate and garbled."
Now, what does all that mean. Well, in short, everything you don't want to do if you want your work considered reliable, Eusebius did. Not only did he do it, he did it with a contemporary. And the obviety there is that the man lived in the same time and lived the events and rather than tell facts he told what sounded good and fit his view. And he is not the only problem child regarding "Catholic History" But he is a banner example of what your clergy considers authoritative. And we have yet to touch on the matter of any of the forgeries that found their way into his works as fact. So, if you want to quote CE which then quotes this hack, you'd do better to quote air and pretend you said something.
Not your fault. It's what you were taught, or rather what you weren't, I'm sure.
Well, let me bring out at least one point of note from that thread (thanks for posting the link, BTW, as it saved me the trouble of searching for it).
| To: proud2bRC just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church For the sake of clarity, is not the "c" in "Catholic" left uncapitalized in the original? That is, didn't Ignatius use the word as an adjective rather than as a proper noun? 53 posted on 3/31/02 9:42 PM Central by angelo
To: angelo Yes, more than likely in the original it was a small "c". I'm not sure where I copied this HTML encoded text of Ignatius' words. Ignatius was using the word to mean "universal," i.e., accepting all the teachings of Christianity, not picking and choosing which parts to believe... 54 posted on 3/31/02 10:37 PM Central by Dr. Brian Kopp
|
-Kevin