No. I am delusion free.

But I had the same experience with the Tao. Which proves you did not experience anything supernaturally real, any more than I did. You just were jolted into rethinking your life. You don’t need a celestial conspiracy theory to do that. No one does.

I was a sinner up till March 1992 but I met one man in that same March and preached Christ to me and I repented from my sin. From that moment my life of sinfulness ended – no more lying, fighting etc . My question to you is Do you believe Jesus Died and rose again on the third 3rd day Sir.

Certainly not. Look at how routinely Christian leaders and apologists lie and fabricate even still now. They were even more rampant liars back then.

Almost all Christian Gospels, Acts, and Epistles, some hundreds of examples, were forged; indeed less than 10% of Christian literature was honestly produced, the rest was fake. And their polemics were full of slanders and lies. It was the normal mode of any cult to act this way, and it worked because the people they want believe all the lies, and the ones who don’t they attack as sinners and the damned and enemies of Christ (see 2 Peter 1–2 for an example). Other examples: How To Fabricate History: The Example of Eusebius on Alexandrian Christianity and The Rain Miracle of Marcus Aurelius: A Case Study in Christian Lies. The problem has been extensively documented in studies recently by Markus Vinzent and Robyn Walsh and others.

Ancient Christianity was a fringe cult and behaved like one. It is more like Mormonism or Scientology today: built on lying at its basic foundation, and thus constructed out of rhetoric to denounce anyone who does not believe the lies, and reward anyone who does.

As to why religions do this: primarily (1) money, (2) power, and (3) social control (religion, like war, is politics by other means: if you want to change society, you have to lie about God wanting you to change it the way you want to; this is a global anthropological phenomenon: see chapter 10 of Not the Impossible Faith).

Secondarily, because people suffering mass delusions have to lie constantly to maintain their beliefs against the evidence (MAGA and QAnon today are textbook examples). This is called cognitive dissonance and it has been a documented feature of all religions for quite some time now. For examples of why this happens see Establishing the Biblical Literalism of Early Christians and How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?.

Thus, it is the people who question the lies who get vilified and expelled, not the liars. The liars get money, support, promotions, and power. Again, observe how this works in the MAGA universe (examples, examples; and example, example; and so on). It worked the same way within the Christian universe then.

None of that is a coherent response to the argument in my article.

Just ignoring what I say is not going to generate any evidence I’m “lying” about anything. To get to that you need to identify a sentence that is (a) false (that hasn’t even been done here) and (b) that I know or must know is false (which is not even being attempted here).

So these interlocutors neither know what the word “lying” means nor what an “argument” is or how to identify its premises and formula so as to respond to either.

Carrier:
He says current legends claim Polycarp knew John. That’s it.

Xtian:
Nope. “I can even describe the place where the blessed Polycarp used to sit and discourse.”
Polycarp] would speak of his familiar intercourse with John”
Irenaeus got this directly from Polycarp.

Carrier:
He never says Polycarp himself said this

Xtian:
“[Polycarp] would speak of his familiar intercourse with John”

someone responded :

it appears to me that you didn’t bother to read the responses. carrier thinks that what you quoted contradicts what iraenues said. carrier seems to be saying that it went from “asiatic churches” as the source to, “full-blown legend that Irenaeus himself actually heard Polycarp say all these things as a boy, the very thing Irenaeus conspicuously did not say in his own actual writings—as we just saw”

what did we see? to quote carrier again : Notice the trick. He has shell-gamed you. He mentions seeing him once. But when it comes time to say he “taught the things which he had learned from the apostles” he credits the source as “all the Asiatic Churches.” Not himself. So he has actually not said Irenaeus heard Polycarp say this. Irenaeus is saying he personally believes Polycarp was teaching what he learned from the Apostles because the churches in Irenaeus’s day claim this. You’ve been duped.

Xtian replied :
it appears to me that you didn’t bother to read the responses.

Yes. Reading comments on blogs by crank conspiracy theorists is not something I usually waste my time on, especially since I had already showed Carrier to be lying about everything. Which is normal for him. Facts don’t really matter to him. All that matters is repeating his conspiracy theory.

The quotes I gave are clear. Carrier is lying.

https://old.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1mu4tmt/the_historical_jesus_is_not_the_figure_worshipped/na4qiza/?context=3

so what is going on here?

It’s not especially.

First, all ancient names meant things. So there is no way to argue “this name had a meaning, therefore it isn’t real.” Indeed names can even be self-chosen or imputed nicknames. To identify a fictional name requires more evidence than this.

Second, Irenaeus is not a reliable narrator and probably not always honest, so it is reasonable to question what he says about himself. But we can’t translate that suspicion into a certainty. The letter of Irenaeus does clearly look like a forgery (and a bad one at that); but his own statements do seem to be so carefully phrased as to suggest he is telling the truth literally, just in such a way as to give some readers false impressions. I discuss this already above. But, of course, he might also be lying.

Third, Polycarp’s epistle may be a forgery, but I see no particular reason to think so, and as it contains no evidence of the things being claimed, it still leaves those claims in doubt.

Fourth, Simon Magus is someone whose existence can be doubted (his contextual invention in Acts suggests fiction; and everything else later written about him is fabulous to the point of ridiculous); but we don’t have that kind of evidence for Cerdo or Papias.

Fifth, Papias is quoted by a number of different authors, demonstrating an actual text did exist. It’s unlikely Irenaeus fabricated an entire book under a fake name just to occasionally quote it (if he did, he’d make it a far more useful trove of data to quote than it appears to have been). It’s more likely the book independently existed for him (and many others) to quote.

Iranaeue probably never met Polycarp as you mentioned. Perhaps, Polycarp’s claim he was the disciple of John is also fabrication narrative from Iranaeus? I don’t find Polycarp’s epistle to Philippians looks authenticity. Probably later forgery.

Iraneus mentions name Papias and Cerdo. Papias is well known for testimony who wrote Mark and Matthew. But I am thinking Papias is not real existed person but his name in Greek is ‘duck’, which symbolize ‘faithful’. His fragments are all fabricated by Iranaeus also, I think.

And about Cerdo, he is explicitly can see fake character deceived Marcion to join in his heresy. Cerdo also means in Greek ‘profit’ which Iranaeus tried to claim Marcion is depraved person like Simon Magus. This theme derive to Tertullian, he create narrative, Marcion donated 200,000 sesterces to church of Rome.

Is my question and analysis sound plausible?

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond with such a well thought out and thorough answer!

I haven’t found much in the way of non-confessional discussions of this, of any real substance (i.e., that are based on anything like a thorough examination of the evidence and background context, e.g. the ubiquitous lying and fabrication among Christians in this period).

A common move is to change when he died (and hence when he was born), in order to bypass that argument (the circularity of that reasoning is lost on the historians who do this; invalid methodology is a ubiquitous defect in this field). Another common move is to state unexamined ambivalence (i.e. declaring for no position and simply stating that it’s possible but not certain).

The age argument isn’t conclusive, after all. The traditional age and dates put his birth in 69. We have no good evidence any apostle survived beyond that year. But if John was 30 in 30 A.D., then for Polycarp to have been instructed by him he’d have to have been at minimum 7 years old (and that’s a stretch; more likely he’d be in his teens or twenties), which puts the date at 76 A.D. So John would have to be 76. Not impossible but it does bear a statistical prior improbability. But maybe John was recruited as an apostle in his teens. Then he’d be in his 60s when he tutored Polycarp. That’s also unlikely, but an order of magnitude more likely than for him to survive into his 70s. (Again, without specific evidence he did, the probability he did falls back to the prior probability, which is the population statistical probability.) If Polycarp was supposed to be in his teens, John would have to be in his 80s. Again, not impossible. But even less probable. Polycarp himself is supposed to have unusually lived as long. And so on.

I think it’s more important to note that Polycarp never says this, and that even Irenaeus doesn’t (if you read him closely), except in a ridiculous letter produced a century later that is surely a forgery (an extremely common, indeed routine, literary production for Christians of this period). So, the earlier and more reliable the evidence, the less it sounds like he ever was tutored by John but only “saw” him once, perhaps as a child.

There remains of course the problem that Polycarp could just as easily be a liar as anyone else; likewise anyone claiming to be the apostle John. We can’t verify that any grifter claiming that really was that John, or that the real John wouldn’t pick up any scheme of lying that suited his agenda, or that Polycarp wouldn’t. So the evidence, even that we have and even read as gullibly as possible, is still unreliable. We don’t know who is telling the truth in any of these layers of tradition. And since Christians routinely lied about things like this, it’s even harder to trust any of them.

But to answer your question:

Typical examples of non-confessional treatment of this question include:

Thomas Slater, “Dating the Apocalypse to John, Revisited,” Review & Expositor 114.2 (2017), 247-53 (who offers the age argument for skepticism that you mention).

And Kenneth Berding, “John or Paul? Who Was Polycarp’s Mentor?” Tyndale Bulletin 59.1 (2008). He declares, “I am not convinced that it can be certainly known either that Polycarp had personal contacts with the Apostle John, or that he had contact with a certain John the Elder (if such a person ever actually existed). There does not seem to be enough independent material either to collaborate or to dismiss the testimony of Irenaeus (and those that follow him) on this point.”

I think he should be more skeptical. But he already is fatally skeptical enough for apologetical tastes. He also observes “It is interesting that Irenaeus does not say Polycarp was taught by John (an interesting omission since it would have helped his argument) but that John lived in Ephesus until the time of Trajan, thus implying that Polycarp would have been acquainted with him,” and it is worth pointing out that the idea of John living to “Trajan” (98 at the earliest) is effectively impossible (one could remotely imagine a teenaged John surviving to 98 A.D. or some extraordinary prodigy of a man living to the age of 98, but both lay in such low prior probabilities as to beggar belief), which suggests Irenaeus had no real information about the Apostle John, or once again confused John the Apostle with John the Elder (as so many others did, as Berding also points out).