A Little Mcclellan And Then Finishing Intro To Dionysius

Well greetings, welcome to the dividing line. We are back in the big studio and of course it looks different. As soon as I walked in, you know, every time I leave when the cats away the mice will play and so I just know that when I go out of town, when I come back, things can be different.

And so here we are and now we're sort of catching up with everybody. We've got the blue lights in the background and evidently that's how you function as an internet influencer in the world today is you have blue lights in the background and that makes you really cool.

The only thing I haven't done to be an internet influencer is record a bunch of stuff on video sitting in my truck. I guess that's the big thing now. And in fact that's what I'll go ahead because I was just trying to track this down this morning and something weird happened.

Dan McClellan and the Myth of Academic Consensus

It seemed to disappear out of our chat channel and then some folks just found it for me. It's not the best way to start the program but it was a link to another Dan McClellan thing and, you know, the guy lives in front of a webcam and it makes sense.

He's got nothing better to be doing in the sense that the Mormons don't really want him and the Christians certainly don't want him. So he's sort of off doing his own thing. And so this guy thinks he is the definition of a Bible scholar.

He is all that and a bag of chips. I've just never seen anybody who's just so non-reflective about how he just comes across as I'm it. I define everything. My views, if you don't accept my views, you're just really sort of stupid and don't know anything about the Bible.

So the weird part of that is, I mean, you know, when Independent Fundamentalist Baptists do stuff like that, they're just speaking from, you know, their background and where they're coming from and they're afraid of any other viewpoints.

Everybody knows all these other viewpoints that Dan McClellan puts out there. I mean, I went to Fuller Theological Seminary for crying out loud. You're going to get exposed to everything in places like that.

But he just sort of pretends like he's the first one to put all this stuff together. And what's what you've got to understand, he was, again, he's one of these people saying the Bible doesn't condemn homosexuality.

It's just about not having hospitality. It's all the stuff that we refuted a long, long time ago. Well, OK, you can't refute anything with Dan McClellan because Dan McClellan does not believe the Bible has a consistent message anyway.

So you just pick and choose what you're going to emphasize, what you're not going to emphasize, and you can make it say whatever you jolly well want to make it say. You know, all he can tell you is, no, the Bible doesn't actually say that.

But what he's really saying is, nobody really knows what the Bible says because the Bible isn't saying any one thing. It's saying all sorts of different things. And you get to pick and choose what you decide the Bible's saying to you.

That's just sort of how it works. It's not divine revelation. It does not consist of itself. It hasn't been preserved. He just, you know, it, once you've been working in this field long enough, you go, you know, that's what Itzar al-Haq was all about.

The 1864 work that launched modern Dawah in Islam, they grabbed hold of all of the German rationalism, and they brought it together as an argument against the Bible and against its consistency and coherence.

Of course, they can't apply the same standards to the Quran because it would do the same thing, but that's another issue. They weren't even thinking about that at the time. Critical studies of Quran hadn't really begun at that point, at least in the Islamic world, which really has barely started in the Islamic world.

It's primarily outside the Islamic world where that exists. But anyways, and so all of these groups, you know, they share the same kind of destructive critical perspective, and what people need to understand is fundamentally what they're saying is there is no reason to be talking about the Bible because the Bible has no consistent message.

Jude, First Enoch, and the Scope of Scholarship

And I've told audiences for decades, if you do believe, if you view scripture the way the writers viewed scripture, the way that the apostles viewed scripture, the way that Jesus viewed scripture, you're in a very small minority.

Very, very, very small minority. And you just need to be aware of that. And that's why when I, in this thing that was linked to this morning, the phrase that was used was academic consensus. And this was about, well, Jude is filtering Genesis through First Enoch, and this is the academic consensus, and of course he thinks he is the definer of academic consensus.

Whatever he thinks is the academic consensus. Which of course is not true, but that's how things are in the Dan McClellan world. But anyway, who gets to define these things? When you start to, and I've criticized this for a long time, you've got to admit, just ask Algo.

We've gone back years. I remember when a certain well-known person was debating Bart Ehrman and would use scholarly consensus and academic consensus to try to establish the basic facts argument for the resurrection and things like that.

The minimalist argument, that kind of stuff. And I'm like, here's the problem. Are we talking about, when we talk about a scholarly consensus, when we talk about an academic consensus, please define academic.

What's the range? Are we talking believers, unbelievers, Christians, non-Christians, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, Mormon, Buddhist? What's the range we're looking at here? You never hear that part.

You never hear that part. Because if you want to take academic consensus, including every academic group out there, which will allow anybody, atheists and everybody else to join, then the academic consensus is that the Bible is not the Word of God, that it's ahistorical, there wasn't a resurrection, wasn't a virgin birth, and does not give us any actual words that were ever spoken by anyone in history.

That's the academic consensus. So, is that the academic consensus at the Evangelical Theological Society? Well, no. It used to be even less, no, before ETS started changing. But still, by redefining what the realm of academia is, what the realm of scholarship is, you're going to get a completely different concept of consensus.

And the consensus of the unbelieving world is God has not spoken. Is that difficult to understand? Isn't that obvious? It's all over the place. That should be something we all recognize, but unfortunately a lot of people don't.

And so they listen to this stuff, and they hear somebody who's obviously very smart, and he is very happy to demonstrate how smart he is to you, and they're like, well, if he says all the scholars agree, well, maybe I should.

Well, all the scholars agree, as a consensus point, in holding to naturalistic materialism anymore. So, so much for resurrection, so much for miracles, so much for any of the things Jesus talked about.

And in fact, so much for thinking that we could know anything that Jesus ever said. Because you need to understand that there are all sorts of academics that don't believe that anything found in the text of scripture actually reflects a historical person named Jesus.

So, that's what makes McClellan such a mixture of self-contradiction, is I don't know why he even bothers to even maintain any kind of Mormon identity or anything like that. I mean, the worldview out of which Joseph Smith came could not be any farther from the worldview that Dan McClellan has.

Couldn't. I mean, if you express skepticism toward John or Paul, you're gonna laugh at Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, at least if you're going to be consistent. But being consistent's a different thing.

Sola Scriptura and Roman Catholic Epistemology

So, anyway, all right, I, real quickly, I got a book, and Eric, wait, I'm going to be sending you an email as soon as I can. I was trying to get to that when I got hijacked, but I thankfully you sent your email address.

I need to try to get this in PDF so I can read through it. Because Rome says so, Presuppositional Defense, A Presuppositional Defense of Sola Scriptura. And I just started thumbing through it and reading stuff, and I'm like, I'm not saying he got this from me.

I'm just simply saying any of us who are Presuppositionalists and are Reformed, and who have dealt with Roman Catholic claims of epistemology, have all had to say the exact same things. You know, I read there was a little dialogue in here about how you know Matthew wrote Matthew, and well, no, how do you know the papacy, well, well, how do you know that Matthew's supposed to be in a camp?

Because the papacy says so. And, you know, the vicious circularity of Roman Catholic epistemology, once you boil it down to where it's really coming from, and I'm like, man, that was, for me, that was 1995, 96, that area in there, listening to Jerry Matitick's stuff, and Scott Hahn's stuff, and realizing all their argumentation is just simply, you know, they say, here's the line you can't cross, and all they've done is move back one step, and then they just sort of move the sand, so you can't see that they're doing the exact same thing.

They're not giving you a meaningful answer at all. Um, it doesn't work, and I'm looking forward to it. I'm not sure how you get a hold of it, but it's called Because Rome Says So, a Presuppositional Defense of Sola Scriptura.

Looks good. I'm going to see if I can track down a PDF of it, so, because that's, for me, how I get to listen to stuff a lot faster than sitting and running the old, aging, floater-filled eyes across a page of scripture.

All right, so, I said that we would continue on, and we will do so. So, on Saturday, we eventually got to doing a program, and we don't do programs on Saturdays, so most of you didn't know what happened, especially if you don't follow the app, or follow us on X, or whatever else it might be.

And so, yes, we did a program on Saturday, and I hate to have to tell you, but this part of the program is going to be a little bit difficult for you to follow if you did not catch the Saturday program.

So, you might want to go catch that, and then watch this on playback, or something like that. But what had happened, as I had tried really, really hard to get to Gallup, New Mexico, to do a program on Friday, no, Thursday, and I did get there.

Unfortunately, I did not have any way of knowing, there weren't any signs or anything warning you, that there was going to be a Native American ceremonial parade in Gallup that would basically close all of Gallup, unless you took I -40, which I should have done, but both Garmin and Google said, no, shortest route to your RV park is right down the main drag here, get you there nice and fast, while that main drag was closed.

And by the time I got to that point, I was now in the midst of 50 ,000 people in a vehicle 57 feet long, turning on the little side roads that were going up 20 percent grades. Not sure how I made that, not sure how something didn't get damaged, didn't get stuck on a high point going over the, oh, it was, it was bad.

And I just got the real feeling that everybody did not care a bit. It's like, you're not here for our parade, so we don't care. I'm not putting Gallup very high on my friendly city list, let me put it that way.

Anyway, so we didn't get to do it on Thursday. I got in on Friday, when you get in, you've got a million things to do. If you've never RV'd, you don't know, set up the breakdown, packing, dumping tanks, cleaning tanks, all sorts of fun stuff like that.

And so on Saturday, we did do the program in the RV, since everything was still there. And by the way, are these our cameras? It's weird. It's very strange to see the cameras from the RV in here. Are they going to be doing double duty regularly?

If they're not in use of the rig, they're going to be in use in here. But they're sitting underneath a camera. That's right. So there are two, four, there are six cameras in here now. There will be a seventh.

There will be a seventh. Yes. Okay, folks, I'm telling you, there's an old saying, don't fix it. But that is not a saying that the Brother Pierce actually embraces and considers to be authoritative or apostolic in origin.

So there you go. Anyway, so what we did on Saturday is I had a long time ago put together a nice little presentation on the Pseudo Dionysian Corpus. And that just thrilled everybody. I mean, on a Saturday, that's exactly what everybody wants to do on a Saturday afternoon.

Why the Pseudo-Dionysian Corpus Matters for Church History

But once again, as I explained at the time, we are in the midst of trying to do something that will have lasting value. And when we began addressing Islam, we did a lot of foundational programs on the Quran, the history of the Quran, Muhammad, the Islamic version of Islamic history, and the origin of the Quran and the Hadith.

And why do we do all that stuff? So that when you really engage with the best that it has to offer, you've got that foundation laid. And you can therefore address the issue in a meaningful fashion and in a fashion that will have value down through the years.

Well, over the past number of years, we looked at the Confession of the Scythias. We looked at what prompted that with Cyril of Carus and his confession. And so we're doing the same type of thing. And in dealing with Eastern Orthodoxy, we're dealing with ancient Christian history and claims about that and contradictory claims between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.

And then Protestantism says something else, even though, again, there's no such thing as Protestantism. Protestantism is ironically, Protestantism is an apophatic phrase. Apophysis in Greek means denial.

Kataphysis, you see apa and kata. So you've got negation theology, you've got positive theology, negative theology, and positive theology. So Protestantism is an apophatic term. What do I do? It's simply a denial statement, not Roman Catholic, not Orthodox.

It doesn't make a positive claim. What does that mean? Because technically, Mormonism is Protestant because it's not Catholic and it's not Eastern Orthodox. Now, some people would put in that. But historically, nobody would because the context would be, well, Christian groups that are not Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics wouldn't necessarily agree that they're Christian groups in the first place.

So that's why Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox get away with murder in constantly comparing Protestantism and its divisions with the unity of Rome and the unity of Eastern Orthodoxy, because they're not dealing with any one group.

There is no Protestant confession. What confession? As soon as you say Westminster, that's Presbyterian. London Baptist Confession, that's Roman Baptist. You've got the Methodist stuff, you've got the...

No, you don't have a Protestant church to even be comparing to. So we've discussed it before. But anyway, so we're looking at a complex issue. And I've tried to say for many years, you know, when Hank Hanegraaff converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, I said, you know, I'm going to have to go ahead and talk about this, but I just do not want to get into this area because it's highly complex.

People in the West don't think like people in the East. It's difficult to... Well, it is a language. It's not just a language issue. It is a thought and expression issue. We think in the West, forensically, they think more mystically, we think more logically.

You know, that's not a thousand percent but it's really important to recognize the differences in the way that people think. But as things have developed, it seems fairly obvious to me that we need to be thinking about these things and we need to be looking at these things and providing a response.

And so we have the debate coming up in barely two months with Craig Trulia. I've explained to you why the debate topic is absolutely central, why it's so important to all of this work, and it was on that basis that I said on Saturday.

So if you'd like to encourage us in doing this type of long-term investment apologetics, please remember us at this time because that will help us to feel like, yes, that's what we want done, rather than, nah, do a Radio Free Geneva, go find the most recent absurd statement from Leighton Flowers, and we'll be happy with that.

Anachronism and the Dating of Pseudo-Dionysius

Well, okay. So I went through the Dionysian Corpus because, as we'll see, we're going to look at the influence that this work had and that's going to help a lot in church history. That's going to explain a lot of church history to you.

It really is. So stick with me on this. This is where we ended. So here's the where we're going to pick up and that's with the problem of anachronism. And so anachronism, of course, is a term that we have discussed many times before in the sense of talking about how western individuals lived with the idea of anachronism.

We've talked about how you'll see the paintings from the medieval period of David and he's riding a horse and he's wearing armor and he's got a castle and stuff like that and David wouldn't have had those types of things, but they thought that he did because of anachronism.

They, many of them, many of the people lived in that time period, never moved more than seven miles into one direction from where they were born, and so they felt that things had always been the same.

And in light of that, it took time for people like Lorenzo Valla and others to start recognizing anachronisms. So they recognized that the donation of Constantine, which had been so important in the establishment of papal authority, made reference to stuff that was supposed to exist in the days of Constantine, but it didn't exist in the days of Constantine, so this had to have been written later.

That's how you recognize historical frauds. And historical frauds had a huge part in the development, well, of ecclesiastical theology and churches. The papacy, as we'll see, Pseudo-Dionysius, if it is taken as a first century document, as it was starting in like 530, as if this was actually written by Dionysius the Areopagite in the first century, it created all sorts of anachronism.

But that only gets recognized at a later point, when we recognize the development of things over time. And so the problem of anachronism, what happens when the corpus is read as genuine first century material?

The anachronisms are severe, cumulative, and fatal to the claim. Now, two things. I'm not presenting my paper yet. I have a presentation. I just gave my paper to an AI and said, make a PowerPoint. That's easy to do.

But I'm not presenting that yet. There is going to be a discussion down here that's going to mention part of this, but I'll have to put some of that to a later point. But we are dealing with a situation today where there is a theory that has been floated over the past couple of years by Nicotopoulos and Trulia, who I will be debating Mr. Trulia in October, that is trying to rehabilitate sort of the long-term view of Dionysius as actually being first century, rather than the scholarly consensus, and this is a consensus, honestly, and they admit this, amongst all historians, almost all historians, the only exceptions might be some Eastern Orthodox guys, but Roman Catholic scholarship, the Roman Catholic Academy, Protestant, unbelieving, whatever, all view the Dionysian Corpus, the books that we talked about, and again, I can't go back and do that.

We did that in the last program, as having been written around the year 500. So, half a millennium after the birth of Christ. So, you've got to factor that in to, you know, is this, if you think these books were written by a convert of Paul, that's going to have a huge impact on the authority, but if you believe they're written by someone pretending to be the convert of Paul, half a millennium later, obviously that impacts their authority as well, in a very, very different way.

Liturgical and Ecclesiastical Anachronisms

So, let's look at these different, we've got liturgical, theological, okay, do not touch the screen, or it will, see, look at that, hmm, I'm not sure I like that. Okay, I have to find a way to not do that.

Liturgical, theological, vocabulary, neoplatonic framework, ecclesiastical structure, and silence of the father. So, what are, what is this referring to? All right, the E-H, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, remember, if you just watch this program right after watching Saturday's program, it will flow.

If you skip everything I just did about Dan McClellan, it'll flow. The ecclesiastical hierarchy describes a developed liturgical order. The Eucharistic Rite, with its specific sequence of readings, dismissals, and reserved roles for clergy and laity, that matches the 5th -6th century Byzantine liturgy, not the simple meal gatherings of the centuries of liturgical development.

So, this is a, again, this is what almost everyone in the academy believes. That's not an argument for me, I'm just simply letting you know that Roman Catholics would agree with what is being said here, that Roman Catholic scholarship would agree with what is being said here.

The description of the ecclesiastical offices, worship, found in the Dionysian Corpus, developed over time. It was not present in the 1st century. It was not present in the 2nd century. Many elements of it did not develop until the 3rd.

And so, if you accept the Nicotopolis Trilia theory, that this is 1st century, then you have to explain, then why did everybody else forget this? Why does Ignatius not know this? Why does the Didache not know this?

Because this puts Dionysius becomes earlier than anything else. It is the earliest document outside the New Testament. It's before the Didache. It's before any of the Apostolic Fathers. It's before Ignatius' letters.

Long before Justin. Long before Irenaeus. They don't know this stuff. The specifics of these types of things, the Eucharistic Rite with a specific sequence of readings, dismissals, reserve roles for clergy and laity, 5th -6th century Byzantine religion.

That's the Byzantine Empire 500 years down the road. Not the 1st century. Where did all that knowledge go? Did the books just disappear, only to re-emerge later? But if this was the Apostolic Teaching, then no one repeated the teaching except Dionysius?

Trinitarian Vocabulary and Conciliar Development

Who then no one ever quotes? That's a real problem. Theological vocabulary. The corpus uses fully developed Trinitarian and Christological terminology. Huppastuses, Fusus, Deanderkas, that emerged from the councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon, and of course all the controversies that preceded, happened during, and after said councils.

None of those vocabulary existed in Paul's day. And as we look at, you know, that's one of the things, you look at that one section in Ignatius' letter to the Ephesians. God and man. And you go, look at that!

Well, if that's coming after Dionysius, it's not nearly as important. In fact, it's not quite as clear as Dionysius. Because Dionysius gives us fully developed Trinitarian language from the 5th and 6th century, as if it actually occurred in the 1st century.

Which again, you know, people go, well that would be great! That'd be wonderful! Only if it's true! It's only wonderful if it's true! I mean, you've got to be take this stuff into debate with Muslims and others.

You can't just throw it out there and say we're going to believe it. And honestly, fundamentally, when you boil everything down, one of my assertions is going to be that the men who believe that theory, believe it because the Eastern Orthodox Church, they believe, tells them to believe it.

They actually make reference to ecumenical councils, and I see it too, and Orthodox saints. So, Orthodox saints believed it, and they did. So, that's what makes it true. Well, you can't take that into debate with a Muslim.

Neoplatonic Framework and the Interpretation of Paul

So, there you go. Neoplatonic framework. The corpus systematically employs the technical vocabulary of Proclus and Neambicus. Procession, reversion, henosis, theurgy, the triadic structure, remaining, procession, return.

Again, stuff that we talked about on Saturday in the hierarchy and hierarchical directions. Remaining, procession, return. Certain things go one direction, other things only go the other direction. Concepts formalized in the 3rd through 5th centuries AD, but that did not exist in the 1st century, and certainly, certainly, certainly are not to be found anywhere in Paul.

I mean, where does Dionysius get this? I mean, wouldn't Dionysius's actual value be as a transmitter of apostolic teaching from Paul, the one who taught him? So, if Dionysius is giving us all sorts of stuff that Paul never dreamed of, what does that tell us?

And, of course, recognize something else. If you accept this, as people like Thomas Aquinas did, what's the temptation? The temptation is now to take Dionysius and make that the lens through which you do what?

You read Paul. You see? So, let me give you just a wild example here, for those of you who are apologetically minded. When we read Joseph Smith's final sermons, King Paul's funeral discourse, Sermon in the Grove, the natural tendency is for us to read them through the lens of what?

The Utah Church, the people that were there, the Journal of Discourse, the developing theology in the next few decades, from the people who were actually there and heard it in the first place. You see?

So, what's happening today? There are people saying, oh no, no, no, we don't need to worry about all the rest of that stuff. They missed the boat and we can go in another direction. But the natural tendency is, well, you're going to read it and light it up.

So, Dionysius would function like the Journal of Discourses for Joseph Smith, naturally, and that ends up impacting how people interpret the New Testament, when you have this lens that they're looking through.

Now, we don't have that lens as non-Roman Catholics and non-Eastern Orthodox, and that would explain why we come to very different conclusions when we look at New Testament language. Now, how many Roman Catholics recognize that they have that lens?

How many of my dear brothers who are so excited about Thomas Aquinas and he's just so wonderful and we have people drawing pictures and we're selling books in the bookstore and all that kind of stuff?

Well, I'm going to tell you about that in a second. I'm getting ahead. I'm thinking ahead of myself. So, just hold on a second on that. Oops, I bumped the bow tie. We need to tape that down. Because, you see, when you bump stuff, it starts reflecting.

And when it starts reflecting light, Rich's blood pressure goes up. And we don't want Rich's blood pressure to go up. He's very old. Just need to superglue everything. Superglue is good. Superglue is good.

Monasticism and the Development of Church Offices

Okay. Ecclesiastical structure. The three-tier clergy, bishop, priest, deacon, appears as an established ancient institution with complex ordination rites, not the fluid charismatic ministry in the New Testament period.

The monastic order is treated as a recognized hierarchical rank. Post-dating Anthony, who died in 326, and Pacomius, if you're familiar with... well, there wouldn't be a reason for you to be familiar with it, but historically speaking, Anthony, so in the middle of the 4th century, Pacomius.

These are huge names in the development and establishment of the monastic orders and the rise of monasticism. Monks, you've got the Desert Fathers in Egypt. But again, all that gets thrown out. All that becomes irrelevant.

Because all they were doing was re-establishing what had been established by Paul via Dionysius in the 1st century. Again, I do not believe there is a single Roman Catholic scholar anywhere who teaches that these offices existed in the 1st century in the way they're seen in the Dionysian corpus.

I just don't think there are. And I think there would be many Eastern Orthodox scholars who likewise would not view it that way. As far as I know, the only people who are willing to put up with this level of anachronism are people in Eastern Orthodoxy that believe this is a 1st century document.

But yeah, bishop, priest, deacon, the distinctions already made. Even the argument that Mitch Packwood presented against me in our debate on the priesthood many, many, well, a couple decades ago now, would be falsified by the acceptance of the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus as being a 1st century production.

His argument was this was, again, development over time where Presbyter, Presbyteros, and Episcopos become distinguished, even though in the New Testament they're not distinguished, they are the same office.

They become distinguished and the one becomes the priesthood if Pseudo-Dionysius is actually Dionysius 1st century. None of that's true. It is an apostolic origination of those differences, which then makes Paul contradictory to Paul.

The Silence of the Fathers

Paul needed to read Dionysius. Paul needed to get caught up on all the new stuff. Finally, Silas and the Fathers, which is the fundamental thesis of my paper. No father before the late 4th century cites or knows the corpus Ignatius of Antioch 107, if that's the date, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus.

Justin is in the middle of the 2nd century, around 150s. Irenaeus, end of the 2nd century, Clement of Alexandria, origin, all are silent. Eusebius, the great cataloger of Christian literature, died in 339, does not mention it.

This is inexplicable if the work dates to Paul's convert. That is going to be something that I will expand upon greatly, and I've spent months expanding upon greatly, through primarily utilization of the Thyrus Lingua Graeca Ancient Greek Database and the searches that I've spent many, many hours on with that.

But, one of the, I'll tell you, one of the portions of the paper is the Eusebian Silence. Eusebius, the first real church historian, shall we say, who documents, well, the fascinating thing is Eusebius documents all sorts of writings that we know nothing about.

We have, he's the only one who mentions it. We have no fragments. We got nothing. This guy, this guy was the quintessential hyper-focused librarian. Okay, you know that guy? But this is before the internet, folks.

You know what I mean? I mean, this is, I cannot imagine the amount of energy he put into detail and attention. Amazing, amazing fellow. And he makes reference to all sorts of things. And, you know, in the modern period, we'll even say, you know, he put too much trust in this, or too much trust in that, or he was a little bit too, you know, this, that, or the other thing.

We criticize some of the things that he said, but the point is, he names his sources. And if there was a corpus of material the size of Justin Martyr's writings, and during my research, I was, I was using AI to go, how big was this?

Who, when did this first get published? Where? Something like that. So I, you know, I have it go off and do its thing while I'm doing searches in TLG and stuff like that. And the funny thing was, I very often caught the, caught AI.

I was using Claude primarily. I very often caught Claude. And I was going, you know, it seems to me that the size of the Pseudodynesian corpus is very similar to Justin Martyr. And at first, Claude was like, no, it doesn't look like it.

I, I'm looking at how many column inches it takes, and, and means, and stuff like that. And I would say, no, no, no. I'm like, you know what? I can find out. I happened to have access to a means on my own computer to do a word count for Justin in Greek.

And I had just, the ministry, thanks to y 'all support, had just purchased for me the current critical edition of Dionysius. And so I have both of them and can do a word count on both of them in certain programs that I have.

And they are within a few percentages of each other. Very, very similar in size. Now, Justin Martyr, writing around the 150s, is being quoted within a few decades by other people. He is known. He is quoted.

Eusebius knows him. Eusebius quotes him by name. Dionysius is about 50 years earlier. So he's, but he's still even earlier than the earliest dates for Ignatius. He's about the same size. This corpus of books and letters that always circulate together, they never circulate separately.

Isn't that interesting? Even the New Testament letters circulated separately before they were collected together. Not the letters Dionysius. Dionysius. There's a reason for that. They were written to, they weren't written as letters to real people.

They were written as letters to communicate something and were always together. And so when you look at Justin, Eusebius knows him, mentions him. He's quoted immediately. Dionysius, more important, earlier, same size.

From Acts 17 to the First Undisputed Citation

Nothing. Nothing. Nobody knows. Nobody ever quotes it. Nobody ever quotes it. So yeah, Silence of the Fathers. That's a big one. That's a big one. Silence of History in the Late Emergence. Rich will like this much better because it's not a white background now.

And so it'll look so much prettier. In fact, that is perfectly readable from what I can see right there. Actually, even without my glasses on. I got my, I picked up my new glasses yesterday. I am deeply disappointed.

I don't know if it's something that I've, I've got to like adjust to them or something. But I'm just like, yeah, I'm just like, no, I'd rather go with, with my one, my, I've got one super clear eye with 20 -20 vision that develops floaters.

And the one that's not 20 -20 is nice and perfectly clear. It's like, oh, thank you. Anyways, the Silence of History in the Late Emergence. So, 57 AD, Dionysius the Areopagite converted, Acts 1734. If he wrote the Corpus, it would be cited within decades.

Now, we don't know when he would have written it. I mean, that's one thing that we do have to sort of think about is how old was he when he was converted? What if he was young and he lived a long time?

Could he have written the Corpus late in the first century? I suppose, you know, you have to leave that stuff there. There's, there's no data. No one ever claims to have seen this stuff. So, 107-ish, Ignatius of Antioch, again, taking the early date, letters full of hierarchical, hierarchical thought would have treasured this Corpus, complete silence.

Ignatius knows nothing about it. And you have to explain how, how would he have not known something this important? And especially if you try to say, well, Ignatius knew the apostles, well, then doesn't it make logical sense to say that Ignatius would have known of Dionysius, Paul's celebrated Greek philosophical convert at the Europagus?

But nothing about it. It would have fit into his stuff perfectly. Irenaeus, 185, combating Gnostic heresies of eons, hierarchies of eons, sorry. And they have, again, Gnosticism has all sorts of hierarchies.

And so, if you had a commentary from a convert, an apostolic convert, was converted by one of the apostles, and he has this whole discussion of hierarchies and the direction it goes, and it doesn't do this, but it only does that, and this is coming from the apostles.

And so now you're taking on the Gnostic hierarchies? What else would you quote? He knows nothing about it. Not a word. Not a word. The Corpus is a perfect resource for Irenaeus. Silence. Nothing there.

Nothing there. Eusebius Caesarea, already mentioned this, catalogs every known Christian writing, not one mention of the Corpus or its author. Well, I shouldn't say or its author. Well, okay, that, yeah, okay, that makes sense.

You could describe that as author from 500. I just don't want you understanding that as saying that he never mentions Dionysius, because he does know Acts 1734. But in the first 500 years, you know what's known about Dionysius?