Dr. Conspiracy
I made some comments here about the Obama conspiracy business waning (wishful thinking) which prompted a comment here and one IRL expressing hope that the blog stays on the Internet. This put me into an introspective mood about the ephemeral nature of some information and the persistence of other.
There’s a book called The Archko Volume, a 19th century pious fraud that contains purported documents about the life of Jesus. At the time it was printed, the newspapers declared it a fraud and the Rev. Mahan who did it was kicked out of his church. Some years later, it was more formally examined in a debunking collection called Modern Apocrypha by Dr. Edgar Goodspeed. The problem is that the newspapers were local and very difficult to access today, and Goodspeed’s book is long out of print, but The Archko Volume is not. Today the myth is more accessible than the truth.
Amazon.com today returned 520 items for sale about Barack Obama (not all books), but I daresay none of them cover the material on this blog. Salon.com has some Obama conspiracy theory articles, but Salon.com may not be around forever. So is it possible that 50 years from now, when the Internet has been replaced with something we cannot even imagine, conspiracy theorists will be convinced that Barack Obama was the first American President born in Africa, and the debunkers will have nothing in reply. Or maybe that long-form birth certificate will be on display at the Barack Obama Presidential Library. Who knows?
Well you could pull out your favorite posts, publish them via a pod service like Lulu as a chapbook and donate a copy to the library of congress.
For obvious reasons, the best source of information about early Christian heresies are the writings preserved by the Roman Catholic church refuting said heresies. The writings of the heretics were, shall we say, not as well preserved.
Your post reminds me of my favorite Bible passage:
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Then the LORD said to Moses, “Write this on a scroll as something to be remembered and make sure that Joshua hears it, because I will completely blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.”
Exodus 17:13-15
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There you have it. All memory of Amalek has been blotted out – except for all of the Bible passages going on at length about how the Amalekites were defeated and memory of them has been blotted out.
Makes a great Bible memory verse!
Yes, except for long quotations from Eusebius, we wouldn’t know about several of these heresies. EEK, am I preserving this stuff?
Just do like I do. Whatever you do, don’t mention the Amalekites, and you’ll be fine.