Thomas_More
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Our English word “God” is from “Goden”, an Anglo-Saxon variant of Woden, and Odin.
Dios, Dieu, are from Latin Deus, who is the god of the Celts, Teu, Teutates. (We forget the Romans were themselves Celts!)
Yes, except that Yahweh was originally only the god of storms. El was the principal god. Yahweh usurped his throne and stole his wife.
I agree absolutely. In Sicily too, Muslims, Latin and Greek Christians worked together on architectural projects. The old idea of “dark” ages has been exploded in the light of research over the last hundred years. Arab science flourished, the romance languages were developing, cosmopolitanism too. The 12th century renaissance brought Moorish knowledge through Spain and the Occitan lands into southern Europe and what is now southern France had closer ties with north Africa than with Paris.
In a very different Spain from what it later became, Jews, Christians (including Cathars) and Muslims formed a cosmopolitan court in the 12th century.The same period saw excellent relations with the Yuan dynasty of China. Marco Polo was not the first to reach China, but he was part of a constant intercourse which went in both directions. Chinese travellers visited Rome and France. In the 1300s Friar Odoric and others recorded their travels through the Middle East, India and at the Chinese court. Polo served Kublai Khan on trade journeys throughout his empire, throughout China and South East Asia.
The friars and others at that time who reached the Far East went not as missionaries but with humility. Their purpose was to align with the Great Khan and thus spare Europe from a feared Mongol invasion. This regular contact continued until the Ming came to power in 1368.Alexei Fadeyev’s statement:
I have always thought the Christians were guilty in burning Rome. Nero wasn’t even in Rome, and he hurried relief and medical services to the fire victims. Also, the fire decimated the homes of his own friends and political supporters.
Christians today, and still most ‘educators’, assume Nero to be guilty and the Christians innocent scapegoats. Yet at the time in Rome, Christian was an unknown word and they were an unknown sect. The Romans would only have seen Jews, and Jewish sects at war with each other, even though some of these might be Christians, they were not identifiable to non-Jews as anything but Jews.
Claudius had had to expel Jews from Rome for previous riots in which rioters had shouted the name “Chrestus!” in the streets. The Romans were so clueless that they assumed Chrestus to be one of the leading rioters.
The Christian Fathers themselves, always quick to invent martyrdom stories, never mention any persecution under Nero!Yet their imagined gods, including Yahweh, were imagined as material, corporeal, beings, not “spirits” as he is today.
“Spirit” and “soul” were manifestations of late-stage Hellenism, especially of Neo-platonism, and were seized upon by neurotic Christians, for whom physicality was troubling. Even their Jesus was originally a “spirit” who was only historicised later. According to Richard Carrier, Paul himself never thought of Jesus as an historical person. The Gospels were the first attempt at historicising.
Modern English Bibles unwittingly change the theology. The Gnostic (?) Paul never says Jesus was born but that he was made. He makes a point of using the Greek word for ‘made’, not ‘born’, although he switches to ‘born’ when referring to humans. He does this consistently.
There is nothing to suggest Paul, writing when he was, would have been an ‘orthodox’ Christian. We only read his epistles in the light of the (later) gospels because we have been habituated to do so.In Judaism the corporeal, physical nature of the divine carried over into its ‘Christian’ sects, in contrast to Paul’s gnosticism. Heaven was material, and the dead who were intended for it were bodies, risen from the grave, when God commanded. Celsus, a Hellenist Roman for whom God was bodiless and spiritual, ridicules those Christians who would populate their Heaven with rotting, stinking corpses – like the zombies who rise and walk in the Gospel.
Even much later in the Russia of Peter the Great, panic was sown among the Orthodox peasantry by his shaving edict, since God would not recognise a beardless Christian approaching Heaven. Russian men who were shaved by force collected their beard hairs and kept them so as to be allowed into Heaven.Ancient Egypt at its full extent.
And then there was the Celtic Church, not in communion with Rome nor the East, with their own computation of Easter and very far and wide missionary work in Europe. Their territory was Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and the Brythonic north of what is now England.
They rejected union with Rome and Orthodoxy and continued to be the Church in Ireland until 1170, and in Wales until the 13th century. The Celtic Church was abbatial, not episcopal, and its bases were monasteries, not dioceses, so it was thoroughly rural, not urban, unlike the Orthodox-Catholic Church.For a long time in Britain the Pelagian “heresy” was influential too.
Lastly, for a long time the Arian (unitarian) Church held sway amongst the Goths and Vandals in Europe, surrounding old Rome and preventing the popes from any expansion.
The Nativity, they called it, in March, until the Imperial Church determined to change it to fit in with the Saturnalia in a bid to attract converts. But the Church Fathers wanted to disassociate from it as much as possible and banned mistletoe, holly, and other symbols of the Saturnalia.
But here we are speaking of the East. Much later, as the bishops of old Rome (popes) in the West sent missionaries into the Germanic lands, they allowed all the full Germanic and Celtic “pagan” rites of the Winter Solstice to remain, so as to assist in converting the native peoples to Christianity. The same with the Nordic peoples too.
Even now, Christmas in the Eastern churches takes a back seat to the main festival, which is Pascha (Easter), whereas in the West Christmas is the year’s most important feast.
Sorry then.
December 25th fell during the Roman Saturnalia. You know the myths the Christians stole are about the sun. The Christian name is Christmas, but it was already the most important festival of the year. The Christian Fathers of the Church forbade Christians from garlanding their homes with holly and mistletoe, because the “pagans” did. So it was not a Christian holiday at all.
