Thomas_More
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I will also confirm that, although not applicable to Roman times, what you say about the much later age of colonialism, and its christianity, is absolutely correct.
He writes that Vespasian and his troops passed an old shrine to the calf god in Judaea. He doesn’t say whether it was still being used. I can imagine some farmers and shepherds holding on to cherished beliefs, but for how long I don’t know.
Robert Price mentions an old Greek woman going to church on Orthodox Christian Good Friday and saying that she hoped Christ would rise this year or her harvest will be ruined. (Showing how beliefs can even now still be intertwined in the minds of country people. When I was in the Greek mountains locals came to the monastery wearing goatskins. That was 1979. In Romania in obscure villages and hamlets, rituals were still recently performed to ward off vampires).
I agree with everything you’ve said here.
My misunderstanding was that you were saying there were Christians in Egypt 3000 years earlier. The same myths being there (but not Christianity) and being copied by the Christian writers was what I actually agreed with.
” It was not an empire as the bible has mentioned. The really big empires were the Assyrian, the Babylonian and the Egyptian empires. Jerusalem was not a place of one religion and one god; there were several religions and several gods.”
Exactly. The Jews were polytheists. Genesis begins with “In the beginning the Gods (Elohim) made the world.” Yahweh was a minor god. El was the main god. Asherah was Yahweh’s wife. The Jews who remained in Canaan remained polytheists. Nebuchadnezzar’s policy was to bring back to Babylon the chiefs and petty kings of conquered peoples to prevent revolts. When Cyrus of Persia conquered the Babylonians he allowed the descendants of the exiled to return to their ancestral lands if they wished. Of the exiled Jewish elite most chose to remain in Babylon, but some returned to Canaan, not grandiosely as in Ezra, but in trickles of a few. These replaced the former Babylonian rulers of the region and enforced monotheism on the people, rewriting the scriptures, erasing mention of many gods and erasing Asherah; blurring distinctions between El and Yahweh and making Yahweh the chief god. They created Moses, David and Solomon, and built the (only) Temple of Jerusalem, which they called “the second” temple.
” Another discrepancy found by modern archaeology is that the so-called golden age of King David and King Solomon did not exist; it is an exaggeration to fulfil a so-called promise made by the god of Israel of a chosen people living in prosperity; they were poor people like many peoples that existed in that time.”
I’ve already agreed with all that too. You were the one who earlier said David was real. I said he wasn’t.
” Another biblical lie is the Jericho walls; there were no walls at that time that the Bible mentioned, and they were destroyed by the Israelite; it was a poor neighbourhood., the modern archeolgy made profound research digging deeper than other arqueochologist who had religious point of views, and they did not find any evidences Ironically, they had received the Ten Commandments from Moses, but one of its clauses says: You shall not kill, but according to the narrative, more than 12,000 peoples were killed and several cities were burned down.”
No problem with that. I agree.
” The ethnological notebooks of Karl Marx cover Africa, Asia and other parts of the world besides Europe, and Marx and Engels wrote extensively on Colonialism.”
I know. I don’t disagree. Why you get angry over no disagreement is something I don’t understand.
” The problem is that you are negating the contribution made by Africa to world history; even more, Africa was the cradle of civilisation. ”
I do not deny that at all. Where do you get that idea? I have never denied that.
” I know that you have not read the book; it does not say that Christianity was started in Egypt; it says that the myth of a messiah was taken from Africa and especially from Egypt, and it was transformed into Christianity ( which should be called Jesuism), which was also established in Rome.”
No problem there. But I’ve agreed with that in numerous messages.
Christian “communists” forebears of socialists, or forebears of Stalin? (Or Jim Jones?)
Ananias and Sapphira sold some property and brought the bulk of the proceeds to give to the church. They kept some of their own money for their own sustenance. Peter challenged them on this, and both of them were done to death and speedily buried.
I know there was no exodus, no large Hebrew population in Egypt, no slavery, no Moses, etc. Had they crossed the Red Sea, they would still have been in Egyptian territory. The Old Testament “history” before Ezra is all made up – and it was made up by the Jewish monotheist intelligentsia returning from Babylonian exile in the time of Cyrus.
