Thomas_More
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Thank you. I will take a closer look.
I think the kind of police state Constantine required, and even more so, Theodosius (who finally banned Hellenism, and ruthlessly enforced Christian Orthodoxy), required the type of ecclesiastical authority that only Christianity could provide. This would establish the dual Byzantine rule of Emperor and Bishops which survived even after 1453 in Tsarist Russia. The Western Church never achieved this, as Popes and the German emperors (Holy Roman) were always locked in conflicts. The west’s feudal system wasn’t suited to Byzantium’s autocracy. Feudal Europe was bound to go its own way, with the Pope too becoming a feudal prince, vying for land.
Meanwhile, Byzantium’s autocracy was very different from the old, Hellenist, Roman Empire, which was a melange of mutually accepting cults, with no monopoly. Constantine’s totally new edifice needed something totally different, and needed the suppression of diversity and a rigid conformity to one tyrannical ideology.Pauline antinomianism would coalesce in the 17th century personality of the Dutch psychopath Jeronimus Cornelisz, for whom it became a personal philosophy. He organised the mass murder of his fellow travellers on the ship Batavia. Bodies are even now still being found.
Porphyry, the Pythagorean writer who wrote Against the Christians did not take part in blood sacrifices, only Pythagorean fruit offerings to the gods. Against the Christians was burned on order of Constantine, but fragments have been saved and are now available in a handsome English edition.
In this, Porphry quotes Paul’s contempt for our fellow animals by saying in one of his epistles, “What does God care for oxen?” For Porphyry, for whom all beings were God-created, this phrase of Paul’s sums up Christian arrogance. Celsus too mocks Christians’ selfish anthropocentrism, which has God only caring for Christians, and only for his “chosen people”, even among all other humans, who will be damned. Celsus says that for the Christians all is made for man, including all other beings. He counters with the challenge that if a lion eats a man, then it is evident that man was made for the lions!Both books are in print in English, and also Porphyry’s On Avoiding Killing Animals.
Julian’s own Against the Galileans is complete in vol.3 of his works in the Loeb Classical Library.
Yes. I agree. I have just begun to read The Amazing Colossal Apostle about Paul, by Robert Price. We don’t even know if Paul was his name. Joachim Kahl calls him “that neurotic philistine.”
The “faith alone” Christians love him. I know that is anathema to Muslims, for whom alms-giving is very important, and also for committed Catholics. The “faith alone” dogma was what the Protestant Reformation heartily adopted, as it presided over the enclosure of land and the eviction of the peasantry, and the stigmatizing of the workless and homeless. No longer were these to be seen as Christ incarnate, but scum to be branded, mutilated and sold into bondage.
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.
