Thomas_More
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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.
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.
