No other way? Are you positive? The historicity of Jesus is very much in question. There simply isn't any evidence for his existence.
How could Rome best stop/slow the spread of Christianity?
- Thread starter agisXIV
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No other way? Are you positive? The historicity of Jesus is very much in question. There simply isn't any evidence for his existence.
Marc
Donor
When I said culture, I was thinking of the core values that make up the framework of a society, their ethos, etc. For Rome, a great deal of it had been centered on military service and a strong legal system, and almost grim rectitude. As Republic eased in Empire, that became tatters...
In AD 100 Christianity was still a minor religion there were few priests and few religious texts.
Hunting down the priests and destroying the texts would be the easiest way to do it.
Hunting down the priests and destroying the texts would be the easiest way to do it.
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On the contrary, there was a large number of Christian texts written around that time, by many different authors. The challenge for the early church was to determine which should be considered part of the canon.
I think it is difficult for Rome to stop a religion that is not only decentralized at this time, but is focused more on eternal salvation than temporal rewards. At the same time, because of the latter, Christians do not necessarily pose a major threat to the régime, either.
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Speaking as a believer here, one thing i can tell you all is that Jesus wasn't even on the Roman's radar. Not really. He was however, almost constantly under the watch of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish religious governing body of the day. He was a threat to their power and their worldview. It was their agitation that brought Jesus to Rome's attention. Without the crowds egged on by the religious leaders to shout 'Crucify Him', Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, would have let him be. Of course, Jesus was going to die anyway, as it had all been planned before Israel was even settled.
SwampTiger
Banned
I am not sure if you can 'prove' Jesus's existence. Neither can you 'prove' Abraham's existence. Jesus was a nobody in the Empire. Without the Sanhedrin encouragement, the Romans would never have heard of him. The growth of the sect was propelled by later apostles like Saul of Tarsus/St. Paul.
The growth of mystery religions during this time leads one to believe someone would have been the focal point of a local salvation focused religion. The old gods were losing their hold on people for a variety of reasons.
The growth of mystery religions during this time leads one to believe someone would have been the focal point of a local salvation focused religion. The old gods were losing their hold on people for a variety of reasons.
Presumably someone existed that all this stuff was based off of, no? Even if it was a conflation of several different individuals and accounts - not saying it was - it had to come from somewhere.
It's an awfully complex tale to just invent without any backing. If it was a total myth or a complete fabrication it could be improved in uncountable different ways over what we received. Plus its not as if itinerant religious leaders were unknown in Judea.
But if you want to be pedantic technically we have no evidence most historical figures existed. Maybe Alexandros was a retroactive invention of the Diadochi to explain a Makedonian migration into the Person empire and construct a heroic cult figure to deify and model their lives off of. There's plenty of religious figures where we have no idea if they were real as well - consider the Bodhidharma, whose life story is realistically cribbed from a dozen odd real Buddhists.
Alternative history as a hobby to some degree involves accepting some sort of narrative or basis of history, I think. Extreme historical revisionism complicates the ability to tell a story based on a shared understanding of reality. And I say this as someone who likes reinterpretations and buys into the idea that the Brennos who fought Ptolemy Keraunos and was defeated in Greece is a total invention.
That could be said about almost any figure of the ancient world.
But as Private Baldrick might say, at some point we went from not having Christianity to having it. So presumably it had a Founder, and given where it originated and who the earliest adherents were, He was almost certainly Jewish. That doesn't leave much to debate except His name, and, given that Yisu/Yeshua was quite a common one in those parts, the name that has been handed down to us is as likely as any.
Kick
There are plenty of "awfully complex tales" out there (Christianity isn't one of them) that have no basis in reality. Hell, I think Star Wars is more complex than Christianity.
Dude, you're just looking for a fight now, please stop before this conversation, which can bear interesting fruit, gets locked.
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Marc
Donor
Why do you think that? It seems fairly clear the mass appeal of the mystery faiths was growing almost exponentially in the Mediterranean world by the mid 1st Century C.E. Christianity had the advantage among those rising faiths in having apparently most of the best philosophical/theological minds of the times, and had developed the best "tool" kit for proselytizing. Nothing is certain - at least if you don't believe in determinism - but some directions that history flowed towards are much more highly likely than others.
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I've been listening, lately, to this lecture on the rise of Christianity with a Professor Kenneth Harl and one thing he makes a big deal of is that's it's NOT fairly clear that the mass appeal of mystery faiths was growing. He spends an entire lecture making clear that, in his expert opinion, what we are calling mystery cults were nothing new and existed, not just in parallel with traditional polytheistic faiths, but embedded within those traditions. The Eleusinian Mysteries, for example, are literally Archaic, older than the Classical practice of traditional Greek polytheism itself. Others, like Serapis and Isis, are much more evidence of Hellenistic syncretism than of declining traditional paganism.
Christianity wouldn't have gone away without Constantine's conversion, in Harl's view, but it wouldn't have necessarily risen to dominate the Greco-Roman and post-Roman European world. Traditional polytheism was vibrant and healthy well into the 2nd century and the slip in its vitality in the 3rd century and into the 4th had more to do with the general slip in Roman institutions and culture during the crisis than anything specific to the religion. There's no deep reason to suspect a recovery in the former wouldn't be accompanies by a recovery in the latter.
I am not expert enough on the subject to tell, definitively, whether Harl's views are just eccentricities, outside the mainstream of scholarship, but they present a pretty serious challenge to the picture of late Roman polytheism as anemic, desperate to be replaced by something more vital.
Though even by Harl's thesis, the vitality of Roman polytheism is linked to the vitality of Roman society in general. So when the RE runs on the rocks (which all empires do sooner or later) traditional polytheism is liable to go down with it.
Marc
Donor
For my limited studies, I'm far from being a Greek & Roman specialist, Harland is being a bit too conservative in his evaluations. An excellent book on the topic, if it interests you to go further, is "Christianizing the Roman Empire (CE 100-400)" by Ramsay MacMullen.
However, I do agree that at best Christianity was very much a minority religion by circa 300 CE, say perhaps 10% of the population (interestingly, that is also the typical estimate of the Jewish population in the Roman Empire). But we are looking at a long trend line that is objectively impressive - a few thousand during Paul's time to few hundred thousand by the end of the 2nd Century, to 4-6 million by Constantine's reign, to a majority a few decades later when it becomes the State religion.
However, I do agree that at best Christianity was very much a minority religion by circa 300 CE, say perhaps 10% of the population (interestingly, that is also the typical estimate of the Jewish population in the Roman Empire). But we are looking at a long trend line that is objectively impressive - a few thousand during Paul's time to few hundred thousand by the end of the 2nd Century, to 4-6 million by Constantine's reign, to a majority a few decades later when it becomes the State religion.
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So over the 4C et seq it presumably continues to grow (though no doubt less dramatically than OTL) even without Constantine.
Marc
Donor
My personal take, even assuming that Constantine doesn't officially accept the role that Christianity is playing in his empire, his near successors will - Particularly the two Theodosius's, First and Second. Christianity isn't like Buddism which had strongly accepted "first" faiths reacting against it, such as in India and China. Again, nothing is inevitable (we think), but frankly, the counter-factual argument against a predominately Christian West is going to be hard-pressed without handwaving...
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Pretty much everyone else here heeded my statement regarding arguing about religion outside of Chat.
Pity you didn't.
Kicked for a week.
I don't see why. The traditional civic polytheism depended on a healthy, urban civilization in the form it existed, but there's no reason to suspect it couldn't adapt to leaner conditions. The history of the existing polytheistic faiths and the contemporary existence of the pagan Germanics east of the Rhine shows it's not like polytheism requires urban civilization in general.
There's just no serious reason to believe that, without the vast influence of imperial patronage being turned towards building a universal, orthodox Christian church, it would have happened anyway. Christianity prior to Constantine was a minority faith prone to endless schisming over points of doctrine everyone else found confusing, not a steamroller ready to take any and all comers. Why should this change?