Jesus is a Roman god

[Kishkumen]

I seem to recall Robert Eisenman arguing that Paul played a key role in the process of creating a less militant form of Judaism in order to ease the Palestinian problem. The aspects of Jesus we find most desirable and admirable in part being elevated by Roman authorities combating religious extremism and unrest. Kinda gives one pause, huh?

Yes, it looks like attempts were made pretty early on to soften opposition to Rome. Depictions of Pilate in the gospels show that pretty clearly.

[Kishkumen]

Bravo, Reverend. I has always wondered why the Roman Pantheon included the Greek gods. Knowing that the Romans incorporated other societies’ Gods is a big chunk of context I’ve been missing.

Gonna have to read this a few more times.

Thanks, RI!

[Kishkumen]

Got it. So in your opinion are there any places in scripture where he's reported as claiming he's God without actually saying "I am God?"

Hey, Jersey! I think there are passages that point in the direction of divinity, but they represent later developments of Christian thought. It is most unlikely that the historical Jesus was viewed by his follower as divine in his lifetime. He would not have seen himself that way either.

That said, this is a historical argument, and it in no way keeps anyone from having faith in Christ’s divinity.

[Kishkumen]

How does all of this relate to Joseph Smith being the fourth member of the God head?

Quite well! The Mormon pantheon grows just as the Roman one did. There are just different rules guarding entry to it.

[Kishkumen]

An interesting theme. It sounds shocking at first, but how unorthodox it really is depends on how far it goes, I think. Up to a point, any religion that flourished in the Roman Empire is going to look like a Roman religion in some ways, just because the old pagan traditions were the cultural water in which everyone swam. Like, I figure that if I were starting a new religion in Rome at the time, and I wanted to say how different my religion was from the cult of Jupiter, my first thought would probably just be to make a big point of how our bulls were being sacrificed to a totally different god. I'm not sure it would occur to me to leave out animal sacrifice completely in favour of meditation or something. I reckon this imaginative inertia would tend to give my new religion a certain Roman look and feel even if it were different from the real Roman cults in radical ways.

There were cults within the Roman Empire that started out as foreign but then Romanized over time. And there were new Roman-style cults to old gods of foreign peoples. Consider Mithraism, an initiatic cult to the Persian god Mithras that was popular in the Roman army. It was neither Persian nor like the old cults of Rome, but it found wide acceptance, including the emperor’s acceptance. By Late Antiquity, Helios Mithras was even used for the name of the highest god.

Maybe the thesis does go farther than that. I'm suspicious of point 7, however.

7. At the same time, Christianity does hold onto Judaism’s religious exclusivity and rejection of other religions and gods. This results in the Roman god Jesus ejecting all of the other gods from the Roman pantheon, leaving Jesus as the only Roman god.

Isn't this really more than a detail? Exclusive monotheism was and is the central point of Judaism, and non-exclusive plurality of small-g gods is a defining feature of Greco-Roman paganism, I would have said. So can you really just note this in the seventh point of a long list and sweep past it? Isn't that kind of like saying, "The Moon is an orange!" and then acknowledging in point 7 that it is a really huge orange out in space that orbits the Earth every month?

Yes, that is a big deal, and in the end there was a compromise called the Trinity, which made God three persons in one. The method for creating that compromise was a culturally pagan one. It never could have happened in Judaism proper. Even then, the Nicene creed had quite a struggle prevailing over Arianism, which is much closer to an admission that more than one god exists.

What I am describing in the opening posts is the long process by which Jesus became progressively more Roman until he was fully accommodated to Roman culture as a Roman god. The process begins when others identify him as a divinity. It ends when Nicene Christianity is the official religion of the Empire.

I'm also a little concerned about point 8.

8. Roman and Greek thinkers wrote anti-Christian polemics along the way, and we read these polemics as reinforcing the view that Jesus was irreconcilable with Greek and Roman religions, but the truth is that polemics were necessary to emphasize the differences precisely because there was nothing about Jesus that could logically keep him out of the pantheon. The religious spirit of the Mediterranean was inclusive and never tried or succeeded at keeping out gods who struck up a big following.

Here you seem literally to be interpreting contemporary pagan writers to mean the exact opposite of what they emphatically said. And okay, I get that there is actually some reason to do that. If somebody bothered to assert something, that implies that it was in doubt at the time. I'm not sure how far we can always stretch this, however. If an ancient wrote that the sky was blue, I wouldn't infer that it must in fact have been green. There obviously are tons of differences between Christianity and classical paganism, and maybe they're all just the same kind of differences of detail that existed between pagan cults, but maybe the concerned writers at the time weren't just being obtuse or polemical. Maybe some of those differences were bigger than details and contemporary observers noticed.

You have to read the polemics. The pagan authors alternate between condemning Jesus worship on the grounds that the similarities are just imitations of Greco-Roman religion, and condemning the differences for making the religion ludicrous. It amounts to special pleading. In fact, there was no mechanism to bar Jesus from Roman divinity absolutely, and the best evidence in support of this is his acceptance as a Roman god.

[Kishkumen]

“To get back to earliest Christianity is to accept it as it is.”

So, how was it (earliest Christianity)?

Earliest Christianity comes about after Jesus died and his crucifixion and post-mortal appearances were incorporated into the movement as divinely appointed positives.

[Moksha]

Earliest Christianity comes about after Jesus died and his crucifixion and post-mortal appearances are incorporated into the movement as divinely appointed positives.

When did the appearance of a church service appear? When was the first liturgy? Who got to wear the first hat?

[Kishkumen]

When did the appearance of a church service appear? When was the first liturgy? Who got to wear the first hat?

You can read the Didache to see what early practices were like. It dates to the end of the first century AD or perhaps the early second century.

[msnobody]

Got it. So in your opinion are there any places in scripture where he's reported as claiming he's God without actually saying "I am God?"

Hey, Jersey! I think there are passages that point in the direction of divinity, but they represent later developments of Christian thought. It is most unlikely that the historical Jesus was viewed by his follower as divine in his lifetime. He would not have seen himself that way either.

That said, this is a historical argument, and it in no way keeps anyone from having faith in Christ’s divinity.

Sticking solely with biblical scripture, when would you say later developments of Christian thought began? Would one look only to Old Testament passages concerning Jesus’ divinity? So, I guess, where would we draw the line in the Bible as to what is untainted by later thought development and what is not? Do we toss out that Jesus was going to send The Paraclete, and what role this Paraclete would play in what is written in the historical biblical record?

I think you’re probably right, that most of those who followed him while he was on this earth in a physical body did not view him as divine at the time. I would think John the Baptist would be at least one exception. I’m fairly certain that there would have been *some* Jews who would have viewed him as divine. Then, something else to take into consideration would be people’s understanding was probably very limited until the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. I also think that while on this earth in a physical body, Jesus would have been fully aware of His divinity.

[msnobody]

“To get back to earliest Christianity is to accept it as it is.”

So, how was it (earliest Christianity)?

Earliest Christianity comes about after Jesus died and his crucifixion and post-mortal appearances were incorporated into the movement as divinely appointed positives.

Not that it matters, but I think that quote is from someone else.