Jesus is a Roman god

[msnobody]

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.

I need to go back and read the various posts in the thread myself.

For some reason, when I read your comment above, a flash of that statue of Joseph Smith that was recently added to the World Peace Dome came into my mind.

[Physics Guy]

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.

Okay, I guess it depends on what they actually said. I'll accept your word for it, that they basically wrote that way.

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.

Maybe I'd like you to pin down what you mean by "Roman god" or even just "god". I think most people who aren't classical historians read "Roman god" to mean "a figure so much like Jupiter, Apollo, Neptune, Mercury, Pluto, or Dionysius as to differ from them by only about as much as they differ from each other". I'm sure that's not the only tenable definition of the term, but I think it is a reasonable definition. And by that definition, it seems like a stretch to put the "Roman god" label on Jesus. For one thing, the (other) Roman gods are all the gods of something—the sea, the underworld, music, the sun. Of what particular thing is Jesus the god?

If on the other hand you were to define "god" as "any kind of divine entity from a deified human emperor up to the ground of all being", then calling Jesus a Roman god is just obvious: Romans worshiped him, so of course he's a Roman god.

[Philo Sofee]

Edited to add:
Here is what ChatGPT says:

Hold the phone. . . ChatGPT is considered a go-to authority now??

If so, I think humanity has officially gone over the edge.

Lol.....

[Kishkumen]

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.

Here is what I am quoting from:

viewtopic.php?p=2848839#p2848839

It is true that the first line in quotes was mine, but the question that comes after it was taken from a post made under your account.

[Kishkumen]

Okay, I guess it depends on what they actually said. I'll accept your word for it, that they basically wrote that way.

Read Origen's Contra Celsum. Origen quotes Celsus' polemics against Christianity, and that gives you some sense of what these pagan opponents of Christianity were saying.

Maybe I'd like you to pin down what you mean by "Roman god" or even just "god". I think most people who aren't classical historians read "Roman god" to mean "a figure so much like Jupiter, Apollo, Neptune, Mercury, Pluto, or Dionysius as to differ from them by only about as much as they differ from each other". I'm sure that's not the only tenable definition of the term, but I think it is a reasonable definition. And by that definition, it seems like a stretch to put the "Roman god" label on Jesus. For one thing, the (other) Roman gods are all the gods of something—the sea, the underworld, music, the sun. Of what particular thing is Jesus the god?

If on the other hand you were to define "god" as "any kind of divine entity from a deified human emperor up to the ground of all being", then calling Jesus a Roman god is just obvious: Romans worshiped him, so of course he's a Roman god.

Exactly. In Roman thought, any being that receives divine cult is a god. Here is how Pliny the Younger represented Christians speaking of their own religious practices in the province of Bithynia-Pontus in the early second century CE:

They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so.

[Kishkumen]

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.

Unfortunately, we have no way to access what Jesus thought of himself, and we have no way of determining which Jews, if any, viewed him as divine during his lifetime. Of course, it is possible that these things were so, but there were heavy impediments to them being true. The strong to the point of exclusive monotheism of Judaism in Jesus' day would almost certainly have kept most Jews, including Jesus himself, from identifying Jesus as a god or the God. I think it a lot more likely that he was seen as an angel in human form. Most likely is that he was seen as a prophet, perhaps on the order of Moses.

By the time the gospels were written, the process of Jesus' recognition as a divinity was well along. So was the process of framing his life and ministry in the terms of Hebrew prophecy in the Hebrew Bible. What I do not think is that there was any groundswell of thought that Jesus was divine in accordance with later interpretations of the Hebrew Bible's references to Jesus' divinity in Jesus' own lifetime.

As for the Paraclete, I am not sure anyone really knows what that is. There are plenty of theories, and different groups interpret it differently, but what exactly did it mean to the person who wrote those lines? Did Jesus really speak them? As a historian, I have no idea how we would know for certain. As a person of faith, one has to decide what they believe it means.

[Kishkumen]

The Reformation is just inside squabbling in the end. It is a departure from traditional Roman religion through the intellectual tools passed down from the Roman Empire. Of course, Christianity continues to split, evolve, and take many forms, but it cannot get away from its origins in the Roman Empire in the Hellenized ancient world. To get back to earliest Christianity is to accept it as it is, not to try to return to something it never was in the first place.

Another way of thinking of the above statement is to say that the Reformation is a faction of Roman religion parting ways with Roman power. The Reformation is the beginning of the second fall of Rome. When kings feel they can pull themselves out from under the power of the pope, and when kings feel comfortable fighting the Holy Roman Empire, the Second Rome of the West experiences a second fall. Eastern Rome fell for the first and last time in 1453. Since Orthodoxy did not exist as a political force in the same way as the Catholic Church, it cannot be considered a second Rome in exactly the same way as the Catholic Church. It is still a Roman religion, but it is not a Roman Empire. Russia comes closest to being a Second/Third Rome of the East.

A fall of Rome, however, does not mean that Rome truly ended. Rome is still very much with us today. What threatens today's Romes most of all is the rejection of Western civilization by anti-imperial radicals living in the West and the theory of Eurasianism in Russia.

[Physics Guy]

In Roman thought, any being that receives divine cult is a god.

Okay, but then for the sake of speaking to non-specialists, who probably only know Roman concepts of deity from books about mythology, I think it might be important to start out by clarifying that. So by calling Jesus a Roman god, you are not asserting that he differed from Pluto and Dionysius by no more than they differed from Apollo and Neptune. Instead, it seems, you're saying that "god" was really a very broad category in Roman minds, a category that included their Greek-derived pagan pantheon but that was by no means limited to them, or even to beings comparable to them.

I can see that you're still making a non-trivial assertion, if you are adding that many Romans would have been quite able to recognize the differences between Jupiter and Jesus and Julius Caesar, but would nonetheless not have seen those differences as all that important.

On that front, though, I'd wonder how the philosophical and gnostic-y traditions fit into the Roman attitude to gods. Wouldn't a keen Neoplatonist have been pretty reluctant to lump the Logos and Jupiter, let alone Julius Caesar, into the same category?

[IWMP]

Sometimes when I hear bits of the Bible or think about it, I wonder if "god" in the Bible is actually really more like a king, someone who is alive and walking the earth. I don't understand why God was so involved then and not now and sometimes I can imagine these prophets being told what to do by a ruler actually speaking to them on earth. Like Jonah and tha whale. I can't imagine my perspective of God telling someone to go somewhere let alone punishing him for not.

[Manetho]

Sometimes when I hear bits of the Bible or think about it, I wonder if "god" in the Bible is actually really more like a king, someone who is alive and walking the earth. I don't understand why God was so involved then and not now and sometimes I can imagine these prophets being told what to do by a ruler actually speaking to them on earth. Like Jonah and tha whale. I can't imagine my perspective of God telling someone to go somewhere let alone punishing him for not.

Ancient religions in general did not think of deities as being as transcendent as our concept of "God" today. I'm reminded of this classicist's remark that "to the polytheistic practitioner, the gods don’t exist outside of creation, or even outside of the community, but as very powerful — and sometimes inscrutable — members of the community." Of course Judaism was not polytheistic, but it evolved out of Canaanite polytheism and only gradually developed a more transcendent understanding of its deity. Many of the older books of the Hebrew Bible reflect the older perspective, perhaps most famously in Genesis 3:8, when Yahweh "walks" through the Garden of Eden.

At the time of Christianity's emergence, the more transcendent view of Yahweh was pretty well established, but Jews were still surrounded and influenced by polytheists, and of course most converts to Christianity after the first generation or two were gentiles and not Jews. In the ancient polytheistic worldview, to quote another remark by the same author, "the line between great humans and minor gods is blurry, and it is possible to cross that line." Hence Point #3 in Kishkumen's opening post.