Jesus is a Roman god

[Physics Guy]

[Neoplatonists] could be real hairsplitters when it came to the differences of status and divinity in their vision of the cosmos. That’s where Christian theologians learned their trade. Average people did not make such fine distinctions. Philosophers did.

The distinction between different registers of a religion is a familiar topic—but I wasn't thinking about it in this thread. I should have been, because it's always a basic question. Are we talking about a popular version of a religion, or about hieratic, heretical, academic, or official versions, or about some entirely hypothetical version, like a rationalized reconstruction projected onto a past in which it never really existed?

If I belatedly remember this whole issue, now, then I think I understand your point better. Christianity spread through the Roman Empire, to the point of becoming the official state religion, but we shouldn't imagine this happening as an ancient Billy Graham crusade in which Romans all came to Jesus. However differently the philosophers and the rulers and the priests on all sides may have thought about the new faith, I bet you're probably right that most people thought of the installation of Jesus as something much like the deification of an emperor or the building of a new temple.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, more or less, anyway. Changes of deity happened.

[Kishkumen]

I'd be interested if you could elaborate on this point a little. Is it that the reasoning by which the compromise was worked out was more in line with Greek philosophy than Jewish tradition?

The idea of the Trinity itself seems un-Jewish because it's not rigorously monotheistic, but, as someone not very familiar with Jewish theology of this period, I've recently learned about the trend of elevating the angel Metatron to the status of a "lesser Yahweh". Apparently the trend eventually (in late antiquity? The timeframe seems to be pretty uncertain) received a backlash, which may account for the legend of Elisha ben Abuyah's heresy, which sounds like an attack on those who exalted Metatron too much. Nothing new to you, I'm sure, but it's an interesting example of how hard it is to maintain rigorous monotheism.

Systematic theology was a Greek invention. It springs from Greek philosophy, and it fully flowers in the Golden Age of Neoplatonism. One can't realistically speak of Christian theology in a historical way without taking the influence of Neoplatonism and even Hermetism into account, too. When we read the great minds of Christianity and Neoplatonism, it is clear we are looking at a dialogue carried on through texts. Christians are criticizing Neoplatonists and Hermetics, but they are also engaging with them on the level of a mutually intelligible language. Neoplatonism and Christian theology merge on the level of conceptualizing ultimate reality. They don't teach the same things, but they are using the same toolkit. Christian thinkers like Origen were obviously Platonists who studied with Neoplatonic teachers.

Now, to say that Christian theology could have nothing to do with Jewish tradition would not be accurate either, because some Jewish thinkers, especially those in Alexandria such as Philo, were steeped in Platonism, especially when it comes to interpreting the Hebrew Bible and thinking about the nature of Deity. Christianity got to Platonism partly because it was one of the most advanced discourses for conceptualizing the divine world but also because Judaism had gotten there first. So, I would say that Christianity is a Hellenistic Judaism that becomes an imperial Roman religion.

This would not be the only occasion on which Jewish religion made inroads into non-Jewish inhabitants of the Roman Empire. Jews were considered to be exotic masters of the divine world in much the same way that Westerners look at gurus and shamans in more recent times. It may have been Jewish influence that resulted in the Hypsistos cult and the increasing popularity of the worship of angels. Angels were even included among the divine beings of the Neoplatonic cosmos. Porphyry has some glowing things to say about Judaism, excepting the Hebrew Bible.

[Kishkumen]

The distinction between different registers of a religion is a familiar topic—but I wasn't thinking about it in this thread. I should have been, because it's always a basic question. Are we talking about a popular version of a religion, or about hieratic, heretical, academic, or official versions, or about some entirely hypothetical version, like a rationalized reconstruction projected onto a past in which it never really existed?

If I belatedly remember this whole issue, now, then I think I understand your point better. Christianity spread through the Roman Empire, to the point of becoming the official state religion, but we shouldn't imagine this happening as an ancient Billy Graham crusade in which Romans all came to Jesus. However differently the philosophers and the rulers and the priests on all sides may have thought about the new faith, I bet you're probably right that most people thought of the installation of Jesus as something much like the deification of an emperor or the building of a new temple.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, more or less, anyway. Changes of deity happened.

At the risk of overgeneralization, I would say that worshiping one god or another in the ancient Mediterranean was something almost like trying a new brand of painkiller. People were looking for things that worked, gods that were able to give them what they needed/wanted. There usually wasn't a lot of fussing about theological arguments and what is real or not. Gods were powerful beings that one related to in order to get benefits and avoid disasters. When the familiar gods weren't getting results, one did not hesitate to try different ones to see if they worked better.

The people who did take interest in systematizing and explaining divine things were philosophers. Philosophy was always, at least in part, a religious activity, and each major school of philosophy had its view on the nature of the gods. The different schools talked to each other and influenced each other's way of talking about and conceptualizing divine things. Jewish and, later, Christian intellectuals who were trained in philosophy and rhetoric just joined the fray and started talking about divine things in a way that meshed with the Hebrew Bible and their distinctive views.

It was only in Late Antiquity after the political elite of Roman society had largely converted to Constantine's Nicene Christianity that one's individual beliefs about the nature of God came to have society-wide consequences that could be deadly. (Here I am talking about believing in Christianity or not, or believing one Christian theology or another.) Before then, discussions about the nature of the divine were, for the most part, the pastime of a small intellectual elite. This discourse was in no way an integral part of "being religious" for the vast majority of people.

Over the course of the Roman Empire, there were religions foreign to Rome and the Italian peninsula that came to be empire-wide religions, which were more or less rendered in a Hellenized or Romanized way. A couple of prominent examples are the cult of Isis (once a uniquely Egyptian deity that was Hellenized in Ptolemaic Egypt and spread through the Mediterranean via Ptolemaic influence) and Mithraism, which was probably born in East, close to the Parthian Empire, and focused on a god with a Persian name, but had a initiatic ritual along Hellenic lines. Mithraism was most popular among Roman soldiers. If you look at both of these cults in the broad strokes, their genesis and spread is not that different from Christianity's. We are talking about foreign deities who become part of the cosmopolitan religious landscape of the Mediterranean and become Hellenized/Romanized over time, achieving success and acceptance all the way up to the imperial court.

[Manetho]

Systematic theology was a Greek invention. It springs from Greek philosophy, and it fully flowers in the Golden Age of Neoplatonism. One can't realistically speak of Christian theology in a historical way without taking the influence of Neoplatonism and even Hermetism into account, too. When we read the great minds of Christianity and Neoplatonism, it is clear we are looking at a dialogue carried on through texts. Christians are criticizing Neoplatonists and Hermetics, but they are also engaging with them on the level of a mutually intelligible language. Neoplatonism and Christian theology merge on the level of conceptualizing ultimate reality. They don't teach the same things, but they are using the same toolkit. Christian thinkers like Origen were obviously Platonists who studied with Neoplatonic teachers.

Now, to say that Christian theology could have nothing to do with Jewish tradition would not be accurate either, because some Jewish thinkers, especially those in Alexandria such as Philo, were steeped in Platonism, especially when it comes to interpreting the Hebrew Bible and thinking about the nature of Deity. Christianity got to Platonism partly because it was one of the most advanced discourses for conceptualizing the divine world but also because Judaism had gotten there first. So, I would say that Christianity is a Hellenistic Judaism that becomes an imperial Roman religion.

Thanks. I was thinking along these lines, but it's good to have it fleshed out.

Gods were powerful beings that one related to in order to get benefits and avoid disasters. When the familiar gods weren't getting results, one did not hesitate to try different ones to see if they worked better.

Just to add to this point a little, I've seen it suggested elsewhere that one of the reasons why Romans were open to Christianity at the start of the fourth century was that the traditional deities had consistently not seemed to work during the Crisis of the Third Century.

[Kishkumen]

Just to add to this point a little, I've seen it suggested elsewhere that one of the reasons why Romans were open to Christianity at the start of the fourth century was that the traditional deities had consistently not seemed to work during the Crisis of the Third Century.

Yes, the Third Century Crisis and the Plague of Cyprian are cited as factors driving conversion to Christianity. I don't know how true this is, honestly. I see these events as factors that might have both helped and hurt Christianity. It is possible that in the end these things did encourage people to turn to Christianity for relief from troubles.

[Kishkumen]

Jesus is a Roman god, Pt. 7

Heresy

Because Jesus is fundamentally a Roman god, whose cult was picked up and propagated by official Roman imperial authorities, the traditions most faithful to the cult’s actual beginnings are Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Anti-Hellenism in Christianity is a direct assault on the tradition itself, much like Judaizers who insisted that Gentiles keep the Law were attacking one of the central premises of what became orthodox Christianity. Worse yet, as mentioned above, the Anti-Hellenists have an anachronistic view of Judaism and are thus unable to recover the Christianity they see being at odds with Hellenistic and Roman culture.

Sola scriptura, like Anti-Hellenism, could be called heretical, because it proceeds along interpretive lines that are at odds with and uninformed by tradition. The Bible, much like the works of Homer, was interpreted with certain Hellenic tools and from a perspective that is now, for the most part, lost. The worst kind of heretical thinking is Biblical literalism. The Bible was viewed as oracular and only properly understood by those who had the right tools to interpret it. This did not mean that the apparent surface meaning was literally correct. It meant that God had put all truth in the text, and also that this truth needed to be pulled out in the right way. That was NOT achieved by taking the text at face value.

Today’s American Christianity is a fanatical cult that cuts across sectarian lines to include Protestants, Mormons, Catholics, and Orthodox people who are Biblical literalists seeking to overthrow liberal society and impose their literalist views on everyone else. Having forgotten the Classical roots of Christianity and the liberal culture that helped Christianity hold onto a measure of reason (Christ is the Logos!), American Christianity has become a tyrannical force that threatens to destroy the last, best expression of Roman civilization, the American Republic.

[Kishkumen]

Jesus is a Roman god, Pt. 8

No Easy Solutions

No matter how you feel about religion, developments in religious culture have consequences. Wiping the slate clean by killing off religion doesn’t solve the problem. The problem is human nature, and the right answer is to manage that nature by persuading people, by teaching them, how to keep it in certain bounds. Bad theology leads to big evils. Even Donald Trump has a theology, and we very much live with the consequences of his spiritual views.

In fact, I would argue that Trump is in essence a heretical prophet perfectly suited to lead the fanatical heresy of American Christianity. The civil war we are engaged in is one between Christian heresy and Classical civilization. The irony is that America’s left is every bit as much of a Christian heresy as American Christianity. It, too, offers bad theology that leads to absurd extremes. It is even more hostile to Classical civilization than American Christianity.

America’s left uses the intellectual tools of Classical civilization to dismantle Western civilization. Rome and Greece are to be studied primarily to understand how to delegitimize and tear down Western civilization. For the left, Western civilization is fundamentally evil, and it must be stopped by embracing a Marxist, anti-colonial utopian vision. It is not enough to be pluralist and tolerant. The extremes of leftism pursue the destruction of the entire tradition upon which Western civilization is based.

Is Western civilization responsible for terrible evils that continue to require repair? Yes. But the left offers no better, practical alternative. It seeks to tear down without working out how destroying those foundations turn into something better. Along the way, it cultivates an intellectual incoherence in rising generations that leaves them open to being manipulated out of democratic and republican norms and institutions. Once politics succumbs to irrational fundamentalism and Utopianism, it ceases to be a constructive means of building and sustaining a good society. Instead it leads to tyranny in one form or another.

[Gadianton]

A great series. I'm surprised Dan hasn't learned anything from it. will comment but I started late and need to go back and read the earlier entries.

[Physics Guy]

I wouldn't have thought of putting things in the form of this thread, but I've been persuaded that there is real point here. Christianity and classical paganism have often been presented—especially by later Christians—as polar opposites, one of which defeated the other. That should never really have been plausible, though. Everyone has always noticed how Christians took over popular pagan festivals, pasting Christian labels on top of them without even changing much else, but it should have been obvious that there must have been a lot more continuity than just that between classical pre-Christian religion and the imperial Roman religion that Christianity became. The New Testament is written in Greek, after all.

Is it a problem, though, that this famously demanding and otherworldly world religion actually has this thick taproot of comfortable conformity in a materialistic secular culture?

Now that I think about it, I reckon it's a good thing, in fact. It's probably what kept Christianity from becoming (entirely) a crazy apocalyptic cult that would have just sputtered out in some ancient massacre. Those pagan feet of clay may be what gave the thing legs.

At the same time, though, a lot of radical stuff did survive in Christianity. You can make the emperor of the day into Christ's representative on Earth, but you can't erase the fact that Jesus was crucified by the Roman state as a criminal. A lot of Christianity's DNA may in fact be inherited from classical paganism, but there's an alien virus in there as well. Credit Caesar for that which is Caesar's, and God for that which is God's.

[Kishkumen]

A great series. I'm surprised Dan hasn't learned anything from it. will comment but I started late and need to go back and read the earlier entries.

Thanks, Dean! I look forward to any thoughts, corrections, or criticisms you have.