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Jesus is Roman God, Pt. 1

Right now I am having fun in a Facebook discussion that was initiated by the complaint that the Christus statue looks too much like Zeus. Suddenly, different strands of thought I have been toying around with came into clearer focus, and I decided to make the argument that Jesus is a Roman god. In other words, the Christus should not be considered inaccurate but instead faithful to the god’s true nature.

Consider the following:

1. Jesus of Nazareth never claimed to be God. It was later Christians who made him a god. As a Jew, Jesus never would have proclaimed or believed in his own deity.

2. In making Jesus a god, early Christians were following the trend of deifying rulers. At a time when the Roman emperor was considered a god and worshiped as one, Christians made their heroic founder a god. For him to be less than the Roman emperor was unacceptable. He had to be greater than the Roman emperor.

3. Once Jesus becomes a god, Christianity decisively parts ways with Judaism. By the end of the first century CE, Christianity had given Jesus a miraculous birth to make him a son of God, just as Hellenic heroes, Alexander the Great, and Augustus were sons of gods. Jesus was also considered deified, having been lifted up into heaven like Romulus before him.

4. As more and more non-Jews became Christian, partly because Jesus has been made more like the gods they worshiped as Mediterranean pagans, Christianity became more pagan. One of the ways this happened was through its apologists using pagan learning to defend and explain Christianity to pagan thinkers. The influence of Hellenic philosophy on Christianity is already evident in the depiction of Jesus and the teachings of Paul.

5. By the third century, we see a Roman Emperor named Severus Alexander worshiping Jesus among other gods and heroes in his personal chapel.

6. Constantine adopts Christ as his patron god in a Roman civil war in exactly the same way that past Roman commanders had adopted other gods as patrons in war. Augustus adopted Apollo as his patron. Constantine chose Jesus. But Constantine did not get rid of the old gods. He also seems to have had a conception of Jesus that was very close to Sol Invictus or Apollo.

6. As Jesus enters art, he does so in accordance with the forms and styles of Greek and Roman art. He is the good shepherd, a figure much like Orpheus. He is assimilated to the image of Zeus.

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.

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.

9. By the fifth century, higher level Christian thought was almost indistinguishable in many ways from the best spiritual philosophy among the pagans. Unfortunately, the exclusive nature of Christianity was used as a political cudgel within the empire, as Christianity increasingly became the only religion that was viable in the absolutist monarchy of the Late Roman Empire. By that time, however, Jesus was no longer the simple carpenter’s son in Galilee, who became a teacher and apocalyptic Jewish prophet. He was now a fully-fledged Roman deity. In fact, the only legally recognized Roman god in the empire.

Jesus is a Roman God, Pt. 2

In the Early Modern Period, Christian intellectuals who were disillusioned with the Catholic Church, sought to purge Christianity from the “corrupting pagan influences” that had caused the Church to depart from the truth. One can sympathize with their desire to recover some kind of pure Christianity that they could embrace without having to be Catholic, and naturally this faith would take a non-Catholic form. It would instead seek to establish itself on the text of the New Testament. But, as I hope you can see, this quest to recover earliest Christianity in its Jewish roots was doomed at the outset, for numerous reasons.

Here are a few:

1. Judaism was always too complicated to be reduced to some pure original form.

2. The Judaism of the Hellenistic world was very much influenced by Greek culture and thought, even as it tried to distinguish itself from that Hellenistic world.

3. Jesus as he is depicted in the New Testament is steeped in the Hellenized Judaism of the Roman Empire. This claim should not be confused with a claim that the historical Jesus was Hellenized in the same way as the New Testament.

4. Early Modern Christians did not understand the world in which the New Testament came to be. Remember, Early Modern Christians did not have access to the intellectual tools of higher criticism or the modern historian’s craft. Their picture of Jesus as a Jew in the first century who was the Son of God was nothing less than their own fabrication, cherry picked in accordance with their need to part ways with Catholicism. And if Catholicism is considered “pagan,” then their Christianity by definition cannot be. Their Christianity, however, is not historical. It is just another myth.

5. Mormonism’s restored Christianity is another version of this Early Modern Myth of non-pagan Christianity. The default assumptions of Mormon leaders have been largely in agreement with the Anti-Hellenic views of Protestantism. The irony is, as Stephen Fleming has been arguing in his dissertation and subsequent presentations, that Joseph Smith’s restoration is structurally very resonant with Platonic Christianity of the second and third centuries A.D.

6. A historically informed Christianity is one that accepts that it is a synthesis of Hellenic and Jewish culture and thought. There is no purely Jewish Christianity. There is no Christianity without Hellenism. Jesus carries the attributes of a Jewish prophet, sage, and Messianic figure, as well as the attributes of a Hellenic hero and god. By Late Antiquity, Jesus became the one official god of Rome, having pushed all the other gods out of the sanctioned pantheon, but he was still very much a Roman god.

Jesus is a Roman god, Pt. 3

If I had outlined this ahead of time, I would have put this in Part 1, or I would have made this Part 2, but I did not. Still, a crucial part of this argument is the following:

The Roman pantheon was formed and continued to grow by including gods from different cultures. There was no purely Roman pantheon. Rome was a kind of crossroads between northern and southern Italy. It was at a convenient location to cross the Tiber river. At the beginning, Rome may have been a marketplace or a location where a defensive league of different Italian villages met to muster their forces and make military decisions. This world brought together different peoples and different cultures to work together and trade with each other. As a result, the Roman pantheon included Greek, Etruscan, Sabine, and Latin gods.

Roman religion had formal mechanisms for welcoming new gods into its pantheon, and it did so over the course of its imperial expansion. When attacking enemy cities, the Romans would sometimes invite the gods of the enemy city to switch sides and come to Rome where they could join the Roman pantheon and receive worship in Rome. Juno Regina, Cybele, and Asclepius all joined the Roman pantheon through warfare or the forging of political alliances that brought these once enemy or foreign gods into Rome and made them into genuine Roman gods.

Other foreign gods simply became popular in Rome without ever being formally brought into the recognized state cult. Isis received a lot of opposition from Roman authorities. Her places of worship in Rome were torn down by Roman magistrates. But eventually Roman emperors built and adorned temples of Isis. One Isis temple in Egypt funded by the emperor Augustus stands in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City today.

The Romans did not make Jesus a god. People who joined the Jesus movement did so decades after his death. Once he was a god, however, Jesus was just as liable to be cultivated as a god by Romans as any other deity. Roman hostility toward Christianity checked the advance of this development for centuries, but eventually Romans, even Roman emperors, worshiped Jesus as a god. The first emperor to worship Jesus as a god did so among his other gods and heroes. Constantine made Jesus his patron in a very public way, and thanked Jesus for his help in ways that transformed the city of Rome, leading eventually to Rome becoming officially Christian. Along the way, Jesus went from being a ridiculed minority deity to being the one true god of Rome.

Jesus is a Roman God, Part 4

The poison pill of Christianity is intolerance of other religions. Christians were persecuted, but, once they achieved political sway, they savagely persecuted non-Christians and destroyed their sanctuaries and statues. Constantine may not have fully understood this when he decided to make Jesus his patron god. But Christian intolerance of other religions is what ended up forging the former Roman Empire into an intolerant absolutist monarchy. Christians celebrate Constantine’s conversion, and one can see why. The unintended side effect, however, was to create an imperial Christianity that became a globally destructive force up to the present. Christians who seek political power to force others to live according to Christian beliefs are the heirs and perpetuators of this intolerant imperial Christianity.

Once victimized by imperial Christianity, Mormonism joined forces with it in response to the perceived threats of feminism, gay rights, and abortion. After having been nearly squashed out of existence for practicing polygamy, Mormons fought for a definition of marriage that excluded both polygamists and gay couples. Imperial Christianity is Constantine’s legacy. The Christus statue is, in this way, highly appropriate in its Romanness. In some ways you might say it is the most honest representation of imperial Christianity.

Jesus is a Roman God, Pt. 5

Not Mythicism

To say that Jesus is a Roman god is not to agree with mythicism. Remember that mythicism teaches there was no historical Jesus, only a myth that was rewritten to look more like the life of a historical person. This hypothesis is that there was a historical Jesus whose life was mythologized to turn him into a deity in the same way that Alexander acquired Zeus Ammon as his father, and Augustus became the son of Apollo. Once he was a deity, his popularity inevitably led to him being worshiped by Roman citizens, and Constantine’s decision to make the god Jesus his patron deity opened the door for official recognition of Jesus as the one true god of Rome.

It seems counterintuitive that a Jewish apocalyptic preacher who was executed by Roman authorities should become a Roman god, but we can point to the parallel of Dionysus being imprisoned by Pentheus to show that a story of rejection is no bar to later worship. Moreover, we cannot expect this process to work according to our preconceptions of what is rational in terms of myths. All that was necessary, in the end, was for many important and powerful Romans to worship Jesus as a god for him to become a Roman god. Foreign identity was no bar. Crucifixion was insufficient an impediment. Popularity among the powerful was the crucial ingredient. Constantine made Christianity increasingly desirable among the most powerful men of the Roman Empire. It was just a matter of time.

Jesus is a Roman God, Part 6

Post-Rome

The question now becomes: did Jesus cease to be a Roman god after the Western Empire fell to barbarian incursions? The answer is no. Christianity is a Roman religion. Jesus is a Roman god. He is to this day. It is true that Catholicism and Orthodoxy are more Roman than other forms of Christianity, but other forms of Christianity do not come closer to the “real Jesus” because Christians worship Jesus as a divinity. 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.

WHOA!!! YEAH BABYYYYYY!!!

I'm a gonna share this on my show tonight! What a perfect FIRST new location subject!

Philo Sofee wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 22, 2023 11:21 pm

WHOA!!! YEAH BABYYYYYY!!!

I'm a gonna share this on my show tonight! What a perfect FIRST new location subject!

Sounds cool, Philo! I look forward to watching your first episode!

1. Jesus of Nazareth never claimed to be God.

Explain that please. Is it that you're saying it's not reported that he stated directly "I am God"?

Jersey Girl wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 23, 2023 12:01 am

1. Jesus of Nazareth never claimed to be God.

Explain that please.

Yes, he never claimed to be God or a god.