Xeno, Thanks for your thorough analysis. Perhaps, you can summarize for us the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. And, why did Latin die as a language despite its apparent usefulness and application in the ancient known world?
---In [email protected], <anartaxius@...> wrote : ---In [email protected], <jr_esq@...> wrote : Xeno, The Romans back then were worshipping pagan gods. I tend to think that the people were accepting them as part of the state religion, but not because they believed in them. The educated Romans more likely knew about Greek philosophy but regarded it more as an intellectual pursuit rather than a subject that had immediate political application. You may differ and question the historicity of Jesus. But the fact remains that Christians swept the ancient world paradigm and changed the religion of the Roman Empire into Christianity. For me, I find it hard to believe that the people back then would accept a new religion based on a work of fiction. Also, many theologians and bible scholars have studied the gospels and analyzed them with a fine tooth comb. Their studies have shown that a person by the name of Jesus existed. Specifically, an ancient Jewish writer by the name of Josephus had corroborated the existence of Jesus who once lived in Palestine. The Romans back then were worshipping the Roman gods, the term pagan is used derisively by Christians today to signify people who do not believe in the monotheistic god of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It is used much like 'heathen'. It also refers to pantheists and neo-pagans. Originally paganus (Latin) meant you were a hick, but was applied by the early Christian church to non-Christians. For example, Jupiter, the primary Roman god is derived from a proto-Indo-European god Dyēus pəter (shining father) via a Vedic sky god Dyaus Pita via the Greek Zeus Pitar. The word etymology is pretty clear here. Dyēus pəter > Dyaus Pita > Zeus Pitar > Jupiter Note that most religious have a strong tendency to think of their religion as true and those of others as fiction, not true, because obviously other religions have a different story to tell with different characters which are not the one you 'know' are right. The Romans sometimes considered Christians cannibals because of the Eucharist ceremony. In general Christians were regarded by the Romans as atheists and excessively devotional and excessively enthusiastic in their religious observances, far more into believing and activity than was reasonably necessary. It wasn't until the fourth century that Christianity took over in Rome by way of a sly decision by Constantine, the first Roman Emperor to adopt Christianity, some 300 years after the beginnings of Christianity. The historicity of Jesus is certainly difficult to ascertain. Nothing is certain. The Jew Titus Flavius Josephus fought the Romans in first century Jerusalem, and the Jews lost. He proved useful as a translator and his life was spared and became a Roman citizen after being freed by Emperor Vespasian. His writings are considered by Christians as the primary non-Christian historical source for information about Jesus. The problem is no original manuscripts exist. The earliest are from the 11th century, some thousand years after the events in question. About a dozen Christian writers in the first 200 years of Christianity mention Josephus but never mention the passage about Jesus. The first such mention appears in the year 324 in the writings of Eusebius and are regarded (except by conservative Christian sects) to be interpolations in Josephus's text, probably by Eusebius himself. The passage about Jesus is inserted in a section on Pontius Pilatus, and breaks the flow of text where Josephus is describing various difficulties Jews had with Pilate's projects and behaviour toward their religion. The passage about Jesus sticks out like a sore thumb in the flow of the text because of its theological flavour, but it is in the most likely spot a forger could find to insert something like this. The Christian writings thought to be the earliest are some of the letters attributed to Paul. The gospels come later, and three of them (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) seem to be a composites from earlier common sources though Mark is the roughest and earliest compilation. The gospel of John came later. The earliest complete manuscripts are from the fourth century, and some fragments of gospels and mentions of them in the writings of early Christian fathers are found from the second century, so nothing earlier than about 100 years after Jesus supposedly lived. The Gospels at any rate are not historical documents, but writings designed to inspire religious belief and sentiment. There are so many contradictions between them as to what happened, it is impossible to come to what actually may have happened. Paul, in his letters seems mostly unaware of Jesus the man and his history which is very odd, some suspect that the Jesus passages might be additions. Paul speaks mostly of the Christ, not Jesus, often as if the Christ is an abstract spiritual principle. So finding out just what transpired in first century Palestine is blocked by a very opaque haze of missing and contradictory information, tales of forgery, and multiple interpretations of what might have happened or did not. People throughout the ages have adopted weird and strange beliefs, have generated countless religions, most of which are now abandoned, and the ones that still exist, schism on a regular basis. For example the Mormons split into six different sects within its first 150 years. The same thing happened to conventional Christianity, but most of those early schisms are lost to history though we have some information about the Gnostic Christians, the Gospel of Thomas for example, but this is not a first century work. So assuming that people would not adopt a religion based on fiction seems out of touch with actual human behaviour with regard to the adoption of ideas. People adopt a religion for various reasons (gullibility would be one) but do not think of what they are doing is adopting a fictitious philosophy. In comes enlightenment. Enlightenment shows you that all religious concepts and philosophies are fictitious. It shows you these ideas are pointers to a certain specific kinda of experience and knowledge, but these pointers are not truths in themselves and they tend to be very culturally specific to time and place so interpreting them out of their time and place may likely lead to confusion; if you can follow the pointers, maybe you will have these experiences and come to some sort of stable knowledge about them, but if you believe them as if they were 'the truth', you are lost. If you do find out what it is all about, as the character of Jesus says in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, you will be astonished. You will encounter something you never in a thousand years could anticipate.
