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He came over to your side yesterday and is changing the state over to your ideology. They're still going to do imperialism and slavery and everything, and nothing will fundamentally change, but it'll still be your ideology, totally.
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They've been feeding you to lions for centuries because of your refusal to acknowledge the state's authority. Now they'll stop, unless you deviate from the state-approved version in any way, in which case they'll burn you at the stake. The state-approved version involves acknowledging the state's authority.
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He seems oddly keen on having everyone go around flashing a symbol of the cruel and humiliating way the state brutally executed your founder.
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You don't get a say in what the state-approved version will look like, but he'll preside over ever meeting deciding that. There won't be any more communes.
Your network of communes began as a doomsday cult eagerly waiting for the apocalypse to happen where the empire you live under would be destroyed, but that didn't happen so you've all just been kinda hanging out in secret meetings trying to support each other and survive :doomer:
Constantine already lives rent free in my head but my lastest kick of reading about heresies has me hating on Augustine just as much.
After the state endorsement of Christianity, there were a bunch of social climbers who jumped aboard the label without really caring about the teachings. A 4th century British theologian named Pelagus criticized this tendency and emphasized free will and the importance of moral behavior, including redistribution of wealth to the poor. He taught that humans are born sinless, and it is theoretically possible (if extremely difficult) to live a sinless life.
What Pelagus considered moral behavior
He is a Christian who shows compassion to all, who is not at all provoked by wrong done to him, who does not allow the poor to be oppressed in his presence, who helps the wretched, who succors the needy, who mourns with the mourners, who feels another's pain as if it were his own, who is moved to tears by the tears of others, whose house is common to all, whose door is closed to no one, whose table no poor man does not know, whose food is offered to all, whose goodness all know and at whose hands no one experiences injury, who serves God all day and night, who ponders and meditates upon his commandments unceasingly, who is made poor in the eyes of the world so that he may become rich before God.At the time, the dogma of original sin had not been established and was a controversial new idea that ran against early Christian beliefs, but it was successfully championed by Augustine. By claiming that it was impossible to achieve salvation by living a moral life, but rather only through the grace of God, it emphasized the importance of the clergy as providing the only access to salvation via sacraments - a factor which was explicitly expressed in the judgement against Pelagus - which laid the groundwork for the selling of indulgences. It also established extremely weird positions like that everyone who died never having heard of Christianity, including unbaptised infants, were automatically sent to Hell. But hey, Roman PMCs could rest easy knowing that they just had to go through the motions and respect the church's authority rather than doing anything crazy like freeing their slaves or something. Meanwhile, he more or less embraced predestination, which was cited extensively by John Calvin (and eventually leading to the modern Catholic teaching which is that God places you in circumstances where he knows ahead of time if you'll pass or fail, but this is different from predetermining your fate... somehow).
So much of this shit is still so relevant because so many people take these beliefs for granted with no consideration of the material influences and interests driving their development.
I've been reading Confessions without doing all the historical context reading beforehand. Right around the middle of chapter 10, I ran into a passage that made me think "this shit smacks of predestination" and looked up "augustine calvin" for the first time. Imagine my surprise!
My head canon is that the New Testament, including the Gospels, doesn't fully reflect the teachings of Jesus, and the thing that was left out was Jesus's anti-Roman and anti-colonizer sentiment. Read the Gospels, especially the trial with Pilate, keeping in mind that Judea was a Roman colony and Pilate was their colonial master. Herod was some puppet king appointed by the Roman Senate, so when he ordered the massacre of those boys, it was really the Roman empire that ordered the massacre since Herod was just some sandal-licking comprador. Pilate releasing Barabbas was literally just some weird rule he made up, and there was absolutely nothing stopping him from just releasing Jesus. Who are the Jews going to complain to, the Roman emperor? Pilate had an entire Roman legion under his command by virtue of being a Roman governor. It's not like they can do shit about it if Pilate made up yet another rule to go on top of his already made up rule.
When you read the text closely, what you would find is that the text plays defense for Pilate and the Roman occupiers in general. Don't you think it's kinda weird that the Gospels would give the Pharisees, a rival Jewish faction, so much shit and not, you know, the Roman colonizers that are oppressing both the Pharisees and Christians and every other Jew living in Judea? My personal guess is that the literate Christians who attended Jesus's ministry and would later write Christian text had aspirations towards becoming Roman or were otherwise mentally colonized while the slaves and sex workers want the whole slave empire to be overthrown. Obviously, the views of illiterate slaves and sex workers aren't going to make it to literary works.
With this terrible foundation, I think people shouldn't be surprised that Christianity went from a religion of slaves to a religion of slavers.
Pretty accurate I think. A classic imperial strategy is to play factions of the occupied peoples against each other. The Romans would have seen a big religious dispute among the Jews as the perfect way to take more power and inflict violence.
Also this is kinda the premise of Life of Brian.
There is a fair amount of anti-Roman sentiment in the non-Pauline letters, especially the Johannine Community, I think. Obviously they can't come out and say it, though.
Also the Jews famously lacked chill. 30 years after Jesus' death came the Great Revolt and they needed to bring in an extra 4 legions after the one in the region was curb stomped.
This is an awful idea. Pilate had a riot on his hands, and Rome was tired of constantly having to reconquer Palestine. If he let the religious riot become a political one he would have lost his pretty well-funded job, perhaps his head depending on the Caesar.
The Gospels were not written down under the third century, so the views prevailing may have been presented by wealthier, well off Christians, many of whom would be or aspired to citizenship, but if they already joined the weird poor person cult I don't think they'd be that in favor of Rome, given they had to hide their Christian identity frequently. A more likely story would be that the Gospels which were put together into the Canon were selected with political goals, which they undoubtedly were, but there's not really many apocrypha with overt anti-Roman politics.
The reason the pharisees were targeted more than Romans is because, as is stated a million times, Jesus is concerned with spiritual life more than physical. The pharisees were trying to follow god but were doing it wrong, according to Jesus. the Romans were not trying to live moral lives in the eyes of God, so it was not important to include critiques of their worldview. The pharisees needed to be corrected, the Romans needed to be converted. Also, given that Romans stopped sacrificing animals to gods when converted but didn't stop rules lawyering their way through faith, which is what the pharisees are called out for, that was probably the better critique.
Overall, a massive theme of the Gospels is that Jesus is not a political leader. He opposes the violence of Rome, and the heathen life of Rome, but is not their political enemy. If he was, given how broad his following was, we would have seen a revolt in Israel at that time. we didn't so we know it was religious reform and restoration he was after. There are similar Pagan leaders at the time, Rome had a sort of dim view but didn't oppose them, while some religious leaders hated them.
I guess the fundamental difference between you and me is that I don't see the Gospels as depicting an entirely accurate picture of Jesus the historical figure. Yes, Jesus as depicted in the Gospels is largely concerned with spiritual life, but that's Jesus as depicted in the Gospel by a class of literate imperial subjects, not Jesus the historical figure. To me, there's no real reason why the Romans would bother to crucify Jesus unless he represented a political threat to their colonial holding. "I'm the Son of God please worship me" isn't really enough to assasinate someone, especially if they're exclusively concerned with spiritual life, but "I'm the Son of God please worship me oh yeah we should plot to overthrow the Roman colonizers and free Judea from the Roman yoke" is a legitimate threat, especially if the following is large enough.
The fundamental difference between you and me is I have studied Roman history. He wasn't assassinated, he was executed because he was causing a ruckus. The Romans killed troublemakers all the time. Why were early Christians pacifists? Why did the apostles get money from Judea and move it to the rest of the empire? Why were Christians happy the temple, the greatest image of Judea, was destroyed? Why does no surviving apocrypha have a more militaristic Jesus? Why would the Jews in Rome have trouble with others who wanted to free Judea? There is simply too great of evidence for Jesus to have not been a violent revolutionary, and none for him to have been.
this is really interesting. are there any books/papers that use a materialist lense to analyze the new testament?
Death to America
Honestly the roman empire conversion to christianity is pretty sussy.
Imagine trading a huge and diverse pantheon that's incredibly closely tied up with your state apparatus for Christianity :cringe:
I mean imagine being Roman seeing christians getting fed into lions and then suddenly your emperor converts to christianity like wtf?
Just as a minor point here, but Christians were never fed to lions and the level of official persecution against Christians by the Roman state was far, far less than Christians make it out to be. Nero persecuted Christians within Rome for a little bit. And one of the later emperors - I think it was Diocletian - did try to persecute Christians across the empire but basically no one went along with it. Julian the Apostate hated Christians but likewise didn't really do much. Basically for the first couple centuries Christians were largely mocked and the religion derided as something only for slaves, women, and children, up until you get closer to the time of Constantine and when it was starting to get a bit "trendy".
Source: Candida Moss' excellent The Myth of Persecution
pray to house shrine for luck every morning
receive bountiful luck from Jupiter in exchange for my piety
Emperor comes in
tells me that I can't pray to Jupiter anymore
tearing down statues
tearing down shrines
tearing down temples
church and state are now two separate institutions (!?)
emperor wants to ban gladiatorial fights (!?!?)
at least I'm still getting my free bread.
You might want to keep that shrine to Jupiter. We've got Emperor Julian the Apostate coming up and he's going to Make Rome Pagan Again.
During the Battle of Samarra, Julian was mortally wounded under mysterious circumstances…
His laws tended to target wealthy and educated Christians, and his aim was not to destroy Christianity but to drive the religion out of "the governing classes of the empire—much as Chinese Buddhism was driven back into the lower classes by a revived Confucian mandarinate in 13th century China."
He restored pagan temples which had been confiscated since Constantine's time, or simply appropriated by wealthy citizens; he repealed the stipends that Constantine had awarded to Christian bishops, and removed their other privileges, including a right to be consulted on appointments and to act as private courts.
Mysterious circumstances claims another victim :epstein:
Imagine if he finished the Third Temple before he get owned by a spear :party-sicko:
Sounds like some bullshit... Anywhozle there's these guys in Rome who can totally trace their authority back to the first disciples and this asshole isn't even living in Rome anymore so I'll follow those guys.
were they all that underground & anarchistic anymore by that point? i mean who were all the poncy pointy hats who went to Nikaia with Mr Constantine?
I'm not an expert on the time period but my understanding is that there were always "higher ups" who were more respected and listened to, but no formal authority or ability to enforce their views, meaning that their takes were more like suggestions. Could be wrong about it and I don't mean to whitewash because there were some problematic takes and all, but the power dynamics of the situation seem very sus.
idk, he seems like bad vibes. any chance we can tell him to just leave us alone?
Death to America
Is he very keen on the gallows-symbol? I was under the impression he was bigger into the ol' ☧, an abrreviation which I recognize from its use in my scripture, which I can read because my cult hasn't been really of the poor and illiterate for many generations. Anyway I like him because he is firing money at us through a firehose, a thing that doesn't exist that I just invented that fires a lot of water very fast, but in this case money
I was referring to the cross/crucifix, which became a lot more popular and widespread during this time.
that still happened later than Constantine, the chiros,XP, was way more his thing.
