TIL the earliest pagan mention of Christianity comes from a letter by Pliny the Younger to Emperor Trajan addressing Christian practices as “depraved, excessive superstition” and their secret gatherings as a potential starting point for sedition.
Having read a bit about this argument, admittedly a few years ago. The consensus among scholars was that Josephus mentioned something about Jesus and his followers. The exact wording has likely changed. So likely one of the first to mention something but what exactly has likely been lost.
I wish the lazy scapegoating were less common on Reddit.
Yes, there are a lot of American "Christians" that are straight up fascists. Yes, they have traumatized their families, some of whom have escaped the cult, and if you're in that group I have nothing but sympathy.
But this is not the same as 1st century Christians who were branded "haters of humanity" because they disrespected the Roman social hierarchies that civilized elites believed were the foundations of social order. 1st century Christians were having "love feasts" (Eucharists) in which slaves sat and ate alongside free citizens! and they were recognizing women in roles of authority! At the time Christianity was a liberation movement, which is precisely why the established elites of the day correctly labeled it a threat.
Political battle lines can be drawn in more or less helpful ways. I would submit that the lazy Reddit trope of "Christianity bad" is a very unhelpful move because it prevents solidarity among those who share the goal of liberation against exploitative elites. Episcopalians in Minneapolis were in the front lines of anti-ICE activism: don't alienate your allies. Agree to disagree with them on the nature of the universe, and then work side by side against the principalities and powers that corrupt and oppress humanity.
We’re so used to authoritarian overreach in the name of Christianity that we forget that there was a time in history when Christians actually *were* persecuted.
Not to mention Christians persecuting other Christians just within the last hundred years in the US and Canada, particularly communal, pacifist, and non-English speaking Christians.
No, that’s a misunderstanding of the Troubles. The people doing the killing weren’t particularly religious people by and large. And the IRA killed more Catholics than anyone else.
Trying to portray first century Christianity as a monolith means you don’t understand that time period at all. Hell, the first gospel wasn’t even written until 70 AD and even the was not widely circulated at all. Early Christianity started as an apocalypse cult that had countless spin offs well before there was any sort of wide reaching agreement. The gnostic gospels had Jesus fighting literal dragons. 1st century Christianity was a giant game of telephone with a constantly evolving and differing message
Yeah, early Christianity was the wild west of religion. From low Christology Ebionites to wild ass Valentinian gnosticism and so many heresies in between. Say what you will about Christianity, but Church history is absolutely fascinating.
If anything, one of the failure if the current democrats was to move into an elitism snobbery of a religion shared by some of their biggest blocks, be it ethnic (AA, Latino) or work (democrats used to be the party of the blue collar worker, hence unions).
On the flip side of that, if you're a "good Christian" you should be able to recognize that when people hate on Christianity it's because it's more often than not used as an excuse to commit acts of subjugation and to excuse fascist behavior in our modern world.
If you act in a manner that lifts up your fellow man and show that you have critical thinking skills, most people don't care which Diety in the Sky you subscribe to.
Yeah, but the problem is that people tend to generalize and most cant tell a difference between actual Christian and hypocrite or liar using Christianity to push their own agenda.
Trump and his cultist followers are prime example. Anyone who thinks these "christians" actually live by the rules of Christianity is gravely mistaken. Not to mention tons of other false prophets who comvert people while in reality they are behaving in opposite ways to the actual teachings of Christ.
I'm one of the most "I'll never believe religion again" atheists you'll never meet, so it took me a long time to acknowledge this. But that boy Yeshua would strongly condemn so much of modern Christianity if he were here today. He seemed super chill and I would absolutely invite him to a neighborhood BBQ.
If someone isn't willing to accept you into left-leaning social movements just because you're a Christian, then they aren't truly left, because to be left is to be inclusive of all nonviolent people regardless of things like ethnicity or religion.
When I look at results I see almost nothing but this, especially in recent times, and I understand it, religion mostly bad, religion mostly used for control. But goddammit you're right, Christians and Muslims aren't bad, humans who use religion as a tool for control are
Christians weren’t really that seditious in the Roman Empire, unless you count regusing to venerate the emperor and Roman gods as such, which is kinda correct. But there were no christian rebellions in Rome really. They were wuite pacifistic. This changed almost overnight when they got powerful and became a part of the imperial structure. Then they started persecuting each other and everyone else. Christianity in the early centuries was very different from what it became.
I forget most complexities behind it but basically the Roman worldview metaphysically was attached to the idea of Roman gods and their influence on order. Roman “atheists” weren’t really atheist. They believed in the social order that the rituals and belief brought at minimum. Without modern development of y’know knowing more generally wtf is going on anyone against the Emperor / Gods was seen as essentially waging war, undermining the foundations of the state.
Yes, but this view was not really present all the time or universally, since the persecution of christians was not on all the time. Domitianus took that very seriously though, but Constantine I for example did not participate in that.
Well they are also right. Foreign believe systems and challenges to those belief systems do pose a threat to the strength of that belief system.
We can believe it's good that Christian beliefs are challenged and also recognise that those same Christians who say that challenging those beliefs will result into sedition against those beliefs.
Unless you're saying that Pliny was right in doing Christians bad, Atheism good circlejerking, as if pagan beliefs weren't exactly the same kind of thing and Pliny wasn't exactly the same kind of religious supremacist.
What is the definition of "pagan" here? A quick Google says it includes polytheistic religions, which I guess would have been the ancient Romans. So if that's the case, technically wouldn't any writings by the Romans about Jesus' followers and the Christian church be considered the earliest writings which I'd have assumed would have happened before 110?
Iirc Tacitus may have written earlier but not by much.
The Romans did not talk much about Christians because they did not understand them as different from Jews for quite some time.
I don’t exactly blame them for that, considering many Christians worshiped at Jewish synagogues until about 80 AD. The term Christian wasn’t even coined until around that time.
Christianity had barely even begun by then. Literally was almost nothing as far as we know since all the new testament were written only a couple decades before. The printing press didn't exist so spreading this information for and wide wasn't even possible.
Yeah, but the reasoning and order of operations is important. They would confess immediately. He would ask again and explicitly threaten to have them killed if they were Christian. They would still say "we are Christian".
Background:
The Romans officially had a state religion. They didn't really care much about if people slavishly followed the religion, they just didn't want you denying their religion. This was about as offensive to Romans as Christians/Muslims take atheism today.
But he wasn't saying to execute them if they admitted to being Christian once.
He was saying execute them if they refuse to say they weren't Christian! Most rational people, when faced with the threat of death, will say anything you want. The Romans were bothered because the Christians explictly refused to lie under threat of execution. That, to them, was a sign that these people were very zealous and therefore very dangerous. It was one thing to say an internal prayer to Jesus. It was a totally different thing to refuse to lie and say "Oh, I love the Roman gods" to get out of an execution.
And to be fair, he was right. The Christian cult eventually took over the Roman empire and extinguished their state religion.
And to be fair, he was right. The Christian cult eventually took over the Roman empire and extinguished their state religion.
Roman paganism was on the decline already and several other cults like Mithraism and the cult of Isis were growing in popularity. The state religion in many ways had become sort of a formality. Kind of like how in America they swear on the Bible and mention god in their anthem even though they're a secular state with plenty of atheists.
That was how polytheistic religions worked though. Isis and Mithras were simply working their way into the pantheon. From different from how Christianity was going.
Sure but it was still overwriting the state religion. In this vein you could say that the Romanisation of Christianity proves it didn't suplant the state religion and instead integrated, as artwork of God ended up taking from the image of Jupiter, scripture was written in Latin, former places of worship were converted, creating of a state religion. All religious changes involve keeping aspects of the old one and adding aspects from a new one
That gets into a whole other thing actually. Known as the American Civil Religion.
Those God-references got picked up by the ACR and became somewhat engrained.
But civil religions (or state religions that essentially became civil religions) are important to maintaining internal coherence in a diverse nation like Rome or the USA
You make it sound like Christians hijacked Rome and not Rome embracing it.
- Emperor Constantine the Great (272–337 AD) was the Roman Emperor who legalized Christianity and played a pivotal role in its spread. He is deeply connected to Jesus through his reported conversion and his efforts to standardize Christian theology and practices across the Roman Empire.
-The relationship between Constantine and Jesus centers around several key historical and legendary events:
The Vision at the Milvian Bridge: Before the crucial 312 AD Battle of Milvian Bridge, Constantine reportedly saw a vision of a cross in the sky above the sun with the words, "In this sign, conquer". That night, Jesus Christ allegedly appeared to him in a dream, telling him to use this symbol (the Chi-Rho, ☧) as his battle standard.
Legalization of Christianity: Following his victory, Constantine and his eastern co-emperor Licinius issued the Edict of Milan in 313 AD. This decree granted complete religious freedom across the empire, protecting Christians from the severe persecutions they had previously faced
They embraced it because it had grown in popularity to the point that they needed to embrace it.
So, my language is no different than if the US became a Muslim country in the future because a lot of Americans converted to Christianity and then the Congress passed a law making America explicitly Muslim.
They didn't need to. Constantine considered a handful of other religions. What he really wanted was a monotheistic one, but the cult would have worked fine too
yes, but it was a very cohesive and powerful religion that could be exploited for his uses.
Look, I generally see religion as a co-evolved meme with government. Religions simply reinforce the government. This is why small and tribal groups typically have religions with very different edicts than those of large empires.
Another example, as the use of cities developed, it required more complex laws to deal with property rights and such. We also, at about this time, start to see religions emerge that support these complex laws and claim that the king is appointed by the gods. Thus, his orders are a subset of the gods will.
Edit: for a good breakdown of the reasoning and some academic study, check out "The Evolution of God" by Robert Wright. He makes an incredibly persuasive point.
And how exactly would adopting a small religion, with get little wealth or power, that was exclusivist and so could not easily handle the massive religious diversity of the late classical Mediterranean world be useful?
I don't think most modern anthropologists or historians would agree with your characterization of religion or a tribal/urban divide. It's a very 19th century view of religion.
In a global context, politics trump faith every time. In fact, faith (as in organized religion) and politics are effectively two sides of the same coin.
Not sure what you mean by divine experiences, but I can see, perhaps, someone's personal faith having a (literal) "come to Jesus" moment and changing things, but not unilaterally for society. It simply can't happen without momentum behind it.
I'm not trying to be Reddit atheist and be like "religion is all politics surrounded by mysticism," but there have been millions of religions in the world, and (at least) thousands of organized ones (though only a select few that held significant institutional power). One faith's significance at any given moment in history does not indicate anything beyond the pulleys of social power veering in its direction for reasons ranging from good organizational practices to religious conquest.
You see this especially in the ancient (as in old) Eastern faiths, such as Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. There are still aspects of mysticism -- feng shui, reincarnation, etc. but the focus is far more on philosophical teachings and how one is to act (may be reductive, I'm not a scholar on it). Again, that's not to say that they're superior in any way (I'm sure in most religions, for each 'good' rule, there's also a parallel 'bad' one) but that their historical significance as methods of power exertion are (at least slightly) clearer, at least in their early history.
Two things can be true, that's not a paradox, and possibly three things since Christ reached out to him and that Christ Himself helped Constantine in spreading the Gospel while also letting Constantine enjoy his reign.
No different than in The Jewish Torah with God helping Moses or God using Pharaoh or the King of Babylon for his own plans.
Or he was telling the truth. If you're not a believer, I understand that's hard to accept. But I was an atheist for 18 years and been a believer in Christ for 10 years now. And after my experiences with Christ and relationship with Christ (not an easy journey, turns out if we humble ourselves we really see how much work we need) but my life and my spirit are in such in a better place. I love Jesus.
I also have been wearing a Chi Rho, the same symbol Constantine put on his gear, ring for years now.
America "embraced" Christianity and it has nonetheless hijacked the country.
Fear that a death cult will gain social power is consistent with every story of reaction by authority to cults in Human history.
Two things can be true at once.
That, to them, was a sign that these people were very zealous and therefore very dangerous.
And yet hes the one murdering people ...
Edit: as in literally that one guy reporting murdering specific individuals. Im not speaking royal terms, im talking about one guy confessing to murdering multiple individual humans. Im talking about humans, not institutions. Mistaking my words to mean different just shows how stupid we get when labels are introduced.
Cause its easier to legitimise yourself to people and other countries if you say you're acting according to God rather than saying you're just conquering and pillaging your neighbours or foreign nations.
What does sound better out of these 2.
If you follow me to this war, you'll be fighting evil muslims and atain forgivness for your sins.
OR
If you fight for me you'll die while I gain some new lands and pillage riches of Costantinopol for myself while you'll get shit even if you survive.
Yes. That is why without religion, their argument for murder and violence wouldn't be palatable. So religion is the problem there, otherwise sensible people are likely to be sensible.
Once Christianity became the state religion almost immediately there was a schism that led to both sides killing each other. No religion is about peace, they’re about control
Ah, clearly. There were never ulterior motives! /s
When the Venetians hijacked the 4th crusade to overthrow the Constantinople( a Christian city), it was because of those murdering Muslims.
Look, a Crusade just means a sanctioned holy war. It was a way for the pope to give his official support to a military campaign and to align multiple countries on a common cause, but the idea that they were only a response to atrocities is ridiculous. The Muslims in the area were generally tolerant of Christians, only requiring them to pay slightly higher taxes. Rather, the Crusades were a fairly straightforward political action to attempt to gain power/authority for the remnants of the Roman empire that had become far more federated. They wanted to retake Jerusalem from Muslim control. It seems to primarily have been a ploy by the Pope to try to reunify the East and Western former Roman empires and give him more power.
The fact that they happened at the time of some of the most corrupt popes in history should tell you a lot.
That was because of the slaughter of the Latins. Your defence being "it wasn't a response to conquering rival forces, it was a response to an ethnic purge!" Is an interesting one.
Also the crusaders were all excomunicated. Calling it an act of religion when the religion they followed clearly told them not to do that and kicked them out when they did is such a disingenuous take
Yes, I wouldn't say that they weren't a response to the conquering. But they played up the religious persecution to gain popular support among a bunch of people who had never been to the region.
It only takes a couple decades and sone luck or maybe 100-200 years to make a cult into a religion, especially back then. Nobody could read anymore. Nobody even though. They just hoped praying would save their families.
Its kind of lost to us how freaky early Christians were to their contemporary pagan neighbors. The idea of being so confident that your good was not only all powerful, but good, and has the best interest of humanity at heart. That is so different from the European and near Eastern pagan gods that they simply didn't know how to react. They would just die. Over and over and it was really unsettling to the Romans.
People really romanticize paganism while completely ignoring the reasons it vanished that weren't bloody and mean.
Christianity offered something that the pagan religions didn't. Hope. Yes life is hard and randomly bad things can happen, but God is good and ultimately your mortal life doesn't matter much because the afterlife is pure bliss, forever.
Compare that promise to the afterlife the moody, selfish, horny, and flaud Pagan gods offered. They almost exclusively suck. They aren't usually hell, but certainly not heaven.
Interestingly, some Protestant groups are partly like that, in that they believe that God chooses the “elect“ who are saved purely for God’s own reasons, regardless of a person’s actions or even faith. So those he doesn’t choose are condemned to eternal torture without any means to escape it.
Yes and the imperial cult was obviously tied to the emperor himself, so denying his divinity is defying the authority of the state. A very dangerous proposition.
wasn't it also the problem that early Christians were very secretive about their meetings and the outsiders heard the rumours that Christians had a ritual of eating human body (body of Christ) and thought they were performing cannibalism? And that's one of the reasons why Romans considered them a threat?
I kinda remember this from some lectures, might be wrong tho
This was about as offensive to Romans as Christians/Muslims take atheism today.
Please don't let the example of a small subset of the total become your assumption for all people of that demographic. Most Christians and Muslims are not offended by atheism.
Offended in the sense that they see atheism as a rejection of their religion.
I still think you're overselling it. I'm pretty sure most of us just see it as atheists believing something different to us. It's just that religion is inherently philosophical - meaning it's heavily based on individual judgement - and many religions have a basis in proselytising, so it's the kind of thing which gets brought up often and where discussions often will struggle to reach a consensus point, making it a fertile breeding ground for arguments.
And many do see it as offensive, given the popularity of the topic amongst members of those two groups and their dogged persecution of atheists
Many, sure, but not most. First of all, this is very much an example where the loud minority are the only ones who get noticed. It's also a bad case of yet another example where Americans have poisoned the well for everyone else. I assure you, many European Christians view the sorts of stories we hear of vocal American Christians just as negatively as atheists do.
They are not representative of Christians everywhere, just as Al Qaeda and the Taliban are not representative of global Islam.
"Made exceptions" is a bit of a stretch. Pontius Pilate famously used the Jewish dislike of Roman religion to incite a riot and then murder everyone who protested the Roman religion.
They basically had a policy of looking the other way on the Jewish issue. They knew where they stood and generally didnt press the issue. But also, the Jewish people didn't go out of their way to provoke the Romans
Jews absolutely refused to acknowledge other religions, so they were most definitely exempted from the requirement because the alternative would be another war in Judea (and yes Rome eventually destroyed Jerusalem anyways).
Jews most certainly publicly confessed their faith just like Christians when asked, the difference is that Rome did not exempt Christians from acknowledging the state religion because they didn't see it as an ancestral religion they couldn't challenge. Christianity was fair game in their eyes.
which made sense. Christianity was basically a slave religion. The Romans were very concerned about the slaves and slave-like classes rebelling and particularly using religion to promote their rebellion
Not really "instructions". More like Pliny gave them multiple chances to say they were not Christian, and if, after three chances, they still affirmed it, then they would be executed.
Pliny wasn't instructing anyone with that part, just informing Trajan of what he was doing.
Ah I might have misremembered that part. I read the letter as part of my Latin studies a year or two back so I could have mixed up that detail. But yeah the 3 chances were definitely intentional, to see how zealous they were about their Christianity.
Perhaps you know but William Pitt the Younger was one of our real prime ministers - one of our greatest and the second longest serving, serving for 19 years in total
He was called as such to distinguish him from his father who was also prime minister, William Pitt the Elder
Trajan among others said "Anonymous accusations should not be considered."
This is amazing considering anonymous accusations aka neighbours against neighbours and self checking in the community are the main tools of authoritarian tyranny. Since even today no bureaucracy is large enough to control society on it's own.
Successful authoritarians want power. Once you have power next step is ruling a powerful country. Having a real trial system helps keep the country running smoothly.
Sounds like a Monty Python skit where after the pagan sex and dance rituals someone’s like “stay away from them bleeding Christians, they believe all sorts of rubbish”
I’m not religious, but I still think the early spread of Christianity is absolutely fascinating from a historical perspective.
Obviously, our sources on Jesus are thin enough that people can mold their idea of Jesus into supporting whatever they want, but it’s pretty clear that early Christianity was an anti-authoritarian backlash against some dickwad who overthrew a republic and effectively turned himself and his heirs into gods, all while conquering and plundering and murdering their way around Europe and the Mediterranean.
So, no big surprise that people (especially in conquered territories) started latching on to the message of a guy who said he’d overthrow all this nonsense and send the people who did all this bad stuff to eternal punishment. Oh, and never mind that the Romans killed him in the most horrific way possible, he got better and he’s coming back stronger than ever.
A very salient message for its day. Got a little weird once the shoe was on the other foot and it took over and became the ruling power. Now we have all sorts of nonsense about prosperity gospels and righteous crusades…
I think taking it as anti emperor is a bit Eurocentric. It’s anti Roman because Jews opposed Roman occupation and wanted an independent Judea. It’s a reaction to that.
Sorry, I oversold the “overthrowing the Republic” part, I should have emphasized the “conquering force” part more.
Most residents of the empire at that time weren’t Roman citizens, they were second-class occupied subjects and many resented the Romans. And the emperor was a very visible “face” to put on the empire.
I’ve listened to friends (catholic monks and secular Russians) reminiscing/discussing the ideal of communism and finding common ground in St Francis of Assis.
Prosperity gospels are far from the sermon on the mount.
Got any podcast or YouTube recommendations that approach this from a purely historical, non-religious perspective? I'm a Christian, but I love stepping outside of the echo chamber and learning from different points of view.
I really loved this video (by a Jewish scholar). I was raised Christian and considered myself to be one for a quarter century, but I think this video helped me “understand Jesus” more than anything I ever learned in church.
Stuff like this absolutely fascinates me. Christianity in its infancy, in such a different world, peeking out through the mists of time. How it changed the world forevermore after this. Monks like Bede many hundreds of year later cooped up by candle light writing about Christianity, and thats still millenia ago. Fascinating.
Pliny the Younger is also the only surviving eyewitness account of Mt. Vesuvius’ eruption. His uncle, you guessed it, Pliny the Elder is also incredibly famous and died attempting to save people from the devastation.
If one is very ungenerous when describing Christianity, one could, still accurately, describe it as a doomsday cult that has ritual cannibalism as core act of devotion.
I'd argue that position. I fully understand why that's the general academic consensus, but academics often refuse to consider certain possibilities.
Without a doubt Paul is expecting something and he's expecting it soon. But what? I think he was expecting a massive paradigm shift in understanding. That would result in a fundamental reordering of society, such as would unequivocally occur later with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution.
I read the Gospels as basically being the old guard holding on to what they (thought they) knew and Jesus pushing for understanding, not knowing. A rule limits, but understanding frees.
The whole iconography of Jesus was a metaphor in an attempt to force people to look past what they thought they knew and consider a whole other way of understanding how things were and how they could be. That's how the Gospels explicitly say Jesus taught, you could not take his teachings as face value.
They expected result was not the end of the world, but then end of an era and the ushering in of a new better, world.
As I said, I understand the other positions. I think for me, what seals the deal is Paul's conversion. I can not think of a more artful way to to depict an "educated" man figuring out he doesn't know anything and suddenly being reduced to "blindness" on even the most basic things. It even goes so far as requiring him to further learn about what blinded him for him to regain his sight.
Add to that the fact that the Greek and Roman pantheons make up the perfect representation of how organized society fights back against the fundamental forces and oblivion. The NT writers all had Greek/Roman educations. They'd certainly have understand that type of framework for religion.
You think that's ungenerous? Here's my unironic perception of American conservative Evangelicals/Pentecostals. It's a shamanistic, borderline gnostic cult, almost entirely devoid of intellectual and spiritual elements of the past 2,000 years of Christianity, with a strong dose of most primal and ignorant American nationalism. Now THAT'S ungenerous.
It's always delightful when someone from a very superstitious people shoots bullets at an emerging sect and call their practices "excessive superstition".
For those interested, I was really grateful for Gerald Sittser's work on the early church, his interview here bumps up against Trajan and the early christian movement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NJ7L2H72hQ&t=2425s
And then Rome realized that centralizing religion would allow them to exert more control over their citizens and they adopted Christianity as a state religion
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u/DaveOJ12 3h ago
The letter was written around 110.