The root of Christianity

[ideologyhunter]

Jesus summons Lazarus out of the grave...only in John's gospel. This most astounding of the alleged miracles, done in public, would have meant that Jesus would be overwhelmed with grieving widows and widowers or parents of dead children, demanding and beseeching that he come and restore their loved ones to life. Caiaphas would have questioned him about it. It would not be a story that could be contained. The disciples would be talking about it and the word would have spread like a fever. But the synoptic sources don't have it.
'Many' dead people came out of their graves after Jesus was crucified, and journeyed into Jerusalem, where they were seen by 'many'...only in Matthew's gospel. No contemporary history mentions it, and Mark, Luke, and John don't have it.
This is exactly what you would expect if folklore developed around a charismatic figure, and older, traditional stories were attached to the new idol.

 

[steve_bank]

Turning water to wine is a very good social skill to have.

Faith healing is not unique to Christianity, it appears in other culture forms.

In Chinese traditions chi, or your life force, can be used to heal , deflect physical blows, or kill by touch or at a distance. It is seen in Chinese martial arts movies. Think 'the force' in Star Wars. In China it is part of 'traditional medicine'. Probably predates Christianity.

 

[DrZoidberg]

https://literatureandhistory.com/index.php/episode-093-severus-life-of-saint-martin

Next up on this podcast is the hagiography by Severus of Saint Martin.

Saint Martin lived through the passing of the edict of Thessalonica. In AD 313 Constantine passes the edict of Milan. This is the edict of religious toleration saying that Christians shouldn't be persecuted. In AD 380 Theodosius I passes the edict of Thesalonica making Christianity the state religion of the Roman state. Not only that, but only allows one kind of Christianity, Nicene Christianity. (Both Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity are Nicene).

Immediately the Roman pagan politiking that Christians had been so upset about now became official Christian policy. This is the moment the rebels started piloting the Death Star and turned out to be no better than good ol' Darth. Immediately.

Saint Martin got involved and got burned. Not literally. But he quickly learned that in the new theocracy of Rome it was more important to be skilled at politics than to be a good Christian. Priscillian, a man who Saint Martin judged to be a better Christian than most of those aristocratic bishops trying to persecute him, was the first man to be executed in the new Christian regime. It violated everything Saint Martin thought Christianity should be about. It also violated one of the commandments.

We all know what happened next. Rivers of blood, all in the name of turning the other cheek. It turns out that the problem with the Roman empire wasn't that they were Pagan. It was other stuff.

BTW, this book is a Hagiography. It's not a true story. It's heavily slanted and spun in order to make Saint Martin look as good as possible. Bad deeds are forgotten. Rumours of good deeds are included without verifications needed. In this Hagiography Saint Martin destroys pagan temples and desecrates pagan holy places. I don't want you to get the impression that Saint Martin was a good person. This guy was clearly an intolerant dick. The fact that this is included in the hagiography of him says a lot about the Christian culture of that time. Extremely intolerant and violent. Which also might help explain why Christians were persecuted earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscillian

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscillianism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Milan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Thessalonica

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicene_Creed

 

[DrZoidberg]

Constantine the Great.


Now I’m listening to the podcast, History of Rome. It’s a great well researched podcast, that does not go into great depth. It’s more to give a big picture of this giant of an empire. Which is a perspective I can recommend, because Rome is such a huge topic, it is easy to read about an emperor and think that the Roman empire always worked that way. The truth is that the Roman empire often changed quite a bit from emperor to emperor. For this thread in particular, they have a bunch of podcasts on the rise of Constantine and his Christianisation process. For me, this episode was informative to me, so perhaps it’s equally informative to you guys.


https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/the_history_of_rome/2011/04/132-in-this-sign.html

This is what I’ve learned that I didn’t know before.

1. Due to the later success of Christianity, there is no reliable history written about Constantine that isn’t the product of the Christianisation project. That is not an argument for or against anything. But it does mean that what later historians write as significant as it happened, perhaps wasn’t at the time. And we have no idea whether he was really Christian or not. None.

1. The Empire had for generations slid toward monotheism. Not just Christianity. But Sol Invictus, Mithraism, Manacheism, Cult of Isis. It was a major trend at the time.

1. Constantine’s rise to power was a very very messy time indeed. The power structure of Rome was so fractured that any random event could send history off in some random direction. Very little was inevitable. Which makes piecing together a coherent story of that period challenging.

1. Before Constantine Rome was ruled by one of Rome’s greatest emperors of all time. Diocletian. After about a hundred years of mess where Rome teetered on the brink of collapse, he managed to reshape Rome and massage it into something that worked. In order to defend the empire Diocletian had split the power into four. The tetrarchy. Basically four emperors. Two senior and two junior. The idea was to guarantee that emperors couldn’t be assassinated and the empire would slide into chaos. While it solved the immediate threat when Rome teetered on the brink of collapse, once Rome was stabilized, there was no way this system could sustain itself.

1. The great hero of Diocletians generation, emperor Aurelian, was a member of Sol Invictus. A monotheistic religion. What set Sol Invictus apart from Christians is that they didn’t have a specific rule against sacrificing to other gods. So they escaped any and all persecutions by Roman emperors. The ONLY crime Christains committed in the empire was that they were dicks, and didn’t respect other religions and cults.

1. For some misguided noble reason it was decided that succession within the tetrarchy should not be to sons. It should be to whatever general was the most competent. Why they thought the sons would be fine with this, is anyone’s guess. Naive to the extreme.

1. Constantine's father, Constantius, was one of the tetrachs. When Diocletian went into retirement Constantine got miffed that he wasn’t bumped up together with his dad. He then made a classic Roman power grab with the army, which made the remaining tetrachs back down, and make Constantine a junior emperor. Bad move. Since he'd already displayed an utter lack of respect for the election process, the coming development should have been obvious.

1. One of Diocletian's many projects was to eradicate Christianity. He saw it as a threat to the stability of Rome. This made him very unpopular. The pagans couldn’t care less about Christians. And Christians got very upset. So it was a stupid policy in general. So when Constantine was trying to grab power for himself he wisely signalled that he was a friend of Christians. Which would have been smart, no matter if he was Christian or not.

1. When Constantine had outmaneuvered tetrarch number 1 and 2, he only had Maximinius II left. Maximinius II was a fanatical pagan and did his best to stamp out Christianity. He was also in control over the wealthiest part of the Roman empire, the East. Which was where most of the Christians lived. Just before the final battle with Maximinus II Constantine made the Edict of Milan which legalised Christianty throughout the empire. The cynic might say that this was calculated to weaken the resolve of the legionaries fighting for Maximinius II, (who outnumbered Constantine 3 to 2). many of who probably were Christian or knew people who had been persecuted. It didn’t go so well for Maximinius II in the coming battles.

1. We have no idea whether or not Constantine was ever really Christian. What we do know is that persecuting Christians in the early years of the third century AD was politically counter productive, and he was smart enough to see that. We also know that most Romans were pagan, so openly embracing Christianity, would also be politically counter productive. He took the only route he could take if he wanted to outmanoeuvre his political opponents. No matter what he really believed. Which means that there’s no way for us to know for sure, what his personal faith really was.

1. By the time of Constantine (306) the Roman empire had stopped being culturally Roman, a long long time ago. The empire was culturally multi-ethnic. Being Roman in no way gave you any privileges when it came to rising in the ranks. In 235 Maximinus Thrax, a Goth became emperor. Unthinkable only a couple of generations before. Emperor Elagabalus (218) was born to a Roman family but raised in Syria. He was culturally 100% Syrian. In 192 the low born provincial Pertinax came to power (192). A son to a freed slave. Following him there would be very few ethnically Roman emperors. Constantine himself was Illyrian (born in Dacia).
   
   This is relevant because the Eastern part of the empire was always more open to monotheism. This, theoretically, has to do with that people there were more accustomed to absolute rulers. As the centre of power shifted east, the empire stopped being culturally Roman. As the centre of power was moved east it would start embracing Eastern religion, Christianity being one of these.
   
2. Fun fact is that at the battle of the Milvian Bridge it’s said that Constantine made a big deal of painting a Chi-Rho on the shield of his soldiers. At the time Chi-Ro was a mystical symbol used by both Christians and Pagans, for different reasons. So that proves exactly nothing about his religion. No matter if it really happened. All it proves (if it happened) is that he was a clever guy when it comes to inspiring his troops.

Chi Rho - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[steve_bank]

I thought it was about geopolitics. Romans always considered religion an essential part of civil order.

 

[Politesse]

Sol Invictus, Mithraism, Manacheism, Cult of Isis

Those are all mystery religions, certainly, but not monotheistic ones. If you want to understand the roots of monotheistic thought in the Roman world, you want to look to the rise of the late Stoics and Neoplatonists.

He took the only route he could take if he wanted to outmanoeuvre his political opponents. No matter what he really believed. Which means that there’s no way for us to know for sure, what his personal faith really was.

In part because the question is anachronistic. Romans lacked a concept of "personal faith" equivalent to the modern European idea. You could, and people did, participate in various temples and religious orders of various kinds, but membership wasn't usually exclusive, and it was assumed that whole families/tribes/towns etc would have obligations to a particular temple regardless of what they "believed" or didn't believe. That simply wasn't up to them, nor relevant to the social expectation that they would do right by their family or deme or what have you. The idea of religion as a badge of autonomous personal identity was a product of the Renaissance, and took centuries to develop into it's present form. They did not reject the modern concept of personal faith, it simply didn't exist yet.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I thought it was about geopolitics. Romans always considered religion an essential part of civil order.

Yes. But the nice thing about paganism is that you can hedge your bets and sacrifice to all of the gods all at once. This little detail changed with the rise of Christianity. Constantine cleverly avoided to make public sacrifices to Jupiter. He did it in private. Or not. Nobody knows. But before Constantine doing them publicly certainly was a fundamental aspect of being the emperor.

Another detail about Diocletian and Constantine is their approachability. Before them Roman emperors went out of their way to be approachable. They needed to be seen as "one of the people". Comparable to... let's say... current American presidents. So they invited the public in to see various staged performances, in order to show the people who normal they were.

Diocletian wanted to change this. In the civil wars the hundred years before Diocletian this idea of the emperor, being just another man, meant that they kept being assasinated by usurpers. If the current guy can do the job, why couldn't I? Diocletian changed that. In his new vision emperors weren't in charge because they controlled the army. They were in charge because they were chosen by Jupiter. He single handedly invented that which we now call the Great Chain of Being. He also physically removed the seat of power from Rome. As I'm sure you are aware the praetorian guard, tasked with protecting the emperors life, managed to somehow murder 1/4 of them. Diocletian created a palace in Croatia designed a long series of gates where you had to be vetted at every gate before you were allowed into his presence. He only showed himself to the public once. All of this was to create an air of mystery about him.

Constantine ran with this. He never did say he was chosen by the Christian God. He stuck to Apollo his entire life. But he simultaneously financed the building of many many churches. The first emperor ever to build them, rather than destroy them. Something which the strained treasury took quite a hit to do. It must have been very important to him. He also took a keen and active interest in the ecumenical councils. Something he actually invented. He was himself devoted to the project of that the Christian church should have a single coherent message. Odd that someone so singularly devoted to Apollo should take such an interest in helping the Christian church.

Christians have gone on and on about how the Battle of the Milvian bridge was the final battle where the Constantinian forces of Christianity fought the last pagan emperor. Odd thing then that the monument erected after the battle, (Arch of Constantine) by Constantine, only had pagan symbols on it.

Great chain of being - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Column of Constantine - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Arch of Constantine - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

When Constantine started on his project to grab power he was not a son of a senior emperor. He was at best, the fifth most powerful man in the empire. If he wanted to win he needed to be super smart about it. What the other tetrarchs failed to identify was that Christians were no longer an irrelevant sect. Diocletians persecution of the Christians had backfired. It had annoyed both Christians and Pagans. Showing goodwill to Christians swung public opinion toward Constantine, both among the Christians AND the Pagans. The Pagans of the time, in general, didn't see Christianity as a threat, at all. They saw them as innocent victims being picked on by a horrible bully. Politically, this was an incredibly savvy move.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Another fun fact about Constantine. In his day, Christianity was a bottom up movement. Ie, the troops were Christian to a larger extent than the officers. The nobility were the least degree Christian. This would have been true just as much for Constantine as Maxentius. Considering the utter and complete lack of Christian symbols on the Arch of Constantine, one might easily think that Constantine was about as Christian as Maxentius. In fact, the whole idea that Constantine was inspired by the Christian God didn't turn up until much later. In the works of church historian Eusebius. Totally planted by Constantine. Eusebius was used by Constantine to spread propaganda that would secure Christian support for Constantine. He used Eusebius, rather than to say it himself, since he wanted, outwardly, to seem like he was still pagan, not to alienate the officers and the nobilty.

My point with all of this is that the rise of Christianity was a freight train no emperor was going to slow down. Sooner or later emperors would have had to embrace Christianity. My impression is that Maxentius might just as well have embraced Christianity, just as much as Constantine. Eusebius wrote that the battle was a battle between Paganism and Christianity. I don't think it was at all. It was a battle between two sides with troops that were a mix between Christians and pagans. Maxentius would have had a bit more Christians, due to where his troops came from (Africa).

I think the Battle of the Milvian Bridge was irrelevant as far as spreading Christianity. If Maxentius would have won he likely would have been the one to embrace Christianity and everything would have played out the same. Just as Constantine realised, Maxentius would also very likely have realised that he could use Maximinius II's fanatical paganism against him. He was especially vulnerable since Maximinius II's army would have had the largest proportion of Christians.

And even if Maximinius II would have been the victor. He would have died at some point and then we'd sooner or later have had a Christian emperor and history would have been back on track. After Constantine we got Julian the Apostate as an emperor. He did his best to reverse the development and stamp out Christianity. He was a capable guy, and that didn't work out.

Sure Constantine turned out to be consequential for how Christianity and the Bible was shaped. This group over that group. But Donatism vs Nicene Christianity! Who cares? They're basically the same. All these rifts and sectarian doctrinal conflicts within the Christian church, they had very little to do with how to be a good Christian as they were power politics. No matter what version of Christianity would win out it would always have been a happy mixture between Paganism and Christianity, as well as all the other religious ideas swirling around at the time. Constantine himself didn't seem to care which version of Christianity prevailed. He just wanted them all to agree on something. It was Constantine's sons who put their big fat noses in which club was their favourite, and join in the sectarian strife. Also, something which was pretty much, inevitable.

The doctrines that won out at the various equmenical councils were usually the most popular, pragmatic and sensible versions of Christianity. Which again points to social evolution being at play, rather than heavy handed tyranny by some one guy or one group.

Bottom line, in the big picture, Constantine might have been irrelevant as far as how Christianity ended up. He just happened to be in charge when the growth of Christianity reached a tipping point. And he rolled with it.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Sol Invictus, Mithraism, Manacheism, Cult of Isis

Those are all mystery religions, certainly, but not monotheistic ones. If you want to understand the roots of monotheistic thought in the Roman world, you want to look to the rise of the late Stoics and Neoplatonists.

I didn't say they were monotheistic. I said they were drifting towards monotheism. And that's certainly true for all of the cults I mentioned. What set Christianity apart is that it was open to poor people and slaves. That's what made that one unique, and ultimately why it beat the others. No other reason.

He took the only route he could take if he wanted to outmanoeuvre his political opponents. No matter what he really believed. Which means that there’s no way for us to know for sure, what his personal faith really was.

In part because the question is anachronistic. Romans lacked a concept of "personal faith" equivalent to the modern European idea. You could, and people did, participate in various temples and religious orders of various kinds, but membership wasn't usually exclusive, and it was assumed that whole families/tribes/towns etc would have obligations to a particular temple regardless of what they "believed" or didn't believe. That simply wasn't up to them, nor relevant to the social expectation that they would do right by their family or deme or what have you. The idea of religion as a badge of autonomous personal identity was a product of the Renaissance, and took centuries to develop into it's present form. They did not reject the modern concept of personal faith, it simply didn't exist yet.

Excellent point. I agree fully. Which also puts a dent in the idea that Constantine would ponder about his personal faith.

 

[Politesse]

He took the only route he could take if he wanted to outmanoeuvre his political opponents. No matter what he really believed. Which means that there’s no way for us to know for sure, what his personal faith really was.

In part because the question is anachronistic. Romans lacked a concept of "personal faith" equivalent to the modern European idea. You could, and people did, participate in various temples and religious orders of various kinds, but membership wasn't usually exclusive, and it was assumed that whole families/tribes/towns etc would have obligations to a particular temple regardless of what they "believed" or didn't believe. That simply wasn't up to them, nor relevant to the social expectation that they would do right by their family or deme or what have you. The idea of religion as a badge of autonomous personal identity was a product of the Renaissance, and took centuries to develop into it's present form. They did not reject the modern concept of personal faith, it simply didn't exist yet.

Excellent point. I agree fully. Which also puts a dent in the idea that Constantine would ponder about his personal faith.

Correct, his decision-making was for the entire empire, of which "The Bulldog" Constantine was the presumptive paterfamilias; there could have been no non-social, non-political permutation of faith for him. The records state he baptized on his deathbed, and despite the biased nature of those records I tend to believe this. By a similar token to the above, it's hard to explain the events of his reign and the transformations of the Empire without the faith having had his sympathies at the height of his very considerable power. But no one at the time thought of things in quite the same terms, and the kinslaying chaos that followed Constantine's death has made it difficult to understand the decades that followed with any clarity.

 

[DrZoidberg]

He took the only route he could take if he wanted to outmanoeuvre his political opponents. No matter what he really believed. Which means that there’s no way for us to know for sure, what his personal faith really was.

In part because the question is anachronistic. Romans lacked a concept of "personal faith" equivalent to the modern European idea. You could, and people did, participate in various temples and religious orders of various kinds, but membership wasn't usually exclusive, and it was assumed that whole families/tribes/towns etc would have obligations to a particular temple regardless of what they "believed" or didn't believe. That simply wasn't up to them, nor relevant to the social expectation that they would do right by their family or deme or what have you. The idea of religion as a badge of autonomous personal identity was a product of the Renaissance, and took centuries to develop into it's present form. They did not reject the modern concept of personal faith, it simply didn't exist yet.

Excellent point. I agree fully. Which also puts a dent in the idea that Constantine would ponder about his personal faith.

Correct, his decision-making was for the entire empire, of which "The Bulldog" Constantine was the presumptive paterfamilias; there could have been no non-social, non-political permutation of faith for him. The records state he baptized on his deathbed, and despite the biased nature of those records I tend to believe this. By a similar token to the above, it's hard to explain the events of his reign and the transformations of the Empire without the faith having had his sympathies at the height of his very considerable power. But no one at the time thought of things in quite the same terms, and the kinslaying chaos that followed Constantine's death has made it difficult to understand the decades that followed with any clarity.

Waiting until your deathbed before getting baptized was a common strategy among noble Christians at the time. Since, it was understood, the baptism would wipe the slate clean. So until baptism the Christian was free to sin as much as they liked. Considering the amount of murder nobles of his generation were doing, waiting with baptism was the prudent move. Him waiting until his deathbed, if anything, proves he was a normal Christian for his generation, and might have been a true believer of Christ his entire life. When he founded his new capitol he went to great lengths to make it a mostly Christian capitol. That says a lot. He did a lot to push Christianity.

But... pagans, in general, didn't have a problem with Christianity. All they cared about was that their temples were well funded and sacrifices were carried out in a timely manner. Paganism isn't about faith. It's about ritual. The pagan gods don't care what you believe. They care what you do. Christian churches had endless problems getting new converts to stop sacrificing to their old gods, while also worshipping God. This idea of Christian religious exclusivity, and the idea that God was a mind reader, took a long long time before it filtered down all the way through to the individual Romans. The persecution of the Christians was only ever about the Christians refusal to sacrifice on the alter of the deified emperors. Something which it was illegal not to do. Since it was such a minor symbolic action the pagans were utterly befuddled when the Christians refused. The other monotheist/monotheist'ish faiths of that time did encourage their followers to sacrifice to the emperor. So they were left alone. The Cult of Isis was in practice in almost every other way identical to Christianity and that cruised along unmolested (until the Christians came along and molested it).

My point with this is that his embrace of Christianity was for Constantine, pretty much, politically risk free. This is of course a major reason Christianity will eventually displace paganism so utterly. This casts doubt on whether he was really a Christian or not. Pascal's wager... and all that. Even if he was a pagan, why wouldn't he get baptized on his deathbed anyway? If he was a pagan he would have nothing to lose. And we know many other pagans of his generation felt the same.

So we really don't know. I would say, given the chaos of his time and and that the only surviving accounts is all propaganda, having an opinion on whether he was a Christian is what's unsupported. There's just not enough information to prove it, either way.

Fun little trivia is that we've found sacrificial alters of Baal, in active use in Caanan well into AD 200. The Jews also struggled with getting people to stop sacrificing to other gods. We can't draw a line on a map and say this part is Christian and this pagan. The Christianization of the Roman empire, and of their pagan cults, was a gradual progress. For all we know Constantine was something in between a Christian and a pagan. That would be the case no matter what. More or less. So perhaps it's a moot point?

 

[steve_bank]

First and foremost Roman emperors were politicians who balanced differing groups. If were not good at politics you ened up dead. What I took away form Marcus Aurelius is thathuman politics never changes.

Relgion or more generally mythology has laways been a tool of state.

When ciommunist Russia collpsed Chrtianity came beck quickly getting political power. Putin makes a point of being phograped wearing a cross. He woe re one when he met GWB a very public Christian who infamously said he looked into Putin's sou and saw a good person.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Byzantinian times.

My odyssey of burning through all quality history podcasts available has taken me beyond Rome and into Byzantine times.

If you ever wondered when the Roman cities stopped looking Roman and started looking Medieval, and when culture shifted from Roman to Medieval, this is the time. The reason is... plague.

As it turns out, being Christian protected you from plague. The more Christian and moralistic the better you were protected. Highly judgemental and moralistic Christians would never set their foot in a bath. Which may have saved their lives. Christians took care of the dead and moved them to places where they would be less infectious. At the time of a plague, Christian burial practices is actually the tits. As is Christian values in general. This is the time when church brothels are closed. Yes, up to this point each church had a brothel that helped pay for it’s upkeep. Not all churches. But it was a financial model inherited from paganism. As it turns out, not going to brothels is also great from a pandemic prevention point of view. A popular past time was "pantomime". This isn't pantomime of today. It was live sex shows. Orgies were frowned upon by Christians. What a surprise!

When Rome Christianised in the 4’th century things went on much like they had before. Christian institutions didn’t spring into being until the time of the barbarian invasions of the subsequent centuries, making Roman civil society unstable and unpredictable. When state welfare seized, the church picked up the slack. And kept it going, much like before. But the church wouldn’t fund things that went against church teachings, like the baths and theatres. So these stopped being funded and would over time, literally fall apart. And then the plague came, like a sledgehammer (not literally) and obliterated what was left of paganism.

As it turns out Christianity was, at the time, just the right thing for a society being hammered by plague. Which is why the society that arose after the arrival of bubonic plague was shaped entirely on the basis of the church.

Episode 38 – Christianising

We look at how Christianity spread more deeply into Roman culture across the 6th century and see how this affected the Empire’s cities and Jews. Period: 500-602 Download: Episode 38 – Christi…

thehistoryofbyzantium.com

 

[DrZoidberg]

Islam
Now the podcast has reached the rise of Islam in the 600's.

This episode was an interview with the author of "In the Shadow of the Sword" by Tom Holland. A story about the rise of Islam. Full disclosure, this book has had a mixed reception. Since he's not an Islamologist. He's a Byzantine scholar. Ie, all that stuff that isn't Islam. Which I would argue might make his perspective less biased, since Byzantium doesn't have a still active fan club threatening people. He also knows the newly conquered empire better than most Islamologists would.

Here's his version of events in a couple of bullets:

1. The Roman empire had an invincible aura around it. Any leader that managed to break their power over a region and seize control would inevitably become legendary and deified. He compared the legend of Mohammed to the legend of king Arthur. A similar historical figure.

1. We have zero written sources from Mohammed's own day. It's not even fledgling rapidly evolving gospels. There's nothing for the first hundred years. Nothing.

1. The Quran is not a narrative. There's no story. It's just a list of commands. The few place names in it, are all contested as to where they actually are. We don't even know where Mecka (from the Quran) is. There's nothing in the Quran from which we can verify any facts. Of the people mentioned in it, the only ones we know anything about is the Romans. This makes it impossible to create a trustworthy time line.

1. Christian scholars contemporary with Mohammed knew the name, but just referred to him as an Arab or Jew. No mention of any new religion. Arabs at this point in history were almost entirely Christian. Some version or another (mostly Nestorians).

1. Context. Much like the Germanic tribes or step nomads, the Arabs were pastoralists and raiders, living across the Arabian desert. A constant nuisance to the settled Byzantinian and Sassanian farm communities. But because the Arabs were on camel, they were highly mobile. So there was no hope for the Byzantine to ever manage to corner them, to crush them once and for all. Besides, the arid Arabian peninsula wasn’t fertile enough to make it worth the Roman’s time to conquer. Since it was so infertile, Arabs would never have the numbers required to ever seriously threaten Rome. Instead they hired Arabs to keep other Arabs in check. The classic, “divide and conquer” tactic. The Romans employed the Ghazanids to keep the Arabs in their part of the empire under control, and the Persians employed the Lakhmids in their part. A very similar arrangement to how Rome had handled the Gothic tribes.

1. So why did the Arabs rise up against the Byzantinans and Sassanians at this specific time? As the plague hit (more of a problems to farmers and urbans than to step nomads). And the exhausting war between the Persians and Romans. The Arabs were used as mercenaries in the armies, (rather than enjoying a comfortable well paid fat cat life back home) being paid by the Byzantine government. Once the war was over the Byzantine empire was broke, and couldn’t pay the Ghazanids. The Sassanian empire had descended into infighting and dynastic struggles. There was nobody who could pay the Lakhmids. The Arabs start getting ideas of that why can't they run this place? If they unify, what's to stop them?

1. Enter Mohammed. According to Tom Holland he doesn’t found Islam. So if Mohammed didn't found it, what did he do that ended up being Islam? The sneaky Roman divide and conquer tactic, to keep Arabs divided and fighting each other, had always been obvious even to the Arabs. Like, the Goths, Vandals and Huns before them the Arabs had long realised that without uniting the various Arab tribes into a super tribe, did the Arabs ever stand a chance to threaten Roman power. So that's what Mohammed did. He founded the Ummah. With shrewd alliance building through marriage he created a kind of pan-Arabic power base, that other Arab tribes could join. The Arabs who joined him weren't submitting to him, they were submitting to the Ummah. At this point it meant the collective community of the Arab peoples. Islam wasn't a thing yet. Mohammed was explicitly stating that the power in the Arab nation wouldn't transfer from father to son upon his death, but to whoever was the most worthy in the entire Ummah, ie all the Arabic tribes. This wasn't much of a system, and had a predictable outcome when he died. And if Mohammed hadn’t whipped the Byzantines and Sassanians so thoroughly, this would have been the end of it. As is the story of most of the step nomad tribe super alliances throughout the history of Rome.

1. In the 630’ies the united Arab tribes under Mohammed start conquering territory (rather than just raiding). Due to the plague and long war with Persia the Byzantines have bene reduced to only having a single full army in the entire empire. An army with a lot of Arabic mercenaries. The Arabs meet the Byzantines at the battle of Yarmuk (636). Unfortunately for the Byzantines that one single army gets utterly obliterated. At a time when they also are broke. Awful timing. So they can’t even pay the Arab mercenaries that fought on the Byzantine side. It will take years to assemble a new battle ready Byzantinian army. At this point there’s no army to oppose all the way Constantinople and India. A method both the Byzantinians and Sassanians had used to more effectively rule, was to have large mobile armies, but otherwise have an undefended country. As a basis for their power, they relied entirely on the fear of the people, of those armies. This means that when the armies were all gone, there was nothing to oppose the Arabs. So they took all of it.

1. Arab tactics. It’s important to recognise the discrepancy in quality of soldier. The Byzantines had heavily armoured troops. Heavy infantry covered from head to toe in chainmail and proper helmets, cataphracts, horse archers with composite bows. The Arabs were unarmoured. They had leather helmets, at best. They fought with spears, shields and small stabby swords. Regular (ie short range bows). They had camels. But camels can’t be ridden in battle. Camel cavalry got off the camels before they engaged the enemy. The idea that these guys would alone ever have been able to threaten a Byzantine army was unimaginable. Until they did. Due to Mohammed cleverly picking a battle site that gave the Arab mobility the upper hand. They were also, just better at fighting in deserts. Their camel raiders would show up, attack an undefended target, as soon as the enemy would show up, they’d fuck off on the camels into the desert. The enemy can’t follow because they have baggage train of horses and retainers, all who will likely die of thirst in days. The Arabs used their mobility and the desert to allow them to do these hit and run tactics. They could also attacked Egypt overland. Which was something, up until they did, everybody assumed was impossible.

1. After the defeat at Yarmuk, what the Byzantinians needed was time to rebuild an army. But the Arabs were an army of highly mobile camel raiders. They would continually push forward and harass any remaining Byzantine forces and centres of control. While they couldn’t really hold onto to much, they could steal shit, making tax collecting in the Byzantinian empire near impossible. The method of Arab conquest wasn’t so much seizing outright control, as it was to undermine Byzantinian authority and image of invincibility, to convince the locals to willingly submit to the Arabs instead. It was more carrots than sticks.

1. For the Arab tribes the coalition was just supposed to be a one time thing to break the Byzantinians. Once they had been successful most of them wanted to go home. Mohammed and the early Caliphs continuously had to force breakaway Arab groups back into the Arab coalition. If the coalition had fallen apart there’s no way the caliphate would ever have become a thing.

1. Mohammed never thought about succession, and when Mohammed dies, Mohammed's father in law (not blood relative) Abu Bakr managed eventually to take control (after a civil war). He founded the Rashidun caliphate and created the governing body that would (he hoped in the future) transfer power peacefully, in the same spirit Mohammed had intended. He established the position of Caliph. Also not hereditary.

1. Upon Ali's ascent, as (fourth) caliph, and his defeat of usurpers, the Arab empire split in two. Shia under Ali and Sunni under Abdel Malik. The meritocratic system Mohammed and Abu Bakr had instituted is now ditched. Both Arab nations are now headed by dynasties. Abdel Malik the Umayyads, and Ali the Shia.

1. It’s in this split, that Islam is born.

1. The enemies of Abdul Malik (not Shia. Within the Umayyad's) produce coins with the inscription "Mohammed is the prophet of God". This is the first mention of Mohammed as a prophet. Around 690. So 60 years after the death of Mohammed. Abdul Malik responds by building the Dome of the Rock and starts having the Quran written. Tom Holland hypothesizes, that what is going on is that Muhammed has become a legendary figure. So anything he said or did is sacred at this point. But since nobody really remembered what he actually said, writers of this time would place their own opinions in the mouth of Mohammed. It became an ideological propaganda war to claim that Mohammed supported their side. Every idea traditionally associated with Islam comes from the court of Abdul Malik. It only later spreads to the Shia Arabs, transforming them into the Shia Muslims.

1. Abdel Malik, fifth Caliph, now ruling a vast population of non-Arabs, is the one who changes the Ummah from being the collected tribes of the Arabs, to something different. Now the Ummah is a ruling body of all Muslims. Which isn’t a thing at this point. So he has to invent the Muslim identity.

1. Muslim scribes backdate events and statements to create the illusion that this wasn't stuff they just made up (or more accurately imported from Roman or Sassanian legal codes). And rapidly a religious system emerges to help govern and maintain a vast multi-ethnic empire.

1. But even after creating Islam, Islam is initially only intended to be the religion of the ruling elite, to bind them together. The Muslims don’t proselytise. It’s seems to only have been a creation intended to make rule and transfer of power within the ruling elite stable. Abdul Malik was trying to avoid a civil war, that up to that point, took place, every single time a new caliph took over. And he was worried that the Arab empire would continually fracture over time. Like Alexander's Greek empire did.

1. Islam was initially only the religion of the ruling elite. It didn't try to convert anyone who wasn't part of the little ruling Arab elite. This can all be traced to Abdul Malik.

1. In the court of Abdul Malik there was a conflict between the autocratic ruler (caliph), and his ethnically Roman and Persian bureaucrats running the empire. The Arabs were just a bunch of illiterate warriors. They need educated people to run the empire. These were all people schooled in the Persian or Roman way of doing things, as well as Roman and Persian philosophy. So all of that is brought into Islam. The Sharia is heavily influenced by the Justinian Codex. Rome’s unique selling point, and arguably, it’s main strength, and reason for staying in power for so long, had always been laws that even the emperor were bound to. This acted as preventing abuses of power. It created more stable governments. The way they got the caliph to go along with this is to place their laws and ideas in the mouth of Mohammed. So it wasn’t sold as the bureaucrats reigning in the Caliph’s powers, it was the word of Mohammed. Anything they said would be backdated to either Mohammed or any of the successors of Mohammed.

1. This leads to some pretty bizarre suras. Since Mohammed, an illiterate guy who supposedly lives in a desert backwater has opinions on dental hygiene, a thoroughly urban Roman issue. There’s plenty of evidence in the Quran that this is a product of members of a highly literate urban educated elite. Not an illiterate step nomad. New suras keep being added for another hundred years, after which the Quran is locked down in the 850’ies.

1. Once the Caliphate had stabilised the people who lived in the fertile crescent were happy enough to be ruled by the Arabs. It seemed to them, irrelevant who ruled them. So the Caliphate became an institution that survives into the modern day.

Episode 57 – Why did the Arabs win? Part 2: In the Shadow of the Sword

An interview with Tom Holland, author of the book “In the Shadow of the Sword.” The book traces the origins of Islam by looking at the Jewish, Roman and Persian worlds of late antiquity…

thehistoryofbyzantium.com

Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Yarmuk


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakhmids

Ghassanids - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Ummah - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[DrZoidberg]

Another interesting factoid is that even after the Battle of Yarmuk, and the Byzantinians were up shit creak with a paddle, they weren't panicking. They seemed to see this as a temporary setback, and the emperors and church were going about things as they always had. The assumption was that the new Arab empire would soon self destruct, and the Byzantines would then be welcome back to pick up the pieces. As the Roman empire had done, so many times in the past. It would take decades for the realization that this wasn't just a temporary setback, to sink in.

 

[steve_bank]

From a book I read on Mohamed he lived on a trade route exposed to different relgions. IJe refers to Jews as The People Of The Book. He considered Jesus a prophet and that he himnself was the last of the prophets, the usual creation of authority and power.

He saw Jews of his time as having lost the true biblical path.

There is corobortion of the existence of Mohamed. He unified Arab tribes with different beliefs under one faith, by persuasion and force.

 

[DrZoidberg]

From a book I read on Mohamed he lived on a trade route exposed to different relgions. IJe refers to Jews as The People Of The Book. He considered Jesus a prophet and that he himnself was the last of the prophets, the usual creation of authority and power.

He saw Jews of his time as having lost the true biblical path.

There is corobortion of the existence of Mohamed. He unified Arab tribes with different beliefs under one faith, by persuasion and force.

According to Tom Holland Mohammed (just like Jesus) has all the hallmarks of being a mythical character. Ie, the man really existed. But the chances that he's anything like what is described in their sacred text is low. The fact that Mohammed led a scrappy bunch of upstarts to topple the world's greatest empire (in all of history) was bound to make him a larger than life character.

His background is exaggerated in order to make him more scrappy. He's an orphan. Pity points. He's a genius general, as well as a world class philosopher and poet. Also illiterate. Hmm... He's a guy who goes to cave's to have visions yet is a shrewd world class politicians, tirelessly building alliances. His army, largely Nestorian Christians, convert to Islam without much conflict... yeah... right. Because Christians tend to just roll over when their faith is challenged.

I think Tom Holland's theory sounds pretty solid. Ie, that Islam was crowbared into his backstory after the fact. How else could the Arab's have conquered the Byzantine and Sassanian empires if it wasn't for divine intervention? After the fact it's easy to convert. At that point Mohammed had already proved he was the winning team. But before he had any power or victories under his belt, why would anybody convert to his new religion?

 

[DrZoidberg]

Iconoclasm

Here's another, highly misunderstood, era of Christian history. The period after it became clear Islam wasn't a passing fad to the time leading up the the crusades, and an attempt to unify the east and western churches. (750 AD to about 850 AD).

The interesting bit is that wikipedia on this period is completely wrong. Or rather, describes the symptom. Not the cause.

The iconoclast debate was officially about how to interpret the second commandment. More specifically, were images of Jesus and Mary idolatry, and therefore forbidden.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Wikipedia presents the surviving church histories as an accurate representation of the debate, and it's made to be only about theological hair splitting. In reality it was... as it always is... power politics.

The way the Byzantines saw the world, if the armies of Rome (the Byzantines didn't call themselves "Byzantines", they called themselves "Roman") were successful in battle, then whatever theological position it's emperor had, must have been the one approved of by God. If there were natural disasters or a re-emergence of plague, then likewise, it was interpreted as disfavor by God. The emperors and ruling elite, knew this and played into it, Not only that, if any faction would lose a power struggle, they would later get slapped with whatever labels were currently out of favour, as well as accusations of debauched living (orgies, homosexuality and his wife was a slut).

The theological positions are more like sports shirts at a ball game, rather than any intellectual debate. But that’s the only thing that made it into the Wikipedia articles. Which makes the Christians of that era come across as hysterics splitting hairs on complete bullshit as their empire slowly crumbled. They didn't.

This was a politically unstable era. Anybody who managed to rise to the top obviously had a laser focus on playing the political game and outmaneuvering ones opponents. They would pick whatever ideological or theological team they thought would ally themselves with the most powerful support base.

The iconophile position won in the end. The reasons for this has nothing to do with the Bible or anything in theological. Just pure power politics.

A quick summary is that the Iconoclasts were allied to the Heraclian (userper) imperial dynasty, and the Iconophile position were allied to the old imperial order. Since Syria and the Levant were lost to the Arabs (at the same time Heraclius grabbed power), they stayed Iconophile. Since the Muslim Arabs picked the iconoclast position, their Christian subjects clung to iconophilia as a way to maintain a distinct identity. The Roman pope had no idea what the fuck the Byzantines were on about, since this is the period when the popes of Rome increasingly turned to the Frankish king support and for protection, rather than asking the increasingly dysfunctional Byzantine emperor for help. So this debate completely past the Roman pope by. As the Heraclian dynasty and their allies lost positions of power in Constantinople iconoclasm went out of fashion and history remembers them as debauched perverted monsters. Even though they must have been highly effective and conscientious rulers.

Episode 71 – Iconoclasm

We take a look at the whole period of Iconoclasm as an introduction to this era. Period: 718-843 Download: Iconoclasm RSS Feed: The History of Byzantium If you want to send in feedback to the podca…

thehistoryofbyzantium.com

Byzantine Iconoclasm - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Hermit]

Isn't Jesus reported to have said that he did not come to abolish the law, but to uphold it? Did they miss that bit, or just rationalized it away?

And what is Torah, to you? Just an English translation of an ancient book of laws? Is that what you think Jesus came to uphold? Why would God visit us in person just to tell us to do what we were already doing, worshipping books and hurting each other? I don't think it was crazy or mistaken to search for a deeper meaning within those words as the Gnostics did and do.

The law needed upholding for the same reason Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg's All Saints' Church in 1517: The religion was in need of being reformed to its original, wholesome self. Jesus was aware of the aberrant uses and abuses religious practice had evolved to. His cleansing of the temple is evidence of it (John 2:13–16, Luke 19:45–48, Matthew 21:12–17, Mark 11:15–19), as is his condemnation of the Pharisees (Matthew 23). He has indeed come to uphold the law because nobody else did.

Disclaimer: I regard religions as bullshit.

 

[steve_bank]

Isn't Jesus reported to have said that he did not come to abolish the law, but to uphold it? Did they miss that bit, or just rationalized it away?

And what is Torah, to you? Just an English translation of an ancient book of laws? Is that what you think Jesus came to uphold? Why would God visit us in person just to tell us to do what we were already doing, worshipping books and hurting each other? I don't think it was crazy or mistaken to search for a deeper meaning within those words as the Gnostics did and do.

The law needed upholding for the same reason Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg's All Saints' Church in 1517: The religion was in need of being reformed to its original, wholesome self. Jesus was aware of the aberrant uses and abuses religious practice had evolved to. His cleansing of the temple is evidence of it (John 2:13–16, Luke 19:45–48, Matthew 21:12–17, Mark 11:15–19), as is his condemnation of the Pharisees (Matthew 23). He has indeed come to uphold the law because nobody else did.

Disclaimer: I regard religions as bullshit.

What you have as Christianity is better called Paulism.

Jesus was a Jew preaching to Jews f his time involing Jewsh prophes amd scripture.

If you want 'real Christianity ' then I'd say become Jewish. I have known some who have.

Paul took the Jewishness out of Jesus and opened it up to non Jews. As Paul said, it is not circumcision that makes you Jewish, it is what is in your heart. He got rid of the dietary rules.

Would Jesus as a Jew caLling Jews back to traditional morality ad quoting Jewish scripture, would he not have kept kosher when eating?