A monotheistic holy days mash-up with blood on everybody's hands

Christians in the world outside of Orthodoxy (unless Zelensky got the Ukranian church to move Easter as well as Christmas) celebrated Easter March 29.

Muslims had started Ramadan before that. 

Then, came the solar eclipse April 8, which means nothing to the non-superstitious.

But, the sliver of crescent moon the day after meant Ramadan was done and it was time for Eid al-Fitr.

Up next? Passover, starting Monday, April 22.

And, to wrap? The Orthodox Easter (a majority of Palestinians are Orthodox, I think, but don't quote me) is May 5.

All three of these world religions have genocidal blood on their hands against each other.

Christians, even if Hitler wasn't one, actively participated individually in the Holocaust. Centuries before that, before the Protestant Reformation, both Catholic and Orthodox leaders promoted the blood libel that Jews needed Gentile blood for matzoh. And, Pope Urban II did nothing to condemn First Crusade genocide against Jews in the Rhineland. Let us also not forget, via de las Casas, debate over whether American Indians were pre-Christian or anti-Christian, and thus, how they could be treated. Or mistreated.

Muslims? In what's widely recognized as not "just" genocide, but a holocaust, the Ottoman Empire, where the sultan was, at least nominally, the spiritual leader of Sunni Muslims as well as secular head of the empire Beyond that, per Wiki's page on the causes of this, the Empire committed further massacres before World War I that arguably also rose to the level of genocide. (So did the secular Turkish state after the war.) Those earlier massacres under Sultan Abdul Hamid II, even if not entirely religious, had a religious element. So did the WWI genocide under Mehmed V, who also formally declared jihad after entering the war. On the other hand, these and other genocides weren't entirely religious, and it's hypocritical for Jewish historians like Benny Morris to go ax-grinding.

And, we're now there. Beyond the genocide now having some degree of religious undertone, let us not forget that the Tanakh / Christian Old Testament has Yahweh ordering a holocaust — not just a genocide, a holocaust — against Amalek. Doesn't matter if it's legend/myth. Orthodox Jews, and everybody in power in Zionist Israel's government, cites it. And, historically, the forced conversion of the Idumeans at least approaches genocide. (Given that, per Yonathan Adler, most Jews didn't start regular observance of dietary and ritual purity laws until Hasmonean times, I think these conversions, as well as those of the Itureans, were indeed forcible.) And, Jews can be racist like Christians or Muslims even to fellow believers. Look at the treatment of Beta Israel.

Let's go back to the other two "western monotheisms." In addition to the jizya, many Muslim empires, nations, powers, required both Jews and Christians to wear special, identifying clothing long before popes came up with Magen David for Jews in the Rome ghetto they had created. But, and possibly by direct influence, popes did do that and it spread from there.

That said, don't get smug, Gnu Atheists. 

Stalin has genocidal blood on his hands from the Holodomor. But, don't act so persecuted, Ukrainians. By death rate, it hit harder in the Kazakh SSR than in the Ukrainian SSR. That said, Gnus, don't pull out the old bullshit about "Stalin went to an Orthodox seminary." I'll kick you in your genocidal ass.

Mao has genocidal blood on his hands from The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and in smaller degrees other Maoist-derived stupidities.

Yes, they're all genocides, at least in my book. A deliberate targeting of one's own people, or socioeconomic classes within one's own people, counts as genocide in my book just like racial or religious genocides. That makes the French Revolution one, too, does it not?

Oh, and Hitler wasn't really Christian, even if not "anti-religious" (other than against Judaism) in the way Stalin and Mao were. We'll just leave that there.

A slanderous lying fuq at Patheos

 Shock me that this is something that, on the political side, Charles Kuffner glommed on to.

A Fred Clark claims at Patheos (which I don't go to on my own since they chased the atheists off) that the only diff between White and Black evangelical Christians is racism or not.

Really? 

For starters, this ignores "liberal evangelicals." Sojourners mag came immediately to my mind. An internet search gives you liberal evangelical Episcopalians for doorknob's sake, and that's a pretty White denomination. Or a liberal evangelical Facebook group.

Second, contra Clark's asterisk that, racism aside, there's actually lots of differences between White and Black, or broader non-White evangelicals overstates those differences.

Third, contra Clark, per an actually academic Christian Century, there's not theological unity within White evangelicals anyway. The unity factor, today, for (conservative) White evangelicals (CC ignores the Sojourners world too) is politics.

Fred Clark could at least be that honest. Shock me that it's at the Slacktivist vertical. That has long been dreck.

Now, per Ryan Burge, one can argue about how politically liberal or not self-proclaimed liberal evangelicals are. But that's a different story. And, per Sojourners' Wiki page, Burge would appear to be right on them not being THAT liberal politically.

==

Shock me that at another post, also touted by Kuff, Clark rolls out the stupidity of the trolley problem, whose derpity I discussed here a week ago.

The United Methodist Church crackup, detailed

 Shock me that the (currently) second-largest United Methodist church in the US is in Southlake, tilts semi-wingnut within the UMC, and has its growth being driven by Californication. 

More seriously, "shock me" that the departing churches are in general, older and whiter. They're also more Southern, as well as more theologically conservative in general.  While "teh gay" and official UMC "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gay ministers is driving the split, larger social justice issues — or resistance to them — in the post-George Floyd era are also in play.

Also shock me that there's not one but two official conservative denominational offshoots. Once the tent is shrunk, there's usually a fight about just how small it should be. Liturgy (including inclusive language), worship styles, hymnody and other things come into play. Also, within more conservative Methodists, there may be frisson, or fission, between modern conservative evangelical types and traditional conservative Methodists.

And, follow the money:

Mr. Bickerton, the bishop, said that many of the congregations that left the United Methodists seemed to be motivated as much by a desire for financial independence as by deep theological differences. “We’ve learned this is not as much about human sexuality as we thought,” he said. “This is about power, control and money.” ... Because of its extraordinary growth, White’s Chapel paid the denomination about $600,000 annually, and had lost confidence that its money was being well spent by a remote administrative bureaucracy, said Rev. Larry Duggins, a longtime member who the church hired to help manage the separation process.

And, follow a church polity matter.

In Southlake, congregants were increasingly wary of the direction of the national denomination’s theology. But they were also unhappy with the Methodist policy of moving pastors to new locations every three years.

Methodists aren't alone here. Catholics reassign priests about every 4-5 years. And, within Methodism in the US, it's been a policy for decades if not longer. The idea, in both churches, as I understand it, is precisely to keep an individual minister from building up a church-politics power base. Especially within Protestant churches that might be a bit less hierarchical than Catholicism, the idea of megachurch pastors within their midst is problematic. They look at the Southern Baptist Convention and say they don't want that. (Surprised my former-life conservative wing of Lutheranism doesn't have more problems with this.)

Also, I think that like Catholics and Episcopalians (whose own fissures, per the 1928 Book of Common Prayer Anglican-type US Episcopalian fracture), there's church property ownership issues with the Methodist split. That too is a matter of follow the money.

The bacon on the grill for Ramadan and beyond

I ate the bacon

That was on the grill

 

And which

You were surely ignoring

And not only

Because of Ramadan.

Or Yom Kippur.

Or Good Friday.

 

It was delicious.

No forgiveness needed.

 

Riffing, of course, on William Carlos Williams' "This is Just to Say."

 

Note: I'm not a Gnu Atheist, but I do skewer at times. 

Also, I'm a semi-vegetarian, but here's how to get crisp oven-roasted bacon.

Love yourself and probably start there: The Buddha vs Paul, Jesus and the Tanakh

I mentioned two weeks ago that I had a "secular spiritual experience" that, in part, involved the most famous logion from the Gospel of Thomas.

Shortly before I saw the standing dead ponderosa pine tree with sprout of whatever growing inside, I saw what I called a "namaste" rock, while hiking high on the east side of the San Juan Mountains. It reminded me of a similar rock at Middle Emerald Pool in Zion National Park, seen deliberately on a second visit. With both visits, I made "photo posters" in Photoshop of one of the better-known quotes of the Buddha, both shorter version and long version. Here's one of the photo posters, with longer version.

And, here's the new namaste rock from the most recent trip.

Finally, the short version of the quote, from the last visit I made to Zion:

First, note that I called it a "SECULAR spiritual experience." "Spiritual experience" by itself is too open to misinterpretation and I don't want to look like a pseudo-secularist, as I perceive Barbara Ehrenreich as being. 

Related to that? I invented a new word. I can't remember if it was at that moment, but it was before that hike ended. It's "humaste," a totally secular alternative to "namaste."

Now, to the meat of the header.

Jesus is, of course, asked the summary of the Torah, and he famously quoted two passages from the Torah, Deuteronomy 6:5, after the Shema in 6:4, and Leviticus 19:18 (Mark, here):

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ No other commandment is greater than these.”

The context beyond that?

Mark 12 just thrust it into a group of brief sayings that portray Jesus being religiously tested. Matthew 22 has it in the same context, but with the parable of the wedding banquet, Q material, leading off the chapter. Luke 10 totally reframes it. It occurs at an early part of Jesus' ministry, and has neither the wedding banquet nor any of the other Markan material. Instead, it's all "Gentile mission" stuff, as the chapter starts with the "mission of the 70" and ends with Jesus pivoting from his answers to a didactic story, similar to a pronouncement story, to explain who a "neighbor" is. You know that as "The Good Samaritan," and Samaritans are picked not to shame a Jewish audience, since Jesus never told such a story in reality, but as further justification for a Gentile mission and pivot.

Within the Tanakh, I already noted the context of the "first commandment of love." The second is the summation of a set of divarim which somewhat parallel the 10 famous ones in Exodus and Deuteronomy. The parallel is partial because the set in Leviticus focus entirely on interpersonal relationships, albeit with Yahweh hovering in the background, and have no human-divine commands or warnings.

Finally, of course, there's Paul's famous chapter on love, 1 Corinthians 13.

What's missing in all of those is what's front and center in the Buddha's words. (I'll assume he actually said them.)

The concept of self-love, and even more, the need for self-love and the need for people to be reminded of this.

Christians talk about how Jesus came to save a broken world.

If you accept the concept of "broken world" but reject ideas of "original sin," or of older Jewish ideas for sacrifice, the Buddha is juxtaposed in something like this as trying to heal and nurture a broken world. (This is setting aside the metaphysics that Buddhism as a religion incorporated from pre-Hindu Indian Epic religion, and setting aside the issue of how much the Buddha himself bought into that.)

And, contra Christians who talk about Jesus' love, and focusing on this world as well as the next? The Buddha focuses on this world first, even if he did buy Indian Epic metaphysics.

That's even more true on trumping Paul. Paul, the apostle of abnegation, writes an allegedly beautiful chapter, but it's all about abnegating (and at times blind) love, and arguably rejects self love in verse 5:

It is not rude, it is not self-seeking

The Buddha would beg to differ on the "not self-seeking." In fact, I think he'd actually, per Zen, say "mu" to Paul's whole angle, not just in the verse but the chapter.

As for the Leviticus 19 background, the Buddha probably would say, to riff on Robert Frost, that good self-love makes good neighboring.

As for Deuteronomy 6? It eventually gets to the "jealous god" that heads up the Jewish version of the Ten Divarim. Enough said there.

==

Footnote: I've said repeatedly that Buddhism is a religion. Backgrounding the parenthetical expression above, per my take on the Diamond Sutra, I think Siddhartha himself was indeed a metaphysician. Once again, Bob Wright is wrong.

==

Update: I should have thought about the old "If it sounds too good to be true, it is," and also how Buddhism, even more than Hinduism, is made amenable (note that first word) to New Ageism. Turns out, Gautama said neither half of the above quote.

==

Update: To go one better on the fake Buddha quotes (which, per the link above, do derive in part from actual quotes and ideas), I'll go beyond both New Agey and Prince Gautama and say:

"Nobody else CAN love you as much as you CAN love yourself. To do that, you must accept yourself." 

"Namaste" — worse than "harijan"? Both bad, but both Christian

 "Harijan" was Gandhi's popularization and reinvention with a twist of a term for the Outcasts or Untouchables. It means, "the lord's person(s)." The first half is cognate, I believe, with German "Herr" and English "sir." Some encyclopedias define it as "Vishnu's person," but I think that is not fully right.

And, it is offensive, not just because the Supreme Court of India said so. Calling the Dalit's the 'lord's children" while ignoring the Hindu caste structure that puts them there? Offensive.

I say the same for "namaste." Claiming to recognize the divine in someone else when said in a pitying way? Offensive.

Both words in some way, to me, seem to say that "god considers you a child of his, and your disability shows god at work and challenges us."

But, it's not Hinduism alone, or eastern religions alone, that hold this.

Jeebus himself, in John 9:2-3:

2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.

There you go.

If the Tacitus passage on Nero, the Great Fire, and Christians is an interpolation, why?

I addressed week before last week how John Drinkwater handles the infamous passages from Tacitus' Annals about Nero's ALLEGED cruel punishment of Christians after the Great Fire. Beyond what I already knew about the Great Fire, about Tacitus in general, and about the Greek itacism and other problems with the specific issues in the passage, I also relied on this piece from a religion Wiki (warning: friendly to Jesus mythicism) which gave me more food for thought.

Tertullian and other Church fathers cite no such passage, and it appears not to be referenced by any Christian before 400 CE.  Sulpicius Severus, ca 400 CE, appears to be the first Christian to write about it, but his account in his "Sacred History" is hugely suspect. It's basically a "blown-out" version of Tacitus. It also gets many other things wrong, starting with claiming there was a massive number of Christians at that time, then that Nero outlawed Christianity along with starting the persecutions. Clement I, especially if one goes by "traditional" date and provenance, would have readers who would have remembered this, had it happened. He doesn't mention it. Celsus surely would have flung this issue at Origin, had he known of it, and of course Origen would have found some way to try refute it. He doesn't discuss it. Tertullian, who cites Tacitus a fair amount, doesn't mention it. Nor Eusebius, the first Christian historian.

And, some early writings actually explicitly counter Tacitus' claim. Brent Shaw, in an academic journal, extracted and summarized here by Charles Mercier, has the details on the possibility this is an interpolation. (Mercier then has a Part 2, which frames Catholic touting of Neronian martyrs within Reformation hagiography.) Shaw, per Mercier's Part 1, doesn't totally agree with the Religion Wiki take on why this is possibly an interpolation. As noted, if the passage IS genuine, the best and most we can derive from it, in my opinion, is that Tacitus was doing a bank shot to smear Nero by saying his torturous deaths were so cruel that Christians got sympathy. (I'm not fully ready to commit to it being an interpolation, as that's an argument from silence, and to do otherwise risks petard-hoisting. That said, [motivated reasoning alert?] the idea that there are degrees of silence would nuance that.)

But, what if it IS an interpolation? Why?

Let's say that Christians of 300 CE or later read Suetonius, and took his account that Claudius expelled the Jews who were engaged in Messianic disturbances (sic on my interpretation of ChrEEStos) and instead took that to be Jesus. 

So, why extrapolate from there to Nero?

Per my big piece about the differences between "antichrist," "man of lawlessness" and "666/The Beast," and John Chyrsostom chiding Christians of his time for visiting synagogues? At 400 CE, Christians still would have known enough Hebrew and/or Aramaic to know that the "666" was Nero. (As I note there, "Nero Caesar" in the Hebrew alphabet is נרון קסר‎ NRON QSR, which when used as numbers represent 50 200 6 50 100 60 200, which add to 666. See the link at the top of the paragraph for more detail.) They would not have know that this could have come from a disciple of John the Baptist who wrote the non-Christian core of Revelation, so they asked, "WHY is Nero the Beast"? And, they created the answer. There may also be angles related to Constantinople as the New Rome and other things.

That said, that leads to a third theoretical option besides Tacitus being true here. That is that there were messianic disturbances at this time, tied to the precursor of the revolt and the First Jewish War in Judea. We have Claudius' previous expulsion of the Jews from Rome. Tom Holland, in his book "Dynasty," notes that, according to Valerius Maximus, the first Roman expulsion of Jews happened way back in 139 BCE. That would have been just after the establishment of the Hasmonean kingdom. And, while the Christian population of Rome at this time (setting aside the issue of them counting themselves separate from Jews or not) was only 1/10 of 1 percent, Jews made up around 5 percent of Rome's population, as the past expulsions had in general not been permanent and Jew/non-Jew and Jewish/non-Jewish, to get at both culture and religion, differences weren't as sharply noticed as in Christian Europe, making returns easier.

But, how likely is that? Suetonius had mentioned the expulsion of the Jews under Claudius; surely he would have mentioned this, too, one would think. Tacitus and Suetonius would have used more explicitly anti-Jewish language, as both were writing after the First Jewish War. And, after the "separation" started, Christians would have cited this among anti-Jewish polemics.

Of the three, an interpolation seems more likely. The double bankshot seems less likely. The Jewish Messianic revolt seems not much more likely than Tacitus telling the truth here.

Update, May 26, 2024: A person at r/AcademicBiblical, in chat with me about a main comment of hers there, where she claims that 1 Clement, stripped of legendary accretions, is about Peter and Paul being killed by fellow Christians, nonetheless, in response to me, claims that the Tacitus is not an interpolation. 

I offered as a sidebar the Option B, that, if genuine by Tacitus, it's still a double-bankshot smear, projecting back from his own interactions with Christians, of what was a non-event, so that he could smear Nero even more than Christians.

As for said person's claims rejecting the interpolation idea? They note that the Correspondence of Paul and Seneca mentions the Great Fire earlier. Two counterpoints: First, on a late dating, only about 20 years earlier. So, it's in the same milieu, even if earlier. Second, the 11th letter of said correspondence is generally believed to be by a second forger than most other letters. Severus himself? Third counterpoint? As mentioned above? Tertullian regularly cited Tacitus, so why not here?

Finally, if you've read both, Severus just reads a lot like Tacitus.

Said person does reject an actual persecution, so they're solid there.

I raised the Tertullian and Celsus issues, and got pretty much a handwaving response.

That one is rather easily explicable. The Annals does not look like it was ever completely finished by Tacitus, or did not receive the full editing required, and so it also wasn't distributed nearly as widely. In fact, Tacitus' works in general were largely ignored, and the Annals was probably just in disrepair. So this isn't surprising nor indicative of much.

We'll agree to disagree. As I said in response, at the time of Severus, Jerome references all 30 books of Annals plus Histories. And, Tertullian wrote no more than a century later. And, got more handwaving in return:

Handwaving, half-truths and more.

Jerome is also writing after Sulpicius, so the Annals were at that point becoming known to Christians, so Jerome isn't surprising or pertinent there. 

And as we know, from the late second century to the early fourth century, Tacitus' works were actually in disrepair and the Annals was not read either by Christians or by Greco-Roman authors. It was just a text almost entirely unknown until there was a revival effort to try and bring his works into public eye (by pagans specifically). Read more

First, Jerome is relevant because it shows he knows them all, and he was enough of a historian for that era to probably have looked at all of them. And, ergo, it directly refutes the "and as we know" of the second paragraph.

I had debated about direct-quoting, even with the first exchange, but this confirmed in me to direct quote both. Especially because it gets even worse after that:

No, actually it doesn't. It shows that from Tacitus' writing, until 250 years later, there is no knowledge the Annals even existed.

And as a case in point, you can read Anthony Barrett's book Rome is Burning, which specifically notes a Roman emperor actively went out of his way to rejuvenate Tacitus' works because they had fallen into disrepair and obscurity. This was the Emperor Tacitus (reigned in 275 CE to 276), who specifically ordered Tacitus' works be revived.

As Barrett notes, even in the sixth century, Cassiodorus still refers to a "certain Cornelius [Tacitus]", using distanced terminology that implies his readers probably would have no familiarity, again speaking to Tacitus' poor reception.

Both Sulpicius and Jerome are writing *after* Emperor Tacitus' attempt to revive his ancestor's work. So no, nothing here is incorrect and is in perfect alignment with the historical record. The Annals were a habitually neglected source, and it was only after Tacitus' reputed descendant the Emperor Tacitus revived his reputation that the Annals started coming to people's attention. Thus, around 70 years later, Sulpicius finally reads the Annals and sees that passage, and Jerome finally knows of them later.

OK, an Emperor who is in the middle of the The Imperial Crisis, aka The Decline of the Third Century and reigns 6 months really has time to puff his namesake? And, certainly doesn't have the reign to make it happen, even if he ordered it? And, the Anthony Barrett who barely touches 4 stars with one book, and can't crack 3.5 on most? And, a handwaving interpretation of what Cassiodorus meant, while continuing to reject my comment about Jerome?

(Update: Per my review of a Melvin Goodman book, this isn't the only bit of suspiciousness from Sulpicius Severus, either.)

Anyway, I promised Crissy the last word. On Reddit, not here.

And, here's why I think that Correspondence piece can't earlier than 380 CE on the 11th letter. Yes, Christianity was legal before that under Constantine. It didn't become the state religion until 380 CE, under Theodosius I's Edict of Thessalonica.) Obviously, despite failings here and there, the Correspondence knew better than to reference a comment from Tacitus if a legitimate one existed.) Before that, no Christian writer would have felt safe blaming Nero. But, once the gloves were off, people besides Severus could simply have reference Tacitus without creating an interpolation, if the actual Tacitus had written something.

And, this leads to me offering further thought on the WHY.

After making Christianity the state religion, Theodosius launched the first attacks on paganism. A Sulpicius Severus would have written his own piece, as well as "dropping a dime" inside Tacitus as alleged proof, in support of these attacks.

"Look at the old Rome! Since the start of Christianity, it has persecuted us!"

Rather than the approach of the biblical gospels and Acts, to have gloves fully on vis-a-vis Rome, it was now time to take the gloves off in service of the New Rome.

Drinkwater on Nero, Tacitus and early Christians: what he gets wrong

Nero: Emperor and Court by John F. Drinkwater
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book gets an overall three-star rating, which itself is a complex of three subratings and some downward rounding. (I was probably at 3.5 stars overall, but with every full review here on Goodreads going 5 stars and the total of all ratings at 4.5? Nope. Needed some evening out.)

 Update: This is why StoryGraph's fractional star ratings are good.

As promised in my review, I said I would address some parts of my review in more detail, as it was more than long enough for a Goodreads review as is. Per the header?

First, I give an easy 5 stars on his discussion of the Principate and imperial administration in the whole latter half of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. 

Second, what was actually part three of the review?

Part three is 3 1/2 stars.

I agree with much of Drinkwater’s revisionist history (which is not sui generis by any means on Nero but is part of a trend).

At some point, however, Drinkwater’s revisionist history becomes apologetics. In this, it becomes so after the Great Fire, and especially after the Pisonian conspiracy. 

Second in the review and the subject of the header? Something of close intellectual interest to me? Nero, the Great Fire, Tacitus’ chapter in the Annals, and just who may have been persecuted, or not. Drinkwater gets 3 stars here, and that may be generous. I agree with Drinkwater that the fire was an accident. I agree that Tacitus seems to have seen it that way. I disagree on who, if anybody, was scapegoated.

First, I had initial email discussions about this with Drinkwater after I got the book on interlibrary loan but before I started reading. It was clear then that we would disagree on some things, but I found more to disagree with after getting into the appropriate section of the book.

First, Drinkwater claims, riffing on the book of Acts, that “Christians” were first called such NOT at Antioch, but at Rome at this time. I strongly disagree, first on grounds that there probably were no more than 600 Christians in Rome at this time (Drinkwater seems to be in the general ballpark on numbers HE postulates, and offered no real argument when I mentioned this in an email) and so, out of a population of 600,000 could not even have been on Nero’s radar screen, and second on grounds that Christians weren’t separated from Jews at the time enough to be separately identified. Beyond that, he’s making an argument from silence, and not a good one, IMO, and he knows that it's an argument from silence, whether he thinks it's a justifiable one or not. I don’t accept that from Christian mythicists and I don’t accept it from him. Ergo, in 64 CE, there WERE NO "Christians" to be singled out by label.

Given what Tacitus writes, the word he uses for “Christ” being an itacism in Greek, and other things, plus what I mention above? There are two options besides Christians being persecuted. One is that Messianic Jewish rebels were blamed …. “a certain ChrEEstos” χρηστός (the itacism for Christos Χριστός) being “HaMosiach,” or Jewish Messianic rebels. Suetonius claims Claudius booted Jews because of this same person (CHREStus was also a name adopted by freedmen), and I find it laughable that, if there’s truth behind that, that Suetonius is referring to Christians, though Drinkwater appears to think he was. See paragraph above. (That said, the CHREStus name's backstory could be connected to the itacism by Suetonuis and Tacitus being deliberate. Under this idea of mine, they would be saying: "Look at these idiotic, disgusting Christians, making a god out of a freedman!")

There's yet more to suggest this first option is more likely than actual Christians.

First, beyond the likelihood that Christians were only 1/10 of a percent of Rome’s population at the time  Jews were probably around 3-5 percent. 

Second, both Josephus and Acts discuss Messianic pretenders at this general time. The Great Fire was two years after James was lynched by Ananus the High Priest, and just two years before the start of the Jewish Revolt.

Third, Suetonius claims Claudius booted the Jews from Rome, probably about 12-15 years earlier, if it happened. AND, he too uses the itacism CHREStos, which gets back to what I say Tacitus, that was writing about Jewish Messianic disturbances; Drinkwater still thinks they were Christians.

Fourth? Drinkwater argues for Tacitus' religious knowledge and scholarship. Sure, he knew Roman religion, both the Olympians and other things like the Vestals, household gods, etc. He knew his Greek religion. How well did he know Judaism? And, given that his "knowledge" of Christianity is largely the repetition of scurrilous rumor, his actual knowledge was probably almost nonexistent.

The second option more likely to me than actual Christians is that Tacitus is repeating another scurrilous story, like the ones he repeats about Christians in his own time, and figures he can “bank shot” a smear of Christians and a smear of Nero for his barbaric ALLEGED executions making them look sympathetic all at once. (Remember, if there was no separate identification of Christians, there was no execution of them as such.)

Really, there's several issues going on here.

I’m not absolutely sure of Drinkwater’s take on all of them, though between the book and the exchange of several emails, I think I’ve got pretty good guesses, and I offer a mix of summary of the above and expansion of some areas.

1. Did Tacitus think the fire was arson or accident? 

2. Regardless of what he thought, did he see this as a tool to scapegoat Nero, Christians or both? 

3. Did Tacitus (and Suetonius, with his claim Claudius expelled the Jews due to instigation of CHRESTus) really understand Judaism in general that much, let alone Messianic strains, let alone Xianity to the degree it was starting to separate by the time Tacitus and Suetonius wrote? 

4. What actually happened, both on fire and scapegoating? 

5. COULD there have been enough Xns to be on Nero’s radar screen AS CHRISTIANS to even have been scapegoated?

Drinkwater and I will disagree a fair amount on some of this. Let’s dig in. 

1. I am not sure, but I think Drinkwater thinks Tacitus may have thought it was. I think he considered it plausible, I’ll put it that way. 

2. I say yes to both. It’s funny, because Tacitus was “pulling the ladder up” 2,000 years ago, elevated to senatorial class by the Flavians. What if Nero had lived and had done that himself? On the second, yes, I think both he and Suetonius were projecting backward the rumors they heard about Xns in their own day, such as “ritual cannibalism” (the Euchariast) wrapped inside an orgy (the larger agape feast.) More on Tacitus: If you read the Annuals, ch 45 after the famous ch 44 in book 15, it’s clear that he thinks Xns were reprehensible but Nero even more so in how savagely he treated them.

3. Drinkwater explicitly, in exchange of emails, cites Tacitus as a religious scholar. Maybe of Roman religion. And certain aspects of Greek religion. Of Judaism, or Greek, or larger Hellenistic/eastern Mediterranean popular religion? Color me skeptical. The CHRESTus / ChristOS itacism is one reason why. Roman religion had little to do with anointing. That was more common in Greek religion, which is why Latin doesn’t even have the word commonly used. Yes, “unctus” leads to “Extreme Unction,” but seriously, that just wasn’t a word of use in Classical Latin. That relates to CHRESTus being a name taken by freedmen, but not Unctus.

In addition, Tacitus has been accused of bias against Eastern religions.

Related? Many scholars talk about Tacitus’ careful investigation. But, his large-scale copying from Pliny the Elder for his own Germania without ever crossing the borders, and without even updating Pliny’s political descriptions, puts paid to that. No less than Syme notes this. His repetition of ethnographic stereotypes (shades of Hume!) in the Germania also raises issues.

4. What actually happened? Drinkwater and I agree on the fire being accidental. We agree that Tacitus claims Nero scapegoated Xns. We disagree on who, if anybody, Nero actually DID scapegoat. Now we’re at point 5. 

5. First, I reject Drinkwater’s claim of the first use of “Christians.” I listed most of this above, but here's more. If Jews were 3-5 percent of the population of Rome, and that may be mildly conservative, enough of THEM might have been riled up (witness the Jewish quarter of Alexandria, the Kitos War and other things) it could have been an issue. So, without starting the Fire, could riotous Jews have been blamed by Nero? Yes. Could Tacitus, through a mix of anti-Xn stance and ignorance of Judaism, piggybacked on this? Yes. Is this guaranteed to be what happened? Not at all. There may have been no disturbances. See option two above.

Then, there's the issue of whether or not Tacitus wrote this.

Drinkwater rejects that it's an interpolation, but the case isn't ironclad. A religions wiki notes the problems: Not cited by Tertullian, who otherwise regularly cites Tacitus. Apparently not cited by Celsus, as Origen doesn’t fire back at any such thing. Not cited by Clement of Alexandria or Eusebius, the first two compilers of pagan stories about Christianity. Sulpicius Severus, ca 400 CE, appears to be the first Christian to write about it, but his account is hugely suspect. It also notes, contra Drinkwater, Tacitus’ overestimation of the numbers of Christians in this time. And, it states that death by burning wasn't a Roman punishment at this time. (I hadn't heard of claims that it was an interpolation before reading a review of this and other recent Nero revisionism, but ... it's plausible. I have more in a separate post.)

Brent Shaw, in an academic journal, extracted and summarized here by Charles Mercier, has the details on the possibility this is an interpolation. (Mercier then has a Part 2, which frames Catholic touting of Neronian martyrs within Reformation hagiography.) Shaw, per Mercier's Part 1, doesn't totally agree with the Religion Wiki take on why this is possibly an interpolation.

No, finally finally a second side note. Drinkwater’s an academic historian, yet uses “AD” rather than “CE” (and when needed, “BC” rather than “BCE.” I had noted it earlier, but given how wrong I think he is about Xns and the Great Fire, it may just have been the tipping point down to a third star, inasmuch as I now wonder if it’s something related to his thoughts on Tacitus. OTOH, Adrian Goldsworthy does the same; maybe it’s imperial hubris of older British historians?

(Update: Per my review of a Melvin Goodman book, this isn't the only bit of suspiciousness from Sulpicius Severus, either.)

View all my reviews

Waxing science, waning religion

Note: Per the tagline, I wrote this 12 years ago. While doing a search on my computer recently, I came across it and realized I'd never posted it here.

The slimmest clarion of new crescent moon 

Strives against being horizontally swallowed 

By a modern, urbanized mix 

Of haze, smog, high-rise skyline and near-solstice summer sunset. 

A totem of a more simplistic time 

(Whether simple or not) 

When times were measured by moons 

Along with sacrifices and other aspects of worship 

As the stench of old, dried, burnt blood 

Coated stones, steles, tabernacles and temples; 

Nasty, brutish, short and simplistic, even if not simple. 

Nor bygone. 

Yet today several million lobster loathers, 

And a billion followers of an illiterate itinerant peddler, 

Mark their calendars by that same crescent, 

While well more than a billion adherents 

Of a dead rebel Jew they cluelessly deify 

Mark his death by that same lunar orb. 

What would Earth by like without that Moon? 

No science of Galileo and Apollo landings, 

But no madness of Middle Eastern myths. 

 — May 31, 2009

Per the last stanza, a lot of people have written about how astronomy might be far different without Earth having a satellite, especially one as close as our Moon. And, that sets aside the issue of how the biology of our plant would be different without that.

But, given the centrality of lunar issues to many world religions, even if lunar month observances were secular, as a way of marking time, as well as endowed with religious import, I don't think you can talk about how science would be changed without talking about how religion would as well.

Early Christian book destruction: Are we missing something?

 Historical theology scholars and other students of Christian origins know that "The True Word," the polemic of Celsus against early Christianity, was later likely destroyed (after imperial ban) and we know it only in fragments quoted by Origen in "Contra Celsus." (It's interesting to note that already, pre-200, Celsus was afraid of the growth of Christianity. Is that tacit support for the "soft mythicist" idea that Jesus was actually one of the Pharisees crucified by Alexander Jannaeus a century before the gospel dating of his life?

Likewise, Philostratus' gospel of Apollonius of Tyana was based on one or more earlier sources — one that also, indirectly, refutes mythicists by showing how early legendary accretions can develop. It's unknown if these earlier sources were simply lost, or destroyed. It's also unknown why no emperor issued a ban against it. Surely, in the fourth and fifth centuries, it wasn't already that unknown.

What about a possible third set of gospels which have never even been hinted at existing?

Mandaeism is an almost-dead world religion allegedly based on John the Baptizer having a position broadly analogous to Jesus in Christianity. The religion, beyond claiming John as its chief prophet (though not as a dying-rising savior god) is Gnosticizing, but not necessarily fully Gnostic. The first writings trace back to the third century CE, though some want to push them earlier. Given that Acts 18-19 has disclples of John wandering around western Asia Minor (in the very early second century CE by my dating of Acts), and the way John's baptism is made to look "less than" that of Jesus (who only gives a mandate to baptize in Matthew), they must have been seen as some sort of competition. So, were some of their writings destroyed as well? Or just lost within the empire as the religion settled (precariously, at times) in Parthian and Sassanid controlled Mesopotamia?

The newest foul ball by Bart Ehrman (Update: Second newest)

I wasn't at all a fan of his previous book, on the history of Christian origins, giving it two stars and also pointing out specific problems and errors with it.

I'm going to beat the rush and tell you to not even bother with his latest book, "Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife." It has its own scholarly failings; in fact, per this two-star review, it's arguably not a scholarly history at all.

Bart Ehrman’s latest book is not a scholarly treatment of the history of concepts of the afterlife. Instead it’s a popular account of the history of the relatively simplistic account of the afterlife the author believes to be held by many Americans. … A lot of the book is then devoted to Ehrman’s personal theory that Jesus Christ and St. Paul believed in the annihilation instead of the eternal punishment of wicked souls. It’s rather idiosyncratic and based on a host of assumptions.

And, if he claims that JW-type annihilation was the default position of Judaism at the turn of the eras and the rise of Jesus, or at least the belief of Jesus and Paul, Ehrman the alleged agnostic is arguably also Ehrman the Freudian projectionist about some of his personal fears still inside, which in turn means we all need to be more skeptical of him otherwise.

Weirdly, "Tippling Philosopher" blogger Jonathan M.S. Pearce can pivot from writing blank checks to un-academic Jesus mythicists to giving guest post space to people who think Ehrman is on to something.

As I said there:

“But the punishment was not eternal.” 

Wrong, as others have noted, per Matthew 25:41 etc. 

The fire is “everlasting” and was “prepared for the devil and his angels.” 

“Hell as we know it (a little metaphysical humor there) was largely a construct developed in the 2nd and 3rd centuries by the church hierarchy after Jesus and Paul.” 

Wrong. It came in “intertestamental” times from Zoroastrianism. And, if Ehrman is making these claims, he’s wrong too. And, far from the first time. His last book before this, on the triumph of Xianity, got a two-star review from me. And, if he dismisses Zoroastrian influence because the first of its texts to mention such ideas came after the Jews returned from exile, he’s an idiot to ignore the Jews remaining in Babylon and communication between them and ones of Judea. 

One two star review of the book on Amazon nails it: 

This is merely Ehrman’s personal view, and it’s not scholarly.

Move along. 

You, too, Dana.

No, he's not on to anything.

And, to put it bluntly? The subtitle is a lie. 

Update, Jan. 29, 2022: I found the book at the Denton library and grokked it earlier today. Ehrman doesn't even mention Matthew 25. Nope, not at all. He does mention the Parable of the Tares and the Wheat from elsewhere, but not the one of the Sheep and the Goats from Matthew 25. And, to me, that's a silence that speaks loudly. The tares and the wheat doesn't mention anything eternal, so Ehrman citing it doesn't undercut my critique, it only underscores it. 

Update, May 29, 2025: This actually good post on a certain sub-Reddit has several books of scholarship refuting Ehrman in various ways, mentioned in various comments.

More updates?

Where's Revelation 20?

Blessed and holy are those who share in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them. ... And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever. ... Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death.

Vv. 6, 10,  14.

Or the classic tale of Lazarus and Dives? 

And lest we try to say it was purely a Christian invention? Daniel 12:2:

Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.

There you are. Of course, librul evangelical / pergressuve Christians are willing to join Bart in their own lying by omission about Daniel 12. The framework of that piece also appears to join Bart in having a quasi-Marcionite view of the god of Judaism.

It's also mentioned as a place of ongoing torment in books of "intertestamental" literature like 1 Enoch. For more on that (albeit from another site ignoring Daniel 12) go here. 

And, speaking of that previous book?

The Triumph of Christianity: How a Small Band of Outcasts Conquered an Empire by Bart D. Ehrman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Nice try in theory, falls well short in reality

This was a book tough to rate.

I generally like Ehrman. I generally think that mythicists unfairly belittie him, though I disagree with some specifics of his own supporting material offered for a historic Jesus.

The idea of the book isn’t new, but presented in popularizing form from a knowledgable New Testament scholar, promised to be good, possibly very good.

But, it fell short. Short enough in some ways that I took fairly detailed notes at chapter breaks.

Without explicitly saying so, Ehrman seems to indicate that Christian evangelism and Christian miracle-working both had modest-to-moderate boosts for the early decades of Christianity, but no more than that, and then it was primarily word-of-mouth, just like you and I buy a car or toothpaste today.

However …

First, the evangelism issue is nowhere near as simple as Ehrman paints.

First of all, we know that Christianity was NOT the only evangelistic religion of antiquity, contra what Ehrman implies, and even semi-directly says.

Ashoka’s Buddhist missionaries to the West went as far as Macedonia and Cyrenaica circa 200 BCE. Four hundred years later, Clement of Alexandria and other Christian fathers knew about ongoing Buddhist proselytizing. And, Will Durant even speculated it may have been an element in Christian missions. See more here.

Either Ehrman is surprisingly uninformed here, or else, Ehrman’s definition of antiquity is narrow. Neither speaks well for this book.

Also, per reading between the lines in Acts, and in some of Paul’s letters, and my take on J. Massyngberde Ford’s Anchor Bible volume on who wrote the original core of Revelation, we know that at least a few followers of John the Baptist evangelized.

Paul himself mentions Apollos and Peter, even talking about Peter getting paid to take his wife with him.

So, Ehrman has a foul ball here.

On the miracle working, whether real or not, Ehrman doesn’t mention that this was common outside Christianity. Indeed, Jewish charismatics such as Honi the Circle Drawer come to mind. Or Morton Smith’s “Jesus the Magician.” Or the name Simon Magus. Ehrman doesn’t go into a lot of depth here. He even mentions Apollonius of Tyana, the contemporary of Jesus, but never goes into detail about his own reported miracle-working.

(Update. This thread isn't new. Ehrman started this thread a dozen years earlier, in "Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene." Thie idea there is: Christians did miracles. They reflect pagan stories of the gods (like Zeus and Hermes visiting Baucis and Philemon. {A deconstructionist critic would aay, hey, Ovid put this in Tyana, where Appolonius was from, and Paul wrote a letter to a Philemon, and would go from there.] Pagan miracles of the present, like the aforesaid Apollonius, don’t get mentioned. Nor do Jewish miracles.)

So, if Christian miracles were more powerful than Jewish, Greek philosophical, or pagan religious ones, why? They were all common. Ehrman doesn't discuss why Xn magic was considered more powerful, whether it had a big effect on recruiting or not.

It’s true that no ancient author writes an unbiased account of this in detail. But Ehrman, while noting that no actual such miracles likely happened, doesn’t explain why Christians were perceived to be (as he would seemingly have us believe) better miracle-workers or magicians.

And, if evangelism were as low as Ehrman thinks it was after Paul, and pagans and philosophers did magic, too, then why was word-of-mouth as successful as Ehrman thinks it was? Word of mouth 2,000 yrs ago presumably was based on testimonials just as much as today.

Reality is that, with people like Polycarp, or Clement of Rome, their letters to other churches were surely part of an ongoing program not just of church maintenance but church planting and spreading. Look at the pseudo-Pauline letter to “Ephesians.” Originally a circular letter, it probably was written in similar spirit.

And, the third failing, a partial one.

I agree with Ehrman that many of the details of Rodney Stark’s projected growth rates of Christianity don’t withstand scrutiny.

However, even though Decius’ persecution wasn’t specifically against Christianity, Diocletian’s was. In a sort of analogy, American whites will start to flee suburban neighborhoods and even whole communities when an influx of minority population, and above all, African-American population, hits a certain percentage, usually around 10 percent.

Ehrman doesn’t ask if a similar phenomenon were in play here. If it was, his believed population percentage of Christians, empire-wide, was too low at the time of Diocletian to be such a trigger. Now, the persecutions were carried out most commonly in the eastern half of the empire, and we have some fairly good indications Christianity was stronger there.

Nonetheless, Ehrman doesn’t follow up.

A fourth partial failing, in my opinion?

Ehrman seems to believe Christianity was not just majority-gentile, but strongly so, by circa 100 CE.

Yet, he fails to mention the “desynagoging” that happened circa 100 CE, per John. If this really did happen, it undercuts Ehrman’s thesis. If it didn’t, he should have offered a bit of exegesis on John here to explain this.

Despite John speaking bluntly of “the Jews,” I think something did happen.

Finally, Ehrman makes a partial version of the same error Stark does on population growth, and it’s connected to his overlooking or ignoring Buddhist evangelism.

He focuses on growth within the Roman Empire.

Armenia became officially Christian in 301 CE, nearly a century before Theodosius so proclaimed Rome. Various kingdoms that today make up Georgia became officially Christian before that time. Ulfilias proselityzed Goths, presumably with some Goths previously Christian, before Theodosius. Legends of Thomas Christians aside, there were Christians in India before this time. Ditto for ancient Nubia, beyond Rome’s Nile frontier.

In critiquing and criticizing Stark, I have noted all of this and said that at least 10 percent of Christians at the time of Constantine were outside imperial borders.

And, of course, by the period that closes Ehrman’s book, Christianity had not swept “the world.”

Finishing up this last section of the notes as I got ready to post this led me to take Ehrman down from three to two stars. Several three-star readers seemed too kind in their detailed reviews.

Ehrman – and his agent who suggested this – should either have committed to an additional 20-30 pages and more rigor, or else suggested this as a series of magazine essays only, or similar.

View all my reviews

==

So, other than when he's wrongly gang-attacked by mythicists, I have little sympathy for Ehrman any more. This is only worsened by the cult he has, which in turn is worsened IMO by him having a paid blogsite, with his Substack-length ramblings on a site that's his own — not Substack, not Medium or Patreon before that, but his own paywalled website.

He's a semi-guru with a cult who's making a killing off of it.

==

Update, Sept. 9, 2023: Looks like Ehrman's newest, "Armageddon," is at least half as craptacular as this one, per this review, especially with him allegedly postulating a New Testament "god of love" vs a Tanakh 'god of wrath."

At worst, that sounds anti-Judaism.

At second worst, Bart's going from being a JW to being a Marcionite.

Third, as I said on comment at that review, this ignores away NT "god of wrath" stuff, starting with Matthew 25, which of course, in the JW book that's the subject of this review, he tried to explain away.

Orthodoxy "versus" orthopraxis

In a post two weeks ago, I noted that the idea of Christianity being all about orthodoxy and Judaism being all about orthopraxis — right doctrine on the one hand, right action on the other — was more stereotype than reality.

Going beyond that, I'd like to say that the division between orthodoxy and orthopraxis in religions in general is more a permeable membrane, and one permeable in both directions, than a wall.

Doing the right thing is usually based on a belief.

Take Communion or the Eucharist.

Catholicism traditionally reserving the cup only for the priests was a practice. But it was based on a doctrine that included ordination as a sacrament. But that sacrament developed — along with other things, such as a single clergy — out of a practice of separating the priesthood from the laity. (Single priesthood also developed from Rome as a way of trying to prevent land in a bishopric from being heritable and thus strengthening regions at the expense of Rome.)

In Judaism, I noted in that previous post, in pre-rabbinic Judaism, Qumran's use of a solar calendar was a praxis issue. But it eventually led to separation from the Jerusalem priesthood, and eventual condemnation of it on both praxis and doctrinal grounds.

Move to Buddhism, outside the Middle Eastern-Western monotheism orbit entirely. Mahayana and Theravada Buddhists may not excommunicate each other, but practices in the two that differ from each other differ in part on whether someone who is an arhat should stay around and help fellow humans or not. And, yes, and yes Buddhists, that's a doctrine. 

Within Muslims, the succession to Muhammad, or within Shia, the split between Sevenrs and Twelvers? Dogma. Per Spinoza's excommunication, defining who Yawheh is or is not, to then wonder who can say the Shema or not? Dogma. Or, if you're a Karaite vs Rabbinic Jews, the status of the Talmud? Dogma.

Stereotypes: Christianity is "orthodoxy" vs Judaism is "orthopraxis"

Two weeks ago, I blogged about my personal academic connection to the forged Dead Sea Scrolls.

Baruch Spinoza: Jew or not a Jew?

The next day, I got to thinking about the claim that Christianity, out of all the world's religions, focuses on "orthodoxy," or right belief of doctrines and dogmas, vs. other religions that focus on "orthopraxis," or right actions. Supposedly, this is in part because Protestant Christanity especially rejects "works righteousness."

But, is this really true?

The real Dead Sea Scrolls, especially the 30 percent or so that are Qumran community documents and weren't known of in other form before 1946, say otherwise. Expulsions from the community.

Per John J. Collins, the Essenes or whomever we call them, separated from other Jews of their time over observances of ritual Torah points, calendrical observances and more. This is spelled out in the 4QMMT scroll. This is doctrine or dogma, not praxis. Remember that the pope and the patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other in 1054 CE in part over whether or not the other used the "filoque" in the Nicene Creed.

The Qumran expulsions also fall under orthodoxy not orthopraxis because, in my interpretation, calendrical observances affect things like observances of festivals like Passover. From there, discussion spills into whether wrong observance makes the whole event nugatory or not, per the old Catholic phrase "ex opere operato." And, when you use multiple Latin words, and use them about interpretation of religious acts, even if it is an act itself, you're still moving toward orthodoxy and out of straight-up orthopraxis.

Qumran's ethico-ontological dualism, as expressed in places like the War Scroll, appears to be more clearly Zoroastrian-bent than what Orthodox Judaism holds today. Given that such beliefs underscored belief in the observance of purity rituals at Qumran, that's orthodoxy.

Or, if you're a Karaite vs Rabbinic Jews, the status of the Talmud? Dogma.

Remember that Baruch Spinoza was not only excommunicated, if one will, but even suffered an Orthodox Judaism version of an Amish "shunning," the Jewish "herem" (yes, that's cognate to the word "harem" from Arabic "haram") over matters of orthodoxy, not orthopraxis.

And, it's not just Judaism. Look at Islam. The Shi'a / Sunni split? The issue of succession to Muhammad is orthodoxy, not orthopraxis. I'd argue the same for the splits between the Seveners and the Twelvers within Shi'a, or the four major schools within Sunni.

And, that's having initially ignored that the "recitation," the head of the Five Pillars of Islam, "there is no god but Allah," is clearly doxy, not praxis.

And, if I looked closely enough at Eastern religions, I could find some "-doxy" there, too.

JUDAS THE SON OF GOD

I am the Son of God.

I was born, I saw and I fell;

That last part due to mythmakers

Who rejected my message.

My name was Judas, Son of God.

The lies against my name are many.

Some claim I was demon-seized

And sold the man named Jesus

For 30 pieces of silver.

Others say I was his cosmic twin,

Judas Didymus Thomas

Later denigrated to move the force

To the one and only.

Others yet call me Ormazd

To his Ahriman,

The dark side of a dualistic god.

And others still a ???

Fated to play out a role;

A reasoning pawn in a cosmic play.

All are wrong.

Rather —

I was the one, the Monogenetes,

I was the Son of God, the Word made flesh.

Am I jealous of the Nazarene?

But of course. I am the Word made flesh.

With good motive — emotions no less dark

Than my father Yahweh had against Sodom

And against the Amalekites, then against Saul.

I am the Son of God.

I am.

Ehrman hits foul ball with rise of Christianity book

The Triumph of Christianity: How a Small Band of Outcasts Conquered an Empire by Bart D. Ehrman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Nice try in theory, falls well short in reality

This was a book tough to rate.

I generally like Ehrman. I generally think that mythicists unfairly belittie him, though I disagree with some specifics of his own supporting material offered for a historic Jesus.

The idea of the book isn’t new, but presented in popularizing form from a knowledgable New Testament scholar, promised to be good, possibly very good.

But, it fell short. Short enough in some ways that I took fairly detailed notes at chapter breaks.

Without explicitly saying so, Ehrman seems to indicate that Christian evangelism and Christiam miracle-working both had moderate boosts for the early decades of Christianity, but then it was primarily word-of-mouth, just like you and I buy a car or toothpaste today.

However …

First, the evangelism issue is nowhere near as simple as Ehrman paints.

First, we know that Christianity was NOT the only evangelistic religion of antiquity.

Ashoka’s Buddhist missionaries to the West went as far as Macedonia and Cyrenaica. Four hundred years later, Clement of Alexandria and other Christian fathers knew about ongoing Buddhist proselytizing. And, Will Durant even speculated it may have been an element in Christiann missions. See more here.

Either Ehrman is surprisingly uninformed here. Or else, Ehrman’s definition of antiquity is narrow. Neither speaks well for this book.

That said, per reading between the lines in Acts, and in some of Paul’s letters, and my take on J. Massyngberde Ford’s Anchor Bible volume on who wrote the original core of Revelation, we know that at least a few followers of John the Baptist evangelized.

Paul himself mentions Apollos and Peter, even talking about Peter getting paid to take his wife with him.

So, Ehrman has a foul ball here.

On the miracle working, whether real or not, Ehrman doesn’t mention that this was common outside Christianity. Indeed, Jewish charismatics such as Honi the Circle Drawer come to mind. Or Morton Smith’s “Jesus the Magician.” Or the name Simon Magus. Ehrman doesn’t go into a lot of depth here. He even mentions Apollonius of Tyana, the contemporary of Jesus, but never goes into detail about his own reported miracle-working.

So, if Christian miracles were more powerful than Jewish, Greek philosophical, or pagan religious ones, why? They were all common.

It’s true that no ancient author writes an unbiased account of this in detail. But Ehrman, while noting that no actual such miracles likely happened, doesn’t explain why Christians were perceived to be (as he would seemingly have us believe) better miracle-workers or magicians.

And, beyond the scope of the book, this also is no different from Exodus showing Moses and Aaron outdueling the Pharaoh's magicians. Or 19th-century European missionaries telling stories about wonderworking to the dusky pagans of darkest Africa. Or 9th-century Carolinian missionaries supposedly outdueling pagan Saxon and Slav religious leaders.

All Ehrman is doing is doubling down on repeating Christian myth.

And, if evangelism were as low as Ehrman thinks it was after Paul, and pagans and philosophers did magic, too, then why was word-of-mouth as successful as Ehrman thinks it was?

Reality is that, with people like Polycarp, or Clement of Rome, their letters to other churches were surely part of an ongoing program not just of church maintenance but church planting and spreading. Look at the pseudo-Pauline letter to “Ephesians.” Originally a circular letter, it probably was written in similar spirit.

And, the third failing, a partial one.

I agree with Ehrman that many of the details of Rodney Stark’s projected growth rates of Christianity don’t withstand scrutiny.

However, even though Decius’ persecution wasn’t specifically against Christianity, Diocletian’s was. In a sort of analogy, American whites will start to flee suburban neighborhoods and even whole communities when an influx of minority population, and above all, African-American population, hits a certain percentage, usually around 10 percent.

Ehrman doesn’t ask if a similar phenomenon were in play here. If it was, his believed population percentage of Christians, empire-wide, was too low at the time of Diocletian to be such a trigger. Now, the persecutions were carried out most commonly in the eastern half of the empire, and we have some fairly good indications Christianity was stronger there.

Nonetheless, Ehrman doesn’t follow up.

A fourth partial failing, in my opinion?

Ehrman seems to believe Christianity was not just majority-gentile, but strongly so, by circa 100 CE.

Yet, he fails to mention the “desynagoging” that happened circa 100 CE, per John. If this really did happen, it undercuts Ehrman’s thesis. If it didn’t, he should have offered a bit of exegesis on John here to explain this.

Despite John speaking bluntly of “the Jews,” I think something did happen.

Finally, Ehrman makes a partial version of the same error Stark does on population growth, and it’s connected to his overlooking or ignoring Buddhist evangelism.

He focuses on growth within the Roman Empire.

Armenia became officially Christian in 301 CE, nearly a century before Theodosius so proclaimed Rome. Various kingdoms that today make up Georgia became officially Christian before that time. Ulfilias proselityzed Goths, presumably with some Goths previously Christian, before Theodosius. Legends of Thomas Christians aside, there were Christians in India before this time. Ditto for ancient Nubia, beyond Rome’s Nile frontier.

In critiquing and criticizing Stark, I have noted all of this and said that at least 10 percent of Christians at the time of Constantine were outside imperial borders.

And, of course, by the period that closes Ehrman’s book, Christianity had not swept “the world.”

Finishing up this last section of the notes as I got ready to post this led me to take Ehrman down from three to two stars. Several three-star readers seemed too kind in their detailed reviews.

Ehrman – and his agent who suggested this – should either have committed to an additional 20-30 pages and more rigor, or else suggested this as a series of magazine essays only, or similar.

The one problem with this review is that, at least on Amazon, where I read through reviewers, it basically left me in the company of mythicists who wrongly attack Ehrman. I gave several them a piece of my mind on their reviews.


View all my reviews

Jesus crucifixion date NOT proven by geologist

OK, let's spot the errors in this story that claims paleogeology, or whatever the word, proves Jesus was crucified on April 3, 33 CE.

Error No. 1? Geologists treading WAY beyond their area of expertise.

Error No. 2? Geologists taking what is poetic license, at least, as literal truth.

Error No. 3? Geologists taking a story with legendary elements, at least, to be literally true, if even in parts.

Error No. 4? Taking the New Testament Gospels as anything close to history. That includes assuming that Jesus was crucified over a Passover period. If the “Palm Sunday” story is true, this would actually fit other festivals more closely, as Hyam Maccoby, among others, has argued.

Error No. 4A? Assuming that (outside of Luke, who still blows it) these books were written to be taken as documents of history, not polemic.

Error No. 5? Assuming that a Yeshua bar Yusuf, if he existed, had the approximate life and death dates that literalists and semi-literalists claim.

Error No. 6? Assuming we can know enough about this Yeshua, from the Christian New Testament, to even guess at facts that might mitigate Error No. 5.

Error No. 7: Assuming that this Yeshua was a historic personage.

Ohhh, other than THAT, there’s nothing wrong with geologists, on what’s probably shaky (pun highly intended) evidence, assuming that something from the geological record proves a Jew named Jesus was crucified on April 3, 33 CE.

Now, they do leave the door to the world of rationality cracked open a small bit:

In terms of the earthquake data alone, (Jefferson) Williams and his team acknowledge that the seismic activity associated with the crucifixion could refer to “an earthquake that occurred sometime before or after the crucifixion and was in effect ‘borrowed’ by the author of the Gospel of Matthew, and a local earthquake between 26 and 36 A.D. that was sufficiently energetic to deform the sediments of Ein Gedi but not energetic enough to produce a still extant and extra-biblical historical record.” 

“If the last possibility is true, this would mean that the report of an earthquake in the Gospel of Matthew is a type of allegory,” they write. 

Only to then shut it even more firmly:

Williams is studying yet another possible natural happening associated with the crucifixion — darkness. 

Three of the four canonical gospels report darkness from noon to 3 p.m. after the crucifixion. Such darkness could have been caused by a duststorm, he believes. 

Williams is investigating if there are dust storm deposits in the sediments coincident with the earthquake that took place in the Jerusalem region during the early first century.

Go BACK to studying sedimentary rocks, Mr. Williams, and stay there.