Malachi151

For those not familiar, I run the following website:

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/articles.htm

The next article I have on my agenda to write will be one about religion, mostly Christianity. This will probably be about a 10 page article. Since I gave up scholarly study of religion years ago, I'm a bit out of the loop on some of the best, and most verifiable and unbiased, current historical info on the Christian religion.

Therefore, any help in this matter will be appreciated.

Before helping though, here is what my positions are, and the type of info I am looking for, and what I'm not looking for.

This is going to be a mostly theoretical and politcal article, I am not going to get into the details of every little controversy surrounding Christinaity.

My thesis will be along the lines of the Christian movement around the time of the setting of the Jesus story was a political anti-Roman, anti-imperialist, anti-exploiter movement.

The Jesus character was a Lenin of his day, a revolutionary promoting the interests of the working class and poor.

The Roman Empire was the largest expansion of civilization in human history at the time and brought many different people together for the first time.

This led to the embracing of the concept of a god for all people, a universal god.

The Jesus character may or may not describe a real single person, but it does capture the nature of the political movmenet against Roman imperialism that was present in Jewish society at the time.

After a bit of time, Paul and other spread this revolutionary ideology throught the Roman Empire.

As the Roman Empire grew and became economically imperailist, the Roman Army became filled with underclass people and foreigners. These people identified with the Christian Religion. At the time, after the triump of Ceasar of course, the army was the key to poitcal power in Rome. The Roman Army became largely Christianized and was becomeing revolutionary, as Roman Armies tended to do in those days anyway.

In order to avoid overthrow by the army, Constantine declared Rome Christian to pacify the army.

This split Roman society and led towards the decline of the Roman Empire.

In the mean time, the Roman State then began to create what we now call the Christian Religion.

The Christian Religion that we know today is primarily a creating of the Roman State, and represents a paganizing of the traditional Hebrew religion. In the hands of the Romans Christianity became a tool of the State and has remained such ever since.

The Jesus figure is really a political revolutionary of his day, similar to the Communsits of the 20th century.

The cult of personality that we see saw in Communist society in the 2th century is the expression of the same types of social phenomena that is embodied in the Christian religion and has been a part of the Christian movment.

What separates Christianity from Judaism and Islam is that Christinaity worships a human being as a god. Neither Judaism or Islam worship a man as a god, and this si a major reason why these religions view Christianity as so heretical.

Christianity is based on a cult of personalty that was embraced by the Roman State machine for political purposes.

Anyone with suggestions for book, or links with info that can be used as refereces for this would be apprecieted. Also good links to early Christian images are a help also.

Thanks

Intelligitimate

For your purposes, you might like Kautsky's Foundations of Christianity.

andrewcriddle

Given the sympathy to quasi-pacifist positions in the early church it seems highly unlikely that Christians were a higher percentage of the Roman army than of the Roman Empire in general.

Before Constantine's conversion Christians were almost certainly less than 15% of the population of the Empire. Hence they were less than 15% of the personnel of the army. This makes it unlikely that Constantine was under pressure from the army to support Christianity.

It is also unlikely that Diocletian et al (who's power base was the army) would have started the 'great persecution' if 20% or more of the army had been Christian sympathizers around 300 CE.

The Diocletian persecution would anyway have substantially reduced Christian sympathizers in the army further reducing the number of Christian soldiers when Constantine seized power.

Andrew Criddle

Toto

My impression, although I can't put my finger on a source right now, was that Mithraism was the religion of the Roman army, not Christianity. Constantine did not declare the Roman Empire Christian - he made three religions official religions of the Roman Empire, Christianity, Mithraism, and the worship of Sol Invictus, and tried to combine elements of the three.

I doubt that Jesus was the Lenin of his time. He was one of many messianists in Israel in the first century. Christianity did not become a social force in the Roman Empire until a few centuries later.

I recommend that you read (critically) Rodney Stark's The Rise of Christianity for some background on the social situation in the Roman Empire. Crossan's The Historical Jesus takes a somewhat Marxist view of history.

Malachi151

Thanks for the info.

Lucretius

First of all I am looking forward to reading this article when it comes out, but I do think that these two aspects will need a bit further research.
Primarily just how "Christian" was Constantine in reality ?
The decline of the Roman Empire is also problematical, as the Eastern Empire effectively still existed as the Byzantine Empire for much longer then the Western Empire, and as they were both technically equally Christian, obviously some much more complex issues were responsible for the downfall.

Baidarka

I think that you would find the books of Hyam Maccoby of interest.

Hyam Maccoby THE MYTHMAKER: PAUL AND THE INVENTION OF CHRISTIANITY, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1986

Killer Mike

If you are looking for something scholarly Id recommend www.PBS.org and go to the "From Jesus To Christ" piece. PBS recently ran a four hour long series titled "From Jesus to Christ". Scholars from Harvard, Yale, Brown, Boston College, etc.. Quite facinating if you ask me :thumbs:

Malachi151

Thanks again all. I'm writing one more piece about capitalism before I get to this topic, so it will probably be a month or so at least becuase its done (typically finish about one article a month, though sometimes more).

This looks like good source material to get started though, thanks.

Javaman

I've posted this before but, as most of us look to Amazon for books, I should point out that Barnes & Nobles carries this book. It is very cheap through them as well ($6.98) as they are the publishers:
The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity