mountainman

Arnaldo Momigliano is on record for describing Constantine's involvement as a "miracle", twice. As an Italian Jewish academic forced to flee the rise of Mussolini, we might presume he knew what he was talking about when he used the term "miracle", unless he was being ironic. Momigliano used heavy irony.


That is a claim of the institution. To be more precise, it is the claim of the minister of propaganda and "historical research", who has been associated with the institution (like Tansar who gathered the "Avesta" for Ardashir) in the same epoch the warlord became the supreme military commander of the empire.

There are serious implications in accepting the propaganda of "early christian" persecutions as historical events. See for example Was the attitude of the "Early Christians" to the Empire noble, stupid or fictitious?.


If an historian were to examine all the evidence ever tendered by the institution in support of its claims, century by century to the present day, there would be generated a massive list of evidence items at least 99.5% of which would today be regarded as fabrications, pious forgeries, swindles, lies, interpolations and other criminal activities.

Because the historian is about to address the history of the christian religion, all these 99.5% of forgeries etc would be momentarily disregarded, and the focus applied to the 0.05% of evidence that remains in the balance, such as the books of the gospels and acts of the apostles, and the letters of Paul, and the letter of Pliny and the words of Celsus, and other sources.

The historian is free to do two things. Construct a narrative using the 0.05% of "positive evidence" while ignoring the 99.5% negative evidence, or to wonder whether the whole barrel of apples is itself rotten to the core.



Or that miracles are not miracles?



Socrates may well have agreed with this.

mountainman

"How many times can a man turn his head
and pretend that he just doesn't see.?"

--- Bob Dylan, "Blowing in the the Wind"

mountainman

Isn't it written that they first called themselves Christians (or was it "Chrestians") at Antioch? This could be one reason to explain why Constantine attended the Council of Antioch before the Council of Nicaea, and delivered his very famous "Oration to the Eastern Saints".

sotto voce

Fine. But then the historian reports that this was the claim of the institution; that the imperial structure claimed to be a church, based on the Bible. Readers can decide for themselves whether the claim is justified.

Who says that it was propaganda? This issue does not affect the issue just mentioned, anyway.

But he isn't. Not ever. If he thinks he's doing that, he should take up another interest, because he's too involved. He writes about what has been claimed to be Christian. In the case of a religion that has only ever been represented by a single organisation, it is a possibility that he writes about that religion; though not necessarily, because an organisation can renege on its original aims (as was indeed suggested of Islam here, a few days ago). In the case of Christianity, he has no chance at all, because of the plethora of competing claims. Only if he writes as historian of a particular claim, such as that of Plymouth Brethren, or Old Catholicism, can he make value judgements in favour of the respective claim. The general historian must be even-handed. His publisher, or students, will put him right if he is not.

In the case of Mormonism, for example, he cannot decide which of the several groups who call themselves Mormons is correct. He just reports these groups by their own designations, and makes no calls on who is in the right. He can point out objective disagreements, even aberrations, contradictions, but does not venture beyond stating those.

I strongly disagree. The historian makes no value judgments. If there was a war, he reports that there was a war; if it was a horrendous war, he reports that it was thought, or rather written, to be horrendous, or he gives casualty figures and the like. If there were forgeries, he reports them, and lets the reader decide on their moral legitimacy. The historian can, and indeed must, provide alternative explanations of a particular event or course of events, and document such alternative views, where possible. The reader decides what is likely to be the truth, or that a truth cannot be known.

The reader decides whether a particular agency truly represented the Bible, or the Quran, or the founding values of the Labour Party, or whatever body, according to its claim. The role of the historian is to provide the relevant factual evidence, as clearly and as objectively as possible, to allow readers to do that.

Doug Shaver

My answer to sotto's response applies just as well to this one.

mountainman

Perhaps you cannot find an answer here because, as you have already admitted, you appear to rationalise the issue being discussed with what Heinlein called the "devil theory of sociology."

When you are able to put such strawmen to the side, you may find your answer becomes self-evident. The historical evidence itself clearly points out that the world's two dominant monotheistic religions were ushered into common currency by means of supreme military control and the canonization of a "Holy Writ". They represented centralized state cults, the focus of which was the supreme military commander and his chief magi, priests or bishops. The technological significance of the employment of the high technology of late antiquity - the codex - is not to be passed over in evaluating the success of these two achievments.

What intellectual skills does it take to understand that "War is a Racket" and that the products of war - the Christian and Islamic Monotheistic Dogmas - are also "rat cunning" rackets.

Doug Shaver

Whatever the historical evidence points to is irrelevant to my question.

sotto voce

I've googled for that, and can't find it.

mountainman

Christian and Islamic Monotheistic Dogmas - About 590,000 results (0.26 seconds)

mountainman

But does your question have anything to do with the OP?