Clivedurdle

The Ruin of the Roman Empire (or via: amazon.co.uk) James J O Donnell.

If in the 500's there was alleged confusion between Judaism and Xianity by outsiders, can we assume they were clearly differentiated beforehand? Is this not an assumption caused by propaganda to differentiate them? The outsiders may be correct...

Were Judaism and xianity really separate? Might xianity be a Graeco Jewish oriental cult that we think is different because the orthodox winners said they were different?

Roger Pearse

Nisibis, not Nisiblis.

There is no confusion; merely the polemic of the 5th century controversies, little understood even by those interested in the Fathers.

Nestorius objected to Mary being called "Mother of God", thinking of God the Father. But Cyril of Alexandria objected to his objection, thinking of God the Son. To object to calling Mary the mother of God the Son is equivalent to denying that Jesus was God. That Jesus is not God in any sense is what the Jews thought; therefore one side could accuse the other of it, I suspect.

Does the book give a reference for the Cyrillian text in which this epithet is used? It's a good idea to always verify such claims.

The Nestorians were condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 433 under very dubious circumstances. But a lot of Easterners felt that Nestorius was framed, and the presence of the Persian border meant that they could escape the persecution of their enemies by basing themselves east of it. The tendency of the Greeks to accuse their political enemies of heresy (even if they had to invent the heresy first) and then have them condemned and persecuted is a feature of the whole history of the Byzantine empire from 400 to its fall.

Nisibis was under Persian control, after it was handed over to the Persians by Jovian. The consequence of all this is that Nestorian Christianity was the characteristic Christianity of Persia.

This in turn had consequences for many centuries. The Abbassid Caliphs under Islam were Persian, and they employed learned Nestorians -- i.e. people from home -- as their physicians. This role and the needs that went with it led the Nestorians to translate medical texts into Arabic in the 10th century, and thus the majority of the people who translated Greek science, via Syriac, into Arabic were Nestorians. The most important of these was Hunain ibn Ishaq.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

mountainman

One might also ask the question as to whether the whole history of the Byzantine empire actually commenced from not 400, but in fact c.324 CE when Constantine, on becoming supreme, paced out the boundaries of the new "City of Constantine".

mountainman

In which century?

1 - no data for the latter
2 - no data for the latter
3 - no data for the latter
4 - See the Theodosian Codex: many mentions of "christians" and "jews"

In the fourth century it ws ordained that "religious practices were reserved for christians". The Jews were tolerated as the only "other" - for a while. It was almost as if it had become "politically correct" to become christian. Perhaps some of the pagans actual selected to become jewish?

The orthodox winners were the "insiders". Everyone else were the "outsiders". The orthodox documentary trail was extant and in the hands of the church authorities, and this package of fraudulent fabrications has been spoon fed to centuries of "biblical scholars".

Independently out of archaeological discoveries the texts of the "outsiders" are slowly turning up. There are a number of tasks:

1) Setting aside implicit "belief" in the testimony of the christian "historians" so that a fair and unbiased testimony can be obtained from the "outsiders".

2) Re-examining from an independent perspective the evidence of the "outsiders".

The "christian glasses" need to be taken off.

Huon

The idea that the Nestorians are descendants of some Jews of the diaspora seem to be a very old theory.

Note also that Urmia (North Iran) is very far from Nisibis (South East Turkey).

Roger Pearse

By the 19th century, the Christians had found it expedient to live in the mountains where the Moslems couldn't "protect" them.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Clivedurdle

Sorry for typo - it is Nisibis.

But I would like to develop a clear family tree - biology uses the term clade - for these belief systems.

For example Judaism was not monolithic - arguably to me it currently looks like a primarily Greek religion in which fundamentalist groups used the old propaganda trick of asserting they are the originals.

Christianity was also taken over by fundamentalists who used the same propaganda tricks and called everyone else heresies.

But more and more I see interactions and symbiosis between belief systems - it is not obvious that the categories Xian and Jew and Pagan are any more than externally imposed labels by groups with power and narrow mindsets.

Dioscoros.

In fact, the words of the Creed - I believe in Jesus Christ - can be understood as a fundamentalist assertion to give xianity a central figurehead to differentiate the true believers from the heretics! The creed itself is evidence of myth - the invention of an allegedly historical godman is a move in the chess game of creating a separate religion from the reality of eclecticism and picknmix.

gentleexit

A clear tree, we'll probably never get but you're spot on about "asserting they are the originals". It gets into labels. Who were "Jews"? Once the label included Philo and Jesus/his followers and the temple-men and the precursors of the Rabbi's and ... then ...

One think I wonder about is who first used "Orthodox" for "true, non-deviant believer"? Irenaeus et al used it but did it come from broad Judaism? Was the label a favorite of every Jewish sect claiming the crown for themselves or did he and other early Christians use it first?

gurugeorge

Great post Clive, I agree wholeheartedly with much of what you are saying. Riffing off your post: My impression is that the scholarly picture is gradually coming more into focus that there was a lot more of a melting pot of ideas in those days than we think. Judaism was more diverse, also Paganism was more diverse (think of a European form of "Hinduism"), and the various philosophies mixed it up with the best of them too (Epicureanism, Platonism, Stoicism, Hermeticism, Cynicism, even Pythagoreanism, etc.). And they were lifestyle things, not just about ideas, and some of them involved various kinds of psychospiritual cultivation practices.

It seems like the natural state for religion is this kind of diversity - you can see long-continued traditions of it in India, China. Singular cults like Christianity (and post-Diaspora Judaism?) and Islam, and even Buddhism to a minor extent seem, relatively speaking, to be aberrations (which of course themselves eventually dissipate in turn). And they are characterised not so much by some kind of broadly-speaking "monotheism" (because, after all, religion's natural state is monotheistic too, or close enough in the henotheistic sense) but by literalist adherence to a pushy, busybody dogma.

Nowadays, the "New Age" (to broadly include Western Buddhism, etc.), where I'd say most real religious feeling (as opposed to the function of religion as mere traditional sociological "glue" with some woo-woo beliefs about the world attached) resides in the West at the moment, is itself a return to that ancient, even archaic way of doing religion. Maybe my using "New Age" is likely to get people riled - but you know what I mean, if you go to a bookshop, the kinds of books that people buy about religion are hugely varied in their outlook, albeit with certain kinds of idea-clusters threading through them, rather than any singlar, proposed dogma. (Idea-clusters about karma, magic, nonduality, etc., etc.).

The "saviour" idea was a similar kind of idea-cluster in a similarly intellectually and religiously (relatively) open Graeco-Roman world, and it was just a natural variant for a cult to arise like Christianity in its earliest incarnation (which I envisage as some kind of proto-Gnostic Jewish movement with the cute idea that the Messiah had already been). Natural, also, for it to diversify. And in the end, natural too, at least in terms of this occasional aberrational tendency of religion sometimes to get monolithic, for a sub-sect (that happened to have a more detailed historical story about that past Messiah) to gain political ascendancy and retroactively cook the books to make it seem like they (their bishops' ancestors, natch) had been in at the origin. One important condition of this periodic ossification seems to be a heavy admixture of politics with religion - when a religion gets "respectable" sometimes livelihoods can be involved, and also religious leaders can gain an undue influence in affairs of state. It's all fine and dandy when you have a bunch of cults doing their thing, whatever, but when they start to get respected and the culture starts defining itself in their terms, then watch out! That's the point at which you get a hook for self-interest.

I keep coming back to this idea of a "gospel", of good news of a victory won, and how strongly analogous that is with the Asian idea in various nondualisms, that there is nothing to do to "gain Enlightenment", that it is already present, already a done deal. I think it was something like this idea that was being worked at by the earliest Christians - a total reversal of the traditional Messiah trope that put one in a state of anticipation. If you look at Paul, where he talks about the spirit of Christ being that in one which calls out "Father!", the idea here is that you area already kin with God, there just has to be a link made, a recognition. The idea is, you can relax, there is nothing to do, it's a done deal, done and dusted. You couldn't be un-saved even if you tried

Well, that would be a "highest" reading of what was going on. It might have been some convoluted old twaddle about whose willy should be cut, and why, but that would be imputing a degree of across-the-board crassness and stupidity to those people that I'm not willing to impute.

Clivedurdle

I am really enjoying O'Donnell!

He comments on the various dates for the fall of Rome - 202 BCE, 476 CE, 800CE (when a woman became emperor!) 1453, 1924.

He also asks for a definition of what is Rome

Classic examples of this are Jerusalem, the Jewish wars and Armageddon.

Jerusalem has never been that important.

Were the Jewish wars that important to Rome, or were they a continuing troubling counter insurgency, a little local difficulty? Was it a training ground for future emperors?

Does anything in that region compare to the loss of three legions on the Rhine, the Punic wars, Anthony, Cleopatra and Octavian? The many battles against the Persians? Cities were razed all over the place - Carthage.

How does a little valley compare with Marathon? Were there Jewish legions in the Roman army?