Clivedurdle

Boris Johnson - the Tory party shadow minister of higher education in his book The Dream of Rome (or via: amazon.co.uk) compares them.

He starts p80


Augustus has Horace and Virgil drawing on themes from Isaiah, Johnson notes the Sibylline oracles are a mixture of Greek and Jewish religious arcana, and Horace and Virgil explicitly break with precedent and ascribe divinity to Augustus.

Augustus is a wonder child, a living Jupiter, a present god on earth.

The Sibyl sees Augustus in the underworld. Virgil's Eclogue - he will free mankind from sin "The goats will come home by themselves with milk filled udders."

Oh and one other thing - Augustus is the son of God.

There is more - the slaughter of the innocents told by Seutonius in relation to Augustus, a copy of the annunciation - this time with Apollo as dad.

Augustus' birthday celebrations are echoed later by xians. Conception is nine months earlier than birth - 23 December.

I like the idea of christianity being a parasite that eventually weakens its host so much only a minimal institutional structure is left - a classic co-evolutionary arms race.

Clivedurdle

Good to see that is agreed then!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Johnson

Ben C Smith

Indeed.

Nice post (seven thousand eighty-ninth one is a charm ), and thanks for the brief review. I shall have to check that book out.

Ben.

jbarntt

Not sure what the point is here. Deification of an emperor by the senate had nothing to do with the idea that the emperor was actually a god. Many emperors were so honoured - Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, etc.

Making a sacrifice to such an emperor, or even to the current emperor was essentially a loyalty oath, not a religious act as we think of it now. The traditional Roman view of religion is different than ours. The mystery religions of the time are more in line with what we think of in this regard. Note that Rome had no problem with these, hence they were a different thing from traditional Roman religion, or even empereror worship.

Understanding these distinctions is critical to understanding how Rome dealt with religious issues. Confusing them because the word "religion" is used for all is a serious mistake.

Clivedurdle

Johnson is quite explicit that the xians copied Augustus deliberately. The problem we have is that we now read everything through xian eyes, it takes work to get back into the pagan paradigm.

Clivedurdle

Jesus is alleged to have been born and brought up in a Roman province. OK, would he have attended the baths and the games, used tweezers to pull hairs out of his nose, enjoyed garum, known an editor?

What do the stories tell us - tax collectors, wine, Roman names of people? Breaking the sabbath rules?

Why wasn't Jesus a legionnaire or Roman citizen? Has anyone researched how Roman Jesus might have been? It would give very strong clues about if we are discussing a mythical or real person.

I think I read somewhere that the disciples sounded quite wealthy - if true, they would have been Roman citizens.

jbarntt

Jesus was not a Roman citizen because His parents were not. Universal citizenship under the Empire only came into force under Caracalla, early third century.

Jesus could have been a member of the militia associated with local defense, sort of a national guard, which offered a path to citizenship. Needless to say there is nothing to suggest that He was such a member. He could not have been a legionnaire.

As to your having heard that His disciples were wealthy, I think you heard wrong. They were fishermen, farmers, etc., from Galilee. They were not Roman citizens nor were they wealthy.

Didymus

Really? I shouldn't speak for the OP, but it seems to me that he's saying that the Jesus story was contrived as a theological, social and political antithesis to the enormously popular Augustan mythology that was created during and after Augustus' rule.

You have it backwards. The point is not that Christianity was an imitation of the cult of Augustus, but that it proffered a dialectical alternative.

Julius came first, but the Augustus cult was by far the most significant and it was more than just a tribute of some sort. His divinity was widely accepted by ordinary Romans; he was worshipped in temples that were built to him across the empire during the first and second centuries. All the other deifications came after, and, as you say, were merely honorifics. Augustus was the only emperor with such a huge following.

But that's exactly the point. Christianity was imperial Rome inverted: carpenter vs emperor; heavenly king vs earthly emperor; spiritual vs material, the provinces vs the capital; rural vs urban; pacificism vs militarism; poverty vs wealth; monotheism vs polytheism; and so on. Of course, the parallels are also significant: aggressive expansionism in pursuit of world domination; an insistence on total loyalty to the central authority; a highly legalistic approach to ethics and belief, and so on. (I'm talking about early Christianity here, before the development of a structure that also mirrored that of the Roman state.)

(In fact, Rome did have a problem with the mystery cults. I can't get to my references right now, but as I recall, the Isis cult was outlawed for political reasons having to do with Egypt, and others were banned for licentiousness and "atheism.")

It seems to me that the idea of Christianity as a dialectical reaction to Augustan imperialism is a sound one, at least on its face. I'm going to reread Vork's superb survey of Mark with that in mind.

Didymus

Clivedurdle

Thank you, you are saying what I am thinking. Johnson does on the face of it seem to be making a valid point. OK, let's test that out.

Clivedurdle

Is it possible that Mark was written as some form of experiment, or mind game or thought experiment or satire - let's try and construct an opposite of Augustus?

Might it have been a training exercise for senior Roman officials?

Paul did his stuff completely independently, the later gospels are based on finding this thought experiment and completely misunderstanding it, Acts is written to join up the dots.