semiopen

The implication of this is that Christianity became the official religion without having any special merit. This view might be reasonable but it seems unlikely to me.

The Jews and Christians were in competition for conversions and clearly making progress, at some point, for multiple reasons Jews were no longer competing.

I like the reasons bacht has listed above for the Christian advantages.

bacht

Cheers. It would be interesting to interview an early convert (not the apologists whose works have survived). Was it really a religion of women and slaves, as Celsus would have it?

Kapyong

Gday,

Should it ?
Why should it ?
What does the Greek say ?


K.

Chili

My first reaction is to say that 'those who know don't say and those who say don't know' which then is why Luke doesn't say that it happened to him but from the detail given in his text it has to be true that it is not 'second hand' to him or compiled from hearsay.

I will go on to say that also Mark and Matthew were written by 'those in the know' to conceal the intricate details that make them 'failed divine comedies' so that they can be juxtaposed instead of compared and so are made to compliment each other instead of contradict (and at the same used to identify heretics likely to be handed over to the state).

Oh and I did take Greek but am not a theologian that I should get into that.

Kapyong

Gday,

Sorry.
You didn't answer the question.

I gave this translation :

"I too have decided,
after investigating everything accurately anew,
to write it down in an orderly sequence for you,"

But you replied :

My question is :
Why 'should' it be your version and not mine?
Why do you think your translation is better than mine?
Why is 'traced' better than 'investigated' ?


K.

Toto

K - don't expect a dialogue with Chili to yield any coherent information.

Elijah

And if that advertisement was unique to the people, then they would be curious to find out about it, leading to its growth. In the Colosseum it would have been like the greatest super bowl ad ever.
What do you think the hermits were doing that helped promote the movement?

I’ve heard talk on here a few times now about Jewish outreach and evangelizing but I’m not sure what evidence that is based on. It’s hard to imagine Paul was the first to try to engraft the Gentiles but I don’t know the texts to see if other Jewish communities tried to bring the them into the fold with faith and relaxing the regulations with the Law.

I don’t know about absorbing Gnostic followers. They were competing to define Christianity with Gnostic Christians but if they got rid of Christian Gnosticism, the people who were interested in Gnosticism in the first place would have just went someplace else for that gnowledge. I also don’t know about retaining Jewish tradition since they got rid of circumcision and sacrifice. The Christians wanted to portray the OT Jews as worshiping the true God (unlike Marcion) but I don’t know about the other traditions. I don’t think you need to look at the Catholics as serving Rome’s interested but as being the political side of Christianity that wasn’t concerned about the philosophical teaching but concerned about establish a new kingdom.
Don’t confuse the pagan superstitious beliefs with the philosophers’ beliefs. I don’t think it came to a dead end, I just think it evolved. The philosophical movement produced the idea that philosophy/Gnosticism was the key to salvation which is great for people who are philosophically minded but for people who are more humble minded/working class, some other path to salvation was going to be more appealing to them. This is where the Orthodox position of “Faith” being the key to unification and salvation comes in.

The faith issue made it very easy for anyone to convert but the reason people first believe in the Faith is they see it in someone else. The most notable example being the early Christians who were willing to martyr themselves. Great advertising and easy admittance, with the reward of eternal life/resurrection.

The filling social needs are more difficult to argue for helping the early Christians, especially as a Christian. I can’t really say that feeding the poor early on and establishing churches later on to provide for communities, was anything out of the norm to attract followers. It may have been but if a Christian says that we were the first or one of the few to provide for the people and that it became popular because of that, would sound like unsupportable propaganda.

Later on, after the threat of persecution was over, I could see providing for the people’s needs as being integral to the growth of the Church but from Jesus thru to when the persecution stopped it was the martyrs that was the main catalyst for the growth of the movement IMO.

Kapyong

Hmm, thanks :-)
I don't seem to recall Chili ...

K.

Chili

Simply because the word 'investigation' implies research and the word 'traced' can be a search from memory and Luke decided to put it on paper for the benefit of the 'worthy' Theophilus.

Please try to understand that the justification for the new religion is contained in the Gospels and is not just a new religious club with a salvation recipe, to say that Luke was not pandering a new religion.

bacht

Nothing directly, just setting an "heroic" example

I believe the Jews developed rules for converts and God-fearers in the Hellenistic period. The publication of the Septuagint opened up Judaism to outside study.

There's two points: first, Rome discouraged private associations and encouraged public participation in the official cults. Gnostics may not have been principled enough to refuse emperor worship for instance, but their existence may have been considered worrisome to the authorities.

Second, Catholicism was a middle path between gnostics and Jewish Christians who retained the Mosaic Laws. Most gnostics had little interest in the Old Testament beyond a few passages that supported their esoteric teachings.

I'm trying to see the situation through the eyes of contemporary seekers. From the early apologists through to Augustine, there was a program of integrating pagan philosophy (Platonic) with the Christian message.
Catholicism promised social support in this life and resurrection in the next without the exclusivity and incoherent teachings of the gnostics.

Social services were limited in the ancient world. From the 2nd C onward the churches distributed alms and eventually built hospitals and schools.

Maybe, I don't know that it was that simple. There seemed to be a general trend towards metaphysics and supernaturalism, like Mithraism and the mystery religions. The spread of Christianity around the whole Mediterranean before Constantine points to a ready market for this kind of teaching. The persecutions seemed to have been sporadic, not everyone would have seen martyrs until maybe Diocletian's reign.