lpetrich

Richard Carrier comments in his review of Earl Doherty's "The Jesus Puzzle" that one notable feature of early Xian writings was a background of intense sectarian conflict. And that this was almost totally lacking from the other Greco-Roman literature that he had been familiar with.

I wonder if that is a fair picture; I don't recall any holy wars over what love affairs Zeus had had or anything like that. But I can think of:

Conservative Romans who disliked the strange cults being imported into Rome
Stoics looking down on Epicureanism as a pig's philosophy -- eating, drinking, excretion, sex, and sleeping
Plato(?) wanting all of Democritus's works burnt
Cleanthes wanting Aristarchus put on trial for rejecting the Gods
Anaxagoras getting in trouble for denying the divinity of the Sun and the Moon
Socrates and the early Xians getting in trouble for not worshipping the official gods

On the other side, I notice:

Xenophanes saying how wicked the Gods are presented as being, and how people make deities in their likeness -- whatever it happens to be

Plato proposing that the works of Homer and Hesiod be banned from his Republic, on the ground that they set such bad examples as heroes lamenting their dead companions and gods laughing

Hippocrates proposing that epilepsy is called the disease of the Gods because nobody really knows what causes it

Widespread acceptance of theories like euhemerism, in which the Gods had originally been human heroes

The popularity of Stoicism, which stated that there was a cosmic world-soul supreme deity, with the familiar Olympians being subordinate to this entity

[ October 15, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>