A Precedent for Controversy

Christianity has never truly been a monolithic religion. Even as near as twenty years (or so) after Christ's death, there were disagreements and controversies which required church councils to be formed to work out what exactly the church was supposed to believe. The earliest recorded controversy was between the Apostle Paul and a group known as the Judaizers.

The Apostle Paul was no doubt a charismatic and radical leader for his day. Imagine a six-figure earning CEO giving his money to the poor and becoming a militant Communist. That's easily the same sort of shock people in the first century would have felt upon learning that Saul, a rabidly zealous Pharisee who sought to put all Christians to death, had now become not just a Christian, but a proselytizer and ardent missionary who devoted his life to spreading the faith he once tried to destroy.

Paul preached a Gospel of radical grace – where all of our sins were cast upon the crucified Christ, and all we must do to receive salvation and eternal life is believe in Jesus and serve God as a redeemed people. However, as often happens, people raised their eyebrows at this notion of a free offer and many could not shake the old idea that we have to do something to save ourselves. Enter the Judaizers, a group of former Pharisees who encouraged newly converted Gentiles to become circumcised and obey the Hebrew food laws.

The Judaizers were scoring points for Christianity with the old guard Jewish leaders, and they resented Paul for making this new faith something that not only included Gentiles, but failed to give them the adequate requirements of the law which they viewed as necessary for communion with God. Paul accused them of denying Christ's sacrifice and making God's work void by placing their faith in good works, as if they could truly outweigh sin.

The two groups met at Jerusalem, where the book of Acts records the Council of Jerusalem, led by James, the brother of Jesus. Both sides were heard, and the decision was handed down after much deliberation amongst the Apostles: Gentile believers were to continue in sanctification (the process by which people on earth are made holy during the course of their lives) and to avoid food that was used in Pagan sacrifices. The food requirement was definitely an attempt to appease the Judaizers, but if the rest of the book can be believed, it failed to mollify the Pharisees who hounded Paul and sought to destroy him at every turn.

The Judaizers separated themselves from the Christian community at this point, and seemed to return to the Jewish faction which was seeking to destroy this troublesome sect. They were the first of many groups who would reject the authority of church councils and go their own way, and this precedent of calling the church leaders together to discuss, pray over, and decide various points of doctrine continues in Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Christianity today, and to a lesser degree, in Protestant circles as well.

Pax vobiscum.

For the Love of God - How Christianity Changed Everything Part I

In the interests of full disclosure, yes, I am a Christian. That being said, I don't think my faith hinders my view of history. Sure, I probably have some bias when it comes to history that involves the Church, but I do my best to put personal opinion aside and truly examine the facts alone, allowing them to determine my ultimate opinion. So while this article is favorable toward Christianity, rest assured, I have plenty of critique for the ancient Christians, which will come to light in the next few months' worth of Thursdays.

Religion, as it was understood by the Pagan world, was something that the State controlled. The Pontifex Maximus, chief priest of the Roman religion, was appointed by the Senate, and not by either the mass of believers or some religious institution. Any worship outside of the state-prescribed deities was usually either syncretized or forbidden, and Christianity was not the only religion to be persecuted by the authorities. As far as the Romans were concerned, religion was a way of currying favor from the gods or preventing yourself from falling under their wrath. Their gods, after all, were not typically benevolent or altruistic; they were petty and concerned first and foremost with their own fame at any cost.

Christianity, that is, Apostolic Christianity, taught that there was one God, who was not only all-powerful and all-knowing, but full of love and compassion for mankind. This quality was an aberration when it appeared in Pagan myth, like in the story of Prometheus, and what usually confounded the Pagan powers-that-be more than anything else was that Christians did not merely fear or obey their God; they loved Him!

Ultimately, it was that love for God that drove Christians to refuse to burn incense at the Emperor's altar, or to have their hands marked at the market in Ephesus. This religion, after all, was founded by a martyr, who was not believed to simply be a good teacher, but God's very son! When persecution came, as it did sporadically throughout the next three hundred years, Christians reacted, most of the time, by silently going to their deaths.

Pax vobiscum

The Ancient Greek Steam Engine

I can already hear you groaning. Here we go again, you're probably thinking. Another revisionist theory that Justin likes, big surprise. You may be surprised to learn, then, that this is no theory: sometime between 10 and 70 CE, Hero of Alexandria created what is believed to be the world's first steam engine. No joke, no hair-brained theory, just cold, hard, unforgiving historical facts. Still don't believe me? Just take a look at this illustration from his book:

Not sure what you're looking at? Well, it worked like this: you poured water into that bowl on the bottom, then build a flame underneath it and waited for awhile. Eventually, that water transforms into steam, which shoots up through the two pipes and into the circular object in the center, which was more like a pinwheel than a globe. The steam would travel out of the two spouts out of the pinwheel, causing it to spin. Presto, ancient Mediterranean steam engine!

In addition to this, Hero is also credited with the invention of the force pump, the syringe, a wind-powered organ, and the vending machine. So, the next time you buy yourself a soda or sodium-coated snack, think of Hero and wonder to yourself what else he may have jotted down on some note paper which was lost along with most of his work when the Serapeum was destroyed in 391 CE by a Christian mob.

The Ultimate Sacrifice

This story from the Greek oral tradition stands out as one of the most heinous crimes of the Trojan War. King Agamemnon made a foolish boast against Artemis after shooting a stag through the heart with a single arrow. She cursed his upcoming expedition against Troy unless he made a sacrifice: his eldest daughter Iphegenia. He obliged, and the war was ultimately successful, but the cruel king himself was murdered when he returned home by avenging family members. There is a similar story in the Bible's Old Testament centering around Jephtha, a Charismatic Judge who swore to sacrifice the first creature that approached him when he returned home if God would grant him a victory over the Philistines. The first creature was his daughter, whom he sacrificed to Yahweh, an event that stands completely alone in Judeo-Christian scriptures. The Greeks, Hebrews, and Romans had come to feel that human sacrifice was wrong by the 500's BCE or before, and kept it out of their worship, exiling it to their oral traditions as cautionary tales rather than promotional stories.

All this is to say that the Phoenicians were not alone in sacrificing people to their gods, but they were getting lonelier when they extended that practice into the early 100's CE. Carthage was the most powerful of the old Phoenician colonies, and by the 300's BCE its power was slowly being crushed under the weight of political corruption and a vacuum in leadership. Having almost no native military power because of their tendency to hire foreign mercenaries to do their fighting, they could only appeal to their gods when Scipio Africanus was at their gates.

The Phoenician deities were of a much older variety than the Greco-Roman gods, being much more like the savage Titans than the diplomatic Olympians. Ba'al was their chief deity, and his very name is derived from the Semitic word El, which means god, and is used in Hebrew words like El Shaddai or Elohim, referring to Yahweh and his angels. His partner goddess was Tanit, whose symbol included a crescent moon and star not unlike the modern Islamic symbol. The Romans identified Ba'al as Saturn, the father of Jupiter who had been usurped by the Olympians years ago, and it seems likely that they factored this into their ideas of superiority to the Carthaginians.

To me, the evidence of child sacrifice in Carthage is very clear. There are mass graves filled with children whose bones have been charred by sacrificial fire. Those who try and make the case that the children had already died of some disease or natural cause before being cremated are ignoring the fact that no evidence of any disease has been found among the remaining bones. I know very well the desire to demonize the Romans and try to rewrite history based on how we would have liked it, but the facts are the facts, and I see no benefit to these attempts at making the Carthaginians into something they are not.

In the cult of Ba'al, children were sacrificed to gain special favor from the gods. The idea was that only blood could show your true devotion to the gods' fame, and what better way to show your true devotion than giving your own child? The Romans and Greeks certainly were no strangers to the idea of blood sacrifice, often killing bulls, birds, and other animals in acts of worship and for divination, but human sacrifice of any kind had long since been outlawed by the Punic Wars.

That is not to say that the Carthaginians always sacrificed their own children. There are accounts (from 800 BCE) of aristocrats buying slave children to sacrifice in place of their own, but in times of famine, war, and hardship the priests would encourage parents to give their youngest child to the fires of Ba'al. Ba'al was associated with the sun, and by extension, fire, which is why the children were killed with a ceremonial knife before being thrown into the blaze.

One bit of evidence that often escapes Carthaginian apologists is the account of young Hannibal joining his father for a campaign in Iberia. It is written that he begged his father repeatedly to join him, and that his father, bitter from the recent defeats in the First Punic War, agreed to take Hannibal only if he would swear an oath against friendship with Rome. Hannibal responded by placing his arm over a nearby open firepit and swearing that he would use fire and steel to arrest the destiny of Rome. While this story is probably mostly fiction, it displays a practice that seems logical for a people who worship a god of fire. What better way to swear an oath by such a god than by allowing the fire to singe you just a little bit to prove your devotion?

No matter how antiquated or barbaric it seems to us, sacrificing animals to appease gods can certainly be said to contribute to the later spread of Christianity, which presented Christ, the sinless man who served as a blood sacrifice for all who believe.

Pax vobiscum

Theology Thursday: The Paradigm of Pettiness

In my younger days (and, let's face it, even now), I couldn't get enough of Myth. I consumed volumes of the stuff, usually the ancient Greek and the Norse, because the idea of many gods was totally different from what I believed, and therefore, intriguing. What especially struck me was their behavior and character, and how different they were in that regard from the God I read about in the Bible.

The Greek gods developed from an oral tradition that quite possibly predates urban Greek civilization. Their stories are almost always told as an answer to a question. For example, the tale of Arachne most likely began when a small child asked their parent where spiders came from. There is a common thread running through most fables of the gods, a universal philosophy: do not cross the gods.

Unlike the Hebrews, whose one God commanded strict obedience to a moral code and religious practice, the Greek gods simply commanded humanity not to get too full of itself. They saw us as a nuisance at best, and rivals at worst. Prometheus, a demi-god who served those uppity Olympians, had the audacity to bring us fire. Zeus was pretty upset by this, since he didn't want humanity becoming powerful enough to overthrow him the way that he, along with his siblings and allies, had overthrown the titans before them. For his trouble, Prometheus was chained to a cliffside where every day birds would come and eat his insides. Every night they would grow back and the circle of pain would continue. It was Heracles who finally saved him on one of his many quests.

Yes, jealousy is an ugly emotion, and the gods were filled with it. The idea of an immortal deity being envious of mankind seems silly to us today, even those of us who still believe that there is a God. Yet the Greeks believed in gods that displayed all the worst human emotions and had super-powers to boot. Hera, Zeus' wife, would frequently vent her frustrations by tormenting some of her philandering husband's illegitimate children (and there were many!). Why, we might ask, didn't she punish her husband directly? Well, Hera's one attempt to go against the king of the gods ended very badly.

Believing that Zeus was wielding too much power for one god, Hera, Poseidon, and Apollo decided to stage a coup, waiting until their king was asleep on his couch and then binding him with one hundred leather ties so that he could not move at all. When Zeus awoke, he was furious and threatened to destroy the betrayers, who openly mocked him, laughing at his feeble attempts to reach the lightning bolts which they had made sure were well out of range. However, the problem with coups is that eventually you have to decide who's in charge. So the three ring-leaders got all the other gods involved and each one began lobbying for leadership in a debate that gradually threatened to erupt into an Olympian civil war.

While they wasted time with talk of succession, Thetis, a long-time friend of Zeus since the days of his rebellion against Chronos, dispatched her giant, named Aegaeon, who possessed one hundred hands. He untied Zeus while the others were distracted, and Zeus quickly grabbed his lightning bolts and brought the situation under control.

For their part in the conspiracy, Apollo and Poseidon were ordered to serve the King of Troy for a time. Taking advantage of this new immortal work force, King Laomedon had them build walls for his city, which were said to be impregnable. If The Illiad is right, it worked, and the Achaeans had to take the city by the trick of the Trojan horse rather than scale those massive walls. Hera received a far worse punishment for her role in the scheme. She was shackled to the sky by her wrists and anvils were hung from her ankles. She continually screamed in anguish night and day until Zeus freed her after securing oaths of permanent fealty from his fellow gods, who cringed at the horrific sound of Hera's pain.

It is interesting that what gave Zeus success in his original ascension is also what prevented this challenge to his power and authority. Unlike the titans before him, who were looked upon by the Greeks as being primitive, Zeus was able to forge alliances and coalitions. He could never have taken the titans down by himself, but with the help of many powerful demi-gods he was able to free his siblings from Chronos' belly, and bring them all to victory. No doubt the Greeks associated the titans with their Mycenaean ancestors, but Zeus and his band were modern gods for a more civilized era, whereby men would be killed in much more civilized ways, no doubt.

It is because of their gods' pettiness that most Greeks simply looked upon them as potential hazards rather than helpers in their time of need. In fact, if a god did help you in your time of need, they probably needed a favor. This is why the Pagan Greeks never wrangled, as modern Christian Theologians do, with the question of suffering. While Christians revere Jehovah as a God who is good and has good intentions, the Greeks held no such opinion of their deities. This meant that while they would sacrifice to them and try to get their attention with great displays of worship, it was either quid pro quo or mollification. That is, if you'd already fought and won your battle, or finished building your house, you would give a dedication to the gods so that they would see your humility and refrain from screwing up your life to remind you that you were still mortal, and therefore not as cool as they are.

The criteria for a successful Greek life was the attainment of fame, whereby you would live forever because people would tell stories about you. The only figures lucky enough to have that honor were, at first, the gods. However, tales of Ulysses, Achilles, Ajax, and the other Greek heroes were passed down through oral tradition and used as models for young Greek boys to follow. And in a world where the gods don't care about you, some claim to fame is your only real hope of eternal life.

Pax vobiscum

Why I'm doing this

Because I am a historiphile, I always have been. I love reading about antiquity in all its glory as well as its brutal shame. I do not romanticize the past, but I always seek a balance between recognizing savagery and tipping my hat to the truly great accomplishments of our predecessors.

This blog will focus, at least for the time being, on Ancient Roman history, from the 700's BCE to the 500's CE. And yes, though I am a Christian, and a very serious one at that, I will be counting years using the BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era) system. It's what good scholars use, and though I'm just a dude sitting on a couch with his laptop, I would like to follow the practices of good scholarship.

That being said, I will by no means simply report history as it is told to me by Tacitus or any other aristocrat. They have their stories, but their stories revolve around themselves, and I would like to find and reveal the hidden stories; the legionnaire who has been digging a trench for three days for a temporary fortification and dies of exhaustion, the people who lived in peace until salt was discovered in the nearby mountains. Of course, I won't completely ignore the wealthy and victorious (who typically have told the story of Rome), but I won't be relying on their word alone.

The most important question that Historians should answer is, what can we learn from the past? While many see similarities between Rome and the modern-day United States, I will balance my conclusions with practical realities. The Romans did not have satellite technology, they didn't have firearms, and they had little to no notion of the liberty of the common man. While I do think there is much we can learn from them, we should not get carried away in any kind of Battlestar Galactica "All of this has happened before . . ." kind of philosophy. While I do believe that history repeats itself, I don't believe it ever repeats itself the same way.

I will also write extensively about Rome's neighbors and competitors. Expect some huge posts about Carthage in the future, as well as the early Spanish and Bythinians. For now, or at least the next few months, I will be focusing on early Rome, that is the BCE Rome. How did a city on the western side of the Italian Peninsula become so important to so many? This and other questions will be answered (in part) next time. Pax Vobiscum.