The New Gospel

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I have therefore postponed further examination [of potential Christians] and hastened to consult you.&nbsp; The question seems to me to be worthy of your consideration, especially in view of the number of persons endangered; for a great many individuals of every age and class, both men and women, are being brought to trial, and this is likely to continue.&nbsp; It is not only the towns, but villages and rural districts too which are infected through contact with this wretched cult.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">It is from pagans, rather, that you’ve taken the teaching of a single divine principle as a source of all things.&nbsp; You’ve changed their sacrifices into your love-feasts, their idols into your martyrs (whom you pray to like they pray to idols!).&nbsp; Like the pagans, you appease the dead with wine and feasts.&nbsp; You keep gentile holidays—the first of each month, the January new year, the summer solstice.&nbsp; And your way of living has remained just like theirs.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">When the end did not come as expected, some of Jesus’ followers transformed this temporal dualism (this age versus the age to come) into a spatial dualism, between the world below and the world above.&nbsp; Or put differently, they shifted the horizontal dualism of apocalyptic expectation of life in this age versus life in the age to come (horizontal dualism because it all takes place on this plane, here on earth) into a vertical dualism that spoke instead of life in the lower world versus life in the world above (with an up and down).&nbsp; In other words, out of the ashes of failed apocalyptic expectation there arose the Christian doctrine of heaven and hell.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.&nbsp; The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor … If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus [96–180]. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em>It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The triumph of Christianity was a symptom of that fall [the 3rd Century Crisis], not its cause … Had the Empire maintained the Pax Romana of the glory years, with the wealth and progress of the 1st and early 2nd century, and had the Senate established a stable constitutional government by the 3rd century (as the movie Gladiator pretended was the real plan of Marcus Aurelius) instead of fifty years of civil war, I suspect Christianity would have been doomed—not to oblivion, but at least to obscurity ... [Had this happened] Christianity would not have had as much to offer anymore, as peace and prosperity would gradually claim more and more potential converts by giving them what they wanted: material happiness and security at the hands of a successful—and therefore “obviously” divinely sanctioned—pagan government.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Pagans did set the stage for the end of ancient science—just not for any of the reasons Christians now claim.&nbsp; By failing to develop a stable and effective constitutional government, the Roman Empire was doomed to collapse under the weight of constant civil war and disastrous economic policy; and in the third century [AD] that’s exactly what it did.&nbsp; Pagan society responded to this collapse by retreating from the scientific values of its past and fleeing to increasingly mystical and fantastical ways of viewing the world and its wonders.&nbsp; Christianity was already one such worldview, and thus became increasingly popular at just that time.&nbsp; But as one could predict, when Christianity came to power, it did not restore those scientific values, but instead sealed the fate of science by putting an end to all significant scientific progress for almost a thousand years.&nbsp; It did not do this [at first] by oppressing or persecuting science, but simply by not promoting its progress and by promoting instead a deep and enduring suspicion against the very values necessary to produce it.&nbsp; Likewise, modern science did develop in a Christian milieu, in the hands of scientists [like Newton] who were indeed Christians ... Christianity only had to adapt to embrace those old pagan values that once drove scientific progress ... craftily inventing Christian arguments in favor of the change, because only arguments in accord with Christian theology and the Bible would have succeeded in persuading their peers.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The bishops and their retinues began arriving in early May.&nbsp; Constantine welcomed them warmly and housed them, depending on their age and distinction, either in the palace or in one of the numerous outbuildings rimming the lake.&nbsp; A good many of them bore scars of past persecutions: eye patches covering lost eyes, limps produced by severed hamstrings or Achilles tendons, backs deformed by hard labor in Phoenician mines.&nbsp; How satisfying to provide these sufferers with some of the worldly comforts they had so long deserved!&nbsp; Their gratitude was equally touching.&nbsp; Some bishops apparently believed they had already entered the Kingdom of Heaven, or at least a well-furnished anteroom.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">If Julian’s attempt in 361-3 had come to fruition, the marginalization of the Jews in the Roman world which had begun in 70 CE, nearly three hundred years before, would have come to an end.&nbsp; But Julian died and was succeeded by Christian rulers, the rebuilding was abandoned, the site of the Temple was left in ruins, and Jews throughout the empire had to learn to live within an increasingly Christian society, their status as outsiders in the Mediterranean world fixed for many centuries.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Julian’s dream lived on, and the bitterness of Christian response to him shows that he touched a sensitive nerve.&nbsp; The Achilles’ heel of the Christian tradition was its relation to Judaism.&nbsp; The truth of Christianity seemed to require the demise of Judaism.&nbsp; For if Judaism was still a living religion, an alternative to Christianity, and the ancient Jewish tradition was still observed by Jews, and the Jewish Scriptures were still read and studied in Jewish communities, Christians could not claim to be the rightful inheritor of the patrimony of Israel and Jesus was not the Messiah whom Jews had awaited.&nbsp; Even though Julian’s program to rebuild the Temple was unsuccessful, it was the final, and most brilliant, stroke in the ancient conflict between paganism and Christianity.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The ruin of Paganism, in the age of Theodosius [379-395], is perhaps the only example of the total extirpation of any ancient and popular superstition, and may therefore deserve to be considered as a singular event in the history of the human mind.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Go tell the king</em></p><p><em>Apollo’s lovely hall</em></p><p><em>Is fallen to the ground.&nbsp; No longer has the god</em></p><p><em>His house, his bay-leaf oracle, his singing stream.</em></p><p><em>The waters that spoke are stilled.</em></p>