Julian the Apostate

[pim]

He was a Roman emperor in the middle of the 4th century AD who reigned a generation later than the emperor Constantine who was the guy who legalised Christianity and made it the official religion of the Roman Empire. Paganism didn’t just fade away when Christianity was legalised. The word “pagan” is from the Latin word for “countryside” . Christianity spread in its early period as essentially an urban phenomenon but in the countryside the rural peasantry continued to adhere to the old cults, worshipping gods of the harvest and fertility. Wheat was a staple crop and the Roman goddess of the harvest was called Ceres. It gives us our word “cereal”. Go figure. So a pagan was essentially a rustic hillbilly. There is a much more English word to refer to the worship of the old pre-Christian gods and that’s the very Anglo Saxon word “heathen”. Pagan/heathen, take your pick.

When Constantine legalised Christianity in 310AD he made Christianity a player in the religious marketplace. He didn’t make it the only game in town. His decree of Milan put an end to the persecution of Christians by his predecessor Diocletian and declared Christianity to be lawful. But the old pagan cults continued to be observed alongside Christianity. Constantine favoured Christianity and one of the reasons he moved the capital to Byzantium and renamed the city after himself, Constantinople, but not the only reason, was that as Rome itself remained stubbornly pagan Christianity needed its own city which is why Byzantium was renamed and remodelled as the world’s first ostensibly Christian city. Ironic that these days it’s Muslim and called Istanbul. It took another 70 years for Christianity to move from being one religion among many to being the only game in town. That was in the year 380AD when the old pagan cults were declared abolished and the Emperor Theodosius declared Christianity to be the one true religion of the Roman Empire. But between Constantine and Theodosius there was an emperor who tried to turn the clock back and reverse the tide of history. The word “apostate” means a person who rejects the prevailing culture in favour of a previous and much older set of beliefs. This emperor is known to history as Julian the Apostate and he is a case study in what happens to leaders who are on the wrong side of history. The worshippers of the old fossil fuel economy who resist the emerging green economy could do worse than study the career of Julian the Apostate.

[pim]

Matt the Apostate! I understand that you were brought up Jewish and that you gave up your heritage for the most extreme fundamentalist form of Christianity that is short on Christian charity and long on “the lord helps those who help themselves and life’s losers have only themselves to blame “. Not much joy in your Prosperity Gospel for the meek whom more compassionate versions of Christianity say will inherit the earth.

The Jews would regard you as an apostate, Matt. One who couldn’t stay the course. Tut tut. Not kosher.

[Occam's Spork]

You are right that paganism just didn't disappear. And tbh, I think Roman Catholicism is nothing more than a repackaged Babylonian religion.

(For instance, the word Easter comes from the name "Ishtar"...  who was an ancient Mesopotamian goddess)

[pim]

There’s another school of thought that argues that Roman Catholics were the first Protestants because they broke from Eastern Rite Orthodoxy in the Schism of 1054. Eastern Rite Christianity doesn’t call itself “orthodox” for nothing

[fat]

"the Schism of 1054"
One day I will look into that

[Occam's Spork]

Sept 19, 2021 16:26:29 GMT 10 pim said:

There’s another school of thought that argues that Roman Catholics were the first Protestants because they broke from Eastern Rite Orthodoxy in the Schism of 1054. Eastern Rite Christianity doesn’t call itself “orthodox” for nothing

Except the reason the schism happened in the first place, is because they tried to impose themselves as the head church that all should answer to. If the RCC actually ascribe to this thought, it isn't a reformation because they believe their system is the default position.

Iow: They didn't leave orthodoxy; orthodoxy left them.

If you look through the ancient Mesopotamian religions, and even now, the veneration of Mothers and sons *(Mary often pictured with the infant Jesus*)is often a pattern in many pagan religions.

This lends to my belief that Catholicism isn't true Christian; Rather repackaged Mesopotamian paganism.

[pim]

If you look through the ancient Mesopotamian religions, and even now, the veneration of Mothers and sons *(Mary often pictured with the infant Jesus*)is often a pattern in many pagan religions.

She’s modelled on the Egyptian goddess Isis. Compare the Christian icon of the Madonna and Child with the statue of Isis and the infant Horus



The veneration of Isis was a popular cult in the later pre-Christian Roman Empire. If you look for vestiges of paganism in Christianity you’ll find them everywhere and one of the issues that the Protestant reformers “protested” about and broke with Rome over was the veneration of saints which Martin Luther and John Calvin, as well as John Knox and Ulrich Zwingli condemned as a thinly disguised pagan pantheon. The cult of Mary, or Mariolatry, is a feature of Catholicism that Protestantism explicitly rejects.

The veneration of sacred images, or icons and statuary, is another pagan hangover that isn’t confined to Roman Catholicism. That it’s a feature of Roman Catholicism is undeniable but icons are an important part of Eastern Rite Orthodoxy as well. Apparently during the final Siege of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 the Orthodox Patriarch paraded the sacred icons from the Hagia Sophia and displayed them to the defenders on the city walls to give heart to the defenders and presumably to invoke divine aid. Much good it did them!

But Protestantism contains more vestiges of paganism than most Protestants realise. The way we measure the passing of time is very pagan. The number we ascribe to a year is the most Christian part of our calendar, being notionally based on the number of years since the birth of Christ - a fuzzy concept with a huge fudge factor but it kinda works and people like to leave well enough alone where that’s concerned. Most of the rest is recycled paganism. The days of the week are named, in English, after Norse gods and in the Latin countries around the Mediterranean they’re named after the old Roman deities. Months of the year are named after a mixture of Christian figures such as May being a corruption of Mary, and pagan deities such as March/Mars and January/Janus. The months of September, October, November and December are from the Latin words for 7, 8, 9 and 10 and reflect an earlier calendar in pre-Christian times when a year was divided into 10 months. Even the word “calendar” is pagan. The beginning of a month in pagan Rome was called the “calends” and from then they counted down to the Ides and the Nones. It’s remarkable how much of that has survived and lived on through the centuries of Christianity and into the modern secular post-Christian era.

This lends to my belief that Catholicism isn't true Christian; Rather repackaged Mesopotamian paganism.

It’s a criticism I’ve often heard from evangelical Protestant Christians of the non-conformist traditions. North American Protestantism is largely non-conformist. It’s that Puritan strain that came over with the Mayflower. Methodists and Baptists found North America to have fertile soil and they proliferated. But the more “traditional” Protestants such as the Anglicans, or Episcopalians in the US (in Canada are they called Anglicans or Episcopalians?) don’t level the same critique. It’s not a critique that I take very seriously. Christianity has had its idolatrous periods followed by an iconoclastic reaction. The Byzantine Empire went through an intense period of iconoclasm. As Christianity spread out from its beginnings in Judea it encountered the Greek-speaking eastern Roman world with its statuary. The icons in eastern rite Christianity are of the martyrs and that makes sense because it was in the Greek-speaking east that Christianity spread the most and where the persecution of Christians was felt most keenly. But I accept the evangelical Protestant critique that it’s tantamount to pagan idolatry. Ever notice how Muslims don’t have graven images or icons? Early Islam spread amongst mostly Monophysite Christian Aramaic-speaking populations of the Middle East. “Monophysite” unpacks from its original Greek as “one nature” and it refers to the debate about the nature of Christ. Monophysite Christians (modern Coptic Christians) claim Christ has one nature which is divine whereas “orthodox” Christianity, imposed at spear point by the Greek-speaking Byzantines, insisted on the dual nature human/divine of Christ. The Byzantines spoke Greek and the Monophysite peoples of the Middle East were Semitic both in language and in culture who found Greek Christianity with its icons and statues and intolerance of alternatives to be oppressive and tyrannical. The arrival of Islam brought by fellow Semites with its rejection of Byzantine Trinitarianism, its icons and its insistence on the dual nature of Christ to be a relief and they embraced it with enthusiasm. Anything to get rid of the idolatrous Greeks. You might say that Eastern rite iconoclasm contributed in a very important way to the spread of Islam.

In the West the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s and 1600s was its iconoclastic period which ended up being as profound in its implications as it was for the Byzantine East some 800 years previously. Whereas in the East it had the early spread of Islam as one of its consequences - and the arrival of Islam changed everything for Christianity, and I mean everything - in the West it led to the settlement of English-speaking North America and also to the rise of the nation state and the modern world.

I accept your critique of Catholicism, Occam, with its Mariolatry, its idolatrous veneration of sacred relics, statuary, images etc and its paganistic (to coin a word) pantheon of saints, and yet I don’t find any of that sort of stuff offensive. I accept that you do and I respect your reasoning, but my quarrel with Catholicism is more … how should I put it … doctrinal? Not sure that “doctrinal” is the right word but let’s go with it for now. I have a problem with the notion of papal infallibility which I see more in the context of the 19th century triumph of the secular nation state, the abolition of the Papal States and the unification of Italy. Papal infallibility was as much about 19th century European power politics as it was about theology. As theology I think it sucks but as politics it’s been brilliant. I also can’t accept the Catholic teachings on divorce and contraception and I think that their obsession with the suppression of sex has led directly to evil consequences most notably the abuse of children by clergy. The Pell case here in Australia has rocked Australian Catholicism to its core. It has no answer morally or spiritually to the sexual abuse of children by clergy and the Pell case, even though his own conviction was quashed on appeal and he was released from jail, showed how he was part of the problem. It’s not just a matter of a few bad apples, the whole barrel is rotten. I can’t be a part of that. So I suppose I’m a bit of a religious loose cannon, cut off from my natural home and unable to rejoin it.

Do I agree that there’s much to criticise in Roman Catholicism? As you Americans say, you bet your ass! And yet the old Whore of Babylon just keeps on keeping on. It gives Christianity as a global phenomenon its critical mass. Take the billion plus Catholics out of the equation so that you only have Protestants of all stripes and types left and you’ve reduced world Christianity to a tiny minority among world religions. It would make Islam the world’s largest religion by far followed by Hinduism and Buddhism.

[Occam's Spork]

That is a good point.
What is the basis for the Pope's alleged 'infallibility'?
Peter is said to be the first Pope, but the scriptures indicate he was far from infallible.

[Gort]

A fine pair those two.

Isis, incestuous wife of Osiris.

Mary, knocked up by a 90 year old at the age of 14.

[Occam's Spork]

Sept 20, 2021 11:25:39 GMT 10 Gort said:

A fine pair those two.

Isis, incestuous wife of Osiris.

Mary, knocked up by a 90 year old at the age of 14.

He was definitely older, but suggesting he was 90 in any degree of certainty is highly speculative.
In their culture standards were much different than ours. Usually by age 13 male children were considered adults and often began providing for themselves. In regards to maturity, I'm certain that the standards weren't too different for females.

There are indications from scriptures that most of Christ's disciples (with the exception of Peter, and Jesus himself) Were under the age of 20, I will even go as far to say they were likely even younger than 18. And John (the youngest) may not have even been 13 when he started following.

[Occam's Spork]

Sept 20, 2021 7:51:15 GMT 10 pim said:

If you look through the ancient Mesopotamian religions, and even now, the veneration of Mothers and sons *(Mary often pictured with the infant Jesus*)is often a pattern in many pagan religions.

She’s modelled on the Egyptian goddess Isis. Compare the Christian icon of the Madonna and Child with the statue of Isis and the infant Horus



The veneration of Isis was a popular cult in the later pre-Christian Roman Empire. If you look for vestiges of paganism in Christianity you’ll find them everywhere and one of the issues that the Protestant reformers “protested” about and broke with Rome over was the veneration of saints which Martin Luther and John Calvin, as well as John Knox and Ulrich Zwingli condemned as a thinly disguised pagan pantheon. The cult of Mary, or Mariolatry, is a feature of Catholicism that Protestantism explicitly rejects.

The veneration of sacred images, or icons and statuary, is another pagan hangover that isn’t confined to Roman Catholicism. That it’s a feature of Roman Catholicism is undeniable but icons are an important part of Eastern Rite Orthodoxy as well. Apparently during the final Siege of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 the Orthodox Patriarch paraded the sacred icons from the Hagia Sophia and displayed them to the defenders on the city walls to give heart to the defenders and presumably to invoke divine aid. Much good it did them!

But Protestantism contains more vestiges of paganism than most Protestants realise. The way we measure the passing of time is very pagan. The number we ascribe to a year is the most Christian part of our calendar, being notionally based on the number of years since the birth of Christ - a fuzzy concept with a huge fudge factor but it kinda works and people like to leave well enough alone where that’s concerned. Most of the rest is recycled paganism. The days of the week are named, in English, after Norse gods and in the Latin countries around the Mediterranean they’re named after the old Roman deities. Months of the year are named after a mixture of Christian figures such as May being a corruption of Mary, and pagan deities such as March/Mars and January/Janus. The months of September, October, November and December are from the Latin words for 7, 8, 9 and 10 and reflect an earlier calendar in pre-Christian times when a year was divided into 10 months. Even the word “calendar” is pagan. The beginning of a month in pagan Rome was called the “calends” and from then they counted down to the Ides and the Nones. It’s remarkable how much of that has survived and lived on through the centuries of Christianity and into the modern secular post-Christian era.

This lends to my belief that Catholicism isn't true Christian; Rather repackaged Mesopotamian paganism.

It’s a criticism I’ve often heard from evangelical Protestant Christians of the non-conformist traditions. North American Protestantism is largely non-conformist. It’s that Puritan strain that came over with the Mayflower. Methodists and Baptists found North America to have fertile soil and they proliferated. But the more “traditional” Protestants such as the Anglicans, or Episcopalians in the US (in Canada are they called Anglicans or Episcopalians?) don’t level the same critique. It’s not a critique that I take very seriously. Christianity has had its idolatrous periods followed by an iconoclastic reaction. The Byzantine Empire went through an intense period of iconoclasm. As Christianity spread out from its beginnings in Judea it encountered the Greek-speaking eastern Roman world with its statuary. The icons in eastern rite Christianity are of the martyrs and that makes sense because it was in the Greek-speaking east that Christianity spread the most and where the persecution of Christians was felt most keenly. But I accept the evangelical Protestant critique that it’s tantamount to pagan idolatry. Ever notice how Muslims don’t have graven images or icons? Early Islam spread amongst mostly Monophysite Christian Aramaic-speaking populations of the Middle East. “Monophysite” unpacks from its original Greek as “one nature” and it refers to the debate about the nature of Christ. Monophysite Christians (modern Coptic Christians) claim Christ has one nature which is divine whereas “orthodox” Christianity, imposed at spear point by the Greek-speaking Byzantines, insisted on the dual nature human/divine of Christ. The Byzantines spoke Greek and the Monophysite peoples of the Middle East were Semitic both in language and in culture who found Greek Christianity with its icons and statues and intolerance of alternatives to be oppressive and tyrannical. The arrival of Islam brought by fellow Semites with its rejection of Byzantine Trinitarianism, its icons and its insistence on the dual nature of Christ to be a relief and they embraced it with enthusiasm. Anything to get rid of the idolatrous Greeks. You might say that Eastern rite iconoclasm contributed in a very important way to the spread of Islam.

In the West the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s and 1600s was its iconoclastic period which ended up being as profound in its implications as it was for the Byzantine East some 800 years previously. Whereas in the East it had the early spread of Islam as one of its consequences - and the arrival of Islam changed everything for Christianity, and I mean everything - in the West it led to the settlement of English-speaking North America and also to the rise of the nation state and the modern world.

I accept your critique of Catholicism, Occam, with its Mariolatry, its idolatrous veneration of sacred relics, statuary, images etc and its paganistic (to coin a word) pantheon of saints, and yet I don’t find any of that sort of stuff offensive. I accept that you do and I respect your reasoning, but my quarrel with Catholicism is more … how should I put it … doctrinal? Not sure that “doctrinal” is the right word but let’s go with it for now. I have a problem with the notion of papal infallibility which I see more in the context of the 19th century triumph of the secular nation state, the abolition of the Papal States and the unification of Italy. Papal infallibility was as much about 19th century European power politics as it was about theology. As theology I think it sucks but as politics it’s been brilliant. I also can’t accept the Catholic teachings on divorce and contraception and I think that their obsession with the suppression of sex has led directly to evil consequences most notably the abuse of children by clergy. The Pell case here in Australia has rocked Australian Catholicism to its core. It has no answer morally or spiritually to the sexual abuse of children by clergy and the Pell case, even though his own conviction was quashed on appeal and he was released from jail, showed how he was part of the problem. It’s not just a matter of a few bad apples, the whole barrel is rotten. I can’t be a part of that. So I suppose I’m a bit of a religious loose cannon, cut off from my natural home and unable to rejoin it.

Do I agree that there’s much to criticise in Roman Catholicism? As you Americans say, you bet your ass! And yet the old Whore of Babylon just keeps on keeping on. It gives Christianity as a global phenomenon its critical mass. Take the billion plus Catholics out of the equation so that you only have Protestants of all stripes and types left and you’ve reduced world Christianity to a tiny minority among world religions. It would make Islam the world’s largest religion by far followed by Hinduism and Buddhism.

It goes back much further than that. The Myth of Isis and Osiris is based on the Babyonian (Assyrian) legend of Semiramis and Ninyas.

Which is why the Bible's prophetic books refer to the false prophets as "Mystery Babylon"

[pim]

That’s interesting. I know nothing about these ancient Bronze Age mystery cults from the Middle East and the Fertile Crescent. I defer to your scholarship, Occam

[fat]

"But in their culture standards were much different than ours. Usually by age 13 male children were considered adult and often began providing for themselves."

Occam - not so long ago really my Dad left school at 12 and a half to start work. (It was what happened)

[Occam's Spork]

Sept 21, 2021 23:40:58 GMT 10 pim said:

That’s interesting. I know nothing about these ancient Bronze Age mystery cults from the Middle East and the Fertile Crescent. I defer to your scholarship, Occam

My wife homeschools our children.
I only know any of this because it was my job to be the children's history teacher last year, and some of my lessons touched on this subject matter.
Here's a very good history lesson on the origin of early pagan religion (though fair warning: this video is from a Christian's perspective)

[pim]

Thank you I’ll have a look at it later.

I have this title on my bookshelf ..



Here’s the synopsis ..

The transition from pagan to Christian in the ancient Mediterranean world was a process whose effects we still live with today. How did this monumental conversion come about? How did Christianity compare and compete with the pagan gods in the Roman Empire? This work places Christians and pagans side by side in the context of civic life.

Like a lot of books on your bookshelf you read it once, find it interesting, put it back and there it stands gathering dust. I should have another look at it.

[Occam's Spork]

Sept 22, 2021 16:38:14 GMT 10 pim said:

Thank you I’ll have a look at it later.

I have this title on my bookshelf ..



Here’s the synopsis ..

The transition from pagan to Christian in the ancient Mediterranean world was a process whose effects we still live with today. How did this monumental conversion come about? How did Christianity compare and compete with the pagan gods in the Roman Empire? This work places Christians and pagans side by side in the context of civic life.

Like a lot of books on your bookshelf you read it once, find it interesting, put it back and there it stands gathering dust. I should have another look at it.

I will look for that. I often download copies of ebooks from our public library. Technology opens up worlds. What a great age to live in!

[pim]

I recall I picked it up in a second hand bookshop years ago. It’s probably out of print or remaindered. I hadn’t thought of downloading it as an ebook! I just looked it up on the ebooks app on my iPad. A wealth of scholarship on the topic reveals itself before my eyes! I’d always wondered about the pagan response to Christianity pre-Constantine. I mean getting beyond the obvious stuff like Christians v lions in the Coliseum and the persecutions of Nero and Diocletian. Christianity existed as a minority in a pagan universe for 300 years before the Edict of Milan. And even then the best part of another century elapsed before Christianity was declared to be the official state religion of the Roman Empire. The way I understand it, the Edict of Milan of AD 313 officially put an end to the persecutions carried out by Constantine’s predecessor Diocletian and made Christianity legal. In other words it was allowed to exist as a cult alongside all the other cults that we would call “pagan”. It wasn’t until the reign of Theodosius 1 in AD 380 that Christianity was declared to be the only show in town. Basically Rome adopted Christianity just in time before it fell to the Goths in AD 410.

What has always intrigued me was what was going on underneath the official veneer of emperors and official edicts. Christians were in the minority for almost all of the history of the Western Roman Empire. Rome itself as a city remained a pagan backwater for quite some time as Constantinople developed both as the new imperial capital and Christian city. The very word “pagan” unpacks to mean “hillbilly”. Christianity developed as an urban phenomenon while in the rural hinterland the peasants clung to their heathen ways. What I’d like to know about is the pagan response to Christianity. Not just the “throw them to the lions” stuff but the intellectual arguments put up by paganism to the challenge posed by Christianity. Paganism itself didn’t call itself “pagan”. There were so many cults that it’s difficult to find a generic name that encompasses all of them. But from memory in the Robin Lane Fox book that I’ve cited, when Theodosius declared Christianity the official religion and removed all government support for the old gods and heathen cults in AD380 the cry went up around the Mediterranean world “Great Pan is dead”. It was a cry of lamentation, not of joy. There would have been adherents of the old cults who rejected Christianity and saw value in the traditional pagan culture that had been handed down to them. Such people might have opposed the persecutions - especially those carried out under Diocletian which were the most severe of all the persecutions - but rejected the Christian message just as today I oppose the demonisation of and hostility towards Muslims while at the same time I don’t accept the religion of Islam, or the Mormons, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Was there a debate between Christianity and paganism? The fact that our language and culture, Christianity itself, has so many vestiges of ancient paganism indicates to me that paganism hung on even after Christianity took over. Witchcraft remained on the statute books in Britain as a hanging offence into the 1700s. If anything is a pagan leftover in the modern world, witchcraft has to claim the prize! What we call “witches” today would have been Vestal Virgins in Ancient Rome and instead of being persecuted and executed as evil servants of Satan they were honoured and venerated. Paganism didn’t just disappear as Christianity took over. It had its answer. It still does! We’re all familiar with the Case for Christianity. It won! But what was the Case for Pan? I know there was one. I’d love to know what it was.

[Occam's Spork]

Sept 23, 2021 6:27:14 GMT 10 pim said:

I recall I picked it up in a second hand bookshop years ago. It’s probably out of print or remaindered. I hadn’t thought of downloading it as an ebook! I just looked it up on the ebooks app on my iPad. A wealth of scholarship on the topic reveals itself before my eyes! I’d always wondered about the pagan response to Christianity pre-Constantine. I mean getting beyond the obvious stuff like Christians v lions in the Coliseum and the persecutions of Nero and Diocletian. Christianity existed as a minority in a pagan universe for 300 years before the Edict of Milan. And even then the best part of another century elapsed before Christianity was declared to be the official state religion of the Roman Empire. The way I understand it, the Edict of Milan of AD 313 officially put an end to the persecutions carried out by Constantine’s predecessor Diocletian and made Christianity legal. In other words it was allowed to exist as a cult alongside all the other cults that we would call “pagan”. It wasn’t until the reign of Theodosius 1 in AD 380 that Christianity was declared to be the only show in town. Basically Rome adopted Christianity just in time before it fell to the Goths in AD 410.

What has always intrigued me was what was going on underneath the official veneer of emperors and official edicts. Christians were in the minority for almost all of the history of the Western Roman Empire. Rome itself as a city remained a pagan backwater for quite some time as Constantinople developed both as the new imperial capital and Christian city. The very word “pagan” unpacks to mean “hillbilly”. Christianity developed as an urban phenomenon while in the rural hinterland the peasants clung to their heathen ways. What I’d like to know about is the pagan response to Christianity. Not just the “throw them to the lions” stuff but the intellectual arguments put up by paganism to the challenge posed by Christianity. Paganism itself didn’t call itself “pagan”. There were so many cults that it’s difficult to find a generic name that encompasses all of them. But from memory in the Robin Lane Fox book that I’ve cited, when Theodosius declared Christianity the official religion and removed all government support for the old gods and heathen cults in AD380 the cry went up around the Mediterranean world “Great Pan is dead”. It was a cry of lamentation, not of joy. There would have been adherents of the old cults who rejected Christianity and saw value in the traditional pagan culture that had been handed down to them. Such people might have opposed the persecutions - especially those carried out under Diocletian which were the most severe of all the persecutions - but rejected the Christian message just as today I oppose the demonisation of and hostility towards Muslims while at the same time I don’t accept the religion of Islam, or the Mormons, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Was there a debate between Christianity and paganism? The fact that our language and culture, Christianity itself, has so many vestiges of ancient paganism indicates to me that paganism hung on even after Christianity took over. Witchcraft remained on the statute books in Britain as a hanging offence into the 1700s. If anything is a pagan leftover in the modern world, witchcraft has to claim the prize! What we call “witches” today would have been Vestal Virgins in Ancient Rome and instead of being persecuted and executed as evil servants of Satan they were honoured and venerated. Paganism didn’t just disappear as Christianity took over. It had its answer. It still does! We’re all familiar with the Case for Christianity. It won! But what was the Case for Pan? I know there was one. I’d love to know what it was.

I'm not certain, but I believe the Edict of Milan wasn't until 325 AD...

[pim]

The Battle of the Milvan Bridge which delivered the imperial crown to Constantine was fought and won by Constantine in 312 AD. Constantine had been an adherent of Sol Invicta or the Unconquered Sun, obviously a sun-worship cult. The traditional narrative is that he dreamt before the battle of the Greek letters Chi and Rho with the words (in Latin of course) “in hoc signo vinces“ or “by this sign, conquer!” True or not, he commanded that his troops emboss their shields with the Chi Rho sign and he won the battle.



Constantine himself wasn’t Christian and the jury is out whether he actually took baptism, if he did it would have been on his deathbed and not before, but he enlisted the support of the Christians and one of his first acts as Emperor - i.e. sole emperor of the whole Empire and not the system of co-emperors that had pertained hitherto - was to end, officially, the persecutions of Christianity that had marked the reign of his imperial predecessor Diocletian which had been very very bad news for the Christians. The Diocletian persecutions are considered to have been the bloodiest, most far-reaching and harshest of all the persecutions waged against the Christians and by calling a halt to them and giving the Christians the status of “legal” meant they were a bona fide cult within the Empire and were free to organise, worship openly, build their churches and participate in all aspects of public and private life. This was the Edict of Milan and I’ve always read that its date is February 313 AD, a year after Milvan Bridge. It took until 380 AD for Christianity to be declared the official religion of the Roman Empire under the Emperor Theodosius. Now that’s the real game changer because while the Edict of Milan gave Christianity parity with the pagan cults, Theodosius placed Christianity above paganism and declared it the only show in town. Didn’t stop the persecutions except that from then on the shoe was on the other foot. It was the pagans who were persecuted.

Mind you when I say that Theodosius made Christianity the only show in town that’s a bit misleading since the Christianity of the day encompassed many ”shows”: Gnostics, Monophysites, Trinitarians … you name it! No wonder that an “official” version emerged that called itself “Orthodox”. It still does! I argue that this makes Catholics the first Protestants!

[Gort]

Sept 26, 2021 13:09:50 GMT 10 pim said:

The Battle of the Milvan Bridge which delivered the imperial crown to Constantine was fought and won by Constantine in 312 AD. Constantine had been an adherent of Sol Invicta or the Unconquered Sun, obviously a sun-worship cult. The traditional narrative is that he dreamt before the battle of the Greek letters Chi and Rho with the words (in Latin of course) “in hoc signo vinces“ or “by this sign, conquer!” True or not, he commanded that his troops emboss their shields with the Chi Rho sign and he won the battle.



Constantine himself wasn’t Christian and the jury is out whether he actually took baptism, if he did it would have been on his deathbed and not before, but he enlisted the support of the Christians and one of his first acts as Emperor - i.e. sole emperor of the whole Empire and not the system of co-emperors that had pertained hitherto - was to end, officially, the persecutions of Christianity that had marked the reign of his imperial predecessor Diocletian which had been very very bad news for the Christians. The Diocletian persecutions are considered to have been the bloodiest, most far-reaching and harshest of all the persecutions waged against the Christians and by calling a halt to them and giving the Christians the status of “legal” meant they were a bona fide cult within the Empire and were free to organise, worship openly, build their churches and participate in all aspects of public and private life. This was the Edict of Milan and I’ve always read that its date is February 313 AD, a year after Milvan Bridge. It took until 380 AD for Christianity to be declared the official religion of the Roman Empire under the Emperor Theodosius. Now that’s the real game changer because while the Edict of Milan gave Christianity parity with the pagan cults, Theodosius placed Christianity above paganism and declared it the only show in town. Didn’t stop the persecutions except that from then on the shoe was on the other foot. It was the pagans who were persecuted.

Mind you when I say that Theodosius made Christianity the only show in town that’s a bit misleading since the Christianity of the day encompassed many ”shows”: Gnostics, Monophysites, Trinitarians … you name it! No wonder that an “official” version emerged that called itself “Orthodox”. It still does! I argue that this makes Catholics the first Protestants!

Buzzo would be pleased that your post has that symbol ...

On the front cover of one of his books.

[Occam's Spork]

Sept 26, 2021 13:33:27 GMT 10 Gort said:

Sept 26, 2021 13:09:50 GMT 10 pim said:

The Battle of the Milvan Bridge which delivered the imperial crown to Constantine was fought and won by Constantine in 312 AD. Constantine had been an adherent of Sol Invicta or the Unconquered Sun, obviously a sun-worship cult. The traditional narrative is that he dreamt before the battle of the Greek letters Chi and Rho with the words (in Latin of course) “in hoc signo vinces“ or “by this sign, conquer!” True or not, he commanded that his troops emboss their shields with the Chi Rho sign and he won the battle.



Constantine himself wasn’t Christian and the jury is out whether he actually took baptism, if he did it would have been on his deathbed and not before, but he enlisted the support of the Christians and one of his first acts as Emperor - i.e. sole emperor of the whole Empire and not the system of co-emperors that had pertained hitherto - was to end, officially, the persecutions of Christianity that had marked the reign of his imperial predecessor Diocletian which had been very very bad news for the Christians. The Diocletian persecutions are considered to have been the bloodiest, most far-reaching and harshest of all the persecutions waged against the Christians and by calling a halt to them and giving the Christians the status of “legal” meant they were a bona fide cult within the Empire and were free to organise, worship openly, build their churches and participate in all aspects of public and private life. This was the Edict of Milan and I’ve always read that its date is February 313 AD, a year after Milvan Bridge. It took until 380 AD for Christianity to be declared the official religion of the Roman Empire under the Emperor Theodosius. Now that’s the real game changer because while the Edict of Milan gave Christianity parity with the pagan cults, Theodosius placed Christianity above paganism and declared it the only show in town. Didn’t stop the persecutions except that from then on the shoe was on the other foot. It was the pagans who were persecuted.

Mind you when I say that Theodosius made Christianity the only show in town that’s a bit misleading since the Christianity of the day encompassed many ”shows”: Gnostics, Monophysites, Trinitarians … you name it! No wonder that an “official” version emerged that called itself “Orthodox”. It still does! I argue that this makes Catholics the first Protestants!

Buzzo would be pleased that your post has that symbol ...

On the front cover of one of his books.

Buzz would boast that he designed it himself