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INTRO | PART 1.1 | PART 1.2 | PART 1.3 | PART 1.4 | PART 1.5 | PART 1.6
PART 2.1 | PART 2.2 | PART 2.3 | PART 2.4 | PART 4.0
PART 5.1 | PART 5.2 | PART 5.3 | PART 5.4 | PART 5.5 | PART 6.2 | PART 6.3
PART 7.1 | PART 7.2 | PART 31.1 | PART 31.2 | PART 31.3 | PART 31.4
Acknowledgements | Bibliography

Part I of Tom Lee's book sets the scene for the arrival of Christianity by exploring the background politics, social situation and religious beliefs operating within the Roman Empire and the geographical territories of the world two thousand years ago. We will serialise this first part over the next three Mondays.

The Invention of Christianity and the Papacy
The first 500 years
by Tom Lee
Setting the Scene for the arrival of Christianity Part I

Introduction…

It was a strange and troubled time. Palestine was a small and rugged territory, a holy land, in an unsettled period of foreign domination and, political and religious unrest. For centuries a corridor between sea and desert, joining, Africa to Asia, Arabia to Europe; it had been the battlefield of others, a vassal of Greece, of Egypt, of Arabia, of Persia, of Mesopotamia. When given a momentary independence by the weakness of neighbors it fiercely separated into discordant northern, southern, eastern and western kingdoms. By habit a country of tireless agitation and incessant revolt between its sects and factions; during the life of Jesus it was a vassal province of the Roman Empire. In 63 BCE, Roman General Pompey quelled a Hasmonean dynasty conflict, ending the Independent Jewish kingdom and bringing direct Roman rule to the region. It was governed by procurators who were, more often than not, venal and cruel, with little or no respect for Jewish law and custom.

Rome had been imperial in its conquests and policies long before Octavian as Caesar Augustus, obtained an authority that marked the beginning of what is known as the Empire. With the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE the appalling civil wars that had harassed the republic did not cease, nor was there any sign of reform in the provinces, maladministered from the outset.

In 40 BCE the Romans installed a new king over the Jews of Israel and Judaea, Herod the Great. The Roman Senate, ancient bastion of aristocratic resistance to autocracy, was weakened and unable to stand against powerful military leaders. For the Senators, betting on the right horse was a matter of life and death. The Romans did not share our most basic assumptions and beliefs. It was a culture obsessed with revenge, honor and dying well; a moral code exemplified in Mars, the god of war.

A Republic but effectively a dictatorship under Augustus…

Emperor Augustus

In 31 BCE Octavian, grandnephew and adopted son of Julius, having defeated Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, found himself without ostensible rivals. The chill and calculating youth, at the age of nineteen, addressed the desperate task of reconstructing the dismal ruins. The young thug who was reputedly capable of tearing out a man's eyes with his bare hands morphed into a serious-minded legislator. He would later boast, "I found Rome brick, and left it marble." Accepting the title of Augustus (Revered One) he became the architect of the Roman Empire, reigning for over forty years from 27 BCE to 14 CE. Although technically Rome continued to be a Republic, governed in the name of Senate and People, it was effectively a dictatorship with the emperor as supreme ruler of all countries under Roman control. Romans saw Rome as the center of the world and believed a stone in the Forum, the omphalos, or navel, stood over the entrance to Hades, their amorphous and unthreatening underworld.

Optimistically, Roman historian Livy (59BCE-17CE) could write: "What makes a society strong is the well-being of its people — basic justice, basic opportunity, a modicum of spiritual reward, and the people's conviction that the system is put in place to produce it.

For the Jews in their homeland the institution of the Empire was an emphatic evil. They saw it as a sign of the Last Days, a diabolical contrivance to withstand the coming of the Kingdom of God. But this feeling was not shared by many of the Jews of the Dispersion, living in other cities of the empire, or even beyond it in Babylon.

Peace imposed by force…

Under the leadership of Augustus there was a peace that had not been known for many years. Piracy in the Mediterranean was virtually extinguished, giving opportunity for increased seaborne commerce. Most of the overland routes were cleared of bandits and linked by a network of well-built roads. Attempts were made to cut down extortion and self-enrichment by officials in the provinces and the internal self-government of countries was subjected to a minimum of interference where loyalty to Rome was assured. However, the Pax Romana was imposed by force and the provinces were administered by Roman governors whose authority was based on the power of legionary troops.

Rome was not loved by the subject peoples, and did not expect to be; but the orderly rule and security it offered were widely appreciated and the Romans themselves were very conscious of the improvements brought about by Augustus. Virgil the poet looked on it as a fresh beginning of the cycle of time, the coming of a new Golden Age, not far removed from the eventual Christian belief that the Incarnation of Jesus had given the history of mankind a new beginning. Virgil's poem The Aeneid tells the story of Aeneas, who after the fall of Troy, it was believed, founded a colony in Italy from which the Romans claimed descent. The theme is pietas (devotion) — to fathers, to the gods, to national ideals.

The great poem flattered and immortalized an era of oppression that is hard to reconcile with the brutal economic facts of slavery and dehumanization that the dying poet had seen during his carriage through the nocturnal city.

The vast empire ultimately extended from Solway Firth, dividing Scotland from England, to the Sahara — from the Atlantic Coast to the River Euphrates, bordering the Persian Empire. But the movement outward from Italy was matched by a movement inward, especially from the eastern Mediterranean lands.

The early civilizations of the ancient Near East, in Egypt and Mesopotamia, trying to make sense of what lies beyond the temporal sphere, were endowed by their hierarchies with a divine aura giving them legitimacy. A king was thought symbolically to be the representative of the divine order, serving either as intercessor with the gods or as a god himself. After Caesar's deification, Augustus was able to style himself "son of God". His home was significantly part of the same complex as the Temple of Apollo, with all the resonance of divine power which that proximity brought. The bond between the divine and the human was a tight one and was only loosened with the rise of Christianity.

Augustus was the first Roman politician to recognize that power in part stemmed from visibility, though the machinations of his bureaucracy were kept secret and denied to common knowledge, creating a mystique. More portrait statues of him survive than of any other Roman. They have been found throughout the empire, often made from a model distributed from Rome.

Augustus' control of the Roman army was central to his power base. To woo them he initiated a vast program that regularized recruitment, conditions of service, and pay (from the state treasury), and provided a generous retirement package at the end of a fixed period of service, sixteen years by the end of the reign.

The Jews…

The Jews, in their captivity and wanderings, encountered distinct but similar beliefs in a pantheon of gods and anthropomorphized forces deemed responsible for the creation and maintenance of their respective locales. Through their exposure to multiple domains, the Hebrews came to reject the fractious conception of the many and evolved an understanding of the interconnectedness of all life forces and creation, which became an overall Force of Nature expressed as a unifying supreme deity. But neither the King James Bible nor any other translation of the Pentateuch expresses a detail of the Hebrew text which was pointed out by Robert Graves and Raphael Patai: in the second verse of Genesis, the word ruach, in the phrase "ruach elohim" (translated as "Spirit of God" in the old version), is a feminine word. Thus the spirit of the Lord is, in name at least, a female spirit, bolstering the feminist joke: When God created man, she was only testing.

Other Religions…

From about 900 to 200 BCE, the traditions that have continued to inspire religiosity had their roots in four distinct regions of the world — Taoism and Confucianism in China; Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism in India; Monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece. In China, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty (140 BCE-87 BCE) decided that mystical Taoism was no longer suitable, as it had encouraged an extravagant expectation of human rights among the rebellious poor. Practical down-to-earth Confucianism, which revered human logic over the laws of nature, was adopted instead, leading to a civil service nomination system that rewarded practical ability rather than class or wealth.

Apart from China, the remains of the older civilizations had for hundreds of years been overlaid by Greek culture, a process that had been speeded up after the victories of Alexander the Great three and a half centuries before. Alexander's conquests deprived Athens of its freedom, but spread Greek art and thought to Egypt, Arabia, Israel, Persia, and even as far as Afghanistan and India, where the Greeks in turn were influenced by Hindu and Buddhist beliefs and customs. The philosophy of Plato and the dramas of Aeschylus expressed the newly revealed truth about human existence. The wealth_ of the Persian Empire captured by Alexander flowed in the track of his spendthrift armies to create the busy trade routes that were largely inherited by the Romans. Rome's subjugation of Greece expedited her own Hellenization.

Where the Greeks had been all verve and inquiry, poetry and caprice, high nobility and sexual freedom, including institutionalized male pederasty, the Romans assimilated and standardized the uneven scene with a genius for system. They bought or copied as much as they could of the best of Greece, and preserved it in stone and cement, an orderly and unambiguous language, and a strong and solid political and legal system. In Rome, and indeed throughout the empire, considerable emphasis was laid on education and the level of literacy was quite high. Most people in Rome itself could speak, read and write Greek or Latin, and many were fluent in both.

Augustus as Pontifex Maximus

When the Romans moved into Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt they encountered a different and disturbing way of life, flamboyant, exotic and temperamentally alien. In Rome itself religion consisted of cold and prosaic civic rites designed to preserve the status quo between men and gods, with the priesthoods reserved, in most instances, for the more prominent citizens and office holders. In 63 CE, Julius Caesar was appointed Pontifex Maximus (head of Roman religion) while opining that "human personality does not survive death." In that same year, Pompey interceded militarily to quell the Hasmonean conflict, thus ending the independent Jewish kingdom and bringing direct Roman rule to Palestine.

Jupiter, Mars, Janus, and Vesta formed the original Roman pantheon, while a separate cult honored the Sun (Sol Invictus) as another of Rome's protectors. The gods ruled the affairs of everyday life, such as war, weather and the home. But Roman religion lacked any concept of the Absolute, had no hope for an after-life, and no mother goddess, though Jupiter did acquire a wife called Juno.

But by the year 27 BCE, when the Empire supplanted the Republic, it is obvious from the surviving works of writers that for many people religion was dead. The ancient faith had lost its hold on the educated classes of Rome. Poets told how cobwebs hung about the altars, and ancient images were crumbling in deserted shrines. The majority of people were becoming pessimistic, believing that Tyche: Fortune, Chance or Luck, completely controlled everything in the world, and that they were adrift in an uncaring universe. The poets and philosophers couldn't agree whether the gods were Tyche's masters, or whether her existence and power excluded belief in their existence altogether. The Roman's world was, however, full of close-at-hand spirits, concerned with every detail of human life. They had to be treated properly if you wished to be treated properly by them. Belief in the fantastical flourished as natural forces were considered to be controlled by unseen sprites and spirits, either benevolent or mischievous.

Many Romans believed they could curse their enemies by writing their foe's name on a lead tablet and dropping the scroll into water or burying it. They would tell the god exactly what they wanted to happen to their enemy. The scrolls were also believed useful to make someone fall in love with the petitioner. Archaeologists have found fifty at the bottom of a well at what was once King Herod's palace at Caesarea Maritima. It was the seat of Roman government for the province of Judea where court cases were tried, and many scrolls were intended to cajole the gods onto the plaintiff's side in a legal wrangle and to make the opponent stumble.

For a considerable time a working relationship had been established between Greek and Roman religion by means of identifying Greek with Roman gods, Zeus being equated with Jupiter and so on. The primal, ancient energy that had suffused Rome and which must have fuelled the powerful foundations of the culture, were buried under the thinnest topsoil of Greek culture and mystery religions. Cults of other nations made an increasing impact on Roman society. Foreign goddesses were the first to arrive: Astarte came from Phoenicia, and later versions of the same fertility goddess were assimilated such as Artemis or Diana of Ephesus, Aphrodite or Venus from Cyprus, Anahita of the Persians and Atargatis of the Syrians; several identified as Moon goddesses.

Sacred prostitution was practiced at her temples, affording communion with the goddess through intercourse with her earthly representative. When life was short and relatively brutal, it is not surprising that procreation of descendants came to be viewed as essential. Gods and goddesses of fertility became paramount and eventually the priests concluded that, of the Seven Deadlies, Lust had the most potential, for exploitation. First came sex with the priest or priestess, as surrogate for the god, for a price. It gave rise to a number of kings and heroes who could claim a god as their father. Later, no doubt to save priestly exertion, many forms of sex were declared sinful, and absolution came at a premium. Even when the world was flat, the priests knew that money makes the world go round.

Some female devotees went to the temples to lie with the gods' priestly proxy prior to marriage: a ceremony of dedication that ensured genetic mixture. The goddess Artemis was paired with her brother Apollo as Moon and Sun deities.

Persephone Bringer of Destruction

The story of the rape and abduction of Kore the Maiden, later called Persephone Bringer of Destruction, also enjoyed great popularity and devotion. Kore's abductor was Hades god of the Underworld, and this episode became the basis of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Kore's mother Demeter (the name means Mother Earth), identified with Roman Ceres (the corn goddess), wandered the world, mourning her daughter and neglecting the crops.

When at last Kore was found, it turned out that she had eaten seven sacred pomegranate seeds and thus had to spend the winter months in the underworld. The Eleusinian Mysteries are thought to have involved a ritualistic and symbolic journey to the netherworld in imitation of Demeter, which ended with the triumph of Spring and rebirth. At the Feast of Demeter, for three days, her initiates mourned with her the abduction of her daughter into Hades, living only on consecrated cakes and a mystic mixture of flour, water, and mint. On the third night a religious drama represented the resurrection of Persephone, and the officiating priest promised a like rebirth to every purified soul.

The cult of the vegetation deity Cybele, the Great Mother, with her self-emasculated priests, had been imported before the close of the third century BCE, though no Roman was permitted to imitate her son Attis by mutilating himself to enter her priesthood. Every April Rome celebrated the Megalesia, or Feast of the Great Goddess, first with fasting and prayer to mourn the death of Attis, symbol of autumn and spring, and then with wild rejoicing to, celebrate his resurrection and the renewal of the earth. The image of the Great Mother was carried in triumph as the crowds hailed her as Nostra Domina, "Our Lady".

The cult of Dionysus (identified with Bacchus), a god of personal salvation, holding out the promise of life beyond the grave, urged its followers to lose themselves in ecstasy and let go of their physical and temporal boundaries. The Dionysian sect's offspring, the Orphic cult taught that the soul is imprisoned in a succession of sinful bodies and can be released from reincarnation by rising to ecstatic union with Dionysus. At the Orphic gatherings, the worshippers drank the blood of a sacrificed bull, to identify with the dying and atoning savior.

The Egyptian moon goddess Isis, cradling her divine son Horus, followed. She was the sorrowing mother, the loving comforter, the bearer of the gift of eternal life, whose spouse Osiris died and rose from the dead. In devout litanies she was hailed as "Queen of Heaven", "Star of the Sea", and "Mother of God" titles that were later appropriated by the Christians as titles of the Virgin Mary.

Under the name of Chaldeans the eastern astrologers invaded Rome, as did the Druidical Celts. The enticement of orgiastic practices, initiations, and the promise of well-being in an after-life, brought decay to the old civic and formalistic Roman religious institutions. The age of Augustus was one of pessimism that increasingly rejected the rationalism of the Greeks and the ancient authoritarian religions of the Orient and sought instead saviors who were above reason and who abolished the law. Savior cults abounded, and among them only Christianity triumphed.

There were moments of resistance, and actions taken to curb the more debasing rites. The Chaldeans were temporarily expelled. Augustus won applause for his efforts to revive the Roman faith and purity of living. It acquired the character of a dogma that the world owed to Rome peace and order, and if the Empire should ever fall, the world would return to darkness and primeval chaos.

Egypt of the Pharaohs believed in the divinity of the reigning king and his consort (often his sister), and in the Hellenistic kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean that grew out of Alexander's conquests, rulers were consecrated after death (by a practice which owed something to the hero cult of the Greeks) and, in some cases, in their lifetime. They were the objects of cults, with temples and priests.

Under Augustus it became a matter of state policy to encourage, mainly in the provinces, the organization of a cult having as its object the worship of Rome as a goddess and of the emperor as a god. The supreme governance of Augustus quite naturally directed to him the worship accorded to deity as the son and representative of Jupiter the father of the gods.

ARTICLE NAVIGATION: You are presently looking at Part 1.1
PREVIOUS | NEXT
INTRO | PART 1.1 | PART 1.2 | PART 1.3 | PART 1.4 | PART 1.5 | PART 1.6
PART 2.1 | PART 2.2 | PART 2.3 | PART 2.4 | PART 4.0
PART 5.1 | PART 5.2 | PART 5.3 | PART 5.4 | PART 5.5 | PART 6.2 | PART 6.3
PART 7.1 | PART 7.2 | PART 31.1 | PART 31.2 | PART 31.3 | PART 31.4
Acknowledgements | Bibliography

PHOTO CREDITS: The image of the Rising Sun used in the headline and footer graphics graphics was taken by Ines Mad. Linz, Austria and sourced through stock.xchng.
Clicking on the other images will take your to the original source of the image.

Tom Lee is an Australian, now semi-retired in Phoenix, Arizona, who has had an illustrious international career as an actor, writer, and broadcast commentator. He does not claim to be a professional theologian, nor an historian, but he undertook this study because, like many of the people who are attracted to what we're doing here at Catholica Australia, he was simply inquisitive about the history of Christianity and trying to better understand what he had been brought up to believe. In a sense, his book is a one-man journey seeking to better understand who Jesus was and what his own faith was about.

What are your thoughts on this commentary? You can contribute to the discussion in our forum.

©2008 Tom Lee (Star Concepts LLC) 15633 N. 17* Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85023-3409

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