#christian history

[iustuspeccator]

I'm OBSESSED with the Council of Nicaea. It's spring of 325. Christianity has been legal for 12 years. Constantine wants a unified religion for the Empire but the church has already schismed three different ways in the 3 centuries since the death of Christ, and legalization ITSELF causes a schism. They don't even all agree that being a legal religion is good. Now they're schisming about the nature of Christ. He can't persecute them into agreeing and Lord knows he's tried.

So Constantine calls all the bishops to his fucking summer resort, on the imperial dime. 280-318 bishops are going to argue about if the Logos (Christ) was "eternally begotten" or the first creation of God. Santa Claus is going to punch Arius in the face for saying the Logos was created. While we're here, let's set a date for Easter, which we also never pinned down. And we have to decide if eunuchs can be ordained because EVERYTHING HAS ALWAYS BEEN THIS WAY.

I've been to church conferences. I lose it every time I think about this. Bishops coming into Nicaea tired from the road (travel's a curse). Rural bishops coming to the seat of power for the first time. There's one guy who doesn't understand Robert's Rules and another guy who won't stop bringing up points of order. Someone's sleeping through all the speeches; he's just happy to be on vacation at the emperor's summer resort. The decision made here will form the closest thing Christianity has to a universal declaration of faith for the next 1700 years and it's going to take THREE MONTHS and we have to do it again in 6 years

I'm fancasting my Nicaea movie as we speak

[whereserpentswalk]

Thing I made.

[crazycatsiren]

Jesus Christ's birth wasn't some "Away in a Manger" very cutesy very mindful very demure lullaby bedtime story.

Mary had her baby in a barn. If you've been inside a barn, on a farm, then you know what I mean. It stinks. Excrements all over the place. It's got mice and rats and sometimes snakes. And near the end of December, it's cold. You can hear the rafters shake in the wind, there's dust and dirt and mud and god knows what everywhere.

She didn't even have a bed. If even a sheet to lie on. She gave birth to her son on a pile of hay in an outdoor shed where animals lived, and his cradle was a trough that was used to hold animal feed.

Then she held him close and went on the run.

It's not a dreamy fairytale, and that's the point. It's a young woman's fear and vulnerability, a mother's desperation and love.

[along-the-silkroad]

Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, page from the MS. 212 Gospels, written and illuminated by Avag during his stay in Tabriz, Iran, 1337 CE.

[religious-extremist]

Westerners often accuse the Orthodox Church of losing the essence of Christianity, because the Orthodox lands were subjugated by Islamic powers: the Eastern Roman Empire fell to the Ottomans, the conquest of Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria.

The funny thing with Islam is that, when it conquers a foreign land, their leaders demand a tax, the jizya, from those who do not convert to Islam. The more Christians converted to Islam, the less jizya they were able to collect; so they didn’t want too many of the Christians to convert to Islam, because then they would have less money.

But then Westerners say, God must have despised the disobedience of the Eastern Romans, of the Christians who called themselves Orthodox! They say that’s why God punished the Greeks; He used the Turks to destroy the Greek people and oppress their religion and scatter them and their congregation.

St. Kosmas the Aetolian spoke well when he said that God indeed showed His mercy upon the Greek people when, instead of letting them fall into the hands of the Venetians, the Papists, God preserved the Greeks by allowing the Muslims to take Constantinople instead. The Fall of Constantinople, this great tragedy which was indeed caused by the apostasy of the Greek people’s hearts, was also a great blessing.

Had the Venetians taken over, subjugated the Orthodox under the Papist yoke, we would have lost the Orthodox faith, forced to conversion. The Muslims at least had some incentive to preserve Orthodox Christianity amongst the Eastern Romans: that is, to collect taxes from them.

So those who had no faith in Christ our God had apostatized and became Muslims, and the ones who remained became saints, of faithfulness stronger than diamonds and brilliance more resplendent than the sun. The purest of gold can only be tried by fire, after all. Even the Old Testament spoke of “the righteous remnant.” And so, until today, the Orthodox faith remains unadulterated, preserved by these souls, the bulwark of Orthodoxy.

[baudouinette]

Not sure who would watch a video of me yapping about Baldwin and Saladin’s seals and tweaking their CK3 counterparts according to them but this is what I’m editing rn lmaooo

(I’ve always hated my voice but since I am interested in content creation I’m trying my best to break through it finally)

My TikTok is also suddenly no longer d3ad so that’s cool! I appreciate everyone who’s been supporting over there!

[thepastisalreadywritten]

“(In the name?) of St Titus.

Holy, holy, holy!

In the name of Jesus Christ, Son of God!

The Lord of the World

Resists (to the best of his ability?)

All attacks(?)/setbacks(?).

The God(?) grants the well-being

Entry.

This means of salvation(?) protects

The human being who

Surrenders to the will

Of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God,

Since before Jesus Christ

All knees bow to Jesus Christ: the heavenly

The earthly and

The subterranean and every tongue

Confess (to Jesus Christ).”

There is no reference in the text to any other faith besides Christianity, which would also have been unusual at this time.

According to the Frankfurt Archaeology Museum, reliable evidence of Christian life in the northern Alpine regions of the Roman Empire only goes as far back as the 4th century AD.

‘Fantastic find’ made possible by modern technology

Wolfram Kinzig, a church historian and professor from the University of Bonn, helped Scholz to decipher the inscription.

“The silver inscription is one of the oldest pieces of evidence we have for the spread of the New Testament in Roman Germania, because it quotes Philippians 2:10–11 in Latin translation,” Kinzig explained in an interview published on the University of Bonn’s website.

“It’s a striking example of how Biblical quotations were used in magic designed to protect the dead,” said Kinzig.

Peter Heather, a professor of medieval history at King’s College London with a specialist interest in the evolution of Christianity, described the discovery as a “fantastic find.”

Heather, who wasn’t involved in the research, told CNN:

“The capacity to be able to decipher the writing on that rolled-up piece of silver is extraordinary. This is something that’s only possible now with modern technology.

If they’d found it 100 years ago they wouldn’t have known what it was. Silver amulets are probably going to contain some kind of magical scroll but you don’t know what – it could be any religion.”

He added:

“You’ve got evidence of Christian communities in more central parts of the empire but not in a frontier town like that in Roman Germany so that is very unusual, well it’s unique. You’re pushing the history of Christianity in that region back.”

[baebeylik]

Processional Cross. Gondar, Ethiopia. Solomonid Dynasty. 17th Century CE.

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

[templevirgin]

2025 marks the 1700th anniversary

of the Nicene Creed.

[nickysfacts]

Vassago: the honest demonic treasure hunting prince detective!

👑🔎

[campgender]

from God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission by R. Marie Griffith (1997)

evangelical subculture was less a bulwark against than a variant of the therapeutic culture.

As evangelicals gradually ceased denouncing psychology outright, they shifted the battle lines, accepting the psychologists’ diagnosis of modern dilemmas while asserting that the cure for emotional sickness was religious faith rather than secular therapies. Popular evangelical writers increasingly began to discuss problems in terms of “anxiety” and “inferiority complexes” and advisedreaders on heightening “self-esteem” and fulfilling emotional “needs,” however, and the boundary between religious and secular prescriptions steadily blurred. Religious writers quoted enthusiastically from psychotherapists and other “positive thinkers” such as Dale Carnegie and Joshua Loth Liebman.

Continuing to denounce liberal Protestants for accommodating and selling out to “secular humanism,” evangelical authors devised an updated theology of their own, in which sin was often reconceptualized as sickness and concerns over salvation were replaced by concerns for earthly happiness, comfort, and health. Those who packaged their message most successfully, such as the well-known Christian pediatrician and psychologist James Dobson, tended to address a largely female audience and directed their concerns to marriage and family life, sex, and depression.

The historian Donald Meyer, whose 1965 study of “religion as pop psychology” was published just prior to The Triumph of the Therapeutic, shared Rieff’s argument and gave it a historical frame of reference, looking back to Mary Baker Eddy and the theology of mind cure for precedents of current therapeutic religion. Having failed to recognize evangelicals as participants in the phenomenon he described, fifteen years later Meyer added a chapter attributing the recent upsurge of conservative evangelicalism to that group’s appropriation of positive thinking and practices of healing therapy.

Tracing the career of Oral Roberts, who ceased his tent meeting healing services in favor of building a colossal modern hospital, Meyer noted the urge among evangelicals to make healing “obtainable as a predictable and rational expectation.” Not only in the Christian counseling centers and medical centers but also in the charismatics’ and other evangelicals’ continuing emphasis on divine healing, the mixing of the therapeutic with popular religion became highly visible. It seemed irrefutable that a deep cultural shift “from salvation to self-realization” had taken place; as two historians independently noted not long after Meyer’s postscript.

[elizabethan-memes]

TIL that relics of St Nicholas- THE saint Nicholas, father Christmas st Nicholas- were destroyed on 9/11 because the Orthodox church they were kept in was next to the World Trade Centre

[prophet-margin]

[crazycatsiren]

Christianity did not steal from paganism.

You know what Christianity did steal from? Judaism.

[along-the-silkroad]

Byzantine Painting of Saint Sergius as a Master of the Knights Templar, Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai, Egypt, c.1275 - c.1325.

[alpaca-clouds]

Why you do not get taught about religion properly

Something that always bothers me is the supposedly very religious folks, who will often use religion as an exuse to be super hateful towards one minority or another... but also don't know jackshit about the content or history of their religion. Mostly obviously this is Christians. Because, well... the thing about Christianity is, that most people who claim to be Christians and are from any western country never once have read the whole Bible, let alone a whole proper translation of the Bible - given that the most common translation is notorious for being horribly badly translated.

But even outside of this, there is the context that most Christians - no matter what side of the political spectrum they lie on - do not actually know how the Bible was "written", or rather collected. Why some texts are canonized (yes, this is where that word comes from) and others are not. Let alone the historical context.

And when we talk historical context, we also need to address that most people are also not taught the historical context of actual events. After all, there are some events in the Bible, that we know did definitely not happen. (The entire Egypt thing, for example. We have so many sources on Egypt that we can most certainly say that nothing of this happened. Just as we can say that there was no world wide flood after humans came to be.)

And if you talk to actual Bible scholars, you will also learn stuff like: "Oh, yeah, we are also fairly certain that this bit was added way later because in the Greek text it uses a word that was not around till 500 AD." And many such things. I mean, I got probably a better Bible education than most, but the context of the translation? Nobody explained that to me.

Once again, I will also remind y'all of that Christian on Christmas that got angry because non-Christians were celebrating Christmas, the "most important Christian holiday". While... Christmas is very much not a really important holiday in terms of Christian lore and the Christian calendar. Both Easter and Pentecost are easily more important in their importance for the religion. But Easter in modern times is barely adopted - and Pentecost is often not celebrated outside of a couple of Catholic places in Europe.

There is also the thing that a lot of American Christians apparently believe that Catholics are not "real Christians". You know, Roman Catholics, the OG Christians.

I could go on and on. But the basic thing it boils down to: Chances are, that even if you were raised Christian (no matter the domination) you never really got educated on the religion, never read the whole bible, and do not really know anything about what current Bible research says about the different things.

I will openly admit, that yes, at times I will use this as a gotcha in terms of debatebro-ing Christian right wingers. Because, again, I read the whole thing several times, and I do also read research on it these days. (And no, I am not Christian.)

But the thing is... let's face it, there is a reason why you do not know most if not all those things I named above. And that reason is politics. For some people it is just very, very conveniant that you do not know that kind of stuff. Because a lot of conservatives do love to use out of context Bible quotes to manipulate people into their conservative believes.

Mind you: Yes, given this book was written between 3500 and 1500 years ago (depending on the parts), this book is fairly conservative... Just not as conservative - and not in the same way - as most people using it to defend their bigotry.

And mind you: There are a whole of bigoted things in that book. Yes. Obviously. Because it was written in Ancient times. You will find the same bigoted stuff in other texts written at the time. Which is why it is important to teach the historical context.

And frankly, I also think it is incredibly fair towards anyone learning about the religion, to also learn about the context of it evolving. We know after all, how YHWH came into the pantheon and then took up Ba'al's position and later that of Elohim and such. We know how both the believe in the one god over the others came to be, and who this was addressed at.

Like, I am all for people finding the religion they vibe with. But at least give people some context to how it got to be. Because we know it - and keeping it from people to me is lying.