#christian history

[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.

[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.

[creature-wizard]

The more you actually learn about the history of Christianity from credible academic sources, the more you learn that Christianity's origins are very easy to explain without either accepting the Gospels as historical fact or believing in some cockamamie "Jesus never existed, he was invented by the Catholic Church who based him on Horus" conspiracy theory.

The more you learn about the actual history of Christianity, the more it becomes obvious that it was a simple product of its time and place, largely unremarkable aside from the fact that Rome eventually assimilated it and made their imperialized version a dominant religious force. Christianity originated from an environment where weird mystical salvific religions and messianic movements were just what people did.

In my opinion it's genuinely fascinating to learn about, because the deeper you go the more obvious it is that it was a very organic, very human sociological phenomenon, and there's no reason to single it out as uniquely compelling to join, or uniquely sinister in origin. It's just... a thing. A plain ol' regular thing started by plain ol' regular people, just like you and me.

[nickysfacts]

Vassago: the honest demonic treasure hunting prince detective!

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[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.”

[adams-r1b]

(details from 'Saint Sebastian' c. 17th century by Giovanni Domenico Cerrini and 'Mary Magdalene in the Cave' c. 1868 by Hugues Merle)

[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

[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.

[gemsofgreece]

My God Netflix... take a fucking hint maybe. Let it rest, honestly, such projects are apparently not for you, it's okay.

Also, can I just add some screenshots from the Hercules thing because

Okay, who watches this unironically and then unironically gives it a 3/5... come forth! I can't stop laughing it looks like bad porn

I will give Tarak and Saphirra the benefit of the doubt as apparently the movie has little to do with accuracy to mythology anyway. There are some scarce myths that Heracles had visited India with Dionysus but that’s nowhere in the plot. And I also doubt this is how the names were in Sanskrit but I don't know much about that.

Lucius is a Latin name, hope they din't give it to a Greek that was "contemporary" of Heracles, also hope they don't gave it to a Roman because there weren't Romans at the time of Heracles. But as I see in the wikipedia page that someone chose to make for this film, apparently, Heracles was sold to a gladiator slave promoter, who was Lucius, so I guess indeed according to Netflix Heracles / Hercules lived with Romans and more so at the time of their peak.

BUT all this is fine compared to SOTIRIS. Sotiris, a pal of Heracles. Sotiris is a Greek name all right and it has an ancient Greek origin indeed.... Soter or Sotir in the modern pronunciation is an epithet meaning "Saviour" and it was a way several gods were called i.e Zeus Soter. Then also some Hellenistic kings used it as an epithet, i.e Ptolemy I Soter. And finally, Jesus. The famous early crypto-Christian fish, if you know. Early Christians who did not want to be discovered and persecuted by pagan Romans and Greeks used as their secret symbol the fish, which in Greek is ΙΧΘΥΣ, and served as an acronym for Ἰησοῦς Χρῑστός Θεοῦ Υἱός Σωτήρ (Iēsûs Chrīstós, Theû Huiós, Sōtḗr - Jesus Christ, Son of God, the Saviour).

The problem is that from Soter the adjective Soterios was derived, meaning the same thing, and soon enough Sotirios (because the pronunciation was already half-modern at the time) was popularised after Jesus and Chirstianity as a first name for normal people that were getting baptised. Nowadays, girls are baptised as "Sotiria" (salvation, the noun, for them) and boys are baptised as "Sotirios" (the adjective) and almost always go with "Sotiris" for shorter.

In other words, they really went for "Hercules and Jack" or something.

This is the Thanos thing happening all over again.

[medievalistsnet]

CALL FOR PAPERS: Entangled Christianities (100-1500 CE), taking place this November in Greece - Click here to get the details.

[whereserpentswalk]

The idea that the Christians were some sort of persecuted minority in the Roman empire is so commonly taught in history, but when you look at actual early Christian beliefs things seem a lot diffrent.

Like, Christians were a highly reactionary and militant religious group that wanted to force a relatively diverse society to follow its extremely strict and conservative moral values. They were known to engage in destructive praxis, and had a strong cult of martyrdom that's an undercurrent of every facist movment. They were a religious minority, but they weren't one that just wanted to practice on their own, they were a rapidly spreading reactionary movement with incredibly conservative values they wanted to push on society.

So don't view Roman citizens trying to keep Christianity out of their society as the ignorant and hateful mob you're often taught about them being, think of them a bit more like we view people trying to keep nazis out of their communities today.

As for the Roman government attack Christians I view it with the same skepticism I view any government trying to attack reactionaries. It's never a good path for a state to go down, even when the ideas they're attacking are awful. And like most governments that start attacking reactionaries, they eventually embrace and enforce those reactionary ideas.

[official-neue-bundeslaender]

@ catholic side of tumblr: why does st mary (?) have a wand here o.o

[the-orphic-youth]

Magic amulet in a form of engraved heliotrope gem, XIth c., Byzantium, 52 x 47mm.

The National Museum of the Przemyśl Land.

[totheidiot]

that new testament john x jesus post of mine is doing so good i might have to start cooking up another new testament related post. can't complain religious history when it comes to christianity and islam is of my most favorite things and i love to talk about it. if you want my thoughts on something concerning specifically the life of jesus and anything regarding islam before the sunni-shia split, shoot me an ask. i will come to you with an extremely long analysis post, trust.

[nickysfacts]

Satan, the powerful demotic ruler of the earth who loves giving people moral pop quizzes!😄

🔥🐐🔥