#christian history

[iustuspeccator]

I suspect this fellow may have blocked me because my reblog keeps failing from him, but I worked hard on my answer so I'm posting it! I'm not going to miss an opportunity to yap about history.

So first, most of this is true! It's a summary of chapters 14-16 from The History of the World Christian Movement. An excellent book, if you enjoy reading textbooks. I have added the apocryphal story that Nicholas of Myra slapped an Arian, because I think it's funny. And, of course, Robert's Rules didn't exist at the time, I also thought that would be funny.

As for the date for Easter, yes, they did decree that Easter would be on a Sunday at Nicaea. You can read about this on the Catholic website New Advent if you don't trust me. It was certainly not settled by an earlier pope, because by the Council of Nicaea, papal primacy was not yet established. I assume you are referring to Pope Victor's decree for Rome that Easter be celebrated on a Sunday (New Advent). However, at this time (c.190), the Greek word παππάς (pappas; father) is in use for every bishop (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church). It doesn't indicate the primacy of the bishop of Rome, which is who Victor is at this time. His decree does not settle the issue for Syrians, who continue to observe Easter according to the Hebrew calendar (New Advent).

There's a long road to papal primacy, with supporters and detractors along the way. This is the second time someone has engaged with this post based on dominant Roman Catholic ideas of history, so what I really want to drive home is that there is much Christian history outside the history of the Roman Catholic church. Church history is much more diverse and nuanced than "this decree was issued and the matter was settled forever." One of the main things I've taken away from Christian History I is that there has always been a diversity of Christian belief and practice, much earlier than even I suspected!

This is important to me not because I think it invalidates modern belief, but because I think it illustrates something important about the work of the church. I don't bring this up or push back on Roman Catholic history as some potshot against Roman Catholics. The lineage of the papacy is still important to the Roman Catholic church and papal primacy rising through a process doesn't invalidate that. But it does show us that Christian doctrine arises through corporate work (as in, as a whole body) and changes over time. This is part of how God has ordered the church, part of how the Holy Spirit guides and forms us. Curiosity, questioning and discussion are sacred tasks set before the church, and we shouldn't flatten that historical work into a list of unilateral decrees.

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.

[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.

[baebeylik]

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

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

[nickysfacts]

Vassago: the honest demonic treasure hunting prince detective!

👑🔎

[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.

[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.”

[templevirgin]

2025 marks the 1700th anniversary

of the Nicene Creed.

[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.

[along-the-silkroad]

A typical early christian depiction of Christ without a beard in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia at Ravenna. Galla Placidia was a powerful woman in the early 5th century, who was the daughter of emperor Theodosius I, the ruler who made Christianity the official Roman religion

[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!

[crazycatsiren]

Christianity did not steal from paganism.

You know what Christianity did steal from? Judaism.

[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.

[nickysfacts]

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

🔥🐐🔥