Should Pope Francis sell the family jewels?

There might be something to that. The Inquisition was really kind of a proto-nationalist thing.

You're throwing out a lot of disconnected stuff Adam so idk where to start - maybe with the simplest, most straightforward one: the Catholic Church blamed the Jews for murdering Jesus based on the story of the crucifixion as it was laid down in the Gospels (which were explicitly written as a political repudiation of the Jewish authorities of the time). There's a very clear line between that theological justification for antisemitism and the Inquisition.

xp

Our notions of what is "good" and what we expect from churches and governments are pretty new, people.

but sure there was def a nationalist element to expelling the Muslims from Andalucia etc., and the Muslims had been treating the Jews pretty well so it was kind of a "let's get rid of all of them" thing

xp

fair enough Alfred, but should we refrain from judging institutions of the past then? Particularly in cases where the institutions are still with us?

Easy to blame it all on Catholic Church but you have to remember there was no separation of church and state.

yes there was

oh lord count me out of thus dumb argument

adam you need to take a seat

During the High Middle Ages the Church educated princes and lords, preserved ancient art, paid for petty wars, and its lowest administrative levels attended to the spiritual plight of their flock because their earthly one was miserable.

xp

Eh it's pretty clear even in the KJV that Pilate was threatening the Jewish lawmakers to take the heat in that whole scenario. In that case it is clearly a matter of state coercion on behalf of the Roman (not Christian) empire.

...

yr scholarship is lacking

read Elaine Pagels idk

Adam.

like hmm would there possibly be reasons for the writers of the gospels to suck up to the Roman Empire while vilifying Jews, hmmmmmm

That is what I am saying.

will no one rid me of this troublesome poster

I will check out Pagels thanks. Clearly I have stumbled into a chamber of brilliant theologians and have much to learn.

ok let me spell it out for you - the WRITERS of the Gospels were living under Roman oppression, and if they were going to go around spreading their new theology it was in their best interests to maybe not anger the Roman authorities by calling them out as having murdered God. Which would result in them quickly being suppressed, exterminated etc. And besides, the early Xtians real enemies were not the Romans, they were the Jewish authorities that they were disagreeing with/splitting off from. So they had a vested interest in making the Jews look bad - here was an institutional enemy that was, not coincidentally, also a problem for the ruling authorities. Ergo concoct a version of events where the murder of Jesus at the hands of the Romans is actually the fault of the Jews. When Pilate is threatening the Jewish lawmakers to take the blame in the Gospels, this is the early Christians' way of explicitly implicating their enemies - the Jews - in an execution that is carried out by the Romans, the state. Anti-semitism is at the core of this story, it's a foundational element of the way it's constructed.

xp

this explains why Pilate repeatedly asks the Jews about who he should execute, the hand-washing, etc. The early gospel writers wanted to largely absolve Pilate and instead vilify the Pharisees. It was constructed to gain converts and strip congregants from the Jewish population by showing how evil and corrupt the Jewish authorities of the time were. "Look at how evil they are, they murdered our Prince! Come join us and live for eternity in Heaven!" It's a propaganda ploy.

this amazon review of The Origin of Satan is beautiful:

The book itself is well written in sequence, but instead of more religious facts it was the author describing her point of view and beliefs on the matter.

classic

pet peeve of mine: people who treat "early christians" as if they're a monolithic entity. in fact there were a number of deep divisions among the early christians (a time period that, i would like to point out, spanned some 300 years), and there were a number of diverse opinions among those followers. if you look at the most important of the early christian writers, paul- here's someone who personally identified as a jew, albeit more religiously than ethnically (as he was culturally hellenized). the major debates he was dealing with in the early christian community was stuff like whether you could be a christian without having to be circumcised, which was kind of a big stumbling block for a lot of male pagans.

the thing with anti-semitism actually is pretty closely linked, historically, to their relationship with roman religion. the thing of it here is, romans didn't really care what you believed or did as long as you sacrificed to the civic gods. now, the jews could to an extent get away with this because the romans respected the antiquity of their religious tradition, although frankly this respect had its limits given the way the romans burned the second temple to the ground and essentially demolished them as a people. the issue is that a lot of early christians wanted to be given the same sort of respect because they were like, yeah, that's our religion, and the actual jews were like, no you're not, you worship that weird messiah who got himself killed, that's not real judaism. which explains why there's so much crap in the gospels about how jesus came to fulfill the law, etc, blah blah- because judaism was super important to them.

anyway, anti-semitism sort of developed out of this rift which grew wider over the years. nothing to do with sucking up to the romans, which i mean given that the entire apocalypse of john is an extremely thinly veiled condemnation of rome doesn't strike me as being terribly plausible.

which i mean given that the entire apocalypse of john is an extremely thinly veiled condemnation of rome doesn't strike me as being terribly plausible.

not written at the same time or by the same authors as the four Gospels btw

and I was not trying to gloss over the multiplicity of early Christianity, I was addressing a very specific issue (antisemitism), which was historically justified by some very specific texts (the four Gospels, although it should be noted they are also not identical on this particular issue), and a very particular event described therein (Pilate implicating the Jews' in Jesus' execution) - which was subsequently explicitly used as theological justifications for the Inquisition.

Obviously the tangled roots of antisemitism on the whole - in Europe, on the part of the Catholic Church etc. - is a much broader and more complex issue. But I was trying to simplify things for Adam, who seemed confused.

i don't really care about this general debate but since we're talking about early christian antisemitism it bothers me that 'good samaritan' as a term for a helpful bystander is so ubiquitous since the story it comes from is pretty obviously intended to defame contemporaneous cohanim + levites at the expense of a splinter heresy

"pretty obviously intended to defame contemporaneous cohanim + levites at the expense of a splinter heresy"

i hate it when this happens.

hey, my people are stuck with "paddy wagon"

Thanks all for the discussion. My main point was these are more complex issues deserving of a more nuanced approach which is kind of where everyone is at anyways. Sorry if I drove the thread into a ditch, as I often do =)

to be fair, all my ideas about christianity come from horror movies and heavy metal. i wasn't raised by christians, so. it's all kinda spooky and weird to me.

i like church music! i listen to a lot of ancient stuff. lotsa organ records. choirs. all that jazz.

the newer stuff is awful, though

yeah you make a good point- one of the issues of christianity is that christian texts have p. much always been read interpretively and frequently this involves reading them in ways very much not intended by the original writers. this is both a strength and a weakness of the texts- they're ambiguous enough to be applicable to nearly any time or place in which one might find oneself, but that same flexibility lets anybody open the door to saying things like "hey, you know, the bible says the jews are evil, we should probably kill them all". this also goes a long way to explaining why the catholic church in the middle ages spent significant effort to keep people from reading the bible- it wasn't just that they were trying to keep people subservient and ignorant, it was that they knew going around following the bible above all else could lead to some pretty terrible stuff.

well that and they wanted to preserve their role as ultimate authority

as usual, cui bono? is always a useful question to ask in these kinds of scenarios

oh wait I see you covered that lol never mind

xxp keeping those middle age mels at bay

jesus, don't ask bono, we'll be here all day.

it wasn't just that they were trying to keep people subservient and ignorant, it was that they knew going around following the bible above all else could lead to some pretty terrible stuff.

Following the Bible above all else could lead to some amazing stuff too like pacifism, egalitarianism, social reform, etc. In medieval times nonconformist sects, pacifists, anarchists, and radical Christians like The Diggers, the Flagellants, the Anabaptists, and the long history of peasant revolts, all found inspiration in the book and were seen as a threat. Social reform and egalitarianism were probably terrible things to the people in power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_peasant_revolts

Ball was imprisoned in Maidstone, Kent, at the time of the 1381 Revolt. What is recorded of his adult life comes from hostile sources emanating from the established religious and political social order. He is said to have gained considerable fame as a roving preacher—a "hedge priest" without a parish or any link to the established order—by expounding the doctrines of John Wycliffe, and especially by his insistence on social equality. He delivered radical sermons in many places, including: Ashen, Billericay, Bocking, Braintree, Cressing Temple, Dedham, Coggeshall, Fobbing, Goldhanger, Great Baddow, Little Henny, Stisted and Waltham.

His utterances brought him into conflict with Simon of Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, and he was thrown in prison on several occasions. He also appears to have been excommunicated; owing to which, in 1366 it was forbidden for anyone to hear him preach. These measures, however, did not moderate his opinions, nor diminish his popularity. He took to speaking to parishioners in churchyards after the official services in English, the "common tongue", not the Latin of the clergy, a radical political move. Ball was "using the bible against the church", very threatening to the status quo.

Shortly after the Peasants' Revolt began, Ball was released by the Kentish rebels from his prison.[3] He preached to them at Blackheath (the revolting peasants' rendezvous to the south of Greenwich) in an open-air sermon that included the following:

When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.

When the rebels had dispersed, Ball was taken prisoner at Coventry, given a trial in which, unlike most, he was permitted to speak. He was hanged, drawn and quartered at St Albans in the presence of King Richard II on 15 July 1381. His head was displayed stuck on a pike on London Bridge, and the quarters of his body were displayed at four different towns.[2] Ball, who was called by Froissart "the mad priest of Kent," seems to have possessed the gift of rhyme. He voiced the feelings of a section of the discontented lower orders of society at that time,[3] who chafed at villeinage and the lords' rights of unpaid labour, or corvée.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ball_(priest)

Οὖτις there's no big surprise really; the vast majority of eastern orthodox people are in russia, former soviet states and surrounding bits of europe and the middle east, but that's a lot of people. there are considerably more protestants than orthodox christians as well, but goole was specifically talking about latin christianity

god, those peasants are revolting!

i've been starting to really dig into eastern orthodoxy lately, and it has some pretty striking historical differences from roman catholicism. eastern orthodoxy didn't get thomas aquinas and scholasticism in about the 12th century like the western church did, so has less of an intellectual bent and more of a mystical bent. a guy like rasputin, for instance, simply could not have come out of the roman catholic church. one of the long-term consequences seems to be that the orthodox church in russia was and is subservient to the state in a way that would be unthinkable in the western tradition, where religious beliefs regularly surfaced as a challenge to temporal authority. dostoevsky's religion, for instance, manifested itself as obeisance to the state in a way that probably wouldn't happen in western europe. my understanding is still rather primitive and these are tentative thoughts.

as for the radical revolts, sure, they led to some good stuff, but most of the reformers, particularly in the first protestant era, had far from unblemished records. luther's revolution got out of hand rapidly and it didn't take long for him to start burning people like jan hus at the stake for advocating freedom of religion. there's also the sad, bizarre story of john lydon and the anabaptist muenster rebellion of 1534. though there have been plenty of organized persecutions against oppressed peoples, most pogroms tend to be populist undertakings.

lotta splainin itt

https://33.media.tumblr.com/237659ad0c7c43ffdb2b2bca5d3bad86/tumblr_nvm25juWtP1rezhn9o1_400.gif

Dale Martin's Yale course (on iTunes U too I think) is (afaict) a v good intro to the historical situation of each of the gospels & the NT epistles - Martin's engaging, good at taking you through the developing relationship between judaism & its factions, the roman (+ ~hellenic) political-cultural forces, and this odd sect that's coming through.

early modern pedantry: diggers and anabaptists aren't medieval.

good maron alternative. ty

i don't really care about this general debate but since we're talking about early christian antisemitism it bothers me that 'good samaritan' as a term for a helpful bystander is so ubiquitous since the story it comes from is pretty obviously intended to defame contemporaneous cohanim + levites at the expense of a splinter heresy

― Mordy, Friday, October 2, 2015 4:03 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

?? pretty obviously meant to tell you that elites are often bad and weirdos and exiles can be good

36 Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?

37 And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.

interpretations differ across christian history but the basic understanding of "don't pay much attn to existing social hierarchies, look at what people do" is right there p much

if there's one thing i've learned from two millennia of christianity it's that obvious interpretations of scripture aren't.

the story means many things but one of those things is undeniably a broadside against jewish religious life [in the second temple era]. the subtext is that you'd expect men of holy castes like the kahunnah or a levite to be charitable but they are too wrapped up in their dogma + laws + stringencies. they aren't just members of a social hierarchy - they were the priests of the second temple. i think it needs to be read in the context of replacement theology in general.