One area where the moralistic and judgemental pagan gods shone
was in guaranteeing oaths and treaties. What human agency could hold
Rome's feet to the fire, if she were faithless to an ally? No one,
there was no international court in the Hague. There were angry
gods; the Roman historian Florus blames Crassus' failure and death
in the east on their superintendence of the world: "Crassus, who
coveted the royal treasures, answered not a word that had any
semblance of justice, but merely said that he would give his reply
at Seleucia. The gods, therefore, who punish those who violate
treaties, did not fail to support either the craft or the valour of
our enemies." (Florus. Delphi Complete Works of Florus
(Delphi Ancient Classics Book 90) (Kindle Locations 1444-1447).
Epitome of Roman History, Book I, Chapter XLVI). Believe it, or don't; but why
pretend that they didn't believe it?
Ehrman's eminently practical, if smug, self-serving and wrong, definition of religion goes back at
least as far as H. L. Mencken; it is atheist boiler-plate:
"Whether it happens to show itself in the artless mumbo-jumbo of a Winnebago Indian or in the elaborately refined and
metaphysical rites of a Christian archbishop, its single function is
to give man access to the powers which seem to control his destiny,
and its single purpose is to induce those powers to be friendly to
him. That function and that purpose are common to all religions,
ancient or modern, savage or civilized, and they are the only common
characters that all of them show. Nothing else is essential."
(H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods, Kindle location 105).
Mencken hoped that something simple like totemism could give us
'religion' in its pure form, from whence its essence could be
distilled, freed from all the accretions one finds in a late
development like Christianity. When this definition is used to winnow down the facts to a more
manageable assortment, it is obviously misused; the least common
denominator of totemism cannot explain Christianity. Paganism is a Protean thing; like the god who could assume any and all shapes, paganism
can present as the religion which gives the second-story man a
thief-god, a patron saint of burglars, to pray to, for success in
his upcoming night's work. The Thugs had Kali to pray to.
But that is not the whole story. At times the pagans can muster enough
humanity to articulate and espouse noble ideals. So the observers of
this protean phenomena should, along with everybody else, follow the rubric, do not be unjust, lest
you discover Nemesis is no fable. Have you never heard, the mills of the
gods grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine? Or maybe this one,
"The Father's voice hath spoken,
Whose word is Destiny,
And the blest Gods have willed it,
The Gods who shall not die. . .
The Dread Sire's valiant Daughter [Athena]
Guards us with eye and hand.
The holy law of Justice
They guard not. Silent she,
Who knows what is and hath been,
Awaits the time to be.
Then cometh she to judgment,
With certain step, though slow;
Even now she smites the city,
And none may escape the blow." (Solon's Lay, quoted in The Public Orations of
Demosthenes, Volume 1, Against Aeschines, p. 112).
. . .because classical literature is filled with that
type of information, as anyone knows who has read any of it. The hatchet job Ehrman does on paganism is reminiscent of the
hatchet job he does on Christianity, and while it may make National
Public Radio hostesses simper with delight, it leaves no one the
wiser. Were the gods vindicating the innocent when they made the flames
dance around Charikleia, falsely condemned to death, for poisoning,
by burning at the stake. . .or was it the magical amulet?:
"The executioners built a gigantic bonfire and then lit
it. As the flames took hold, Charikleia begged a moment's grace from
the guards who held her, promising that she would mount the pyre
without the use of force. She stretched her arms towards that
quarter of the sky whence the sun was beaming, and prayed in a loud
voice: 'O Sun and Earth and you spirits above and beneath the earth
who watch and punish the sins of men, bear me witness that I am
innocent of the charges laid against me and that I gladly suffer
death because of the unendurable agonies that fate inflicts on me'.
. .The flames flowed around her rather than licking against her;
they caused her no harm but drew back wherever she moved towards
them, serving merely to encircle her in splendor and present a
vision of her standing in radiant beauty in a frame of light,
like a bride in a chamber of flame." (Heliodorus,
An Ethiopian Story, Collected Ancient Greek Novels, B. P. Reardon,
p. 526).
The concept that the divine providential governance of the world
engineers a balance, so that those who do wrong will in the end be
sorry, is by no means alien to the Bible, which says, "Whoever digs
a pit will fall into it, and he who rolls a stone will have it roll
back on him." (Proverbs 26:27). The quarrel
between the pagans and the monotheists was not over whether the bad
you scheme to do against others will recoil back on your own head,
they agreed that it will, but rather whether the system is
administered by a plurality of actors or only one. The pagans
believed in avenging gods. The concept is, what goes around comes
around:
“When the Veientes learned of this from a prisoner, they wished
to send heralds to their besiegers to seek a termination of the
war before the city should be taken by storm; and the oldest
citizens were appointed envoys. When the Roman senate voted
against making peace, the other envoys left the senate-chamber
in silence, but the most prominent of their number and the one
who enjoyed the greatest reputation for skill in divination
stopped at the door, and looking round upon all who were present
in the chamber, said: 'A fine and magnanimous decree you have
passed, Romans. . .when you disdain to accept
the submission of a city, neither small nor undistinguished,
which offers to lay down its arms and surrender itself to you,
but wish to destroy it root and branch, neither fearing the
wrath of Heaven nor regarding the indignation of men! In return
for this, avenging justice shall come upon you from the gods,
punishing you in like manner. For after robbing the Veientes of
their country you shall ere long lose your own.'”
(Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman
Antiquities, Book XII, 13.1-3, (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 79)).
The illusion that pagans should receive credit as almost atheists is deeply rooted in
the 'New Atheism' of the Four Horsemen. The reader will recall
Richard Dawkins quoting 'Seneca the Younger' in defense of skepticism,—the
quote is made up of course, Dawkins is an atheist after all,—
but they want to see fellow travellers thronging their course. They
are lonely people. The pagans do not generally return the
compliment. The modern pagans of India, for example, do not feel
much fondness or affinity for their own atheists. Unfortunately,
they often are not willing even to respect the civil liberties of
Indian atheists: "The success of that gathering spurred the Goswamis
to call the first public conference of rationalists at their ashram,
inviting speakers from across India to gather in October 2016.
Before the conference could meet, Hindu nationalists, armed with
sticks and stones, attackd the ashram and demanded that the Goswamis
be arrested. . .'Atheists are deviants who need rehabilitation,'
Neeraj Shastri, a chief priest at the Prem Hindu Temple in
Vrindavan, said reently. 'Vrindavan only has place for believers of
Radha and Krishna.'" (Atheist Ashram on Lord
Krishna's Home Turf Roils India's Hindu Nationalists, June 19, 2019,
by Priyadarshini Sen, Religion News Service).
Why on earth should pagans like atheists? And why on earth should
pagans be amoral, simply because atheists are amoral?
Though Ehrman is not being fair to pagan religion, he probably doesn't mean it for a hatchet job. When he
describes paganism as fundamentally amoral, while it was not always or
necessarily so, he is paying it a compliment in modern terms: it was not
judgmental. Pagan civilization had its faults and its glories, but
it was far more hospitable to homosexuality than any form of
Christian civilization could possibly be,
because the Bible is unambiguous in its condemnation of such
activities. That, to these people, is the issue of all issues. Perhaps
he feels he is making paganism look good by misrepresenting it as
inherently amoral. And for the most part he is
air-brushing paganism, trying to make it seem more respectable,
certainly more tolerant, than it actually was. Recall, they've done
this before. People were perplexed when Dan Brown wrote a
best-seller in which he described the gnostic gospels as presenting
a more human Jesus than the canonical gospels. Where could he have
gotten such a strange misimpression? Certainly not from reading the
gnostic gospels. No, but from reading the secondary literature, because
these people were at that time trying to pretend that the gnostics
were enlightened proto-feminists. No one who took the trouble to
read gnostic literature could fathom what they were talking about,
beyond simple wish-fulfillment, but any stick is good enough to beat
Christianity with. If gnosticism is forced to be made palatable,
then why not paganism? Is that what he's trying to do here? He
doesn't really like paganism all that much, indeed he doesn't even
know very much about it, but he hauls it out in hopes of doing a bit
of biased product comparison, with Christianity coming out the
worse. Truth to tell, paganism, so far as one can grab hold of such a
multi-formed Proteus, is not as bad as he represents it; it wasn't
entirely amoral, but then neither is it as good as he represents it, by
their lights: it wasn't tolerant.
Like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead,
when it was good it was good, and when it was bad it was horrid.
This author has built a career on doing this 'Ripley's
Believe-it-or-Not' routine on classical antiquity. Remember when he
explained that people in antiquity did not know men and women
belonged to the same species?: “People today usually think about male and female as two kinds of the same thing. There's one thing, the human being, and it comes in two types: male and female...basically this is how we see it. It is not, however, how people in antiquity saw it.”
(Bart Ehrman, 'Peter, Paul
& Mary Magdalene,' p. 212). He makes one absurd statement or another
about what "people in antiquity" supposedly thought. . .and
evidently none of his students has enough of a classics background
to say anything other than, 'My, that's amazing!'
Christian apologists have always found in the triumph of
Christianity, not only an inspiring history, but a powerful argument
in defense of Christianity. This goes back to the immediate
aftermath of the resurrection. What transformed the apostles from a
dispirited band of scattered sheep into world-changers?:
"What we have to account for is, in the first place, the
Pentecostal 'giving of the Spirit,' the conversion of the little
group of disciples from heart-broken men who had just witnessed the
apparent ruin of all their dreams into a body of fervent
missionaries with an unquenchable hope to proclaim and a mysterious
communal life of a quality unknown in the world before."
(A. E. Taylor, Does God Exist? p. 145-146)
As an atheist propagandist, Bart must try to disable this argument, which
he does by pointing out that Christianity, to triumph, need only
have been a slightly improved brand of snake oil, versus the snake
oil being sold by the competition, which was really bad, and smelly.
The giggly, fluff-headed teenage atheists to whom this material is
pitched are delighted to hear, from the learned professor, that they
need make no effort to understand the pagans, because there is
nothing less congenial to them than mental effort. But they should
know they have caused themselves loss by walling themselves off from
the pagan intellectual tradition, as found for instance in the Greek
tragedies. He works the same magic on paganism as he does on
Christianity, pressing it down to a thin, one-dimensional cardboard layer. There is
a Stupidity Generator whirring in the background, but it wasn't
brought in by the Christians, nor even by the pagans, though they
had their moments. It's him. Though not only him, of course; it's a
trope in current thought: "The ancient Pagan religions were seen as
tribal religions, based on custom and tradition rather than on dogma
and belief, grounded in what one did rather than in what one
believed." (Drawing Down the Moon, by Margot Adler, p. 375). The
pagans who believe paganism is not about what one believes are the
modern ones, not the ancient.
We learn from Bart that animal sacrifice was a defining concern of
pagan religion: "Roughly speaking, there were three
kinds of activities in pagan religions: sacrificial offerings,
prayer, and divination. . .Participating in pagan religions meant engaging in these
activities, or— especially with animal sacrifice and divination— observing someone else do so."
(Bart D. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity, p. 83). What about those
'observers' who were not only grossed out, but highly offended by animal
sacrifice? Were they Christians? Not Porphyry, nor Apollonius of Tyana! Since animal sacrifice is supposed to be definitional for paganism, you wouldn't
know, would you, that certain pagan theologians were
vegetarians who disapproved of animal sacrifice:
"We, however, do not act after this manner; but being
filled with animal diet, we have arrived at this manifold illegality
in our life by slaughtering animals, and using them for food. For
neither is it proper that the altars of the Gods should be defiled
with murder, nor that food of this kind should be touched by men, as
neither is it fit that men should eat one another; but the precept
which is still preserved at Athens, should be obeyed through the
whole of life." (Porphyry, On Abstinence from Animal Food, Book 2,
Chapter 28).
He's aware that Porphyry wrote a diatribe against the Christians,
but not aware that he also wrote a diatribe, in equally vitriolic
and indignant language, against animal sacrifice. In other contexts,
our author quotes 'advanced' pagan
theologians like Plutarch as if it were self-evident that they spoke
for the pagan man in the street. It isn't very likely that
Porphyry's vegetarianism ever caught on, but why make a practice
definitional which would exclude the most advanced pagan thinkers
from the fold? It's actually true that some of the oldest and holiest of the
pagan sacrifices were grain offerings, and is noted by historians:
"And as we Greeks regard barley as the most ancient grain, and for
that reason begin our sacrifices with barley-corn which we call
oulai, so the Romans, in the belief that spelt is both the most
valuable and the most ancient of grains, in all burnt offerings
begin the sacrifice with that." (Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, Book II, 25.2). In some cases these
cereal offerings were the sole offering on that occasion. Why, if
animal sacrifice is definitional?
The neo-Platonists recalled Pythagoras as also opposed to
bloody sacrifices: "They [the women] should not worship divinities with blood
and dead bodies, nor offer so many things at one time that it might
seem they meant never to sacrifice again." (Iamblichus, The Life of
Pythagoras, The Pythagorean Sourcebook, Kindle location 1478). The
Latin poet Ovid depicts him delivering a diatribe against animal
sacrifice:
"And first that animals should heap the board for food,
he strict forbade; and first in words thus eloquent, but unbeliev’d
he spoke. 'Cease, mortals, cease your bodies to pollute with food unhallow’d: plentiful is grain; the apples bend the branches with
their load. . .Nor is this all, the savage deed perform’d, they
implicate the heavenly gods themselves, pretend th’ almighty deities
delight to see the slaughter of laborious steers. Spotless must be
the victim; in his form perfection: (fatal thus too much to please!)
with gold and fillets gay, the beast is led before the altar, hears
the unknown prayers, and sees the meal, the product of his toil,
betwixt his horns full in his forehead flung: then struck, he stains
the weapon with his blood, the weapon in reflecting waves beneath
haply beheld before. Next they inspect his torn-out living entrails,
and from thence learn what the bosoms of the gods intend. Whence,
man, such passion for forbidden food? How dar’st thou, mortal man!
in flesh indulge? O! I conjure you, do it not; my words deep in your
minds revolve, when to your mouth the mangled members of the ox you
raise, know, and reflect, your laborer you devour.'"
(Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 15, Delphi Complete Works of Ovid (Kindle Locations 14401-14431).)
What the 'historical' Pythagoras actually believed is open to question,
but the Pythagorean system does revolve around reincarnation, and
there's this little problem with meat consumption under that view. .
.that pig could be grandpa! Some deities at some temples never had
been worshipped with bloody sacrifices. Perhaps Ehrman visualizes
the Vestal Virgins wrestling a pig to the ground and then hog-tying
him; but they never did that, not since "time immemorial," or more
plausibly, since when Numa established that form of observance.
A minority, of pagans who prefer bloodless sacrifice, plus
another minority, of Christians who despise pagan sacrifice of any
form, might well equal a majority. Bart Ehrman ought to know this,
because oftentimes it seems he is just reading out the atheist
boiler-plate answers as one would find them in a book like H. L.
Mencken's 'A Treatise on the Gods,' and Mencken does know this:
"In Greece itself, though Socrates could still call for
the sacrifice of a cock in the age of Pericles, many of the priests
boasted proudly that their altars were innocent of blood, whether
human or animal. Among such clean altars were those of Apollo at
Delos and Zeus at Athens." (H. L. Mencken, A Treatise on the Gods,
Kindle location 1748).
The 'gymnosophists' of Helidorus' Ethiopian Tale equate animal
sacrifice with human sacrifice, and fervently hope for a stop to the
practice: "Now we shall withdraw into the temple, for neither can we
ourselves approve of anything as barbaric as human sacrifice nor do
we believe that is pleasing to the divinity. I only wish it were
possible to put an end to all animal sacrifice as well and be
satisfied with offerings of prayers and incense such as we make."
(Heliodorus, An Ethiopian Story, Collected
Ancient Greek Novels, B. P. Reardon, pp. 564-564). In addition to the Neo-Platonists and Pythagoreans who objected
to 'bloody sacrifice' in principle, other pagan authors deprecated
sacrifice, in a way reminiscent to the prophets of Israel, in favor
of ethical behavior, such as "So Menander, the Comic poet, writes
what answers to this in these very words:
"'For whosoever brings a sacrifice
Of countless bulls or kids, O Pamphilus,
Or aught like these, who works of art designs,
Vestments of gold or purple, life-like forms
Graven in emerald or ivory,
And hopes thereby God's favor may be won
He strangely errs, and hath a dullard's mind.
Man's duty is to help his brother man,
Nor simple maid nor wedded wife betray."
(Eusebius of Caesaria, Praeparatio Evangelica, (Preparation for the Gospel),
Book XIII, Chapter XIII, Kindle location 10658).
The fact that the best pagan theologians disliked or de-emphasized animal
sacrifice probably made it easier to ban the practice, and so any real
historian would have made a note of it. If Constantine did indeed ban animal
slaughter at the temples, thus secularizing the meat market, then it
cannot have been because the Christians disliked paganism, as there
were not enough of them to work their will; it must have been in
recognition that the best of the pagan theologians did not like it
either. It isn't enough to give us an imaginary 'historical' Jesus, now they have to give
us an imaginary paganism to go along with Him. Back to the
Thrice-Holy Library, where you'll always find reality-based
information:
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