Zachary Tanana’s Reviews > Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World > Status Update

The last pagan emperor Julian, raised a Christian, admonished the cult of Cybele to re-assert its religio by taking care of the poor like the Christians 'even our poor they care for'. This betrayed his Christian upbringing, the priests however were puzzled by this admonishment, they knew the gods never even pretended to care about the poor. Rome was becoming Christian whether it knew it or not.

It's hard to overestimate the radical nature of the gospel in the first century, as many of the ethical commands seem obvious to us today after 2000 years of living in a society shaped by Christianity. But in antiquity it wasn't obvious at all that you should help the poor and treat people as having unique dignity before God, and it wasn't clear why one shouldn't revel in any carnal thing permitted by the emperor.

The Mediterranean world was untied by Caesar Augustus, worshiped as the divi filus(son of god). In this world where borders between people were coming down, Paul the Apostle, preaching a crucified Son of God spread his gospel, the Jewish God was now for all. For some like the Galatians, it was a calling to freedom from ritual, both pagan and Jewish, and to others like the Corinthians, it was restraint from sin.

Pompey the Great's conquering of Jerusalem and marching into the Holy of Holies in 63 b.c was only the latest defeat the Jews had to wrestle with. who unlike the cultures around them, believed they had a covenant with the supreme God, who allowed this evil to befall them. Their incorporation into the empire had them mix with cultures, create converts and with the greek Torah, establish a Judaism beyond the temple.

The few centuries leading up to Christianity laid the ground work for it through the philosophies of its empires. The Persian empire saw the world as a battle between good and evil, the Greeks, because of their capricious gods, sought truth through philosophy, leading the belief in a perfect god beyond their Pantheon and influenced the Romans through stoicism in the belief of the divine logos in all things.

The strangeness of Jesus in the ancient world wasn't that he rose again and became divine, it was the manner in which he died, as crucifixion was the most shameful and barbaric death one could endure, it was so rarely talked about in polite society (though it happened so much) that only four truly detailed accounts of crucifixion come to us from history, and they are all the story of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.