The Pokey Finger of God

The State Cult Hypothesis: “Christianity was primarily the result of a competition between the state cults of Diocletian and Constantine. It was the efforts of Constantine to defeat Diocletian’s Tetrarchy, co-opt the Persian cultural invasion, and subsequently unify the Roman Empire that resulted in the creation of Christianity.”

Constantine was a keen student of history, and notably concerned with the major problems the Empire faced. The primary issue was the Greek/Latin split within the Empire — which is visible as the East and West divisions of the Empire. Rome respected Hellenistic culture and had thoughtfully appropriated and co-opted whatever She felt relevant and palatable. Consequently, the Greek language, not Latin, remained the predominant tongue of the western-most Alexandrian conquests. Rome provided the military might, and the Greeks provided the culture. At the same time, the linguistic split revealed a stress within the Empire that Constantine was delighted to exploit.

The second major issue was the economy had been devastated by a century of usurpers, invaders, and currency inflation. The inflation was deliberate, at it had originally seemed to be a good way to pay the army. After a while, the trick stopped working so well and the entire currency system was shattered. After some experimentation, they finally stumbled upon an idea of stamping a value directly upon the coins. At least this way, they became representative of value: like money from a board game.

The third major issue was the size of the Empire. It made it impossible to face every invader at once, and difficult to get accurate information on anything. Since armies were expensive, and it was a serious threat to any Emperor if anyone else had one, there was only one army in the Roman Empire. The Emperor had to choose which threat was most pressing and confront it, while trying to bribe or otherwise forestall the others.

Which brings us to usurpers. The fourth issue was that the Emperors had long ceased to have a legitimate claim to power. It was unclear how the successor to a fallen Emperor should be chosen, so the result was frequently civil war between competing Generals. Originally, it was the Roman Senate with the right to confirm the title upon someone of their choosing, but since the person they chose had to lead the army and poor leaders usually got killed rather quickly, the army ultimately dictated selection. This worked well so long as the army was united, but when they weren’t, there was civil war. And that was expensive, too.

Representing smaller problems, but ones that added to the diversity within the Empire, were the Eastern mystery and healer cults. Through the growth of the Empire, a number of cults had been accreted into accepted practice. There was no limitation to how many different cults one could participate in, and many people toured the temple precincts the way people today might go to movies. The problem was that after all this exposure to engaging religious practices that emphasized personal spirituality and gnostic understanding, it was very difficult to get people to participate in the dreary processions, the stoic self-sacrifice, and stiff ritual of the state cult.

A more insidious problem was Manicheism. When the Sassanids took power in Persia, they revived the Zoroastrianism that had been the traditional faith of their lands prior to the arrival of the Greeks. An updated version was contrived, and missionaries for this new faith were sent throughout the Roman Empire to win converts. There were many successes, and the impact of Manicheism on the Empire was notable. Some of the earliest reports we have of Christian persecution was actually against the followers of Mani.

By the time of Diocletian, previous emperors had conjured up a number of justifications for their rule. Among them: blood relations to a previous emperor, divinity in family line, and, previous divine emperors in family line. Diocletian had a good shtick — he was the Savior of Rome. And he had been, in several ways.

Big D had been a personal guard for an emperor who had been assassinated by the guy who became the next emperor. When Diocletian killed the assassin, he not only became the next Emperor, he could say that he was meting out justice by taking on the post in the name of his late employer. Diocletian was a very clever man and he had a wide vision. He taught everything he knew to Constantine: this, more than anything, made Constantine a dangerous man.

Three times Diocletian doubled the size of government. It was all in the name of increasing regulation of all aspects of life, and it resulted in enough resources to run a couple of armies for the Empire. The improvements in tax receipts garnered through centralized control enabled Diocletian to mitigate the damage to the currency market and provided a relatively fair, if outrageously totalitarian, way of life for average citizen.

To solve the problem of both invasions and civil war, Diocletian created the Imperial franchise. Each Caesar got an army, scribes, support of the Imperial legal and tax systems, and their own corner of the Empire to run. To back it up, he retooled and re-invigorated the state cult as the means to unify the Empire. The franchise was set up to provide a long-term framework for the future development and selection of caesars.

When Constantine was declared Augustus by his father’s troops upon the elder’s death, he did so outside of the Imperial franchise. Although he was eventually accepted as legitimate, he was ultimately in the unenviable position of having to defend his claim to the title through the defeat of the legitimate caesars. He also needed to win the support of the people and the Senate. Taking a cue from Diocletian, he presented himself as the Savior of Rome, only this time from the evils of the Tetrarchy.

In the interest of promoting this perspective, Constantine created a competing state cult to rival Diocletian’s and subvert the Persian cultural invasion. Constantine was the hero and king in his own state cult: he was both the son of Sun, and a living god. He was the Savior come to rescue Rome from paganism — namely the state cult promoted by Diocletian. His cult had missionaries that would invade the Greek side of the Empire, and  further into Persia, in order to win converts to his cult at the expense of both the Tetrarchy and Persia.The missionaries also acted as spies, sending information back to Constantine.

Christianity thus began in the West — in Latin! Thus explaining why Britain and the Gothic tribes had such surprisingly old Christian traditions, especially in relation to the history of the lands in the East. After Constantine took power in Rome, he instituted his new cult throughout Italy and Africa. Soon, his new cult sprang up in cities in the East, like a virus, and soon spread to every port. The virulent persecution exacted by Galarius, then the leader of the Tetrarchy, against Christianity was an attempt to shut down the cultural revolution being formented by Constantine via a competing state cult that claimed to be more ancient and more Roman.

The most significant cultural populations within the Roman Empire were the Greeks and the Jews. Both populations were widely spread throughout the Eastern half of the Empire, concentrated in the cities. Both were centers of the cultural miasma that shuddered through the Empire on some regular basis. By taking on aspects of both cultures in his novel cult, he was able to play upon existing tensions in a way that was far more devastating in the Eastern lands he did not control than in the Western ones he did.

Immediately after taking power in the East, Constantine invoked the first ecumenical council at Nicea. The Bishops attending at Nicea would have largely been the leadership of the Tetrarchy’s cult, attending for indoctrination into the new universal cult under threat of death. The bishops began as civilian overseers that reported directly to the Emperor, and their use began under Diocletian. By the time Constantine assembled his convocation of bishops in 325, bishops had become a signficant feature of the political structure, and most were happy to stay in power under the new Emperor.

In recent months, I have grown exceedingly confident in the theory that Constantine was the originator of Christianity. Not only has it illuminated many elements of Christian history, it explains a lot about our culture. It explains the relatively late perspective of the Church Fathers, and how all of the Imperial political hierarchy became Church hierarchy. It also explains our cultural obsession with authority and retaining Roman traditions.

Conveniently, what this leaves out is a need to settle the “Jesus” issue. Contemporary scholarship may be eternally debating mythic vs. historical Jesus, but this theory just steps around that whole issue. This theory says that whatever such a pre-existing faith may have brought to the table, most of it was relegated to trivia by the specific requirements of a 4th Century Roman Empire. This leaves open both the potential of one (or more) pre-existing Jesus (messiah/teacher/healer) types or having the whole thing made up from scratch by Constantine and Eusebius.

The view that Constantine and Eusebius invented the whole of Christian history and theology begs the question — to what end would Constantine choose to create a story about a crucified Jewish radical? If there wasn’t already a popular story, or set of stories, to capitalize upon, it’s difficult to imagine why this set of circumstances would have been conjured otherwise.

A significant point is that Romans had a long-standing tradition of adopting the faiths of captured peoples by having the pontifex maximus — typically, the Emperor — take on the role of chief priest of that faith. They would bring the captured sacred temple objects to Rome and the Emperor would wear the funniest of the stolen hats to perform the time-honored “Nya-Nya, I’ve got your gods!” ritual. The point being that the Romans understood the importance of co-opting a foreign faith in order to assimilate a new peoples.

One trail of evidence follows the destruction rendered to pagan temples in the immediate aftermath of the Council of Nicea. Noteably, temples to Aescepulus were particularly prone to elimination. It’s not a great leap to note that the extremely popular healer and teacher bears a great resemblance to the stories we have of Jesus. Was this cult crushed in order to clear away the competition? Or was this one of the sources of the new theology, and thus cleared away in order to match the new history? It is possible that they simply failed to embrace Constantine as the high-priest of their cult.

This brings up possibly the most nagging unanswered question regarding the origins of Christianity, if one insists upon the existence of a Jesus cult prior to Constantine. From whom did Constantine take the title pontifex maximus of the Christians? Presuming that all the information we have about heretical groups in conflict with the “orthodoxy” is correct, we cannot easily locate any Bishop or other elder in the Christian community to whom all would have shown obsequence. If Constantine crushed the Aescepulus cults for lack of centralized leadership, why would have have shown a virally reproducing, yet leaderless, Jesus cult any deference?

Rome’s greatest threat for much of her existence was the Parthians and their successors, the Persians. Emperors of both lands traded off attacks of military and political nature, all while milking the trading routes between each other. In terms of revolts and internal strife, the eastern end of the Empire — Egypt, Palestine, and Syria — was one of the more expensive areas to hold on to, but because of the production and trade routes provided, they were also the richest.

The province of Judea had a number of revolts: at one point it had its main temple razed to the ground. All of the holy objects of that temple had been carried to Rome. The Emperor was already, by all rights, the chief priest of Jahweh, among many others. Constantine had every right to claim it, but why did he?

The Empire of Palmyra was a succession of a number of eastern provinces under a general in Palmyra. They kept the Persians at bay during a low point in Imperial fortunes, and generally retained their Roman structure. This upstart breakaway had only recently been restored to the Empire by the time Constantine took power. Perhaps he took the continued troubles in the area as a sign that the “Nya-Nya” ritual wasn’t enough: in order to truly become the spiritual leader of that area, he would need to incorporate it into the state cult.

The tradition of the ‘anointed’ leader was a significant part of the Judean political system and this was what Constantine sought to attain for himself in order to take the spiritual leadership of the Judeans. The mythos became that of the ‘failed messiah’ having been reborn and returning in the shape of the Roman Emperor. In this way, he could remind everyone about the extent of Roman domination in the area as well as further increasing his deific biography.

This line of thinking embraces the notion that Constantine and Eusebius made up most of the Gospels themselves. The emphasis within the stories about the Temple in Jerusalem, and its destruction, indicates how foundational to Biblical theology this event was. Was this a deliberate reminder for the Judeans to stay in line? Was it a message to the other provinces that revolt would be answered with a heavy hand?

Another reason for looking to Syrian faith was the example of Elagabalus, the Syrian hereditary High-Priest who replaced Jupiter at the top of the Roman spiritual hierarchy with El Gabel, who became the Roman Sol Invictus — the Unconquered Sun. Since Constantine scooped up the other Sun gods historically called upon by previous Emperors, this one came along as well and took a starring role. Perhaps there is some hereditary connection here between Elagabalus and Eusebius that may have also come into play.

Finally, the imposition of the Tetrarchy that preceeded Constantine brought with it another innovation. The needs of the army had become the motive force for Imperial taxation. In order for all of the needed goods to flow as required, most of the citizens of the Empire found their positions were guaranteed and hereditary, but also manditory. Increasingly, the state felt the need to dictate where its citizens would live and what they would do. It was a natural progression that the Emperors would eventually demand ultimate authority in all things spiritual, as well.

Here’s something I’ve enjoyed greatly this last week: Stephen Williams’ Diocletian and the Roman Recovery. This book from 1985 was apparently one of the first biographies of the man written in English.

The genius here is the clear and concise comparison between the Empire under the “Good Emperors” and the Empire under “Crisis”. Williams provides several reasons for the general failure of the imperial economy, and shows how the continued cycle of civil war and invasion sapped the economic engine of Empire.

All of this background helps to understand the near-miraculous recovery brought on by the reforms of Diocletian, and why his reforms worked when so many Emperors had failed in the past. Williams goes into fascinating detail about the changing fate of the landholders and the land workers.

Most interestingly, Williams also looks at the entire sweep of the period in terms of the development of Roman Authoritarianism. We are given the propaganda to compare with the living situation of the citizens, and why, despite being oppressive, it was considered such an improvement over the decades of invasion and civil war. Also interesting are the explorations into notions of freedom and slavery, and how these ideas changed and blurred through Diocletian’s work.

To top it all off, it’s a well-written book targeted to a more general audience, so it’s a pleasure to read. I recognize that I have a more-than-passing interest in the topic at hand, but I’ve had to slog through some pretty tiresome books before, and this simply is not of that type. I was actually disappointed to come to the end and not have more to read.

The Persecuted Christians

The period of the Tetrarchy beginning with the accession of Galarius to the purple is one remembered in Christian tradition as the Great Persecution. The stories are usually that Diocletian wasn’t opposed to the Christians at first, but that Galarius poisoned his heart against them. The dreadful torments they imposed are legend. This is all part of the great build-up to the story of Constantine’s triumph, so as to make Constantine appear to be sweeping away truly evil usurpers.

The problem for me, of course, is that my studies have recently taken a turn which doesn’t allow for the Great Persecution to have actually taken place. Simply in terms of remaining open to the scholarship of others, I have taken a compromise position that there may have been some kind of pre-Nicean cult that may have even referred to itself as ‘Christianity’, or failing this possessed some mythos about a Jewish messiah — and whatever this group may have represented was completely overshadowed by the development of Roman Catholicism. The only issue with this, again, is that I have a very hard time coming up with verifications for any reports of pre-Nicean persecution.

This comes up for me in two ways. The first is how the author injects Christian history into the bulk of the book: tangentially, and without any supporting material. Mostly, these points are in relationship to a reference to how Diocletian interfaced with different, Asian faiths, and how this reflected upon Diocletian’s reaction to Christianity… but we’re not given anything to support or to detail the assertions. The other is when he goes into greater detail about the impacts of the Early Church at its watershed moment just prior to legitimization: suddenly presuming some large population of Christians having some kind of impact on Roman culture. But as he, himself, points out: Roman culture was a lot like Christian culture already, so whatever this impact was is unclear.

Toward the end of the book, Williams briefly explores the religious environment of the 3rd Century Empire. Where he discusses the Asian faiths, he generally provides a favorable, if brief, overview of the practices of each. And then he supposes how an early Christian would feel in that context. Where he describes the Mystery faiths, Mithraism, Isis & Serapis cults, and the like, his information jibes well with similar material that I’ve seen. His analysis of Diocletian’s dislike of Manicheism was insightful: he understood that Diocletian saw it as a Persian weapon to forment social unrest after the uprisings in Egypt and the Balkans shortly after he became Emperor.

The simple fact is that one has to go through some pretty fantastic gyrations in order to accommodate an ‘Early Church’ into the actual history of the Roman Empire. What’s even more convincing is that I have found nothing verifiable that is notably dependent upon the existence of an Early Church.  Which is to say that it’s a lot of work to insinuate an ‘Early Church’ into history, yet no work at all to leave it out.

Mostly, what this says to me is that I need to continue to seek out further verification and information regarding the “Early Church”, even if I have given up the idea nearly completely. But tradition says that the Early Church existed, and I’ll simply need to be very precise about what did or did not exist at various points of history as I study.

Following are the assertions I currently use regarding the origin of Christianity. These will likely each be expanded upon over time.

1. Evidence: There is no physical evidence for the existence of a single, rapidly developed mystery cult whose theology or structure singularly informed the post 4th-century Christian church. There is no art, architecture, ritual gear, or contemporaneous mention. This includes a general lack of statuary, reliefs, mosaics, funerary motifs, or graffiti that can be said to be “Christian”, in the post 4th-century sense. No churches were built before Constantine. There was no episcopate prior to Constantine^[1]. There is no evidence of persecution of Christians within or without the Roman Empire, prior to Constantine^[2].

2. Tradition: Christ does not belong to a chain of any tradition. There are no connecting paths linking the teachings of Christ to any teachers previous to or subsequent to him. There are no connecting paths linking Christ, theologically or genealogically, to any church leadership or membership of any ecumenical councils. We do not know which of the three contemporary strains of Judaism he followed, nor do we know his teachers.  We presume we know the top-tier of his students, yet we are provided with few names of any significant students of the Apostles, and we have no connections between these and the leadership of any of the major 4th Century churches. We have no evidence of significant theological differences derived from competing apostolic schools… until Constantine.

3. Space & Time:The traditional narrative for the development of the Early Church places most of the action in the largest cities of the Empire. Since Christ was shown as teaching largely in the Judean countryside, this emphasis on big cities is a remarkable deviation. A significant problem with this narrative is that it assumes a kind of Pax Romana existing in the Eastern Mediterranean at the beginning of the millennium as there was in the 4th Century. It also requires that a similar, easy multi-culturalism existed throughout the Empire at the time of Christ that actually wasn’t present before the 3rd & 4th centuries. Given the situation at the beginning of Empire, it is exceedingly unlikely that a radicalized, Syrian Ya cult would have been able to spread easily into the major cities, especially Rome, without significant and well-documented reactions by Roman officials. It lies beyond the pale to anticipate that such a cult could somehow remain hidden, and yet explosively mushroom in numbers such that they become the favored cult of the Empire in a couple of centuries.

4. Hadrian: The Emperor Hadrian^[3] was truly the Philosopher King in the Platonic mold. He travelled throughout his empire building cities and walls and temples where-ever he went. When he travelled into Judea, he sparked a full-scale rebellion by building a shrine to Jupiter on the foundations of the Great Temple, renaming the city of Jerusalem^[4], and making circumcision illegal. Had there been a rapidly popularized Jewish cult with the triumphant universalism of 4th Century Christianity, Hadrian would likely have gladly embraced it over more established, stiff-necked Jews. He would have made some point to explore it, or try it out. We have no evidence that Hadrian recognized any such cult during his time, although we are told it had significant populations in every major Roman city of the day.

5. Constantine: The most certain argument against the existence of a single-source, universalist Messiah cult prior to Constantine was his own disdain for tradition — the best you can do with the assumption of a pre-existing Messiah cult is to accept that it would have to have been significantly modified to fit his purposes. Constantine was probably the first emperor after Hadrian who had spent enough time in both the East and the West to appreciate the pros and cons of each and to recognize the degree to which government is theater.  Better than most, Constantine realized that in order to hold the whole of his Empire, he would need to expand the universalism of Roman Citizenship to encompass all the peoples of his Empire. The fact that the structure and dogma of the 4th Century Christian Church far better served Constantine’s needs and agenda than that of any hypothetical believer then or in 65AD also strongly indicates that any previous order or organization would have been subsumed within the Roman system to become something very different under Constantine’s hand.

6. Entropy:  One would have expected that the earliest Christian creeds would have contained the most detail regarding the life of Christ, and the later ones would have represented successively more refined versions. Instead, it’s the other way around: the Nicean creed of 325AD contains almost no identifying elements that would connect the deific Christ to any human biography. Only after accretions were applied at the council of Constantinople in 381AD, did it this creed even mention the Virgin Mary or Pontius Pilate by name. This is indicative, not of a slowly forgotten story, but of a thinly built tale that was gradually fattened over time.

7. New Testament: Internally Contradictory - The received text of the New Testament contains numerous anachronisms and internal contradictions within the texts, most of which are resolved only through an acceptance of a very late date of authorship, or perhaps later, subsequent interpolation of older texts. Deliberately Ambiguous - The vast majority of the personages mentioned in the text cannot be clearly identified. Jesus of Nazareth, for example, could also be Joshua, son of Joseph the Nazarene, but this still does little to give him a time or place. In the Gospels, we are given, for Jesus, contradictory genealogies and the simultaneous assertions of membership to specific bloodlines and a “virgin birth”. For supporting characters, like Phillip, the text is vague where not directly contradictory — is he a king or a slave? A clerk or a witness? Irrational & Derivative - The miracles presented within the text are obvious, irrational fictions, and most of the philosophical content can be found in the sources of other bright lights of Asian faith traditions. The timing of the appearance of this material is also suspect, linking it to the “historian” of the early church, Eusebius of Caesarea.

8. Synchretism: The synchretism inherent within Christian theology would have been anathema to wisom seekers one needed to attract for the early formation of a successful mystery cult. No one would stand and defend, before the face of torment and death, a faith that was the pale shadow of a dozen other, purer and more vibrant cults. Those who seek truth know synchretism exists as signposts toward truth: systems composed entirely of sychretic elements serve as spiritual teaching tools for the naive initiate, but rarely satisfy the seeker of wisdom. Synchretism was used by the Romans as a tool to eliminate the cultural distinctiveness of the various areas of their empire. Some cults did this willingly, but it was less popular in the areas less inclined to favor the Empire. Since there was an extended history of conflict between Judea and the Empire, the suggestion that a radical Jewish cult would willingly submit to synchretism with the Emperor’s personal cult is as insulting as it is unlikely.

1. any references to bishops in written records can be shown to be later inferences or insertions
2. most contemporary writers relate these as actions against followers of various Asian faiths, like Mithraism or Judaism
3. reigned from 117-138AD
4. which was otherwise something of a dump by that time

At first, I could never understand the True Believers.

My first encounters with them was in Christian churches. My own, initially pedantic, attempts at Bible study repeatedly failed to illuminate the motivations or goals of True Believers. I could never understand just what was so exciting in the faith as I had ever seen it practiced.

Atheists I understood. Three centuries after Western World returned to rationalism and the Americans are still talking about heaven and God and resurrection with a straight face: this I didn’t understand.

Even I, an unlettered, dillettante, amateur historian could come up with a rational history of Christianity that holds not a single miracle, and yet fully explains all of the historical evidence we do have and why we don’t have any before this. Better yet, many other people have written scholarly books, with rational explanations, all of which refuting the mythology, if not the theology, of the Church. These things are not secret.

Obviously it’s not enough for people to write books about the fictive nature of the mythos and expect somehow to change attitudes about, or participation in, Christianity.  Why do people still cling to the Church? How can Christianity still have its True Believers in a fundamentally rationalist society? This was the primary paradox at the very beginning of my research.

A clue was uncovered recently, in a political essay that had posited a “spectrum of morality” that included the elements of “inclusion”, “authority”, and “sanctity”. It occurred to me that Constantine had co-opted these three into the Church, and this was why it’s not sufficient to point out that the Jesus story is entirely mythical, or that their faith is merely a modern derivative of an ancient, Roman Emperor cult.

Membership and participation within a church community provides its membership with inclusion, a source of authority, and the offering of sanctity. The mythos is really secondary to the activities of the organization on the whole — at the micro or macro level.  True Believers easily suspend their disbelief about their theology because they have been conditioned to accept whatever direction provided to them by their authorities. Further, they have been trained to take direction only from those within their particular hierarchy and no other, so in any question, a believer will favor the authority of their church, all others being heretics, atheists, or secular humanists.

Authority is the key. Those who are included by the authority are allowed to share in whatever the authority declares to be sanctity. It turns out there is a reason why the history of the Church is so remarkably political: the development of an independent Roman Catholic Church was an unintended consequence of the creation of Constantine’s Imperial cult, which he designed as a tool of political organization and control. It worked so well, that it has continued on, as another layer of political control, superior to all others, long after the Empire it was designed to support had fallen away.

Before the rise of the Roman Empire, people looked to their familial and tribal leaders as sources of authority. Inclusion was a function of location, or a commonly known ancestry.  Sanctity was something provided by one of many local or foreign devotional or mystery cults. And this point is important — there was, especially in the late 3rd Century AD, a great variety and depth of religious expression available to nearly every person. Religion tied one to a family and a tribe, it identified one’s culture.

As the ever-more-jealous Imperial cult developed in the span of a few centuries from a theological template into a fully-developed historical fiction, all other sources of authority, identity, or sanctity were repressed, demonized, and burned, where not co-opted outright. The variety and depth of religious expression was thinned and compressed, such that religion became a one-size-fits-all affair.

Through some really clever rhetoric, and the occasional Papal compromise, this new faith gradually expanded somewhat to accomodate the natural religious responses in the citizenry. It gradually recognized deaths and weddings, births and holidays, in order to remain relevant to a people shorn of all other forms of religious expression.

During this period, rationalism was roundly condemned as being a devilish tool to confound the faithful. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a general ignorance of history, logic, and philosophy was praised and encouraged by the clerics, who had a monopoly on education at the time. Such is why the return to rationalism in the 1700’s is a big deal. Political leaders began to seek out, if not become one of, the new rationalists. Once this began, the political control of the Church over the nations began to fail and fall away.

The United States of America was originally a novel political fiction, drawing its authority from rationalist principles of innate human sovereignty. Not from the Church, not from the Gods, but from the citizenry itself. The notion of a separation of church and state came from a desire to centralize all political authority to the secular mechanisms of the state. This has not prevented churches from retaining an unofficial subset of authority in most communities. Every Presidential candidate, for example, must be seen as winning the approval from the biggest names in contemporary religious circles.

Thus the authority of churches has not fallen away at all, but has become stronger, perhaps through a sense of needing to compete with the state for “final authority”.  Part of the reason that this works is that the believers need that source of authority in their lives.  Those who find their faith wanting will often cast about for a new source of authority, inclusion, and sanctity. Just as frequently, the first source who provides these will be believed whole-heartedly.

One cannot ask a believer to step away from their church — their source of inclusion, sanctity, and authority. Membership with this group is likely a key component of their self image, and the context from which they interface with others. That sense of belonging is real, that interaction with a family of families is real. These experiences of fraternity are what bring people back to churches.

Which brings us back to the True Believer. True Believers are a consequence of human psychology and not a deliberate element of Christianity. The key to the True Believer’s personality is that they require an active, fraternal community of faith in which to work. Their enthusiasm frequently propels them to minor positions of power within the community, from which they can lord over others. Theological or dogmatic issues are rarely important, unless they can be used as leverage against any perceived competitors. I have come to recognize True Believers in many other contexts.

The presence of True Believers in modern churches is thus indicative of active, fraternal communities of faith present in churches. Perhaps they could be viewed as a “canary in the coal mine”, as a warning that when a church community fails to periodically attract true believers, that its community has lost conherency. On the other hand, a church full of True Believers can be a highly-charged (if not highly political) affair that might be a little over the top of what most people seek in their communities of faith.

Recently, I have enjoyed Death and the Emperor by Penelope J.E. Davies. Dr. Davies teaches Roman art and architecture at UT Austin, and is apparently working on a book focusing on the Republic^[1]. This study of the purpose and meaning of a variety of the funerary remains of the great Roman emperors.

This work is full of quite fascinating observations^[2], far more than I could go into here. One line of discussion was particularly constructive as regards my current research, in tracing the Emperor cult from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius. I hadn’t realized, for example, that “Aurelius” was the Roman “Helios” — and thus that the Emperors in the first & second centuries were overtly styling themselves as Sun gods.

Not afraid to draw her own lines of speculation, Davies makes a number of deeply astute observations regarding the simultaneous purposes each monument would serve. Primarily, these monuments served to praise and elevate the deceased, but secondarily also served to highlight the illustrious predecessor, through which Imperial authority had passed.

After Augustus, the Roman Senate lost its power to absolutely determine the leadership of the Empire. As legislated, Imperium was simply the authority to lead the military forces as needed to protect the borders. In practice, the ones who led the armies tended to rule with absolute authority, and the Roman senate existed as a kind of governmental theater. In this context, the need to trumpet one’s claims to this Imperial authority was necessary. Such is why Diocletian constructed the Arch of Titus, both to celebrate his brother’s glories, but to also emphasize his own deific connections.

Suddenly, it’s obvious that the need to continuously rationalize one’s own claim on Imperium had been a component of sitting on that throne, pretty much from the beginning of Empire. It’s just that some Emperors understood this obligation and others were oblivious to it.

1. D&tE is Imperially focused.
2. and the author’s own detailed photography

I’m getting that sand-through-the-fingers feeling again. Just when I thought I had pegged the origins of “Christianity” via Constantine, I got all caught up on the question of pre-existing material. How can we know what it was he actually defined himself, and what was pre-existing? Of the pre-existing materials, why were some things chosen and not others? How do we distinguish satire from history, devotion from contrivance? More importantly, how does one identify any pre-existing and self-identified communities as “Christian”, previous to Constantine?

It does not readily appear that the distinction of Christian versus Pagan even came up before Eusebius (of Caesarea). The concept of “Christos” seems to have been deliberately conflated with the Greek “chrestos”, the Platonic idea of good.  Whether or not the word Christos carried much weight outside of Hellenized Syro-Jewish mystical communities before this time is unknown, but is presumed to be present given the admixture of the two cultures over such a wide area. This appears to be a potent clue into the past.

“Jesus”, on the other hand, is a name so clearly anachronistic that it’s simply not worth looking for someone in Herodian Palestine named “Jesus”.  There is no Hebrew equivalent for this name, and attempts to conflate this name with Joshua or Jesse are fruitless. The reason is very simple: the name is Greek. It roughly transliterates into the Latin alphabet as “Iasous”. “Sous” or “sus” is the Greek root for our words sustain and resuscitate. In this context, we can say it means “saves”.  “Ia” references our favorite tetranym, thus “Jesus” = “Ja saves!”^[1].

From this, I feel that I can put a greater weight of relevance on materials that talk about “Christos” or “Chrestos” over anything that directly speaks of “Iasous” in any context. Other things that I know were pre-existing include: mystery cults, resurrection dramas, healer cults, and messiah cults.

Interestingly, the items with the most detail in the Gospels are the hardest to find. John the Baptist was attested to by multiple, independent sources, whereas Jesus is mentioned by no one not associated with the early Church. The Temple in Jerusalem was a real place, that really had money changers and blood sacrifices. Pilate really was the prefect of Judea around the time specified in the standard mythos (although his name didn’t rhyme with dial-it). But Peter or Mary, John or James — who were they, exactly? Since we have little in the way of identifying names or characteristics, it’s difficult to know where to place some of these characters.

In another tangent, the development of the emperor cult in Rome caught my eye. The path from Julius Caesar to Constantine is pretty clearly marked, nay paved by the graves of emperors, and it is a prominent forebear of modern Christianity. Constantine had the advantage of three centuries of history of schemes and manipulations of previous emperors to provide many negative examples of what to do. It seems that this may have lead him inexorably towards the development of Christianity as a matter of course.

The state cult of the Roman Republic was the militantly self-satisfied ideology of an expanding empire. It placed the traditional gods of Northern Italy into a stern and rigidly hierarchical system of temples and priests that reinforced traditional dominance of specific families throughout the peninsula. From these families came the Senators who guided the Republic. Political and religious roles were frequently carried by Senators and their families, such that the political and religious reality of the early Republic was generally one and the same.

This system worked until provincial colonies became economically relevant on their own works. Initially, local governors would command local military structures, such that the Senatorial class began to include many of these provincial types — but not their religious ties. When the Phrygian goddess cult was initially allowed into the Roman capitol, it was during a time of extreme duress for the Romans. Even so, She and her followers were kept on a short leash and behind a curtain so as to not offend the staid and traditional Roman gods.

Julius Caesar realized the power of the legions in seizing power from Rome itself, and had the opportunity to give it a shot. His error was in attempting to take power from the Senate, which the Senate was unwilling to concede. Octavian Augustus did not repeat this error, and thus began the long illusion of Imperial co-operation with the Senate. After ninety years of good governance from the “Adoptive Emperors”, came Commodus, who renamed the city of Rome, the Roman fleets, and anything else he could think of into some form of “Commodia”. He was the first to openly reject the rule of Senate^[2] and those after him ruled by might of military prowess alone.

When the Praetorian Guards executed him, they sold the throne to the highest bidder and lost their place in history: their choice lived very briefly, and his successors left little to chance with the Guards^[3]. Thereafter, it was the various military legions who would select claimants for the Imperial throne. These contests would rarely last more than a year, and successful generals could be expected to live at least a couple of years afterward before being knifed in bed or poisoned at breakfast.

The results of one such conflict placed the hereditary high-priest of El-Gabal, a 14-year-old Syrian,  upon the Imperial throne. While the short reign^[4] of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (known to history as Elagabalus) was not remarkable for any military achievement, it was remarkable in that he replaced Jupiter at the head of the Roman pantheon with the Syrian sun deity El-Gabal, retitled Deus Sol Invictus. A festival at the summer solstice was established which was wildly popular for its distribution of free food. Elagabalus built a lavish temple in which was placed the sacred relics of all the leading cults of the day, such that only El-Gabal would be worshiped. After Elagabalus was assassinated by his own guards and his humiliated, headless corpse was thrown in the Tiber, the Elagablium was dismantled and the artifacts were returned to their home temples, including the black stone of El-Gabal to Emesa.

Aurelian^[5] was one of the better general-emperors of the “Crisis Period”, who was able to re-establish Roman dominance in the breakaway Gallic empire in the West and Palmyrene empire in the East. He also strengthened the position of the sun in the Roman state cult, establishing a holiday on December 25th, a pontifical college, and a new temple to the sun in Rome. Presumably, it was his hope that the sun would be something that citizens from all of the Eastern provinces would be able to agree upon worshiping. Aurelian actually wore a golden diadem of solar rays, which may be the source of the later artistic depictions of emperors as having halos.

Constantine^[6] also championed Sol Invictus, and in 321, declared Sunday to be the Roman day of rest for urbanites^[7]. He had a special reason for pulling this one out of the closet — as a usurper against the Tetrarchy, he needed his own “branch” of the Imperial cult to legitimate his own rise to power. The Sol Invictus cult provided a cultural link to relative strengths of the Severan dynasty, as opposed to the disintegrating Tetrarchy. The Syrian connection of El-Gabal would need addressing, as Constantine would not allow the priesthood of a minor cult to direct or correct Him.

From this perspective it seems almost necessary that Constantine would have had to create a replacement origin for the Sol Invictus cult that would allow him to retain the position of king of priests. An alternative narrative, centered in the relative backwater of Galilee, would obviate any power the families of Syria might have retained. Given the time and place of the established narrative, the Romans could easily shrug their shoulders at the lack of proof by saying that the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in 79AD had wiped out all evidence.

Constantine had learned the lesson of Commodus, in that all of his changes would be impermanent if there are not significant efforts made to retain these fixtures. Such efforts are generally only expended by those attempting to preserve their positions of power and authority, and so Constantine carefully constructed an Imperial hierarchical network of interconnecting dependencies, along with his creation of Bishops as secondary administrative functionaries, such that the empire continued to run for nearly 900 years after his death.

Conveniently, Constantine was, himself, the returned messiah, as predicted by the scriptures he personally had commissioned. Remember that the origin of the Christian Bible, as we know it, was the request by Constantine to Eusebius to create 50 Bibles for the consecration of the sanctuary of Hagia Sophia. Whether or not sacred text actually existed at the time, when the Emperor requested 50 Bibles, he got 50 Bibles. And we know that Eusebius of Caesarea was responsible for filling this order, so his hand in editing, if not authorship, is most immediately suspected.

The transition of the Sol Invictus cult into Christianity is pretty clear from this perspective. Inasmuch as this indicates pre-existing materials, we can point to at least two other emperors as being responsible for establishing, if not laying the groundwork for, Christianity, through their support of the Sol Invictus cult. We also have a direct line to Syrian mythology through the El-Gabal connection.

1. Making the slogan “Jesus saves” unnecessarily redundant.
2. in fact, he abandoned his civic obligations
3. they were officially disbanded by Constantine
4. ruled 218-222CE
5. ruled 270-275CE
6. ruled 306-337CE
7. farmers were encouraged to work whenever there was work to do

I haven’t seen very much, if any, information regarding the relationship between Constantine and either Eusebius (of Caesarea or of Nicomedia). The most detailed information found so far was within one of the Constantine biographies I read last Winter. Intimations there was that the Eusebians were the Katzajammer Kids with Constantine when they were all in Rome.

So how did they end up in his court? E of Caesarea says that he “saw” Constantine when the latter was in Syria in the court of Diocletian. But does that mean that one observed the other from some distance, or that they had shared lengthy conversations?

The reason this has interest to me is in the question of how Syrian-Hellenic Messianic theology, and a big chunk of the Hebrew bible, got co-opted into Constantine’s ego cult. We’re told that both Eusebii were trained by “Christian” theologians, but given that this is unlikely, we might speculate that they were trained by distinct, Hellenized Jewish schools and combined this with the other “Mystery” school initiations they had encountered.

But how did Constantine find these guys? Did they petition him for recognition? Were they referred by trusted advisors? To what degree was the inclusion of Jewish material Constantine’s idea? How much of it existed simply to ridicule the Jews? Was there a culture-wide recognition that the Jews had some sort of monopoly on divinity, or were they chosen to ridicule because they had caused so much trouble?

I’m starting to become overwhelmed (again) with revising my understanding of 1st-4th Centuries CE. On one hand, I can still clearly point to the council of Nicea in 325AD and say that this was the place at which Constantine (re-)created Christianity. On the other, I’m completely befuddled regarding which characters were real and which were not, and which words were really written by which real person.

Credit should be given to Constantine for being a brilliant military and political strategist. His education is what many aspire to as “classical”; his tactical tutors were the best; he practiced with real armies against real enemies and became a sterling general. His ambition was equally great. But he was not a man of letters. He was not a philosopher. He was a man of action, and of decision. Although I give Constantine credit for “creating” Christianity, this does not mean that I think he was clever enough to make it all up, but that through his force of will, he was able to co-opt and redefine existing systems to his own ends.

Recently, I found myself stalling out on the research front. I could trace the movements of the larger groups of Jews and various Jewish derivatives from the Second Temple until the 7th Century. Likewise, the development and movements of the myriad Eastern and Mystery cults into the Roman Empire from its founding until the 5th Century could be shown on a map. I speculated that the urban areas with the largest groups of Jews and Hellenized mystery cults would be the places where a sychretization like Christianity could have naturally developed.

Again, until recently, my understanding was that the term “Messiah Cult”, “Mystery Cult” and “Christianity” were all roughly interchangeable during the 2nd and 3rd Centuries, such that Ba’alism, Mithraism, Manichaeism, Serapis worship and Jesus cults were all under the same umbrella. This understanding came from a study of Roman persecution in the first 4 centuries of Empire, in which I discovered Imperial ire to be placed on mystery cults other than Jesus worship in almost every case.

The irony is that I had felt certain that within the history of persecution that I would at least get some sense of how the early Church interfaced with the Roman state. Once I realized that there was almost no actual history of Christian persecution by the Roman state, I began to founder — what was I missing? And now I have it: I was missing the identification and motives of the real authors of the New Testament.

With the meme of the previous three posts in my head, I’ve been able to work my way out of my rut. Let’s assume that some or all of the New Testament was either entirely made up or misappropriated from other sources and heavily redacted, in Rome, sometime between 311 and 323CE. The questions now become: who were the editors and what were their sources?

PRF Brown suggested Eusebius of Caesarea, author of the first book of Christian History, as being the primary, if not the only, author of the New Testament corpus. I think that it would have been a lot of material for one man to have written in such a short span of time. Rather, I’m beginning to see a team of conspiratorial scholars working at the behest of Constantine.

Our man from Caesarea is still on the list, but with him, I’ll be adding Pamphilius of Casearea, who apparently introduced the Hebrew scriptures to Eusebius, but also worked with him to create a defense of Origen’s work on the Old Testament. Also added is Eusebius of Nicomedia, who was the primary Bishop at the sides of Constantine and Constantine II and who baptized Constantine I at his death.

It’s not clear how much men like Jerome and Epiphanaeus, who wrote after the council of Nicea was a done deal, were aware of the actual history previous to that council’s actions, so one cannot be sure if they were deliberate in their attempt to paint a Christian gloss over history, or if they were simply unable to see history without it.

Regarding the sources, it’s easy to assume that our team of hack writers simply made a lot of it up as they went along. So much of it is reflective of other material, that it’s easy to see how bits of elements common in all the other traditions could have been gathered up for use by the Eusebiuses. Since so many of the real cults and traditions were destroyed in the decades following the establishment of Christianity, it is difficult to imagine what might have been present. One wonders if there had not actually been some Jewish messiah cults that had influenced Eusebius — what were they and what did they teach?

We are told of two predominant “schools” of Christian theology — one in Alexandria and one in Antioch. Alexandria was famous for its many schools of philosophy, and the Alexandrian school was the host for some of the greatest minds of the early Church and the development of allegorical exegesis of biblical material. The Antiochan school preferred a literal exegesis… but there’s scant little evidence of its impact or students. Lucian of Antioch — about whom we know nothing — was supposedly the instructor for Eusebius of Nicomedia, Arius, Maris, and Theognis.

To demonstrate how much easier things are with the expectation that much of the early church history was simply made up by Eusebius, we can understand the school of Antioch as simply a foil to an equally imaginary Alexandrian school and be done with the endless lists of imaginary deans. Eusebius had the education and exposure to made a very nice Christianity. It really seems like the simplest explanation for a lot of it.

Many questions are still unanswered. Did Eusebius write the Gospels from scratch, or did he draw from other sources? What about the Pauline epistles? Were those legitimate communications in any way, or based on a set of legitimate communications? To what degree did Eusebius plunder the works of existing cults to populate his own?