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

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.

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

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

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?

Your comments, corrections, and questions are encouraged.

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?

Most of the “Introductory Articles” posted on the site are recommended reading. The first few do a remarkable job of demonstrating the impossibility of an historical Jesus. Some discussions about the Roman Empire and specifically about Constantine is followed by some rather pointed information about Eusebius. And then the historical documents follow for quite some time. I’m looking forward to working my way through his archive.

This chronology built a depot in my head and sent fully loaded trains of thought out on on the hour. Brown helpfully created this chart which summarizes only the destruction of literature indicated in the chronology. I was first struck at the horrific destruction of culture over two centuries of documented, state-funded terrorism against Hellenic culture. I remembered my recent studies of Christian persecution in the first two centuries, when I discovered that almost every reference was either vaguely referenced or had been proven to be late interpolations of earlier material. There is, on the other hand, a confident quantity of proof that there had once been Hellenic temple cultures and schools of philosophy from before 300 BCE, and that these were all no more by 500CE.

Another train of thought considered how much of the time before 325 is hidden from view because of Constantine’s flames and Eusebius’ pens. Polluting the pool of historical documents with propaganda and lies is bad enough, but incinerating all incriminating documentation puts a fine point on us not bing able to ever uncover the whole truth. There is a very significant shadow that Christianity throws onto the historical record that clearly begins with Constantine, and doesn’t seem to have a single reliable reference beforehand. Unfortunately, due to the efficiency of the Roman Empire, we have only shadows.

One thing that I’m not entirely clear on, and perhaps he isn’t either, but it seems that Brown places fully into the lap of Eusebius the authorship of the Gospels, Acts, many letters, and most of Origen’s New Testament commentary. Possibly, I’ve misread his material and he may attribute more or less to Eusebius, but you get a clear sense of scale nonetheless. I still hold to the theory of an historic continuity of a Nazarite tradition from the 1st Temple period through to the Roman occupation and expect that some of their materials made it into Eusebius’ works.

The notion that Paul/Saul emerged as antagonistic, and then latter supportive, of a community set in this tradition had been my source understanding for his epistles. Now that I have to ask whether it was Eusebius, instead, I find less reason to hold up Paul’s letters as ‘real’ — but I still anticipate that a Nazarite community did exist, largely from Torah references. The question of whether Paul/Saul was even real should be addressed. His names are clearly abbreviations of two popular names: Apollonius and Solomon. As in, he was like Solomon when he was persecuting the “early Church”, but then he was like Apollonius once accepting them. This seems really contrived, but this measure alone is hardly convincing.

New train, now departing: the deep and rich irony of using ’synchretism’ to explain the traditional understanding of the development of Christianity is shockingly clear to me now. “Synchretism”, as a force that traditionally impels minority religions to accept political authority from majority faiths, was the modus operandi for the Roman Empire whenever they allowed Eastern cults to operate within its borders. That is, if a new faith could demonstrate how it was essentially like, and would accept direction from, an already accepted faith, it would be allowed in as a subset of the previous faith. I’m beginning to suspect that the notion that the Greeks did all of it derives from the flaming anti-hellenic crusades of the early Church.

Here is another thing I saw only dimly before very recently: the primary actions of the Roman Empire to dominate the religious world, after the adoption of Christianity, were focused on decimating Hellenic culture. The other culture I’ve been studying recently that had a strong conflict over varying degrees of Hellenism was, of course, Judaism. I understand now how easy it would have been to take a few legends here, a few traditions there, and co-opt a (or create a new) rebellion tradition to define a New Truth for the whole Empire in which Hellenism is the Great Evil. I’m sure, now, that the selection of Byzantium as the new capitol was chosen in order to be close enough to squash all things Greek, while monopolizing trade from a unassailable fortress.

Arianism now takes on a whole new light, if one must discard Eusebius as a source, what more can be said about them? We know that the cult was mostly spread in the Western Empire, based in Rome. Some biographies of Constantine that I have read stated that Constantine began as an Arian and eventually moved to his position at Nicea. If, as proposed by Brown, Constantine released ‘version 1′ of Christianity to Rome and the Western Empire first, before bringing it to the East, it is possible that Arius was an intiate of that early version of Christianity.

Knowing Constantine’s hatred for those who might upstage him, and his invective against Arius, I would expect that Arius may well have became personally popular and was receiving the adulation the Emperor wanted for himself. This in itself may have sparked the need to refit the entire enterprise with written texts and a strict hierarchy, thus the “New Testament” and the re-release of the faith in the East: to ensure that the Emperor, not the priesthood, received all the glory.

The very delicious and cruel comedy of the entirety of the New Testament can be fully appreciated now. The Romans had destroyed the Judaean state, and now made that destruction the central memory of the new State Faith. The stories are told with a straight face, yet when one is ‘in’ on the joke, it becomes plain how the Jews are being shown as fools, thieves, brigands, and charletans. Suddenly, the rush to live ascetic lives in distant hovels as far from civilization as possible, even migration to Persia, makes a lot of sense. Who wouldn’t want to get as far away from the madness of the Roman Empire as possible?

Now I’ve got a whole new list of figures to (re-)investigate:

• Apollonius of Tynea — referenced as having begun the Essene movement
• Origen — to see the difference between Old and New Testament commentary
• Mani — the Prophet of Manicheism
• Arius — just what was it he was preaching, anyway?
• and that list of destroyed temples — just who were those people and what were they up to?

1. see Resources
2. That Eusebius authored or edited together all of the canonical New Testament material, manufactured historical documentation, and insinuated false information into known works, at Constantine’s behest, roughly between 310-320CE.

Brown uses his web space to defend his thesis: Constantine the Great invented Christianity. He defends this pretty well so far, and appears to still be truckin’. His primary thesis, alone, is a good read and successfully summarizes the material on the site. If you want to get into the detail of how this or that thing happened, he has certainly got the detail for you.

Loyal readers will know that I had already come, more or less, to this conclusion. What I had not done that Brown does do, is focus closely on Eusebius (Pamphilus of Caesarea) and return with the opinion that he had forged the majority of the New Testament single-handedly. Further, Brown postulates that this was done as per the direction of Constantine in the years before Constantine took control of the Eastern half of the Empire.

Brown tells a fascinating story about how Constantine had his spies (specifically, his episkopos) systematically record the priestly hierarchies of all of the (Hellenistic) temples in the Eastern empire. When Constantine defeated Licinius, he called the heads of all these temples to Nicea for a little chat alongside his Western Bishops. There, he declared that a new religion was formed and anyone who wanted to join would be promised power and wealth and those who declined would be immediately hacked into small pieces. Subsequently, the new royal priest class formed at Nicea established a jaggernaut that even another Emperor^[1] — only 40 years later — was completely unable to derail.

Again, what’s best about this site is the incredible amount of detailed, scholarly work he has published here with the clear intention of having others follow his work and challenge it. This is now one of my resources.

1. Julian

My first subject has defined an entire school of investigative research, and has been frequently been given credit, by his example, for the general improvement of police detective work since the 19th century.  There is copious written material describing the man, his works, his methods, and his environment, all unquestionably published at a time contemporaneous with the events recorded. The histories provided are unquestionably about real, verifiable places and set in the appropriate time, with no recognizable anachronisms. There is even video proof of the man and his methods. Interestingly, something of a hero cult has even developed over the years regarding this English gentleman.

Naturally, the person I am speaking of in this case is the fictional sleuth Sherlock Holmes, created out of the genius of Arthur Conan Doyle. The video proof is obviously that of the various imposter-actors who have worn the fabled cap and coat. The “historical record” was simply Doyle’s regular column in the Strand Magazine. That and all the hundreds of books of commentary thereon, written since Doyle struck his last tittle. The thing about the hero cult is no joke, nor is this fictional character’s impact on real-life investigative professionals in any way illusary.

My second subject was a national treasure and an object of devotion. He was the modern Prometheus in every way, ushering America into a brightly-lit and musical century of a somewhat smaller world. Acres of press and dozens of biographies were written about the man in his lifetime, and we have many hundreds of confirmable photo, video, and even audio recordings from inventions made by the man himself. It is a much harder task that I had expected to say anything relevant about this exceedingly famous personage without immediately giving away his identity.

But even for a verifiable and famous personage like Thomas Alva Edison, there is easily as much mythology about the man as there was history. For example, everyone knows that Edison invented the light bulb. Except that he didn’t. Light bulbs already existed before Edison turned his attention to them. What he did do was put some of the resources at his “invention factory” in Menlo Park towards systematically discovering the best material to use as the “filament”, or the burning part of the bulb.

What this means is that several (perhaps dozens) of low-paid physics students did painfully tedious experiments with hundreds of sample materials. For weeks, these experiments were conducted until the very best materials were found. And the cheapest was used to create abundant and cheap light bulbs that made Edison yet another fortune and crowned his glory. And the students who actually did all the work? Mostly forgotten.

Most curiously, although the man certainly has his modern fans, there just doesn’t seem to be a generalized hero cult about the man that existed in his lifetime. Much of his genius is now seen to be a skillful combination of media manipulation and patent farming. Admirers of competing inventor Nikola Tesla (who does seem to have an active hero cult) have done some good work knocking away some of Edison’s shiny exterior. Although it was Edison’s own silly obsessions that weighed the most against him, ultimately dragging down his reputation toward the end of his life.

These two examples show the problem pretty clearly. We have great heaps of written materials that frequently appear to be valid from the context of their own times. We’ve made movies about the people talked about in these stories, so there are many who think they’ve seen the true stories of their lives. Many  think they know what these people should look like, how they spoke, even what they believed.  Whatever truth may lie at the bottom of all of this is lost in a miasma of ideology and politics.

How are we to know when a famous person really existed? Holmes and Edison were contemporaneous — even Holmes’ stories started coming out when both men were roughly the same age. Someone who lives in a time or a place where they might miss the point about Holmes being fictional might really wonder about this. Had Holmes and Edison played chess together? Might they have gone to school together? Once the existential questions are set aside, mighty struggles can then ensure speculating this interaction of that. What about The Seven Percent Solution, in which Holmes turns to Sigmund Freud for help in kicking his cocaine addiction? This even comes from a distinct source — doesn’t this prove that Holmes existed?

So what if we tried to avoid the vagaries of ego and hero and attempted to look at larger groups and measurable activities? Okay. Let’s make it really easy and look at something as modern and American as apple pie and Fahrvergnügen: baseball. The origin of baseball is easy, right? Everyone knows Abner Doubleday invented the game in a cornfield near Cooperstown, NY, in 1839.

Except that he didn’t. Doubleday was a remarkable man, and a true American hero. He was a West Point cadet who served faithfully in the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and in battles against native peoples.  He wrote many books^[1] and none of them even mention baseball. He never spoke of it, and as far as we know: he never played it; he never even watched it. For a man who had as little to do with baseball as he had to be credited with its invention took an act of bravado by baseball club owners interested in making the game seem more “American” (some years after Doubleday had passed on).

Credit for the establishment of the modern, American game of baseball is credited (by no less than the United States Congress in 1953) to a certain Alexander Cartwright for his Manhattan team, the Knickerbockers. Cartwright published his club rules in 1845, and these became the basis for the rules used today in professional and college leagues all across America. But Cartwright did not invent the game, which had been played, in various forms and incarnations, by young men and women throughout the colonies from the earliest times. Forms of ball-and-bat games are discussed in medieval European documents, and possibly derive from games played by pre-Christian Celts as part of Spring fertility rites.

Several lessons here:

• Things get out of hand really fast. It’s easy to forget how much of what we do today has been done about the same way for thousands of years, with only some of the pattern changing a little in the last century.
• Pointing to the origin of a group activity is like nailing jello to the wall. People use what advantages they have at hand and this changes how they do things, like play games. People have been playing games for as long as there have been people, so we can assume that many of the “best practices” for such activity had long before been worked out before the first milkmaid protected her dangling stool  from flying turnips^[2].
• People can be strangely possessive about their national mythos, so things like mentioning that baseball wasn’t invented here can really upset people. No doubt getting into things that are actually packaged and distributed as “religion” will dutifully stir up emotional distractions, as well.
• Finding out what really happened with something is possible up to a pretty limited and modern point. Before that, it’s all a lot of speculation. This is rarely the result of a conspiracy, more often it is simply another example of the tendency for people to forget.

To put a fine point on it: Holmes, Edison, and Doubleday were all significant personages 125 years ago and today the legends they have collectively inspired have distorted the truths of each. The language in which their original stories were written is nearly the same one we speak today, with very little variation. And yet we are still unable to clearly distinguish fact from fiction. The stories of the Bible were written two and three thousand years ago in dead languages that had been translated through other dead languages into  predecessor languages of our own.  Not only were the original and intervening languages different, the cultures, the worldview, and the size of the world was very, very different when most of the stories of the Bible were first written down. Life before and life during the Roman Empire were very different things for most peoples — life afterward was as unimaginable for the people of those days as life before the Roman Empire is to us. Little wonder we struggle today with the ancient materials of the Bible.

1. Kudos to reader Tom Barthel who clues me into the fact that there are no legitimate biographies of Doubleday.
2. stoolball was a medieval precursor to both baseball and cricket