The Pokey Finger of God

Quite a milestone was reached last week when I published my book, Janus in Nicea.  I had started this blog some years ago when I realized that the state of my study of Early Church history was such that it needed a home away from Live Journal. After continued work in it, I received a [...]

[Read more →]

I recently received a comment to this site that I deleted, due to a fake email address. The comment was to my State Cult Hypothesis post from two years ago. The entire comment read as follows:
“This has got to be the dumbest thing I have ever read. I would like to leave a detailed [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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, [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]