/christian/ - Christian Discussion and Fellowship

https://archive.org/details/RomeContraJudaea/page/n1

when will the dark ages meme finally die

>>728984

>Shilling this book.

lol.

If you really want a "based" book, read Evola instead.

>>729630

https://www.bitchute.com/video/GVoVCpW0lIXq/

>>729939

>Edward Gibbon

Stopped watching there.

>>729986

What about him?

>>730026

He was important in the field of history of for his methods of gathering information on the subjects he wrote about, most notably insisting on using primary sources whenever possible. That being said, his writings themselves are very flawed and inaccurate. Some think he just flat out made shit up to push his Enlightenment agenda, but personally I think he couldn't read Greek and Latin well enough to fully understand those primary sources because the stuff he came up with is almost too out of left field to come purely from his own imagination. To give an example, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire he cites this passage from Orosius's Seven Books of History Against the Pagans:

During the combat orders were issued to set fire to the royal fleet, which by chance was drawn on shore. The flames spread to part of the city and there burned four hundred thousand books stored in a building which happened to be nearby. So perished that marvelous monument of the literary activity of our ancestors, who had gathered together so many great works of brilliant geniuses. In regard to this, however true it may be that in some of the temples there remain up to the present time book chests, which we ourselves have seen, and that, as we are told, these were emptied by our own men in our own day when these temples were plundered—this statement is true enough—yet it seems fairer to suppose that other collections had later been formed to rival the ancient love of literature, and not that there had once been another library which had books separate from the four hundred thousand volumes mentioned, and for that reason had escaped destruction.

Somehow, Gibbon interpreted this as saying Christians are the ones who burned down the Library of Alexandria despite the event described here took place before Christianity even existed. This is a particularly odd interpretation because the event that passage is talking about occurred decades before Christ was born. I'm guessing it had something to do with the line about book chests being emptied during temples being plundered. Things like the story of Hypatia being killed by Christians because she was a learned Pagan and the claim that Eusebius admitted to lying in his History of the Church are similar fabrications he came up with by distorting the meanings certain passages in ancient books, either intentionally or unintentionally.

>>729630

By that time Germans werent pagan anymore, though Goths and Vandals were mostly Arian

>>728984

>rebellion of Christianised slaves (from Asia Minor and North Africa) against Indo-European paganism, which represented the ancestral customs and traditions of the Roman and Hellenic aristocracies

It's a load of bullshit filtered through the lens of modern ideologies about indo-aryans and shit.

As an historian it make by blood boils to see postmodern reconstruction based on our own prejudices rather than on an understanding of how the people of that age actually thought.

The people of the cities, the urban educated citizens of the Roman empire no longer believed in the hellenic gods. The traditional religion was doomed, only farmers and rural people (pagans) believed in it.

The educated roman was looking for answers in all sorts of eastern cults. Many years before Christianity won other Emperors were already trying to do what Constantine did with Christianity: push a single religion to unify the Empire.

What Constantine did with Christianity others tried with Sol Invictus, also a religion from the east (Syria). Other eastern cults such as Mithraism, Cybele, Isis and Osiris were prospering in the empire mixed with the old gods as syncretic cults.

>b-but Porphiry, Celsus and Julian the apostate were the educated romans and they believed in the hellenic gods

No, they didn't, they believed in neoplatonic syncretism with the asian cults. It was a complex philosophical system needed to conciliate belief in unity (the One as supreme God) with multiple gods. This was a made up artifical belief that emerged precisely as an answer to the dominant skepticism of the upper class.

>christianity was the religion of the slaves

Far earlier than Constantine we know of patrician martyrs, the urban middle class was also full of converts.

As I said urban people no longer believed in the hellenic gods so they were looking for answers in other religions, such as Christianity.

One of the reason Christianity spread even in persecution is because they provided for the poor, now how could an illegal religion provide for the poor if it had no rich members capable of doing charity?