The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Re: "A History of Christianity" by Paul Johnson

Re: "A History of Christianity" by Paul Johnson
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Friday, March 9 2012, 23:09:16 (UTC)
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...thanks, I'll see if the library here has that.

One concern I have is how sourcing works in some scholarly pieces....in this book for instance there are no notes, just a "select bibliography" at the end. There is an index but no footnotes telling you where particular references came from...I've run across this before....you'll find a footnote or three for one reference...and then later after an astounding claim is made...nothing.

Am I to assume that the source lies somewhere in those 1000 books in the bibliography and that if I was to read them all, or find the appropriate one, I too would reach the same conclusion?

Especially where early Christianity is concerned and everyone agrees there are so few actual sources...even more when next it is claimed that "Christianity spread rapidly"....and even MORE so after we read actual sources for the later "spread" of this religion which admit that great violence and mayhem and murder was used to force people into Christ....how then did anyone conclude that in the earliest years the religion "spread rapidly" with the implication, sometimes downright avowal, that it spread peacefully with great hordes of people being "tired of their failed religions", embracing Christ?

Nowhere in modern history do we see numbers of people "tired of their failed religion" who then leap into yet another one....when Christians followed Luther in their disgust with Catholicism it wasn't because they were tired but furious...and they reformed it into a much more virulent religion....in our day indeed people are getting very tired of religions but they aren't flocking to new ones, they're quitting altogether.

If we know, without a doubt, that murder was the final means of "conversion" to Christianity...how do we also assume that in the beginning no murder was used?

It seems safest to say that early Christianity, almost indistinguishable from Judaism, was easily adopted by Jews, and no one else. In fact in this book the author says that what should have been THE church in Christendom, that of Jerusalem, soon died away precisely because it was swallowed up again by Judaism...because it failed to distinguish itself enough from its source, whose numbers were always greater. Not so Rome where Christianity was indeed imposed form on high and later forced on everyone.

One thing I never understood which this book makes clear is why the wealthy Romans became Christians. Turns out they did so to remove their property from the increasingly burdensome tax rolls of the later Empire. They would deed their property to the Church with the proviso that their family would enter into a scared bond with the papacy with the head of the family appointed bishop ,or something close, who then administered his own property "for the Church", and that this position would pass down as an inheritance so the family could keep control....whatever was gained by the Church was probably less than what would have been lost in taxes to the State.

One thing is sure...Christianity, like all the rest, was man made, to serve men here on earth, the only place the religious have ever been interested in maintaining power and wealth for "eternity".



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