The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> To Your Cousin...

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Tuesday, May 1 2007, 6:38:54 (CEST)
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...looking back on it I have to admit that Paul was onto something when he said we may well have been originally Jews for all we know. Dr Joseph mentions that the first two centuries in the life of Christianity are shrouded in history and that we'll never know just went on...but it seems more than plausible that the first converts to Christianity were indeed those Jews living outside Israel and therefore, in a sense, rejecting and rejected by the mainstream Jews...they would have found the idea of Jesus, the "rejected" Messiah as, nonetheless, the "real" one most appealing...other sources in Dr Joseph's book say that Christianity in the Persian Empire, Parthian and Sasanian, was the work of Jews. Makes sense. Jesus too was the "work of Jews".

The premise I am working from is that no one and certainly no city-state, ethnicity or nation ever dumped its religion and traditions willingly for any other religion...not unless some other forces were brought to bear.

Paul and his pal Dean rushed to say that Armenians converted first, as a nation, and converted gladly...willingly, joyously and, I guess, en masse. When I said I suspected the Romans of forcing this religion on the various people caught up within their empire, Paul rushed to say that Rome never controlled Armenia....and Dr Joseph says that only two churches developed outside the Roman Empire, our own Church of The East and the Armenian church.

However, in the 3rd century Rome did indeed conquer and rule Armenia...and in their wars with the Parthians and Sasanians over the next few centuries, captured, ruled, lost and re-captured Bet Nahrain many times, Armenia somewhat less so...in fact the battlefied was BetNahrain with the two sides trading off at the Euphrates river, which was their frontier and "front".

In such a state of turmoil and insecurity I can see the Romans making a concerted effort to forcibly convert the Armenians as well as the pagans, remaining Assyrians and Jews of BetNahrain...obviously the Romans weren't Christians in any but the opportunistic use of that term...they liked the religion because it worshiped meekness, mildness and giving the emperors all they asked of you.

Paul too should read something beside Syriac manuscripts...then he would realize that at that very crititcal time, a time for which we have no real facts as to what Christianity was up to, except for the self-serving myths and legends of the church itself...all of them penned quite after the fact, the Romans were indeed in control of both Armenia and BetNahrain...and although Rome was not yet officially Christian, it soon made that religion mandatory on all (325 A.D),on pain of confiscation and death.

The Muslims atracted people not by threatening them with death...some converted because they may have believed in and sensed the truth of Muhammad's statement of his mission: that Judaism and Christianity were imperfect versions of what God wanted and Islam was the culmination...but the vast majority converted, I would guess, because without such conversion they could never join the mainstream Islamic society..it's true they were allowed to worship and even protected in their own faiths...but, aside from not being eligible for military service and having to pay a special tax, they could not mix and get ahead...and, of course, the ongoing wars between Christian Rome and an Islamic Empire, taking the place of Rome's older Parthian and Sasanian adversaries, would again make things uncomfortable for the Christians within the Islamic fold...there was no need to evangelize or kill people into Islam...left to time and common sense and self-interest, numerous Christians and pagans too converted...not quite "willingly", perhaps...but without the bloodshed Christianity evangelized people with.

It was the Romans...the real and only Christian powerhouse, who murdered people into Jesus...and they did it in Armenia and Betnahrain as well...like they did everywhere else, including Rome and Byzantium.

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