We're fresh off of a long, perhaps disjointed, series of entries that ultimately focused on the fallibility of the texts of the New Testament. We didn't argue that the entire New Testament is incorrect, but merely that it couldn't all possibly be taken for granted as "absolutely correct, the word of God."
Before we completely abandon that line of thought, let me try to punctuate it once more: if the texts of the New Testament are not necessarily all one-hundred percent the "word of God," which I believe we have shown adequately, then a faithful person owes every single text of the New Testament the full scrutiny and suspicion that any other ancient historical text would receive, if for no other reason than to try to suss out what is divine in these texts, and what is merely human.
Ok.
Let's change gears to something some of you may find way more interesting. Today, let's begin an open ended study of the world of paganism as it existed before and during the Apostolic Age.
Here we go.
Paganism: An Introduction
Terms and Context
If you lived in a Roman-controlled city around the time of Jesus' birth - which could have been in what we now call Italy, Spain, France, North Africa, Greece, Turkey or the Near East - you very likely believed that the cosmos, the world, and your life were controlled by the whims of a pantheon of many Graeco-Roman gods.*
Depending on how broadly one defines paganism, nearly every ancient religion across the globe could be considered "pagan." Key for our understanding is that paganism was not a monolith. Whether or not a particular religious system might be considered "pagan" is fluid insofar as the definition of the term is fluid.
In the first century, in the Roman Empire's paganism, there were certain deities which had to be worshipped. For example, sometimes the Emperor himself was considered a living god and a member of the divine pantheon, and would have been worshipped as a matter of law. Generally speaking, however, as long as adherents to paganism gave lip-service respects to the legally instituted Roman gods, they were allowed to worship whatever other gods they chose. In this sense, Graeco-Roman paganism could be seen as an extremely inclusive thought system. The Roman gods did not exclude other gods. While some pagans focused their worship on particular patron gods rather than actively worshipping an entire pantheon, all pagans still at least believed in the existence of other deities.
To be sure, when Rome entered Palestine, they didn't ask the Jews to abandon their god. They only insisted that the Jews make room in their belief system for a few Graeco-Roman gods.
Aside from the resistance offered in Palestine, as Hellenism and the Roman Empire spread across the known world during the centuries before Jesus' birth, religious assimilation of newly conquered peoples was generally easy because Graeco-Roman paganism was so much like the paganisms of the peoples they assimilated.
In pagan societies, religious ritual centered around sacrifice at a local temple. A Graeco-Roman citizen desiring favor from the gods (or a particular god) in 100 BC might take an animal such as a lamb or a bird or a pig to the local temple to have it ritually killed by the temple cultists. If one didn't have an animal to sacrifice, one could easily buy one from a vendor inside, or in the immediate vicinity, of the temple. (Here, think about the men Jesus scolds for selling things in The Temple in the gospel.)
After the sacrifice, the animal meat was normally cooked on a big communal fire, and a large portion of it distributed back to the worshippers present for consumption, with only a small portion being totally burned up as sacrifice to the god or gods in question. In this sense, religious worship in the Graeco-Roman world was somewhat like a barbeque.**
Since there were so many gods, morality didn't necessarily fall under the purview of paganism. In the modern age, we frequently see religions as morality-systems. In ancient times, religion was far more transactional than behavioral. If you wanted to have a good harvest, you needed to make the sacrifice prescribed by the cultists. If you wanted your baby to be born healthy, you needed to make the sacrifice prescribed by the cultists. If you wanted your battle with the Persians to go well, you needed to make the sacrifice prescribed by the cultists. The gods didn't generally hand down rules for human behavior or rules governing human interaction. The gods were interested in the goings on of their own world too much to care how humans acted toward one another.
Sacrificial cult worship existed in the extreme antiquity of Egypt, perhaps thousands of years before Christ's time. Herodotus, the Greek "father of history" suspected that the most ancient Greeks had gotten their religion from Egyptians. We know by archaeological evidence that the semitic peoples that predated the Jewish people practiced pagan ritual sacrifice. Truly, then, paganism predates history.
I frequently think of paganism as predating humanity.
My cat leaves trinkets by her food bowl when the food gets low - some kind of prototypical sacrificial transaction, perhaps...
"We give, that we might receive."
Next time, we'll explore the collision between paganism and Abrahamic monotheism that occured in Palestine only decades before Christ's birth.
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Matthew 5:7
7 Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
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Jesus' Saying #11 is Beatitude #5 today in our continued reading. The Fifth Beatitude constitutes the fifth hard clue we have as to Jesus Christ's morality.
Today, Jesus blesses the merciful among humanity, and promises that they will be shown mercy in the future.
Let's go back to the dictionary:
Today, Jesus blesses the merciful among humanity, and promises that they will be shown mercy in the future.
Let's go back to the dictionary:
mercy: noun - compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one's power to punish or harm.
"Compassion or forgiveness."
In a world that values strength through force and the dominion of vengeance above all other things, Jesus' radical doctrine is that the merciful are blessed and justified. The compassionate and the forgiving are blessed and justified.
Jesus' injunction to forgive our fellow human whatever misdeed they may do to us begins here, I would say.***
As with the other Beatitudes, we can see an opposite side to the coin of this saying. If the merciful (the compassionate and forgiving) are blessed, then the merciless (the uncompassionate and the unforgiving) are not blessed and are not justified.
Jesus is issuing his moral rule to his followers immediately here in the Sermon on the Mount. Forgiveness, poverty, meekness, mournfulness, and a desire for justice - all these Jesus elevates as ideals.
We'll soon start a new list to run parallel with our "Sayings of Christ" list. The new list will be "The Ideals of Christ." We'll work on that for next time. In the interim, I will be focusing my inner thoughts on these already revealed ideals: forgiveness, poverty, meekness, mournfulness, and a desire for justice.
If you want to give it a try with me, try focusing on those ideals until next time.
Thank you so much for reading. Please share this writing.
Love.
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In a world that values strength through force and the dominion of vengeance above all other things, Jesus' radical doctrine is that the merciful are blessed and justified. The compassionate and the forgiving are blessed and justified.
Jesus' injunction to forgive our fellow human whatever misdeed they may do to us begins here, I would say.***
As with the other Beatitudes, we can see an opposite side to the coin of this saying. If the merciful (the compassionate and forgiving) are blessed, then the merciless (the uncompassionate and the unforgiving) are not blessed and are not justified.
Jesus is issuing his moral rule to his followers immediately here in the Sermon on the Mount. Forgiveness, poverty, meekness, mournfulness, and a desire for justice - all these Jesus elevates as ideals.
We'll soon start a new list to run parallel with our "Sayings of Christ" list. The new list will be "The Ideals of Christ." We'll work on that for next time. In the interim, I will be focusing my inner thoughts on these already revealed ideals: forgiveness, poverty, meekness, mournfulness, and a desire for justice.
If you want to give it a try with me, try focusing on those ideals until next time.
Thank you so much for reading. Please share this writing.
Love.
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* pantheon: noun - all the gods of a people or religion collectively.
** The math of this kind of sacrifice still doesn't totally work out to me. "Hey God, I'm giving you this beautiful delicious pig. Oh wait... nevermind... I'm eating it. Yum." It's like giving your pig, and eating it, too.
*** Yes, Jesus makes an injunction that his followers forgive all human transgressions. No, there will not be any exceptions to this. Yes, this undermines all of western civilization.
** The math of this kind of sacrifice still doesn't totally work out to me. "Hey God, I'm giving you this beautiful delicious pig. Oh wait... nevermind... I'm eating it. Yum." It's like giving your pig, and eating it, too.
*** Yes, Jesus makes an injunction that his followers forgive all human transgressions. No, there will not be any exceptions to this. Yes, this undermines all of western civilization.
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To read what's next, click here.
To read what's next, click here.
To read what came prior to this, click here.
For the index of Christ's words, click here.
