Jesus discussion

[Thiudareiks Flavius]

But what interests me more is how after the eledged crucifixion of Jesus this religio illitica spread out from Judaea to the Roman world.

That's a big question. I'd second the recommendation of Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians on this topic, as well as Ramsay MacMullen's Christianising the Roman Empire: 100-400 AD.

Were they part of the Essenic philosophers of Qumran?

Probably not (and there's a growing school of thought that actually doubts there even were any Essenes at Qumran). The early 'Jesus Movement' shared some ideas with the Essenes, but only to the extent that many other Jewish groups did. They differed from them in many important respects. The Essenes were obsessed with spiritual purity, for example, which meant they would have avoided all contact with 'sinners'. Jesus clearly disagreed with them on that point and many others.

who were the earliest Christians, and what were their original teachings?

Again, that's a big question. I could give a really, really long answer, but it might be easier for you to check out some of the books I recommended in a previous post. Short version? The original Jesus Movement followers were Jews who held to Judaism but simply considered Jesus the Messiah or "Annointed of God". They don't seem to have considered that he was God at that stage. Their movement spread into the Greco-Roman world via coimmunities of Jews across the Mediterranean and, as it did so, began to lose much of its original Jewish character and absorb distinctly non-Jewish ideas.

for I always have found it hard to believe that a movement which had only a few followers in the beginning in a society which was so controlled by Roman law and politheistic faiths,
could have grown into the massive state endorsed religion it became.

There was already an interest in the Empire in 'foreign religions', especially Eastern ones. Mithras, Isis and Cybele all became popular amongst Romans in much the same period. As did, surprisingly enough, Judaism. Modern Judaism doesn't tend to seek out non-Jewish converts, but elements of ancient Judaism did. So there were many Romans and Greeks who were attracted to Judaism as an ancient philosophy and some of them came to be 'God Fearers' - believers in the Jewish God who stopped short of circumcision.

It was some of these 'God Fearers' who became the first non-Jewish converts to Christianity. The early Christian movement actually had some bitter disputes over whether a non-Jew could be a Christian and Peter and Jesus' brother, James, debated Paul on this point. It was Paul who won the debate and this victory accelerated Christianity's drift away from Judaism proper. That rift widened in the late First Century when the Jewish Council of Yavneh declared Christians heretics and excluded them from synagogue worship. By that stage Christianity was well on the way to becoming a totally non-Jewish faith.

Early Christianity had all of the attractions of Judaism for non-Jews, without any of its drawbacks (eg weird dietry rules and painful circumcision). It had other attractions as well. Unlike many other 'mystery religions' it was totally non-exclusive. Mithraism was popular, but it excluded slaves, women and anyone 'not up to scratch' - it was an exclusive, invitation-only men's club. Christianity, on the other hand, welcomed anyone, and everyone who converted was meant to be 'equal in Christ', regardless of class, rank, wealth or sex. Conversion provided other benefits, particularly the support of an Empire-wide community and financial support for the poor. This made it especially attractive. And its view of the afterlife was also very appealling to many people.

So it's not really surprising that it gained converts rapidly in the Second to Fourth Centuries. Even then, when Constantine made Christianity legal in 313 AD, Christians only made up 10-15% of the Empire's population. The removal of its illegality and the end of active persecution boosted conversions and the eventual Imperial endorsement of Christianity as the state religion by Theodosius in 382 AD effectively made it the dominant faith.

When persecution became prevalent in Domitian's reign, was it for reasons like this, or was it a case of bringing up old fears among the population?

By then Christianity was large enough to be a genuine cultural force in the Empire. It had lost some of its old anti-Roman, apocalyptic, 'the end is nigh' elements, but Christianity was an exclusive faith that didn't allow its members to sacrifice to the Emperors or to the Roman state gods for the good of the Empire. This was seen as a direct political challenge and as a genuine spiritual threat and it was this that caused the persecutions. The Romans didn't really have a problem with Christians holding their weird pseudo-Jewish beliefs, but objected to a cult that refused to placate the gods on the Empire's behalf. This is why they were called 'atheists' and why Julian called them 'those impious Galileans'.

The persecutions actually strengthened the movement. Wishy-washy believers buckled under Imperial pressure and left the faith, leaving the 'true believers' in control. And for those guys threats of torture and death didn't really have much of an effect, since they believed that those who suffered and died for their faith would go straight to heaven. They were about as bothered by the threat of execution as fundamentalist Jihadist suicide bombers are by the idea of being blown to pieces - they welcomed it. It hard to scare people with threats of death if they aren't afraid to die.

The only thing i can imagine is that the early christian teachings were juxtaposed over mithraism, and several other gods where incorporated by the christian pandemonium. for instance, Early depictions of Mary always wear almost exactly!! the same crown as Cybele. Also depictions of Jesus in armour, and as in St Pauls Cathedral, with a strange likeness to Alexander the Great, lead me to believe that early christianity found a mixture of Pagan beliefs with their own teachings ideal to be used for their own agenda.

That's true to an extent, but it's a point that's often overstated. Some people go so far as to claim that Christianity was 'simply' paganism by another name', which is not true. Christianity certainly did absorb many non-Jewish elements - that's how the Jewish concept of 'the son of God' morphed into the distinctly non-Jewish 'God the Son'. And, like any faith which moves into a new culture, Christianity used existing artistic expressions: thus the Isis-style pictures of the Virgin or the Apollo-style depictions of Christ.

But those influences generally didn't change the fundamentals of Christian beliefs. Some fringe modern authors totally overstate the parallels between Christianity and other cults. You can find plenty of web sites that claim Mithras had twelve disciples, raised the dead, was crucified and rose again. They sound like amazing parallels with Christianity and clear evidence of Christian borrowing from Mithraism, until you realise Mithraism actually had none of these elements at all. There's a hell of a lot of outdated, amateurish crap written on this topic.

as to your interest in how 'things were rewritten", you may enjoy this aspect of my next book which examines how early Christians essentially "rewrote" the Old Testament in order to have a popular new religion that retained the "respectability and antiquity" of Judaism, combined with the dualism of Zoroastrianism that was far more palatable to the pagan mind than the strict monotheism that Judaism is. This is why Satan is transformed from the obedient servant of Jehovah in the old Testament to the fallen angel and wicked Ahriman dragon carbon copy taken from Zoroastrianism. And of course, pagan hellenistic mythology was thrown into the mix as well, which is why there is a Platonic Hades to punish the wicked, that never existed in the Old Testament, and also why the New Testament is overrun with Greek demons which never seemed to trouble anybody in the Old Testament.

Hmmm, are you really going to argue that 'Christianity' did this? That kind of dualism and concepts like 'Hades' certainly aren't found in the OT, but the transition from the Judaism of the OT to these more dualist, Persian and Hellenic-influenced concepts happened long before Jesus was even born. Prominent branches of Judaism absorbed those ideas in the post-Exilic period and in the period of Hellenic domination. We can see them in Rabbinical Judaism and we see them prominently in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Christianity didn't make this transition on its own, it inherited it from an already transformed Judaism. It added some touches of its own, but it was Judaism that transformed itself under Persian and Greek influence and it did so in the two to three centuries before Jesus. Christianity exhibits that dualism etc largely because of its origins as a Jewish sect.