History is ripe with crafting, especially by those who have the privilege of writing it, and Christians and non-Pagans have taken the reins for 2 millennia. Among the most common claims are those of Christian and Jewish persecution at the hands of Pagans. It bothers me because a lot of it is false or exaggerated.
Top Egyptologists now agree that there is no evidence that the Jewish or Hebrew people were massively enslaved by Egypt. They did not build the pyramids; paid workers did, and the construction of highly religious state monuments would not have been given over to slaves. It would have been assigned to people heavily steeped in the state religious order, not slaves who were outsiders. The people who built the pyramids were, one, Egyptians not Jews, and two, were not slaves. Of course, the Jewish people may have indeed had contact with Egypt. If you read the Old Testament, the adoption of ancient Egyptian religious ideas cannot be denied, but the Jews were likely a warring power that was eventually ousted from the Egyptian kingdom, and if there were some captive Jews in Egypt, they were likely not mainstream slaves or servants. It simply isn't factual history, not only because there's no evidence for it, but because we have evidence directly to the contrary.
The Jewish people have most certainly faced real persecution in their history, but it wasn't from Egypt. In fact, their greatest persecution ever in the history of their world came at the hands of a professed Christian named Adolf Hitler who had 6 million of them murdered.
"My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter against the Jewish poison." - Hitler, April 12th, 1922 at Munich.
Moving onto Rome is a far stickier subject, but nevertheless, something the Christian church has exaggerated. There is still debate as to whether Jesus actually existed or not, but let's just say he did and he was simply a religious leader. Chances are, he wasn't punished for his religious beliefs. He was probably executed because he attempted to overthrow the Roman government. Rome was ripe with new religious cults popping up literally by the day. Rome did not mind accepting new Gods into its Empire. The idea of a new or non-Roman God was not, in itself, automatically rejected. In fact, when Rome conquered an area, one of their acts would be to invite the God of those people into the Roman State. While some may have been at odds with one another sometimes violently, even the Jews eventually excommunicated the Christians from their community in 90 CE. But the 313 Edict of Milan gave everyone freedom of religion, including Christians. However, the problem was that the Christians of the time refused to allow Jesus to be worshiped alongside other Gods.
But the Christians had a problem. They weren't having much luck converting the general population, so instead, they appealed to leaders in government. Once governments had been Christianized, the forced conversions began, one of the most famous being under the rule of Theodosius the First who outlawed the old Pagan and Polytheistic religion, closed down temples, and killed adherents who refused to convert. The Vatican itself likely sits on top of the Temple of Mithras that was there before, and what temples they didn't destroy, they reserved for the purpose of converting them into churches. The only non-Christian religion that remained legal in Rome was Judaism, likely because it was the predecessor. It must be made clear, on the basis of hard historical fact, that the ancient religion left through the immense force of government, not the people. Obviously, attempted eradication of another culture would have led to conflict between Christians and the people they tried to impose upon.
One of the greatest heroes of early Christianity, Paul, spent two years in Ephesus warring against the Temple of Artemis and massively burning ancient Greek and even Jewish texts. He eventually fled to Macedonia after the local population rose up against him because of his criminal activity. The Christians couldn't remain safe in many places due, in large part, to their refusal to respect the rights, freedoms and properties of other human beings who didn't agree with them.
One of the biggest claims of persecution from early Christians was that they were punished for refusing to give tribute to the State religion of Pagan Rome. This is an inaccurate statement. Everyone at that time was required to pay proper homage to the State, not just Christians. It wasn't as if it said that only Christians had to do it. It was law, and no matter what your religion was, you were not above the law. I agree there should have been more religious freedom than that, but there wasn't an organized effort to only pick on Christians. Anyone who didn't obey the law was reprimanded. It would be like me refusing to pay my taxes and then claiming that the State came after me because I'm Pagan. When in reality, it's because I didn't obey the law, and the Church persecuted others during and after their time of taking over. Only in recent history in places like Rome and Greece have followers of the old religion been able to safely be open about their beliefs without being persecuted by the Orthodox powers, and to this day, some individual Christians still carry out violent attacks on Pagan and non-Christian gatherings and properties in various places around the globe.
As an historian, it would also be false for me to sit here and write that there were never any early Christians who were persecuted simply because of their religion. Of course there were. There have always been people who faced oppression for their beliefs, even Pagans at the hands of their own States. Everyone should have the inalienable human right to believe and live the way they want. But the idea that the Christian church was all good and the Pagans were all bad, just isn't true.
In the Goodness of the Gods,
Chris Aldridge.
Work Cited
* LaBorde, Sharon,
Following The Sun: A Practical Guide To Egyptian Religion, 2010. Print.
* Ellerbe, Helen,
The Dark Side of Christian History, Morning Star Books, 1995. Print.
* Jones, Prudence, Pennick, Nigel,
A History of Pagan Europe, Routledge, New York, New York, 1995. Print.
* Burkert, Walter,
Greek Religion, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1985. Print.
* Spivey, Nigel,
The Classical World: The Foundations of the West and the Enduring Legacy of Antiquity, Pegasus Books, New York, New York, 2016. Print.
I'm not sure exactly who owns the Parthenon and its fragments if not the people who built them, but according to the Greek Reporter today, the British Museum which has been housing stolen sculptures from the Parthenon that were taken 200 years ago, aka the "Elgin Marbles," and claimed that the pieces don't actually, legally belong to people they were taken from, since they were, according to the museum, legally given over to a one Lord Elgin by the Ottomans in the early 1800's.
