ancient religions Archives - Page 5 of 11

What Did Jesus Really Say about Homosexuality?

None of the canonical gospels portray Jesus as having said anything whatsoever about homosexuality. You can scour every last line of the four canonical gospels and you won’t find anything that can be unambiguously interpreted as a reference to homosexuality in any form. As far as the canonical gospels are concerned, Jesus did not condemn homosexuality, but he did not endorse it either.

Fascinatingly, though, it is possible that there may have been an alternate, non-canonical version of the Gospel of Mark in circulation in the second century CE that implied that Jesus himself had sexual relations with men. The existence of this possible version of the Gospel of Mark is controversial and many scholars regard it as a flat-out hoax. Nonetheless, it is worth talking about—even if only for the sake of curiosity.

Was the “Green Man” Really an Ancient Pagan Deity?

If you’ve read anything about paganism, you’ve probably heard of a figure known as the “Green Man.” This is a name that is commonly applied to an artistic motif that often appears in decorative carvings in churches in western Europe, depicting a male face surrounded by leaves and foliage. In many depictions, the man is shown with his mouth open, disgorging foliage from it.

In modern popular culture, the Green Man is widely portrayed as an extremely ancient and extremely powerful “pagan” nature deity who was supposedly of immense importance to pre-Christian cultures throughout Europe and the Middle East. In reality, the Green Man is nothing of the sort and the whole notion of him as any kind of deity is actually less than a century old.

Was Socrates a Monotheist?

It seems to be widely believed among members of the general public that Socrates was some sort of monotheist. If you go on the Stack Exchange Philosophy website, there’s a question: “Was Socrates a monotheist?” As of the time I am writing this, three of the answers say that he was definitely a monotheist and one of them says that it’s an open question. Only two answers correctly say that he wasn’t a monotheist, but neither answer gives a detailed explanation how we know this.

Historically speaking, Socrates almost certainly believed in the existence of many deities—just like most other people in classical Athens. Unfortunately, modern readers who are accustomed to thinking about religion in monotheistic terms have a tendency to misinterpret passages from the Platonic dialogues as suggesting monotheism.

This problem is only made worse by the fact that some of the most widely used translations of the Platonic dialogues were produced by monotheistic scholars who were desperate to see Socrates as a monotheist and therefore deliberately translated the texts to make it sound like he was one.

Where Does the Idea of a “Saint” Come From?

Most people today are familiar with the concept of a “saint,” but the question of when and how this concept arose is a very interesting one. The basic idea behind the Christian conception of sainthood can be traced all the way back to the writings of the Hebrew Bible, which contains stories about holy people using their special connection with God to perform miracles for the benefit of others.

This idea is expanded on in the writings of the New Testament and in other early Christian texts. Early Christian ideas about sainthood may have been influenced to some extent by similar Greek and Roman stories about holy men performing miracles. By late antiquity, a conception of sainthood similar to the one most people today are familiar with had developed. Although saints have become less prominent in western Christianity since the Protestant Reformation, ancient and medieval stories about saints continue to influence contemporary western culture.

Was Jesus Literate?

The question of why Jesus of Nazareth didn’t write down any of his own teachings has puzzled many Christians and non-Christians alike. From the perspective of a literate person in the twenty-first-century west, it makes little sense why a person who saw himself as a prophet would not bother to write down any of his own ideas. Most of us are accustomed to getting our information about religion from books, so we tend to assume that it would have only been natural for Jesus to write down his teachings.

The problem with this assumption is that Jesus was not a twenty-first-century literate westerner, but rather a first-century CE Jewish itinerant preacher from Galilee. Although the canonical gospels consistently seem to portray Jesus as literate, it is an open question whether the historical Jesus was actually literate. Furthermore, even if Jesus was indeed literate as the gospels portray him, there are several good reasons why he might have decided not to write down his teachings.

No, History Doesn’t Need to be “Mathematized”

On 12 November 2020, The Atlantic published an article titled “The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse.” This article, written by a staff writer named Graeme Wood, is primarily a profile piece about Peter Turchin, a Russian American entomologist-turned-pseudohistorian. It is also, however, to a large extent a full-on polemic against real historians, whom Wood portrays as obsolete curmudgeons who don’t really understand the past and are allergic to science.

As can only be expected, the entire article displays an absolutely flagrant ignorance of what the historical discipline is and what historians actually do. Indeed, it is full of all kinds of outlandish howlers, bordering on outright silliness. Unfortunately, many of the misconceptions that the article promotes are becoming more and more common as our society continues to devalue the study of history.

How Historically Accurate Is Netflix’s ‘Barbarians’?

There have a been a lot of Netflix originals related to ancient history recently. One such show is the German historical drama series Barbarians, which was first released on Netflix on 23 October 2020. The show is very loosely based on the historical events leading up to and surrounding the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE, in which an alliance of several Germanic tribes won a crushing victory against the Romans and destroyed three whole Roman legions.

A lot of people have commented on Barbarians’ similarities to the History channel series Vikings, but there are a couple factors that differentiate it. One is that Barbarians is set about eight hundred years earlier than Vikings in the world of antiquity rather than the world of the Middle Ages. The other factor is that Barbarians is overtly a German show that is clearly made for a German target audience with German concerns; whereas Vikings was clearly made with British and North American target audiences primarily in mind.

Barbarians is mostly fiction, but, so far at least, it does generally stick more closely to the broad outline of historical events than Vikings. (There are, for instance, no bizarre scenes in which historical figures who actually lived centuries apart are portrayed as meeting in person.) In this article, I want to talk about aspects of the show that are historically accurate and other aspects where the makers of the show have taken some creative license.

The Difference Between Mythology and Religion

There is an extremely popular belief that the term “mythology” refers to any religion that is no longer practiced. This belief seems to be especially popular among atheists. I’ve often heard atheists use the expression “Today’s religions are tomorrow’s mythologies.” This belief, however, is wrong. The terms “religion” and “mythology” refer to two completely different things. A religion does not turn into a mythology when it stops being practiced.

What Does the Genesis Creation Story Mean?

The first three chapters of the Book of Genesis have been studied, interpreted, reinterpreted, and misunderstood by people of diverse religious convictions for around 2,500 years. The stories recounted in these chapters have had an enormous impact on world religions, mythologies, literatures, and cultures. Most people think that they understand these stories. Nonetheless misconceptions abound—not just about what the text means, but also about who wrote it, what it actually says, what sources the text is based on, and how the text has historically been interpreted.

In this article, I want to take a deep dive into the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis, debunk some popular misconceptions, and hopefully do my part to help others understand these stories that have become so influential. This is going to be a bit of a long read, but, by the end of it, hopefully, you’ll know pretty much everything you wanted to know about the Genesis creation stories.

Unicorns in the Bible

You may have heard at some point that unicorns are mentioned nine times in the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. This fact has been used by some skeptics to argue that the Bible is ridiculous, which has, in turn, led some fundamentalist Protestants to defend the Bible by making the incredible argument that unicorns may have actually existed at some point in the past.

If you look at the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament, however, you won’t find anything at all about unicorns. Unicorns are only mentioned in the King James Version due to a roughly 2,200-year-old mistranslation originating in the Greek Septuagint. This mistranslation has been corrected in most modern translations of the Bible, including the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) and the New International Version (NIV).