ancient religions Archives - Page 5 of 12

Did Pythagoras Study Philosophy in Egypt?

Pythagoras of Samos (lived c. 570 – 495 BCE) is undoubtedly among the most famous of all ancient Greek philosophers. Unfortunately, extremely little can be said about him historically with any degree of certainty. As far as we know, Pythagoras never wrote anything himself and the only contemporary references to him come from the meagre fragments that have survived from the originally much more voluminous writings of his contemporaries. These sources are enough to establish that he was almost certainly a real person, but his life is almost completely obscure.

The later sources about Pythagoras that provide most of our information about him are filled with all kinds of unreliable legends. As I discuss in this article from March 2018, although most people today believe that Pythagoras was a mathematician, the earliest sources about his life actually portray him as more of a mystic sage. It’s only in later sources that he starts to be portrayed as having done anything involving math. The theorem that now bears his name isn’t even attributed to him in any written source until many centuries after his death.

In this article, I want to talk about one of the most famous stories about Pythagoras’s life: the story that he travelled to Egypt, learned about religion and philosophy from the Egyptian priests, and then introduced Egyptian religious ideas to the Greeks. This is a story that is attested in some ancient sources and that has become very prominent in popular discourse about Pythagoras—but is it historically correct?

Transgender People Exist—And That’s Ok

If you’ve paid any attention whatsoever to the news over the past few years, you have almost certainly heard about how a lot of conservatives are really mad that transgender people exist. They routinely insist that acknowledging the existence of trans people is “gender ideology” and that it goes against both science and the Bible. They insist that there are only two genders—male and female—and that a person’s gender is determined by their chromosomes and can never, under any circumstances, truly be changed.

In this essay, I intend to demonstrate that these arguments are, in fact, incorrect and that the existence of more than two genders is totally compatible with both science and the Bible. This essay has taken me nearly a month to research and write, so it will be quite long and will incorporate evidence from a wide range of different fields, including biology, neuroscience, history, anthropology, and religious studies.

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.