(May 7, 2017 at 4:13 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote:(May 6, 2017 at 8:15 pm)emjay Wrote: I was watching Ben-Hur (the new one) the other day and it got me thinking along similar lines as you in this post. That the things Jesus was saying, and the context in which he was saying them (as portrayed in the film) were not new, but rather the sorts of thoughts anyone can have under similar conditions. Ie if you look at the world and all you see is violence met with violence and misery, there'll always be, in every time and place, people who want to find 'a better way'... want to find a way to break the pattern. Some may be more vocal/determined (ie activist) about it than others. So just hypothetically, if Jesus or someone like him existed, and was as portrayed, it seems perfectly plausible to me that he could just be one of these people... an activist trying to find a better way (in the context of a brutal Roman world) and even willing to die - requesting his followers forgive rather than reply in kind with violence - to make the point and break the pattern. So a bloke... an idealist... tired of all the shit around him, and looking for a better way. It doesn't seem that far fetched to me and nothing supernatural required, just one possible human response to a shitty situation.
The Christians want us to think that those older civilizations—Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia were the great darkness which, save for a few prophetic gleams of light in Judaea, brooded over the world until Christ came. The sacred bulls and cats of Egypt, the dragons and demons and whores of Babylon, were the outstanding memories.
Nevertheless when we look at the evidence like letters, contracts, grave-stones, moral treatises, fragments of law, and other documents from those civilizations we see they reflect the moral temper of a people with unalterable fidelity.
Egyptians believed intensely in the immortality of the soul, and in the severe moral examination of each soul as it entered the underworld. Like the great god Osiris. There the good and evil deeds of the man are weighed in incorruptible scales, and the judge passes sentence.
Or the so called "Whore of Babylon". I mean if you look at Hammurabi Code (written more then 1700 years BC) you can see they were obsessed with sex-chastity and had laws protecting the position of the wife against a favourite concubine; protecting her from divorce in case of illness; giving sentence of banishment against a man for incest, or of death for intercourse with his daughter-in-law and so on...
When it comes to Rome the orator Cicero (who lived BC) had the first complete Roman manual of morality called De Officiis (On Duties) and in it there is a fine chapter on benevolence, of "the universal fellowship of the human race," and he says that "nature ordains that we should wish the good of every man, whoever he may be, for this very reason that he is a man"; and he condemned the use of torture in the administration of justice.
Then few decades later you had Seneca who wrote the standard of conduct which was received among cultivated Romans. He wrote moral stuff that slaves are not just people but your family; that you must live for others if you would live for yourself; and so on, that it is worth checking at least as quotes on the internet. They were so moral and so richly paralleled with the Gospels that early Christian writers pretended that Seneca had borrowed from Paul, and even such scholars as Jerome and Augustine accepted the correspondence which was forged in their names.
Or the Christian propaganda that wants us to convince that the emperors before Constantine were generally a perverse lot, encouraging a vicious people; but an hour's study of Roman history will inform us that during the first two hundred and fifty years of the Empire it was ruled by good emperors for two hundred years and by bad emperors for only fifty years.
I mean sure they were conquering and plundering Europe and middle East, but again they saw themselves as helping those people, bringing civilization. I mean if we where to judge them by that, then what about today's so called "wars for oil"? Are we to condemn whole nations of people because they are dragged into stupid wars, like in Vietnam?
When it comes to "Ben-Hur" I remember hearing from Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek how during Yugoslavia the communist party edited out scenes with Jesus and released movie like that and he said that the movie was actually better. It was instead this existential story of survival.
I was mainly just making a general point that in any time and place, there'll be people sick of the status quo and looking for a better (or different) way. This was just really an illustration of that thinking, but I don't know much about Roman history... how it actually was; whether it was as brutal as it is portrayed in some films, or not in others. That's always been a bit of a confusion for me to be honest; on the one hand you have ancient Greek and Roman philosophy suggesting a very moral and learned culture, but on the other you have films like Caligula, suggesting a very decadent and brutal culture. I know it would make a difference who was emperor, and that some may be better than others, but still I don't really have a picture of what it was generally like in the Roman world.
