[Sca-cooks] Roman tolerance (was: An Apology)

[Siegfried Heydrich]

    What got the christians in trouble was first, they refused to
acknowledge social conventions. In their secret 'love feasts', patrician
would mingle with plebian or even slave. This was NOT done in polite
society, or even impolite society! The fact that these were secret rites
just fanned the flames of prurient speculation, and made people really
suspicious of them right off the bat. It was widely speculated that they
were engaging in cannibalistic practices. After all, why else would you have
your ritual dinners in secret?
    Second, they refused to offer sacrifices to the state gods. Remember,
back then religion was simply one arm of the state. Nobody else had any
problems sacrificing; when the jews got upset about it, the Romans
accommodated them by allowing them to sacrifice by proxy. You could pay
someone to make a token sacrifice in your name, and by doing so, you
indicated your submission to the state.
    The christians refused to do even this, indicating that they refused to
submit to the authority of the state, thus placing themselves in a really
unpleasant position. Almost all martyrs could have avoided death by simply
tossing a small cake onto an altar fire. In fact, the Romans really DIDN'T
want to kill most of them, at least in the early days. They were brought in,
it was explained to them what was expected of them, and what would happen to
them if they refused to comply. I very strongly suspect that the majority
did the sensible thing, and didn't try to make a grand statement.
    The fanaticism of these martyrs was another factor in the persecutions -
they were that era's version of suicide bombers. People who were so opposed
to the state that they were willing to die rather than submit. The Romans
could NOT allow this sort of challenge to go unanswered, and the roman
answer was generally to send them to the circus to provide an object lesson
to the populace of what would happen those who defied the state.
    The more fanatical the christians got, the more determined the Romans
were to suppress this cult. The Romans were amazingly tolerant of religions
in general - they even had a shrine in the Pantheon dedicated to the gods
that didn't have a shrine, just to make sure they had all their bets
covered. But they could in no way allow their authority to be superceded by
that of some resurrected jew whom they had executed for felony
rabble-rousing!

    Sieggy


----- Original Message -----

>
> Oh, yeah, big time. The Romans were interested in keeping the peace,
collecting their tax money, and building whatever they needed to integrate a
place into their Empire. While they would build temples for their own use
and invite the locals to practice their faith, they had little or no
interest in forcing their religious beliefs on others, for the most part. I
will always remember the first time I encountered Jesus as a theoretically
historical figure as seen through the eyes of Rome. "We have here a race of
notoriously argumentative troublemakers, and they're complaining about this
guy who is so much of a troublemaker that even _they_ can't stand him.
Better be on the safe side and execute him; we can fit him in on Friday. Oh,
look, now that he's been executed he's _still_ posing a threat to our
authority. Better execute his followers, too."
>
>
> It's interesting to note that both the Roman religion and, as far as I
> know, Judaism, contain no strictly built-in imperative to, um, propagate
> the faith, while Christianity and Islam do. At least I'm assuming Islam
> does.
>
> Adamantius