Pagans and Christians in the Late Roman Empire

This paper is going to analyze the way that Romans accepted and integrated the foreign gods and cults through specific examples all over the period of Roman Empire. The importance of the examination of this issue is based on the interconnection of Roman religion with their success in domestic politics as well as in their foreign policy and in their military and global expansion. Consequently, the acceptance or not of the foreign gods and cults has to be seen via different aspects and angles, such as the contribution in the coherence of the society, the free will of individuals, the economical and societal well fare and the political order. This paper will be divided into two basic chapters. The first one will elaborate on the background of polytheism in Rome and in the immigration and complete integration of foreign cults and deities as well as in their offer to Rome's political and military establishment as a "Hegemonic force" for many centuries. The second chapter will focus on the rivalry between the forms of polytheism and monotheism inside Roman Empire and the attitude of Rome towards new monotheistic religions (especially, Early Christianity and its followers/believers) and the One and Only God (Ο Ένας και Μοναδικός Θεός, in Greek translation). However, this paper will not cover all the aspects or the possible interpretations of this issue as there are many obstacles and difficulties. First of all, the Roman Empire and especially the religious issues derive from the early years of Rome which was a city of peasants who worshipped deities of productivity and fertility. For this reason, the issue of chronological order consists a great problem for analyzing every aspect. Secondly, the matter of space and place constitutes also a major problem as the grounds of Roman Empire were vast and we cannot have a clear view of the deities or the foreign cults who became "Immigrants" during these years and transferred their virtues, their grace and their model-role (anthropomorphic deities) to Roman society. As far as the material that has been used is concerned, the sources are various. The highest priority will be given to Jan Assmann and his paper "Axial 'Breakthroughs' and Semantic 'relocations' in Ancient Egypt and Israel" 1 as my paper will be based on his own paper for discovering the attitude of Romans towards the foreign cults as well as to explain the changes that a monotheistic culture brought in the Roman Empire and how these changes had been outfaced. Moreover, material for this paper has been derived from books and papers related to Roman Empire, religion in Roman Empire, polytheism and monotheism and papers/articles which derived from Website historical and scientific sources. The approach which has been used puts special emphasis on the historical contextualization (historical -critical method), on sociological theories and methods and last but not least on the comparative method (trying to find out similarities between religion in belief and in practice).

Within the largely stable social and political structures of the Roman Empire, the most far-reaching change was the religious revolution by which the polytheistic environment of the age of Augustus gave way to the overwhelming predominance of monotheism in the age of St Augustine. The study of monotheism is not easy for students of classical antiquity. This transformation in religious ideas and behaviour had profound consequences for individuals, for social organisation, for the exercise of political authority, and, above all, for the way in which men and women understood their place in the world. The prevalence of monotheism now marks one of the largest differences between the modern world and classical antiquity. Precisely for this reason the differences between Graeco-Roman polytheism and the Jewish, Christian or Islamic monotheisms, which have dominated our own religious and cultural experience since the end of antiquity, pose a serious challenge to our understanding of the past. We view ancient religion through a filter of assumptions, experiences and prejudice. Monotheism contains its own internalised value judgements about polytheistic paganism, and these have always influenced, and sometimes distorted, the academic study of ancient religion.

Journal of Early Christian History, 2020

According to the conventional construction of the religious history of the Roman Empire, the dense variety of Greek and Roman religions had ceased to exist sometime around the fourth to fifth centuries CE, during the so-called Constantinian Revolution. Certainly, at some point in Late Antiquity, there were no longer functioning cult centres for deities like Apollo, Dionysus, Isis, Cybele, and the like. However, far from indicating the triumphal supersession of Greek and Roman religions by Christianity, the evidence of religious history is more complex. Christianity/ies is, one can say, an epiphenomenon of processes of cultural shifts and demographic changes (helped along by the changes wrought by migrations and the emergence of diasporic religions as the main manifestation of cultic formations) that swept the circum-Mediterranean world. The "old religions," woven into the cultural fabric of inhabitants of the Mediterranean world as they were, did not suddenly cease to exist-the discourses, the practices, the iconographies, cultic performances continued to shape nascent Christian discourses and practices. This process was not an even one, it differed in pace and shape from one geographic locale to the other, and from one epoch to the other-therefore the plural, twilights. Hence one can say that Christianity was the big sponge that absorbed all the others (which does not exclude that from time to time there were indeed legislation and mob action aimed at destroying the vestiges of "pagan" cults). Thus, reading the evidence from outside the triumphalist framework characterising early Christian writers on the nature and fate of "paganism," one is left with the unavoidable impression, now strongly asserted in Late Antique scholarship, of the interpenetration of "paganism" and Christianity. Christianity was born as a syncretic phenomenon in a process of cultural bricolage. This has some implications, not only for how we conceived of the origins of Christianity, but also for how we conceive of religion as object of theoretical reflection. Twilights of Greek and Roman Religions: Afterlives and Transformations Gerhard van den Heever,

Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 2007

List of illustrations x Acknowledgements xii Foreword xiii How to use this book xvii Authors and events: a time-chart xx 1 Approaching paganism 1 Pagans, so primitive 1 Christian ending 4 Roman government 4 Germanic invaders 8 Beyond the Roman pale Beyond the Byzantine pale Evidence Latin and other languages Greek and Roman windows on barbarian culture 2 Dividing the landscape 25 Location Focus and area Physical features (absolute position) Relative position Ownership: public and private Power The god in the stone? Strength in numbers: tree, stone, spring 3 Focus I: spring, lake, river 39 Spring and well What a spring is Prevalence CONTENTS vi Purity and health What happens at springs and wells Saints, the conversion of the aniconic, and heads Other water Lake River Water worship 4 Focus II: stone and tree 58 Stone What a stone is Feelings about stones Personalising stones Stones and permanence Stone as the object of cult What happens at stones Tree What trees are like Personalising trees Notable trees What happens at trees Pagan tree and Christian objectors 5 Area I: land 78 Hill and mountain What mountains are like Worship on mountains: lightning and fire Shore and island Sea: shore and promontory Islands Cave 6 Area II: growth 89 Meadow Grove What a grove is like Grove and temple-culture The feel of natural groves Grove and garden Groves and barbarians 101 Groves and placenames 104 CONTENTS vii The power of groves Ancient groves Inviolability On the Dusii demons… Divine ownership Inside the grove 7 Technology: statues, shrines and temples Statues The place of statues Impressive statues and Christian destruction Temple, fanum, ecclesia What a temple is The shape of temples Contents and decoration Shrines, vocabulary and placenames Temples in less developed cultures Continuity Instances What are Christians to do with temples or fana? Destroy the fana! Build churches! 8 Christian paganism 149 Christian knowledge Textuality: coming down from Sinai Specificity What pagans do Eating and drinking Dance Particular customs New Year's Day Thursday The moon Laurel Catechism: renouncing what?

Contextualization and Syncretism, 2006

The question of how we arrived in a religious climate with “otherworldly” expressions of belief can be answered by a critical look at what some have called the Golden Age of Faith. This paper discusses Christianity after Constantine and the remnant Pagan belief that became a part of the church and has contributed to the revival of pre-Christian European Native Religions. The study concludes with a discussion of a missiological lesson to aid in the avoidance of syncretism when Christianity is brought to a new culture.