Chapter 4 3. The beginning of the shackles

The rapid conquest of the Western world by Christianity is sometimes cited as evidence to emphasize the heavenly origin of Christian thought.I don't want to join the debate, but just to point out that the misery of most Romans had as much to do with the success of the earliest missionaries as a life of misery led to theological success. So far I have sketched out for the reader one aspect of Rome—the world of soldiers, politicians, and corporate magnates, the lucky ones who lived on the slopes of Mount Latte, in the valleys of the Campanian peaks, and on the Gulf of Naples, enjoying the joys of a happy civilization. Life.

But they represent only one aspect. Rarely, in the slums of the city's outskirts, does that prosperity make poets exult in peace and orators compare Octavian to Cupid. In the endless rows of desolate tenement dwellings, crowded and stinking, the lives of toiling beings are nothing but endless hunger, exile and misery.In the eyes of these men and women, only the story told by a simple carpenter is true and credible. He lives in a small village on the other side of the sea and earns daily food and clothing with his hard work; he loves the poor and humiliated. , and thus was killed by bloodthirsty and insatiable enemies.It is true that the poor Romans had all heard the names of Mythras, Isis, and Istarte; but these gods were dead, passed away thousands of years ago, and they were known only on the basis of Rumors left behind by those who died before.

But Joshua, the Christ, whom the Greek missionaries called the Savior, was alive not so long ago.He was known to many living people at that time, and anyone who occasionally traveled to southern Syria during the reign of Emperor Tiberius may have heard his speeches. There are other examples.The baker on the corner and the fruit seller on the next street talked to a man named Peter in the dark little garden off the Via Appion; the fisherman who was near the Gorgata Hill may have seen the Prophet killed by soldiers of the Roman government. nailed to a cross. These must be kept in mind if we are to understand the reasons for people's sudden enthusiasm for new beliefs.

It is personal contact, that is, intimate and direct personal feelings, that gives Christianity a far superiority over other teachings.Christian love is the voice of oppressed and disenfranchised people in all nations, and thus spread far and wide.It does not matter whether Christ's words corresponded to the vocabulary used by posterity. The slaves had ears and hearts to understand.They trembled before the lofty promises of the glorious foreword, and for the first time in their lives saw the gleam of hope. At last they hoped for the word that would set them free. In front of the power of the world, they no longer appear humble and hateful.

Instead, they became favored children of a loving father. They want to inherit everything in the world. They were also to share in the joy of having been dominated by the pompous man who lived in the high compound of the Samney House. From this comes the power of the new faith.Christianity was the first real religion that gave equal opportunities to common people. Of course, I don't mean to say that Christianity is a feeling of the soul - a way of living and thinking - I mean that in the decaying world of slavery, this kind of good news is bound to travel far and wide and ignite emotions The raging fire on.But history does not, except in exceptional cases, record the spiritual adventures of ordinary men, free or slave.If these humble men were divided into nations, guilds, churches, armies, fraternities, and confederations, began to submit to a unified command, and accumulated enough wealth to pay their taxes, were enlisted to fight for the subjugation of other nations, only in Only at these times will they be noticed and valued by the chroniclers.So while we know a lot about the early Christian church, we know very little about its true founder.This is indeed a pity, because the early development of Christianity is one of the most interesting facts in any history book.

The Church of Christ has finally risen on the ruins of an ancient empire.It is the product of the union of two opposing interests, the one representing the pinnacle of the ideal of fraternity and charity taught by Jesus himself, and the other the parochialism by which Jesus' fellow countrymen were bound from the beginning to the rest of the world. people are estranged. In layman's terms, this provincialism fused Roman efficiency with Judean tyranny, and the result was a reign of terror that repressed ideas, effective but unreasonable. In order to understand what happened, we must go back again to Paul's time and fifty years after Jesus' death, and grasp the fact that Christianity arose out of a revolution within Judaism, a purely nationalist movement, From that day onwards, it was none other than the rulers of the Jewish kingdom that threatened.

The Palicians, who were in power in the time of Christ, knew this well.Naturally, they are terribly afraid of agitation which threatens a spiritual monopoly based only on brute force.In order not to be driven out, they were forced to act in a panic, sending their victims to the gallows before the Roman authorities could intervene. No one can tell what countermeasures would have been taken if Christ had not died.When he was killed, he had not been able to form believers into a sect, and he had not written anything to tell future generations what to do. Yet it turned out to be good news. There are no written regulations, no clear regulations and rules, but believers are free to follow the spirit of Jesus instead of the canonical rules.If they are bound by a book, they are bound to devote all their energies to theoretical discussions and indulge in fascinating studies of periods and colons.

If this were the case, of course, no one but a few professional scholars would be interested in the new faith, and Christianity would follow the pattern of so many other denominations, beginning with an elaborate written program and ending with contentious theories. The home ended up being thrown into the street by the police. Today, nearly thirty centuries later, we learn of Christianity's blow to the Roman Empire, but it is surprising that, since it threatened national security as much as the invasions of the Huns and Goths, why did the Roman rulers What if no action is taken to suppress it?They knew, of course, that it was the Eastern Prophet who had caused the house slaves to riot, and the women chattered about the soon return of the King of Heaven, and many old men solemnly predicted that the earth would perish in a ball of fire.

Still, this is not the first time the poor have gone mad over a religious artifact, and it likely won't be the last.As long as the police keep a close eye on what's going on, impoverished zealots can't disturb the peace of the empire. The police were indeed heavily guarded, but they did not find a reason to resort to force.The way the followers of the new religion go about their business is admirable.They didn't want to overthrow the government. At the beginning, some slaves expected that God's fatherly love and human brotherhood would end the old relationship between master and servant. Saint Paul hurried to explain that his kingdom was There is an invisible and intangible kingdom of the soul, and it is best for all earthly people to accept everything in order to get good rewards in the kingdom of heaven.

Similarly, many wives struggled against the bondage of marriage stipulated by the Roman Code, and concluded that Christianity, liberation, and equality between men and women are synonymous. Paul jumped out again, and begged his beloved sisters with a series of eloquent words not to go to extremes, so as not to be conservative. The pagans became suspicious of the church and persuaded them to remain half-slaved, as it had been for women since Adam and Eve were cast out of heaven.All these show a reverence for the law, which is worthy of imitation, so the authorities allow Christian missionaries to come and go as they please, because their preaching is most suitable for the taste and wishes of the authorities.

But, as so often in history, the masses were less tolerant than the rulers.They are poor and poor, and they cannot be happy and prosperous even if their conscience allows them to make compromises in order to accumulate wealth. The lowest ranks of ancient Rome were, without exception, subject to the above-mentioned laws, because they had indulged in wanton drinking and fighting duels for centuries.At first they took their vulgar pleasures from stern-faced men and women who listened with rapt attention to the marvelous tales of Jesus' inglorious death on the cross like common criminals, who watched as they prayed loudly for the stone-throwing hooligans. It is your responsibility to do it. But the Roman missionaries could not hold a detached attitude towards this new development trend. The religion practiced in the empire at that time was the state religion, which included solemn sacrifices in certain seasons, for which people had to pay cash, and the money was put into the pockets of the head of the church.If thousands of people ignore the old shrine and rush to another penniless church, the priest's income will be greatly reduced.This, of course, did not please them, and they tried their best to slander the pagans who did not believe in the traditional gods and betrayed the God of the ancestors, and accused them of offering incense in honor of foreign prophets. But there was another class of people in the city who had more reason to hate Christianity.They are a bunch of liars, like the Yogis of India and the chief priests of the myths of Isis, Aste, Baal, Sibel, and Atis, squandering credulous Roman middle-class people year after year. The money of the class, living a luxurious life full of fat.If Christianity is their rival organization, charging a price for the revelations it provides, then wizards, palm readers, and wizarding guilds have no reason to complain.A business is a business after all, and it is not uncommon to let someone else do some of the business of prophecy.And yet Christians come up with some goddamn ideas, refuse to take pay, give away what's theirs, feed the hungry, take home the homeless, and take nothing.They've gone too far, and it can't be done without private income or undiscovered financial resources. At this time, Rome was no longer a city of free people, but a temporary shelter for thousands of peasants who had lost their property from all over the empire. These lower-class people only know to obey the mysterious laws that govern the behavior of the majority, but they are disgusted with people who behave differently, and they are wary of people who want to live a decent and temperate life for no reason.The well-meaning people who often drink a glass of wine and occasionally pay money for others are indeed good neighbors and good friends; but they are self-proclaimed and don't want to watch the Colicham's bullfight show, and see groups of prisoners of war in Kesitlan Mountain. Those who roam the streets without cheering are regarded as rebels, as enemies of the public. In 64 A.D. a great fire destroyed the poor settlements of Rome, which provided the grounds for the first organized attack on Christians. In the beginning, there were rumors that the drunken Emperor Nero, on a whim, ordered the capital to be set on fire and the slums cleared so that the city could be rebuilt according to his plan.But everyone knows better.The fire was set by the Jews and Christians, because they always talked about the great ball of fire coming from heaven, and burning the wicked world to ashes. This statement quickly aroused repercussions at the beginning.An old woman heard Christians talking to the dead, and another learned of them abducting children, cutting their throats, and smearing blood on strange altars of God.Of course, no one witnessed the dastardly deeds, but that was because the Christians were so cunning that they had paid off the police.This time they were caught red-handed and must face punishment for their own crimes. We have no way of knowing how many devout Christians were lynched, perhaps Paul and Peter were also victims, since their names have not been heard since. Needless to say, nothing came of this terrible public outburst.The awe-inspiring attitude with which the victim accepts his doom is the best advertisement for new faiths and dead Christians.A Christian dies, and a dozen pagans scramble to fill his place.After Nero did the only decent thing in his short, useless life (which was his suicide in A.D. 68), the Christians went back to the old land, and everything was the same again. At this time, the rulers in Rome made a major discovery. They began to suspect that Christians and Jews were not exactly the same. It is also difficult for us to blame them for their mistakes. Historical research in the past 100 years has increasingly shown that the synagogue is actually a transfer station for information, and new beliefs are spread to all parts of the world through it. Remember, Jesus himself was Jewish, and he was always faithful to the ancient law laid down by his ancestors, speaking only to Jewish audiences.Only once did he leave his homeland for a short time, but the mission he set out for himself was with and for the Jews.There is nothing in his words that would make the Romans feel the difference between Christianity and Jews. What Jesus actually tried to do was the following: He had clearly seen the abuses in the church of his ancestors, had spoken out, and fought effectively.But he fought only for internal reforms, and never imagined that he would be the founder of a new religion.If someone had mentioned such a thing at the time, he would have thought it ridiculous.But, like reformers before and after him, he gradually fell into irreconcilable situations.His untimely death instead saved him from the fate of Luther and many other reformers who also wanted to do a little good "inside" but suddenly found themselves a new group "outside" the organization the leader, so that he was at a loss. For many years after the death of Jesus, Christianity (the name was not yet formed) was only a small Jewish sect with only a few supporters in Jerusalem, the villages of Judea and Galilee, and never crossed the province of Syria. It was Gaius, a Roman citizen of Jewish descent, who first saw the possibility of this new teaching becoming a worldwide religion.His ordeal tells us how Judeo-Christian vehemently opposed the globalization of this religion.They only want it to enjoy a dominant position in their own country and only allow their own people to join.They hate anyone who preaches the salvation of souls to both Jews and non-Jews alike.On his last visit to Jerusalem, without the protection of a Roman passport, Paul would surely have been torn to pieces by his enraged countrymen, reliving the doom of Jesus. Still, it was necessary to send half a battalion of Roman soldiers to protect Paul, take him to the port city, and sail back to Rome for the famous trial that never took place. Not a few years after his death, what he had always worried about and kept predicting all his life finally happened. Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, and a new temple of Cupid was erected on the site of what used to be the Temple of the Lord.The name of the city was changed to the capital of Eleia, and Judea became part of the Roman province of Syria Palestine.As for the local inhabitants, they were either killed or expelled from their homes, and no one was allowed to live within miles around the ruins. This holy city has brought many disasters to Jewish Christians, and now it has finally disappeared.In the centuries after this, in the small villages of the interior of Judea, strange people were to be found, who called themselves "poor people" and were waiting with great patience and constant prayer for the coming end of the world.They are remnants of the old Jewish Christians in Jerusalem.We can often see their situation from the books of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.Far away from the civilized world, they formed a system of grotesque teachings of their own, whose purpose was hatred of the disciple Paul.By the seventh century or so, we no longer find any traces of these self-proclaimed Nazarenes.The victors of Islam killed them all.However, even if they survived for hundreds of years, they would not be able to turn history back. Rome brought the east, west, north, south, and north under its command and centralized politically. The conditions for the world to accept a unified religion were ripe.Christianity is simple and functional, and its believers can speak directly to God, so it is destined to succeed, while Judaism, Mithrasism, and all other competing creeds are guaranteed to lose.But unfortunately, the new faith did not abandon some of its own undesirable characteristics, which are obviously contrary to its purpose. A small boat once carried Paul and Barnabas from Asia to Europe, bringing hope and kindness. But another guy slipped into the boat too. It wears a veil of sanctity and purity. But the masked face is cruelty and hatred. Its name is: the tyranny of religion.