(This is a continuation of my debate with Scholar, begun two posts ago – “The Myopic Christian” – Hrafnkell)

You wrote “I spoke specifically of Mr. Douthat and those who think like him – there was no blanket condemnation of Christians made or implied” and “As for specific Christians and/or groups of Christians, I identify these when addressing the topic in question”. You ought to read your post again because you have not identified specific groups of Christians in your post; you write about one particular Christian and then proceed to speak of “Christians” as though to imply a unity. You do, indeed – in the post that I commented on – imply that Christians as a whole are intolerant.

I think it’s quite clear from the context who I was speaking of. To the extent I was unclear, I apologize. If you are a all familiar with my blog, you will have seen me say often enough that I do not include all Christians. I have said many times that my own family is Christian and I have the utmost respect for their toleration of other forms of belief. But you enter onto the stage, apparently unacquainted with me at all, and presume to know me. You don’t.

You wrote “Indeed, I carefully cite my sources when I write”. I missed the source that you cited when you proclaimed what “Christians” would say and that “Christians” initiate conversations about religion. Nowhere did you say that you were writing only about Christians who think like Mr. Douthat.

Would you like me to cite every personal encounter I’ve ever had with a Christian? I happily invite every Pagan who drops by to comment upon their own experiences. I can guarantee you they won’t be any different than mine.

You wrote “I’m sorry, but this won’t do. This is an old excuse and I’m quite frankly tired of seeing it trotted out. The crimes committed by Christianity since the fourth century cannot be wished away by simply waving a magic wand…” Indeed, this won’t do – I did not say (and here you are putting words in my mouth) that Christians have not committed atrocities. Clearly they have. No need to elaborate. I was referring to Christians now, not Christians then. (But I think that you have difficulty differentiating…).

Not trouble differentiating at all. I was quite clear in pointing out that these crimes continue today in the form of cultural genocide. The basic premise of Christianity is one of intolerance. There is a difference between that and what individual Christians think and do, but as I made clear, the religion is itself intolerant by its very nature – as are Judaism and Islam, both being monotheisms.

Please see (in no particular order): Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History (Morning Star Books, 1995), 136 n. 103. Ellerbe’s position is that the Christian legacy fosters sexism, racism, and intolerance; Karen Armstrong, The Gospel According to Woman: Christianity’s Creation of the Sex War in the West,” (Elm Tree Books, 1986). Armstrong condemns what she calls “Christian sexual neurosis” and argues that Christianity’s traditional hatred of women and of the body still cripples woman’s self-image today;  H.A. Drake, “Lambs into Lions: Explaining Early Christian Intolerance,” Past and Present 153 (1996), H.A. Drake argues that Christianity is not inherently intolerant while making allowance for a certain level of intolerance endemic to monotheism in general; David Lochhead “Monotheistic Violence” Buddhist-Christian Studies 21 (2001); Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997); R. Joseph Hoffmann, ed., The Just War and Jihad: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006); Michael Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (University of California Press, 2005); Charles Freeman, A.D. 381: Heretics, Pagans, and the Dawn of the Monotheistic State (The Overlook Press, 2009); Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Harvard University Press, 1997);  Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism (Stanford University Press, 2009).

Let’s try a little test, shall we?  We’ll play “Who’s God is It?” (and remember, these passages are are part of Christian SCRIPTURE – the word of God, and these scriptures are spouted every Sunday in churches across the world and nobody bats an eye:

The virulent hatred and intolerance of monotheism for polytheism is astounding.  See YHWH’s threats espoused at Lev 26.14-17; they are enough to chill anyone’s blood. As R. Joseph Hoffman observes, the God of Abraham “has always threatened vengeance of cosmic proportions for not keeping his laws…The Abrahamic god must be understood in terms of two words: exclusivity and judgment.”[1] Schwartz notes the manner in which the biblical narrative paints “inclinations toward polytheism” as “sexual infidelity” and how Israel itself “is castigated for ‘whoring after’ other gods, thereby imperiling her ‘purity.’” The land itself must be kept clean “or its inhabitants will be ejected, ‘vomited’ out of the land…when Israel is not monotheistic, it is filthy and it pollutes the land” (Lev 20.22-25). When Israel worships a foreign deity, she is a harlot, the land is made barren, and she is ejected from the land” (Jer 3.2-3).[2] The God of monotheism is made the “True” God and the “gods” of polytheism are false. The result, when the opportunity offered, was slaughter, pure and simple. See as examples, 2 Kings 23:20-25 and Deuteronomy 13:13-18 for chilling examples of what happened to those as, George Carlin has put it, “gave the wrong answer to the God question.”

You wrote “you won’t find any such list of polytheistic intolerance”. Wrong and wrong. There is plenty of indication of Roman intolerance (despite your careful waving away of it with the magic wand of “Christian bias”). Read Josephus for some of the description of Roman treatment of the “Other”. Consider the Chanadala and associated groups trampeled by Hindu society… I am sure that if you were interested in having a real ecumenical view you would investigate the dark sides of polytheism as well.

You haven’t even begun to advance an argument. I give you a list many pages long citing specific, documented examples, and you throw a vague reference to Judaism at me and a comment about Hindus (I’ll give you some Josephus in a moment).

As I said, there is a vast gulf of difference between finding the notions of a religious group (or even its practices) ridiculous, abhorrent, foolish, or what have you, and actually putting an end to those practices. I think Christianity is a ridiculous religion – it offers nothing new, nothing original – but I don’t deny your right to practice it.

The Romans did not oppose the Druids so much because of human sacrifice but because the Druids were at the center of resistance against Rome. That was their crime – they threatened the peace of the province (Gaul, and later, Britain). I’ve read Josephus many times over. Do you want a list of all the nice accommodations the Romans came to for Judaism, just as one small example?

Let us take a look here at some of the concessions and privileges granted to the Jews by the Roman state (and compare and contrast, if you will, American treatment of the Native Americans in the 19^th century – a supposedly enlightened “Christian” century):

• No Quartering of Troops on the Native Population (Ant. 14.10.2 § 195). Nor did the Jews have to generally even see Roman troops, except on holidays such as Passover, when they were present in Jerusalem to keep the peace. The Roman garrison appears to have been stationed largely in Caesarea, a Greek-speaking area.[3] One might think back to the situation in the American Colonies in the days leading up to the revolt and the role quartering played on American sensibilities. This was one annoyance spared the Jewish population of Palestine.
• Tax allowances (Jews allowed to deduct out of their tribute every second year the land is let (in the Sabbatic period), a corus of that tribute (Ant. 14.10.5 §201)
• The Jews allowed to live “according to their own customs” (Ant. 14.10.8 § 214).
• Jews excused from military service by Prefect of Asia (Ant. 14.10.11-12 §§ 223-228) “on account of the superstition they are under” (Ant. 14.10.14 § 232) in other words, Sabbath restrictions on travel and fighting, etc. Note that this does not mean that Jews could not, if they wished, serve in the military, and also that it is a far cry from excluding Jews from military ranks by the Christian Roman Empire (C. Th. XVI.8.24).[4]
• Roman acquiescence of Jewish ban on images customarily observed by procurators (Ant. 18.3.1 §§ 55-56). This included the re-routing of Roman troops (no doubt at great expense) due to the Jews finding the images on the standards offensive when paraded anywhere on “Jewish” soil, as shown by the incident with Vitellius described by Josephus (Ant. 18.121-122). The Romans went so far as to omit from coins struck in Judaea “any sign or symbol that might be offensive to the religious feelings of the Jews…”[5] It is interesting to compare the coins of Herod, which while also observing the ban on images, do bear Pagan religious symbols, for example a coin of 37 BCE which portrays the tripod of Apollo and on the reverse, the Dioscuri cap topped with a star.[6]
• Augustus confirmed Jewish privileges conferred originally by Julius Caesar (Ant. 16.6.1 §§ 160-165) “that the Jews have liberty to make use of their own customs, according to the law of their forefathers” See also Philo, Leg. ad Gaium 309-319.
• The Sacred Money was not to be touched (Ant. 16.6.2 § 163) – This was violated on several occasions, including, allegedly, by Pontius Pilate (Ant. 18.3.2 § 60) and on one occasion the proconsul of Asia, L. Flaccus in 62/1 BCE confiscated the temple contributions from his province (Cicero, Flacc. 66-9) but his action was not repeated.[7] See also Ant. 16.6.3 § 166, where Augustus commands the recipient, the proconsul of Sardinia, to let the Jews “send their sacred money to Jerusalem” freely and a similar letter from Herod Agrippa to the Ephesians (Ant. 16.6.4 §§ 167-168). There is also an example from Berenice in Cyrenaica, where the local Jewish community commemorated a Roman official for his part in seeing that the sacred money was not diverted from the Temple to pay the tax levied on resident aliens.[8]
• Anyone stealing the Jewish holy books will be deemed a “sacrilegious person” and his property confiscated (Ant. 16.6.2 § 164). We have duly noted the punishment meted out to a Roman soldier (by Roman authorities) for profaning the Torah. By way of contrast, the United States is continually being accused of mishandling the Qu’ran but the US Government pretends it never happens and so far, no American soldiers have been punished.
• Exempted from participation in the imperial cult and allowed to make prayers in their own temple on behalf of the emperor (War 2.10.4 §197; Against Apion 2.7 §77) instead of to the gods in Pagan temples.[9] Philo tells us that the cost of these sacrifices was born by the Roman government and not the Jewish people (Spec. Leg. 157).
• Gentiles were not allowed into the sacred precincts of the temple (Tacitus, Histories 5.8; Josephus, War 5.193; Ant. 12.145, 15.417; cf. Philo, Leg. 212). This prohibition (of which Paul runs afoul Acts 21.28-29) has been proven by archaeological findings.[10]
• Far from persecuting the Jews, the Roman government served as their advocate: “The Romans appear at times to have chosen to put their influence behind Jewish communities in dispute with their neighbors…and did not even cease after A.D. 70.”[11] For examples, see Josephus, Ant. 14.10.12-26).
• Jews exempted from court on the Sabbath.[12]
• Claudius renewed the edict of tolerance issued by Caesar and renewed by Augustus, making it empire-wide (Ant. 19.5.3 §§286-291). The edict is not specific; Rajak argues “that Claudius is not doing much more than expressing his good will towards the practice of the Jewish cult and establishing a lead for Greek cities to follow.”[13] If, as Rajak argues, this falls short of a Jewish Magna Carta, it still illustrates the extent to which Rome permitted self-rule and represents a general good will not mirrored in Europe for the fifteen centuries following the end of Pagan rule.

It is important to note that these edicts of toleration were not general and empire wide, but seem to have been issued on a city by city basis. Though these senatus consulta were ad hoc in nature, they also served as legal precedents to which future governors and emperors could appeal. Leonard Rutgers makes an important point when he notes that “Rome did not have a standard policy toward the Jews: Roman magistrates responded to situations.”[14]

Momigliano, not along among scholars, takes note of the fact that “the members of the ruling class of Rome were ready to transact business with people who worshipped different gods and were used to different political traditions. Roman polytheism could adapt itself to, and indeed merge with, what we may call the provincial traditions.”[15] Provincial traditions = ethnic religion. Roman polytheism was itself an ethnic religion. Barriers translated.

But, it is clear that you are a thirty year reactionary against a bad experience from your youth. This is clear when you write “I speak from three decades of experience as a polytheist and before that an upbringing as a Lutheran (ELCA) – from birth to age 22″. You throw this out as some kind of claim for authority about what you are saying – and it is a common trope used by reactionaries against religions – but being raised in a tradition is no guarantee of sufficient knowledge of it. Perhaps you have sufficient knowledge, maybe you have studied Lutheran theology in depth – I don’t know; what I do know is that the claim which you make carries little weight.

Yes, right, because only your experiences as a Christian are relevant. Those of a polytheist are irrelevant. And you have yet to show that the claim I make carries little weight. In point of fact, you have offered me very little at all.

Don’t get me wrong – I am not interested only in defending Christianity. I am defending it here because you are attacking it with rather specious arguments. If you were attacking polytheism, I would be defending that. But, in your rebellion against your previous religious tradition (which was no doubt thrust upon you authoritatively) you craft your own Other against which you demonstrate very little tolerance. You contradict your own claims for polytheism.

I invite you again to show where my arguments are specious. You have yet to do so. And please, the old “saw” that it is a “rebellion” against my previous religion…Christians trot that out EVERY time. Ask any Pagan. We’ve all heard it. But it says far more about the Christian in question than it does the Pagan.

I would think that a real ecumenical position would seek to rehabilitate all religious positions to be tolerant of the Other rather than seek to brand some inherently and irremediably intolerant and therefore not worthy of regard.

Universal intolerance is a logical impossibility. We cannot be tolerant of intolerance. You have a right to believe what you believe. You do not have a right to coerce others (and I’m not saying you specifically are). But Christianity, since the fourth century, as a whole, has done so, and continues to do so. And it continues to spout hate for the “other” through recitation of biblical passages in churches and confirmation classes and Bible study meetings. The Bible itself, as I said, is one long anti-Pagan diatribe. Christianity is a religion of condemnation. It is not Pagans who seek to brand some religions as unworthy of regard, but Christianity. I recognize your God is real; can you say the same?

But you have already crafted your own vision of Christianity and have declared it to be the only viable one (and you make use of similarly ideological representations) and thus you cannot take into account any nuance that can be legitimately read in Christian scriptures.

But I have not done so. I am representing Christianity as a historical religion – one that existed then and one that exists now. Are we going down the old “Only a believer can understand the Bible?” road now? Please tell me we are, because I love that argument.

I am sure that if you read any polytheistic writings the way that you read Christian writings you would find intolerance of Others (whether or not these Others are differentiated according to religious view or according to some other criteria).

I’ll just let Jan Assmann speak here:

Does not every religion quite automatically put everything outside itself in the position of error and falsehood and look down on other religions as “paganism”? Is this not quite simply the religious expression of ethnocentricity? Does not the distinction between true and false in reality amount to nothing other than the distinction between “us” and “them”? Does not every construction of identity by the very sane process generate alterity? Does not every religion produce “pagans” in the same way that every civilization generates “barbarians”?

However plausible this may seem, it is not the case. Cultures not only generate otherness by constructing identity, but also develop techniques of translation. We have to distinguish here between the “real other,” who is always ther beyond the individual and independent of the individual’s constructions of selfhood and otherhood, and the ”constructed other,” who is the shadow of the individual’s identity…

He goes on to  argue that polytheism (which he calls cosmotheism) functioned as a means of translation between cultures, translating across cultural and ethnic barriers.

The Mosaic distinction was therefore a radically new distinction which considerably changed the world in which it was drawn. The space which was “severed or cloven” by this distinction was not simply the space of religion in general, but that of a very specific kind of religion. We may call this new type of religion “counter-religion” because it rejects and repudiates everything that went before and what is outside itself as “paganism.”It no longer functioned as a means of intercultural translation; on the contrary, it functioned as a means of intercultural estrangement…the new counter-religion blocked intercultural translatability. False gods cannot be translated.[16]

I would like you to prove that all polytheisms have been perfectly tolerant to all Others. After all, your silence suggests that you deny my claim that polytheists do not escape the dark, intolerant side of human nature.

I would like you to prove that polytheism is intolerant; prove Jan Assmann wrong. The Pope tried (Truth and Tolerance, 2004) but he failed. Maybe you can do better but you’ll have to try harder than this. You have yet to done so, unless I am expected to take your word for it, that such is the case. I’m sure you can understand in light of the mountains of scholarship to the contrary, if I decline to do so.  I have provided you with evidence; you have offered me nothing in return. The burden of proof is not on me, but on you. I have offered not only these two posts, but every post I’ve published here since 2005, and all the sources I’ve cited in that space.

I would also like to know what silence you speak of? I have answered you in some depth; I am unaware of any gulf of silence.

I have made an argument that polytheism is by its very nature tolerant. It does not construct others (as Assmann said, you must distinguish between “real” and “constructed” others. The Greeks and Romans saw people as barbarians but this was not a religious distinction. They saw an unreasoning fear of the divine as superstition, but they did not treat these people like monotheists treat Pagans.

Your final point is not even part of the equation. I have nowhere argued that polytheist do not commit crimes. Criminal activity, the “dark side of human nature” has always existed, and it exists just fine outside of the religious spectrum. And as I said, you might claim the Romans were intolerant because they laughed at Egyptian religion, but they didn’t exterminate it, did they? One guess who did? (and that answer will be the same for who exterminated Roman religion – and all other ancient religions, and indeed, every indigenous ethnic religion in Europe and the Middle East and many in Africa, South America and in other parts of the world. Just one guess Go ahead.

---

[1] R. Joseph Hoffmann, ed. The Just War and Jihad: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, & Islam (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), 10-11. Among this god’s enemies are, as Hoffmann identifies this group’s composition, “a blend of idolaters, foreigners, sorcerers, heretics, homosexuals, drunken sons, dismissed wives, disobedient slaves, and above all the catch-all remainder of ‘those who do not do his will.’”

[2] Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain, 18, 63.

[3] Maurice Sartre, The Middle East Under Rome, 103.

[4] Leonard Victor Rutgers, “Roman Policy towards the Jews: Expulsions from the City of Rome during the First Century C.E.,” Classical Antiquity 13 (1994), 58.

[5] F.W. Madden, History of Jewish Coinage (London: Bernard Quartich, 1864), 135.

[6] See David M. Jacobson, “Herod the Great Shows His True Colors,” Near Eastern Archaeology 64 (2001), 100-104. As Jacobson states in relation to the cap of the Dioscuri, “such an image might have been offensive to the Jews.”

[7] Tessa Rajak, “Was there a Roman Charter for the Jews?” JRS 74 (1984), 107; cf. Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 399.

[8] For the example of Cyrenaica see Martha W. Baldwin Bowsky, “M. Tittius Sex.f. Aem. And the Jews of Berenice (Cyrenaica),” The American Journal of Philology 108 (1987), 495-510.

[9] It has been demonstrated that sacrifices in the Imperial Cult were generally made on behalf of rather than to the emperor. See S.R.F. Price, “Between Man and God: Sacrifice in the Roman Imperial Cult,” The Journal of Roman Studies 70 (1980), 28-43. For this reason, the Jews had no difficulty accommodating the needs of the Empire just as they had in the past accommodated other foreign rulers. They simply prayed to their God to watch out for the emperor rather than to the gods of the State; the Romans, quite sensibly, were also satisfied with the arrangement since there was no rejection of YHWH implicit in polytheism. Claims that the Jews (or Christians, for that matter) were required to worship the emperor miss the mark.

[10] The warning inscriptions would have been difficult to miss: They were inscribed in Greek and Latin in red-painted letters on white limestone. Discovered by Clermont-Ganneau in 1871, the inscribed stone reads: “No foreigner may enter the forecourt beyond the barrier rail around the sanctuary; Anyone who is caught will have himself to blame for his own death.” See Elias J. Bickerman, “The Warning Inscription of Herod’s Temple,” JQR 37 (1947), 387-405. Bickerman compares similar inscriptions found at Pagan temples and notes that “The pagan visitor of the Temple however was shut out not because his hands or his heart were unclean but because he was an alien.”

[11] Rajak, 107.

[12] Jerry F. Daniel, “Anti-Semitism in the Hellenistic-Roman Period,” JBL 98 (1979), 45-65.

[13] Rajak, 115.

[14] Rutgers, “Roman Policy,” 58-59.

[15] Arnaldo Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 123.

[16] Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian (Harvard University Press, 1997), 2-3.