My new post, Islamophobia and an American Heathen, is up at Pagan + Politics. You can also find a recent post on this subject by me at PoliticusUSA, here

Since Akhenaten’s failed experiment with monotheism in the fourteenth century B.C.E. monotheism has waged war on mankind. It was not enough for Akhenaten to simply install a cult devoted to one god, or even as one god as the only god. He had to demolish the other gods and their worship.

It was the same with Moses. “Thou shall have no other gods before me,” YHWH is to have said to Moses. At once an acknowledgment that other gods lived and an injunction against them, this rabid and unreasoning intolerance of alternatives to itself has been monotheism’s hallmark for close to thirty centuries.

That’s a long time to hate.

And it’s a lot of insecurity.

Polytheism never had a problem with other gods. Just plug another god into the pantheon or add a pantheon and worship one, two or ten. It made no difference to the worshiper and it made no difference to the gods. Jealousy is a thing felt only by a god who wants to be the only one.

Or, at least, by his followers. After all, as the emperor Julian said in the fourth century, it’s a libel upon god to accuse him of such shortcomings.

When Jesus came around the same problem cropped up. But now the focus was not on YHWH but on his son, and it was his turn to be the big cheese. Everything was about Jesus; it still is in Christian culture. YHWH belongs to the OLD Testament.

Mohammed offered the same stark distinction: there is no god but Allah.

None. Zip. Cancel Jesus’ claim and push him out the door. And all the other gods with him.

And on and on polytheism persisted, accepting every god that came along and rejecting none. The Romans thought people who believed in just one god were a little odd but there was no legislation against it, let alone a persecution that lasted centuries.

But monotheism has never been content to live and let live. Its entire history is one of holy wars, persecutions, book (and people) burnings, and inquisitions. Monotheism is by its very nature intolerant. It is part of the package.

And after all the long years we’re stuck with three of them, all hating each other and the rest of us, demanding that their own system of belief be privileged above all others and claiming unique access to the divine. Everyone belly-up, kneel, or bend over and praise god.

Millions have died over a question of divine jealousy and insecurity. It is rather difficult for a non-monotheist to imagine anybody wanting to honor a god who is capable of such childish motivations, but monotheists thrive on it.

Banished are the benign gods and welcomed is the angry sky god with his wrath and threats of eternal damnation. It’s difficult to find something monotheism doesn’t hate.

Choice, the first fruits of a liberal democracy, is a bogeyman. There is a reason that choice is equated with heresy, because choice negates orthodoxy. There is only one thing to believe and there is only one way to go about believing it. Any veering from the path leads to catastrophe.

A polytheist can only throw up his hands in wonder. Everybody knows, after all, that there are many truths and many paths, and that each culture has the religion that is right – and true – for it.

People have a right to believe anything they want, including nothing at all. As Thomas Jefferson said, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

That is the assurance we have from the United States Constitution, ratified by every state in the Union.

And now under attack by conservative Christians who have decided that since the history of the United States is not to their liking that it should be re-written and our nation established retroactively as one made by and for Christians and Christians alone.

And only a specific type of Christian.

We’re even being told that Islam isn’t really a religion and therefore First Amendment protections do not apply to it. Who is making this ruling after the fact? A conservative Christian. And of course if the world’s second largest religion isn’t really a religion, you don’t have to work your brain very hard to figure out where everyone else stands.

It is to prevent such madness that the First Amendment exists. It is for that reason that conservative Christians are re-writing our nation’s history, and interpreting the First Amendment and the Wall of Separation out of existence.

As Sarah Palin says, the Ten Commandments trump the Constitution. Sharron Angle wants to legislate Old Testament law.

You don’t have to be a genius to see the outcome for those who, as George Carlin said, give the wrong answer to the god question.

To polytheists, atheists, secular humanists, liberals, progressives, and everyone else who might worship one god but not in the approved way, bend over and kiss your golden idol goodbye.

The Huffington Post reported this week that “the American Family Association, a religious right group, is urging that Tillikum (Tilly), the killer whale that killed a trainer at SeaWorld Orlando, be put down, preferably by stoning. Citing Tilly’s history of violent altercations, the group is slamming SeaWorld for not listening to Scripture in how to deal with the animal.”

Apparently, the Bible should be referred to in cases such as this:

Says the ancient civil code of Israel, “When an ox gores a man or woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner shall not be liable.” (Exodus 21:28)

“However, the group is going further and laying the blame for the trainer’s death directly at the feet of Chuck Thompson, the curator in charge of animal behavior, because, according to Scripture,”

But, the Scripture soberly warns, if one of your animals kills a second time because you didn’t kill it after it claimed its first human victim, this time you die right along with your animal. To use the example from Exodus, if your ox kills a second time, “the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death.” (Exodus 21:29)

I submit to the AFA that it is now 2010, not 610 B.C.E. when the Yahwists were busy stoning everybody who disagreed with them. Can we at least pretend that 3,000 years have gone by?

I hereby name the American Family Association  nithings. Let them stand shamed and condemned before all for their vile and reprehensible behavior.

INTRODUCTION

The gay/lesbian rights movement has been called the civil rights issue of the new millennium. Conservative Christian groups oppose granting the gay-lesbian community the rights guaranteed them by the Constitution and they do so on the basis of a black and white moralistic dichotomy. Some Pagan groups do as well. I will argue here that opposition to gay and lesbian rights on a historical basis is misguided and – where not influenced by Judeo-Christian understanding of morality – is based on modern ideas of gender roles and categories. Homosexuality has not been universally seen as immoral; it has not even always been seen as homosexuality. As often happens, the truth is much more complex than the simple black and white model offered modern Western audiences.

We claim to live in an enlightened age yet we are trapped by our own understanding of gender roles and categories. We are brought up to believe that there are boys and there are girls. Boys have penises and girls have vaginas. And there is nothing in between and it is obvious how the pieces are supposed to go together. And no surprise: we are brought up to see the world in this way.

But it is not the only way; other cultures and other ages have different ideas and understandings. In the industrialized West we determine gender categories based on plumbing. We don’t base these categories on gender roles; instead, gender roles have for a long time been determined by gender categories: men fight and hunt; women engage in domestic duties.

Likewise, if a boy makes love to a boy, it is homosexuality. You thus have a category called “homosexual” – those who engage in same-sex sexual relations. Both participants are labeled as homosexuals.

But homosexuality, few people realize, is a modern concept. The pathology of the 19^th century created the category from the male/female conceptualized as abnormal.[1] Ancient ideas about sex and sexuality are far more ambiguous.[2]

To claim therefore that modern distinctions and prejudices are simply continuances of ancient Pagan feeling on the subject is to misstate the case. As Marilyn Katz puts it, “the nineteenth-century notion of sexual pathology was unknown to antiquity.” As she goes on to say, “[T]here is a radical discontinuity between the ancient and modern discourses on sexuality.”[3]

This is a point upon which modern Pagans would do well to ponder. Will we appeal to the past, or to the present, or will we find our own way? And if we appeal to the past we must have a care that we do not impose our own prejudices on our interpretation of history. As Beate Wagner-Hasel observed in 1989, the debate over the status of women in ancient Greece “is not only an attempt to reconstruct a bygone way of life, it is also a discourse over woman’s place in modern bourgeois society which had its beginnings in the Enlightenment and has continued up until the present time.”[4]

Archaeologist Joan Breton-Connelly speaks of “presentist” assumptions – arguments based on or colored by “late twentieth -century political sensibilities.”[5] With regard to genders as “fixed” categories Breton-Connelly appeals to Judith Butler’s questioning of “woman” as a fixed category in her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) in which she “exposes the ways in which traditional feminist constructs decontextualize individuals from their historical, political, and cultural settings and identities.”[6] The same can be said of homosexuals as a fixed category.

OTHER PARADIGMS

But what if gender was based on gender roles instead of plumbing?

Take for example my own Norse ancestors. While a boy might be born with male sex organs, that simple fact did not in itself make him a man. Gender categories were not fixed and manhood was something that had to be earned – and maintained – through the activities normally associated with that gender category. This meant that while a boy and his penis could aspire to manhood, so could a woman. By laying aside one set of gender roles and embracing another, a woman could become a man. Conversely, a man could become a woman.

Critics – many of them Christian – and Western – say “you confuse gender roles with gender categories.” The answer to this claim is that such a viewpoint is ethnocentric and of little help in understanding the complex nature of gender issues both temporally and spatially.

“This is a world in which ‘masculinity’ always has a plus value, even (or perhaps especially) when it is enacted by a woman,” writes one scholar.[7] It was “a society in which being born male precisely did not confer automatic superiority, a society in which distinction had to be acquired, and constantly reacquired, by wresting it away from others.” Because women had no theoretical ceiling and men no theoretical floor, gender categories were flexible and movable.[8]

Like the Norse, the Romans and Greeks lacked a modern understanding of “homosexual” and “heterosexual.” Once again, it was not what a Roman “was” but what a Roman “did” that determined things. A Roman male was supposed to be a penetrator, the “active” partner in sexual activity. It was manly to penetrate; it was feminine to be penetrated.

The poet Horace put it thusly:

When your organ is stiff, and a servant girl

Or a young boy from the household is near at hand and you know

You can make an immediate assault, would you sooner burst with tension?

Not me. I like sex to be there and easy to get.

As one author puts it, for a free male citizen of Rome “to be sodomized was shameful, a betrayal of his masculinity. Anyone who was known to enjoy being buggered was scorned.”[9]

The Norse understood things in the same terms. “Anal penetration constructed the man who experienced it as whore, bride, mare, bitch, and the like – in whatever guise a female creature.”[10]

To put it bluntly: A hole was a hole was a hole, and quite literally, since the Roman word “vagina” (which means sword-sheath) applied equally to vagina and anus and certain Norse words served the same dual purpose.[11]

The evidence suggests that for the Norseman’s “character was not either male or female, but lay on a spectrum ranging from strong to week, aggressive to passive, powerful to powerless, winner to loser.”[12]

To be called a man was the highest compliment a man could pay a “woman,” as we see in Laxdaela Saga when Snorri of Helgafell says of Gudrun the Fair, “Now you can see what a man Gudrun is, when she gets the better of both of us.”

To be a man was to be hvatur – bold, active, and vigorous – and this was to be admired, whatever sort of plumbing you had. Likewise, to be blauður – soft and weak – was to be despised, whatever sort of plumbing you had.[13]

CONCLUSIONS

In our world of assumed certainty, things are far less certain than we like to pretend. As it turns out, gender roles and categories are nebulous, shifting things. In the end, they are what we say they are from age to age and culture to culture. We decide man = x and woman = y but x and y are neither fixed nor universal.

The moralizers in some ancient pre-Christian societies decided that men were penetrators and women were penetrated. The old ditty about Caesar demonstrates this, that he was “every woman’s man, and every man’s woman.” In contrast to today’s paradigm, by sodomizing another man Caesar would not be seen as effeminate; but being sodomized was another matter altogether.

Christian moralizers, following Jewish Law, presented the Western world with a new paradigm: Not only did men “insert” and women “receive,” but men could only be insertive with regards to women and women could only be recipients of men. Any toying with this equation was an abomination that had unhappy results for all concerned. And the derision of your fellows (in Pagan cultures) and a relatively quick death (in Judaism) was replaced in Christianity by an eternity of hellfire.[14]

And so it remains today.[15]

Except that these distinctions are all artificial. In mathematics numbers added to or subtracted from other numbers have certain, unchangeable results. But nature – and life – don’t work that way. There is homosexuality in the natural world outside of the human species – or at least we label it as such (we can’t possibly know how the animals involved would think of it).[16]

It is the human-imposed synthetic categories of “moral” and “immoral,” “normal” and “abnormal” that is unnatural. They are not universal; they are not constant and unchanging. They are what we say they are. And if we want, we can say they are something else. The irony is, for the West, that it is a religion that distances itself from nature that has decided for us what is and is not natural.

Some Pagan moralizers sound like conservative Christians; they like to say that homosexuality is immoral but they have forgotten to change their moral filters. For a reconstructionist religion making this determination isn’t reconstructing the past; its imposing modern prejudices on their model of the past (which had an entirely different set of prejudices).

On reconstructionist grounds alone, there is no basis for 21^st century ideas about gender roles and categories; you cannot reconstruct what did not exist. It seems the pathology of the 19^th century can capture those who escape the clutches of Judeo-Christian moralizing.

The monolithic and universal category of male/female is a myth, the determinants differing for every culture and/or religion. For one group to say “our way is the True way” is not only arrogant but wrong-minded. Just as every ethnic group or culture has a religion that is true for it (true because it works) so every culture has gender roles that work for it. We may not approve of them, but then, who are we to say that we are right and they are wrong? Put the shoe on the other foot and see how you feel about it.

Once we start imposing our particular views, once we start categorizing our local views as universal, we open ourselves up to a world where might makes right, where the dominant culture (which in recent centuries has been Western and Christian) determines in a blatantly ethnocentric manner what is right for everyone: this is what a woman is, this is what a man is. These are the rules permissible for men and women; conform or die.

But ancient Church Councils aside, universal truths are not attainable by popular vote. One book, developing out of one culture and society (and religion) no matter how popular, cannot dictate for everyone what determines gender roles and categories. Such an understanding is only one out of many thousands of possibilities.

If we are going to come to a new understanding of these matters, we have to set aside our arrogance and our ethnocentrism; we need a new paradigm…and a new discussion.

---

[1] Marilyn Katz, “Ideology and ‘The Status of Women’ in Ancient Greece,” History and Theory 31 (1992), 92. With regard to “homosexual” or “gay/lesbian,” and the effect of using one term over another see Steve Williams, “Gay and Lesbian or Homosexual? What’s in a Word?” http://www.care2.com/causes/civil-rights/blog/gay-and-lesbian-or-homosexual-does-it-matter/

[2] See Ray Laurence, Roman Passions: A History of Pleasure in Imperial Rome (Continuum, 2009), 84-86 for a discussion of views of “homosexuality”in the Roman world.

[3] Katz (1992), 92.

[4] Beate Wagner-Hasel, “Frauenleben in orientalischer Abgeschlossenheit? Zur Geschichte und Nutzanwendung eines Topos,” Der Altsprachliche Unterricht 2 (1989), 19.

[5] Joan Breton-Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece (Princeton University Press, 2007), 19-20.

[6] Breton-Connelly (2007), 22.

[7] Carol Clover, “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe,” Speculum 68 (1993), 372.

[8] Clover (1993), 380.

[9] Anthony Everitt, Augustus (Random House, 2006), 149.

[10] Clover (1993), 375.

[11] Clover (1993), 378.

[12] Nancy Marie Brown, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman (Harcourt, 2007), 74.

[13] Brown (2007), 74.

[14] And in Uganda, with the support of extremist American Evangelicals, we are seeing the return of the death penalty for homosexuality. See “Human Rights Impact Assessment of Uganda’s Anti-homosexuality Bill,” The Zeleza Post, January 17, 2010 http://www.moveon.org/r?r=86439&id=18903-6770804-EYlalox&t=5

[15] See the discussion at ReligiousTolerance.org: http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_legis.htm

[16] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/5550488/Homosexual-behaviour-widespread-in-animals-according-to-new-study.html

It is a wonder to me that people today can scoff at Pagan divine birth stories but accept without a blink the details of Jesus’ birth as given in Matthew and Luke (Mark wasn’t interested in where or how Jesus was born and John had a different conception altogether – pardon the pun).

In Matthew (1:18-2:23, Mary gets knocked up and Joseph figures she has been sleeping around and he’s going to dump the tramp until he has a dream that says the Holy Spirit is responsible. They get married; Jesus is born.

In Luke (1:4-2:40), it’s a bit more fantastic: Here an angel tells Elizabeth, a cousin of Mary, and who happens to be barren, that she will give birth to John (the Baptist). Apparently, the Holy Spirit is responsible (at least for making it possible for a barren woman to give birth). An angel also appears to Mary (not Joseph) and tells her that the Holy Spirit is going to knock her up personally and that she will give birth to the Son of God.

It gets more bizarre, rather like a bad Broadway play: Mary visits Elizabeth, who is six-months pregnant at the time, and the little tike leaps in her womb because the “Lord” has come into the room (via Mary’s tummy). Mary suddenly starts singing like Maria in Sound of Music. John comes popping forth, and Liz’s hubby, Zechariah, has a spontaneous fit of prophecy. Finally, Jesus himself is born.

Believable? You tell me. Christians don’t even blink. But if they get a whiff of anything faintly miraculous from the Pagan side of the aisle and eyebrows go up. Suddenly it is absurd (far too absurd to be given any credence) – and a myth.

An example of this attitude comes in an otherwise excellent book, Anthony Everitt’s Augustus (2006) – and this is just one example out of many thousands. The author makes some statements that you are unlikely to find being made about Jesus’ birth:

Dio preserves an unconvincing tale that echoes one told of Alexander the Great’s mother and was no doubt designed to encourage a divine comparison. When Julius Caesar decided to make Octavian his heir, he was influenced by “Atia’s [his mother’s] emphatic declaration that the youth had been engendered by Apollo, for while sleeping in his temple, she said, she thought she had intercourse with a serpent, and it was this that caused her at the end of her pregnancy to bear a son.”

On the day of Octavian’s birth, Atia dreamed that her intestines were raised up into the sky and spread out all over the earth, and during the same night her husband, Octavius, thought that the sun rose from her womb. The following day the elder Octavius came across a learned expert on divination, Publius Nigidius Figulus, and explained what had happened. Figulus replied, “You have begotten a master over us!” (201-202).

Now, I ask you, the reader, to tell me how one of these stories is any more fantastic than the other? Does it matter if a snake or a spirit makes you pregnant? Is one more believable than another?

The only difference is Christianity. Because there is only one God, only one of the stories can be true, even though it’s as patently ridiculous as those same Christians claim these Pagan birth stories to be.

It is perhaps significant here that there are incredible similarities between the language used of Jesus and that used for Augustus. It is almost as though the early Christians used the cult of Augustus (the Imperial Cult) as a model for their own religion. One little known example is found in Luke 24:13 (and remember, Luke was an educated Greek speaker). Luke’s account of the risen Jesus bears a striking resemblance to the report of the appearance of the deified Romulus in Dion. Hal. II.63.3f, and Livy I.16.5f .

It is downright eerie when you get down to details, which is what I will proceed to do now.

Son of God

Augustus was the Son of God (“divi filius“) before Jesus (the only difference – if it can be called that – being that Augustus was son of one of many gods and Jesus was seen as son of the “only” god). Augustus was already the Son of God before Jesus was even conceived.

In Greek, his official title was “Emperor Caesar Augustus, son of god.” An inscription from Pergamum reveals Augustus as “The Emperor Caesar, son of god, Augustus, ruler of all land and sea.” A coin of Tiberius reads “Son of the Divine Caesar, the Divine Augustus.”

Christians have tried to differentiate between Augustus as “son of god” and Jesus as “son of god” but Robert L. Mowery (“Son of God in Roman Imperial Titles and Matthew,” Biblica 83 (2002), 100-110) argues that “this Roman imperial formula exactly parallels the distinctive Christological formula in three Matthean passages (14,33; 27,43.54)” and that “the Matthean formula qeou=ui(o/j would have evoked Roman imperial usage for at least some members of Matthew’s community.”

He was spoken of in messianic terms, as the savior of Rome. Virgil wrote in his fourth eclogue,

The firstborn of the New Ages is already on his way from high heaven down to earth

With him, the Iron Age shall end and Golden Man inherit all the world.

Smile on the Baby’s birth, immaculate Lucina [goddess of childbirth];

your own Apollo is enthroned a last.

Anthony Everitt (2006:115-116) believes the child spoken of was the predicted offspring of Augustus and Scribonia. Augustus had from the beginning identified himself with Apollo. It is a bit of a no-brainer.

We have here a god made man but still god himself, and an immaculate birth as well – and the dawn of a new age (analogous to the waited-for “kingdom of god/heaven”).

All this, needless to say, predates Christianity by a long margin: Virgil wrote that poem almost forty years before Jesus was born.

The Star of…

But there is more. Everyone is familiar with the famous “star of Bethlehem.” But Augustus had a star first. The star (or comet) became a symbol of Augustus early on and can be seen on these coins from 17 B.C.E.  This star is an appeal to the comet that appeared during the games Augustus held in honor of Caesar (in July 44 B.C.E.) and was thought to mark the ascent of Caesar to the divine abode (unlike the star of Bethlehem, we know this comet to be real – it is documented by Chinese astronomers).

Just as the “Star of Bethlehem” emphasizes Jesus’ divine origins, so the Star of Augustus emphasized his – but again, Augustus was there first.

The Gospel of…

Augustus was not deified until Tiberius did so, and it is Tiberius who is “largely responsible for propagating the cult of the Divine Augustus.” As Larry Kreitzer writes, “Tiberius was emperor during the public ministry of Jesus.” (“Apotheosis of the Roman Emperor,” The Biblical Archaeologist 53 (1990), 211-217) Significant, don’t you think, that all this imagery should be there for the Gentile Christians to see when they co-opted Jesus the Jewish seditionist cum messiah as their god?

Kreitzer calls this period “one of the most formative in terms of the development of Christianity” and he is absolutely correct. It is also quite clear that the Romans did not get their idea of man as god from Christianity as it has a long history in ancient Near Eastern cultures (as it did in the Far East – see Samping Chen, “Son of Heaven and Son of God: Interactions Among Ancient Asiatic Cultures regarding Sacral Kingship, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 12 (2002), 289-325). As Brian Bosworth writes, (“Augustus, the Res Gestae and the Hellenistic Theories of Apotheosis” JRS 89 (1999), 1-18), “Augustus used motifs which had become familiar during the previous centuries, emphasizing simultaneously the protection of the gods, and his own godlike status” and this is noticeable in his Res Gestae, Augustus’ formal report of his achievements to the people of the empire – the good word, or his “gospel” one might say.

And so it was, as advertised by the Provincial Assembly (koinon) of Asia in 9 B.C.E. (again, Jesus had not even been conceived yet) spoke of the “good tidings” or “evangelion” (that word sound familiar to you?). And so you have it, from before Jesus’ birth: The Gospel of Augustus.

It might be argued that they had identical origins. The imperial cult (to which there was a temple in Caesarea – significant to early Gentile Christian history) was very much “in your face” in the first decades of the first century – a period during which original Jewish Christianity was destroyed (when Jerusalem fell in 70 C.E.) and Gentile Christianity replaced it (by the 90s C.E.). It is no surprise – and no mystery – where Paul of Tarsus got his ideas. He could not possibly have missed what amounted to big neon signs about the new messiah, Augustus and his gospel.

Kreitzer claims that “The Roman concept of apotheosis moved a man from earth toward heaven, whereas the Christian concept of incarnation moved God from heaven toward earth” but that is not strictly true when you claim divine descent, as Augustus did. This claim also conflates the various early Christian concepts of Jesus into the later orthodox idea perpetrated by John. The divine status of Jesus is missing altogether from Mark and Matthew and Luke had quite different conceptions of Jesus – in Matthew Jesus was not literally the Son of God and in Luke it is possible that originally it did not read as if Jesus was “born” as the Son of God. In the earliest manuscripts Luke 3.22 reads, “You are my son, today I have begotten you” when John baptizes Jesus (see note below). In other words, Jesus did not become incarnate until that moment (see the discussion in Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted (2009): 39-40).

A Fulfillment of Prophecy

Early Christian apologists (like Matthew where everything about Jesus is a fulfillment of scripture) were keen to show that Jesus’ coming had long been foretold. So, too, as it happens, had that of Augustus, at least according to Vergil, who has Anchises the Dardanian say that “prophecies of Augustus’ coming are already causing panic, over a millennium before his actual birth” (Aen. 6.798-9). Needless to say, this was written before Jesus’ birth and the mad scramble to find prophecy about his coming. According to Anchises, “Augustus will revive the golden age of Saturnus and bring felicity to Latium – and indeed to the human race in so far as it came under his sway” (Bosworth, 6).

The hopes of the early Jewish and Christian apocalypticists come readily to mind – a Golden Age, a Kingdom of God on Earth, the restoration of Israel for the Jews, a restoration of Rome for the Romans.

What comes across is a sense of inferiority complex – the early Christian writers were anxious to compare Jesus – who compared unfavorably – with Augustus, whose own accomplishments were more in line with the messianic aspirations of the time (see for various ideas of what the messiah would be like, Jacob Neusner, William S. Green, Ernest Frerichs, ed. Judaisms and Their Messiahs At the Turn of the Christian Era (1987).

It is perhaps no coincidence that both Vergil and the Gospels are strongly Hellenic in character and both written in Greek. Language is, after all, a reflection of the culture that created it. As Bosworth says, Vergil places emphasis on “conquest, deliverance, and benefaction”(Bosworth, 9)  – three elements quite familiar to apocalypticism and indeed, the New Testament.

Bosworth points to 9 B.C.E. and the koinon of Asia (already mentioned above) which proclaimed Augustus god (Bosworth, 12): “Since the providence that has divinely ordered our existence…has brought to life the most perfect good in Augustus, whom she filled with virtues for the benefit of mankind, bestowing him upon us and our descendants as a savior – he who put an end to war and will order peace, Caesar, who by his epiphany exceeded the hopes of those who prophesied good tidings (evangelion), not only outdoing benefactors of the past, but also allowing no hope of greater benefactions in the future…”

Sounds pretty Christ-like to me – and two years before the earliest postulated birth date for Jesus.

Summary

Is the idea of a God-man improbable, as Kierkegaard asserts (Christian faith being necessarily a belief in the absurd)? (see the discussion in Robert Herbert, “The God-Man,” Religious Studies 6 (1970), 157-174). For Christians, yes, given their conception of the divine; for polytheists? Not at all. The apotheosis of Augustus has at least as much to recommend it as that of Jesus as it eventually came (under the auspices of orthodoxy) to be conceived.

What is of paramount importance in all this is that all the ideas of Christianity are more pre-existent than their savior. Every element of Christianity can be found previous to Jesus’ birth – including John’s logos, which is Pagan in origin and dates from the 6^th century B.C.E. – a logos which, incidentally, is not found in the other three Gospels.

Augustus is just one example, one small slice of the pie. Everything is already there, in the first century – a century of faith indeed – but Pagan – and no intolerance of other forms of belief are part of the equation. All beliefs can be true, and they can coexist peacefully, without strife, without war, without inquisitions, and without burning books, witches, or heretics.

If the truth is not quite the golden age Augustus and his court poets advertised, it still has something to recommend it on that basis alone. Universal tolerance may be a logical impossibility, but that does not mean we cannot strive for tolerance – as much tolerance as a functioning society can manage. But for the discourse on tolerance to have any meaning, it must appeal to the facts, and not simply to pious history “as it should have been” and it must not privilege one set of miracles over another.

In speaking of god become man and man become god, I have used deliberately provocative language. Such language is fitting for what is a provocative subject. The ancients understood that it was no trivial detail, the degree to which an individual might partake of the divine. It was a powerful message Augustus and his publicists put out, just as it was again a powerful message the Gentile Christian publicists put out in the name of Jesus decades later.

I’m not saying the idea of divine birth or apotheosis is impossible. As Bart Ehrman points out, that is not the domain of the historian but of the theologian. My point is that many historians, Christian themselves, accept without criticism the story of Jesus’ birth but still speak of similar (and far older) stories told of Pagans as absurd or mythical or openly propagandistic and self-serving.

What I am saying is that miracles are miracles. You cannot classify one set of miracles as more possible than another. If you are going to accept miracles about Jesus, you have to accept miracles about Apollonius of Tyana – and about Augustus and Alexander and others. And if there is to be a discourse between Pagans and Christians it cannot be on the basis of “my religion is better than yours.” We need to agree either that all miracle stories are equally absurd or equally likely – or at least possible. That’s a big leap for the folks who claim to have sole possession of the truth, while it’s much less a problem for those who understand that there are many truths.

In the end, we Pagans can make the approach, but discourse is possible only with a willing audience and acknowledgment that there is room for more than one iteration of “good tidings.”

Note:

With regards to Jesus’ apotheosis Luke actually offers three methods (I chose one above for the sake of argument):

Acts 13.32-33:  Upon his resurrection (also Acts 2.36)

Luke 3.22: Upon his baptism by John (noted above)

Luke 1.35:  Via virginal conception by the Holy Spirit (also Luke 2.11)