As I’ve grown older, I’ve begun to come to grips with my mortality. We all live; we all die. We just don’t think about it much when we’re younger. It seems so far away. Think about how we experience time: It always takes forever for Yule or your birthday to come when you’re a kid; summers seem to last forever – as does the school year. But where once it took forever, now it’s here before you know it – before you want it. What, another birthday, already?

The time just seems to start flying by, and pretty soon ten years have gone past, or twenty, and you wonder where they went. Hours become minutes, days become hours, and years…well, some days you wake up feeling like Rip Van Winkle. Is it really more than 30 years now since that rainy afternoon when I first saw Star Wars?

Now too I’ve been told that I am having heart problems. I have known of my mitral valve prolapse for many years – it kept me out of the Army when I tried to enlist back in the 70s (I was going to Berlin as part of the Third Brigade – an artillery spotter). But it’s never really been problematic until recently, when shortness of breath and fluttering led me to the cardiologist, who, after some tests, informed me that my heart was too big, too weak, and that the valve leaked too much.

Surgery was always inevitable, he told me. It was just a matter of when. Well, when was suddenly upon me. “It isn’t the news we wanted, I know,” he told me, “But it is what it is.” That may be a tired old expression, but it has the virtue of always being true.

Two tests later (heart catheterization and transesophageal echocardiogram, or TEE), I have been told that my heart is less weak than previously thought (which is good news), and that because I am fit and healthy in all other respects – no diabetes, etc, I am in good shape for surgery.

The heart surgeon came into my room after the catheterization. He told me that he loves doing mitral valve repairs. He had a childlike gleam in his eyes as he told me he has been doing this for 15 years and that he is successful 90% of the time. If he cannot repair it, he said, he will replace it. I told him I chose the synthetic valve over a pig or bovine valve – not because I don’t dig on swine or cows but because both those would wear out over time and require, as he put it, a second, even more dangerous surgery.

He gave me all the percentages, which is only fair. It turns out I have only a 2% chance of dying. Not bad really. Think about it: climate scientists say with 90% certitude that we are experiencing anthropogenic global warming (AGW). As James Hoggan says in his Climate Cover-Up (2009), if somebody told you that there was a 90% chance the plain you were on was going to crash, you would seriously consider making other plans.

Well, it works both ways. 90% is pretty close to 100% – and you can’t have 100% certainty in science or in most other aspects of life. If there is a 90% certainty that he can repair the valve, I’m going in pretty confident. The 2% seems trivial by comparison – except that if the repairs can last decades, running afoul of that 2% lasts – forever.

I’ve had a lot of time – and many opportunities – to think about death. My brother was killed when I was 10. My grandparents died in the 80s, and I was holding my grandma’s hand as she died.  My ex-father-in-law died in the 90s and I was very close to him. Both my parents died a few years ago. One of my ex-sisters-in-law suddenly died last year. She should have outlived me. As you get older, you start losing people. It’s simple math. I don’t think anyone should become accustomed to the idea of people dying, but perhaps exposure to it makes you a little less afraid of it.

I’m 53. By any generous estimate I’m at the half-way point. When your gas gauge dips below half, you start thinking about a fresh tank. There aren’t any fresh tanks in life, so we should start thinking about our legacy instead, if we haven’t already.

It’s probably no surprise then that I’ve thought about my own death as I’ve grown older – the legacy I want to leave behind, the awareness that time to do the things I want to do is not infinite. Particularly now, with the heart problems.

I’m not afraid of dying. Even before I became a polytheist I liked what Socrates had to say about it. He provided an example for us all in his Phaedo, when he told his friends that there was nothing to fear:

[E]ither death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. . . . Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is a journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?

My Heathen ancestors had a great many conceptions of death, and to what road it led: to the halls of our ancestors, to Hel (nothing like Christian hell but just a place you go when you die), to Valhöll if Odin chooses you. Skjöldunga Saga speaks of “going to King Odin” and “the underworld,” and there is some sense of going “into the mountains” to join your ancestors. There is also a limited appeal to reincarnation, as Ellis-Davidson puts it,  “belief in the birth of the souls of dead ancestors into the living world again, in the persons of their descendants.”[1] And of course, there are the dísir, who are female ancestors who have stayed behind to help the household.

Who knows? It is difficult to know what to make of all the various ideas surrounding death. Islamic traveler Ibn Fahdlan, when watching a Varangian funeral,  spoke of “paradise” which was the best he could interpret the Norse word as he was made to understand it. But anything that smacks of paradise cannot be bad.

Outside of the claim to Valhöll (a claim no mortal can make) the poem heard by Ibn Fahdlan at the chieftain’s funeral, and re-rendered by Michael Crichton in the 13th Warrior, captures the essence of Heathen ideas of death:

Lo, there do I see my father.
Lo, there do I see my mother.
And my sisters and my brothers
Lo, there do I see the line of my people
Back to the beginning.
Lo, they do call to me.
They bid me take my place among them
In the halls of Valhalla
Where the brave may live forever.

My ancestors did not live their lives towards an afterlife, or for a hope in some afterlife, though ideas of joining their ancestors shows that they expected them to be there already, waiting for them. They lived their lives as part of a continuum, inheritors but also progenitors, descendants and ancestors to be. And they lived their lives for life, for what mark they made on this world, what they did for their families and communities – and for their gods. And for what name they left behind them. As I quote in every email I send out:

Cattle die,
kinsmen die,
oneself dies likewise,
but good renown
will never die
for him who earns it.

- Hávamál, 76

I think this is true. And who does not want to be well thought of when they are gone? Who would choose ill-renown over good? We all want to have had a good impact on those whom we love and care for. We want that “son of” or “daughter of” to mean something.

So how have I done? Too soon to tell. As another Norse proverb tells us, “Praise not the day until evening has come, a woman until she is burnt, a sword until it is tried, a maiden until she is married, ice until it has been crossed, beer until it has been drunk.”

And I think that is as it should be. We should not be judged on our accomplishments until we are done with the opportunity to affect change – that is, when we are dead. I hope that when the day comes that I have shaped my final fate that I will have done some praiseworthy deeds. That is what we should all hope for.

Followers of the White Christ hope for some form of eternal salvation, a nebulous form of afterlife in which they will enjoy the fruits of their devotion to their god. I find there is a disconnect between “up there” and “down here.” But our gods, like us, are of this world; there is a connection that is very real between we mortals and the Otherworld.

It is only fitting that as I have lived “down here” that I be judged “down here” and by the people I have lived among, whose lives I have in some way impacted and whose lives have impacted me. I hope that my deeds will have been found worthy of my ancestors, that the good will have outweighed the bad, wisdom foolishness, and piety impiety. I would very much – like Theoden King in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – to go before my ancestors unashamed, just as I have hoped to live my life unashamed.

We all make mistakes. We all make decisions we are not proud of; say and do things we regret later, or fail to say or do things we feel we should have said or done. We don’t have to apologize to our gods for those oversights. Instead, we redeem ourselves here. It is redemption – not salvation – that is meaningful.

But in the end, as each of us shapes our own fate, we have nothing to complain about. Our decisions, our actions, have brought us to where we are now. If sometimes (as in my case) genetics jumps in with a “surprise!” then there is still no reason for complaint, no reason to rail against gods or fate.

So in the end, my concern is where it should be, not with some nebulous and unknowable afterlife or paradise but with the world I leave behind, the world I belonged to, and whether or not I’ve done enough to have made it a better place.

The gods will know, but they will not judge. That will be left to my fellow mortals here on the little island in space we call Midguard.

(I have my surgery on March 8. I will be missing from the Internet for a few days. I am told a couple of days in ICU, completely cut off, and 5-10 days in the hospital after that, during which time I will probably write but may or may not be able to get on the Internet. There will be some limits on my activities afterward, but none that should keep me offline or from writing – 3 weeks without driving, six weeks until I can perform ordinary household tasks on my own, 12 weeks before returning to work, and several months before full recovery. At the end of it all, I am promised I will feel better than I have in a while, which is something to look forward, and something, I should add, more tangible than beliefs in an afterlife. I will continue to post up until March 7 and I will look forward to seeing you all again after that – Hrafnkell)

Notes:

[1] H.R. Ellis-Davidson, The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature (1968), 145.

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)

If the United States was founded by Christian Europeans, the government established in the wake of the Revolution was secular. This was not only a protection of belief (or lack of belief) but a protection of government. The religious wars of the Old World were a recent memory for those people and they knew firsthand the dangers of government sponsored religion.

More than two centuries later, we live in the most pluralistic society in the world. There are not only Christians (protestant, catholic and denominations too numerous to count), but Buddhists, Hindus, Scientologists, atheists, pagans, and others. Every possible viewpoint is represented as never before in history in a single culture.

It is not always easy getting along. Christianity still dominates American culture. Christians are still a majority, though even defining what makes a person Christian is as difficult as it was in the first Christian century. The process of syncretism, which affects every religion, has had some positive effects. There are Christians who accept that there are other paths to “salvation” and who embrace more New Age viewpoints, such as reincarnation and past lives.

On the other hand, there have been some negative effects. There are those who do not want to lose their “dominant culture” status, who feel threatened by the loss of status in society, who ever more stridently insist that the United States was founded as a Christian Nation and who claim that atheists, feminists, pagans and secular humanists are to blame for all the ills of society, and not only that, but a danger to the country itself.

This argument is right out of the Old Testament. And for non-Christians of every stripe, it smells of rank superstition – a petulant, jealous, childishly angry deity punishing those who dare think for themselves. The Hurricane Katrina disaster is laid at the door of this angry god (punishing the sinful people of New Orleans) as is the recent quake in Haiti. This is what YHWH did to the people of Israel who “whored after foreign gods” we are told.

The irony is that those foreign gods were actually ethnic gods of the Jewish (Canaanite) people and YHWH himself was the foreign god – a god out of NW Arabia (Sinai) brought into the country most likely by Midianite merchants. But conservative Christians have built up a mythical past to which they can appeal at need, one which, while taking little cognizance of history, makes history conform to a system. This is not good history, but as Kierkegaard said, Christianity is belief in the absurd and it is certainly absurd to refuge to acknowledge the facts as they lay plainly before you.

The rest of us are trapped in this mythical world. And not only is ancient history mythologized but so is American history – the myth of a Christian Nation. And as rapidly as events happen in the real world, they are mythologized – re-interpreted to fit, to conform to the system. It is becoming difficult for the real world – and us – to keep up with the spin.

How does the majority of the population get along with a vocal, vitriolic minority who refuse to live in the same evidence based world in which we live? Though pagans and atheists and Buddhists and Hindus have many differences between them, it is far easier for these groups to coexist (along with more moderate Christians) than it is for any of them, singly or collectively, to get along with the extremist minority (whether we identify them as Evangelicals, Fundamentalists – or more pointedly, Talibangelicals).

The forces of reaction demand adherence to their myth. When we decline to play along, when we insist on our freedom of choice in these matters, we are told we are turning away from God. During the Bush Administration it was worse (if that’s possible): we were told that since God chose Bush (he apparently didn’t choose Obama?) if you opposed Bush you opposed God. Similarly, God chose the USA to continue Rome’s work in bringing people together (they’re easier to hammer into submission if you get them all into one place?) so if you oppose American policy you…yes, you see how this works now…you turn against God.

And you know what happens when you turn against God – hurricanes and earthquakes, Sodom and Gomorrah.

And for disagreeing, for embracing choice, we are accused of making war on Christianity, of persecuting them. If universal tolerance is a logical impossibility, we can still try to get along, can’t we? But how do you include somebody who sets themselves apart, who refuses to be included?

Look at it from the perspective of a little child (we’ll call him Tommy) who says, “I won’t play with you!” or “I’ll only play with you if you play by MY rules!” and who then says, when his demands are rejected, “They’re persecuting me!”?

But nobody is telling little Tommy who isolates himself in the corner that he can’t do what he wants. Tommy’s real problem is that Tommy insists the other children do what he wants. Tommy has the right to live and play as he chooses with like-minded children. He does not have the right to dictate to other children.

In the end, Tommy’s claims of persecution ring hollow. Nobody is persecuting Tommy. The other children are not insisting Tommy live and play like they do. They are just insisting he behave when in their company.

The Constitution is set up to deal with this. We do not have a true democracy; Madison understood that in a true democracy that the rights of minorities are trampled by majorities. The Constitution prohibits (in theory – but not in California?) such blatant abuses, which were thought of as the “excesses of democracy.” The rights of all are to be protected. The majority of the children and Tommy too. Each is free to seek happiness. None of them are free to dictate to the other. All are equal. None are privileged.

Tommy claims that his rights are being ignored, or trampled. But they’re not. And Tommy does not really want equal rights. He wants his views to be privileged. But for Tommy, not being free to dictate to the other children is an abridgment of what he sees as his rights – his right to dictate to others. Religiously, Tommy may feel he has that right, but those perceived rights must, in a pluralistic society (as ours is) take second place to equal rights for all. Because if one group has the right to dictate to the other groups, then only one group has rights. And you will find no support for Tommy’s  position in the Constitution. None at all.

Believe what you want, live how you want, we are told, but extend that same right to others. Ironically enough, this very attitude is enshrined in the Bible Tommy holds so dear: Do unto others  as you would have them do unto you.

But when you don’t live in an evidence-based world, you can ignore pesky little inconvenient facts like that, can’t you?

In the end, the rest of us – the majority as it happens – must insist on our rights; our Constitutional Rights. Our right to believe or disbelieve as we choose. As 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.” And he is right. It doesn’t. Tommy might be offended that the rest of us refuse to believe him when he says his god will punish us (and him) when we refuse to play by his rules, but the Constitution says (for very good reasons – grounded in centuries of religious conflict and terror) that Tommy doesn’t have the right to impose his rules on us, and that the government also lacks that power.

We have to insist on those rights, and insist loudly, as Tommy and others like him insist on making history – and us – conform to his system. It’s bad parenting, after all, to give into a child’s temper tantrum, and that is what this amounts to.

Paganism, in the Roman Empire, died hard. For centuries, laws and edicts punished the devout. People continued to believe, to celebrate their gods. They loved their religion; they did not want to give it up.

From the fourth century to the ninth, you can see the measures taken to crush the beliefs of the people.

The same was true in Northern Europe. “Barbarian” Christian successor states rose up from the ruins of the Christianized empire and began to impose Christianity not only on their own people, but on peoples beyond their borders. The Frisians, the Saxons, and Slavic peoples, all resisted. None of them wanted the new religion.

Further north, in Scandinavia, Heathen practices persisted for centuries. In Iceland, which was forced under threat of war to convert to Christianity in 1000, Heathenism simply went underground.

Much of the myth of Christianity centers around the idea that people flocked to become Christians, that it was a liberating experience. It was not. Christianity succeeded because it was imposed by force, including torture and death. It was maintained by the same forces throughout the centuries. In the later Roman Empire, every time Roman Christian authority waned, Paganism sprang up and the people cast off the unwanted religion. This happened in Britain, it happened in Spain, and it happened elsewhere.

Another sign of Paganism’s enduring nature comes from central Mexico – from the descendants of the Maya. This video is brief but it’s message is powerful and compelling: people love the gods, they love their religion: The Secrets of the Maya

It’s refreshing to see something like this, with no hint of disapproval in the narrator’s voice, no sign of missionaries engaged in cultural genocide (though we all know they’re out there somewhere). Leave people alone; let them worship as they wish. If it’s a syncretic form of Christianity that pays homage to the past and to ancient religion, fine. You may think of them as heretics, but let them be. If it’s something else, something closer to the beliefs of their ancestors, even better. Either way, it’s their choice.

We need to get over our strange belief that we know best, and I’m speaking of Western cultures in particular, given the age we live in and the influence of Christianity on these cultures. Never before in history has the idea been prevalent that a culture has to export its religion, and not only export it, impose it and enforce it. Bring the missionaries home. Let the people be. If you think your god wants everyone converted, he will do it in his own good time

There is a reason you don’t hear much about Prosper of Aquitaine. Why? Because he agreed with the position I stated above, that it was “for divine grace alone”to bring about conversion. Prosper wrote in 440 CE a book called “De Vocatione Omnium Gentium (On the Calling of All Nations). It has been called “the first work in Christian literature to be concerned with the salvation of infidels” (A. Hamman in the Encyclopedia of the Early Church Oxford:1992) but what sets it apart is that Prosper spoke of salvation, not evangelization.

It was an enlightened position for fifth century Christian culture; it would be an enlightened position today, in the twenty-first century, sixteen hundred years after those thoughts were put to parchment.