bigmountainscotland
Member
Beyond the questions it raises about the current situation in the holy land, what did folk get up to before a book told them to worship some poor dude who got nailed to a cross?
Well, first of all remember that much of christianity predates christ. Besides that, it’s not all that well understood, or at least not well proven- history’s written by the winners so we know there were a load of different jewish sects, zoroastrians, possibly yazidis (opinions differ, present day yazidism is much more recent but they’ve sort of overwritten themselves multiple times so even their own history is completely garbled and mingled with other faiths and the continuity is all broken)… Possibly mithraism as a standalone or maybe it’s just stuff that looks like mithraism. Moabites probably. Without a doubt lots and lots of little cults, household gods, ancestor spirits, older faiths that were already basically forgotten, though we can kind of only find the absence where they were.. World was much bigger then, only the strongest ideas would travel more than a few days’ ride away, but lives were short so generation changes happened fast and spoken traditions evolved way faster than you’d think. And people didn’t see the hard lines that we do now, you would find people praying to christ and sacrificing to athena.
But tbh it all gets a bit meaningless because of the way cults grew, ate each other and got eaten in turn- there’s probably a hundred faiths that would consider themselves unique, that now we just see as part of judaism and islam, or which got entirely subsumed or destroyed and forgotten, and there’s no possible line in the sand where you can go “this is modern christianity as we know it, whereas that is a forebear” or “this part of christianity grew from scratch while that part was nicked from somewhere else”.
Christianity itself is almost certainly made out of previous sects and cults that either got organised and merged, or decided to fall in with the new boy, the likelihood of a new movement coming out of nothing is incredibly unlikely even if there was a literal son of god (lots of hellenic jews converted to christianity frinstance because they were already kind of outcast and also quite progressive and outward-looking) and there were tons of strands of faith that outlived the birth of christianity but which could easily have got drawn into it, but then got folded into islam (especially as islam was at the time incredibly open to deviation and variation- which eventually solidified into the modern islamic factions) And the line between judaism and christianity was pretty damn thin and again pretty much impossible to draw, especially once you’ve got new kids on the block declaring themself king of the jews.
I always like that the qu’ran specifically refers to jews, christians and zoroastrians as being All Right With Us- “people of the book”. “Well it’s not THEIR fault that the prophet didn’t arrive til after they’d had to settle on a faith after all”. Good marketing- if you launch a new religious product and you make it incompatible with the old ones, you might get lucky and have it rise to dominance like bloody stupid boost axles, but more likely you get crushed beneath the stronger products’ sandals, and tomorrow not only will hardly anyone have you but you won’t even be able to get the parts.
(disclaimer; I just find this stuff fascinating, I’m no sort of scholar. But it’s really obvious when you look at the actual scholars, that they don’t agree on everything and many of the key lines are basically decisions of faith themselves)
