Well kinda sorta. Goy is Hebrew not Greek. The Greek is éthnē. So Goy=éthnē=gentile=non-Hebrew. But great response Jay. Thanks. I always enjoy your posts.
As an aside I was once ripped off by a Jew. Who told is Hebrew friend later, “That’s the way we can treat the goyim.” I learned then that I was goyim to them and so can’t trust them to treat me honorably … and if I had a Jewish name I would be treated differently : oh the payoffs of tribalism, I suppose.
While I’ve been citing references, you have been making broad claims about anthopology without citing anything. If it is as you say, referneces should not be hard to find. As I have seen the word used, Paganism did not begin or end with Hellenism. It goes all the way back to animism. Hellenism is the Greek variety of Paganism as spread and practiced throughout the Alexandrian Empire. Paganism, in spite of its etymological meaning of rural, has a number of distinct meanings. It refers to the Greco-Roman religions of the Roman Empire period, including the Roman imperial cult, the various mystery religions, as well as philosophic monotheistic religions such as Neoplatonism and Gnosticism and the tribal religions practiced on the fringes of the Empire. If you have evidence that it is otherwise, show me.
Caesar Augustus was called “Divine,” “Son of God,” “God,” and “God from God,” “Lord,” “Redeemer,” “Liberator,” and “Savior of the World” by Roman pagans before Jesus was even born. The influence was from Pagan to Jesus chronologically. Those terms were applied to Jesus from the earliest time of which we have a record of him i.e. in the New Testament. So, somebody show me, how it is that Christianity was not Pagan from the beginning. If Christianity was Pagan-influenced from the beginning, it’s wrong to claim that it got paganized.
I’m not insisting on my view dogmatically. I’m willing to learn new tricks. But, you’ve got to show me.
Pretty easily, I’ve listed the three main entries on the matter from wikipedia…
If you want, there’s also your nearest Encyclopedia Britannica, or dictionary…those would work as well.
Or you can go to any community college or university anthropology course and just find out there if they call it the “paganistic period”, et. al.
You simply won’t find that use; the 19th c CE established that terminology we use today for the “Hellenistic” culture.
We don’t call Alexander’s expansionism “Paganization”.
I don’t really know what to say Felix…I mean…all I can think of is to just show you some examples of the use and absence of use in education centers.
anthropology.arizona.edu/hasakie
niu.edu/anthro/engaged_learn … cily.shtml
lakeforest.edu/academics/pro … ourses.php
I mean…I could keep going, but you’ll notice it’s always “hellenism”, “hellenistic”, et. al. and not “paganistic” when referring to the period and culture as a whole.
Paganism is a type of sub-culture often found in Hellenistic cultures, but it is not what we use in anthropology to define the culture.
Inversely, we can say something like, “Pagan cultures…”, if we are carrying on a discussion about religious commonalities across many cultures, and in only this way would “Hellenistic” cultures be sub-categorized to “Pagan”, but this is only when we are specifically tuning into a narrow category of momentary discussion axiomatically accepting that we are talking about religious commonalities and not all cultural commonalities.
Further, this use is fading from favor now-days because there really isn’t much of a commonality between cultures that have “pagan” religions.
More often today, you will find the concept expressed as “those cultures who had pantheons and naturalism…” or something of that sort (unless you are watching sensational documentaries on TV, then you’ll hear all sorts of errant uses because that’s not their concern).
But we do not define the historical culture or period of Hellenism as “Paganism”…we don’t have a thing that we call the “Paganistic period” and from which the Hellenistic culture was part of, but instead inversely as far as it is discussed in general anthropology.
It’s rather useless to general anthropology to hypothetically speak of “Paganistic era” and then consider each geopolitical region over time a sub-set of that era.
It’s rather useless because we would then be classifying all of Europe over at least a thousand years under one single culture…which they are not quite clearly.
Did early Church historians prior to the 19th c CE talk in this way? Absolutely.
Is that how we continue to talk today? No, not really. It doesn’t help anthropology and so was largely dropped by the 19th c CE.
OK so the way you are using the term Pagan it doesn’t encompass the entire culture of the Alexandrian Empire. And yet, since it encompasses all non-Abrahamic religions, it is larger than just the Hellenistic ones. And also note below that Hellene is sometimes synonymous with pagan. It’s possible that anthropologists are using the word in a more technically exacting sense. In that case Pagan is narrower than Hellenism in a cultural sense, but larger than Hellenism in a relgious sense.
So are you or Thomas is going to specify that Jesus and/or the earliest earliest recorded accounts of his life were Hellenized but not paganized? Because, I don’t think that’s the case since, like Wikipedia says “[Paganism} refers to the Greco-Roman religions of the Roman Empire period, including the Roman imperial cult, the various mystery religions, as well as philosophic monotheistic religions such as Neoplatonism and Gnosticism and the tribal religions practiced on the fringes of the Empire.” So the fact that many of the terms applied to Jesus as I cited above were apparently taken from the Roman Imperial cult of Augustus Caesar should indicate paganization.
This is correct.
This is also correct.
Jesus would have had massive contact with the Hellenistic culture, but not much with Pagan culture.
He would have known of their religions, but he would not be versed in them in the way that he would have been versed on Hellenistic architecture (as a tekton).
That’s a very sloppy way to call Jesus “pagan” when pagan also refers to Nordic religions, Germanic religions, Celtic, Gauls, etc… tons…and not just Greco-Roman religions; wikipedia or not.
Hell, I may even take that to wiki comments and contest that entry; that’s terrible!
Yours is the broad brush approach. Later philosophers tried to adapt Plato’s belief in the existence of transcendent ideas, such as beauty and truth, into ideas of their god: hence, neo-platonism. Fact remains: Socrates was sentenced to death for not believing in the gods of the Athenian state, and there is not a shred of God worship in the Republic, a purely secular theory.
Right, well I didn’t introduce the term to the discussion. I would prefer the “Romanization of Christianity” But, there is still the evidence that the Romanization had already begun to occur when the New Testament books were written.
There’s a difference, Felix, between the two comments of “Hellenization” and “Paganization”.
Paganization refers to infusing pagan theological concepts into a non-Pagan format.
Hellenization can include Paganization (such as many overt actions by Alexander that mostly failed, but sometimes succeeded mildly), but does not require such for an event for Hellenization to take place.
Thomas was stating that Christianity had been Paganized, not Hellenized; Paganized is a finite theological category.
I had stated that Jesus was Hellenistically familiar, and to some small effect Galilee was in part Hellenized, such as in trade and some architecture, but they were not so religiously (Paganized).
Just as I can claim that many people that I met in Korea were Americanized, but that does not mean they were Chrisianized.
Some were indeed Christianized, but not all.
This is a venn diagram type of categorical error.
Really? Then what do you make of this?
I hope the confusion is clarified. I have tried to make clear what I have meant by the term “pagan”.
Socrates, of course, had to deal with the idea of God but the core philosophy of the Republic is secular. This conception is extremely abstract. There is no interventionist deity at work here. This “God” does nothing and is just an idea.
Good question. There is obviously unfinished business here. If I started a business, it would not be a success simply because I or someone else decided to say it was a success. We, I think, are trying to determine what the actual teachings of Jesus were and exorcise from Christian orthodoxy those parts that are not logical or natural extensions of his conceptions, hence my emphasis on pagan corruption. The vision of Jesus, as I have described it, is a vision that brings the kingdom of his God to earth. He is the messiah.
He was definitely messianic to some groups of Hebrews.
Exactly how many of him saw him “cosmically”, is a bit unclear.
So far, we don’t have that many Hebrew sects (actually, none that I’m aware of) that appear to refer to their variation of Jesus in a sort of “cosmic” manner that we see later by Hellenistic Christians.
It should also be remembered that many people were anointed as messiahs around this time, not just Jesus.
It wasn’t too uncommon for people to declare their favorite teacher whom they followed as such.
Most died. Some disappeared.
This anointed status crossed over into “Christ”, as we’re all very well aware of, and that seems to have linked up with the rest of the divine savior cosmic metaphysical dramatics and exaggerated the title’s value equally as all other aspects had been exaggerated in value and meaning.
Thank you for the offer. I may take you up on it.
Okay, I’m not as smart as y’all, nor as informed.
But seems to me that, if I just study the Hellenes I just become informed about them and their times. But if I embrace the ways of the Hellenes then, as I do, the more I become pagan.
So what I’m seeing stated about Jesus is that, he was just a lay student of Hellenistic ways and customs, by association ; that paganism didn’t stick to him.
How likely is that?
Maybe if we had at least one gospel written by a card carrying pagan, we’d see the pagan side of Jesus, that was hidden by the Hebrew inclined Jesus story tellers.
When it comes to Jesus the pagans don’t get a voice. What we have is a skewed story … that perchance doesn’t show all sides of Jesus.
And isn’t that what we’re striving for? all sides of Jesus?
Would it change the man Jesus if he was pagan?
The pagan seeds, that later grew and blossomed in Christianity, may have been planted by Jesus … and that’s why the Hellenist pagan gentiles were welcomed in … slowly slipping in, a little at a time, paganism.
And voilà, we have what we have today. Jesus done it. Jesus wants Christianity to be paganized.
What’s wrong with that? are all the added Christian symbols too confusing? Do you feel tricked by them?
Embrace a pagan Jesus and find happiness, peace, love, joy, hope. and equality.
It’s the Hebraic influence that produces corruption in Christianity.
This thread has been most wonderful for me.
I use to hold the typical Christian attitude toward pagans. I avoided the holidays because of such leaven in Christianity.
And on this thread I’ve learned that the paganization of Christianity began very early on, with the virgin birth … a belief, back in those days, I didn’t avoid.
As a result, now, I’ve warmed up to the pagans. Now I don’t think the paganization of Christianity is such a bad thing. In fact, now that I look at it, it’s kind of pretty. I mean, there’s nothing ugly about virgin births ; they’re virgin, after all.
But by contrast I do see, that, it’s really the Hebraicization of Christianity that has adversely tainted and corrupted Christianity.
So if you’re looking for corruption in Christianity, you’re looking in the wrong direction if looking at paganization.
Pagans aren’t hung up on a book, like it’s God’s word, like Christianity. So Christianity is a cookie-cutter-copy of Judaism. There’s the leaven. There’s the corruption.
Why? Because as Thomas has pointed out : “The real story of Jesus is the story of a man, not a God, preaching to men and women on how to improve the quality of their lives by embracing love, peace, equality and sharing the bounties of this earth.” – and Hebraicization brought in divisive tribalism, destroying the real story of Jesus, IN SPITE of the pagan cosmic Jesus.
OK, then how do you debunk this theory?
V - This is not the conclusion I would have arrived at but I agree that paganism adds a lot of color, sounds and smells to Christian doctrine. Remember earlier when I described the paganized Christian doctrine as a ‘crock pot of herbs and spices’. And I further agree with you that realizing that modern Christian doctrine is essentially a paganized view of the story of Jesus should soften the harsh views held by some Christians of pagans generally. However, we differ because my view is that paganization was used to destroy the real message of Jesus while Hebrew traditions were exploited by Jesus to make his case.
Hey. I do remember that now. Good and descriptive line. Deeper than I thought at first reading. Hope there’s garlic in the mix. I like garlic. Is garlic really pagan?