Charitable me would say this is simply laughable ignorance, but I know better

Was Paul a Slave? The surprising argument that Saul of Tarsus was born into bondage. By Mark R. Fairchild and Jordan K. Monson, Christianity Today, April 22, 2024:

But Paul was neither a proponent of slavery nor an abolitionist, despite efforts to use his letter to Philemon to make him out as one or the other. In truth, neither option was available to him.

It’s difficult for modern readers to understand that in the Roman Empire of Paul’s time, abolitionist thought was virtually nonexistent. According to Jeffers, “No Greek or Roman author ever attacked slavery as an institution.”

It was a given that slavery would always exist. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “All available evidence suggests that even those ancients who were born slaves and later freed, several of whom have left us very beautiful texts, envisioned servitude in the same light.”

Instead, the first Christians had their minds almost exclusively fixed on the Second Coming, which they believed was imminent. There wasn’t time to reform entrenched Roman injustices.

 

The article is replete with tendentious statements, attempts to redefine words, and special pleading. It's lying by omission.

What will be next from Christianity Today? That Paul was a tranny?

I can't wait.

Meanwhile, free-born Roman citizen, self-described Pharisee from a wealthy family in Tarsus*, Paul the Apostle, not only endorsed freedom from slavery, Second Coming or no, but well understood the possibility of it under the Roman system:

Were you a slave when called? Never mind. But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity. ... You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men. 

-- I Corinthians 7:21, 23.

   

*A property qualification of 500 drachmae was fixed for admission to the roll of citizens, perhaps by Athenodorus sometime after 30 B.C. (Dio Chrysostom, Oration 34.23).

-- F. F. Bruce, The Book of the Acts (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), p. 432.

Phil Yancey thinks Christians have done a pretty good job of making disciples of all nations lol

In short, [Jesus] was elevating human agency so that his followers would do the work of God, just as he had done.

. . . It’s up to you now, he said in effect.

Jesus had healed diseases, cast out demons, and brought comfort and solace to the poor, the oppressed, and the suffering—but only in one small corner of the Roman empire. Now he was setting loose his followers to take that same message to Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth.

Two thousand years later, 3 billion people around the world identify as followers of Jesus. The message he brought has spread to Europe, Asia, and every other continent. 

The chance of that spread without the jolting event we celebrate as Easter is vanishingly small. Before his resurrection, Jesus’ few followers were denying him and hiding from the temple police. Even afterward, Thomas doubted until he saw proof in flesh and scars. But as they came to understand what had happened in the Resurrection, the disciples were able to glimpse Jesus’ cosmic view.

Here.

Apart from the dubious assertion that Jesus embraced human agency, let's just look at the numbers.

Are the chances of Christianity's growth to 3 billion "vanishingly small" without the resurrection?

One estimate of the global Christian population in 1800 puts it at about 204 million, growing to 2.7 billion by 2025. Not that far off from Phil Yancey's 3 billion. He is rounding up, obviously.

The rate of growth? 1,227%.

How about for Islam, though, over the same period?

2,067%.

Hindus have grown by a respectable 922%. 

And the Sikhs by 1,567%.

Meanwhile more than 7 BILLION people have died globally from 1850 to 2022.

If "it's up to you now", are those deaths on them, many of whom never heard the gospel?

These things boggle the mind, but not Phil Yancey's, who has been writing books since 1976.

Cosmic Cowboy 1978

 

 

Italian disciple of The Limits to Growth and peak oil completely unaware of a Roman citizen who envisioned the collapse of the Empire

 Ugo Bardi, professor of physical chemistry at the University of Florence, here, in September 2009:

 I think it is enough to say that the Romans did not really understand what was happening to their Empire, except in terms of military setbacks that they always saw as temporary. ... it gives us an idea of what it is like living a collapse “from the inside”. Most people just don’t see it happening ... we can’t rule out that at some moment at the time of the Roman Empire there was something like a “Roman ASPO”, maybe “ASPE,” the “association for the study of peak empire”. If it ever existed, it left no trace.

Ugo Bardi admits he's no historian, but one would like to think that a contemporary Italian would remember with pride the most famous Roman citizen of Italy's Christian past.

Now these things happened to them as a warning, but they were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come.  

-- I Corinthians 10:11

Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world:  But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. 

-- Galatians 4:3ff.

For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. 

-- Ephesians 1:9f.

Sohrab Ahmari learns something valuable from Catholic historian Henri Daniel-Rops: Rome lent Christianity inspiration to be a world religion

 The ­universalist—in the sense of world-spanning—religion of this new church was from the ­beginning suited to and even prefigured by the political universalism of the Roman Empire. Roman-ness, this history teaches, is of the essence of ­Christianity. ... Roman reality structured the Christian mind and lent it the same universalist impulse. ...

Christian life in the centuries prior to the Constan­tinian conversion was already developing authoritative structures, and at a relentless pace. Such structures are always necessary for governance, spiritual and temporal. The general tendency of these structures was expansion, away from the margins and into the center of human affairs. 

More.

 

 

Certain partisans will object strenuously to the idea that pagan Rome lent the universalist impulse to Christianity, but they will be wrong.

They are already unwilling to accept that the aims of the historical Jesus were more modest, who insisted he was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matthew 10), whose twelve disciples were to judge the twelve tribes of Israel in the imminently coming eschatological kingdom of God (Matthew 19) in Jerusalem. To it many in Israel were called, but only few were chosen.

The germ of the universal religion idea certainly came from elsewhere, from the likes of St. Paul the Roman citizen and his intellectual and spiritual kin who, inspired by Isaiah the prophet among others, thought God's aim was to have mercy on all the nations (Romans 11).

For his part, Paul combined in himself two streams with a single and much more ambitious agenda. The Hellenistic Jew of the proselytizing Pharisee variety not coincidentally was still the enthusiastic missionary despite a crisis of conversion, but with a now much wider field of opportunity. And the Roman citizen by birth who was at liberty to travel and study in Jerusalem became himself an itinerant teacher, exploiting his favored position both at the margins and finally at the center of the empire.

My ambition has always been to preach the Good News where the name of Christ has never been heard, rather than where a church has already been started by someone else. ... In fact, my visit to you has been delayed so long because I have been preaching in these places. But now I have finished my work in these regions, and after all these long years of waiting, I am eager to visit you. I am planning to go to Spain, and when I do, I will stop off in Rome. And after I have enjoyed your fellowship for a little while, you can provide for my journey. But before I come, I must go to Jerusalem to take a gift to the believers there.

-- Romans 15:20ff. 

Ahmari chalks it all up to the divine will. The evidence chalks it up to the civis romanus and Pharisee.

Bioarchaeologist blames mass child sacrifice by Chimú "civilization" in Peru in AD 1468 on the weather

And don't forget boys and girls, the real villain in the new world was the European, beginning with Christopher Columbus not three decades later, according to the author of your kid's high school history book, Howard Zinn:

How certain are we that what was destroyed was inferior? Who were these people who came out on the beach and swam to bring presents to Columbus and his crew, who watched Cortes and Pizarro ride through their countryside? What did people in Spain get out of all that death and brutality visited on the Indians of the Americas? 

From the story here in National Geographic:

The layer of mud found during excavations may provide a clue, say the researchers, who suggest it was the result of severe rain and flooding on the generally arid coastline, and probably associated with a climate event related to El-Niño. ...

Haagen Klaus, a professor of anthropology at George Mason University, has excavated some of the earliest evidence for child sacrifice in the region, at the 10th- to 12th-century site of Cerro Cerillos in the Lambayeque Valley, north of Huanchaco. The bioarchaeologist, who is not a member of the Las Llamas project, suggests that societies along the northern Peruvian coast may have turned to the sacrifice of children when the sacrifice of adults wasn't enough to fend off the repeated disruptions wrought by El Niño.

"People sacrifice that which is of most and greatest value to them," he explains. "They may have seen that [adult sacrifice] was ineffective. The rains kept coming. Maybe there was a need for a new type of sacrificial victim." 


Meanwhile, "ancient" ain't what it used to be (anything before 476 AD, the fall of the Western Roman Empire), perhaps because the arc of human barbarism keeps interfering with that other one bending toward justice somebody recently immortalized.

Stupid statement of the day: "People who live in poverty cannot change the world with the Gospel of Christ"

Raphael's Healing of the Lame Man

For rank ignorance of the early history of the church you can hardly do better than that, and I won't mention who said it but her initials are RS.

Christians basically took over Roman culture from the bottom up through their sustained ministry to the poorest members of society, transforming it so that it eventually became what was called the Holy Roman Empire.

Evidently it is little studied anymore.

A shining early example of changing the world one person at a time without money but with the Gospel of Christ comes from the Acts of the Apostles:

Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.

-- Acts 3:6

The stupid statement of the day comes from the solitary Joel Miller

 

 

Here:

The early Church flourished without any political power.

The early church was a political power.

The statement is breathtakingly oblivious to the irreducible political nature of man, most memorably articulated in antiquity by Aristotle, reinterpreted in St. Paul's notion of the one body of Christ and its many members, and most famously embraced by the Christian theologian Aquinas. You have to be a dumb animal, eating the grass of the field, not to grasp the self-evident fact that the early church itself constituted a (rival) political force which took over the Roman Empire from within because it became socially dominant.

From Aristotle, Politics 1, 1253a:

From these things therefore it is clear that the city-state is a natural growth, and that man is by nature a political animal, and a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it (like the “clanless, lawless, hearthless” man reviled by Homer, for one by nature unsocial is also ‘a lover of war') inasmuch as he is solitary, like an isolated piece at draughts. And why man is a political animal in a greater measure than any bee or any gregarious animal is clear. For nature, as we declare, does nothing without purpose; and man alone of the animals possesses speech. The mere voice, it is true, can indicate pain and pleasure, and therefore is possessed by the other animals as well (for their nature has been developed so far as to have sensations of what is painful and pleasant and to indicate those sensations to one another), but speech is designed to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right and the wrong; for it is the special property of man in distinction from the other animals that he alone has perception of good and bad and right and wrong and the other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city-state.

Thus also the city-state is prior in nature to the household and to each of us individually. For the whole must necessarily be prior to the part; since when the whole body is destroyed, foot or hand will not exist except in an equivocal sense, like the sense in which one speaks of a hand sculptured in stone as a hand; because a hand in those circumstances will be a hand spoiled, and all things are defined by their function and capacity, so that when they are no longer such as to perform their function they must not be said to be the same things, but to bear their names in an equivocal sense. It is clear therefore that the state is also prior by nature to the individual; for if each individual when separate is not self-sufficient, he must be related to the whole state as other parts are to their whole, while a man who is incapable of entering into partnership, or who is so self-sufficing that he has no need to do so, is no part of a state, so that he must be either a lower animal or a god.

Therefore the impulse to form a partnership of this kind is present in all men by nature; but the man who first united people in such a partnership was the greatest of benefactors. For as man is the best of the animals when perfected, so he is the worst of all when sundered from law and justice. For unrighteousness is most pernicious when possessed of weapons, and man is born possessing weapons for the use of wisdom and virtue, which it is possible to employ entirely for the opposite ends. Hence when devoid of virtue man is the most unholy and savage of animals, and the worst in regard to sexual indulgence and gluttony. Justice on the other hand is an element of the state; for judicial procedure, which means the decision of what is just, is the regulation of the political partnership.

Depart from your cell, Joel, and join the human race.

The inspiration for Paul's refusal of table fellowship with sinning Christians is in Pharisaism, not in Jesus

"The Pharisees were a Palestinian holiness movement of laymen whose aim was the ritual sanctification of everyday life in the Eretz Israel, such as was required of priests in the sanctuary."

-- Martin Hengel, "The preChristian Paul", in Lieu, J., et alia, THE JEWS AMONG PAGANS AND CHRISTIANS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE (Routledge, 2013), p. 37.

'"Perisha" (the singular of "Perishaya") denotes "one who separates himself," or keeps away from persons or things impure, in order to attain the degree of holiness and righteousness required in those who would commune with God (comp., for "Perishut" and "Perisha," Tan., Wayeẓe, ed. Buber, p. 21; Abot iii. 13; Soṭah ix. 15; Midr. Teh. xv. 1; Num. R. x. 23; Targ. Gen. xlix. 26).

'The Pharisees formed a league or brotherhood of their own ("ḥaburah"), admitting only those who, in the presence of three members, pledged themselves to the strict observance of Levitical purity, to the avoidance of closer association with the 'Am ha-Areẓ (the ignorant and careless boor), to the scrupulous payment of tithes and other imposts due to the priest, the Levite, and the poor, and to a conscientious regard for vows and for other people's property (Dem. ii. 3; Tosef., Dem. ii. 1). ...

'A true Pharisee observed the same degree of purity in his daily meals as did the priest in the Temple (Tosef., Dem. ii. 2; so did Abraham, according to B. M. 87a), wherefore it was necessary that he should avoid contact with the 'am ha-areẓ (Ḥag. ii. 7).'

-- Jewish Encyclopedia, "Pharisees", 1906.

And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto his disciples, Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners? But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

-- Matthew 9:10ff.

Finally, Some Fighting Words About Barack Obama, and Other Enemies of Christ

"For 2,000 years the enemies of Christ have certainly tried their best. But think about it. The Church survived and even flourished during centuries of terrible persecution, during the days of the Roman Empire.

"The Church survived barbarian invasions. The Church survived wave after wave of Jihads. The Church survived the age of revolution. The Church survived Nazism and Communism.

"And in the power of the resurrection, the Church will survive the hatred of Hollywood, the malice of the media, and the mendacious wickedness of the abortion industry.

"The Church will survive the entrenched corruption and sheer incompetence of our Illinois state government, and even the calculated disdain of the President of the United States, his appointed bureaucrats in HHS, and of the current majority of the federal Senate.

"May God have mercy on the souls of those politicians who pretend to be Catholic in church, but in their public lives, rather like Judas Iscariot, betray Jesus Christ by how they vote and how they willingly cooperate with intrinsic evil. ...

"Remember that in past history other governments have tried to force Christians to huddle and hide only within the confines of their churches like the first disciples locked up in the Upper Room. ...

"Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services, and health care.

"In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama – with his radical, pro abortion and extreme secularist agenda, now seems intent on following a similar path.

"Now things have come to such a pass in America that this is a battle that we could lose, but before the awesome judgement seat of Almighty God this is not a war where any believing Catholic may remain neutral.

"This fall, every practicing Catholic must vote, and must vote their Catholic consciences, or by the following fall our Catholic schools, our Catholic hospitals, our Catholic Newman Centers, all our public ministries -- only excepting our church buildings – could easily be shut down. Because no Catholic institution, under any circumstance, can ever cooperate with the instrinsic evil of killing innocent human life in the womb.

"No Catholic ministry – and yes, Mr. President, for Catholics our schools and hospitals are ministries – can remain faithful to the Lordship of the Risen Christ and to his glorious Gospel of Life if they are forced to pay for abortions."

-- Bishop Daniel Jenky

Read the whole thing, here.