And in Antioch the disciples were for the first time called Chrestianous

 

 And in Antioch the disciples were for the first time called Chrestianous [χρηστιανους].

So says the original hand responsible for most of the New Testament in Codex Sinaiticus at Acts 11:26, where the first Greek iota [I] in Christians [Χριστιανούς] is replaced by Greek eta [H], a much more common itacism of the second hand of this same codex but in the prophetic books of the LXX. You will observe that the attempt of the corrector of Sinaiticus to erase part of the eta (above in line four from the top) to turn it into an iota was not entirely successful.

 

Chrestianon and Chrestianos are used respectively in Acts 26:28 and I Peter 4:16 in Sinaiticus, and similarly undergo subsequent correction.

These three instances of the only uses of the word Christian in the New Testament are not mistakes of this original hand's eye or ear in the scriptorium which produced Sinaiticus, but instead are deliberate reproductions of evidence which it had before it, no doubt of Roman origin, which long previously had mistaken χρηστός (useful, handy, often of slaves) for Χριστός (Christ). 

The Roman historian Tacitus and the biographer Suetonius in the early second century have evidence of this misunderstanding at Rome.  

... quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Chrestianos appellabat.  auctor nominis eius Christus ...

... whom, hated for their shameful deeds, the commons called Chrestians. Christus, the source of this name, ...

Tacitus, Annals 15.44

The text of Tacitus implies that the Christians are Christianos from Christus, not Chrestianos from Chrestus as popularly [vulgus] misunderstood. 

Suetonius, who mentions the Christiani correctly in Nero 16, in Claudius 25 nevertheless had referred to a Jewish expulsion from Rome under Claudius impulsore Chresto, at the instigation of Chrestus:

 Iudaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantis Roma expulit. 

He expelled from Rome the Jews constantly making disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus.

(Like Tacitus who seems quite ignorant of these details in his previous Histories, Suetonius also seems to have come up to speed by the time he composed his Nero.)

One of these Jews, Aquila, and his wife, who had been compelled to leave Rome, show up independently in Acts 18:2, connected there explicitly to the expulsion of the Jews from Rome in 49 A.D., and also to Paul the apostle of Jesus Christ.

Codex Sinaiticus' connection to Rome is highlighted by its preservation of The Shepherd of Hermas, which the Muratorian Fragment indicates was composed in Rome by the brother of Pope Pius I sometime in the second century. 

 

It is common to mark the beginning of the introspective conscience of the West in the life of Augustine of Hippo

... Augustine made the inner life legible in a way it had rarely been before. He showed that faith ... is a struggle ... The “Confessions” ... taught believers that the interior life matters — that what happens in the private conversation between a person and their conscience is not a footnote to the religious life but its very center. In some ways, this was more revolutionary than anything in scripture itself. ... Augustine made interiority a theological category. Western Christianity has not been the same since. ...

Discussed here.

And yet Augustine arguably is the product of an introspective Western wave which itself had been many centuries in the making.

One could say that the turn to the inner life in the West actually began under the prosaic circumstances of the collapse of the Athenian Empire in 404 BC. 

If Hellenic is the ideal which was lost and Hellenistic its Nachleben and personalization, there are centuries of preoccupation with the experiences of individuals under various aspects which follow after the collapse of classical Athens. These arguably add up to interiority as the rule of the subsequent West, not the exception.

The advent of disorder in the world ended up provoking a broad search for order in the soul, which ultimately worked to the greatest advantage for Christianity.

Notable evidences of this search would have to include, for example, Plutarch's biographical interest in the personal morality of his subjects, or Hellenistic philosophy's general retreat from concern with public life to the vicissitudes of the inner life, as seen in the developments of Epicureanism and Stoicism.

The latter in particular came to dominate elite conviction for centuries, from East to West in the Mediterranean, from Seneca's Letters in the mid-first century evincing his struggle of the will to Marcus Aurelius' self-critical Meditations a century later, a Stoic analogue to Augustine's Confessions later popular in the Greek East.  

The early great Christian authors are nothing if not children of this past, sometimes quite beyond their ken or control, which was surely not the case with Augustine, who was inspired from a young age by Cicero's love of wisdom. While completing his Confessions in 400 Augustine self-consciously borrowed from the Neoplatonist Plotinus, in whom he found the idea of the immaterial soul liberating from the materialism of the Manichaeans.

Combining this abstraction with the allegorical interpretation of the Bible which he embraced from Ambrose of Milan, one could say Augustine was equipped with the spiritual tools necessary for not just his interior project, but for surviving a civilizational collapse which he saw coming in his own time.

The Gothic invasion of the Roman Empire had begun years before the Confessions, in 376, when Augustine was still a very young man of 22. But by 410 Rome had been sacked, in the wake of which he composed The City of God, in which he provided Christians with a rationalization of the catastrophe and an inner retreat from the horrible new reality, an invisible, spiritual city where God was still in control. 

Augustine is nothing if not a spokesman for the experience of everyman from every age, for the little lives of people who turn inward to protect who they are when all is falling down round about them, while some, and even now just like Strelnikov, simply choose to die on the inside before they must die on the outside:

Jesus wasn't killed for blasphemy but for challenging Jewish complicity with Roman economic tyranny

 

I'm glad to see this argument gaining wider circulation, even if it appears in an essay which more broadly is mistaken to think that Jesus imagined that terrestrial injustice could be overcome by anyone or anything short of the coming of God's celestial kingdom to earth. Not even the resurrection has done that.

The argument was first made by St. Luke.

And the whole multitude of them arose, and led him unto Pilate. And they began to accuse him, saying, We found this fellow perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Caesar, saying that he himself is Christ a King.  

-- Luke 23:1f.

Palm Sunday Was a Protest, Not a Procession

 ... The next day, Jesus walked into the Temple, the heart of Jerusalem’s religious and economic life, and flipped the tables in the marketplace, which he described as “a den of robbers.” The Temple wasn’t just a house of prayer. It was a financial engine, operated by complicit leaders under the constraints and demands of the occupying empire. Jesus shuts it down. This is what gets him killed.

Jesus wasn’t killed for preaching love, or healing the sick, or discussing theology routinely debated in the Temple’s courtyards, or blasphemy (the punishment for which was stoning). Rome didn’t crucify philosophers or miracle workers. Rome crucified insurrectionists. The sign nailed above his head — “King of the Jews” — was a political indictment and public warning. ...

This dread of nations, this almighty Rome

The Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna

 The boasted ancestors of these great men,

Whose virtues you admire, were all such ruffians;

This dread of nations, this almighty Rome,

That comprehends in her wide empire's bounds

All under heaven, was founded on a rape.

-- Joseph Addison, Cato

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.

At least Rome tried to stop the barbarian invasions from the north, the LCMS' Matt Harrison has welcomed the hordes from the global south for a decade

 Here.

You will be replaced by better Christians, he says. It is God's will, he says.

Except you won't be. You aren't being. The future is oblivion for the LCMS, not replacement.

This has only been the LCMS' latest gimmick in a long line of gimmicks to stem the tide of decline.

The first, minor dip in the numbers for the LCMS was from 1974. Seminex. It amounted only to a pruning of the tree. The second, steeper dip from the late 1990s was purely demographic, and cut to the root. Peak Baby Boom in 1957 reached age 40 in 1997, after which it is difficult for a woman to have children.

It was already then too late.

The LCMS was always an improbable enterprise to begin with, suffering from multiple personality disorder, just like the religion itself. Simul justus et peccator. The members were at once disloyal to the homeland as immigrants to America, yet here they were, still strangely German proud. It worked for quite a long while out in farm country, where animal husbandry kept the prime directive always in mind, but the forces of anti-German discrimination started to take their toll during the Great War, and finished off the German-lovers in the Second.

My grandfather, a graduate of Springfield who had been a missionary and church planter in places such as Oregon and Wisconsin, introduced English services once a month during The War To End All Wars. The anger over that expressed by church members caused him a massive heart attack which killed him suddenly in 1919 the day after an ugly voters meeting. He was only 52. His last of nine children ended up volunteering to fight Hitler in 1943, to the quiet consternation of the extended family, some of whom had retreated to the safety of the Wisconsin Synod. The LCMS continued to grow only because its loyal sons like my father survived the war and continued to have relatively big families of four.  I happily grew up taking German from the 7th Grade onward in the public school. In college I read Faust and the Lutherbibel.

But we were too few.

Some of the people running the show then weren't stupid. They knew what was coming if they didn't DO SOMETHING. And so there were desperate attempts pushing evangelization programs on the youth in the 1970s, many of them non-Lutheran in inspiration.  There was the Ongoing Ambassadors for Christ. The group would descend on a town for a weekend and cold-call at front doors, doing a survey, presenting the Gospel, inviting them to church. There was the Jesus Movement, then the Charismatic Renewal, The Purpose Driven Life, and the Church Growth gimmickry.

They all came to nothing, except to infect the LCMS' church life and worship with the same laxity infecting the wider culture. Die, Der, und Das was too hard! back then, but now we must learn over 100 gender identities. 

What they should have done is make babies. That is how one honors father and mother.

And so it is not well with the LCMS. And it will not live long on the earth.

The soul of the LCMS was required of it a long time ago. The only question now is whose things shall these be which remain?

Down he points.

 

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.

LOL, Calvinist John Piper says you are free to obey The Emperor and get vaccinated

And you thought "freedom is slavery" was an Orwellian idea. The inspiration is thoroughly Christian, and "The question is", said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master, that's all".

 

The apostle Peter said,

This is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as slaves of God. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor. (1 Peter 2:15–17)

“Live as people who are free.”

Peter had just said, “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether to the emperor as supreme, or to governors” (1 Peter 2:13). So how can you “be subject” and “be free” at the same time?

Peter’s answer is that Christians are “slaves of God.” In other words, when you submit to a “human institution” (1 Peter 2:13), you don’t do it as the slave of that institution. You do it in freedom, because you are slaves of God, not man. God owns his people — by creation and redemption. ...

When we submit, we do so for the Lord’s sake. Because he said to. God’s ownership of his people strips every decisive entitlement from human authority. It turns every act of human compliance into worship. When we submit, we do so for the glory of our one Owner and Master. Life is radically Godward.

More.

 

Every act of compliance is worship, eh?

In the 3rd century many Christians found one act of compliance utterly beyond the pale. They refused to comply with an edict of Decius requiring everyone to perform a sacrifice to the gods in the presence of a Roman magistrate, which was deemed sufficient to demonstrate one's loyalty to the empire.

Some Christians at the time thought such sacrifices to be idolatrous. Many were killed for refusing to offer them.

Many people today, and not just Christians, think that the vaccines can cause harm, to their children and/or to themselves, and refuse to take them or allow them. Some people are losing their jobs as a result.

Many wonder what happened to the ideas we grew up with, that in America health decisions are between the individual and her doctor and are no one else's business, especially not the government's business. Many today wonder what happened to the "first, do no harm" line in the Hippocratic oath.

Circumstances likewise changed a great deal between the composition of I Peter and the 3rd century. There was no formal empire-wide persecution of Christians before the Decian edict of 250 AD. In the absence of official edicts requiring apostasy, obeying the law was not at issue and was promoted in the interests of evangelism and comity, especially in the 1st century.

Similarly Paul in I Corinthians 8 knew that eating meat offered to idols was nothing because no other gods actually exist, but that weak minds found it offensive, for which reason he said that one should not eat meat offered to idols to protect their feelings.

This advice had unintended consequences. The weak minds proliferated, to the point that by the 3rd century the Christians were literally a people living apart from the wider Roman society, attracting suspicion and ultimately the ire of the authorities for failing to behave like Romans. Rod Dreher fans should take note. His prescription in The Benedict Option might be more cause than effect of the troubles he believes are coming, and may prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

Today vaccine compliance earns you a proof of vaccination card. With it you can go about the normal business of living, including going to work. In the 3rd century, sacrifice earned you a libellus, a proof of sacrifice card. With it you could escape execution.

You would expect that in a liberal society, a free society such as that bequeathed to us by the Protestant founders of America who inherited the ideas of Paulinism, the, if you will, weak-minded anti-vaxxers among us would be cut the same slack Paul cut those who were superstitious about idol meat.

But we don't live in that world any longer. We live in an absurd world where the vaccinated, the protected, promote fear of the unvaccinated, which is superstition. It's getting to be more and more like the 3rd century world of suspicion and compulsion.

John Piper has as little to say to the one as to the other. But the 3rd century speaks volumes.

 

 

Paul clearly had opponents from east to west, in Galatia, Corinth, Rome and possibly Ephesus, who accused him of lying

Roman Galatia in the early second century

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now the things which I write unto you, behold, before God, I lie not.

 

-- Galatians 1:20

The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is blessed for evermore, knoweth that I lie not.

 

-- 2 Corinthians 11:31

I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost,

 

-- Romans 9:1

Whereunto I am ordained a preacher, and an apostle, (I speak the truth in Christ, and lie not;) a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and verity.

 

-- 1 Timothy 2:7

Caiaphas continued as high priest until deposed by Vitellius, Roman governor of Syria, in 36

Kayafa ossuary

And Jesus said, "I am; and you will see the Son of man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven."

-- Mark 14:62

Vitellius was there [at Jerusalem] magnificently received, and released the inhabitants of Jerusalem from all the taxes upon the fruits that were bought and sold, and gave them leave to have the care of the high priest’s vestments, with all their ornaments, and to have them under the custody of the priests in the temple, which power they used to have formerly, although at this time they were laid up in the tower of Antonia, the citadel so called ... Vitellius put those garments into our own power, as in the days of our forefathers, and ordered the captain of the guard not to trouble himself to inquire where they were laid, or when they were to be used; and this he did as an act of kindness, to oblige the nation to him. Besides which, he also deprived Joseph, who was also called Caiaphas, of the high priesthood, and appointed Jonathan, the son of Ananus, the former high priest, to succeed him.

-- Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XVIII.

Rome Still Pink As The Day Is Long

The UK Daily Mail reports here on yet another embarrassment for the Roman Catholic Church right in its own backyard:

Catholic sex scandal as undercover reporter 'films priests at gay clubs and having casual flings'

By Nick Pisa

23rd July 2010

A gay priest sex scandal has rocked the Catholic Church in Italy today after a weekly news magazine released details of a shock investigation it had carried out.

Using hidden cameras, a journalist from Panorama magazine - owned by Italian Prime Minister and media baron Silvio Berlusconi - filmed three priests as they attended gay nightspots and had casual sex.

Today there was no immediate comment from the Italian Bishops Conference and the Vatican - which has been rocked by a series of sex scandals involving paedophile priests since the start of the year.

A preview of the Panorama article sent out by email last night added that video footage from the investigation would be made available.

The article describes how the reporter was assisted by a gay 'accomplice' as they 'gate-crashed the wild nights of a number of priests in Rome who live a surprising double-life.'

In its preview, Panorama added: 'By day they are regular priests, complete with dog collar, but, at night it's off with the cassock as they take their place as perfectly integrated members of the Italian capital's gay scene.'

Panorama described its investigation as 'deeply disturbing' as it detailed how three priests - two Italians and a Frenchman - happily took part in gay events and had casual sex.

The Catholic Church forbids priests to have sex and homosexuality is also seen as a 'sin' .

In 2008 the Vatican issued guidelines which said that any would be trainees should not join if they had 'deep-seated homosexual tendencies'.

In one part of the investigation Panorama said that one priest, named as Carlo, willingly put on his cassock to have sex with the reporter's gay accomplice, adding 'all of which was filmed by the hidden camera'.

The magazine also described how they had attended a Mass which was celebrated by Carlo.

In its preview Panorama insisted that it had carried out through checks and established that all three priests were bona fide but would not reveal their real names or any other details.

Panorama editor Giorgio Mule said: 'This was a two week investigation and was not aimed at creating a scandal but showing that a certain section of the clergy behaves very differently.'