για τη μετάβαση από την αρχαιότητα στο Χριστιανισμό

Ενα βιβλίο για τη μετάβαση από την αρχαιότητα στο Χριστιανισμό.

Η βιβλιοπαρουσίαση λέει πως γράφτηκε από δημοσιογράφο, όχι ιστορικό, με πολλές προκαταλήψεις, και πως οδηγήθηκε σε μια συλλογή ιστορικών επεισοδείων ώστε να δικαιώσει την εκ των προτέρων γνώμη που είχε.

Η βιβλιοπαρουσίαση δείχνει, λοιπόν, και την αναγκαία ερμηνευτική στάση στη προσέγγιση της ιστορίας. Κάτι που δεν συμβαίνει σε ό,τι διαβάζει κανείς σε πολλές σημερινές ιστοσελίδες. Και δυστυχώς...., πολλοί νομίζουν πως τα ξέρουν όλα επειδή στις ελαφρολαϊκές αυτές ιστοσελίδες βρίσκουν τον θεό που έψαχναν να βρουν.

Αυτό το καιρό, ανάμεσα σε ορισμένα άλλα, ετοιμάζουμε και ένα εκτενές κείμενο για τη μετάβαση από την αρχαιότητα στο Χριστιανισμό και το Βυζάντιο.


From Constantine to Justinian: the triumph of Christian ‘terrorism’

Jesús Zamora BONILLA
October 24, 2018

πηγή :
https://mappingignorance.org/2018/10/24/from-constantine-to-justinian-the-triumph-of-christian-terrorism/


One book that has caused much stir in the past months is Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. I confess I approached the book with some skepticism, for ‘the classical world’, I thought, was already considerably ‘destroyed’ by the time Christianism became the official, and soon the only legal religion of the Roman Empire. [...] also the arts and the literature of the late Roman Empire are, to our sight, very far from the perfection of a Virgil, a Horace, an Apollodorus, or a Praxiteles. My impression, hence, was that the ‘classical world’ was dying, and would have very likely disappeared equally with or without the push of Christianism, more or less around the same time.

[...] The sheer accumulation of dismal episodes like this in the book has provoked that many critics despise it at just an example of biased, bigoted and sensationalist historiography, her author being actually a journalist rather than a professional historian.

[...] Nevertheless, being curious about the amount of bias in Nixey’s book, I have turned to other less vitriolic authors that, in some recent publications, have also documented the same period. In particular, somebody recommended me Candida Moss’ The Myth of Persecution, James O’Donnell’s Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity, and particularly one of my favourite specialists, Bart Ehrman’s The Triumph of Christianity. To make a long story short: it is true that there were no real ‘persecution of pagans’ under the Christian Roman emperors, but rather an increasingly hostile environment, one in which, as more and more people converted to the new religion, it was more and more difficult for the remaining ‘pagans’ to keep their own social networks and institutional pre-eminence, and so, probably, we might bet that most of the ‘conversions’ to the Christian faith in late Antiquity took place, if not out of sincere religious beliefs, at least ‘voluntary’ in the sense that it paid off from a social point of view. [...]

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