Despite the assurance of the Lann prince, Lenard, his men are afraid to enter the tabooed time vault. When Lenard asserts that the power of their gods is with them, one replies:
"'Our gods are far away in the north...'" (p. 107)
Paganism indeed. A god is in his temple. The Jewish God was, perhaps, in His Temple but the Temple was destroyed when the Jews were taken into Exile where they maybe developed the idea that their relationship to God was internal. See Jeremiah 31:31. In the Roman Empire, the rulers wanted one God for one Empire and displaced slaves needed to believe that they had not left their God in their homeland: He was omnipresent. Christianity, Jewish monotheism without the Jewish Law, fitted Roman conditions.
The Lann have an equivalent. They bend their heads while their "Doctor" (priest) chants over "...a small iron box..." (ibid.) that he had carried in his robe. He then declares that they are guarded against spells. (p. 108)
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I am sorry, but I disagree. Over and over, thru out the OT, I see it emphatically stressed that God is not confined to a single place, location, temple, etc. Rather, things like Jerusalem and the Temple were sacred because these were places God had chosen from all the world for His Name to be known. And over and over we see the Prophets warning that if the Jews persistently apostatized they would be punished by God, up to and including the destruction of His own Temple.
The prophetic message was not totally negative, of course. The Prophets declared God would vinicate His name and the promises given to the Jews by bringing back a remnant to Jerusalem, where His Temple would again be built. As we see happening during the reign of Cyrus the Great of Persia.
And I simply don't agree with the simplistic explanation given by you for how and why Christianity spread thru out the Roman Empire. For one thing you overlooked how, for centuries, Christianity was an outlawed, intermittently persecuted faith regarded with contempt, hostility, or simple bafflement by many Roman pagans.
Sean
Sean,
The idea of God developed in the OT. He started out walking through a garden and passing by so that Moses saw part of Him as he passed.
The Bible as we have it was edited fairly late but still contains more primitive passages like God flooding the world and gods plural descending to confound the builders of a tower that threatened heaven.
Christianity spread for many reasons. It synthesized many existing ideas. While it was persecuted, it appealed to so many of the lower classes that the Imperial authorities realized that they ought to incorporate it as the state ideology and Constantine, not yet baptized, convened a Church Council to put an end to doctrinal disputes that could not be settled either by evidence or by reason.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Of course I agree you can find primitive elements taken over from legends and myths in the OT. The Creation and Flood stories had earlier analogs in Mesopotamian stories. What the inspired author did was to recast these stories in ways enabling them to be used in teaching revealed truths about God and man in ways that could be understood by the peoples of those times. And not in the crude ways I see so often from evangelical Protestants!
And I don't believe Christianity to be a mere "synthesis" of already existing ideas. Rather, Christ did and said many things that made sense only if He was a madman or truly God among us. God the Son truly became man in the Incarnation, suffered truly on the Cross, and truly rose from the daad.
Sean
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