Gregory Aldrete
speaker
587 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Gregory Aldrete’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So if one of the best educated, most widely traveled guys really doesn't know much about them, that kind of suggests that not many people did at this point in time.
Hundreds of little mystery religions the Romans sort of thought of as, and these are religions that have some sort of revealed knowledge and that make more personal appeals to people. Now, stepping back from this in a broad way, I think you can say that Christianity really was different in some ways and had some things that maybe the Romans should rightfully have viewed as a threat.
I mean, the Romans are people very focused on this world. right? Citizenship, what you do. Christianity, in essence, has a focus on the next world. So this world isn't as important as what you're setting yourself up for.
And even worse, from a Roman perspective, I'm kind of saying, okay, if I were a Roman, Romans are all about making distinctions between people, citizen, non-citizen, man, woman, free, slave. Christianity comes along and says, in God's eyes, you're all equal. Now, that's a pretty problematic idea if you're deeply invested in Roman hierarchy.
And I think it is no surprise that among the earliest converts to Christianity are women and slaves, and in particular, female slaves. Now, who are they? They're the people at the rock bottom of the Roman hierarchy of status, right, which the Romans are obsessed with status. But here's a religion that says that doesn't matter.
And in that same letter to Pliny, Pliny says, okay, in this group of Christians I've heard about, their leaders are two female slaves they call deaconesses. Now, this is really early. This is before the church exists, right? There's no church structure yet. And who is leading the local congregation of Christians? Two slave women. Okay. So that's an interesting moment.
And that's not necessarily the image we get of early Christianity. But you can see how for people in this social structure, that would be very appealing to them. And in some ways, yeah, it is sort of a threat to the Roman system because they're challenging it. Now, the irony is, of course, 300 years after the life of Christ – the emperor converts to Christianity.
And another 100 years later under Theodosius, it becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire. So all of a sudden you have this flip-flop where now the state itself is not just converted to Christianity, but actively promoting it and now persecuting pagans. And The reason the emperors do that is one of the biggest problems for emperors at that point in time is legitimacy.
That there's tons of civil wars where you have lots of different people saying, I'm emperor. So lots of generals declaring themselves emperor. Now, under a polytheistic religion, you're all just fighting. It doesn't matter. But if you say there is only one god – Then if that god picks someone to be his emperor, they're the only legitimate emperor, right?
So there is a real advantage to emperors now becoming Christian because if they can say – We're now a Christian empire, and there's only one God, and I'm the guy that God picked to be emperor. That means all these other people claiming to be emperors are illegitimate.
Well, I mean, that's why it's appealing to the emperors. And we're talking here – I mean, the religious answer is people see the light, right? It's a faith-based thing. I'm looking at this as a historian. So putting aside religious feeling and saying, okay, if I'm doing an analysis of this as a social phenomenon, what would be appealing to people?
And there is that very compelling reason for emperors to want to go to Christianity because it helps them with their biggest problem, which is legitimacy. Now, if you're an ordinary person, what is the appeal of Christianity? Well, we already looked at a couple of them. One of them is that it promises you a reward in the afterlife. Yeah.
I mean, the Roman and Greek notions of the afterlife aren't that appealing. Either you just sort of turn into dust or at best you turn into this kind of ghost thing that floats around something that looks like a Greek gymnasium, which is like a bunch of grassy fields. It's not so hot. So here you're offered the idea of like, oh, you go to paradise forever. That sounds really good.
And secondly, for a lot of people in Roman society, that notion of Here's something that says I'm valuable as a human being. It doesn't matter whether I'm free or slave. It doesn't matter whether I'm Roman or non-Roman. It doesn't matter if I'm a man or woman. Here's something that says I have equal value. That's enormously appealing.
And finally, early Christians, I mean, they honestly, a lot of them do good works. They take care of the sick. They feed the poor. I mean, if you look at Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, that's the stuff he really hammers. If we look at the words of Jesus when he says, what do you do to be a Christian? A lot of it is take care of the unfortunate. Take care of people who are sick.
Take care of people who are starving. And a lot of the early Christians really take that seriously. So they are helping people out. So that's appealing.
Switch your pace here.
I mean, okay, gladiator games obviously become a popular form of entertainment, and they're one of the ones that's captured people's imaginations for all sorts of reasons. I mean, it's dramatic, but also I think it's that apparent contradiction that in so many ways Roman society seems familiar to us. In so many ways it seems sophisticated and appealing.
Law is wonderful, all this, but yet for fun they watched people fight to the death. So how do you reconcile these things? So gladiators, I find very interesting because they're an example of what historians call status dissonance. So it's someone who in society has high status in some ways and very low or despised status in another.
So gladiators, most of them were slaves, the lowest of the low in Roman society, right? Yeah. Also, they're fighting for other people's pleasure and dying sometimes for other people's pleasure. And the Romans had a real thing about this, like your body being used for others' pleasure.
Showing 381–400 of 587 · page 20 of 30
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