Chapter XV: Early Christianity

[nwhyte]

0) Apologies

Sorry to be a bit late in posting this weekend. This is the longest chapter so far by a long way, and very meaty. You can read it here, here or here.

1) Good quotes

This chapter features Gibbon's sarcasm at the heights of subtlety, mainly directed against the naive pretensions of faith. He ends with a particularly barbed comment on how

Comments

[strange_complex]

Yes, this certainly is a long chapter - and I see that the next one is slightly longer, too! I am trying really hard to catch up here, but think I am destined to languish a week behind schedule until we get on to some shorter chapters. Gibbon also assumes a fair amount of pre-existing knowledge here - probably fairly, as I suppose most educated people would have been pretty familiar with the history of Christianity in his day. He uses allusive phrases like 'the apostle of the Gentiles' instead of direct names (in this case, Paul), which is a bit unhelpful from a modern perspective.

On nwhyte's point, there was a fair extent to which ordinary Romans were tolerant towards Christians - quite a few cases of people clearly treating Jesus as just another polytheistic deity, for example. But anti-Semitism is millennia old - Cicero accuses the Jews of being a money-grabbing clique in the Pro Flacco (though, to be fair, the Romans were equal opportunities xenophobes). And there are various examples of people outside the ruling elite being critical

[swisstone]

This is one of the first chapters of Gibbon I ever read, and I always find it difficult to get a grip on it. I can see the sarcasm - it's a bit like Geoffrey Howe's resignation speech, which stasrts off mildly, and then slowly sticks the knives in. But I find it hard to understand the degree of the offence that it caused. This is because a lot of it seems perfectly fair to me. But that, of course, was the problem leading Church figures had - treating Christianity as just another historical phenomenon, rather than a manifestation of God's Will, was offensive to the Church of England in a way that is difficult to conceive today.

I can't comment on the reliability of the sources. But I do know that there was a viewpoint, which Gibbon probably promulgated, that could be caricatured as the Roman empire being all fluffy and lovely until those nasty Christians came along. This is, of bollocks, and scholars tend to avoid it now.