It’s that whole martyr thing at the core of the religion. Mark spoke to the Romans by emphasizing Jesus’s actions as a leader to appeal to their whole imperialistic thing. That’s probably one reason why the final codified version of the New Testament has four gospels, each written as to appeal to a somewhat different group of people. Testable Hypothesis 1: One can not reasonably use an undetected Designer to disprove or exclude a Designer of the universe. By utilizing these printables as visual aids during Bible study or personal reflection time, you can gain a deeper understanding of each piece’s significance. In this regard, Morocco may also very well offer a critical case for study. The relationship between Romans and the history of Judaism is easily but for the time being let it suffice to say that they really, really did not get on all that well. The main conflict was between the influences of Judaism and Hellenism.

That’s where the second big conflict comes in. Hadith are the reports of the words and deeds of the prophet and considered an authoritative source of revelation, second only to the Quran. Bing bong, cherry on a pie, in heav’n the bells are ringing! At the beginning are the brain and sense organs, which together help organisms decide how to move. Octopuses have large brains with more neurons than a human brain – more than half of which are in their long tentacle-like arms. If you look at the places where Paul sends his letters about how great Jesus was, you’ll notice that more than half of them are Greek places, and of course Greek was the common language of the eastern Mediterranean world thanks to our old friend Alexander the Great. In the Hindi language in India, Santa Claus delivers gifts by horse and cart. Instead, I’m going to talk about how the development of Christian doctrine is heavily influenced by its political, historical, and philosophical context. I won’t talk about Jesus’s life because you all know the highlights already. But you know what, to just explain what Christianity is and how it got to where it is now, I think we need to back up and start from the beginning.

Think of any pagan god. But the fact of the matter is there’s solid and well documented history here, and I think it would do us a world of good to be educated on it. To put it simply, the premise of holding on to their unified identity above all else is single-handedly the reason for Christianity staggering success as well as the reason for nearly all of the problems it would have throughout history and even today. Both’s theory lines up well with the description of an Aztec festival dedicated to Tezcatlipoca, the god of the night sky. Zeus drew the position of sky god, his brother Hades became the patron god of the underworld and Poseidon’s domain became the high seas. That’s why their pantheon is full of gods, and every time they conquered some new territory the top of their to-do list is either finding a way to incorporate these new gods by adding them to the pantheon as is or combining them with an existing Roman god.

Christianity was, at least way back then, fundamentally Jewish, and was building on a solid framework of Jewish beliefs. The thing is, you probably already know that none of these were original Christmas traditions way back in the day, and if we’re really trying to go for authenticity here, we shouldn’t be doing any of this in the winter at all. Christianity’s desire to be separate and do their own religious thing apart from Roman state helps explain why the Christians were so fiercely prosecuted. If Christians didn’t conform to the Roman religion, or at least accept it in addition to their own personal devotion to Christ, Rome saw itself as being robbed of pax deorum and as a result doomed to fail. Roman pantheon and were right there helping Rome keep its precious pax deorum. Now baby Christianity was very much the opposite, in that instead of trying to blend into the Roman pantheon and the politics there of, Christianity insisted that it remained separate, distinct, and unique. Acquiring this pax deorum was absolutely essential to the welfare of Rome, so religious life went hand in hand with politics.