this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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Why do you think that old religions like Greek and roman mythology were allowed to slide into widely accepted fiction while others, which often have similarly outlandish stories, are held up as at least a reference to some divine truth?
Is that the right question to ask? I dont like the easy answer that gets spread around of "they just aren't raised to be critical of their beliefs". How did people back then make such a decision as what religion to follow?
An interesting insight I gathered from a Bart Ehrman lecture somewhere is that cultures that have a primarily oral-based tradition don't care as much about consistency in their lore. Not because they're dumb or anything; it just doesn't matter to them as much.
Both Judaism and Christianity started as oral traditions. That's why you have two separate creation stories in Genesis, and different accounts of how Judas died, and the wildly different Gnostic tradition of Christianity. It doesn't go much deeper than that: an oral culture that used these stories as parables that weren't really meant as literal truth, but later got treated that way when it evolved into a written culture.
Thats really interesting with Judaism and Christianity, I was not aware they overlapped that much and were so different, I mostly assumed Judaism diverged and has its own thing.
That sort of brings up the next question though, how did people deal with being aware of competing traditions? Or were they just normally only exposed to one at a time? Was it common for something new to be brought to a tribe and they have to reckon with how it fits with their current beliefs?
I suppose its easy now to see the steps one might take to leave a religion or join another, but I can't translate that to back when people didnt travel as much and everything had to be copied by hand or mouth.
This is getting a little beyond my knowledge, but it appears to me that polytheistic oral cultures tended not to care too much. For example, Caligula followed the Cult of Isis, an Egyptian god. This doesn't seem to be particularly unusual. Everybody was in some kind of cult; they functioned more like social clubs with "secret" knowledge (that was probably unremarkable and disappointing, tbh), something like the modern Masons.
The exceptions to this "let everyone believe whatever" seem to have been Judaism and Christianity. Judaism had long since thrown off its monolatry (many gods exist, but we have this one primary one; early parts of the Hebrew scriptures read this way) and became fully monotheistic (only our god exists). Christianity grows up from that to be monotheisitc from the start. This is something that simply does not jive with polytheistic religions around them. Rome would let you believe whatever else you want as long as you recognized the Imperial Cult, but Judaism and Christianity refused. That's why they were both heavily persecuted for a time under the Roman Empire.