Time Travel, killing Jesus, and the religion of empire

[beatrice_otter]

There's a post about time travel going around tumblr, and somebody tagged that they would kill Mary before the birth of Jesus, so that Christianity wouldn't exist.

Problem is, while that might indeed kill Christianity, it would probably just mean that Constantine would slot Mithraism into his Imperial domination schemes instead.

In the late 200s AD there were two mostly-underground monotheistic mystery cults rapidly gaining adherents in the Roman Empire. There were a lot of similarities between the two, at least superficially. For example, there was a lot of emphasis on communal ritual meals. One was Christianity. The other was Mithraism. Constantine was intrigued by both. We know he was involved in Mithraism in his youth.

But what Constantine really liked the idea of using religion to unify the Roman Empire. By the 300s, the Roman Empire was beginning to fragment, with regular civil wars. Constantine came to power in one of those civil wars. He thought that if everyone worshiped the same god (instead of different gods worshiped in different places, with the Roman pantheon and emperors as a thin veneer of unity), it would help keep the whole ramshackle edifice together. (Spoiler alert: it did not.) So he picked one of the two monotheistic religions that was rapidly gaining in popularity, and encouraged people to convert to it, heaping power and wealth on (some of) them. And that's how Christianity became an imperial religion.

Christianity changed rapidly in response to that. Major parts of the religion were changed or dropped entirely. For example, until Constantine, the vast majority of Christians were strict pacifists. In most communities, soldiers were required to leave the army and find a new trade before they could be baptized. Obviously, this was unacceptable if Christianity was going to become the religion of the Roman Empire. In a straight-up choice between pacifism and Imperial power, the Christian church as a whole dropped the pacifism like a hot potato. 100 years after Constantine you have St. Augustine laying out the "Just War" theory where war is fine as long as you have a good reason for it. That's a complete 180 from everything the early Christians believed. There are many other examples of things that got dropped or changed in Christianity to make it more palatable to Imperial might.

There are a lot of toxic things in Christianity as we know it. But the thing is ... many of them come from this process of adapting their beliefs and practices to fit what Constantine (and later Emperors, and the entire power structure of the Empire) wanted Christianity to be. Namely, something tame that affirmed and enforced the existing Imperial power structure. And Christianity has been a partner and tool of the power structures of the dominant culture ever since. This is one of the reasons there's so much difference between Jesus' teachings and Christian teachings, in so many cases. In a straight-up choice between faithfulness and power ... a majority of Christians in the last two thousand years have most often chosen power.

But here's the thing. If Christianity didn't exist, that doesn't mean none of this would have happened. It just means that Constantine would probably have chosen Mithraism instead. Do you think the Mithraists would have been any less willing to take the power and wealth on offer to them, in exchange for becoming a lackey of empire? Do you think Christianity was uniquely corruptible? I don't.

Comments

[bluewinged_songbird]

Thank you for this, it was so interesting to read!

[beatrice_otter]

You're welcome!

[viggorlijah]

I wish we knew more about mithraism as its own religion rather than in comparison to Christianity - I’d love an alternative universe story exploring this

[beatrice_otter]

Oh, absolutely! We know so little about Mithraism. What we do know is intriguing, but it's only fragments.

[foxinthestars]

My own Time Machine + Christianity musing at one point was rescuing Jesus from execution. Personally I don't believe in substitutiary atonement, which for many would be the big monkey wrench there. Not sure it would change history a whole lot but it'd be nicer than killing someone.

[beatrice_otter]

I would be very interested to see the results, myself.

[soc_puppet]

So what I'm hearing is, we need to go back and kill Constantine...

[beatrice_otter]

If you want to eliminate the possibility of a Roman-backed imperialistic monotheistic religion rising to prominence in the 300s and becoming the official religion of the Empire, yeah, killing Constantine would be a lot more effective than killing Jesus.

[redbird]

Even if I stipulate that Jesus really existed, and that some parts of the Christian bible describe actual events, I suspect that removing Jesus would have meant the attention went to some other(s) of the many preachers who lived in Judea at the same time. ("Some parts" because internal contradictions mean they can't all be historically accurate.)

It also seems likely that St. Paul would have found some other cult to attach himself to and rewrite large parts of.

Conversely, a likely Christian answer to this time-travel what-if is that God would have chosen some other Jewish woman to be Jesus' mother.

[beatrice_otter]

As a Christian, I absolutely believe that God would have chosen some other Jewish woman of the area to be Jesus' mother, but to a non-Christian that's not going to be a persuasive answer. But the thing is, even if you assume that Jesus was not God's son ... just killing him wouldn't change Constantine's desire for an imperial monotheistic cult three centuries later.

[vicki_rae]

It's baffling how many people think they could change one thing and have everything else stay the same. It's always going to leave a hole and something else will fill it and ripple forward.

[beatrice_otter]

Yeah. Christianity didn't become what it did in a vacuum! There's a reason for it! And there's always reasons for the shit that people do. Often bad reasons, but those bad reasons don't go away just because you kill one person.

[labingi]

Interesting! As I recall, the religious folks in Raised by Wolves are very loosely "Mithraic," though how or if this relates to our Earth I have no idea. It does seem to gesture at the idea that another religion could have taken on the dominant place of Christianity.

[beatrice_otter]

Never read Raised by Wolves. We know very little about historical Mithraism because they were a mystery religion, i.e. one that was closed to outsiders and you had to be initiated to participate fully in (so was Christianity, at the time). But we do know that a lot of people who were drawn to one were also drawn to the other.

[labingi]

Interesting history. Raised by Wolves is a TV show, by the way.

[genarti]

Yes!!! Thank you for this. So many people write as if Christianity is somehow uniquely toxic in a weirdly tautological way, rather than being fundamentally shaped (a few hundred years after it started) by becoming deeply intertwined with an imperial state and its efforts to consolidate and ideological reinforce its power (which is absolutely the cause of many many horrible things but, also, is not unique to Christianity).

[beatrice_otter]

There are some branches of Christianity that are at the very far end of the toxicity scale. And those branches, alas, have a lot of power in the US right now mostly because they're the ones yelling and using really awful tactics both to manipulate their people and to manipulate the social and political system. That doesn't mean that all branches of Christianity are toxic, and it doesn't mean that other religions can't also have toxic branches. And that period of Imperial powermongering from Constantine to the fall of Rome was extremely formative; Christianity after that time was very little like Christianity before that time.

[sulien]

Nope, it wouldn’t matter what a person did about removing whichever religious and/or political leader(s), religion always has been and always will be used as a means of control over its adherents. And this is a soap box I’m stepping away from right now.

[osteophage]

Thank you for this post.

[beatrice_otter]

You're welcome!

[osteophage]

Do you have any reading recs for where to learn more about that early history around Constantine and all that?

[beatrice_otter]

Not really, alas! I learned most of this in seminary, and it was focused on specifically Christian history, which Constantine had a huge influence on, but he was never the focus. I'm sure there are good books out there (check your local library), but the texts we read for class would probably not be very good if you wanted to find out more about Constantine himself and the broader historical context, as opposed to, say, the First Council of Nicaea (which he called for and sponsored).

I'd start with the wiki article and look at the citations, see if any of the books seem interesting; or search your library's catalog.