"the miracle"

ON PAGANS, JEWS, and CHRISTIANS

--- Arnaldo Momigliano, 1987


Chapter 1:

Biblical Studies and Classical Studies
Simple Reflections upon Historical Method


p.3

Principles of Historical research need not be different
from criteria of common sense. And common sense teaches
us that outsiders must not tell insiders what they should
do. I shall therefore not discuss directly what biblical
scholars are doing. They are the insiders.

What I can perhaps do usefully is to emphasise as briefly
as possible three closely interrelated points of my
experience as a classicial scholar who is on speaking terms
with biblical scholars.

   1) our common experience in historical research;

   2) the serious problems we all have to face because of the
      current devaluation of the notion of evidence and of the
      corresponding overappreciation of rhetoric and idealogy
      as instruments for the analysis of the literary sources;

   3) what seems to me the most fruitful field of collaboration
      between classical and biblical scholars.


Let me admit from the start that I am rather impervious to
any claim that sacred history poses problems which are not
those of profane history.





p.7

One is almost embarrassed to have to say
that any statement a historian makes must
be supported by evidence which, according
to ordinary criteria of human judgement,
is adequate to prove the reality of the
statement itself.  This has three
consequences:


   1) Historians must be prepared to admit
      in any given case that they are unable
      to reach safe conclusions because the
      evidence is insufficient; like judges,
      historians must be ready to say 'not proven'.

   2) The methods used to ascertain the value
      of the evidence must continually be scrutinised
      and perfected, because they are essential to
      historical research.

   3) The historians themselves must be judged
      according to their ability to establish facts.


The form of exposition they choosen for their presentation
of the facts is a secondary consideration.  I have of course
nothing to object in principle to the present multiplication
in methods of rhetorical analysis of historical texts.

You may have as much rhetorical analysis as you consider
necessary, provided it leads to the establishment of the
truth - or to the admission that truth is regretfully
out of reach in a given case.

But it must be clear once for all that Judges and Acts,
Heroditus and Tacitus are historical texts to be examined
with the purpose of recovering the truth of the past.

Hence the interesting conclusion that the notion of forgery
has a different meaning in historiography than it has in
other branches of literature or of art. A creative writer
or artist perpetuates a forgery every time he intends
to mislead his public about the date and authorship
of his own work.

But only a historian can be guilty of forging evidence
or of knowingly used forged evidence in order to
support his own historical discourse. One is never
simple-minded enough about the condemnation of
forgeries. Pious frauds are frauds, for which one
must show no piety - and no pity.




p.92

CH 6: How Roman Emperors became Gods


"Gertud Bing, the director the Warburg Institute ... happened
to be in Rome with with Warburg, the founder and patron saint
of the Warburg institute, on that day, February 11, 1929, on
which Mussolini and the Pope proclaimed the reconciliation
between Italy and the Catholic Church ... There were in Rome
tremendous popular demonstrations, whether orchestrated from
above or below. Mussolini became overnight the "man of providence",
and in such an inconvenient position he remained for many years.

.... some of the most original work on the Roman imperial cult
was done around the years 1929-1934 in the ambiguous atmosphere
of the revival of emperor worship in which it was difficult to
separate the adulation from political emotion, and political
emotion from religious or superstitious exitement.









p.120

"Religious Opposition" to the Roman Empire.






p.136


Emphasizes "the very remarkable attitude of those Christians who,
though persecuted by the Roman Empire, defended the notion that
the Roman Empire had been providentially created to foster and
support the Christian message."



p.137

"What is perhaps most remarkable in Roman paganism is that
there was no basic objection to conversion: all that was
required was acceptance of the consequences of one's own
conversion.  This is really what Constantine, not a very
sophisticated mind, understood better than everyone else.
He converted.  The problem of Christian opposition to the
Empire was solved by one stroke. Or almost."




p.138

Jewish and Christian forgery of the Greek Sibylline oracles
-----------------------------------------------------------

"The Jews began writing Sibylline oracles in the 2nd century BCE".

"The Jews stopped writing history after 100 CE and the Christians
did not write political history before the fifth century. The
Sibylline oracles filled a historiographic gap."




p.139

"The collection of Sibylline Oracles which has reached us
contains both Jewish and Christian Sibylline oracles.  The
collection as it now stands was put together and transmitted
by Christians.  Here we find Christian forgers using Jewish
forgeries and adding their own more or less for the same
purposes: anti-Roman feeling, apocalyptic expectations, and
general reflection on past history presented as future.
Father of the Church (notably Lactantius) hurried to quote
these texts, and of course the Christians went on composing
their Sybilline texts (now also in Latin) throughout the
Middle Ages.



Paul Alexander in his volume "The Oracles of Baalbek" (1967)
edited a text which Silvio Giuseppe Mercati had discovered
on Mount Athos, but which was not published.  Alexander showed
this text to be an expanded version put together between
502-506 CE of an earlier Greek oracle composed about 378-390 CE.
The earlier Greek text is still recognisable under the Latin
guise of medieval Tiburtine oracles .... the Sibyl is made
to speak on the Roman Capital and to answer questions put by
a hundred Roman judges.  The text is definitely Christian.
Yet Jewish priests interven in the dialogue and respectfully
question the Sybil about rumors in the pagan world regarding
the birth of Christ.  The Sybil, of course, gives a precise
confirmation, and the Jewish priests are not heard again,
What concerns us here is that Jews are here shown to question
a pagan Sybil as a matter of course.







p.140

The Christianization of the oracles of Hystaspes
--------------------------------------------------

"These oracles predicted the destruction of the Roman Empire
and the return to the power of the east."



"Justin in his Apology knew that the circulation of the
oracle of the Hystaspes had been prohibited on penalty
of death. (1.44.12).  One version of the oracle had been
Christianized before Clement of Alexandria. Clement in fact
attributes a quotation of Hystaspes to St, Paul (Stom 6.5.43.1)
He must have found reference to it in some apocryphal text
attributed to Paul.  In this Christianized version, Hystaspes
alludes to Christ.


Lactantius, who directly or indirectly
summarizes most of the oracle, had a text before him which
was not interpolate by Christians ...."



p.142

Chapter 9:
The Disadvantages of Monotheism for a Universal State



"What is self-evident to the historians of ancient Rome
 is the superiority of the Roman war machine, if judged
 with the criteria of sheer survival."



148

CELSUS

" ... it is indeed impossible to be certain that Celsus is
fairly represented by the texts Origen quotes to refute him."







p.153 to 158

Emperor Julian



p.156

"the destruction of the temple was an essential part of the
Christian interpretation of the Roman Empire."



JULIAN:   "The Greeks sought after truth, as its nature requires,
by the aid of reason and did not suffer us to pay heed to the
incredible fables or impossible miracles like most of the barbarians."

(251 D, 252 B)


p.158

"Julian at least never really ceased to be a monotheist - which does
not mean a Christian.

Julian regarded the Sun or Helios as the Supreme God and subordinate
to him the hierarchy of the other gods.   (p.154)



p.158

"The pagans and the heretics, not to speak of the Jews, lost interest
in the Roman State.  Furthermore, the new loyalties toward the Church
or rather the churches diminished the loyalty toward the State; and
the churches attracted the best men, the best leaders.  The gain of
the Church became the loss of the State.





p.159

CH 10: Ancient Biography and the Study of Religion in the Roman Empire


"Only in the late 1970's did a new generation begin to notice the povery
of the work done on the religion of the Roman imperial period in comparison
with the attention given to earlier ages."


p.163

"The Roman Empire was a religiously an agglomeration of competitive groups,
some mutually exclusive, some mutually compatible or even mutually
integrative, but still competitive.


p.172

DIOGENES LAERTIUS

"His silence on the Christians is total.  We need hardly add that no
educsted man of the second or third century could be unacquainted with
the elementary fact of life that the Christians existed and were
persecuted.  Diogenes wrote as if they did not exist and there were
no Christian philosophy.  The silence on Christian philosophy, like
the silence on Roman philosophy, was intentional. What Diogenes tries
to present is a world of philosophy which is exclusively Greek,
pre-Roman and pre-Christian."

"decicates book to a woman Platonist ..."



"A Greek was entitled to be a skeptic, a Christian was not."




"The real difference between a pagan and a Christian holy man,
as far as I know, was never written down in antiquity.  The
difference, to use Peter Brown's language in inverted commas,
was the invisible presence of the bishop in the life of a
Christian holy man.  The pagan holy man was a law unto himself:
as such he was often a crank, and Garth Fowden was right in
describing his drift towards social maginality.  The Christian
saint had to reckon with the bishop, if he was not himself
a bishop.  It was no accident that the protoptype of the saint's
life was written by a bishop.  There was no Athanasius to mark
the boundary for the pagan equivalent of St. Anthony.






p.197


"Christianity and its ecclesiastical organisation provided what
could alternatively be either a rival or a subsiduary structure
to the imperial government; the choice was left to the Roman government,
which under Constantine chose the church as a subsiduary institution
(without quite knowing on what conditions).

The novelty of the conflict explains the novelty of the solution -
not tolerance but conversion.  The emperor had to become Christian
and to accept the implications of his conversion.  It took about
eighty years to turn the pagan state into a Christian state. The
process took the form of a series of decisions about public
non-christian acts of worship.   The first prohibition of pagan
sacrifices seems to have been enacted in 341 CE. Closing of the
pagan temples and prohibition of sacrifice in public places under
penalty of death was stated or restated at an uncertain date
between 346 and 354 CE.   (Codex Theodosianus).






p.199


According to a widespread opinion shared by Paul the Apostle (but
not by all the Fathers) pagan gods existed - as demons."