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- W2460145194 abstract "Pagans, The End of Traditional Religion and Rise of Christianity. By James O'Donnell. New York: Harper Collins, 2015. Pp. 288. $ 27.99.Pagans reads like a fireside chat with a knowledgeable uncle. It is full of delightful stories that reference nearly all of our favorite characters from antiquity. The novice will be introduced to key practices and figures from a period long removed from our own. The professional historian will note that O'Donnell reveals his arguments and opinions in how he crafts the stories. The book opens with the main thesis, that we are wrong to think of a great struggle between Paganism and Christianity in the same way we think of a boxing match or the competitive religious wars that accompanied the Protestant Reformation. (3) Ancient Roman was not like a denomination of modem focused on fervent faith in an unseen God or founded on a covenant between God and His People. Rather, ancient Roman was a series of local cults associated with practices that accompanied well-known myths, but which allowed for easy comparison and assimilation to other local practices and myths. Once we have the right mental picture of this ancient as a loose conglomeration of various practices and local cults, O'Donnell then moves his argument from disheveling our conception of paganism to tracing how Christians invented the notion of a monolithic anti-Christian which they labeled pagan. Both the thesis that we are wrong to think of ancient Roman as a matter of fervent belief and the observation that no one self-identified as pagan are well-made and easily accepted.The philological case for the development of pagan is made clearly and is accessible to beginning students. O'Donnell is careful to note that through the second century after the earthly life of Christ, paganus meant something like peasant or civilian. (160) Christians considered themselves soldiers of distinct from the common pagans, but no one in Antiquity claimed to be a Pagan. Self-identifying pagans are a much later development, indeed a modem invention. (253n6) In this way, Christians invented Pagans as a category of opposition. Christianity not only replaced the local religions, but it also solidified its case that all of the various local Greco-Roman religions were Pagan in the fourth century of its existence, according to O'Donnell. When Christianity became the state religion of the Roman empire, pagan then became the term for an enemy of Christianity and took on a theological character different from its meaning from two centuries before. What is more, this shift from paganism to Christianity has appeared to be a great struggle with sudden and dramatic implications, but O'Donnell argues that appearance is false. The pages of history read much more like the progression of two slow processes than the sudden break of a new chapter that definitively interrupts the old. The first process is that of conversion from numerous local deities to a consolidated (Trinitarian) God who has a Church. The second is the slow process of Christianity assimilating what it could from ancient philosophers and practices. The irony of Christianity labeling its enemy, but adopting philosophical principles from thinkers like Plotinus (who could only be called Pagan in this new terminology) is not lost on O'Donnell. The story of Christianity is not the sudden conversion of masses from believing in Zeus to believing in the Father, Son, and Spirit, but rather the gradual replacing of various ancient practices with Christian rituals and doctrines in which faith, hope, and love take center stage. The preface to the book and its final page reveal O'Donnell's main argument about why the story of Christianity is not the drama of sudden conflict with an ancient and organized Paganism. Few noticed their passing, few wept...The [Pagan] gods were no longer needed. (pp. 6, 241)O'Donnell is convinced that the fourth century after the death of Jesus Christ marks the real turning point in the history of what we might call Western Religion, but not for the reasons others have supposed. …" @default.
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- W2460145194 title "Pagans, the End of Traditional Religion and Rise of Christianity" @default.
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