Martyrs of Stupidity
History is written by the victors, but it is shaped by the idiots
Imagine being a Roman citizen of Lugdunum (present-day Lyon, France) in ca. 175 AD. You return from a tavern after a night full of beer, wine, snacks, and gods only know what else.
As you pass by a house marked with a graffiti as Christian you hear a damped but still thunderous voice, “Dear brothers and sisters, children of our only father! Now, in remembrance of our lord, let us eat his flesh and drink his blood that was sacrificed for atonement of our sins.”
You can’t believe what you just heard.
Still, curious and encouraged by fermented drinks from earlier, you peek through the rags that block the window. You cannot see much, but in the room, dimly lit by flickering candles, you clearly recognize your neighbors, married couple that lives in the house next to yours.
You always considered them to be a normal law-abiding Roman family. And here they are eating human flesh and drinking human blood, and on top of it they are siblings — the thunderous voice proclaimed that they have one and the same father just few moments ago.
You don’t know much about these so-called Christians that came from East few years ago, but now you understand why everyone considers them weird.
“Disgusting,” you turn away from the window and totter into the dark of the night street.
This is a fictional reconstruction, of course. But it pretty much illustrates the atmosphere in Lyon at the end of the second century AD. The atmosphere that in the year 177 AD resulted in 48 brutal causalities (which is however still nothing compared to the deaths of e.g. more than 300 supporters of Tiberius Gracchus, and also the man himself, who were slain by stones and staves in 133 BC, because of Tiberius’ political aspirations to help the poor of Rome).
To make the long story a bit shorter, those Christians in Lyon were accused of “Thyestean banquets and Oedipean intercourse” (a reference to cannibalism and incest), tortured and killed in local amphitheater, and later glorified by Eusebius of Caesarea, a Christian historian and exegete who lived all the way to the East across the Mediterranean Sea more than hundred years after those events in Lyon took place, and who is regarded the “father of Church history”.
Let’s also not forget that martyrdom, obviously due to Jesus’ way of departure from this world, was highly regarded among Christians (and to this very day still is), even to the extent that in the late 180's AD (i.e. few years later after the incident in Lyon), when several Christians interrupted a judicial hearing proclaiming that they were Christians and wished to be put to death, Roman Proconsul Arius Antonius acceded to their death-wishes, but when still more Christians yearned for the same, he responded, exasperated, “You wretches, if you want to die, you have cliffs to leap from and ropes to hang by.” [1]
Zealous idiocy at its best.
But what always stroke me the most were the accusations of cannibalism and incest.
Now, it’s not hard to see how the concept of one God who is the “father” of all creation and the idea of egalitarian society where all people are considered brothers and sisters, both utterly foreign to an average polytheistic Roman citizen, could easily result in a misconception that those Christian nutcases are wicked incestuous monsters.
On the other hand, it’s equally easy to see how Jesus talking basic biology (“Guys, remember me every time you eat this bread that turns into my body, and each time you drink this wine that turns into my blood.”) was twisted into a semi-cannibalistic ritual by Christians themselves.
Put it all together, and you cannot overlook that all human-inflicted misery stems from the lack of education, absence of simple knowledge, or just sheer stupidity — the one that, in the end, shapes even the history.
[1] Larke, John. 2014. The Way to Christianity. (pp.194–195)
