It’s far from pointless to point out your clear misrepresentation of source material.
In that post I didn't mis-represent any material. In the next post I presented MORE material from the next century demonstrating anti-pagan laws and actions.
Either you can’t read or understand your own sources, or you are deliberately misrepresenting them.
Either way it makes discussion pointless.
I presented several peer reviewed sources then started to use your sources to show how you misrepresented them and that there is a strong academic consensus against the Gibbonian narrative based on an uncritical reading of Christian propaganda.
That you pretend this is “one report” is silly.
No, it said scholars are in different camps,
epigraphical evidence also suggests a steep decline in cult practices starting in the third century, it's complicated. Ok, history is complicated. Wow, what a shock. Last post I demonstrated many examples of 4th century anti-pagan practice. This is a non-issue.
You were unable to grasp how religious buildings can disappear over time without being destroyed.
Uh, no, like I said, one way was to remove the idol and make it a Christian church. That also counts.
I gave you an example that you can see with your own eyes today. You were still unable to grasp it and insisted a regime that does not actively save bankrupt religious institutions should be seen as having a strategy of destroying them.
They destroyed some, took th eidols, made anti-pagan laws. I'm sure we can go to the 5th century and see many more examples of this non-issue.
Yet many do survive in all kinds of sources.
Really, which documents with non-canon theology survived without being hidden?
Many survive because theologians bothered to try to refute them and thus obviously must have had copies to refute.
No, some disagreed on matters like the trinity, calvinism and so on. Nothing survived that said Jesus was a different deity from Yahweh.
No one tries to refute mythicism though.
2 Peter 1:16 did. For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when
we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.
That is a refutation of someone calling it a myth and an addition of a claim that it was seen. (not)
The idea that there was a well known belief that Jesus didn’t exist, yet there remains not a trace of it anywhere is unlikely.
That doesn't track at all. Look at ALL of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Pure chance it was found hidden in a cave. Jesus separate from Yahweh, Jesus is just a spirit, Jesus has a WIFE?????
-read, note the last words.....
"
The Gnostic Enigma Almost all of these codices are concerned with Gnosticism, which is a modern term for a mysterious religious movement that has at its centre a
gnosis (that is, arcane knowledge), and is one of the most fascinating enigmas in the history of religion. A complex amalgam of traditions, ideas and influences, it was an important religious phenomenon that flourished for several centuries during the Early Christian era,
but then seems to have been almost completely suppressed. "
completely suppressed. Stories about Jesus completely suppressed. Huh?
ALSO, mythicism is that Jesus was a celestial deity. AS I SAID, it's that way in one version of Ascension of Isaiah and Philo, many decades before, wrote of an arcangel, who was firstborn son of God, his favorite, "the East", the hHgh Preist, the Divine Logos, the being who God used as an instrument to create the universe and is Lord over all creation. All of these things were said of Jesus in the Epistles.
Before Mark made him an earthly being who ascended to Heaven. Paul said nothing about a birth on Earth, a family, a ministry or even a crucifixion. He said Jesus was killed by the Archons of the Age. This could be demons in the celestial realm or humans. It's used both ways in antiquity.
I already said all this, why am I repeating it? You didn't refute it, you just ignored it and asked the same question again, knowing full well I gave 2 examples?
Why didn’t Jewish critics notice he was just a made up figure from Jewish scripture and that many people knew he was never real?
They also didn't provide evidence for historicity. Some thought he lived 130 years earlier. During the time when stories were going around they clearly didn't even notice. By the time it became a thing it was the 2nd century. all they cared about was there was no messiah, myth or Rabbi.
That this super heresy didn’t survive in all the factionalism is unlikely.
There were far stranger things that didn't survive that we see in the Gnostic Gospels.
If you lack the wit to differentiate between evidence that supports your claim that Christians destroyed all temples of all religions and all non-canonical material, and that which supports my claim that there was some oppression and violence which varied by time and place but you massively overstated it and paganism declined for a variety of reasons over the best part of half a millennium and many trends started before the rise of Christianity then I can’t help you.
If you can’t see nuance, just black and white, you’ll never understand anything with any degree of ambiguity.
Can lead a horse to water…
Terrible attempt at a false narrative. You are now back to my original statement attempting to ignore the fact that I said it was hyperbole and I went on to produce massive evidence of all types of anti-pagan propaganda. Then in a 2nd post moved on the the 4th century with even more pronounced examples. Which you failed to even respond to.
So now to rescue your argument you pretend it's nuance I'm not seeing. Sorry, already talked about that.
There was many examples, in every century of many types of anti-pagan policies. When nuance was needed I'm sure it was used. And some temples survived.
You are not going to rescue this with false information and ad-hom.
Ironically you are desperately defending an uncritical reading of Christian propaganda in the face of overwhelming secular historical evidence against its veracity.
I’ll leave you with these, all from sources you introduced as reliable, and I’ll leave it to others to decide if these convincingly support your claim that an all powerful church destroyed all temples of all religions and all non-canonical texts:
As it now becomes more and more accepted in Late Antique Studies to discard the triumphalist overtones of our Christian sources and to view religious transformation as a gradual and complex process, in which violence only rarely erupted…
The archaeological evidence that has now been collected for most parts of the Roman Empire, however, shows overwhelmingly that the destruction of temples and their reuse as churches were exceptional rather than routine events… it becomes clear that [many claimed] incidents occurred in specific local, socio-political circumstances
Yeah you already posted this. Doesn't account for things like:
"Anti-pagan legislation reflects what Brown calls "the most potent social and religious drama" of the fourth-century Roman empire.
From Constantine forward, the Christian intelligentsia wrote of Christianity as fully triumphant over paganism. It didn't matter that they were still a minority in the empire, this triumph had occurred in Heaven; it was evidenced by Constantine; but even after Constantine, they wrote that Christianity would defeat, and be seen to defeat, all of its enemies - not convert them.: 640
The laws were not intended to convert; "the laws were intended to terrorize... Their language was uniformly vehement, and... frequently horrifying".
Or this:
"Trombley and MacMullen say part of why such discrepancies (between the literary sources and the archaeological evidence) exist is because it is common for details in the literary sources to be ambiguous and unclear.
[184][185] For example, Malalas claimed Constantine destroyed all the temples, then he said Theodisius did, then he said Constantine converted them all to churches."
Which I already posted and shows even though a temple was claimed to be destroyed and it actually wasn't, it was converted.
But this was all posted, and ONCE AGIN, you ignored it and are pretending like it's a new take. That sounds familiar.........? However it was done, nuance, whatever, it's clear that there was strong anti-paganism by the churches, through whatever means.
