Werd het Christendom in het Romeinse Rijk ingevoerd om een antwoord te geven op de multiculturele chaos die het gevolg was van de totstandkoming van het Romeinse Rijk?
Was het Christendom met andere woorden een politiek instrument om de ethnische tegenstellingen in het Romeinse Rijk te overwinnen door één samenhangende cultuur aan alle burgers op te leggen en zo de politieke eenheid en samenhang van het Romeinse Rijk te verzekeren?
En deden de Romeinen daarmee niet net hetzelfde als wat farao Echnaton in Egypte 1500 jaar daarvoor deed met het vervangen van alle Egyptische goden door de leer van de ene Aton, toen Egypte zich op zijn hoogtepunt bevond en eveneens vele verschillende volkeren met verschillende culturen onderworpen had?
In his fine recent work The Origins of Christian Morality, Wayne Meeks reminded us that when we are talking about "morality or ethics we are talking about people. Texts do not have an ethic; people do" (1993:4). It was only as Christian texts and teachings were acted out in daily life that Christianity was able to transform the human experience so as to mitigate misery.
Chief among these miseries was the cultural chaos produced by the crazy quilt of ethnic diversity and the blazing hatreds entailed thereby. In uniting its empire, Rome created economic and political unity at the cost of cultural chaos. Ramsay MacMullen has written of the immense "diversity of tongues, cults, traditions and levels of education" encompassed by the Roman Empire. But it must be recognized that Greco-Roman cities were microcosms of this cultural diversity. People of many cultures, speaking many languages, worshipping all manner of gods, had been dumped together helter-skelter.
In my judgment, a major way in which Christianity served as a revitalization movement within the empire was in
offering a coherent culture that was entirely stripped of ethnicity. All were welcome without need to dispense with ethnic ties. Yet, for this very reason, among Christians ethnicity tended to be submerged as new, more universalistic, and indeed cosmopolitan, norms and customs emerged. In this way Christianity first evaded and then overwhelmed the ethnic barrier that had prevented Judaism from serving as the basis for revitalization. Unlike the pagan gods, the God of Israel did indeed impose moral codes and responsibilities upon his people. But to embrace the Jewish God, one had also to don Jewish ethnicity.... Indeed, as I argued in chapter 3, many Hellenized Jews of the diaspora found Christianity so appealing precisely because it freed them from an ethnic identity with which they had become uncomfortable.
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