Jesus is Caesar deified

[ghost]

This makes sense.

http://www.carotta.de/subseite/texte/esumma.html

[steve43]

It makes no sense.
It is a common misconception that the Roman Emperors were worshiped like Gods. No one seriously thought they were Gods at the time, and only paid lip-service to the concept. All Rome cared about was that taxes were paid and there was peace in territories they conquered. They only rarely outlawed native religions. And exception would be the Druids in Britain for their practice of human sacrifice, and the defeated Jews in the east due to the continued trouble the Second Temple High Priesthood was causing.
It was a common belief that no one ever attained absolute rule without being favored by the Gods, but that is different.

[ghost]

It's parallelomaniacal?

[neilgodfrey]

It is a common misconception that the Roman Emperors were worshiped like Gods. No one seriously thought they were Gods at the time, and only paid lip-service to the concept.

I have been reading in more recent works that this idea is now outdated -- their divinity really was taken seriously even in the West. The old idea apparently owed as much to Western bias towards its heritage, preferring to think Western heritage was more rational than anything found in the East, as much or more than to the evidence itself.

[ficino]

They only rarely outlawed native religions. And exception would be the Druids in Britain for their practice of human sacrifice, and the defeated Jews in the east due to the continued trouble the Second Temple High Priesthood was causing.

steve, you don't mean that Judaism as such was outlawed, right? Judaism continued to exist in Palestine, both after the revolt of 66-70 and after the Bar-Khokba revolt. The destruction of the temple and later founding of Aelia Capitolina weren't accompanied by general ban on Judaism. The emperor Julian later on even planned to have the temple rebuilt - a plan that was not achieved. Glen Bowersock in his book on Julian speculates that the plan was opposed by the Patriarch and his colleagues, i.e. the rabbis who were recognized as the leaders of the Jews by the Romans, so that the Romans could have an identified leader to deal with.

I always thought Nero was a god. Like Elvis.

[steve43]

Jews were banned from Jerusalem, the ritual and ceremony of the Second Temple and the High Priesthood was outlawed (i.e. animal sacrifice and Astrology, and, I believe, the formalized festivals), and the High Priest "position" was banned. And, of course, the Second Temple itself was destroyed.

Judaism itself banned? Of course, here is the conundrum- are the Jews more a people or a religion? If it is a religion, it is a loose one- especially as we read from Josephus. Depending on your sect, either you believed in heaven and hell, or you didn't. A pretty big difference for a religion!

How Judaism itself morphed in the decades after the destruction of the Temple would be interesting to know. And the second revolt squashed by Hadrian would make for a good story- if we had a Josephus-like figure to document it.

Certainly, all the Jews followed the Torah and the Jewish laws therein as best they could, which kept them together.

[MrMacSon]

It makes no sense.
It is a common misconception that the Roman Emperors were worshiped like Gods. No one seriously thought they were Gods at the time, and only paid lip-service to the concept.

You mean

• a/ there is no indication anyone at the time seriously thought their Emperors were Gods; or
  b/ there is no indication anyone in the next few generations seriously thought recent Emperors were Gods; or
  c/ no-one today thinks anyone at the time seriously thought they were Gods??

(Alexander the Great was heralded as the son of a god).

[steve43]

Read the sentence again and you will get the answer.

[Andrew]

The way you have worded your sentence allows for both a/ and b/ (but not c/).

[steve43]

Naw.