I can accept all that is fact (as well as varying/relative requirement of citizens to worship the supreme Roman god, Jupiter (ie. relative to the requirement to worship the emperor, depending on the emperor))neilgodfrey wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 2:24 pm
It's "a fact". Hadrian revamped emperor worship to unprecedented levels in the Greek world. All homes were required to have a shrine to the emperor for offerings/sacrifices. https://vridar.org/2022/04/18/emperor-w ... evelation/ This was usually placed at the entrance of the house and as an imperial procession passed by people were expected to respond by attending to their household shrine. It was not easy to hide one's refusal to do so.
Hadrian did not, as other emperors had for the most part done, oversee worship of himself alongside a god, but he identified himself as Zeus himself: https://vridar.org/2022/05/28/hadrian-the-god/
Hadrian, like Nero, was wildly popular with "the people", especially the Greeks. And Jews, too, before the war, appear to have highly honoured him.
Hadrian is known as the "traveling emperor", but those travels were not mere sight-seeing excursions. Every place he entered responded to him as the epiphany of a god making his "parousia" to them. His stay with them guaranteed them "salvation" - and he often left coins depicting his ongoing "presence" as their saviour god still abiding with them.
That level and extent of emperor worship was unprecedented.
I should add: some historians have seen in the evidence of the geographic spread of the Jewish uprisings under Trajan (along with key personalities associated with them, and the types of destruction they wreaked (especially on pagan temples), and some of the literature of the time, that there were real hopes among Jews for a rebuilding of the Temple and messianic restoration.
But my questioning was not of that. It was of:
You're assuming there were Jesus[-of-Nazareth]-following Christians in Hadrian's time ("if the Pliny-Trajan-Christian correspondence is genuine")"pressure Christians were made to face...as a result of Hadrian's revamped policy of "hyper" emperor worship"
eta:
So, perhaps,
'If the Pliny-Trajan-Christian correspondence is genuine, 'Christians' would have still been made to face Hadrian's policy of "hyper" emperor worship'
(and, as I referred above, there is still the question of what 'Christians' might have been in Pliny's, Suetonius' and Tactitus' time (& even either side of it)