MrMacSon wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 1:05 pm
pressure Christians were made to face in the Greek world as a result of Hadrian's revamped policy of "hyper" emperor worship
- is that an assumption or a proposition??
- A proposition(?) as in:
- "pressure Christians [might have been] made to face in the Greek world as a result of Hadrian's revamped policy of "hyper" emperor worship" ??
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 site-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.