Best way to abort Christianity after Constantine?

[Qastiel]

After Constantine is a bit tricky. During Constantine would be easier since Constantine did an incredibly amount for Christianity within the Roman Empire, turning the tables from them being a powerful minority that faced selective localised persecutions at best but otherwise was left alone into a faith that held significant controls over the levers of power and it’s own coordinated empire-wide structures that merged with state-apparatus when convenient.

Give Julian a win against the Persians and he’ll do something similar for Neoplatonic Paganism while dismantling Christian political structures to try and minimise the coordination of Christian variants with each other and diminish wider Christian control over the state.

Something which I feel alone would be enough for Christianity to remain a bunch of mutually antagonistic theologically divergent sects unable to enforce orthodoxy on each other and coordinate against a universalist neoplatonic paganism. I don’t really think Neoplatonism in this format will be able to really spread itself without state structures the same way the Islam/Christianity/Judaism could though. And its spread outside the Empire would likely be more resembling Hindu-Buddhist iconography being utilised in Maritime Southeast Asia by elites but there not being an organised religion resistant to universalist monotheistic faiths.

Which perhaps leaves an avenue for Christianity to both spread and reconfigure with the institutions needed to develop and gain control of a state to further spread around the world. Though it’d have much more competition due to the setbacks experienced in this timeline. Though resistance towards its spread within Rome could make the wealthy and still powerful Christian groups to expand abroad earlier in directed pushes.

 

[Hassungṙengjang]

After Constantine is a bit tricky. During Constantine would be easier since Constantine did an incredibly amount for Christianity within the Roman Empire, turning the tables from them being a powerful minority that faced selective localised persecutions at best but otherwise was left alone into a faith that held significant controls over the levers of power and it’s own coordinated empire-wide structures that merged with state-apparatus when convenient.

Give Julian a win against the Persians and he’ll do something similar for Neoplatonic Paganism while dismantling Christian political structures to try and minimise the coordination of Christian variants with each other and diminish wider Christian control over the state.

Something which I feel alone would be enough for Christianity to remain a bunch of mutually antagonistic theologically divergent sects unable to enforce orthodoxy on each other and coordinate against a universalist neoplatonic paganism. I don’t really think Neoplatonism in this format will be able to really spread itself without state structures the same way the Islam/Christianity/Judaism could though. And its spread outside the Empire would likely be more resembling Hindu-Buddhist iconography being utilised in Maritime Southeast Asia by elites but there not being an organised religion resistant to universalist monotheistic faiths.

Which perhaps leaves an avenue for Christianity to both spread and reconfigure with the institutions needed to develop and gain control of a state to further spread around the world. Though it’d have much more competition due to the setbacks experienced in this timeline. Though resistance towards its spread within Rome could make the wealthy and still powerful Christian groups to expand abroad earlier in directed pushes.

In all honesty the less Platonism, the better, in my mind. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are all forms of Platonism, and Plato was a repulsive heretic. But, that’s my religious bias coming through 😂

So, I think we have a basic outline of a PoD here—Julian reigns for longer, a pseudo-Radagaisus seizes Constantinople and burns its churches to the ground and sacrifices the Christian bishops, and a pseudo-Attila crushes the Roman Empire, after which centuries of non-Roman European empires are going to draw their legitimacy from descent from this man and laying claim to his legacy. I imagine this will culminate some time in the Middle Ages with the synthesis of these rulers with the Neoplatonic religion as it is continued in the Mediterranean, which will make for the birth of a new civilization.

Now I need to think about how to turn this into an interactive game for people on this forum, what the rules will be, etc. I’m open to suggestions in this regard, but let’s keep those in DMs and not spam the forum here with them.

Thank you everyone for your input ☺️

 

[CEL]

In all honesty the less Platonism, the better, in my mind. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are all forms of Platonism, and Plato was a repulsive heretic. But, that’s my religious bias coming through 😂

What is it about Platonism that you actually oppose?

Furthermore, consodering your opposition to Platonism and Christianity, I would like to know your thoughts on this segment in Manly Palmer Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages:

The term Patristic is employed to designate the philosophy of the Fathers of the early Christian Church. Patristic philosophy is divided into two general epochs: ante-Nicene and post-Nicene. The ante-Nicene period in the main was devoted to attacks upon paganism and to apologies and defenses of Christianity. The entire structure of pagan philosophy was assailed and the dictates of faith elevated above those of reason. In some instances efforts were made to reconcile the evident truths of paganism with Christian revelation. Eminent among the ante-Nicene Fathers were St. Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, and Justin Martyr. In the post-Nicene period more emphasis was placed upon the unfoldment of Christian philosophy along Platonic and Neo-Platonic lines, resulting in the appearance of many strange documents of a lengthy, rambling, and ambiguous nature, nearly all of which were philosophically unsound. The post-Nicene philosophers included Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Cyril of Alexandria.

Do you really oppose Christianity, or merely the Platonism that has "infested" its doctrine?

I believe that a better understanding of your views would allow for a better understanding of the story you are working on.

 

[Hassungṙengjang]

What is it about Platonism that you actually oppose?

Furthermore, consodering your opposition to Platonism and Christianity, I would like to know your thoughts on this segment in Manly Palmer Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages:

Do you really oppose Christianity, or merely the Platonism that has "infested" its doctrine?

I believe that a better understanding of your views would allow for a better understanding of the story you are working on.

Plato was a heretic in the highest order. His whole analogy about shadows dancing on the wall of a cave? This is a denial of the acceptance of This World and Its Gods. A statement that Our Holy Mother, the Magna Mātēr, is Herself an illusion and a tyrant who keeps imprisoned within Her Body. There is a very good reason he was hated in his day, and that he was sold into slavery. His religion is a religion that keeps humanity enslaved with the promise of freedom by way of escape, when freedom is right here in front of us. He is perhaps the most accursed man ever to stain this Earth with his wretched footsteps, and I hope to All the Gods he is one day castrated and whipped through the Underworld, his ankles and his wrists broken, his ears filled with wax, his eyes gouged out and his nose cut off so he can crawl across a desert of broken glass with the Furies at his back. What do I oppose? EVERY WORD he ever vomited up.

Sorry if that sounded aggressive, I just really, really hate Plato… may his bones be broken. As for your fellow Manly Palmer, I’m not familiar. I’ll have to check him out 😜

I do in fact very much oppose Christianity, and Judaism, and Islam, and Buddhism, and Jainism, and to a certain extent most modern varieties of Hinduism. Basically, all Axial Age religion. It’s nasty stuff that teaches us that the ultimate goal is escape from this world, when anyone who has ever done any kind of Spirit Work knows that Spirits and Gods alike are jealous of mortal men precisely because our mortality and our limited capacity is what allows us to see The World for Its Beauty and to derive purpose in the struggle that is this life. We should be happy to be here, we should our mortal bodies and this mortal existence, not curse it and deny ourselves every pleasure in the pursuit of some spiritual afterlife. Besides, there’s no Christianity without Platonism because there’s no Judaism without Platonism. See Russell Gmirkin, Carl Ruck, and D.C. Ammon Hillman on the real history of Old Testament. It was not translated into Hebrew until centuries after the original Greek, which was composed in the early 3rd century BCE, and that much is rather apparent when comparing the Greek and the Hebrew. The Old Testament was most likely composed during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus in Alexandria, and the scholars that composed it were obviously intimately familiar with Plato. So, the Platonism was there before Christianity was even born.

 

[Silver01]

ultimate goal is escape from this world,

That's sounds more like gnosticism than any branch of orthodox Christianity

 

[Hassungṙengjang]

That's sounds more like gnosticism than any branch of orthodox Christianity

Indeed 😂

Escape the world or the world needs to be corrected because it’s “fallen” and Jesus is the only one who can correct it in the Second Coming and the establishment of the Kingdom of God. Ultimately, what you’re looking at is a denial of This World and all that is sacred. And Gnostics were Christians, by the way. If you had asked them, they would have identified as such, and they were probably much closer to the original form of Christianity than the state-sponsored churches that came later.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

I would argue that, by the time of the Milvian Bridge, the Christianization of the Roman World was more or less inevitable; that is a much debated point, though.

 

[Silver01]

Escape the world or the world needs to be corrected because it’s “fallen” and Jesus is the only one who can correct it in the Second Coming and the establishment of the Kingdom of God. Ultimately, what you’re looking at is a denial of This World and all that is sacred.

There is quite a difference the world was perfect and while it's still beautiful is fallen but will one day return to it's original perfection to say all flesh as whole is bad.

And Gnostics were Christians, by the way. If you had asked them, they would have identified as such, and they were probably much closer to the original form of Christianity than the state-sponsored churches that came later.

Gnostics is a huge umbrella that yes some of them would have been christians other just saw Jesus a not divine figure also no gnosticism isn't by far the original form of chirstianity the first christian were Jews and would have founded some gnostic text were they said old testament god was not god to be utterly wrong the epistles of Jonh call out Docetism saying it's wrong

 

[CEL]

Plato was a heretic in the highest order. His whole analogy about shadows dancing on the wall of a cave? This is a denial of the acceptance of This World and Its Gods. A statement that Our Holy Mother, the Magna Mātēr, is Herself an illusion and a tyrant who keeps imprisoned within Her Body. There is a very good reason he was hated in his day, and that he was sold into slavery. His religion is a religion that keeps humanity enslaved with the promise of freedom by way of escape, when freedom is right here in front of us.

Sounds like he only realised the one half of the full picture (recognising the world as an illusory thing; an incidental set of possible phenomena that the human existence is trapped in). The subsequent other half is appreciating the world as it is (possibilities to be experienced).

 

[Hassungṙengjang]

There is quite a difference the world was perfect and while it's still beautiful is fallen but will one day return to it's original perfection to say all flesh as whole is bad.

Gnostics is a huge umbrella that yes some of them would have been christians other just saw Jesus a not divine figure also no gnosticism isn't by far the original form of chirstianity the first christian were Jews and would have founded some gnostic text were they said old testament god was not god to be utterly wrong the epistles of Jonh call out Docetism saying it's wrong

Not functionally, there isn’t. Christians of all denominations abhor human nature and teach that the Natural Man is an enemy of their God and that the only upright and moral way to live life is to excise parts of yourself that their God finds undesirable. Again, a denial of The World and all that is sacred in pursuit of asceticism. This was a major motivating factor behind the iconoclasm of the Early Christians and their wanton destruction of ancient art and literature, only keeping what they thought they could use to their benefit, for the most part.

And yes, Gnostics were Christians. They called themselves Christians and they worshipped alongside them. And yes, they were evidently much closer to the original. The original Christians may have been ethnically Jewish, but the picture that nost scholarship paints of Antiquity her assumes the integrity of Christian and Jewish claims as to the origins and antiquity of Judaism and discounts what is quite evident in the Greek of both the Old and New Testaments because the Old Testament is assumed to have been originally written Hebrew despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary that screams at you when you compare the Greek and Hebrew versions and anything that does not line up with this worldview in the Greek in the New Testament is immediately discounted… like the multiple references to the use of ancient entheogens by Jesus and other characters, Jesus’s tattoos (the placing of which are actually corroborated in the Talmud), and the nature of certain characters and their relationships to Jesus or even what “Jesus Christ” means. When we read the Old Testament in Ancient Greek and acknowledge that that was the original language and then compare it to other Ancient Greek texts, particularly the pharmacological literature which very few Westerners have taken an interest in, it becomes abundantly clear that this narrative that this narrative about the antiquity of Jewish monotheism is a lie, and that the first Christians would have indeed been much more similar to the Gnostic sects.

Thank you for your input, though. You sound like either a Christian or some sort of Christian apologist, and I’m not that interested in debating the history or merits of Christianity in this thread. If you would like to continue this discussion, we can move it to direct messaging. I have entire series of YouTube videos of interviews with the aforementioned scholars in which this stuff is explained in detail for you to check out. Let’s not derail the subject matter, though.

 

[Hassungṙengjang]

Sounds like he only realised the one half of the full picture (recognising the world as an illusory thing; an incidental set of possible phenomena that the human existence is trapped in). The subsequent other half is appreciating the world as it is (possibilities to be experienced).

Just because our perception of reality is limited doesn’t mean that it is “illusory”. It just means that we can only see what we are evolved to see. And yes, he and everyone after him very much didn’t get to the appreciating our existence.

 

[Stellar_Lights]

Alternatively you could have Aurelian live longer and establish worship of Sol Invictus as the new "it" religion in the Roman Empire.

Aurelian lived and died before Constantine ascended to the throne. In fact, Constantine would be a 3 year old toddler in the Royal palace, when Aurelian was assassinated in 275 AD. The challenge in this thread might likely have to start after 313 AD.

Now, to the OP:
Changes that will have to come from within the society cannot come so quickly and almost impossible without a Natural event like a Plague or a huge Global cooling that sets off a chain reaction. The changes will have to come from an outside force which is still likely to be driven by a Natural change.

My idea would be is to create a Viking or Scandinavian agricultural revolution and a population explosion, like it exploded in the Arabs, who in culminating developments over a few centuries, led what became the Islamic conquests. The steps would be that the Scandinavians somehow involve in an agricultural revolution, likely in Fisheries and Fish farming, or some kind of Pastoralism, and over 2-3 centuries, their population explodes, their religion undergoes more sophistication, and new institutions grow in their tribes and so on. At this time, they also learn several doctrines from Christianity, Buddhism, Paganism, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism and Judaism through their trade routes but don't convert to them yet. Finally, when the population explosion cannot be limited to Scandinavia, they start unifying themselves, likely undergoing a couple of civil wars, before the unifier or his successor leads the empire in conquest of the South and Southeast Pagan regions like the Baltic coast, Russia and Ukraine, eventually establishing their new cities, coinage, language and religion in those regions, like the Umayyads and the Abbasids. Of course, some alternate Baghdad on the Dnipro or Volga river might still face the same fate as Baghdad, when the Mongols emerge, maybe hopefully not. Parts of Christian German and Frankish/French empires survive, however Christianity is weakened terribly, here, with a new major religion, likely alongside Islam.

 

[ImperialxWarlord]

IMO it’s too late by then and I don’t see Julian saving the day for pagans and reversing the Christian trend. Christianity had already survived years of persecution and only grew stronger. Afteral Diocletian did his absolute best and yet it didnt end Christianity or anything. After years of success under Constantine and becoming not only allowed but became a true faith of the empire with the empire’s leaders now being Christian, so that won’t be easy to reverse. I think Julian is overrated and would not have success if he tried to combat Christianity as it would only provoke a civil war or assassination at some point. And also doesn’t really adress why Christianity had such success and was able to spread like it did. I’m not an expert on this and it’s probably bene talked about elsewhere but the thing about appealing to a wide audience and promising a lot etc etc helped it spread and there was no real answer to that from the other faiths. So Christianity has a lot of momentum and no real opposition. It’s gonna be hard to abort it.

 

[Arkenfolm]

Plato was a heretic in the highest order. His whole analogy about shadows dancing on the wall of a cave? This is a denial of the acceptance of This World and Its Gods. A statement that Our Holy Mother, the Magna Mātēr, is Herself an illusion and a tyrant who keeps imprisoned within Her Body. There is a very good reason he was hated in his day, and that he was sold into slavery. His religion is a religion that keeps humanity enslaved with the promise of freedom by way of escape, when freedom is right here in front of us. He is perhaps the most accursed man ever to stain this Earth with his wretched footsteps, and I hope to All the Gods he is one day castrated and whipped through the Underworld, his ankles and his wrists broken, his ears filled with wax, his eyes gouged out and his nose cut off so he can crawl across a desert of broken glass with the Furies at his back. What do I oppose? EVERY WORD he ever vomited up.

Sorry if that sounded aggressive, I just really, really hate Plato… may his bones be broken. As for your fellow Manly Palmer, I’m not familiar. I’ll have to check him out 😜

Platonism =/= Gnosticism. Plotinus for instance wrote in opposition of Gnosticism and condemned it for believing the creator was evil. That doesn't sound like he thought there was a tyrannical demiurge, and in fact quite the opposite where the world was a necessary place to exist until one's soul might ascend.

Besides, there’s no Christianity without Platonism because there’s no Judaism without Platonism. See Russell Gmirkin, Carl Ruck, and D.C. Ammon Hillman on the real history of Old Testament. It was not translated into Hebrew until centuries after the original Greek, which was composed in the early 3rd century BCE, and that much is rather apparent when comparing the Greek and the Hebrew. The Old Testament was most likely composed during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus in Alexandria, and the scholars that composed it were obviously intimately familiar with Plato. So, the Platonism was there before Christianity was even born.

The source material of the Old Testament mostly came from centuries earlier and all that happened in the Hellenistic period was it was formed into a set of coherent texts. This seems like a fringe theory to assert that Judaism was/is a form of Platonism.

 

[Hassungṙengjang]

Platonism =/= Gnosticism. Plotinus for instance wrote in opposition of Gnosticism and condemned it for believing the creator was evil. That doesn't sound like he thought there was a tyrannical demiurge, and in fact quite the opposite where the world was a necessary place to exist until one's soul might ascend.

The source material of the Old Testament mostly came from centuries earlier and all that happened in the Hellenistic period was it was formed into a set of coherent texts. This seems like a fringe theory to assert that Judaism was/is a form of Platonism.

“Ascend”. That is your key word. This world is to be escaped, cleansed, etc. It is not a place that we want to remain, or it is something other than it should be in its original “perfect state, etc.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all forms of Platonism. They all descend from it, much as they might differ from the original source material, the seeds are still there. And no, we have no evidence whatsoever that anything at the material in the Old Testament predates the Hellenistic Period. None. There is not a single citation or discussion of any story in it nor any of the beliefs of the Jews before that time. In fact, the first attestation of Moses outside the Old Testament is by Hecataeus of Abdera, who claims to be citing Diodorus Siculus. You’re right that it’s a “fringe” theory, but that’s only because mainstream academia assumes the integrity of Christian and Jewish claims as to the antiquity of their religious writings, when such claims can be and have been demonstrated quite easily in fact to be false.

 

[Hassungṙengjang]

IMO it’s too late by then and I don’t see Julian saving the day for pagans and reversing the Christian trend. Christianity had already survived years of persecution and only grew stronger. Afteral Diocletian did his absolute best and yet it didnt end Christianity or anything. After years of success under Constantine and becoming not only allowed but became a true faith of the empire with the empire’s leaders now being Christian, so that won’t be easy to reverse. I think Julian is overrated and would not have success if he tried to combat Christianity as it would only provoke a civil war or assassination at some point. And also doesn’t really adress why Christianity had such success and was able to spread like it did. I’m not an expert on this and it’s probably bene talked about elsewhere but the thing about appealing to a wide audience and promising a lot etc etc helped it spread and there was no real answer to that from the other faiths. So Christianity has a lot of momentum and no real opposition. It’s gonna be hard to abort it.

The lack of imagination of people on this forum truly never ceases to astound me. Let’s close this thread, please. I know what the PoDs are. I am going to turn this into an interactive game here on the forum, we no longer need to discuss what is going to be done. Thank you everyone for commenting. I got some great ideas from some of you.

 

[Arkenfolm]

“Ascend”. That is your key word. This world is to be escaped, cleansed, etc. It is not a place that we want to remain, or it is something other than it should be in its original “perfect state, etc.

It's a place given to humanity by the gods so that humans might one day return to a divine state. That's very different than seeing the world as a fundamentally evil place as in Christianity or Gnosticism.

It's also an idea which has obvious mass appeal given it appears in many different religions, if not a universal echo of the idea of a distant golden age which is found in practically all religions on all continents (i.e. the four ages in Greek legend, the yugas in Hinduism, Dreamtime among many Aboriginal Australians, Time of Transformation in some Native American legends). It's possibly a reflection of the natural decay of things and loss of those around you, if not the natural shifting of landscapes through erosion.

So it's rather hard to move away from it religiously (otherwise what's the point?), and it's not surprising that Neoplatonism and Gnosticism were both incredibly popular belief systems in the ancient Mediterranean much as Buddhism was in Asia during Late Antiquity. It's a "winner" of a religious idea because it reflects the suffering people experience in their daily lives (especially in an era of where warfare and epidemic was common), gives an explanation why things are bad, and gives a solution to the problem.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all forms of Platonism. They all descend from it, much as they might differ from the original source material, the seeds are still there. And no, we have no evidence whatsoever that anything at the material in the Old Testament predates the Hellenistic Period. None. There is not a single citation or discussion of any story in it nor any of the beliefs of the Jews before that time. In fact, the first attestation of Moses outside the Old Testament is by Hecataeus of Abdera, who claims to be citing Diodorus Siculus. You’re right that it’s a “fringe” theory, but that’s only because mainstream academia assumes the integrity of Christian and Jewish claims as to the antiquity of their religious writings, when such claims can be and have been demonstrated quite easily in fact to be false.

That's just a bias toward the extant sources which have survived. Not many would have been interested in the details of Israelite religion other than to note what gods they worshipped, the same reason we don't have detailed explanations of what the Philistines or other local states believed. It also ignores the fact that Judaism has and had a rich oral culture which would have transmitted stories and lessons from previous times until they were finally written down. Sure enough, there are records of verses that later appear in the Old Testament as early as the 6th century BC, which fits with the long-accepted line of thinking. It also begs the question why Hellenistic Jews were such a controversy in the Jewish community of Antiquity.

I should note that mainstream academia does not accept Jewish or Christian claims regarding how or when the religions were created and long hasn't. The claims Moses wrote the Torah 3,500 years ago are demonstratably false, and monotheistic Judaism emerged from one religious faction in Israel (IIRC under Hezekiah or definitely Josiah).

 

[Silver01]

Not functionally, there isn’t. Christians of all denominations abhor human nature and teach that the Natural Man is an enemy of their God and that the only upright and moral way to live life is to excise parts of yourself that their God finds undesirable. Again, a denial of The World and all that is sacred in pursuit of asceticism. This was a major motivating factor behind the iconoclasm of the Early Christians and their wanton destruction of ancient art and literature, only keeping what they thought they could use to their benefit, for the most part.

That falls in to more a religious debate that we s
Can't have here but also no on that last one early chirstian iconoclasm for pagan temples was motivated not because of hatred of the world or what ever it was because you know their interpretation that pagan temples were idolatry.

As for literature that wouldn't be iconoclast anymore and while some destruction did occur the prevailing christian though from antiquity till now was Greco roman classics were ok I mean they were pagan but they had wisdom the chirstian kept many of the works most of them died of because of neglect of the socio economic reality rather than the chirstians not wanting them.

The Great Myths 8: The Loss of Ancient Learning - History for Atheists

The idea that we only have a fraction of Greek and Roman learning and literature because most of it was destroyed by Christians is a common assumed truism in much New Atheist discourse. But this is substantially a simplistic myth based on a number of misconceptions and errors of fact. If...

historyforatheists.com

And yes, Gnostics were Christians. They called themselves Christians and they worshipped alongside them. And yes, od were evidently much closer to the original. The original Christians may have been ethnically Jewish, but the picture that nost scholarship paints of Antiquity her assumes the integrity of Christian and Jewish claims as to the origins and antiquity of Judaism and discounts what is quite evident in the Greek of both the Old and New Testaments because the Old Testament is assumed to have been originally written Hebrew despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary that screams at you when you compare the Greek and Hebrew versions and anything that does not line up with this worldview in the Greek in the New Testament is immediately discounted

irrelevant to what I said because while scholars might say the old testament and what were the believes of it's writers by the 1st century AD the founders of Christianity lived under rabbinical Judaism which had a set of believes like the God of Israel the old testament God is the only God, prophets exist, if was so Jewish that Paul had to fight the early christians on whether gentile converts had to follow the laws.
Some branches of gnosticism rejected that notion of old testament God was God, gnostic ideals of escaping the physical world were against Paul view of resurrection

like the multiple references to the use of ancient entheogens by Jesus and other characters, Jesus’s tattoos (the placing of which are actually corroborated in the Talmud), and the nature of certain characters and their relationships to Jesus or even what “Jesus Christ” means. When we read the Old Testament in Ancient Greek and acknowledge that that was the original language and then compare it to other Ancient Greek texts, particularly the pharmacological literature which very few Westerners have taken an interest in, it becomes abundantly clear that this narrative that this narrative about the antiquity of Jewish monotheism is a lie, and that the first Christians would have indeed been much more similar to the Gnostic sects

Again utterly irrelevant because by the first century AD Jewish monotheism was established it had been so for 6 centuries prior to Jesus and no the first chirstians would have been similar to Jews as seen by Paul arguing with Jewish christians rather than gnostics who rejected many Jewish claims

Thank you for your input, though. You sound like either a Christian or some sort of Christian apologist,

I'm but even if weren't what you said is so ridiculous that no scholar of early Christianity would take you seriously

and I’m not that interested in debating the history or merits of Christianity in this thread. If you would like to continue this discussion, we can move it to direct messaging. I have entire series of YouTube videos of interviews with the aforementioned scholars in which this stuff is explained in detail for you to check out. Let’s not derail the subject matter, though.

Is it myth vision podcast? Because I have seen them and I don't remember a single video of them saying anything about second temple Judaism being similar to gnosticism

 

[Silver01]

Any way since after Constantine not necessarily after his death so how about he is only ever emperor in the west?

 

[ImperialxWarlord]

The lack of imagination of people on this forum truly never ceases to astound me. Let’s close this thread, please. I know what the PoDs are. I am going to turn this into an interactive game here on the forum, we no longer need to discuss what is going to be done. Thank you everyone for commenting. I got some great ideas from some of you.

I mean it’s hard to be imaginative in a situation where things are pretty certain without asb level of changes. The Christian population had exploded to like half the empire by the time of Julian so it was too late by that point.