Holy Crap Day. 14 September 2023.

In many places a commemoration we Lutherans usually call Holy Cross Day is observed on 14 September. Its actual name is Exaltatio Sanctae Crucis, which in Latin means "Exaltation of the Holy Cross".  Thing is, exaltatio in Latin does not mean what its derivative exaltation has come to mean in English.  It means raising aloft, so the name actually translates as "Raising Aloft of the Holy Cross" which is pretty close to its Greek name "Raising Aloft of the Precious Cross". I ain't getting into the Greek. I also ain't getting into all the other "Holy Cross Days" on 13 September, 12 October, 6 March, 3 May and 1 August either!

But I am getting into making clear that the literal exaltation, the lifting up, of the cross for which this "feast" was instituted is not a reference to either Christ or the cross of Calvary as the means of salvation or its triumph, but to the lifting up of a supposed relic.  Here's the deal.

So What's a Holy Cross Day?

Glad you asked. But before getting down to that, let me be clear about two things. None of what follows should be construed as knocking the historic liturgy and things related to it.  I consider it one of the great treasures of "Lutheranism" that they are retained except where they contradict, as distinct from are commanded by, Scripture. 

It should be construed as what it is, knocking the retention of this "feast" as in any way aiding either the work of zealously guarding and defending the liturgy or of deepening the awareness of and reverence toward what was accomplished for us by Christ on the cross.

The Origin of Holy Cross Day.

So why a Holy Cross Day on 14 September? Because on 14 September 335 the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was concluded.  The dedication itself was the day before, then on 14 September the "cross" was brought outside for veneration by the people.  And, the Roman Emperor, Constantine, made it a feast day.  That's why. What in all church planting Judas does that mean? And what cross? Why, the "true" cross, discovered by the Emperor's mom Helena on a dig funded by the Imperial treasury, that's what cross! Huh?

So why ain't the church called the Church of the Holy Cross then? Well guess what, there was already something standing there, which was another church, well a temple actually, to the goddess Aphrodite, known to the Romans as Venus, she from whom the planet, and also Friday, is named. Some say the place was originally a Christian worship site, for reasons that will presently be clear, and that the temple was later built by Emperor Hadrian in his rebuilding of Jerusalem.

Why Jerusalem Had To Be Rebuilt. Again.

Now why rebuilding? Well, Jerusalem was completely trashed by the Romans in 70 AD. Why?  We need to back up a bit to get back to Hadrian.  Here's a summary of the events as related to out topic here.  They have  much wider effect and significance than this topic, and that is covered in our post Temples, Taxes, Vespasian and Now, also this month.  It started in 66, when some Greeks started offering pagan sacrifices outside a synagogue in Jerusalem. At first, the Roman soldiers stationed in Jerusalem did not get involved in this local matter.  But next thing you know, the Jewish priests quit offering token sacrifices to the Emperor.  The Roman Empire generally left you alone as long as you paid tribute to the top and didn't rock the boat, which is how its surviving state church still pretty much operates.  And then next thing you know there's protests against Roman taxes, call it an ancient Tea Party, and muggings of Romans living there.  Finally, when some of the boys from duty stations in the area go in to intervene they get their butts kicked by a bunch of Jews (that's the Battle of Beth Horon) and that clean pisses off the Roman Emperor, guy named Nero.

Old Nero tells General Vespasian -- who had distinguished himself in the Roman invasion of Mother England (OK Britannia at the time) in 43 as commander of Legio secunda Augusta (Second Augustan Legion), one of the four legions deployed -- to go in and open up a major can of whoop-ass on Judea. Which he commences to do along with the forces of his son, Titus, also a general, in April 67, with total forces of about 60,000. By 68 they had pretty well cleaned house in the north, and in the south the Jews pretty well cleaned house on each other with infighting, so about all that was left was Jerusalem.

But then something else happened back in Rome. Nero was getting too bizarre for even the Romans (more about that in the post for 22 February), the Senate and the military went against him, he was declared an enemy of the people, so he bolts and commits suicide in 68. All hell breaks loose and in 69 Rome goes through four emperors! First, the new emperor, guy named Galba, gets assassinated by a guy named Otho who wants to be the new emperor so he bribes the Emperor's bodyguards, the Praetorian Guard, to kill him.  Then a guy named Vitellius, with the best legions in the Roman army on his side, defeats Otho and inspires him to commit suicide, but then Vitellius pisses everybody clean off by having so many feasts and parades that he about bankrupts the Empire. So in July 69 Vespasian gets hailed as emperor by his army and other Roman armies -- Roman armies did that sometimes, that's also how Constantine would later get his start as emperor -- and, thinking maybe that isn't such a bad idea, Vespasian heads to Rome and his allied armies kick the living crap out of Vitellius' forces and kill him, and the Senate proclaims Vespasian emperor 21 December 69. Helluva year.

Vespasian had left crushing the Jewish rebellion to his son Titus, which he bloody well does, so thoroughly destroying Jerusalem that Jospehus, the Roman name of the great Jewish contemporary historian Yosef, says you wouldn't have even thought the place was once inhabited. This includes the destruction of the Temple, which happened on 29/30 July 70. In the Hebrew calendar it was Tisha B'Av, or the 9th of Av (a month in the Hebrew calendar) and guess what, it was on exactly that date that first Temple had been destroyed by the Babylonians, leading to the Babylonian Captivity (the one of the Jews, not the church) some 656 years earlier.

Why the Destruction of the Second Temple Is a Big Deal.

The destruction of the Second Temple has enormous consequences for both Christianity and Judaism.  To have the centre of one's worship and people's identity destroyed for the second time was catastrophic. And this time there wasn't even a captivity in which to be carried off. Worst of all, with the Temple, its priesthood and sacrifices now gone, it would now be impossible to fully follow the Law. How does a religion and people based on the Law continue when observing the Law is no longer fully possible?

There's only two answers: one, the Law could now pass because it had been fulfilled, or two, something else would take the place of the Temple sacrifices until such time as they could be restored. The second answer was forthcoming from Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai. During the siege, he was slipped out in a coffin, and knowing the destruction was coming, and sensing Vespasian would become Emperor, negotiated from him three things: 1) sparing the city Jamnia, 2) sparing its sages, who were students of Rabbi Gamaliel, grandson of the great Hillel, and whom St Peter mentions as having argued against killing the Apostles for their messianic beliefs about Jesus, and among whose students St Paul counts himself, 3) a physician to attend an old rabbi (OK, his name was Tzadok) who had fasted for forty years hoping to ward off any destruction such as has just happened. It was here that Judaism as we know it, in the absence of the Temple, began to take shape. Basing himself on Hosea 6:6, he concluded that our mitzvoth (good works) and prayer would now take the place of the sacrifices commanded in the Law.

The other answer is that the sacrifices had culminated in that to which they pointed, the sacrifice of Jesus at Calvary, who is now both priest and victim, and temple, and the destruction of the Temple is what was meant when Jesus said some of those living would see the end, meaning the end of things as they knew it -- which some of them did.

Hadrian Rebuilds Jerusalem.

The story goes that, as Hadrian, who had become Emperor on 10 August 117, was rebuilding Jerusalem, which began in 130, there was a site that had been a Christian church reportedly on the site of Jesus' burial, so Hadrian, who hated Christians, ordered dirt brought in to cover the site, then had a temple to Venus (Aphrodite to the Greeks) built on top of the earth on top of the old church site.  So Constantine ordered the temple destroyed and the earth underneath it moved back out!

Makes for a nice story, but the story is pure bull. Hadrian located the forum for the new Jerusalem where Roman fora were always located, which is, at the meeting of the main north-south road through town and the, or one of the, main east-west roads. In Jerusalem it was the latter case, and the forum was located in the space between the two east-west roads and along the north-south road, and the temple to Venus was part of that. So far from being a special action against Christians, it was just a following of standard Roman practice anywhere.

And, that the site is that of Jesus' tomb is so unlikely as to be nearly surely false. The Bible says Jesus' tomb was outside the city walls of Jerusalem, and this site is within the walls of Jerusalem. Oh well, some say, the walls of Jerusalem in Jesus' day were different. Two problems with that. If they were east enough of the current walls to make the site west of them, Jerusalem would have been quite a narrow city, which it wasn't. Also, building a tomb west of the city is highly unlikely, as wind in Jerusalem generally blows from west to east, and thus would blow over the tombs bringing ritual impurity, not to mention a possible stench, to the city and in particular to the Temple Mount. So, graves go to the east of the city.

Also, these bogus legends obscure the fact that while Hadrian did see Christianity as an uncouth superstitious cult dangerous to a humane social order, that was nothing compared to his regard for Judaism, of which he wanted to remove all traces altogether.  What Hadrian actually did do has nothing to do with temples to Venus on Christ's crucifixion or burial site.  The rebuilding of Jerusalem was as a new city with no Jews, called Aelia Capitolina, Aelius being Hadrian's clan name (nomen gentile) and Capitolina referring to Jupiter Capitolinus, which is the great temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill in Rome and from which comes the English word capitol, btw.  He built a temple to Jupiter on the ruins of the Temple site, forbade observance of Jewish law or its calendar, especially circumcision which was held to be utterly barbaric, publicly burned the Torah scrolls, and attached Judaea to Syria and renamed it Syria Palaestina, Philistine Syria, in 135.

Helena.

And, to those unlikely to be true legends, add those about Helena and the finding of the "true" cross. Helena was the mother of Constantine.  His father was Constantius, however, it is unclear if she was a legal wife or a concubine, which then meant an extra-legal wife, since the marriage was between social classes (he was noble, she was not), and that was prohibited by Roman law (same problem Augustine had with "the one" who was mother of his son). Helena's unclear status was controversial for both husband and son, and Constantius later dumped her in a power deal to solidify his political position to marry another (Theodora), which he did in Trier, then called Augusta Treverorum and his new capitol. Son Constantine the "Great" would later do the same thing for the same reasons. Once her son became Emperor, Helena returned to public life and was made Augusta Imperatrix, and was given unlimited access to the imperial treasury to locate objects of Christian veneration.

The story is, after the Temple of Venus was torn down and the land removed, excavation found three crosses at what was supposed to be the site of Jesus' burial. So a woman near death was brought in, and did not recover on touching the first two crosses but did on touching the third, which Helena then proclaimed was the cross of Christ. Problem is, for one thing contemporary accounts of the excavation (Eusebius) do not mention Helena being there at all, rather unlikely for the Augusta Imperatrix to not be mentioned if she were there.  For another,  the legend about authenticating the true cross appears not only later, but in at least three distinct versions, the one just related, and one where a dead man was touched to each of the three and came back to life at the right one, and that the inscription put on the cross was still on it.

Take Your Pick. Or Not. Exaltatio Sanctae Crucis.

What a wretched mess, most of it legend of the most spurious kind and the rest of it fact of the most disgusting kind. A verifiable total confusion of the Two Kingdoms (left and right hand) surrounded by unverifiable legends that don't even agree with each other. This honours the cross of Christ? Such a miserable excuse for piety should be shovelled out and thrown away just like Constantine shovelled out what Hadrian shovelled in. The object of our veneration is not the cross per se, or toothpicks from it, or legends about finding it, or big fancy churches built at state expense on the supposed site of it, or a feast day established by a Roman Emperor, but Christ and his action on it for our salvation, whose body and blood he gives you right in your own parish in Communion at Divine Service.

The true Raising Aloft of the Holy Cross is not like some empty fiction, for example the story about Dietrich von Bern, or these miserable True Cross legends, imperial-sponsored liftings-up thereof and feast days commemorating them.  Or in trying to rewrite the narrative so the facts are whitewashed out and a new narrative put in place.  The true raising aloft of the holy cross is as St John says in John 12:32 "And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." Et ego si exaltatus fuero a terra omnia traham ad me ipsum. The Alpha and the Omega, and his Omega Point, through whose exaltation, lifting up, we are drawn from the Alpha and raised aloft to the Omega.

More on that in our next post.

Temples, Taxes, Vespasian and Now. (2023)

Vespasian is usually mentioned as this terrible pagan Roman general who hated God and whose forces therefore obliterated Jerusalem and the Temple in it.  Actually, his campaign in Palestine is rather of a sidelight in his career and had no religious motivation at all.  What's more, if it weren't for the same guy in charge of destroying Jerusalem and the Temple there would be no Judaism now at all.  The real deal about him will show us something important about religious reactions, to him and more importantly religious reactions to things in general.  Here's the deal.

Temples.

First Temple.

The destruction of the second temple shows that Israel has been a massive pain in the butt for everybody else for centuries, not just recently.  Notice it's second Temple.  There's been two temples, and both were destroyed by conquering foreign powers.  

The original Temple was built by King Solomon, who reigned from about 970 to 931 BC (or BCE if you will), helped by an architect from Tyre in Phoenicia (now in Lebanon) named Hiram.  It was to replace the Tabernacle constructed 440 years earlier under Moses as the Israelites went from Egypt through the Sinai Desert on their way to conquer Canaan.  Thus it was to be God's dwelling place on earth, and be the sole place of worship sacrifices, replacing local ones.  Solomon's dad King David had gotten quite wealthy from trade with the Phoenicians.  

More murky historical stuff nobody cares about?  Yeah well the Phoenician alphabet is the oldest one, traders carried it across their known world, the Romans adopted and adapted it, whereupon it became the alphabet used world wide now and is the reason you're reading this or anything else, so relax.

This first Temple, Solomon's, was plundered by Pharaoh Shoshenq I of Egypt (called Shishak in the Bible) about 926 BC during the reign of Solomon's son and successor Rehoboam, at a time of Israelite civil war during which they split into the Kingdom of Judah (the tribes of Judah and Levi) and the Kingdom of Israel (the other ten tribes) to the north.  Not least of the issues in the split was the Temple, which put out of business the various local temples and their priests.

It was restored in 835 BC by Jehoash, King of Judah.  Then it was plundered again about 700 BC by Sennacherib, King of Assyria (capital, Nineveh, modern day Mosul, Iraq, see Kings II in the Bible), not on religious reasons as he plundered everyone who didn't accept Assyrian rule, especially the Babylonians; he obliterated Babylon (about 53 miles south of modern Baghdad, Iraq) in 689 BC.  Assyria also obliterated the Kingdom of Israel around 722 BC or so and deported the people (2 Kings 17:6) to nobody knows where exactly as no identifiable further record of them exists, hence lost "Lost Tribes of Israel".  Josephus says they were beyond the Euphrates River and too numerous to even guess by his time.  This left the Kingdom of Judah, which is why Jews are called "Jews" since the other tribes are lost (lots of fanciful theories about where they went abound). 

Assyria fell apart amidst internal strife, Babylon came roaring back which kind of got the Egyptians nervous, and when King Jehoakim of Judah quit paying tribute -- which doesn't mean saying nice words, "tribute" comes from the Latin tributum, meaning contribution; it's money and/or goods and services given as a sign of submission -- and hoped the Egyptians would contain the Babylonians,  Nebuchadnezzar (the second, actually) eventually conquered Jerusalem on 16 March 597 BC and looted the city and the Temple, and took the current king and other notables, like Ezechiel, to Babylon.  But resistance remained, the new king Zedekiah allied with the Egyptians, the prophet Jeremias warned this is not gonna end well, and it didn't.  

Nebuchadnezzar had enough and obliterated the Temple in 587 BC and started resettling the locals to Babylon, the famous "Babylonian Captivity".  So now all twelve tribes had been deported.  This wasn't just about the Israelites; resettlement of conquered peoples for more politically practical reasons was a common practice in ancient Assyria and Babylon.  Ancient?  We do it now!  In die Vertreibung (expulsion) after WWII about 31 million ethnic Germans were expelled from lands that would no longer be Germany as the victors determined the borders that would eventually become Germany as it is now.  Then again the Nazi Generalplan Ost under Himmler planned the ethnic cleansing of eastern Europe for more Germans to move in; the Soviet victory at Stalingrad started the process by which it wasn't successful.  And there's the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1947/8 in which about 700,000 Palestinians were evicted or fled to avoid eviction in the creation of the modern State of Israel.

Second Temple.

The second Temple dates from 516 BC.  What happened?  Babylon fell to Persia, or in modern terms, Iraq fell to Iran, in 539 BC, that's what.  The great Babylon was overtaken by a power that became even greater, Persia, specifically, the First Persian Empire, sometimes called Achaemenid Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great (Cyrus II actually; Cyrus I was his grandfather).  It became the largest empire the world had yet known and lasted until it was conquered by Alexander the Great, who greatly respected Cyrus' legacy and made a point of visiting his grave in 330 BC.  His grave is still there, in his capital Pasargadae, near modern Shiraz, Iran; a UNESCO World Heritage Site and to this day site of celebrations on Cyrus the Great Day, on 29 October, the day Cyrus entered Babylon, and on Nowruz, Iranian New Year, on the spring (in the northern hemisphere) equinox on or around 21 March.

There's a lot to respect.  Cyrus was a conqueror indeed, but he did not obliterate those he conquered and allowed them to keep their culture within his empire under a client-ruler (satrap).  In a move that was not unique toward the Jews but actually typical of him toward conquered peoples, Cyrus issued an edict whereby the Jewish exiles in Babylon were allowed to return to their land and rebuild their temple.  This momentous event is among many other places recorded in the Bible; in fact the Jewish Bible, which is more or less the Christian Old Testament though with the books in a different order, ends with the account of the edict in II Chronicles 36.

(Side note.  Chronicles was originally one book called The Matters of the Days in Hebrew.  When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek couple centuries before Christ since most Jews spoke Greek at that time (what is called the Septuagint) the book was divided in two and called The Things Left to the Side, or Paralipomena in Greek.  When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin in C5 AD (what is called the Vulgate) he called them Chronicon, Chronicles in English, and the two-part division and the name Chronicles has pretty much stuck in anybody's translation since, although older RC translations like the one I grew up with whose OT is based on the Septuagint, which has a few more books than the Hebrew canon, retained the name Paralipomena, along with other Greek-like spellings such as Ezechiel and Jeremias that I use sometimes.)        

The fact is, the usual term "captivity" makes it seem much different than it actually was.  Psalm 137 (136 in the Septuagint and Vulgate, the famous "super flumina babylonis", above the waters of Babylon), which the Septuagint attributes to the prophet Jeremias no less, is a lament of the exiles for being in Babylon rather than Judah, not for being treated poorly, human rights abuses as we might say now, but for being unable to sing a song in a strange land of their native land even when asked to by the Babylonians, and prays that their right hand lose its ability if they forget Jerusalem (guess there weren't any lefties) or prefer present joys to Jerusalem.

Yes they were exiles with the loss of their land and Temple, but they were not slaves, they were not prisoners, they were not badly treated.  In fact in 538 BC when Cyrus allowed their return to the land from which they were exiled most chose to stay!  Esther, a Jewish woman and protagonist of the Biblical book, became the wife of whom the book names Ahasuerus, King of Persia, and thus a Jew becomes Queen of Persia!  (The story is pretty wild; I'll leave that to the book.)  Ahasuerus is generally identified as Xerxes I, the fifth king of the Achaemenid Empire (First Persian Empire) from 486 to 465 BC.  He's the one who lost big-time to the Greeks under Themistocles at Salamis in September 480 BC.  The Septuagint and the Vulgate identify him as Artaxerxes I, the sixth king and the third son of Xerxes, whose rule was 465 to 424 BC.  Either way, well after 538 BC when Cyrus allowed the return. 

So, there's ambivalence in the Bible itself about the return -- unless one is one of those who can't handle ambivalence in what is supposed to be the word of God and thus says since it can't be it isn't.  On the one hand, Isaias (oh sorry, Isaiah) 45:1 says God anointed Cyrus to make his proclamation of return and rebuilding, and as anointed one is what messiah means, he is so described, the only non-Jew in the Bible to be called an anointed one of God.  On the other hand, most Jews stayed.  For those who returned, the rebuilding of the Temple was complete in 516 BC, a little over twenty years after the return.  This is recorded in the Book of Esdras (oh sorry, Ezra), which was originally one book along with the Book of Nehemias (oh sorry, Nehemiah), the two were not separated until the first printed Bibles in C16 AD, and also recorded in variants called 3 and 4 Esdras, or 1 and 2 Esdras by those who call 1 and 2 Esdras Ezra and Nehemiah, found in the Apocrypha in modern Bibles if that is included.

Second Temple Judaism was not like that of the First, in either the building or the religion.  The building itself was not a reconstruction of the first but a rather plain structure, which those returnees old enough to remember the first found very disappointing.  It is not the ruins of this building that are there to-day but we'll get to that.  Also, the returnees did not return to the Kingdom of Judah; the kings were gone, and the land became a client-state of Persia under its Babylonian name Yehud.  Before, the temple priesthood was subordinate to the kings, but with them gone, the priesthood increased in power, with the High Priest effectively becoming the ruler, a role that would endure after the Greeks and then the Romans took over, with the latter making sure the High Priest didn't rock the boat.

The second Temple did not have the Ark of the Covenant from the first Temple and the Tabernacle of Moses before it.  One of the strangest things about the Bible is that despite the enormous importance of the Ark, containing the stone tablets given by God to Moses at Mount Sinai and all, there is absolutely no mention of what happened to it after the destruction of the first Temple.  Speculation abounds of course, to the present day even to hit movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark. 

And too, in contrast to Jewish reaction to later catastrophe, it was thought that God had allowed the destruction of the first Temple and the "captivity" due to their lack of adherence to Biblical religion and dalliance with the gods and women of those around them, so on returning a great emphasis was placed on getting it right and sticking to it -- no intermarriage, even with those who hadn't been deported, a purity of community, a purity of Temple worship with the priestly animal sacrifices, and study of the Law of Moses and the Prophets.  To this end, Esdras and the 120 Men of the Great Assembly (Nehemias 10) codified existing observances into three times of prayer to correspond with the times of sacrifice in the Temple, morning, afternoon and evening, thus establishing a form that is still used in synagogue worship and was adapted by the Christian church into Matins, Vespers and Compline.  

They also established the central prayer of Jewish worship, the Amidah, which means "standing" because it is said standing, also called the Shemoneh Esreh, which means "eighteen" because it is composed of eighteen blessings, said on weekdays at all three times of prayer to this day.  The Amidah for Sabbath condenses the petitions since Sabbath is a foretaste of eternity when no petitions are needed, and the Christian church evolved a Christian prayer in exactly its structure, which is said to this day too -- usually called the Gloria, from its first word in Latin.  They also finalised the canon, the list of books to be considered authoritative, of the Hebrew Bible as we have it now (when used as the Old Testament in Christian Bibles the book order is different but the list is the same).

The building was different too, twice over.  What is there in ruins now is neither the first Temple nor the original second Temple but a massive rebuilding and replacement of it undertaken by Herod the Great, Jewish client king to the Romans of Judea at the time of Jesus' birth.  Herod was Jewish, but an Edomite (descendant of Esau) and also a Roman citizen.  He began as governor of Galilee in 41 BC with the backing of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, was appointed King of Judea by the Roman Senate in 37 BC and given military support to bring the area under tighter Roman control.  When Marc Antony lost out to Octavian as the Roman Empire was taking over the Roman Republic Herod was solidly behind the new Empire and switched allegiance to Octavian, who as Caesar Augustus was the new and first Emperor and the guy mentioned in the famous nativity account in Luke read at Christmas who ordered the census.  Herod brought a great deal of prosperity to Judea and at the same time was quite cruel.  Look at the dates -- all this is happening in the unsettled violent change from Republic to Empire, same era as the Arminius episode, and Herod was concerned to maintain his power.  This is the same Herod who would order the Massacre of the Innocents recorded in Matthew, but nowhere else, which some say indicates the passage is a literary invention to mirror the Passover slaughter in Exodus, but given that Herod had his wife (one of them, anyway) and several of his children killed as well as many others as threats to his power that particular massacre probably wasn't all that significant to warrant mentioning with non-Biblical sources.  

The second second Temple, so to speak, Herod's, was begun about 20 BC.  The Temple per se was completed in about three years, but construction on the entire complex continued much longer.  John 2:20 says it had been under construction for 46 years when Jesus went there for Passover.  So, at the time of its destruction in 70 AD none of it was very old at all.  It's what it meant that was, and its loss was of huge impact.  But before we get to the impact of the destruction we need to get to the destruction itself.

Before we do, have you noticed something?  How is it that a guy who died in 4 BC, BC standing for Before Christ, was in power when Christ was born?  That's because Christ was around Before Christ too.  Huh?  Here's the deal.  The calendar in world-wide use now was originally produced by commission of Pope Gregory the Great, who was head of the Roman Empire's state Catholic Church a little over a hundred years after the Western half of the Roman Empire, the part with Rome actually in it, collapsed in 476 AD.  Part of the idea was to number the years going forward starting with Christ and going backward from him.  Thing is, the calculations of what year that was were a little off but we didn't know that until the calendar had been in standard use for centuries.  So keeping the same year numbers, the year Christ came was about 4 BC.

Taxes and Religious Significances.

While Jews and Christians assign various religious significances to the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem, to the Romans doing it had no religious motivation or significance whatever.  

The Romans could not care less about whatever local religious observances there were in the areas they controlled, unless they rocked the boat about who runs things.  What motivated the First Jewish Revolt was all about who is the true god and what therefore one does or does not do, such as pay taxes to foreign rulers, but the Roman reaction to it was mostly about the non-payment of taxes by Jews who thought it wrong to pay them, as well as attacks by Jews on Romans in the area, not about who was right about God.  The Roman governor ordered the Temple plundered for the money since they would not pay, which resulted in an escalation in which the Roman garrison was taken and the client king (Agrippa) had to flee.  When initial attempts to quash the rebellion failed, Emperor Nero had enough and ordered General Vespasian to take over and, as we might say now, turn it into a parking lot.

This question of taxation by the Romans that would lead to the obliteration of Jerusalem was long-standing.  It's the same issue in the New Testament passages Mark 12:13-17, also told in Matthew 22:16-22 and Luke 20:20-26, namely, asking Jesus if it's moral according to God to pay taxes to Rome.  It's the same issue in Jesus calling a tax collector for the Romans who was himself Jewish to be among the Apostles!  Who, btw, was Matthew himself!  Not the kind of guy you want around if you're looking to attract followers, since he would have been largely despised, yet Jesus called him and not after extensive catechesis or a change of heart on Matthew's part but while he was on the job collecting taxes, just telling him "Follow me."  It's the same issue in the famous parable told in Luke 18:9-14 of the Pharisee and the Publican, sometimes translated tax collector.

OK, what's a publican?  Don't hear anybody talking about publicans now do you?  Yeah you do, we just don't use that term for them.  A publican (publicanus in Latin) was a private contractor with a public government contract for which it successfully bid.  They're in the news now all the time.  Then as now a lot of their activity was in construction of public works and buildings, and in supplying the military.  This practice began after the overthrow of the Kingdom and the establishment of the Republic around 500 BC and the oldest surviving account of such activity is from 390 BC.  Our modern practice comes directly from the Roman Republic.  But there are two important differences.

One is, there was no Roman IRS, and the publicans also collected taxes in Roman controlled areas.  The other is, Senators could not participate in running a publican company (societas publicanorum) and publicans could not hold Senate seats.  No Dick Cheneys.  Also, publicans were mostly of the equites class, which is often translated as Knights but was not knights in the mediaeval sense we usually think of, but a property-owning based class (horses were part of the property, which is the basis for the later use of the term) and, they were the lower of its two ranks, with the senatorial class number one.  That's the Republic.  With the Empire this began, along with much else, to change.  It had to.

In the Republic, there was a temporary position called dictator (one who speaks, ie commands) which the government could appoint for a specific cause (causa) to address a crisis.  The dictator was to resign upon completion of the task or after six months.  Julius not-yet-Caesar had gathered a great deal of power from his wars in Gaul (France) and Britannia (England) and the Senate ordered him to resign his command and return to Rome.  To do so would leave him open to prosecution as a war criminal, so instead, he returned to Rome alright but at the head of his 13th Legion (Legio tertia decima gemina) which was illegal as hell, a capital offence actually to exercise imperium (command) in Rome itself, crossing the boundary river the Rubicon 10 January 49 BC.

He knew exactly what he was doing and what would happen.  It's from this event that we get the phrase "crossing the Rubicon" for taking an action after which there is no reversal or point of return, and also the phrase "the die is cast", from his reported words by Suetonius "iacta alea est" as they waded through the river (it's shallow), though modern usage usually changes the original word order to alea iacta est. 

The die was cast.  He was now not only open to prosecution as a war criminal but subject to the death penalty for violating the restrictions of command.  It set in motion a long civil war in which the Roman bureaucracy was centralised and strengthened, what was left of the Senate proclaimed him dictator perpetuo (dictator in perpetuity), two months later on the proverbial Ides of March (the 15th) in 44 BC he was assassinated in the Senate, which in turn led to further civil war, with his adopted son Octavian being named Augustus (illustrious one) by the weakened Senate on 16 January 27 BC, though he himself liked Romulus as a title, as the reference to the founder of Rome connoted a second founding of Rome, and Imperator Caesar divi filius, Commander Caesar the son of the god (Julius Caesar had been declared a god by the Senate on 1 January 42 BC).

So there you go, from imperium legally broken to Imperator legally established, from complete defiance of the Roman Republic and its concepts to a Roman Empire based on very non-Roman concepts.  This is covered in more detail on other posts on this blog, but the point here is, in the time of Jesus' public ministry, 30-33 AD, the Jewish Revolt, 66-73 AD and the destruction of the second Temple in it (70 AD), Rome was not this great monolith but in the stages of becoming one amid great political and social upheaval in changing from the Republic to something very different, the Empire, with sentiment from significant Romans that this change was not for the best and being a republic was better.

This wasn't a problem just for Jesus.  What we now consider great Roman figures also had a tough time in this transition -- Cicero, Horace, Seneca, Stoics in general, Tactitus, all of them leery of the Empire and much in sympathy with the former Republic.  To the extent that not just Jesus died in this context -- Cicero was executed and Seneca, under orders from Nero, committed suicide.

At the time of Jesus' death the Empire was quite new, only 60 years old.  When the great revolt began it was 93 years old.  When the Temple was destroyed it was 97 years old and just the year before experienced huge upheaval with the death of Emperor Nero.  Territorial governors like Herod and local tax collectors like the publicans were in a very precarious position toward both the local population and the government they worked for, with their roles changing dramatically as the autocratic centralized nature of imperial Rome rapidly evolved and diminished them. 

Vespasian.

Vespasian distinguished himself in the ongoing conquest of Britannia, which began in 43 AD under Emperor Claudius, in which Vespasian commanded one of the four legions sent (Legio secunda Augusta, to be specific).  He retired from the military after that and pursued a political career, retiring in 51 after incurring the disfavour of Claudius' (fourth) wife Julia Agrippina, who was the mother of Nero by an earlier marriage and whom Claudius made his heir.  Vespasian's military expertise is no doubt why Nero appointed him to take care of this political problem.  Josephus' account is controversial among Jews; he was a Jew himself, but also a Roman citizen and had imperial patronage.  Ironically, he regarded Vespasian highly.

With the death of Nero political chaos fell upon the new Empire, and in 69 was the Year of Four Emperors, Vespasian being the last.  Theoretically, he did not have the pedigree for that, being of the equestrian not senatorial class, but the army was behind him and the Senate soon confirmed him.  He was all for the Empire, and it being rather new at the time, was suspicious of those still hankering for the old Republic, particularly the Stoics.  He was otherwise known as quite amiable though.  As Emperor he embarked upon many reforms, extended financial generosity to many, and to the public as a whole. 

One such is still famous, the so-called Colosseum!  It's real name is Amphitheatrum Flavium, or Flavian Amphitheatre in English.  Why "Flavian"?  It's from Vespasian's actual name.  In English we tend to refer to significant Romans by one name, but a Roman had three.  His was Titus Flavius Vespasianus.  Flavius is his nomen, the name that gives your clan (gens) and identifies you as a citizen, hence the Romans would use that and not what looks like a "last" name in English but in Latin is a cognomen, originally a nickname but later identifying your family within the clan.

Flavian also describes the dynasty he established.  After a ten-year reign, he was succeeded by his son Titus, who had also taken over the destruction of Jerusalem when his dad got involved in bigger stuff, and also was then the first emperor to be succeeded by a biological heir.

Among his reforms was the re-institution of vectigal urinae, yup, a urine tax, not for taking a leak but for buying urine!  Huh?  Well, public toilets also were a collection place for pots to piss in from lower classes, and the urine was used for its ammonia content in tanning and laundering.  Yes, laundering.  There's a great story Suetonius records that when his dad re-instituted the tax his son Titus said "Dad, that's just gross" (or words to that effect in Latin) whereupon Vespasian held up a coin and asked Titus if that seemed gross, and when Titus said No, Vespasian said pecunia non olet, money doesn't stink.  The phrase is still used to distinguish money from its source, and I think the term for a public toilet in French and Italian is a Vespasian; why Spanish did not get this I do not know!  Marx himself in Das Kapital uses the phrase to identify the phenomenon that from money itself one cannot tell how the person with money got it or from what trade it came.

Vespasian was all for the Empire.  We saw that the huge transition from a Republic to an Empire meant Rome was discarding some essential Roman ideas and principles, and the Empire was thus quite un-Roman.  So, by the time Rome defined the Roman Catholic Church by imperial decree and made it the state religion in 380 (Cunctos populos) the state church was quite in line with the distinctly un-Roman characteristics of the Empire.  Its further development after the Empire faded and the "Holy" one came about was also quite in line with that, and even now this former state church retains the nature of the state church though the state is gone.  In short, the Catholic Church is in no way the catholic church.

Third Temple?

Vespasian is remembered for his role in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, though his son Titus finished the job, but, he should also be remembered for his role allowing the creation of a form of Judaism that could survive the destruction and is the form in which we know Judaism now, so it's not so ironic after all that Josephus thought highly of him.

As the destruction neared, everyone understood that this would end everything if it happened.  There wouldn't even be a "captivity" somewhere.  So, a Pharisee named Yohanan ben Zakkai tried hard to get the Jewish side to stand down, and when they wouldn't, he arranged a secret meeting with Vespasian to save what he could from the now inevitable destruction.  He asked Vespasian only for sparing the town of Yavne (Jamnia) and its teachers, as well as Gamaliel's descendants and a physician to attend a Rabbi Zadok who had been fasting 40 years that things might not end this way.

Zadok is an interesting name for a rabbi.  Zadok is the name of the high priest of the First Temple of Solomon and David and from whom the priestly party in the Second Temple, the Sadducees, were named and claimed legitimacy, and who accepted only the Torah (first five books of anyone's Bible, the books of Moses).  The teachers and scholars in local synagogues, the rabbis, had no Biblical office, accepted the Prophets and Other Writings as well as oral tradition and the ability to make further rulings as necessary, and weren't so sure a Temple built under foreign authority was all that legitimate.  These are the Pharisees, which means "ones set apart", as in for teaching and study. 

Vespasian granted his request.  Upon which, Yohanan told him he would be emperor.  Yohanan saw Rome as the fourth of the four world powers prophesied in Daniel 7:23, and saw Vespasian as fulfilling the prediction of Isaias 10:34 that the holy house would fall into the hands of a king.  About three days later, word arrived that Vitellius, the current emperor, was dead and the Senate had named Vespasian emperor.  Vespasian had never supported Vitellius in his overthrow of Otho, the previous emperor, who committed suicide when he lost, and Vespasian's forces defeated Vitellius' forces and killed him, whereupon the Senate proclaimed Vespasian emperor 21 December 69, though communications being what they were at the time, it would be some time before he knew.  That's why Vespasian left for Rome and the actual destruction was carried out under Titus, his son.

The school and centre at Jamnia has enormous ongoing influence.  With the Temple, priesthood and sacrifices gone, the religion revealed by God in the Hebrew Bible was now impossible to do, so what do we do?  Jamnia, be it an actual council or a centre of activity, answered this challenge, and the answer turned the Judaism of the Pharisees into the rabbinical Judaism we have now.

Yohanan issued nine edicts which modified the observance of observances commanded in Torah so they could be done outside Jerusalem and the Temple and its priests, which were now destroyed.  The gathered rabbis also instituted an observance called Tisha B'Av (the ninth of Av, which falls between mid-July to mid-August in the now-standard Gregorian calendar), patterned after Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) with a complete fast and four other prohibitions, and the Book of Lamentations, composed after the destruction of the first Temple and attributed to Jeremias, though the Bible itself is not clear on that.  Regardless, its use laments the destruction of both Temples, which happened on the same day, the ninth of Av, and other calamities that later befell the Jews on or around that day are often added too now.

Lamentations is an extraordinary book.  It both accepts that the destruction was a just response by God to the sins and faithlessness of the people, and notes that maybe the punishment could have been not so harsh.  It accepts that God has been gracious in the past, and notes that this does not guarantee he will be gracious now or in the future.  It accepts that this may mean that God has rejected his people, but hopes that based on the past he will be gracious again.  The church uses it too, as part of a night service called Tenebrae, which existed from at least C9 until early in my lifetime, when in 1955 Pope Pius XII changed Holy Week services into what they are now.  Tenebrae as held now in some churches on Good Friday is loosely based on the original Tenebrae but does not use Lamentations.  (Maybe I can talk my pastor into it one of these days, although a traditional Lutheran Tenebrae on Good Friday evening with the Seven Last Words or a Passion reading is the most gripping service we have so I'll be quite happy if we stick with that.)

The most far-reaching of all of Yohanan's work is this:  what is to replace the sacrifices that bind Man to God now that the place and people to perform them are gone?  Based on Osee, oh sorry, Hosea (the name means "salvation") 6:6, which is, "For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings", he concluded and persuaded the others to conclude that our mitzvoth (prayer and good deeds, especially the 613 commands of the Law of Moses in Torah), replace the sacrifices going forward until such time as the Temple is restored, the Third Temple. 

Now.

So here we are, now.  Is there gonna be a Third Temple?  Depends on who you ask.

Orthodox Jews say yes and pray for it daily.  Orthodox?  What's that?  While all Judaism since the destruction of the second Temple comes from Yochanan et al. at Jamnia, in mid-C19 Germany a movement coalesced around Abraham Geiger (1810-1874) called Reform Judaism, which rejected traditional rabbinic Judaism as really the product of exclusion, a ghetto mentality, incompatible with modern life, but did not see it as a rejection but reclaiming the ongoing spirit of rabbinic Judaism from its shell, much as Ezra and the 120 Men of the Great Assembly had done.  Each synagogue was a temple, not just one in Jerusalem, so there is no need to restore it or the sacrifices which reflect a primitive time out of which we have grown.  A middle ground between the two emerged in Germany around Zecharias Frankel (1801-1875) known as Conservative Judaism, and its position on the Temple and sacrifices is typical: yes to rebuilding the Temple, no to the sacrifices and references to sacrifice are removed from the Amidah and other prayers.  Both of these movements are now primarily found in the United States, where many Jews now view being Jewish as more a social and ethnic thing and among those who have a formal affiliation Reform is the biggest.

On top of that, even if the Temple is to be rebuilt, there's a big problem.  The space is taken.  Right on top of the site of both temples is the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine begun by the fifth Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik (646-705).  While the motives behind building it are disputed by historians, its significance is clear:  it's from this site Muhammad's "Night Journey" around 620 through the heavens is held to have happened, beginning with the silver domed al-Aqsa mosque next to it, which is the third holiest site to Muslims of any kind.  All indications are, it ain't going anywhere anytime soon.

Finally, there's another option as to the current significance of the Temple and its sacrifices.  What if the third temple, so to speak, has already happened?  What if the full and final sacrifice has already been offered?  What if that's why there is no reason to mourn the Temple, what it was there for has been fulfilled?  What if that answers the questions of Lamentations, yes we are justly rejected by God for our faithlessness but yes, he will be merciful again, this time to the extent of paying the price himself, becoming incarnate as a human in Jesus of Nazareth to be priest, sacrifice, temple and all?  What if we are just like the lame beggar in Acts 3, who was put by one of the Temple gates to beg, and encounters Peter and John on their way in for Minha (afternoon service)?

Peter, John, the Temple and Jesus are physically gone.  Being a beggar is the same.  He couldn't go to where God was, so God came to where he was.  It's still like that.  We can't go to where he is, so he comes to where we are, priest, sacrifice, Temple and all, as the Office of Holy Ministry rightly preaches the Word and rightly administers the Sacraments of Baptism into his death and Communion in his Body and Blood given for our salvation.

Wir sein Pettler (modern German: Wir sind Bettler).  Hoc est verum.

We are beggars.  This is true. 

Augustine and Happy Birthday, Western Catholic Church. 6 September 2023.

Huh?

Nah, 6 September is not the birthday of the Catholic Church.  What happened on 6 September 394 is the Eastern Roman Emperor Theodosius I defeated the Western Roman Emperor Eugenius at the conclusion of the two-day Battle of The Frigidus.

Judas H Priest, where and what in the hell is the Frigidus, never heard of it and why should I have heard of it, or care to hear of it?  Because though nobody ever hears about it these days it changed the entire course of history after it, that's why.  Here's the deal.

What's a Frigidus and Why the Battle. 

OK, The Frigidus is a river.  The Latin name means "cold" as its English descendant "frigid" suggests. It is in modern northeastern Italy and Slovenia and is now called the Vipacco in Italian and the Vipava in Slovene, and of course I gotta tell ya it is called the Wipbach in modern German, or, as b and p get sort of interchangeable in German sometimes, the Wippach.

So why was there a battle there and why should I care to know? Goes like this. On 27 February 380, the Eastern Roman Emperor Flavius Theodosius Augustus, and his two Western Roman Emperor counterparts, Flavius Gratianus Augustus (Gratian) and Flavius Valentinianus Augustus (Valentianin II), (the two were senior and junior Augustus, respectively, more or less co-emperors) jointly issued the Edict of Thessalonica.  The edict is also known by its Latin name, Cunctos populos, which means "those people" (plural accusative case).  Latin and other languages typically use the first word or two of a document as its title name.

This edict did not, contra the usual summary, make Christianity the official religion.  Christianity was not, contra another summary often heard, some unified happy whole, identified by the word "Christianity", not divided as it is now, whose happiness and unity we should or could recover now.  From the start there were many versions of what "Christianity" is, there was no "traditional" Christianity.  What the Edict did was make one of the versions the state religion.  That version is called "Nicene Christianity", from the Council of Nicaea, called and presided over by Emperor Constantine (the "Great"), though he was not Christian at the time, in 325 AD to define what is now traditional Trinitarian Christianity from the various other contenders for what is Christianity, principally the Arians, but also the Novatians, the Macedonians, the Anomoeans and others.

The Edict made Nicene Christianity the official state religion which was to be universal, or catholic, in the Roman Empire overall, and it required that all subjects of the Empire must hold this faith as delivered to Rome and preserved by then-current Pope Damasus I and then-current Bishop of Alexandria Peter, and it declared that these alone shall be called "Catholic Christians", the universal faith of the Empire, and all others, being truly demented and insane (vero dementes vesanosque, in the words of the edict in case you thought I'm making stuff up) are thus heretics and not even churches, subject to such punishment as God and the Empire should choose to visit upon them (divina primum vindicta, post etiam motus nostri, quem ex caelesti arbitro sumpserimus, ultione plectendos, in the words of the edict in case you thought I'm making this up).

The council didn't settle things.  Constantine himself, not being a member of any version, was tolerant and taken aback by the continuing controversy, wondered if maybe the council got it wrong, and was finally baptised on his deathbed by a "bishop" sympathetic to the Arians (Eusebius of Nicomedia).  His son and successor Constantius II was openly sympathetic to the Arians, and his successor Julian wasn't sympathetic to any version of Christianity and wanted to get back to traditional Graeco-Roman religion, for which he's sometimes called "Julian the Apostate".  Julian's successor Jovian only lasted eight months and though Christian didn't push one version of that over another, and his successor, Valens, was an Arian Christian!

Valens died in the disastrous Battle of Adrianople (in modern northwestern Turkey) against the Goths on 9 August 378, which marked the beginning of the end for the Western empire and also of Arian influence in the Eastern empire.  So when Gratian (remember him above?) asked Theodosius, who was Trinitarian and from Hispania (modern Spain and Portugal) to take over the army in the East, this effectively made him Eastern emperor succeeding Valens, on 19 January 379, and things were anything but settled, politically or religiously.  The year after the edict, 381, Theodosius convened another council, the First Council of Constantinople, to settle things, at least the religious ones.  Notice how it's emperors, not church types, convening church conventions?

So who are Damasus and Peter?  We'll meet Damasus in the post later this month on Jerome, but in this context suffice it to know that he was Bishop of Rome from 1 October 366 to 11 December 384.  OK, nice to know, but why does it matter?  Here's why.  In those days previously, popes were elected locally by the clergy and laity, but now they had to be confirmed by the Emperor.  The Emperor Constantius II had sent the previous pope Liberius into exile for not sharing his sympathetic view of the Arians, and when Liberius died 24 September 366, two different popes were elected in two separate elections.  The deacons of the church and the plebian class (regular people) elected Liberius' deacon Ursinus, but the patricians, the wealthy upper class, elected Damasus.  Mob violence ensued, including deaths and massacres by Damasus' faction of Ursinus' faction, and the city authorities had to restore order.  Which they did, on the side of Damasus, since the patricians had bought Imperial support, and he was confirmed pope 1 October 366, and exonerated of charges of murder.  And also adultery.  His dalliance with wealthy women had earned him the nickname auriscalpius matronarum, the ladies' ear scratcher.  How's that for "apostolic succession", just what you'd expect from the conservator of the true faith, right?

Peter was Peter II, the 21st patriarch of Alexandria, a student of St Athanasius (we'll meet him again below), a major opponent of Arian Christianity, who had been exiled by the local prefect on orders from Emperor Valens (an Arian) and went to Rome where Damasus supported him until he could return to Alexandria in 373.

Cunctos populos refers to Damasus as pontiff (pontifex) but to Peter as bishop (episcopus).  Why is that significant?  "Pontiff" comes from pontifex, which means bridge builder.  Originally, a pontifex was a high religious official in the Collegium pontificum, which included the Vestal Virgins charged with maintaining the fire in the Temple of Vesta believed to be essential to Rome's survival, and the highest ranking of them was the pontifex maximus.  As the Republic declined this office became more and more political and in the Empire was held by the Emperor.  The last to use it was Gratian, one of the signatories to the Edict, and after he renounced it pontifex became associated with Bishop and pontifex maximus with the Bishop of Rome, and still is to-day.  The use of pontifex in the Edict only wrt to Damasus and Peter as epicopus, since any episcopus is a pontifex, indicates pontifex maximus is intended.

Before we continue this part of the story, we need to stop this part here around 380 to introduce the other part, namely Augustine.  Before that though, four ironies that result from this part.  1) The Council of Nicaea and the First Council of Constantinople are often called the first "oecumenical" councils, but the word does not mean what we mean now; it does not mean all the various Christian churches, but rather, drawn from all the Roman Empire.  2) The "Nicene Creed" used in most current Christian churches is not the Nicene Creed, as in the creed from that council, but rather the revision and expansion of that creed at the First Council of Constantinople, and more exactly not even that but liturgical versions of it, not the conciliar statement itself.  3) The liturgical versions changed the statement of the assembled councils, "we believe", to "I believe" reflecting its non-conciliar liturgical use as an individual statement of faith stated collectively, which is why recent attempts to revert liturgically to the conciliar use are invalid.  4) We get the word creed from the incipit (first word) of the Latin liturgical version, credo, I believe.

So, 27 February 380 is the birthday of the "Catholic Church", as distinct from the catholic church.  The Eastern version took hold earlier but it was a little more unsettled in the Western Empire, and it took 14 years for resistance to this in the Western Empire to be crushed militarily.  That's what happened 6 September 394, so, though the Catholic Church has its birthday with the issue of Cuntos populos on 27 February 380, 6 September 394 is a sort of Western birthday, since that is when resistance to it in the Western Empire was crushed by military power from the Eastern Empire.  And it's no co-incidence at all that this was at the hands of Theodosius, who would be the last Emperor both East and West.

And all this fits right in with St Augustine, whose feast is 28 August, who in 380 (Cunctos populos) was a pagan and a professor in Carthage, and in 394 (The Battle of The Frigidus) was about to be named Bishop of Hippo in the new state church.

A Renowned Professor Get Caught Up In This.

Augustine was a Roman citizen, from what are now called Berbers, and was teaching in Carthage in 380, seven years away from being baptised by the state bishop, Ambrose, of the state church in the state's Western capital by then, Milan. Diocletian, the last emperor of an undivided Roman Empire, had made Milan, then called Mediolanum, the Western capitol in 293 and Nicomedia, now Izmit Turkey, the Eastern capitol in 286, and called his new provincial units diocese, after himself. Constantine moved the Eastern capitol to nearby Byzantium, renamed it Constantinople, which is now Istanbul Turkey.  You get to name stuff after yourself when you're really powerful.

The Roman Senate, still in Rome, was not shall we say comfortable with this new state religion in the two new capitals of the Empire, and lots of academic disputes and apologetics on both sides went back and forth, but no violence. During this unsettled time Augustine gets appointed to the most prestigious professorship in his world, at the Western capitol Milan in 384, and is all caught up in the swirling controversy between the old religion and classic philosophy and the new state church.

He also gets caught up in his mother Monica's designs for his career. Now with a prestigious academic position, mom says his longstanding relationship with a woman he never names but called "the one", of some 14 years complete with son, called Adeodatus, meaning "given by God", hasta go. So he caves and sends her away, she saying she will never be with another man, he finding a new concubine to tide him over until the proper social marriage his mom, "Saint" Monica, arranges with a then-11 year old girl (yeah, really) can happen.

And about concubines. Ain't what you think. A concubine in ancient Rome was simply a wife that Roman law forbade you to marry due to your or her social class. These marriages denied legality by Imperial law were rather common, and the church didn't come down on them since it wasn't the couple's fault they weren't legally married. Something to keep in mind when "the one" gets called concubine in the modern sense, their relationship gets passed off as merely lustful and their son whom they named Gift of God passed off as "illegitimate".

Take, Read -- This Christian Bestseller!

No wonder the dude was confused! His whole world is swirling in unsettled controversy and mom is running his life like a beauty pageant mom. And then, as he's all upset about his life, he has this really weird experience where he hears a kid's voice saying "Take, read" (the famous tolle, lege). Now what he was told to take and read you won't likely find in your local Christian bookstore, but was among the most widely read books, first in the Imperial Christian state church and then through the Middle Ages. It's a Life of St Anthony of the Desert, written by St Athanasius about 360 in Greek, but best known in a Latin translation, Vita Antonii, made about ten or so years later by Evagrius, who was, or was not, depending on whose side you are, the true "bishop" of Antioch 388-392.

Hoo-boy, old Tony. He was a wealthy Egyptian who became Christian at about age 34, so far so good, sold everything and took up with a local hermit. Tony in NO way was the "Founder of Monasticism", as religious hermits of various religions were common on the outskirts of cities; Philo the Jewish-Egyptian writer mentions them all, sharing the Platonic idea of having to get out of the world to get into an ideal. Pure Platonist Idealism. Sure glad Jesus didn't do that or let his Apostles do it either when they wanted to, but went back to Jerusalem where real life had things for them to do.

But old Tony went the other direction, and left even the outskirts for the desert itself to get away from it all to get into it all. But the crowds followed -- everybody loves an exotic "holy man" -- and Tony took on the more advanced cases of this mania and left the rest to his associates, sort of a Christian Oracle of Delphi, which "guidance" was later variously collected as the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, or Apophthegmata, if you want a word to impress somebody sometime.

The Famous Professor Converts.

Anyhoo, Gus reads this in 386, and on the Easter Vigil of 387, Ambrose baptises Gus and his son. The next year, 388, he determines to return home to North Africa. Which he did, but along the way both his mother and his son died, so he arrives alone in the world, and understandably unsure of himself once again. Next he sells the family stuff and gives the money away, except the house which he turns into a sort of lay monastery. I guess that's what you do when you read about dudes in the desert, rather than go through the grief and live on in the world of people. Then he gets ordained presbyter or "priest" in 391 in Hippo, now Annaba, Algeria.

This mostly academic and political controversy, in which Gus' unsettled life had its context, and of which it is typical, changed the next year when Western Emperor Valentinian II was found hanged in his home on 16 May 392. His half brother and co-Emperor Gratian was already dead, killed 25 August 383 in Lyon France by forces of Roman generals who thought he was losing his grip. The official word was Valentinian was a suicide, but his wife and others thought he was done in by his military power behind the throne, a Frank named Arbogastes.  The Imperial Milan court church's bishop, Ambrose, left the question open, suicide being a no-no for a Christian Emperor held up as a hero.

A Digression, but a Damned Important One.

What's a Frank? Not a hot dog, that comes from Frankfurter, and originally meant Frankfurter Würstchen, which means "little sausages from Frankfurt" served on a bun. They originated in the 13th Century and became the peoples' food for coronations of the Holy Roman Emperor starting with Maximilian II, a Habsburg and nephew of Emperor Karl V, he to whom the Augsburg Confession was presented, on 25 July 1564. About 1800 or so, a butcher named Johann Georg Lahner from Coburg, Bavaria, introduced the Frankfurter Würstchen to Vienna. Now Vienna had its own sausages, which were a mixture of pork and beef called Wiener, from Wien, which is "Vienna" in German. Lahner modified his product by mixing the original pork with beef like the Viennese and calling the result simply a Frankfurter. German immigrants brought the product to the US at Coney Island, and at St Louis where the German American owner, Chris von der Ahe, of the St Louis Brown Stockings, now the Cardinals, started selling them at baseball games.  So there -- the inter-relation of hot dogs, Lutheranism, St Louis and the Cards! Toldya it was important! The name got shortened to "Frank", they're hot, and the "dog" thing came from rumours that the makers actually used dog meat. Myself, I like kosher beef hot dogs, not at all the original!

Oh yeah, almost forgot, what's a Frank?  The name comes from the Roman name gens Francorum for these Germanic barbarians who threw their axes (the franks), whose own ethnic history says they were Trojans under Priam who ended up on the Rhein, oh sorry, Rhine, after the fall of Troy in Homeric times.  Which is exactly the ethnic history Augustus tried to blend into Roman understanding at the beginning of the Empire by having Virgil write the Aeneid!

Back To the Story.

On 22 August 392, Arbogastes, who being a Frank and not Roman could not be Emperor, names a Roman Christian named Eugenius the Western Emperor. Eugenius though Christian was sympathetic to traditional Roman religion and started replacing Western officials sympathetic to the Eastern Empire. The Eastern Empire put off recognition of the new Western regime, and finally in January of 392 Theodosius declared his two-year-old son Honorius as Western Emperor and begins preparing an invasion of the Western Empire, which began in May 394 and concluded in the victory at The Frigidus 6 September 394. Arbogastes commits suicide and Eugenius is beheaded by the Catholic forces of Theodosius.

The new Imperial state Catholic Church was on a real roll.  It had destroyed the Temple of Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi in 390, the Serapeum and Great Library in Alexandria in 391, the year Augustine was ordained a priest in the official church, then had ended the two great rituals of ancient Greece, the Eleusinian Mysteries in 392 and the Olympic Games after the ones in 393.  Then later in the same year, 394, as the Battle of the Frigidus, it puts out the fire considered essential to Rome's survival at the Temple of Vesta, and disbands the women who were personally selected by the pontifex maximus, when that meant the head of the traditional Roman religion rather than the head of the new state Catholic religion.

The next year, 395, Augustine becomes religious head, which is called bishop, of the Roman Imperial administrative unit called a diocese, in Hippo. Guess Gus knew on which side his bread is buttered.

It All Comes To-gether, It All Falls Apart.

The Battle of The Frigidus effectively ended any Western resistance to the new state church. But those old Roman families knew a thing or two about survival and before long they were papal families, eventually supplying Pope Gregory, made Pope 3 September 590, who ruled the state church like a real Roman indeed. This enormous civil war though left the Western Empire greatly weakened, and it collapsed a thousand years before the Eastern Empire did, with the Visigoths sacking Rome in 410. So Augustine, by then 56 and still Bishop of Hippo, writes more Platonism to assure the shocked Romans that though the joint was a mess it was not the fault of the new state Roman Imperial religion having replaced the traditional Roman religion thirty years before and its subsequent eradication of it, the real and ideal City of God was the real winner.

Well, back here in reality the "City of God", Rome, was first sacked by the Gauls in 387 BC, and after the 410 sack by the Visigoths, got sacked again by the Vandals in 455, but Gus died at 75 on 28 August 430 so he missed it. And Rome would be sacked again by the Ostrogoths in 546, and again by the Arabs in 846, and again by the Normans in 1084, and last by soldiers of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, but not on his orders, in 1527.  And you know what Gus, the ascendancy of the new state religion DID have a lot to do with the Fall of Rome.  How so?  Because the new state religion the Catholic Church was as false to the catholic church of Christ as the Roman Empire had been false to the Roman Republic.  The civic side of this transition is covered in our post for 21 April, the Founding of the City.

Anyway, that's the famous book The City of God, which is actually only the first part of its title, which is On The City Of God Against The Pagans (OK it's De civitate Dei contra Paganos, I translated). "Pagan" is another term reinvented by the new church. It once meant someone from the country, or a civilian, but with the Imperial Catholic Church firmly in the cities, and their faithful thinking they were a church militant, soldiers of Christ, which, the state military having kicked the crap out of the former religion for the state church, I guess kind of fits, and "pagan" came to mean someone adhering to the old religion which hung on more in the countryside rather than just someone from the sticks.

For all his Platonic faults and his immersion in social-political turmoil and change of his time, Augustine was aware that six twenty-four hour periods is not even the "literal" reading of Genesis.  More on that in a later post this month.  Busy month, September.

The Aftermath.

That Platonic idealism guided and fuelled the West as it struggled through centuries of chaos and tried to reinvent its former glory with the Holy Roman Empire, which, as has been famously remarked, was not holy, not Roman, and not much of an empire. Hell, it was Frankish, the new Romans! Old Arbogastes would have liked that! And it by God had the Roman state Catholic Church with popes and bishops and diocese and all the Platonism reinvented as Christianity you can shake a stick at, complete with justification as the City of God.

Which wholesale hijacking of the catholic church as the Catholic Church, one might say its Babylonian Captivity, lasted for a thousand years. Then a poor guy in a screwed up world with a screwed up life, and a barbarian to boot, a German named Martin Luther from outside the old Roman boundaries, seeks solace in a religious order modelling itself after Augustine's Platonic idealism turned into Christian monastic asceticism, and discovers none of this crap is gonna save you but simply faith in the Son sent by God to be the sacrifice which takes away our sins, just like Scripture, which is supposed to be the church's book, says.

And so begins the disentanglement of the catholic church from the Catholic Church of the Roman and Holy Roman Empires. They tried like hell to make the catholic church, the pillar and ground of truth, the bride of Christ, into the Whore of Babylon. The vestiges of Theodosius' state Imperial Catholic Church continue in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. That's bad enough, but after the Lutheran reformation began, opposite but equally false reactions to the Babylonian Captivity arose, and several "second" or "another" reformations (Nadere Reformatie), took the "Reformation" well beyond anything about the Lutheran Reformation, and continue on in later church bodies.  On top of which, some Lutheran churches became as obscenely an extension of the state as the "Catholic Church" had been. 

The guideline of the Lutheran reformation was, if it contradicts Scripture it must go but what doesn't is retained, since the power of the Gospel and Word and Sacrament is such that not even the Roman Empire could entirely keep it out. The Babylonian Captivity was a captivity, not an extinction.  But with these later guys the guideline became, if it ain't in Scripture it goes -- depending on whose version of what is in Scripture one buys -- thus losing his Divine Service of his body and blood for our salvation, and in some cases even Baptism as well.

And lately all of these anachronisms, the state churches that survived their original states, seem intoxicated with a Rousseau-like Romantic fiction, which is some sort of resurrection of an imagined pure church of the Apostles and Church Fathers, rediscovered by their scholarship of course, a noble church, sort of an ecclesiastical version of Rousseau's "noble savage".  It was precisely this against which Pope Pius XII warned in 1947 in Mediator Dei, which he called an exaggerated and senseless antiquarianism and has since been called liturgical archaeology.  And it must be said some of these anachronisms have the word "Lutheran" in their names. Thus the equal but opposite errors of the old state church and of the later Reformers, equally condemned in the Lutheran Confessions, continue as well.

Conclusion.

But while all of this rages about us, and even infects the Lutheran Reformation, thanks be to God for the Lutheran Reformation and its confession of the true teaching of Scripture, the book that is the church's own measure and norm, while yet retaining what does not contradict it.  Even if that is found in a minority of churches with "Lutheran" in their names.

Arminius, Herman the German, Us and Now. (8 September 2023)

As we commemorate a world changing even that happened in September 2001, we might learn something from a world changing even that happened in September 8-11 9AD.  And you gotta wonder why no-one ever said there's an inherent contradiction between being so big on the Romans as I am (the Republic, not the Empire nor the Church) and having an image of the Hermann Heights Monument in New Ulm MN, which is a copy of the Hermannsdenkmal in Germany, as a cover photo on my former blog as I did.  Well actually it's no wonder, which we'll explain later.  The wonder is, this monument commemorates one of the most decisive events in world history that changed all subsequent history to the present, but now, hardly anyone knows about it, and there's reasons for that.

Huh?  What does that even mean?  OK let's start with Who's Hermann. 

Who's Hermann?,

Hermann is a name given, possibly first by Martin Luther, to a guy named Arminius. Great, who's Arminius?  Arminius is the Latin name of a hostage from a Germanic tribe called the Cherusci, who lived right around present-day Hannover.  Hermann was the son of the tribal chief Segimerus (in Latin, in German it's Segimer).  He was taken hostage, raised in Rome, given military training, made a Roman citizen, and made a member of the ordo equester, the order of knights.  This is not knights in the European mediaeval sense, but a property-based class below the patricians.  Patricians are so-named as the descendants of the patres, the founding fathers and families of Rome.  The ordo equester was originally based on the ability to provide men and horses for military service, so that's how horses come in, and also where we get the word equestrian.  In Arminius' time the ordo equester was just below the ordo senatorius, the order of Senators and their families.  Arminius was about eighteen when Jesus was born in another part of the Roman Empire.

Arminius turned against Rome and united various Germanic tribes against Roman direct rule, and sometime in September 9 A.D. inflicted arguably the worst defeat ever suffered by Rome in its entire history.  In German this is called die Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald. Holy crap, what's a schlacht, what's a wald, and what's this Teutoburger thing, some kind of hamburger at Five Guys?  OK, die Schlacht is a battle, der Wald is a forest or woods, and Teutoburger is the name of the forest.  However, the German name only dates from 1875, centuries after it happened, and the reasons for that reflect not so much the ancient battle but its continuing influence even up to the present time.  Yet that influence, though there, is hardly known now, and there's reasons for that.  Which is why I'm posting about it.  Here's the deal.

Why the Battle Was a Big Deal Then.

The Latin name for this event comes from when it happened.  It's called clades variana, the Varian Disaster, after Publius Quinctilius Varus, the losing general.  Arminius lured his former ally into a trap, and defeated three Roman legions (Legions XVII, XVIII and XIX) plus six cohorts of associated non-citizen auxiliary troops and three squadrons of non-citizen cavalry (alae), with a total Roman loss of somewhere between 15 to 20K men.  It was so bad that as it was ending Varus, following custom, committed suicide by falling on his sword, as did a number of his sub-commanders.  The rest were killed, including his second in command, the Legate Numonius Vala, who tried to run away. The others were either killed in action, or, Tacitus records, later cooked alive in native German religious rituals, and many captured soldiers were made slaves.  Arminius had Varus' head cut off and sent it to another German king, Maroboduus of the Marcomanni, to propose an alliance, but that king stayed out of it and sent the severed head to Rome for disposition.  Topping it all off, in what the Romans considered a great shame and humiliation, each legion had its aquila, eagle standard, captured.

No Roman account tries to minimise the extent of the loss.  Bear in mind that in 9 AD the Roman Empire was just 36 years old, under its first emperor, Caesar Augustus, and eager to establish itself over the former Roman Republic, for which some still held sympathy, so it was not in any mood to sustain catastrophic defeats.  Suetonius records in The Lives of the Caesars, sometimes called The Twelve Caesars, original Latin title De vita caesarum (On the Life of the Caesars), that Caesar Augustus was so upset at the magnitude of the loss that he repeatedly banged his head on the wall shouting Quintilius Varus gimme back the legions (well, he actually said Quintili Vare legiones redde, I translated).

OK so where did this happen exactly?  The precise location of the battle was not known for centuries and is still not settled, and, the whole engagement happened in several places over several days, but in general it was just south and east of Hannover, Arminius' tribe's area, which is east of the Rhine and north of the Danube, or Rhein and Donau in German; or Rhenus and Danubius in Latin.  In present-day Germany, it's in the states of Nordrhein-Westfalen (North Rhine-Westphalia), and Niedersachsen (Neddersassen in the local dialect), Lower Saxony, both created 23 August 1946 by the British military administration of their occupation zone following World War Two.

After the clades variana, from 14 - 16 AD under Tiberius, who succeeded his stepdad Augustus as Emperor, Roman forces under the command of Tiberius' nephew Germanicus inflicted some severe but local losses on the Germans, including recovery of two of the three lost eagle standards.  That's how Germanicus got the name by which he is known; it's a victory title (that's called an agnomen btw) conferred by Rome.  With this, Arminius and his Germanic allies were defeated and honour recovered, but that didn't restore things, and the ongoing effects have a lot to do with what happened next.  Which is, Tiberius ordered operations to cease; he was satisfied with the result and thought that anything to be gained from further expansion frankly was just not worth what it would take to gain it.  That changed everything.  Details in the next section.

After their impressive victory, the unruly Germans descended into internecine war.  Tacitus records that a plot to poison Arminius by Germanic rivals was proposed to Tiberius but he rejected it, saying Rome does not avenge itself by secret plots but by open arms.  And guess what, in 21 AD, just 12 years after the battle, Arminius was killed by rivals in his own tribe who thought him too powerful. The Romans continued to hold him in high regard and respect, as Tacitus and others record, as one who had the skill to beat them even at the height of their power.  Typically Roman.

The third and last eagle standard (aquila) was recovered in 41 AD by forces under the command of Publius Gabinius, by which time Claudius, Germanicus' brother, was emperor.  Yes, the Claudius of the famous historical novel "I, Claudius" by Robert Graves.

Why the Battle Was a Big Deal Later. 

So how did Rome's decision to never again attempt direct rule of Germania, though it may make treaties and arrangements with client kings, shape the course of all subsequent European history and American too?  How does that happen?  And how does it happen that hardly anyone will hear of it in general education?  Here's the deal on that.  

The impressive stand against Rome forever determined the culture of subsequent Europe.  Rome's decision that further expansion was just not worth it began a military boundary across continental Europe (which is to say, Europe) that would last 400 years, with the effect that Latin and Germanic cultures remained distinct.  To this day there is a palpable difference in the "feel" of those parts of Europe which were part of the Roman Empire and those that weren't, as those areas which Rome never directly ruled did not absorb Roman culture into their identity.

Had Rome expanded, here's how Europe would have become much different than it is.  Kind of like dominoes.  The rest of Europe would have been under direct Roman rule.  

-  So the German language would have evolved as another Romance language.  

-  Then later on in the Roman Empire, when it replaced traditional Roman religion by creating its state church the Catholic Church in 380 AD, that church, though present because by that time it was the only one, would have been much more secure in its presence with a more unified state and culture behind it, which in turn would not have allowed the conditions in which the Reformation happened.  

-  And thus the Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648, which devastated all of continental Europe to an extent not surpassed until WWII, and was between the Protestant of various kinds states of northern Europe and the Catholic ones in southern Europe, which they still are, though nominally, even now, would not have happened.  

-  And in turn the colonisation of the Americas would not have seen such intense rivalries to appropriate wealth to pay wartime debt.  Thus the "French and Indian War" that began in 1754 between the French and British over American colonies would not have happened.  

-  Which in turn would not have helped ignite and become part of the Seven Years' War, 1756-1763, which as Winston Churchill commented was the world's real first world war, as it was fought in Europe, both Americas, Africa, India and the Philippines.  That war did not change the various belligerent states per se (status quo ante bellum, status as before the war) but did produce a massive shift in alliances largely as a result of changes in colonial jurisdictions.  That shift in alliances brought about a complete change of the balance of power in Europe; Britain emerged as the world's superpower, Prussia emerged as the driving German power, a drive for independence emerged in the British American colonies, followed by France's decline and eventual internal revolution, and finally, the Thirty Years' War, fuelled a desire among Germans for a unified state (nothing like modern Germany existed before 1949), all of this evolving from Tiberius' decision in 16 AD not to pursue further expansion into Germania, and none of which would have happened without that decision. 

-   Which takes us back to Arminius.  

Arminius and his victory continued its influence in the Germanic sagas that formed a Germanic sense of identity.  Not in historical record but in literary sagas; Arminius is the basis for the character Sigurd in the Volsunga Saga and the Niebelungenlied.

By Luther's time (1483-1546), about 1500 years after the battle, the Roman Empire was long gone but its state church, the Roman Catholic Church, was not, and it continued as the state church in what understood itself as the restoration of the Roman empire, what is now, but was not then, called the Holy Roman Empire.  At the same time, Europe was experiencing a massive transformation.  The "Black Death", which was called the Great Plague at the time (1346 - 1353), had wiped out roughly half of Europe's and the Middle East's population.  Food prices and land values dropped and the demand for workers rose.  Also, beginning in Florence in the 14th Century (1300s) and extending to Venice, Genoa, Milan, Bologna, all cities within the ancient empire, and eventually to Rome itself, feudal society, which [ based on land and class, began giving way to a mercantile society, based on trade, capital, goods and services.  There being no explanation for the plague catastrophe, theories abounded, and there was an awareness of the emergence of a via moderna, a modern way, across the board, in society, theology and philosophy, art, science, everything.  Adding to this transformation was the arrival of scholars with classical Greek texts fleeing the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire to the Muslims on 29 May 1453.

Manuscripts long tucked away in monastic libraries were examined, and among many other discoveries, Tacitus' histories were found and with that recovery of information about Arminius.  Thus Luther found in Arminius a figure for a successful stand against Rome, this time not militarily or politically, but religiously, against the necessity of control by Rome's church of ultimately everything.

Later, Arminius also became an important figure in German opposition to French control, once again of the ability of Germans to stand against great empires, Roman or otherwise.  From 1792 through 1802, the French, who killed their royalty and had a revolution to establish Liberty, Equality, Fraternity but instead got a Reign of Terror then Napoleon, were at war with pretty much everyone else in Europe.  Not to mention within themselves.  Napoleon had ended the 1,000 year run of the "Holy Roman Empire", in which nothing like modern Germany existed, and with his final defeat in 1815, the battle and Hermann became a symbol for a concept of a united German people free of non-German control.

The Congress of Vienna (1815), much like the EU would do after WWII, attempted to establish a balance of power so that Europe would be at peace, but it did not result in a German nation.  The original monument was begun with an idea in 1834, the foundation stone was laid in 1838, the finished base was dedicated in 1841, but the 1848 German revolution did not result in a unified German state either and work (and money) stopped.  Prussia's victory over Austria in the Austro-Prussian War in 1866 rekindled the ideal, and the victory in the Franco-Prussian War (1870) brought even more enthusiasm for the ideal.  The completed monument was dedicated 16 August 1875, with Kaiser Wilhelm I, the first head of the German Empire, the first united German state ever, in attendance.  That's why the German name for Arminius' battle in 9 AD only dates from 1875.

Upon this completion a society for the aid of German immigrants began work on a replica, to be located in New Ulm, MN, which as the name indicates, was heavily German and not coincidentally the home of the society's head.  The cornerstone was laid in 1888, and was dedicated in 1897.

Part of the united Germany free of foreign control thing was not just latter-day "Romans" to be free of like the French and Austrians, but the Kulturkampf against the control of the Roman Catholic Church of university and church/state positions.  Thus Catholic Germans were not altogether on board, later joined by others.  On the 1,900th anniversary of the battle in 1909, there was a large event from 14-23 August, and during World War I the monument became a symbol for hoped-for eventual German victory.

After the defeat, in the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) it became a meeting place for those hoping for a restoration of the old order, and plain old tourism began as well.  With the Nazis, they used it somewhat, but turned it down as any official symbol, preferring to have their own events and monuments.  Quite in character, as much of the initial support for the Nazis was in the hopes of a successful restored Germany only to find the Nazis had a very different Germany in mind and despised the old order.  After World War II, insofar at it was promoted at all it was purely as a tourist attraction.

On the 2000th anniversary of the battle, 2009, the Germans, who will likely take 1000 years to recover, especially in their own minds, from the taint of the "1000-year Reich" (Tausendjähriges Reich), Hitler's vision of the endurance of his German state, the whole thing was downplayed.  Der Speigel reported that even in the deliberately small scale re-enactments, most of those participating wanted to play Romans, not Germans.  The battle or Hermann is barely mentioned in German schools.  Why?  Association with Hitler in particular and with nationalism in general, which it is feared could lead to someone like Hitler. The reality is, Hitler had little use for Arminius, and Arminius had nothing to do with what others later made of him.

Why the Battle Is a Big Deal Now and Going Forward. 

So we have choices.  As to Arminius himself, there is no contradiction in using the Herman the German monument on the old blog.  Arminius was a Roman.  Meaning, he was a Roman citizen, which takes no regard of ethnicity, race, national origin or anything else.  A citizen is a citizen.  That's where we got the idea.  Moreover, in Roman society he was made an eques, a member of the equites just under the senatorial class, and had a Roman education as well as military training.  Which shows that even successful opposition to Rome is Roman.

As to our choices.  We could continue doing what we are doing, which is either or both of 1) thinking ourselves more advanced and/or intelligent than those who came before us and since they did not experience life as we do now therefore we need not pay them much attention, and 2) suppress anything that does not fit or confirm our narrative or contradicts it, and/or rewrite it so it does.

This will work --  in the same way a self-fulfilling prophecy works.  As we follow part two it confirms part one, and so we fall in line with centuries and millennia who have done the same thing, quite unaware both that they did it and we are doing it, and quite unaware that there is not a modern narrative or meta-thought that one or another ancient Greek did not express and comes to us through the Romans, also quite unaware that we are doing the same thing with new labels and better technology, sure that our new labels and better technology make it something new, and last, quite unaware of what brought us to where we are now thus we misunderstand where we are and misidentify who we are, seeing none of this.  This is the course of most of our present educational, ecclesiastical and societal institutions.

Or, we could give up our box that we don't see is a box because we believe it to be not a box and beyond boxes, and learn from them.  Not to know what happened before one was born is to be forever a child.  Thus said a great figure of the Roman Republic (Cicero). It's a motto of this blog, and for good reason.  Those who would establish the Empire in place of the Republic in 27 BC and were in power in 9 AD had him proscribed (proscriptio) as an enemy of the state and executed him in 43 BC.  They had to.  Just as those who follow either or both of the paths away from the heritage given us by the Roman Republic must either ignore or falsify him and that heritage, our heritage.