Why do you think Christians had such a problem with idolatry?
Because they came from Judaism which states that one shouldn't gave any gods before me, hence all those temples to Zeus were problematic for the same reason as well that both and christians didn't sacrifice to the emperor as they did not and could not consider him define
A problem you seem to have outgrown, cuz here I am in Siena and all I see is idols of your Jesus and your Virgin Mary and your saints everywhere, but still.
For most christians is a clear difference between idolatry and iconoclasm having a painting on Jesus on a church is not the same bowing to a statue of hera.
The problem was not merely related to the worship of idols, it was a problem with the idea of Gods that performed functions in the material world that were represented in material forms that they were called to inhabit in the form of said idols.
If that was the case icons a mainstay of eastern Christianity and the many pre nicean portrays of Jesus wouldn't exist yet they do iconoclasm tendencies existed in early Christianity? Yes but they weren't popular .
Christians have a very long literary tradition of disdaining creation and many Christians have even speculated that it would be better if the creation had never happened to begin with. This is why Christians are so obsessed with excising various parts of human nature.
Name them because I can think of no church fathers that said it would have better if god never created in fact quite the opposite about what you said about nature is bad
John of Damascus says “Whenever any creature freely rebels and becomes disobedient to Him who made him, he has brought the evil upon himself. For evil is not some sort of a substance, nor yet a property of a substance, but an accident, that is to say, a deviation from the natural into the unnatural, which is just what sin is"
Sin was seen as divination from the natural order
And don’t try to argue for a second that the Christians did not burn the Ancient World to the ground in a wanton display of bloodlust
I will because it seems you get your idea based of the movie agora or the darkening age book, now did destruction like that occur? Yes was the ancient world burned to the ground bu displays of bloodlust? No
For one laws were issued to protect both ancient art and temples see
C.Th. 16.10.15 and
C.Th. 16.10.18
To quote lavans the archeology of late antique paganism
"As a result of recent work, it can be stated with confidence that temples were neither widely converted into churches nor widely demolished in Late Antiquity. …. In his Empire-wide study, Bayliss located only 43 cases [of desacralisation or active architectural destruction of temples] of which a mere 4 were archaeologically confirmed.” (Lavan,
“The End of the Temples: Toward a New Narrative?” in Lavan and Mulryan, p. xxiv) ... In regions such as Africa, Greece and Italy, temple preservation seems to have been a more prominent process than temple destruction"
so of the hundreds of temple around the the empire 43 were destroyed, most temples became ruins or destroyed not because of mobs ruining around because of neglect in the same manner some churches today are bulldozed simply put the decline of followers + the cost to maintain meant that later in to the middle ages people began to use them as construction material and or repurpose them .
this is what happens to many buildings in Rome well in to middle ages as the city declined they became ruins and people used them for construction material.
They only preserved what they thought they could use either to demonstrate how “silly” Paganism was or to frame the Ancients as “preparing the way” for Christianity. Less than 10% of Ancient Greek literature survives and probably around 1% of Latin, and the Christians have made a point over the last 1500 years of NOT TRANSLATING Ancient Greek pharmacological literature, even in the present.
If you bothered to read what I sent you know this a very simplistic view so since you don't want to read let me quote.
"there is actually no evidence of any such “systematic” or even sporadic but extensive attempt at extinguishing ancient learning. And if this had happened as Grayling claims, we would indeed have plenty of such evidence."
"What is actually surprising is not how little of this kind of material that was fairly incompatible with Christianity survives, but actually how much of it made it to our time. Even some of the pagan hymns written by the fervently anti-Christian Iamblican, Proclus, – whose mystical Academy in Athens Grayling laments – can be read today because they were preserved by Christians. And if works like this have survived to our time, they represent a fraction of what was actually preserved.
On the whole, therefore, pagan works were not the great threat to Christianity that polemicists like Grayling imagine. Even ones that were not compatible with Christian theology were often still preserved and studied and the rest were either broadly compatible – Plato minus the transmigration of souls, or Aristotle ignoring his eternal, uncreated cosmos, for example – or theologically neutral. After all, works of mathematics or natural philosophy were not exactly going to excite the alarm of even religious zealots.
Contrary to Grayling’s fantasies, schools and academies continued to operate across the Christian world both after Theodosius and after Justinian and, as Reynolds and Wilson state categorically, “there was in general no attempt to alter the school curriculum by banishing the classical authors” (p. 50). "
As for the Ancient Greek pharmacological literature this is wrong Brill's Companion to the Reception of Galen says galen was very influential in the byzantine empire so much so that to quote
"The late Byzantine period also evidenced the gradual replacement of traditional Greek pharmaceutical dosage forms with new ones"
Yes these people didn't translate pharmacological ancient Greek so much so it was used as the standard of pharmacology for centuries.
. Most of your scholars on Early Christianity know absolutely nothing about Ancient Pharmacology and so the numerous references to sexual and psychedelic rituals in the New Testament are completely lost on them
Like do you know them personally ? Modern scholarship knows well about ancient Greek and christian views on sexuality
Jesus was NOT a Rabbinical Jew, he wasn’t even dealing with Rabbinical Judaism as we understand it
Of course he wasn't rabbinical Judaism came as an evolution of second temple Judaism which Jesus and his apóstoles were .
. The closest thing we can pin him down to being was a Dionysian mystic of some sort, but he was by far absolutely NOT in the sphere of Rabbinical Judaism as we understand it and that was not even a thing at the time. If it was, the New Testament would not be littered with references to sex rituals and psychedelics being practiced IN JUDAEA. Your absolutely right that no scholar of Early Christianity takes this stuff seriously, but myself and a growing number of Pagans don’t really take THEM seriously.
Dude hellenized Jews existed the gospels using Greco roman ideals or representations like Jesus turning water into wine doesn't mean it wasn't Jewish given how the gospels talk about Jewish elements and purpose of GMatthew is to show Jesus was the Jewish messiah or how Paul again has to figth the Jewish christians In the early years to allow gentiles not to follow the law of Moses