23 Christian Apologists and Greek Gods

J.N. Bremmer & A. Erskine (eds), The Gods of Ancient Greece (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010) 442-464., 2010

J.N. Bremmer and A. Erskine (eds), The Gods of Ancient Greece, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, 1-18 (http://www.euppublishing.com/book/9780748683222?template=toc&), but note that this article has been updated and reprinted in my The World of Greek Religion and Mythology (2019)

This is the introduction to the first modern study of the gods of the ancient Greeks in antiquity. The contents of the book are: List of illustrations; Notes on Contributors; Abbreviations; Preface; Introduction: The Greek Gods in the Twentieth Century, Jan N. Bremmer; 1. What is a Greek God?, Albert Henrichs; Systematic Aspects: 2. Canonizing the Pantheon: the Dodekatheon in Greek Religion and its Origins, Ian Rutherford; 3. Gods in Greek Inscriptions: Some Methodological Questions, Fritz Graf; 4. Metamorphoses of Gods into Animals and Humans, Richard Buxton; 5. Sacrificing to the Gods: Ancient Evidence and Modern Interpretations, Stella Georgoudi; 6. Getting in Contact: Concepts of Human/Divine Encounter in Classical Greek Art, Anja Klöckner; 7. New Statues for Old Gods, Kenneth Lapatin; Individual Divinities and Heroes: 8. Zeus at Olympia, Judith M. Barringer; 9. Zeus in Aeschylus: the Factor of Monetisation, Richard Seaford; 10. Hephaistos Sweats or How to Construct an Ambivalent God, Jan N. Bremmer; 11. Transforming Artemis - From the Goddess of the Outdoors to City-Goddess, Ivana Petrovic; 12. Herakles between Gods and Heroes, Emma Stafford; 13. Identities of Gods and Heroes: Athenian Garden Sanctuaries and Gendered Rites of Passage, Claude Calame; Diachronic Aspects: 14. Early Greek Theology: God as Nature and Natural Gods, Simon Trépanier; 15. Gods in Early Greek Historiography, Robert L. Fowler; 16. Gods in Apulia, Tom H. Carpenter; 17. Lucian's Gods: Lucian's Understanding of the Divine, Matthew W. Dickie; 18. The Gods in the Greek Novel, Ken Dowden; 19. Reading Pausanias: Cults of the Gods and Representation of the Divine, Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge; 20. Kronos and the Titans as Powerful Ancestors: A Case Study of the Greek Gods in Later Magical Spells, Christopher A. Faraone; 21. Homo fictor deorum est: Envisioning the Divine in Late Antique Divinatory Spells, Sarah Iles Johnston; 22. The Gods in Later Orphism, Alberto Bernabé; 23. Christian Apologists and Greek Gods, Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta; 24. The Materiality of God's Image: Olympian Zeus and Ancient Christology, Christoph Auffarth; Historiography: 25. The Greek Gods in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century German and British Scholarship, Michael Konaris; Epilogue, Andrew Erskine; Index of names, subjects and important passages.

Journal of Early Christian History, 2020

According to the conventional construction of the religious history of the Roman Empire, the dense variety of Greek and Roman religions had ceased to exist sometime around the fourth to fifth centuries CE, during the so-called Constantinian Revolution. Certainly, at some point in Late Antiquity, there were no longer functioning cult centres for deities like Apollo, Dionysus, Isis, Cybele, and the like. However, far from indicating the triumphal supersession of Greek and Roman religions by Christianity, the evidence of religious history is more complex. Christianity/ies is, one can say, an epiphenomenon of processes of cultural shifts and demographic changes (helped along by the changes wrought by migrations and the emergence of diasporic religions as the main manifestation of cultic formations) that swept the circum-Mediterranean world. The "old religions," woven into the cultural fabric of inhabitants of the Mediterranean world as they were, did not suddenly cease to exist-the discourses, the practices, the iconographies, cultic performances continued to shape nascent Christian discourses and practices. This process was not an even one, it differed in pace and shape from one geographic locale to the other, and from one epoch to the other-therefore the plural, twilights. Hence one can say that Christianity was the big sponge that absorbed all the others (which does not exclude that from time to time there were indeed legislation and mob action aimed at destroying the vestiges of "pagan" cults). Thus, reading the evidence from outside the triumphalist framework characterising early Christian writers on the nature and fate of "paganism," one is left with the unavoidable impression, now strongly asserted in Late Antique scholarship, of the interpenetration of "paganism" and Christianity. Christianity was born as a syncretic phenomenon in a process of cultural bricolage. This has some implications, not only for how we conceived of the origins of Christianity, but also for how we conceive of religion as object of theoretical reflection. Twilights of Greek and Roman Religions: Afterlives and Transformations Gerhard van den Heever,

Late Antique Christians were very opposed to certain practices of Greco-Roman religions such as idolatry, the practice of blood sacrifice, and divination. Christian authors perceived these practices as manifestations of demons and the worship of false gods. Therefore, the Christian emperors Constantine (306-337) and Constantius II (337-361) forbade blood sacrifices - but their successor Julian (361-363), a follower of paganism, reintroduced them. In fact, pagan texts suggest that, despite prohibitions, Greco-Roman worship practices remained active for a long time period. For Christians, especially for Greeks, the continuation of these practices was an evil that had to be fought. The return to a pagan and Hellenic culture of power under Julian accelerated the Christian urge to make a convincing case against traditional religions. Against this background, the Christians authors of the second half of the 4th and the 5th centuries attempted to demonstrate the obsolete and inefficient nature of traditional cult practices. They even invented situations of sacrifice and divination that resulted in failure due to the interventions of Christ. In this talk, I will examine the cases that Gregory Nazianzen, Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret made against the sacrifices of the Emperor Julian. The dialectic of their stories reveals striking contradictions. Instead of proving the inefficiency of traditional sacrifices and divination, the authors argue that the communication with the gods during these practices is only possible because of the presence of Christ. This suggests that Christians simply redistributed the ceremonial roles while the actual practices remained deeply rooted in Hellenic culture. In short: Christ replaced the gods, the bishops replaced the intermediaries between Humans and God, and the Christian emperors replaced the pagan emperors.

2019

This piece offers a survey of the history of scholarship on Greek religion in Germany, Britain and France from the foundation of its study as a modern academic discipline in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries to the twenty first century. From nineteenth-century romanticism and historicism, Indo-European Comparative Mythology and anthropology to structuralism and polis-religion, we look at different interpretive traditions in the history of the field and their impact. In addition, we discuss how specific issues have been approached in the history of the discipline including the question of Greek monotheism, the role of belief in Greek religion, the relation between myth and ritual, the questions of origins and foreign influences, periodization, and others, and link them to current debates. Particular attention is given to how such factors as the Christian background of nineteenth century scholars, gender, the idealization of the Greeks and Orientalising attitudes affected past accounts of Greek religion and how subsequent generations of scholars have been responding to these aspects of the work of their predecessors.

JOURNAL OF HELLENIC RELIGION, 2021

https://www.meduse-d-or.fr/revues/17487811-14

2010