From: mls@panix.com (Michael Siemon)
Subject: Re: Weirdness of Early Christians
Organization: PANIX Public Access Unix, NYC
Lines: 58

Were the early Christians weird?  Yes!  So were their non-Christian
contemporaries (the more familiar you are with late Republican Rome
or the Pricipate, the weirder those people will seem -- forget the
creative filtering done by Renaissance and Eighteenth Century hero
worship.)  So are modern non-Christians.  And Christians.

You are pretty weird, yourself, with your rather acid dismissal of
Luther and of Protestantism -- and in apparently buying into a
simplistic propaganda model about Catholicism *not* being faddish.  
Sure, it's so large that global fads take longer cycles than they
do in smaller denominations (and local ones are not usually visible
unless you do a lot of traveling to exotic lands :-)).  May I recom-
mend, as a salutary antidote to this nonsense Philippe Aries' book
_The Hour of our Death_, a longitudinal study of death customs in 
Western [specifically Catholic] Christendom?

And it won't help to escape into the obscurity of the first Christian
century.  Paul was pretty weird, too; as were Peter and the others in
the (apparently quite weird) circle around Jesus.

What I think you might find helpful is a bit more charity -- try to
understand these weirdos and nutcases with the same respect and love
you would expect others to show YOUR notions.  We *are* commanded to
love one another, after all.  And Brown's book is, in fact, a heroic
attempt to SEE the groupings he talks about as motivated in love and
the gospel and their social contexts.  (If anything, Brown is *too*
heroic here -- he manages to overstrain himself at times :-))

I don't suggest that we *follow* any of these old cult paths -- and
it raises hard questions from the skeptic inside me that so much of
early Christianity *was* like the weird (Christian and non-Christian)
cults we see today.  To that extent, I think you raise a serious
problem (and perhaps your phrasing is implicitly self-deprecatory
and ironic.)

But the first principle for *answering* these questions is respect and
love for those we do not understand.  And it helps to *work* at under-
standing (as long as we do not get overwhelmed by revulsion and begin
to withdraw our respect for them as people.)  I would advise, in other
words, MORE historical reading (Brown's other books are also good, most
especially his bio. of Augustine; also try Robin Lane Fox's _Christians
and Pagans_, maybe the Paul Veyne ed. _History of Private Life_, some
of Foucault's books on sexuality in the ancient world ...)

Humanity *is* weird -- we have known ONE sane person, and we killed Him.
Fortunately for us, this has proved a Comedy rather than a Tragedy.

Easter, 1993.

(yes; this is a tad early -- our Vigil service here has been moved forward
because so many churches in the area have taken to doing their own Vigils,
and the seminarians must therefore worship-and-run if they are to do it
here and there as well.  Think of this as an Anglican fad.  :-))
-- 
Michael L. Siemon		We must know the truth, and we must
mls@ulysses.att.com		love the truth we know, and we must
     - or -			act according to the measure of our love.
mls@panix.com		  				-- Thomas Merton