The environment for the 1st century Jesus-followers in the Roman Empire was most interesting. How their love and their lives set themselves apart from those most broken … yet, they would not hate the broken, for most realized they had been most broken before Jesus’ love changed them from the inside out over time and were still “in process”.
Even when they were hated, blamed for everything and even killed they had a heart for others while taking up the sword as needed to protect self, family and property.
This all proved to positively impact the empire for generations to come.
The source for the quoted material below is from Bionic Mosquito talking about Tom Holland’s book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“Some [pagan priests] would work themselves up in a lather of prophecy, indulging in “spectacular orgiastic rites.”
But copulation was not possible for the most celebrated of these:
“The Galli, men dressed as women, were servants of Cybele, the Mother Goddess who sat enthroned amid the highest peaks of Galatia….”
Next time someone claims to be transgendered, ask them if they take their belief this seriously:
“…and the mark of their submission to this most powerful and venerable of all the region’s gods was the severing with a knife or a sharp stone of their testicles.”
This is how Holland introduces the chapter entitled AD 19: Galatia.
But wait, there’s more!
… Then we come to Rome. Paul did not found this church, but perhaps his most influential letter was written to it. It was the Rome of Nero – who killed his mother, kicked his pregnant wife to death. Dressed as a woman, he married a man.
“In the summer of AD 64, a great street party was thrown to celebrate the new order of things…
..A lake filled with sea monsters, brothels lined along the edge – staffed with a wide array of whores, ranging from the cheapest streetwalkers to the most blue-blooded of aristocrats. For just one night, all were fair game – open to both the slave and the free man.”
According to Dio, Roman statesman and historian:
‘Now a minion would take his mistress in the presence of his master; now a gladiator would take a girl of noble family before the gaze of her father.’
Why was this so? How was this possible? In the words of Holland, “…the potency of a Roman penis.”
“..Sex was nothing if not an exercise of power. …to be penetrated, male or female, was to be branded as inferior….”
Can this be celebrated?
Look around you here in 2021 … you can’t say this is not celebrated as being the new normal.
Paul in his letter to his friends in Corinth back in the first century reminds Jesus-followers how they are different …
Demonstrating the clear distinction of Roman and Greek identity from that of the Christian (and from our sense of morality), Paul would offer, instead, that our bodies are members of Christ Himself. This is taken from 1 Corinthians 6, where Paul writes:
15 Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid.
Conclusion
In the summer of 64, a few weeks after Nero’s notorious street party, a deadly fire broke out in Rome. For days it raged.
Perhaps a third of the city was reduced to rubble. The Christians were blamed. Some, dressed in animal skins, were torn apart by animals; others lashed to crosses and used as torches.
Among those put to death, so later tradition would record, were two famous names. One was Peter. The other – beheaded, as befitted a Roman citizen – was Paul.
Shortly thereafter, the second temple was destroyed. ..”
We in 2021 are in similar times …
.. be prepared!
Quite the mission field .. a dangerous one as well.
Stay the course.
-SF1