Gods and the One God
Robert M. Grant
Number of quotes: 12
Book ID: 426 Page: 34
Section: 2B2,4B
Attempts to bring Isis into Rome during the first century B.C. were not successful. Tertullian mentions that the Egyptian gods Sarapis,{18} Isis, and Harpocrates were prohibited and tells of consuls who overturned altars erected to them and checked the vices characteristic of “disgusting and pointless superstitions.” Though by the end of the second century A.D., Sarapis had become a Roman{19} (obviously Isis and Harpocrates had received the citizenship too), there had been a lengthy struggle over admitting such alien gods.
Quote ID: 8670
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 426 Page: 40
Section: 2B2,4B
Dionysus in ItalyIn Italy the cult was not officially accepted before the end of the Roman republic. Its gradual movement into Roman circles was due to private initiative, not to public approval. It may have arrived when Greek prisoners taken by the Romans at Tarentum in 208 B.C. brought the Greek cult of Dionysus to south Italy in a secret and dangerous form.{43} Within two decades it became clear that the Bacchanalia were not compatible with the Roman character. In 186 B.C. the consuls put down the Dionysiac rites, practiced by slaves and some others, because they were secret and dangerous, not controlled by reason or authorized by the state. It may have been Julius Caesar who first authorized the cult. In the second century it was fully respectable.
Quote ID: 8671
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 426 Page: 42
Section: 4B
The most peculiar feature of the temple at Jerusalem was that it contained no statues. This lack made possible the inventions of Greco-Roman writers, who variously describe what was “really” inside. Tacitus tells us that they had a statue of the ass which supposedly guided them in the wilderness.
Quote ID: 8672
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 426 Page: 42
Section: 2B2,4B
According to a tale related by Diodorus Siculus, when the Syrian king Antiochus IV “entered the innermost sanctuary of the god’s temple” he found “a marble statue of a heavily bearded man seated on an ass, with a book in his hands” and concluded that this was Moses.{56} A little later the anti-Jewish author Apion claimed that the king had found a golden ass’s head.{57} A further fiction concerned the king’s discovery of a kidnapped Greek who was being fattened in the temple so that the Jews could eat him.{58}
Quote ID: 8673
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 426 Page: 57
Section: 4B
It is hard to find out what ordinary people thought the gods did for them.
Quote ID: 8675
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 426 Page: 75
Section: 2B1
Against polytheism stood those who, usually followed philosophers, developed ideas about the unity of God or, as it is sometimes called, the divine monarchy. This idea was supported more often not by rejecting other gods in favor of one but by insisting upon the virtual identity of one god with others.
Quote ID: 8676
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 426 Page: 91
Section: 4A
…at every turn Christian Alexandria was closely related to currents in pagan thought.
Quote ID: 8677
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 426 Page: 135
Section: 2B1
…in the early centuries the Christian doctrines about God—Father, Son, and Spirit—were remarkably flexible and that at least the emphases changed from one generation to another.
Quote ID: 8678
Time Periods: 123
Book ID: 426 Page: 147
Section: 2D3A
When the African church leader Tertullian became a Montanist he wrote seven books “on ecstasy” but none of them survive.
Quote ID: 8681
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 426 Page: 147
Section: 4A
In Tertullian’s Montanist treatise On Ecstasy “he criticized Melito’s mind as elegant and rhetorical and said that he was considered a prophet by many Christians.”{46} Obviously the Montanists did not so regard him.
Quote ID: 8682
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 426 Page: 158
Section: 2B1,4A
This is to say that in beginning to develop the doctrine of the Trinity Christians made use of the methods already worked out among Platonists and Pythagoreans for explaining their own philosophical theology, in harmonious accord with pagan polytheism.
Quote ID: 8683
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 426 Page: 161
Section: 3C1
We are persecuted because we say, The Son has a beginning but god is without beginning.” The bishop of Nicomedia agreed with him. “It is obvious to anyone that what has been made was not before coming into existence. What comes into existence has a beginning of being.” The slogan of Arius and his allies soon came to be this: “There was when he was not.”
Quote ID: 8684
Time Periods: 4
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