> Three books that have influenced me are:
i haven't read any pagels since _the gnostic gospels_, which was a load of bunk, though it's been a decade + since i gave it a thought so i couldn't elaborate. what i've read of cohn was ok, though he manages to make apocalytpticism a bit dull, which is a real achievement, imo. and aho, dunno.
> There was clearly scapegoating, demonization, and apocalypticism before
> Christianity. Was there conspiracism? Tough call. I'd welcome more cites.
the usual method for ancientology is to work from extant evi- dence, not to pose idle questions. were there laptops? tough call--there's no evidence to the contrary. i've READ the old testament aprocrypha, the new testament aprocrypha, the dead sea scrolls, the nag hammadi library, gobs of magical papyri, josephus, philo, the antenicene fathers, as well as more hel- lenistic blabla than i care to remember, and there's nothing even remotely resembling an allegation of a 'conspiracy' any- where to be found. not even in the dozen years +/- 200, when rome mounted its first empire-wide persecution of christians, will you find anything the looks like a conspiracy. nor will you find it in _city of god_ or in any of the merovingian or carolingian chronicles. even in material dealing serious her- esies--donatism, the aligensians, bogomils, catharists, etc., etc.--will you find such allegations.
even in the roman condemnations of christians, which for the most part centered on their 'misanthropy,' there are no such charge. they didn't *need* it: misanthropy did just fine.
> Cohn clearly argues it has its roots in the apocalyptic paradigm. Christian
> demonization of Jews has its roots in the first century of Christianity,
> according to Pagels, but the conspiracy theory about Jewish ritual murder
> and poisoning wells comes much later. See:
apocalypticism is far too flexible a notion to be described as a paradigm, imo, unless you're willing to call something as pervasive as marriage a paradigm. doctrines of mutual as- sured destruction and a lot of blabla about Y2K have their roots in apocalypticism, too.
it's a pretty safe bet that the christian demonization of jews began in the first C onaccounta that's when christian- ity began. judaism was far, far from monolithic in the cen- turies preceding and following the turn of the era; and the christians were hardly much more organized until the roman seat began to exert a hegemonic force in well into the 2d century (see bauer, _orthodoxy and heresy_ [?--been a long time...]).
as for all the kooky charges that christians made against jews, they *pale* in comparison to the charges that chris- tians made against each other--which, of course, is where the later antijew allegations came from.
> So if the elaborate conspiracy theory about Jews arises under Catholic rule,
> what is different about what you call ur-conspiracy? Is it tied to
> anti-enlightenment or anti-modernist tendencies?
i don't know what 'modernist' means when you're talking about a scale of five centuries. and since catholic doc- trine underwent seismic shifts in relation to the status of jews (cf. le goff, _your money or your life_, and the invention of purgatory to allow christians *instead of jews* to collect interest), i'm not sure i see the rele- vance of the enlightenment. by that time, conspiracism was well on its way to being secularized--as the sudden' rise of the ever-splintering 'freemasons' soon theerafter attests.
much too much emphasis is placed on antijewish discourses in conspiracism. what does it mean to equate 'jews' with 'capital' or whatever unless it 'capital' has been deemed Evil? there's a long *catholic* history of the doctrinal ins and outs of money vis-a-vis jews, but by the time the reformers rolled around those questions had been settled for the most part. which may be why, in part, christians began to attack each other so viciously over these issues.
> I can see the paradigm of the secret elite conspiracy in the book of
> Revelation with its claim that in the end times government leaders will
> betray true belivers to a one world government.
this is a chick publications-style exegesis--i won't even try to argue.
> On the other hand, I agree that Protestantism seems to be a rich nutrient
> soup for conspiracism.
they invented it.
cheers, t