So, I was reading Paul F. Bradshaw's "The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy", 2nd ed., the other day, and he summarized the findings from this big new book everyone's trumpeting that reanalyzes evidence and suggests among other things that a lot of early Christians seems to have used water with their Eucharist, not wine...
The interesting part is that the proposal points out that a lot of Early Christians also abstained from meat, so perhaps in the first couple sentences there was this ascetic strain where the group was counter-cultural and abstained from foodstuffs associated with non-Christian sacrifice (wine for libations, meat for altar sacrifice).
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Very interesting. Any other findings?
I found this very interesting too. Some people complained that in earlier times some priests used wooden chalices but had hearts of gold, whereas today others complain that some priests have chalices of gold but hearts of wood. Sounds like something the Curé of Ars would say. Father Paul
That reminds me of the end of the third Indiana Jones movie.
Also, why does that book cost $329?
Academic books cost that much.
A friend told me some interesting stuff about Christian/Jewish/pagan gravesites, but it's secondhand... Basically, people tended to mark family/profession on gravesites in Rome, but when they did choose to mark religion or use religious symbols in the 3rd/4th centuries, Christians did this all out of proportion, probably showing that that was the highest level of their identity when they interacted with society.
But isn't that about the time that it was becoming a state religion?
The Edict of Milan allowing toleration for Christians was early 310s, so 3rd c. was before that.
Also, just because Christianity was tolerated, that doesn't mean that suddenly everyone was a Christian, only that enough people believed for it to be a recognizable political faction that Constantine could pander to. At least in the Eastern half of the empire there were elite Greek pagans through the 530s (like 200 years after the death of Constantine).
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