As those who know me know, I have become very interested in the archaeology of the Bible. By Bible, I mean the Hebrew Bible.
My personal opinion is that faith is just that, faith. To me, faith does not have to be ‘proven’ by the historicity of religious texts or disproven by the lack of same. My interest has pretty much nothing to do with my Jewish beliefs, but rather curiosity as to whether the historic record is consistent or inconsistent, or has any evidence at all, related to the Bible as history. There has been a lot of new information collected over the last twenty years and the ability to interpret the material already collected has increased enormously. Thus there is lots to read and think about.
Over time, my interests stray a bit from that original focus and have moved to early Christianity and on to the middle ages and Islam, covering what I call the three major Abrahamic religions. When I talk about, and I guess write about, these thoughts I do find myself more cautious when discussing Christianity or Islam, since as a Jew I sometimes feel how my thoughts will be taken, which I try to always disassociate with faith and belief, may be misinterpreted.
A discussion about the Edict of Milan after the jump …
In any event, recently I received an email from the National Defense University, a wonderful institution about their Empires series, http://www.nationalwarcollege.org/EMPIRES/index.htm, To quote from their web page “The purpose of the “Empires” series is simply to take a sophisticated and explicitly historical look at the experience of past imperial powers, always with an eye towards the United States’ current “imperial” issues.”.
While I intend to attend as many of these as I can, sadly I will not be able to attend the next one because of schedule conflicts.
Since I am easily distracted, I used the excuse of the email to look at past meetings in the series, then looked at the materials from those lectures, then looked at web pages about the topics in the materials, and on and on.
One of the lectures talked about Constantine. Ah-ha, a truly significant figure in Christian history. In fact, I suspect an underestimated such figure. One of the acts that he did was to issue what was called the Edict of Milan in 313. This Edict legalized the worship of Christianity explicitly but the wording was actually an interesting expression of religious freedom. It was issued in the name of Constantinus, Constantine, and Licinius, emperors nominally of the East and West, an organization established by Diocletian before Constantine.
The quote below is from one of the lectures, the emphasis was from the original speaker.
“We, Constantinus and Licinius the Emperors, having met in concord in Milan and having set in order everything which pertains to the common good and public security, are of the opinion that among the various things which we preceived would profit men, or which should be set in order, the first was to be found in the vultivation of religion: we should therefore give both to Christians and to all others free facility to follow the religion which each may desire, so that by this means whatever divinity is enthroned in heaven may be gracious and favourable to us and to all who have been placed under our authority. Therefore we are of the opinion that the following decision is in accordance with sound and true reasoning: that no one who has given his mental assent to the Christian persuasion or to any other which he feels suitable to him should be compelled to deny his conviction, so that the Supreme Godhead (“Summa Divinitas”), whose worship we freely observe, can assist us in all things with his wonted favour and benevolence.”
To me, it sounds amazingly modern.