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Julian was clever enough to recognize how to cause his Christian adversaries the greatest possible aggravation—he issued an order for the recall of all Christian bishops and other clergy who had been exiled from their places of residence on charges of heresy or schism, including Arians, Donatists and even the famous Bishop Athanasius.
The pagan emperor insisted that he was entitled to a far greater measure of gratitude from the Christians than his late cousin, the Christian emperor. “For under him, most of them were sent into exile, prosecuted and imprisoned, and many of them were butchered, whereas under me, the opposite has occurred,” Julian writes with characteristic sarcasm.
Rabbis took the place of the hereditary male priests who once served at the Temple in Jerusalem as the spiritual leaders of the Jewish people. “Rabbi” literally means “my master,” and a rabbi functioned not only as a prayer leader but also as a teacher, a preacher, a scholar, a judge. Worship could be offered anywhere in the world where a minyan of ten Jews gathered.
Some temples included an oversized model of an ordinary human ear, fashioned out of plaster or clay or stone. Worshippers were invited to whisper their most intimate questions and their most urgent pleas into the ear—and then they hastened back to their homes, to sleep and perchance to dream.
Among the otherwise humane and progressive laws that Moses is shown to bring down from Mt. Sinai is one that prescribes a weird ritual of sympathetic magic for determining whether a woman has committed adultery. The priest is to write out a series of curses, wash the ink into an earthen vessel with “holy water” and make the suspected adulteress drink the potion. If she is guilty of the crime, the Bible assures us, “her belly shall swell and her thigh shall rot.”
Sigmund Freud takes the argument to its furthest reach in Moses and Monotheism by suggesting that Moses himself was a priest in the cult of Aton who converted the Israelites to the new faith after the Egyptians repudiated the dead pharaoh. “The man Moses, the liberator and lawgiver of the Jewish people, was not a Jew but an Egyptian,” proposes Freud. “Moses conceived the plan of finding a new people, to whom he could give the religion that Egypt disdained.”
Starting in 353, the year of Magentius’s suicide, the emperor issued a series of imperial decrees that enforced and expanded the formal persecution of paganism.
First, the rituals of sacrifice carried out by night—and later all sacrifices—were formally banned. According to a decree issued in 354, the pagan temples were to be closed and, two years later, the use of pagan statuary in rituals of worship was condemned. At last, the death penalty was officially adopted as the punishment for what was now the crime of paganism.
Not even the worst of them ruled over the Roman empire as an absolute monarch. Nero declined an offer from the Senate to be officially deified and worshipped: “The Princeps does not receive the honour of a god,” he demurred, “until he has ceased to be among men.”
Indeed, philosophy was already moving toward what we would today call ethical monotheism . All of the gods, goddesses and godlings of paganism, some philosophers suggested, ought to be understood as fanciful ways of describing the various attributes or manifestations of a single high god—the “Great Ruler of Intelligent Beings,” as Plotinus (c. 205-270) dubs the deity.
By the fourth century, one bishop was able to count a total of 156 false beliefs and practices within the community of Christians, and a whole new vocabulary was required merely to categorize and describe the heretics and schismatics—the Archontici, the Barbelognostics, the Cerinthians, the Encratites, the Menandrians, the Nazarenes, the Ophites, Phibionites, the Quartodecimians, the Stratiotics and the Valentinians were just a few of the sects that came to be harshly condemned and ruthlessly persecuted by the authorities of the Christian church that called itself “catholic” and “orthodox.”
Monotheism, for example, cruelly punishes the sin of “heresy,” but polytheism does not recognize it as a sin at all. Significantly, “heresy” is derived from the Greek word for “choice,” and the fundamental theology of polytheism honors the worshipper’s freedom to choose among the many gods and goddesses who are believed to exist.