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“The conclusion is reminiscent of the acclamation of the emperor: ‘One God, one Logos, one emperor,’ ” writes historian Hermann Dorries. “The perversions implicit in this formulation became manifest in the words of Louis XIV, ‘ Un roi, une loi , une foi ’ ”—“One king, one law, one faith”—“and in the vastly more sinister slogan of the Nazis, ‘ Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer ’ ”—“One people, one nation, one leader.”
Even those “uncanny places” that served as venues for the worship of pagan gods and goddesses—caverns, grottoes, crags and glens—were recycled into sites for the construction of Christian chapels, shrines and martyriums: “Let altars be built and relics be placed there,” decrees Pope Gregory the Great (c. 540-604) “so that [the pagans] have to change from the worship of the daemones to that of the true God.”
Ironically, many of the pagan writings that survive from antiquity were preserved by pious Christian tract-writers who quoted their pagan adversaries in order to repudiate them. The only fragments of Julian’s fiery anti-Christian manifesto Against the Galileans that survived Christian censorship, for example, appear in a refutation that was composed by Bishop Cyril of Alexandria in the fifth century.
Rome under the Christian emperors set out to destroy its own rich patrimony—the writings of the pagan poets, philosophers and historians, which were among the highest achievements of classical civilization. Scribes were forbidden to copy out the old pagan texts on pain of death or, perhaps worse, the amputation of the scribe’s writing hand. Existing texts were seized and burned or, sometimes, literally erased—because vellum was both expensive and reusable, the old pagan writings were often rubbed off the page so that a pious Christian text could be put there in its place.
With the reign of Theodosius I (c. 346-395), a fierce and even fanatical Christian true believer who ascended to the throne in 379, the war of God against the gods entered its final and decisive phase. He was the first emperor to formally elevate Christianity to the legal status of the state religion of Rome. As a faithful member of the “orthodox” and “catholic” church, he condemned Arianism and other Christian beliefs and practices that the orthodox church regarded as apostasies and heresies.
Jesus is shown to prophesy the destruction of the Temple in the Christian Bible: “Verily I say unto you, there shall not be left here one stone upon another.”
The fact that the Roman army left the Temple in ruins at the end of the Jewish War was seen by Christians as incontrovertible physical proof that the prophecy of Jesus had been fully realized and, therefore, Jewish monotheism had been repudiated and superseded by Christianity.
So Julian decided to strike a blow against Christianity by the simple if astounding feat of rebuilding the Temple.