Mucking about in civilization's attic
I’ve been watching a fascinating series of videos on the Bronze-Age Indo-Europeans. This is one of those things whose attraction can be hard to explain. And some avoid the topic because of what has sometimes been made of it (lots of cranks have this bee in their bonnets, and a few have spawned some nasty racial bilge in the past).
But most of what we call the social sciences – anthropology, sociology, comparative religion, high school “social studies,” etc. – were born of the comparative philology of the early 19th Century. That was a time in which certain linguists, especially Danish and German, had seized upon the similarities of Sanskrit, Avestan, Greek, Latin, and the Germanic languages, to posit an ancestor language that must at one time have existed. They called it Proto-Indo-European. Having started to reconstruct this extinct language, they went on to try to reconstruct its social order, its poetry, and its religion by the same comparative method. And, of course, they tried to locate its original homeland and dates.
Their method fructified and proved applicable to all kinds of societies beyond those which could be thought of as Indo-European in either language or culture. Today, social scientists and archaeologists state canny conjectures about Eskimos, Bantus, Polynesians, Chinese, and Aztecs. But scratch many of them only a little, and just under the surface you will find this fascination with the Indo-Europeans.
The reconstruction of Indo-European mythology at times has bid fair to subsume Biblical religion under its aegis, too. People who are used to comparing Zeus, Jupiter, Indra, Odin or Tyr, etc., find it easy to think of Yahweh as just another “Sky Father.” They point slyly to the Persian origin of the word paradise (originally, a word for a formal garden) and issue conjectures about Iranian influence on the idea of Satan and angels.
What some of these folks – particularly, the amateurs among them – fail to remember is that the languages, social systems, poetry, and religion/mythology of the North-West Semitic peoples (the Akkadians, the Canaanites, the Hebrews, and other inhabitants of the ancient Near East) matured some thousand years or so before the Indo-Europeans began spreading out from their homeland beyond the Black Sea and establishing their linguistic and cultural hegemony over Europe and South Asia. The North-West Semites' cousins the Egyptians and their descendants the Carthaginians also have legacies worth examining. To give one easy comparison between the Semitic and Indo-European milieux, the world of Abraham pre-dates the setting of the Greek myths (the Mycenaean city-states supposedly inhabited by Jason, Theseus, and Heracles) by some six hundred years, give or take.
My point here is that the people who think that Christianity is a European religion are displaying their ignorance. At its core, Christianity is a Jewish religion that has come to be practiced mostly by Gentiles. The Bible is thoroughly Semitic, and a very peculiar kind of Semitic at that. (The Jews eventually rejected their Canaanite cousins’ worldview pretty definitively, near to their own though it was.) Now, as Christianity began to appeal to more and more Gentiles (who in the days of the Roman Empire were mostly Indo-European in origin, or at least Indo-Europeanized in their culture), no doubt many things got attached to it. Many folk customs practiced by Christians in religious contexts are no doubt Indo-European in origin (such as Carnival). But that doesn’t mean that any Christian dogma or sacrament can be traced to an Indo-European source.
Christianity is the leaven that makes the dough rise, even tough, old Indo-European dough. Indo-European ideas did not replace or overwhelm Semitic ones in Christianity; Semitic ones – very particular Semitic ones – transformed Indo-European cultural norms (and the norms of many other peoples who have come to embrace Christianity). This is why it is so important to study the Bible with good guides, and why pastors need to be educated in many ancient topics, as well as Jewish history and biblical interpretation.
But most of what we call the social sciences – anthropology, sociology, comparative religion, high school “social studies,” etc. – were born of the comparative philology of the early 19th Century. That was a time in which certain linguists, especially Danish and German, had seized upon the similarities of Sanskrit, Avestan, Greek, Latin, and the Germanic languages, to posit an ancestor language that must at one time have existed. They called it Proto-Indo-European. Having started to reconstruct this extinct language, they went on to try to reconstruct its social order, its poetry, and its religion by the same comparative method. And, of course, they tried to locate its original homeland and dates.
Their method fructified and proved applicable to all kinds of societies beyond those which could be thought of as Indo-European in either language or culture. Today, social scientists and archaeologists state canny conjectures about Eskimos, Bantus, Polynesians, Chinese, and Aztecs. But scratch many of them only a little, and just under the surface you will find this fascination with the Indo-Europeans.
The reconstruction of Indo-European mythology at times has bid fair to subsume Biblical religion under its aegis, too. People who are used to comparing Zeus, Jupiter, Indra, Odin or Tyr, etc., find it easy to think of Yahweh as just another “Sky Father.” They point slyly to the Persian origin of the word paradise (originally, a word for a formal garden) and issue conjectures about Iranian influence on the idea of Satan and angels.
What some of these folks – particularly, the amateurs among them – fail to remember is that the languages, social systems, poetry, and religion/mythology of the North-West Semitic peoples (the Akkadians, the Canaanites, the Hebrews, and other inhabitants of the ancient Near East) matured some thousand years or so before the Indo-Europeans began spreading out from their homeland beyond the Black Sea and establishing their linguistic and cultural hegemony over Europe and South Asia. The North-West Semites' cousins the Egyptians and their descendants the Carthaginians also have legacies worth examining. To give one easy comparison between the Semitic and Indo-European milieux, the world of Abraham pre-dates the setting of the Greek myths (the Mycenaean city-states supposedly inhabited by Jason, Theseus, and Heracles) by some six hundred years, give or take.
My point here is that the people who think that Christianity is a European religion are displaying their ignorance. At its core, Christianity is a Jewish religion that has come to be practiced mostly by Gentiles. The Bible is thoroughly Semitic, and a very peculiar kind of Semitic at that. (The Jews eventually rejected their Canaanite cousins’ worldview pretty definitively, near to their own though it was.) Now, as Christianity began to appeal to more and more Gentiles (who in the days of the Roman Empire were mostly Indo-European in origin, or at least Indo-Europeanized in their culture), no doubt many things got attached to it. Many folk customs practiced by Christians in religious contexts are no doubt Indo-European in origin (such as Carnival). But that doesn’t mean that any Christian dogma or sacrament can be traced to an Indo-European source.
Christianity is the leaven that makes the dough rise, even tough, old Indo-European dough. Indo-European ideas did not replace or overwhelm Semitic ones in Christianity; Semitic ones – very particular Semitic ones – transformed Indo-European cultural norms (and the norms of many other peoples who have come to embrace Christianity). This is why it is so important to study the Bible with good guides, and why pastors need to be educated in many ancient topics, as well as Jewish history and biblical interpretation.