They Weren't People Like Us

Nassim Taleb (NYU photo)

Mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, best known for his bestseller, The Black Swan, reviews Tom Holland's Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World : [bold added]

Christianity did stand the entire ancient value system on its head.

The Greco-Romans despised the feeble, the poor, the sick, and the disabled; Christianity glorified the weak, the downtrodden, and the untouchable; and does that all the way to the top of the pecking order. While ancient gods could have their share of travails and difficulties, they remained in that special class of gods. But Jesus was the first ancient deity who suffered the punishment of the slave, the lowest ranking member of the human race. And the sect that succeeded him generalized such glorification of suffering: dying as an inferior is more magnificent than living as the mighty.

The modern world is guilty of "retrospective distortion". Because we have absorbed many of Christianity's principles (the value of an individual, the importance of character over money and power) we think, mistakenly, that the original Christians were a lot like us.

We see this lack of contextual understanding, for example, on a much lesser scale in our college children who can't imagine a world where they would have to write a physical letter home to ask for money then wait for a check to come back, or go to a library, refer to its card catalogue, then delve into the stacks in the hope of finding the right book on a subject.

If the world has changed so much in 30 years, how alien must it appear after 2,000 years have passed?

Today's lectionary reading, appropriately, was from Luke 14:

When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. "When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, `Give this person your place,' and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, `Friend, move up higher'; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."