The title of this submission has been editorialized, contrary to the HN guidelines. The actual article title is "Early Christians struggled to distinguish themselves from pagans".
The scene bespeaks the ugliness of death, which Romans found anathematic and polluting. This dread shaped pagan views of Christians, who seemed to savour the dead. They frequented burial grounds, celebrated death days, held up martyrs as role models (cherishing their body parts), and circulated stories of Jesus as a heroic figure because he could bring the deceased from the grave. This pursuit of intimacy with the dead repulsed pagans. They suspected that initiates to the new religion engaged in eating human flesh when, during the Eucharistic ritual, they consumed the body and blood of the dead Jesus. To pagans, Christian practices seemed mordant and cannibalistic.
Uh, was there a reason for copy-pasting a paragraph from the article with no commentary, and no quote marks?
Just a mistake.
When submitting there is a text box, I thought it would show up differently than regular comment.
You can still edit your post to add quotes, a reference to the article, and any comments that you wish to offer.
It had timed out. The edit feature has a time window.
Christians would bury the dead, pagans would cremate. As Christianity expanded, people wouldn’t know whether they could trust burial as a proper way to keep the dead from monstrously reanimating, think revenants or vampires. So for a couple of generations as the practice of burial took hold, many dead would be buried with a stake through the heart for good measure. And thats one of the origins for the whole staking the dracula comes from in the modern folklore.
Coincidentally, I was watching a video yesterday that made a couple points about this. The video is titled Is Jesus Historical? What Do The Romans Say About Him? by creator Metatron. There are many testimonies from non-Christian perspectives (mostly pagan).
It is interesting to note that Augustine of Hippo (who of which a lot of this article was centered around) was held in high regard by many early Christians, but even Luther and the Catholics had some major disagreements with him w.r.t. his ecclesiology.
It's much easier to spread a religion when your gods are "dead" or apathetic and you don't have to regularly make miracles happen. Instead, pageantry and edifices are all that's needed to keep people from getting bored.