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Comment by _bin_ | Hacker News Reader

Wrong. This is essentially the context in which we still live today though we’ve secularized substantially over the past centuries. But Rome was on the path to Christianity at this time and later converted, so this is a very common way to understand things. Generally a work is one of a few things: Christian, Jewish, maybe Muslim depending on whom you ask, as it’s also an Abrahamic faith, or Pagan.

To be honest this feels more like you have an axe to grind with Christianity or its dominance, similar to the people pushing for “BCE/CE” over BC/AD. I don’t know why, but don’t expect the rest of the world to carry that cross for you.

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> This is essentially the context in which we still live today

Who's "we"? - It doesn't apply to everyone in the world, so you're assuming some limitations in who you're referring to.

GP makes a fair point. If you mean by "pagan" simply non-Christian and non-Jewish, then to make it relevant to call it a pagan library you would need to establish that it was curated specifically to exclude Christain or Jewish themes. You might as well call it a "non-Mithraic library", if it happens to exclude mention of Mithras, which was also an up-and-coming cult among the Romans in the first century. Then it would be incorrect or presumptious to call it "non-Mithraic", unless you'd first established that it contained no mention of Mithras. And the only reason you'd do that is if Mithras held a particular parochial relevance to you. You understand that not everyone holds up an image of Mithras as a prism through which to view everything else.

OTOH, if you mean by "pagan" just that it's Roman, but from before Rome converted to Christianity, then just say it's a first century Roman library.

America, which is the center of world power and culture. You may not like that but that doesn't make it untrue. It's also where most users of this site live.

GP does not make a fair point. We're specifically talking about classical antiquity which was a fairly bounded world. Warrior god cults, like that of Mithras, didn't have a strong role in the overall state and direction of the empire. They weren't major players and it is actually perfectly fine for terminology and understanding to focus on those.

Christianity is the prism through which the Romans later viewed things and through which the heirs of classical antiquity did. This isn't parochial, this reflects your general dislike of Christianity's dominance. But I don't actually have to make a normative argument that it should be, just the positive point that it is.

"Pagan" is a widely-accepted way to refer to Rome's old polytheistic religious traditions, which existed, but not unchallenged, around the first century.

> America, which is the center of world power and culture.

Yeah, ok. So an explicitly parochial prespective. This isn't compelling from a disinterested, objective perspective.

> Warrior god cults, like that of Mithras, didn't have a strong role in the overall state and direction of the empire. They weren't major players and it is actually perfectly fine for terminology and understanding to focus on those.

just like Christianity in 79AD Herculaneum

That's not parochial, that's realistic. If you have an axe to grind with American dominance that's your own bias; it's a fact, not something you can argue with on objective grounds. Keep your personal anti-Americanism out of this; it's keeping you from thinking clearly.

Christianity didn't have as strong an influence there and then, but it obviously did in the course of the Roman Empire, and this was around the time it started to grow. It's obviously relevant in a way cults of Mithras or Serapis or whomever else weren't.

Thank you, that's illuminating. So it's a first century scroll, discovered in Italy, and you insist it's only true categorization is from the perspective of a present-day American Christian, while also claiming that everyone else is ideologically blinkered...

I am saying the perspective of classical antiquity and its heir in western civilization, of which America is the current exemplar, is the correct one.

You know what else isn’t a compelling argument? This arduous attempt to argue that Christianity, the largest religion in the world and the very one that was adopted by Rome, is somehow inconsequential to the framing of what came before it. There is no logical argument that can be made to separate the two, for experts in the field will continue to use the term Pagan to refer to Pagan Rome no matter how much it hurts your feelings. It is simply the most objective and efficient method of separating it from the other. Unless of course you know of a better method that the historians do not? I’m sure they’d love to hear it.

> "Pagan" is a widely-accepted way to refer to Rome's old polytheistic religious traditions, which existed, but not unchallenged, around the first century.

Do you know for a fact that the library contained no mention of Jesus nor Judaism? If you don't know this, then why do you refer to it as pagan?

The point is: we have a Roman library from the first century AD. We don't know what it contains. To call it "pagan" tacitly assumes that (a) Christianity was not relevant to the collectors of the library, and (b) whether something is Christian or not is of primary interest whenever we discuss an artefact from the past.

We don't know whether (a) is true, and (b) is only true from a particularly dogmatic and insular perspective

Tbh, I'm struggling to understand what your point is apart from you're asserting that you view the world as centered on your own particular dogmatic tradition and you find it hard to understand why other's don't share that perspective

No, of course not. The accuracy of the original statement isn't the point. The point is to invalidate the ideologically-motivated conniption fit some people are pitching about a framing that is meet for the topic to have.

I don't live in USA lol

To be honest, adding the word "pagan" just seem needlessly divisive. When I read about the past, nobody is going out of their way to point out that it's Pagan.

Do you believe that Goy/Goyim is similarly divisive? Or Kafir? And I’m not sure what books you’re reading, Pagan vs Christian Rome is a common distinction if the context hasn’t already made it obvious (such as here).

> Do you believe that Goy/Goyim is similarly divisive? Or Kafir?

Yes, which is why I don't use those words unless they are immediately relevant to the subject.

When a scientist in India publishes a study, we don't call it a "pagan" study.

The word "pagan" adds nothing to the original post. "An entire library from the first century" conveys just as much information.

Indian studies were not part of the world of classical antiquity and you know it. Nobody is calling them pagan. And no, stripping that descriptor removes information from the statement.

Is there evidence of a single significant Christian library from the first century?

Pagan in this case would also exclude Judaism in its many different forms, which certainly had a long written tradition by that point.

Greece had multiple colonies in India and there was significant cultural diffusion in BCE times.

This isn't especially relevant. It barely covered a few scraps of northwest India. Most "Indo-Greek" civilization and culture was concentrated in Bactria and Sogdiana, not those few scraps of modern-day India, and BC Indo-Greek culture was not what we'd understand to be "Vedic Indian" so much as Persian-esque.

It also wasn't exactly part of the classical hellenistic civilization we talk about as the root of the western tradition, something of which I'm sure you're fully aware, making this a moot point.

Before Christian Era and Christian Era.

My main gripe with it is the low entropy. In BC/AD each letter is unique. Even if you only heared 1 letter you still know what was said.

Seems like we could be using BCE/AV (for Anno Vulgi). This would be cromulent with how the BC/AD pair is half English and half Latin. And then for convenience and compatibility, shorten BCE to BC.

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