was constantly in danger, not taking it into account threatened with death. Natural and social selection was looking for the most effective, most fruitful tools for behavior management for man. Is it possible to imagine that he slipped him such a useless, flunking tool as hallucinations?!
Is it any wonder that Homer’s gods tell a person how to behave? Is it absolutely necessary to look for some real basis behind the gods? After all, this is the same as seeing space aliens in the heroes of ancient legends and myths. The mythical world of ancient man was inhabited by gods. The gods had to do something. Dictating important decisions to a person is quite a worthy role. Such a role was given by myths to the gods.»
Here we can add that the eruption of Santorini occurred around 1380 and the story about it is available in the biblical book «Exodus»: Tikhomirov A.E., Exodus. https://ridero.ru/books/iskhod_2/
And the gods in the Iliad and in other ancient works are people who only have great capabilities and technologies.
In order to raise the question of the historical background of Christianity, it is necessary to pay attention to the features of the Christian God, sharply distinguishing him from the gods of pagan Hellas. Firstly, in Christianity we see a single God, unlike many Olympian gods. Secondly, the Christian God is the supramundane creator and ruler of the world, unlike the Greek gods, who personify the world forces and are subordinate to the cosmic order. But there are even more serious differences related to the understanding of man and the ratio of the divine human and natural.
The Christian God is a Spirit above the world, freely creating not only nature, but also man. At the same time, a person only partially belongs to nature, he primarily acts as a person, i.e. a super-natural «I» with his freedom, uniqueness, and ability to create. Personality is the image of God in man. In other words, there is something divine in man, but this «something» is not a natural force, but the ability to be a person. In this way, Christian culture reveals and justifies the absolute importance of the human personality, creativity and freedom. However, the way of understanding and practical realization of this spiritual discovery was very different at different stages of the development of Christian culture.
«The belief in almighty God originates in Judaism, the religion of the ancient Jews. This faith expresses the tragic history of the people described in the Old Testament, a collection of books sacred to both Judaism and Christianity. The Old Testament history is full of wanderings and hope, bitterness of Babylonian and Egyptian captivity» (Men A. History of Religion. M., 1993, vol. IV, p.298). And, of course, such a story gave rise to a religion radically different from the Hellenic one. The gods of Hellas expressed the Hellenes’ trust in the established order of the universe, their hope for a decent life in one of the niches of the divine cosmos. But for the ancient Jews, the present cosmos was a world of exile and captivity. The gods, who personified the forces of this cosmos, were subordinated to its fate, which for the Jews was ill-fated. People needed hope, and only God, who himself was the creator of the world and the ruler of cosmic destiny, could give it. This is how the original version of Judaism, the most ancient monotheistic religion, was formed.
«The God of the ancient Jews, the God of the Old Testament, was the prototype of the Christian God. Strictly speaking, for Christianity it is the same God, only his relationship with man changes. Thus, the Old Testament faith is seen as a preparation for the New Testament, i.e. a new union of man with God. And indeed, despite the significant differences in the ideas of the Old and New Testaments, it is the Old Testament sages who for the first time have those spiritual requests that Christianity was able to answer. But first let’s focus on the differences» (Gurevich A. Ya. Categories of medieval culture. M., 1994, p.67).
If the God of the Old Testament is addressed to the whole people as a whole, then the God of the New Testament is addressed to each individual. The Old Testament God pays great attention to the fulfillment of a complex religious law and the rules of everyday life, numerous rituals accompanying each event. The God of the New Testament is addressed primarily to the inner life and inner faith of each person.
«However, already in the Old Testament we see man’s thirst for a genuine encounter with God and the desire to spiritually free himself from subordination to the external side of life. These motives are primarily expressed in the book of Job and the book of Ecclesiastes» (Men A. History of Religion. M., 1993, vol. V, p. 56). This desire for spiritual overcoming of the external side of existence is especially evident at the turn of our era, because the people again fall under the power of foreigners, which this time became the Romans. In the Old Testament history, God fulfilled his promise, gave the people a place for independent life. Now all that remained was to wait for the Savior, who, according to the beliefs of the ancient Jews, was to save the entire people and become the head of the kingdom. But the Savior (in Greek – Christ) did not come, and it only remained to think: or maybe the expected salvation will not be at all national-state, but spiritual in nature? It was with such a sermon that Jesus spoke.
«It is impossible to conclude from doubts about the reliability of individual biographical details that the preacher Jesus never existed as a historical person. In this case, the very emergence of Christianity and the spiritual impulse that (despite all private disagreements) unites and leads the authors of the Gospels (they formed in the late – early 1—2 centuries AD) and unites the first Christian communities becomes a miracle» (Petrov M. K. Socio-cultural foundations of the development of modern science. M., 2005, p.40). After all, this spiritual impulse is too brilliant and powerful to be just the result of a concerted invention.
Subsequent events have shown that the content of the new spirituality (and it was realized not only in the sermon, but also in the very life of Jesus and his closest disciples) has a meaning that goes far beyond the borders of little Judea. At this time, the Roman Empire is being engulfed by a gradually increasing spiritual (semantic) crisis: in the vast expanses of the empire, people feel spiritually lost, they become only cogs of a huge bureaucratic machine, without which it is impossible to manage the empire. Traditional pagan gods expressed a sense of spiritual involvement in the life of the cosmos, the continuation of which was perceived as the life of the ancient city-state (polis). In the 1—2 centuries, the first Christian communities began to appear, which were persecuted, and after the adoption of Christianity as the state religion in the 4th century in Rome, Christianity became a feudal exploiter.
Man was created by God in the «image and likeness of God», i.e. he is a person with freedom and creative ability. The freedom of the individual is connected with the fact that it embodies the supramundane spirit originating from the Divine Spirit. The original sin of Adam and Eve violated the God-likeness of man and alienated him from God, but the image of God remained intact in man. The whole subsequent history is considered by Christianity as the history of the reunion of man with God.
The highest religious goal of Christianity is salvation. The specificity of the Christian understanding of salvation is expressed in the dogmas of the trinity and the Incarnation of God. God eternally has three equivalent persons (personalities:) – the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit – united by a single divine essence («nature») and having a single will. At the same time, Christian theology demands «not to mix persons and not to separate entities.» The Savior (Christ) is one of the persons of the one God (God the Son). God the Son incarnates into human nature («becomes human») and becomes Jesus of Nazareth in order to atone for original sin and create conditions for the restoration of man’s God-likeness. «God became man so that man could become God,» the Church fathers said (true, man is not called to become God «by nature», but «god by grace»). Salvation requires spiritual efforts from a person, and, above all, faith, but it is impossible to be saved independently, this requires an appeal to Jesus Christ and the effective intervention
