PJ Media

Re the Indian gentleman who claims that the pre-Christian past of Europe was entirely erased (does he mean southern Europe, where there are masses of ruined temples? where you can visit the Colosseum today? where you can visit the Parthenon? where you can go to Delphi and where you know exactly what was done at Delphi? Does he mean northern Europe, where **Christians** carefully wrote down in books the pagan beliefs and the pre-Christian histories of their own ancestors. It was Christians who wrote down, and copied, and handed on the Icelandic Sagas, the Elder Edda of the Scandinavians, the Nibelungenlied, the High Deeds of Finn MacCool, the Mabinogion, and the saga of ‘Beowulf’.

We would probably have a lot more such things, except for things like wars and pirate raids that destroyed books; what we’ve got is what survived the simple ups and downs of human history. The entirely accidental fire in the Cotton library in the 17th century may have destroyed all kinds of things – the Beowulf manuscript is one of the treasures that was in that library, and was just barely rescued. What else was in there, that *didn’t* survive? No Christian set that fire…it was plain old bad luck).

I would like our angry Indian, intent on equating Christianity with the genuninely history-hating culture-hating anti-art project of Islam, to reflect on the fact that Christian Byzantium copied and recopied the manuscripts of Plato, the plays of Aristophanes, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Homer, the poetry of Sappho…that Latin Christian scribes copied the works of Virgil, Pliny, Ovid, Catullus, Livy, Tacitus, Cicero ….ALL thoroughly pagan works.

Christians like my own irish and Scots and Danish and German ancestors were perfectly familiar with much of the pre-Christian mythical world of their forebears; they remembered it and passed on the stories, as well as plenty of customs and traditions and practices that they had decided were good and innocent, or neutral; but they simply no longer worshipped gods that, among other things, called for human sacrifice. There are and have been, in human history, ‘gods’ that are surely unworthy of worship – ‘Odin Glutter of the Crows’, whose piratical warrior followers believed that only those killed in battle deserved paradise (Valhalla), and who worshipped him by mutilating the dead on the field of battle – ‘the blood eagle’. (The claim that there was no violence due to religion, prior to Christianity and Islam, is nonsense: why did the Greeks, the Romans and the Scandinavians, the Angles and Saxons, have gods of War, then? Odin/ Wotan, Ares, Mars? Whose task was particularly to prosper the cause of the nations who took them as patrons, over against other groups? The pagan Romans saw themselves as favoured by Mars; the legendary founder of Rome, Romulus, was the son of the war-god, Mars; Mars gave them victory in their wars of conquest and empire..).

I doubt that today’s Greeks would like to return to the adoration of Cybele and Bacchus – the former of whom demanded that her most devout male devotees must cut off their own genitalia, the latter of whom was worshipped by bands of frenzied women tearing live animals and humans to pieces in the woods.

The Incas, Aztecs and Mayans – but especially the Aztecs, who made themselves hated and feared by all their neighbours because of their habit of waging war to catch people to use as sacrificial victims – all practised human sacrifice (the Aztecs did it to war captives; the Incas did it to **their own children** – people keep finding the mummified bodies of such sacrificed children, on mountaintops, today); should we regret that their modern day descendants (and they were not wiped out, indeed they have PLENTY of modern day descendants, many still speaking the ancient languages as well as Spanish) no longer perform such sacrifices, and instead worship a god who became a human being and sacrificed HIMSELF to save the lives of his followers? – ‘the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep’? In any case, quite a lot is known about the culture and history of the pre-Columbian civilisations, because western scholars have carefully decoded such things as Mayan writing; any Mayan, Aztec or Inca descendant can find all this out by reading the books, as well as by visiting many carefully-preserved locations where the old cities and temples still stand and the carvings still stand.

Our angry Indian should read the work of ex-Muslim Lamin Sanneh, who comments on the contrast between the attitude of Muslims to the native languages and cultures of African tribes, and the attitude of the Christians. The Muslims engaged in forced Arabisation; the Christians usually learned the native language and **translated** their scriptures into the vernacular, thus enculturating Christianity and very often enabling the native languages to resist colonisation. And almost universally you find that the best and most effective Christian missionaries were genuinely interested in the language **and in the non-Christian lore, history, songs and stories** of the cultures within which they worked. Among the Diyari tribe in the Australian desert, German Christians didn’t just translate the New Testament; they also composed a massive dictionary of Diyari, and a kind of encyclopaedia of local culture – including all sorts of frankly ‘pagan’ (and in some cases, frightening and violent) customs, practices and stories. It’s all there. History is history, facts is facts; this is what that particular tribe were at, good and bad together, so that is what the Christian historian wrote down. The same sort of thing happened in many other places.