The Birth of Christianity from the Spirit of the Roman Empire: A Paradoxical View of Europe’s Religious Development in the Works of F. F. Zelinsky

Abstract

This article analyzes the unorthodox concept of the development of ancient religions and the emergence of Christianity set out in the six-volume work of Faddey (Thaddeus) Zelinsky History of Ancient Religions. Zelinsky refutes the well-established idea of the origin of Christianity from Judaism, and argues that it was based on the Hellenistic-Roman religion of the early Roman Empire. This religion had a monotheistic and pantheistic idea of a God who is the basis of all world processes and human actions. At the same time, the idea arose that a “particle” of God could enter a human personality (the personality of the emperor). According to Zelinsky, it was these ideas that became the basis of Christianity, which radically rethought them but nevertheless left them close to the beliefs of the majority of the citizens of the Roman Empire; that is why early Christianity quickly spread throughout the empire. The article suggests that Zelinsky’s flight from Bol-shevik Russia in the 1920s and his life in the Polish Catholic environment deterred him from developing his ideas to their natural outcome, which might have conflicted with Catholic teaching. The article reconstructs the result that Zelinsky should have come to if he had carried his ideas through: He would have had to admit that the teachings of Jesus Christ and early Christianity that arose from the Roman religion and not from Judaism were the same religious tradition that the Catholic Church historically persecuted as Gnostic heresy.