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A Threat to Public Piety : Christians, Platonists, and the Great Persecution by Elizabeth DePalma Digeser is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is A Threat to Public Piety : Christians, Platonists, and the Great Persecution about?

In A Threat to Public Piety , Elizabeth DePalma Digeser reexamines the origins of the Great Persecution (AD 303–313), the last eruption of pagan violence against Christians before Constantine enforced the toleration of Christianity within the Empire. Challenging the widely accepted view that the persecution enacted by Emperor Diocletian was largely inevitable, she points out that in the forty years leading up to the Great Persecution Christians lived largely in peace with their fellow Roman citizens. Why, Digeser asks, did pagans and Christians, who had intermingled cordially and productively for decades, become so sharply divided by the turn of the century? Making use of evidence that has only recently been dated to this period, Digeser shows that a falling out between Neo-Platonist philosophers, specifically Iamblichus and Porphyry, lit the spark that fueled the Great Persecution. In the aftermath of this falling out, a group of influential pagan priests and philosophers began writing and speaking against Christians, urging them to forsake Jesus-worship and to rejoin traditional cults while Porphyry used his access to Diocletian to advocate persecution of Christians on the groun

Who reads A Threat to Public Piety : Christians, Platonists, and the Great Persecution?

Author

Elizabeth DePalma Digeser

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published

2016

Language

EN

ISBN

9780801464430

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Philosophy, History, Religion