Vinland

1000 – 1056 CE

Toward the year 1000, the Scandinavians, under Leif Eriksson, reached the coast of America. No one bothered them, but one morning (as Erik the Red’s Saga tells it) many men disembarked from canoes made of leather and stared at them in a kind of stupor. “They were dark and very ill-looking, and the hair on their heads was ugly; they had large eyes and broad cheeks.” The Scandinavians gave them the name of skraelingar, inferior people. Neither the Scandinavians nor the Eskimos [sic; probably Beothuk Indians] knew that the moment was historic; America and Europe looked on each other in all innocence. A century later, disease and the inferior people had done away with the colonists. The annals of Iceland say: “In 1121, Erik, bishop of Greenland, departed in search of Vinland.” We know nothing of his fate; both the bishop and Vinland (America) were lost.

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Viking epitaphs are scattered across the face of the earth on runic stones. … Conversely, Greek and Arab coins and gold chains and old jewels brought from the Orient are often discovered in Norway.

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After a century, the Normans (men of the North) who, under Rolf, settled in the province of Normandy and gave it their name, had forgotten their language, and were speaking French.

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[Before 1200] the Icelanders had written the first sagas, which are realism in its most perfect form. … William Paton Ker wrote: “The great achievement of the older world in its final days was in the prose histories of Iceland, which had virtue enough in them to change the whole world, if they had only been known and understood.”

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These facts suffice, in my understanding, to define the strange and futile destiny of the Scandinavian people. In universal history, the wars and books of the Scandinavians are as if they had never existed; everything remains isolated and without a trace, as if it had come to pass in a dream or in the crystal balls where clairvoyants gaze. In the twelfth century, the Icelanders discovered the novel – the art of Flaubert, the Norman – and this discovery is as secret and sterile, for the economy of the world, as their discovery of America.

Jorge Luis Borges The Scandinavian Destiny 1953

More prosaically, Scandinavian adventurers traveled by ship. Their ships could cover great distances, but they were expensive, and not very large. They carried warriors and merchants, not large masses of peasant settlers. So the far-flung Scandinavian expansion would not leave the same footprint as, say, the earlier Slavic migrations to eastern and southeastern Europe. (See, again, Empires and Barbarians.)

Regarding language: Danish colonists in England introduced some vocabulary – skin and skill come from them; compare Anglo-Saxon hide and craft. But their main contribution to the language may have been negative. Anglo-Saxons and Danes learning each others’ languages dropped a lot of incompatible grammar (sort of like how my German vocabulary is OK, but I mess up genders and cases and so on). So English ended up with a simpler grammar than other Germanic languages. (At least that’s one theory.)

And here’s the Hemingwayesque passage that Borges uses to illustrate the realism of the Icelandic sagas (from Grettir’s Saga)

Days before St. John’s Eve, Thorbjörn rode his horse to Bjarg. He had a helmet on his head, a sword in his belt, and a lance in his hand, with a very wide blade. At daybreak it rained. Among Atli’s serfs, some were reaping hay; others had gone fishing to the North, to Hornstrandir. Atli was in his house with a few other people. Thorbjörn arrived around midday. Alone, he rode to the door. It was closed and there was no one outside. Thorbjörn knocked and hid behind the house so as not to be seen from the door. The servants heard the knock and a woman went to open the door. Thorbjörn saw her but did not let himself be seen, because he had another purpose. The woman returned to the chamber. Atli asked who was outside. She said she had seen no one and as they were speaking of it, Thorbjörn pounded forcefully.

Then Atli said: “Someone is looking for me and bringing a message that must be very urgent.” He opened the door and looked out: there was no one. By now it was raining very hard, so Atli did not go out; with a hand on the doorframe, he looked all around. At that moment, Thorbjörn jumped out and with both hands thrust the lance into the middle of his body.

As he took the blow, Atli said: “The blades they use now are so wide.” Then he fell face down on the threshold. The women came out and found him dead. From his horse, Thorbjörn shouted that he was the killer and returned home.

Empires and barbarians

875 – 939 CE

The fall of Rome involved the disintegration of the Roman state; the collapse of long-distance trade; the disappearance of mass-produced pottery, coinage, and monumental architecture over large areas; declining literacy among commoners and elites; great insecurity of life and property, and demographic collapse. The process was drawn out and played out differently in different regions. In the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, central government supported by taxation continued; in the West it largely disappeared. The nadir in the West was perhaps the tenth century. We might set the turning point at the battle of Lechfeld (955): a last set of invaders off the steppes, the Magyars, was defeated by the Emperor Otto, and then adopted Christianity, gave up nomadic marauding, and settled down as feudal lords in Hungary.

The fall of Rome illustrates a general lesson. The overall trend of history is for more complex societies to replace less complex. (Important note: “more complex” is not the same as “nicer.”) But the process is an uneven one, in part because military effectiveness is only loosely coupled with social complexity. Tribal peoples with states next door often react by developing states of their own, partly to defend against their civilized neighbors, partly to prey on them. The resulting societies – no longer tribal, not really civilized, but barbarian – have sometimes been more than a match militarily for their more complex neighbors. In Europe, the result over nearly a millennium was a great leveling process. Rome declined under barbarian assault, while state organization, class stratification, and Christianity spread eventually as far as the Slavic East and the Scandinavian North. (See Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians.) And here’s me on “barbarigenesis” and the collapse of complex societies.

By the end of the first millennium, Western Christendom had some consciousness of itself as distinct from the Islamic world; this would later help motivate the Crusades, but it would never be enough to spur unification. Much later, in the twentieth century, Europe would be divided by a different set of meta-ethnic frontiers, centered on the clash of ideologies, rather than civilization versus barbarism. But that’s a story for later

Muslim majority

808 – 875 A.D.

192 – 261 A.H.

Muslims were initially a small minority in the lands they conquered. But over the course of centuries they came to be a large majority of the population in the Middle East and North Africa. Strikingly, it may be possible to quantify, at least roughly, the progress of conversion.

A major production of Islamic society, from the earliest days until recently, is the biographical dictionary. As befits a patrilineal society, many of these dictionaries provide a nasab, or genealogy, for their subjects, a list of ancestors similar to the begats in the Bible, as well as a nisba, an affiliation, most often a geographic affiliation. An individual might be listed as Muhammed son of Ahmad son of Rustam, affiliated with Nishapur (a city in Iran). Note that the first two names (Mohammed, Ahmad) are clearly Muslim, while the name of the grandfather (Rustam) is Persian. This is probably telling us that Rustam was the first member of his family to convert to Islam, and that he initiated a sequence of Muslim names among his descendants. It’s possible to use this information, along with some reasonable demographic assumptions, to construct a graph showing the course of conversion to Islam among a large group of biographic subjects. Here’s what we get for Iran:

The points fall nicely along a logistic curve. A logistic curve is what we often see with the spread of an infection, where the y-axis shows the number of people infected. Logistic curves also commonly show up when we look at memes rather than germs, where the y-axis might show how many farmers have adopted a new strain of corn. In either case, the rate of growth of the “infection” is proportional to the product of the number already infected and the number not yet infected. So conversion to Islam in the medieval period may fit a simple model of cultural transmission. (Note however that this method does not tell us about people who never converted to Islam during this period, like the ancestors of present day Christian Copts in Egypt.)

This exercise is presented by Richard Bulliet (he also wrote about wheels). He makes some further observations.

• Conversion seems to proceed more quickly in Iran than in other areas of the Arab empire (Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia). It looks as if the Christians who were the majority of the population in the latter areas are more resistant to Islam than the Zoroastrians in Iran.

• Converts, especially in the early stages, often leave behind their native communities and settle with other Muslims. This helps drive urbanization, with new cities growing up around Muslim military cantonments; Baghdad and Cairo get their start this way. The wave of urbanization following the Arab conquests contrasts sharply with the ruralization which follows the end of the Roman Empire in western Europe.
• The early period when converts make up less than half the population coincides with a period of anti-Islamic revolts. As the Islamic fraction grows, these revolts move from more central to more peripheral regions. They eventually cease altogether as Muslims attain a secure majority.
• In the early period, local Muslim rulers are too insecure to risk rebelling against the central authority of the Caliph. It is in the later period, with local Muslims securely in the majority, that regions assert their independence, and the ummah (community of the faithful) fragments.
• Rather than assimilate to the locally dominant version of Islam, later generations of converts often carve out cultural space for themselves by adopting variant versions. Much of the sectarian segmentation of the Islamic Middle East today, between different legal schools and sects, traces back to differential timing of conversion during the medieval period.

I now pronounce you

808 – 875

Charlemagne was crowned emperor on Christmas Day in the year 800, a collaboration between Church and State. A particular division of power between secular and religious authorities would define European society for many centuries.

On this blog I pay particular attention to kinship systems. They deserve this attention: the study of kinship is the most important contribution of cultural anthropology to the social sciences. And while kinship can seem like a recondite, specialized topic, I would argue that it is important for understanding not just small scale, tribal, “kin based” societies, but the major civilizations of Eurasia as well. Europe ­– specifically Western Christendom – followed a particular path in the development of kinship and family life. The Western Church prohibited cousin marriage, divorce and polygamy, and encouraged the breakup of extended families, and clans. Unusually among major civilization, Christian marriage depended on the consent of both groom and bride, rather than being arranged by parents (at least below the level of royalty and high aristocracy), resulting in a shift in power from older to younger generations, and probably encouraging the accumulation of physical and human capital by young couples.

There is evidence that modern Westerners, the W.E.I.R.D (Western Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic), have a distinctive cognitive style, relatively individualistic and context-independent. The roots of this distinctive psychology may go back to the Middle Ages. This argument is made in several recent articles and a book from Joe Henrich and co-workers. A few observations: religion isn’t everything; differences in kinship systems and intellectual style between Europe and China are evident well before the advent of Christianity. Also, it’s not just the influence of the Church that mattered for the establishment of the Western kinship system in the early Middle Ages, but the development of a particular economic regime, the bipartite manor, in which peasants worked some of the week on their own land and some of the week for their lords. The lords of the manors, clerical and secular, pushed for the establishment of independent nuclear families as basic units of production and surplus extraction. Here’s a scholarly treatment, and you can find a lot more from the blogger and tweeter who calls herself h-bd chick.

Just a generation after Charlemagne, Tang dynasty China presents an instructive contrast. Buddhism had been spreading extensively in China, and Buddhist monasteries had come to acquire considerable wealth. Buddhism presents some clear parallels with Christianity, in both ideals and institutions: a selfish meme complex that effectively sterilized a fraction of its hosts and turned them into cultural superspreaders. But China followed a different path from Europe religiously and socially. Confucian scholars resented the new religion, and complained that it undermined the loyalty of father to son, and subject to emperor. Responding to these complaints, the emperor Wuzong suppressed Buddhist monasteries in 845, and the religion was brought under heavy state control. State patriarchy won, and would dominate China for more than another millennium.

Culture of honor

582 – 661 CE

The major civilizations of Eurasia found different ways to integrate

(a) systems of kinship and descent, with roots stretching back into the deep history of Neolithic demic expansions,

(b) states and state formation, especially along meta-ethnic frontiers, and

(c) major world religions.

In Classical Greece and Rome, devotion to patrilineal descent groups was edged out by wider loyalties to the city state. And in Late Antiquity and later, Christianity in Europe would also encourage the weakening of extended family ties. China took a different path, upholding state patriarchy and the rule of the clan, and eventually suppressing Buddhist monasteries.

In the case of the Islamic world, something about (a) kinship, marriage, and descent is reflected in this map, which shows percentages of consanguineal marriages (first and second cousins) around the world today.

Dravidian southern India has a tradition where men from group A can take wives from group B but not from their own group, and vice versa, which can result after a generation in cousin marriage, specifically cross-cousin marriage where the linking parents are of opposite sex. (Aboriginal Australia has similar marriage rules.) In the south Indian case even some uncle-niece marriages are allowed, specifically marriage of a man to his sister’s daughter, who is categorized as an in-law rather than a blood relation.

The Islamic Middle East and Central Asia, a culture area formed in the course of the great Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, have another kind of cousin marriage, where marriages are kept within a patriline: i.e. it is common for a man to marry his father’s brother’s daughter. Such marriages are not directly mandated by Muslim law. However Muslim rules of inheritance may indirectly encourage them. Under traditional Muslim law, each daughter gets one share of inheritance; each son gets two shares. This is a better deal for women than the one where sons get everything (as in traditional China, for example). But it means that a lineage can expect to lose a third of its property with each generation if it lets daughters marry out.

There is probably more going on, though, than just inheritance law: marriage within the patrilineage long predates the rise of Islam among Near Eastern pastoralists. It is probably connected with another characteristic of this culture area: an intense culture of honor, including a high premium on female purity (guaranteeing the integrity of the patrilineage). To allow a daughter or sister to be seduced by an outsider is deeply dishonorable. But even a legitimate marriage to an outsider carries some shame, putting the wife-giving family in an inferior relation to the wife-takers. Not letting daughters and sisters marry outside the patriline is one way for a lineage to advertise its honor.

One of the classic studies of the culture of honor in the Mediterranean is entitled The Fate of Shechem. The reference is to the story of Shechem and Dinah and her brothers in Genesis 34. Shechem, prince of a then-Canaanite city, despoils (seduces or rapes – in this culture the difference is immaterial) the Israelite Dinah. His father, the king, proposes to make things right with a classic marriage alliance: “Make marriages with us; give your daughters to us, and take our daughters for yourselves. You shall dwell with us; and the land shall be open to you; dwell and trade in it, and get property in it.” This is the classic formula of alliance theory, as laid out by Tylor, Lévi-Strauss, and other anthropologists. But Dinah’s brothers, who are Jacob’s sons, have other ideas. They pretend to agree to the bargain, but use a ruse to kill Shechem and his father and plunder their city. Jacob is outraged that he has acquired a whole new set of enemies, but his sons ask “Shall he make our sister a whore?” The advantages of an exogamous marital alliance are trumped by an unflinching determination to avoid a humiliating sexual connection: blood washes honor clean.

Bring out your dead

497 – 581

We’re now taking history less than one century per day.

Something major happened to Earth’s atmosphere in 535. We have reports from around the world of the sun being darkened or blotted out for more than a year, and evidence from tree rings and ice cores of an extreme cold spell. The culprit might have been dust thrown into the atmosphere by volcano or a comet. This on its own must have been bad news for the world’s population. But even more consequential was what happened starting seven years later. In 542, bubonic plague made an appearance in the Egyptian port of Pelusium, and rapidly spread around the Mediterranean, eventually reaching much of western Europe and Persia. (China seems to have gotten off more lightly.) It’s possible the epidemic had its origin among rodents in the east African Great Lakes region: disturbances to these populations after 535 may have contributed to the spread of plague, either up the Nile valley, or to trading towns on the Indian Ocean. Recent genetic evidence has confirmed that plague bacteria from this period are almost identical to those from the later, better known Black Death in the late Middle Ages. The plague struck repeatedly around west Eurasia for the next 200 years, before disappearing. The death toll must have been many tens of millions.

Major movements of peoples would follow the plague in the sixth and seventh centuries. The Byzantine reconquest of most of the western Roman Empire, under Justinian, came undone as a new wave of Germanic barbarians, the Lombards, occupied Italy. The Anglo-Saxons expanded from the east of England to occupy most of present-day England. Slavs moved south to occupy most of the Balkans. And, most consequentially, Arabs under the banner of Islam occupied most of the Middle East and North Africa.

The selfish meme

313 – 417

In the first decades after the crucifixion of Jesus, the number of those who worshiped him as a resurrected savior was at most a few thousand, and probably many fewer. In 313, when Constantine issued the Edict of Milan mandating tolerance for Christianity, Christians numbered many millions. Thus, in two and a half centuries, Christian numbers had doubled at least ten times. On average, someone who lived to the age of seventy-five during this period could expect to live through an eight-fold increase in the numbers of Christians between her birth and her death.

Christianity began in confusion, controversy and schism and so it continued. A dominant orthodox church, with a recognizable ecclesiastical structure, emerged only very gradually and represented a process of natural selection — a spiritual survival of the fittest … The Darwinian image is appropriate: the central and eastern Mediterranean in the first and second centuries AD swarmed with an infinite multitude of religious ideas, struggling to propagate themselves. Every religious movement was unstable and fissiparous; and these cults were not only splitting up and multiplying but reassembling in new forms.

Paul Johnson A History of Christianity

If we’re going to apply Darwinian analogies to culture, we might want to distinguish between the selection of memes within people’s heads, and between them (intra- and inter-cephalic selection, if you will). Inside people’s heads, different ideas survive or fail depending on the benefits and costs they produce for their carriers, how well they fit with other ideas, and so on. Outside people’s heads, some ideas may spread because people work extra hard to propagate them. Christianity spread as rapidly as it did partly because it radically exalted the Spirit over the Flesh. As Clement (a relative moderate among early Christians) wrote “Our ideal is not to experience desire at all.” A consequence is that the new religion effectively sterilized a fraction of its hosts, who gave up on the normal business of marrying and raising children, and turned into cultural super-spreaders.

Two ways of life were given by the Lord to his church. The one is above nature, and beyond common human living; it admits not marriage, childbearing, property nor the possession of wealth. . . . Like some celestial beings, these gaze down upon human life, performing the duty of a priesthood to Almighty God for the whole race. . . . And the more humble, more human way prompts men to join in pure nuptials, and to produce children, to undertake government, to give orders to soldiers fighting for right; it allows them to have minds for farming, for trade, and for the other more secular interests as well as for religion.

Eusebius, quoted in Peter Brown The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity

Women were another important vector for the spread of Christianity. Pagans and Christians agreed they were over-represented among converts. Celsus, a pagan critic of Christianity, took a dim view of this, sounding like a modern critic of advertising for children: “Christians must admit that they can only persuade people destitute of sense, position, or intelligence, only slaves, women, and children, to accept their faith.” Tatian, a Christian apologist, was cheerier: “They say of us, that we gabble nonsense among females, half grown people, girls, and old women. Not so. Our maidens philosophize, and at their distaffs speak of things divine.”

Of course some of the same observations (e.g. regarding the overcoming of desire and religious celibacy) could be made about the spread of Buddhism during the same period, suggesting that there are general principles at work in the spread of religions, as in the spread of microorganisms.

For a sophisticated scholarly treatment along these lines of the interaction of selfish genes and selfish memes check out Mixed Messages: Cultural and Genetic Inheritance in the Constitution of Human Societies by Robert Paul. A lot of work on the coevolution of genes and culture has been done by mathematical modelers; Paul is something else, a long-time cultural anthropologist who brings wide knowledge and thick description of culture and symbolism to the topic.

Plagues and peoples

213 – 312 CE

Every day on Logarithmic History we cover an interval 5.46% shorter than the preceding day. From covering the first 754 million years after the Big Bang on January 1, we’re down to one century worth of history today.

And it’s a bad century for both Rome and China. Rome goes through an economic crisis, with a huge currency devaluation. Political life goes to hell too. From 235-284 there are 20 Emperors; 18 of them die violently. The Roman Empire experiences multiple, destructive invasions by barbarians. Previously under the Pax Romana, most of the cities of the Empire, including Rome, had been unwalled; now there is a spate of wall-building. The empire recovers toward the end of the century, but in a more heavily militarized and authoritarian form. And in China the Han dynasty disappears entirely after 220, to be replaced by three kingdoms of barbarian origin.

This coincidence of catastrophes may be more than just bad luck. Put it this way: If we look at the Big Picture, going way back on our calendar, and turning for a moment from human history to the evolution of life, we can summarize biological evolution since the Cambrian as:

• A process of escalation, in which arms races among organisms are major drives of progressive evolution …

but …

• Now and then, a physical catastrophe punctuates the history of life, causing mass extinctions, from which living things slowly recover.

Returning to human history, we can summarize social evolution since the adoption of agriculture as:

• A process of escalation, in which conflicts between rival groups (matrilineal and patrilineal kin groups, empires, and – we will see – major religions) are drivers of increasing social complexity …

but…

• Now and then, a biological catastrophe – in the form of an epidemic of some new disease – punctuates human history, causing major population losses, and often political and social collapse as well (i.e. the “germs” in Guns, Germs and Steel).

One such catastrophe contributed to the collapse of New World societies in the face of Old World diseases after 1492. But the Old World too must have had its own earlier catastrophes as the great killer diseases – the diseases of civilization that need a minimum population to keep going – established themselves.

Epidemic disease may have made a major contribution to the fall of Rome and of Han China. Rome suffered two massive epidemics, one from 165-180, another from 251-266. It’s plausible (and some day geneticsts will tell us whether it’s true or not) that these epidemics represent the arrival of smallpox and measles in the West. There is also evidence from the current distribution of tuberculosis strains that the expansion of the Roman Empire, and trade across borders, helped to spread this disease. And we’ll run into bubonic plague in a few days time. There may be a similar story to tell about China, also stricken by epidemics at this time. The opening of the Silk Road and of trade across the Indian Ocean allowed precious goods and new ideas to travel between civilizations. It also opened the way for lethal microorganisms.

In addition to “Guns, Germs and Steel,” a classic book here is William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples. For the Roman empire, more up-to-date, and with a wealth of information, is The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire.

Enjoy it while it lasts

108 – 212 CE

If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian [96 CE] to the accession of Commodus [180 CE]. The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The armies were restrained by the firm but gentle hand of four successive emperors, whose characters and authority commanded involuntary respect.

Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 3

Gibbon doesn’t include China in this assessment of the state of the world, but for that country too, under the Eastern Han dynasty, there was a period of stability and prosperity, lasting from the death of the usurper Wang Mang in 24 CE to the outbreak of the Yellow Turban peasant uprising in 184 CE. During this time, the Roman and Han empires so completely dominated their respective portions of Eurasia that they enjoyed relative peace. Toward the end of the second century CE, both empires had populations around 50-60 million; world population was perhaps 190 million. In the succeeding centuries both empires would experience major population declines and political collapse. As a result, the world’s total population may have declined as well.

Ian Morris’ attempt to quantify historical progress, set forth in his book The Measure of Civilization, tends to corroborate Gibbon. Roman diets and biological well-being may or may not have been very good, but their standard of living, measured by energy capture – the energy embodied in livestock, household goods, dwellings, public buildings, infrastructure, and so on – may have reached heights unmatched in the West for a millennium.

Of course Gibbon’s view is a retrospective one, and didn’t anticipate the vast rise in standards of living that eventually followed the industrial revolution.

(After this I’ll give dates as numbers without the “CE”.)

The historical Jesus

3 BCE – 107 CE

The historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma. The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Savior. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed to meet it. But He does not stay: He passes by our time and returns to His own … by the same historical inevitability by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position.

Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Taking stories of the past seriously is not the same as taking them literally, as we’ve already seen in the cases of Crater Lake and the Exodus. By the time Albert Schweitzer wrote the words above, scholars of the New Testament, working for more than a century, especially in Germany, had pieced together an account of Jesus and his message very much at variance with millennia-old Christian doctrine.* It’s a testament to Schweitzer’s intellectual integrity that he – a believing Christian – followed the evidence where it took him. His general conclusions (although not all the details) are now very much the scholarly mainstream. Bart Ehrman summarizes in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium:

Jesus is best understood as a first-century Jewish apocalypticist. This is a shorthand way of saying that Jesus fully expected that the history of the world as we know it (well, as he knew it) was going to come to a screeching halt, that God was soon going to intervene in the affairs of this world, overthrow the forces of evil in a cosmic act of judgment, destroy huge masses of humanity, and abolish existing human political and religious institutions. All this would be a prelude to the arrival of a new order on earth, the Kingdom of God. Moreover, Jesus expected that this cataclysmic end of history would come in his own generation, at least during the lifetime of his disciples. It’s pretty shocking stuff, really. And the evidence that Jesus believed and taught it is fairly impressive.

The study of the past – by biologists, geologists, physicists, and philologists – had a disturbing effect on the intellectual equilibrium of a Christian society. No doubt it will go on disturbing us, Christian or not.

* Some “New Atheists” not only  reject the Christian conception of Jesus as Messiah and Savior, but doubt whether he existed at all. From the “History for Atheists” blog, here’s a good discussion of why most scholars believe that Jesus really existed.