Question by Just wondering: How much history has been loss due to priests and others destroying what they thought was pagan?
Best answer:
Answer by The Ultimate Sacrifice
A lot – but not too much to the point where the truth can’t be found.
Add your own answer in the comments!
Much
Spanish Bishop Diego de Landa lived in modern Mexico from 1549 – 1578, he committed one history’s worse cases of “cultural vandalism” he burnt all Maya manuscripts he could locate in order to eliminate paganism so that only four survived to this day.
I don’t think it’s good to blame a single people…
Especially, when nearly every civilisation did this to destroy rival peoples and other civilisations…
A enormous amount of valuable data has been lost
BTW – the US invasion of Iran destroyed a invaluable artifacts and relics of ancient Persia
You might want to consider the fact that most of what we know of the works of Classical Paganism is because they were preserved through the Dark Ages by Christian and Muslim scholars.
I think Henry VIII could be responsible for losing much of our history. The monks and nuns were among those few who were literate enough to write down much of our history and when the dissolution of the monasteries took place, there was much burning of books and artifacts.
This vandalism has occurred throughout history, the victors destroying the vanquished culture. In fairness, the “priests” have not been the only ones.
Christians tried to preserve what could be preserved. In fact, the Christians have always admired Roman and Greek mythologies, as well as the traditions of all the European cultures. Christians are not “of the law” and are thus not required to subscribe to any one tradition. All good things come from God.
The fact is, most cultures were based on oral histories and so they were lost forever. We don’t even know tha tmuch about the Greeks and Romans. you know that most of their stuff was lost too. The Library of Alexandria was destroyed. Thousands of the papers that they wrote on havce also withered away. People back then were ruthless. One tribe would fight with another, and they would destroy each other’s things. It was really sad. A lot of history has been lost by looters and destroyers. Almost all armies back then did that. People weren’t as interconnected and they did not see each other as one human family. This is why it’s diferent. Also, back then, that’s just how it was. It was destroy or be destroyed. It was a tough life. I don’t know why you act like Christianity was the only that existed in Europe. You probably think Christmas is the only cool holiday too. It’s not about Christianity. Christianity was not big back then. Christianity was just one of many cultures. Can you even name any of the cultuers besides Christianity, Greek and Romans? Just ’cause they’r enot in the history books, doesn’t mean the hundreds of other cultures didn’t exist.
Oh yeah….
Impossible to answer. That’s like asking ‘How many children would Pete have had if he never died yesterday?’
To be fair, some faiths need to destroy existing wisdom to prevent themselves from being threatened by it.
The Bible is a flat-earth book, so when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire it was inevitable that one of the first actions of the Christian emperors would be to close the universities and ‘recycle’ non-fiction works as prayerbooks (this is what happened to the Archimedes Palimpsest).
Justinian’s war on knowledge was highly effective. Ovid around AD 1 knows that the Earth is a planet in free orbit in space (he describes it so in the first twenty lines of the Metamorphoses), but six hundred years later the church geographer Cosmas Indicopleustes is able to write a flat earth book, and even Martin Luther seems to have accepted the general idea (“Scripture simply says that the moon, the sun, and the stars were placed in the firmament of heaven, below and above which heaven are the waters “: Lectures on Genesis 1540’s).
Religion and knowledge cannot easily co-exist, so if religion is to flourish there has to be some suppression of wisdom. Successful religions will promulgate more ignorance and fear, but this is why they are so successful.