05-25-2012, 08:19 PM
All good points. Nevertheless, I still think that our view of these events is necessarily coloured by the subsequent growth of Christianity (which in AD39 was not, I think, a religion as such) and the church - which was why they were recorded, of course. It's still worth trying to imagine the view through the other end of the telescope, so to speak, and to see what happened as the people involved might have appreciated it.
Cornelius is mentioned as being very pious, and 'praying to God', even before his meeting with Peter. So which god was he praying to? Not the Jewish god, as he was a gentile. Presumably not the Christian God either, or the importance of Peter's intervention would be lost. Could Acts have glossed the centurion's devotion to some diety of the more traditional pantheon, or some ancestor of the neo-Platonic 'supreme being'?
Alternatively, could Cornelius have been praying to the God of the Samaritans? There were Samaritan auxiliaries in the Roman army, serving in Judea (Cohors Sebastanorum), and clearly these men saw no contradiction between their monotheism and military service to the Roman state. Cornelius was centurion of the 'Italian cohort', but may himself have been a Samaritan.
The third possibility, as I said above, is that Cornelius understood the nascent Christianity to be a mystery cult of some sort, something like the later Mithraism. Baptism by water might have seemed quite similar to various cultic initiation rituals.
Cornelius is mentioned as being very pious, and 'praying to God', even before his meeting with Peter. So which god was he praying to? Not the Jewish god, as he was a gentile. Presumably not the Christian God either, or the importance of Peter's intervention would be lost. Could Acts have glossed the centurion's devotion to some diety of the more traditional pantheon, or some ancestor of the neo-Platonic 'supreme being'?
Alternatively, could Cornelius have been praying to the God of the Samaritans? There were Samaritan auxiliaries in the Roman army, serving in Judea (Cohors Sebastanorum), and clearly these men saw no contradiction between their monotheism and military service to the Roman state. Cornelius was centurion of the 'Italian cohort', but may himself have been a Samaritan.
The third possibility, as I said above, is that Cornelius understood the nascent Christianity to be a mystery cult of some sort, something like the later Mithraism. Baptism by water might have seemed quite similar to various cultic initiation rituals.
Nathan Ross
