Hints and tips:
...With a libretto he and Peter Sellars stitched together from the gospels, Latin American poetry and other texts, it tells the story of Jesus from the Annunciation to his family’s flight to Egypt....
...Yet in the best-known, post-pagan version of the tale, Baldur stands in for Jesus, symbol of rebirth. All very syncretic. All very Christmassy....
...On their Facebook page (every modern pagan has one), the group describe themselves as “a fully inclusive pagan group”. This intrigued me. I grew up with quite a broad sense of the divine....
...Attempts were made too to establish the “right” belief, in the face of many varying beliefs about who Jesus was, what the Trinity meant and how to live a holy life....
...Like the mosque, it sits on the site of a much earlier pagan holy place, the Temple of the Sun....
...The Testament of Mary (2012) did something similar, but it connected back easily to Tóibín’s Irish Catholic home territory, being an iconoclastic depiction of an angry and non-virginal mother of Jesus....
...A crowd of 40 figures watch, marvel, throw up hands in astonishment or disbelief; on the fringes, the Pharisees plot against Jesus....
...That was The Country Girls, which led to Girl with Green Eyes, Girls in Their Married Bliss, A Pagan Place — and to divorce, infamy, freedom and the London she had imagined....
...But the current version, which clearly celebrates the Nativity (“And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ/ To be our sweet Saviour”), could in fact be far from ancient....
...He expounds the influence of a pantheistic philosopher, the pagan Plotinus....
...Historical scholarship suggests it is unlikely that Jesus was born on December 25, or at any time in the Palestine winter....
...Of course Jesus would be able to do anything. At Easter he is said to have looked sufficiently like a gardener for Mary to have mistaken him for one....
...Jesus had undergone the ultimate human experience, death, in order to redeem all who believed....
...Schama passes over the Karaites, an influential group of Jews who rejected the great body of rabbinic learning, the Talmud (he also bypasses Jesus)....
...This shows that the birth of the child Jesus marks the end of the old order, the pagan world, in which Caesar’s claims went virtually unchallenged....
...He compared the Pope with the Church fathers who long ago faced two big challenges – loving Jesus and teaching other Christians how to manage their lives in a pagan society....
...Nevertheless, unlike the young Titian, Tintoretto would have thought twice before mixing pagan and Christian stories in the same canvas....
...The alternative pagan tradition of cupids and putti – orgiastically overpopulating Rubens’s “Feast of Venus”, for example, does the opposite, ageing the infants with precocious erotic knowledge, the dimpled...
...veins on Jesus’ legs transmit their grief with stark immediacy....
...He advised that some of the trappings of local pagan religions – such as animal sacrifices and temple buildings – should be preserved and respected by the incoming Church....
...As the popularity of this grew, so the pagan origin was lost....
...“Why does that Jesus get all the publicity?”) – the ancient-historical deities book screen time. How good to see Zeus and the Olympians back in Clash of the Titans....
...“The pagan philosophers were as anti-rationalistic as the Christians. But it doesn’t matter....
...The perfect, pagan arts of ancient Greece first inspired Joannou’s fascination with the body, but it is Christianity’s corporeal mortification that continues to absorb him....
...Susannah’s quasi-step-daughter Karen has a hilarious journey through pagan religion. Edwin’s very English sister Helena is wonderfully uncomfortable at a Jewish wedding, commenting “Two photographers!...
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