History is Fun

Last week, I ordered and received some lecture DVDs from one of my favorite places, the Teaching Company (www.teach12.com). They have the best professors in their fields do lecture courses on their favorite subjects, then they tape the lectures, and you can listen in your car or watch it on your tv or computer. My dad's favorite are the physics and math lectures, which are fun. I enjoy physics and math, but I also enjoy wider interests, like history, religion, arts, and philosophy. I find it interesting that the more one studies quantum physics and Zen Buddhism, the more they resemble each other.
My new lectures are on the Middle Ages. They started with the late Roman Empire and its transition from Paganism to Christianity, then came the Goths and the Franks and so on. Right now, I'm up to the Carolingian Renaissance, when people started to realize that the Bibles they had were more or less garbled because they were all handwritten, and most at this point were the copy of a copy of a copy, and people began to realize that they were no longer actually speaking Latin, but the beginnings of French, Spanish, and Italian, and the only people who REALLY spoke Latin were the Anglo-Saxon monks, whose native language was not based on Latin, so they had to study hard to learn it. Charlemagne was disturbed at these realizations, because he thought that God could only understand Latin, and if the Bibles, chants and prayer books had all become garbled translations, that Gods could not hear the prayers of the people. So, he ordered all the monks and scholars to re-learn Latin from original sources: Cicero, Ovid, etc. Then, once they had learned Latin properly, they would find the oldest Bible they could, and transcribe from that. In this period, the original Latin works weren't appreciated for their own merits, like they were in the Italian Renaissance, but as a means to an end, to learn proper Latin so God could hear you. Interesting stuff.
There was also a part about missionaries going into Saxony to try and convert the Saxons, as they were still largely Pagan at this time. At this point, the Heliand was written, which is essentially a version of the Bible written in Saxon in the style of the Epic Sagas. So, if you try to imagine the story of Christ written so as to appeal to people who worshipped Thor and Odin, you can get an idea of what a strange narrative it was. Bits of it were read in the lecture. It was strange to see Jesus depicted as a warrior chieftain with graphic depictions of a head wound that went on for at least a paragraph. To us, it doesn't make much sense to depict Jesus this way, as he's generally regarded as a peaceful figure, and much if not all of his message generally consists of "love thy neighbor" and "turn the other cheek" and generally advocating peace and humility before God. To the Saxons, it would have been difficult to imagine such a peaceful figure as being in any way divine or worthy of worship. The whole Christian conversion of the Saxons didn't really go well until Charlemagne conquered them and threatened to cut their heads off if they refused to convert.
History is interesting.