On “The Mysteries of Artemis of Ephesos” by Guy MacLean Rogers ***

Rogers sets out to discover what exactly the mystery of Artemis was—indeed, what the mystery was of such mystery cults in general. In the process, Rogers sets forth a history of Ephesus and of the Artemisian, the temple of Artemis. I have not found a book yet that tells a secular history of Ephesus from early days to end, but Rogers, via the tale of Artemis, comes closest to what I've been looking for.

The work is highly technical. Rogers tells his story and makes his point by looking at a lot of inscriptions and then deducing information from thoses. He traces the growth of the cult of Artemis and its demise by looking at the names in these inscriptions, the people listed as various kinds of priests of Artemis and of Ephesus. I found the work difficult to get into as a result,

And yet, the tale grew on me. Rogers starts with the relocation of the temple and city by Lycomedes, in part because of flooding in the original sites, back in the 500s BCE. My area of interest was largely in the early CE, and this was indeed when Ephesus began to find its biggest success, peaking around 161. And then, by 167 or so, it began its descent. Why? And why so quick? By 262, the temple was in ruins, the cult of Artemis pretty much dead.

Rogers makes the case that the temple and goddess and her cult were all about salvation. If the people served her properly with sacrifices and adoration, she would keep the city safe. When things were prospering, this meant good things for the cult. But in the 160s, the Roman Empire was hit with plague. Death raged. Add in earthquakes and other disasters, and the economics of Ephesus collapsed, but so too did faith in the goddess. Despite the tedium of much of Rogers's discusion, I felt a bit sad for the city when it finally started to head toward its destruction.

On “The Triune God” by Edmund J. Fortman *****

This work provides a quick synopsis of trinitarian thinking from the beginning of the Christian faith to the twentieth century. My interest was primarily in the first half of the book—really from the foundation of the church through the first couple of centuries—and these are the book's clearest passage. In fact, as Fortman lays out, the Trinity teaching doesn't really find full form until the time of Augustine, in the fourth/fifth century, with some major “clarifications” happening in the Middle Ages, with Thomas Aquinas.

Fortman, himself a trinitarian, does a good job providing a framework and even denoting—or admitting—that trinitarian teaching is only implied among thinkers in the first one hundred years or so. He runs through pertinent scriptures and also through pertinent passages in early writers. The doctrine would not begin to find substantial form until the beginnings of the third century, and even in that, there would be plenty to argue over for the next hundred to two hundred years. Earliest thinkers didn't spend much time trying to figure out the place of the Holy Spirit; incorporation of the spirit as a “person” within the godhead would only begin really near the end of the second century. Instead, the arguments were over how Jesus was God and how he was related to, or positioned against, the Father.

Many of the arguments seem heavily tinged in philosophy, and after Augustine, even more so. As later Catholics would affirm, the trinity is a mystery. In that sense, I'm left wondering why there's been so much attempt to explain it. As becomes clear, as the centuries go on, there really isn't a good way to explain it; the second half of the book is full of seeming nonsense speak. Our terminology doesn't have the words to express what is attempting to be said; and even some of the terminology used, such as person(a), has changed over the years such that that that older terminology is no longer even as meaningful apparently as it once was (even though no better terms have arisen). Fortman, as he discusses later thinkers, seems to affirm much of what Augustine and certain other thinkers said on the subject, but over and over I'm left wondering why so many insist on this view of God (or insist Christians hold to it), when the earliest Christian writers did not conceive of God in the same way (and thus wouldn't be Christians in the view of contemporaries). The assumption is, of course, that later writers were led to greater truths that go beyond those earlier writers—but if the doctrine is so essential, why did the early writers not have it? Are Christians perhaps arguing over and hypothesizing about the wrong thing?