By Norman Gelb
Herod the nice, king of old Judea, was once a brutal, ruthless, vindictive and dangerously high-strung tyrant. He had a lot of his topics killed on suspicion of plotting opposed to him and was once accused of slaughtering young ones in Bethlehem while trained new king of the Jews have been born there. one of the sufferers of the murderous paranoia that finally drove him to the edge of madness have been his 3 oldest sons and the spouse he enjoyed so much. yet there has been an important point to Herod's personality that has been principally neglected over the centuries. Norman Gelb explores how Herod reworked his previously strive-ridden state right into a modernizing, economically thriving, orderly nation of foreign importance and reputation in the sprawling Roman Empire. This reassessment of Herod as ruler of Judaea introduces a outstanding distinction among a ruler's infamy and his striking laudable achievements. As this account indicates, regardless of his terrible failings and supreme psychological unbalance, Herod was once a fascinatingly complicated, dynamic, and mostly positive statesman, a determine of serious public accomplishment and some of the most underrated personalities of precedent days. historical past buffs and people attracted to well known old background can are brought to this ruthless tyrant and his sufferers.
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Extra info for Herod the Great: Statesman, Visionary, Tyrant
Sample text
Yet what if criticism was directed at a more fundamental level—that of the ideas on which the institutions of the church were ultimately based? In the case of Christianity, the ideas in question derive from the Bible. As with any classic religious text, three fundamental questions The Gathering Storm arise concerning its application: How is the most authentic form of that text to be determined? How is it to be translated? 28 The question of the “canon” of the Bible had been sorted out seven centuries earlier and was not seen as particularly problematic.
Second, Luther argued that the pope had no authority over purgatory and therefore was in no position to influence how long anyone spent there. In the highly unlikely event that he did have any such authority, surely he ought to empty the place free of charge? These were unquestionably dangerous, subversive ideas that posed a challenge to the finances of the church as much as to its theology. Yet the reader of these theses is more likely to notice their fundamental continuity with traditional Catholicism than their explosive potential.
The writings of medieval theologians could be set to one side with the greatest of ease to allow a direct engagement with the ideas of the New Testament. The ecclesiastically safe and familiar interpretations of the Bible found in scholastic theology would be marginalized in favor of reading the text directly. 30 The humanist demand to return to the Bible turned out to be far more radical a call than many senior churchmen could stomach. The humanists were primarily scholars—men of letters who insisted that this systematic return to the Bible should be done on the basis of the best possible scholarship.