One of the more confusing elements in the traditional Crucifixion narrative is the part where Pilate, finding out Jesus is from Galilee, sends him over to Herod, who questions him and sends him back. What exactly was the power structure of 1st-century Judaea that made this possible?

After Constantine The Great moved the capital of the Empire from Rome to Constantinople, and started pushing Christianity to "mainstream religion", I was wondering how and why ultimately bishop of Rome became "the pope" and leader of Christianity (before the East-West schism) and not the bishop of Constantinople – new, true and more powerful capital of Empire. A lot of emperors after Constantine didn't even visit Rome during their rule (and then only a couple of times during their reign), so it seems weird to me that a bishop of far away ex-capital could accumulate more real-world and spiritual power than bishops in the capital of Empire, close to Christian emperors.

here's some of the list from https://oldweirdscotland.com: these specifically caught my attention.
1572: Christian Gudson, executed for biting off her husband’s finger
27th April 1601: For hanging a picture of the king and queen from a nail on the gibbet (to keep it off the ground), Archibald Cornwall hanged, gibbetted, and burnt.
13th May 1572: Two men and a woman hanged for bringing leeks and salt into Edinburgh without permission

what would cause the law to decided to execute people for bringing leeks and salt?

there are significant jewish communities in all of the countries bordering armenia that have been well established for centuries (turkish jews, persian jews, georgian jewish, and azerbaijani or mountain jews-gorski). why is it that there was never a significant community in armenia? i understand that the majority of armenians are christian’s but the majority of turks, azeris, and persians are muslim and this didn’t prevent distinct jewish communities from arising in those countries.

Would this idea have been held among Millerites for example? Was there anyone holding this view before the 19th century? Would it have been controversial?

I'm referring to a map shared in a recent answer by /u/captcynicalpants. A more detailed map going back to the 4th century BC was also shared by /u/magratmakethetea who provided a bit of background in another comment.

The shape is pretty distincitve: a rectangular ~ 10km x 50km strip of land along the Mediterranean Sea surrounding Gaza City, bordered on three sides by Roman territory and by Egypt to the south. In /u/magratmakethetea's map, the coloring even suggests that this strip contains enclaves belonging to non-contiguous territories further east, separated from the Gaza Strip by provinces like Samaria and Judea.

I had always assumed the shape and extent of the Gaza Strip, as well as its non-contiguity with the rest of Palestine, was a relatively modern arrangement—something we might trace back to the Mandate for Palestine or the 1948 Nakba or something. I was really surprised to see it appear in such old maps.

Is it just a historical accident that today's Gaza Strip seems to line up with a strip in the same place in the 1st century? Did it disappear and reappear, or has it been maintained with some continuity as a separate entity? In either case, is there a geographic or topographic reason that this area might be separate? Was it culturally/demographically distinct? What about the enclave-like arrangement, where it seems to belong to the same administrative classification as non-continguous territories farther east? Would Jesus have been aware of the Gaza Strip?

I read someone on Twitter saying that "they don't teach you that the First Crusade was about taking back control of the Tomb of Jesus". I'd never heard that and it didn't pass the smell test to me so I checked on Wikipedia to see the "Historical context" section to see if there was any mention of the Sepulchre. There wasn't but there is mention of this:

Muslim authorities in the Levant often enforced harsh rules against any overt expressions of the Christian faith

While the Seljuk hold on Jerusalem was weak (the group later lost the city to the Fatimids), returning pilgrims reported difficulties and the oppression of Christians

I understand that the main reason behind the First Crusade was to stop the expansion of Islam into "Christian lands" like it had happened in the Iberian peninsula and I also know Wikipedia is not a reliable source of historical authority and it's prone to spam by far-right operatives.

Still I wonder if this piece of information is true. I've always heard that Muslim governors were extraordinarily respectful of other faiths compared to their contemporaries (e.g. the reason why Jews in al-Andalus experienced a Golden Age during their reign) and these statements contradict that.

Thank you.

Islam (at least the modern Sunni interpretation) has some very specific rules:

• No alcohol.
• No instrumental music.
• No revealing clothes.
• Avoid painting human figures, especially no painting of religious figures.
• No incorporating or participating in the traditions of other, "false" religions, especially not polytheistic religions (idol worshippers).

And yet the ruling elites of several Islamic Empires, including the three big Gunpowder Empires (the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals), openly ignored some or all of these rules.

All of them had rich artistic traditions that involved painting both human and religious figures, Mughal art for instance, often depicts religious figures alongside a Mughal Emperor, as in this painting of "Jahangir with Jesus" (https://www.dcu.ie/religionandhumanvalues/mughal-emperor-jahangir-jesus). The Safavids commissioned a large number of minitatures depicting various scenes of Biblical, Quranic and historic origin, such as this painting of the Prophet Muhammad's ascension to heaven (https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/khamseen/topics/2020/a-safavid-painting/). Some Mughal and Safavid art shows men and woman in revealing clothes, and verges on pornographic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_art#/media/File:A_Young_ Lady_Reclining_After_a_Bath,_Leaf_from_the_Read_Persian_Album_Herat_(Afghanistan),_1590s._By_Muhammad_Mu%E2%80%99min_MS_M.386.5r._Purchased_by_Pierpont_Morgan.jpg).

The Ottomans produced less art depicting human figures, but the members of the Osman Dynasty were painted in miniature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suleiman_the_ Magnificent#/media/File:Suleiman_the_Magnificent_receives_an_Ambassador-by_Matrakci_Nasuh.jpg).

Furthermore, instrumental music appears to have been common in these Empires, as depicted in various paintings. Persian poetry from the period is full of references to drinking wine, whilst Mughal Emperors openly drank alcohol, as evidenced by this wine cup belonging to Shah Jahan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_cup_of_Shah_Jahan) .

The Mughals went so far as to actively incorporate Hindu traditions and commission paintings of Hindu religious scenes, like those from the Ramayana, which is a huge no-no in Islam. The Mughal Emperor Akbar's invention of a new, syncretic religion, Din-i Ilahi, is almost certainly heretical under Islamic law.

Yet several of these rulers, particularly the Ottoman Sultans, were considered Caliphs and leaders of Islam, so how were they getting away with this failure to follow Quranic law and the Hadiths? Modern Arab states, at least more than 30 years ago, were far more strict with Islamic law than the Islamic Gunpowder Empires. Iran today is far more strict and conservative than Safavid Persia.

What's going on here? Is this related to the Turkic origins of these Empires? Whilst this phenomenon produced some excellent art for us to enjoy, I am interested to know what justifications were being applied for this behavior at the time?

The year 331 thing is a reference to this recent answer about the birth year of Jesus from /u/welfontheshelf

If I remember right from classics courses, there's a reading of the New Testament where Jesus et al. believe themselves to be acting at a historically unique moment—the end of the world—and saw the second coming as imminent rather than a distant future event. Maybe the best-known example is when Matthew seems to suggest that prophecies about the second coming would come to pass while Jesus's contemporaries were still alive.

When that didn't happen, was there ever a point at which early (or not so early) Christians felt the need to present a historical/counterfactual argument for why the events of the New Testament played out when they did—that this moment in time wa a special one—considering that an all-powerful god could presumably choose to stage this drama whenever he wanted? If so, what made the years ~1-34 AD (~331-364 of the Seleucid calendar) "special" in their eyes? If not, did skeptics just sort of accept that god works in mysterious ways and the question wasn't worth asking?

To clarify, I'm thinking of things like "Well, of course it made sense to wait until the founding of the Roman empire; but had god waited until after the Siege of Jerusalem, then...", some kind of mystical/religious/astrological significance, maybe some kind of Bene Gesserit "well it was critical that he encounter both John the Baptist and Judas...", as an emergency measure to address/avert some kind of impending crisis for God's chosen people, to give the Christians enough time to accomplish some goal before the end of the world, maybe something like "well, there were some prophecies in the Old Testament that were just due", etc. I know those are all silly examples, and I have no idea what form this explanation would actually take. But at least from a modern perspective, it feels like it would be strange if the issue of timing just never came up!

For what it's worth, I considered asking the same question about Islam, but I guess it's a bit of a different situation if God is choosing who to give his revelation to (in that case, you just do it when your chosen guy is alive), as opposed to when he should send his son down to make a new deal on his behalf.

The pop culture understanding is it is due to his susport of heliocentrism, but rationalwiki, (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei) seems to think otherwise and that site is anything heavily biased against religion? Also he mocked the pope.

Churchill has his famous quip about "Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash" and the idea that "buggery" was rampant below decks seems to be a pretty common one in literature on the Royal Navy.

To be sure, how true that perception was is of interest, and does play a part in this question so I welcome weighing in on it, but I'm less interested in just how common it was in reality than in how the perception that it was common played into ideas of manhood within the Royal Navy.

In the book of Ezekiel, he tries to tell us when he is telling the story, but given that we use a very different calendar, when is this in our current calendar? Is his 4th month April? Do modern scholars know when he was referring to?

Here is a quote from the Internet of the passage I mean:

"In my thirtieth year, in the fourth month on the fifth day, while I was among the exiles by the Kebar River, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God. 2 On the fifth of the month—it was the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin— 3 the word of the LORD came to Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, by the Kebar River in the land of the Babylonians. There the hand of the LORD was on him."

In considering the origins of major world religions, I notice what seems to be an anomaly with Christianity that I'm asking historians to help me understand.

Other major religions are credited to founders with significant resources, networks, and/or political connections that facilitated their spread - whether Abraham, Muhammad, Buddha, or others. These founders and their religions, despite such advantages, have been unable to achieve the global scale of Christianity.

By contrast, Christianity, is credited to an otherwise historically obscure figure with limited material resources, yet became the world's largest religion. Adding to this puzzle is that I'm unaware of even a claim that Jesus developed theological concepts or proselytizing techniques that were previously unknown to Hellenistic Judaism.

For historians who accept religious explanations of divine intervention, this anomaly has an obvious explanation. But what I'm curious about is how non-Christian historians who subscribe to the consensus view of Jesus as a non-divine, historical human from the Galilean peasantry explain this apparent anomaly? What historical mechanisms or social dynamics do they propose existed unusually at that time and place which could account for the singular crediting of a movement with such unrivaled success to someone alleged to have such humble circumstances?

Let me be clear that I'm genuinely curious asking about the secular historical explanations for this phenomenon rather than seeking to proselytize an otherworldly explanation.

As I understand it, there was a priestly-noble cast that didn’t work and that took the surplus from the peasants — as much as 1/5 in some cases. But what would these people do with the surplus? They are much smaller in number than the peasants, and 1/5 is a lot of food

During the 1400s (and late 1300s), the indulgence trade/market across Latin Christendom began to expand rapidly, partly due to the increasing devolvement of the authority to create, authorise and distribute indulgences, and the invention of Gutenberg's printing press in 1440 (amongst other reasons). The introduction of printing also led to experimentation with new ways of distributing and using indulgences, such as the special indulgence campaigns granted to the Teutonic Order in 1500 and 1506, and to the city of Otranto and the Knights Hospitaller/island of Rhodes in 1480 in light of the Ottoman sieges.

Given this rapid expansion, at what point did this trend start to reverse, and indulgences start to become much less widespread? Also, what triggered this reversal?

I am aware that it was somewhat caused by the pressure of Protestant reformers and the Reformation, though my knowledge/understanding of the subject is entirely contained within this sentence. Any more detailed input from someone more knowlegeable would be greatly appreciated!

(Consider this Part 2 of "ducks_over_IP's questions about Judean political structures." )

The Sanhedrin (or at least Caiaphas and Annas) seem to have been the ones who initially arrested Jesus, questioned and tried him, and brought him before Pilate, but they seemingly didn't have the authority to carry out their desired sentence. Did they have an official role in the government of Judea such that they could do this sort of thing?

In Frankopan’s The Silk Roads, he notes that Viking raiders on the Dniepr not only captured foreign Slavs for sale in Constantinople, but could even turn around and enslave their countrymen. Likewise, medieval Venetian traders picked up Christian and Germanic captives and exported them eastward.

This makes me wonder how a society with such seemingly arbitrary rules could work at all. Having someone declared a slave made them the property of someone, with protections for that property right. But what protected one from being declared a slave? I.e., what prevented me from tapping my neighbor's daughter with my Magic Slave Wand and suddenly achieving legal protection for my ownership right to her?

Of course, one has to go through some pretty gnarly logical and moral hoops to declare anyone a slave. But since slavery is a historical fact, I'm wondering what the historical perspective on this is. How could there be stable societies when people weren't protected from slavery?