Christian writers blamed same conquest on opposing denominational sins
Evidence
Most Christian writers sought to explain the invasions with the traditional tools of Judeo-Christian historiography: the invaders were scourges sent by God to punish bad Christians for their sins. For Dionysus, a Syrian Monophysite, the scourge is sent against the Byzantine church as punishment for its Duophysite heresy and for its persecution of good (Monophysite) Christians. For Byzantine writers, on the contrary, the punishment falls on the Monophysites for their heresy. Some writers, by contrast, will attribute the invasions to more venal (often sexual) sins. All hoped that proper repentance would turn away the Saracen scourge, and few bothered to inquire into the religious beliefs of the invaders. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 286
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- SEED: Angle: how ‘God punishes us for our sins’ historiography is a flexible frame where each faction finds its own adversaries guilty — a mirror for modern partisan blame narratives.
- SHARE: Good tidbit for a historian friend interested in how religious historiography projected blame onto whichever denomination one opposed.
Related
- Early Christian writers read Muslim conquest as divine punishment for Christian heresies. (similarity 0.89)
- Christians explained Muslim conquest as divine punishment for sin (similarity 0.80)
- Christian apocalyptic authors read Muslim conquest as deserved punishment for Christian sexual sin (similarity 0.79)
- Christians ignored Islam’s actual beliefs because they read Muslim conquests as divine punishment (similarity 0.79)