Joshua, the amelekites and history

At 1 Kings 6:1 we are told that 480 years had passed between the Exodus and the fourth year of King Solomon. The date is schematic [twelve generations of forty years], and, as we have seen, it balances the Israelites' length of time in Egypt [430 years at Exodus 12:40]. If we took it literally, it would put the exploits of Joshua back at c1420-1400 BC: it is not, however, a correct figure.
Robin Lane Fox, The unauthorized version: truth and fiction in the Bible

I'm trying to get my head around ancient history, starting with events described in the Old Testament, but probably mythical. That's to say, the bloody events described mainly in the book of Joshua. In the Hebrew Bible [he's a much more minor figure in the Torah] Joshua became the leader of the Israelites after Moses. Bible chronology isn't entirely reliable, as my quote indicates, but scholars are more or less agreed that he flourished between 1450 and 1370 BCE. That's to say, that's the period in which he's calculated to have lived, had he lived at all.

The Joshua of the Bible is an almost monotonously victorious general. His first victory was over the Amelekites – the first of many slaughterings of a people destined to become the archetypical enemy of the Jews. Next he crossed the Jordan, with Yahweh parting the waters as before at the Red Sea, and was bloodily victorious in battle against Jericho, Ai [after a brief glitch, see Joshua 7: 3-26], Gibeon, Makkedah, Libnah, Lachish, Gezer, Eglon, Hebron, and Debir. Chapter 10 of Joshua ends on a high note:

So Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded. And Joshua smote them from Kadeshbarnea even unto Gaza, and all the country of Goshen, even unto Gibeon. And all these kings and their land did Joshua take at one time, because the LORD God of Israel fought for Israel.

To most modern consciences, this is sickening stuff, and the fact that we have not a shred of external evidence that this Yahweh-sanctioned splattering spree ever took place, or that Joshua or Moses ever existed, hardly makes it more palatable. But if we put our feelings aside, what evidence do we have, either from archaeology, or from external records, of these Biblical places and peoples and their histories? For it should always be emphasised that the Bible is by no means a history book, and every supposedly historical statement found therein should be treated with the utmost scepticism.

The only extra-Biblical reference I've found regarding the Amalekites so far comes from one Nachmanides, a mystical Jewish scholar of the thirteenth century, whose own gleanings would have come from the sacred texts. This isn't to say that the Amalekites were purely fictional – it's very likely that they were an aboriginal group in southern Canaan or Palestine – but the name should give us pause. The Amalekites are named for Amalek, mentioned in two genealogies [Genesis 36:12 and 1 Chronicles 1:36] as a grandson of Esau, Jacob's brother. Jacob and Esau, though, are as mythical as Adam, so at this point I've reached a dead end so far as the Amalekites are concerned.

We can say more that's extra-biblical about some of the other places I've mentioned. A lot of archaeological work has been done at the site of Jericho, unearthing more than twenty successive settlements going back 11,000 years. The results have proved extremely problematic for the Bible-is-history pundits, because unfortunately the author of Joshua provided details of the battle which are subject to empirical testing

presentism and the conflict thesis

Even the most well-founded, well-argued, and well-intentioned ideas about science and religion are liable to later change or eventual rejection. The same is true for historiographical positions, including, of course, the complexity thesis itself.
David Wilson, 'The historiography of science and religion'

Wilson's essay in the Science and Religion collection is certainly more thought-provoking than the previous one, though the view is much the same - that a conflict thesis has operated largely among non-historians, and particularly among scientists, but that historians of science have largely come round to a 'complexity thesis'. Again, though, its many examples point to a complexity of understandings of both science and religion between individuals, and often within particular individuals, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The fundamental philosophical issues are not discussed.
Having said that, Wilson does highlight some important themes. Particularly pertinent is the issue of 'presentism'. Wilson explains it in contrast to contextualism. I'll provide a lengthy explanatory quote from early in the essay:

Although historians have espoused various approaches to the past, it will make our subject more manageable if we concentrate on the polar opposites around which views have tended to cluster. One approach has been to examine past ideas as much as possible in their own context, without either judging their long-term validity or making the discussion directly relevant to present issues. Another approach has been to study past ideas from the perspective of the present, taking full advantage of the hindsight provided by later knowledge to judge which ideas have proven to be valid. The second approach has apparent advantages. It does not exclude current knowledge that can assist us in the historical task. It also keeps present issues to the fore by insisting that historians draw lessons from the past that are relevant to current issues. However, historians have tended to regard the second approach as precariously likely to lead to distortion of the past in the service of present concerns. Dismissing this as 'presentism', therefore, historians of science have come to favor the first, or contextualist, approach.

 Presentism isn't a term I've heard before, but the problem is familiar enough. we find it in fiction too, of course, when we find modern writers of historical romances getting not just the tone but the whole seventeenth century context wrong - sometimes deliberately. Or we have new dramatic interpretations of such perennial faves as Jane Austen which 'tease out' feminist undertones claimed to be found in the original. It raises the obvious question of whether we can ever really recapture the context of the times [I think of Borges' character writing an exact replica of Don Quixote which critics find disturbingly other than the previous version]. Here, though, the distortions of presentism are said to feed into a progressivist view of science and knowledge, what historian Herbert Butterfield called 'the whig interpretation of history' [he published a book with this title in 1931]. 

Were I a historian, I would heed the warnings, while also recognising, for example, that the rigorous exclusion of non-natural explanations in the sciences [meaning, essentially, a tightening of the definition of scientific praxis] has been a great boon in the advancement of knowledge over the past few hundred years, an advancement that has been truly sensational. We should indeed guard against what Maurice Mandelbaum called 'the retrospective fallacy', in which we lose sight of the groping, uncertain nature of the past as it was lived for those who felt it as present and future. For that would be to destroy empathy and to judge harshly. Many great past scientists 'transcended' their times, but only to a limited extent, and to see them as our contemporaries would be to do them a great disservice. Sometimes, in reading them or reading about them, we wish we could free them from the context of their times and show them how times have changed, partly as a result of their own achievements. That's only human, but it's fantasy, after all. 

So, it's true that the earliest practitioners of what we 'retrospectively' call modern science were not atheists, secret or otherwise, and that they were seeking to comprehend the glory of their god's creation, but I'm not so sure that it's a 'presentist' distortion to point out that they were, in fact, contributing to a loosening of the grip of theology and religion upon our modern understanding of how the world works, to a degree that, a few hundred years later, that grip is but a memory trace in the collective scientific consciousness. Or is that going a bit too far? 

Again the point I'm making is that there's plenty of complexity in the relations between and among scientists and believers, but science and religion have ceased to mix sociably since science has refused to, or forgotten to, keep to its circumscribed territory, and has shrugged off its dress-up as some deity's hand-maiden.

more on the history of Jesus

how old was this corpse?

But thou, Bethlehem, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel.
Micah 5:2

I try to limit myself to reading six books [slowly] at a time, but I must admit that two books occupying me at present are not on the six-list, which is all a bit of a worry. One is the collection of essays I've been criticising, and the other is a new addition to my library, Robin Lane Fox's The unauthorized version: truth and fiction in the Bible [1991]. I've had a few things to say already about Fox's monumental work of scholarship, Pagans and Christians [1985], which provided a fantastically detailed background to the world that Christian belief was disgorged into, as well as a rich account of the differences between 'pagan' and Christian belief, and how the different beliefs interacted. However, I found the work heavy-going at times because of my unfamiliarity with much of the material. I have no such problem, so far, with The unauthorized version, the first chapter of which throws fascinating light on the two creation stories in Genesis, and the jumbled nativity stories in the gospels [largely as result of ensuring that Jesus of Nazareth should be connected, in birth, with Bethlehem, to fulfil the prophecy from Micah]. The second of these themes covers much the same ground as my two-part, and unfinished, post 'how real was their Jesus?', but of course Fox is a much more thorough scholar than I am. Still, he only focuses on a few problems, such as the census, the different birth datings of 'Matthew' and 'Luke', the star and the maji, Jesus's age at his death, and the date of the crucifixion. He doesn't enter into the problem of the massacre of the innocents, the genealogies, the miracles and so on. Some of these are hardly worth refuting of course, but I'm surprised that, as a historian, he didn't get stuck into the massacre of the innocent legend [maybe later?], and 'Matthew's' penchant for linking Jesus's story to Old Testament prophecy - though he did mention one that I wasn't aware of. Matthew is at pains to mention that the star guided the cognoscenti to Bethlehem, and I wrote about modern astronomical exploration of this star recently, but I didn't realize that Matthew may well have been providing a link to Numbers 24:17 - 'a star shall come forth out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel', again revealing that gospeller's concern to present Jesus as a king rather than a god.
Considering the endless disputation over such matters, Fox does occasionally surprise with definite conclusions. He's convinced he's found the right dating of the crucifixion - at the end of March in the year 36, the last year of Pontius Pilate's governorship. He works it out by the Passovers in the gospel of John, as well as from the described incarceration of John the Baptist, at which point Jesus's 'ministry' began [Mark 1:14]. John the Baptist was jailed for criticising Herod Antipas's marriage to Herodias, and his consequent abandonment of his first wife, events described in Josephus with enough detail that a date can apparently be put on it. There are three distinct Passovers mentioned, and Fox believes they were consecutive, covering, essentially, the three years of Jesus's ministry. However, he inclines to the belief that Jesus was older than popular mythology has it, leaning heavily on a passage in John [8:57], and inclining also, it appears, to the view that the star of Bethlehem was in fact Halley's comet, definitively dated as appearing in Rome in 12BCE.
Anyway, it's all good fun, and just what the doctor ordered as far as I'm concerned.

touching on the Christian legacy, inter alia

ethical solutions, inc

Happy new year to all my darling fans.

Now I mustn't forget my promise about a quotation, so this time, a double dose:

I've just read Geoffrey Robertson's The case of the pope, gifted to me for Christmas. Robertson does his usual thorough job, and is very convincing on the inadequacies of Canon Law, and the abysmal record of the current pontiff in his previous role as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The overall impression I get is of a profoundly insular, arrogant organisation, convinced of its moral superiority, and convinced that its 'house rules', aka Canon Law, is superior to all secular laws in dealing with every aspect of 'sin'. The result, of course, has been disastrous for thousands of children in every country the RCC has made inroads into. And there's no real sign of change in spite of the pressure being applied.

I'll review the book in more detail later perhaps. For now, I'm going to be a bit churlishly critical - I love a bit o' churlishness, especially during the festive season. In a section titled 'Reflections' at the end of the book, Robertson makes this statement, after arguing at length on the Vatican's abuses of human rights:

It should not be necessary to invoke human rights law against a great church, especially one whose founder laid down the Judeo-Christian ethics that have contributed considerably to the principles of that law.

Now, I suspect that this praise of Judeo-Christian ethics was a concessional bone thrown at the RCC after nearly 200 pages of relentless, but judicious, attack. But I must object to it on two counts. First, Robertson refers to the church's founder, by whom he clearly means the character known as Jesus. Now, the idea that Jesus founded the RCC is quite preposterous. Even if we assume that the name refers to a historically real character - a big assumption - there is no evidence from the gospels [and the gospels are all we have] that he intended to found a 'church' as such, and certainly not a church anything like the RCC. The RCC is, and has been since the beginning, a profoundly authoritarian, ritual obsessed, secretive organisation. There are certain consistent qualities of Jesus that emerge from the gospels - an impatience with ritual, a preference for substance over form, an anti-authoritarian tendency, an open simplicity of style and a preference for the company of the poor, the dispossessed and the powerless - notably women and children. His attack on the pharisees for being more concerned with dress and form than substantial teachings, for being essentially out of touch with ordinary people, gives a pretty clear indication of what he would've thought of the RCC, which raises the question of whether the RCC is or ever has been a Christian organisation.
The second point is the familiar one - that our modern ethics were 'laid down' by Jesus, as recorded in the gospels. I find it extremely difficult to comprehend how anybody reading the gospels carefully and with an open mind can find a foundation for modern ethics therein. The sayings of Jesus are not, in my opinion, particularly 'ethically rich', and the parables are often obscure and sometimes very dubious in their message. The golden rule, for example, is found in dozens of religious traditions, indicating that it transcends religion as a common-sense formula for social living. The peacemakers are, or should be, blessed, and the meek shall inherit the earth. This is wishful thinking - admirable enough, but hardly the basis of an ethical system. Love your enemies [a piece of preaching that Jesus didn't always practice himself] is merely a paradoxical remark that undermines the concepts love/hate and friends/enemies. The remark 'let he who is without sin cast the first stone' is a useful corrective against moral dudgeon, but it's hardly original [and in any case was a later insertion]. Altogether, all we have in the gospels are a few general remarks, mostly unobjectional and generally kindly, but not particularly earth-shattering. Had they never been published or bruited about, I strongly doubt that our modern ethical thinking and the laws based on it would have been any different.

My point is that Christianity continues to be over-rated from an ethical perspective, even by non-believers. We have always done better, in thinking about ethics, to leave religion out of it, as the Graeco-Romans did. It is to that tradition, more than any, that we owe the upholding of ethical standards in law.

Francis Bacon's dream

So much concerning the several classes of idols, and their equipage; all of which must be renounced and put away with a fixed and solemn determination, and the understanding thoroughly freed and cleansed; the entrance into the kingdom of man, founded on the sciences, being not much other than the entrance into the kingdom of heaven, whereinto none may enter except as a little child.

These remarks are from Francis Bacon's Novum Organum, in which he criticises what he calls 'idols', what we might call preconceptions or idees fixes, which inhibit our understanding and our approach to the phenomena around us. Interestingly, Bacon was particularly concerned about the muddying effects of everyday language, anticipating such later seventeenth century thinkers as Spinoza and Descartes, who were won over by the achievements of mathematics, and sought to model philosophical thinking upon mathematical axioms.

In the version I have, an extract published in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Bacon describes the Idols of the Tribe [the tendency to generalize or abstract from too little evidence, and to create general forms from specific instances], the Idols of the Cave [the tendency to generalize too much from your own specialization], the Idols of the Marketplace [the above-mentioned tendency to mystify what should be clear, through the use of everyday language], and the Idols of the Theater [a preoccupation with philosophical systems, discredited or not, as a guide to truth]. Another problem that I encounter is the fear of divesting yourself of the trappings of supposed adulthood and sophistication, so to become child-like, as if wonder is a failing and knowingness is all. Our identity is wrapped up in a bank of knowledge, opinions and attitudes, and these are the greatest barriers to scientific exploration we have - which is all somehow rather ironic.

quel surprise - a flawed pope

While I was out the other day, collecting my thoroughly unremarkable academic transcript from campus west of Unisa, I took the time to visit Borders and catch up on some reading. The book I finally settled on was The hound of Hitler, by Gerard Noel, a biography of the controversial Pius XII, pope from 1939 to 1958. I had no intention of buying it - I have no money - but after a bout of reading, I was hooked, and definitely would have liked to buy it. It would have made a great companion volume to the new Geoffrey Robertson book - which I also can't afford.
I've heard Pius XII described as 'the nazi pope', and his activities got an airing at the atheists meetup I attended about a week ago. So what was coming out of the Vatican during the war and the immediate post-war years? What, if anything, was this pope's association with nazism? After reading only a dozen pages of this book, I have more inklings about this than I had previously.
The first thing to become clear about the book is that it's no hatchet job, which you might expect it to be from the title, though that title is ambiguous - was he a hound attacking Hitler or working for him? The author is himself a Catholic, having edited a major Catholic journal for a decade in the seventies and eighties, and he seems to know plenty about recent Catholic history and Catholic politics. More importantly, he has the historian's detachment and fealty to the deepest and fairest understanding of his subject. What comes out, in the small portion that I've read, is a judicious appraisal of a closeted, delicate, intellectual, unworldly personality, probably ill-fitted to the position of moral arbiter of millions of people's lives at such a time of storm and stress as the second world war provided. Eugenio Pacelli, to use his real name, was no Nazi. After all, Nazism invoked an extreme, specifically German nationalism, which could hardly appeal to anyone who wasn't German. As to whether he had fascist sympathies, I've not read enough yet to determine that, but it's possible. Pacelli's aristocratic family had been lawyers and advisers to various popes for decades. They were members of the soi-disant 'black nobility', nobles created by the Holy See who remained loyal to the papacy during the years of church-state conflict from 1870 to 1929, and Pacelli himself seems never to have questioned the authoritarianism of the RCC, an authoritarianism that fascist regimes, as well as sympathetic organisations such as Action Francaise, partly modelled themselves on.
Now I've just finished reading the quite comprehensive Wikipedia article on Pius XII, as well as reviews of Noel's book, such as this one [since it's sadly unlikely that I'll be able to secure myself a copy], and the figure that emerges is of a pope who, in spite of his previous extensive career as a Vatican diplomat, was a political naif who placed too much emphasis on treaties and agreements, a la Neville Chamberlain, and who failed to realize the threat of Hitler until too late. Pacelli was notoriously silent about Nazism during the war years, and in the post-war years reserved his strongest criticism for communism, the more 'natural' enemy of the RCC. This silence has been the subject of numerous books and articles, and the focus of furious debate for decades.   The question of the Jews and anti-semitism lies at the heart of it all. Anti-Judaism was a major feature of Roman Catholicism for centuries. Noel writes about an extraordinary ceremony that traditionally accompanied the inauguration of a new pope, in which the pope would offer to a rabbi a copy of the Bible, or perhaps it was the Tanach, upside-down, together with thirty pieces of silver. This symbolized, presumably, that the Jews had gotten the 'word of god' upside-down. No prizes for guessing what the silver coins represented. Pacelli would have been imbued with this traditional enmity towards the Judaic religion. All in all, though, he doesn't seem to have been any more anti-semitic than the rest of his tribe, and he really does seem to have made some efforts to help the Jews towards the end of the war - too little, too late. He seems particularly to have read Hitler all wrong, imagining him, because of an early pact made between the Nazis and a left-wing workers' group, to have been 'secretly' a creature of the left. And he always saw the greatest danger as coming from that direction. Apparently, in his days as as a Catholic diplomat in the thirties, he had an audience with Roosevelt, in which he harangued him about the threat of communism in the US.
Above all, this pope was concerned about the power of his church, a church whose 'truth' was beyond question. Plus ca change... His silence may have had something to do with his ambivalence about the Jews [there were no doubt plenty of rabid anti-Semites in the Vatican in the early twentieth century, and Pacelli's family had by and large come out against Dreyfus at the time of the notorious Dreyfus affair] but just as much to do with the fear of becoming the target of the Nazis, as had occurred when Dutch bishops protested against Nazi behaviour. A vast number of Dutch clergy and laity were then rounded up and executed.
It's probably unlikely that a more vociferously anti-Nazi pope would have made much of a difference to the Nazi killing machine during the war. However, I'm trying in vain to find an explicit statement from Pacelli about the Holocaust made after the war. I'll keep on trying. Meanwhile, I note that a number of Jewish historians and writers have come out in defence of Pacelli and the Catholic church's role in saving many thousands of Jewish lives during the war.

Cicero on universal law and morality

Marcus Tullius Cicero was more renowned as a literary stylist and an orator [as well as a prominent lawyer and politician] than as an original philosopher, but these comments, made more than two thousand years ago, and in turned derived from earlier Stoic philosophers he had studied, would be endorsed by many a modern-day thinker, such as Stephen Pinker, concerned to emphasize a real human nature rather than a 'blank state' which might be filled with whatever values a teacher or master-manipulator might choose to impose.

In his essay On Duties, Cicero distinguishes between statute or civil law and 'the moral law which nature itself has ordained':

As I have said before - and it needs constant repetition! - there is a bond of community that links every man in the world with every other. Though this bond is universal in application, it is particularly strong as a unifying link between people of the same race: between actual compatriots the link is closer still. 

The existence of this natural bond of community between all human beings explains why our ancestors chose to make a distinction between the civil law of the land and the universal law. The law of the land, it is true, ought to be capable of inclusion within the universal law, but they are not synonymous since the latter is more comprehensive.

Cicero regularly refers to this universal law as 'natural', and so one thinks of principles of natural justice, and of natural law, which dates back to Roman law. The idea of a bond of community between all humans surely contains the germ of the concept of universal human rights [and universal human responsibilities], in spite of the rigidly hierarchical nature of Roman society, the overall powerlessness of women, and of course the general acceptance of slavery [upon which much of the economy was based]. Cicero doesn't take the concept too far, taking human nature as 'god given', the god he mentions being Jupiter. His claim that 'people of the same race' have a stronger bond, and compatriots a stronger one still is both questionable and a commonplace. David Hume would certainly have agreed, and it's a bit reminiscent of Singer's 'expanding circle', though I've often wondered myself about the strength of the nationalist bond, a very weak bond in my case. I'm not sure what he means by 'people of the same race', as opposed to compatriots, and I'm not at all sure if his contemporaries understood it either. The Romans at this time were forever fighting peoples on their borders - in fact this sort of fighting went on throughout the many centuries of Roman power, and presumably they considered these 'barbarian' peoples as races rather than nations. Then again, they may have distinguished some of their enemies as more civilized than others, as 'compatriots' among themselves. In any case Cicero was clearly grappling with the same sorts of issues around the extent of human sympathies that philosophers and psychologists have been grappling with in more recent times, and which genetics and evolutionary psychology have been helping to shed light on - even as they have rendered the concept of race redundant.
The main subject of Cicero's essay, though, is the relationship between 'right' [as in doing what is right] and 'advantage' [as in self-interest]. He treats the subject confusingly at times, and I might look more closely at it later.

Constantine's role

the arch of constantine, rome

Theology is a subject I've tried to get into, and apparently Jason Rosenhouse and Jerry Coyne have been trying to do the same, with regard to modern theology. Being a lesser mortal, without immediate access to modern university material, and being too poor to be able to subscribe to scholarly journals, I've looked at whatever scraps came my way, such as the apparently dubious interpretations of Islamic theology offered up by Karen Armstrong, as well as more ancient theologies such as Augustine of Hippo's attempt to prove the existence of the soul, Anselm's ontological 'proof' of his god's existence, and historical interpretations of the thought of the likes of Origen and Arius.
Much of this I've found a real yawn, though I've occasionally been impressed by the ingeniousness, as well as the energy, of the arguments. I've tended to take the 'emperor's new clothes' position - is there really anything to talk about? This seems especially relevant to theology about Jesus - a person or a god or an aspect of a god? It seems to me that, before you start speculating about such things, you have to establish whether the guy ever really existed - a matter for empirical research, not pure intellectual speculation. But with theology in general, you have to have something of the other-wordly about you to appreciate it, and there's not much of that in me. And I find too little of the this-worldly in theologians.
To judge from Rosenhouse's experiences with modern theology [or theistic enquiry into the existence of gods, which isn't quite the same thing, but which is surely self-evidently problematic], I'm probably not missing much. From my reading, Rosenhouse thinks much like me on the subject - but probably with a greater command of formal logic - and once you encounter the first profoundly dubious or unwarranted assumption in these writings it's hard to find the energy or enthusiasm to go on. I'm more interested in the history of these debates, and their political implications, which aren't great these days, but were very great when the RCC ruled the roost, or when monarchs claimed to rule by divine right.
So I'm currently, through Robin Lane Fox, learning much about a key moment, probably the key moment, in the history of Christianity's relationship to secular authority, that's to say the Roman Emperor Constantine's accession to full power in 324, and his various decrees and speeches from that time, requiring the institution of Christianity as the religion of the emperor, if not of the state.
Constantine's conversion and its momentous impact has occasionally come up in conversations I've had with vaguely interested parties, and as always I've pretended to know more about the subject than I actually do. Now I can partially rectify the situation - I mean, I'll still pretend to know more than I do, but at least what I do know is a lot greater than before.
One issue Fox helps clarify is this: Wasn't it just a matter of time before Christianity became the official state religion, considering its gradually growing popularity in the Graeco-Roman world? Another is this issue: Was Constantine a 'real' Christian, or did he just adopt the religion for specific, pragmatic reasons? And there are other issues I'd love to have clarified. What was the reaction of the various strata of the population to Constantine's conversion and his decrees? How did Constantine get converted in the first place? How did all this affect the church hierarchy? When was the first pope consecrated, and how was power distributed between the emperors and the popes? etc etc
Not all of these questions are addressed directly in Fox's book, and I suppose I'd have to read or peruse dozens of texts before I got a proper handle on it all [always remembering too that the primary materials are so scant, and often one-sided and propagandist, that many questions will never be fully answered], but if I can trust Fox - and I feel inclined to do so -  I can at least answer the first two questions more or less to my satisfaction. Most of the following comes from Fox and from wikipedia articles on Constantine, his dad Constantius, Diocletian and others.

Constantine was born in 272. At the time, his father was a Roman officer, part of the bodyguard to the emperor Aurelian [270-275]. Interestingly, Aurelian, a highly successful emperor in spite of the brevity of his rule, raised the status of the sun god, Sol, as the main divinity of the empire, providing a first glimpse of European monotheism, though perhaps we shouldn't make too much of that.
Hard to know how much the young Constantine was aware of it all, but the empire was in a right mess during his early years - the last years of what has been dubbed by historians 'the crisis of the third century' - with seven emperors having dropped dead by his fourteenth birthday. The eighth emperor, Diocletian, a former army officer of 'low birth', eventually raised Constantius, the army officer of low birth, to the position of Caesar, or junior co-emperor. For some reason Diocletian decided, over time, to divide the empire into quarters. First, in 285, after only a year as emperor, he appointed Maximian as his senior co-emperor, or Augustus, and then in 293 he appointed Constantius and Galerius as junior emperors. My guess is that there were so many marauding peoples on the borders of the empire [Quadis, Sarmatians, Goths, Alamanni, Longiones, Franks, Burgundians and Vandals to name a few] that Diocletian realized he'd have to be in four places at once to keep his eyes on them.
Constantius was one of the western emperors. His son, the future Constantine, eventually joined him on campaign in Gaul and Britain, where Constantius died, in York, in 306. This was in the year after Diocletian retired to his vegetable garden [he was one of those rare top pollies who chose to turn his back on power]. The tetrarchy he created immediately came under strain. Constantine wasn't named Caesar after his father's death, and a complicated power struggle ensued. More importantly though, for the future of Christianity, Constantine, who was brought up in Diocletian's court, witnessed the early years of the Great Persecution, the worst persecution of Christians in the empire's history, a persecution begun by Diocletian and further pursued by Galerius and Maximin. It probably had a profound effect, and, while trying to consolidate power in the west, he took a more tolerant approach to Christianity, as his father had before him. He seems to have converted to Christianity around the year 312, probably under the influence of a close adviser, Ossius, bishop of Cordova. Ossius was to become Constantine's representative in the Christian disputes the emperor felt bound to deal with in the 320s, most notably the Donatist and Arian controversies. He also presided over the Council of Nicea in 325.
Anyway, to answer the two questions. Firstly, no, it wasn't inevitable that the Roman Empire would become Christian. It came as quite a shock in fact. Although we don't have clear data like censuses and the like, there's little evidence that Christianity was on the rise before Constantine's conversion, and of course the vast majority of the ruling class and the ranks of the military were pagan. It was also hardly inevitable that Constantine would survive to stabilize the empire, and to take it onto the road towards Christianisation. The fifty years before Constantine's rise to power were incredibly bloody and dangerous for emperors. Many were corrupt or incompetent, but many were brilliant, or at least potentially so. No doubt Constantine kept his wits about him, but he also would have had more than his fair share of luck, and Christianity itself was riding on this luck. But it should also be noted that Christianity was a vastly different religion from paganism. It was far more than just moving to a more monotheistic paradigm, as with the emperor Aurelian and his son-god. With Christianity came the concepts of sin, redemption, salvation, the Fall and the Second Coming, a way of looking at the world completely at odds with the pagan religion. For this reason, once the religion became established, disestablishing it - as the later emperor Julian tried to do - was something of a too-hard-basket proposition. So, given that, had Constantine not been persuaded that way, another later and successful emperor might have turned to Christianity, the religion still might have been successful without Constantine. Then again, maybe not. The best approach would've been to ignore the religion, rather than adopting it or persecuting it. And perhaps that's the best approach today - but it becomes difficult when a religion interferes with scientific theory, or campaigns against the furtherance of knowledge, as I believe the Catholic Church does.
As to the second issue, it's clear from his concern to iron out the problems with Christianity in the early fourth century, and his keenness to establish an orthodoxy, that Constantine was a sincere Christian. There doesn't seem to have been any obvious pragmatic motive for his conversion, which would've caused more logistical and process problems than not.

more argy-bargy

John Adams, early Unamerican President

One Karl Giberson, sometime physicist and now heavily involved in the Biologos website discussed earlier, has been trying to defend an accommodationist view of science and religion with some energy round the traps of late. Jerry Coyne has rebutted a recent Giberson offering here.
A Giberson statement that's getting a lot of stick is this:

There is something profoundly un-American about demanding that people give up cherished, or even uncherished beliefs just because they don't comport with science.

One commentator on the Coyne site countered with this bit from a letter to Thomas Jefferson, by US founding father John Adams:

They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton's universe and Herschell's universe, came down to this little ball, to be spit on by the Jews; And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.

With due consideration for the context [the science is a bit outmoded, there might be a hint of anti-Semitism, and the term 'blasphemy' presupposes religious belief] it's a great response.

a controversial historical matter

a monument to the Armenian genocide in Bikfaya, Lebanon

Canto: You've been talking about how human society rights itself, or fights its way back to health, by facing its invaders, its peculiarities, and defeating them, or assimilating them in a more benign form maybe...
Jacinta: Like with endosymbiosis...
Canto: Yet often there's a struggle to face the past, and a wholesale denialism, as with holocaust denialism, but that's just a loopy fringe thing. In other cases the denialism is more 'mainstream' if you like, as with Japan and its 'war heroes', and Turkey and the Armenian genocide. What do you think of this last example - there was an article in this weekend's Australian about it.
Jacinta: I tried to emphasize last time that though it's 'natural' that we move towards health after troubled times, that shouldn't diminish our respect our respect for those who put themselves about, and even sacrifice their lives, for the sake of a healthier, fairer, more balanced system. Also, people disagree, often violently, over what such a system should be like. Some people feel it should be based on suppression of the 'wrong attitudes', and some of those people really believe, in the case of the Armenian genocide - well, first of all they reject the term 'genocide' as a gross exaggeration, or even a complete lie - that it's an anti-Turkish conspiracy.
Canto: Designed to destabilize Turkey - there we are with health and balance again.
Jacinta: The second secretary to the Turkish embassy in Canberra described the claims as  'a systematic  campaign of defamation carried out by Armenian lobby groups living in various countries all over the world. Any recognition or any resolution accusing the Turkish nation of a crime that it has not committed is unacceptable. The allegations are totally groundless and baseless.' A pretty unequivocal response. However, Australian politicians Maxine McKew and Joe Hockey have both made speeches acknowledging the Armenian genocide. McKew is the member for Bennelong, which has a large Armenian population...
Canto: Ah yes, those Armenian lobby groups...
Jacinta: And Hockey has an Armenian grandfather. So we have contradictory claims, and what do we do? We look at the evidence.
Canto: Only twenty countries have so far recognized the Armenian genocide [among them Britain, France and  Switzerland], but Australia isn't one of them. I would imagine that for many nations, recognition would depend on issues of diplomacy and trade rather than truth or falsity.
Jacinta: The Wikipedia article on the subject, while anonymous as usual...
Canto: Obviously written by an Armenian lobbyist..
Jacinta: It seems to be well-documented and footnoted, with photos of the forced marches, of the bones of massacred Armenians, and descriptions from observers at the time, such as ambassador Henry Morgenthau, of the US, who reported that what was happening to the Armenians was public knowledge, freely admitted by many Turks. The famous historian Arnold Toynbee published a book about the treatment of the Armenians under the Ottoman Empire in 1916, including much eyewitness testimony. It seems to have held up well, in spite of claims at the time that it was just anti-Turkish wartime propaganda. In short, while the extent of the extermination will always be arguable [Wiki puts the numbers at one to one and half million], the claim that it didn't happen at all seems absurd. The treatment of Armenians by the Turks became increasingly Draconian towards the end of the nineteenth century, leading to the Hamidian massacres [under Sultan Hamid II] in 1895-6, and various other pogroms and massacres up to the 'official' genocide of 1915-22.
Canto: So there appears to be plentiful evidence. And this diplomat's comments suggest that there's still quite a bit of anti-Armenian bigotry in that part of the world. Does he claim that there was no killing at all, or is he quibbling about the term 'genocide'?
Jacinta: Yes, it isn't clear, but there appears to be a wealth of info about it online. Just reading some of the comments on different articles, though, tells me how emotive and polarizing the subject is.
Canto: Well, I've found this well-written, and thoroughly footnoted, piece which discusses the event or events as a 'disputed genocide'. It ends on a reasoned note, I think, with these remarks:

Some Turkish and Armenian historians have suggested recently that it is time to "step back from the was-it-genocide-or-not dialogue of the deaf, which only leads to mutual recrimination" and instead concentrate on empirically grounded historical research that seeks a common pool of firm knowledge.[56] Time will tell whether it will be possible to rescue history from nationalists who have plundered history to serve their own political ends.

Jacinta: Sounds sensible. So we, who are new to the subject, must reserve our judgment, not having fully analysed the evidence. Clearly the Armenians became a target because of their siding with Russia during the Great War...
Canto: Not surprising, then, that Russia is one of the countries that has officially recognized the genocide.
Jacinta: But whether there was an intention to exterminate the Armenians in Turkey, that's the big genocide question. Not that this matters much to the victims.