A disastrous act of God...
QUESTION Were Christians blamed for the eruption of Vesuvius that wiped out Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD79? IN ANCIENT times, people sought moral explanations and scapegoats for natural disasters. However, the eruption may have helped spread Christianity.
There had been recent persecution of Christians on the Italian peninsula.
Following the Great Fire of Rome in 64AD, when rumours swirled that the emperor was responsible, Nero blamed the Christians.
According to Roman historian Tacitus, he had Christians ‘covered in wild beast skins and torn to death by dogs’. When Vesuvius erupted, killing up to 20,000 people, there is no evidence Christians were scapegoated.
Suetonius wrote that Titus, now Emperor, did what he could to help the people: ‘In his reign, several dreadful disasters occurred – – an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Campania, a fire at Rome that burned for three days and nights, and one of the worst ever outbreaks of the plague.
‘In the face of all these disasters, he displayed not merely the concern of an emperor, but also the deep love of a father, whether by offering messages of sympathy or by giving all the financial help he could.’
Writing a century later, Tertullian, an early African Christian apologetic, wrote that natural disasters can’t be explained as God’s wrath against Christians.
‘Besides, we have not a word of complaint against the Christians from Tuscany or Campania, when Heaven shot his flames upon Volsinium, and Vesuvius discharged his upon Pompeium.’
The Jews were a possible target after the eruption of Vesuvius, having staged a bloody rebellion in Judea. In 66AD, they had expelled the Romans from Jerusalem. Vespasian was dispatched by Nero to crush the rebellion. He was joined by Titus, and together the Roman armies defeated the Jews. The Temple, as predicted by Jesus, was burned, and the Jewish state collapsed.
However, it’s possible the eruption of Vesuvius was viewed as a punishment for the burning of the Second Temple and rampant Roman immorality.
There is evidence that there were Jewish and Christian slaves in Pompeii. In 1862, archaeologists discovered graffiti written in charcoal with the word ‘Christianos’ preserved by the volcanic ash in what was called the House of the Christians.
More graffiti was found, one with the chilling Hebrew word ‘cherem’ meaning ‘God blots out a place’.
Another had the words ‘Sodoma and Gomora’, the cities destroyed by ‘fire and brimstone’ in Genesis. These were possibly written as the ash fell from the skies and denoted God’s wrathful punishment for the sinful lives of the Romans living in the shadow of Vesuvius.
Mark Collier, London.
QUESTION What is the best way to reduce oil vapours and aerosols when frying?
THIS problem goes by the scientific term explosive hot oil droplets, which are part of a larger group of air pollutants called kitchen-based aerosols.
It isn’t the oil that spits and explodes out of the pan. Rather, it’s the moisture in or on the food that interacts with the oil. When water molecules hit oil, they create tiny pockets of steam that burst, launching an oil-coated drop into the air.
You can mitigate against this by patting food dry with a paper towel before putting it in the pan. Make sure the pan is dry, too. If you’re cooking food with a marinade, let excess moisture drip off before placing it in the oil.
Another way to prevent splatter is to toss meat or vegetables in cooking oil before cooking and put it in a dry, hot pan, rather than heating the oil first.
Use a pure oil with a high smoke point, such as sunflower oil, rather than a composite fat, such as butter. You could use a deeper pan or splatter guard made of wire mesh or silicone.
QUESTION What is the most established scientific theory to be disproved?
CHEMISTRY’S phlogiston theory about combustion was first stated in the early 17th century. Since burning things lost weight, it was said that an element called phlogiston went into air.
The discovery of oxygen and the gain in weight of burnt metals caused this theory to be disproved in the late 18th century.
In physics, the concept of the ether in space dates to the 17th century. Later it was adopted to explain the transmission of light and other electromagnetic waves across a vacuum.
Experiments failed to detect the ether and after Einstein’s theories of relativity it was considered unnecessary.
The star prize might go to geology. In 1915, it was suggested that, against all previous thought, land masses were not fixed, but instead there was continental drift, now called tectonic plate theory.
Despite much evidence – the distribution of mountains, seismic activity, animal species, rainforest fossils in Antarctica, the shapes of continents, matching rocks in Scotland and the Appalachian mountains and volcanic mid-ocean ridges – the idea was controversial for nearly 50 years before being accepted in the early 1960s.
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