> Neopythagoreanism emerged again and developed further starting in the first century BCE and extending throughout the rest of antiquity and into the middle ages and Renaissance. During this entire period, it is the Neopythagorean construct of Pythagoras that dominates, a construct that has only limited contact with early Pythagoreanism; there is little interest in an historically accurate presentation of Pythagoras and his philosophy.
which makes it sound more like a mythical interpretation of what they believed Hellenistic philosophy to be, than a religion based in Greek sciences.
As in the early Christian context, wouldn't 'pagan' most likely refer to the religion of the dominant social group, the Romans, which worshiped neither the earth nor science?
Paganus roughly meant "yokel", in the pejorative sense.
New religions tend to start in areas of high population and spread from there, so at some point Christianity would have been the religion of the urban elite.
> Medieval writers often assumed paganus as a religious term was a result of the conversion patterns during the Christianization of Europe, where people in towns and cities were converted more readily than those in remote regions, where old ways lingered. However, this idea has multiple problems. First, the word's usage as a reference to non-Christians pre-dates that period in history. Second, paganism within the Roman Empire centred on cities. The concept of an urban Christianity as opposed to a rural paganism would not have occurred to Romans during Early Christianity. Third, unlike words such as rusticitas, paganus had not yet fully acquired the meanings (of uncultured backwardness) used to explain why it would have been applied to pagans.[9]
> Paganus more likely acquired its meaning in Christian nomenclature via Roman military jargon (see above). Early Christians adopted military motifs and saw themselves as "Milites Christi" ("soldiers of Christ").[8][9] A good example of Christians still using paganus in a military context rather than religious is in Tertullian's De Corona Militis XI.V, where Christians are referred to as "paganus" (civilian)
They didn't worship science as such, but they could to some extent be said to worship numbers and mathematics, since it represented the ideal and hence the divine.
