That depends probably a lot of what you mean with “really believe”. They probably didn’t believe in the same sense of “believe” that 21st century Christians in their Gods.
Not all 21st-century Christians “believe” in the same sense, either. If a future anthropologist or classicist were to reconstruct the “beliefs” of modern Christianity from the kind of patchwork sources that we have for ancient Greek myth, they might have a pretty hard time.
I wonder what people living 10,000 years from now (assuming that “people” would even exist then, however defined) would think of christianity. In that time, one of the world’s dominant religions might have started 8,000 from now/2,000 years “before” their time, and only a few antiquarians would even know of the existence of the christian religion. They would have to reconstruct it from fragmentary evidence comparable to efforts to reconstruct, say, the ancient Sumerian religion.
That depends probably a lot of what you mean with “really believe”. They probably didn’t believe in the same sense of “believe” that 21st century Christians in their Gods.
Not all 21st-century Christians “believe” in the same sense, either. If a future anthropologist or classicist were to reconstruct the “beliefs” of modern Christianity from the kind of patchwork sources that we have for ancient Greek myth, they might have a pretty hard time.
I wonder what people living 10,000 years from now (assuming that “people” would even exist then, however defined) would think of christianity. In that time, one of the world’s dominant religions might have started 8,000 from now/2,000 years “before” their time, and only a few antiquarians would even know of the existence of the christian religion. They would have to reconstruct it from fragmentary evidence comparable to efforts to reconstruct, say, the ancient Sumerian religion.