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My response is: and a lot of the Bible was written in response to the disasters against Assyria and Babylon.
Apocalypticism is a result of the failures against the Greeks and Rome which were so bad that many basically decided that the world would have to end - and soon- in order to resolve them. Instead of simply abandoning their faith (like us, increasingly) they found a new interpretation.
Apologetic responses to geopolitical disaster are a part of religious life continuing. That's what religion does. It doesn't - inherently- mean that religion is actually at risk of not continuing.
The Babylonian Exile didn't lead to the abandoning of Judaism, it lead to its creation.
It seems like the bone of contention here is the "just" in "just continuing on" so I'll just retract it: of course there was upheaval and the word implies a more cavalier attitude than intended. What I meant was that Christianity undid the Temples and pagan life but it replaced it with a self-sustaining, alternate hegemonic religious framework (that inherited a lot too). Maybe we will settle on a similar framework ourselves but what seems to be happening is that Christianity is degenerating and we don't seem to have a new hegemonic religious system
Similarly, we haven't actually replaced the fertility regime we had with a self-sustaining one, we simply punted the problem. Thus we're closer to the "Rise of the Nones" situation today than a "Conversion of Constantine".
Surprised we got so deep in the weeds of this analogy.
I love getting deep into the weeds from throwaway quips.
Isaiah 36:18 {General of the King of Assyria Speaking, Hezekiah being the current king in Jerusalem}
Your point about what we understand as Judaism flowing from the Babylonian captivity, and Christianity surviving the fall of Rome, are true; what you miss is that they are extraordinary. Where are the gods of Hamath and Arphad? They died, their people went into captivity and their religions died. The survival of a religion past the destruction and enslavement of its homeland is historically rare, typically conquest leads to the death of the culture and the assimilation of its people, at best the gods might survive in syncretic form.* The bane and the brothers of the late Romans, Persian Zoroastrianism would be consigned to the margins by the Muslim conquest of Persia, only remnants remain scattered abroad.
So, in a sense, you are right that religious life just kept right on, it is possible to tell the history of Christianity from a 10,000ft view without dwelling on the fall of Rome. But that skates over how extraordinary it is, the effort it took from great men, from saints and prophets and doctors of the church, to make that happen. Christianity and Judaism underwent many changes that allowed them to survive, the readings of the old texts are different and new texts and doctrines had to be invented. To say from a contemporary perspective that everything just went right along is conflating major differences.
*Ovid, Virgil and Plutarch, three of my favorite classical authors, were explicitly trying to tie the now dominant Roman culture to the now-enslaved but beautiful and profound Greek culture. In many ways, in the form of the Greek speaking Eastern empire centered on Constantinople, the Greek hybrid culture would outlive the Latin culture of Rome itself. But that was another tremendous effort by a collection of geniuses. We still have the schoolboy assignments from great Roman leaders asking whether Alexander could have conquered Rome!
They are extraordinary because of the degree of disaster they were able to absorb (there was arguably an element of luck imo: a lot of the same theological beliefs existed in the Northern Kingdom yet it never arose again, despite being stronger and richer, because the Assyrians were more thorough/there was no Cyrus/the groundwork hadn't been laid after watching another Israelite kingdom get wrecked).
They are not extraordinary in the sense of providing apologia for disaster. That is not really unique to these religions, it's moreso that their apologia survived and proliferated for other reasons (e.g. bookishness of the religion, likely as a response to being physically uprooted, monotheistic intolerance).
For example: we have the Mesha Stele which directly parallels the general Deuteronomistic view of geopolitics: "it's not that our God abandoned us or was powerless (as our enemies always say when they break the idols and temples), we were bad so he was mad at us and punished us. But I'm the good King so he rewarded me!". "Directly parallels" is honestly light: it's basically identical. Yahweh directly takes credit for the empires attacking Israel and the apologia around Josiah is similarly about a supposedly honorable king restoring Israel. Until that failed and then we got another story.
Which is why I retracted the "just" qualifier. But I still think "religious life continued" - given how I've explained my meaning- is a fair statement of the situation and I think it's fair to say that this doesn't apply in the same way to our world as it did to the world of soon-to-be late antiquity.
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