Loading...In my previous post dealing with how Christianity managed to take over the Roman empire, I stressed its two highly unusual (and therefore — to outsiders — weird) aspects that in tandem ended up more or less destroying all the other religions: their stress on evangelism and their insistence on exclusivity. It’s not that every Christian evangelized or that all Christians completely gave up all their other religious traditions, but enough did that it led to the Christianization of the West.
Here I want to explain a bit more about how the virtually unparalleled exclusivity worked, again drawing on my book The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster).
******************************
One way to understand Christian exclusivity is to think about the Christians’ unusual approach to “choice.” Of course everyone in the ancient world had to choose how to live, what to think, how to behave, and how to worship. In fact, pagan religions in recent scholarship have been portrayed as a kind of “marketplace,” where “shoppers” would choose among competing options. Just as you might choose to buy a fish, so you could choose a cult to follow. And at the market you might buy not only a fish, but also some fruit, some grains, and some vegetables. At every point you make a choice. So too with religion, you can choose which cults to belong to and how often or rigorously to observe them.
Get access to Dr. Ehrman's library of 4,000+ articles plus five new articles per week about the New Testament and early Christianity. It costs as little as $2.99/mth and every cent goes to charity!
Unlock 4,000+ Articles Like This!
The MacMullen example really clarifies something I hadn’t thought about that clearly before. If one system absorbs new cults and the other requires you to drop everything else, then every convert is automatically a net loss for paganism. Simple but powerful.
One thing I’d add though: Christian exclusivity wasn’t really a strategy. It was a consequence. If the God of Israel made everything that exists, and if Jesus is somehow part of who that God is, then of course you can’t also worship Mithras. The exclusivity just follows from the claim.
That makes your closing point especially important. How exclusivity helped Christianity grow at the expense of paganism is clear here. But why enough people found this particular claim convincing enough to pay the social cost seems to be the harder question.
Yes, I’d agree that exclusivity was not a strategy. As to why people found the Xn claims convincing — I’ll be talking about that in a later post.
Thank you. I look forward to that post. That seems to be where the really interesting question lies.
I whole heartedly agree that the exclusive and evangelistic nature of historical Christianity has done immense damage, as most exclusive versions of Christianity continue to do. I added to that damage as an evangelical minister.
My deconstruction has now given way to reconstruction. Surprisingly, I have found much help in the Gospel of Thomas, reading it through the lens of the universal mystical and perennial wisdom traditions. (I have written a book on it.)
Adherence to and promotion of exclusive Christianity is deeply rooted in the egoic self. I had to acknowledge that and confront the illusions, deceptions, manipulations, and defensive strategies of my ego. Reason alone couldn’t change me. As I did so, I humbly, openly, and sincerely opened to Presence. This is what liberated me from an oppressive and dysfunctional Christianity that the Christian would suffers.
1. 1 Cor 3:4 For when one says, “I belong to Paul,” and another, “I belong to Apollos,” are you not all too human?
Seems like some of the pagans wanted to become even more excusive after they became Christians?
2. “As the church grew, the pagan world shrunk, until – after a couple of centuries – pagans realized they had a problem on their hands.”
What could the problem be for the pagans? Were they getting money or some benefit from pagans worshipping the pagan gods?
The problem was that most of them thought that the Christians were foolish and superstitious and did not think the gods would be at all pleased to see so many of their followers stop worshipping them, leading to divine retaliation.
Hey Pagan, Monotheism is where it’s at man. You wanna be in with the in crowd? Then get down with Jesus!
Hello Bart,
I am asking this question here, but it is unrelated to the theme of this post. To keep it brief, I am at one of the hardest points of my life, the dimming of my faith. I have always been a person of faith throughout my young age, and I really want to keep that faith mainly because I want a better future for my son. However, upon the discovery of the contradictions, errors, and upon actually studying the difficult-to-digest parts of the Bible, I do not know what to think anymore.
I still pray and read the Bible, but it’s like the house is slowly crumbling down; I can’t even read without being critical of the text. I know your position regarding faith, but also know that you have many friends and family members who still hold faith. How do they do it? How do they keep faith despite the facts mentioned earlier? Especially scholars who recognize the Bible as a contradictory and even human book.
I am not sure I want this question posted. I just wanted to get your input, and I don’t know of a better way to reach you. Thank you, Bart.
I think the problem is that people have become convinced in modern times that Christian faith is all about believing the Bible. That is a modern view that simpy seems like “common sense,” but it only seems that way because fundamentalist views of Christianity have convinced not only fundamentalists but most everyone else that Christianity is all about the Bible. That’s the mistake. It’s completely possible to believe that Christ died for your sins without the Bible being completely accurate about everything. Do a word search on the blogfor SIKER: two of my friends (married) are ordained Presbyterian ministers who hold many of my views on the Bible but are active in ministry and wrote posts about how that works for them.
You are correct, the entirety of my faith depended on the “immaculate accuracy of the Bible”. After a couple of books, historical records, some educated lectures and debates, I can no longer recognize the Bible as the literal Word of God, and it pains me.
I recently watched one of your videos featuring Siker, and I will be conducting further research on his writing. I want to remain faithful, but not in the blind way I have been until now. Let’s see what the road ahead holds for me.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply.
YonathanG,
thank you for writing this. It takes courage to say it out loud.
The crisis you’re going through is framed as intellectual: contradictions, errors, difficult texts. But your faith also seems under pressure, and you haven’t yet found a way to hold the tension.
Bart answered well: equating Christian faith with biblical inerrancy is a modern construction. I agree. The question is not whether the Bible is also a human book, in many ways it clearly is, but whether that settles anything about the God to whom it witnesses. I don’t think it does.
The move from “this text has problems” to “therefore its central claim, that God raised Jesus from the dead, collapses” is not automatic. It requires its own reasons, which textual and historical problems don’t by themselves supply.
How can scholars hold on? In my view, not because they’ve stopped seeing the problems, but because they’ve stopped assuming the problems are fatal to the central claim.
I recognize the questions. I face the intellectual problems too, fully. But I see enough reason to hold on to faith.
My God is still the God of Luke 15.
The God who goes looking.
-Tjalling
Thank you, Bart, and also the members who commented. I learned a great deal and had many thoughts while reading the exchange. Here I have a different question.
I have also wondered about the textual problem in 2 Peter 3:10, where the final phrase appears in several forms, including readings that suggest the earth and its works will be “found” rather than burned up or destroyed.
I have heard from a Japanese scholar that, in textual criticism, the more difficult reading is often more likely to be older. This reading seems almost unintelligible at first glance, but precisely for that reason it may be text-critically interesting. How do scholars evaluate a reading that is strongly difficult internally but also difficult to make sense of exegetically? At what point does “the harder reading” become too hard to be plausible?
It’s a great question and not easily answered. Yes, since the 18th century (J. Bengel, e.g.) textual scholars have recognized that the “more difficult reading” (lectio difficilior: heavy scholarship was written in Latin in those days!) is to be preferred as more likely original, since scribes regularly changed hard to understand or otherwise problematic words/phrases into simpler or less troubling ones. The validity of the principle has been established repeatedly since the 18th century, because much older manuscripts have been discovered that regularly have the “harder” reading rather than the easier one, showing that it was probably changed.
Generally the princple it works. But the problem is just what you question: where do you draw the line? When is “hard” simply “too hard” or even “impossible” and so not the best reading? That’s often thought to be the case in 2 Peter 3:10, where “found” simply doesn’t make sense. BUT, it is found in the oldest and best manuscripts and has by far the superior support. As it turns out, most of the critical editions of the Greek NT in modern times have printed “found” (since it’s the best attested and hardest reading) but translators — even translating that form of the text! — have often translated it as something like “burned”! And the most recent critical edition (Nestle Aland 28) gives “found” but adds a NEGATIVE in front of it (“will NOT be found”)! Even though that’s not in a single Greek manuscript (it is found only in some manuscripts of the Syriac and Coptic)! Why? Because otherwise it doesn’t make sense. A number of manuscript provide other ways of reading it (five major rewritings, including “will be burned” “will disappear” etc.) In additional, there have been eight or more proposals by textual specialists about what the original must have said without any manuscript support at all!
It’s a knotty problem. I don’t have a solution for it. And I’m not sure anyone does, though some think they do!
Very interesting. Thank you, Bart, for the detailed explanation!
Perhaps the original author himself may have had a somewhat internally conflicted or psychologically fragmented way of thinking. If so, the reality is that we may never truly know for certain what was going on in the author’s mind.
I wonder if this mechanism also explains the triumph of orthodox Christianity over Gnosticism. I get the impression that the Gnostics were not as exclusive but I may be quite wrong
Hello from Greece, it is a great honor to speak with the world’s leading living New Testament scholar! Dr. Ehrman I have read your excellent book “The Triumph of Christianity = How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World” since it was first published (Feb 2018) and I have enjoyed the dozens of spicy revelations it contains regarding the morals and thinking of the early Christians.
I particularly liked that you point out that early Christian descriptions of hell (such as in the Apocalypse of Peter) are described by historians as the only “sadistic literature” of antiquity. And this is because they included blasphemers hung by their tongues over fires and adulterers hung by their genitals!
AND ONE LAST THING: Here in Greece, all university Christian theologians assure us that there is NO Hell, according to the New Testament and the Fathers of the Church, because Saint John of Damascus writes somewhere that “God does not condemn” («Ο Θεός ού κολάζει» in greek)!
Interesting. In Greek in the NT periold κολάζει usually means “punish” (before that, something like to prune or cut back). In later patristic work it sometimes meant anything from “discipline” (as a verb) to “torture.” I don’t know that it came to mean “condemn” until much later?
Thank you! Fascinating!
It’s possible that adhesion is creeping into Christianity now. I am an adherent, but I also adhere to other religions- specifically Advaita Vedanta, and Buddhism. The exclusivity of Christianity is something I feel repelled by. I know of a number of others like me in this regard. Father Thomas Keating said, “the time for conversion is over.” I find it helpful to take what is useful to me from various traditions. The Christian mysticism looks beyond forms and belief systems, and seeks not to believe, but to know. Beyond form, exclusivity is impossible.