Now here’s an intriguing topic I bet you’ve never thought about. Can you (should we?) consider early Christianity — and in fact Christianity as a whole, as a “cult of the dead”?
Kyle Smith is an associate professor and director of the History of Religions program in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto (See: Kyle Smith | Department of Historical Studies (utoronto.ca). I have known Kyle for many years, since he was a PhD student in early Chrsitianity at Duke. Since then he has become a well-known scholar of Christianity in late antiquity, who already now at a relatively young age (compared to us geezers) has published six books. (Not sure if you know this, but many, many senior scholars publish only two or three for their entire careers.) Five of them are hard-hitting scholarship. His most recent one is for a general audience, Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity (University of California Press, 2022). I think it’s unusually interesting.
I thought it would be extremely interesting to have Kyle publish some blog posts on the topic, to get us all up to speed. If you like what he says, check out the book itself! Here’s the first post. Kyle will be happy to respond to your questions and comments.
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Is Christianity a Cult of the Dead?
Short answer? Yes, Christianity is a cult of the dead. I know our minds go straight to the sinister, to the Jim Joneses and David Koreshes of the world, when we hear the word “cult,” but to call Christianity a cult of the dead isn’t to condemn it. It’s to celebrate the popularity of the martyrs and all the ritual practices by which they’ve been remembered and venerated—all the relics, shrines, feast days, miracles, and pilgrimages—that are the cultural centerpiece through which the story of Christianity itself can be told.
Think about it like this: as Christians have understood it, Jesus’s resurrection opened a bridge between the land of the living and that of the dead. In this way, all the apostles and martyrs who are said to have followed Jesus in death could continue to intervene in the world.
We can see the beginnings of this at work in the Martyrdom of Polycarp.
Lately on the blog, Bart has been discussing this text. Specifically, he has focused on questions about the date, authorship, and integrity of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, arguing that it’s likely a later forgery that wasn’t written by an eyewitness to the events it describes. My own scholarly work on early Christian martyrdom narratives often engages with similar sorts of questions, and I agree with Bart’s assessment of Polycarp’s authenticity—or lack thereof. That being said, I deliberately avoid the “so are these stories true or not?” sorts of questions in my newest book, Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity. Instead, I focus on the popularity of the martyrs and the long endurance of stories (like Polycarp’s) that have fundamentally shaped the culture of Christianity for centuries.
Recall what happens when Polycarp is about to be executed: he thanks God for deeming him worthy to share the cup of Christ with those who have been martyred before him. Then the fire is lit. But, like Daniel in the fiery furnace, Polycarp does not burn. The fire gracefully envelops him, “like a linen sail filled by the wind,” and from within his flaming cocoon, Polycarp’s body becomes “like gold and silver being refined in a furnace.” From the fire wafts the sweet smell of frankincense, which in the parlance of Christian martyrdom stories is the olfactory sign of his holiness. Once it is clear to those present that the fire will not kill Polycarp, his persecutors run him through with a sword. A torrent of blood quenches the flames.
After Polycarp’s death, the Christians of Smyrna set out to retrieve his remains. More than anything, they want “to have fellowship with his holy flesh.” The Jews, however (who are often maligned as bogeymen in Christian martyrdom stories), already know that Christians venerate the remains of their martyrs, and they convince the governor of Smyrna not to hand over Polycarp’s body, lest the Christians “abandon the crucified one and begin to worship this one.” The story’s narrator rejects this accusation, explaining that Christians worship Christ alone. Still, he admits, Christians do “love the martyrs as students and imitators of the Lord.”
Once the pyre is relit and Polycarp’s flesh is burned from his bones, the Christians swoop in to collect them, regarding such relics as “more dear than precious stones and more valuable than gold.” What then became of Polycarp’s relics we cannot say. We hear from the Smyrnaeans only that they were deposited “in a fitting place,” where Christians still gathered “to celebrate the anniversary of his martyrdom with exultation and joy.”
By the end of the fourth century, martyrs’ bones were increasingly being deposited in churches throughout the Mediterranean world. We hear, for instance, from Saint Ambrose of Milan in the year 386. In a letter to his sister, Ambrose recounts that a chorus of voices dogged him after he dedicated Milan’s new basilica. The Christians of his city, he explains, would not stop begging him to properly consecrate their new church by installing martyrs’ relics inside. They understood that the bones of God’s “very special dead,” as Peter Brown often called them, would immediately render the place holy. Ambrose understood this too, so he promised his congregation that he would comply with their wishes and sanctify their new church with martyrs’ bones—if only he could find some.
How Ambrose knew exactly where to look is not something he mentions in his letter, but he does tell his sister that a “prophetic ardor” entered his heart. Soon he found the telltale signs of two Christian martyrs and instructed some of his junior clerics to dig up the spot where the saints had been buried. Nervous at what they were being asked to do, they were overjoyed when they eventually discovered Saints Gervasius and Protasius, both nearly intact despite the many years that they had been entombed. The authenticity of their relics was confirmed when the saints healed a sick man who had been brought to the site. The following day, as the relics were being processed to their new home inside Milan’s basilica, a blind man in the crowd regained his sight.
Once the saints’ bones were safely deposited, Ambrose rose to address his congregation. He preached to them about the holy martyrs, who “declare the glory of God.” He pointed to the miraculous healings that his flock had just witnessed and reminded them of the power of Jesus and the apostles. Then he asked his listeners to recall from scripture how many had been healed just by touching the robes or even handkerchiefs of the saints (Acts 19:12). Likewise, he foretold, any garment “laid on top of the holy relics” of Saints Gervasius and Protasius would be imbued with the power to heal.
Seeing what Ambrose had done, Christians in other cities were eager for their own churches to be sanctified with the bones of a martyr, with newly acquired relics stored either in a crypt beneath the altar or directly inside it, within its plinth. Several church councils passed decrees requiring that a martyr’s relic be embedded in an altar as a condition of its proper consecration. With its martyr always there, the altar really was the place where heaven met earth, echoing the book of Revelation’s vision of the souls of the martyrs residing beneath the heavenly altar (Rev 6:9).
With their martyrs so nearby, Christian communities expected the blessings of their saint to be effective. But patronage was a two-way street. If a saint was somehow failing in the duty to bless and aid the community, then the saint was told so in no uncertain terms. On occasion, an ineffective martyr’s relics were humiliated, which is to say they were removed from their reliquary and piled on the ground. With the church’s candles snuffed out, there they were left—cold, alone, and exposed—as punishment for abandoning those who had prayed to the saint for help.
Clearly, martyrs’ bones were not dead: saints were still present in their relics. As many early Christian theologians put it, how else could relics work their miracles if the saints and their divinely granted power were not still there?
Notes:
For Ambrose’s letter to his sister, see Letter 22 in The Letters of St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, trans. H. Walford (Oxford: James Parker, 1881). For saints’ relics in an architectural context, including their placement in altars, see Anne Marie Yasin’s Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Also helpful in this regard is Éric Palazzo’s “Relics, Liturgical Space, and the Theology of the Church” in Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe, ed. M. Bagnoli et al. (London: British Museum Press, 2010). Patrick Geary discusses the practice of punishing nonworking relics in his “Humiliation of Saints” in Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore, and History, ed. S. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Sounds like some congregations had a bone to pick with their martyrs.
Being piled up outside the church was no way to thank or praise the respective martyr, who had clearly worked themselves to the bone on the church’s behalf.
Ha! Apparently, someone has been boning up on their humerus dad jokes.
That is a grave accusation!
Some years ago I made a number of trips to Ukraine. One of the more memorable experiences was descending into the catacombs beneath a monastery in Kiev where the bodies of deceased saints were kept in glass coffins (bodies covered with veils and such). Crowded with people carrying candles as the sole light source, it was a warm, stuffy somewhat creepy scene. People would stop and pray to various saints, sometimes kissing the coffin. Not at all my type of religion! Isn’t it odd that a religion that celebrates a resurrected life should be so concerned with dead people?
I love your description of this scene! My kind of place! (At least as a tourist, interested onlooker, and wannabe ethnographer.) It’s a real paradox though, isn’t it? For Christians, Jesus was resurrected from the dead, and yet the Roman tool of torture that was used to kill him is the most recognizable symbol of the faith.
Kyle,
Thanks for this very interesting post. I’ve heard several tries at the difference between a cult and a religion.
A cult is a religion with no political power, a religion is a cult with more real estate (Frank Zappa?), or even just the raw amount of time it is able to ‘hang around’ without dying out; ie after 100’s of years it gets leveled up like in a video game to a religion. I can recall when Mormonism was often called a cult but after Mitt Romney won the GOP nod for Prez nominee and the growth of Mormonism now not nearly as much. I’m in my 60’s so I have seen that change in just my lifetime.
Most people I discuss religion and history with at the coffee shop view cult as a negative word. But listening to scholars I often hear them use the word cult in a non-pejorative way.
Can you discuss the difference there? How do you and other scholars use and view the word cult as opposed to the unwashed masses (like me! ekkkk!) in fly over country…
Thanks for your time,
SC
Thanks for your comment. You’re right: “cult” is not used as a pejorative in my world, which is to say among those who study Christianity in late antiquity, specifically because it’s intended to refer to the many ritual practices by which Christians cared for their holy dead. The connotation and use of the word in common parlance, though, is (as you point out) quite different. That being said, “religion,” as many recent theorists have argued, may be the more problematic term/idea here in that the concept of “world religions” (Buddhism, Islam, etc.) is completely tied up in European colonialism. See, for instance, J.Z. Smith’s classic article “Religion, Religions, Religious.” Online here: https://womrel.sitehost.iu.edu/Rel433%20Readings/SearchableTextFiles/Smith_ReligionReligionsReligious.pdf
What has always struck me in these stories is how Christianity insists that only believing in Jesus brings salvation and that Jesus “lives in a person’s heart,” and such, and yet, in practice, assert the importance of intermediaries who will “pray for us,” even so far as to beseech Jesus’s mother.
So, which is it? Belief in Jesus is enough, or somehow it isn’t, and people need a holy figure to intercede in order for one’s prayers to be heard. It isn’t enough to ask to be healed by Jesus, one needs a saint?
I might read your book hoping to get a better sense of how the contradiction between “simple faith in Jesus” (which I suppose is the emphasis of Protestantism) and the need for saints in addition to Jesus (as I suppose one finds most in Roman Catholic and Orthodox beliefs), is resolved by believers historically.
I would argue that the idea of faith/belief without practice/ritual action would’ve been unintelligible to a late ancient Christian.
Were/are all martyrs considered saints?
If someone was recognized as a martyr by a particular community, they were undoubtedly considered a saint. In fact, it seems from the earliest calendars of the saints that we have, the terms are synonymous: the martyrs *were* the holy ones. It was only later that the term became more expansive. I wrote a blog post about this for All Saints’ Day: https://www.ucpress.edu/blog/60478/the-deep-history-lurking-behind-halloween/
I need to read this book! Having been raised Roman Catholic before Vatican II, I have always been fascinated (and somewhat repulsed) by the entire theology of relics. I had a “lucky rabbit’s foot” as a kid; relics seemed like the religious equivalent. I wonder how theologians explained the saints souls existing in the relics (so they healed), yet still shared God’s glory in heaven. And do I remember first, second, and third class relics?
Readers of the blog can use the coupon code CULT40 at checkout when buying directly from the University of California Press for a 40% discount off the cover price!
What do you think of Peter Brown’s Cult of the Saints?
It’s a classic!
To what extent do you believe Christianity still has cult of the dead characteristics? Do these attributes include the worship of Jesus Christ?
I was raised in and quickly left evangelical Protestantism. The only one I recall that community worshipped was “Jesus Christ”, whom they worshipped because he was believed to be alive, not dead. I’ve lived in Latin America, where most people are Catholic and revere Mary and the saints as ones who can “go to bat” with God for them. So my initial reaction is to see traits of the dead in Catholicism, but not in Protestantism. What am I not seeing?
That’s certainly fair. The cult of the saints is alive and well in Catholic and Orthodox churches; much less so in most Protestant ones.
How many churches would you say had martyrs in their alters? And, was there a shortage of martyrs? It seems that supply and demand might require the creation of martyrs in order to have enough churches.
The good thing about bones is that they can be fragmented! You don’t need a whole skeleton any more than you need a whole cross — just a splinter will do. Fragments of what was supposedly the true cross were ubiquitous in the late ancient and medieval worlds.
Mr. Smith!
How many times does the term Jesus appear in these stories? And how many times is the word Christ?
Thanx!
Don’t know or don’t want to answer?
To which stories, in particular, do you refer?
Did belief in saints and relics make it easier for a “pagan” to accept Christianity? The idea being that saints and relics replaced having a god for every purpose (fertility, luck, successful crops, etc.). I would think that, especially as the Roman Empire outlawed pagan beliefs, having a saint’s shrine in the house and making offerings to it might have felt the same as the old ways. But was that really the case?
It’s a fair question, but I might pose it differently: rather than thinking of “Christianity” as this new form of monotheism that arrived in and spread throughout the Roman Empire, slowly edging out its native polytheisms, I would suggest that Christianity itself is a cultural product of the soil upon which it grew.
So, are you suggesting that it was a natural product of the culture to associate (if not replace) local gods with revered martyrs? That Christianity developed as it did because of “pagan” practices and beliefs, not in spite of them?
Precisely.
This sounds a bit like polytheism; with martyrs replacing local gods, to which the community could appeal for local blessings.
Indeed. This was a charge commonly levied by Protestant reformers and philosophers/historians of the Enlightenment era. The equally common refrain (preserved even here in the text of the story of Polycarp) is that the saints are venerated as holy intercessors but not worshipped as gods.
Do scholars agree that John the Baptist told people to repent of their sins and that the future messiah was about to come? And if so, did John think that it was Jesus? Because if not it would be strange that he baptized Jesus and that some of Jesus’ early followers were followers of John.
It’s widely agreed that he indicated that people needed to repent, but it’s not at all clear that he said a messiah was soon to come. He may have been saying that God was soon to come in judgment. But no, it seems unlikely that John expected or predicted Jesus. He baptized Jesus because he was baptizing people who agree on the need to repent and prepare for the kingdom, and Jesus was apparently one of them.
Kyle,this is very interesting.Particularly learning that the saints could be held accountable and be “humiliated”.I find it hard to understand why more was expected from the saints/martyrs than from Jesus or God himself.Believers could pray to Jesus or God or Mary or all of the above,and their prayers,perhaps more often than not, would not be answered.But they wouldn’t dream of behaving towards these divine beings, even symbolically,as they behaved with the saints.I imagine anyone attempting any such sacrilege would have burned.How do you explain this?
Another thing I am curious about is the “miracles” reported.Were there lots of “miracles”of healings,more than
statistically expected by natural healing alone?Could the stories of such miracles have been created by the clergy?How were such “miracles” verified? Were there other types of “miracles”,such as we find in Jesus’ narratives?One always wonder about Jesus’ “miracles”,on which so much of Christianity is built,how they were performed to make such an impression on the people.
As a humorous aside,the novel The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco,one of the greatest writers of the 20th century in my view(I read it 3 times in two languages)has a vision of the monastery’s relics,a hilarious parody whose description includes,for example,St.Ursula’s uterus.
Thanks for this! The Name of the Rose is a fabulous novel. As to your other points: the “humiliation” (literally, putting on the ground, the “humus”) of saints’ relics was not a common practice; in fact, it was outlawed by later councils. But it was certainly a colorful response to “non-working” relics! I have a whole chapter in my book called “The Miracles of the Dead.” That chapter addresses every question you’ve asked here! A lot of miracles were healings; a lot weren’t. What we find in the monastic registers (accounts of miracles compiled by monks) is the importance of interrogating those who told of miracles. The monks, in other words, had a responsibility to investigate and verify.
My wife is from Taiwan, which was not subjected to Mao’s attempts to eradicate religion, so the people there are traditional with respect to worship. I had heard Chinese Buddhism described as a form of “ancestor worship.” When i mentioned this to her, the description made her uncomfortable and she found it demeaning.
“Cult” implies a sect with weird ideas that might be exploitative or dangerous; it is used predudicially as a slur.
Similarly, the title “Cult of the Dead” applied to “Christianity” (including many protestants across a wide part of the US who abhor relic veneration, roods with dying Jesus in churches, etc) seems pointedly provocative and inflammatory.
I used to enjoy polemacists mocking religion and i would have liked a title like yours’ that cuts at Chistians, but now i think insults are counterproductive. Perhaps your publisher intended for the inflammatory title to get clicks and sell books… “Cult of the Dead: A brief History of Christianity” is Hitchens-esque (“Hell’s Angel: Mother Theresa of Calcutta”).
Apart from the title, I’m fascinated with how traditions and practices including relic veneration came to be. Relic veneration is something done in certain forms of Buddhism, so the practice within humanity must be very old.
I won’t deny either that “cult” is undoubtedly a provocative word the way we use it in English today or that its use in my title wasn’t purposeful. That said, it is quite common in my field of late ancient Christianity to talk about the “cult of the saints.” And throughout this book, I use the term as a way of talking about how Christians *cared* for their saints. That, really, is the root of the term. Just as agriCULTure means care for the fields and to CULTivate, for instance, a child’s love for music means to nurture it with lessons and trips to the symphony, similarly the stories, the dates on the calendar, the relics, the shrines, the miracle books — all the things associated with the Christian care for their saints — is the fundamental point of my book.
Was this practice of venerating saints unique to Christianity or were there similar practices in pagan religion?
That’s a great question. While it’s certainly the case that Roman pagans venerated local gods and certain quasi-divine heroes, the crucial difference with the Christian veneration of their saints (read: martyrs) was a focus on celebrating their deaths for Christ as a paradoxical triumph and, more so, at least by the fourth century, venerating those same saints’ *relics*. The latter really is a crucial distinction, as this Christian notion that the saints are somehow more proximate to God specifically because of their deaths, and that they’re somehow still present in their bodily remains, was totally anathema to non-Christian Romans. On this point, I’d recommend the classic work by Peter Brown, “The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity,” which remains very influential despite being published over 40 years ago.
Hi Bart,
After your Paul course I re-read Lost Christianities. I’m wondering if any of the early (or contemporary) “competitors” of Paul, also claimed to have had a vison of Jesus – similar to that of Paul – to set them on their mission?
We don’t have any first-hand reports, of course. Paul himself does seem to think that being an apostle means haveing been commissioned directly by Christ to spread the message, andhe names a number of people (including the Junica and her husband Andronicus) as apostles, and he does of ocures talk about James and the twelve seing Jesus.