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Who Were The “Pagans” Christians Were Converting?
PART TWO of FOUR: Pagan Converts and the Power of God This is the second lecture I gave at the Smithsonian on Feb. 10, 2018, based on my book The Triumph of Christianity: How A Forbidden Religion Swept the World. The premise behind the lecture: as Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire, it converted almost entirely pagans (after the first couple of decades). Who were these people, and what were they converting *from*? And why? Paganism is not and was not really a “thing.” The term was designed (by Christians) simply to designate all the ancient religious practices that were not either Jewish or Christian — that is, it lumped together all kinds of religious practices, thousands of them, as some”thing” opposed to the faith in the Jewish god. But is there anything all these religions spread throughout the Roman world had in common? And how did Christians approach people from these traditional religions, religions that each individual would have always assumed was simply right, involving rituals and ideas that had always been part of […]
Tags: Ripley Center, Roman Empire, Smithsonian, Smithsonian Associates, Triumph of Christianity
April 14, 2019
Why Did Christianity Take Over the World? Smithsonian Lecture 3.
Here is Lecture 3 (out of 4) that I came at the Smithsonian Associates in Washington DC on Feb. 10, 2018, based, again, on my book The Triumph of Christianity. This lecture deals with the key aspects of the early Christian movement to try to explain its success. What was it about Christianity that allowed it to take over the entire Christian empire? People have all sorts of “common sense” answers to the question — as did I for many years, even as a professional scholar — which are probably wrong (e.g., Christianity was naturally superior to all the other religions, because of its strict monotheism and strong ethical stance, so naturally people were inclined to convert). The first time I realized the actual answer to the question was when, long ago, I read Roman social historian and Yale professor Ramsay MacMullen’s brilliant analysis The Christianization of the Roman Empire. I pondered the matter for years, read massively on it, and here is what I ended up concluding (very much in line with MacMullen, but […]
Tags: Ripley Center, Roman Empire, Smithsonian, Smithsonian Associates, Triumph of Christianity
April 23, 2019
Constantine and the Christian Faith: My Fourth Smithsonian Lecture
I have found over the years that lots of people have mistaken ideas about Constantine the Great, the early fourth century Roman Emperor who converted to Christianity. I used to have mistaken ideas myself, until I started reading the sources and examining the scholarship. For example, Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the empire, right? (Wrong.) Constantine is the reason Christianity took over the empire, right? (Wrong again). Constantine didn’t really convert to Christianity: it was a political move by a savvy politician who remained, at heart, a pagan, right? (Well, uh, sorry…) It is true, though that the conversion of Emperor Constantine in 312 CE is one of Christianity’s pivotal events, and that by the end of the 4th century, Christianity was proclaimed the official religion throughout Rome, leading to the suppression of other religious traditions. Here is a lecture I gave on Constantine and Christianity at the Smithsonian on Feb. 10, 2018. It is the last of the series of four that I have given here on the blog, based on my […]
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Tags: Ripley Center, Roman Empire, Smithsonian, Smithsonian Associates, Triumph of Christianity
May 2, 2019
Did Jesus Pray “Father Forgive Them” from the Cross?
I recently received an important question about a highly significant textual variant in Luke 23:34, the one and only place in the NT where Jesus prays for those responsible for his death “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.” The verse is not found in the other Gospels, and interestingly, it is also not found in some of the important manuscripts even of Luke. And so the question: is it a verse that some scribes inserted into Luke? Or is it a verse that other scribes decided to take out? It’s one or the other! When I received the question I was sure I had dealt with it on the blog before. But I’ve checked. Nope. Never have. But I was even more sure I had written about it somewhere. It took me a long time to track it down, but I’ve uncovered it in an article that I wrote called “The Text of the Gospels at the End of the Second Century,” now found in a collection of my more scholarly essays […]
March 24, 2019
Armageddon and American Politics
As I indicated at the beginning of this thread, I am in the process of thinking my way into the next trade book, which I think will be on the book of Revelation and how it has been read by modern fundamentalists, who think it is predicting what is going to happen in our own world very soon, and how that reading has immigrated into, and even infested, the wider culture, the actual secular world, both socially and politically. I said a few words about the social impact of apocalyptic thinking since 1945, and the advent of the nuclear age (the End really *is* near!), and now, as it has transmorgrified (a word we ought to use more often) in the post-Soviet era to issues connected with climate change, etc. One of my theses is that the social concerns have come to affect the political landscape in America, particularly starting in the 1980s. My ideas on this are not based on wild speculation, but on very interesting scholarship produced by American cultural and political historians, […]
March 25, 2019
Did Ancient Greeks Invent Heaven and Hell?
Back, for a post, to the scholarly project I’m now doing on the “katabasis” traditions in early Christianity – the stories of people being given tours of / visions of both heaven and hell. Some readers of the blog may be confused about why, on a blog devoted to the study of the New Testament and Early Christianity, I would want to discuss the Odyssey of Homer or the Aeneid of Virgil, etc. It’s because I very much want to understand where the Christian ideas of the afterlife come from. In the traditional Christian view, after death a person is taken off to be rewarded with paradise or punished with the torments of hell came from. In my book I’ll be arguing that idea did not come either from the Old Testament or from Jesus. Then whence? My last post on this was on the Odyssey, where Odysseus goes to the underworld and there are no heaven and hell there either, just a place called Hades where everyone – whether great or small, valiant or […]
March 26, 2019
A Roman Vision of Heaven and Hell
In our world, most people who think about the afterlife suppose that when we die we either cease to exist or receive our due rewards (rewards/punishments). I have pointed out that the latter view did not originate in Jewish or Christian circles, but in pagan, going back some time before the Greek philosopher Plato in the fourth century BCE. The Greeks influenced their later conquerors the Romans in many, many ways, one of which involves their views of the afterlife. The idea of fantastic rewards or horrific torments to come after death be seen in rather graphic terms in the writings of the most famous and talented poets of the Roman world, the great Latin poet Virgil (70-19 BCE), who like his Greek predecessor Homer, some seven centuries earlier, tells the story of a descent to the underworld. Aeneas En Route to the Underworld Virgil is best known for his epic the Aeneid, named for its main character, Aeneas, a fugitive from the Trojan War who, in the wake of Troy’s disastrous defeat through […]
March 27, 2019
The Odd Modern Way of Reading the Book of Revelation
Back to my possible trade book on the book of Revelation and the way it has affected not just modern conservative Christianity but also secular society (literature, film) and political policy (environmental legislation; second Amendment discussions; policy on the Middle East). In my description-to-myself of what I’m imagining the book to be, after discussing these various effects of Revelation, I start talking about Revelation itself, and how it came to be read as a blueprint for our future (a reading that seems so *natural* today, but is not how the book was read until the 19th century). ******************************************************** Armageddon in the Book of Revelation The thesis of my book is that all of these manifestations of apocalyptic thought in American discourse – religious, literary, cinematic, social, and political – ultimately stem from a particular way of reading the book of Revelation, a reading that, despite a few scattered precedents throughout history, came to the fore only at the end of the 19th century. Critical biblical scholars are unified in thinking it is based on […]
March 29, 2019
My Very First Post: Do Textual Variants Matter??
In three days we will hit the seventh-year anniversary of the blog. I thought it would be fun (for me) to look at the earliest posts. Here is the very first one, from April 3, 2012 (I’ve edited it a bit to tone down the rhetoric; I was a bit more hot-headed in those days!) It’s about one of the most interesting and hotly disputed topics I’ve dealt with throughout my career. ******************************************************************** Probably more than any of my other books, Misquoting Jesus provoked a loud and extensive critique from scholars – almost exclusively among evangelical Christians, who appear to have thought that if readers were “led astray” by my claims in the book they might be in danger of losing their faith or (almost worse!) changing what they believed so that they would no longer be evangelical. I’m not so sure there is really much danger in presenting widely held scholarship to a lay-readership, and so I was a bit surprised at the vitriol I received at the hands of some of my evangelical […]
March 31, 2019
I’ve been talking about how the book of Revelation has been interpreted by modern conservative Christians. Isn’t it telling us what will happen in our own near future?? Here is how I will address the issue, in short, in my book on Revelation, assuming that I go ahead with the project and Armageddon doesn’t happen first. ********************************************************************************* In Contrast: Scholars and the Book of Revelation Not only are these futuristic readings of Revelation contrary to the history of Christian interpretation, they stand radically at odds with how critical scholars read the book of Revelation, and insist it ought to be read. As often pointed out, every single interpreter who has argued that the “signs of the times” reveal the end is coming soon – probably next month – have been shown demonstrably and incontrovertibly to be wrong. But just as significantly, the specific interpretations of these modern manifestations of these sings are almost always demonstrably flawed. I give just one example from the book of Revelation, an interpretation famously pronounced by Hal Lindsey. In […]
April 1, 2019
Revelation as a Blueprint for our Future
I’ve been talking about how the book of Revelation has been interpreted by modern conservative Christians. Isn’t it telling us what will happen in our own near future?? Here is how I will address the issue, in short, in my book on Revelation, assuming that I go ahead with the project and Armageddon doesn’t happen first. ********************************************************************************* In Contrast: Scholars and the Book of Revelation Not only are these futuristic readings of Revelation contrary to the history of Christian interpretation, they stand radically at odds with how critical scholars read the book of Revelation, and insist it ought to be read. As often pointed out, every single interpreter who has argued that the “signs of the times” reveal the end is coming soon – probably next month – have been shown demonstrably and incontrovertibly to be wrong. But just as significantly, the specific interpretations of these modern manifestations of these sings are almost always demonstrably flawed. I give just one example from the book of Revelation, an interpretation famously pronounced by Hal Lindsey. In […]
A Blog Anniversary! Seven Years!
Today is the seven anniversary of the blog. My first post (which I reposted a few days ago) appeared on April 3, 2012. I never thought it would last this long. I figured I would run out of things to say in about six months. Hasn’t happened yet! There’s so much interesting material back in ancient Christianity, starting with Jesus and the New Testament, and going on up through the next three hundred years, that it seems inexhaustible. And readers have so many interesting and important questions, many of them that take numerous posts just to answer (without even getting into the weeds). When I started the blog I was really not sure what it would be or become. In *principal* I knew what I had in mind. The idea was guided by two desiderata: (1) to disseminate scholarly knowledge about the New Testament and early Christianity to a wider reading public of non-scholars, in terms that were intelligent and sensible, but not overly technical or loaded with jargon or requiring extensive background information; and […]
April 3, 2019
The Writings of Papias: Guest Post by Stephen Carlson
I occasionally get questions about one of the most interesting but least known Christian authors of the early 2nd century, a man named Papias (writing in 120 CE? 140 CE). Many readers consider him particularly important because he claims to have known and interviewed the companions of disciples of Jesus’ own apostles (it’s a bit confusing: but Jesus had his apostles; after his death they themselves had disciples; Papias knew people who knew these disciples of the apostles); moreover, Papias is the first author to mention a Gospel of Matthew and a Gospel of Mark. Pretty important. Unfortunately, we don’t have his writings – only a few quotations of them, here and there, among the writings of later church fathers. But these quotations are highly fascinating. There has never been a definitive, full-length study of Papias until now. (Well, until the near future.) My friend and former student and Stephen Carlson has been working for years on the Papias fragments. Stephen did his PhD in New Testament at Duke and is now a Senior Research […]
April 4, 2019
Papias. How Do We Know His Context? Guest post by Stephen Carlson
Now that Stephen Carlson has said a few things about Papias, in this post he is going to explain why it is so hard to know what Papias is actually saying in the fragmentary quotations of his writings that we have. (Even though people / scholars quote them all the time as if we can tell exactly what he means.) It all has to do with putting them in context. But what if you don’t know the context? This is the second of his two posts. And he leaves us with a cliff hanger. If you want to hear more, let us know! Stephen Carlson is the author of The Gospel Hoax and The Text of Galatians and Its History, among others ***************************************************************** Context, Context, Context Continuing the discussion, scholars of fragmentary texts wrestle with the difficult problem of context. As we all know, context is the key to interpretation. Like any other text, the quotations that constitute our fragments of Papias are not self-interpreting just by reading them as stand-alone statements. Readers need context […]
April 5, 2019
Jesus “Only” Adopted to be the Son of God?
Here’s a post from six years ago involving an important matter that I completely changed my mind about. I know some scholars (not to name names) will never change their views about something, come hell or high water. They probably don’t think they should be seen to waffle. I don’t mind waffles. Especially on a nice Sunday morning like this. ****************************************************************** I used to think – for years and years I thought this – that being adopted was a lower kind of sonship. Jesus was “only” the adopted Son of God, not the “real” Son of God. But I came to realize this was fundamentally a mistake and an extremely important one. To say Jesus was the adopted Son of God was to say HUGE things about him, virtually INCONCEIVABLE things. It was not a “lowly” view of Jesus. Here’s how I explain it in my book How Jesus Became God. ****************************************************************** Part of what has convinced me that this [adoptionistic] understanding of Christ should not be shunted aside as a rather inferior view involves […]
April 7, 2019
Enoch’s Vision of the Realms of the Dead
In discussing the research I’m doing on (human) journeys to the realm(s) of the dead, I have so far mentioned two in particular that occur outside of Christian circles and much earlier: the famous account of Odysseus’s vision of the dead in Homer’s Odyssey book 11 and Aeneas’s journey to the underworld in Virgil’s Aeneid, book 6. These are very similar to one another (since Virgil was basing his account on Homer’s) but also very different: in particular, whereas in Homer every spirit has the same uninteresting and boring forever in Hades, in Virgil the righteous are given fantastic rewards and the wicked graphic torment, with the possibility of reincarnation to have another go at it. . Now I introduce a Jewish version of this kind of journey, found in the non-canonical book of 1 Enoch, which has many similarities to Virgil (though not so much with Homer). Here too the righteous are rewarded and the wicked punished. But there are (a couple of) gradations from one kind of sinner to the next. And moreover, […]
April 9, 2019
Fund Raising Event on the Blog: Contradictions in the Gospels??
We will be engaging in an unusual fund-raising event on the blog in a week or so. A well-trained Anglican priest named Matthew Firth had issued a challenge that no one could point out any contradictions in the Gospels of the New Testament that could not be explained. As I understand it, he offered an award of $1000. OK then! Someone on the blog contacted me to see if I’d be willing to take up the challenge. Of course, there is not a contradiction in the known universe that someone cannot explain away to his or her own satisfaction, given sufficient ingenuity and the deep inclination or desire to think that contradictions do not exist. So in a sense the outcome is pre-determined. Rev. Firth will not be convinced, nor will his followers, nor anyone on either side of the pond who comes into the question with mind already made up. So in one sense, at least, it’s a pointless exercise. On the other hand, outsiders might be interested in a back and forth. There’s […]
April 10, 2019
A Papias Mystery: What Was the Book He Wrote? Guest Post by Stephen Carlson
Stephen Carlson has graciously agreed to do a few more posts on his work on Papias. Remember, Papias is that (very?) early second century church father who is later said to have written a five-volume work called the Exposition of the Sayings (or Oracles) of the Lord. We don’t have the book any longer, and don’t really even know what was in it. But several church fathers mention it and give a few quotations from it, some of them very intriguing indeed (including an alternative account about how Judas Iscariot died!). In this post Stephen continues his explanation – based on a new book he is just now finishing up for publication. For my money, this is the most interesting one yet, dealing with an intriguing question: just what kind of book was this that Papias produced? (The other fascinating question that has no definitive answer – don’t know if Stephen will be dealing with this – why didn’t anyone preserve the book for posterity???) Stephen Carlson is the author of The Gospel Hoax and […]
April 12, 2019
What Is a Contradiction?
As many of you know, Rev. Matthew Firth, an Anglican rector trained in theology at Oxford, will soon be participating on the blog in a fund-raising event, for which many of you, bless your souls, have already donated. This will entail a debate with me over whether there are contradictions in the Gospels. The debate will start soon, but I thought I should lay a little bit of groundwork. I hadn’t planned on doing this originally, and haven’t told Rev. Firth that I’m going to do it now – but I’ll show this post to him and allow him to respond if he feels inclined, prior to my opening gambit when I mention several points in the Gospels that appear to me to be contradictory to one another. I do not plan or intend anything in this post to be controversial, but in case Rev. Firth does want to respond, he’s certainly welcome to do so. Otherwise, we can just get on with the debate. But I did want to say a few words about […]
April 15, 2019
Contradictions in the Gospels
This is the opening gambit in my debate with Rev. Matthew Firth on whether there are contradictions in the Gospels. I believe there are many. He believes there are none whatsoever. So who is right? I would strongly recommend that, if you are really interested in the matter, you actually look up the passages in question and see for yourself. I will need to be brief on each one, since space is highly restricted. I ended up requiring 1300 words, and so obviously Rev. Firth can follow suit. I start with one that may seem completely unimportant, but is, to me, a clear contradiction. In Mark 5:21-24 a man named Jairus approaches Jesus in distress. His daughter is “very ill.” He wants Jesus to come heal her so she doesn’t die. Jesus agrees to go, but before he can get to Jairus’s home, he is delayed by a woman who herself desperately needs to be healed (5:25-34). While Jesus is dealing with her – it takes a while – someone comes from Jairus’s house to […]
April 16, 2019