(16 votes, average: 4.81 out of 5)
Loading...I have been laying out the Prospectus for my proposed book The Triumph of Christianity that I circulated to several publishers last summer, and I am now at the very heart of the matter, the explanation (as I saw it then) for why Christianity succeeded so massively in the Empire during its first three centuries. Here is what I said:
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There were two key factors specific to Christianity that facilitated the growth of the Christian church. These two factors could not be found in other religions of the empire. And in tandem – this is a very important point: they worked in tandem – they led to the spread of Christianity and the demise of all the other religions of the empire. The factors: Christianity was evangelistic and it was exclusivistic.
- Religions in antiquity were not evangelistic, in part precisely because they were not exclusivistic. A broad survey of ancient writings makes it completely clear: most people did not much care whether you adopted their religious practices or not. No one insisted that you begin to follow their religion – and most especially only their religion. All the gods deserved to be worshiped, yes. But if you worship your own gods, there is no reason that you should have to worship mine. Jews were a partial exception, but only a partial exception. Most Jews refused to worship anyone else’s gods. But they did not insist that others convert to worship their God. Christians, on the other hand, did insist on this. Quite vociferously. Christians from the outset were inherently evangelistic.
This in no small measure was because of the very nature of Christianity. Christians, unlike most other religions…
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Christians, unlike most other religions (again, with the partial exception of Judaism), were concerned about life after this life. They were concerned about eternal life. They believed that there would be life after death. And they believed that Jesus’ death and resurrection were the way to secure life after death. In fact, he was the only way. Anyone who did not accept the way of Jesus would be lost. Forever. And so Christians felt the urge to convert others to worship Jesus, as the Son of the one Creator god.
This emphasis on the afterlife had an obvious attraction for potential converts. As with all other religions, there was certainly a clear and compelling concern in the Christian faith for securing divine power to help one survive and live well in the present life. But the divine power available to the followers of Christ continued in the life after death as well. Those who experienced hardship now, even hardship in extremis (e.g., persecution, torture, and death), would be vindicated in the life to come and rewarded with eternal bliss. At the same time, the fate of those who refused to accept this Christian message – as this message was “proved” by the miraculous events that had occurred in the life of Jesus, in the lives of his apostles, and in the lives of his followers in the present – would be horrible and unthinkable: eternal torment. Everlasting joy or everlasting torment: Christians repeatedly emphasized that everyone could make the choice, and the choice involved a complete conversion away from the “dead” gods of the pagan religions to worship the living and true God as revealed by Jesus.
- And so it is for more or less that same reason that — unlike any other religion in the empire — Christianity was exclusivistic. Christians from the very beginning insisted that there was one way to have this blessed afterlife and to avoid the horrors of hell. It was not simply by being a good person, as so many other people at the time imagined. It was by faith in Jesus. And only by faith in Jesus. For that reason, anyone who began to worship Jesus had to abandon their previous religious ideas and practices . Conversion was to be complete, total, and exclusive. Christians believed that if they were right (and they were highly convinced that they were indeed right), everyone else was wrong. This was Jewish monotheism raised to a new level.
It is largely the combination of these two factors that led to the ultimate triumph of Christianity. Christianity did not need massive conversions at any one time to succeed. It only needed steady growth. And that is because it destroyed all the other religions as it spread. It was the only religion to do that.
This is a central point, and it can be easily explained. As I’ve already indicated, anyone in the Roman world who was a worshiper of Zeus who decided, later, to become also a worshiper of Apollo, did not stop worshiping Zeus. He simply worshiped both of them. Along with other gods of the state. And of his city. And of his family. And so on. But anyone who worshiped any of these gods who started to worship Jesus had to give up the other gods. And so when someone who was already a pagan began worshiping other gods, they remained pagan. But if they started worshiping the Christian God, they had to leave paganism.
A social historian of religion from Yale, Ramsay Macmullen, author of Pagans and Christians, explains how it worked. Suppose there were two preachers trying to convert a crowd of 100 pagans to adopt a new form of worship. One of the preachers was proclaiming Athena, and the other Jesus. And suppose both preachers were equally successful, convincing half the crowd. If that happened, then paganism would lose 50 adherents and gain no one; Christianity, on the other hand, would gain 50 adherents and lose no one. The Christian mission destroyed all other religions in its wake. (And to do so, Christians did not even have to be equally convincing as adherents of other religions; since the religion required only slow, steady grown to destroy the others. Christian missionaries could in fact be unconvincing to most people they talked with, and the church would still grow and paganism shrink.)
Christianity was the only religion that was annihilating others. Pagan religions were never exclusivistic and by and large they were not evangelistic. Judaism was not actively evangelistic either: most Jews did not much care whether anyone converted to worship their God. God was their God; the other religions could have their gods as well. But Christians did not see it that way. Faith in Christ is the one and only way to have salvation. Anyone who did not believe in Christ would be eternally punished. Christianity was right. All other religions – including non-Christian Judaism – were wrong. And so others had to be converted (evangelism). And when they did so they had to swear allegiance to the God of Jesus alone (exclusivity). Christianity was the only game in town playing by these rules, and it was these rules that would, over the steady course of years, decades, and then centuries, leave the Christian religion as the one dominant form of devotion in the empire.
So could you see the Roman church as a kind of empire – a second wave of Roman empire, more insidious, less militaristic than the first? We are so used to the idea of a Roman church, we don’t think it strange that an essentially middle-eastern religion came to dominate Europe.
I”m not sure I would say it was more insidious! But it ended up being much longer lasting!
Dr. Ehrman, there is an insidious consequence to the logic of this argument (an argument I happen to agree with); namely, that the core of the Christian doctrine is that God will save you and your loved ones, guiding all of you into the next life, a paradise on earth, without want, without pain, without sorrow. Meanwhile, God will not only destroy all of your enemies, but he will make them suffer for an eternity — a suffering that allows us a bit of schadenfreude. This, I believe, taps into a fundamental part of human nature — alas, into our very animal nature: the part of us that seeks vengence for our enemies and bliss for ourselves and our loved ones.
But Christianity adds a twist to this innate desire for vengence by letting God be the one getting his hands dirty. We see this today with radical Evangelical Christians such as the Westboro Baptist Church, who will say — without any self-awareness — that they are not judging or condemning anyone; only God can judge and condemn. This is what makes Christianity (and Islam, if we’re being honest) insidiously appealing, because it allows us to satisfy our animal hunger for vengence, but without the requisite guilt and remorse, without getting blood on our hands. We don’t need to concern ourselves with the vengence part. God will take care of it for us. Just imagine a salesman offering to sell you a product that will send you and your loved ones to live in an eternity of paradise, but will send all your enemies to an eternity of pain and suffering. That would be a very, very, very difficult sales pitch to turndown.
Christianity teaches one to love one’s enemies, not pray for divine retribution upon them (Westboro notwithstanding).
I would say on the contrary, the desire to save others from perdition impelled evangelism, rather than any desire to see destruction upon the rest of the world (although that seems to have been a feature of the early, apocalyptic movement).
Hello Bart
being an expert on early christianity which chrsitian sect existed in Arabia during 7 century . were they considered heretics sect by the rest
thanks
I’m afraid I don’t know!
That would be the Ghassanids. They were a nation of Christian Arabs that came to occupy roughly the area of what was the Nabataean Arab nation southeast of the Levant. They were allies of the Byzantine Empire, and were a natural buffer between the Byzantines and the pagan Arabs. The Ghassanids lasted for several centuries before being subsumed by the Muslim Arab conquests.
From the late Patricia Crone, of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, (and a prominent advocate of radical skeptical views about early Islamic history):
Even if we insist against the evidence that all Jewish
Christians were dead and gone by the Messenger’s
time, a number of doctrines reflected in the Qurʾān
take us back to the first three Christian centuries: thus
the doctrine of Jesus as a purely human being and
prophet sent to the Israelites, Mary as a Levite, docetism
in respect of food intake and the crucifixion, the
syzygies, and the chain of prophets (if actually present
in the book). The denial of bodily resurrection by
the Messenger’s opponents, another key issue in the
Qurʾān, is at home in the same period, but we do at
least know that this question remained a contested
issue for centuries thereafter. And even if we strike
out the prophetic chain as too uncertain, dismiss the
docetism in respect of food intake and the crucifixion
as recent developments thanks to the survival of
some unknown Gnostics, and for good measure explain
Jesus’ human status as a case of the Messenger
reinventing the wheel, we are left with two doctrines
(Jesus as a prophet to the Israelites and Mary as an
Aaronid) which disappeared so fast from mainstream
Christianity that they must have been transmitted to
Arabia by people whose views had been formed in the
first or second centuries. The most obvious candidates
are Jewish Christians. They did not necessarily come
to Arabia in the wake of the Roman wars against the
Jews in the first and second centuries. But whatever
the date of their arrival, they must in fact have been
present in the localities in which the Messenger was
active.
“Jewish Christianity and the Quran: Part Two”
Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Volume 75, Number One, pp.1-21
Bart, I’m not sure I believe this. I’ve read Elaine Pagels’ book the Origins of Satan. Those beliefs were not set in stone in the early days. Mark has Jesus saying “Anyone who is not against us is for us.” Later, that got turned on its head.
I can’t help but wonder if you’re engaging in teleology here. Because this is how some Christians are now, this is how Christians must have been back then. Do we really have the data to back this up? Christians seem to have gotten along fine with non-Christians most of the time. And they were not KILLING non-Christians for not being Christians until much later. Any annihilation that occurred before Constantine involved pagans annihilating Christians. There is considerable evidence Christians were periodically made to suffer for refusing to worship the official gods of the state–not because this was heretical, but because it was seen as seditious.
Yes, aspects of later Christianity did behave this way. But in the first century of the cult? I’d need to see a lot of evidence.
You’re assuming it was entirely a negative thing. But there were, in fact, many positive aspects to Christianity that were not present in paganism as then practiced. Contemporary scholarship on the Roman Empire deals with this. Christians were performing valuable services with regards to helping the poor and sick. They were respected for their community values.
I don’t think the reasons you present are a sufficient explanation.
Yes, the historian does not base his or her views on what is happening today, but looks only to historical evidence. If you’d like to see the case laid out, try Ramsay MacMullen’s book Christianizing the Roman Empire.
I’ve seen multiple accounts, and they don’t all agree with each other, which is the problem with historical evidence–the historian still has to interpret it, and different historians interpret it differently.
The most important thing of all is to allow for prejudices–which we all have. Right now, aspects of the three great monotheistic religions are problematic for many of us. The fundamentalist aspects. But there were no fundamentalists back then. Fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. There were no Billy Grahams in the first century, let alone Franklin Grahams. The Christians then would have a very hard time comprehending today’s Christians, and vice versa.
You were a fundamentalist Christian, and you spend a great deal of time now debating fundamentalist Christians, who have not, I think we can fairly say, been fully appreciative of your insights.
I think when people get wrapped up in a new thing, they become very zealous about it–overzealous, even. I see that now in many atheists–they’re also very evangelistic and exclusivistic (which does not seem to be an actual word, btw). Roman Paganism did in fact have a spurt of evangelism in reaction to Christianity–Julian the so-called Apostate, others. Was this something peculiar to Christianity? I tend to doubt it. Protestantism triumphed over Catholicism in some areas, not in others–you can’t explain that by saying it was more exclusive, and everyone had already been evangelized by then.
Judaism itself had periods of evangelism (the Ashkenazim attest to that), and was certainly about as exclusive as a religion can possibly be. Jesus’ family may have become Jews during one of those periods of evangelism, according to some sources I’ve read. So why didn’t Judaism expand the way Christianity did?
I don’t dismiss your answer, but I think as presented (and of course a blog post is not a book) it’s too simple, and leaves out too many other key factors. Christianity had something more to offer than exclusion and evangelism, or it wouldn’t have survived.
And really, we don’t know how far it would have gotten without Constantine. After he converted, Christianity took on many aspects of Roman Paganism–not least in that it became the accepted state religion, and just as with the old one, there were penalties for not at least pretending to believe. Paganism was tolerant of private beliefs–not public ones. You were not allowed to say the Roman gods did not exist, because that was attacking the legitimacy of the Roman state. Which was treason.
Food for thought.
Technical detail:
Constantine did not make Christianity the state religion. That came later.
A fair point, that Bart has already raised, but seriously–in a state like the Roman Empire, the Emperor’s religion is the state religion. Constantine didn’t 100% abandon the older religion, he hedged his bets a bit, but once you’re telling people” they no longer have to sacrifice to the state-sanctioned gods, you’re raising the question (in the minds of people who lived back then) “Who is the state-sanctioned god now?” Obviously the one the Emperor worships, and whose banner he claims to have triumphed under.
I mean, technically, English people have been free for a very long time to follow any faith they pleased–but their unwritten constitution said there was an established church, that the monarch is the head of it, and that said monarch cannot be the monarch unless he or she professes faith in it, nor can he or she marry outside that faith. That’s only very recently been changed, and only to the extent that the monarch can now marry a non-Anglican. But we’ll see how long it take for that to actually happen.
Constantine couldn’t just tell people to stop believing in the old faiths, but since he really was the living embodiment of the state, his conversion did make a rather large statement. One that the Emperor Julian tried to refute, but too little, too late.
“I see that now in many atheists…”
I’m curious please: how many is many?
This makes perfect sense…except that I still can’t see why the Roman authorities, when they realized this new religion posed a threat, weren’t able to debunk it!
They would have been able to argue that there was no good reason for believing either that Jesus had risen from the dead, or that he’d subsequently “ascended into Heaven.” The only supposed “witnesses” were his diehard followers. Also, no one had ever believed, before those stories about Jesus, that anything of the sort would happen to the Jewish “Messiah”…or that belief or non-belief in him would determine anyone’s fate in the afterlife. (Debunking the “resurrection and ascension” claims should have been enough to discredit all of it.)
If ordinary Romans in that era were gullible enough to be influenced by what evangelists were saying, why wouldn’t they have paid just as much attention to common-sense rebuttals?
Do you mean like… today? 🙂
I think it is different today since people today are born into Christianity. The first century people were adults and still bought into it. (I know some adults buy into it today but most people today have been exposed to Christianity all of their lives.)
Why don’t people get that everybody believed in miracles then? NOBODY ever tried to debunk Jesus being able to do miraculous things.
How exactly were the Romans supposed to persuade people that Jesus did NOT rise from the dead? By the time they realized the cult was a potential problem, pretty nearly all witnesses were gone. There was obviously no body they could produce if he was left to be eaten by scavengers. They might have been able to produce records to show he’d been crucified (though I doubt it). All that does is back up the gospel story. They had no newspapers, no radio, no television–if they issue proclamations to be read in town squares, saying “This Jesus was a fraud” that’s practically legitimizing him–people are like “Who is this Jesus our rulers fear so much?”
The Republicans have their own news channel, and look how good a job they did debunking Donald Trump!
Sorry, this is a non-argument.
I can think of a way the Romans could have tried, perhaps successfully, to debunk Christianity…and it wouldn’t have involved denying the possibility of miracles!
To begin with, they could have identified individuals who were hosting Christian meetings in their homes…and approached them, in a non-threatening way. Specially trained “counter-evangelists” could have focused on *first* de-converting *them*.
Here’s the argument I think they should have begun with.
Let’s assume, for the moment, that Jesus has risen from the dead – in (as his followers believed) a newly indestructible body. *If we weren’t burdened with preconceptions*, what’s the first thing we’d expect him to do? *Confront Pontius Pilate*, of course, and *dare* Pilate to have anyone try to lay a hand on him again! Or at the very least, confront other Roman and Jewish authorities in Jerusalem. Make it very well-known that he was alive.
If his followers had claimed he’d done those things, and the various authorities denied it, Christian apologists could have said they were lying. But no one had even made the claim (unless they’d done so in legends that hadn’t been accepted by any of the authors whose writings were being circulated).
I think that if the “counter-evangelists” drove that point home, the faith of the local quasi-“leaders” they were targeting would have been sufficiently shaken that they’d be willing to listen to other arguments. How weak the evidence for the “resurrection” actually was…and how convenient the “ascension” claim. How riddled with inconsistencies those circulated writings were. How far the new faith had strayed from Jews’ beliefs about the “Messiah.” And how drastically the Christian message itself had changed, from expecting the imminent “return” of Jesus to something else.
On reflection, I suppose the Christian evangelists’ promises were so amazing, and their threats so horrifying, that people weren’t willing to take the *risk* of dismissing them, if there was even a slight chance of their being true. “The Triumph of Demagoguery”! Brrr…
Still another thought…
*Unless* Constantine might really have been capable of snuffing it out, and chose instead to *use* it. (The “in hoc signo vinces” stuff.) He certainly seems to have succeeded in putting his own stamp on it!
Maybe you’ve already said this and I missed it, but why did Christians think people would go to hell for not believing their message? Why did it involve torture? Where did the idea even come from?
Would you say that evangelism and exclusivity led to steady growth of the Church combined with the supernatural experiences of significant leaders? First Apostle Paul, then later Constantine. Without these unusual experiences to the *right* people, would Christianity have survived?
Yes, search for “hell” on the blog: I’ve talked about it a bit before.
Bart, I see two problems with your argument. First and most obvious: if newly converted Christians were required to give up all other gods, this would have made conversion more difficult. Not only were new Christians required to adopt something new, they were also required to reject something (perhaps many things). Logically, it is more difficult to impose two requirements than one. Let’s use an analogy. Perhaps through great persuasive power, I might manage to convince you to wear a kilt the next time you taught a class. Perhaps I might even convince you to occasionally wear a kilt. But could you imagine my persuading you to wear nothing but kilts going forward? So, you’re right: my “kilt campaign” might destroy business casual wear forever, but for that very reason it would be less likely to succeed than a campaign to wear kilts on Fridays. Similarly, the Christian requirement to renounce all other gods must have deterred some would-be Christians who were unwilling to give us belief in Zeus and Apollo.
The second problem I see in your argument is that you’ve skipped over how Christians managed to convince pagans that Christianity held the key to eternal life. From a present-day mindset, the promise of eternal life is compelling. But was this the case 2,000 years ago? I don’t see how it could have been, or else Christianity wouldn’t have been the only (or one of the few) would-be religions to promise it. Again, I see an obstacle for Christianity here: not only were they required to prove that belief in their crucified savior would bring eternal life, they also had to convince pagans that eternal life was possible.
In short: I see from your argument how Christianity succeeded once they convinced pagans to become believers, but I don’t see how they convinced these pagans in the first place.
Yup, that will be what my book about! (What it is that convinced people) But I don’t understand your first objection. There is no question that Christians *did* convince pagans not only to accept the Christian God but also to reject their other gods in doing so. So to what are you objecting?
I didn’t make this as clear as I should have. Yes, of course, Christians convinced converts to accept Christianity exclusively, and this was pretty much a unique feature of early Christianity. Yes, of course, this helps explain how the conversion of Christians succeeded in pushing paganism to the margins. But it doesn’t itself explain why people converted in the first place. Just the opposite, in fact. Joining a pagan cult was a simple matter of … well, joining the cult. Christian conversion required two things: joining the church, AND rejecting all other gods. That second requirement was pretty much unique, and without knowing more, it would seem that this second requirement posed a unique obstacle to the growth of the church. I tried to draw an analogy to kilt-wearing: it’s going to be easier to convince you to mix in a kilt with your usual clothing choices, but much harder to get you to wear a kilt 24-7. My guess is that a lot of potential Christians must have balked at the 24-7 nature of early Christianity. True, enough Christians did not balk. But to make your case for why Christianity succeeded, you’ll have to explain why so many pagans converted to Christianity, notwithstanding the difficulty (and novelty) of asking converts to reject paganism in its entirety.
Yes, that’s what I mean when I say that Christianity, unlike the other religions of the empire, was exclusivistic. (But the reality is that most Christians, of course, were not of the 24-7 variety, even if their leaders — including most of our surviving authors — thought they should be)
OK … confused then … if most early Christians were NOT exclusivistic, if most were part-time pagans, then what becomes of the Ramsey Macmullen explanation you quoted above?
I think we’re miscommunicating! Most early Christians *were* exclusivistic.
Hey Bart! 🙂
I once read an argument based on Matthew 23:15 to the effect that first century Jews (or, at least, some first century Pharisees like, perhaps, Paul) were in fact evangelistic. You, apparently, wouldn’t buy such an argument. What then do you make of the statement ascribed to Jesus that scribes and Pharisees “cross sea and land to make a single convert”?
Many thanks! 🙂
Yes, that is commonly argued. But the more accepted view is that Jesus is talking about Pharisees trying to make other Jews Pharisees, not them trying to convert non-Jews to be Jews.
Ah! Thank you so much, Bart!
Your blog is invaluable.
🙂
I like the example of the two preachers. Even if the Christian preacher was much less successful than the Athena preacher, only converting 1 vs 99, that’s still a win, unless the other preacher converts a Christian. Which brings up another point: how many Christians were being converted to paganism? I suppose there must have been some but I suspect it would have been pretty rare. Even today the fear of hell can be enough to keep people in the faith, “just in case” so to speak. Did the first Christians have a concept of hell?
Yes they did!
Jesus preached an apacalyptic message to repent to prepare oneself for the advent of the Kingdom of God.
There does seem to be the concept in apacalyptic Judaism that there would be a sorting out of the good guys and not so good guys at the advent of the Kingdom of God (the Son of Man judgement).
Is that perhaps what Christians spring boarded off of to come up with their heaven or hell consequences?
Otherwise it seems kind of tough to reconcile Christianity, as you have described its formula for success here, with Jesus’s ministry, as in how the one as a logical consequence gives rise to the latter.
It’s hard to tell how much the afterlife played into the Christian missionary endeavors, but I’ll certainly be discussing it in the book!
Will you be discussing when, and how, the Christian message changed from the concept of the “Second Coming” being expected within believers’ lifetimes – possibly, with “God’s Kingdom” still expected to be on Earth – to the “Second Coming” being delayed indefinitely, and the “Kingdom” concept being replaced by “Heaven” and “Hell”?
I suppose most potential converts heard only the second set of beliefs, and never knew the earliest Christians had been saying something very different. But it seems strange that a movement could have “gotten away with” changing its message so radically, even in that era.
I’m not sure!
It seems you’ve received a lot of objections on this post. Do you sense many have missed the mathematical argument, that minimal but steady success for Christians, as against minimal but steady losses for all the others, was all that was needed for Christianity to eliminate all competition? It’s certainly working for the more delusional sects now.
Second question: will you be dealing with the downside that early Christianity’s early opposition to all things not Christian helped bring about a dark age in the West?
Well, my sense is that the objections came because they were reading a very brief synopsis where I didn’t lay out the case; so that’s completely understandable.
How do the mysteries play into this schema? Many were, if not exclusivist, at least pretty passionate about the powers of their particular gods/goddesses.
Yes, the point to stress is that they were one way to engage in religious activities, but they were decidedly and emphatically *not* exclusivistic. (You could join as many as you wanted; and it was expected you would still participate in other religious cultic activities.
Isn’t “faith” a fundamental difference between Paganism and Christianity? My impression is that polytheistic paganism was simply the conventional wisdom of the time – not something that entailed the psychological commitment entailed by faith.
Yes, “faith” didn’t really enter into the equation.
Would you consider Islam to be both exclusivistic and evangelistic, How about Mormonism?
Yup, it’s both.
I think your premise is based on what would later become the orthodox interpretation of Christianity. Our idea of ‘hell’ is more influenced by Dante’s Inferno than by what the term was understood to mean in Judaism (‘sheol’) or Greek (‘hades’, ‘gehenna’, ‘tartarus’). I find it striking that Paul’s letters (our earliest witnesses) don’t seem to mention ‘hell’ at all, neither ‘hades’, nor ‘gehenna’, nor ‘tartarus’. The terms ‘hades’ and ‘gehenna’ are used only in Matthew and Luke, Gospels which already were influenced by the orthodox opinion (i.e. Mt 16:18, designating Peter to be ‘the rock on which the future church be build’, clearly an orthodox insertion meant to justify the legitimacy of the (Roman) orthodox church. So, Paul does not teach about ‘hell’, neither does Mark, with the exception of Mark 9:43, 45, 47. Interestingly, this saying is found – although in different form – in the Gospel of Thomas, which some scholars have begun to consider as early (or at least consider some of the sayings as early), Saying 22. Here we also have the elements of ‘children’, ‘eyes’, ‘hands’, ‘feet’, but in a purely spiritual context. When Mark wrote his Gospel, this saying (which seems quite cryptic and would be beyond comprehension for people not familiar with the contemplative tradition), through oral tradition, might have become what we now find in Mark. The Christian gnostics seem not to have entertained the doctrine of ‘hell’ and ‘eternal damnation’, I use the term ‘gnostic’ for lack of a better word, I do not refer to that type of ‘Gnosticism’ which emerged in the 2nd and 3rd century, but I refer to those people who entertained ‘gnosis’, the knowledge of God, as we find for example in 2 Cor 4:6, 1 Cor 12:8, Col 2:2-3, the knowledge of God not as ‘I know how she looks like’, but in the sense of an inner spiritual understanding. That the struggle for ‘orthodoxy’ was already fiercely raging by 85 CE we can assume from 1 Clement, written around 96 CE. However, lots and lots of Christians in other places had a different understanding of Jesus and his teachings, and I believe that Paul was one of them.
‘Gnostic’ Christianity would not have the missionary zeal, they would just share their understanding of inner ‘truth’ and once it is understood, ‘pagans’ would simply give up worshiping all kinds of ‘gods’ since it wouldn’t be compatible with the new paradigm. ‘Orthodox’ Christians, particularly church leaders and bishops, on the other hand had different motivations. They interpreted/presented Jesus in the Jewish way, claiming his death on the cross was the ultimate temple sacrifice in order to cleanse humanity once and for all from all ‘sin’ and ‘trespasses’. As on the Day of Atonement a sacrifice was offered to God to cleanse Israel from all ‘sin’, so Jesus, God’s Only Son, was offered as a sacrifice to do that for all of humanity once and for all. This idea emerged within Judaism to explain in what way Jesus had been the expected messiah. I wonder how Greeks and pagans would have embraced this idea? What was their notion of ‘sin’ and ‘atonement’?
Regrettably there is very little evidence to help us know what pagans thought was happening during their acts of sacrifice….
As a Christian, I would like to believe that the efforts of the chuches to help the poor and the lame also inspired people to embrace the egalitarian ideals of Jesus’ revolutionary message. Do you think there’s anything to this?
There’s *some* very limited evidence to suggest this was a factor, but not much!
You’ve probably addressed this before so sorry if I’m redundant … Christ himself as far as we know then did not preach belief in Him (obviously not the resurrection) would bring eternal life? Why did the Christians develop this “all or nothing” kind of exclusivity? What would have been their motives? Also was there any proof behind their beliefs? I suppose if I had a very hard life and one religion suggested that I would find happiness later while another offered no such prospects, I’d opt for the “happiness ever after” plan. I don’t mean to be flip but that is what it seems to boil down to? Then were most of the converts the suffering rather than the elites? (sorry to be always behind … hard to be on the internet … lots of slow blackouts)
Yup, these are key questions. The answers are too long for a comment here, but I hope to deal with them in subsequent posts!
I watched a program on Netflix, Secrets of Christianity, or something like that. They presented evidence that Christianity had a toehold in Pompeii…graffiti and other things… The premise was that the eruption of Vesuvius may have been seen be many Romans as divine punishment for destroying the Temple in Jerusalem, and helped to convert many to the cause.. Do you think that there may be any validity to this Dr. Ehrman?
I’ve been to Pompeii a couple of times, but am not familiar with the Christian graffiti there. Maybe someone on the blog can enlighten us?
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=7&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjv_s7ytOTMAhXJaz4KHVPDCe4QtwIILTAG&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DaakJEflzVdk&usg=AFQjCNHSolcKxL3egjK_J97Op7ceSe6Cvg
If you can’t open the link, google Christian graffiti Pompeii to see the Youtube video which is actually from the show I watched… Its 9 minutes, the meat starts at 2 minutes in.
The video shows clips from the show, but the computerized voice is added by obviously pro Christian apologists… My interest is in the graffiti, do you think this is real?
Don’t you think the fact that Christianity was the region’s first free religion had some impact? It required no sacrifices! If you offered any sacrifice at all, it showed you did not believe that Jesus was the universal sacrifice, and therefore that you were not a Christian.
Christians didn’t insist that others worship their god. Instead, they just presented Christianity as a better, more appealing choice. If you want to read the kind of advertising Christianity was doing, read Hebrews. The whole book is a sermon pleading with Christians not to leave for a different religion, one whose followers were not being persecuted as atheists. That may have even been before the idea of an afterlife came into play. The motivation for evangelism was compassion. The benefits of my religion are so much better than the benefits of yours.
Another appeal of Christianity was the egalitarian attitude promoted by Paul. It didn’t matter whether you were Jewish or polytheistic, or even a slave, or even a woman. You could be a Christian. That was a great attitude for a religion of empire. Participants in empire realized life need not be a zero-sum game. Cooperation instead of enmity with your neighbors of different ethnicity. That might be why Constantine chose Christianity as the religion of his empire. The Evolution of God develops this theme.
The priests of the southern tribes of Israel figured that out in Diaspora. When Assyria defeated Babylon, its rulers allowed Israel to freely practice their own religion. Wanting to capitalize on that attitude, they stopped preaching enmity against other tribes, replacing it with cooperation.
We see that working its way into Second Temple Judaism with the teachings of Jesus, as portrayed in the synoptic gospels. The definition of neighbor (as in, love your neighbor) was being expanded by Hillel to include sinners (non-practicing Jews) and Samaritans. Love your enemy expanded inter-ethnic cooperation even farther, to those ethnicities you had traditionally considered enemies. Empire works better when you cooperate with them (trade with them) instead of fighting them. Besides, the empire won’t let you fight them, since they are within the same empire.
The schadenfreude mentioned is a hold-over of the apocalyptic worldview. In that, good people sometimes suffer because of the cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil. But in the end, evil will be punished and good rewarded. Jewish imprecatory writing (in the Psalms and in the prophets) offered a dual consolation. If you are good, you will be rewarded, and the bad guys who have been hurting you will be punished. Only later (late first century and beyond) did people figure out that it had not happened on earth as they expected, so maybe that reckoning would happen in an afterlife.
I think belief in an afterlife was uncommon in early first century. Most Jews didn’t even believe in a resurrection, which was an apocalypse on earth, returning to an ordinary mortal life on earth but in a world where God was actively in control. I don’t see much influence of Osiris outside of Egypt. But in all cases, your treatment in the realm of the dead was based on your behavior, whether you were a good person or an evil person. Only for Christianity was it based on what you believed. I think it took a long time for that idea to develop.
Christianity later hijacked that worldview, saying that the gating factor for your eternal destiny was not what you do (as it had always been), but what you believe (the universal sacrifice of Jesus).
Christians would not have to stop believing in Zeus and Apollo. They need only stop offering sacrifices to them. I suspect that by the first century Roman Empire, deities already played a very small role in the lives of most people. Buy your meat at the temple, where the sacrificing of the non-edible portions has conveniently been done for you already by the temple priests. It was hard to get meat anywhere else. Burn some incense in a corner of your home where you keep your little altar. Maybe participate in come communal ceremonies. That’s OK, Christians will develop their own. Baptism was a one-time initiation rite, but eucharist was repeated, at least annually.
Matthew 23:15 was hyperbole, exaggeration. The goal of the Pharisees was not to make more Pharisees. It was to persuade non-practicing Jews (‘sinners’) to resume full obedience of Torah. The purpose was exactly the same as that of all the polytheists. If we give the gods what they want, they will treat us well, and control in our favor the things we can’t control. For Israel, that was codified in the Mosaic Covenant. Most specifically, if the God of Israel assesses the obedience of Israel as a whole favorably, then God will keep his side of the covenant and give Israel victory over their enemies. In this case, that would be Rome. Victory over Rome would let Israel govern themselves as they once did. Their name for that situation was the kingdom of God. Polytheists persecuted Christians only because Christians refused to offer the traditional sacrifices to the traditional gods. The only faith involved was the faith that giving the gods what they want makes your life better.
Bart will give the numbers in his book, but if I recall correctly, it took nearly 3 centuries for the Christian mindshare to reach a few percent. Constantine and his successors were the ones to drive those numbers up. He may have chosen Christianity for its egalitarian attitudes, its reputation for cooperation and good behavior, and its stress on inter-ethnic cooperation.
Most people who participated in pagan religions (that is, almost everyone in antiquity) did not have to pay for the sacrifices. They just had to show up!
Oh? Yes, there was public ceremony, especially in Rome. But from what I read, home and community worship was still ubiquitous. There were shrines and sacred spots all over the place. The Roman lararium had a food offering at every meal. See for example Backgrounds of Early Christianity, Everett Ferguson, p. 177ff.
Dr. Ehrman, in the PBS documentary From Jesus to Christ, Dr. Paula Fredriksen suggests that because early Christians were essentially Jewish, that this helped the spread of Christianity: “It’s because of diaspora Judaism, which is extremely well-established, that Christianity itself, as a new and constantly improvising form of Judaism, is able to spread as it does throughout the Roman World.” To what extent do you think the Jewishness of Christianity helped or hindered its spread?
I think she means that the early Christians could make inroads in various locations because there were already gentiles familiar with Jewish monotheism. I think that may be true to some limited extent, but I do not think it was the main factor. (Though lots of scholars think so)