The Triumph of Christianity

by Bart D. Ehrman

  The Limits of Tolerance

  Because most cults were viewed as proper and acceptable, few efforts were ever made by state authorities to restrict them. It did happen on rare occasion: merely a handful of known instances over centuries in which thousands of cults were in constant practice. This handful of exceptions is worth noting, however, especially given the fate of Christianity at the hands of Roman authorities in the years before Constantine. These exceptions show that the Roman state was massively tolerant, but not infinitely so. If religious practices were deemed socially dangerous—either causing physical harm or creating infectious social problems—the authorities might act.

  The most famous instance occurred in Rome in 186 BCE, when the senate intervened to quash the cult celebrating Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and religious ecstasy. The suppression of the Bacchanalia is recounted two centuries later in the history of Rome produced by Livy (59 BCE–17 CE), in a passage some scholars have argued exaggerates the profligate activities of the group.16

  Livy indicates that the Bacchic cult had come to Rome from Etruria and then spread “like an epidemic.” It was, he claims, a wild and licentious affair that involved nocturnal sex rituals and ceremonial murder. Livy states that Bacchic meetings occurred at night under the cloak of darkness. They began with gluttonous banquets where the wine—Bacchus’s drink—flowed freely and the sexes mingled promiscuously so that “all sorts of corruption began to be practiced, since each person had ready to hand the chance of gratifying the particular desire to which he was naturally inclined.”

  But it was not all fun and games. The evening events, Livy claims, would lead to “wholesale murders” that were concealed from public knowledge by the loud revelries: “No cries for help could be heard against the shriekings, the banging of drums, and the clashing of cymbals in the scene of debauchery and bloodshed.”

  It was through the testimony of an eyewitness that the Roman senate came to be alerted to these dangerous rites. Under threat of punishment the witness revealed that new inductees in the cult were always under the age of twenty. One of them would be introduced to the cult priests as “a kind of sacrificial victim.” This hapless youth would then be taken into the midst of the frenzied Bacchics, who were shouting, singing, clashing cymbals, and beating drums to cover over the ultimate cultic act: ceremonial rape. Moreover, “anyone refusing to submit to outrage or reluctant to commit crimes was slaughtered as a sacrificial victim.”

  The senate was especially shocked to hear these practices were not a small-time affair but a massive movement involving not only the lower classes but also “men and women of rank.” Moreover, they came to think it was growing at an alarming rate.17 The senate stepped in and issued an edict to bring the festivities to a halt, rounding up those who had actively participated in the Bacchic rites—there were said to be seven thousand of them—and those who had “polluted themselves by debauchery or murder . . . were condemned to death.” The senate then ordered the destruction of all the shrines dedicated to the worship of Bacchus, not only in Rome itself but throughout Italy, except, Livy indicates, those that had an altar or statue that “had been consecrated.” This surely must mean that some sanctioned Bacchic cults were accepted as innocuous and thus allowed to continue. In fact, Livy goes on to say that anyone who considered Bacchic ceremonies “hallowed by tradition” and essential could submit an official request to be allowed to follow them. But “there was to be no common fund of money, no president of the ceremonies, and no priest.” That is, there could not be a Bacchic organization, funding, or leadership. This edict, in effect, killed the cult, at least as insofar as it entailed drunken festivities involving rape and murder.

  In sum, even though by modern standards Roman religion was incredibly diverse and tolerant, it was not endlessly so. There were limits. The limits were set by acceptable social norms. Degeneracy and criminal activities were not allowed and could be punished to the extreme.

  Magic, Atheism, and Superstition

  Roman officials were generally, or at least publicly, opposed not only to morally degenerate and socially dangerous cults but also to what they saw as a kind of pseudo-religion, the false manipulation of divine forces for selfish and often antisocial ends that went under the name “magic.” Magic in antiquity was not a matter of tricks performed by a master of sleight-of-hand and deception. Magic was understood to be very real. It was thought to involve illicit and unsanctioned interactions with daimonic powers who could be swayed to accomplish miraculous results that might harm others or induce them to behave contrary to their own wishes.18 These interactions might involve spells and invocations of dark forces in order to curse and even kill an enemy, to provide personal supernatural powers, or to make the village beauty fall helplessly in love at one’s feet.

  Scholars have long wrestled with how to define magic, especially in relationship to sanctioned “religion.” The older view was that magic compelled divine powers to act but religion humbly petitioned them; that magic manipulated the powers of darkness but religion submitted to the powers of light.19 In the second half of the twentieth century, however, scholars came to realize that it was difficult indeed to draw a clear and definitive line between practices one might call magical and others that might be called religious. Magic involves many of the same techniques and strives to attain many of the same ends as religion.

  And so scholars had to reimagine ancient magic and began to think of it as the dark side of religion. Magic, in this understanding, would involve religious practices that were considered by mainstream opinion to stand on the margins, unauthorized, esoteric, secretive, nefarious, and dangerous, as opposed to cultic practices that, even if they look very much the same, were socially approved, public, open to scrutiny, licit, and, for the most part, wholesome.

  However magic is defined, it clearly was known to exist in antiquity, as there is considerable evidence for it in both literary sources and archaeological finds, such as lead “curse tablets” in which a person invokes a divine attack on an enemy and papyrus texts that prescribe rituals and prayers that could have great magical effect.

  In addition to forms of cultic practice perceived as socially dangerous, two religious extremes were widely disapproved of on both the state and popular levels: atheism and superstition. In a sense these phenomena were on opposite ends of the spectrum.

  If we use the term in the modern sense, atheism was an exceedingly rare phenomenon in antiquity: very few people believed there were literally no gods. The word “atheism” itself, however, simply means “without the gods,” and one could be “without” them while still acknowledging they existed. As Roman religion specialist James Rives has pointed out, atheism applied more normally to “anyone who rejected or neglected the traditional modes of honoring [the gods].”20 That is to say, anyone who abjectly refused to participate in the worship of divine beings could be labeled an atheist. Such a person could expect a good deal of opprobrium and sometimes civil action. The Christians were often accused of being atheists. Obviously that was not because they denied the divine realm but because they refused to acknowledge (and act as if) it was inhabited by more than the one being they worshiped and refused to interact with it in traditional ways.

  Christians also came to be accused of superstition, which for most Roman ancients was on the other end of the spectrum from atheism.21 Superstition involved excessive fear of the gods and what they might do, leading to extreme and immoderate attempts to avert their anger.22 In a scathing attack on superstition, Plutarch labels it as “a fear which utterly humbles and crushes a person, for he thinks that there are gods, but that they are the cause of pain and injury.” He notes that fear of the gods gives a person no escape: it invades even sleep and death itself. Death in some ways is that which is feared the most, because of what might come afterward: “Rivers of fire . . . specters of many fantastic shapes . . . judges and torturers and yawning gulfs and deep recesses teeming with unnumbered woes.”23

  Unfortunat
ely, the superstitious person thinks all this misfortune is deserved because “he is hateful to the gods, that he is being punished by the gods, and that the penalty he pays and all that he is undergoing are deserved because of his conduct.” Such a one “assumes that the gods are rash, faithless, fickle, vengeful, cruel, and easily offended; and, as a result, the superstitious person is bound to hate and fear the gods . . . As he hates and fears the gods, he is an enemy to them. And yet, though he dreads them, he worships them and sacrifices to them, and besieges their shrines.”24

  For Plutarch, this is far worse than atheism, and much more despised by the gods themselves. As he puts it in a clever and convincing comparison:

  Why for my part, I should prefer that people should say about me that I have never been born at all, and there is no Plutarch, rather than that they should say “Plutarch is an inconstant fickle person, quick-tempered, vindictive over little accidents, pained at trifles. If you invite others to dinner and leave him out, or if you haven’t the time and don’t go to call on him, or fail to speak to him when you see him, he will set his teeth into your body and bite it through, or he will get hold of your little child and beat him to death, or he will turn the beast he owns into your crops and spoil your harvest.”25

  Religion Past and Present: In Sum

  Of all the features of Roman religion I have delineated here, those most analogous to modern experience are atheism and superstition. There are today, of course, many atheists who do not believe in any divine being at all and many other people who live their lives without giving any particular thought or attention to the divine. There are also plenty of monotheists who are highly superstitious in Plutarch’s sense, stricken by dumb fear of what the divine ruler of the world will do to them either in this life or the world to come. At these points we are on familiar turf.

  But Roman religions are highly unfamiliar in so many other ways. They involved many gods; they were all about practice, not about belief; they had no orthodoxy or heresy, no doctrines, almost no ethical requirements (with a few exceptions, such as a proscription of parricide), and no sacred “Word of God” giving instructions about theology or daily ethical practices. There were no trans-regional religious organizations or leaders. The religions on the whole were massively inclusive and highly tolerant. They principally entailed cultic activities of prayer, sacrifice, and divination. These are religions that would be scarcely recognizable in the modern Reform synagogue, the neighborhood mosque, or the Baptist church on the corner. Yet they were the dominant form of religiosity throughout all of Roman antiquity.

  Their dominance was not restricted to some realm that we can wall off and call “the religious sphere.” It is always to be remembered that throughout all of antiquity—in fact, until the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and still in most parts of our world today—the religious and sociopolitical realms were not kept distinct. The state not only promoted and encouraged religious cults, it staffed them. In Rome itself, the priests of the major state priesthoods were political appointments held by professionals trained in affairs of the state. The emperor himself was the pontifex maximus, the “chief priest” over the state cults. As we will see in a moment, his predecessors were revered as gods. Religion infused the state; it infused life; it was virtually omnipresent.

  THE OMNIPRESENCE OF RELIGION

  Religion could be seen everywhere, in the temples and cult statues that dominated the landscape, both in the cities and in the countryside. We have a list of buildings in a papyrus document from ancient Alexandria. It enumerates 845 taverns, 1,561 baths, 24,396 houses, and 2,478 temples.26 That would be nearly one temple for every ten houses. If that were true in my neighborhood, there would be five temples—or, in my Christian environment, churches—just on my relatively short street.

  Numerous other holy places could be seen, apart from permanent temple buildings in the cities. Shrines could be located almost anywhere and could be small and roughly constructed—for example, at a crossroad or in the middle of virtually nowhere in the countryside. A typical home would have a small shrine to the Penates and Lares, who were gods of the family. (The Penates, for example, watched over the larder.)

  The self-contained temples in the Roman world functioned differently from church, synagogue, or mosque buildings today. They were not places where the congregation would come together for worship. They were houses of the gods. The cult statue, representing the god, would be kept there, in a specially appointed room that normally was closed off and not accessible to the public. Sacrifices would take place not in this room, in the presence of the statue, but outside the temple, in front, on the altar. That is where people would gather together for the ceremony to hear prayers and music and to observe the slaughter.

  These were normally festive occasions. Most people could not afford to eat meat on a regular basis, and a public sacrifice provided a rare and welcome exception. The priests who performed the ritual sacrifice would then butcher the animal in the temple precincts, after an expert examined the entrails to be sure the offering had been accepted by the god. Most temples had dining rooms, and if it was a large public ceremony with a number of sacrificial animals, as opposed to a small private occasion, there might be a distribution of the meat. On the inside, those celebrating were often joined for the meal by the god, in the person of the cult statue.

  A temple to one divinity could house numerous cult statues of other deities as well. Statues could also be found in numerous other places. The surroundings of a middle-size temple, such as the Tychaean in Alexandria, Egypt, might be taken as typical. Not only did it have numerous gods within its walls; it was located near a bathhouse that held gods, and buildings nearby with niches in the walls for places for statues, “probably upward of a hundred different images of gods in and around this one intersection.” Larger temples obviously would be associated with many more. The Acropolis in Athens was “absolutely packed with nearly one thousand years of dedicatory statues honoring both men and gods.”27

  As already intimated, cult statues were not actually worshiped. They were a kind of physical representation of the god to help focus the attention, or even a site through which the god could make himself present. As a rule, divine images had little to do with the sacrificial activities that played a central role in most cults. But they were often treated as holy objects: washed, dressed, and cared for; paraded through town with music and dancers; brought out to the god’s worshipers on special occasions—special objects of reverence.

  TWO SPECIAL KINDS OF CULTS IN THE EMPIRE

  Among all the kinds of religious cults in the empire, two have struck specialists interested in the spread of Christianity as particularly significant and interesting: the various “mystery religions” and the imperial cult—the worship of the emperor.

  Mystery Religions

  The term “mystery religion” or “mystery cult” is normally applied to a range of cults that came from various eastern climes and that sponsored the worship of a foreign god or goddess, such as Demeter (in Greece), Isis (from Egypt), or Mithras (from Persia). To participate in the full range of religious activities in one of these cults (in addition to their public processions and sacrifices) a person was required to undergo a sacred initiation ceremony.28

  Despite what one sometimes reads, we actually do not know a good deal about how these cults were organized, what specific cultic practices they entailed, how people were initiated into them, what these people were taught to understand about the deity at the center of the cult’s worship, and what kind of myths were told about that deity. There is good reason for considering them “mysteries”: only initiates could participate in the secret rituals of these cults, and initiates were sworn to silence, evidently with threats of serious divine reprisals and punishments for breaking their vow.29 As a result, hardly anyone did.

  For that reason, scholars deeply interested in these cults have had to base their views—and sometimes the highly detailed descriptions they spin out, often from
whole cloth—on very slight evidence, including highly allusive references made in passing in ancient texts and the material remains that have been uncovered through archaeological discovery. In some instances, such as the worship of Mithras, archaeological finds are by far our most extensive and telling (though often ambiguous) evidence.

  These cults naturally differed from one another in numerous ways, both in how they were practiced and to whom they were open. The mysteries of Mithras, for example, were restricted to men. No women were allowed. That, naturally enough, limited its appeal: it is hard to imagine Mithraism “taking over the world” if half the human race could not participate. Consistently among these cults, however, it is clear that an initiate in one could participate in others as well. None of them was “exclusive” in the way that Christianity was. Anyone who worshiped Mithras in an underground cave, where the god’s sacred sites were always located, could also worship in a temple of Isis. Initiates participated widely in all kinds of other cults as well: civic cults, imperial cults, family cults, and so on.30

  Even though initiation appears to have been a constant feature of mystery cults, the procedures would have differed significantly from one cult to the other. Becoming an initiate was thought to place a person in an unusually close and intimate relationship with the god or goddess at the center of the cult. A kind of personal relationship with a divine being was not something promoted or fostered in public cults. This may well have been the major attraction of the mysteries. This relationship was supposed to improve one’s life in the present, and in some instances the relationship was understood to continue into the afterlife. It is not necessarily the case that the mysteries promised an afterlife to those who otherwise would simply not have one. Instead, for those who believed that life existed beyond the grave, a mystery cult maintained that the intimacy obtained with the deity in the present would continue after death, making the afterlife a far more enjoyable and pleasant experience.