The Triumph of Christianity

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Some of the mysteries—for example, Mithraism and the Isis cult—had communal leaders and a kind of “graded” membership by which initiates could “rise up” through the ranks, both to have greater authority in the community and to attain a yet closer relationship with the divinity. It appears as well that part of the periodic celebrations of these cults involved sacred meals that were shared together.

  From all these features, as vague and underdetermined as they are, it should seem obvious why mystery cults have sparked the interest of scholars of early Christianity. Christianity too involved an initiation rite (baptism) that brought particular intimacy with the deity (Christ and God himself) and a hope of a greater afterlife; the Christian church had clear grades of authority, and one of its major rituals involved a weekly shared meal (which became the Eucharist). As a result, scholars have often wondered whether we should consider Christianity another mystery cult—this one from another eastern region, Israel—and whether some of the other mysteries played any role in the development of Christianity.31

  Those who have rejected such a suggestion have pointed out that Christianity is stunningly different in many ways from each of the mystery religions. Unlike Mithraism, for example, it was open to all people of both genders, not just to men, and in fact women played significant leading roles in the early years of the church. Unlike the others, it was exclusive and did not allow participation in other mysteries. Moreover, unlike them all, it also emphasized the importance of doctrine and ethics.

  These are all strong points, but it is worth noting that any one of the mysteries could be selected—say, the cult of Cybele that is associated with Anatolia (modern Turkey)—and shown to be different in numerous ways from all the others. Each had its own distinctive features, sometimes extremely distinctive ones, such as only men being allowed to worship in underground caves. The fact that Christianity differed from other mysteries does not alter the fact that it also shared numerous features, probably more than it shared with other cults scattered throughout the empire.

  The Imperial Cult

  For many modern persons, the form of ancient cult that seems most alien involved the worship of political leaders. Such worship could take a variety of forms, but the one best known is the imperial cult: the worship of the emperor.

  In trying to make sense of the worship of mere mortals, it is important to remember that ancient people had a sense of the divine that was different from what we have today. For the monotheistic traditions of the modern West, an enormous and unbridgeable chasm exists between the divine and the human. God is the Almighty and Eternal Creator of All “up there”; humans are peons fated for a brief and painful mortal existence down here. Ancient people, on the other hand, understood both the divine and the human realms to involve gradations of grandeur and power, and sometimes the two realms overlapped. There may have been the one ultimate all-powerful divine being over all, but below that one were the great gods and goddesses of ancient mythology and worship; below them were local divinities who were more closely connected with daily life; below them were family gods; below them were daimones; and so on. The divine realm was a continuum.

  So too was the human. Some people are fantastically, even preternaturally brilliant, beautiful, or powerful. They are not like the rest of us mere mortals. In that light, who could be more powerful than the Roman emperor? He was able to accomplish feats the rest of us could barely even imagine. The emperor was not Jupiter or one of the great gods. He was the emperor. But he, like other amazingly elevated human beings, could have a touch of the divine.

  The worship of the emperor was precipitated by Julius Caesar, who advertised his family line as physically descended from the goddess Venus. After Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE, his adopted son, Octavian, helped promote the claim that he had ascended to live now with the gods in the heavenly realm as a divine being. Caesar had been made a god. Octavian’s declaration was not personally or politically disinterested. If his own father was a god, what did that make him?

  Some fifteen years later, Octavian was to become the first of the Roman emperors, renamed Caesar Augustus. When he died, after a reign of just over four decades, he too was declared by the Roman senate to have become a divine being, and he was worshiped as such. The imperial cult that developed worshiped deceased emperors who had been declared deified by the senate. The senate did not actually make anyone a god but rather officially recognized that a deification had occurred. Deification came, of course, only to “good” emperors. The hopelessly inept or morally degenerate ones—think Nero or Caligula—did not receive the honor. Ironically some of the “bad” ones, including Caligula, were deemed awful precisely because of their megalomaniacal insistence that they were gods while still living.

  It is often argued that the imperial cults offered prayers and sacrifices only to the deified, deceased emperors, not to the living. For the living emperor, offerings were made to his genius. The term “genius” is a little hard to define, but it means something like “guardian spirit,” which, in the case of the emperor, inspired him and directed the course of his life. Thus, for example, we have a calendar of festivals observed by the Roman army from the third century CE that indicates that anniversaries of deified emperors were to be observed through sacrifices, whereas anniversaries of the current emperor were marked either by offerings to his genius or offerings to other divinities connected with his rule, such as the trio of divinities associated with the Capitoline Hill in Rome: Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. Two centuries earlier, from 15 CE, we have an inscription found in a town near Sparta, Greece, that speaks of a festival on one day “for the God Caesar Augustus, son of the god, our Savior and Deliverer” and on the next day “for the emperor Tiberius Caesar Augustus, father of the fatherland.” The wording is very important. Caesar Augustus, who had died the previous year, was God and son of God, the Savior and Deliverer. The current emperor, Tiberius, was “father of the fatherland.” It was a big difference.32

  There are other instances, however, especially in provinces in the East, where the living emperor was indeed worshiped as already divine. Scholars have long tried to make sense out of this discrepancy. Possibly the most persuasive view takes into account the fact that most people living in the empire, until the time of the emperor Caracalla (ruled 198–217 CE), were not actually citizens of Rome. Being a citizen was an enormous privilege and honor. In the provinces the honor was almost always granted only to highly placed and wealthy members of the local aristocracy. As a result, the majority of people living in the provinces were not citizens of Rome but still subject to Roman rule. One way to explain the discrepancy in the way the cult to the living emperor was practiced is to say that Roman citizens were not expected to worship the living emperor but Roman subjects—like most people in the eastern provinces—were. Most provinces in the West, on the other hand, followed the lead of the city of Rome itself by offering cult just to the emperor’s genius.33

  A previous generation of scholarship took a rather cynical view of the imperial cult and maintained it was a ruse foisted on non-citizens in the empire as a way of bringing them under control. There was a clear logic to this idea. If people throughout the empire were required to participate in the worship of the ultimate ruler as a divine being, were they likely to rebel? They may have wanted to resist the authority of a mere mortal, but who would want to cross swords with a god?

  Despite the attractions of this view, it has waned over time as scholars have realized from abundant evidence that most cults to the emperor were not imposed on distant populations by the central authorities in Rome but derived from local initiatives. It was a mark of distinction to be allowed to build a temple in honor of the Roman emperors. Cities competed for the honor. Local aristocrats who sponsored the movements and paid for the temples experienced exalted personal status, as they were seen to be uniquely connected with the mighty emperor himself. For local regional aristocrats who valued status and prestige above all things, few honors could be
considered comparable.

  The imperial cults, therefore, were localized affairs, and participation was voluntary. Apart from the fact that a city or region needed official approval to start a cult, there was no centralized control, no detailed set of rules they had to follow or leaders who oversaw the entire operation empire-wide. In this, imperial cults resembled all other cults of Rome. Roman religion did not involve interregional organization, leadership, and governance. It was always carried out on the local level.

  At the same time, there was a general sense, promoted by authorities both in Rome and throughout the provinces, that faithful adherence to the worship of the gods was vital to the healthy working of the empire. People were expected to participate, even if this meant simply showing up on an occasional feast day to watch a sacrifice and enjoying a meal of good meat and plenty of wine afterward. The worship of the gods was not intellectually, emotionally, or theologically separate from the sociopolitical realities of daily existence. Religion was part of life, fully integrated and interwoven with governance, social order, and daily experience.

  ROMAN RELIGION: IN SUM

  In many respects, the enormously wide-ranging cults of the Roman world represented different ways for different people in different parts of the empire to worship the gods. At the same time, there are a few features these cults do seem to share. They all subscribed to the existence of many gods and all were based on cultic acts of worship, such as sacrifice, prayer, and divination. As such, they were by and large inclusive. None of them insisted their god was the only divine being, or that this god was to be worshiped in only one particular way everywhere. As a corollary, these religions were highly tolerant of differences. So too was the Roman government, both centrally in Rome and throughout the provinces. There were exceptions, but only when a cult was judged to be morally degenerate or socially dangerous.

  These exceptions help to prove a very important rule. Throughout the empire it was understood that the worship of the gods, in ways handed down through ancestral tradition, was important both for the proper working of the state and for the success and prosperity of the people who lived in it. The gods supported the empire, the city, the family, and the individual. The gods provided help for people who could not help themselves. They averted disaster. They showered beneficences among those who revered them and worshiped them properly.

  It was in that context that Christianity arose. One of the leading questions historians of early Christianity have always tried to answer is how such a different understanding of religion could sprout, grow, and thrive in such an environment. Christians opposed the gods of the state, city, and family. They did not believe there were many gods but only one. They rejected the claims that emperors were divine. They did not accept the validity of other forms of worship. They did not think the traditional gods provided any benefits. They thought the gods were demons who had deceived virtually everyone in the known world.

  The Christians themselves were widely considered strange. They were also known to revere, as the savior of the world, a lowly day laborer who had been crucified for crimes against the state. For a pagan in the early empire, it would have been virtually impossible to imagine that these Christians would eventually destroy the other religions of Rome. How they did so will occupy us in the chapters to follow.

  Chapter 4

  Reasons for the Christian Success

  For over a century, since the pioneering work of the German historian Adolf von Harnack, scholars have widely believed that by the beginning of the fourth century Christianity probably made up 7 to 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empire.1 Then Constantine converted and the numbers exploded. By the end of the fourth century, it is typically maintained, something like half of the empire’s sixty million inhabitants claimed allegiance to the Christian tradition.2

  If these ballpark figures are correct, then by 300 CE there would have been four to six million Christians in the world. Even though just a fraction of the empire, that is a lot. Suppose, for reasons I will adduce later, it is too many. Cut the numbers in half, so that, on hypothesis, there were two or three million in the empire. It is still a lot. And it raises the most obvious of questions. As we saw in chapter 2, Christianity started as a group of Jesus’s male disciples and a handful of women—say, twenty people in the year 30 CE. How do we get from twenty to two or three million in under three centuries? And to go from there to thirty million in less than a hundred years, as most experts agree happened? That is absolutely extraordinary. How is it possible?

  EXPLANATIONS FOR THE CHRISTIAN SUCCESS

  Older scholarship was virtually unified on the question of why Christianity succeeded. It filled the spiritual vacuum created by the collapse of paganism, which fell under its own weight. At this point in antiquity, the view held, no one could any longer believe the ridiculous myths of the pagans or accept the bizarre cultic practices established by age-old tradition. The door was wide-open for the superior Christian faith to enter in and take over.

  Thus, for example, in a multivolume discussion, A History of the Expansion of Christianity (1937–1945), Kenneth Scott Latourette spoke of “the decay of the older faiths.” Christianity was lucky enough to emerge on the scene when “the traditional state and family cults of Greece and Rome had been losing their hold. Increasingly they were unable to satisfy some of the needs . . . of the population looking to religion.”3 So too, two decades later, a classic study of E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, proclaimed: “One reason for the success of Christianity was simply the weakness and weariness of the opposition.”4

  Underlying these assessments of paganism is a moral judgment that most scholars of Europe and the United States would have found completely non-problematic: Christianity, with its rigorous monotheism and high ethical demands, was simply superior to anything on offer among the polytheistic cults of the Roman world. This is not just a commonplace of twentieth-century scholarship, however. It appears in the first critical examination of the rise of Christianity from relatively modern times, the massive and influential eighteenth-century work of Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.5

  Gibbon insisted that paganism had grown weak and bankrupt. In his inimitable terms:

  An object much less deserving [than Christianity] would have been sufficient to fill the vacant place in their hearts, and to gratify the uncertain eagerness of their passions. Those who are inclined to pursue this reflection, instead of viewing with astonishment the rapid progress of Christianity, will perhaps be surprised that its success was not still more rapid and still more universal.6

  To be sure, as an eighteenth-century British scholar firmly ensconced in the ideological world of his day, Gibbon could not assign the enormous success of early Christianity to purely historical explanations. No, Gibbon conceded that ultimate success derived from its spiritual superiority and God’s personal oversight: “Our curiosity is naturally prompted to inquire by what means the Christian faith obtained so remarkable a victory over the established religions of the earth. To this inquiry, an obvious but satisfactory answer may be returned; that it was owing to the convincing evidence of the doctrine itself, and to the ruling providence of its great Author.”7

  Even so, Gibbon devoted the bulk of his analysis to the “secondary causes of the rapid growth of the Christian church.” No one can doubt that, in his own mind, these were what really did the trick. There were five of them:

  • “The inflexible, and . . . intolerant zeal of the Christians.” For Gibbon, such religious zeal for the implacable rightness of one’s cause was otherwise unheard of in pagan antiquity.

  • The doctrine of immortality. Pagans were desperate, Gibbon maintained, to learn that it was possible to enjoy a blessed ongoing existence after death.

  • The miracles worked by the early Christians. These, he argued, convinced pagans that God really was on the side of the Christians.

  • Strict Christian morality. In a religious w
orld of lax morals, the Christians showed a superior way.

  • Strong ecclesiastical organization. Unlike the pagan religions, Gibbon stressed, Christianity established an efficient hierarchy of authority that advanced its cause. Christianity out-organized its competition.8

  Many scholars since Gibbon’s time have reiterated and affirmed his insights. But scholarship has advanced and we see things far more clearly today, even while acknowledging that subsequent research was built on the foundation he laid.

  One issue scholars have wrestled with more vigorously since then is the fundamental question I raised in chapter 1: What does it mean to “convert”? Or, to ask it differently: What does one have to believe or do in order to be counted as a Christian? What if numbers of self-proclaimed Christians at the beginning of the fourth century continued to worship Roman gods, civic gods, or family gods, along with the Christian god? Should we call them Christian? What if members of a family were forced to adopt Christian ways because the head of the household, the paterfamilias, had converted, even though in their own minds and hearts they were still committed to the worship of Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, or others? Do they count as Christian? What if people who claimed to be Christian were not baptized, did not go to church, and basically did nothing at all to show that faith had any bearing on their lives? Were they Christian or not?

  Much of the twentieth century saw scholars answering no in all such cases. As far back as the influential work of William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), experts argued that only a person who experienced a blinding-light experience that led to a radical change and a complete reversion of character and an unassailable commitment could be said to have had undergone genuine conversion.9 One problem with this perspective is that it counts Christians based on psychological experiences and inner spiritual states that are inaccessible to historical knowledge. The historian’s question is, how do we count? How do we know how many Christians there were, as opposed, say, to Jews, Mithraists, or worshipers of Zeus or Apollo? Historians are neither priests nor psychologists. They lack the capacity or resources to explore what a person really and genuinely believed, only to what they say about themselves and what they do in their lives. And, of course, for over 99.99 percent of the people who lived in antiquity, we have no access even to that.