How long did it remain a doomsday cult? Was it still one after Paul’s death?
I guess it might be hard to say, given that Christianity wasn’t some monolithic entity at the time, right? More like loosely connected denominations.
Yes early Christianity was big on the imminence of the end times, but ironically St Augstine of Hippo influenced the church to downplay that just as the Roman Empire was actually declining.
The real decline started in 395, before that it would have seemed like business as usual to most citizens in the empire, and right after that from 395-430 is when Augustine of Hippo reformed the church including getting rid of the imminent doomsday.
A numer of reasons it spread relatively quickly in the Roman world:
- Appealing message. Jesus died for you so you can live forever, even if your life stinks now it will be better in the future.
- Motivated evangelists like Paul and Barnabas and who knows how many others who traveled the known world.
- Inclusivity: it was open to Jews and Greeks, men and woman, slaves and free. Don’t forget that children were by and large raised by women and slaves.
- Ease of safe travel thoughout the empire
- Common language (Greek) throughout the empire
- When Jerusalem was detroyed, the Christians in that area were scattered which helped spread the faith.
I don’t think you’re being fair here. E7T mentioned that he’s a believer, but in the context of trying to provide an answer to the OP. He thinks that Christianity spread because they were convinced by the accounts of the resurrection. I happen to think he’s mistaken, but it’s not out of bounds to make that argument.
Speaking of which…
I would also be blown away if I had seen Mohammed ascend to heaven sitting upon his horse. Every religion has its core claims, and if you believe those claims, then you’ll be a believer. That’s not saying much. So why do you think that the Romans accepted the claims of Christianity and not the others?
Come to think of it, I’d be pretty blown away if I personally witnessed Zeus throwing lightning bolts at his enemies too…
Isn’t it still?
Growing up, they used to tell me we were in the end times (they have a whole list of ‘signs’ that are just now coming to pass indicating that it is time) and Jesus would be here before the year 2000.
Yep, for example this place is not far from my house.
Christianity (and Islam) offer two major innovations to religious memes that strengthen their spread.
- Universality. While letting in women and slaves was a great idea, what really did it was the idea that Christianity applies to everyone in the entire world, and there is no merit to any other belief system. Every previous religion basically took a live and let live approach to other religions and adherents, with very few exceptions. They focused on the religious needs of their particular community and figured either the other gods people were worshipping were either minor gods, the right gods for them but not for us, or not real and not worth worrying about. Christianity was the first time a religion said “Our religious system is the only one with any truth, and everyone needs to be a part of it.”
This leads, logically, to:
- Evangelism. Previous religions typically focused on the needs of their community, and often did not encourage (or even actively discouraged) conversion. Not surprisingly, having “spread the religion” built in as one of the fundamental functions of the religion gives it a huge advantage when it comes to spreading.
What makes you think that all the people who considered themselves followers of Jesus in the first couple of centuries AD were followers of Paul? Paul’s version of Christianity is the one that eventually won out, and thus the one we are familiar with, but it was not the only version that was around in the early days. Have you ever looked at the Gnostic gospels? Some of them provide an account of what Jesus was like wildly at odds with that in the New Testament (and, sometimes, at odds with each other). For some Gnostic Christians, Jesus was not even incarnated in a human body, a point vital to Pauline Christianity. Furthermore, we can be sure that those “alternative” Christian writings that have survived are only a tiny fraction of what was in circulation at the time (not to mention the plethora or oral teachings that never got written down, but that surely existed).
As I explained in my earlier post, in the Early Empire, traditional Roman religion was not the main competitor with Christianity for people’s religious allegiance. For the reasons you give, and others, it had already lost the fight. There were, however, lots of other competitor religions, some very popular for a time, and some who also offered eternal paradise. Furthermore, not all people who considered themselves Christians back then believed in the now canonical Christian view of the afterlife. Gnostic Christians, for instance, would have been horrified by the Pauline notion of bodily resurrection.
I don’t, but some of the other religious movements of the early Empire were at least as anti-establishment as early Christianity. In fact, old fashioned Judaism caused the Roman state a good deal more trouble than Christianity, to the extent that Hadrian was eventually forced to the extreme expedient of kicking the Jews out of their ancestral homeland (something from whose aftereffects we are still suffering today).
Christianity’s greatest success came when the Roman state, under Constantine, embraced it.
I expect there is some truth in that, but the cause of the Reformation was very quickly co-opted by pre-existing secular powers – notably Henry VIII and various German princes – as part of the power politics games they were already playing. The growth of Christianity in the early Roman Empire was much more of a bottom up thing than the Reformation ever was. (And much more messy than you seem to be aware.)
Underneath the vehement pro-Israel stance of many in the religious right is the belief that the rapture will, in fact, occur there. It’s the main venue for the End of Times. And they’re plenty actively involved in supporting that agenda, in and out of church. So, I’d say, yes, it still is a doomsday cult.
True. But just as a data point, the entire peninsula (Yemen up to I think parts of Syria) was under control during Abu Bakr’s reign. True, it doesn’t say what the religions of the conquered were, or whether they were “out.”
Great thread, but allow me to voice some concerns on how traditional Roman polytheism is being depicted.
Traditional Roman polytheism was not some washed up belief system easily shoved aside by Christianity. It took the mother of all culture wars, up to and including open street fighting, for Christianity to take over. If the traditional religious systems were moribund, there would not have been so much resistance.
Nor was traditional polytheism deficient just because it did not offer ethical prescriptions. In Graeco-Roman culture that was the job for philosophers, not priests. Christianity and traditional religion differed significantly here, as well as in the importance Christians placed on Belief and Truth. But those differences did not give Christianity advantages that made its triumph inevitable or even predictable.
Finally, the literary mythological tradition often doesn’t have a lot to do with actual cult, so Christian outrage at the myths has an element of strawman in it.
A lot of older scholarship assumes Christianity is the template for what a religion should be, notes the differences between Christianity and traditional polytheism, and then count the traditional polytheism’s differences as deficiencies which explain why Christianity naturally won out. But the differences are more a matter of each tradition’s orientation rather than effectiveness.
Something I left unaddressed in last post –
Rational critique of traditional religion had been going on since the 5th century B.C., so I think traditional religion was pretty immune to its undermining effects. Besides, given the traditional polytheist’s lack of interest in belief, rationalizing did not threaten his religious practices. Cicero is a good example here. He writes rationalizing philosophical works which present religion as very nearly something like superstition, yet in other works his piety is clear. His seemingly contradictory stances can coexist because traditional polytheism was not very interested in questions of truth and belief. Instead, the religion served as a means to connect with your local ethnic identity by doing what your ancestors had done before you. Whether you personally believed in what you were doing (or whether your ancestors had done so either) was not important to such a project.
I disagree. Traditional Roman (and Greek) polytheism was largely washed up by the time Christianity arrived on the scene. The “culture wars” and street fighting weren’t between Christians and people who firmly believed in Jupiter and Juno, they were between Christians and people who believed in one or other of the other religious systems that were becoming popular around the Empire at the time. Conflict between Christianity and the Roman state might sometimes have been framed in terms of a conflict with traditional Jovian polytheism, but what really mattered was the refusal of some Christians to pretend to acknowledge that the Emperor was a god, and make a token sacrifice to him. In the eyes of the Roman officials (few of whom could seriously have believed that the Emperor was a god in the way that Jupiter was supposed to be), this was really a bit of pantomime by which someone could show that they were loyal to the state, and not a potential traitor, but some Christians (the ones who got themselves martyred) took this talk of gods much more seriously than was intended, and so refused to make the token sacrifice.
Again, I disagree. First of all, although it is true that traditional Graeco-Roman polytheism and myth did not offer much in the way of ethical prescription, it did provide ethical models to emulate. The trouble was, those models were appropriate to the small-scale, quasi-feudalistc societies of warrior aristocrats and peasants in which the traditions had originally developed, and were totally unsuited to the large, bureaucratic, cosmopolitan, and economically diverse society in which people now found themselves. Hence the hectic search for new religious models in the early Empire. The “new” religions, including Christianity, were not really all that much about ethical prescription either. The point was not so much to obey the ten commandments, it was to model your behavior and attitude to life on that of Jesus (whichever version of what Jesus was like you took to be true).
Ancient philosophy did not function principally as an ethical supplement to traditional religion either. In its early and golden ages – roughly from Thales to Aristotle or maybe Theophrastus – it functioned largely as a critique of traditional polytheistic religion, and was one of the more important factors in the weakening of its hold, paving the way for the religious melting pot of the early Empire, and, eventually, for the triumph of Christianity. In the relative decadence of classical philosophy that followed first the establishment of the empire of Alexander, and then of the Romans, well defined philosophical schools developed – Platonism, Epicureanism, Skepticism, Stoicism – that functioned more as alternatives and rivals to religion rather than as ethical supplements to them. Unlike religions proper, the philosophical schools did not ask you to take too much on faith, did not ask you to believe too many fantastical things, did not expect you to engage in a lot of ritual (although later Neoplatonism is an exception to this last), and provided elaborate rationales for the metaphysical and ethical systems that they set forth. For a small minority of intellectuals, they provided an alternative to religion proper. At the same time, the actual religions, perhaps especially Christianity, often borrowed selected bits of philosophical ratiocination to bolster their own cases. Religions and religious “tendencies” like Christianity, Manicheanism and Gnosticism were able to draw upon and use ideas and techniques of reasoning from the philosophical tradition to strengthen themselves, in a way that Gaeco-Roman polytheism had never been able to do.
I think the disadvantage of traditional classical polytheism was that it was focused on secular rewards. You made sacrifices to the Gods so you would be rewarded (or at least avoid punishment) in this lifetime.
Christianity promised rewards in an afterlife. Now that might seem like a weak promise. Why care about theoretical rewards you were being promised after death in comparison to rewards you could experience in this lifetime?
But plenty of people weren’t getting any rewards in this lifetime. Jupiter and Minerva and Apollo apparently had nothing for these people. So they were open to a promise that Jesus would reward them after death. It gave them hope no matter how miserable their lives were that things would eventually get better.
This is a nitpick and may not invalidate Little Nemo’s main point, but Wikipedia claims “Christianity in Ethiopia dates to the 1st century AD.” Even the more conservative date (341 AD) when Christianity became Ethiopia’s state religion is early. At that date, I think, Christianity was only beginning to catch on in remote parts of the Roman Empire.
(I became intrigued about early Ethiopian history on reading the fascinating Sign and Seal by Graham Hancock.)
Axum (a state in the northern part of modern Ethiopia) was, after Armenia, the second state in world history to be officially Christian.
Traditional polytheism changed a lot over the first five centuries CE, but it would be wrong to see the changes as a significant rupture with earlier pagan practice.
For example, one big shift is that some cults focus on foreign space rather than Roman space.
Think of, say, how worship of Isis deliberately looks beyond Rome to a construction (albeit artificial) of Egypt. Sure that’s a significant change, but at the same time people strained to maintain continuity with earlier traditions.
As a result we have epigraphic evidence crediting Isis as being the mother of the traditional Roman pantheon, emphasis on syncretism in the typical polytheistic practice of praying to Isis using the name of Venus or Minerva, and finds like statuettes of Dionysius and Venus in excavations of Isis’ temple at Pompeii. By the same token the Syrianizing Jupiter Dolichenus had a shrine on the Aventine with statues of Diana, Hercules and Apollo in it.[I’m taking this stuff from Beard, North and Price “Religions of Rome”].
So when I speak of traditional polytheism I see cult innovation in Imperial Rome as part of the picture. Traditional polytheism always had great capacity to shift and adapt. I take the fact that innovation was continuing as an indication that traditional poytheism was alive and well.
As for distinctions between official and popular religion, I think Beard et al. put it well when they consider the two not as in stark opposition but rather as different points on the same continuum.
I don’t claim ethical supplement as the principal function of ancient philosophy – there’s too much going on there to reduce it to that. I’m just saying that there is a rich ethical tradition there.
Good point about models vs. prescriptions. I worry though that traditional religious practice does not have much to do with the mythologies that provide the models. Further the Roman love for ethical models (‘exempla’) has so much emphasis on historical models that I’d hesitate to characterize it as a religious phenomenon.
Though I’ve been highlighting disagreements, let me say that I loved your posts and consider them most interesting and informative.
And not just the priests —
From Acts 19 (The Message translation):
21-22 After all this had come to a head, Paul decided it was time to move on to Macedonia and Achaia provinces, and from there to Jerusalem. “Then,” he said, “I’m off to Rome. I’ve got to see Rome!” He sent two of his assistants, Timothy and Erastus, on to Macedonia and then stayed for a while and wrapped things up in Asia.
23-26 But before he got away, a huge ruckus occurred over what was now being referred to as “the Way.” A certain silversmith, Demetrius, conducted a brisk trade in the manufacture of shrines to the goddess Artemis, employing a number of artisans in his business. He rounded up his workers and others similarly employed and said, “Men, you well know that we have a good thing going here—and you’ve seen how Paul has barged in and discredited what we’re doing by telling people that there’s no such thing as a god made with hands. A lot of people are going along with him, not only here in Ephesus but all through Asia province.
27 “Not only is our little business in danger of falling apart, but the temple of our famous goddess Artemis will certainly end up a pile of rubble as her glorious reputation fades to nothing. And this is no mere local matter—the whole world worships our Artemis!”