The Triumph of Christianity

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Let me be clear that I am not saying that Christian missionaries were actually performing the miraculous works ascribed to them in our sources: healing the sick, speaking with demons and driving them out, raising the dead, leveling pagan places of worship with a word, giving dogs human voices, and bringing smoked tuna back to life. (We will see these miracles later.) I do not think there is any way, given the nature of the historical discipline and the tools in the historian’s chest, for a historian ever to claim that any of these things “probably” happened. Believers may think they did; nonbelievers will think they did not; and historians cannot arbitrate in that dispute (although theologians may want to give it a go). What historians can say—clearly, emphatically, and with a clear conscience—is that throughout history people have thought miracles happened. Most often they have thought this not because they saw miracles but because they heard about them.

  Paul’s converts heard about miracles. In fact, he suggests they saw him personally do miracles—or thought they saw him do them, which for our purpose comes to the same thing. Again, the references are allusive at best. But they do seem to point in that direction. In Paul’s letter to the Romans, where he indicates he had preached the gospel throughout the eastern Mediterranean from Jerusalem to Illyricum, he claims he converted people not only “by word” but also by “deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:18–19). It is hard to imagine what “signs, wonders, and Spirit-power” would be if not miracles.

  So too, in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul admits his speaking abilities were rather feeble but his words were backed up by incredible acts: “I was with you in weakness and fear and great trembling, and my word and preaching was not in persuasive words of wisdom but also in a show of the Spirit and of power” (1 Corinthians 2:3– 4). Again “Spirit” and “power” as a supplement to his preaching. Then, more emphatically, in his second letter to the Corinthians, while reminding his readers of his apostolic ministry among them, Paul states that “the signs of an apostles were performed among you in all patience: signs, and wonders, and miracles” (2 Corinthians 12:12). What was Paul actually doing in these peoples’ presence? We have no reliable record and no real clue. Whatever it was, it must have been stupendous. And it proved convincing. He was, after all, converting people and establishing churches, in city after city.

  PAUL: IN SUM

  I am all too aware of the problem of hyperbole, but I nonetheless stick to my claim: Paul was not simply the most significant convert of the first few years of Christianity, or of the first century, or of the early church. He was the most significant Christian convert of all time. One can argue that, without Paul, Christian history as we know it would not have happened.

  It is not that Paul himself started Christianity. Christians were already around before his time. Otherwise he would not have had anyone to persecute. Moreover, contrary to what people often say, it is not that Paul invented the idea that Jesus’s death and resurrection brought salvation. That is what the earliest Christians were proclaiming before Paul had ever heard of them. Instead, Paul is so significant because he came to believe—whether in a flash, as claimed in the New Testament, or over a period of time, as calmer reflection might suggest—that the death and resurrection of Jesus brought a salvation that was not tied to explicit Jewish identity; that the salvation of Christ was efficacious for gentiles as well as Jews; that pagans who came to believe in Christ did not first have to convert to Judaism and begin to follow the prescriptions of Jewish law and custom. Salvation had indeed come to the Jews, but it had gone forth to the gentiles. God was in the process of saving the entire world. Gentiles could remain gentiles—and presumably Jews could remain Jews.

  What is more, Paul believed God had called him, and him in particular, to make this gospel, this “good news,” known to the world at large. The prophets of old had predicted someone would come to bring light to the gentiles, enlightenment to the pagans. Paul was that one. He had a message and a mission, and it was not a small-time affair merely involving a leatherworker talking to customers in his shop. It was that, but it was also massively bigger. It was a fulfillment of the promises God had made through his prophets centuries earlier. Paul’s mission would bring God’s entire plan of salvation to completion. Once Paul had reached “the ends of the earth,” the gentiles would have heard the message and the climax of history could arrive. Jesus would come from heaven, the forces of evil would be destroyed, and God’s utopian kingdom would arrive. Paul’s mission was of cosmic proportions.

  The end, of course, did not come. But the Christian message continued to thrive after Paul’s day. It does not appear to have thrived in Jewish circles. Nearly all the early Christians we know about—including those addressed in our earliest writings, those of the New Testament—came from pagan stock.23 For reasons I have set forth in this chapter, most Jews simply could not accept the claim that Jesus, a lower-class itinerant preacher who was crucified for crimes against the state, was in fact God’s messiah. Pagans proved more receptive to the message—not just in Paul’s day, but in the decades and centuries to come.

  Later we will consider how the message was preached after Paul and why it succeeded. First we need to gain an even clearer idea of what it was pagan converts were converting from. That will require us to explore more fully the world of Roman paganism, the world from which most Christians came and that they then confronted.

  Chapter 3

  The Religious World of Conversion: Roman Paganism

  The earliest Christians were Jews. According to the New Testament, the first to believe in Jesus’s resurrection were his eleven disciples (Judas Iscariot no longer being on the scene) and a handful of women, including Mary Magdalene (see Matthew 28; Luke 21; John 21). They were all from rural Galilee, the northern part of the land of Israel. One of the Gospels, Matthew, indicates that the disciples came to this belief (although some “doubted”) sometime after Jesus’s execution, when they had returned to Galilee (Matthew 28:16–17). That seems reasonable: they had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with Jesus to celebrate a Passover festival; things had not gone well there; and Jesus had been arrested, tried, and crucified for crimes against the state. It seems unlikely the others would have stayed in the city to see if the authorities would come for them next. They went back home, possibly in some haste.

  Once these followers came to believe, they presumably told others in Galilee that Jesus had been raised, and these people converted. Eventually, when the heat died down, some of the disciples, if not all, returned to Jerusalem. We are not sure why. Did they, already at this early date, expect Jesus to return there? Whatever their reasons, we find them in Jerusalem in the book of Acts (Acts 1), and that’s where Paul locates them as well (Galatians 1). It appears the city became the base of the Christian operation, with Jesus’s disciple Peter and then his brother James taking charge of the small but growing community. That community would have principally comprised locals in the capital—that is, all Jews. Paul indicates that the earliest believers had undertaken a mission to convert Jews to the faith, headed by Peter (Galatians 2:7–8). That too is completely plausible.

  It is usually assumed, then, that the first Christian community was located in the principal city of Judea. We do not learn much about the group in later sources, apart from the names of their leaders and a scant few legends associated with them. The truth is that, for reasons we saw in the previous chapter, the Jewish mission was never a huge success. In sources over the next four centuries we occasionally learn of a Jewish group of Christians here or there in the empire—in the Transjordan, in Egypt—but they never played a huge role in the ongoing life of the church at large. They were almost always on the margins.

  The Jewish Christians were probably heading to the margins by the second part of the first century. We have seen that Paul himself was intent on establishing communities of believers on pagan soil, and he is the only massively effective evangelist we hear of
in our first-century sources.1 His churches, which appear to have grown even after he relocated to evangelize elsewhere, comprised exclusively or almost exclusively pagan converts. And not just the churches he founded. The one surviving letter from his pen sent to a community he did not start is to the Christians in the city of Rome, a church he had yet to visit. He explicitly addresses the Christians there as “gentiles” (Romans 1:13; 11:13). Scholars frequently argue that it was a strongly “mixed” church of Jew and gentile. It may have been that, but the letter itself indicates that the vast majority of the congregation were converts from paganism. In the greetings in the final chapter Paul names twenty-six people, several of whom indeed may have been Jewish: we can’t tell just from their names. But he identifies six of them specifically as “of my race”—that is, Jews (Romans 16:7, 11, 21). That this is an identity marker of just these six seems to suggest that they stood out, for reason of their heritage, from all the rest.2 The other twenty were probably former pagans.

  Much the same can be said about the churches addressed by most of our earliest Christian writings. The vast majority of the New Testament books—including that “most Jewish” of our Gospels, Matthew—appear to be directed largely if not exclusively to gentile audiences, and most may well have been written by gentile authors.3 The church by the second half of the first century was probably made up of predominantly pagan stock.4

  We have already seen some indications of who such people were and what they believed in connection with Constantine, the most famous and significant pagan convert in the history of Christendom. We can now explore the matter in greater depth, as a prelude to showing, in the chapters that follow, how Jesus’s followers managed to convince so many of these pagans to abandon their ancestral religious traditions in order to worship the Christian god alone.

  THE “ISM” IN “PAGANISM”

  Paganism, scholars have long argued, was not a single thing. Or, to put the matter differently, there was no such thing as paganism. What we call paganism was numerous things.5

  The word itself would have made no sense to ancient people, including the very ones we call pagans. No one called themselves or thought of themselves, religiously, as a pagan—not because it was a derogatory term, but because it was not a term with any religious meaning. The idea that all the hundreds or even thousands of ways of honoring the gods involved some kind of unified “system” was simply not part of the ancient intellectual landscape. The religious designation “pagan” came into existence only after customs for acknowledging and worshiping the gods had been in place for millennia. It was deployed by Christians in its religious sense as a way of referring to others who did not follow their own practices of religious observation. Christians had to call non-Christians something. Worshipers of the god of Israel were no problem: they could be called Jews. But what of everyone else? What of the 93 percent of the rest of the human race?

  There are different theories about why Christians settled on the term “pagan” to describe the non-Jewish other.6 Most commonly it is thought that the word derives from the Latin term paganus, which refers to a person who resides in the countryside. The idea, in this case, is that as the empire became Christianized in the fourth century and later, the sophisticated city folk were more likely to see the clear superiority of the Christian faith. Only country bumpkins (the pagani) continued to observe the backward customs of their ignorant ancestors.

  Other scholars have argued, instead, that the term “pagan” originally referred to “civilian,” as opposed to “soldier.” In that case it would stand in contrast to the few, the strong, the brave: the soldiers of Christ. Those who were not in Christ’s army were weak and morally out of shape.

  Whatever the origins of the term, “pagan” was not a self-identity marker: in the early Christian centuries, no one in the Roman world would say, “I am not a Jew, I am a pagan.” Being not a Jew—or later not a Christian—simply meant being what everyone else was: a person who accepted the existence of gods and worshiped them by following customs that had been followed since time immemorial. There were innumerable such localized customs. Modern people might call each of them a “religion.”

  As we have seen, ancient people would not call them that, since there was also no word for “religion.” And in fact what we typically think today about religion simply did not apply to ancient modes of worship. If we were to define a religion as a coherent system of thought, belief, and practice, with a clearly demarcated set of theological views about the divine being(s) and a prescribed set of rituals to be practiced in reference to them, then none of the so-called pagan religions would probably qualify.7 Certainly the totality of all the customs followed over the expanse of the Roman Empire cannot be lumped together into a unified whole and considered a solitary religion.

  In Roman paganism (I will keep using the word for the sake of convenience) there were no set gods. Because the standard Greek and Roman mythologies are generally known, people today often still imagine there was just one ancient pantheon: for example, with Jupiter, the head god; Juno, his wife; Mars, the god of war; Venus, the goddess of love; and so on. It is true these gods were widely worshiped in the empire. But there was no set pantheon. Instead, there were different gods and various ways to worship them, depending on whether a person lived in North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Gaul, Spain, Britain, or anywhere else. As a result, there was no universal mythology. Moreover, there was no single way to talk about the gods. There was no sense of a community of worshipers throughout the empire to which one would “belong.” There were no organizations with empire-wide oversight over religious practices—no religious authorities who transcended particular localities. Trying to wrap our minds around this totality is difficult.8

  RELIGION AND MYTH

  It is often thought by people casually acquainted with the ancient world that Roman religion (and Greek religion as well) was focused on the famous myths that we still read today—that books such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey functioned as the pagan Bible. The logic behind this view is that these literary works, along with writings of Hesiod and Euripides on the Greek side, or Virgil and Ovid on the Roman, reveal what people believed about the gods. The pagan myths seem comparable to the stories found in the Christian Bible, whether in the Old Testament with God’s interactions with Israel or in the New Testament with the stories of Jesus. Since religion involves principally how we think about God or the gods, in this view, the myths tell us what ancient religion was like.

  That common sense would not have made sense to most ancient Romans. It is true that myths were very important for helping people think about the gods. But ancient religion was less about what one thought and more about what one did. Traditional myths played little part in most ancient religious customs. Stories about the gods in great works of literature were usually taken to be just that: great stories. The educated classes in particular insisted they were not to be taken literally. Myths were not so much accounts of what happened in the past as amusing and always entertaining tales, or possibly highly allegorical narratives. As such, the myths formed the basis for a good bit of ancient literature, theater, and art, but they were not the “theological basis” for ancient religion, the equivalent of the Jewish Scriptures or the New Testament writings.

  Pagan religions were almost entirely about practice, about doing things, about giving the gods their due—not through mental affirmations of who they were or what they had done, but through ritual actions that showed reverence and devotion.

  RELIGION THEN AND NOW

  In trying to conceptualize Roman pagan religions, one of the most important points to stress is that they differed enormously from how we think of religion today, at least in the context of the great monotheistic traditions of the West: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

  Many Gods Instead of One God

  To begin with, Roman religions were all polytheistic, accepting the existence of many gods and promoting their worship. As just mentioned, there
were Romans, certainly at least among the highly educated, who did come to believe that one ultimate divine being ruled over all. But these were the exception to the rule, and even they acknowledged the existence of numerous other divinities that varied in grandeur, power, and function. Many Romans did acknowledge a pantheon of the “great gods” known from the famous mythical tales: Jupiter, Juno, Mars, Venus, Minerva, Pluto, and the rest. But this was not the full extent of the divine realm.

  On the contrary, there were gods for every municipality and every family; gods with all sorts of functions: gods connected with love, war, livestock, crops, health, childbirth, and weather; gods associated with specific locations: mountains, streams, meadows, homes, hearths; gods of various abstractions, such as fortune, mercy, and hope; gods connected with elements of nature, like the moon, the sun, the sky, and the sea. Less grand and powerful divinities existed as well, including those known collectively (in Greek-speaking areas) as daimones. These were not “demons” in the later Christian sense of fallen angels that inhabit human bodies and force them to do unpleasant things. They were low-level divine beings who were more active in humans’ daily lives than the greater gods and who could be either nefarious or beneficent, depending on circumstances and their character or mood.