The Triumph of Christianity

by Bart D. Ehrman

  How many gods were there? They could not be counted. There were many divine beings in many places. And the same god could be in many different places. A god such as the Greek Zeus was worshiped in cities hundreds of miles apart, in different ways, and with different appellatives (Zeus Kasios, Zeus Ammon, Zeus Bennios). In any city there would be temples to a wide array of gods. The Roman architect Vitruvius recommended that a Roman city have temples to the gods of the Roman Capitol—Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva—as well as to Mercury, Isis and Serapis, Apollo, Liber Pater, Hercules, Mars, Venus, Vulcan, and Ceres. That was just to start. As one modern scholar has pointed out, we have coins from the city of Nicomedia (northeast Turkey) that advertise the worship of forty deities there. Those are just the ones mentioned on the city’s surviving coins.9

  Polytheism in Roman antiquity was normally an open and welcoming affair. New gods could be added and worshiped at will. It was simply accepted that people would worship the gods they chose: gods supporting the state, gods of the municipality, gods of various functions, gods of various locations, gods of the family. The gods themselves were at peace, which is one way in which Roman religion was at odds with Roman mythology, where the gods were constantly at one another’s throats. Moreover, the god worshiped in one locality was often identified with a different god called by a different name worshiped in another locality.

  Romans would frequently assimilate the gods of the people they conquered. This shows the remarkable openness of religious perspectives, and it made it possible for conquered people to continue living their lives with less cultural disruption. It also had the effect of submerging the identities of the other gods into the Roman system, just as the conquered people were also brought into a new form of governance and control.

  Because of the open nature of polytheism, there was virtually no such thing as “conversion.” Anyone who chose to begin worshiping a new god was welcome to do so and was not required or expected to leave behind any previous practices of worship or make an exclusive commitment to this one deity. Outside the world of Judaism, exclusivity—the insistence that only one god be worshiped—was practically unknown.

  Many people today wonder what might have happened if Christianity had not eventually taken over the empire. Could another religion have done so? Some have argued that the mystery religion called Mithraism (discussed more later in the chapter) was Christianity’s “competition”—that if the world had not become Christian, it might have become Mithraist. That is an intriguing idea, but on closer reflection it simply cannot be right. No one who started worshiping the god Mithras was required to stop worshiping Jupiter, Minerva, or Apollo. Mithraism may have spread, but it could not have destroyed anything to become the one and only option.

  At the same time, as we have seen, there were increasing numbers of pagan henotheists in the Roman world who maintained that situated above this mass of divine beings and the cults that honored them was one ultimate divinity. We observed an example already in chapter 1 with Constantine, who, prior to his Christian conversion, committed to the worship of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. Such a move would not have seemed a complete oddity in his world. Those who did acknowledge one ultimate divinity and chose to focus worship on that one alone, however, were not expected to deny either that other divine beings existed or that people were justified in worshiping them.10

  Pagans who tended toward henotheism did so for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, out of awe and wonder, a pagan worshiper would lavish such abundant praise on a particular god for being so incredibly powerful, wise, caring, merciful, just, and so on that there would be nothing left to attribute to any other god. So why not simply worship this one? Sometimes these various attributes would be converted into names or epithets for the divinity—he is the Greatest, Most Magnificent, Healer of All—to the same effect: there was no need then to name any other god. Possibly more frequently the hierarchy of power thought to exist among the various gods was taken to its logical extreme. The gods worshiped in large city festivals were greater than the daimones a farmer had to appease for the well-being of the crops; so too the great gods of the Roman pantheon residing on Mount Olympus were greater than the gods distinctive to individual cities. This pyramid of power could be imagined as going all the way to the top, above the great gods of state, to one who was the most glorious and powerful.

  There cannot, of course, be two or more gods who are “most” glorious and powerful. And so sometimes this greatest god was worshiped as the One. In fact, he sometimes went under the name Theos Hypsistos (Greek for “the Greatest God”). We have abundant evidence that this god, sometimes alternatively called Zeus Hypsistos, was worshiped in parts of the empire by devotees who still recognized that it was perfectly legitimate to worship other, lesser gods should anyone choose to do so. For all pagans there were lots of gods, and all deserved adoration for their greatness, whether absolute or relative.

  Cultic Acts Instead of Doctrine and Ethics

  In the modern West, and most especially in some forms of Christianity, religion is all about what people believe and how they behave. Someone is in a right standing with God by acknowledging the validity of certain conceptual truths and by living as God wants. It is all about doctrine and ethics.

  Traditional Roman religions were not like that. Pagan religions were about cultic acts. The word “cult” comes from the Latin phrase cultus deorum, which literally means “the care of the gods.” A cultic act is any ritualized practice that is done out of reverence to or worship of the gods. Such activities lay at the heart of pagan religions. Doctrines and ethics did not.

  That does not mean that pagans did not believe anything. Pagans had all sorts of views of the gods—different pagans with different views, often very different views. But these views were never collected into a set of propositional statements to be affirmed by the worshiping community or even by individuals in it, as eventually happened in Christianity (“There is only one God, the creator of all things”; “Christ is both fully human and fully divine”; “The death of Christ alone brings salvation from sins”; and so on). As Christianity came to develop, it was largely about the “faith”—that is, about affirming these statements. Pagans never had to affirm anything. As odd as this seems, pagans were not required to believe truths about the gods. Paganism was instead about performing the proper, traditional cultic acts.

  Roughly speaking, there were three kinds of activities in pagan religions: sacrificial offerings, prayer, and divination.11 Sacrifices involved offering an animal (which was then butchered), a less expensive food stuff (such as grain or wine), or some other gift (such as flowers or incense). Prayer involved invoking a god—for example, to give thanks or to make a request. And divination involved ascertaining the will of the gods through natural phenomena, such as the ritually observed flight of birds or, particularly alien to modern ways of thinking, the ritual examination of the entrails of sacrificed animals (for example, to see if the sacrifice had been accepted by the god).

  Participating in pagan religions meant engaging in these activities, or—especially with animal sacrifice and divination—observing someone else do so. These various cultic acts did, of course, involve some basic ideas and beliefs about gods: the gods did appreciate offerings, for example, and could be influenced by them; they did answer prayers; and they did communicate their will through birds in the air or the entrails in bulls. Still, no one cared whether a participant actually believed these things were true. There were no propositional statements about a god that a participant in a cultic act had to affirm. There really were no doctrines. As a result, there was no such thing as “orthodoxy” (right beliefs) or “heresy” (false beliefs). There was instead an enormously varied set of ritual practices, each one formed by many years of custom and tradition.

  Moreover—and this seems even more strange to many moderns—there was a scant role for ethics in the pagan cults. It is not that ancient people were less ethical than people today; it is that ethics had
little to do with religion. If it had a “location” in ancient life, it was in philosophy. Philosophers talked a lot about how people should act toward one another, as members of a family, in relationships with friends and neighbors, as citizens of a city. Good behavior was part of being a worthwhile human being and a responsible citizen.

  But it generally was not a part of religious activities. It is true that the gods would not accept some rather extreme forms of criminal activity: they condemned parricide, for example, and sometimes profligate licentiousness. And in a vague way the gods were thought to approve proper behavior and to disapprove bad. But most ethical activity had no relationship to cultic practices. Someone could mistreat their siblings, ruin their business associates, or carry on extramarital affairs, and it would have little real bearing on their religious life. The gods were principally concerned with prayers and sacrifices, and would reveal their will through natural phenomena.

  This Life Instead of the Afterlife

  Another key difference between traditional Roman paganism and some modern faiths is that, for most ancient religions, the afterlife was not a concern.

  Ancient textual sources attest to a wide range of views about the afterlife. The classical writings of Homer describe a shadowy and vague type of existence for departed souls. Virgil speaks of the utopian existence coming to those who made it to the Elysian Fields. Philosophers differed widely among themselves concerning what would happen to a person after death. Those who followed Pythagoras held to the transmigration of the soul. Adherents of Plato talked about rewards for the good and punishments for the wicked. The Epicureans were infamous for taking a hard line: there would be no life after death at all; instead, the body would dissolve into its original state as a mass of atoms and whatever there was of the soul would dissipate.

  It is very hard indeed—impossible, actually—to know what most people thought. The vast majority of the population could neither read nor, more important, write, so we have no written record of their fears of death or anticipations of what, if anything, lay beyond. But we do have some material remains that are suggestive. Archaeologists have found numerous pagan tombs with “feeding tubes” through which nourishment could be occasionally funneled. This suggests the idea that some kind of divine spark continued its existence in the grave.

  Ancient tombstone inscriptions are particularly fascinating. Many of them suggest that people expected death to be the end of the story, with no existence in any kind of great beyond. Today we are familiar with the funereal abbreviation “RIP” (“Rest in Peace”). Ancient Romans had something comparable, a seven-letter abbreviation that spoke volumes: “n.f. f. n.s. n.c.” When spelled out, it stands for non fui; fui; non sum; non curo, which means “I was not; I was; I am not; I care not.” The meaning is clear. There was no existence before birth. A person existed only after being born. After death there once more was no existence. And so the person could not be upset. The payoff: you have nothing to fear. You did not find it distressing before you were born, and you will not find it distressing after you die.

  If that was the case—if there were no rewards or punishments—then gods were not worshiped to secure blessings in the afterlife. Worship was about the present life.

  This life, for most ancients, was lived very near the edge. Simply surviving, let alone thriving, was an enormous struggle. This was a world that provided no protection from the ravages of weather: if it did not rain one year, the village would die of starvation the next. This was a world filled with disease and no way to handle it: a tooth abscess was often a death sentence. This was a world in which life itself was a life-threatening proposition: many children died in infancy; many women died in childbirth. Every childbearing woman in the Roman world had to bear an average of six children in order to keep the population constant.

  There were numerous aspects of life that mere mortals simply could not control because of the forces of nature or of communal life: climate, the growth of crops, the fertility of livestock, health, personal safety in the home or while traveling abroad, acts of war. But the gods could control these things. That is largely why gods were worshiped: the gods had significant power and could provide what people could not provide for themselves. Gods worshiped properly would give the community and the individual what was needed to survive and thrive.

  Some scholars have argued that ancient religion was principally concerned with averting the gods’ anger.12 But this divine anger was aroused almost always because of neglect. The gods—or at least one of them—had not been respected and worshiped properly or sufficiently. That was the main logic behind Roman persecution of the Christians. Because this group of miscreants refused to worship the gods, there was hell to pay. And so we have the revealing and oft-cited words of the Christian defender of the faith Tertullian:

  They think the Christians the cause of every public disaster, of every affliction with which the people are visited. If the Tiber rises as high as the city walls, if the Nile does not send its waters up over the fields, if the heavens give no rain, if there is an earthquake, if there is famine or pestilence, straightway the cry is, “Away with the Christians to the lion!” (Apology 40)13

  To think that pagans worshiped the gods only to abate their anger, however, ignores far too much that we know about traditional religions. These were practiced not only as a kind of preventive medicine but also for positive outcomes, the many beneficences that gods could supply to those who could not provide for themselves. Consider the advice of one of the most famous elite agriculturalists, Cato, for addressing a god after an appropriate sacrifice had been offered on a field:

  That you may prevent, ward off and avert diseases, visible and invisible, death and destruction, ruin and storm, and that you permit the crops, corn, vineyards and plantations to grow and flourish, and that you keep safe the shepherds and their sheep, and grant good health and strength to me, my house, and our household.14

  Chief among the beneficences sought, judging from surviving inscriptions and other material remains, was bodily health—so much so that one prominent scholar of antiquity has claimed that “the chief business of religion, it might then be said, was to make the sick well.”15 Virtually every god of the Roman pantheon, whatever else his or her primary function, occupation, or interest, could be and was invoked for healing. Even today people feel nearly helpless against the ravages of one epidemic, disease, or illness or another; prior to the invention of modern medicine, everyone felt that way, against each and every one of them. The gods had the power to help, though. As they could help in all other matters, personal, familial, civic, and imperial, if honored and worshiped appropriately.

  Local Instead of Global

  We today are accustomed to global religions. That does not mean that religion is practiced, or understood, the same way everywhere. Christianity in the hills of Croatia will differ significantly from Christianity in the hills of Kentucky. Even so, major forms of Christianity are widely considered transnational, with Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and other communities sharing practices, beliefs, and even leaders worldwide. So too, mutatis mutandis, with forms of Judaism and Islam. But it was almost never like that in the Roman world. Religious cults varied from one place to another. The few exceptions were notable principally because they were in fact so rare.

  There was no “religion of Zeus” that could be found throughout the Greek-speaking eastern part of the empire. No head priest of Zeus or governing council had any say or any concern over how the practices were carried on in various localities. No international religious organizations of any kind existed.

  Even those cults practiced in similar ways throughout the empire were the same more by the accident of propagation than by intention and design. The worship of Mithras mentioned earlier, for example, appears to have comprised a number of consistent elements whether practiced in Rome, Gaul, or Syria. But that was because of how it was spread: principally through the Roman army, as soldiers who adhered to the reli
gion were reassigned to a different part of the empire. Moreover, Mithraism was a relative newcomer on the religious scene, not an ancestral tradition that had been in place for centuries. Most cults were age-old practices that had grown up locally. As international travel became more popular, there might be some influence of one regional cult over another—for example, in the taking over of the name of a god or the practice of a cult that worshiped him. But it did not happen consistently or regularly. Traditional religions were local affairs.

  Customs Instead of Books

  Modern Western monotheisms are all religions of the book: the Torah, the New Testament, the Qur’an. There was nothing like them in the Roman world.

  There were, of course, books. I have already mentioned influential works of literature that helped provide ancient Romans with their various mythologies. There were even, in a few religions, sacred books. The famous Sibylline Books, for example, allegedly recorded prophecies of an ancient prophetess, a sibyl, and were consulted by especially appointed and trained priestly experts to determine the proper course of action for the leaders of the city of Rome in times of crisis. But there really was nothing like a Bible, a book that would give instructions about what to believe and how to act in one’s daily life.

  Instead, the many and various local religions practiced rituals that had been handed down for years or centuries. Customary observance was canonized in the sense that it came to form a body of tradition, but it was most often cited to justify or condemn specific religious practices. In particular, in Roman circles, specific appeal was made to the mos maiorum, the “custom of the ancients”—the established custom that determined proper behavior and practice. It was such oral tradition, rather than written texts, that normally provided guidance and precedent.