The Triumph of Christianity

by Bart D. Ehrman

  At the same time, Christianity prided itself as a religion of love. Jesus was remembered as one who taught his followers to love God above all things, but also, next, to love their neighbors as themselves. By “neighbor” he did not simply mean the person next door. Everyone is a neighbor. Even an enemy is a neighbor. Christians were to love everyone in the world, even those who detested, opposed, and persecuted them.

  If God commands his people to love others and, consequently, to act in ways that will benefit them, and if others are destined to the coming divine judgment unless they turn to God in repentance and begin to worship him alone, there is only one clear conclusion: Christians need to urge others to adopt their religion. It is the only way these others will be saved, the only way they can escape eternal punishment. It is therefore the only way a Christian can really show love for the other.

  Christians then, starting at least with Paul, came to be missionary, convinced they had to convert the world. Goodman maintains it was Paul himself who came up with the idea. He was the innovator, “the single apostle who invented the whole idea of a systematic conversion of the world, area by geographical area.”24 At the same time, this is what makes it so striking and unexpected that, outside of Paul’s work itself, we do not know of any organized Christian missionary work—not just for the first century, but for any century prior to the conversion of most of the empire. As MacMullen has succinctly put it: “After Saint Paul, the Church had no mission.”25

  That may be hard to believe, but in fact, if you were to count every Christian missionary about whom even a single story is told, from the period after the New Testament up through the first four centuries, you would not need all the digits on one hand: there is Gregory the “Wonderworker,” who worked not worldwide but in a small area of third-century Pontus, a province in what is now northern Turkey; Martin of Tours, a fourth-century bishop who converted pagans in his own city of Tours in France; and Porphyry, a late-fourth-century bishop who closed pagan temples in Gaza and converted their devotees. We are not talking about armies of volunteers knocking on doors. We know of three, all in a different isolated region.26 And, as we will see, even the stories told of them are highly legendary.

  If Christians did not convert others through organized missionary efforts, how did they do it? The answer is simple: it was not by public preaching or door-to-door canvassing of strangers. They used their everyday social networks and converted people simply by word of mouth.27

  Social networks are all the human connections we have by virtue of the fact that each of us is a living, breathing human being who has a life. We have family. We have friends. We have neighbors. We know people at work. We see acquaintances on the street, at the store, and at sporting events. We belong to clubs and organizations. We participate in the life of our communities. In short, we have numerous connections in numerous ways with numerous people.

  The people you know from different points of contact often know many other people you also know. And they know people you do not know. Those people you do not know may know some people you know and certainly others you do not. Social networks all overlap but they are never the same from one person to the next. The community comprises everyone networked into it in a wide range of ways.

  That was true in the ancient world as well. Christians did not associate only with Christians. In the early centuries, most of the people Christians would have known would have been non-Christians. The way Christianity spread was principally through these networks.

  A Christian woman talks about her newfound faith to a close friend. She tells the stories she has heard, stories about Jesus and about his followers. She also tells stories about her own life, how she has been helped after prayer to the Christian god. After a while, this other person expresses genuine interest. Over time she considers joining the church herself. When she does so, that opens up more possibilities of sharing the “good news,” because she too has friends. And family, neighbors, and people she sees in all sorts of contexts.

  The woman converts. Over time she converts her husband. He insists the entire family—children, servants, slaves—follow the Christian religion. Three years later he ends up converting a business associate. That one requires his family as well to adopt the Christian faith. One of his teenage daughters eventually not only goes through the religious motions that her father requires (for example, saying prayers and going to the weekly church meeting) but becomes deeply committed. She converts her best friend. Who converts her mother. Who converts her husband. And then the next-door neighbor.

  And so it goes. Year after year after year. One reason Christianity grows is that it is the only religion like this: the others are not missionary and they are not exclusive.28 These two features make Christianity unlike anything else on offer. The people who become Christian are turning their backs on their pagan pasts, their pagan customs, and their pagan gods. That means that virtually every new Christian is also an ex-pagan. Every new addition to the church means one less adherent to the old, traditional religions. As Christianity grows, it is destroying paganism in its wake.29

  CHRISTIAN EXCLUSIVISM

  One way to understand Christian exclusivity is to think about the Christians’ unusual approach to “choice.” Of course everyone in the ancient world had to choose how to live, what to think, how to behave, and how to worship. In fact, pagan religions in recent scholarship have been portrayed as a kind of “marketplace,” where “shoppers” would choose among competing options.30 Just as you might choose to buy a fish, so you could choose a cult to follow. And at the market you might buy not only a fish but also some fruit, some grains, and some vegetables. At every point you make a choice. So too with religion: you can choose which cults to belong to and how often or rigorously to observe them.

  For pagan religions, the cults you followed normally would not have provided a distinctive identity marker. If someone asked you how you identified yourself, you would not have said, “I’m a worshiper of Apollo” any more than you would have said, “I’m a consumer of sea bass.”31 You might indeed have worshiped Apollo on occasion just as you might have sometimes eaten sea bass, but that was not how you identified yourself. In no small measure that was because your decision for Apollo and sea bass was just one of the many decisions you made all the time with respect to cult and cuisine.32

  Christianity was different. The Christian god was not normally chosen as one of the gods to be worshiped. The choice in this case was exclusive. The choice specifically for one thing was the choice against everything else. It was eating sea bass and nothing but sea bass. And to most pagan minds, it probably seemed just as odd.

  Scholars have long noted this distinctive feature of Christianity, especially since the days of Arthur Darby Nock, whose book Conversion is one of the true classics in the field.33 Nock argued that the principal difference between pagan religions and Christianity was the difference between “adhesion” and “conversion.” Within paganism one always had the possibility of adopting a new set of religious practices, but that simply meant “adhering” to it. There was no sense that a person who turned to a new cult had to turn away from another. That sense of completely turning to a new thing, and in so doing leaving behind the old, is what Nock meant by “conversion.”

  Nock was operating with an older sense of what conversion entailed: as the complete, heartfelt, emotional commitment to the new thing—the view I critiqued earlier in the chapter. All the same, Nock deeply understood that what traditional Christianity expected of a new follower had no precise parallel in paganism. He did acknowledge that something comparable to the concept of conversion could be found in the philosophical traditions of antiquity. At least some of the philosophical traditions were seen to be mutually exclusive: an Epicurean philosopher was not also a Stoic; a Cynic was not a Peripatetic. These were not airtight categories and there certainly were philosophically oriented people who borrowed from one school of thought or another. But, strictly speaking, a real disciple of Aristotle
was not a follower of Epicurus. So Christianity was a bit like that.

  One difference is that philosophical schools were not religious cults, even if they did discuss the divine and humans’ relationship with it. There were also, however, rare instances in which followers of one divine being or another expressed deep and virtually exclusive devotion. No example is better known, or more fully exploited by Nock, than the devotion to the goddess Isis found in a popular work of Roman fiction, The Golden Ass, written by Apuleius, a North African author of the second century CE. Exploring this account can indeed help us understand the contrasts between pagan adherence and Christian conversion.

  A PAGAN PARALLEL TO CHRISTIAN EXCLUSIVITY: THE GOLDEN ASS

  The Golden Ass is a hilarious tale filled with joyous and rather raucous sex, nocturnal magical rites, murderous plots, wild escapades, narrow escapes, and, as it turns out, deeply felt religious experiences. As the title indicates, it is about an ass—or, rather, about a man who becomes an ass. The main character is named Lucius. On a journey to a new city, Lucius is hosted by a man whose wife is a witch, and Lucius is fascinated. After seducing the housemaid, Fotis, Lucius convinces her to allow him to watch her mistress practice her magical craft. Looking through a chink in the door, he sees the woman anoint herself with a magical potion to be transformed into an owl before flying off into the night.

  Desperate to obtain such power, Lucius urges Fotis to retrieve the ointment for him. She enters her mistress’s chamber and snatches the jar, but, rather unfortunately for Lucius (but luckily for the plot), she grabs the wrong one. When Lucius applies the ointment, he turns not into a noble owl but into a ridiculous ass, with his human mind intact but no human physical abilities. He can do nothing but bemoan his fate by braying loudly. Fotis, trained in the ways of her mistress, knows what Lucius the ass must do to be restored to his human self. He needs simply to eat some roses.

  Before any can be found, in the dead of night, robbers break into the house, despoil its contents, steal the ass Lucius, load him with plunder, and drive him off to their stronghold. The rest of the long tale narrates Lucius’s misadventures as a man trapped in a beast’s body being handed over from one set of owners to another, overworked, beaten, manhandled, and generally abused, though occasionally treated well. As part of the narrative, he is often privy to intriguing stories told by owners within hearing distance, all while desperately trying to locate a bunch of roses to consume, always to no avail.

  The ribald and rowdy story takes an unexpected turn at the end. Lucius the ass has a deep religious experience that changes not only his outer life—literally, as he becomes a man once more—but even more his inner person. He becomes a devotee of the Egyptian goddess Isis.

  By book eleven Lucius is more than fed up with his asinine existence. He escapes his latest masters, manages to find a quiet place on the seashore, and falls asleep, only to awaken to see the moon rise over the ocean. He knows that the moon was “the primal Goddess of supreme sway,” so he immerses his head seven times in the water as a ritual act and invokes her, acknowledging that she might be any one of a number of divine beings: the goddess Ceres, Venus, Diana, or Proserpina. He ends his catalog of petitionary options by covering every possibility: “Or by whatever name and by whatever rites, and in whatever form, it is permitted to invoke you.”34

  Then he has an epiphany. The goddess appears to him. She informs him that she is the ultimate divine being: “I, the natural mother of all life, the mistress of the elements, the first child of time, the supreme divinity, the queen of those in hell, the first among those in heaven, the uniform manifestation of all the gods and goddesses—I, who govern by my nod the crests of light in the sky, the purifying wafts of the ocean, and the lamentable silences of hell.” She goes on to indicate that various peoples have called her various things, but that her “true name” is “Queen Isis.”

  Isis promises to bring Lucius salvation—that is, to deliver him from his lowly beastly existence. Furthermore, she will enable him to worship her even after his mortal death. But there is a condition. When she bestows her blessings upon him, he must be utterly devoted to her: “All the remaining days of your life must be dedicated to me, and . . . nothing can release you from this service but death . . . . [Y]ou should devote your life to her who redeems you back into humanity.”

  Isis is true to her word. She instructs Lucius that the next day, at a festival in her honor, he will find a priest bearing a bouquet of roses, which he will be able to consume to return to his human shape. He does so, and it happens. The rest of the book narrates how Lucius then devotes himself to the worship of the goddess. He goes through a prolonged and rather difficult period of preparation and then is initiated into her mysteries. The author cannot tell us exactly what is said during the ceremony, or exactly what happens—he is, after all, describing a “mystery” and he is not about to explain what actually happened in any detail. And so his account is both rapturous and frustratingly elusive. What is clear is that Lucius experiences the most glorious moment of his mortal existence, a kind of new birth, and he dedicates his life to serving Isis.

  He later learns, however, that he has not reached the pinnacle of devotion. There is a higher level, a ceremonial induction into the mysteries of the divine husband of Isis, the “Father of the Gods, unconquerable Osiris.” Lucius is surprised: “For I had thought myself fully initiated already.” But no, Osiris is the greater god and a new initiation is necessary. In part Lucius is dismayed, because participating in these initiations is expensive. But he goes through with it.

  Sometime later he learns that a third initiation is necessary. He starts wondering if this is a scam, but he decides to calm his suspicions. Afterward he realizes that in fact all is well: “At length, after the lapse of a few days, the Lord Osiris, the most powerful of the great gods, the highest of the greater, the greatest of the highest, and ruler of the greatest, appeared to me in the night, now no longer disguised by deigning to speak to me in his own person and with his own divine voice.” And soon the book ends.

  As Nock recognized, there are indeed numerous parallels between what happened to the fictional character Lucius in his devotion to Isis in The Golden Ass and what happened to actual pagans who became Christian. Lucius recognizes Isis as the greatest of divine beings, one who is worshiped in heaven, on earth, and under the earth. In exchange for his devotion, she transforms his life. He is born again. In a sense, he becomes fully human—literally. Moreover, he is promised a life after death. In exchange, she demands a complete commitment. He is initiated into her cult, and he lives his life in adoration of her.

  That does indeed sound very much like what happened to converts who joined the Christian community, recognizing the god of the Christians as the one ruler over all who was more powerful than all beings in heaven and earth, who could bring new life to one who was born again—not to mention life after death—in exchange for absolute devotion. But there is a very real and tangible difference. Lucius never had to think or act as if Isis were in fact the only divine being. On the contrary, she was superior to all others. As it turned out, not even that was right. There was one greater: Osiris. Were there yet others even greater? The author never says. When Lucius turned to Isis, he did not stop being a pagan who recognized the divinity of other divine beings. Nor did he make any commitment to worship her alone. His was not an exclusive devotion. It was simply a particularly intense devotion.

  THE ADVANTAGES OF EXCLUSIVITY

  And so Christianity was the only evangelistic religion that we know of in antiquity, and, along with Judaism, it was also the only one that was exclusive. That combination of evangelism and exclusion proved to be decisive for the triumph of Christianity. If it had been evangelistic but not exclusive, it may well have gained adherents, but paganism would have remained unaffected. Pagans would simply have begun to worship Christ along with whatever other gods they chose: Jupiter, Apollo, Diana, Mithras, Isis . . . take your pick. If, on the other hand, it ha
d been exclusive but not evangelistic, Christianity, like Judaism, would have simply been an isolated and marginal religion without masses of adherents.

  But it gained a massive following. Not at first, but over time, progressively adding to its ranks year after year, decade after decade. As it grew, paganism necessarily shrank. Unlike any religion known to the human race at the time, Christianity thrived by killing off its opposition.

  No one has seen that better or argued it more convincingly than Roman social historian Ramsay MacMullen.35 MacMullen explains with a hypothetical example that I will modify slightly. Suppose two persons were each promoting a new cult, one the worship of Asclepius and the other the worship of Jesus. A crowd of a hundred pagan polytheists gathers to hear each devotee extol the glories of his god. In the end, the two prove to be equally successful: fifty of the crowd decide now to worship Asclepius and fifty others decide to worship the Christian god. What happens to the overall relationship of (inclusive) paganism and (exclusive) Christianity? If our two hypothetical speakers are equally persuasive, paganism has lost fifty worshipers and gained no one, whereas Christianity has gained fifty worshipers and lost no one. Christianity is destroying the pagan religions in its wake.