This example, of course, is completely hypothetical and unlikely for all sorts of reasons. We do not know of pagan evangelists working a crowd. And even though Christianity was evangelistic, we don’t know of public speeches aimed at conversion outside of the book of Acts in the New Testament and later comparably legendary accounts. Moreover, it does not appear that there ever were massive on-the-spot conversions to Christianity (a point on which I strongly disagree with Professor MacMullen). Christianity grew by one-on-one discourse as a person would convince a family member, friend, or acquaintance, who would convince another, who would convince another. How these people proved convincing will be the subject of the next chapter. For now, the point is that it is highly unlikely that anyone convinced fifty people at one time, let alone on the spot on the basis of a single public talk.
But the point still holds. Christianity necessarily destroyed the other religions as it grew, and it was the only religion in the empire doing so. As the church grew, the pagan world shrank until—after a couple of centuries—pagans realized they had a problem on their hands.
CHRISTIANITY AS AN “ALL-ENCOMPASSING RELIGION”
One other feature of Christianity that made it different from all the pagan religions throughout the empire is that it encompassed numerous aspects of life that had always been kept distinct.36 Adopting the Christian religion did not mean simply participating in cultic activities, as was the case for other religions, whether imperial cults, civic cults, or family cults. For these pagan religions, the cultic acts were the religion. Cultic acts for Christianity, however, such as baptism, communion meals, prayers, hymns, and so on, were certainly important aspects of the religion, but they were only some of the aspects. Christianity also entailed an ethical code, a way of thinking about the divine, and a set of stories about divine intervention in the past. In the words of a scholar of ancient Rome, James Rives, Christianity was a “totalizing discourse.”37 That is, it involved a totality of a person’s life. It was all-encompassing.
As a corollary, since Christians conceptualized their religion as a coherent system, they began thinking that everything outside their religion was a competing coherent system. Thus, relatively early in their history, Christians declared there were three kinds of persons: Christian, Jewish, and pagan. Being a pagan meant being some “thing.” Paganism became an entity, granted its own “ism.”38 Everything not Jewish or Christian cohered together—even if there were hundreds, even thousands, of manifestations of this one thing, with enormous differences among them. That coherent whole was the rest of the world.
Because paganism was now seen as a recognizable “thing” standing as a competing force against Christianity (even though, for most of the first three hundred years, no one on the other side realized they were in a competition), it could be appraised, evaluated, and condemned. It could be contrasted with Christianity and judged to be deficient in everything that it practiced, believed, and taught. Pagans could be portrayed as unethical. As believing foolish things. As engaging in meaningless—or, worse, demonic—acts of worship. Comprising such features, paganism could be attacked. And over time it was attacked successfully.
REASONS FOR THE CHRISTIAN SUCCESS: IN SUM
A number of readers will have realized that I have been speaking in broadly general, even generalizing terms about Christians and Christianity, as if the early Christian movement were one thing, not lots of different things. The reality, as we know so well, is that Christianity was an amazingly diverse phenomenon throughout the first four Christian centuries, with different Christians advocating an enormous range of beliefs and engaging in strikingly different practices. This has been the subject of a large number of books in modern times, especially over the past forty years.39
If so, how can we make such broad generalizations as “Christianity was exclusive” or “Christianity was evangelistic”? I have made these statements fully knowing that Christianity encompassed a terrifically divergent set of beliefs and practices. There certainly were Christians, arguably the majority of them, who were not interested in evangelizing their next-door neighbors. And there were almost certainly large numbers of Christians who refused, either in their minds and hearts or in their daily lives, to be committed fully and exclusively to the Christian god alone.
In my view, all of that goes without saying. But I need to say it anyway, in part because in the long run I do not think that it matters for the case I am trying to make. For the argument I have been advancing, it is not important whether Christianity is reduced to some kind of essential entity that is necessarily evangelistic and exclusive. What matters is that broad swaths of it demonstrably were. That is the kind of Christianity that in the end became dominant in the empire.
I would like to make two concluding points about this eventually dominant form of Christianity. The first is that we know about it from the majority of written sources that have come down to us and these documents represent idealizations of later Christian leaders. This is the way the elite, highly educated Christian writers of the early centuries who produced our texts wanted to portray Christianity and possibly how they fervently wanted Christianity to be. This means these views represent the perspectives of the cultured leaders of the church.
But it also means they were the views of those who were in power. That is a point to consider deeply. In my judgment it would make no sense to think that the “official” line taken by leaders of the church was completely unrelated to the views held by numbers of average church people who possibly didn’t think much about such things on their own. These are the views they were taught by those in power, and even if they are idealizations, they would represent idealizations held by other Christians as well, not simply by the elite authors whose works have come down to us. Again, for my purposes, it would not matter if everyone held these views as long as some did. And probably a significant number of Christians did.
My second point is that the distinctive features of this idealized Christianity that I have been presenting—that it was evangelistic, exclusive, and totalizing—can almost certainly be attributed to a number of the Christian groups of the first four centuries, not simply the one that became dominant. It is true that most of our surviving writings come down to us from sources that scholars call orthodox and proto-orthodox. The term “orthodox” refers to the form of Christian belief and practice that came to be dominant in the fourth century after Christianity began to expand and grow significantly. “Proto-orthodox” refers to the similar form of Christianity that was held by forerunners of the orthodox party in the years before its views came to dominate. In those years of pre-dominance there were varieties of Christian belief. But even some of these non-orthodox groups—call them heresies—were evangelistic and invested in converting Jews and pagans into their fold.40
Most of the converts into the proto-orthodox tradition—as well as most of the heretical traditions—came not from Jewish communities but from the ranks of the pagans. With such potential converts, Christians of different sorts made some common cause. They agreed with a growing number of pagans that ultimately there is one divine being above and beyond all others. For these Christians, this was not an unknown god, or one of the Roman pantheon, or simply “the Greatest God,” Theos Hypsistos. It was the god of Israel, who had become the god of the Christians. These Christians also agreed with pagans that one of the chief reasons to revere this god was that he could provide numerous benefits to those who acknowledged his divinity and properly worshiped him. Divine benefactions had always been at the core of pagan religious devotion as they were at the core of Christianity.
What made these Christians different from those who adhered to traditional pagan religions was their concern and, for at least some of them, their passion to convert others to the worship of their god, their insistence that anyone who did so needed to turn away from the gods they had always worshiped, and their view that true devotion to God involved not just ritual acts but also ethical behavior and proper doctrinal
understanding of who this god was. This was the form of Christianity proclaimed by the first known missionary to the pagans, the apostle Paul. It was the message proclaimed by our literate, elite, cultured Christian writers from the proto-orthodox tradition. It was the message that later orthodox writers of the fourth century insisted upon with unusual vehemence. And it is the message that eventually overtook the religious world of Roman antiquity.
One dominant question, though, is why anyone found the message convincing. Why were pagans persuaded to give up everything they had ever thought, change everything they had ever practiced, abandon all the gods they had ever worshiped, in order to join the Christian community and worship only the god of the Christians?
Chapter 5
Miraculous Incentives for Conversion
We have already seen that the church did not spread through a well-thought-out and highly organized missionary endeavor, a first-century parallel to British and American missions to deepest, darkest Africa and other “heathen” places in the nineteenth century. It spread by word of mouth, from one person to another, all deeply connected in their daily lives to social networks through which news could circulate and views could air. One place to start in considering the persuasiveness of the Christians is with the audience they were addressing: the pagan reservoir from which they were drawing most of their converts.
We wish we knew who these people were. It would especially help if we had some disinterested sources of information. But we do not. For the first 150 years of the church, virtually all our evidence comes from Christian accounts, which are obviously slanted in a particular direction and often make unverifiable claims about the masses adopting this new faith.1 The first extensive discussion of the Christian movement from a non-Christian source—also not disinterested, of course—comes from the end of the 170s.2 We do not have this source as a stand-alone document. It is a book quoted, instead, by a Christian author, the great theologian Origen of Alexandria, who cited it precisely in order to refute it. The book had been written by an otherwise unknown pagan intellectual named Celsus.3
Celsus’s work was called The True Word. In it he assails Christianity as a foolish and dangerous religion that lacks all academic credentials and poses ominous problems, particularly because it leads people astray from traditional religions. Celsus’s attack was direct and incisive. He had read the Christian Gospels and with rapier-like wit and clearheaded analysis tried to tear them to shreds, along with the Jesus they worshiped. Origen had his hands full in writing a refutation some six decades later.
Much could be said about Celsus’s critique of the Christian faith, but for our purposes here, one point he makes is particularly trenchant. He argues—with obvious exaggeration—that Christianity is a religion of ignoramuses who are too thick to recognize either religious truth or valid argument. Christian proponents work especially hard to convert the foolish and the gullible. Here is what Celsus says in a rather amusing but mocking tone, a statement worth quoting at length:
Wherever one finds a crowd of adolescent boys, or a bunch of slaves, or a company of fools, there will the Christian teachers be also, showing off their fine new philosophy. In private houses one can see wool workers, cobblers, laundry workers, and the most illiterate country bumpkins, who would not venture to voice their opinions in front of their intellectual betters. But let them get hold of children in private houses—let them find some gullible wives—and you will hear some preposterous statements. You will hear them say, for instance, that they should not pay any attention to their fathers or teachers, but must obey them. They say that their elders and teachers are fools, and are in reality very bad men who like to voice their silly opinions . . . . Now if, as they are speaking thus to the children, they happen to see a schoolteacher coming along, some intelligent person, or even the father of one of the children, these Christians flee in all directions . . . . These Christians also tell the children that they should leave their fathers and teachers and follow the women and the little chums to the wool dresser’s shop, or the cobbler’s or to the washerwoman’s shop, so that they might learn how to be perfect. And by this logic they have persuaded many to join them.
There is obviously a lot of elitist snobbery going on here. But there may be some truth as well. We have very little evidence to suggest that serious intellectuals converted to the Christian faith between the time of Paul and the mid-second century. Most converts would have been lower-class and uneducated. This was certainly true in Paul’s own day. In a letter to one of his largest congregations, he explicitly reminds the Corinthians about their own constituency: “Consider your calling, brothers and sisters: Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many of you were powerful, not many of you were born to nobility. But God chose the foolish in the world to put to shame the wise; God chose the weak in the world to put to shame the strong” (1 Corinthians 1:26–27).
Some scholars over the past thirty years have stressed that, since Paul indicates not many of the Corinthian Christians were wise, powerful, or of the nobility, surely some of them must have been.4 That is probably true, but Paul’s entire point is that the vast majority of his converts were uneducated, powerless, and lower-class. Nothing in our early Christian sources suggests things had changed much in the century between Paul and Celsus.
On the contrary, it is striking that when Celsus claims that the ignorant lower classes—either literally or figuratively “children”—were particularly attracted to Christianity, Origen does not defend the faith by disagreeing. In his view, the fact that Christianity could be so successful despite its lack of intellectual force and impact on the highly educated classes shows that God must be behind the movement: it is not gaining converts because of its obvious intellectual superiority. The early-fourth-century defender of the faith, Lactantius, also indicates that most Christians were uneducated and “foolish” (Divine Institutes 5.1–2).
Celsus also mocks Christianity for being a religion not just of “children” but also of “gullible women.” He clearly means this as a slur. It may simply represent a standard misogynistic charge leveled against a despised social group, but there are other indications that for some time the Christian faith drew more women than men into the fold. One piece of hard evidence comes somewhat later. As we will see, in 303 CE the emperor Diocletian inaugurated an empire-wide persecution. We are fortunate to have a report of personal belongings confiscated at the time from a church in the town of Cirta, North Africa: sixteen men’s tunics, but thirty-eight veils, eighty-two women’s tunics, and forty-seven pairs of female slippers. This datum is slight, but it has led one historian, Robin Lane Fox, to claim, though probably on too thin a thread of evidence, that “it is highly likely that women were a clear majority in the churches of the third century.”5
By the middle of the second century one does start seeing isolated intellectuals convert to the faith: Justin in Rome, Tertullian in North Africa, Origen himself in Alexandria. These are clear exceptions to the rule. At the same time, it cannot be emphasized enough that most people in the Roman world by far were lower-class and uneducated, so it cannot come as a surprise that most Christians were. Still, the church may have had more than its fair share. Among other things, this suggests that most converts were not drawn in by the writings of the Christian literary elite or through public debates with well-educated proponents of the faith. Sophisticated argument was almost certainly not the principle engine of conversion.
There have been numerous attempts over the years to determine exactly what, then, was driving the Christian success. I do not need to enumerate all the options. It may be useful, however, to begin by considering two of the more intriguing but ultimately implausible ones.
THE ATTRACTIONS OF THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY
It is often thought and widely claimed that one of the main reasons pagans converted to Christianity was because of the inherent attractiveness of the church community. Pagan civic cults did not involve much community. They did entail ceremonies perfo
rmed in public in the presence of others, but there were no weekly community meetings, opportunities for fellowship, or planned times of discussion, reflection, and sharing of concerns.
That was different within Christianity. Much like the Jewish synagogues out of which they grew, Christian churches entailed regularly scheduled weekly meetings. Converting to Christianity was not an isolated individualistic affair, a matter of private spirituality. It meant joining the church. The church was not a place: there were no buildings for Christian gatherings until the middle of the third century, so far as we know. Prior to that, and probably for a good while afterward, most churches met in private homes and in outdoor areas such as cemeteries. Rather than being a place, the church was a community. A tightly knit community. A community as tightly knit as the nuclear family. In fact, Christians were often encouraged to replace their families with the members of their new community. The founder or leader of the church was a “father”; fellow believers were “brothers” and “sisters” in one big family. Moreover, these were self-consciously communities of mutual love and respect. They provided material support for their needy members. They provided moral support for everyone who came.
Such, at least, were the claims of Christians who wrote about the church. Whether all this was entirely true is another question. But numerous scholars have maintained that the obvious attractions of this kind of community would have drawn in outsiders eager to join for the enormous social benefits. Classical historian E. R. Dodds once claimed that the nature of the Christian community “was a major cause, perhaps the single cause, of the spread of Christianity.”6
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