Pagan Opposition to Christianity
Our earliest records indicate that Christians were sometimes violently opposed by pagan mobs and/or authorities.13 The apostle Paul, for example, in a listing of his various sufferings for the sake of Christ, recounts that on three occasions he was "beaten with rods" (1 Cor. 11:25), a form of punishment used by Roman municipal authorities against criminals judged to be socially dangerous. And as we have seen, Paul writes in his first surviving letter that his Gentile-Christian congregation in Thessalonica had "suffered from your own compatriots what they [the church of Judea] did from the Jews" (1 Thess. 2:14). In the latter case, it appears that the persecution was not "official" but the result of some kind of mob violence.
In fact, most of the pagan opposition to Christians during the church's first two centuries happened on the grassroots level rather than as a result of organized, official Roman persecution. Contrary to what many people appear to think, there was nothing "illegal" about Christianity, per se, in those early years. Christianity itself was not outlawed, and Christians for the most part did not need to go into hiding. The idea that they had to stay in the Roman catacombs in order to avoid persecution, and greeted one another through secret signs such as the symbol of the fish, is nothing but the stuff of legend. It was not illegal to follow Jesus, it was not illegal to worship the Jewish God, it was not illegal to call Jesus God, it was not illegal (in most places) to hold separate meetings of fellowship and worship, it was not illegal to convince others of one's faith in Christ as the Son of God.
And yet Christians were sometimes persecuted. Why was that?
To make sense of Christian persecution, it is important to know something about pagan religions in the Roman Empire. All these religions—and there were hundreds of them—were polytheistic, worshiping many gods; all of them emphasized the need to worship these gods through acts of prayer and sacrifice. For the most part, the gods were not worshiped to secure for the worshiper a happy afterlife; by and large, people were more concerned about the present life, which for most people was harsh and precarious at best. The gods could provide what was impossible for people to secure for themselves—for the crops to grow, for the livestock to be fed, for enough rain to fall, for personal health and well-being, for the ability to reproduce, for victory in war, for prosperity in peace. The gods protected the state and made it great; the gods could intervene in life to make it livable, long, and happy. And they did this in exchange for simple acts of worship—worship on the state level during civic ceremonies honoring the gods, and worship on the local level, in communities and families.
When things did not go well, when there were threats of war, or drought, or famine, or disease, this could be taken as a sign that the gods were not satisfied with how they were being honored. At such times, who would be blamed for this failure to honor the gods? Obviously, those who refused to worship them. Enter the Christians.
Of course, Jews would not worship the pagan gods either, but they were widely seen as an exception to the need for all people to worship the gods, since Jews were a distinctive people with their own ancestral traditions that they faithfully followed.14 When Christians came on the scene, however, they were not recognized as a distinctive people— they were converts from Judaism and from an entire range of pagan religions, with no blood ties to one another or any other connections except their peculiar set of religious beliefs and practices. Moreover, they were known to be antisocial, gathering together in their own communities, abandoning their own families and deserting their former friends, not participating in communal festivals of worship.
Christians were persecuted, then, because they were regarded as detrimental to the health of society, both because they refrained from worshiping the gods who protected society and because they lived together in ways that seemed antisocial. When disasters hit, or when people were afraid they might hit, who more likely as the culprits than the Christians?
Only rarely did the Roman governors of the various provinces, let alone the emperor himself, get involved in such local affairs. When they did, however, they simply treated Christians as a dangerous social group that needed to be stamped out. Christians were usually given the chance to redeem themselves by worshiping the gods in the ways demanded of them (for example, by offering some incense to a god); if they refused, they were seen as recalcitrant troublemakers and treated accordingly.
By the middle of the second century, pagan intellectuals began taking note of the Christians and attacking them in tractates written against them. These works not only portrayed the Christians themselves in negative ways. They also attacked the Christians' beliefs as ludicrous (they claimed to worship the God of the Jews, for example, and yet refused to follow the Jewish law!) and maligned their practices as scandalous. On the latter point, it was sometimes noted that Christians gathered together under the cloak of darkness, calling one another "brother" and "sister" and greeting one another with kisses; they were said to worship their god by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of God. What was one to make of such practices? If you can imagine the worst, you won't be far off. Pagan opponents claimed that Christians engaged in ritual incest (sexual acts with brothers and sisters), infanticide (killing the Son), and cannibalism (eating his flesh and drinking his blood). These charges may seem incredible today, but in a society that respected decency and openness, they were widely accepted. Christians were perceived as a nefarious lot.
In the intellectual attacks against Christians, considerable attention was paid to the founder of this newfangled and socially disreputable faith, Jesus himself.15 Pagan writers pointed to his impoverished origins and lower-class status in order to mock Christians for thinking that he was worthy of worship as a divine being. Christians were said to worship a crucified criminal, foolishly asserting that he was somehow divine.
Some of these writers, starting near the end of the second century, actually read the Christian literature in order better to build their cases. As the pagan critic Celsus once said, concerning the basis of his attack on Christian beliefs:
These objections come from your own writings, and we need no other witnesses: for you provide your own refutation. (Against Celsus 2, 74)
These writings were sometimes held up to ridicule, as in the words of the pagan Porphry:
The evangelists were fiction-writers — not observers or eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus. Each of the four contradicts the other in writing his account of the events of his suffering and crucifixion. (Against the Christians 2, 12-15) 16
In response to these kinds of attacks, claims the pagan Celsus, Christian scribes altered their texts in order to rid them of the problems so obvious to well-trained outsiders:
Some believers, as though from a drinking bout, go so far as to oppose themselves and alter the original text of the gospel three or four or several times over, and change its character to enable them to deny difficulties in the face of criticism. (Against Celsus 2, 27 )
As it turns out, we do not need to rely on pagan opponents of Christianity to find evidence of scribes occasionally changing their texts in light of pagan opposition to the faith. There are places within our surviving manuscript tradition of the New Testament that show this kind of scribal tendency at work.
Before considering some of the relevant passages, I should point out that these pagan charges against Christianity and its founder did not go unanswered from the Christian side. On the contrary, as intellectuals began to be converted to the faith, starting in the mid-second century, numerous reasoned defenses, called apologies, were forthcoming from the pens of Christians. Some of these Christian authors are well known to students of early Christianity, including the likes of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Origen; others are lesser known but nonetheless noteworthy in their defense of the faith, including such authors as Athenagoras, Aristides, and the anonymous writer of the L
etter to Diognetus. As a group, these Christian scholars worked to show the fallacies in the arguments of their pagan opponents, arguing that, far from being socially dangerous, Christians were the glue that held society together; insisting not only that the Christian faith was reasonable but that it was the only true religion the world had ever seen; claiming that Jesus was in fact the true Son of God, whose death brought salvation; and striving to vindicate the nature of the early Christian writings as inspired and true.
How did this "apologetic" movement in early Christianity affect the second- and third-century scribes who were copying the texts of the faith?
Apologetic Alterations of the Text
Although I did not mention it at the time, we have already seen one text that appears to have been modified by scribes out of apologetic concerns. As we saw in chapter 5, Mark 1:41 originally indicated that when Jesus was approached by a leper who wanted to be healed, he became angry, reached out his hand to touch him, and said "Be cleansed." Scribes found it difficult to ascribe the emotion of anger to Jesus in this context, and so modified the text to say, instead, that Jesus felt "compassion" for the man.
It is possible that what influenced the scribes to change the text was something more than a simple desire to make a difficult passage easier to understand. One of the constant points of debate between pagan critics of Christianity and its intellectual defenders had to do with the deportment of Jesus and whether he conducted himself in a way that was worthy of one who claimed to be the Son of God.
I should emphasize that this was not a dispute over whether it was conceivable that a human being could also, in some sense, be divine. That was a point on which pagans and Christians were in complete agreement, as pagans too knew of stories in which a divine being had become human and interacted with others here on earth. The question was whether Jesus behaved in such a way as to justify thinking of him as someone of that sort, or whether, instead, his attitudes and behaviors eliminated the possibility that he was actually a son of God.19
By this period it was widely believed among pagans that the gods were not subject to the petty emotions and whims of mere mortals, that they were, in fact, above such things.20 How was one to determine, then, whether or not an individual was a divine being? Obviously, he would have to display powers (intellectual or physical) that were superhuman; but he would also need to comport himself in a way that was compatible with the claim that he originated in the divine realm.
We have a number of authors from this period who insist that the gods do not get "angry," as this is a human emotion induced by frustration with others, or by a sense of being wronged, or by some other petty cause. Christians, of course, could claim that God became "angry" with his people for their misbehavior. But the Christian God, too, was above any kind of peevishness. In this story about Jesus and the leper, however, there is no very obvious reason for Jesus to get angry. Given the circumstance that the text was changed during the period in which pagans and Christians were arguing over whether Jesus comported himself in a way that was appropriate to divinity, it is altogether possible that a scribe changed the text in light of that controversy. This, in other words, may have been an apologetically driven variation.
Another such alteration comes several chapters later in Mark's Gospel, in a well-known account in which Jesus's own townsfolk wonder how he could deliver such spectacular teachings and perform such spectacular deeds. As they put it, in their astonishment, "Isn't this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon, and aren't his sisters here with us?" (Mark 6:3). How, they wondered, could someone who grew up as one of them, whose family they all knew, be able to do such things?
This is the one and only passage in the New Testament in which Jesus is called a carpenter. The word used, TEKTON, is typically applied in other Greek texts to anyone who makes things with his hands; in later Christian writings, for example, Jesus is said to have made "yokes and gates."21 We should not think of him as someone who made fine cabinetry. Probably the best way to get a "feel" for this term is to liken it to something more in our experience; it would be like calling Jesus a construction worker. How could someone with that background be the Son of God?
This was a question that the pagan opponents of Christianity took quite seriously; in fact, they understood the question to be rhetorical: Jesus obviously could not be a son of God if he was a mere TEKTON. The pagan critic Celsus particularly mocked Christians on this point, tying the claim that Jesus was a "woodworker" into the fact that he was crucified (on a stake of wood) and the Christian belief in the "tree" of life.
And everywhere they spea k in their writings of the tree of life ... I imagine because their master was nailed to a cross and was a carpenter by trade. So that if he happened to be thrown off a cliff or pushed into a pit or suffocated by strangling, or if he had been a cobbler or stonemason or blacksmith, there would have been a cliff of life above the heavens, or a pit of resurrection, or a rope of immortality, or a blessed stone, or an iron of love, or a holy hide of leather. Would not an old woman who sings a story to lull a little child to sleep have been ashamed to whisper tales such as these? (Against Celsus 6, 34)
Celsus's Christian opponent, Origen, had to take seriously this charge that Jesus was a mere "carpenter," but oddly enough he dealt with it not by explaining it away (his normal procedure), but by denying it altogether: "[Celsus is] blind also to this, that in none of the
Gospels current in the Churches is Jesus himself ever described as being a carpenter" (Against Celsus 6, 36).
What are we to make of this denial? Either Origen had forgotten about Mark 6:3 or else he had a version of the text that did not indicate that Jesus was a carpenter. And as it turns out, we have manuscripts with just such an alternative version. In our earliest manuscript of Mark's Gospel, called P45, which dates to the early third century (the time of Origen), and in several later witnesses, the verse reads differently. Here Jesus's townsfolk ask, "Is this not the son of the carpenter?" Now rather than being a carpenter himself, Jesus is merely the carpenter's son.22
Just as Origen had apologetically motivated reasons for denying that Jesus is anywhere called a carpenter, it is conceivable that a scribe modified the text—making it conform more closely with the parallel in Matthew 13:55—in order to counteract the pagan charge that Jesus could not be the Son of God because he was, after all, a mere lower-class TEKTON.
Another verse that appears to have been changed for apologetic reasons is Luke 23:32, which discusses Jesus's crucifixion. The translation of the verse in the New Revised Standard Version of the New Testament reads: "Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him." But the way the verse is worded in the Greek, it could also be translated "Two others, who were also criminals, were led away to be put to death with him." Given the ambiguity of the Greek, it is not surprising that some scribes found it necessary, for apologetic reasons, to rearrange the word order, so that it unambiguously reports that it was the two others, not Jesus as well, who were criminals.
There are other changes in the textual tradition that appear to be driven by the desire to show that Jesus, as a true son of God, could not have been "mistaken" in one of his statements, especially with regard to the future (since the Son of God, after all, would know what was to happen). It may have been this that led to the change we have already discussed in Matthew 24:36, where Jesus explicitly states that no one knows the day or the hour in which the end will come, "not even the angels of heaven nor even the Son, but the Father alone." A significant number of our manuscripts omit "nor even the Son." The reason is not hard to postulate; if Jesus does not know the future, the Christian claim that he is a divine being is more than a little compromised.
A less obvious example comes three chapters later in Matthew's crucifixion scene. We are told in Matt. 27:34 that while on the cross Jesus was given
wine to drink, mixed with gall. A large number of manuscripts, however, indicate that it was not wine that he was given, but vinegar. The change may have been made to conform the text more closely with the Old Testament passage that is quoted to explain the action, Psalm 69:22. But one might wonder if something else was motivating the scribes as well. It is interesting to note that at the Last Supper, in Matt. 26:29, after distributing the cup of wine to his disciples, Jesus explicitly states that he will not drink wine again until he does so in the kingdom of the Father. Was the change of 27:34 from wine to vinegar meant to safeguard that prediction, so that he in fact did not taste wine after claiming that he would not?
Or we might consider the alteration to Jesus's prediction to the Jewish high priest at his trial in Mark 14:62. When asked whether he is the Christ, the Son of the Blessed, Jesus replies, "I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven." Widely considered by modern scholars to embody or approximate an authentic saying of Jesus, these words have proved discomforting for many Christians since near the end of the first century. For the Son of Man never did arrive on the clouds of heaven. Why then did Jesus predict that the high priest would himself see him come? The historical answer may well be that Jesus actually thought that the high priest would see it, that is, that it would happen within his lifetime. But, obviously, in the context of second-century apologetics, this could be taken as a false prediction. It is no wonder that one of our earliest witnesses to Mark modifies the verse by eliminating the offending words, so that now Jesus simply says that the high priest will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power with the clouds of heaven. No mention remains of an imminent appearance by One who, in fact, never came.
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why Page 21
