The Faith Instinct (24 page)

The most successful of these competing sects was a new version of Judaism. Well before the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70, Jews had set up thriving communities in the major cities of the Roman empire. In Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus, Alexandria and Rome, Jews had synagogues, and freedom of association, and were accorded considerable privileges. They were exempted from the official emperor worship and allowed to make sacrifices instead.

These expatriate Jewish communities were influenced not only by Judaism but also by the powerful ideas of ancient Greek literature and philosophy. They spoke Greek, which had become the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean in the fourth century B.C., and were so Hellenized that many no longer spoke Hebrew. They used a special translation into Greek of the Old Testament, known as the Septuagint, which differed frequently from its original.

These Hellenized Jews of the first century B.C. were unlike their counterparts in Judaea in several ways. They were a sophisticated urban elite, whereas the Jews in Judaea were a more rural population, centered on the Jerusalem temple’s main activity, that of serving as a vast sacred abattoir for sacrificial cattle. The Jews of the Septuagint were more interested in spreading their religion than were the Jews of the Hebrew Bible. And the population of expatriate Jews seems to have been around 4 million, far outnumbering the 1 million Jews in Judaea.

This vibrant network of urbanized, Hellenized Jewish communities probably provided the fertile ground in which Christianity sp
read so widely within the Roman empire. Several special factors
then eased the transmission of Christianity from the expatriat
e Jewish community to Roman citizens at large. The Hellenized Jews were well integra
ted into Roman society, in which they enjoyed special status. J
ewish ethics and commitment to charity were noticed and well regarded in the Roman w
orld. “Jews were admired for their stable family life, fo
r their attachment to chastity while avoiding the excesses of celibacy, for the pecu
liar value they attached to human life, for their abhorrence of theft and their scru
pulosity in business,” writes Johnson.
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Because of the attractions of the Jewish faith, an important class of non-Jews had sought and received membership in synagogues. Known as God-fearers, they did not have to be circumcised but were affiliated in various degrees with Jewish worship.

The Hellenized Jews and the God-fearers would have been the most receptive audience for Christianity, a creed that claimed continuity with Judaism. The sociologist Rodney Stark, after doing fieldwork with modern religious movements such as the Moonies and the Mormons, noted that missionary efforts are most likely to yield results when pursued within existing social networks. People often convert if approached by or through close friends or family members. Cold calls seldom succeed. This is much as would be expected on the evolutionary assumption that religious behavior evolved as a means of group cohesion: there is good reason to follow the same rituals as one’s friends and families, none to adhere to that of strangers unless one is seeking to assimilate with them.

Stark considers that Christianity too must have spread through already existing social networks. These would naturally have been the networks between the Jews of Judaea and those elsewhere in the Roman empire. The expatriate Jewish communities were used to visiting teachers from Jerusalem. Even though the apostle Paul declared that his mission was to the gentiles, it would have been the Hellenized Jews and God-fearers who were most receptive to his message.

It is clear from Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s epistles that there was a tussle in the early church between those who wished to remain in the Jewish fold and those, like Paul, who sought to broaden the appeal of the new sect beyond ethnic Jews by dropping barriers to entry such as strict observance of Jewish laws including circumcision.

At first Paul’s opponents, based in Jerusalem, seemed likely to prevail. They set in motion the train of events that led to Paul’s transfer in custody to Rome, where he is believed to have been executed in or shortly after A.D. 64 during the emperor Nero’s crackdown on Christians. The little sect, numbering at most a few thousand, would in the normal course of events have doubtless been reined in by the authorities in Jerusalem. But in the disaster of A.D. 70, many of the Jerusalem-based members of the early church perished. The central focus of Christian activity passed from Jerusalem to the large group at Rome. They and the
Jewish communities in Antioch, Alexandria and other Roman cities now had a free hand to shape the new faith as they thought best.

Evidence that the early missionaries focused their efforts on expatriate Jewish communities comes from the following facts, Stark argues. Many of the converts mentioned in the New Testament can be identified as Hellenized Jews. Many of the New Testament’s quotations come not from the Hebrew Bible but from the Septuagint. And archaeological evidence shows that the first Christian churches outside Judaea tended to be in the Jewish quarter of Roman cities.
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Jews of the diaspora “provided the initial basis for church growth during the first and early second centuries,” Stark estimates. They were a significant source of Christian converts until about A.D. 400, and Jewish Christianity remained significant for another century. How could the diaspora community, with a population of just 4 to 5 million people, have had such an impact on the rise of Christianity? The number of Christians was very small for 250 years. But if there were 1,000 Christians in A.D. 40, and if the community grew by 40 percent per decade, which is close to the 43 percent growth rate per decade achieved by the Mormon church over the last century, then the population growth would have been as follows, Stark calculates
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Two factors that may well have spurred such a striking growth of early Christianity were its social cohesion and the high birthrate induced by its doctrines. The cohesion of the Christians was evident even to their enemies. Celsus, an anti-Christian writer of the second century A.D., commented on their close-knit structure, even though he attributed it to their fear of persecution. The Christians’ willingness to help one another was particularly noticeable in a society like that of the Roman empire which was severely lacking in social services. Living conditions in Roman cities were appalling, since most people lacked proper sanitation or heating systems. Buildings frequently collapsed. Major disasters like fire, earthquake, famine or epidemics ravaged the major city of Antioch once every 15 years during the 600 years of Roman rule.
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The numbers of Christians started to increase because of the ethical attraction of the new creed and its provision of a mutual assistance network that provided better social services than those on offer from th
e Roman authorities. But there was a more decisive factor that drove the Christians’
swelling population: they achieved a far higher fertility rate.

The population of the Roman empire was failing to reproduce its
elf. As early as 59 B.C., Julius Caesar had passed a law awardi
ng land to the fathers of three or more children. The falling birthrate was of incre
asing concern to Roman emperors, who had to rely on mercenarie
s to fill the army’s ranks. The reasons for declining fertility were not obscure.
Female infanticide was common. Husbands could order their wives
to have abortions, which often ended in the mother’s dea
th or infertility. Homosexuality was common; Roman and Greek cities maintained large
numbers of male prostitutes. Many different methods of contrac
eption were practiced. “It is notable too,” observes the historian Sarah Pomeroy, “that
the woman with a small rump was not considered desirable, owin
g, no doubt, to the practice of anal intercourse which was also
a useful method of contraception.”
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All these practices, with the possible exception of contracepti
on, were forbidden by the new creed. Fertility among Christians
presumably rose as a result although its exact contribution to demographic increase
cannot be estimated. “All that can be claimed,” says Stark, “is that a nontrivial port
ion of Christian growth probably was due to superior fertility.”
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The role of religion as a significant demographic force is discussed in a later chapter.

Roman emperors frowned on the threat to social order posed by the Christians’ growing numbers and by their refusal to sacrifice to Roman gods. But even as the emperors sporadically persecuted the Christians, they came to perceive the need for an improved state religion and cast about for deities more compelling than the Roman pantheon. Astrology was one of the swirl of new beliefs competing for the Roman public’s allegiance. Aurelian, a successful general who restored the empire’s territorial integrity in the late third century, made Sol, the sun god, the principal divinity of the Roman pantheon, with the intent of giving citizens throughout the empire a single god to worship in addition to their local gods.

Diocletian, one of Aurelian’s successors a few decades later, also favored unity of religion, but under the traditional Roman pantheon. He first suppressed the Manichaeans and then, in 303, launched against the Christians the severest persecution to which they had yet been subjected.

But the campaign did not last long. Diocletian was eventually succeeded by Constantine, who reversed the policy. In his Edict of Milan of 313, Constantine granted tolerance for all religions. He showed many favors to Christianity and was the first emperor to become a convert. In pursuit of his interest in having Christianity serve as a unifying imperial creed, he convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 to deal with the heresy of Arianism and to settle unresolved issues such as the date of Easter.

Constantine’s support of Christianity may have been as much a political decision as a matter of personal faith. Though he built two churches in his new capital city of Constantinople, he also placed a sta
tue of the Sun god, bearing his own features, in the forum, as well as a statue of t
he cult goddess Cybele.
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Nor did he make Christianity the official
religion of the empire, though he paved the way for his succes
sor to do so; in 380 Theodosius made Christianity and belief in the Trinity, as defi
ned by the Nicene Creed, the religion of the Roman state. The emperors’ intere
st in a cohesive religion was probably a decisive factor in the
eventual success of Christianity. “It is possible, therefore, to speculate th
at Christianity achieved its success in the empire in part because it answered best
to the empire’s need for a universal religion with which it could identify its
elf,” writes the church historian Henry Chadwick.
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In just 300 years, a tiny cult from a population that regularly defied Roman rule had grown to become the dominant religion of the empire. What made the new religion so attractive to so many?

Early Christianity has two distinctive features that greatly in
fluenced its later development. The first is that its founding prophet of record see
ms to have had little or no intention of founding a new religio
n. The second is that, whereas Jesus’ language was Aramaic, Hebrew in his time
being no longer a spoken language, the founding language of Chr
istianity was Greek. Somehow, in the transition zone between these two strong cultur
es, a powerful new religion took shape.

Despite the occasional sparring with Pharisees depicted in the
gospels, Jesus seems to have been a conventional Jew, observant
of the Jewish law. “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I
am not come to destroy, but to fulfil,” he says in Matthew.
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E. P. Sanders, an authority on the New Testament, concludes: “In view of the indisp
utable fact that Jesus thought that the Jewish scripture contained the revealed word
of God, and that Moses had issued commandments that should be
followed, we should be very hesitant to accept the common view
of New Testament scholars that he had actually opposed the Jewish law.”
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Jesus urged people to repent before an imminent catastrophe heralding the kingdom of God but seems to have had little interest in spreading his views beyond the world of Judaism. He instructed his apostles, “Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not. But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
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Later, a command to “teach all nations” is attributed to him but only after the resurrection.
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In Sanders’s view, Jesus’ interest in gentiles was secondary to his interest in Jews, being perhaps related to the idea that if Israel was to regain its former greatness, it would help if gentiles worshipped the same god. The writers of the four gospels believed in the mission to the gentiles, yet do not cite much support for it. “What is striking is that th
e evangelists had so few passages that pointed towards success in winning Gentiles to faith,” Sanders notes.
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After his death the leadership of Jesus’ movement passed into the hands of his brother James and the apostle Peter. Many scholars have pointed to deep differences between the beliefs of the Jesus movement and those of what might be called the Christ movement, which after 300 years eventually became the dominant form of Christianity in the Roman empire. The Jesus movement remained restricted to Jews who followed the Torah’s rules. They believed Jesus was a human prophet, not a god, born of human parents; they had no use for the concept of the virgin birth. Their sacred text was a version of Matthew’s gospel translated into Aramaic but without the passages on the virgin birth.