The Triumph of Christianity (12 page)

Remarkable evidence of Paul’s association with the privileged comes from Judge’s calculation that, of ninety-one individuals named in the New Testament in connection with Paul, a third have names indicating Roman citizenship. Judge called this “a startlingly high proportion, ten times higher than in the case of a control group” based on epigraphic documents.
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If this were not enough, there is evidence in Paul’s letters that there already were significant numbers of Christians serving in the imperial household. Paul concluded his letter to the Philippians: “All the saints greet you, especially those of Caesar’s household” (Phil. 4:22). And in his letter to the Romans (16:10–11), Paul sends greetings to “those who belong to the family of Aristobulus” and to “the family of Narcissus.” Both Harnack and the equally authoritative J. B. Lightfoot (1828–1889), identified Narcissus as the private secretary of the emperor Claudius and Aristobulus as an intimate of the emperor.
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Finally, there is the First Epistle to Timothy. Whether or not Paul actually wrote this letter is not very important to the matters at hand. Everyone agrees that it was written no later than soon after Paul’s ministry and that Timothy was engaged in a ministry in Ephesus. Thus it is instructive that the Epistle offered so much advice about what to preach to the rich members: “As for the rich in this world, charge them not to be haughty” (1 Tim. 6:17). Timothy was advised to tell his rich members not to cease being wealthy, but “to do good, to be rich in good deeds” (v. 18). In addition, 1 Timothy 2:9 advises that “women should adorn themselves modestly and sensibly in seemly apparel, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or costly attire.” This advice is silly unless there were significant numbers of rich people in the congregation at Ephesus.

Did early Christianity also attract lower-class converts? Of course. Even when a wealthy household was baptized, the majority would have been servants and slaves, and surely some lower-status people found their way to the church on their own. The point is that early Christianity substantially over-recruited the privileged, not that it only recruited them, or even that most early Christians were well-off. This is entirely consistent with Gerd Theissen’s reconstruction of the congregation in Corinth: it included many from the lower classes as well as a remarkable, if much smaller, number from the upper ranks of the city.
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In about 110
CE
Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, was arrested by the Romans and then set out on a long, leisurely walk to Rome in the company of ten soldiers. Along the way he wrote a famous series of letters to various congregations. Among those addressed or mentioned were people of high social status, including the wife of a procurator, and Alce, the wife of a police official. But the most telling revelation of the high status of some Christians came in Ignatius’s letter to the congregation in Rome. Ignatius had made up his mind to die in the arena—to which he already had been sentenced—and his greatest fear was that well-meaning Christians in Rome would intervene and get him pardoned. So he wrote: “I am afraid that it is your love that will do me wrong.... [Let me] state emphatically to all that I die willingly for God, provided you do not interfere. I beg you, do not show me unseasonable kindness. Suffer me to be the food of wild beasts.”
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The point is that Ignatius assumed that some members of the Roman congregation
could
get him pardoned, which required considerable, high-level influence. And there is every reason to believe that Ignatius was properly informed. Many historians now accept that Pomponia Graecina, a woman of the senatorial class who Tacitus reported as having been accused of practicing “foreign superstition” in 57
CE
was a Christian. Nor was hers an isolated case. The distinguished Italian historian Marta Sordi noted: “We know from reliable sources that there were Christians among the aristocracy [in Rome] in the second half of the first century (Acilius Glabrio and the Christian Flavians) and that it seems probable that the same can be said for the first half of the century, before Paul’s arrival in Rome.”
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In 112
CE
, Pliny the Younger wrote to the emperor Trajan for approval of his policies in persecuting Christians. He informed the emperor that the spread of “this wretched cult” involved “many individuals of every age and class.”
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By the end of the second century, Tertullian claimed that Christians were present at every level in Rome, including the palace and the Senate.
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Fifteen years later Tertullian mentioned in a letter to Scapula that there were many “women and men of the highest rank” known to be Christians.
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At this same time, the noblewoman Perpetua was martyred at Carthage; Edmond Le Blant noted that a large number of the martyrs were rich.
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During the reign of Commodus (180–192), according to Harnack, “in Rome especially a large number of wealthy people went over to this religion together with all their households and families.”
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For more systematic evidence, in a sample of Romans of the senatorial class from late in the third century, 10 percent could be clearly identified as Christians—or at least twice the percentage of Christians in the empire.
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A study of grave monuments in Phrygia from this same era found fourteen Christian city councillors and the son of a Christian city councillor. A city councillor was necessarily very rich since the office was imposed as a civic duty and required the expenditure of considerable personal funds for municipal benefits.
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Clearly, then, Paul told the truth when he implied that although not many Christians were powerful or of noble birth,
some
were! Indeed, as compared with the general population, it would seem that
many
were. Obviously, then, the early Christians were not a bunch of miserable underdogs. This always should have been obvious, not only from reading the Gospels, but from asking why and how a bunch of illiterate ignoramuses came to produce sophisticated written scriptures at a time when only the Jews had produced anything comparable; several of the Oriental faiths had brief scriptures, but the dominant Greco-Roman paganism had none.

Christian Literacy

A
S WITH ALL THE
other “scholarly” attacks on the credibility of the Gospels and the early church, claims that Jesus was illiterate, that Paul’s Greek was “vulgar,” and that the Gospels are written in a crude, artless style, originated with German professors during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The most prominent among them was Adolf Deissmann (1866–1937), who began with the assumption that Christianity was “a movement among the weary and heavy-laden, men without power and position, ‘babes’ as Jesus himself calls them, the poor, the base, the foolish.”
⁴³
Building on this foundation, Deissmann used the term
Kleinliteratur
(low or small literature) to distinguish Christian writings from those of educated ancient authors who wrote
Hochliteratur
(high literature). According to Deissmann, early Christian writings used “just the kind of Greek that simple, unlearned folk of the Roman Imperial period were in the habit of using.”
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And the letters of Paul show that “Christianity in its earliest creative period was most closely bound up with the lower classes and had as yet no effective connexion with the small upper class possessed of power and culture.”
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As Deissmann’s colleague Martin Dibelius (1883–1947) summed up, early Christianity “gave no place to the artistic devices and tendencies of literary and polished writing.... [Christians were an] unlettered people [who]... had neither the capacity nor the inclination for the production of books.”
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Unfortunately, for most of the twentieth century even highly committed Christian scholars accepted these claims.
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But, as with all the other attacks on the early Christians by German academics in this era, this was mostly arrogant nonsense. Paul wrote letters, not plays or epic poems. It would have been bizarre had his (or anyone else’s) letters been highly literary—one supposes that even James Joyce’s letters were much less “literary” than his novel
Finnegans Wake
. As for Paul’s Greek, it now is recognized that it was a “Jewish Greek,” much like that used in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible), and no one denies that Paul was a Jew, not an Athenian. Nock dismissed Deissmann’s claims, arguing that “Paul is not writing peasant Greek or soldier Greek; he is writing the Greek of a man who has the Septuagint in his blood.”
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As for the Gospels lacking literary merit, the writing style is like that of the great Greek scientific works (such as Ptolemy’s astronomy)—works written primarily to convey information and therefore presented in “straightforward, factual prose.”
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The authors of the Gospels were not writing fiction or art; they had material to convey and their style was in keeping with “the professional prose of the day.”
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As scholars have finally turned away from the German claims that Christians were an ignorant and illiterate lot, there has been a growing awareness that the history of early Christian writing and texts reveals an unusually sophisticated group of writers and readers. One of the earliest proponents of this “privileged Christian audience” thesis was the distinguished Yale professor Abraham J. Malherbe. After analyzing the language and style of the early church writers he concluded that they were addressing a literate, educated audience.
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Indeed, who else could they have been writing for? Deissmann seems to have forgotten that in those days the poor, the base, and the foolish couldn’t read.
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Since Malherbe’s book appeared, there have been some superb studies published of early Christian writing and literacy.
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All of these scholars stress the Jewish origins of Christianity, which not only makes it likely that early Christians shared the unusually high levels of literacy enjoyed by the ancient Jews, but also would have encouraged Christians to regard scripture as essential to their religious life.

Clearly, the early Christians placed immense importance on Jewish scripture. As Harry Y. Gamble explained: “One of the most urgent tasks of the Christian movement in its infancy was to support its convictions by showing their consistency with Jewish scriptures.... [Hence they] necessarily developed scriptural arguments.”
⁵⁴
To this end, Gamble suggests, they would have assembled “anthologies of proof texts... extracted from Jewish scriptures.”
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Collections of proof texts were found in the scrolls surviving from the sect at Qumran, and it seems virtually certain that Christians would have assembled similar works. The existence of such collections is further supported by the fact that many of the quotations from Jewish scriptures that appear in early Christian writing vary from the wording in the Septuagint or from the Masoretic texts; hence they must have been copied from another source. As Gamble put it, “There is, then, at least a strong circumstantial probability that collections of testimonies were current in the early church and should be reckoned among the lost items of the earliest Christian literature.”
⁵⁶

Alan Millard agreed with Gamble that from its earliest days Christianity was a written religion: “This is not to say the Evangelists began to compose the Gospels in Jesus’ lifetime, but that some, possibly much, of their source material was preserved in writing from that period, especially accounts of the distinctive teachings and actions of Jesus.”
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Graham N. Stanton thought it unbelievable that Christians would have waited a generation or two before they began to write things down: “The widely held view that the followers of Jesus were illiterate or deliberately spurned the use of notes and notebooks for recording and transmitting Jesus traditions needs to be abandoned.”
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The use of notebooks in this era is lucidly examined in detail by Richard Bauckham who demonstrated that “such notebooks were in quite widespread use in the ancient world (2 Tim 4:13 refers to parchment notebooks Paul carried on his travels). It seems more probable than not that early Christians used them.”
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Thus the evidence strongly suggests that the Gospels were the end product of a faith that was set down in writing from the very start. It seems nearly certain that at least some of Jesus’s words were written down when they were spoken. It seems even more certain that the early evangelists, including Paul, possessed and often referred to written materials—far more of them than merely the postulated Q—which helps to explain the variations and differences across the Gospels. As for the latter, they were written to be read, not only by the emerging clergy, but by rank-and-file Christians!

Finally comes the persistent claim that Jesus was illiterate: This snide assertion flies in the face of the immense familiarity with Jewish Scriptures displayed by Jesus throughout the Gospels
⁶⁰
and the near certainty that he was a well-trained rabbi. It also ignores statements such as in Luke 4:16–17: “and he went to the synagogue, as his custom was, on the sabbath day. And he stood up to read; and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written.” In addition is the frequency with which Jesus prefaces an exchange with the rhetorical question, “have you not read?”
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Granted that this evidence comes only from the Gospels; but that is true of
everything
we know about Jesus.