Ancient Pagans and Christians, or Who Did What To Whom

Watching people debate about the first four centuries of the common era is like watching a football game. The fans are rabidly rooting for their team all out of proportion. Trash is talked. Facts are distorted.

Kurt Willem’s Pangea blog here on Patheos recently featured a video that delves into this sort of trash talking. Greg Boyd seems to be a bit confused in this video. He’s accepting without question Eusebius self-admitted exaggerations and falsehoods regarding early Christianity and persecution, while criticizing him for praising the power gains of the early church. Not to mention I’ve never heard of any temple of Artemis or Hephaestus marking the strength of their God by how many died in it’s name. That’s a bizarre argument to make. But it’s a typical argument, lacking nuance and historical accuracy, that is almost always made about this period.

This period is important. Western civilization changed dramatically due to events that took place in this period. The struggle between worldviews was epic, and at times the future of the West rested on moments thin as dimes. We don’t know what the world would have been like had the outcome of this struggle gone differently. Yet if we don’t look at this period with all the facts in hand, we lose the lessons history has to give us.

*Everything here is as true and correct as I can discover. If I make a mistake, miss something or lack nuance, please feel free to put that in the comments. I know this is a big topic to discuss on a blog post*

Pagans Were Not (And Are Not) A One-Dimensional, Unified Body

Truth be told, Pagans didn’t exist until Christians invented them. Before the rise of Christianity there were priests of Isis, devotees of Hephaistos and the Mithraic initiate who made the pilgrimage to Eleusis every few years. There was no common religious cause or identity until Christians declared everyone but themselves to be worshiping false idols. Pagan is a negative term, a group of religions defined by it’s critics, not by the faithful.

Truth is, it was a couple of centuries after Christ before Pagans even caught on to this idea, that they were something separate from,  and in opposition to, Christianity. Even then, it was a weird idea. Julian may have been the first pan-Pagan advocate, and it’s worth remembering he folded the Jews into his vision of Paganism. His reign, during which he began rebuilding many temples and planned to rebuild Herod’s temple in Jerusalem, came after Constantine and after the church had already become the “state religion.” Prior to Constantine there were no “Pagans” and no idea that Christianity was any different from any other religion. Essentially, Christianity was a very odd Pagan religion, in the eyes of ancient Pagans.

Religious Exemptions and Tolerance

Rome was known for allowing religious exemptions in the execution of civic duties. Not only did some of the priests and priestesses in Rome’s state cult have weird taboos and restrictions, but many religious communities outside the state cult did as well. Initiates of Mithras who served in the military were exempted from wearing celebratory coronets, which could have been viewed as an insult to the state, due to their religious taboos against crowns.

Jews flourished in Rome and were granted the exemption that instead of making offerings to the state cult, they could make offerings to their God requesting blessings and protection for Rome. In fact, Jews were a significant fixture in Rome, and Julius Caesar was particularly connected to the Jewish community in Rome, so that they were among the first to mourn his death. Jews thrived in Rome, even actively proselytizing to some success, until the revolts of the first century, whereupon Rome did what Rome does: it hit the insurrectionists where it hurt. Just as they destroyed the sacred groves of the Druids to bring the population into submission, so Rome destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in an attempt to bring the insurrection to an end. There were no religious objections to Jews within the Roman empire, but religion was used as a last resort tool in military matters. It was during this period of political unrest that Christianity was born.

Within the Republic and Empire many, many, many religions flourished, and many of them weirder than Christianity. Mithraism was a secret cult comprised of primarily of middle-class men, poor men, freedmen, slaves, and most particularly  soldiers, that had a hierarchy that superseded rank outside of the religion, with rites held in dark, windowless places and spread throughout the Western world. If any religion could be considered a threat in common era Rome, the Mithraic mysteries had considerable sway over the lower ranks of the military, and yet were tolerated and offered exemptions.  Rome was far more tolerant than has been claimed.

Ancients Behaving Badly, or Anal-Rape and Suicide-By-Centurion

Other than as a seldom military strategy, the only time Rome interfered with religion was when public safety was a concern. The most famous example of this is the outlawing of the Bacchanalia. These frenzied rites in honor of Bacchus or Dionysus got so out of control that celebrants were known for committing crimes during the celebrations, which would at times spill out into the streets. Citizens would be attacked by these mobs, and there was a concern that these out of control rituals led to passerby, male and female, being raped by the mob. Obviously, this was not acceptable. The Bacchanalia were prohibited throughout the Empire. The Romans didn’t care what your religion did on your own private property and in your own homes, but disturbing the public peace in such a manner was not to be tolerated.

Another religion that disturbed the public peace was Christianity. Obviously not all Christians behaved badly, just as not every Bacchanalia got out of hand, but enough did on a regular basis to lead Rome to automatically associate Christians with troublemakers. So why did they create disturbances? The Bacchanalians had wine, ecstatic devotion and possibly entheogens to blame. The Christians were by contrast very ascetic. How did they get the reputation for being annoying punks?

Think about it. They were on fire. Their Lord had been crucified, the Temple was destroyed, the homeland of the Jewish diaspora was occupied and they thought the world was ending. People do some crazy stuff when they think the world is ending. Like seek out martyrdom. Sometimes martyrdom is taking a stand for what you believe in even if it means death. Sometimes it’s annoying the crap out of Roman officials, forcing them to arrest or kill you. This kind of martyrdom isn’t exactly noble. It’s like setting off a bomb in a crowded market or waving a black-painted water pistol at police. Getting to heaven that way likely makes Jesus do a /facepalm and sigh “You’re doing it wrong.”

The first principle to remember is that both Pagans and Christians are humans, and humans aren’t always the smartest of creatures. There were likely bureaucrats who decided to  make an example of Christians because their knickers were in a twist over a perceived insult. There were probably also Christians who decided their ticket to heaven gave them a free pass on violating civility and law, much to the embarrassment of their fellow Christians. When Nero said Christians started the fire in Rome, the public found it easy to believe in light of the troublemakers disturbing the peace regularly.  However, it’s quite likely that there was a lot less persecution than had been reported.

The source for much of our information on early Christian persecution is Eusebius. While there is some argument over whether he said “I have repeated whatever may rebound to the glory, and suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace of our religion,” it’s pretty clear he wasn’t exactly a model of virtue and veracity. Aside from his anti-Semitism, his fellow Christian Photius said of Eusebius: “The man is indeed very learned, although as regards shrewdness of mind and firmness of character, as well as accuracy in doctrine, he is deficient.” The Swiss historian Jakob Burkhardt has said Eusebius is “the first thoroughly dishonest historian of antiquity.” The Emperor Julian called him “wretched” in his Against the Galileans.

Rather than some ongoing street-fight, neighbor pitted against neighbor and violence rampant in the streets, the change of power in Rome was like the quiet flipping of a switch. Constantine restoring lawful status to Christianity was like pardoning a terrorist. His suspicious deathbed conversion, and creation of a church-state, had much the same effect as if Obama announced tomorrow morning America is now a Muslim nation, with state-religion status suddenly granted to mosques and imams suddenly placed in important advisory positions. Jaws hit the floor.

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I’m going to have to finish this another day as I have waxed exceedingly verbose. I hope this is somewhat useful in understanding the context of the first four centuries of the common era. Again, if I got something wrong, kindly let me know in the comments!