The Triumph of Christianity Read online

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  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Time Line

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  The Beginning of the End: The Conversion of Constantine

  Chapter 2

  Back to the Beginning: The Conversion and Mission of Paul

  Chapter 3

  The Religious World of Conversion: Roman Paganism

  Chapter 4

  Reasons for the Christian Success

  Chapter 5

  Miraculous Incentives for Conversion

  Chapter 6

  The Growth of the Church

  Chapter 7

  Christians Under Assault: Persecution, Martyrdom, and Self-Defense

  Chapter 8

  The First Christian Emperor

  Chapter 9

  Conversion and Coercion: The Beginnings of a Christian Empire

  Afterword

  Gains and Losses

  Appendix

  Notes

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  I am deeply grateful to everyone who has helped me write this book. First and foremost is my brilliant and insightful wife, Sarah Beckwith, not only a partner for life but also an extraordinarily helpful reader, who has provided numerous pointers and perceptive observations. Four other scholars with deep expertise read the entire manuscript and made insightful comments: Elizabeth Clark, John Carlisle Kilgo Professor, emerita, Department of Religion, Duke University; Harold Drake, Professor of History, emeritus, University of California at Santa Barbara; Andrew Jacobs, Mary W. and J. Stanley Johnson Professor of Humanities, Scripps College; and James Rives, Kenan Eminent Professor of Classics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These are among the top scholars in the world in the fields I cover in the book. Their comments and suggestions have been invaluable to me, and they saved me from several serious faux pas. For those that remain, the fault, alas, lies with me.

  I also chose to have several non-scholars read the book, and in doing so I have done something rather unusual. This will take a bit of explaining.

  I started the Bart Ehrman Blog just over five years ago. The blog covers all the areas of my academic interest: the New Testament, the historical Jesus, the writings of Paul, the early Christian apocrypha, the Apostolic Fathers, the manuscript tradition of the early Christian writings, the history of Christianity during the first four centuries, and so on. I post about a thousand words a day on the blog, five to six times a week. The only hitch is that to read my posts, a person has to join the blog, and to join costs money (but not much).

  I do the blog, and charge the money, in order to raise funds for those in need. Every penny goes to charities—two local to me, two international—that deal with poverty, hunger, and homelessness. The blog keeps growing, as do the moneys that we raise through it. Last year we raised $120,000. I hope to do even better this year. For those interested in joining, go to www.ehrmanblog.org.

  As I have done previously, I decided to offer members of the blog a chance to read the book and make comments on it, prior to publication, in exchange for a donation of a set amount. Several members took me up on the offer. I provided them with the manuscript; they read it and made remarks; and I took their comments seriously in making my final revisions. I am deeply thankful to them all: Randy Corbet, Patty Floyd, Paul Jacobs, Jon Sedmak, Steve Sutter, Trevor Wiskus, and my two friends Gabriela Laranjeira and Bill Sutherland. I am grateful as well to blog member Jim Stevenson, for helping me think about the rates of Christian growth in the first four centuries, and especially James Bell, who provided extraordinary assistance in showing how such calculations of growth must work.

  I have also had the benefit of assistance from several graduate students in the Program of Ancient Mediterranean Religions at UNC, all of them already experts in early Christian studies: Luke Drake, Andrew Hagstrom, and Shaily Patel. These are fine scholars and I am lucky to have them in my world. Special thanks go to my recently graduated PhD student Travis Proctor, now teaching at Northland College, who read the entire manuscript and made incisive comments.

  This book would not have seen the light of published day if it were not for the guidance and vision of my literary agent Roger Freet, who helped me envision the project, develop it, and produce it. Roger excels at his work and enjoys a good martini and an occasional cigar. We are perfectly matched.

  I also would like to thank Megan Hogan, assistant editor at Simon & Schuster, for numerous helpful comments on the manuscript. Most especially, I am grateful to my new editor, Priscilla Painton. Her passion for books and the intellectual life broadly, and for this project in particular, have been both gratifying and inspiring. Throughout the process she has given me the benefit of her keen insights, high standards, and remarkable editing talents, and I am deeply in her debt.

  In the book I have cited many ancient texts and have benefited from modern translations, always acknowledged. Quotations from the Old Testament are taken from the New Revised Standard Version (slightly revised, in some instances). Translations of the New Testament are my own.

  Time Line

  29 BCE–14 CE—Reign of Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor

  4 BCE—Birth of Jesus

  27–30 CE—Public ministry of Jesus

  30 CE—Crucifixion of Jesus

  33 CE—Conversion of Paul

  50–60 CE—Letters of Paul

  64 CE—Fire in Rome; deaths of Peter and Paul under Emperor Nero

  112 CE—Pliny’s persecution of Christians; letter of Pliny to Trajan

  150–60 CE—Apologies of Justin Martyr

  177 CE—Apology of Athenagoras

  195–225 CE—Writings of Tertullian

  215–54 CE—Writings of Origen

  249–51 CE—Persecutions under Emperor Decius

  250–58 CE—Letters of Cyprian

  257–60 CE—Persecutions under Emperor Valerian

  284–305 CE—Reign of Emperor Diocletian

  293 CE—Diocletian institutes the Tetrarchy

  303–13 CE—The Great Persecution

  311 CE—Lactantius writes Divine Institutes

  312 CE—Conversion of Emperor Constantine

  312 CE—Battle at the Milvian Bridge

  313 CE—The “Edict of Milan” (cessation of persecution and full religious tolerance)

  314 CE—Council of Arles (dealing with the Donatist controversy)

  317 CE—Lactantius writes Death of the Persecutors

  324 CE—Constantine defeats Licinius to become sole ruler of the empire

  324 CE—Final publication of Eusebius’s Church History

  325 CE—Council of Nicaea (dealing with the Arian controversy)

  330 CE—Minucius Felix writes Octavius

  337 CE—Death of Constantine

  339 CE—Eusebius writes Life of Constantine

  341 CE—Beginning of anti-pagan legislation under Constantius II

  345 CE—Firmicus Maternus writes The Error of the Pagan Religions

  361–63 CE—Reign of Julian “the Apostate”

  379–95 CE—Reign of Theodosius I

  380 CE—Gregory of Nyssa writes On the Life and Wonders of Gregory the Wonderworker

  381–92 CE—A
nti-pagan legislation of Theodosius I

  396 CE—Sulpicius Severus writes Life of Saint Martin of Tours

  422 CE—Augustine writes The City of God

  Introduction

  In my junior year of college I took a course in English literature that made me understand for the first time how painful it can be to question your faith. The course introduced me to poets of the nineteenth century who were struggling with religion. Even though I was a deeply committed Christian at the time, I became obsessed with the work of the great Victorian poet of doubt, Matthew Arnold. Nowhere is Arnold’s struggle expressed more succinctly and movingly than in that most famous of nineteenth-century poems, “Dover Beach.” The poem recalls a brief moment from Arnold’s honeymoon in 1851. While standing by an open window, overlooking the cliffs of Dover, Arnold takes in the shoreline below, mesmerized by the sights and sounds of the sea as the tide goes out:

  The sea is calm to-night.

  The tide is full, the moon lies fair

  Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light

  Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

  Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

  He asks his bride to join him at the window to enjoy the sweet night air and to look down where the waves break upon the beach:

  Listen! You hear the grating roar

  Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

  At their return, up the high strand,

  Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

  With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

  The eternal note of sadness in.

  This is the sound, he notes, that Sophocles described many centuries before, in his play Antigone—a sound that made the Greek dramatist think of the “turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery.” The sound gives Arnold a thought as well, but one quite different and particularly attuned to his age. For Arnold the retreating sea is a sad metaphor for the Christian faith, ebbing from his world and leaving a naked shoreline in its wake.

  There was a time, he wistfully recalls, when the world was comfortably filled to the full with faith:

  The Sea of Faith

  Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

  Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

  But that sea too is now retreating, and one can hear the sucking sound as it pulls back from the shore:

  But now I only hear

  Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

  Retreating, to the breath

  Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

  And naked shingles of the world.

  For Arnold, the modern, educated person no longer has the comforts of religion, the presence of an all-powerful and loving divinity, or the redemption provided by a Son of God who has come into the world to save those who are lost. In the void left by the withdrawal of the Christian faith, all that remains is a confusing and chaotic emptiness, filled only in part by the presence of others, the people we love and cherish who can join us through the uncertainties, pains, and anxieties of life. And so he concludes his poem:

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! For the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  Here is a world of profound and disastrous mayhem and confusion— a struggle of armies fighting to the death, in the dark, with no joy, peace, or certainty. In this void we have only are our friends, companions, and loves: “Ah, love, let us be true to one another.”

  “Dover Beach,” and other poems of its era, resonated with me as a young college student because I was beginning to move through my own nineteenth century. In my liberal arts education I had begun learning about the geological and biological sciences, philosophy, critical thinking, and intellectual history—all of which posed problems for my faith, much as they had for the intellectuals of Arnold’s era. And I too found my emerging doubts deeply disturbing.

  Now, forty years later, I have a different perspective on these nineteenth-century struggles. Rather than experiencing them personally as a Christian, I look on them as a historian specializing in the study of religion. Even though I myself am no long at sea, I can empathize with those who have been racked with doubt and uncertainty, forced to reconsider and even abandon their faith, not simply since the rise of modernity but throughout history.

  THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTION

  In the first four Christian centuries, the religions of the Roman Empire came under assault by those proposing a new faith, declaring that only the worship of the god of Jesus could be considered true religion. As Christianity spread, it destroyed the other religions in its wake, religions that had been practiced for millennia and that were simply assumed, everywhere and by everyone, to be good and true. But Christians insisted they were evil and false. For those reluctant to accept these claims—or even those unsure of what to believe—this transition was no less agonizing than that of Victorians living centuries later.

  The Christian revolution proved far more massive and its triumph far more enduring than the skepticism that emerged as a counterforce in the nineteenth century. Even though many Victorians experienced radical doubt, or left the faith altogether, the Christian tradition did not disappear. There are still two billion Christians in the world. By way of contrast, in antiquity, when Christianity succeeded in taking over the Roman Empire, any pagan religions left in its wake were merely isolated and scattered vestiges of ancient “superstition.”

  The ancient triumph of Christianity proved to be the single greatest cultural transformation our world has ever seen. Without it the entire history of Late Antiquity would not have happened as it did. We would never have had the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, or modernity as we know it. There could never have been a Matthew Arnold. Or any of the Victorian poets. Or any of the other authors of our canon: no Milton, no Shakespeare, no Chaucer. We would have had none of our revered artists: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, or Rembrandt. And none of our brilliant composers: Mozart, Handel, or Bach. To be sure, we would have had other Miltons, Michelangelos, and Mozarts in their places, and it is impossible to know whether these would have been better or worse. But they would have been incalculably different.

  By conquering the Roman world, and then the entire West, Christianity not only gave rise to a vast and awe-inspiring set of cultural artifacts; it also changed the way people look at the world and choose to live in it. Modern sensitivities, values, and ethics have all been radically affected by the Christian tradition. This is true for almost all who live in the West, whether they claim allegiance to Christianity, to some other religious tradition, or to none at all. Before the triumph of Christianity, the Roman Empire was phenomenally diverse, but its inhabitants shared a number of cultural and ethical assumptions. If one word could encapsulate the common social, political, and personal ethic of the time, it would be “dominance.”

  In a culture of dominance, those with power are expected to assert their will over those who are weaker. Rulers are to dominate their subjects, patrons their clients, masters their slaves, men their women. This ideology was not merely a cynical grab for power or a conscious mode of oppression. It was the commonsense, millennia-old view that virtually everyone accepted and shared, including the weak and marginalized.

  This ideology affected both social relations and governmental policy. It made slavery a virtually unquestioned institution promoting the good of society; it made the male head of the household a sovereign despot over all those under him; it made wars of conquest, and the slaughter they entailed, natural and sensible for the well-being of the valued part of the human race (that is, those invested
with power).

  With such an ideology one would not expect to find governmental welfare programs to assist weaker members of society: the poor, homeless, hungry, or oppressed. One would not expect to find hospitals to assist the sick, injured, or dying. One would not expect to find private institutions of charity designed to help those in need.

  The Roman world did not have such things. Christians, however, advocated a different ideology. Leaders of the Christian church preached and urged an ethic of love and service. One person was not more important than another. All were on the same footing before God: the master was no more significant than the slave, the patron than the client, the husband than the wife, the powerful than the weak, or the robust than the diseased. Whether those Christian ideals worked themselves out in practice is another question. Christians sometimes—indeed, many times—spectacularly failed to match their pious sentiments with concrete actions, or, even more, acted in ways contrary to their stated ideals. But the ideals were nonetheless ensconced in their tradition—widely and publicly proclaimed by the leaders of the movement—in ways not extensively found elsewhere in Roman society.

  As Christians came to occupy positions of power, these ideals made their way into people’s social lives, into private institutions meant to encapsulate them, and into governmental policy. The very idea that society should serve the poor, the sick, and the marginalized became a distinctively Christian concern. Without the conquest of Christianity, we may well never have had institutionalized welfare for the poor or organized health care for the sick. Billions of people may never have embraced the idea that society should serve the marginalized or be concerned with the well-being of the needy, values that most of us in the West have simply assumed are “human” values.

  This is not to say that Judaism, the religion from which Christianity emerged, was any less concerned with the obligations to “love your neighbor as yourself” and “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But neither Judaism nor, needless to say, any of the other great religions of the world took over the empire and became the dominant religion of the West. It was Christianity that became dominant and, once dominant, advocated an ideology not of dominance but of love and service. This affected the history of the West in ways that simply cannot be calculated.