Older Explanations for Why
Christianity Succeeded
In yesterday’s post I indicated some of the major issues
involved with the question of how Christianity managed to take
over the Roman Empire, as spelled out in the Prospectus that I
wrote in hopes of finding a publisher interested in signing up
my book
In this post I’ll give another excerpt from the
Prospectus, in which I discuss some of the common answers one
can find in books and articles about the matter.
How have
scholars in the modern world explained the amazing success of
the Christian mission?
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In modern times one common answer is that Christianity came
along at just the right time, when the “pagan” (i.e.,
polytheistic) religions of the Roman world were on the wane,
when people had become sophisticated enough to realize that
the ancient Greek and Roman mythologies were simply
unbelievable, when people were looking for something more
religiously vibrant and sensible.
Christianity filled the
void, in this view, left by the demise of the Greek and Roman
pagan religions.
The problems with this answer have been widely recognized
among scholars of antiquity over the past half century.
On
one hand, even at the height of paganism the ancient
mythologies about the gods were almost never “believed” by
ancient persons – even highly religious persons – in the way
that the Bible is believed by conservative Christians today.
The myths were seen as good stories, but were not what the
religions were actually about (as I’ll explain further
below). Moreover, all of the evidence now is seen to show
that paganism was precisely thriving in the period when
Christianity was on the rise.
This new religion was not
filling a void left by the demise of paganism in the empire.
It was competing with other religions in their prime.
Some modern interpreters have suggested, relatedly, that
Christianity succeeded principally because of its inherent
superiority to the other religions of the empire.
In this
view, monotheism is clearly a more philosophically defensible
position than polytheism and its (rather ridiculous, it is
implied) multitudes of gods.
Moreover, Christianity provided
something lacking from the pagan religions: a stress both on
(a) the spiritualized aspects of religiosity – in that
reflections on the divine took precedence over animal
sacrifices – and (b) its moral aspects, in that ethics, for
ancient people, was a part of philosophy but not of religion
per se.
It was, then, Christianity’s inherent greatness that
effected its success.
The problem with this view is …
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