Bart D. Ehrman has written a book on the origins of Christianity: "The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World" (Simon & Schuster)
Ehrman is a bit of a bogeyman in conservative Christian circles, so I was intrigued to read this review of his latest book by an atheist historian. What follows is an edited account outlining the expansion of early Christianity and Constantine's role, if he indeed had one, in the process.
There is a common web-meme that Christianity was invented in the fourth century by the Emperor Constantine. That the decrees of Constantine, especially that of making Christianity the state religion, had a massive impact goes without question, but quite how much is a matter of some dispute.
The Orthodox traditions have always held him in high regard, he and his mother Helena are saints in most of the eastern churches. The western Catholic tradition, suspicius of Byzantine "Caesaropapism", venerates the sainted Helena but has a slightly less enthusiastic view of Constantine.
Francis of Assisi traces corruption in the Church back to his conversion, and Bernard of Clairvaux expressed grave reservations about the impact of the (alleged) “Donation of Constantine” that was thought to have transferred authority over the western Europe to the Popes. More radical medieval critics like Wycliffe and Jan Hus saw the conversion of Constantine as the point where "true Christianity" was subverted and suppressed by a pagan corruption of the true faith.
In 'God is Not Great', Christopher Hitchens writes with typical breezy assurance of how "(Christianity) was eventually adopted for political reasons by the Emperor Constantine, and made into an official faith" (p64). This and other such assertions have been dismissed by scholars.
Constantine ended persecution of Christians, he showered Christian clergy with benefices and donations, he commissioned and financed the building of a network of churches, several of them monumentally large buildings, he restored confiscated Christian property, he commissioned twenty expensive copies of the Bible, he personally intervened in the Donatist and Arian controversies and he built a new city as his capital in which he did not allow pagan worship but which he filled with new churches and Christian monuments. His 26 chapter Oration to the Saints makes it absolutely clear that he was a fully fledged believer, given it is basically a defence of Christianity over paganism. And pagans were also quite clear that he was a Christian as well. The idea that his conversion was not sincere is simply not sustainable.
The Sol Invictus issue is also, according to Ehrman, a sign of a deepening understanding of his faith. No doubt embracing the preaching of St Paul on the areopagus, Constantine came to understand that the ancient symbol of the Sun also pointed to a higher reality, that of Christ the Logos.
The question of how many Christians there were in the Empire on the eve of fourth century is one that has been tackled from various angles over the last century or so. Early attempts were by analysis of literary sources. A letter from Cornelius for example, a bishop of Rome in the 3rd century, details the community there as 46 presbyters, 7 deacons, 4 sub-deacons, 42 acolytes, 52 exorcists, readers and doorkeepers, and furthermore that the community supported some 1,500 widows, orphans and other needy people.
Adolf von Harnack (1850-1930) concluded that the Christian population of Rome under Cornelius was around 30,000 in a city with a population of one million. Using similar references from other cities he arrived at an overall percentage of Christians in the Empire was 7-10%. Assuming a population of the Empire of around 60 million in this period, this gives us approximately 4-6 million Christians.
Roger Bagnall has used another approach, onomastics – the study of personal names. Given that some names (eg. Theophilus, Peter, Paul) are uniquely Christian, tracing their usage and spread can help map the spread and growth of the new faith. Sociologist Rodney Stark has used the growth of modern religious movements as a model to estimate how quickly a sect like Christianity could grow over four centuries. As families tended to convert, by organic growth alone, Christianity could go from just 20 adherents to 3-4 million by 312D and then a whole 25-35 million (half or more of the population of the Empire) by 400AD.
Even if Constantine had not converted, Christianity would still have gone from a relatively low percentage of the population in 312AD to over half of the Empire by 400, by the same organic growth it had seen in the previous three centuries.
Like Judaism, Christianity was an exclusive religion, where paganism was not. A pagan usually worshipped any number of gods and might do so at different times for different reasons. Family deities, local divine spirits, sacrifices to Neptune, say, before a sea voyage or to Mars before marching to war.
“Suppose two persons were each promoting a new cult, one the worship of Asclepius and the other the worship of Jesus. A crowd of a hundred pagan polytheists gathers to hear each devotee extol the glories of his god. In the end, the two prove to be equally successful: fifty of the crowd decide now to worship Asclepius and fifty others decide to worship the Christian god. What happens to the overall relationship of paganism and Christianity? If our two hypothetical speakers are equally persuasive, paganism has lost fifty worshippers and gained none, whereas Christianity has gained fifty and lost none.” (p126)
It is this accidental but ultimately highly effective combination of exclusivity and outreach that proved the key combination for Christianity and which drove the demographic exponential curve that saw it conquer the Roman Empire.
Was, then, Constantine motivated by politics and saw the Christians as a substantial power base?
It seems very clearly not. All the evidence indicates that, at least prior to Constantine and his successors, Christianity was substantially a lower class cult. While it had a few aristocratic and learned adherents – and they were prominent because their writings are our main sources of information – the majority of Christians were slaves, 'foreign' non-citizens and the urban plebeians. That Christians were so low class was a perennial comment by pagan observers as well as a source of satire and a basis for at least some anti-Christian polemic (such as Celcius). The popular support from the lower classes played very little or no role in bolstering the claim of a Roman emperor. In Constantine’s time, an emperor stayed on the throne via the support of the army, the senators and the equestrian class. Not the hoi-poloi.
Constantine emerged as the sole ruler largely because he had the support of the Roman army’s officer class, at least enough to give him an edge over his competitors. That support came from the western legions’ devotion to his father and then from his own proven skill as a general. The other key to keeping the throne in this period was the support of the equestrian class. These were the educated administrative elite who kept the Empire running.
The key point here is that both the military officer class and the equestrians were mostly pagans. There were some Christians in both echelons, but far fewer than in the lower strata.
The idea that Constantine adopted Christianity for political reasons, something I have believed a possibility — is not the case.
The next question is whether, once Constantine converted, his conversion tipped the scales in Christianity’s demographic favour?
Why had it appealed to millions of Romans in the centuries before his conversion?
Edward J. Watts’ "The Final Pagan Generation" shows a society that was an weave of family, sponsors, patronage and favours and so religion, like everything else, was a highly communal and shared business, rather than a matter of private and personal conscience. Within this framework, Christianity did not need large scale, organised evangelism – the faith spread organically, family by family, from sponsor to subordinate and from patron to client.
As mentioned above, part of its attraction is that the Christian community provided a highly supportive safety network that was uniquely charitable, caring and supportive. Support for widows and orphans, care of the sick and homeless, the provision of funerals for the poor and the care of graves were all noted as benefits of belonging to the Christian community. Erhman however does not see this a major factor in winning adherents.
In a generally very positive review in The Spectator, history writer Tom Holland wonders whether Erhman’s emphasis on his status as a non-Christian scholar necessarily makes him neutral and draws attention to a similar book to Ehrmans’ by the Christian scholar Larry Hurtado: "Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World". Both scholars note that Christianity placed an emphasis on ethics that was not found in the pagan cults. Holland observes:
“It is left to Hurtado, though, to tease out what the implications of this might be for anyone looking to explain the appeal of Christianity to potential converts. That the poor should be as worthy of respect as the rich; that the starving should have a claim on those with the reserves to feed them; that the vulnerable — children, prostitutes, slaves — should not be used by the powerful as mere sexual objects: all of these novel Christian doctrines must surely have had some influence on ‘the triumph of Christianity’ among the teeming masses of Roman cities.”
Tertullian depicts pagans as saying "these Christians, see how they love one another", this may be hypothetical, but the hypothesis needs some credibility to have any rhetorical effect.
Finally, Ehrman looks at the tendency toward imposing restrictions on pagan practice. He notes the various laws constricting public sacrifice, worship by pagans and the orders for the closure of temples. "These laws were directed to specific locales, not empire-wide, and there existed no state apparatus to ensure they were carried out. As a result, they had but little effect: paganism continued, unchecked, in most places. But the laws do show the will of the emperor, and this would not have gone unnoticed. Conversions away from paganism continued apace." (pp. 246-7)
Ehrman notes the increasing intolerance and tendency toward coercion that developed in Christianity as the later fourth century progressed, but he also notes that this was far from the universal attitude, quoting Gregory of Nazianus: “I do not consider it good practice to coerce people instead of persuading them”. (p256)
The destruction of the great temple of Serapis in 391AD offers the whole story, including the gang of pagan zealots who had holed up in the temple and were torturing and killing Christian captives, a pertinent detail that critics often forget to mention. Likewise the death of Hypatia, caught up in the political struggle between Cyril and Orestes (both Christians), was a political murder, paganism, philosophy and Christianity having very little to do with what was a tit-for-tat assassination.
The conclusion of most objective historians: Christianity did not win out because of violent coercion. Michele Renee Salzman observed: "it is hard to accept the interpretation advanced by certain scholars that physical violence, coercion, was a central factor in explaining the spread of Christianity" (p274).
While many works of literature were lost due to a declining interest in them by Christian scholars, many were also preserved by those same scholars, and "such pagan works may have been lost anyway, without the Christianization of the empire" (p285). Loss is actually the norm for most pre-modern texts. Any student of early Christian history can only wonder and lament the loss of most of Origen's works, or the volumes of early Christian history of Papius ... on balance, the loss shows a general trend across all literature, rather than any attempt to wipe of a pagan heritage.
By all accounts, Ehrman seems to have done a good job ...
Ehrman is a bit of a bogeyman in conservative Christian circles, so I was intrigued to read this review of his latest book by an atheist historian. What follows is an edited account outlining the expansion of early Christianity and Constantine's role, if he indeed had one, in the process.
There is a common web-meme that Christianity was invented in the fourth century by the Emperor Constantine. That the decrees of Constantine, especially that of making Christianity the state religion, had a massive impact goes without question, but quite how much is a matter of some dispute.
The Orthodox traditions have always held him in high regard, he and his mother Helena are saints in most of the eastern churches. The western Catholic tradition, suspicius of Byzantine "Caesaropapism", venerates the sainted Helena but has a slightly less enthusiastic view of Constantine.
Francis of Assisi traces corruption in the Church back to his conversion, and Bernard of Clairvaux expressed grave reservations about the impact of the (alleged) “Donation of Constantine” that was thought to have transferred authority over the western Europe to the Popes. More radical medieval critics like Wycliffe and Jan Hus saw the conversion of Constantine as the point where "true Christianity" was subverted and suppressed by a pagan corruption of the true faith.
In 'God is Not Great', Christopher Hitchens writes with typical breezy assurance of how "(Christianity) was eventually adopted for political reasons by the Emperor Constantine, and made into an official faith" (p64). This and other such assertions have been dismissed by scholars.
Constantine ended persecution of Christians, he showered Christian clergy with benefices and donations, he commissioned and financed the building of a network of churches, several of them monumentally large buildings, he restored confiscated Christian property, he commissioned twenty expensive copies of the Bible, he personally intervened in the Donatist and Arian controversies and he built a new city as his capital in which he did not allow pagan worship but which he filled with new churches and Christian monuments. His 26 chapter Oration to the Saints makes it absolutely clear that he was a fully fledged believer, given it is basically a defence of Christianity over paganism. And pagans were also quite clear that he was a Christian as well. The idea that his conversion was not sincere is simply not sustainable.
The Sol Invictus issue is also, according to Ehrman, a sign of a deepening understanding of his faith. No doubt embracing the preaching of St Paul on the areopagus, Constantine came to understand that the ancient symbol of the Sun also pointed to a higher reality, that of Christ the Logos.
The question of how many Christians there were in the Empire on the eve of fourth century is one that has been tackled from various angles over the last century or so. Early attempts were by analysis of literary sources. A letter from Cornelius for example, a bishop of Rome in the 3rd century, details the community there as 46 presbyters, 7 deacons, 4 sub-deacons, 42 acolytes, 52 exorcists, readers and doorkeepers, and furthermore that the community supported some 1,500 widows, orphans and other needy people.
Adolf von Harnack (1850-1930) concluded that the Christian population of Rome under Cornelius was around 30,000 in a city with a population of one million. Using similar references from other cities he arrived at an overall percentage of Christians in the Empire was 7-10%. Assuming a population of the Empire of around 60 million in this period, this gives us approximately 4-6 million Christians.
Roger Bagnall has used another approach, onomastics – the study of personal names. Given that some names (eg. Theophilus, Peter, Paul) are uniquely Christian, tracing their usage and spread can help map the spread and growth of the new faith. Sociologist Rodney Stark has used the growth of modern religious movements as a model to estimate how quickly a sect like Christianity could grow over four centuries. As families tended to convert, by organic growth alone, Christianity could go from just 20 adherents to 3-4 million by 312D and then a whole 25-35 million (half or more of the population of the Empire) by 400AD.
Even if Constantine had not converted, Christianity would still have gone from a relatively low percentage of the population in 312AD to over half of the Empire by 400, by the same organic growth it had seen in the previous three centuries.
Like Judaism, Christianity was an exclusive religion, where paganism was not. A pagan usually worshipped any number of gods and might do so at different times for different reasons. Family deities, local divine spirits, sacrifices to Neptune, say, before a sea voyage or to Mars before marching to war.
“Suppose two persons were each promoting a new cult, one the worship of Asclepius and the other the worship of Jesus. A crowd of a hundred pagan polytheists gathers to hear each devotee extol the glories of his god. In the end, the two prove to be equally successful: fifty of the crowd decide now to worship Asclepius and fifty others decide to worship the Christian god. What happens to the overall relationship of paganism and Christianity? If our two hypothetical speakers are equally persuasive, paganism has lost fifty worshippers and gained none, whereas Christianity has gained fifty and lost none.” (p126)
It is this accidental but ultimately highly effective combination of exclusivity and outreach that proved the key combination for Christianity and which drove the demographic exponential curve that saw it conquer the Roman Empire.
Was, then, Constantine motivated by politics and saw the Christians as a substantial power base?
It seems very clearly not. All the evidence indicates that, at least prior to Constantine and his successors, Christianity was substantially a lower class cult. While it had a few aristocratic and learned adherents – and they were prominent because their writings are our main sources of information – the majority of Christians were slaves, 'foreign' non-citizens and the urban plebeians. That Christians were so low class was a perennial comment by pagan observers as well as a source of satire and a basis for at least some anti-Christian polemic (such as Celcius). The popular support from the lower classes played very little or no role in bolstering the claim of a Roman emperor. In Constantine’s time, an emperor stayed on the throne via the support of the army, the senators and the equestrian class. Not the hoi-poloi.
Constantine emerged as the sole ruler largely because he had the support of the Roman army’s officer class, at least enough to give him an edge over his competitors. That support came from the western legions’ devotion to his father and then from his own proven skill as a general. The other key to keeping the throne in this period was the support of the equestrian class. These were the educated administrative elite who kept the Empire running.
The key point here is that both the military officer class and the equestrians were mostly pagans. There were some Christians in both echelons, but far fewer than in the lower strata.
The idea that Constantine adopted Christianity for political reasons, something I have believed a possibility — is not the case.
The next question is whether, once Constantine converted, his conversion tipped the scales in Christianity’s demographic favour?
Why had it appealed to millions of Romans in the centuries before his conversion?
Edward J. Watts’ "The Final Pagan Generation" shows a society that was an weave of family, sponsors, patronage and favours and so religion, like everything else, was a highly communal and shared business, rather than a matter of private and personal conscience. Within this framework, Christianity did not need large scale, organised evangelism – the faith spread organically, family by family, from sponsor to subordinate and from patron to client.
As mentioned above, part of its attraction is that the Christian community provided a highly supportive safety network that was uniquely charitable, caring and supportive. Support for widows and orphans, care of the sick and homeless, the provision of funerals for the poor and the care of graves were all noted as benefits of belonging to the Christian community. Erhman however does not see this a major factor in winning adherents.
In a generally very positive review in The Spectator, history writer Tom Holland wonders whether Erhman’s emphasis on his status as a non-Christian scholar necessarily makes him neutral and draws attention to a similar book to Ehrmans’ by the Christian scholar Larry Hurtado: "Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World". Both scholars note that Christianity placed an emphasis on ethics that was not found in the pagan cults. Holland observes:
“It is left to Hurtado, though, to tease out what the implications of this might be for anyone looking to explain the appeal of Christianity to potential converts. That the poor should be as worthy of respect as the rich; that the starving should have a claim on those with the reserves to feed them; that the vulnerable — children, prostitutes, slaves — should not be used by the powerful as mere sexual objects: all of these novel Christian doctrines must surely have had some influence on ‘the triumph of Christianity’ among the teeming masses of Roman cities.”
Tertullian depicts pagans as saying "these Christians, see how they love one another", this may be hypothetical, but the hypothesis needs some credibility to have any rhetorical effect.
Finally, Ehrman looks at the tendency toward imposing restrictions on pagan practice. He notes the various laws constricting public sacrifice, worship by pagans and the orders for the closure of temples. "These laws were directed to specific locales, not empire-wide, and there existed no state apparatus to ensure they were carried out. As a result, they had but little effect: paganism continued, unchecked, in most places. But the laws do show the will of the emperor, and this would not have gone unnoticed. Conversions away from paganism continued apace." (pp. 246-7)
Ehrman notes the increasing intolerance and tendency toward coercion that developed in Christianity as the later fourth century progressed, but he also notes that this was far from the universal attitude, quoting Gregory of Nazianus: “I do not consider it good practice to coerce people instead of persuading them”. (p256)
The destruction of the great temple of Serapis in 391AD offers the whole story, including the gang of pagan zealots who had holed up in the temple and were torturing and killing Christian captives, a pertinent detail that critics often forget to mention. Likewise the death of Hypatia, caught up in the political struggle between Cyril and Orestes (both Christians), was a political murder, paganism, philosophy and Christianity having very little to do with what was a tit-for-tat assassination.
The conclusion of most objective historians: Christianity did not win out because of violent coercion. Michele Renee Salzman observed: "it is hard to accept the interpretation advanced by certain scholars that physical violence, coercion, was a central factor in explaining the spread of Christianity" (p274).
While many works of literature were lost due to a declining interest in them by Christian scholars, many were also preserved by those same scholars, and "such pagan works may have been lost anyway, without the Christianization of the empire" (p285). Loss is actually the norm for most pre-modern texts. Any student of early Christian history can only wonder and lament the loss of most of Origen's works, or the volumes of early Christian history of Papius ... on balance, the loss shows a general trend across all literature, rather than any attempt to wipe of a pagan heritage.
By all accounts, Ehrman seems to have done a good job ...
