The Triumph of Christianity (9 page)

Of course, one can easily imagine doctrines so bizarre as to keep most people from joining. It also is true that successful faiths sustain doctrines that do have wide appeal. In that sense doctrines can facilitate or hinder conversion, but in the normal course of events,
conversion primarily is an act of conformity.
But then, so is nonconversion. In the end it is a matter of the relative strength of social ties pulling the individual toward or away from a group. This principle has, by now, been examined by dozens of close-up studies of conversion, all of which confirm that social networks are the basic mechanism through which conversion takes place.
⁸⁸
To convert someone, you must be or become their close and trusted friend. Consequently, when someone converts to a new religion, then they usually seek to convert their friends and relatives, and consequently conversion tends to proceed through social networks.

Clearly, that’s why we don’t know the origins of the various Christian congregations as they began to appear even in the West. Mostly, the church spread as ordinary people accepted it and then shared it with their families and friends, and the faith was carried from one community to another in this same way—probably most often by regular travelers such as merchants. Such a process leaves few traces—it is seldom and only by chance that we know of people such as Priscilla and Aquila (Acts 18:2). Nor did the early church leave many physical traces. Archaeologists can dig in the ruins of synagogues from the first century, but only later were there any church buildings; in those days all Christian congregations were small and, as is evident in Paul’s letters, most met in private homes.
⁸⁹

To say that doctrines play a quite secondary role in conversion is not to suggest that doctrines remain secondary. Once immersed in a religious group, people are instructed as to the significant implications of the doctrines, and most converts soon become very strongly attached to the doctrines—as are their friends.

Given how conversion actually occurs, it follows that Paul’s visits were more like evangelistic campaigns, such as a Billy Graham crusade, than they were like a visit to a community by a missionary. Graham did not found churches, nor did he often bring the irreligious into faith. What he did was to greatly energize the participating local churches by intensifying the commitment of their members, which often led them to recruit new members. So it was with Paul’s visits. When he spoke to the unconvinced as in Athens and Lystra, the results were meager, at best. But when he spoke mostly to the converted or to converts-in-process, as he usually did, he aroused them to far greater depths of commitment and comprehension.

To recognize these aspects of Paul’s missions does not in any way reduce his stature. He not only strengthened many congregations; it seems likely that many who began in his entourage later became effective missionaries. But above all, Paul’s contributions to Christian theology are what made him a giant.

Conclusion

A
FTER ALL IS SAID
and done, we still know very little about the Jesus Movement during the first century. We know that Jesus’s family played a leading role in the church in Jerusalem—Paul clearly accepted the authority of James, the brother of Jesus, who headed this church until he was murdered in 62. Either in response to or in anticipation of the First Jewish Revolt, the Christian leadership left Jerusalem sometime in the late 60s and probably resettled in Pella. At this point their history ends—although it seems reasonable to assume that they played an active role in the rapid and remarkable Christianization of the East. As for the spread of Christianity in the West, it often is assumed we have substantial information on how this occurred, based on Acts and Paul’s letters. But a closer look reveals that here too the story is quite lacking in details. That may well be because the spread of religious movements is not accomplished by dramatic events and persuasive preachers, but by ordinary followers who convert their equally anonymous friends, relatives, and neighbors.

Chapter Four
Missions to the Jews and the Gentiles

B
ECAUSE
P
AUL WON PERMISSION TO
convert Gentiles without them becoming Jews, and because a substantial Jewish community remains, it long has been assumed that the mission to the Jews failed. But that is inconsistent with a great deal of evidence, including that Paul’s mission efforts seem to have been devoted primarily to the Jews of the Diaspora. Of course, whatever the success of early efforts to convert Jews, the ultimate fate of Christianity depended upon a successful mission to the Gentiles. Oddly enough, important aspects of these efforts have been given little attention. How did pagan Gentiles perceive and respond to this very Jewish new religion? And why did they find it familiar and attractive? These are the matters to be pursued here.

The Diasporan Jews

I
N 597 BCE
, I
SRAEL
fell to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. To pacify his conquest, Nebuchadnezzar took somewhere between eight and ten thousand high officials, military commanders, priests, and other members of the Jewish upper classes, along with their families, back to Babylon as hostages. However, rather than imposing servile conditions upon them, Nebuchadnezzar made every effort to “assimilate the [exiles], and to cause them to strike roots in their new homeland.”
¹
Hence, Israelites soon were “serving in the royal court and attaining high rank.”
²
Indeed, many exiles soon assimilated. They gave their children Babylonian names
³
and did not teach them to speak Hebrew.
⁴

Seventy years after the Jews had been taken to Babylon, Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire, conquered Babylon and gave all exiles permission to return home. Most of the descendents of the exiles from Israel did not go! Some who stayed were still pious Jews, but had become so accustomed to life in Babylon that they had no desire to return to Israel.
⁵
But many who stayed were very lukewarm in their Jewishness or were no longer Jews at all.
⁶

At the beginning of the Christian era, many Jews of the Diaspora resembled those Babylonian exiles who did not return. They had lived away from Israel far longer than had the exiles, and intermarriage with Gentiles was widespread.
⁷
Moreover, they read, wrote, spoke, thought, and worshipped in Greek. Of inscriptions found in the Jewish catacombs in Rome, fewer than 2 percent were in Hebrew or Aramaic, while 74 percent were in Greek and the remainder in Latin.
⁸
Most of the Diasporan Jews had Greek or Roman names; many of them “did not even hesitate to [adopt] names derived from those of Greek deities, such as Apollonius, Heracleides and Dionysus” or those of Egyptian gods—Horus was especially popular among the Diasporan Jews.
⁹
As early as the third century
BCE
the religious services held in Diasporan synagogues were conducted in Greek and so few Diasporan Jews could read Hebrew that it was necessary to translate the Torah into Greek—the Septuagint. In the process, not only Greek words, but Hellenic ideas crept into the sacred text. For example, Exodus 22:28 was rendered “You shall not revile
the gods
.” Calvin Roetzel interprets this as a gesture of accommodation toward pagans.
¹⁰
This is quite consistent with the Jewish shrine in Elephantine in Egypt where not only was Yahweh worshipped, but so were two goddesses who were said to be Yahweh’s consorts—Anath the goddess of war and Eshem, the sun.
¹¹

In addition to pagan influences, Greek philosophy also deeply affected the religious perspectives of Diasporan Jews. The most revered and influential Jewish leader and writer of the era, Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20
BCE
–50
ce
), described God in ways that Plato would have found familiar, but which would have been denounced in Jerusalem: “the perfectly pure unsullied Mind of the universe, transcending virtue, transcending knowledge, transcending good itself and the beautiful itself.”
¹²
Philo was also very concerned to justify the Law on the basis of rational explanations. It was not sufficient for him that God had forbidden Jews to eat the flesh of birds of prey or of carnivores. The reason God had done so was to emphasize the virtue of peace. What portions of scripture Philo could not rationalize, he recast as allegories. Thus did Philo interpret the Law “exclusively through the filter of Greek philosophy.” As a result, the clear religious and historical meaning of much of the Torah was “lost among the spiritual and moral sentiments by which Philo sought to demonstrate the harmony and rationality of the universe.”
¹³
Philo’s was not a lonely voice; he was the most celebrated leader of the Jewish Diaspora at this time. Thus did the image of God sustained by the influential Jews of the Diaspora shift from that of the authoritative Yahweh to a rather remote, abstract, and undemanding Absolute Being.

Socially, most of the Diasporan Jews found it degrading to live among Greeks and embrace Greek culture and yet to remain “enclosed in a spiritual ghetto and be reckoned among the ‘barbarians.’ ”
¹⁴
Consequently, many failed to fully observe the Law, especially the prohibition against eating with Gentiles. It should be noted that, when faced with similar circumstances, the Jewish communities in China were slowly absorbed by Confucianism. Similarly, very high rates of conversion to Christianity broke out among European Jews when the many restrictions on them were removed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
¹⁵
As for the Diasporan Jews, although some embraced paganism, for most of them paganism offered no real alternative—even most of the Greek philosophers had dismissed it. Thus it seems likely that many Jews in the Diaspora longed for “a compromise, a synthesis, which would permit a Jew to remain a Jew” and still be able to claim full entry into “the elect society of the Greeks.”
¹⁶
Monotheism with deep Jewish roots, but without the Law, should have had wide appeal.

Cultural Continuity

A
LTHOUGH SOCIAL NETWORKS PLAY
the critical role in conversion, doctrine matters too, just not in the way that usually has been supposed. It is not so much a matter of what the doctrine promises to do for people as it is that bodies of doctrine, and the religious culture that surrounds them, represent
investments
of time, effort, and emotions. That is, any religion requires an adherent to master a lot of culture: to know the words and actions required by various rituals or worship activities, to be familiar with certain doctrines, stories, music, symbols, and history. Over time, people become increasingly attached to their religious culture (“It just wouldn’t be Christmas for me without an angel at the top of the tree”). Expressed as a social scientific concept, one’s
religious capital
consists of the degree of mastery of and attachment to a particular religious culture.
¹⁷

It follows that, other things being equal,
people will attempt to conserve their religious capital
. This proposition has many implications. For one thing, people will tend not to change religions, and
the greater their religious capital, the less likely they are to change
. This is supported by a large research literature showing that converts overwhelmingly are recruited from the ranks of those having a very weak commitment to any other religion. In the United States, the group most likely to convert to a new religious movement consists of people raised in an irreligious or nonreligious home.
¹⁸
In addition, people are more likely to change faiths to the extent that they are presented with an option that allows them to conserve much of their religious capital. This explains why, in a Christian culture, people are more apt to convert to Mormonism than to Hinduism. To become a Mormon, a person of Christian background need discard none of his or her religious capital (including Christmas tree decorations), but only add to it. In contrast, to become Hindus, Christians must discard all of their religious capital and start over.

Applied to new religious groups, this becomes the principle of
cultural continuity
. Other things being equal, a new religion is more likely to grow to the degree that it sustains continuity with the religious culture of those being missionized.

For all that many Diasporan Jews may have dabbled in paganism, rarely did they go all the way and convert. Those who did would have needed to undergo a great deal of religious re-education and to discard their Jewish religious capital. In fact, it is likely that those Jews who did become pagans had only modest amounts of Jewish religious capital at risk, probably having been raised by parents whose Judaism was nominal at best.

In contrast with paganism, Christianity offered Diasporan Jews a chance to preserve virtually all of their religious capital, needing only to add to it, since Christianity retained the entire Old Testament heritage. Although it made observance of many portions of the Jewish Law unnecessary, Christianity did not impose a new set of Laws to be mastered. In addition, services in Christian congregations were very closely modeled on those of the synagogue and, in early days, Christian services also were conducted in Greek, so a Hellenized Jew would have felt right at home. Finally, Christianity carefully stressed how its central message of salvation was the fulfillment of the messianic promises of orthodox Judaism.

Paul and the Diaspora

I
T WASN’T, IN THE
first instance, cultural continuity that led Christian mission efforts to the Hellenized Jews of the Diaspora. It was social networks. For missionaries headed out from Jerusalem, the pressing first question was where should they go? Who would receive them? The answer seemed obvious. All across the Greco-Roman world were relatively well-to-do communities of people to whom the missionaries had ties: those who were relatives (even if very distant), or friends of friends. Indeed, at least until the destruction of the temple in 70
CE
the Diasporan communities were accustomed to visits by religious teachers from Jerusalem. So that’s where the earliest Christian missionaries went, and Paul followed their example.

Although much has been made of Paul’s breakthrough in gaining permission for Gentiles to become Christians without also becoming Jews, far too little has been made of the impact of his subsequent assertion that Jewish-Christians need no longer observe the Law (Gal. 3:15–29).
¹⁹
This had no consequences for Gentiles, but it would have had immense appeal to Hellenized Jews who wished to be free of the Law’s social limitations. And for all the emphasis on Paul’s mission being aimed at Gentiles, in fact nearly all of his efforts took place within the Diasporan Jewish communities. Except for Luke, of course, most of his entourage was Jewish. He was welcomed by Jews. He preached in Jewish homes and in the synagogues. And most of those greeted in his letters seem to be Jews. In addition, if Paul really was devoting his efforts to the pagans, why did he continue to receive so many severe beatings by local Jews?
²⁰
Surely he would have been ignored by Diasporan Jewish leaders had he kept to pagan circles.

This raises the possibility that, despite the emphasis on missionizing to the Gentiles, Paul’s efforts actually more often brought in Jewish converts. True enough, Paul’s rejection of the Law created an even more profound gap between Christianity and orthodox Judaism. But, as a practical matter, devoutly orthodox Jews were not going to convert to Christianity anyway, which is why Palestine was not a rewarding mission area. Rather, as Nock explained, it was Hellenized Jews “who had lost their traditional piety... [who] were receptive of new convictions.”
²¹

In addition, W. H. C. Frend (1916–2005) pointed out that what Paul meant by a ministry to the Gentiles may have been limited to appeals to the “God-fearers,” those Gentiles who already frequented the synagogues and even helped to build and support them, but who never became full converts to Judaism because they were unwilling to fully embrace the Law. Frend wrote: “When in Corinth Paul declared that henceforth he would go to the Gentiles, his progress was as far as the house of Titus Justice, ‘a worshipper of God’ who lived next door to the synagogue (Acts 18:7). Seen as a mission to the ‘God-fearers,’ Paul’s activity and his successes become intelligible.”
²²
This is, of course, a far cry from attempting a ministry to real pagans, to people having no prior connection to Judaism. Indeed, when Paul made such an approach, as in Athens, he accomplished nothing. But being able to admit the God-fearers as full-fledged Christians gave Paul an immense recruiting advantage and should have rapidly swelled the ranks of non-Jewish Christians.

When Did Jewish Conversion Stop?

N
EARLY EVERYONE BELIEVES THE
mission to the Jews soon failed. Some suppose that an impervious barrier to Jewish conversion was erected during the Jewish Revolt of 66–74, when many Diasporan Jews supported the rebels and Christians did not. Others accept that substantial Jewish conversion continued until the Bar-Kokhba revolt in 132–135, which further alienated the church and the synagogue. But from then on, it is assumed that Jewish conversion was at an end. Perhaps so, but this conclusion seems contrary to a considerable variety of evidence and inference.

The first objection to the claim that the mission to the Hellenized Jews ended in failure early on is that the fundamental circumstances that led to its early success did not change—their weak attachment to Jewish culture and the Law persisted.