DESTROYER OF THE GODS:
Early Christian distinctiveness
in the Roman World
By Larry W. Hurtado
Baylor University Press. 304 pages. £15.54
ISBN 978 1 481 304 740
Frequently, Islamic missionary material and its propagators assert that the early Christians compromised with Graeco-Roman paganism, and that the doctrine of the Trinity is the result of this.
When challenged as to where in Hellenistic polytheism its pantheon included a Triune God, let alone held to his uniqueness (as Christian monotheism demands), they are usually left silenced, or change the subject. Hurtado’s superlative book wholly undermines their unhistorical assertion. The Christians compromised neither with Graeco-Roman polytheism nor with its concomitant (im)morality.
Hurtado also demonstrates how costly this was for Christians, not least in public attitudes to them: pagans saw them as ‘different, odd, and even objectionable’ (p.15). These days that is how the post-Christian Western society increasingly sees us, notably in relation to matters of marriage, sexuality and gender. Christians, now as then, are outsiders. Hurtado’s very accessible volume is thus directly pertinent to present conditions in many ways, and should encourage us to see how, in the face of social hostility, the Gospel triumphed.
Misinformation from cultural elite
Hurtado shows that negative views of Christians were promulgated by ‘members of the cultural elite’ (p.20) – plus ça change. For example, he quotes Tacitus and Suetonius to demonstrate that Christianity was characterised as ‘superstition’ – which to them connoted beliefs and rituals which were ‘excessive, repellent or even monstrous’ (p.22). Christianity was seen as ‘different, and objectionably so, and not as simply one type of Roman-era religious option among like others’. Scarcely surprising that while there was occasional harassment of cults like that of Isis, or of the Jews in Rome, there was nothing like the ‘repeated and increasingly hostile stance’ against Christianity (pp.24-25).
For example, the famous philosopher Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180) dismissed the readiness of Christians to die for their faith as ‘mere obstinacy’, which Hurtado renders as ‘bloody mindedness’ (p.28) but which may have denoted incom-prehensibility at ‘fanaticism’ – like modern attitudes to Islamic jihadis who blow themselves up (though in their case, to kill others). The pagan critic Celsus, whose work The True Word (c.175–180) attacked Christianity, was especially hostile to Christ’s resurrection, reflecting Hellenistic views of the soul (p.31). In particular, his antagonism towards Christians was based on their refusal to honour the gods, which he and other pagans felt could provoke their wrath against the Empire (pp.31-32).
No accommodation to polytheism
This destroys any idea that the Christians altered their doctrine of God to accommodate Hellenistic polytheism. Note the date – mid- to late second century – and still nothing to suggest that Christians engaged in syncretism with polytheism, more especially that they decided to include the worship of Jupiter, Minerva, etc., in their religious practice. Even agreeing to worship more than one god would not have worked, because the Romans insisted upon express worship of their pantheon. Immediately, we can see that polemical accusations of theological compromise are wide of the mark.
One of the problems with the accusation of compromise is that it ignores the syn-cretistic nature of Roman attitudes to religion. Provided people acknowledged the gods of Rome, they were quite free to import new cults and add these to their worship of the traditional gods – ‘by the time of earliest Christianity the Romans had adopted or allowed other deities as well that originated from various parts of the empire’ (p.45). It was the very fact that Christian insisted upon the exclusive worship of one God – rejecting others, including the Roman pantheon – that seemed so bizarre. Effective toleration was given to Jewish monotheism as an ethnic distinctive, but the Christians were a trans-ethnic body. So, the Christians continued to be defamed, excluded and often persecuted.
Were Christians traitors?
Hurtado also shows how these issues affected matters of identity. A Roman citizen (unless Jewish) was expected to worship Roman gods. This was much deeper than traditional associations of a Pole being considered Catholic, or an Englishman as Anglican, etc. Effectively, by refusing to worship Roman gods, the Christian had defected from his nation (pp.78-79). That is, he was essentially a traitor. Of course, this became more acute regarding the Emperor-cult (pp.81-82), since Christians refused to offer the requisite sacrifices. This issue of identity is still with us – for example, while Iran is willing to give limited toleration to its Armenian and Assyrian Christian minorities, it is unwilling to do so to ethnic Persians who convert to Christianity – not just because of Islamic apostasy laws, but because, apart from Zoroastrians, in popular estimation to be Persian is to be Muslim.
Denouncing child abuse
A more vital distinction between Hellenistic paganism and Christianity is found in their respective ethical codes. For example, in Roman society, it was morally acceptable to abandon and expose newborn babies, especially girls, who, if they did not die, were ‘rescued’ by slavers, often ending-up in brothels (p.144ff). Yet the Christians, as demonstrated in the Shepherd of Hermas and Justin Martyr, vehemently condemned this practice. Inevitably, we think of Christian attitudes to abortion today. Again, while wives were supposed to be chaste in Hellenistic society, the same obligation was not placed on men, who could have ‘sex with courtesans and prostitutes and also sex with boys, typically slave boys’ (p.157). Indeed, famous pagan writers such as Juvenal and Petronius et al., celebrated sex with minors (p.167ff). Christian writings as early as the Didache (c. 100) and the Epistle of Barnabas denounced this as ‘child (sexual) corruption’. It is obvious how counter-cultural the early Christians were.
Hurtado does not examine how the lives of the supposed Graeco-Roman gods reflected such immorality – e.g. Jupiter was famed for ‘seducing’ female relatives, as well as human women, but he also abducted the handsome young prince Ganymede to be more than just his cup-bearer. It follows that the Islamic polemical accusations noted earlier are wide of the mark, not only because of the number of gods worshipped in the Roman empire, but also because of their character, which was so contrary to the holy nature of Yahweh consistently proclaimed by the early Christians. Practically speaking, the demand for holy living, reflecting the holy character of the Christian God, was probably a bigger obstacle for many than the insistence upon monotheism, since it required such a radical revolution in personal conduct, abandoning the ‘pleasures of the flesh’, yet the Christians never compromised on ethics. Hurtado’s book is a welcome aid to Christian apologetics (though that is not the nature of the book), and also a reminder of how difficult a mission field Graeco-Roman society was; yet ultimately Christianity triumphed – an encouragement to us in post-Christian Britain.
