📚✝️ NYT Review: The Roman Empire made Christianity!
How the Roman Empire Made Christianity What It Is Today reviews Tim Whitmarsh’s ROME’S AGE OF REVOLUTION: Augustus, Empire, and the Making of Christianity.
Excerpts:
A very old story about the rise of Christianity goes like this: A rebel band of outsiders, who were hunted and killed by an empire in decline, eventually triumphed over their oppressors through the force of their message and the spectacle of their sacrifice. It’s a story of uneasy coexistence, proposed and carried forward by leaders in the faith eager to tell and retell the dramatic narratives of the early Christian martyrs, which served to inspire later believers.
Even in the last 75 years, that account has changed mainly in its nuances. One recent approach focuses on the Jewishness of Jesus and early Christianity — through the postwar discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls; the Second Vatican Council’s characterization of the first Christians as a “wild shoots” grafted onto the “well-cultivated olive tree” of Judaism, which was an effort to undo centuries of Christian antisemitism; and the focus of many evangelical Protestants on Israel as the once and future Holy Land.
But what if a movement that got started 1,500 miles from the Italian mainland was actually an outgrowth of the imperial system and not an aberration within it? That’s the question raised by Tim Whitmarsh in “Rome’s Age of Revolution,” a striking exploration of the spread, influence and character of early Christianity.
...
The argument is straightforward enough: After the death of Jesus Christ, a Christian revolution coincided with an imperial revolution set in motion by the first Roman emperor — the Caesar Augustus who is seen calling for a census early in Luke’s Gospel and whose successor’s government executed Jesus. “Christianity was a religion born into, and intimately interconnected with, the Augustan Roman Empire,” Whitmarsh, a professor of Greek at Cambridge, asserts early on.
Whitmarsh dismisses what he calls the “oil and water” account of Christianity as an exaggeration. “The idea that virtuous Christians were engaged in endless conflict with the Roman state makes for great narrative,” Whitmarsh declares, “but the reality is more banal: Most Christians were fully integrated into Roman society, and no more or less harassed than anyone else.” As for Jesus’ Jewishness, Whitmarsh doesn’t scant it, but he points out that the Judea of Jesus’ time was subject to the Roman Empire and its everyday life affected by new policies implemented by Augustus. As Augustus’ developments brought about “the Romanization of the Mediterranean basin,” he writes, Christians nimbly adapted.
Here, as in so many accounts of Christianity’s origins, the role of Paul is decisive, and, for Whitmarsh, Paul is a creature of the Roman Empire through and through. Unlike most Jews, Paul spoke Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern part of the empire, and he held imperial citizenship. His “universalist” effort to separate Christianity from Jewish law and practice — he insisted you didn’t need to be circumcised to take part in the “new covenant,” for instance — perfectly suited the empire’s ambition to expand. His use of personal letters to spread his message took advantage of the empire’s pioneering mail system, which operated along the dense “meshwork” of freshly laid bits of Roman infrastructure that eased travel. In other words, “Paul was a product of a new age, the age of the road,” Whitmarsh observes, and his accounts of his missionary journeys were basically “road trip” narratives.
...
Whitmarsh gives most of his attention to the Christian revolution, but he also notes the role that Christianity played in the other revolution he has in mind — the one begun by Augustus to reform and expand the Roman Empire. As the monotheism that Christians adopted from Judaism displaced Roman polytheism, he argues, it fit neatly with “the transition of the Mediterranean basin into a politically unified and culturally interconnected entity.” Whitmarsh sees religion and empire as being in a “paradoxical” relationship: The Messiah whom Christians worship is a “doppelgänger” for the emperor whom Roman citizens exalt and obey. This doubling echoes Hobsbawm, who saw Europe’s annus mirabilis of 1848 as a result of a “dual revolution” involving democracy in France and industry in Britain.
It’s all quite elegant and persuasive — and finally a little too persuasive, as Whitmarsh winds up overstating the case. He warns that it is “dangerously misleading” to assume that Christianity’s emergence in a thoroughly Romanized form was inevitable. But his argument tends toward making that very case — as if the Christians coolly and comprehensively surveyed the imperial situation, figured out what was needed for the faith to prosper in it, and set out to meet the need.
A tiny selection of only two comments:
Mikey, Los Angeles · The Romans crushed the Jewish revolts, destroyed the Second Temple, and forced most Jews into exile or slavery. Yet, in one of history's great ironies, the Roman Empire eventually embraced Christianity, a religion that originated within Judaism, and helped establish it as a universal faith. In the process, they transformed the Jews from the people whose religious beliefs gave rise to Christianity into villains, collectively blamed for the death of Jesus, who was himself Jewish. This distortion helped lay the foundations for centuries of European antisemitism, during which Jews were persecuted as enemies of a religion whose very foundations were Jewish.
Islam emerged centuries later, acknowledging Judaism and Christianity as earlier monotheistic religions while generally assigning their followers a subordinate religious and legal status under Muslim rule.
The historical irony is extraordinary: Judaism gave rise to two universal religions, yet Jews were subsequently marginalized, demonized, and persecuted by societies shaped by those very religions.
What is particularly troubling is that many contemporary progressives, seemingly unaware of or indifferent to this history, continue to perpetuate antisemitic narratives without recognizing their historical roots.
joel bergsman, Southern Maryland · Mostly yes but a little bit no. See “The Swerve” by Stephen Greenblatt. A super read, btw.