The Triumph of Christianity (11 page)

Conclusion

T
HE INITIAL SUCCESS OF
Christianity seems to have been based primarily on conversions among the Diasporan Jews. Our first knowledge of Christians in Rome comes from disorders reported within the Jewish community over “Chrestus.” Paul was sent to Damascus to punish Jews for accepting Christ. The many other Christian congregations that preceded Paul’s missions were most certainly Jewish since no exception had yet been made for the conversion of pagans without their becoming Jews too. No doubt Gentiles began to swell the ranks of converts as Paul spread the word about the new policy: the “God-fearers” probably quickly switched en masse from the synagogues to the churches. But since Paul continued to base his efforts within the Diasporan communities, Jewish Christians must have continued to dominate the church. This is consistent with my previous study in which I found strong statistical evidence that Greco-Roman cities with a significant Diasporan community had Christian congregations far sooner than did other cities. All nine of the larger Greco-Roman cities with Diasporan communities had a Christian congregation by the end of the first century. Only four of the twenty-two equally large Greco-Roman cities without such a community had a church that early; a third of them still lacked a church by 180.
⁴⁴

Eventually, of course, the rise of Christianity was accomplished by the mission to the Gentiles. This was greatly facilitated by the many aspects of the Christ story that made it familiar and convincing to pagans: the star in the East, the Virgin Birth, the visit by the Magi, the miracles, the blood sacrifice of the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension.

Chapter Five
Christianity and Privilege

T
RADITION HAS IT THAT
C
HRISTIANITY
recruited most of its initial supporters from among the very poorest and most miserable groups in the ancient world. Since early times, many ascetic Christians have claimed that poverty was one of the chief virtues of the “primitive” church, and by the nineteenth century this view was ratified by the radical Left as well. Karl Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) put it thus: “The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblance with the modern working-class movement. Like the latter, Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome.”
¹
Working from this assumption, Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), the German editor of Marx’s works, built the case that Jesus may have been one of the first socialists and that the early Christians briefly achieved true communism.
²

Although many Bible scholars rejected Kautsky’s claims, the view that Christianity originated in lower-class bitterness and protest remained the received wisdom all across the theological spectrum. As Yale’s Erwin Goodenough (1893–1965) summed up in a widely adopted college textbook: “Still more obvious an indication of the undesirability of Christianity in Roman eyes was the fact that its converts were drawn in an overwhelming majority from the lowest classes of society. Then as now the governing classes were apprehensive of a movement which brought into a closely knit and secret organization the servants and slaves of society.”
³

This view was further elaborated by the German sociologist Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) who claimed that
all
religious movements are the work of the “lower classes.”
⁴
Troeltsch was echoed by the American Protestant theologian-turned-sociologist H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962), who wrote in an extremely influential book that a new religious movement is always “the child of an outcast minority, taking its rise in the religious revolts of the poor.”
⁵
Subsequently, the most popular explanation of why people initiate new religious movements came to be known as
deprivation theory,
which proposes that people adopt supernatural solutions to their material misery when direct action fails or is obviously impossible.
⁶

Recently, it has become apparent that deprivation theory fails to fit most, if not all, of the well-documented cases of new religious movements—whether Buddhism in the sixth century
BCE
⁷
or the New Age Movement
⁸
in the twenty-first century
CE
. Contrary to prevailing sociological dogmas,
religious movements typically are launched by the privileged classes
. Why this occurs will be examined later in this chapter. First comes a detailed refutation of the claim that early Christianity was a lower-class movement, which I will replace with the recognition that, from the very beginning, Christianity was especially attractive to people of privilege—Jesus himself may have come from wealth or at least from a comfortable background.

Privileged Christians

A
LL DISCUSSIONS OF THE
social standing of the first Christians would seem to have been settled by Paul’s “irrefutable” proof text, when he noted of his followers that “not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth” (1 Cor. 1:26).

It is amazing how many generations of sophisticated people failed to see a very obvious implication of this verse. Finally, in 1960, the Australian scholar E. A. Judge
⁹
began an illustrious career by pointing out that Paul did not say “
none
of you were powerful,
none
of you were of noble birth.” Instead, Paul said “not many” were powerful or of noble birth, which means that some were! Given what a miniscule fraction of persons in the Roman Empire were of noble birth, it is quite remarkable that
any
of the tiny group of early Christians were of the nobility. This raises the possibility that like the many other religious movements, Christianity also began as a movement of the privileged. In fact, several noted historians had expressed that view long before Judge pointed out the obvious. The immensely influential German historian Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) remarked on the special appeal Christianity held for upper class women,
¹⁰
and the renowned Scottish classicist W. M. Ramsay (1851–1939) claimed that Christianity “spread at first among the educated more rapidly than among the uneducated; nowhere had it a stronger hold... than in the household and at the court of the emperor.”
¹¹
However, aside from a few specialists, these dissenting views have had little impact on the conventional wisdom that the early Christians were recruited mostly from the lower ranks of society. So, let us look more closely at the likely social position of Jesus, his disciples, Paul, and the early generations of Christians.

Many Bible scholars have been troubled by 2 Corinthians 8:9 wherein Paul remarks “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” Could this be true? Was Jesus once a rich man? Some have used this verse to “prove” that Paul knew nothing about the life of Jesus
¹²
—an obviously absurd claim. Most others have interpreted it metaphorically—claiming that the reference is to spiritual riches. But this interpretation is greatly compromised by the fact that the verse occurs within a context wherein Paul is asking the Corinthians to contribute money, not prayers, for the poor in Jerusalem. He also cites the example of the Macedonians as setting a standard for giving money and assures the Corinthians that God’s blessings will accrue to generous givers. To cite the example of Jesus in this context strongly suggests that Paul was talking about Jesus having given up material, not spiritual, riches. A careful examination of Jesus’s biography, as well as the examples favored by Jesus in his teachings, suggests Paul may have known what he was talking about.

As noted in chapter 3, Jesus probably was not a carpenter, unless it was in keeping with the traditional Jewish practice that a rabbi always learned a trade to fall back on, since it seems extremely likely that Jesus was a well-educated rabbi. It appears that his parents “occupied a prominent place in the community” and were sufficiently well-off “to have had property in Capernaum as well as Nazareth.”
¹³
They also were able to go to Jerusalem every year for Passover (Luke 2:41), something most families could not afford.
¹⁴

In addition, among the immense number of analogies and metaphors used by Jesus in the Gospels, only three times
¹⁵
did he make any references to “building” or “construction,” and these are so vague as to indicate nothing about his knowledge of carpentry. One surely need not be a carpenter to know it is better to build a foundation on rock than on sand (Luke 6:46–49). On the other hand, Jesus constantly used examples involving wealth: land ownership, investment, borrowing, having servants and tenants, inheritance, and the like. It has been noted that the “parable of the talents shows familiarity with banking practices.”
¹⁶
These rhetorical tendencies may not reflect that Jesus was a son of privilege, but they surely do suggest a privileged audience. As the respected George Wesley Buchanan noted, many of Jesus’s images and parables “would be pointless if told to people who had not enough wealth to entertain guests, hire servants, be generous with contributions, etc. The audiences, at least, were predominantly wealthy.... [A] teacher from the lower classes would have been less likely to have found his most attentive listeners among the upper classes than a teacher who, himself, had been reared in upper class conditions.”
¹⁷
And, in fact, the Gospels are filled with clues that not only did Jesus address a privileged audience, but that he tended to draw his supporters from among them.

Consider the twelve apostles or disciples. It is widely assumed that they were all men of very humble origins and accomplishments. But is it true? We know almost nothing about some of them other than their names. But what the Gospels tell of others is inconsistent with their humble images. For example, when James and John abandoned their fishing boat to follow Jesus, “they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants” (Mark 1:20). It is not surprising that they employed servants; fishing was quite profitable and required a substantial investment. Since, according to Luke 5:10, Peter (Simon) and Andrew were partners of James and John, it can be assumed they too were somewhat affluent. In fact, it is quite possible that Peter owned two houses, one in Bethsaida and another in Capernaum. Mark’s mother owned a house in Jerusalem that was sufficiently large to serve as a house church (Acts 12:12). Moreover, Andrew had previously had the leisure to be a disciple of John the Baptist. And then there was Matthew (or Levi) the tax collector. Tax collectors were hated; but they were powerful and affluent.

Among the people mentioned in the Gospels as involved with Jesus, a number can be identified as wealthy and even upper-class people. Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector and very rich. He was honored to have Jesus as his guest (Luke 19:1–10). Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, came to Jesus seeking help for his daughter (Luke 8:40–56). Joseph of Arimathea was an early convert and very wealthy (Matt. 27:57). Joanna, the wife of Chuza who was steward of Herod Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee, also was an early convert and a generous contributor to the support of Jesus and his disciples (Luke 8:3). Susanna was another wealthy woman who helped finance Jesus (Luke 8:3).

In Matthew 26:6–11, we learn that while Jesus was seated for dinner at the home of a leading Pharisee (see Luke 7:36) “a woman came up to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive ointment, and she poured it on his head” (v. 7). When his disciples become indignant because it could “have been sold for a large sum, and given to the poor” (v. 9), Jesus responds to them, “Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a beautiful thing to me. For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me” (vv. 10–11). It should be noted that the value of the ointment was approximately equal to a year’s wages for the average worker at that time.
¹⁸

To quote Buchanan once again, “the majority of Jesus’ teachings were directed toward the upper economic class with whom Jesus associated... [which] support[s] the possibility that Jesus may also have been reared in an upper class of society.”
¹⁹

Many will object that Jesus often advised that wealth was a barrier to salvation and that one should give one’s wealth to the poor. But rather than interpreting this as a “poor man’s” complaint against the rich, it would seem at least as plausible that these were the statements of someone in a position to say, “Do as I have done.”

We come now to Paul and to the post-Crucifixion generation of Christians. Despite continuing and militant efforts to maintain that Paul was a pretentious nobody, truly a tentmaker,
²⁰
it is certain that Paul was, as A. D. Nock put it, from a family “of wealth and standing.”
²¹
He was born a Roman citizen when that was a very uncommon and meaningful badge of distinction in the East. Not only he, but his father, was a Pharisee (Acts 23:6). Paul left his home in the Greek city of Tarsus and went to Jerusalem in order to study under the famous Rabbi Gamaliel and then rapidly became so prominent that he was appointed to impose punishment on Jews who had taken up Christianity. His training as a tentmaker was in keeping with the long-standing tradition that every rabbi learn a trade “by which he could live.”
²²
That Paul later actually pursued this trade from time to time seems to have been a bit of an affectation. As C. H. Dodd (1884–1973) put it, “A man born to manual labour does not speak self-consciously of ‘labouring with my own hands.’ ”
²³
In addition, Paul did not preach to the masses, but “to those who, like himself, spoke and read Greek and knew their Septuagint; and he sought to interpret the mystery of God’s purposes, for the relative few who could comprehend such concepts.... He moved easily among the upper reaches of provincial society.”
²⁴

It should be no surprise, therefore, that Paul attracted many privileged followers, especially women. According to Gillian Cloke, “What is already evident is that women of the comfortably off and merchant classes of the empire were well-attested in the Christian movement from early on in its spread.... [Early Christianity] had substantial purchase amongst the classes of those capable of being patronesses to the apostles and their successors.”
²⁵
One of these was Lydia, a wealthy dealer in purple cloth, who was baptized by Paul—along with her family and servants—and who subsequently conducted the congregation in Philippi from her house. Several times she sent funds to Paul to support his mission in Thessalonica (Phil. 4:16). To a considerable extent, “Christianity was a movement sponsored by local patrons to their social dependents.”
²⁶
In fact, when Paul arrived in a new city, he usually stayed in a wealthy household and conducted his mission from there.
²⁷
E. A. Judge identified forty persons who sponsored Paul and, not surprisingly, all were “persons of substance, members of a cultivated social elite.”
²⁸
Erastus, the city treasurer in Corinth, assisted Paul and may well have been one of his hosts. Another was Gaius who also had “a house ample enough not only to put up Paul, but also to accommodate all the Christian groups in Corinth meeting together.... The same is true of Crispus,” who not only had “high prestige in the Jewish community” but probably was “well to do.”
²⁹
In addition, there is Theophilus to whom both Luke and Acts are dedicated and who most likely was a Roman official
³⁰
who probably subsidized Paul—perhaps during his long period of house arrest in Rome.