The Triumph of Christianity (13 page)

It seems inescapable that early Christianity was not an exception to the rule that religious innovation is primarily the work of the privileged. This recognition has caused considerable anxiety among many recent historians of the early church. Why, they ask almost incredulously, would privileged people feel driven to form and embrace a new religious movement? This has led to many confused and rigid discussions of various social scientific notions such as status inconsistency and cognitive dissonance.
⁶²
But the reason the privileged turn to religion is neither so complex nor so convoluted.

Privilege and Religious Innovation

T
O SET THE STAGE,
consider that Buddha was a prince, that fifty-five of his first sixty converts were from the nobility, and the other five might have been nobles too (we simply don’t know their backgrounds).
⁶³
For another major example, after many years of effort and only two converts, Zoroaster built a successful movement after converting the king, queen, and then the court of a nearby kingdom. The early Taoists as well as the Confucianists were recruited from among the Chinese elite, and, of course, Moses was a prince. Or consider two small sects that appeared in ancient Greece: the Orphics and the Pythagoreans. According to Plato, both movements were based on the upper classes: their priests “come to the doors of the rich... and offer them a bundle of books.”
⁶⁴

Nor is it true that most, let alone all, of the Christian sect movements arose from the lower classes. With the possible exception of some Anabaptist Movements, the great Christian religious movements that occurred through the centuries were very obviously based on persons of considerable wealth and power: on the nobility, the clergy, and the well-to-do urbanites.
⁶⁵
For example, the Cathars enrolled a very high proportion of nobility
⁶⁶
and so did the early Waldensians.
⁶⁷
Luther’s Reformation was not supported by the poor, but by princes, merchants, professors, and university students (see chapter 18). At the outbreak of the first French War of Religion in 1562, it is estimated that 50 percent of the French nobility had embraced Calvinism,
⁶⁸
but very few peasants or urban poor had done so.
⁶⁹
Indeed, of 482 medieval ascetic Roman Catholic saints, three-fourths were from the nobility—22 percent of them from royalty.
⁷⁰

Many sociologists continue to cite the Methodists as a classic proletarian movement,
⁷¹
seemingly ignorant of the fact that John Wesley and his colleagues did not depart from the Church of England and found Methodism because they were lower-class dissidents seeking a more comforting faith. They were themselves young men of privilege who began to assert their preference for a higher intensity faith while at Oxford. By the same token, the prophets of the Old Testament all belonged “to the landowning nobility”
⁷²
and, contrary to most sociologists, so did most members of the Jewish sect known as the Essenes.
⁷³
If they thrive, nearly all religious movements attract many lower class adherents—as, of course, the Methodists did. But like the Methodists, these movements originate in the religious concerns of the privileged, not in lower class dissatisfaction.

Clearly, then, based on history the correct generalization ought to be that religious movements are not “revolts of the poor,” but are spiritual ventures of the privileged. But why?

Insufficiencies and Opportunities of Privilege

H
AVING NEVER BEEN RICH,
let alone born into privilege, most scholars share with the vast majority of persons many unfounded illusions about what it is like to be at the top of the social pyramid. Although popular rhetoric abounds in adages minimizing the importance of wealth and status, most people don’t really mean it and their perceptions are clouded by envy as well as by rampant materialism. Oh, to be born a Rockefeller! That Laurence Rockefeller played an active role in founding and funding various New Age groups such as Esalen seems mystifying.
⁷⁴
But the fact is that wealth and power do not satisfy all human desires. Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) wrote at length about the need for self-actualization,
⁷⁵
and the Nobel laureate economist Robert William Fogel linked this to privilege: “throughout history... freed of the need to work in order to satisfy their material needs, [the rich] have sought self-realization.”
⁷⁶

In earlier times, the route to self-realization quite obviously was a spiritual journey; hence the remarkable propensity of the privileged to found or join religious movements. In modern times this quest has often led the privileged to leftist politics, as in the case of late-nineteenth-century participants in the British Fabian Society or in the instance of the many sons and daughters of privilege who sustained American radical movements during the 1960s.
⁷⁷
In both cases, however, for many, the worldly, materialist quest proved unsatisfactory, whereupon substantial numbers dropped out and turned to religious movements. Many ’60s radicals joined intense religious groups,
⁷⁸
and many Fabians became Spiritualists.
⁷⁹
Indeed, a large proportion of Muslim terrorists who have attacked the West have come from highly privileged backgrounds. What this reflects is that while worldly Utopias inevitably fail to deliver,
⁸⁰
spiritual salvation does not. Buddha could not find satisfactory purpose and meaning when living in a palace; he found it under a Banyan tree.

Clearly it is necessary to add a fundamental extension to deprivation theory as it originally was formulated. It is not merely that people will adopt supernatural solutions to their thwarted material desires, but that people will pursue or initiate supernatural solutions to their thwarted existential and moral desires—a situation to which the privileged are especially prone, since they are not distracted by immediate material needs.
⁸¹

It also must be recognized that the privileged are in a position to act on their spiritual dissatisfactions and desires in a way that the poor are not: they have visibility, influence, experience, and means. That the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel were both born into wealth and the priesthood gave them initial credibility. As he founded the Waldensians, Waldo, a rich merchant of Lyon, had the funds to commission a French translation of the Gospels and the experience needed to administer an ascetic movement that attracted many other rich followers. John Wycliff launched the Lollard movement without stirring from his rooms at Oxford; it was enough that he published an English translation of the Bible and proposed that the church pursue “apostolic poverty.” Merchants and members of the nobility took it from there.
⁸²
Jan Hus was the personal chaplain of the Queen of Bohemia and thus able to recruit followers from the nobility on a face-to-face basis. Martin Luther was a professor and so prominent in church affairs that he was sent to Rome to make appeals on behalf of the Augustinian Vicar-General. Ulrich Zwingli’s parents bought him a parish. During his youth in Noyon, John Calvin enjoyed the sponsorship of the local nobleman, and while a student in Paris he was assigned the income from several ecclesiastical posts.
⁸³
The University of Paris not only trained Calvin as a theologian, but perfected the rhetorical skills that enabled him to achieve political power in Geneva from whence he mounted religious campaigns in many parts of Europe. No matter how otherworldly their outlook, to succeed, religious movements must deal effectively with complex worldly affairs.

Finally, growing up in privilege often generates the conviction that one has the superior wisdom needed to transform the world and the right, perhaps even the duty, to do so.

Conclusion

K
ARL
M
ARX WAS MERELY
reflecting the conventional wisdom of the day when he wrote that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature... the opium of the people.”
⁸⁴
But he might better have said that “religion often is the opium of the dissatisfied upper classes, the sigh of wealthy creatures depressed by materialism.” Of course, given his relentless intellectual as well as personal materialism, Marx couldn’t conceive of such a thing. Neither can far too many social scientists. Fortunately, most New Testament historians no longer believe that the early Christians were a motley crew of slaves and the downtrodden. Had that really been the case, the rise of Christianity would most certainly have required miracles.

Chapter Six
Misery and Mercy

E
VEN IF IT IS THE
affluent who usually initiate new religions, it is obvious that rich and poor alike often turn to Christianity in response to the widespread need to be comforted for the miseries of life—not merely poverty, but disease, the deaths of loved ones, and all the other misfortunes and disappointments humans face. The central idea is, of course, that Christian faith offers a sedative for suffering in this life by promising that we will be fully compensated in the next, when “many that are first will be last, and the last first” (Matt. 19:30). Atheists like to ridicule this aspect of faith as “pie in the sky.”
¹

What is almost always missed is that Christianity often puts the pie on the table! It makes life better here and now. Not merely in psychological ways, as faith in an attractive afterlife can do, but in terms of concrete, worldly benefits. Consider that a study
²
based on ancient tombstones has established that early Christians outlived their pagan neighbors! What that demonstrates is that Christians enjoyed a superior quality of life. They did so because of their commitment to what was an unusual virtue in ancient times: “the quality of mercy,” as Portia put it in
The Merchant of Venice,
played a major role in the growth of early Christianity.

Urban Misery

J
ESUS’S MINISTRY WAS MAINLY
in the rural areas of Galilee, but his disciples soon transformed the Jesus Movement into an urban phenomenon.
³
Not only was the church headquartered in Jerusalem, but the earliest congregations were in the larger cities.
⁴
Of course, what were “larger” cities in those days were very small by today’s standards. Even so, they were far more crowded, crime-infested, filthy, disease-ridden, and miserable than are the worst cities in the world today.

Size and Density

Ancient history has long suffered from very exaggerated numerical claims offered in the original sources.
⁵
Many armies of perhaps ten thousand were said to number in the hundreds of thousands or even as many as a million.
⁶
Similar exaggerations distort city sizes. For example, Josephus reported that in the first century
CE
there were more than 204 villages in Galilee, and that the smallest of these had a population of fifteen thousand.
⁷
In fact, Sepphoris, the largest
city
in Galilee probably did not have as many as five thousand residents, and most villages probably had fewer than one hundred. Consider that in this era Jerusalem’s population probably exceeded twenty-five thousand only when it was crowded with refugees fleeing Roman armies—and even then it is unlikely to have contained more than forty or fifty thousand people, despite ancient claims that more than a million Jews were slaughtered when Jerusalem fell to Titus in 70
CE
.
⁸

Ancient cities had small populations! When Paul visited, Corinth probably had fifty thousand residents, Thessalonica thirty-five thousand, and Athens seventy-five thousand. Even Rome, then the largest city in the world (Loyang, China, was second), probably only had a population of about 450,000,
⁹
although many historians still cling to outdated figures in excess of a million.
¹⁰
But despite having small populations, ancient cities were remarkably crowded because they covered such small areas. Rome probably suffered from the greatest density. John Stambaugh
¹¹
estimates it to have had 302 people per acre (compared with 122 in modern Calcutta and 100 in Manhattan). I have estimated the density of Antioch as 195 per acre.
¹²
Most other “major” cities of the day had densities comparable to Antioch. To get some feel for what such density was like, imagine yourself living on a popular beach in mid-summer.

To squeeze everyone in, it was necessary to jam all the buildings together and build them higher than was safe. Even so, most streets were so narrow that we would consider them to be mere footpaths. Although Roman law required that all streets be at least 9.5 feet wide, many were narrower.
¹³
In fact, the famous roads leading out of Rome such as the
Via Appia
or the
Via Latina,
were only fifteen to twenty feet wide! The main thoroughfare of Antioch was celebrated throughout the classical world for its spaciousness—it was only thirty feet wide
¹⁴
(streets in modern residential areas usually are forty feet wide). In most parts of ancient cities, streets were so narrow that if people leaned out of their windows they could chat with someone living across the street without having to raise their voices. Such crowding, combined with the fact that everything except a few temples and palaces was constructed of wood (covered with stucco), and that all heating and cooking was done over open braziers, explains why “dread of fire was an obsession among rich and poor alike.”
¹⁵

There was a nearly equal obsession with the collapse of buildings. In Rome it was illegal to construct a building higher than sixty-five feet. Nevertheless, buildings fell down all the time. Rome “was constantly filled with the noise of buildings collapsing or being torn down to prevent it; and the tenants of an
insula
[tenement] lived in constant expectation of its coming down on their heads.”
¹⁶
The tenements collapsed because they were too lightly built
¹⁷
and because the less desirable upper floors (there being no elevators) housed the poor, who so subdivided them that the upper floors became heavier than the lower floors and beyond what the beams and foundations could carry.

Housing

Not only were the buildings squeezed together; inside them people were crowded into tiny cubicles.
¹⁸
Private houses were rare; in Rome there was “only one private house for every 26 blocks of apartments.”
¹⁹
Tenements lacked both furnaces and fireplaces. As noted, cooking was done over wood or charcoal braziers, which also were the only source of heat; since everyone lacked chimneys (it was still many centuries before they were invented), the rooms were always smoky in winter. Because windows could only be “closed” by “hanging cloths or skins,”
²⁰
the tenements were sufficiently drafty to prevent frequent asphyxiation. But, of course, the drafts increased the danger of rapidly spreading fires. Given these living conditions, people tended to live their lives in public places, and the “home” of the average person “must have served only as a place to sleep and to store possessions.”
²¹

Filth

Soap had not yet been invented. Because water had to be carried home in jugs from public fountains, there could have been little water for scrubbing floors or washing clothes. Nor could there have been much for bathing—although many people could go to the public baths. But even at the baths the water was quite contaminated because, whether it came to a city by way of an aqueduct or from local wells, all the larger Greco-Roman cities had to store water in cisterns, awaiting use. And “untreated water[,]... when left stagnant, encourages the growth of algae and other organisms, rendering the water malodorous, unpalatable, and after a time, undrinkable.”
²²
No wonder Pliny (23–79
CE
) advised that “all water is the better for being boiled.”
²³

One thing is certain: when human density is high, urgent problems of sanitation arise. Granted that an underground sewer carried water from the major baths of Rome through public latrines next door and on out of the city (to be dumped untreated into the Tiber River which could, therefore, be smelled for many miles). But few people jogged off to public latrines each time nature called. Like all cities until very modern times, people used chamber pots and pit latrines—and for lack of open spaces most Greco-Roman cities were entirely dependent on pots.
²⁴
Of course pots needed to be emptied, and often the only option was to dump them in the open ditches running down streets that served as sewers. Too often the pots were emptied out of upper-story windows at night. As the great French historian Jerome Carcopino (1881–1970) described it:

There were other poor devils who found their stairs too steep and the road to the dung pits too long, and to save themselves further trouble would empty the contents of their chamber pots from the heights above the streets. So much the worse for the passer-by who happened to intercept the unwelcome gift! Fouled and sometimes even injured, as in Juvenal’s satire, he had no redress save to lodge a complaint against the unknown assailant; many passages in the
Digest
indicate that Roman jurists did not disdain to take cognisance of this offense.
²⁵

Given limited water and means of sanitation and the incredible density of humans and animals (narrow as they were, the streets were constantly traversed by horses, donkeys, and oxen, as well as by flocks on their way to be butchered, all making their own contributions to the mess), it must have been a remarkably filthy existence. The tenement cubicles were smoky, dark, often damp, and always dirty. The smell of sweat, urine, feces, and decay permeated everything. Outside: mud, open sewers, manure, and crowds. In fact, human corpses—adult as well as newborns—were sometimes just pushed into an open sewer.
²⁶
And even if the wealthiest households could provide ample space and personal cleanliness, the rich could not prevent the stench of general filth from penetrating their homes—no wonder everyone was so fond of incense. Worse yet, flies, mosquitoes, and other insects flourish where there is stagnant water and filth—and like stinks, insects are very democratic.

Crime and Disorder

Amid all the concern that modern cities lack community, being filled with newcomers and strangers, it is forgotten that ancient cities were even more so. Had that not been true, ancient cities would quickly have become empty ruins. A constant and substantial influx of newcomers was required to offset the extremely high mortality rates of ancient cities.
²⁷
Consequently, ancient cities had a quite high proportion of residents who were very
recent
newcomers, and Greco-Roman cities were therefore communities of strangers. Wherever such conditions prevail, crime abounds since people are attached to the moral order primarily by their ties to others. Consequently, Greco-Roman cities were far more crime-ridden than are the worst of modern cities. As Carcopino described Rome:

Night fell over the city like the shadow of great danger, diffused, sinister, menacing. Everyone fled to his home, shut himself in, and barricaded the entrance. The shops fell silent, safety chains were drawn behind the leaves of the doors.... If the rich had to sally forth, they were accompanied by slaves who carried torches to light and protect them on their way.... Juvenal sighs that to go out to supper without having made your will was to expose yourself to reproach for carelessness.... [W]e need only to turn to the leaves of the
Digest
[to discover the extent to which criminals] abounded in the city.
²⁸

More specifically, “most criminals in Rome followed traditional pursuits, and the city was plagued with housebreakers, pickpockets, petty thieves, and muggers.”
²⁹
There also were very high levels of interpersonal violence
³⁰
—there even were professional murderers for hire.
³¹

In addition to crime, the constant influx of strangers into Greco-Roman cities caused a great deal of disorder, including riots—some involving ethnic conflicts, some involving political disputes.
³²
Riots not only cost many lives and ruined immense amounts of property (major fires often resulted), but the political riots aroused such extreme anxiety among the ruling elite that secret police proliferated, generating a huge network of informants. Subsequently, “no class, high or low, could escape their prying.... [T]hey [also] were commissioned to carry out political assassinations.”
³³
All this added to the miseries of everyday life.

Disease

The constant companion of filth, insects, and crowding is disease. Consequently, people were far more likely to die during the summer than when the chill of winter mitigated the effects of filth and insects.
³⁴
Even so, illness and physical afflictions probably were dominant features of daily life. A recent analysis of decayed human fecal remains in an ancient Jerusalem cesspool found an abundance of tapeworm and whipworm eggs, indicating that almost everyone had them.
³⁵
Although being infected with one or both of these parasites is not fatal, both can cause anemia and make victims more vulnerable to other illnesses. Given their living conditions and lack of medications, the majority of persons living in Greco-Roman cities must have suffered from chronic health problems that caused them pain and some degree of disability, and of which many would soon die. Compared with modern cities, sickness was highly visible: “Swollen eyes, skin rashes and lost limbs are mentioned over and over again in the sources as part of the urban scene.”
³⁶
Roger Bagnall reported that in this age before photography and finger-printing, written documents offered descriptive information to help identify the parties, and these very often relied on “their distinctive disfigurements, mostly scars.”
³⁷
Bagnall cited a fourth-century papyrus that lists a number of persons owing debts,
all
of whom were scarred.
³⁸
Finally, as will be discussed in chapter 7, women were especially susceptible to health problems due to childbirth and to widespread abortion by means of unsanitary and crude methods.