Why Did Christianity Spread in the Ancient World?

by James Hankins

In the numerous interviews and podcasts I’ve done about The Golden Thread since the publication of vol. 1 last August, I’ve often been asked to explain how and why Christianity spread in the ancient world. I’m not sure why this subject comes up so often, unless my interviewers are trying to gauge just how Christian I am. I suspect some of them want to know whether I’m capable of a giving a secular, causal account in terms of socio-economic factors acting on fringe populations in the ancient world—an explanation that will leave interviewers and listeners undisturbed in their agnosticism. Maybe I’ll try to explain the appeal of the Christian message in religious terms or even reach up to heaven to invoke the plan of Divine Providence, like that nun or Sunday-school teacher they half-remember from their early adolescence. They will then be free to dismiss me as a religious crank, addicted to the foolishness of Christ, in the Apostle Paul’s phrase.

Answering questions about the spread of Christianity is more of a problem for Christian historians than may at first appear. The problem was raised at a more profound level many years ago by the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in an early essay entitled “Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?” MacIntyre argued that a religion like Christianity isn’t able to be understood from a detached, skeptical, ‘scientific’ point of view. The way a skeptic frames his question excludes the “form of life” of the religious person, and no amount of open-mindedness will succeed in helping him understand the “insider” perspective of the religious person. He’s just not going to “get” Christianity unless he has some personal experiences of sin, grace, redemption, and revelation. This in my view is one reason for the natural affinity of Christianity and Platonism, as Augustine discovered. Unless you believe in the ontological priority of soul to body, mind to matter, the only account you can give of the life of the spirit is going to be reductive. It will end up as an exposé of delusion and tribal orthodoxies.

In writing The Golden Thread I wanted to write in such a way as not to undermine religious belief, which I regard as necessary to a healthy polity. To do this I set aside the reflexive skepticism of professional historians, a habit of mind imposed by their professional training over the last century. (I note that I was given the same kind of training as a graduate student at Columbia half-century ago.) Ancient historians today are always trying to get at “the facts” via a systematic review of the scant surviving evidence and by arguing critically from that evidence. Since a “fact” is a description of a state of affairs upon which all competent observers can agree, the unchallengeable facts of history turn out to be quite few, barely enough to weave into a coherent, reliable narrative. That’s one reason why the narratives of ‘critical’ historians so often die the death of a thousand qualifications. A sizeable number, perhaps a majority, regard narrative itself as an unscientific form of historical writing, following in the footsteps of Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973). Modern historians have a built-in bias towards skepticism, which in part accounts for the profession’s addiction to revisionist accounts.

In The Golden Thread I escaped this dilemma, at least to my own satisfaction, by writing a history based on what John Lukacs called “the remembered past,” which he opposed to “the reported past,” the past as preserved in coeval documents. That’s why I used the subtitle: A History of the Western Tradition rather than A History of Civilization in the West. We can’t really write history wie es eigentlich gewesen, as it actually happened, in the famous phrase of the positivist historian Leopold von Ranke. We can only tell the story of the past as it has existed in the narratives, representations, and cultural practices that have lived on in our tradition. These are the stories that have nourished our collective sense of ourselves as Westerners, the stories we have told and retold to make sense of our actions in the present. They are what constitute our tradition: we become the stories we tell ourselves. In this sense history is, like religion, a “form of life” that can’t easily be understood from “outside.” That is why it is so important to read original sources alongside historical narratives. It’s not just to see “what history is based on,” as critical historians say, but to understand the way our ancestors experienced the past.

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Circling back now to the question of Christianity’s rise in the Roman empire, I think it’s possible to give a plausible answer to this question that can, as least in part, satisfy a curious skeptical mind—although for a Christian it will be far from the whole story. To explain the spread and triumph of Christianity in the ancient world before Constantine, I think two eras are critical. The first was the decades around the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in ad 70. The second came in the late third century. In The Golden Thread I think I did a pretty decent job (with help from Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome) in explaining how the Christian churches benefited from the Third Century Crisis, especially during what Eusebius called “the Little Peace of the Church.”

I’m less satisfied with my account of the early spread of Christianity in the first century, where I didn’t explicitly confront the question of causation. To get at the interplay of events and belief, I think it helps to try to imagine ourselves in the position of Jews after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple. The Temple had been the spiritual and physical heart of Judaism for six centuries, after the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians.

During the time of Christ and in the decades following his death, Jews who tried to be faithful to their traditions had basically five options, called “philosophies” by the great historian of that era, Josephus. There were the Sadducees, descendants of the priestly establishment under the Jewish Hasmonean monarchs. They were conservatives, satisfied with received practices of the Temple, whose guardians they were. Then there were the Pharisees, reformers who were appalled at what had happened to Judaism in recent centuries and were determined to restore the ancient covenants with God. They did this by teaching and interpreting the Torah in synagogues, calling Jews back to the purity of their ancient law. The Essenes were also purists, but they held that ‘the world’ of modern-day Judaea was too corrupt to be brought back to ancient ways, and instead built intentional communities—in some ways like the early Christian churches—designed to keep themselves unspotted from the world.

These three groups were all backward-looking in one way or another. The other two ‘philosophies’ were forward-looking. The Zealots were revolutionaries who wanted to rebel against the Romans and reject the authority of Jews who were collaborating with them. Last of all were the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, who proclaimed himself to be the Messiah, the anointed (hochristos) successor of David, to whom God had promised an eternal kingdom. Jesus’ teaching did not challenge earthly powers, and it rejected the violence of the Zealots. Instead, he proclaimed a future kingdom ‘not of this world.’It was, in other words, a prophetic and eschatological teaching. If people followed his difficult teaching, God would reward the Jews by bringing in the true Kingdom of God, with Christ as its monarch.

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Jesus himself during his earthly ministry (as recorded later by the Evangelists) constantly made connections between his own life and that of the Messiah who had been foretold in the Prophets. After his resurrection, on the road to Emmaus, the Risen Christ explained to his disciples, still blind to his identity, how his death and Resurrection had fulfilled Scripture.

Then he said unto them, ‘O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: Ought not Christ (ton Christon) to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?’ And beginning at Moses [i.e., the Torah] and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. (Luke 24:25-27, KJV).

Now imagine you are a Jew who has survived the Jewish War of 66-70 AD. The Temple has been razed to the ground. Jews are prohibited by law from entering Jerusalem. The Romans have turned Jerusalem into a Roman fort known as Aelia Capitolina. It will not recover its religious identity until the emperor Constantine refounds it three centuries later. The synagogues of Judaea are being wiped out and Jews are being ethnically cleansed from the Land of Promise. The Romans outlaw the practice of circumcision, to them a form of genital mutilation. The inhabitants of Judaea are fleeing to Jewish enclaves in the Greek-speaking world.

In these circumstances, which of the five ‘philosophies’ is going to appeal to you? The backward-looking ones espoused by the Sadducees, Essenes, and the Pharisees? The Sadducees no longer had a temple to serve; the temple possessions that supported them as a class were now gone. The Pharisees had promised that a return to ancient Jewish tradition would save Israel, but it hadn’t. The Essene communities were scattered or under siege. Among the two forward-looking ‘philosophies,’ the Zealots had been utterly discredited.

Only the words of Jesus Christ, lovingly preserved and elaborated upon in the early Christian community, now seemed to have power to explain the situation of God’s Chosen People. Jesus and Paul had not only explained how Jesus fulfilled the prophecies, especially the Messianic prophecies of the second Isaiah. They also brought into focus the many passages in the Old Testament about how the Jews would be a light unto the nations and a witness to the greatness of their God to all peoples. Jesus and his faithful interpreter Paul had made Judaism into a universal religion with a message of Good News and salvation to all the earth. If you are a Jew wondering if God had abandoned his Chosen People and why he had brought unspeakable suffering upon them, what news could be more welcome, what message could make better sense of their punishment than Christ’s message?––the message that the Messiah promised to the Jews had indeed come, and was offering salvation and eternal life the whole world.