Western Civilization

The Rise of Christianity    page 1 of 3

1. Christianity first arose historically as a reform movement within Judaism. The apostle Paul forced it open to non-Jews and gave it the Greek flavor that allowed it to flourish in the eastern Mediterranean. The significant question is how it became the official religion of the Roman empire and an agency of the Roman imperial government.

2. Roman religion did not provide a moral base or message of hope.

The Romans had an elaborate religious system with many groups and types of deities.

• The Pantheon: the gods and goddesses of mythology.
  
  

• The old gods -- Chronos, Uranus, and others overthrown by the Olympian deities
  
  

• The Titans - defeated allies of the old gods -- friends of humanity -- Prometheus, the fire-bringer was a titan.
  
  

• The demi-gods -- the "almost gods" -- like Ganymede, chosen as servants by the Olympians
  
  

• The heroes -- humans who achieved divine status -- Hercules was the most famous example. Note that the gap between god and human was not so great as to be uncrossable.
  
  

• Local deities -- each region, city, town, and village had its own tutelary gods, and their were gods who protected field boundaries, storehouses, and every other imaginable thing of value.
  
  

• Nature spirits -- each tree, stream, hill, and other natural feature had its in-dwelling spirit. Dryads in trees, hydrads in springs and streams, oreads in hills and mountains.
  
  

• lares and penates -- the early Romans were ancestor worshippers, and each family and family home had its "household gods."
  
  

• Genii -- in addition, each individual had his or her own "genius," a tutelary deity transformed by the early Christians into the "guardian angel."
  
  

• Magic and superstition -- people needed to believe that they had protecting spirits, because they were very superstitious and that they were always in danger of "bad luck" on Fridays, the 13th of the month, after having broken a mirror, when their stars were not in a good alignment, and so forth. They also believed in witches, vampires, the evil eye, and other malevolent forces.

There were alternate systems of belief for those dissatisfied with the chaotic traditional religious forms:

Greek philosophical systems (Skepticism, Epicureanism, Stoicism that offered moral bases but no hope.
Nevertheless, some of these systems, particularly Stoicism with its belief in universal brotherhood and justice exerted an important influence on developing Christianity.

Mystery cults (Isis, Mithra, Orpheus, and many others) that offered hope, and sometimes a moral basis for human action. The mystery cults (so-called because members had to undergo an initiation -- such as a purifying bath of the eating and drinking of the symbolic body and blood of the cult's founder) and the nature cults (exemplified in the shepherd's god, Pan, and the fishermen's god, Neptune, who were combined into the Christian image of the devil and given Prometheus' name of Lucifer -- "the fire-bringer") provided Christianity's major competition for converts and supporters.

3. Christianity's advantages:

Its founder was an actual person

It had the Jewish legal code and tradition of morality

It had the ability to adopt and adapt: Christmas was taken from the cult of Mithra, the Madonna from that of Isis, and many other Christian traditions were borrowed from other religions

The early Christians were extreme bigots, filled with zeal and commanded to evangelize; expansion was built into Christianity.

Christianity appealed to the downtrodden masses. Women, low-skilled workers, prostitutes, the uneducated, slaves, fishermen, tax collectors, and so forth were the companions and "beloved" of Jesus, and a growing class of the oppressed and despised saw Christianity as the only faith that viewed them without contempt - as "the salt of the Earth - and that offered them the hope a better life --- sometime.

Christianity attracted only the committed, since becoming a Christian was like signing one's own death warrant, and the sect's numbers were periodically purged in a wave of Roman persecution. Those of weak faith did not stay long

It is said that "the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church," and this was true in many respects. The Christians met horrible deaths with equanimity and even joy, impressing all who watched with the fact that the Christians seemed to have something worth dying for. Christianity's ability to survive persecutions impressed those who possessed little faith of their own.