Christianization of the Roman Empire

Greek and Roman Gods and Goddesses

Religion as it is understood in the modern world did not exist in the Graeco-Roman world. Roman religion in the early Roman Empire was polytheistic and local, with rituals varying between localities. Most religious practice was embedded in, and inseparable from, the city. Ritual was the main form that worship took. Politics and religion were intertwined and many public rituals were performed by public officials. Respect for ancestral custom was a large part of polytheistic belief and practice, and members of the local society were expected to take part in public rituals.[32][33]

Roman historians such as J. A. North, observe that Roman imperial culture began in the first century with religion embedded in the city-state, then throughout the imperial period, it gradually shifted to religion as a choice.[34] Roman religion's willingness to adopt foreign gods and practices into its pantheon meant that as Rome expanded, it also gained local gods which offered different characteristics, experiences, insights, and stories.[35][36][35][37] There is consensus among scholars that religious identity became increasingly separated from civic and political identity, progressively giving way to the plurality of religious options rooted in other identities, needs and interests.[38][35]

A combination of external factors such as war and invasions, and internal factors such as the formal nature and political manipulation of traditional religion, was said to have created the slow decline of polytheism beginning in the second century BC, and for many years this decline has been axiomatic.[39][40] James B. Rives, classics scholar, has written that: "Evidence for neglect and manipulation could readily be found, and a standard list of examples gradually took shape, ... But, as more recent scholars have argued, this evidence has often been cited without proper consideration of its context; at the same time, other evidence that presents a different picture has been dismissed out of hand".[41][30]

Over the last thirty years, evidence has expanded to include "inscriptions, coins, sculpture and architecture" which have "exploded" the many assumptions that underlie narratives of decline and "completely altered" the picture of late antique paganism.[42]

For many years, the imperial cult, with its worship of human rulers as though they were gods, was regarded by the majority of scholars as both a symptom and a cause of the final decline of traditional Graeco-Roman religion. It was assumed this kind of worship could only be possible in a system that had become completely devoid of real religious meaning and it was, therefore, generally treated as a "political phenomenon cloaked in religious dress".[43]

Scholarship of the twenty-first century has shifted toward seeing it more as a genuine religious phenomenon.[43] S. R. F. Price used anthropological models to show the imperial cult's rituals and iconography are elements of a way of thinking that people came up with for themselves as a means of coming to terms with the tremendous power of Roman emperors.[44] The emperor was "conceived in terms of honors ... as the representation of power" personifying the intermediary between the human and the divine.[45][43] According to Rives, "Most recent scholars have accepted Price's approach".[46]

The term "imperial cult" implies a coherent system when there was, instead, a wide range of practices and images. These established some association between the emperor and his household on the one hand, and the divine sphere on the other, but in several very different ways.[47] The imperial cult served as a way for local elites and other representatives of Roman power to negotiate status.[46] In western provinces, it was "an instrument of centralized policy". Recent literary evidence reveals emperor worship at the domestic level with his image "among the household gods".[47] As a result, there are innumerable small images of emperors from a wide range of media that are now seen to have "potential religious significance".[47]

Rives adds that "epigraphic evidence reveals the existence of numerous private associations of ‘worshippers of the emperor’ or ‘of the emperor’s image’, many of which seem to have developed from household associations".[47] Private cults of the emperor were previously greatly underestimated.[46] It is now recognized that these private cults were "very common and widespread indeed, in the domus, in the streets, in public squares, in Rome itself (perhaps there in particular) as well as outside the capital".[47]

According to most modern scholars, the fourth century of the Roman empire was not an age of decline.[48][49] Late Antiquity was an age of tremendous activity.[50][51] Scourfield explains that the course of the fourth century "is most aptly described in terms of negotiation, accommodation, adaptation, and transformation" instead of decline.[52] Brown describes this world as one in which "Polytheism itself evolved, often by adopting aspects of the new religion. The Euphemitai of Phoenicia emerged as a new cult in the mountains of Lebanon. Their gatherings, from which blood sacrifice was pointedly absent, were marked by hymn-singing and by blazing lights in buildings that could be mistaken for Christian basilicas".[53]

By the late fourth and early fifth centuries, the structure and ideals of both the Church and the Empire had been transformed through a long period of symbiosis.[54] The products and processes of fusion and intermingling known as hybridity, syncretism, interculturation, and transculturation indicate societal divisions began to blur.[53][55] Many scholars have claimed that Christianity of this period identified itself with so many Roman values that it ensured the "dignity" of Rome would survive its collapse in its new baptized form of the Catholic church of the Middle Ages in what Kimberly Bowles calls "the swap sale model of change", as if one Roman practice or social role was simply exchanged for its Christian equivalent. However, Brown says this assumes intent and fails "to do justice to the elements of novelty that accompanied the rise of Christianity in the later empire".[56]

Roman Empire with dioceses in 400 AD

The fourth century developed new forms of status and wealth that included moving away from the old silver standard.[57] Brown says Constantine consolidated loyalty at the top through his spectacular generosity, paying his army and his high officials in gold and thereby flooding the economy with gold.[58] The imperial bureaucracy soon began demanding that taxes also be paid in gold.[59] Greed became rampant as the ruling elite "drove a primitive system of taxation and markets to its limits" to acquire gold. This created multiple problems.[60]

"The fourth century scramble for gold ensured that the rural population was driven" hard says Brown.[61] Eighty percent of the population provided the labor to harvest 60% of the empire's wealth, very little of which ever trickled down to them.[62] This contributed to unrest.[63] Constantine and his successors reached out to the provincial elite enlarging the Senate's membership from about 600 to over 2,000.[64] This also contributed to unrest.[65]

In response to all of this, bishops became intercessors in society, lobbying the powerful to practice Christian benevolence.[66] After 370, wealth and cultural prestige began moving toward the Catholics.[67]

Constantine the Great in Oria (Retouched)

Edward Gibbon wrote the first version of the top-down model of Christianization in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1776. Gibbon saw Constantine as driven by "boundless ambition" and a desire for personal glory to impose Christianity on the rest of the empire – from the top down – in a cynical, political move.[68][69] He believed this was how Constantine's religion "achieved, in less than a century, the final conquest of the Roman empire".[70][71][72] However, Gibbon's sources were almost exclusively limited to Christian documents.[73] These documents have a starkly supernatural and hagiographical quality that depicts Constantine's conversion as evidence of the Christian god's final triumph in Heaven over the pagan gods and presents the rise of Christianity in terms of an inevitable and irresistible "conquest".[74]

Twentieth and twenty–first century developments in numismatics,[75] epigraphy,[76] archaeology,[77] and art history, (as well as whole new fields of scholarship such as functional sociology, legal anthropology and social anthropology), have produced "an abundance of evidence unavailable to Gibbon".[78] This has led to the assertion that paganism did not end in the late fourth century[79][80][81] and that the pace of Christianization did not change dramatically under Constantine.[82][24] In Schor's view, "The conversion of Constantine would ...represent merely the largest peak of a chain of network incorporations."[83]

According to classics professor Seth Schwartz, the number of Christians at the end of the third century indicate Christianity's success predated Constantine.[82] Edwin A. Judge, one of Australia's most well-known social scientists and the "new founder" of social-scientific criticism, has provided a detailed sociological study demonstrating that a fully organized church system existed before Constantine and the Council of Nicea. From this, Judge concludes "the argument Christianity owed its triumph to its adoption by Constantine cannot be sustained".[84]

T. D. Barnes says twentieth century scholarship has shown that "a true understanding of Constantine only became possible in the 1950s" due to discoveries concerning source material.[85] Peter J. Leithart and most modern scholars now assert that Constantine was a sincere, if simple, believer.[86] He was an autocrat, as were those emperors before and after him, but that did not equate to a demand that everyone become Christian.[87] Constantine never directly outlawed paganism, and accounts indicate he was generally tolerant of pagans.[88][89][note 1]

Constantine's personal views undoubtedly favored one religion over the other, but his imperial religious policy was aimed at including the Church in a broader policy of civic unity which required some tolerance of the pagan majority.[93] Following the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine and his co-Augustus Licinius issued the Edict of Milan which granted religious toleration to all faiths.[94] This provision for tolerance was restated in the Edict of the Provincials, and Constantine never reversed this.[95]

In Drake's view, indications are that Constantine genuinely converted to a belief in Christianity as a "big tent" capable of containing different wings.[96] Leithart writes that Constantine "did not punish pagans for being pagans, or Jews for being Jews", and scholars generally agree he was not in favor of suppression of paganism by force.[86][97]^: 523[98] Constantine never engaged in a purge,[99] there were no pagan martyrs during his reign,[88][100] and pagans remained in important positions at his court.[86] Constantine's main approach to religion was to use enticement by making the adoption of Christianity beneficial.[101]

In his 1984 book, Christianizing the Roman Empire: (A.D. 100–400),[note 2] and again in 1997, Ramsay MacMullen argues the conflict model which asserts that widespread Christian anti–pagan violence, as well as persecution from a "bloodthirsty" and violent Constantine (and his successors), caused the decline and eventual demise of paganism through forced conversion, from the top-down, in the fourth century.[108][102][note 3] In the twenty first century, the conflict model has become marginalized.[113] Archaeologists Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan of the Centre for Late Antique Archaeology indicate that archaeological evidence of religious conflict exists but not to the degree or the intensity previously thought.[114] Award winning historian Michelle Renee Salzman asserts that, in light of current scholarship, violence can not be seen as a central factor in explaining the spread of Christianity in the western empire.[115][116]

The fourth and fifth centuries are richly documented by Christian sources which tend to be eager to portray their leaders as engaging in violent anti-pagan acts in order to emphasize their piety and power.[117] Yet these texts contain only a handful of incidents of Christian-pagan violence, and none include forced conversion.[118] The ancient Christians rarely committed violence against persons.[119] According to Alan Cameron, most violence committed by Christians was against property, was unofficial, perpetrated primarily by monks and radicals, and done without the support of Christian clergy or state magistrates.[120][121] There are only a few examples of Christian officials having any involvement in the violent destruction of pagan shrines. In the 380s, one eastern official (generally identified as the praetorian prefect Cynegius), used the army under his control and bands of monks to destroy temples in the eastern provinces.[122][note 4]

In Gaul, some of the most influential textual sources on pagan-Christian violence concerns Martin, bishop of Tours (c .371–397), the Pannonian ex-soldier who is "solely credited in the historical record as the militant converter of Gaul".[130] These texts have been criticized for lacking historical veracity, even by ancient critics, but they are still useful for portraying the world of late fourth century Gaul.[131] The portion of the sources devoted to attacks on pagans is limited, and they all revolve around Martin using his miraculous powers to overturn pagan shrines and idols, but not ever to threaten or harm people.[132] Salzman concludes that "None of Martin's interventions led to the deaths of any Gauls, pagan or Christian. Even if one doubts the exact veracity of these incidents, the assertion that Martin preferred non-violent conversion techniques says much about the norms for conversion in Gaul" at the time Martin's biography was written.[133]

Christian hostility toward pagans is understood by most modern scholars as far from the general phenomenon previously assumed.[134] In a comparative study of levels of violence in Roman society, German ancient historian Martin Zimmermann, concludes there was no increase in the level of violence in the Empire in Late Antiquity.[135][136] Christianity sought to legitimize its new power through rhetoric[111][137] that often became hostile and contemptuous,[138][139] whereas acts of violence were usually isolated and rare.[140][141][142][143]

Archaeologist David Riggs writes that evidence from North Africa reveals a tolerance of religious pluralism and a vitality of traditional paganism much more than it shows any form of religious violence or coercion. Force and compulsion were not seen as constructive, or even realistic options, as much as persuasion was.[144] Both Christian clergy and Roman magistrates preferred the power of words and the use of positive incentives: "persuasion, such as the propagation of Christian apologetics, appears to have played a more critical role in the eventual "triumph of Christianity" than was previously assumed".[145][146][147]

Archaeological evidence for the violent destruction of temples in the fourth century, from around the entire Mediterranean Basin, is limited to a handful of sites.[148] For example, the Serapeum of Alexandria is the only temple destroyed by human violence in this period in Egypt.[149] Christianity was thriving there, and Cameron writes that the Roman temples in Egypt "are among the best preserved in the ancient world".[120]

There is regional variation in the destruction of pagan shrines.[150] In the Greater Levant such destruction was substantial, though most of it occurred after the mid-fifth century.[150] Richard Bayliss, archaeologist, has stated that the significance of this is that it can no longer be argued that a universal 'fall of the temples' was caused by Constantinian legislation.[150]

Roman temple, Maiden Castle

Most recorded incidents of temple destruction are known from church and hagiographical accounts which are eager to portray their subjects as engaging in violent acts in order to emphasize their piety and power.[117] For example, the temples of Zeus at Apameia [151] and of Marnas at Gaza City[152] are said to have been brought down by the local bishops around this period, but the only source for this information is the biography of Porphyry of Gaza which is considered a forgery.[153] Temple destruction is attested to in 43 cases in the written sources, but only 4 have been confirmed by archaeological evidence.[123]

Archaeologists Lavan and Mulryan write that, "As a result of recent work, it can be stated with confidence, that temples were neither widely converted into churches nor widely demolished in Late Antiquity".[123][note 5]

Scene of sacrifice in honour of Diana. Fresco from the triclinium of House of the Vettii in Pompeii

Imperial laws of the 5th-century Theodosian Code are the cornerstone of the 'Legislative model' which argues that the Christianization of the Roman empire and the decline of paganism were imposed from the top down through imperial laws that repressed paganism and coerced pagans to convert through fear of violent consequences for not converting.[102][163] The Imperial laws collected in Chapter 10, Book XVI of the Theodosian Code, focus on two things: they condemn the practice of sacrifice, and call for the closing of temples that continued to allow it.[164] Blood sacrifice of animals was the element of pagan culture most abhorrent to Christians, though Christian emperors often tolerated other pagan practices.[165]

While it is difficult to date with any confidence any of the laws in the Code to the time of Constantine a century earlier,[102][166][167] most scholars agree that Constantine issued the first law banning animal sacrifice. This ban was then reissued by his Christian successors with much the same "fierce denunciations of blood sacrifice".[168][169] These imperial laws concerned the public setting.[168][169] Brown notes that the language of these laws "was uniformly vehement", and the "penalties they proposed were frequently horrifying", evidencing the intent of "terrorizing" the populace into accepting this change.[163] Of several fourth-century pagans whose testimony survives, the emperor Julian, the Antiochene rhetor Libanius, and the historian Eunapius of Sardis all make it clear that to make a public sacrifice under Christian emperors was an act of daring.[170]

Minor and discreet sacrifices continued to be performed privately by individuals, but the public ritual killing of animals seems to have largely disappeared from civic festivals by the time of Julian (361 to 363), and evidence for public sacrifices altogether runs out by the end of the century.[171] Archaeologist Luke Lavan writes that blood sacrifice was already declining in popularity by the time of Constantine,[172] and classics professor Scott Bradbury agrees Christianity was not solely responsible for its end.[173] The decline in prestige of pagan priesthoods, and the starving of funds assigned to the cults,[174] would also have played a part.[175] Bradbury still asserts that the complete disappearance of public sacrifice "in many towns and cities must be attributed to the atmosphere created by imperial and episcopal hostility".[176]

Sozomenos, also known as Sozomen, the Constantinopolitan lawyer, wrote a history of the church around 443 where he makes a sole reference to one religious law contained in the Code: that issued on 8 November 392. This law has been described by some as a universal ban on paganism that made Christianity the official religion of the empire.[177][178][note 6] The law describes and bans those practices of private domestic sacrifice, such as the lares fire, that had not previously been included in other laws.[180] Sozomen evaluates the impact of the law of 392 as having had only minor significance at the time it was issued. Sacrifice was already in decline.[181]

Policies toward sacrifice did not automatically translate to a position in favor of a more general coercion of pagans for any of the Late Antique emperors. For 200 years, no Christian emperor legalized the forced conversion of pagans until Justinian in 529.[182][183][169][184][185][186] Some historians have theorized that emperors coerced aristocratic conversion by favoring Christians for appointment to public office, but even the most assertively Christian emperors continued to appoint pagans to positions of high office into the sixth century.[187][188] Another theory has suggested aristocrats were coerced by anti-pagan laws, but Salzman says the idea that the elite could have been coerced at all underestimates their strength and independence and over-estimates the influence of the emperors.[189] Emperors were influential, but their influence had practical limitations.[190] The senatorial aristocracy was composed of men and women of status, wealth, power, and prestige who wielded significant influence.[191] According to Salzman, no emperor had the ability to force religious change on this group "even if they wanted to".[192][193]

Legal anthropologist Caroline Humfress, says the idea of "an empire-wide 'legal system' being imposed from above" does not accurately reflect the social and legal realities of the Roman Empire before Justinian.[194] Robert Malcolm Errington has shown that, of the half dozen or so chroniclers of the period when the Code was promulgated, Sozomen is the only one who even mentions Theodosius' religious legislation indicating these chroniclers either did not know the laws contained in the Code, or they simply did not see them as important enough to mention.[195]

The Theodosian Code provides important evidence of the intent of Christian emperors to promote Christianity, but it does not have the ability to tell how, or if, these policies were actually carried out.[196] Imperial commands provided magistrates with a license to act, but those magistrates chose how, or whether to act, for themselves, according to local circumstances.[197] The Roman Empire lacked an equivalent of modern prosecutors or a police force, and Roman administrative authorities tended to be lax in enforcing the punishments. Even bishops intervened.[198][199] There is no record of anyone being executed for violating anti-sacrifice laws before Tiberius II Constantine (r. 574–582) some 250 years after Constantine I.[200] Difficult geography and the slowness of communication, the passivity and isolation of the imperial court, contradictions between imperial decisions, the inability of the imperial court to enforce its will at the local level (the absence of a police force, etc.), the persistance of the patronage system and its overriding obligations to family and friends, all this and more, constrained the implementation of imperial law.[201]

Humfress asserts that Roman imperial law, though not irrelevant, was not a determining factor in Roman society before Justinian.[202]

In 379, Theodosius ascended the eastern throne, initially spending a year and a half in Thessalonica before moving on to Constantinople. In 380, a leap year, he issued the edict Cunctos populos, also known as the Edict of Thessalonica, on February 28.[203] The Edict declares that "the [Nicene] religion that is followed by the Pontiff Damasus and by Peter, Bishop of Alexandria" shall be practiced by all "who are ruled by the administration of Our Clemency" and that those who "sustain the infamy of heretical dogmas" will receive both divine and earthly vengence.[204][note 7] The Edict was addressed directly to the people of the city of Constantinople, but it was also valid throughout the Eastern part of the empire - but only the Eastern Empire. Theodosius was emperor only in the East and did not become emperor of both East and West until 392.[206][207] The Edict was about opposing Arianism, establishing unity in Christianity, and suppressing heresy.[208] German ancient historian Karl Leo Noethlichs writes that the Edict of Thessalonica was neither anti-pagan nor antisemitic; it did not declare Christianity to be the official religion of the empire; and it gave no advantage to Christians over other faiths.[209] It is clear from mandates issued in the years after 380 that Theodosius had made no requirement for pagans or Jews to convert to Christianity.[208][note 8]

Pat Southern has written that, generally speaking, the empire's inhabitants were not directly affected by Constantine's religious change.[87][213] Yet indirectly there was long term impact. His main approach to religion was to use enticement by making the adoption of Christianity beneficial.[101] Having begun its growth 300 years before Constantine amidst opposition, the "Imperial patronage, legal rights to hold property, and financial assistance", granted to the church by Constantine and those emperors after him who followed his example, were important contributions to the church's success over the next hundred years.[214]

Laws that favored Christianity increased the church's status which was all important for the elites. By absorbing aristocratic values and attitudes into Christianity, emperors who modeled Christianity's moral appeal with aristocratic honor made it attractive to the aristocratic class.[215][216] David Novak concludes, as does Salzman, that this began largely because Constantine had tremendous personal popularity and support even amongst the pagan aristocrats. That prompted some individuals to become informed about their emperor's religion.[217] This passed along through aristocratic kinship and friendship networks and patronage ties.[218] The sociological view of conversion is that "conversion tends to proceed along social networks formed by personal attachments".[219] A few senators became Christian right away, under Constantine, but Salzman documents the shift to the predominance of Christians in the aristocracy as taking place in the 360s under Gratian.[220][221]

Early Christianity never openly called for the abolition of slavery, and while South African theologian G. François Wessels writes that it "must be conceded" that abolition was not a possibility in Paul's day, it must also be affirmed that many of the early Christians were slave owners who voiced no objection to the long–standing institution.[235][236] Christians of Antiquity advised acceptance of what could not be changed, service to others with a loving attitude, and a focus on true freedom in Heaven.[237] Their stated purpose was to change the heart of man, not the social order, and ancient Christians did not think of their movement in terms of social reform.[238] However, Christians did have some impact on the world of slavery in which they lived in at least two ways and possibly more.[239]

The first can be seen in Paul's Epistle to Philemon, which indicates that Christianity worked to transform the slave-holding household to recognize Christian brotherhood and manumit (an established Roman practice of freeing slaves) accordingly.[240][241] Wessels explains: "Onesimus, a slave, had run away from his master Philemon, but both had become Christians, and Paul sends Onesimus back home with a letter. In that letter Paul insists on Philemon's acceptance of Onesimus, no longer as a slave, but as a 'beloved brother'. New Testament professor Marianne Thompson has argued convincingly that "a reading of the letter to Philemon which views Paul as asking for Onesimus' spiritual reception as a brother in Christ, without the setting free of his body as a slave, assumes a 'dualistic anthropology' in Paul which his writings do not confirm".[242]

According to Wessels, "Paul's understanding of the church as a 'body' meant that, once Onesimus was accepted into the group as a brother, it would become impossible to treat him as chattel and sell him off if the price was right".[243] J. H. Roberts also asserts that "The phrase, 'you will do even more than I say', can really only have one meaning: Philemon should set Onesimus free".[236] The cumulative weight of Paul's many suggestive phrases support this view.[244] If the information in Colossians 4:7–9 is historical, the slave Onesimus was, accordingly, freed.[245] Professor of Classics and Letters Kyle Harper argues that a "broad religious impulse toward manumission runs as a submerged current through the eastern provinces".[246]

Christianity also impacted the world of slaves through its adoption of slavery as metaphor.[247][248] There are no ancient sources written from the point of view of the slave,[249] but Christian rhetoric is filled with that metaphorical perspective. John Chrysostom's surviving corpus alone mentions slavery over 5,000 times.[250] Chrysostom, as one example, wrote baptismal instructions for churches in his jurisdiction, telling the officiating priest to stop at various points to remind the catechumens of how the act of baptism frees them. In Tate's view, "Through their baptism, the catechumens became not only free, holy, and just, but even sons of God and joint-heirs with Christ. Repeated so often, in such an important context, this message must have made a major impact on the thinking of Christian congregations and those with whom they interacted".[251]

Outside of defeated enemies, there were three primary sources of slaves. The first most prolific source was natural reproduction (childbearing), since a child born to a slave was automatically a slave, without option, themselves. Early Christian historian Chris L. de Wet writes that Chrysostom attempted to "guard the sexual integrity of the slave by desexualizing the slave's body and criminalizing its violation. Slaves were no longer morally neutral ground – having sex with a slave while married was adultery and if unmarried, fornication".[252] These teachings, along with the proliferation of chastity among slaves who became Christian,[253] and the spread of ascetism through Roman society, may have lessened their sexual use and their reproductive value and impacted slavery directly.[239]

The next best source of slaves was from the abandonment of unwanted children called exposure because the babies were exposed to the dangers of the wilds. These children were often picked up by strangers to be raised and sold as slaves. The third method was kidnapping. Christians interfered with these methods for resupply through new laws and actions taken against them.[254][255][note 9]

Chrysostom supported the obedience of slaves to their masters. He also told his audience, which consisted mostly of wealthy slave holders, that "Slavery is the result of greed, of degradation, of brutality, since Noah, we know, had no slave, nor Abel, nor Seth, nor those who came after them. The institution was the fruit of sin".[264] MacMullen has written that slavery was "rebuked by Ambrose, Zeno of Verona, Gaudentius of Brescia, and Maximus of Turin", among others.[265] Evidence indicates this oft repeated Christian discourse on slavery shaped late ancient feelings, tastes, and opinions concerning it, and this may have indirectly impacted its practice.[239]

It is generally accepted that slavery began a decline in the second century which became more decisive as time passed, but this is usually attributed to economics rather than ideology as actual numbers of slaves have not been established.[266]

Helmut Koester asserts that "the Christian community in the letters of Paul, begins with a baptismal formula, which says in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, neither slave nor free. This is a sociological formula that defines a new community ... [giving] even the lowliest slave personal dignity and status".[267][268] Sociologist Keith Hopkins points out that real communities of real people would have diverged from the Christian ideal even though the ideal would have influenced practices.[269] Yale University professor of Biblical Studies, Wayne A. Meeks, asserts that evidence from Pliny the Younger and others demonstrates that early Christian communities were, in fact, highly inclusive in terms of social stratification and other social categories, much more so than were the Roman voluntary associations.[270] From the beginning, the Pauline communities cut across the social ranks. This conscious dismantling of concepts of hierarchy and power was imposed by Paul the Apostle. His understanding of the meaning of the Crucifixion of Jesus and the paradox of Christ created a new order unprecedented in classical society.[271]

A key characteristic of these communities was the use of belief to construct identity and social boundaries.[272] Believing was the crucial and defining characteristic that set a "high boundary" that strongly excluded the "unbeliever". Trebilco asserts that these high boundaries were set without social distancing or vilification of the outsiders themselves, since context reveals "a clear openness to these 'outsiders' and a strong 'other regard' for them".[273] Strong boundaries for insiders, and openness to outsiders, are both held in very real tension in New Testament and early patristic writings.[274]

On the one hand, the term for sinner (Ancient Greek: αμαρτωλοί), meaning the immoral, is another NT term for those 'on the outside'. Its use was undermined by Jesus, who showed that any 'outsider' could become an 'insider'. Jesus did not classify everyone as sinners, but he did call for those who considered themselves insiders to repent. Paul extended the term's application to everyone, arguing that even 'sinners' can become insiders.[275]

On the other hand, the exclusivity of Christian monotheism formed an important part of its success enabling it to maintain its independence in a society that syncretized religion.[276] E. R. Dodds has suggested that the Crisis of the Third Century led to anxiety that was appeased by a "totalist" creed.[277] According to Praet, this gave Christianity the powerful psychological attraction of elitism.[278]

Several ways of referring to outsiders in the New Testament can be called 'low-boundary' terms which recognize the need to accommodate and converge with wider society.[279] A range of social contacts between insiders and outsiders was seen as permissible, but Paul writes this while at the same time maintaining a high boundary for insiders as differentiated by their moral standards and group purity.[280] Paul did not want Christians divorced from society, and does not call for social withdrawal, but he also wanted Christians to be different from society in the strongest ways possible.[281]

Christianity was unhindered by either ethnic or geographical ties, was open to being experienced as a new start for those who needed one, was open to both men and women, and rich and poor; baptism was free, there were no fees, and it was intellectually egalitarian, making philosophy and ethics available to ordinary people who might not even have known how to read.[282] Many scholars see this inclusivity as the primary reason for Christianity's success.[283]

Christian charity Thorvaldsen Louvre RF3698

It has, for many years, been one of the axioms of scholars of early Christianity that significant numbers of women composed its earliest members.[284] Yet none of the literary evidence gives an objective statistical account.[285] Pagan writers wrote polemics criticizing the attraction of women to Christianity along with the uneducated masses, children, and "thieves, burglars and poisoners", but Judith Lieu describes this as politically motivated rhetoric that cannot be depended upon to prove the presence of large numbers of women.[286] She also notes that, "No Christian source explicitly celebrates the number of women joining their ranks".[287] However, art historian Janet Tulloch has observed that "Unlike the early Christian literary tradition, in which women are largely invisible, misrepresented, or omitted entirely, female figures in early Christian art play significant roles in the transmission of the faith".[288] Feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza wrote in her seminal work In Memory of Her: a Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins that many of Jesus' followers were women.[289]

The Pauline epistles in the New Testament provide some of the earliest documentary sources of women as true missionary partners in expanding the Jesus movement. The women named as leaders contributed directly to that endeavor with roles like those of men.[290][291] Sarah B. Pomeroy says "never did Roman society encourage women to engage in the same activities as men of the same social class."[292] Lieu affirms that Christianity offered a framework for influential women exercising new and different roles.[293] The idea that women of note were attracted to Christianity is evidenced in the Acts of the Apostles, where mention is made of Lydia, the seller of purple at Philippi, and of other noble women at Thessalonica, Berea and Athens ( 17.4, 12, 33-34).[294] Lieu writes that, "In parts of the Empire, influential women were able to use religion to negotiate a role for themselves in society that existing conceptual frameworks did not legitimate".[293] This is consistent with sociological views of social change that revolved around the "instability, marginalization, religious innovation and the independent role of women".[295]

Moses Finley says: "There is no mistaking the fact that Homer fully reveals what remained true for the whole of antiquity: that women were held to be naturally inferior..."[296] Professor of religious studies at Brown University, Ross Kraemer, argues that Christianity offered women of this period a new sense of worth.[297] Judith Lieu cautions that there is "good reason for rejecting a model that understands women’s attraction to early Christianity... purely in terms of ’what it did for them’."[298]

Elizabeth Castelli highlights another possible explanation for women who became Christian: "The ascetic life, especially the monastic life, may have provided women with a mode of escape from the rigors and dangers of married and maternal existence, with the prospect of an education and (in some cases) an intellectual life, and with access to social and economic power that would otherwise have eluded them".[299][300]

Having their female (and imperfect male) babies taken from them and exposed, was an accepted fact of Roman life for most women.[301] In 1968, J. Lindsay reported that even in large families "more than one daughter was practically never reared."[302] Stark adds that, "A study of inscriptions at Delphi made it possible to reconstruct 600 families. Of these, only six had raised more than one daughter".[303] There was also a high mortality rate among women due to childbirth and abortion.[304] The conversion of women to ascetic Christianity, especially in choosing monasticism, would have constituted a true break with this traditional pattern.[305][297]

For most women, life activity revolved around the household.[306] Ordinary women moved in and out of houses and shops and marketplaces, took the risk of speaking out and leading people, including children, outside the bounds of the "proper authorities". A survey of the literature of the early period all show female converts as having one thing in common: that of being in danger. Women took real risks to spread the gospel.[307] This is evident in the sanctions and labels their antagonists used against them.[308] Power resided with the male authority figure, and he had the right to label any uncooperative female in his household as insane or possessed, to exile her from her home, and condemn her to prostitution.[309] Kramer theorizes that "Against such vehement opposition, the language of the ascetic forms of Christianity must have provided a strong set of validating mechanisms", attracting large numbers of women.[310][311]

Widows were especially critical to growth in Christianity's first generation, and in the literature from the second century, there is conclusive evidence of groups of women, with some "exercising the office of widow".[312] Nathan explains that "a widow in Roman society who had lost her husband and did not have money of her own was at the very bottom of the social ladder".[313] The practical support the early church provided to those who would, otherwise, have been in destitute circumstances "was in all likelihood an important factor in winning new female members".[312][314]

MacMullen concludes that Christianity did make a moral difference in Roman Empire in the area of sexual conduct: "Here we see an absolutely remarkable impact on manners and morals that was to shape also the whole millennium to come".[315] Classics scholar Kyle Harper states it this way: "the triumph of Christianity not only drove profound cultural change, it created a new relationship between sexual morality and society ... The legacy of Christianity lies in the dissolution of an ancient system where social and political status, power, and the transmission of social inequality to the next generation scripted the terms of sexual morality".[316]

Both the ancient Greeks and the Romans cared and wrote about sexual morality within categories of good and bad, pure and defiled, and ideal and transgression.[317] These ethical structures were built on the Roman understanding of social status. Slaves were not thought to have an interior ethical life because they had no status; they could go no lower socially. They were commonly used sexually, while the free and well-born who used them were thought to embody social honor and the ability to exhibit the fine sense of shame and sexual modesty suited to their station.[318] Sexual modesty meant something different for men than it did for women, and for the well-born, than it did for the poor, and for the free citizen, than it did for the slave — for whom the concepts of honor, shame and sexual modesty were said to have no meaning at all.[318]

In the ancient Roman Empire, "shame" was a profoundly social concept that was always mediated by gender and status. "It was not enough that a wife merely regulate her sexual behavior in the accepted ways; it was required that her virtue in this area be conspicuous."[319] Men, on the other hand, were allowed sexual freedoms such as live-in mistresses.[320] This duality permitted Roman society to find both a husband's control of a wife's sexual behavior a matter of intense importance, and at the same time see that same husband's sex with young slave boys as of little concern.[321]

The Greeks and Romans said humanity's deepest moralities depended upon social position which was given by fate; Christians advocated the "radical notion of individual freedom centered around ... complete sexual agency".[322] Paul the Apostle and his followers taught that "the body was a consecrated space, a point of mediation between the individual and the divine".[323] This meant the ethical obligation for sexual self-control was to God, and it was placed on each individual, male and female, slave and free, equally, in all communities, regardless of status. It was "a revolution in the rules of behavior, but also in the very image of the human being".[324] In the Pauline epistles, porneia was a single name for the array of sexual behaviors outside marital intercourse. This became a defining concept of sexual morality.[323] Such a shift in definition utterly transformed "the deep logic of sexual morality".[325]

Harper concludes that there are risks in over-estimating the changes in old sexual patterns that Christianity was able to promote, but there are risks, too, in underestimating Christianization as a watershed."[324]

"Roman Hall of Justice", Young Folks' History of Rome, 1878

In another challenge to the sociological model, MacMullen asserts that "under the Christian emperors cruelty rose" because the number of capital crimes did, and their threatened methods of execution became increasingly harsh.[326] It is possible to identify a mounting severity in criminal law, but Peter Garnsey says it takes place throughout the entire imperial period, beginning under Augustus in the first century. Garnsey asserts this was a result of the political change from a Republic to an autocratic empire.[327]

Harries points out that Roman justice was always harsh.[328] It was a common belief of those in the Roman Empire that severity was a deterrent of undesirable behavior.[329] As an example of this, Harries writes of the SC Silanianum, a particularly harsh law passed in 10 AD, which foreshadows and helps to explain how Roman laws of the empire developed and grew harsher throughout the imperial age.[330]

The SC Silanianum was originally aimed at slaves who murdered their masters, but its reach and its harshness grew as time passed.[note 10] Its history documents the establishment of a legal tradition of increasing harshness, since ancestral customs – the Mos maiorum – were the most important source of Roman law.[337][338]

While the Roman empire was becoming ever more brutal, the Judeo-Christian concept of mercy introduced a new cause of tension between church and state.[339] On the one hand, increasingly harsh penalties for an ever enlarging number of capital crimes were published by emperors. On the other hand, emperors also wanted to be seen as generous in offering mercy and clemency.[340]

Beginning in the first century under Augustus, the established Roman understanding of mercy and clemency (clementia) began a transformation that was completed in the fourth century.[341] Christian writers had embraced the concept of clemency and used it to express the mercy of God demonstrated in salvation.[342] The use of clementia to indicate forgiveness of wrongs and a mild merciful temper becomes common for writers of the Later Roman Empire.[343]

Because Christianity did not grow outside Roman culture but grew within it, it ameliorated some of Rome's harsh justice and also adopted some of it.[344][345][346] Augustine of Hippo urged Donatus (the heretical African bishop) to practice Christian mildness when dealing with enemies.[347] He praised Marcellinus, who presided over an Imperial inquiry into the Catholic-Donatist controversy, for having conducted his investigation without using torture. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, advised his correspondent Studius, a Christian judge, to show clemency, citing as a model Jesus' treatment of the adulteress. Bishops, generally, opposed the death penalty. Such a penalty was consistent with the authority of the state, but it was inconsistent with the expansion of the Church through the 'correction' of its enemies.[348]

Arrests and punishments of heretics and all crimes against clergy were processed through the local bishop, and Augustine's correspondence after 405 contains many references to him using the bishop's right to intercede for those the state condemned. He used his personal influence with Imperial officials to make sure the death penalty for Donatist terrorists was, above all else, avoided.[349] The state responded with the law of January 409 which laid down that crimes of violence against the clergy might be denounced by anyone; "in this way the authorities could politely by-pass the 'bishop, the persuader of mercy' in arresting and punishing culprits".[349]

Garnsey has recognized that "Augustine, Ambrose, and other church leaders of progressive views clearly had a beneficent influence on the administration of the law, [but] it is evident that they did not attempt to promote a movement of penal reform, and did not conceive of such a movement".[345] As Peter Brown has summarized: "When it came to the central functions of the Roman state, even the vivid Ambrose was a lightweight".[350]

Saint Augustine Disputing with the Heretics painting by Vergós Group

In a challenge to the assertion that the practice of charity contributed to social change and the spread of Christianity, MacMullen has written that there was hardly any charity amongst Christians toward heretics.[351] One example often used in demonstration of this view is Augustine's support of the state's use of coercion in dealing with the Donatists. Brown says this has led to modern liberals describing Augustine as the "prince and patriarch of persecutors".[352] In an alternative view, Rutgers professor of history Frederick Russell asserts that Augustine's views came out of a loving desire to heal and help the Donatists.[353][354][355][356]

The harsh realities Augustine faced can be found in his Letter 28 written to bishop Novatus around 416. Donatists had cut out the tongue and cut off the hands of a Bishop Rogatus who had recently converted to Catholicism, also attacking an unnamed count's agent who had been traveling with Rogatus.[357] Russell says Augustine confesses he does not know what to do. By this time, he had spent twenty years verbally appealing to the Donatists using popular propaganda, debate, personal appeal, General Councils, appeals to the emperor, and even politics, and all attempts had failed.[358][359][360]

The empire responded with force and coercion, and Augustine eventually came to support that approach. Augustine did not believe coercion could or would convert someone, but he did observe that it softened the "stubborn Donatists" enough to make it possible to reason with them. He thought that reason would then lead to voluntary agreement, true repentance, and change.[361][354] Augustine's personal sufferings and his "conversion through God's pressures" are part of what led him to decide there was value in suffering for discerning truth.[362]

Augustine approached the infliction of punishment, and the exercise of power over wrong-doers, by analyzing such issues in ways similar to modern debates on penal reform.[363] Brown says Augustine thus becomes an eloquent advocate of the ideal of corrective punishment aimed at the reformation of the wrongdoer.[364]

In Peter Brown's view, Augustine lived in a harsh, authoritarian age of punitive punishment, yet he placed limits on the type of coercion that could be used for heretics, recommending what was common practice in the home, school and ecclesial court at the time.[365][366] He opposed all the extreme forms of torture and maiming and capital punishment common to the empire of the time.[367]

Russell asserts that Augustine's response on coercion was context dependent.[368] H. A. Deane says there is a fundamental inconsistency between Augustine's political thought and "his final position of approval of the use of political and legal weapons to punish religious dissidence", and others have seconded this view.[369][note 11]

The impact on Christianization of Augustine's approach to heresy is found in the "rivalry between the two factions that caused the landscape of Roman Africa to be 'covered with a white robe of churches'" as Donatists and Catholics built church after church in competition with each other for the loyalty of the people.[370][371] The Donatists survived until the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb in the closing years of the seventh century.[372]

Despite corruption having a long history in Roman society, Ramsay MacMullen "attributes to the fourth century ...the spread of an ethos of venality (greed and bribery) and the displacement of aristocratic networks of patronage by the indiscriminate exchange of favors for money". He has asserted that this practice shows the church, and Christians in government, were universally corrupt in the fourth and fifth centuries.[351][373] MacMullen's thesis has produced considerable scholarly criticism that has been dubbed the "corruption debate".[374]

Modern studies have employed many of the same sources as MacMullen, but have arrived at virtually opposite conclusions.[375] For example, in the 1960s, political scientists examined the processes of modernization in the empire, along with those practices considered "corrupt" by modern Western standards, and found that what modern historians have termed "corruption" might in some ways, "and sometimes systematically, have a beneficial impact on a range of important goals: 'nation-building', economic development, administrative capacity, and democratization."[376]

Tim Watson concludes that, "Even if agreement can be reached on what exactly constituted "corrupt" behavior, there is simply not enough data" in the sources to settle the corruption debate. He adds that this, in turn, has given rise to the tendency of modern historians of this ancient period to adopt their own personal perspectives.[377]

Christian Charity-Daniel Rauch-2-Hermitage

Christians showed the poor great generosity, and "there is no disputing that Christian charity was an ideology put into practice".[378][note 12] Prior to Christianity, the wealthy elite of Rome mostly donated to civic programs designed to elevate their status, though personal acts of kindness to the poor were not unheard of. The ancient world has no trace of any organized charitable effort for feeding and clothing the poor, visiting prisoners, or supporting widows and orphan children.[380][381][382] Nevertheless, Salzman asserts that the Roman practice of civic euergetism ("philanthropy publicly directed toward one's city or fellow citizens") influenced Christian charity "even as they remained distinct components of justifications for the feeding of Rome well into the late sixth century".[383]

Christian and non-Christian witnesses testify to the zealousness of Christian communities for almsgiving and charity.[384] "That the later church in Rome was actively involved in charity and renowned for its work with the needy is attested".[385][note 13] Hart writes that the emperor Julian, who was hostile to Christianity, is recorded as saying: "It is [the Christians'] philanthropy towards strangers, the care they take of the graves of the dead, and the affected sanctity with which they conduct their lives that have done most to spread their atheism."[389][390]

Steven C. Muir has written that "Charity was, in effect, an institutionalized policy of Christianity from its beginning.  ... While this situation was not the sole reason for the group's growth, it was a significant factor".[391]

Reims - musée Saint-Remi (15)

MacMullen has written that, "the role of Christianity in the abandoning of most western gladiatorial combat was nil."[326] However, as Meijer explains, while gladiator shows were never effectively officially politically abolished, Christians did speak out against them, and the rising number of Christians in the population in the late fourth century caused the popularity of the games to decline.[392] It is likely the games ended from this lack of public support before 440.[393]

Two devastating epidemics, the Antonine Plague in 154 and the Plague of Cyprian in 251, carried off a large number of the empire's population, though there is some debate over this.[394] Graeco-Roman doctors tended largely to the elite, while the poor mostly had recourse to "miracles and magic" at religious temples.[395] Christians, on the other hand, tended to the sick and dying, as well as the aged, orphaned, exiled and widowed.[396][397] Many of these caretakers were monks and nuns. Christian monasticism had emerged toward the end of the third century, and their numbers grew such that, "by the fifth century, monasticism had become a dominant force impacting all areas of society".[398][399]

According to Albert Jonsen, a historian of medicine, "the second great sweep of medical history [began] at the end of the fourth century, with the founding of the first Christian hospital for the poor at Caesarea in Cappadocia."[400][401][note 14] By the fifth century, the founding of hospitals for the poor had become common for Bishops, Abbots and Abbesses.[404]

Helmut Koester argues that, "One should not see the success of Christianity simply on the level of a great religious message; one has to see it also in the consistent and very well thought out establishment of institutions to serve the needs of the community".[405] Through almsgiving and other acts of charity, Christianity established a realm of mutual social support for those that joined the church. Koester asserts this was "probably an enormously important factor for the success of the Christian mission".[405]

According to Stark, "Christianity did not grow because of miracle working in the marketplaces ... or because Constantine said it should, or even because the martyrs gave it such credibility. It grew because Christians constituted an intense community" which provided a unique "sense of belonging".[406][407] Praet has written that, "in his very influential booklet Pagans and Christians in an Age of Anxiety, E. R. Dodds acknowledged ... 'Christians were in a more than formal sense 'members one of another': I think that was a major cause, perhaps the strongest single cause, of the spread of Christianity".[407]

Christian community was not just one thing. Experience and expression were diverse. Yet early Christian communities did have commonalities in the kerygma, the rites of baptism and the eucharist.[408] As far back as it can be traced, evidence indicates the rite of initiation into Christianity was always baptism.[409] In Christianity's earliest communities, candidates for baptism were introduced by a teacher or other person willing to stand surety for their character and conduct. Baptism created a set of responsibilities within each Christian community, which some authors described in quite specific terms.[410] Candidates for baptism were instructed in the major tenets of the faith (the kerygma), examined for moral living, sat separately in worship, could not receive the eucharist, and were generally expected to demonstrate commitment to the community and obedience to Christ's commands before being accepted into the community as a full member.[411]

Celebration of the eucharist was the common unifier for Christian communities, and early Christians believed the kerygma, the eucharist and baptism came directly from Jesus of Nazareth.[409] According to Dodds, "A Christian congregation was from the first a community in a much fuller sense than any corresponding group of Isis followers or Mithras devotees. Its members were bound together not only by common rites but by a common way of life".[412]

Joseph Hellerman observes New Testament writers as choosing 'family' as the central social metaphor to describe their community. In doing so, they redefined the concept of family.[413] In both Jewish and Roman tradition, genetic families were generally buried together, but an important cultural shift took place in the way Christians buried one another: they gathered unrelated Christians into a common burial space, as if they really were one family, "commemorated them with homogeneous memorials and expanded the commemorative audience to the entire local community of coreligionists".[414] The Jewish ethic and its concept of community as family is what made "Christianity's power of attraction ... not purely religious but also social and philosophical".[415] The Christian church was modeled on the synagogue. Christian philosophers synthesized their own views with Semitic monotheism and Greek thought. The Old Testament gave the new religion of Christianity roots reaching back to antiquity. In a society which equated dignity and truth with tradition, this was significant.[415]

Community on a larger scale is evidenced by a study of 'letters of recommendation' that Christians created to be taken by a traveler from one group of believers to another.[416][417] Security and hospitality when traveling had traditionally been undependable for most, being ensured only by, and for, those with the wealth and power to afford them. By the late third and early fourth centuries, Christians had developed a 'form letter' of recommendation, only requiring the addition of an individual's name, that extended trust and welcome and safety to the whole household of faith, "though they were strangers".[416] E. A. Judge writes of the fourth century diary of Egeria which documents her travels throughout the Middle East, seeing the old sites of the Biblical period, the monks, and even climbing Mount Sinai: "At every point she was met and looked after". The same benefits were applied to others carrying a Christian letter of recommendation as members of the community.[416]

Faithful Unto Death by Herbert Schmalz

Theologian Paul Middleton writes that:

 ...accounts of martyrdom are contested narratives. There is no neutral way in which to tell martyr stories, as they inevitably create heroes and villains ... even in the early church, martyrdom has always been contested. Moreover, any quest to distinguish objectively between true and false martyrdom essentially represents the imposition of the values or identity claims of the compiler, narrator or even editor.[418]

Justin wrote: "it is plain that, though beheaded and crucified, and thrown to wild beasts, and chains, and fire, and all other kinds of torture, we do not give up our confession [of Christ]; but the more such things happen, the more do others and in larger numbers become faithful, and worshippers of God through the name of Jesus".[419] The Roman government practiced systematic persecution of Christian leaders and their property in 250–51 under Decius, in 257–60 under Valerian, and after 303 under Diocletian. Keith Hopkins concludes that "it was in this same period that, in spite of temporary losses, Christianity grew fastest in absolute terms. In other words, in terms of number, persecution was good for Christianity".[420]

In MacMullen's view, miracles and exorcisms form the most important (and possibly the only) reason for conversion to Christianity in the pre-Constantinian age.[421] These events provide some of the best documented ancient conversions.[422] However, there is a drop-off in the records of miracles in the crucial second and third centuries. Praet writes that "as early as the beginning of the third century, Christian authors admit that the "Golden Age" of miracles is over".[421] Yet Christianity grew most rapidly at the end of that same third century indicating that the real impact of miracles in garnering new converts is questionable. In Praet's view, even if Christianity had "retained its miraculous powers", the impact of miracles on conversion would still be questionable, since pagans also produced miracles, and no one questioned that those miracles were as real as Christianity's, yet there is no record of anyone converting to paganism because of them.[423]

The Christian Graces, Faith, Hope & Charity. Die Christlichen Grazien, Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe (front)

Religion scholar William Baird has written that there is scholarly disagreement over the exact composition of the ancient kerygma.[424] In 1936, C. H. Dodd published The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments which introduced the idea of a sharp distinction between the kerygma (the message) and the didache (the pattern of ethical instruction) in the early church.[424]

For Dodd, the early gospel included six major facts or doctrines: 1) "The age of fulfillment has dawned"; 2) "This has taken place through the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus"; 3) "By virtue of the resurrection, Jesus has been exalted at the right hand of God"; 4) "The Holy Spirit in the church is the sign of Christ's present power and glory"; 5) "The Messianic Age will shortly reach its consummation in the return of Christ"; 6) "An appeal for repentance, the offer of forgiveness.. . and the promise of 'salvation' " is extended".[424]

Others have suggested three, five and seven major doctrines instead. For Dodd, "the early Christian message consists of a formula of facts and doctrines about God's action in Christ".[425] The alternate school of thought is made up largely of German scholars led by Rudolf Bultmann, who says "the gospel is itself God's powerful act in which Christ is dynamically present calling men to a decision of faith".[425] Baird says the two schools of thought are simply a difference of emphasis.[425] J. N. D. Kelly has asserted that, from the beginning of Christianity, there was a broad outline of doctrine that was seen as sacrosanct: the life and teachings of Jesus, his sacrificial death, and his physical resurrection.[426][427] These were accepted by early believers as handed down from those Apostles who had known Jesus and been taught by him.[428] Together with the Hebrew Bible, these provided the central message, also known as the kerygma, of the early church.[429]

According to Greek scholar Matthew R. Malcolm, the concept that the power of God is manifested through Jesus in a reversal of power can be found in the writings of Paul. This reversal has impact on all doctrines of the message: it redefines love as an "other-regarding sacrificial act",[430] which also redefines the nature and practice of power and authority as service to others.[431] Yet, it is in the gospel of Matthew (20:25-26), rather than Paul, that Jesus is quoted as saying: "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be a servant..." Biblical scholar Wayne Meeks explains this by saying "the ultimate power and structure of the universe" has manifested itself in human society through Jesus' act of giving up his power for the sake of love. Meeks concludes "this must have had a very powerful, emotional appeal to people".[430] N. T. Wright argues that these ideas were revolutionary to the classical world.[432]

This message contained the assertion that Christian salvation was made available to all, and it included eternal life. Ancient paganism had a variety of views of an afterlife from a belief in Hades to a denial of eternal life completely.[433] Afterlife punishments can be found in other religions preceding Christianity. One scholar has concluded "Hell is a Greek invention".[434] Philosopher and philologist Danny Praet asserts that much of the Roman population no longer believed in Graeco–Roman afterlife punishments, so there is no reason to expect they would take the Christian version more seriously.[434] While it may or may not have been a major cause of conversion, writings from the Christians Justin and Tatian, the pagan Celsus, and the Passio of Ptolemaeus and Lucius are just some of the sources that confirm Christians did use the doctrine of eternal punishment, and that it did persuade some non-believers to convert.[278]

The Christian teaching of bodily resurrection was new, (and not readily accepted), but most Christian views of an afterlife were not new. What they had was the novelty of exclusivity: right belief became as significant a determiner of the future as right behavior.[435] Ancient Christians backed this up with prophecies from ages old documents and living witnesses, giving Christianity its claim to a historical base. This was new and different from paganism.[436] Praet writes that anti-Christian polemics of the era never questioned that: "[Jesus'] birth, teachings, death and resurrection took place in the reigns of the emperors Augustus and Tiberius, and until the end of the first century, the ancient church could produce living witnesses who claimed to have seen or spoken to the Savior".[436] Many modern scholars have seen this as one of the major reasons for Christianity's success.[436]