How Christianity conquered the Roman empire

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1:55The Roman Empire was home to a multitude of religious cults in the 1st century AD. However, only one, Christianity, rose to global domination. But why? That's a question that Tim Whitmarsh sets out to answer in his latest book, Rome's Age of Revolution. And in this episode of the History Extra podcast, Tim talks Spencer Mizzen through a story that encompasses Christian entrepreneurs, Greek intellectuals, and the surprising parallels between Jesus and the Emperor Augustus.

2:27Hi Tim, it's great to have you on the History Extra podcast today. You've got a new book out. It's called Rome's Age of Revolution. One thing that really jumped out at me when reading it was just how important Augustus, the brutal, brilliant first Roman emperor, was to the rise of Christianity in the 1st century AD. So, with that in mind, I wonder if you could start by describing the revolution that Augustus initiated when he came to power.

3:05And I wonder also if you could explain why that revolution created conditions that would prove so fertile to the growth of Christianity. Yes, thank you. That's the key question. Now, with Augustus, when we talk about him coming to power, we have to be careful here because, in a sense, he didn't really come to power. He's remembered as the first Roman emperor, but that was never a title that he took. The Roman Republic was coming to an end, but he tried to present himself as continuing the Roman Republic and just as somebody who just happened to have vast amounts of what he called authority, not power, not power, but authority in his lap.

3:43But, in effect, he was the first Roman emperor, yes, and he retooled space and time in a really radical way. There had been earlier empires, of course, but none on the scale that Augustus commanded now. So, Augustus set about networking this empire. He built roads everywhere. We tend to think of Roman roads as boring phenomena, long and straight and tedious, but actually they were super important back in the day because they were obviously means of connectivity.

4:14And it was that connectivity, really, that was at the heart of the new Christian religion as it emerged in the first century. But he also remade time, which is a more mind-bending idea at some level. Can you remake time? Well, you can't remake time itself, but you can remake the way in which it's measured, the way in which it is expressed. And that's what he did. He took over his adopted father, Julius Caesar's calendar and rolled it out across the empire. And that is essentially the calendar that we use today.

4:45So, that was a really important moment. And it was a very accurate calendar, a calendar that didn't get out of sync with the seasons. So, it's a very effective tool. But he also presented himself and his father, in a way, as inaugurating a new age. And I think it's these two facets, really. It's the time and the space, the remaking of both, that lays the ground for the emergence of Christianity. So, how did Christians capitalise upon that then? Why did this new Augustinian settlement prove so fertile to the growth of this new religion?

5:19Well, I think there are two more factors that we need to bring in here. Clearly, Christianity wasn't simply a Roman phenomenon. It was also a Jewish phenomenon and it had the explosive force in the Roman Empire of a new way of thinking about the world. So, it was very clearly enmeshed in its Jewish roots at this particular point. But it also landed in the Greek-speaking east of the Roman Empire. We tend to think of the Roman Empire as Latin-speaking. And in the west, it was Latin-speaking. But many more people lived in the east.

5:51And the east was, in a way, more urbanised or metropolitanised. It had the huge cities, the huge port cities of Alexandria and Antioch and the famous capital of culture, Athens and so forth. So, this was the best place to be. And the Christian Gospels were almost certainly written in Greek. Paul's letters were written in Greek. So, what you have is this conjuncture of a Jewish religion expressed in Greek, the language of the Eastern Roman Empire, but also landing in an incredibly energetic new world in which change was afoot.

6:26And spaces like the Galatian Plateau, for example, which is the central area of Anatolia of Turkey, which is ringed by mountains and very hard to get to, was suddenly being urbanised. And you get this huge influx of new architecture and new ideas, new coinage and so forth, rapid development in living standards. And these were precisely the areas that Paul and his ilk focused on, these newly emerging areas. At the same time as, of course, they are going to the older cities,

6:57they're proselytising in these newly networked spaces, which are ripe for, if you like, development in terms of new ideas and new thoughts. And they're really hungry for new ideas. Yeah, you describe early Christians as brilliant entrepreneurs. But what do you mean by that? That's a good question. I think they're brilliant entrepreneurs in the sense that they are forward-looking and adaptable and creative. And they're very strongly driven by mission, which is, of course, has become a Christian word.

7:28They have a really strong sense of purpose, and they know how to achieve that purpose in different contexts. So that's what I mean by it. But I think you're right to pick me up on that particular metaphor, because it suggests a capitalist model whereby what you're after really is money. And these guys weren't after money. One of the things we have to remember about the ancient economy, in inverted commas, is that money isn't the sole driver of the ancient economy. So much of it is about prestige and about authority and about honour and more abstract concepts like that.

8:03So what Christians were after, what these entrepreneurial Christians were after, was not. I mean, they had to have enough money for the communities to survive. And we can see in early Christian documents a certain amount of attention to money generation. But what they're really after is embedding the authority of the Christian message in the prestige economy of the Roman Empire. Can you talk to us a little bit about some of these people you describe as entrepreneurs, who were like the main characters we need to know about in this story, in capitalising on sort of Roman structures and driving the growth of Christian faith?

8:39Well, we, in the earliest period, the first century CE, it's the apostles, Paul and the others, who are going out, irradiating outwards across the empire, travelling. Of course, travelling is super important because these are charismatics. These are people with extraordinary personal authority who convince small local communities to follow them. And we have other parallels for other such charismatic individuals. So it's really important to be there, to be on the ground and to magnetise and mesmerise,

9:12as clearly these individuals do. Paul is always remembered as the most magnetic and the most alluring of these apostolic figures. But that first generation of apostles was really remembered in later Christian tradition as the people who generated the energy and the enthusiasm for the early movement. And of course, in a sense, they were expected to be kind of closer to Christ, even though someone like Paul had never met Christ. Christ only ever lived in Judea.

9:42Paul, of course, was taking the message to the wider world. So it's a separate phase. But because of the temporal proximity to Jesus, a figure like Paul was thought to have some of the charisma by proxy, if you like, of Jesus. Another strand of your argument is that this is a story of adaptation and integration and not antagonism and persecution. Now, we're kind of all familiar with the stories of the brutalisation and the martyrdom of early Christians at the hands of agents of Rome.

10:15Why has this version of events become the dominant narrative? Why was it in Christians' interest to promote this narrative of martyrdom? I don't want to deny that the Roman state, which was characteristically brutal and unaccommodating to people that it deemed to be troublemakers, and executed and persecuted Christians because they did that systematically to all insurgent groups, if you like. So I'm absolutely convinced that a certain amount of that happened.

10:46But you're absolutely right to distinguish, if you like, the historical reality of what happened from the narrative function of martyrdom in early Christianity, which is a separate phenomenon. And it did have this snowballing effect. People were emotionally engaged by these stories. And the reasons for this are complex. I think they're partly to do with the story of Jesus's death and resurrection, which is, of course, the founding story, which is, again, not to say that it didn't happen, but as a story, it matters as a story.

11:16So every martyrdom, in effect, replays that narrative. So that's part of the reason for the spread of martyr stories. There is also an intrinsic magnetism to these stories, these stories of people who are so true to their values that they confront opposition, but nevertheless die heroically and or pathetically. Interestingly, this is an era in which we have not only Christian martyr stories, but we have similar sorts of stories in the form of early novels.

11:49The Greek culture of the Roman Empire produces novels that have martyr-like elements in them, where young lovers, for example, who are devoted to each other, are threatened with all sorts of punishments and so forth, but they remain true to each other. So it's an era where people are really getting to appreciate the force of the underdog, the figure who is oppressed by the state. So there's a kind of narrative energy to it as well. But the thirdly, I think, and this is really a little bit later on,

12:20but when you start getting the legalisation of Christianity under Constantine, in this kind of era, the 4th century, what we begin to see is saints being a way of linking local communities to the centre. So every local community worth its salt has to have some kind of martyr, who then becomes a saint, who is then worshipped as, if you like, a sort of local version of the centralised Christian church. So there are different dynamics that power the development of the martyr narrative.

12:54This brings us quite nicely to a word you employ quite a lot in the book, and that's paradox. You point out that it was arguably when Christians set themselves directly against Rome that they were at their most Roman. What exactly do you mean by that? So because the central argument of the book is that Augustus and Augustan imperialism create the space in which Christianity flourishes, I also see Christianity as paradoxically part of the same imperial system,

13:26which again is not to deny that Christians are persecuted or executed and so forth, but they are creative participators in the symbolic structure of empire. So when you get these stories of a martyr in the arena and being condemned by a Roman official and being punished, and that story turns out to flip the anticipated narrative on its head so that the martyr who is supposed to be abased here is actually exalted and becomes the winner in this particular competition. When you get that kind of situation, what you're getting is not Roman imperialism over here and poor plucky Christians over there,

14:04but you're getting an imperial space, the arena, with an imperial judicial frame imposed on it. And the Christian tellers of that story are participants in that Roman imperial story. They are using the idea of inversion, of inversion of power. The Roman official should have the power, but in fact it's the martyr, it's the punished Christian who has the power. That inversion actually, in a sense, re-establishes the importance of the imperial space.

14:35That's a kind of abstract idea, but I hope some of it came across. It certainly did. And speaking of paradox, there's another consequence of Christianity's immersion in the Roman Empire that you touch on, and that's the fact that believers increasingly distance themselves from the faith's Jewish roots. You write that from the early 2nd century onwards, we see a marked anti-Jewish bent, a ramping up of hostile language, a negative stereotyping.

15:06How did Christianity's links with the Roman Empire supercharge this process? In a way, Christianity and Judaism remained interleaved right up until late antiquity. We have all sorts of evidence, even in the 4th century after Constantine, we have all sorts of evidence for Christian bishops, for example, speaking to their flock and saying, don't backslide into Judaism. So they're clearly very worried about the grey area between Christianity and Jewishness, even that late.

15:37But there is a breakpoint, and that breakpoint is 70 CE, when the Romans destroy the Jewish temple and begin a process that leads to eventually the refoundation of Jerusalem as a kind of local imperial capital called Aelia Capitolina, which is named after the Emperor Hadrian. So in a sense, from two sides, 70 represents a breakpoint. From the side of the Romans, this is a new dynasty coming to the fore in 70 CE, and they want to establish themselves as a new dynasty with a really big victory.

16:17So they say, we trashed the Judean capital. And they bring the spoils back, and they present them in a temple called the Temple of Peace. And the Arch of Titus has the parading of the menorah on it. So the Romans are making a big deal of how they've destroyed this fearsome foreign foe. So from the Roman side, it is really important to mark a point of break with the past here. But also from the Jewish side, this is seen as such a devastating act of sacrilege to the temple in particular,

16:49that this impels 50 years or so of Jewish uprising. So there is a fierce antagonism between Judaism and the Roman state. And certain Christian writers piggyback on this. Certain Christian writers take this opportunity to side with the Romans against the Jews and effectively say, don't confuse us with the Jews. We're much more on the Roman side. As I say, I don't want to overstate that because there was always that grey area in between the two.

17:20But certain of our elite sources in particular are very keen to say there is a sharp break at this point between Christianity and Judaism. Looks like the back-to-school list is back. You mean the list that comes with its own list. No teddy bears this year, no purple anything, no whatever we found last week. Which is why we're shopping at Walmart. Walmart? Glitter headphones to match her backpack? Check. K-pop Demon Hunter's notebooks? Check. And all the boring stuff that's somehow not boring. Oh, check out these folders and crayons starting at just 25 cents.

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18:03I'm not giving up. I am selling the building. The final season of FX is the bear. The restaurant is flooded.

18:14Everything's either going to be okay. No! Or not. We are outgunned and we are outmanned. We have each other. FX is the bear. The final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney+. Still waiting in line? Again?

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19:08And that's Augustus. Because you draw quite a lot of parallels between the figures of Augustus and Jesus, don't you, in the book? You write that some people portrayed them both as messianic saviour kings. Some early Christians sort of depicted Christ himself as almost an emperor, imposing a kind of religious monoculture, just as Augustus had imposed a political monoculture on the empire. Would it be fair to say that the figure of Jesus was, to an extent, kind of modelled on the figure of Augustus?

19:45Or would that be overplaying the parallels? I think it would be overplaying the parallels. I mean, they're clearly very different figures in terms of their backgrounds and in terms of the message that they're projecting. But I think the way in which Jesus was, if you like, packaged in the first century was designed to gel with elements of Roman propaganda around the figure of Augustus himself. So, yes, you mentioned the idea of the saviour. I mean, Augustus is presented as a saviour. Augustus creates this paradoxical relationship, we can use that word again, with the past,

20:20whereby the Roman Republic is both fulfilled in the figure of Augustus, who is returning to the Republic, but also in a sense radically changed by it. So you've got this sense of simultaneously rerouting the Roman Empire in tradition, but also transforming it. And again, Jesus does something very similar to that. So I'll give you two examples of the most striking meeting points between Jesus and Augustus. The first is the set of stories around their birth.

20:50So we're very familiar with the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke around the birth of Jesus. There are surprisingly similar stories told about Augustus, and crucially, they're told first about Augustus. We know that Augustus was 60, 70 years older than Jesus. In particular, there's a story about Augustus that when he was born, there was a prophecy that a future king, and the Romans didn't like kings, a future king would be born in the town of his birth at this particular juncture.

21:21And so the Roman state decides to execute all children born in this town. And this is so eerily close to the story in Matthew, the massacre of the innocents, that it seems to me unlikely that the massacre of the innocents was not, in a sense, reflecting on that. So that's one point, the similarity of stories told about their birth. But the other point is that one of the most famous decrees that Augustus rolled out was the New Year decree, about the New Year would be held on his birthday, on Augustus' birthday.

21:53And this uses some very strange language. And this is rolled out across the Greek-speaking part of the empire. The Greek is euangelion, the good news. And that is taken up by Christians. And it's not only taken up from here, but it must be partly taken up from here by Christians to mark the Gospel. The Gospels are called the good news of Jesus Christ from Mark's Gospel onwards. So, as I say, you can see Christians, it's exactly what I was talking about earlier, this sort of creative adaptation. We're not being told that Jesus is Augustus, but they're using the same language and the same tropes, if you like,

22:26to establish Jesus as a new, radically new figure who also is rooting us in the past. But do you think that early Christians, or at least some of them, looked at the size and success of the Roman Empire and thought, well, if this imperium can dominate these swathes of land, why can't our religion? Did the success of the Augustinian project kind of expand Christians' ambitions? I think so. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the earliest Christian missions that we know, let's take Acts of the Apostles, for example,

22:58which not everyone accepts as a photorealistic depiction of reality, but leaving that to one side, something like what happened in Acts of the Apostles did happen. What is the psychology of these individuals? Why are they following these new Roman roads into spaces that were not connected to mainstream metropolis beforehand? And why are these individuals who are undertaking these missions, why are they buddying up to local Roman bigwigs and so forth in order to get papers and support and so forth to get into these places?

23:29It is because they're seeing the new opportunities of the world expanding. Most ancient religions, Judaism included, have a really strong sense of place. And of course, the Jewish religion, it was always Jerusalem. So Christians are uncoupling themselves from the space-related view of religion and inserting themselves into the filaments of empire and thinking of themselves as a religion on the move. One of the points that I make in the book is that the earliest Christians seem to have used the metaphor of the way.

24:02They didn't describe themselves necessarily as Christians. They described themselves as the way. And the Greek word odos, which is translated as the way, which sounds rather grand in English, simply means the road or the street. Now, there are many more metaphorical resonances to that particular word. But it's a reminder that Christianity literally was a religion of connectivity, a religion that embraced the new technology of the road and the road-based system. What was it about Christianity?

24:32Because obviously there was a plethora of religions in the Roman Empire in the first century AD. What quality was it about Christianity that sort of enabled it to capitalise on this better than any other religion? That's the crucial point, isn't it? And the answer that I give in the book is, again, to do with a kind of, that's not entrepreneurialism here, but a kind of farsightedness here. It is, as you say, it's relatively easy for cults to spring up in the Roman Empire in this newly networked space.

25:04There's a lot of prestige at stake. There is also money at stake for unscrupulous people. And we have stories about unscrupulous people enriching themselves by pretending to be a new prophet and so forth. So there is plenty of opportunity there. But you can only really do that for one generation. Then you have to think about how to embed your religious dispensation and transform it into something permanent. And that is a pretty complicated process. You need to go from what I call, you know, the charismatic stage where you've got all of this energy around a new religion and stories of miraculous doings and self-sacrifice, heroic self-sacrifice, all of this charismatic energy.

25:47And you need to transmute that into something more permanent and stable. And I think Christianity did that in two ways. One was by generating a clerical structure so that you could actually transmit wisdom to your followers and they could skill up junior people who would then eventually become senior community leaders, if you like. So Christianity from a very early period seems to be very aware of the need to have this sort of role specialization.

26:19It's clearly it's an evolving process, but they borrow titles from both from Jewish culture. So a priest, for example, is a presbyteros, which is the word for a Jewish elder, but also the deacon and what we now call the bishop, the episkopos. These are words that are taken from Greek temple culture as well. So we can see that early Christians, very early Christians are thinking about role specialization as a way precisely of guaranteeing the futurity of the religion. But the other thing which emerges much more slowly is a interest in the book, which is such a important factor of in particular the, if you like, the sort of intellectual prestige economy of the early Roman Empire.

27:02We can see Romans from the first century BCE onwards just suddenly start presenting themselves with books, you know, on their tombs and the like in all of their visual art. The book is the symbol of the symbol that you've made it, symbol that you've really got some heft in this world. So, as I say, it took a long time, took 200 years or so. But Christians began to embrace the idea of the book as a marker of authority, but also as a vehicle for elevated forms of wisdom. And we simply don't see either of these two phenomena really in other new cults of the Roman Empire.

27:38They're not really thinking about the future in quite the same way that Christians are. So, this kind of interest in the book, does that in some ways stem from sort of the fact that Christianity first rose in the Greek-speaking world? Because I think you say in your book that the book generally played a really prominent role in thinking in the ancient Greek world. And this kind of fed through to the way that early Christians practiced their religion and saw the world around them.

28:09Well, again, I think it's a combination of three cultural roots, if you like. Judaism clearly has a strongly established sense of scripture. Christianity did take that over, but surprisingly slowly, actually. If you were expecting Christians to immediately emerge in the first century CE and say, we've got our own scripture, which is related to but substantially different from Jewish scripture, which, of course, is the position that they ended up with, with the New Testament and the Old Testament. If you were expecting that, then they don't do that.

28:39But there is clearly a memory of Jewish scripture that plays an important role in the foundation of Christianity as a culture of the book. The second thing is precisely Greek culture. Greeks in the Roman period, the imperial period from the first century CE onwards, are absolutely preoccupied with particularly the elites, but not just the elites, but with libraries, with book culture, with the idea that books are the link between past and present.

29:10They are absolutely preoccupied with Homer and Plato and Euripides and so forth. And they use these as resources to create new creativity in the present. So the book is absolutely central to the definition of, as I say, particularly, but not exclusively, elite Greek culture. But the Romans as well. Rome moved very fast in the first century BCE. And beginning of that century, you didn't really have, it's an exaggeration, but you didn't really have Roman intellectuals. By the end, you had lots of people who were embracing the Greek idea that being an intellectual is something to conjure with.

29:48You have people like Caesar writing his accounts of his conquests and so forth in a very traditional classical style. So Rome, as ever, hyper-accelerates these movements. And the book becomes, as I say, a really important symbol within the Romanised Greek world. OK, here's a quick note for our listeners. If you'd like to hear more about the Roman Empire in the first century AD, then why not check out my Life of the Week interview with Edward Watts about one of the most remarkable characters in all of ancient history, one that we've already mentioned on this podcast quite extensively.

30:26And that's the first Roman Emperor, Augustus. I'll leave the link to that episode in the notes for this show. Right, Tim, the book obviously challenges a few long-held and cherished assumptions about the rise of Christianity. How do you think he'll be received? Are you envisaging any pushback? Yes, yeah. I mean, you always brace yourself for pushback, but especially if you're going into such a contested area as this. I mean, I've tried to be humble and thoughtful and, I mean, clearly my expertise lies in the Roman Empire and actually, as it happens, the Greek-speaking part of the Roman Empire.

31:06So I'm trying to tell a story that comes out of my own area of intellectual expertise. But no, there are an awful lot of people with an awful lot of stake in the telling of this particular story. I'm aware that my version of it, in a sense, de-exceptionalizes Christianity. I don't mean to. What I want to do is, in a way, precisely the opposite. I want to say that Christianity was exceptional, but so were many other things in the Roman Empire. And that what a good, honest historian does is pays attention to every single phenomenon and gives it its due and wonders why that was successful on its own terms.

31:43But it is, yes, it's not a theological story of the development and the embeddedness, embedding of Christianity. It is a cultural historical story. And yes, I imagine that will ruffle some feathers. Thank you very much for that. That was great. Thank you so much for sparing your time there. Thank you very much, Spencer. Thanks for having me on the show.

32:05That was Tim Whitmarsh speaking to Spencer Mizzen. Tim is Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge. To find out more about the extraordinary rise of Christianity across the Roman Empire, check out his new book, Rome's Age of Revolution. Looks like the back-to-school list is back. You mean the list that comes with its own list. No teddy bears this year, no purple anything, no whatever we found last week. Which is why we're shopping at Walmart.

32:36Walmart? Glitter headphones to match your backpack, check. K-pop Demon Hunter's notebooks, check. And all the boring stuff that's somehow not boring. Oh, check out these folders and crayons starting at just 25 cents. Check, check. Okay, this is so my vibe. And check. Who knew? This back-to-school, check out the whole list for less at Walmart. Prices vary by location.

32:58I'm not giving up. I am selling the building. The final season of FX is the bear. The restaurant is flooded.

33:09Everything's either going to be okay. No, stop. Or not. We are outgunned. And we are outmanned. We have each other.

33:20FX is the bear. The final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney+. Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com.