All notes below take from: NT Wright and Mike Bird – “The New Testament In Its World,” Johnson Sunday School in the Garden Room
Chapter 7
The Greco-Roman Context of the Early Church
They [the Romans] ransack the world, and afterwards, when all the land has been laid waste by their pillaging, they scour the sea . . . They plunder, they murder, they rape, in the name of their so-called empire. And where they have made a desert, they call it peace. – Tacitus
The conquests of Alexander the Great had led to a proliferation of Greek language, learning, and civilization. Places like Egypt, the Balkans, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and the Fertile Crescent were all Hellenized to varying degrees.2 This does not mean, of course, that all prior customs and local traditions just vanished. Some Greek culture did displace certain aspects of life, but more often than not, it brought old customs to new expression. Indigenous forms of art, architecture, religion, and language did not die out. They were caught up in the larger, and complex, world of Greek culture. That culture did indeed take over, but the many other local cultures, far from vanishing, blended to create a wealth of hybrid cultural expressions. This ability to fuse cultures together explains why Hellenization prevailed, and became as powerful as it did. {Page 143, The New Testament In Its World}
The primary instrument of hellenization was language. Greek became the lingua franca of the ancient world, and remained dominant for centuries even after the Latin-speaking Romans had gained overall power. {Page 143}
The second instrument of hellenization was the polis or city-state. As the Greeks conquered regions, they established colonies with a Greek way of life. Here the Greek polis was the political, economic, educational, religious, and social hub of a civilization. Cities were adorned with temples honouring the gods, a gymnasium for training young men, schools for instruction in philosophy and rhetoric, an agora for traded goods, and amphitheatres and stadiums for arts and sports. The polis was the means of forming a cultured urban society. {Page 144}
A third instrument of hellenization was religious syncretism. Local deities could be identified with gods from the Greek pantheon. The Samaritans identified YHWH with Zeus under the Seleucid ruler Antiochus Epiphanes IV in the second century BC, and then with Jupiter (the Roman equivalent of the Greek Zeus) under the Roman emperor Hadrian in the second century AD. {Page 144}
Greek culture in the time after Alexander was shaped, in the different regions, by Egyptian, Judean, Arabian, Asian, Syrian, and even Iranian influences. Greek influence was also uneven, affecting different regions and the social classes to different degrees. In places like Judea there was a mixture of appropriation and resistance to Hellenism. {Page 144}
Greece provided the cultural capital of the ancient world, but it was the Romans who spent it in expanding their empire. {Page 144}
The transition from the Roman republic to the Roman empire, in the latter sense, began to take place under Julius Caesar (100–44 BC) who, though he was never called ‘emperor’, paved the way for the idea. After he had crossed the Rubicon and defeated Pompey, he was proclaimed dictator perpetuus, ‘dictator for life’—which was why a group of staunch republicans killed him (44 BC). {Page 144}
The reign of Augustus (31 BC–AD 14) marked a period of consolidation, reorganization, and renewal throughout the Roman empire. Augustus embarked on an empire-wide policy of fiscal rationalization; he developed a constitutional settlement for Rome; and he centralized his military authority over the various provinces. Writers and artists of the era heralded Augustus’s reign as a time of unprecedented peace (from civil war) and security (from the Germanic tribes in the north and the Parthian empire in the east). {Page 145}
Rome’s military power, famed and feared over a vast area, enabled the capital itself to grow rich with taxes imposed throughout its territories. The lower tiers of society in urban centres swelled with those who were made slaves or else displaced by military conflict. This put considerable pressure on the empire’s ability to feed the populace of Rome itself, and the city became dependent on grain levied from Egypt. {Page 145}
The colonies thus provided a type of Rome away from Rome, a place to settle troops and cultivate supporters. These colonies became outposts of Roman culture, and a reliable source of labour and soldiers that could be called upon if Rome needed them. {Page 146}
Roman religion itself followed the lines of the Greek pantheon. The Roman interpretation of Greek religion meant that Zeus was Jupiter; Poseidon, Neptune; Hera, Juno; Athene, Minerva; Aphrodite, Venus. Ares becomes Mars; Artemis, Diana; Demeter, Ceres; Hephaistos, Vulcan; and Dionysos, Bacchus. Heracles changes a couple of letters to become Hercules; Asclepius adds a couple to become Aesculapius. {Page 146}
Roman ‘religion’ was largely controlled by the state through a set calendar and the appointment of priests and vestal virgins. It was practised both in public and in the home. The private ‘household gods’ in each home were particularly important, with the father of the family acting as priest. These ‘household gods’ comprised the lares, small statues of two young men, and the penates, the small cult statues placed at the innermost point of the home, symbolizing the identity of a particular family. Harder to describe, but extremely important, was the genius of the father of the household. The genius was the deified concept of the person in his true identity or self. {Page 147}
THE SOCIAL ORDER
Social status was usually inherited through family descent and gender, all in an assumed ordered hierarchy. However, social advancement was possible, and many pursued it vigorously, by accumulation of wealth, or by marriage, education, manumission from slavery, and military exploits. All Romans belonged to one of the various social tiers of society: senatorial, equestrian, decurion, plebeian, freedman, and slave (see Table 7.1).5 Social ranking often determined who would interact with whom, and on what terms. This caused various conundrums for the early church, committed as it was to living in a totally different way. {Page 148}
If we look at the list of people named in the assemblies of the early church, it is clear that there was social diversity from the very beginning.10 While the early church contained people from the upper and merchant classes (though not the senatorial class, it seems, in the early decades at least), the largest block of people in the church came from the lower echelons and even from among the slave population.11 This socio-economic disparity contributed to some of the problems faced by the first churches, such as the congregation in Corinth where the rich (it seems) were unwilling to give up their culture of privilege and patronage, but instead translated it into their behaviour in the church. {Page 149}
Roman social stratification created other headaches too. For example, Christian noblewomen had a dilemma. There was at times a shortage of Christian men from the upper classes, but Christian noblewomen were not supposed to marry pagan men. If, in order to marry a Christian, they married a social inferior, they would lose their status among the nobility. Bishop Callistus, a third-century bishop of Rome, recognized that mixed marriages with pagans were undesirable for Christian noblewomen, but that it was preferable for them to retain their social status. He therefore gave the church’s blessing to Christian women living in concubinage with a socially inferior Christian man, even with a slave, without being legally married.13 This was the kind of thing that some found necessary if Christians were to negotiate their way within the social structures of the greco-roman world. {Page 149}
RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY, AND CULTURE
Obviously the ancient world did not have TV shows, the Internet, or Major League Baseball. But it did have its own literature, theatre, sporting heroes, cultural icons, and political celebrities, all of which were infused with stories and symbols from their mythic past. {Page 150}
They knew these stories as well as today’s western culture knows the present state of various soap operas, or film franchises such as Star Wars, or the present marital dilemmas of leading celebrities. We cannot begin to understand how ordinary people in the first century thought, imagined, reasoned, believed, prayed, and acted unless we try to get inside their myth-soaked culture. Importantly, this was a culture in which religion was everywhere. Like coffee shops or advertisements for cheap pharmaceuticals in our own culture, it was assumed and taken for granted everywhere. {Page 151}
So when someone like Paul arrived in Thessalonica or Ephesus with his message about the one God and his crucified and risen son, he was not offering an alternative way of being ‘religious’ in the sense of a private hobby, something to do in a few hours at the weekend. He was offering a heart transplant for an entire community and its culture. In cities like Thessalonica, this meant offering a direct challenge to the imperial cult, with its pretentious claim to being the religious and political glue that kept society together. {Page 151}
GRECO-ROMAN RELIGION
A first issue we have to broach is that the ancient world did not have something called ‘religion’ as we understand it today. If by ‘religion’ we mean a body of beliefs about ‘the supernatural’, with various ethical corollaries that can be kept in a separate compartment from secular culture, then clearly there was no such thing as ‘religion’ in that sense. There wasn’t a word for that kind of thing, because it was unknown. {Page 152}
The word ‘religion’ only gradually came to be used in the ancient world in relation to Christianity when it was fashioning a way of separating cult from culture. The idea that there might then be different ‘religions’ was an innovation of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. {Page 152}
1. Concern with present life rather than with an afterlife. One of the main attractions of Christianity or even Islam is the promise of life after death in an unending eternity with God. Ancient views on an afterlife were quite diverse . . . Men and women pursued the favour of the gods not primarily for what the gods might give them in a future life, but for blessings, boons, help, security, peace, and prosperity in this life here and now.
2. Focus on cultic ritual rather than on doctrinal beliefs. Some ancient authors do, indeed, discuss different views of the gods. Cicero, for instance, wrote a dialogue, On the Nature of the Gods, discussing the different views about the gods held by different philosophical schools.
3. No secularism with a separation of religion and state. Secularism, even as we might think of it, is not a monolithic concept . . . Political leaders wanted peace and security, and ‘religion’ was one vital way to achieve that. This is why emperors built temples, sponsored religious rites, often attempted to reform religious practices, and sometimes even enforced participation in religious observances by whole cities . . . Religious practices were thus part of statecraft.
4. Pluralism but not necessarily tolerance. Worship of a god was never exclusive. There were gods for just about everything: love, poetry, baking, travel, and even bee-keeping. Greco-roman ‘religion’, both at the public and private level, was usually capable of accommodating various divinities. {Page 153}
James Rives gives a good summary of religion in the greco-roman polis:
‘Religion’ did not exist as a separate area of human activity, but was embedded in the overarching structure of the city; there were no important religious institutions or offices separate from civic institutions and offices. Each city had its own distinctive set of cults, even if most of these were directed at a shared set of deities, and a city’s public cults were what defined the distinctive religious identity of its citizens; there was no religious identity separate from political or civic identity. Control of these public cults was in the hands of the local elite, in their capacity as magistrates, priests and members of the town council; priesthoods were public positions, distinguishable from magistracies only by certain formal features. The town council as a whole oversaw public cults, supporting established shrines and festivals with public funds and decreeing new ones as appropriate. Priests and magistrates presided over rituals and festivals on behalf of the city as a whole; in some ceremonies the populace at large took part, either en masse or through the participation of representative groups. Religious activity also took place in ‘private’ contexts, such as the household or various associations, but these functioned as constituent elements of the city rather than alternative focuses for religious allegiance and identity. The essence of religion lay in ritual rather than belief; hence the exegesis of particular cult acts or ceremonies and speculation about the nature of the divine were (sic) not part of public religion, but were left to the private initiative of interested individuals. {Page 156}
If we had to distil the substance of ancient ‘religion’, then, we could say that it pertains to negotiating the relationship between the divine world and the human world through ritual observance. This could be summed up by Cicero as cultus deorum (‘the cult of the gods’) in the sense of the labour of cultivating the divine favour of the gods for human existence. {Page 156}
The differences between all this and the early Christian devotional life are striking. For a start, Christianity had no priesthood and no temple, so to outsiders it would look much more like ‘philosophy’. Yet Christianity had some similarities to greco-roman ‘religion’: Christians, too, could talk about God, about the gods (though they didn’t believe in them), about heavenly worlds, spirits, and ‘demons’ (the latter term covering a range of imprecise supposed beings). Furthermore, Christians exhibited religio in the sense of having their own rituals like the Lord’s Supper and baptism, cultic acts which bound the members of the community to one another and particularly to the God revealed in and through Jesus. Where pagans consulted sacred books and oracles, the Christians searched the scriptures and prayed for the holy spirit to guide them. Christians, like other groups, had various forms of worship, singing, and prayers, including ecstatic utterance. Knowing all this becomes important when it comes to mapping how Christianity both fits into, and grates against, the religious context of the ancient world, and what Greeks and Romans might have thought when they encountered the little groups of Jesus-believers and their varied life and practice. {Page 157}
GRECO-ROMAN PHILOSOPHY
Again, we must resist the anachronism of imposing upon the ancient world our modern idea of philosophy as an abstract academic discipline. Philosophy in antiquity was far more integrated with religion, politics, rhetoric, art, science, and wider culture. It was everyday life as lived, reflected upon, and interpreted in this or that way. Philosophy shaped the intellectual currents of the greco-roman world as it reflected on the meaning and purpose of life, ethics, religion, politics, science, nature, law, public speaking, and even agriculture. {Page 158}
The entire edifice of western philosophy owes its origins to ancient Greece, and to the important trio of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They, building on their predecessors (‘the pre-Socratics’), set the questions and agenda for western philosophy ever afterwards. Socrates (c. 469–399 BC) was regarded as the first great philosopher and the first philosophical martyr as well. To paraphrase Cicero, it was Socrates who brought philosophy down from heaven to earth.22 In contrast to the pre-Socratics, particularly the Sophists, Socrates did not see philosophy as primarily a discourse about nature, but as a matter of practical living. {Page 158}
Socrates’ student, Plato (c. 428–348 BC), taught that the world of space, time, and matter was essentially a secondary thing, a world of illusion, by comparison with the ultimate reality, the world of the ‘Forms’ or ‘Ideas’, the invisible realities of which this-worldly things were mere space-time copies. True knowledge, for Plato, was therefore knowledge of these ‘Forms’. Such knowledge was what the soul desired; and the soul, Plato believed, was immortal. It passed into the body, and departed from it upon death, either into a state of disembodied bliss or into a series of other bodies through reincarnation. {Page 158}
Plato’s star pupil was Aristotle, but Aristotle did not become part of the Academy. Aristotle came from northern Greece and returned there after Plato’s death to tutor the young Alexander of Macedon, who through his vast conquests would become ‘Alexander the Great’. Plato had a flair for the abstract, but Aristotle moved in the opposite direction, towards concrete categorizations of things, distinguishing objects, animals, behaviour, and beliefs. He tackled areas as diverse as biology, virtue, rhetoric, aesthetics, music, and metaphysics, and practically invented the discourse of logic with his three-point syllogisms. {Page 159}
There are plenty of apparent parallels between certain ideas and themes in the New Testament and the themes, teachings, and ideas found in the greco-roman world.26 In some cases there is direct borrowing (such as when Paul quotes philosophers or poets in Ac. 17 or 1 Cor. 15). Elsewhere there are close analogies, but not necessarily a direct genealogy of ideas. In plenty of places we can see the New Testament authors strongly repudiating standard greco-roman beliefs.
When Jesus himself, and his first followers, engaged with the greco-roman world, we see a mixture of adaptation and confrontation. Jesus could quote a famous proverb, ‘Physician, heal yourself ’,27 probably going back to Euripides, to lament how his own home town of Nazareth gave him a frosty reception. Yet he could also censure his disciples for aspiring to the pattern of power and privilege that was prevalent in the gentile world: ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you.’28 The very genres of the New Testament, biography (gospels), historiography (Acts), and epistles (Pauline and catholic letters), have all sorts of echoes of greco-roman literary forms, even if their contents have been shaped by the Old Testament and Jewish traditions. {Page 160-161}
On the whole, the apostle Paul shared the Jewish critique of greco-roman religion and the behaviour-patterns that went with it. His rejection of the central symbols of paganism was sharpened by what he believed about Jesus.29 Yet Paul lived and breathed the cultural air of the greco-roman world. As a speaker and writer, he exhibited tell-tale signs of rhetorical training, even while claiming not to have preached with rhetorical elegance or proclaimed his message with specious and self-serving reasoning. {Page 161}
The Carpenter's Nail 