For many, the story of early Christianity is forever filtered through Hollywood films. Victor Mature’s extravagant pecs or Deborah Kerr’s elaborate coiffure in epics such as The Robe and Quo Vadis signify the heroism of the faithful in the face of Roman persecution. Brave believers refuse to worship deluded emperors as gods. Martyrs are thrown to the lions.
Tim Whitmarsh’s erudite yet entertaining new study of Christianity’s historical origins, Rome’s Age of Revolution, deftly demolishes such tropes. Ironically, he says, Christians and the Augustan Roman state had much in common – in fact, the former piggybacked on earlier Roman structures and mores to build their own new empire, overlaid on existing political, civic and cultural templates. Both referenced the mythology of a miraculous child born to be world saviour. Both successfully repackaged revolution as a return to tradition. And both, eventually, achieved the status of a “global brand”. As Whitmarsh observes: “When Christians set themselves directly against Rome… they were at their most Roman.”
For Whitmarsh, regius professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge and an expert on early religion, Christianity’s proliferation is inextricable from the age of the emperor Augustus. When Augustus seized power in 27 BC, after long and attritional civil wars led to the decline of republican Rome, he promptly established an imperial state, setting himself up as supreme ruler, despite a constitution that had long been “built on the rejection of kingship”.
Deborah Kerr and Robert Taylor in Quo Vadis (1951), a film that framed early Christianity as a struggle between the devout and Rome – FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images
Augustus established a period of peace and initiated a programme of public building works, including maintaining a vast new network of public roads that created, in Whitmarsh’s words, a unique “ancient information superhighway”. This unified empire enabled a “porousness” between ancient cultures, allowing a swifter exchange of Roman, Greek and eastern literature and ideas, all of which were to contribute to both the precepts of the new Christian faith and its successful spread throughout the empire – what Whitmarsh calls “the swirl”.
The traffic was often cultural. Christian teachers and “bibliophiles” recognised early on that, in a world “enthralled with the book”, the means to gain authority and durability, to manage structure and succession, was through the written word. The narrative structure of the Gospels, Whitmarsh argues, reveals the influence of the popular new literary form of the novel, written in Greek, if often in eastern cities. Whitmarsh also cites Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, a bucolic idyll by the premier poet of the Augustan age, which predicts the advent of a saviour figure, here possibly Augustus. Much later, Christian emperors such as Constantine the Great claimed this as evidence that Virgil had predicted the arrival of Jesus.
But if this sounds too complex or scholarly, Whitmarsh compensates with a keen eye on accessibility: Rome’s Age of Revolution is packed with fascinating facts. We learn that a single sheet of papyrus in the ancient world would have cost a third of a labourer’s daily wage. That the first beast to confront the Christian martyr Perpetua in the amphitheatre was “a ferocious cow” (anyone who has had to walk through a herd on a country hike will commiserate). My personal favourite is the second-century AD novel Leucippe and Clitophon, which offers “the longest and most enthusiastic description of the female orgasm in ancient literature”.
Ultimately, though, the volume asks the age-old question: how did Christianity outlive – and outplay – all other faiths, including contemporary eastern cults such as those of Isis, Mithras or Cybele? In the third and final part of his history, Whitmarsh outlines a series of important, interconnected “makers of Christian culture”, starting with the role of eastern “charismatics”. Like the Christian apostles, these preachers also roamed the ancient world, performing “miracles” and speaking in strange tongues, placing the apostles and the account of their deeds in Acts very firmly in the wider tradition of the eastern empire. And so, much as Augustus himself had done, Christianity survived and thrived by selectively absorbing characteristics of ancient cultures and reconstituting them in its own image.
Whitmarsh understands the importance of semantics throughout; that in questions of faith, language matters – down to the smallest preposition. Pre-Christianity, he specifies, Greek speakers had “believed”, but now Christian readers of the Greek Gospels “believed in”. Faith, it seems, was no longer the nebulous worship of several gods and cults but a specific credence in a single, omnipotent deity.
His own style throughout is dry and crisp, elucidating complicated cultural crossovers with clarity. As he explains of the Gospels, whether you were Jewish or pagan, this new Christian text “carried with it both the thrill of the new and the comfort of the familiar: the exact ingredients for a revolutionary new religious movement”.
Such issues have long been debated by both classicists and theologians, if, as Whitmarsh notes wryly, usually in separate campus buildings. But his cerebral approach, citing a range of Western thinkers from Hegel to Max Weber and Roland Barthes, is engaging, exploring concepts of space and time to the metaphysics of history. His assault on the traditional foundation of religious belief – that faith is stronger than evidence, and would survive regardless of any cultural “swirl” – might not appeal to all. But he imbues his polemic with more than enough charm, and conviction, to carry readers through.
★★★★☆
Josephine Balmer’s books include Piecing Together the Fragments: Translating Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry. To order your copy of Rome’s Age of Revolution for £19.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books