Smithsonian Part Two - Pagan Converts and the Power of God

Smithsonian associates sponsored lecture part two presented by Barty airman Christianity's triumph how faith conquered an empire pagan converts and the power of God okay folk we're gonna go ahead and start right lights thank you okay excellent okay how we doing good great so great me too you might I don't know if you noticed my voice isn't completely there so about three days ago my voice started going out and I think you know this will be interesting so the the really so the the very bad outcome was that the UNC Duke basketball game was Thursday night and I was there and all I could do is clap is like so last year I've never I've never had problems with laryngitis or anything till last spring I was in Minneapolis and giving a I had to give a public lecture but I was losing my voice so I give this public lecture and the next day there were about 15 scholars from the area who were invited in to do a seminar with me where there they were at a chapter of my book and we're going to talk about it for a couple hours and right in the middle of this thing my voice literally gave out my vocal cords did not work so I had to whisper this entire time you know is so we made a big joke about it but you know it's like I had never had that before you you maybe have had so I'm I am hopeful that my voice holds out today it's for for lecture so we we will see not figure out Plan B okay right so in this lecture can you hear me hear me okay upstairs you hear me okay yep great okay because I'm not gonna try not to shout so in this lecture what I'm principally interested in is what is it that people converted from when they became Christian so as I pointed out most people were not we're not Jewish who became Christian most people had been pagans and so I wanted to talk about pagan converts and what it is that convinced them to convert so when I use the term Christian I'm just using it in a very broad generic sense there are there are people who object to the idea of using the term Christian for anything around Paul's time they think that you know Christianity hadn't really developed into its own thing yet and they don't want to call these early converts Christians and I don't share that scruple I don't really mind about that I think if anybody believes that Jesus is the way of salvation in some way I'm going to call them a Christian it ends up being a it ends up being a problem when we start talking about masses of people converting because if you know it's likely that a lot of people who are converting to become Christian know nothing about Christianity and they don't really know the doctrines very well and they have weird ideas and they they might not agree with this out of the other thing or they might not even be they might not be baptized in money but in some sense you know they're going to do to a Christian community and they're considering themselves a fall or the Christian God so I have a very loose definition for what I mean to be Christian just as people do today I mean if you get surveyed are you a Christian or not you know people say yes even though they're not so so I but anyone who considers themselves to be a follower of the god of Jesus I'm calling them a Christian and even more problematic term is the term pagan the term pagan when used by historians does not have negative connotation it doesn't mean anything derogatory so it doesn't mean what it means today when I say that my next-door neighbor is a real pagan which by the way he is pagan simply refers to anybody who followed any of the polytheistic religions of the ancient world who first anybody who followed the polytheistic of the religions of the ancient world it's not a word that anybody would have used for themselves nobody would have said no I'm not a Christian I'm a pagan it's because pagan was a word that was applied to these other people originally by Christians Christians had to figure out what to call people who weren't Christian and they could call Jews Jews cuz everybody knew Khadija was although that's also problematic term but if people basically knew what a Jew was but what about everyone else so it's not queer correct quite clear where the term pagan came from there debates about this among scholars the most common view is that it comes from the Latin word pagano's pa GaN u.s. Parganas which refers to somebody who lives in the country in the countryside somebody lives in the countryside a rural person why would you call why what and the logic is that as Christianity spread it mainly spread in urban settings is mainly in cities and that's where more culture was that's where the more sophisticated people were and the people who converted latest were people who were not cultured and sophisticated because they weren't living in the cities they were the outliers and so you called them the pagans the unsophisticated ones who haven't acquired the the sophistication to adopt this this new better religion and so pagan would became a derogatory term for became a derogatory term for these these outsiders that's one one possibility for what the term meant and so scholars use the term simply because they have to refer to these other people and call them something the problem is that we're talking about 93% of the human race and so which raises the question about paganism was there such a thing paganism is it an ISM is it a thing and the reality is that what I'm going to be calling paganism was not a specific thing it wasn't a specific thing which is another way of saying that there were there really was nothing that was paganism paganism what wasn't wasn't anything it wasn't anything so that's that's probably true the reason it's true is because in polytheistic religions there are obviously lots and lots of gods in the Roman Empire there are hundreds of gods thousands of gods and there are different ways to worship these gods in different localities different practices different different I mean ideas different different hierarchies different kinds of temples and their differences throughout the Roman world hundreds and thousands of religions that were lumping together and calling paganism so that makes it problematic to talk about paganism on the other hand there are certain things in common among these various religions that make them stand out and so when I talk about paganism I'm talking about the this vast network of a variety of religious religions with various gods and various practices but that have some things in common and what it'll help us to kind of keep thinking in terms of what it is Roman religions had in common among themselves because this will make them stand over against Christianity for us so in trying to get to what paganism was all about it might help to talk about why it is people are religious today people who are religious a lot of people aren't religious at all obviously but but people who are religious why are they religious this will help me contextualize what was going on in paganism you could probably come up with a long list that would cover more things that I'm gonna give here I'm just gonna give a few things about why in my my anecdotal experience why people tend to be religious one thing is people in Archon text see religion as a way to satisfy their quest for truth people want to know what to think about the world and and what we're doing here and why we got here and is there a divine being what's that divine being like and how do I relate to the divine being and and how am I supposed to think about big questions and about God and and so it's a religion provides answers because religions have doctrines they have they have points of view they they they teach things and so religion and part is a quest for truth religion provides a moral compass religion provides ethics for people to give them direction for how to live their lives my view is that a lot of people are religious for this reason and this might just be because of me personally when I I was a I was a conservative evangelical Christian for a long time and then I became a liberal Christian I was a liberal Christian for a long time but I was a Christian and I understood Christianity to provide my moral compass for how I'm supposed to live and relate in the world this became crystal clear to me when I decided when I realized that I was becoming an agnostic and I was really afraid that if I become an agnostic I would lose my moral compass and that it would just be like an orgy every night then when it happened I realized once a week is perfectly fine so religion people think you know religion is what kind of guide you guide your activity fellowship and community this is a very important part of religion just speaking from the perspective of Christian churches they provide fellowship and community that is very hard to find otherwise you get together periodically once a week maybe more for some people less for other people but you people who are on the same page with you about a lot of very big interests and concerns you come together you share with one another you have fellowship with one another you eat meals together you talk together you share your ideas you share your concerns you pray for one another it provides a sense of community that is very hard to find outside of that context it's very little anything like that for people who are agnostics and atheists today where you can get it in a religious context and a lot of people are religious because of the life to come I would say that my students at Chapel Hill this is the reason they think they ought to be religious because they they want to go to heaven and they want to avoid being tormented in hell given the choice they'd rather not thank you and so and so for them religion is a kind of fire insurance and so that's why so they they want to be related and and they think you know if there's no afterlife there'd be no reason to be religious absolutely there there is no reasonably religion if there's no afterlife and so religion is a way that provides a guarantee for afterlife so again you can come up with other thing for the list but these these four things strike me it's particularly significant what's interesting about the ancient world is that nobody was religious for any of those reasons well really yep so ancient Roman religions had virtually no doctrines no statements of belief no statements that everybody had to agree with in order to be part of the religion there were no Creed's that were said no beliefs that were propagated that you have to believe there was no heresy there was no orthodoxy these were not religions based on belief at all this seems really weird but in ancient Roman religions it did not matter what you believed it did not matter it was not part of the religion at all what you believed well that's weird for people today because people today think you know I mean with Christianity there are certain things you gotta believe there's only one God he created the world in some way or other Jesus has a son Jesus died for the sins of the world Jesus was raised from the dead these are things you got to believe well it's a religion they didn't have things you had to believe there is no such thing as almost no such thing as religious ethics now when I'm saying this I'm not saying that ancient people didn't believe anything and I'm not saying that ancient people were not ethical ancient people were just as ethical as we are but ethics had nothing to do with religion almost nothing to do with religion ethics involve philosophy ethics involved philosophy which is a very important part of people's lives it's important for people to be ethical but they learned how to be ethical not from their religious practices but from from what philosophers said and as those that would trickle down to the general population there were some ethics I mean but very few I mean the gods didn't like it if you murdered your parents you know they they didn't like that so there-there are parasites or a problem and a few other things but the gods did not care if you were sleeping with your neighbor's spouse they didn't care if you cheating on your income tax they didn't care if you were me no muck they didn't care that isn't that isn't what the religion religion had it had nothing to do with the religion there is virtually no community in ancient Roman religions they did not get together once a week to share their problems and to pray for one another and to have meals together it wasn't a periodic thing for most Roman religions no sense of like having this kind of shared community where you're all brothers and sisters together and you're all in this together and you meet together and that didn't happen I mean the if if there was a Roman a religious event there'd be like I sacrifice a public sacrifice time out earlier you get a hundred you're hundreds of people together and you sacrifice an animal and then you all have a party together but it's like you're watching the sacrifice you're not participating you're just you're there as an individual you and then you get to meal afterwards so you probably with your own family but there's no community and finally there's virtually no religious connection to the afterlife this is the one that strikes my students as very strange indeed but religion most Roman religions had nothing to do about what's going to happen to you after you die nothing to do with many many people in the Roman Empire didn't believe there was an afterlife many religious people didn't believe there was an afterlife one of the one of the I'm writing a book now on the afterlife it's my new thing and just try to make sure for myself and one of the in ancient Rome they had a they had a tombstone inscription you know today you have this inscription our IP rest in peace the Romans had a had an inscription that was a very common inscription it was seven letters three four five six seven yeah seven letters the letters were n F F n s and C and it the abbreviation stood for I was not I was I am NOT I care not so I didn't exist I came into existence I no longer exist and it doesn't matter to me so so religion wasn't about wasn't about securing an afterlife well then in fact if they didn't have that what what was religion that and so what can I be say about religion first point is the one I've made already ancient pagans were polytheistic they were polytheistic so there were many gods there were gods for every sort of function and purpose there were gods who were gods of war gods of love there were gods of health there were gods who controlled the livestock to make sure they multiplied their gods are the weather to make sure that it rained God's made sure the crops grew gods of gods of childbirth God's gods for every kind of function everything involved with our lives there were gods there are gods of various places so the the mountain has a God the forest has a God the river this for every individual river a stream has a God every meadow has a God your house has a God your threshold has a God your hearth has a God you've got you've got family gods you've got city gods you've got state gods gods of all sorts of places and things and so everybody knew there were lots of gods nobody in the ancient world would come up to someone and say do you believe in God it's a nonsensical statement I mean for one thing every everybody knows that there are gods and there very few atheists in the age where there are a few people basically everybody but do you believe in God I mean it's like you know there are lots of gods so you would never ask it that way everybody knew that the people who were thought to be ridiculous were those Jews they're only worshiping one God can you imagine saying you can have one God it's like saying you can have one friend you know it's like what why make a sense and so everybody was a polytheist the gods would not worship by what you believed they were worshiped by cultic acts cult again is not a negative term in this context so when a historian talks about ancient cult they're not ancient cults they're not referring to you know a group of people who are enamored by a charismatic leader who who sexually abuses them and then tells them to drink the kool-aid you know it's not that it's not that kind of cult cult cult comes from the latin phrase cult is de Orem koltes deorum which means the care of the gods the care of the gods we still have this we serve the term cult in modern English where we say something like agriculture agriculture is the care of the fields koltes to Orem is the care of the gods so how do you care for the gods it's not by what you believe the gods don't care what you think what you believe the Qods care the gods care about what you do the religions are all about cultic activities cultic acts there are several cultic acts spread throughout Roman religions and to the most to the most important are prayer and and offerings prayer and offerings prayer God's want you to acknowledge them they want you to ask for help they want you to thank them for what they've done they want you to magnify them and tell them how great they are everybody loves to know how great they are as we know but also there are offerings so sometimes offerings are animal sacrifices where you sacrifice an animal to a God and when you sacrifice an animal you know you don't destroy the animal you're you're butchering the animal you butcher the animal and then you have a big feast you the gods get the parts you don't want you burn the fat and the bones to the gods which is what they want and then you get the meat and so these were very festive occasions when you'd have a sacrifice to the god be happy you'd be happy the city would be happy you'd be everybody would be happy but it wasn't just animal sacrifices you could offer other things to gods if you're just having you or you're having your evening meal and you're drinking you some wine you might pour just a little bit of wine out on the hearth of the fire - to the gods in honor of the gods or you might take a little bit of of grain and you might throw it on the fire and honor the God so you're offering them things you can offer them other things they weren't even foodstuffs you could offer them incense or offer them flowers or so these were these were giving giving things to the gods and then the logic was expressed in a Latin phrase dough boot days dough boot days which means I give so that you might give I'm giving you this so you can give me what I what I need and want those days so so the religions were all about cultic action not about what you happen to believe and the emphasis was the present life rather than the afterlife the emphasis was the present life instead of the afterlife as I said many people didn't believe in the afterlife those who did believe in the afterlife most of those who believed in the afterlife some of them just thought everybody went to the same place some people thought that there were rewards and punishments but they came for they came to people who were good or rotten you know if you're basically a good person you'd be fine if you're really good you might get awarded in a big way if you were a tyrant who has you know murdered a thousand people too so you can get power you're going to be punished so there were people who believed in rewards and punishment for most people they you know the afterlife is gonna be fine if it exists at all then why be religious because for ancient people almost everybody was living near the edge this it was hard to survive in the ancient world it was very hard to survive they had I mean for obviously they couldn't control the climate so you couldn't control if it rained or not if it doesn't rain this year your village is going to starve to death next year there's no mass transportation where you can ship in some food or something there is no mass transportation there's there's not there's no modern medicine if you have a tooth abscess you are almost certainly going to die can't control the infection childbirth women frequently die in childbirth and infants born often died in the Roman world every childbearing age woman had to have six children to keep the population constant whoo yeah so people people are living people just daily life is hard and it's it's it's hard to survive and you worship the gods because the gods can provide you what you cannot provide yourself they can provide the things you cannot provide whether it's rain or health or the livestock multiplying or surviving childbirth infants surviving or just anything is that you can't control the gods can't control and that's why the gods are worshipped so that's what ancient religions are the paganism is roughly comprised in these these these three things what made Christianity different I'm trying to remember what time I started what time did I start starting 11 last time I gave this lecture I gave this lecture a couple of weeks ago and I couldn't figure out why the lecture was going so slow like I had so much time left over and afterwards the guy told me actually you were a half-hour off ha all right so sorry though okay got it okay I'm good okay all right what made Christianity different well for one thing Christians were monotheists they said there's one God they're not lots of gods there's one God this is the God who created the world he did call Israel to be his people but now his message has gone outside and he is the one God who is to be worshipped this God has a son Jesus Jesus is the Son of God different Christians meant different things by that and there were all sorts of theological debates within Christianity about the what it meant to say that Jesus was God or the Son of God but but every Christian agreed that Jesus was the was the son of God so that it's not that this was not Judaism this was something else this was this is a religion based on in some way on the worship of Jesus the Son of God this was a religion that insisted that faith is what brings about salvation not sacrifices it's faith it's not coal tacacs Christians have cultic acts they they eat a meal together a special symbolic meal all every week they baptized there are cultic acts but what really saves you is your faith specifically your faith in Jesus and Christians promoted a very real afterlife Christians insisted that having faith in Christ was essential for what was going to come after you die everyone is going to go either to heaven or hell and you have a choice to make you can choose whether you want to have eternal bliss or be tormented forever that's the choice that was a very effective evangelistic tool what is it that made Christianity attractive this is for me this was like one of the very big questions for my book what is it that convinced anybody the reason the reason it was a big big issue for me is you have to think about these pagan religions they don't know that they're even following pagan religions somebody in Ephesus or in Rome or an Antioch they're simply doing what everybody does they worship the gods that's what everybody does you just do that you go to the public festivals you do it in your home you just what everybody does and it's what everybody has been doing forever not just like for the last year or two the last decade or two the last century or two forever since for millennia this is what people have done how do you convince somebody like that to leave that thing that everybody else is doing and that it's just what everyone's always done to adopt a new religion well what I'm gonna argue is that what Christians did is they made common cause with pagans on the key point which is the power of God if the reason you worship the pagan gods what however many gods you worship if the reason you worship however many gods you worship is because they can provide you for things that you cannot provide for yourself that means that the gods have power that you need access to Christians have to connect with people at that point to show that their God is more powerful than the pagan gods that's my thesis how do you know that God is powerful the way you know that the god of the Christians is powerful is because of the miracles that he does really yep so take the New Testament book of Acts the book of Acts as I've said is an account of the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman world the first 30 years how is it that they convert people it starts right off the bat so in Chapter one of Acts Jesus has been from the dead and he gets together with his disciples for forty days and talks to them and then he ascends to heaven and he says don't leave Jerusalem because a great miracle is going to happen the Holy Spirit is gonna come upon you and empower you next chapter chapter 2 the day of Pentecost Pentecost is 50 days after Passover that's Penta 5 it comes from 50 50 days after Passover is the Jewish celebration of Pentecost the disciples are together and this time there's 120 of them and they're all together and they're there praying and all of a sudden the Spirit comes upon them the hair sound of a great rushing wind and they have tongues of flame that appear over their heads and they start speaking in foreign languages they don't know they go outside they're speaking these foreign languages and everybody's in town from around the world that's common are looking at these people and they're hearing the gospel preached in their own language but people who don't know their language and it's this amazing miracle and Peter realizing that everybody's fascinated by this stands up and and gives us speech which he says that the the people around are saying these people are drunk look at them no no Peter stands up they're not drunk look it's only 9 o'clock in the morning we're not drunk yet we we this is the power of God has come upon us God who brought his Messiah Jesus you you Jews in Jerusalem you killed him but God has raised him from the dead and now you see a manifestation of this power with the coming of the Holy Spirit Peter preaches a sermon tells people to repent and 3,000 people convert on the spot the next chapter Peter and John John are walking by the temple and there's a man sitting outside the temple gate who who's paralyzed he can't walk and and he looks up this man is begging for money looks up to Peter and he says begs for money and P season there there's people all around Peter says looks at him and says silver and gold have I none but what I have I can give to you in the name of the Lord Jesus I say stand up and walk the man's paralysis disappears he stands up he starts leaping around jumping around running around and everybody's looking saying what no world and Peter preaches a sermon he says this happens through the power of Jesus you killed him God raised him from the dead and now he's empowering us to do these miracles and 5,000 people convert so you know it's 3,000 people then it's 5,000 people before I mean for long they aren't gonna be any Jews left in Jerusalem this is like everybody's converting and so and it goes from this throughout the entire book of Acts people are converting because of these miracles that are happening Peter gets so powerful that at one point he can walk down the street and if his shadow falls on somebody who's sick they're healed Wow that's effective and and Paul later in the narrative begins to pull the the the holy handkerchief trick which is that if if somebody's sick and they send to Paul Paul will send them one of his handkerchiefs and if they touch his handkerchief they'll be made well and so of course everybody who gets healed gets converted bear boy you see as these things can convert it and it's like everybody's converting and so it's because in the in the New Testament they're converting because of these miracles and outside of the New Testament the apocryphal acts I mentioned the acts of Paul in my last lecture with baptised Lyon Paul does great miracles that convert people in this legendary account we have a book called the Acts of John about John the son of Zebedee Jesus disciple John who who is said to have become the apostle in Ephesus if any of you have ever traveled around Turkey and God Ephesus you know that John is a big figure there these legends are the first accounts that place in there in Ephesus and it's an interesting and instead of accounts he does these amazing things he raises people from the dead there'll be some some woman who is like married to the leading figure in the city who's died and John will publicly raise her from the dead and everybody will convert and so this is happening and at one point John comes into the city he's out of town he comes back in and he goes to the Temple of Artemis Artemis was the was the main deity of Ephesus the city deity and he goes in to this big temple and he stands up on a platform and everybody's there all these pagans who worship Artemis and John issues a challenge he says we will have a contest you pray to Artemis to strike me dead and if it doesn't work I'll pray to my god to strike you dead no John no because they've seen him raise people from the dead no don't do that and so and so he he says he won't do it but he orders the demon of the temple to leave the temple and then all of a sudden the roof caves in half the temple is wiped out the idols all fall down and turn into dust and and yeah the temple doing the roof caved in it fell on the head of the priests of Artemis who killed him just for extra measure and so this is showing that that John's God is more powerful than their God and they all convert now we believe in the God of John all of them on the spot which is I mean it seems a little bit weird because he hasn't taught them anything convert to what right all they're converting to is the god of jobs that so the god that John's preaching but presumably instruction takes place after that but this is this is an account of and and by the way for at the end of it then he actually raises this priest from the dead who converts to become a Christian so yeah these stories go so there's also a there's a one of my interesting accounts legendary counts is the acts of Peter in the in the apocryphal acts the acts of Peter is really interesting because it it involves a series of miracle contests between pea and somebody who represents a false religion and so the this other person is called Simon Magus and Simon Magus is he's actually he calls himself a Christian but he represents false heretical beliefs and Peter comes to Rome in order to combat the Simon Magus who's leading everybody astray so Peter arrives in Rome and he goes Simon Magus is inside this magistrates house this big shot of aristocrats house and the the door is guarded and so they're not letting Peter inside to talk to Simon Magnus and confront him and so Peters wondering what to do and there's a crowd waiting cuz they're all the Christians are there watching to see what he's going to do and they're pagans they brought their neighbors and their family so this big crowd and Peter sees a dog tied to a fence and so he goes over and Ana ties the dog and he instructs the dog to go in and tell Simon Magus that he's waiting for him and he's not in a good mood the dog acquires a human voice goes in tells Simon Magus that Peter is waiting for him and and then he comes back out he says to Simon to Peter I've told him now that you're waiting for him so he's going to come out now and then the dog falls down and dies and everybody all the pagans in the crowd seen this dog talking with the human voice and they converted on the spot and then and then you end up with these confrontations between Simon Magus and and Peter the the most interesting of which is the final one where Simon Magus is doing all these miracles to convince people that he's the one who's got the power of God Peters trying to do better miracles prove that he's the one the power of God at the end Simon Magus comes up with a great miracle he says I'm going he tells people come back in a few days names the day I'm going to fly over the temples and hills of Rome so he they come back then the next day and Peters Peters people are saying what are you gonna do about this cuz I mean this is gonna convince everybody and Peter says don't worry I've got it and so Simon Magus this this big fanfare he takes off and he starts flying over the temples and hills of Rome and then when he's in when he's up over the overall Peter then calls upon the power of God and derives him of the power of flight and he crash-lands he breaks his leg in four places and everybody realizes that he's the false teacher and they stoned him to death and worship the god of Peter so this is the miracle context so right now so like I'm not saying that this happened just in case but what I am saying is that it's interesting that when you read these apocryphal acts which are talking about how the Apostles converted people they're always converting them by miracles and that's additionally interesting because you can read through our early Christian sources of all kinds whether they're legends whether they're letters the church leaders right I mean actual real letters the church leaders right whether there are treatises whether they're essays and they all say whenever they talk about people converting it's always in relationship to miracles even Agustin Agustin in the City of God Agustin is the greatest theologian in the history of the church after after Paul I guess but Agustin the grid greatest theologian writes he's a very sober incredibly learned intelligent author in his book the City of God in chapter 22 he deals with this question of why is it that people no longer do miracles if they used to do miracles in the days of the Apostles and what he says is that's completely wrong people are doing miracles all the time and he starts enumerate the miracles that he himself has seen people who are blind who are heal who were given sight people who can't walk were made to be able to walk people people can't hear her go names instance after instance after instance and he says this kind of stuffs happening all the time and I've seen this stuff all the time and that's why people convert well okay so what's really going on my view is that it doesn't matter what really was going on the reason I think it doesn't really matter is because most people who believe in miracles have never seen one now I know five of you are going to come up and tell me the miracle you've seen so and I know all sorts I know I mean I've talked with people for I I have talked with many many people who've told me about the miracles they've seen what's interesting to me is that most people believe in a miracle because they've heard about it they've got a they've got a next-door neighbor who tells them about it or they've got a cousin that something happened to or they've got a colleague that something happened to or somebody or you know they they they've got a they've got a cousin who knew somebody whose brother wants kind of is that kind of thing I mean most people believe most Christians believe that on the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit came upon the Apostles and they started speaking in tongues did they see that happen no they read about it so I'm not saying miracles didn't happen but I'm saying most people believe in miracles because they've heard they happened which means it doesn't matter whether they've happened or not because they're talked about if people hear about miracles that's enough and the early Christians were talking about miracles Christian's talk about all sorts of miracles that happened of course you've got Jesus himself and the main stories about what Jesus is doing in the Gospels is miracles it's one miracle after the other and the Gospels you can't open the Gospels without having miracles happening on every page and at the end is the greatest miracle of all he's raised from the dead great miracle and Paul allegedly did all these miracles and the Peter did all of these miracles and by the way last month my daughter was ill and I prayed to the God of Jesus and she became well I saw it happen all you have to do is tell the story and and that's that's what's convincing me the reason it's convincing people is because the reason you worship God or the gods in the first place is because they can provide things you can't provide which means divine power which means doing things that humans can't do which means miracles Christians have other kinds of miracles that are related to all this one has to do with the amazing martyrs now in my next lecture I'm going to talk about the persecution of Christians in the Empire and how how widely Christians are persecuted I'm going to be arguing that the idea that Christians are always being persecuted all the time and like you know it's illegal to be a Christian and you would be sent to the Lions if you were Christian um I'm gonna argue that's probably not that's actually it's not true but it did happen sometimes it did happen sometimes and there are stories about Christian martyrs that are circulating just as there are stories about miracles and the thing about the stories about the martyrs is these stories about the martyrs are also portrayed as miracle stories our earliest account of a Christian martyr is called the martyrdom of Polycarp the martyrdom of Polycarp who is a bishop in a town called Smyrna which was in a city named Smyrna which was in what's now Turkey who's then Asia Minor Polycarp of Smyrna was apparently martyred in a in the arena in Smyrna probably around the Year 155 around the 155 we have an account of his martyrdom and it begins by this author telling you that martyrs are always supported by God when they are being tortured and executed and what the author says is that that he had seen played times when Christians were being flogged within an inch of their life they're being flogged so violently that the skin and the muscles were all ripped away so you could see the interior arteries on their backs and they didn't cry or even groan whoa miracle God was supporting them when polycarp's go when Polycarp goes to get martyred they decide you know he's a Christian he's he's leading people astray we're going to we're going to we're gonna execute him and they decide that they're going to burn him at the stake and so they're gonna tie him to the stake to to execute him they tie him they start the time saying he says no no it says you don't need to do that I'll just stand here I'll be fine I'm not gonna move so they say okay and so they leave him to stand there and they like the fire around him and the fire doesn't turn touch his body it makes kind of like an envelope around him like a sail from on a sailboat around him doesn't touch him and instead of the smell of burning flesh there's a smell of a perfume that comes from the fire whoa okay and then they realized they can't kill him by fire and so they order an executioner to go up and he takes a dagger and they sticks it in his side and so much blood comes out then it puts out the fire and then and then a dove comes out of his side and flies to heaven what so it's apparently like the Dove the Holy Spirit or his spirit or something flies up to heaven and so it's this miraculous thing and the person riding this claims he was an eyewitness he said he saw this himself he's riding right afterwards now I don't think he was an eyewitness I think actually this was written later by somebody claiming to be an eyewitness but the point is this thing gets puts in circulation and most people are not seeing martyrdoms because it's not happening that often but they can hear about martyrdoms and they can see accounts like this and these are these martyrs are amazing there's an author author from this time from the Year 150 whose name is Justin he lived in Rome a Christian author he's commonly known as Justin Martyr because he he also was martyred and we haven't out of his martyrdom but before he was martyred he was a philosopher a Christian philosopher who lived in Rome one of the first Christian intellectuals and he wrote three books and we have these book we wrote more than that we've got three of his books the writings of Justin Martyr in one point he says that the reason he converted to become a Christian is because he saw how these martyrs behave when they're being martyred and he couldn't believe that that'd be possible without the power of God behind it and so he converted and so this is this is another kind of miracle not a healing miracle per se but the kind of strengthening that God provides in in the case of public torture another miraculous theme is the terrifying afterlife what the Christians proclaimed was that the power of God that's being manifest here and now is going to continue after death you have heard about these miracles you've seen these miracles and the miracles are going to continue God has ultimate power and that ultimate power is going to be manifest after after after death those who side with God are going to be given eternal rewards those who oppose are opposed to God are going to be given eternal punishments and it's never going to end this will be the clearest manifestation of the power of the one God and so if you don't believe in him you will pay a price and the the martyrs the the martyr texts that we have are very interesting because in these martyr texts the in these these martyr texts what's said is the people are being tortured and so like this person's being tortured and there and people are saying just you know reject Christ you know you're suffering so much you don't need to suffer just reject Christ and we'll stop and these people these people say things like you can torture me for an hour but you're going to be tortured forever ooh okay and so and so it's it's it's this kind of connection between between miracles and martyrdom so in some we have numerous accounts of people converting from early Christianity I'm going to be looking in the next lecture at some other possible explanations for why Christianity succeeded but at this point what I want to emphasize is that at least in the accounts that we have what Christians are doing is they are agreeing with pagans on the key point that makes them religions which is that gods can provide things we can't provide because gods are powerful and Christians are arguing that our God is more powerful and there's only one way to prove that which is to show the power of God that requires showing that God does miracles and so the Christians tell stories of miracles not just the miracles of Jesus and His disciples but miracles that have continued on to the present day and some people get convinced and what people get fully convinced or reasonably fully convinced they convert to become Christian and once they become Christian they stop being pagan pagan and Christianity begins to grow thank you very much could you turn on the crowd lights to please yeah thanks so I've left extra time for questions for this metric yes yeah what I'm what I'm trying to argue is that it that I mean I'm not a Christian myself so I don't I don't really think that those miracles happen but I think is that stories and miracles did happen people did tell stories about miracles and if you hear that your next-door neighbor got healed by praying to the god of Jesus then that might make you think well maybe I should pray to the god of Jesus the Christians more Christians more stories Sohail was not a big deal for Jews or Christians so where did it come from and so actually this is the topic for my next book the one I'm working on right now I'm giving it the tentative title the invention of the afterlife so I don't know if it's going to be called that but but it's a question of where did the ideas of Heaven and Hell come from and the thing that's driving this book is actually it's a question about modern Christianity in a sense which is most of my students at Chapel Hill think that they when they die their souls going to go to heaven or hell their soul will go to heaven or hell and that's I think that's a common view among among Christians the thing is that views not taught in the Old Testament and it's not what Jesus preached so why is this what everybody thinks if they're a Christian and that's so that's the question of the book yeah and so I don't know yet I gotta figure that out okay I write the book so just say but what I'm gonna argue is so just kind of the overviews this in a nutshell in the in the Old Testament when when when a person dies they go to Sheol which is this kind of netherworld where not much happens and it's kind of shadowy and it's uninteresting and everybody goes there whether they're wicked or the righteous and everybody goes to Sheol I think that what happened is when this apocalyptic thinking that I was talking about in the last lecture started developing and people had to develop ideas of righteous and unrighteous and rewards and punishments they came up I think this happened in a time of persecution that this apocalyptic view started developing and it especially came to a head during the Maccabee in Revolt which was this revolt in about about a hundred sixty years before Jesus was born there is a there's a Jewish uprising against a the Syrians who were in charge of the promised land and the Syrians were trying to make Jews stop being Jewish and Jews were being punished for maintaining their Jewish traditions keeping the Jewish law and this this just didn't seem right because if if we're on God's side and God's all-powerful why are we suffering we're suffering for obeying God you know it's not like we've done something wrong and God is punishing us we're doing what's right and we're suffering so that's not that and so how do you make sense of that and they developed this idea of a resurrection that it it's not good now but God's going to raise everybody from the dead and he's going to reward you for for suffering this way and so then you start getting the idea of a differentiated afterlife where it isn't everybody goes to Sheol it's all the same the righteous are going to be rewarded later in and so that's that's what Jesus saw I think I think Jesus thought that the righteous are gonna be rewarded with the kingdom of God and everyone else is just gonna be destroyed and later on I think what happens is as Christians themselves suffering they start developing the idea not only are we going to get rewarded but our enemies are gonna get punished so it's not just good enough that I'm gonna be you know that God's gonna make it right with me he's got to take care of those wicked people and so they're gonna get punched and that's where the doctrine fell comes from I think but it's after it's after Jesus yeah so so with a varieties of Christianity was this something found in just like one distinctive kind of Christianity was it widespread it's a little bit hard to know there are there are some very few Christians not many but there are some Christians well okay there we know of a variety of you there are some Christians who believe in a universal salvation this is most clearly represented in a church father named Origen who is writing in the early third century who maintained that God is ultimately sovereign nobody in the long haul nobody can resist God's goodness or power so that people who are going to be punished are going to be punished until they see the light I mean I can say if that were me it'd be about 10 seconds but but but for Origen it's it's like you know it's going to take ages but even the devil is going to come around because nobody can resist God forever and so there'll be universal salvation and a lot of people found that really offensive and they ended up condemning him as a heretic for saying that even though in his own day he was seen to be kind of a bulwark of Orthodoxy there were other people who held to a view of reincarnation Christians there are some Christians who held a reincarnation the idea being the typical view reincarnation that if you if you mess up now you're gonna have worse life later you're good now you'll be rewarded later and eventually over time after a number of reincarnation you get perfect and then you up you go so so there are that but the mote most of our sources have this other idea of this kind of Heaven and Hell thing in mind and so I I don't know if that was the dominant view but it's certainly the dominant view and our sources yes sorry okay I'll get ya know it's a good question what about Egyptian views of the afterlife because they have a more pronounced understanding of afterlife than say in most Greek circles and such and the odd thing is that as as refined as many of these Egyptian ideas were they don't seem to play a very big role in the development of Christianity for probably for a variety of historical reasons but Egyptian Egyptian thought just doesn't seem to have affected Christian thinking about the afterlife very much oddly enough yeah you would have expected because it seemed kind of similar in some ways and stuff but yeah apparently not yes danke yes yes yes you please in Daniel 7 she's asking was in in these early ideas with the afterlife like in the Book of Daniel are they talking only about but they talk about Gentiles and the Talmud everybody are they talking about are they talking about Jews Daniels talking about Jews Daniels talking about who the righteous and the unrighteous Jews and that comes to be transferred then to more broadly well they're different they're different views about it most Jewish authors didn't care it's like you know they're just concerned about but so a book like Daniel actually doesn't say what he thought about everyone else and so it does isn't clear do they go to like a I mean I mentioned the Sheol thing in Jewish text and and in Greek text you have Hades which is like in Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey Hades is very similar to the Hebrew she'll in a lot of ways it's this kind of shadowy place that everybody goes to and it was there and not much is happening and it maybe they thought that's just kind of where they're gonna be something like that yeah okay I'll come back up yep yes okay I'll come up now yes yeah right did they go to church on Sundays and have fellowship afterwards and stuff so right so there were no church buildings and period I've been talking about so far the first time we actually get church buildings is in the middle of the 3rd century and the earliest church building that we have evidence of is in a place called dura europas which is I guess northern Syria near the yeah northern Syria in dura europas the archaeologists discovered a church that was a converted house they had taken a house and it turned it into a church with the baptistry and stuff and so it's it's from around 250 or so they start building churches at the end of the 3rd century so in one sense they didn't go to church in the sense of going to the church on the corner but going to church in the early Christian surely early Christianity involved going to house churches people worshiped in private homes that would mean that they would worship in the home of the probably the richest member of the community who would actually have a house as opposed to a small apartment most people lived in small apartments but if you were wealthy you could have a house that could accommodate if you're wealthy enough you could have accommodate 30 or 40 people maybe in your home in the open space and so people would come there and that's where they would have their services in Paul's letters already it appears that people are getting together on Sunday for that there so they're meeting on Sundays when you get into the early second century we have we actually have a pagan author plenty of the elder who's a governor of a region of what is now western Turkey who talks about Christians getting together before it's light and so they're they're meeting in the dark and probably because some of them are slaves or they you know they've got you've got they got to work and so they go before work so they are going to church but it's not a separate church building it'd be a private home and they are probably once a week having a having a meal together in which they commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus and possibly his Last Supper so is that was that your question yeah good okay yes in the first year yes yes love God did that comments it play all the love of God yeah did the love of God figure into the preaching of the gospel I think it almost certainly had to I mean I think you know that but I think it it was it was two things it was the love of God and it was the wrath of God and those are two sides of the same coin in some ways for these early Christians that you can either if you accept if you accept the love of God you know you'll be rewarded if you reject the love of God he's gonna be really ticked off and so and that that has bad consequences so yeah it's probably both yes when did the calendars that more common today when did when did that happen so it's kind of a complicated question Christians started worshipping on the on Sunday because from the very beginning because it was the day of the resurrection and so Jesus died on a Friday raised from the dead on a Sunday and to commemorate the resurrection they would start worshiping on Sunday if they were Jews they would also observe the Sabbath and they would observe Sunday if they were come from pagan stock they they didn't have Sabbath or anything so they just worshiped on Sunday there never was like this official decree you know in the early church saying okay you've got a worship on Sunday it's just like what what they had already always done the question about like how the calendar itself shifted so instead of worshipping instead of observing Passover they start following Easter that's a little bit more complicated and it happens a little bit later the Jewish people would if they were Jewish Christians they would continue observing Passover and they celebrate Easter and the question is will when do you celebrate Easter and has led to a huge controversy in the second century that gets really kind of technical but it has to do with whether Christians are going to observe the Easter Festival on the Passover or if they're if they do that it could be any day of the week so you can have Easter on Tuesday after a lot of people that just didn't sound right I mean you can't take your mom out for breakfast afterwards so it's like so so so that was the big big debate whether it's to be celebrated on Nisan 14 14th of Nisan the month of Norman when Passover is or whether you celebrate it on a Sunday I found a Sunday which Sunday is it and they ended up there's a complicated calculation that you can look up on the web I'm not going to try and give it to you about how you know which Sunday it is but this was a big debate it actually split the church interesting it's split the church in the second century and it ended up being the Sunday Easter solution so that gets decided pretty much by the end of the second century yeah other questions yes in the back all I can say is thank you Jesus that's very funny yes thank you yeah yeah I think it when does Jesus go from being a human to being God or son of God I think it happens right away so I think as soon as as soon as Christians said he was raised from the dead what they thought was the earliest Christian so I mean you know I don't know when this is in the New Testaments three days later of course but I don't know if it's three days later might have been three months I don't know three weeks probably not three months but soon afterwards his followers thought he got raised from the dead and they didn't think that it's just that his body came to back to life you know so it's not like he had a near-death experience or it's not that he it's not that it was a resuscitation of his his body it's that he was actually taken from the realm of the dead and taken up to heaven and in the ancient world anyone who's taken up into heaven becomes a divine being we have accounts of a number of in Roman mythology and Greek mythology in Jewish thinking of a human being who goes up to heaven who's made a divine being the earliest followers of Jesus off that's what happened at the resurrection I think they started thinking right away that he was he was the son of God that he was divine in some sense and so that developed over time that what they thought that kind of in basic terms but it took centuries for them to work out exactly what it meant but the beginning of it I think was right away so I have I have a book on that actually discusses that entire process but the book is called how Jesus became God and it shows kind of how it happened from the resurrection all up through the fourth century that oh yeah yeah strangely enough I actually heard that I know it's a miracle yeah what happened to Jesus body yeah so I have kind of a controversial view about this so I about it in how Jesus became God because I point out in how Jesus became God that our earliest witness to Jesus resurrection is Paul and Paul doesn't say anything about there being an empty tomb which is interesting also in the Gospels of the New Testament you do get discussions of the empty tomb and the empty tomb doesn't make anybody believe for kind of an obvious reason I mean if you bury a body in a tomb and three days later you go back the tomb is empty you know your first thought is not oh he's gone to heaven now your first thought is grave robbers right somebody stole of the body where's the body who did that and that's what you think and so so and so in the Gospels nobody comes we believe because of the empty tomb I think the empty tomb stories were invented in order to explain the body wasn't there he was really physically raised from the dead so what really happened to the body this is where I get even more controversial I've looked up every reference I could find in any ancient Greek and Roman source about crucifixion and whenever they talk about the disposal of the body they always say the same thing which is that the bodies were left on the cross to to deteriorate and to be eaten by scavengers that was part of the punishment because it's not just that your humiliated you're stripped naked tortured to death in public is also that you weren't allowed decent burial and this was all of this the entire process of crucifixion was meant to be a disincentive for crime you know if you oppose us this is what's going to happen to you and so and so you get all these comments about birds eating the bodies and stuff and and so I think his body was left on the cross I don't I don't think that the story of joseph of arimathea is a historical story of him burying the body that afternoon it would kind of get completely against what was the Jewish who was there who was the Roman practice if Jews had killed him they would have buried him out of piety but Romans killed him and Romans didn't give a damn about Jewish piety and so they did they wanted to humiliate him and so I think they just left him in the cross so I don't I mean eventually then the remains whatever was left after a few days or some days would have probably been put into a some kind of common grave some common grave of some kind probably you might guess his disciples weren't there anymore I'm his disciples in Matthew scoffs I think Matthews right about this the disciples when they got arrested they didn't just like flee they went back to Galilee you know for good reason they you know they probably thought they were gonna be next and so they just they got out of there and so they didn't know they they weren't around to see so okay so that's kind of controversial you yeah yeah yeah yeah so where there are people about the same time who were claiming to be the Messiah who were obviously false messiahs because it didn't happen and we do have a record we do have a record of this kind of thing where sometimes sometimes it's people actually claiming to be King and that didn't never went down too well with the Romans since the Romans are supposed to be ruling and the other thing that we get is we get people who are predicting like Jesus did that the the God is soon going to intervene and destroy the Romans and bring in a bring in a good Kingdom and those people didn't fare well either they they were usually rounded up and either executed or they got away but they yeah so we do have a record of these this kind of person from the writings of Josephus the Jewish historian of the time a time for one last question if there is if there's one more yes we don't yeah is there any evidence that early Christian communities were different in the sense that was describing such an example yeah yeah so he's saying that Tertullian the the church rider from around the Year 200 or a little bit later says that Christians were recognized for loving one another more than others and and that this could this have been a kind of a recruiting tool the Christians loved one another more it's interesting that you've that the evidence for Christians being known for loving one another the evidence for that is all Christian you you never have any pagan saying oh yeah they love each other more than we do you know and so I'm going to be talking about that a little bit in my next lecture about is you know are the superior Christian ethics possibly a reason for people converting so I'll say a few things about that then I'm gonna stop now we get back together at 130 130 okay have a good lunch break

Channel: Bart D. Ehrman

Views: 62,359

Rating: 4.7183909 out of 5

Keywords: Smithsonian Associates, Ripley Center, Triumph of Christianity, Smithsonian, Bart Ehrman, Roman Empire

Id: 3l28jktOH7o

Length: 74min 3sec (4443 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2019