Not so for all those slaves and beggars. For them, by the start of the Common Era, the pagan narrative described a world without meaning. Then Christianity came along and said: this world was a mere test for what would happen after death. The poorest, meekest, and most oppressed were passing the test; they would live on forever in the kingdom of bliss. The Roman elite were mostly failing. For them, getting into heaven would be harder than it was for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Framed by the Christian narrative, now everything made sense. Aha! Such is the power of narrative.
