Cities of God

by Rodney Stark

Early Christianity was primarily an urban movement. The original meaning of the word pagan (paganus) was “rural person,” or more colloquially “country hick.” It came to have religious meaning because after Christianity had triumphed in the cities, most of the rural people remained unconverted.

What Christianity offered the world was monotheism stripped of ethnic encumbrances. People of all nations could embrace the One True God while remaining people of all nations.

But these instances aside, conversion is primarily about bringing one’s religious behavior into alignment with that of one’s friends and relatives, not about encountering attractive doctrines. Of course, one can easily imagine doctrines so bizarre as to keep most people from joining. But, barring that, conversion is primarily an act of conformity—but so is nonconversion. In the end it is a matter of the relative strength of social ties.

For example, in dismissing the Acts account of Paul’s shipwreck, Conzelmann and others ‘proved’ that the story must be a fantasy by demonstrating that it has the boat following ‘implausible’ routes and otherwise goes against common sense. Fortunately for their critics, these historians knew even less about sailing than they did about science. To them the Mediterranean is like an indoor swimming pool and one would, naturally, head directly to one’s destination, giving no heed to currents or to the fact that it is impossible to sail directly into the wind. When it subsequently was shown that the Acts account is fully in accord with meteorological and nautical conditions and principles,46 the response was to grudgingly accept the account in Acts as accurate, but to claim that it didn’t happen to Paul—rather, that the account in Acts must have been lifted from another unknown, but nonbiblical source!47

Unlike dense modern cities such as Manhattan, which are very spread out vertically, Greco-Roman cities had no tall structures—usually no more than three stories. Even so, inhabitants lived in constant danger of having their tenements collapse for lack of adequate beams, to say nothing of the threat of falling down during earthquakes, which were very frequent in the eastern portion of the empire.

Although some temples and public buildings were built of stone, most structures were built of wood thinly covered with stucco, and they burned so well that many of these cities were often destroyed by fire and had to be rebuilt repeatedly upon the ashes.

The power of Christianity lay not in its promise of otherworldly compensations for suffering in this life, as has so often been proposed. No, the crucial change that took place in the third century was the rapidly spreading awareness of a faith that delivered potent antidotes to life’s miseries here and now!

The truly revolutionary aspect of Christianity lay in moral imperatives such as “Love one’s neighbor as oneself,” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” and “When you did it to the least of my brethren, you did it unto me.” These were not just slogans. Members did nurse the sick, even during epidemics; they did support orphans, widows, the elderly, and the poor; they did concern themselves with the lot of slaves. In short, Christians created “a miniature welfare state in an empire which for the most part lacked social services.”14

It was these responses to the long-standing misery of life in antiquity, not the onset of worse conditions, that were the ‘material’ changes that inspired Christian growth. But these material benefits were entirely spiritual in origin. Support for this view comes...

As E. R. Dodds recognized, religious life in the empire suffered from excessive pluralism, from “a bewildering mass of alternatives. There were too many cults, too many mysteries, too many philosophies of life to choose from: you could pile one religious insurance on another, yet not feel safe.”21

Moreover, since no god could effectively demand adherence (let alone exclusive commitment), individuals faced the need and the burden to assemble their own divine portfolio,22 seeking to balance potential services and to spread the risks, as Dodds noted in his reference to religious insurance.

Roman roads were much “too narrow for large carts”27 or wagons and in many places were far too steep for anything but foot traffic. In addition, the Romans often did not build bridges, relying on fords that could be crossed on foot but usually were too deep and the banks too steep for carts and wagons.28 These inadequacies of the Roman roads existed because, despite being “built and kept up at staggering public expense,”29 their sole purpose was to permit soldiers to march quickly from one part of the empire to another. Of course, civilian pedestrians used them too, as did animal and human pack trains. But even the soldiers preferred to walk along the side of the roads whenever possible, and that’s where nearly all civilian travelers walked or led their beasts. Why? Because the Roman roads were often paved with stone and therefore were hard on legs and feet when dry, and very slippery when wet, making them perilous on steep descents.

Christianization, we are led to: HYPOTHESIS 3-1: Port cities tended to be Christianized (that is, to have Christian congregations) sooner than inland cities. This hypothesis can be tested by simple cross-tabulation and by correlation coefficients. Both are shown in the Statistical Appendix, as is an explanation of how to read and interpret the data. Here in the text it will be adequate to summarize the results. These show that most port cities (64 percent) had a church by the end of the first century, while far fewer inland cities (24 percent) had a church that soon. Conversely, only 14 percent of port cities still lacked a church in 180, while many inland cities (35 percent) still were without a church by that year (Table 3-1 in the Statistical Appendix). These are very substantial differences.

In keeping with usual practice, I will accept results here only when the odds are at least twenty to one that they are not the result of chance. When the odds fall below that level, I will dismiss differences as trivial.

In the case of port cities being Christianized sooner than inland cities, the odds against this being a difference produced by chance are greater than a hundred to one. The hypothesis is strongly supported: Christianity did become established in port cities sooner than it did inland.

There is nothing modern about unbelief. About five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, the Greek poet and philosopher Xenophanes dismissed Homer’s portrayal of the gods as immoral nonsense.

Both the Old and the New Testaments abound in geographical and historical details, although, as Larry Hurtado pointed out, readers of the “Gospels may have become so accustomed to these things that they have to pause to note the sheer abundance of local color…an impressive body of information about the geography and sociocultural features of Roman Judea.”46 In contrast, Isis’s ‘biography’ took place entirely within the invisible world of the gods. No human ever clasped her hand or joined her at table. Isis simply could not be freed from the fundamental shortcomings of mythology.

In similar fashion, St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote in the fourth century that God is so “far above our nature and inaccessible to all approach” that he, in effect, speaks to us in baby talk, thereby giving “to our human nature what it is capable of receiving.”55 St. Thomas Aquinas agreed: “The things of God should be revealed to mankind only in proportion to their capacity; otherwise, they might despise what was beyond their grasp…. It was, therefore, better for the divine mysteries to be conveyed to an uncultured people as it were veiled.”56 So too, John Calvin flatly asserted that God “reveals himself to us according to our rudeness and infirmity.”57

But Marcion was not content to promote a purely Pauline brand of Christianity. He demanded total celibacy, charging that the directive to be fruitful and multiply came from the God of the Jews.

He also preached other forms of abstinence, declaring that it was sinful to enjoy food or drink; he even substituted water for wine in liturgical use. Consequently, what Marcion founded was not so much a mass movement as an ascetic ‘order’ for the laity.

Marcion seems to have been somewhat optimistic about his chances when he took his proposals for a ‘purified’ Christianity to leaders of the Christian church in Rome. It was only after they rejected him, and excommunicated him when he refused to recant, that Marcion became a rebel—although he probably had attracted followers and founded congregations prior to visiting Rome.

Indeed, the proposal to dispense with the Old Testament has been favorably reinterpreted by a series of modern scholars who hail Marcion as the first Protestant, “harking back to the pure message of Jesus and his Father.”69