Strange Religion

Summary: A look at Roman religious practices and the how the early church was different from the religious practices of their surrounding culture.

It took me a decade or so, but eventually I came to see that the work of NT Wright and others were bringing attention to the Roman and Jewish cultural practices of the several centuries around Jesus. The good of that work continues in many others like Nijay Gupta’s recent books. Strange Religion and Tell Her Story are interrelated. Tell Her Story is an investigation into the role of women in the early church. The main insights was Gupta’s investigation into the role of women in broader Roman society. Women were marginalized in Roman society, but wealth and class meant that women could still participate in the patronage system even if there were only some women who had the privileges of wealth and class that allowed them that role.

Strange Religion is using similar tools and methods to explore Roman religious practices and with that base understanding explore how early Christian practices were similar or different from the culture of the time. Strange Religion is very readable, but some background knowledge in anthropology, culture, concept of honor/shame versus guilt/innocence will help you get the most out of the book. If you have read Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes or Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes, I think you will get more out of Strange Religion. That isn’t required pre-reading, but at least for me, getting my head wrapped around how the early church was significantly different in its thinking needed multiple angles and multiple books and I am sure I do not have it all.

I think the negative of this type of project is that it can make those who are new to the investigation of the early church mistrust their own ability to read scripture. That isn’t the point, but there is some value in giving us humility as we approach scripture and our faith. Christianity is complex. The early church culture was significantly different from our own. The various cultures presented throughout scripture were significantly different from each other, not just from then to now. It is not that reading scripture is impossible, but there are many ways to misread it.

I am not going to summarize the whole book but instead just offer a few take aways and commend the book. Strange Religion is really offering two types of strange. Early Christianity is strange to our eyes because it was in a completely different culture and used an entirely different social imaginary. But early Christianity was also strange to the culture it was in. Roman culture was “religious” in the sense that everyone participated. Almost all meat had been used in some sort of sacrifice or offering. Everyone wanted to appease the gods because it was the gods who controlled weather and luck and all of the things that were outside of the normal human areas of control.

What made Judaism and then Christianity different was their resistance to participate in those communal practices that would bring good to the community. This is not completely different from some versions of Christian nationalism or early Puritanism which believes in a covenant with God by a culture or state. In order to fulfill that covenant, everyone needs to participate in the religious practices that appease the god(s). Judaism did not believe in “the gods” but A God. To appease “the gods” was to deny the supremacy of their god. That was dangerous and different enough. But Christianity added to this by crossing ethnic and cultural boundaries.

Strange Religion fits well with NT Wright’s recent book on Acts. Wright suggests that part of what Paul was doing in going to the local synagogues before reaching out the local gentiles was to identify with Judaism’s exemption from communal sacrifices. The Roman government had allowed Jews to opt out of communal sacrifices as long as Jews would pray for Roman and community good. But Jews were physically marked with circumcision in addition to being primarily an ethnic group. Paul wanted to use that Jewish exemption but also wanted gentile Christians to not get physically marked in circumcision. That appeared to be dangerous both to Jews who wanted to maintain their exemption and to Romans who wanted to be able to identify who Jews were.

Gupta explores this and many other areas of Roman culture, especially religious culture so that we as readers can understand the two threads of strangeness. Private cults were common in the Roman era and Christianity was at times thought of as just being one of the many cults of the era. They maintained secrecy, they called one another brother and sister and to outsiders it appeared that they participated in incest and talked about eating flesh and drinking blood of their god. This is a strangeness that many others in the past have talked about. But Gupta adds to this basic idea of strangeness, why Rome allowed, but monitored cults. Rome was interested in communal stability. And Christianity with its boundary crossing encouraged its members to flout traditional communal roles. Women and slaves were giving places of leadership and authority.

There has been recent push to monoculture or mono-ethnic communities within a portion of Christianity recently. Danny Slavich, a pastor of a multiethnic SBC church, tweeted:

The kingdom of God is multiethnic.

The Church is multiethnic.

If you don't like multiethnicity, take it up with the Lord.

Because I have paid attention to his work, I know that he has received a lot of critique for his emphasis on multiethnicity as an important function of the church. When I am writing this, the tweet has over 100K views and about 1500 retweets, comments or likes. Many are supportive because they are aware of the context he is speaking into. But he also drew a number of overt white supremacists. There were three main types of negative responses: 1) those who said that the church was universal in its multiethnicity, but local churches should be segregated. 2) those who asserted that Christianity was white and/or European and others could only be Christian to the extent that they adopted white or European cultural norms. (One said that in heaven all people would become white because dark skin was a result of sin.) 3) Nation states should be monocultural or mono-ethnic and the churches within those nation states would then naturally be mono-ethnic and monocultural. Many of these people cited the Tower of Babel as God’s command to not allow ethnic or cultural mixing.

I don’t want to suggest that this type of thinking is widespread in the church, but it is present. And people who do think in this way are going to be resistant to a reading of scripture, especially Acts and Paul’s letters, which significantly pays attention to the importance of crossing boundaries of all sorts in the early church. (Amos Yong’s commentary on Acts is helpful if you want to understand how important boundary crossing was to reading Acts.) Skye Jehani interviewed NT Wright about his commentary on Acts and in the last 15 minutes cited the kinds of segregationist tendencies that Skye knew are a part of the church. (Go to 1:05 of this video to see the 10-12 minutes of discussion about this.) Books like The Myth of Colorblind Christians and The Bible Told Them So are histories that grapple with the role of the Homogenous Unit Principle played in the church growth movement and how that HUP worked to maintain segregation within churches when other institutions were moving away from segregation.

The importance of Strange Religion and NT Wright’s commentary on Acts is that we need to understand scripture and scriptural culture to understand how modern movements may be deviating from Christianity. It is harder to read scripture when you understand the obligation to pay attention to how different scripture is from our current context. But it is part of Christian maturity to see that scripture is for you but not necessarily written directly to you. And some people are resistant to doing that work to grow in Christian maturity.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/strange-religion/

The book is split into 4 sections, with 12 chapters, an introduction, and a short conclusion. There are end notes at the back. The 4 sections are: Becoming Christian, What the First Christians Believed, How the First Christians Worshipped, and How the First Christians Lived.

I reviewed an advance reader copy from Netgalley, meaning it wasn’t in its final form. My copy had no illustrations, just captions where the illustrations should go. So I cannot comment on their quality, though there were a good number of them and they’re placed to illustrate interesting aspects of the text.

The author used a decent number of quotes from ancient texts in addition to numerous Old and New Testament quotes. He often tied things together with modern examples which I found a bit jarring but might help a general audience better understand the thought process of ancient peoples.

The book has some great aims and asks some excellent questions. These are questions that cannot be fully answered, as sources are limited, but it was frustrating at times how short the discussion was. The author might give a few possible answers but little or sometimes no reasoning on why these answers should be considered.

For example, in the 3rd chapter he questions why Romans would join the new Christian church when it was so radically different from what they were used to. He mentions 4 possibilities: the intriguing idea of monotheism, the promise of eternal life, that the new faith blended religion, philosophy and morality in a way others didn’t, and the concept of loving everyone. He mentions these but has no follow-up discussion about them and simply ends the chapter. Also strange is the absence of Christianity’s idea of equality as one of those possibilities. Many early adopters of Christianity were rich upper class women (women whose houses were gifted to the church to become buildings of worship upon their deaths). While upper class women had more agency than many in ancient Rome, the Christian faith gave them power over belief in ways other religions denied them. The author does cover the stratification of Roman society and how Christians tried to upend that with their idea of everyone being treated equally within the church in a later chapter, but he never posits this as a reason why lower class individuals might have joined the church in the first place. Even in his conclusion, when he again considers the question of what made Christianity so compelling, he neglects to mention it in favour of purely spiritual answers.

Despite my desire to see more discussion, the book is excellent at giving a good idea of how differently ancient peoples thought about concepts like religion. It was very useful learning how Greeks and Romans worshipped. I also appreciated learning more about how early Christian practice was different from the Jewish faith it sprang from. I highlighted numerous passages in the book that I thought were worth reflecting on. Christianity has changed a lot from those early years, so it was interesting seeing what the first Christians believed and how they followed Christ.

Consider this a great introduction to the topic of how early Christians practiced and how their worship and thought patterns differed from those of the people around them. It’s a fairly short, easy to read book that will give you a lot to think about.