The Dawn of Christianity By Robert Knapp, Profile Books, £25
The extraordinary success of the Christian religion, growing from a small group of baffled Galileans cowering in an upper room in Jerusalem to the state religion of the Roman Empire, is hard for historians to explain. Nietzsche ascribed it to the appeal of its egalitarian ethos to hitherto subject classes of society such as women and slaves. The devout Christian sees the hand of God and so too, it would seem, does Robert Knapp.
On October 28 in AD 312, the Roman Emperor Constantine, as he prepared to fight his rival Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge, saw the sign of the Cross appear in the sky. The Christian religion, Knapp concludes, “might well have died but for Constantine’s cross in the sky. A second miracle resurrected Jesus a second time. This time the faith he inspired, carried on the shoulders of empire, spread throughout the Mediterranean lands for good.”
Knapp does not tell us whether or not the Trinitarian Christian God was responsible for this miracle: he is a diligent scholar who taught ancient history for more than 30 years at the University of Berkeley in California, hardly the seat of faith-based speculation.
His earlier book, Invisible Romans, was much praised for informing us about the lives of ordinary Romans, rather than the Roman elite. Here too, in The Dawn of Christianity, he gives a detailed account of the beliefs of pagans and Jews both before, during and after the time of Jesus.
The early Christians might have been disillusioned that Jesus did not return in their lifetime, but the message of the Gospels fell on fertile soil in the sense that no one at the time doubted the existence of supernatural beings who intervened in their lives: for the pagans, a number of gods; for the Jews, Yahweh, the one true God.
The advent of schools of philosophy that were sceptical about the gods and heroes – Platonists, Stoics and particularly Epicureans – did not, except in the case of Socrates, upset convention. “True to the essentially sponge-like quality that underlay their thought and action,” writes Knapp, “polytheists could absorb moral guidance from philosophical teaching without giving up their sacrifices, festivals and so on.”
It was all rather like the Church of England. Unlike the Cof E, however, the polytheists expected their gods to perform. Either favourably, with cures of illnesses or rain to end droughts, or as punishment for misdeeds, with storms and earthquakes.
The Jews, too, expected Yahweh to show his power; and both among Jews and pagans there were charismatic prophets or leaders who claimed access to supernatural powers. Such were John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth: the historian Josephus notes Jesus’s reputation as a “wonder-worker”, rather than a teacher or prophet.
Describing Jesus, writes Knapp, “is like trying to seize Proteus. The shape keeps changing, defying any purchase tried.” Undaunted, he aims “to capture how the people of the day viewed Jesus and, subsequently, those preaching his message.”
Was Jesus a Zealot? Was he an Essene? And what of St Paul? Paul antagonised the Jewish establishment (Knapp prefers the word “elite”) by insisting that Jesus was the promised Messiah and Son of God. “The major differences between what adherents of early Christianity preached and what Jewish people most readily believed, [was] that Jesus spoke with authority, that is as a supernatural being, not a mere agent (prophet) of Yahweh.”
This was blasphemy to the Jews and sedition to pagans. “In all probability,” wrote Cicero, “disappearance of piety towards the gods will entail the disappearance of loyalty and social union among men as well and of justice itself.” No wonder Christians, who said the gods were bogus, were thrown to the lions.
The 19th-century Swiss author Henri-Frédéric Amiel accused Ernst Renan, the doyen of biblical exegesis, of altering facts to suit the limpid prose of his Vie de Jesus. There is no danger of that here. The reader is informed but not entertained: there is no wit to leaven the bare prose.
Knapp gives us facts, and conjecture as facts (he believes, contrary to Catholic teaching, that Jesus had brothers), and comes to conclusions that no doubt conform to the current consensus among biblical exegetes, but which will not convince the devout. He makes little of the Gospels as a factor in the spread of Christianity.
Jesus’s teaching, he tells us, was not so different from that of the Stoics and Platonists. As a result, “the Christian culture that would emerge in late antiquity carried more of the genes of its ‘pagan’ ancestry than of the peculiarly Christian mutations”.
As Professor Knapp is unquestionably learned, one hesitates to place The Dawn of Christianity in the same category of rubbishy speculation by American academics such as Reza Azlan’s Zealot. That the ancient world, unlike the modern one, was predisposed to believe in the supernatural is a point worth making. But Knapp’s hypothesis, that Christianity triumphed because of it superior magic, culminating in that miracle at the Milvian Bridge, is unconvincing.
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