The Library and Lighthouse of Alexandria

In approximately AD 175, shortly after the death of Claudius Ptolemy, another Alexandrian scholar named Celsus penned a withering broadside against a new religion known as Christianity. His book, which bore the sarcastic title of The True Word, heaped scorn on the faith and its followers for page after numbing page. According to it, the whole religion stemmed from one wayward girl’s tall tale of a “virgin birth,” the same sort of story which girls like her had been inventing for millennia when they suddenly turned up pregnant. The only difference was, this girl had had a family stupid enough to believe it.

Christianity was suitable only for “foolish and low individuals and slaves.” Who else would worship a god who would allow himself to be tortured, humiliated, and finally executed by the very mortals he had created? Certainly not the wise and educated men of Alexandria’s library and museum.

Wherever one finds a crowd of adolescent boys, or a bunch of slaves, or a company of fools, there will the Christian teachers be also, showing off their fine new philosophy. In private houses one can see wool workers, cobblers, laundry workers, and the most illiterate country bumpkins, who would not venture to voice their opinions in front of their intellectual betters. But let them get hold of children in private houses — let them find some gullible wives — and you will hear some preposterous statements. You will hear them say, for instance, that [the children] should not pay attention to their fathers or teachers, but must obey them. They say that their elders and teachers are fools, and are in reality very bad men who like to voice their silly opinions. Now if, as they are speaking thus to the children, they happen to see a schoolteacher coming along, some intelligent person, or even the father of one of the children, these Christians flee in all directions.

It is silly to suppose that when God, like a cook, brings the fire, the rest of mankind will be roasted, and only the Christians will remain — not merely the living ones, but those who died long ago, rising from the earth with the identical flesh they had before. Really, it is the hope of worms! It is only the simpletons, the ignoble, the senseless — slaves and women and children — whom Christians can persuade. Wool dressers and cobblers and fullers, the most uneducated and common men, whoever is a sinner… or a godforsaken fool.

One doesn’t have to be an expert in human psychology to recognize that Celsus protests rather too much. Lurking between the lines of the contempt which he heaps upon a religion that he insists is beneath contempt is a deep-seated wariness of it — even, we might venture to say, a palpable fear of it. To a man like Celsus, so invested in the entrenched social structures of his time, Christianity was as radical and as terrifying as, say, communism was to a twentieth-century man of capital. “God chose the weak in the world to put to shame the strong,” the Christian apostle Paul had written. Has a more subversive statement ever been made?

Celsus wrote his screed against Christianity almost a century and a half after Jesus Christ had been martyred, and probably at least a full century after the religion had first become a presence on the streets of Alexandria. According to church histories, the man who first brought Christianity to Alexandria was none other than the apostle Mark, author of one of the four New Testament gospels, who limped into the city with a damaged sandal some time between AD 41 and 44. The cobbler whom he asked to fix his shoe was named Anianus. Whilst doing so, Anianus injured his hand with his awl. But rather than shouting an oath as one might expect, he screamed out, “God is one!” Much surprised at hearing this humble pagan make reference to a singular God, Mark asked for an explanation, but this Anianus could not provide; a spirit had simply come over him, he said. Taking this as a sign, Mark laid his own hand over that of the cobbler to heal his wound, and then told him about the life and death of Jesus Christ. Anianus and his family became the first people in Egypt to be baptized into the Christian faith. Mark later made him his ordained successor, the second pope of Egypt.

Modern secular historians view this founding narrative with considerable skepticism even after discounting Mark’s miraculous healing of Anianus as a bit of poetic embellishment. Still, it’s clear that by the time of Celsus Christianity was both long- and well-established in the city. And yet Celsus’s book constitutes the oldest comments on Christianity by a non-Christian Alexandrian to have reached us. Surely there must have been many similarly strident condemnations, and perhaps even some commentaries that offered a more balanced perspective, but they were all destroyed by Christians of later centuries in a concerted effort to expunge anything that cast their religion in a negative light — or, even more importantly, that cast doubt on the notion that the version of Christian dogma which had been set in stone by the end of classical times was the same as that which had existed, complete and inviolate, since the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. They had good reason to be so sensitive on this point: the notion of an immaculately conceived Christianity was, as we’ll see, thoroughly at odds with the real early history of the religion. Indeed, for all that it was already well removed from the crucifixion, the Christianity that the Alexandrians of Celsus’s time knew was still a very different faith from the one that would be standardized in later centuries.

We saw in an earlier chapter how the Jews, that first of the Peoples of the Book, laid claim to that title in the Alexandria of an earlier age by translating and collecting in a standard format first the books of the Torah and then the rest of the Hebrew Bible. The Alexandrian Christians that Celsus knew were a long way yet from that stage; nothing like a Christian Bible yet existed. Theirs was still a mostly oral tradition — as it must be, considering that most Christians were illiterate — supported by a diffuse collection of texts that were passed about among the relative few able to read them. Some of these texts would later appear in the New Testament of the Christian Bible, while others would be forgotten and lost to time, or denounced as heresies and more purposefully erased from history. Christian beliefs in Celsus’s time were no more standardized than Christian texts, with many interpretations being bandied about of exactly who Jesus had been and still was, and what his relationship to God really was.

Alexandria’s large size and fairly close proximity to Christianity’s birthplace in Jewish Palestine made it the most important early locus of the religion outside its homeland. When we add to this Alexandria’s longstanding position as the classical world’s premiere intellectual center, a haven for thinkers and writers of all stripes, we can see how it became the place where many of the debates that eventually led to a more doctrinaire, institutional form of Christianity took place. This evolution will be a major focus of future chapters. But before we can turn to those things, we need to understand how the religion came to be in the first place. The picture that emerges from such an inquiry is inevitably different from the one that is typically drawn in Sunday schools.

Still, we need not cast doubt on all aspects of that story. The vast majority of secular historians believe that a religious leader named Jesus really did live in ancient Palestine. We now believe that his birth, that epochal event from which later generations would attempt to number all of the human history that followed, is more likely to have been in 4 BC than AD 1, and that he was probably crucified by the Roman provincial governor Pontius Pilate — a real historical figure of whose existence we do have incontrovertible evidence — in about AD 30. Almost everything else, however, is more or less speculation. Jesus’s followers were drawn almost exclusively from the lower classes, and must have been well-nigh universally illiterate. We have no written accounts of Jesus’s life penned by firsthand witnesses to it; virtually no secular scholars of the Bible believe today that any of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John was written by someone who was actually there. These four texts, the bedrock of the eventual Christian Bible in the same way that the Torah is of the Hebrew Bible, are rather believed to be written versions of stories that were first passed around orally. The Gospel of Mark, which is believed to be the oldest of the four, likely dates from at least 35 years after the crucifixion; the Gospel of John, which is believed to be the newest, from perhaps 25 to 30 years after the Gospel of Mark, with the other two falling somewhere in between.

Thus we cannot rely exclusively on the gospels for our understanding of Jesus’s life. For, not being firsthand accounts, they are in the end only a reflection of what people were saying about his life decades after its mortal phase had ended on a lonely cross in Jerusalem — after, as we’ll soon see, his followers’ very conception of who and what Jesus was had undergone a radical revision.

What follows represents the rough consensus among secular historians about the origins of Christianity. It presumes that no supernatural elements were involved. I approach the subject with this assumption already made not because I wish to offend any readers who happen to be Christian believers, much less put my oar into the tiresome war of words between theists and atheists — I belong to neither camp personally, being a resolutely irresolute agnostic — but simply because to do otherwise would be to move this book out of the realm of historical inquiry and into another form of literary endeavor entirely.

In order to come to terms with the historical rather than the divine or mythical Jesus, we need to place him firmly in the context of his time and place. And that in turn means realizing that he was first and foremost a Jew, both in his own mind and those of his followers, bringing a message meant not so much for all of humanity as for his own sect. So, we must begin with the political situation in the once-independent nation of Judea during his life.

Herod the Great, the last of the famed Jewish kings of antiquity, died at some point between 4 BC and AD 1. Judea’s independence had long been at the sufferance of the Romans, and in AD 6 Emperor Augustus opted to remove that sufferance, deposing Herod’s son and making Judea a province of his empire along with the rest of Palestine. Some Jews — an upper crust who would later be demonized as the principal agents of Jesus’s execution — did quite well for themselves under the Romans, but the lower classes suffered poverty and oppression. These turned to their faith and its holy texts for comfort, as Jews have done so often in times of trouble. The rabbis told their flocks of the Book of Daniel, the story of another subjugation of Jews at the hands of a foreign people, in this case that of the Babylonians of the early sixth century BC.

In Chapter 7 of the Book of Daniel, the titular prophet has a mysterious vision of four fearsome monsters. He discovers through prayer that “these great beasts, which are four, are four kings, which shall arise out of the earth.” The downtrodden Jews of Roman Palestine now concluded that the monsters symbolized the successive empires which had interfered with their lives in the centuries since Daniel had had his vision: the Babylonians, the Persians, the Macedonians, and the Romans. And so they rejoiced at what had come next to Daniel:

I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of Days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.

And he shall speak great words against the most high, and shall wear out the saints of the most high, and think to change time and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time. And the kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven, shall be given to the people of the saints of the most high, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.

Apocalyptic thinking, inspired by this text and a number of other prophetic visions found in places like the apocryphal Book of Enoch, became all the rage in Jewish Palestine. The Son of Man must be coming soon, many Jews believed, because the last of the four imperial beasts now reigned supreme. Surely the time was nigh for God to grant his chosen people dominion over all the world, as he had promised Daniel he would do.

Downtrodden people looking forward to an apocalypse tend to be receptive to would-be prophets among their ranks. We can presume that Jesus was far from the only self-proclaimed enlightened one who wandered among the Jewish villages of Galilee, the particularly hardscrabble northern region of Palestine. In fact, children today still learn of one of the others in Sunday school: John the Baptist, the itinerant preacher and prophet whose “meat was locusts and wild honey,” and who, according to the gospels, baptized the young Jesus in the Jordan River.

Jesus may or may not have been unique in preaching that he himself would be entrusted by God to rule the world after the final vision of Daniel had come to pass. The second name which he gave to himself, or was given by his followers, implied as much. The name of “Christ” by which we know him today is a Greek translation of “messiah,” a Hebrew word which literally means “anointed one”: i.e., one — presumably a mortal — who is separate from God but anointed by him to carry out his purpose on earth. All earlier Jewish texts which refer to a messiah hew to this interpretation.

There is no reason, on the other hand, to think that Jesus ever called himself the incarnate son of God, or ever believed himself to be such a divine figure. He was a mortal — God’s chosen mortal, yes, who was destined to rule the world when the apocalypse came, but a mortal nonetheless. Some of his most famous prophecies from the gospels take on a markedly different flavor when understood in this light, such as this one from the Gospel of Mark which has been vexing believers for the better part of two millennia now, thanks to its manifest failure to come to pass: “Truly I tell you, some of you standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come in power.” In this problematic passage, Jesus was quite likely referring to a temporal kingdom ruled by his mortal self rather than his triumphant return from beyond the grave to pass a final judgment on all the people of the world, past and present, and live in peace with those who passed muster for all eternity.

Jesus’s transformation in the minds of his followers from a mortal anointed one to the immortal son of God came in response to an extremely awkward series of events. In AD 30, this supposed next and greatest Jewish king traveled to the old Judean capital of Jerusalem to claim his crown, only to be arrested for his rabble-rousing, given a hasty show trial, and executed by crucifixion without further ado. At this point, his followers’ options were either to accept that Jesus had been a false prophet, or to re-frame his story in such a way that it could continue to inspire them.

This re-framing was surely neither as cynical nor as conscious as the previous sentence might imply. There is no particular reason to doubt that those who claimed to see a resurrected Jesus really did believe in the truth of their visions. The fact is that people have visions all the time of things that aren’t actually there, in the sense of being verifiable by any empirical means at our current disposal. Many who have recently lost a loved one experience what psychologists refer to as “bereavement visions,” in which the deceased come back to communicate with them in dreams, as ghostly presences in the waking world, or even as apparently solid flesh-and-blood entities. Intriguingly, such visions are most common among those who feel some sense of guilt or shame involving the deceased, as those of Jesus’s followers who fled Jerusalem upon his arrest must have, and among those who are angry at the circumstances of their loved one’s death, as all of Jesus’s followers certainly would have been. The presence who returns almost always takes an idealized form, with all faults and blemishes smoothed away; this was definitely the case with the resurrected Jesus. Further, visions — especially religious visions — that are shared by large numbers of people are by no means unheard of even in the modern world. During the twentieth century, mass sightings of the Virgin Mary, sometimes by hundreds of people at a time, occurred in Venezuela, Egypt, France, Portugal, Spain, and Bosnia-Herzegovina among other places. All of which is to say that the visions of the resurrected Jesus experienced by his followers are not of themselves hugely exceptional in a situation such as theirs.

But what of the story that seemed to provide a sort of physical proof of the resurrection of Jesus: the story of a group of his female followers visiting his tomb two days after his crucifixion, only to find it empty? The historian of religion John Dominic Crossan among others has pointed out what a bizarre story this is even long before one gets to the big reveal of an empty tomb. Why on earth should Jesus have been buried in a tomb at all? He was, after all, a pauper who was executed like any other common criminal — executed alongside, as the gospels famously tell us, two petty thieves. Crucifixion was not typically followed by any form of dignified burial. Its real purpose was to serve as a deterrent to anyone else who might be thinking of breaking the laws of Rome or otherwise challenging Roman hegemony, and one of the ways it accomplished that goal was the degradation of its victims even after their deaths on the cross, by leaving their bodies hanging there to rot and be slowly devoured by birds and scavenging animals. Anyone who attempted to interfere with such a corpse could expect to face crucifixion himself. Thus, as Crossan has stated, the real body of the real Jesus Christ is more likely to have wound up in the bellies of hungry dogs than in a cozy cliff-side tomb. At best, it might have been tossed into a mass grave after the birds and beasts had had their fill. Tombs were awarded to the rich and to the nobility, not to peripatetic prophets preaching dangerous anti-Roman propaganda.

The early Christians could not have been unaware of this incongruity at the center of their tale of the resurrection. In fact, the problem would have stood out even more clearly for them, given that they were much more acquainted with the realities of Roman crucifixion than we are today. To put it bluntly, they needed to find an excuse to get Jesus’s body down off his crude cross and into a palatial tomb. The Gospel of Mark describes the following as occurring immediately after Jesus has expired on the cross:

Joseph of Arimathea, an honourable counsellor, which also waited for the kingdom of God, came, and went in boldly unto Pilate, and craved the body of Jesus. And Pilate marvelled if he were already dead; and calling unto him the centurion, he asked him whether he had been any while dead. And when he knew it of the centurion, he gave the body to Joseph. And he bought fine linen, and took him down, and wrapped him in the linen, and laid him in a sepulchre which was hewn out of a rock, and rolled a stone unto the door of the sepulchre. And Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jesus beheld where he was laid.

But this story too is very hard to reconcile with the other details of Jesus’s crucifixion. The council to which Joseph of Arimathea belonged was the ruling body of Jews in Jerusalem, who were in league with the Roman government there. In fact, it was this council which had decided to arrest Jesus in the first place. Mark tells us that they held a debate on his fate after doing so, and “they all [emphasis mine] condemned him to be guilty” and deserving of death. And so they passed him on to Pontius Pilate along with their recommendation.

Mark, then, asks us to believe that Joseph of Arimathea first voted to execute Jesus, then went to extraordinary lengths to recover and honor his body. Why would he do such a thing? The only motivation Mark provides him is that he “waited for the kingdom of God.” But if he believed Jesus’s claims about the coming kingdom of God, why did he vote to execute him for making those claims? The later Gospel of Luke attempts to address this issue, by inserting as a literal parenthetical that Joseph of Arimathea “had not [emphasis mine] consented” to the decision of the apparently no longer unanimous council. By this point a distinct whiff of retroactive continuity-fixing is clinging to the whole narrative.

And what of Pontius Pilate, the man Joseph of Arimathea would have had to convince to release Jesus’s body? We can see his personality undergoing an alteration over the course of the four gospels, from being a faceless and heartless tool of Roman oppression in Luke to being a decidedly reluctant executioner in John. “I can find no fault with him,” he says of Jesus to the council in the latter gospel, and explicitly asks them whether they wish him to grant the prisoner clemency as part of the Jewish holiday of Passover, which was being celebrated at that time. But the council is implacable: “Then they cried all again, saying, ‘Not this man, but Barabbas.’ Now Barabbas was a robber.” Pilate feels he is duty-bound to honor the council’s wishes, sparing the robber and killing the messiah. It’s easy enough to imagine this version of the man agreeing to release the body of Jesus to Joseph of Arimathea for a decent burial after the ugly deed has been done.

This portrait of a conflicted Pontius Pilate was filled in even more indelibly by the crucifixion literature that came after the New Testament. He came to live in the collective Christian imagination as a thoughtful and fundamentally fair-minded if overly diffident bureaucrat, deeply unsettled by the execution he feels compelled to order. In time, as Christianity separated itself fully from Judaism and antisemitism took root among Christian thinkers and believers, this version of Pilate provided a neat way to scapegoat Jews as the killers of Christ — ignoring, of course, the fact that Jesus was himself a Jew, preaching what was during his lifetime a profoundly Jewish message of salvation.

But the Pontius Pilate whom we meet in ancient records other than the New Testament bears little resemblance to this vaguely tortured figure. The two most prolific Jewish writers of the first century both mention him, neither of them in a positive way. The philosopher and theologian Philo, who was living and writing in Alexandria at the very same time that Pilate was crucifying Jesus in Jerusalem, never wrote a word about the latter but did describe the former’s “venality, his violence, his thefts, his assaults, his abusive behavior, his frequent executions of untried prisoners, and his endless savage ferocity.” And Josephus, an historian who migrated from Judea to Rome, wrote of a governor who couldn’t care less about the sensitivities of his Jewish subjects, who besmirched their holy places with graven images of the Roman emperor despite their howls of protest and thought nothing of raiding temple coffers to finance his infrastructure projects. It’s hard to imagine this man showing any compunction whatsoever about executing a Jewish troublemaker like Jesus, and equally hard to imagine him giving the body special treatment afterward at the request of a Jewish subject of any stature.

In light of all these circumstantial but persuasive arguments against the probability of an entombed Jesus, one might well ask why it needed to be part of the tale at all. Couldn’t he just as well be raised from a mass grave, or for that matter from the bellies of carrion dogs? The story of an empty tomb was so vitally important to what would emerge as the orthodox version of the Christian religion because it provided a form of proof that he was physically rather than just spiritually resurrected. In the next chapters, we’ll return to the question of why such a distinction became such an obsession of early Christian thinkers. Right now, though, we move on to another pivotal moment in the early history of Christianity, one almost on par with Jesus’s crucifixion and (alleged) resurrection.

The most prolific author of the New Testament in terms of attribution is the apostle Paul; fully 14 of its 27 books are credited to him, although these take the form of epistles — i.e., letters — written to others rather than consciously created holy texts. Scholars today believe that only about half of the epistles attributed to him were definitely the products of his pen, but these probably constitute the oldest texts to be found in the New Testament, predating even the Gospel of Mark.

The story of Paul’s conversion is perhaps the most famous of all the Christian tales that postdate Jesus’s ascension to heaven. Paul was a well-born Jew from the city of Tarsus, who would appear to have held a fairly high position in the Roman provincial government of Palestine at the time of the crucifixion. He used his position to, as he himself put it, “persecute beyond measure” Jesus’s followers before and immediately after that event — until, just a few years after the crucifixion, he had a vision of Jesus while he was traveling the road to Damascus; the splendor of it left him blind for three days. When he recovered his eyesight, he set about spreading the good word far and wide, working to set up communities of believers all across the Roman Empire. He became the first great Christian missionary, “planting churches” everywhere he went. The letters which constitute his contributions to the New Testament were written in connection with this work. They provide a precious window into the rapid early evolution of Christian thought.

The most important of all the arguments advanced by Paul in his epistles is that Jesus had actually been a messiah for all peoples: that Gentiles — i.e., non-Jews — could also accept him and achieve salvation thereby. Those who would become Christians, in other words, did not need to convert to Judaism as a prerequisite, and did not need to obey the strictures of the Halakha, or Jewish Law: they did not need to refrain from eating pork, did not need to circumcise themselves and their male children, etc. All of that was now in the past. “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the Law,” wrote Paul.

His position was not accepted unanimously or immediately. For evidence of this, we need only turn to the Gospel of Matthew, which was written some time after Paul’s epistles. Its author, who would appear to have been of a markedly more conservative disposition, placed precisely the opposite words in Jesus’s mouth. One can easily imagine this part of the Gospel of Matthew being intended as an explicit riposte to Paul’s radical views on conversion.

Think not that I am come to destroy the Law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no way pass from the Law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

Despite the best efforts of this author, Paul’s argument won the day in the end, condemning the above to become another problematic passage, to be unconvincingly explained away by non-Jewish Christian believers after the Gospel of Matthew was canonized.

One can hardly overstate the magnitude of the decision to welcome Gentiles into the ranks of Christians. Instead of being a closed, ethnically homogeneous religion for a single chosen people, as Judaism had always been and would remain, Christianity would be a faith for everyone, of each and every ethnicity, nationality, and social class. And conversion to it would be easy, entailing no obligation to give up treasured foods or submit to uncomfortable and potentially dangerous surgeries. Had Paul not gotten his way, the course of world history would have been very, very different.

As it was, though, this universalist religion proved to be extraordinarily appealing to the teeming masses of the Roman Empire. Over its first 270 years, the ragged handful of believers who fled Jerusalem in despair at the time of the crucifixion increased their numbers to as many as 3 million. Christianity grew at this pace not because it was imposed on anyone — that would not begin until later in its history — but because its core tenets were so intrinsically appealing. “All in all,” notes Will Durant, “no more attractive religion has ever been presented to mankind.” In addition to eternal life after death, it offered much comfort and wisdom that was directly applicable to this life. It said that the lowliest slave was no more nor less worthy of salvation than the emperor himself. Instead of wealth, fame, or power, it prized the noblest human virtues: kindness, compassion, mercy, love, service, forgiveness. And it told everyone, regardless of her rank, that she was empowered to make her own choices in life. Small wonder that it unnerved so many like Celsus, who were so invested in the hierarchical status quo of ancient society.

In time, more dogmatic, authoritarian impulses would be joined to this egalitarian, humanistic philosophy, as the simple faith of Jesus’s original disciples took on the trappings of a bureaucratic institution as heavily invested as any in the ethos of control. But we should be careful not to let these developments blind us to the historical potency of Christianity in its most basic form. The story of Jesus Christ resonated not because it was true but because it was truthy — because it was one of the best stories humans had ever told to one another, this tale of a man who was somehow more than a man, who chose to die for humanity’s long litany of sins, thereby to give all humans everywhere a chance of redemption. Like all the best stories, the power of this one is ineffable, impossible to fully verbalize in the language of literary criticism or psychology or anything else. It just is, throbbing in humanity’s collective soul. The British humorist (and outspoken atheist) Douglas Adams once summarized the story of Jesus as that of a man who was “nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change.” At bottom, that perhaps really is all there is to it — but this “all” encompasses an awful lot.

It’s been fashionable for decades among some tribes of intellectuals to treat the rise of Christianity in the ancient world much as one might the takeover of a modern multicultural, democratic, secular state by a fundamentalist cult. This point of view is deeply anachronistic and ahistorical, ignoring or glossing over such inconvenient realities as the fact that the economy of the Roman Empire was built around the loathsome institution of slavery.

The prolific secular Biblical scholar Bart D. Ehrman goes to the opposite extreme to make a maximalist argument for Christianity as a force for good in the world. He too perhaps exaggerates his case, in that he might almost lead one to believe that human kindness of any sort did not exist before Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, there is more than a little truth in the contrast he draws with the accepted ethic of the ancient world before Jesus, which he sums up in the word “dominance.”

In a culture of dominance, those with power are expected to assert their will over those who are weaker. Rulers are to dominate their subjects, patrons their clients, masters their slaves, men their women. This ideology was not merely a cynical grab for power or a conscious mode of oppression. It was the commonsense, millennia-old view that virtually everyone accepted and shared, including the weak and marginalized.

This ideology affected both social relations and government policy. It made slavery a virtually unquestioned institution promoting the good of society; it made the male head of the household a sovereign despot over all those under him; it made wars of conquest, and the slaughter they entailed, natural and sensible for the well-being of the valued part of the human race (that is, those invested with power).

With such an ideology one would not expect to find governmental welfare programs to assist weaker members of society: the poor, homeless, hungry, or oppressed. One would not expect to find hospitals to assist the sick, injured, or dying. One would not expect to find private institutions of charity designed to help those in need.

The Roman world did not have such things. Christians, however, advocated a different ideology. Leaders of the Christian church preached and urged an ethic of love and service. One person was not more important than another. All were on the same footing before God: the master was no more significant than the slave, the patron than the client, the husband than the wife, the powerful than the weak, or the robust than the diseased. Whether those Christian ideals worked themselves out in practice is another question. Christians sometimes — indeed, many times — spectacularly failed to match their pious sentiments with concrete actions, or, even more, acted in ways contrary to their stated ideals. But the ideals were nonetheless ensconced in their tradition — widely and publicly proclaimed by leaders of the movement — in ways not extensively found elsewhere in Roman society.

As Christians came to occupy positions of power, these ideals made their way into people’s social lives, into private institutions meant to encapsulate them, and into governmental policy. The very idea that society should serve the poor, the sick, and the marginalized became a distinctively Christian concern. Without the conquest of Christianity, we may well never have had institutionalized welfare for the poor or organized healthcare for the sick. Billions of people may never have embraced the idea that society should serve the marginalized or be concerned with the well-being of the needy, values that most of us in the West have simply assumed are “human” values.

But of course the rise of Christianity was not an unmitigated positive. In addition to the humanistic, humane impulse which Ehrman justly celebrates, it would bring with it in time its own full measure of intolerance, accompanied by a rabid anti-intellectualism. The details of Christianity’s rise from the simple faith of a handful of hardscrabble illiterates to a rigidly formulated, institutionalized religion are not always as appealing as the beautiful tale of Jesus that Christians told to one another. Yet these arguments over dogma, conducted in harsh words and sometimes in orgies of violence that would seem the antithesis of the Christian savior’s teachings, also shaped the world that we know today. And more of them took place in Alexandria than anywhere else.

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