Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Anniversary Post 5 why I was Reluctant to Write the Triumph of Christianity by Bart D. Ehrman Read by John Paul Middlesworth My book, the Triumph of Christianity, was by far the most difficult book I've written for a general audience. Difficult to write, not difficult to read, and it was the most learned in many ways, as well as the one I learned most from by writing it because of the range of information I had to deal with.
[00:00:30] Here is my anniversary post number five, published in 2016 before I was fully committed, that is under contract to write it, explaining why I knew it would be unusually hard when my agent, Roger and I decided that we might want to explore the possibility of going with a different publisher. The first step was to come up with a book proposal to shop around for 10 years or so. I had been wanting to write a particular book but had always put it off because it had seemed like such a major undertaking.
[00:01:00] I came to think that this was the perfect time to pursue it, to propose doing a new book on a completely new topic with a new publisher as a new beginning.
[00:01:09] The book was to be about how Christianity spread throughout the Roman world until, less than 400 years after it started, it had taken over and the Roman Empire had officially become Christian.
[00:01:21] In my mind I was thinking about a title like the Triumph of Christianity How Faith in Jesus Destroyed the Religions of Rome.
[00:01:29] It would be unlike anything I had ever done.
[00:01:32] The strategy was for me to write a 15 to 20 page prospectus in which I would explain what the idea behind the book was, why the topic was both important and interesting, and how I would go about structuring the book.
[00:01:44] A prospectus like this is designed to get a publisher interested and to give them enough of a sense of what would actually be argued in the book for them to see that it has already been carefully thought through.
[00:01:55] You can't simply write a prospectus off the top of your head. You have already to have done substantial research on the topic and to know where you want to go with it. For many authors, that alone takes months or years just to get to the point of writing a compelling prospectus.
[00:02:11] In my case, I had been thinking, reading and teaching about the topic for years.
[00:02:16] Many, many years ago, I had taught a PhD seminar on Christianizing the Roman Empire.
[00:02:23] The seminar had developed out of an earlier one than I had taught when I first came to UNC in the late 1980s that dealt with the early Christian apologists.
[00:02:32] These were the earliest intellectual defenders of the Christian faith against attacks of pagan opponents, authors such as Justin Martyr, Athenagoras Tertullian and Origen.
[00:02:43] I enjoyed that older course very much as it allowed us to look at how pagans portrayed 2nd and 3rd century Christians, attacked them, persecuted them, and so on, and to see how the Christians defended themselves, how Christians argued that they should not be persecuted, but instead should be recognized as the superior religion.
[00:03:03] But while teaching that course one semester, it occurred to me that it could be profitably broadened to cover other areas, especially on the growth of the Christian Church, the manner in which Christians conducted their mission of converting others, the elements of the Christian religion that made it distinctive among the religions of Rome, other elements that made it very much like the other religions of Rome, and so on.
[00:03:27] I taught my Christianization seminar just a couple of times before moving on to other things.
[00:03:33] But I always thought that I'd like to write a book about it. There was a lot of important scholarship on the topic, books written by and for specialists.
[00:03:41] And there were attempts to write books to explain the spread of Christianity throughout the Empire to popular audiences.
[00:03:47] The specialist books were often highly impressive, but not accessible to mere mortals. And the popular books all seemed to me to be problematic.
[00:03:56] The reason I held off from proposing a popular book earlier was that I knew such a book would have to cover so many topics that I thought it would be hard to get a handle on it all. It would have to involve a discussion of the religious world within which Christianity was born. Predominantly pagan, filled with people who worshiped the many gods of Rome, of their localities, of their families, and so on.
[00:04:19] How did religion work in that world?
[00:04:22] Did beliefs matter?
[00:04:24] Not so much. Were ethics part of the religion? Not really. They were a matter instead for philosophy and social order.
[00:04:33] What did people do in their religions? Cultic acts. And why did they do them?
[00:04:39] Fear of the gods. To please the gods. For an afterlife?
[00:04:44] Not for an afterlife.
[00:04:47] The nature of Christianity itself. It was a missionary religion. In a world where there weren't missionary religions. It was strictly monotheistic. In a world where that was thought to be nonsense. It worshipped a crucified criminal and so on.
[00:05:02] The early spread of the Christian religion through the work of such persons as the Apostle Paul.
[00:05:08] How did he start churches? How did he convince pagans to renounce their traditional religions to be followers of Christ?
[00:05:15] When Paul went to a new city where he didn't know a soul, how did he actually do it? Did he preach in the public square?
[00:05:22] Did he start in the synagogue to make contacts there and begin to preach to people he met? Did he use his workplace as a place for evangelism?
[00:05:31] All of the above something else.
[00:05:35] The rate of growth of early Christianity. How much would it need to grow in order to be a major force in the religions of the world by the fourth Christian century?
[00:05:45] Opposition and persecution of the Christians, first on the local level, as former friends and family members opposed those who converted. And then, later, starting at least in the early second century, official opposition at the hands of local authorities and eventually opposition on the imperial level, with the intervention of Roman emperors, including such topics as whether Nero's persecution had any effect on Christians outside of Rome.
[00:06:13] The charges leveled against Christians for being socially reclusive, refusing to participate in civic festivals and celebrations, and morally deviant Christians were accused of committing incest, infanticide and cannibalism. They killed babies and ate them.
[00:06:30] Really? That was a common charge.
[00:06:33] The responses to these charges as set out by the Christian apologists, the ways Christians converted to give up their traditional cults to become exclusively Christian.
[00:06:43] How did they convince anyone?
[00:06:46] The conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine.
[00:06:49] How did it happen? Why did it happen?
[00:06:52] What motivated him? Was he truly a Christian?
[00:06:56] Was he sincere?
[00:06:57] Was it all a political move?
[00:07:00] The effect of Constantine's conversion on Roman society, the eventual dominance of the Christian religion and its effects, for example, in anti pagan and anti Jewish legislation, the destruction of temples and idols, the persecution of pagans at the end of the 4th century, and so on.
[00:07:20] The effect of the Christianization of the empire on the history of the West.
[00:07:25] These are just some of the things a book like this would have to cover.
[00:07:29] It all seemed daunting, but it also all seemed really important, interesting and exciting.
[00:07:35] So I decided that this is something I wanted to work on next and I wrote up a prospectus to float before some publishers.
