Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire

by Martin Goodman

This is a controversial and important new examination of the origins of Christian mission, set against the background of ancient Judaism and the pagan culture of the Roman Empire. The author invites a total reconsideration of the grounds for religious conversion in both Christianity and Judaism. He suggests that mission was not inherent to either early Judaism or Christianity, and was only sporadically practiced in antiquity by these religions. Clear, accessible, and displaying considerable scholarship, this book will provide an important challenge and a stimulus to both theologians and historians.

Genres: History

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Martin David Goodman is a historian and writer on Roman history and the history of the Jews in the Roman period.

Reviews

[Taylor Swift Scholar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting look at mission across early religion traditions in Rome. Goodman challenges the assumption that mission is an essential part of religion and makes a convincing case for how mission did develop in middle/later Christianity.

[Mateusz · Rating 4 out of 5]

From a pagan perspective all forms of proselytization stem from the conviction that one is in the right and combines that with blind fear, in order to compensate this uncertainty of 'certainty of faith' one is prompted to win more converts in order to justify and mirror his own doubt in front of others to consolidate it into sectarian make-believe cognitive behaviors. I've never met a strong-willed, logical, reasonable being that seeked to justify his own stances in the eyes of others, or convert them otherwise than by inspiration stemming from his example, or wisdom of his words and nobility of his ethos that convinced others in a suffiicient manner in order to incorporate and individuate in maturity in a similar fashion. The case with Judeo-Christian and Manichean proselytizing in the Roman Empire was a boiling bog in which doctrines formed in opposition to the high antique, while using and abusing everything on its way. This book is about this boiling, written in a concise form and leaving the chaos out. What conjoins Manicheanism and Christianity is its operation on absolutes - the interpretations of their adherents must be definitive and final, universalistic, thus it is a form of exclusivity of the flocks accompanied with terror against the outsiders. It is a form of religious schizophrenia in which all outsiders are enemies or pagans, but it would be great to make them friends by the law of incorporation, 'only if' they would accept a carve-out of the indivisible world and bottleneck it into a category of a weird religion. The 'truth' of Manicheanism is contradicting the 'truth' of Christianity yet both parties held 'one and only truth', evangelical in that matter, and spreading their own ideas about it. The triumphalism of christianity is purely sociological, there is no revelation, mystery or miracle in it, the socio-historical processes were prone to adapt to this new cultic formoid, it has something of the Jewish stubborness and revanchism: "The more you mown us (christians) the more we grow", there is something of a ruthless foolishness of pseudo-chivalry that one sticks to his views no matter what is the evidence. Even if all the Gods, Providence, Divine would unveil the great realization to a Jew, Christian or Muslim, they would interpret it into their religious ideas shaped by their tribal codices and laws either as a 'form of a revelation' a 'message from the angels of God' or 'devilish illusion attempting to thwart their faith', depending on the beholder and his own filter of psychological setting and religious ideas. One may retrace many ideas [return to Zion, return of the Messiah, eschatological proximity, covenantal evangelism et al. 'Philosophia Perennis' by Wilhelm Schmidt Biggerman surveys Judeo-Christian theological ideas across history in detail] in mainstream christianity from the corporae of judaism, thus using the term 'Judeo-Christianity' is fully justified, personally I treat christians as sectarian jews that monolithized themselves into a major religion much later. Highly commendable book.