Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity

The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library

by Luke Timothy Johnson

The question of Christianity’s relation to the other religions of the world is more pertinent and difficult today than ever before. While Christianity’s historical failure to appreciate or actively engage Judaism is notorious, Christianity’s even more shoddy record with respect to “pagan” religions is less understood. Christians have inherited a virtually unanimous theological tradition that thinks of paganism in terms of demonic possession, and of Christian missions as a rescue operation that saves pagans from inherently evil practices. 

In undertaking this fresh inquiry into early Christianity and Greco-Roman paganism, Luke Timothy Johnson begins with a broad definition of religion as a way of life organized around convictions and experiences concerning ultimate power. In the tradition of William James’s Variety of Religious Experience, he identifies four distinct ways of being religious: religion as participation in benefits, as moral transformation, as transcending the world, and as stabilizing the world. Using these criteria as the basis for his exploration of Christianity and paganism, Johnson finds multiple points of similarity in religious sensibility.

Christianity’s failure to adequately come to grips with its first pagan neighbors, Johnson asserts, inhibits any effort to engage positively with adherents of various world religions.  This thoughtful and passionate study should help break down the walls between Christianity and other religious traditions.

Genres: Religion, History, Theology, Christianity, Nonfiction, New Testament, Biblical Studies

461 pages, Hardcover

First published November 10, 2009

About the author

Luke Timothy Johnson is an American New Testament scholar and historian of early Christianity. He is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Candler School of Theology and a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University.

Johnson's research interests encompass the Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts of early Christianity (particularly moral discourse), Luke-Acts, the Pastoral Epistles, and the Epistle of James.

Reviews

[Drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was too difficult for me. I heard Luke Timothy Johnson speak on the topic covered by the book--one of the best speakers I have ever heard and I found the topic fascinating. So, I bought the book. Mistake. I read half of it but it took more discipline than I had to finish it, so I quit. This book was written for serious scholars and seminarians. I was not at all familiar with the vocabulary and many of the words can't be found in a standard Webster's dictionary.

The book is a magnificent, impressive work of scholarship. Rather than look at the beliefs of various faiths, primarily Greco-Roman, Jewish and Christian, he has examined the way those various faiths are practiced. One of his interesting conclusions is that in practice, modern Christianity is much closer to the Greco-Roman religions than it is to Judaism, which was not true of early Christianity.

[John David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many religious people choose to focus on those things that make their religion unique, ahistorically separating it from the cultures and other religions in and around which it originally formed. It makes sense that several kinds of contemporary Christianity would do the same. For those looking for a scholarly, well-argued position against the singular historical uniqueness of Christianity, Luke Timothy Johnson provides an excellent one in “Among the Gentiles.”

Johnson feels that illustrating lines of continuity between Greco-Roman paganism, Jewish traditions, and nascent Christianity opens up the possibility of dialogue, as well as providing a space where the comparative history of religions can take place stripped of the limiting, often judgmental assumptions of contemporary conservative Christian apologetics. Any project with this type of scope requires tools which allow for the analysis of those types of continuity at which Johnson is looking.

Methodologically, he proposes a fourfold religious typology which claims will be useful in looking at all of these traditions; even though Johnson teaches in a school of theology, he avoids any theological language in any of these. What he calls “Religiousness A” is the participation in divine benefits, including “revelation through prophecy, healing through revelation, providing security and status through Mysteries, enabling and providing for the daily successes of individuals, households, cities, and empires.” This type of religious practice is optimistic in believing that the world is a stage for divine activity, and pragmatic in that “salvation involves security and success in this mortal life.” Johnson says that Greek orator Aelius Aristides embodies this type. In several of Aristides’ orations, he singles out for praise Serapis (who protected him on his journey to Egypt) and Asclepius (who bestowed the gift of oratory upon him).

Religiousness B is moral transformation, which exemplifies the belief that “the divine [spirit] is immanent within human activity and expressed through moral transformation.” The pagan example here is the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, whose Enchiridion is quite literally a “handbook for the moral life,” detailing how to manage desires and emotions and learn one’s social duties.

Religiousness C attempts to transcend the world, since “the divine is not found in material processes of the world but only in the realm of immortal spirit and light. Salvation is rescuing the spark of light that has fallen into a bodily prison and returning it, through asceticism and death itself, to the realm from which it first came. It is triumph through escape.” Johnson selects as an example of Religiousness C the Poimandres, a selection from the Corpus Hermeticum (a complex set of texts of Egyptian origin associated with the revealer-god Hermes Trismegistus).

Religiousness D tries to stabilize the world, consisting largely of “all ministers and mystagogues of cults, all prophets who translated oracles and examined entrails and Sibylline utterances, all therapists who aided the god Asclepius in his healing work, all ‘liturgists’ who organized and facilitated the festivals, all priests who carried out sacrifices, all Vestal Virgins whose presence and dedication ensured the permanence of the city.” Johnson chooses Plutarch, the biographer, priest, and philosopher as the epitome of Religiousness D. Plutarch accepts the responsibility of exercising civic magistracies, shows a commitment to maintaining Apollo’s temple at Delphi (as well as serving as a priest there), and expends a lot of effort in returning the temple to its former grandeur. Plutarch is a student of the social dimension of religion, and obviously is most concerned with how religion affects the reigning social order.

Johnson says that types A and B were already at work in the Christian world in the first century; he looks at type A in the apocryphal Gospels, Acts, and Montanism; type B is discussed in Clement of Rome, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Polycarp. Religiousness C, “transcending the world,” Johnson argues, does not appear until the second century, where its predominant idiom is found in the Gnostic writings discovered at Nag-Hammadi, and especially Irenaeus’ refutation of Gnostic doctrine in “Adversus Haereses.” Religiousness D, stabilizing the world, first became recognizable after 313’s Edict of Milan, which marked the beginning of Constantine’s adoption of Christianity as the official imperial religion, and grew even stronger after the appearance of political and communal power within the bishoprics around the Christian world.

If there was one criticism I have of the book, it would be that the fourfold typology is sometimes applied too strictly to situations where it doesn’t apply as well as others. It is clear from the way Johnson phrases the language of the four types that he anticipates the rise of Christianity, and therefore molds them to accommodate it. Also, Johnson represents the types as if they were compartmentalized and essential, when in fact they bleed together and inform each others’ practice. Surely transcendence was sometimes thought of as a gift bestowed by the gods, or that moral transformation can stabilize society, and so forth. Surely Johnson realizes this, but he has already performed quite the feat in establishing his thesis in a mere 280 pages.

Johnson is a Catholic, and his scholarship in this book truly is in the spirit of the “Nostra Aetate,” the Second Vatican Council’s rallying exhortation for a thoroughgoing ecumenism. The truth is that Johnson does have an agenda: one of inclusion, one whose goal is the “embrace of a catholicity of religious sensibility and expression.” At the heart of Johnson’s book is a call for Christians to embrace the fullness and complexity of their past, and to view this as a means of starting a conversation instead of stopping one.

I have simplified and adumbrated some of the arguments that Johnson makes in the book, because they really are too rich and fully textured to give them the treatment they deserve here. I recommend this highly for anyone with a catholic (lower-case c) attitude toward Christianity and Christian history, and anyone who wants to learn about the ways that Christianity borrowed from paganism during its first few centuries.

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This 13 year old work is perhaps the most dense and challenging 283 pages of text on religious history I have encountered in a long time. Johnson establishes four ways of being religious in the Greco-Roman world: participation in Divine benefits, moral transformation, escape from the world and maintenance of social order. He then shows now those four categories also appear inn Judaism from 300 BCE to 300 CE. The bulk of the book is an analysis, in stunning detail, of how those same categories were carried over into early Christianity through the time of Constantine and in fact may be ways to categorize all religious impulses. His goal, which he meets, is to breakdown the idea that our response to non-Christians must be one of conflict and attempted conversion. I may actually buy the book as a guide through a re-reading of all the study of early Christianity I have done.

[Sara]

I found the first several chapters (before Johnson really gets into Christianity) fairly interesting, and I learned a lot about the context of early Christianity. However, I found the general heuristic of four kinds of religiosity not to be particularly fruitful or eye-opening. As that was the main organizational structure of the book, this didn't really land nor make me want to keep reading.

[Joe Beery · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is definitely dense and academic, but it is a potent antidote to the propensity of modern Christians to collapse historic religious practices of Greco-Roman communities. This will take a while to fully digest, but I'm glad I picked it up.

[Ramona · Rating 1 out of 5]

I could not get my mind lock into this book.

[Brandon Hawk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Johnson's study is an excellent approach to what he traces as an old debate: the comparison of Christianity with Greco-Roman religion. His basic argument thus flies in the face of centuries of Christian polemical and rhetorical claims against paganism: "At the level of sensibility and temperament... Christians were religious pretty much in the ways that Gentiles were religious" (ix). In making this argument, the book takes the shape of a historical analysis, focusing on archaeological, literary, and socio-cultural sources and bringing to bear on the first few centuries of Christianity new methodologies that emerged in the late twentieth century. In short, the book is a success as both an argument and an introduction to the Greco-Roman and Christian religious mentalities in the first centuries of the Common Era.

Johnson spends his first few chapters defining his methodology, and this is much to his credit. Thus, he discusses previous approaches to the subject and distinguishes his own. Most importantly, he establishes his study as that of a religious historian, not a theologian. What he defines as his main methodology, then, is through a sociological understanding of religion; at the heart of this is the definition (following Joachim Wach) that "religions involve experiences and convictions concerning ultimate powers" (17), which Johnson later rephrases to state that religion is the "organization of life around (what is perceived as) ultimate power" (19)--both definitions allowing for the flexibility of human beliefs and behaviors across a broad range of cultures. (Indeed, Johnson even acknowledges that this approach may be profitably applied to all world religions, allowing for further meaningful comparisons.)

The remaining bulk of the study is divided into two major parts: the first discussing Greco-Roman religion, and the second discussing Christianity in relation to it. For this, Johnson proposes four "Ways" or "Types" of religiosity for the two groups, acknowledging that there are more, but these are the most central and provide the most useful comparisons. These four types he categorizes as: 1) "Participation in divine benefits," those who enact ritual practices such as prayers and worship, especially toward the end of safety and success; 2) "Moral Transformation," those who take a philosophical view focused on divine mandates for living; 3) "Transcending the World," those who believe that the human world is illusory and entrapping; and 4) "Stabilizing the World," those who are essentially gate-keepers for the faith (related to type 1) such as priests, prophets, mystagogues, etc. Acknowledging the complexities and overlaps, Johnson essentially defines all four of these types for Greco-Roman religion, then goes on to also show how they are applicable for Christians.

In a sense, Johnson takes the underlying practices of religion and demonstrates how close the two religions are in their understandings of the world. In the details of the book, he establishes the many ways that these types are manifest in the various religious practices, and he aptly provides an open door to modes of religiosity during the first few centuries of Christianity.

[M Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Luke Timothy Johnson makes an excellent case for his thesis in "Among the Gentiles" that early Christianity (and Hellenistic Era Judaism) was influenced by the "pagan" religions of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world. As is the case in many scholarly books, he piles up more evidence than needed for this intuitive learner to get the point but that's a minor quibble.

Perhaps more importantly is how he shows the connections. Johnson posits four basic ways of "being religious" established in the civilizations of Greece and Rome that were not only carried over into the Church of the first four centuries of the Common Era but also characterize world religions today. His constructs of A, Participation in Divine Benefits; B, Moral Transformation; C, Transcending the World; and D, Stabilizing the World organize the varieties of religious experience in a way that should prove useful not only to scholars but to anyone trying to understand why it is that religious people so often come into conflict with each other.

If this book doesn't become a classic in the fields of religious studies and sociology as well as a book required for all seminarians, it's a tragedy.

[Jocelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Johnson writes a lucid and compelling argument, as usual. His aim in this work was to approach the relationship between Christianity and Greco-Roman religion not in terms of we-are-right-and-they-are-wrong but rather in terms of even-though-we-believe-different-things-we-all-tend-to-practice-religion-in-the-same-ways. More specifically, he sets up an analytical framework of four different types of religiosity: A) taking advantage of religion's personal benefits; B) seeking moral improvement via a relationship with God; C) using religion to transcend the world; D) using religion to stabilize the world. He applies this framework first to Greco-Roman religions and then to Christianity. At the end of the book, he suggests that our religious conversations begin with similarities in practice instead of differences in belief. All very interesting and thought-provoking.