People in the modern West tend to think of religion as a detachable aspect of personal (and even of national) identity. We also tend to think of religion as something largely personal or private, a question first of all of beliefs. And ‘‘God’’ in modern monotheisms functions as a unique, transcendent, somewhat isolated metaphysical point.
What of ‘‘religion’’ in Mediterranean antiquity? The word, first of all, scarcely translates at all. Its closest functional equivalent would be ‘‘cult,’’ those rituals and offerings whereby ancients enacted their respect for and devotion to the deity, and thereby solicited heaven’s good will. While individual households and, indeed, persons might have their own particular protocols of piety, much of ancient worship was public, communal, and (at the civic and imperial levels) what we would call ‘‘political.’’ Modern religion emphasizes psychological states: sincerity or authenticity of belief, the inner disposition of the believer. Ancient ‘‘religion’’ emphasized acts: how one lived, what one did, according to both inherited and local custom. Ancient religion was thus intrinsically communal and public: performance-indexed piety.
In this world filled with gods, some ancient communities - Jewish; eventually, Christian; also pagan (Athanassiadi and Frede 1999) - worshiped a single god as the highest one, the one to whom they particularly owed allegiance and respect. But ancient monotheists did not doubt that other gods also existed. In antiquity, divinity expressed itself along a gradient, and the Highest God (be he or it pagan, Jewish, or Christian) hardly stood alone. Many lesser divine personalities, cosmic and terrestrial, filled in the gap between the High God and humanity. The question for the ancient monotheist was how to deal with all these other gods. Different groups - and different individuals within the same group - had, as we shall see, different answers to this question. But as we imagine both Judaism and, later, Christianity within ancient Mediterranean culture, we should not conceive them as ‘‘monotheism’’ standing against ‘‘polytheism.’’ By modern measure, all ancient monotheists were polytheists. It was their behavior, not their beliefs, that distinguished these groups from others.
A useful way to contrast ancient and modern conceptualizations of‘‘religion’’ is to consider, in antiquity, the embeddedness of divinity. Ancient gods were local in a dual sense. First, they attached to particular places, whether natural or man-made. Groves, grottos, mountains; cities, temples and, especially, altars: all these might be visited or inhabited by the god to whom they were sacred (Lane Fox 1986: 11-261). Gods tended to be emotionally invested in the precincts of their habitation. Humans, in consequence, took care to safeguard the purity, sanctity, sacrifices, and financial security of such holy sites, because, in a simple way, the god was there. We catch a nice statement of this common ancient idea in the Gospel of Matthew, wherein Jesus observes that ‘‘he who swears by the Temple [in Jerusalem], swears by it and by him who dwells in it” - that is, the god of Israel, who abides in his temple (Mt 23:21; cf. similarly Paul, Rom 9:4).
Second, gods also attached to particular peoples: ‘‘religion’’ ran in the blood. Put differently: cult was a type of ethnic designation, something that identified one's people or kinship group, the genos. Herodotus, in his Histories, gives a clear example of this way of thinking, when he defines ‘‘Greekness’’ in terms of shared blood, gods, cults, and customs (Hdt. 8.144.2-3; Malkin 2001); centuries later, the apostle Paul likewise described Jewishness in strikingly similar terms (Rom 9:4-5; see below). More commonly, deities were identified through reference to the peoples who worshiped them: the god of Israel, the gods of Rome, the god at Delos, and so on (cf. Acts 19:28: ‘‘Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!’’).
This family connection between gods and their humans could be expressed or imagined in terms of descent. Rulers - kings of Israel, or Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar, for example - were deemed the ‘‘son’’ of their particular god. Alexander was descended from Heracles; the Julian house, through Aeneas, from Venus. Jewish scriptures used similar language, designating Israelite kings the sons of Israel’s god (e. g., 2 Sm 7:14; Ps 2:7, and frequently elsewhere. Later Christian exegesis referred such passages to Jesus.) Divine connections were politically useful.
Whole peoples, also, saw themselves in family relationships with their gods. Hellenistic and later Roman diplomats wove intricate webs of inter-city diplomacy through appeals to consanguinity inaugurated, in the distant past, by prolific deities (C. P. Jones 1999). Jewish scriptures frequently referred to Israelites as the sons of their god. The apostle Paul, repeating this biblical commonplace of Israel’s sonship, distinguished his genos in terms reminiscent of Herodotus. To them, he said, through the gracious gift of their god, belong the presence of the deity (doxa, a reference to the divine presence at the altar in the Jerusalem temple), customs (‘‘covenant’’ and ‘‘law,’’ that is, Torah), and cult (latreia, a reference as well to the Temple, where the cult was performed: Rom 9:4). Later in the second and third centuries, when nonJewish Christian communities sought to formulate their identity, they too would fall back on this native Mediterranean language of divinity and blood-kinship or ethnicity (Buell 2002).
What did these ideas about gods and humans mean practically for the way in which ancient people lived? They meant that, first, in an age of empire, gods bumped up against each other with some frequency, even as their humans did. The larger the political unit, the greater the number of different peoples, and thus the greater the plurality of gods. And the greater the number of gods and peoples, the greater the plurality of cultic practices, since different peoples had their own ancestral customs. Ancient empires, in other words, accommodated as a matter of course a wide range of religious practices. To see this accommodation as ‘‘religious tolerance’’ is to misunderstand it. Ancient society simply presupposed religious difference, since many subject peoples eo ipso meant many customs and many gods.
Second, the existence or non-existence of the gods of outsiders (those of a different genos or natio) was not at issue: people generally assumed that various gods existed, just as various humans did. The Roman practice of evocatio makes this point nicely. When besieging a city, Romans would call out the city’s gods to come over to them, promising to continue their cult. Jewish traditions also presupposed the existence of other gods, e. g., Micah 4:5: ‘‘All the peoples walk, each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our god forever and ever.’’ Jews living in the Hellenistic Diaspora lived with a different pantheon than the Canaanite/Philistine ones frequently reviled in their prophet texts, and the translators of the Jewish Bible, rendering their sacred Hebrew text into Greek, seem to have taken account of this shift. When they came to the Hebrew of Exodus 22:28, they altered ‘‘Do not revile God,’’ to ‘‘Do not revile the gods ( tous theous).’’ Paul too acknowledges the existence and influence of these other gods: he demands, however, that his gentiles, if they want to be included in the coming redemption, worship only the god of Israel, and no longer these lower divine powers (2 Cor 4:4; Gal 4:8-9; 1 Cor 15:24). Short of extreme situations (like siege in our first example, or apocalyptic convictions in the second), what mattered to ancient people was the practical question how to deal with these other gods, while dealing with their humans as well. In general, a sensible display of courtesy, showing and (perhaps as important) being seen to show respect, went a long way towards establishing concord both with other gods (who, if angered, could be dangerous) and with their humans (ditto).
Third, the index of respectable cult within this culture was precisely ethnicity and antiquity. To be pious meant to honor one’s own gods according to ancestral custom. People might well choose to honor gods who lay outside their inherited ones. Isis, Mithras, and Sarapis were new deities; emperors (and occasionally even governors) were themselves the object of cult (Price 1984; Gradel 2002); some pagans, continuing in their native cults, nonetheless joined with Jews both in diaspora synagogues and, until 70 ce, in the Temple in Jerusalem, to worship the Jewish god as well (Reynolds and Tannenbaum 1987; L. I. Levine 2000). Diaspora Jews also, to the degree that they engaged in athletics, higher education, the military, civic politics, drama, or music, were involved in activities entwined with the gods of majority culture (Schurer 1973-87: 3: 1-149; Gruen 2002: 105-32; Fredriksen 2003: 3856). But this openness to other cult in principle did not loosen the ties of obligation and respect that bound people, first of all, to their own gods. Conversion to Judaism, however, and later to Christianity, demanded the convert’s renouncing the worship of his native gods and pledging exclusive allegiance to the god of Israel. As we shall see, such activity did indeed lead to social disruption.
The dense religious multiplicity of the Roman world was offset by the binding power of civic organization and the imperial cult. Both were the political and religious legacy of Alexander the Great (d. 323 bce). In the wake of his conquests, which stretched from the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt to the edges of Afghanistan, Alexander established cities settled by Greek colonists and organized along lines reminiscent of the ancient polis. Civic altars, the agora, city councils, schools, libraries, theaters, gymnasia - the organs of the polis, widely transplanted abroad, gave rise to the West’s first experiment in cultural ‘‘globalization,’’ namely Hellenism. At a practical level, this meant that Greek became the international language par excellence, whether for trade, for government, or for high cultural endeavor (paideia) - philosophy, poetry, music, drama. (So enduring was this linguistic accomplishment that most of the Christian documents that we shall review, even those composed in the ‘‘Latin’’ West, were in fact written in Greek.) Hellenism, its myriad local variations notwithstanding, facilitated communication and cultural coherence across vast distances. Adapting and adopting it, Rome extended this civilization even further. By the end of the first century ce, the expanse from Britain in the west to the edge of Persia in the east, from the Danube in the north to the African breadbasket in the south, formed an identifiable (if not uniform) cultural whole.
Through the Hellenistic city, at another equally practical level, Alexander had a lasting effect on Roman religion and politics. These cities were themselves religious institutions. Through innumerable public and communal rituals - processions, blood sacrifices, dancing, hymns, competitions both athletic and musical - citizens and residents displayed their respect to the heavenly patrons of their city, thereby ensuring continued divine favor. Further, the opening of a city council, the convening of a court of law, the enjoyment of and participation in cultural events - all these activities, which seem religiously neutral to moderns, in fact acknowledged and honored the traditional gods. (This is why later Christian moralists, such as Tertullian, inveighed against Christians’ frequenting the theater, the baths, and the competitions: these were tainted with the worship of pagan deities. Diaspora Jews - and as the heat of
Tertullian’s invective reveals, most gentile Christians - evidently made their peace with this level of engagement with ‘‘idolatry.’’) Public displays of piety measured civic responsibility. Impiety risked divine anger, which could be manifest in any number of dangerous ways: drought, flood, plague, earthquake, invading armies. Proper cult pleased gods; and when gods were happy, cities prospered.
Finally, the cult of the ruler, introduced to the West through Alexander, was adapted and adopted by Rome. The emperors, from Augustus on, ruled and protected the commonwealth as heaven's special agent on earth. After death, translated to a higher realm, they continued to serve as the empire's special agent in heaven (Gradel 2002; cf. Euseb. LCI.1.1: after death, Constantine too continued to exercise this protective celestial function). Such worship served to bind the empire’s far-flung municipalities together both politically and religiously (again, the terms are virtually synonymous in this context). Politically, establishing an imperial cult brought honor to one's city and the potential for more direct imperial patronage. Religiously, to offer to the emperor was to offer as well for the empire.
World History
