The Protestant, anti-Catholic agenda that Smith discovered in past studies of religion in the Roman Empire has a fundamentally romantic perspective: an original prophetic Christian message became polluted and ‘‘paganized,’’ to become the obscurantist ‘‘mystery religion’’ that the Catholic church represented to these scholars. Examples of this romanticism pervade scholarship: for the Reverend Blomfield Jackson, a late-nineteenth-century translator of ancient Christian writers, ‘‘Christianity relapsed into paganism’’ as iconography became increasingly plentiful in a church that had gone out of its way to destroy the images in temples (NPNF 3:148 n. 1); for more recent scholars Christianity was losing its original spiritual energy to convention and formalism (Helgeland 1980; compare Luck 2000: 52). But such lamentations also go back to late antiquity, when some Christian writers themselves felt a cooling of the Church’s (imagined) primal passions (Brown 1998: 662-4).
For some classical scholars who romanticized an originally ‘‘pure’’ Greek (or Egyptian or Babylonian) culture, the Roman period posed a similar decline. In the opinion of A. A. Barb, the ‘‘economic upheaval and moral decadence’’ of Greco-Roman times led to the democratization, the cheapening, and the wholesale mutation of the great classical cults of the empire, whose grotesque remains, preserved in magical spells and mysteries, resembled once-fresh food that had rotted (Barb 1963, 1971; also Luck 2000: 204).
In contrast to these romantic perspectives, which viewed the religious trends of the Roman Empire as amounting to a progressive decline, another perspective sought to discover a kind of anticipation of Christian truth - a praeparatio evangelica - in the scope or nature of religious movements in the Mediterranean world. Scholars of this inclination have claimed to identify a pervasive anxiety or existential yearning, a need for ‘‘salvation,’’ a general dissatisfaction with tradition, which Christianity was then supposed to have resolved. Such evaluations are inevitably motivated by theological assumptions about the ‘‘needs’’ that Christianity uniquely answered, such as the salvation of the individual or anxiety about evil. Christianity’s rise could thus be seen as historically or culturally timely, even necessary, given the lamentable state of the great temples or the chaotic marketplace for mysteries and magic. These kinds of evaluations about Christianity’s ultimate inevitability all underscore the dangers in broad generalizations, especially those with an eye towards ‘‘Christian triumph.’’ Thus the papyrologist H. I. Bell concluded his lectures on the Greco-Roman transformation of Egyptian religion:
Later paganism... died with a kind of mellow splendour, like a beautiful sunset, but dying it was. It had been conquered by the truer and finer religion, for which it had itself prepared the way, a religion which at last brought the solution of problems which paganism had posed but to which it had found no answer. (Bell 1953: 105)
Study of the religions of the Roman Empire must avoid preconceptions about spiritual needs, their fulfillment, and the capacity of historical Christian groups to address them. Christianization itself was a diverse, regionally-specific, and socially-contextual process. More importantly, Christianity attracted adherents for many reasons apart from personal needs for ‘‘salvation’’: healing, protection against demons, prophecy, and social organization, none of which reasons justify a triumphalist conclusion (Brown 1978; MacMullen 1984a; Stark 1996; Frankfurter 1998a: 23-33, 265-84).
World History
