| Title | : | Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1587435179 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781587435171 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 240 |
| Publication | : | Published February 27, 2024 |
Within Roman society, the earliest Christians stood out for the oddness of their beliefs and practices. They believed unusual things, worshiped God in strange ways, and lived a unique lifestyle. They practiced a whole new way of thinking about and doing religion that would have been seen as bizarre and dangerous when compared to Roman religion and most other religions of the ancient world.
Award-winning author, blogger, speaker, and New Testament teacher Nijay Gupta traces the emerging Christian faith in its Roman context in this accessible and engaging book. Christianity would have been seen as radical in the Roman world, but some found this new religion attractive and compelling.
Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling Reviews
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A simple book on a simple faith and the ones who believed it and their witness to the world. Glad I ended my study of early church books back to back to back with an easier to read one. Nijay is so good at cutting out all the fluff. Would recommend for anyone wanting to learn more about the earliest Christians.
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Along with Robert Louis Wilkens’ “Christians as the Romans saw them” and Larry Hurtado’s “Destroyers of the gods,” “Strange Religion” adds another well written treatment of early Christianity set against Greco-Roman culture and piety. This book, like the others mentioned, does a good job of explaining historical sources and Roman mindsets according to their own texts. I would recommend this book to those interested in entering into comparison of Christian texts as a witness to some of the biggest differences to the Hellenistic and Roman world. It also does a good job of offering good exegesis on key points of New Testament theology on a variety of themes that give a good panorama of Christian belief, worship, and ethics.
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A fun and nerdy look at early church context in a Roman world
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In "Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling," New Testament scholar Nijay Gupta provides a fascinating exploration of the early Christian church and how it stood out in the context of the Roman world. Drawing on extensive research and a deep understanding of early Christian history, Gupta illuminates the unique beliefs, worship practices, and way of life that set the first Christians apart from mainstream Roman society.
Gupta divides the book into four main sections: Becoming Christian, What the First Christians Believed, How the First Christians Worshipped, and How the First Christians Lived. Through these sections, he demonstrates how the early church represented a radical departure from the religious norms of the time. Christians embraced monotheism, the promise of eternal life, and a faith that blended religion, philosophy, and morality in a way that other belief systems did not. They also lived out their faith in practical ways, forming tight-knit communities characterized by equality, love, and a commitment to following Jesus.
While the early Christians' beliefs and practices made them compelling to many, they also rendered them dangerous in the eyes of the Roman power structure. By refusing to conform to societal expectations and challenging the traditional religious and social order, Christians faced suspicion, ostracism, and even persecution.
Throughout the book, Gupta makes the ancient world come alive, drawing connections between the early church and contemporary Christian practice. He challenges modern readers to consider how the "weirdness" of the first Christians might inspire us to live out our faith more boldly and distinctively in our own cultural context.
Although Gupta's writing is accessible and engaging, "Strange Religion" is thoroughly researched and includes extensive citations and references. The book serves as an excellent introduction to early Christian history and thought, providing valuable insights for both lay readers and those with some prior knowledge of the subject.
In conclusion, "Strange Religion" is a thought-provoking and enlightening exploration of the early Christian church and its place in the Roman world. By highlighting the ways in which the first Christians were weird, dangerous, and compelling, Gupta invites readers to reflect on the transformative power of the gospel and the call to live as a distinct and countercultural community of faith. -
Disclaimer: I'm a former student of the author's and received early access to the book in exchange for my honest review.
Nijay Gupta does it again with an excellent survey of how early Christians would have been perceived within the context of ancient Roman paganism. And how would they have been perceived? Weird. It's easy for us in the 21st century, where Christianity has been a well-established religion for centuries, to forget just how weird the early Christians were. There are some very significant ways in which they went against the grain of the religious culture of the Roman world and Gupta does a great job of outlining exactly how they did so.
Strange Religion was a very accessible and readable book, while also clearly being well-researched. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about the cultural and religious landscape into which Christianity was born. -
Nijay Gupta, in similar fashion to Tell Her Story has done another excellent job of bringing the historical context of the early church alive. In Strange Religion, he highlights how the early church in comparison to Roman culture was weird, dangerous, and compelling.
It was weird because its worship of one God alone ran contrary to the common religion which encompassed many gods. Their God was present, not distant. They talked about a God who loved them. It was weird.
It was dangerous because Jesus competed with loyalty to Ceasar. Romans tolerated many religions, but this one was dangerous because it divided loyalty.
It was compelling because it grew like crazy! People wanted to know why this new religion was becoming so popular.
Christianity was introduced to an existing cultural dynamic, and Nijay gives a vivid description of it. This emphasis on the differences will be helpful as we seek to understand why early Christians lived as they did and why the New Testament writers wrote as they did. It also inspires us today to ask, "Does our Christianity look weird to others?" Do we live in a radically different way from our neighbours? And by this I don't mean habits that become shallow cultural markers. Whom do we love? Whom do we serve? Is our faith compelling? -
An enjoyable book to help give context to the Christian faith. I would definitely recommend this to anyone of that faith or interested to know more. It is full of references and important descriptions from historical documents. I don't know of few books that give so much information on this topic so easily and in so pleasant a read.
It is more comforting than challenging. This is not a drawback, not everything has to be challenging and adversarial. Instead, it's a positive and profoundly engaging book to bring you closer to the context of the development of Christianity from its origins in Antiquity. -
All too often as readers we assume that biblical world essentially works the way our world works, just without smartphones, airplanes, and jeans. Scholar Jerry Hwang in a Onscript Podcast (April 18, 2023) makes the claim, that of all our present world cultures, the Japanese culture today is most similar to the 1st Century Mediterranean culture of Paul's day. i.e. most of us have no idea of the deep undercurrents flowing in the subtext of the New Testament.
This is where this book comes in. Nijay Gupta does a brilliant job elucidating how radically different the Roman world was compared to our (Western and Christianized) world, and simultaneously how how dangerously different the Christian communities were living and worshipping within their Roman context.
In turn the book challenges todays Christian community to in turn live boldly different in (at least my context) the radical individualist context in which we live. For example, even as the first Christians were challenged to live out a new sort of family loyalty towards one another (despite the disapprobation of their biological families), even now the radical individualists are called to lay give generously of their personal freedom to form covenant community that nurtures the individuals and proclaims to the world the Father who calls individuals to become family.
In the end, Nijay cautions that even the earliest Christians were not perfect and that the New Testament itself may reflect some of this (the New Testament is made up of occasional letters written to certain people facing certain challenges… it is up to us with the guidance of the Holy Spirit to continue working out the Gospel's message in our present circumstances today).
I highly recommend this thought-provoking and accessibly written book. -
Strange Religion is one of those books where I never grew tired of from beginning to end. Perhaps it’s because it is both accessible and yet endlessly fascinating when comparing Christianity and the Romans and Jewish religion at the time.
It is indeed strange, we would after 2,000 years, believe in a Roman criminal absent a temple, an idol, a hiearchy of gods, class, priests, out of duty to appease their wrath and to maintain societal order, and instead believe he’s the son of God, came to his creation and lived among us, messiah who died on the cross, raised to life, who indwells us in His Spirit, bringing a new equality on the basis of love and a future hope.
No wonder it’s not strange to us now, we are either the beneficiaries of it and not know it, or we don’t realize how strange we are.
My hope is all who read this book will become strangely, weirdly compelling to the world once again, as our strange God intended his community to be! -
Great popular level resource on why the early church was counter-cultural. They were strange. So strange that Gupta cites a second century critic who said “If all men wanted to be Christians, the Christians would no longer want them.” (4).
The early Christians had no issues being viewed as odd. But they weren’t countercultural for the sake of being defiant. They weren’t hateful or vitriolic of the world around them, instead, Gupta shows, they genuinely loved God and were captured by Jesus.
Their “cultural engagement strategy” was to believe in Jesus and live like Him. That made them very very weird. Maybe if the modern church knew a little bit more about our brothers and sisters from the first and second centuries, we would be a little more comfortable being as strange as Jesus demands, and comforted in the fact that we aren’t the first ones to have to figure out how to live differently wherever we are. -
This is very good presentation of the differences between the Romans thinking and practice of religion and the Christians. In Roman practice it was important to keep peace with the gods and in comparison Christians beliefs and practices appeared to be weird and superstitious.
Dr. Gupta arranges the book in four parts: Part 1: Becoming Christian, Part 2: What the First Christians Believed, Part 3: How the First Christians Worshiped, and Part 4: How the First Christians Lived. In each part he shows how the Roman and Christian views differed by referencing primary and secondary sources on the subjects showing how they differed in regard to orthodoxy and orthopraxy, and relationship to the state/politics.
This is a well written and documented book that held my attention and was hard to put down. I learned much about the Romans view of the gods and highly recommend it. -
In a culture heavily influenced by Christian belief and worldview, it can be easy to lose sight of how strange, dangerous, and compelling the early church was in the first century. Gupta draws out the unique beliefs, worship framework, and way of living, and compares to the mainstream culture of the day. These distinctives represented a threat to the traditional power structure of Roman society, yet it was precisely their curious way of life that made the early Christians so compelling, an alternative community of equality, love, and commitment to Jesus.
While slightly more academic than some of Gupta's other work, this is a helpful primer on what makes Christianity unique. To reach our culture with the good news of Jesus, we will need to recover the weirdness of the early church. Highly recommend. -
This book was a great encouragement to me. Gupta has a real knack for explaining ancient concepts in ways that are clear and engaging. He has a great description of just how different classical religion and culture was to that of Christendom and the modern day. His explanation of how religion functioned within society and the family life were particularly fascinating.
This book is ultimately about how weird we Christians are. Weird in ways we no longer perceive because we've remade the world in our image. And Gupta's plea is for us to embrace the things that made us weird in the first century: love, justice equality and a personal relationship with God. -
I enjoyed this book about early Christians and the culture that surrounded them.
A couple of favorite quotes:
“To say “there is no longer Jew or Greek” did not mean that ethnicity would vanish. It simply meant that ethnicity would not be a dividing line of favor and power in the kingdom of God.”
“our modern values of equality owe a lot to Greek notions of democracy and the voice of the people, and Roman governance through an organized senate; but the Western notion of inherent dignity of each individual comes from the Christians, their best teaching and reasoning.” -
Fascinating. Well written account of what made Christians different and weird and compelling in comparison to other religions. I was familiar with some of the material from others, e.g. Larry Hurtado.
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We err when we try to take some New Testament principles and apply them to modern American culture. The Bible becomes even truer when you read the epistles in light of that 1st century culture. The Bible became even more alive because of this book.
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Highly recommended for anyone who is interested in the early church and Christians. I enjoyed learning about the culture surrounding the New Testament church.
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I lead a house church in Houston and have always been interested in early church goings-on. When I saw this book was being released, I immediately signed up for the launch team. I read an advanced copy.
In all, I really enjoyed this book. It met my expectations to learn about the early church as well as the Roman culture at that time. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I didn't know! It was really interesting to hear how a lot of things we take for granted in Christianity was so shockingly different back then. Again, I'm a house church leader, so I found a lot of comfort in knowing what we're trying to do isn't so different from how our forbears lived out their faith. That being said, the book is valuable for more than house church leaders like me! If you're looking for a history foundation on the beginning of the Christian faith, as well as information about culture at that time, this book is for you! -
I really enjoyed this book! It was a great overview of how Roman religion and culture differed from early Christian religion and culture. It was well written and easy to read. Great for someone who wants to learn but doesn’t want to read a dense text book.
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This is quite the simple book. Unlike all the other texts I've been reading recently, this one can be read at a middle-school level, and no background in theology is needed. Gupta spends 12 short chapters talking about how the first Christians (pre-Constantine) were weird in the sense that their beliefs went against both Roman religion and Jewish practices. A lot of this book is talking about differences between Christians, Romans, and Jews. Gupta notes that while Christianity is somewhat similar to the mystery cults common in the Roman Empire, in the sense that Christians worshiped in secret, Christians did not try to hide their beliefs and instead tried to spread them everywhere. Gupta also points out that Christians focused on the idea of a relationship with their monotheistic God, while Romans viewed worshipping gods as a way to not upset the natural order and to get their gods to do special favors.
Gupta also draws in contemporary examples to make his case. He says that he lives in Portland, Oregon, which is known for being a weird city, so he's used to weirdness, and he makes many other comparisons between contemporary life and early Christianity. He does sometimes judge early Christians using modern standards that would have seemed weird to even those weird Christians, like saying that slavery should not have been permitted back then. While I also oppose slavery, I don't think it's fair to judge early Christians for not challenging it, because they are limited to their time.
The book is also not very detailed. There's not that many footnotes, and the simple explanations leave readers wanting for more. I wish he would have added about a hundred more pages worth of info. There's just not that much here. I suppose it's good for beginners though. -
What really made the first Christians different?
This is the foundation for New Testament researcher and noted author Nijay Gupta's "Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling."
Gupta co-chairs the Pauline Theology Seminary of the Institute for Biblical Research and serves as a senor translator for the New Living Translation. Thus, he brings into "Strange Religion" both extensive research and a well-developed understanding of how Christianity fit, or mostly didn't fit, into a world that was governed by inaccessible gods and a Roman empire that wasn't particularly concerned about the relational aspects of faith.
As Gupta states very early in the book, the first Christians were weird and it feels likely that modern day Christians aren't really aware of just how weird.
"Strange Religion" is divided into four distinct sections - Becoming Christian, What the First Christians Believed, How the First Christians Worshipped, and How the First Christians Lived. There's a natural flow to the sections that works well and Gupta both introduces and concludes the book. As one would expect, there's a wealth of provided citations to end the book.
"Strange Religion" is likely to most appeal to those wishing to gain an understanding of the earliest foundations of Christianity and how it stood out. Those with a stronger knowledge of Christian history, and most certainly seminary graduates, will appreciate Gupta's work but will likely not learn as much as a significant amount of material that's here is fairly basic knowledge of early Christianity. While it's fun to explore this period through the lens of just how completely weird it all is, if there's a basic lack in the book for me it's that the "weirdness" never really registered.
Maybe it's because I'm too weird for it?
However, one can't help but appreciate Gupta's extensive research and ability to make accessible just what made Christianity so different than Roman society. The earliest Christians had beliefs that were odd and practices that were entirely unique. They believed unusual things, worshipped God in strange ways, and lived as outsiders in a society where that choice alone could be considered quite dangerous. Quite simply, they did religion differently. To understand this, is to really begin to grasp the intentional choice that the first Christians made to be different and to push boundaries and to begin a transformation of how society viewed religion. It was bold and brave and it caught on like wildfire.
"Strange Religion" is more of an introduction to this world, both surprisingly brief in subject matter and overall length and more prescriptive than engaging. This isn't a bad thing - "Strange Religion" starts a valuable discussion and I'll admit that even as a seminary graduate myself I found myself digging back into my theology to look up Christian history, terminology, and beliefs/practices. Gupta's obvious excitement with this material made me excited - in turn, I found myself starting with "Strange Religion" and exploring further.
The final edition of "Strange Religion," my version was an ARC lacking the images/graphics to be included, will have numerous images to enhance Gupta's informative and intellectually stimulating material.
"Strange Religion" is an accessible introduction to religion in the Roman world and how the early faith and practices of the first Christians began to change that world. Both worlds, if we're being honest, were kind of strange though the Roman world was the accepted norm and Christianity upended it. In a world where conformity can often be expected, "Strange Religion" is, perhaps most of all, a reminder that we may very well be called to be weird, strange, and dangerous in living out what it means to be Christian. -
This is more than a history book on the ancient Church, it is an examination of the early Christian faith and practice in its context and, to the sensitive reader, how it is relevant to us today. American author and philosopher David Foster Wallace is quoted as saying "A fish doesn't know it's in water”, meaning that the most obvious realities that surround us are often hard to identify and define. Followers of Jesus Christ in the West are mostly unaware of how jarringly different, or weird, Christianity is to other world religions. Surrounded by the remnants of “Christendom” and immersed in western individualism, it is hard to understand the radical difference Jesus made to the world then, and our lives now. Nijay Gupta helps the reader to see just how weird, and even dangerous, Christianity was to the Romans during the time of the early Church and in doing so awakened me to again to many of the key elements of genuine Christian faith now. Although this book is accessible written, Gupta is an accomplished academic writer and the material is well researched and footnoted.
I have worked in cross cultural missions in the majority world (specifically Asia) for over twenty years and found that Gupta’s book is extremely helpful in laying out many of the key differences between Christianity and the religions I have encountered in Asia. Not only did the Romans think Christians were weird, they thought they were dangerous because they represented a risk to the “pax deorum”, (meaning “peace with the gods”) and as such put the entire community in danger. This is also true today in many majority world contexts! Accordingly, I would strongly recommend this book to every westerner who works in cross cultural missions. Beyond this, I fully recommend this book to all who are curious about the early church and its cultural context.
#netgalley -
“The Corinthian church is evidence that not all churches lived out Jesus‘s vision of status indifference. Not all churches let their new family identity take root. But the ideal was that those who willingly entered this community would join a special household of God. This would be unlike any other kind of household they knew. No one was of more importance or lesser importance in this family. Because of the invitation of Jesus the Son, each participant is simply “brother” or “sister.” That cast a bold vision that would have been powerfully compelling, especially to “the least of these” ( Matt. 25:40).” Strange Religion is a book you need! It’s so liberating knowing it’s OK to be weird! This passage reminds me of how my family has walked me through some of the most horrific things a person can go through. The invitation of Jesus is that of come to Me. We find Him in each other.
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My background is in medicine, and in the first year of med school, we learned the importance of taking a good history before attempting to diagnose a patient. As I have begun studying the Bible in greater depth, I have come to see that, here too, you won't really understand what is going on until you delve into the history. Nijay Gupta does a stellar job of explaining the Roman world in which the first Christians lived. Gupta explains why the Christian thought process and value system was so countercultural and even threatening to the Roman way of life. He is concise, informative, and very readable, providing the necessary background to help the reader understand the world of the first Christians and how it relates to the Biblical text.
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This originally appeared at
The Irresponsible Reader.
---I set out to spend a few years studying ancient religions in general and Roman religion in particular, and I came to a clear conclusion: by and large, early Christians were weird and were dangerous to many, and yet clearly some found this religion attractive and compelling.
This book is not a handbook for how to be Christian today or how to create a “weird” church. Largely, I see the work I have done as descriptive—these are the first Christians, warts and all. They were not bucking conventions and pop religion to be special or different. In their best and most genuine moments, they were simply following Jesus, like mice blindly chasing after the pied piper. As they did so, they deviated from the norm of religion, and, whether they were intending to or not, they stood out in society. This deviation from the norm is one way of defining what it means to be “weird. Another way is simply to say that “weird” things belong in another category. l am hoping that an extended investigation of the belies, practices, and ethos of the early Christians will clarify their origins and foundations, and provide insight into authentic Christianity today.
WHAT'S STRANGE RELIGION ABOUT?
Gupta's observation/conclusion is that early Christians were strange or weird when compared to others in their culture—thanks to their beliefs, ways of acting, and ways they wouldn't act (for starters). They didn't set out to be strange, to rebel against the culture, or anything like that. Actually, their goals involved being good citizens and living quiet lives—but their religious convictions set them outside the norm, and they stayed there for a good long time.
While Gupta doesn't shy away from the occasional application to the contemporary Western (particularly American) Church, by and large, this is a descriptive book. He just talks about Roman culture in certain areas and then talks about how Christians were oddballs in the midst of all that. As he says above—this isn't an attempt to make Christianity weird again, or anything like that—just to remind us how out of touch with the culture we were at one point.
Some of the areas he covers are: how the Romans of the first couple of centuries saw Christianity as a superstition; some early Christian beliefs—like believing they were possessed by God's Spirit, their reckoning of the meaning of Time, and wanting to be associated with a horrible criminal in the first place (only the worst of the worst were crucified, who'd want to be associated with someone like that?); worship practices; family practices; and the way they treated others.
BELIEFRomans sometimes argued about the gods—not over personal “beliefs” but over what they thought was true of the gods, But the Christians took their views to a whole other level, “believing” things that seemed absurd, disturbing, and even impossible. This may be one reason that Christians originally referred to themselves as “believers.” Today, we take for granted that religion is all about “faith” and “belief.” We have “faith” statements, “faith” traditions, and “interfaith” dialogue. But in the ancient world, there wasn't this natural association between religion and faith language.
This is one of the biggest differences—one that shapes a lot of the rest. The book as a whole comes from Gupta's students asking, why early Christians called themselves "believers," what did the other followers of other religions call themselves? And well, one of Gupta's findings was that Christians were more than a little strange by focusing on faith and belief. It was just foreign to the status quo.The priests of public Roman religion were not chosen for their piety. They were expected to be experts in performing rituals. In fact, they had to be masters of religious arts so as to maintain the pax deorum*. It was a bit like being a professional bomb-disposal expert. It really doesn't matter what you believe about government, law enforcement, or justice as long as you are good at defusing bombs. French historian and archaeologist Robert Turcan refers to Roman ritual worship as “Taylorism”—a form of scientific management. Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) developed a theory of management that was meant to produce efficient and effective workflow. Taylor offered a kind of mathematical formula to get the most out of human and industrial resources. Turcan argues that this was the mentality of the Romans—efficient and “successful” ritual performance to keep the gods content and happy. Roman priests and other cultic personnel had to provide meticulous observance of time-honored rituals.
He goes further:There was a pervasive Roman understanding that persona beliefs, best intentions, and heartfelt emotion did not enhance religion. What mattered was what the gods actually called for—sacrifice and compliance. The early Christians had ther own practices and rituals, of course...But one thing we learn when we read the New Testament is that these Jesus people were absolutely obsessed with belief.
Now, Gupta spends twenty pages making that case, I just gave a brief overview—but even here, you can get an idea of how he goes about talking about each topic addressed.
* "Keeping Peace with the Gods." Gupta describes the function of the sacrifices and rituals as maintaining this peace. It's most of the content of the first chapter, and the basis for most of the rest of the book.
POBODY'S NERFECT
The last chapter* is entitled "The Christians Were Not Perfect"—some of this covers similar ideas as
Nadya Williams' book, Cultural Christians in the Early Church, but not all of it.
I really appreciated this chapter for a couple of reasons: 1. It'd be easy to take Gupta's material and walk away with the idea that the early Christians had it all together (something that Williams and Guptareally wanted to counter), and 2. Gupta hits on some things that a lot of people don't cover along these lines.
That said, it's not a perfect chapter—and maybe it's the most obviously imperfect chapter—I'm not sure I'm willing to buy into all of his examples from the Scriptures showing those imperfections (actually, there are some I'm sure I don't buy).
But the chapter as a whole is a nice, refreshing reminder about the feet of clay that even the best of us possess.
* There is a conclusion following it, but it's not long enough (or something) to be considered a chapter—at least not a numbered one. I wanted to stress that because I've complained recently about too many books not having a conclusion.
SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT STRANGE RELIGION?
One thing I haven't talked about yet is that one of the things that Gupta focuses on is that despite—or maybe because of—the strangeness of Christianity to the Romans of the first and second centuries is that it was attractive to them. The "freaks" kept drawing more and more people to them, converting them to the weirdness. Again—not because they were strange, but because following Jesus Christ made them that way.
As a reader, not only did I appreciate the material, but the way that Gupta presented it. He built his arguments carefully and clearly (and one assumes accurately). Throughout all of this Gupta's sense of humor shines through—keeping the text engaging as it educates. I'm always going to say good things about a book that does that (as long as the humor doesn't detract from the serious material), and Gupta got this part right.
This is really one of the better books that I've read this year. From the thesis to the conclusion, and most points in between, Gupta painted a much-needed picture of early Christianity and Christians and how they related to the culture around them. It's encouraging to remember that's the natural state of the Church and one that we shouldn't find ourselves overly-worried to be in again. I encourage Christians and those curious about our early history to give it a read.
I know that my wife has another book by Gupta on her shelves, I'm probably going to have to borrow it soon. -
Today it can be difficult to understand how disruptive and transformative Christianity was when it first made the scene, given ubiquitous it is in western society today. To truly get of good feel for this, you need to know the context from which Christianity emerged. Dr Gupta helps to provide a general treatment of that context in Strange Religion, highlighting both the common perception of how religion was supposed to work then as well as providing the striking contrasts of christian worship that made adherents to that way “weird.” The book is divided into four (4) parts that logically progress from what the ancients expected from their religion and how they practiced it, to what they believed and how they behaved and lived … and where each of these were different for Christians AND why that difference might be considered dangerous. There are a few quotes from scripture to help illustrate a particular point, but IMHO it stops short of actually using prooftexting (the quotes are part of the support and not the foundation). If anything, I thought in many cases the author didn’t delve deeply enough to provide any surprising incites, but provides an excellent introduction that should prove helpful to anyone interesting in interpreting christian scripture … especially the epistles of St Paul.
The chapters and sections in this work are:
Introduction
Part 1 Becoming Christian
1. Roman Religion and the Pax Deorum: Keeping Peace with the Gods
2. “Believers”: The First Christians and the Transformation of Religion
3. A Dangerous and Strange Religion: Christianity as a Superstition
Part 2 What the First Christian Believed
4. Believing the Unbelievable
5. Cult without Smoke and Blood: Strange Worship
6. Possessed by the Spirit of God
7. Beginning at the End of All Things: A Strange Reckoning of Time
Part 3 How the First Christians Worshiped
8. A House of Faith: The Family Practices of the Early Christians
9. A Priest-God and a Priestly People: Church as a Liturgical Community
Part 4 How the First Christians Lived
10. Dangerous Contact: Becoming Godlike
11. To Treat Allas Equal
12. The Christians Were Not Perfect
Strange Religion: Putting It All Together
Some of the other points that really got my attention are:
I was given this free advance reader copy (ARC) ebook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.
#StrangeReligion #NetGalley -
In Ann Jarvis' Paul and Time, she makes a persuasive argument against familiar conceptions of either the overlap of the ages (old and new creation), or views that see the new age as future occurrence. Indeed, Jesus did in fact accomplish something in the resurrection and ascension, and that accomplishment, by its nature, accompanies the proclamation that the kingdom of God has arrived, having been established in our midst. The mistake, she believes, that the above conceptions make, each in their own way, is failing to recognize how the early Christians, rooted as they were in the Jewish Tradition and expectation, understood time as both a cyclical process and a linear progression which finds its culmination in Christ. For Jarvis, it's not as though we await a moment in time where we pass from one reality to another. What happens in both death and the awaited consummation of Jesus' person and work is in fact a continuation of the time we are already embodying in the here and now. This becomes an important distinction for how we read and understand Paul, and it's most immediate implication is how we understand the relationship of the now to the not yet. It is, in my opinion, a groundbreaking and paradigm shifting work.
So why mention it here? Because I heard of the book through Gupta, and there are sizeable sections of this book that utilize its ideas in establishing how and why the early Christians stood out as so strange in the ancient world. Their conception of the fulness of time is but one way in which their beliefs and practices clashed with the norms of their day.
Gupta's essential thesis is, for as simple as it sounds, that the early Christians and their religion were strange. To understand what this strangeness was requires us to know the norms of the ancient Greco-Roman world and how the ancient Chrisitians existed in relationship to these norms. Which is what the bulk of this book sets out to unpack.In truth, we are conditioned to see the ancient world as strange and our modern norms as the measure, but thinking this way blinds us to the particular strangeness of the early Christians and what actually set them apart in a largely pluralistic society. Even the term pluralistic means something different then than it does today, as would the term atheism. This was, after all, not a world divided by belief in God and belief in no God. What largely defined this world, and certainly the Roman Empire, was a world filled with gods which demanded a hierarchy for Empires to successfully bind together worship (or ritual) and Power. People were free to worship whatever god(s) they wished as long as this worship was subservient and payed allegiance to the authority of the Roman Empire and its pantheon.
It would be difficult to know if there is a singular, overarching descriptive that could explain and define why the early Christians became such a well documented anomaly in this ancient context, but there are a few defining distinctives. One would be the absence of a temple, a fact that owes itself to the storied period of Israel's exiles. This allowed for the practice of these early Christians to see God both present and at work in the world around them as opposed to viewing the interaction between the gods and the world mostly within the Temple and its accompanying rituals. A second would be the breaking down of hierarchal systems, something that would have cut through the honor-shame systems that defined the socio-politcial systems of their day.
These are broader observations, and to be honest aren't revelatory in and of themsleves. These defining aspects of the early Christians have been well documented in plenty of other spaces and by the different facets of academia. What sets Gupta's work apart is the attention he gives to the minor details, something born from the many years he has given to the study of ancient Greco-Roman religion and society. What makes this book an intriguing addition to that field of study is the way he binds this to a specific comparative in its world. The tendency in scholarship is either to whitewash this strangeness by collapsing the whole enterprise of antiquity together, thus representing it as a singular comparative to our more enlightened modern norms, or to redefine early Christianity according to modern norms so as to use it as a means of declaring the strangeness of the ancient world that surrounded it. In truth, the ancient Christians would be as strange to us today as they were to the ancient world, and this is an important and necessary observation if we are to be interested in the question of what this strangeness means for us today, either as Christians or for understanding Christianity's history.
It should be noted, Gupta is a practicing Christian, and for lack of a better descriptive, a Protetant Christian who came from a Hindu family and background and occupies space here in the West. He's also not afraid to allow his faith to intersect with his academics, which might frustrate some who might come to this looking merely for information. Personally, I think more academics should allow their worldview and their working assumptions to have a clarufying place in their academics, as it helps to contextualze the information accordingly and keeps ideas and implications accountable. There are points of disagreement that I do hold with certain aspects of Gupta's confessional interests, but I also note he is one of the better Protestant voices working and writing today. He is willing to grapple with ideas, he is aware of current trends in scholarship, and he's widely read in his field of interest (Greco-Roman history). All of which fuels the insights he tables here.
One last point. It's always a point of contention to wade into the waters of any viewpoint that looks to single out Christianity with any intent. There is a working tension that exists in much of modern scholarship that wants to resist any claim to uniqueness or particularness, even when it flies against the facts as we have them. Part of this resistance exists because of the potential for such claims to sit uncomfortably beside working assumptions regarding a godless reality. Part of it exists because monotheistic tendencies tend to be deemed as the enemy to romanticized visions of pluralistic societies like Rome (which ironically whitewashes the facts of Rome while isolating Judaism and Christianity). In any case, Gupta does give some time to qualifying this strangeness by pointing it back to Jesus rather than His followers. While it is true that we find this strangeness reflected in these early communities of Jesus followers, it would be a mistake to make a people and their religion into an appeal towards exceptionalism. This is certainly not the case, especially if we are to see the Gospel as being for the world and relevant to all. This strangeness exists only because the person and work of Jesus broke into this ancient context. It speaks similarly to all of the strangeness of the Greco-Roman world because it reflects a Kingdom that truly does clash with the kingdoms of this world. It is about a particular revelatory and historical witness, not the propping up of another power system, one in which we can conceive and percieve ofthe power systems being defeated. This is what made Jesus so weird, dangerous and compelling.
