Vorkosigan

Come, come. It's pointless to look at the content of Christianity -- virtually any religion will be successful if (1) missionary and (2) stays on message. See scientology or Mormonism, whose content is batshit insane. After all, there is nothing new in Christianity, and the content of the gospels is a morass of Hellenistic and Jewish thinking. How could the content mean anything? The Cynics and Stoics had already expressed anything that was attributed to Jesus, in wittier and more memorable ways.

No, the key to the triumph of Christianity was its Leninist political organization, the first world had ever seen, including brainwashing of the young, a cell structure with cells (house churches), cell leaders (pastors/elders), political commissars to enforce doctrine (bishops), and an orthodoxy complete with a ready-made enemy (heretics). Such a structure is well positioned to missionize, enables the organization to stay on message, and short of wholesale murder, difficult to root out. It must have sorely troubled far-sighted Romans.

You can see that Christianity at the end of the first century resembles Communism at the end of the 19th -- a leaven of bright intellectuals to act as leaders, and popularity among the mass of the marginalized. Christianity worked its way, as Communism does now -- and as missionaries do now -- among the disaffected and marginalized. Christianity was the first great centralized authority-belief, and it encapsulated everything that Communism, Fascism, Nazism, and Islam would later give us -- the absolutes, the demand that the world submit to it, and the bloodshed and killing that all worship of the Ultimate Leader brings. Christianity gave us the first great transformation, calling power love, just as the communists would later call slaves workers, and the fascists would turn citizens into ]subjects. This ability to warp everything into its own woof too was part of its structure: what it could not stamp out it assimilated.

The uber key point is missionizing. If Christians had never sent out missionaries, then there would be no Christianity today, except perhaps as a minor local Roman variant of Judaism. Missionary work is the necessary though not sufficient condition for the spread of a religion.

In sum, stop thinking about content and start thinking about structures. It's naive to imagine that success is due to content....

Michael

Clivedurdle

Who invented the structures? Is it Paul or someone else? Author of Luke and Acts?

Magdlyn

The hierarchy is laid out in 1 Timothy, ie: bishops and deacons. Paul did not write it. Later authors faked it and attributed it to him.

Other refs to leadership (including elders and pastors) are in Acts 20:17,28, Titus 1:5,7, 1 Peter 5:1,2. All late works.

Of course, the gospels only stress the original missionaries, ie: apostles, to deliver the last minute good news: the world is ending, repent and believe in Jesus. No heirarchy needed b/c the world was ending.

Magdlyn

I disagree. Christianity, yes, was a religion for the uneducated masses (as it largely is today). Of course, soon enough the wealthy jaded dishonest bishops just made it as corrupt as the Judaean priesthood had Judaism.

Judaism, as shown in the Hebrew Bible ( not as reinterpreted in the Talmud) was at its real inception (which imo was just prior to, during and after the Babylonian/Persian exile) a religion invented by the ruling Jerusalem elite, the Kohein (priests) and Leviim. The Levitical "blessings" (Hebrew: mitzvot, wrongly called laws) were established (in Yahweh's name of course) to consolidate the fiefdom of Judah, with the peasants and other workers required to bring the best products of their labors to Jerusalem, laying them as "sacrifices to Yahweh" and tithes, at the feet of the de facto rulers.

The prophets railed against this kind of oppression, making Yahweh say he spit on their sacrifices, and demanded charity to the poor instead. But this protest was overlaid on the actual goings on in the city. There is a direct conflict here between the materialists and those who preached charity.

Rich Oliver

Ah yes but it was the content that gave it, its Lennnist qualities. The great invention was Judaism. Despite its thorough going racism and chavinist message, it was very attractive to outsiders. What was needed was to universlise the message. Islam proved even more succesful than Christianity in the convert, subvert and conquer game. The evidence is confused, but it seems that whole tribes in Arabia converted to Judaism or Hagarist Judaism prior to Islam.

Malachi151

That is it, but what I was discussing was the way that the politicians were able to use Christianity to unseat their opponents.

Plenty of examples of how this was done in the Justinian Institutes, which, while codified in the 6th century, contains laws going back to the 3rd century:

http://www.vitaphone.org/history/justinianc.html

etc., etc., there are many more examples.

aa5874

There were many versions of Jesus or the Christ, some were believed to have existed without Paul or Eusebius. Without the intervention of Constantine in the 4th century, the many concepts of Jesus including those of Valentinius, Marcion, Basilides, Cerinthus, Carpocrates, Simon Magus, the Ebionites, Colorbasus, the Ophites and others may have survived until today.

In effect, believers of one version of Jesus had to eliminate or convert believers of other versions of Jesus. Even in the NT we have the words of a supposed Jesus saying, "Many shall come in my name, saying I am Christ and shall deceive many. (Matthew 24.5)

Who really emerged victorious? "And then if anyone says to you, Behold here is Christ or behold there he is, do not believe him.(Mark 13.21.)

andrewcriddle

Rome (the city) as distinct from the Roman Empire (most of Europe and the Middle East) was probably a special case.

Even here what happened was that Pagan aristocrats held onto their position without converting. They were not replaced with a new Christian secular elite.

Andrew Criddlr

jules?

It is a very good question, and got me thinking. To add to the other ideas there is the question as to whether 'christianity' would have happened regardless of founders [mythical or historical or composite]. Some Jews were counting down to their new age, particularly the Essene who calculated 70bce-70 ce to be a period of change hence the rise in so many wanabes. the messianic saviour [Christ+Jesus] is a title so naturally he is going to pop up. The saviour was in the making for at least 500 years but why christianity did better than zoroasterism or the hybredised Manism is a complex and fascinating subject.

As for why the church did so well is well covered in other posts... and take your pick as to which you think is the clincher. One of the leaps I made was through reading sci-fi where concepts of alternative histories or civilisations corrects the notion that evolution of ideas/technologies/animals has a single route to an ultimate outcome. It is just the position we are in now in our ability to look back.

Lucretius

First of all sorry to edit this post so drastically but this one point is I think significant,it is all too easy to forget exactly how "Hellenised " the civil service and the bureaucracy of the Roman Empire was.
Also how "trendy" Middle Eastern religions had become, the worship of Isis being just one example
With Christianity you therefore found exacty the right mixture that managed to appeal to the "Hellenistic elite" as well as the seekers of "new" religions from the Middle East.
That combined with the supposed support for the "poor masses" and the PR campaign by Paul made it a sure fire winner .