aporia

I recently went to a talk by Oliver Nicholson of the University of Minnesota's classics department. He specializes in Near Eastern history of late antiquity and is writing a book about why the early Christians were persecuted. The main idea of the talk was that while early Christians were often persecuted (many Christians and non-Christians wrote about it; it is no fabrication) they were persecuted not for what they believed but for what they did.

Specifically, people who refused to perform public religious duties to local gods responsible for the preservation of a city (gods of agriculture, weather, fertility, etc.) were thought to be displeasing these gods and thereby endangering the city. The local authorities would therefore attempt to "persuade" those who did not perform their duties by torture and death threats. If they did not comply they would be killed. Christians frequently refused to perform these religious duties and encouraged others to refuse as well, so they were considered especially dangerous. However, these persecutions remained local and non-systematic until the Decian persecution of 250.

A common Christian apologetical argument suggests that the resurrection must have happened because the apostles would not have "died for a lie". The argument says that if the apostles and other early believers were pressured to deny a physical resurrection and they knew it wasn't true, then some of them would have denied it and admitted it was a big conspiracy; but since there is no record of them doing anything of the sort, they must have really seen it (or at least a very convincing illusion like a hallucination, which the apologists would then go on to reduce to absurdity as well).

However, if there was no particular pressure on the Christians to repudiate their beliefs, this argument no longer works. According to Nicholson, all that the Christian persecutors wanted was for the Christians to do their public religious duties so the gods would be appeased. Since there would be no specific pressure to deny the physical resurrection, the apostles and other early Christians might have refused to perform their duties for any number of reasons other than belief in a physical resurrection.

So that's my thought. What do you all think? Is this a helpful counter-apologetic? Does it make sense? Do you have any books or articles which refute/expand on/look at this from a different point of view?

Spitfire

Common?

I've never heard anyone say that. I didn't even know it was an issue.

aporia

If you google "die for a lie" you'll get 3 Christian apologetics sites in the top 10, and you can find many more if you use related search phrases. Obviously not everyone will have heard of it but it is fairly common.

Apikorus

Professor Nicholson's observations are interesting, but it seems to me that while the proximate cause for Christian persecution may have been their refusal to take part in pagan religious rituals, and their encouragement of others to do the same, it was their Christian faith which demanded this of them. Therefore, the main force of the "noone dies for a lie" argument is hardly changed.

The main problem with the "noone dies for a lie" argument is that it fails to account for human psychology. History is replete with examples of "true believers" who died in the misguided pursuit of some false promise. For example, some 40 members of the "Heaven's Gate" cult committed suicide in March, 1997, apparently fully believing that their souls would be "replanted" into extraterrestrial bodies aboard a spaceship then obscured by the Hale-Bopp comet. Is this any more loopy than the belief that Jesus would return "on clouds of glory" and the other eschatological elements of early Christianity?

Anat

At best this supports the notion that the people who died held their beliefs sincerely, but it says nothing about the basis of those beliefs.

aporia

I see your point, Apikorus. But I see this account of the Christian persecution as useful because it reveals that the content of the early Christian belief is less clear than "orthodox" apologists would like. If the Christians were merely persecuted for what they did and not what they believed, they may have believed any number of things that led them to do what they did. It would follow that Christians were not necessarily persecuted because they believed that Jesus was physically resurrected. But I suppose there are other reasons to think that many early Christians thought Jesus was physically resurrected, like 1 Cor 15:12-19 ("if Christ has not been raised, our faith is in vain..."). So perhaps this is not terribly helpful.

But that passage intrigues me all of a sudden. If Paul knew Jesus to be physically resurrected, why didn't he just say that the fact is well-attested to by the apostles and those hundreds of people Jesus appeared to? Why did he fall back to the much weaker argument that if Jesus has not been raised, we are still in our sins? Perhaps Paul and other Christians believed in the resurrection precisely because their faith would be in vain otherwise, and they had previously committed to their faith psychologically and socially on other grounds besides a physical resurrection.

Julian

Here is the earliest non-christian reference from Pliny to Younger who punished some christians in Asia Minor. This is a letter to emperor Trajan: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/pliny.html

Julian

Edward Gorey

This analogy is still inadequate. The forty members of the heaven's gate cult were motivated by FAITH in the crazy extraterrestial nonsense. The "noone dies for a lie" argument is based on the idea that if the apostles KNEW that the message they were spreading was bogus they wouldn't have died for it. The Heaven's Gate people did not know that what they believed was a lie. The apostles obviously would have known if they themselves had fabricated the resurrection story.

Apikorus

I'm not saying that the early Christians believed their message was a lie. I am saying they were deluded.

Diogenes the Cynic

There is no evidence that any direct follower of Jesus believed in a physical resurrection. We don't have a word of first-hand testimony from anyone who ever met Jesus, so we have no idea what they believed. The authors of the Gospels were not apostles and never met an apostle. There is also no evidence that any of them were persecuted for whatever beliefs they did have.