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What made the first Christians so different from their surrounding culture? How did their worship differ from the way the average Roman citizen viewed the gods? Why did the early church view themselves as a family and why is that so significant? We’ll discuss these questions and more with our guest Dr. Nijay Gupta around his new book, .

Nijay K. Gupta (PhD, Durham University) is professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary. He is cohost of the Slow Theology podcast, founder of the Crux Sola blog, and has written numerous books, including Tell Her Story, A Beginner's Guide to New Testament Studies, 15 New Testament Words of Life, and commentaries on Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, and 1 and 2 Thessalonians.

Episode Transcript

Scott: What made the first Christians so different from their surrounding culture? How did their worship differ from the way the average Roman citizen viewed their gods? Why did the early church view themselves as a family and why is this so significant? We'll discuss these questions more with our guest Dr. Nijay Gupta who ran this new book, Strange Religion, subtitled, How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling. I'm your host Scott Rae.

Sean: And I'm your co-host Sean McDowell.

Scott: This is ThinkBiblicaly from Talbot School of Theology here at 51ÂÜÀò. Nijay, welcome. Great to have you with us and really appreciate the new book that you've come out with.

Nijay: Thanks so much. I was looking forward to this conversation.

Scott: Yeah, so tell us initially, my guess is there's a bit of a backstory for why you decided to write this book about this subject at this particular time. But why this subject right at this time?

Nijay: Yeah, well I live in Portland, Oregon. I love living here and one of the challenges but also a calling living here is we live in a very unchurched environment where there's a lot of negative attitudes towards Christianity. And even for the Christians here, it's really difficult because of the sometimes anti-tradition, anti-Christian sentiment. And what we noticed during the pandemic was, you know, obviously people couldn't go to church. You watch church online. And then when it was time to go back to church, a lot of people didn't, at least not initially. And during that phase, I was thinking about the earliest Christians as part of my work with the New Testament. And when I talk to people about why they're not going to the church, a lot of the answer is I'm busy and I'll get to it when I can or it's skiing season. And the idea behind that is church is boring, it's dull, and it's so normal, why bother? I think that was the idea. And then even beyond that, those of my neighbors and friends here who have kind of a chip in their shoulder against the church, they say things like, why would I go to church when it just magnifies or amplifies the worst evils of society like racism, sexism, greed, narcissism, individualism? That's not all churches, obviously. I'm very happy with my church. I'm happy with a lot of churches in my area that I interact with. But certainly American Christianity has been going through a reckoning in the last 10, 20 years with all the church scandals and things like that. And I think it's time that we actually try to go back to the original formula, the original recipe. And when I compare American Christianity today, again, not all strands, not everywhere at all times, but some general patterns. And I look at the earliest Christians, I think the Christians created a completely different way. And I'm even dumbfounded by how strange Christians were in their own world, bucking trends of religion, politics, culture, ethics. I want to read a quote to you that I hope will get our conversation started. This comes from second century opponent of Christianity named Kelsois. And he says this, "If all men wanted to be Christian, the Christians would no longer want them." Okay, he's exaggerating. But what he's saying is Christians do things the opposite. We go right, they go left. We go up, they go down. And I wonder if it is time for a new wave of Christianity where we go back to the beginning and say, "How do we tap into that original DNA of Jesus and the apostles?" Not to live differently for the sake of living differently, right? Portland's tagline is "Keep Portland Weird." We don't want to be weird for the sake of being weird, but we do want to grab a hold of that original DNA and make sure that we resemble that. So a question that my book prompts is, "Would our spiritual ancestors recognize us as their true descendants?"

Sean: So this book is not written for your neighbors that you just got, you mentioned, but for Christians to re-embrace and re-remember the good strangeness and counter-cultural nature of our faith. Is that right?

Nijay: 100%. I try to avoid Christianese in the book. I don't use regular language about, for example, the lordship of Jesus because I want to drop readers into a world they're unfamiliar with, a world of Jupiter and Neptune and Mars as great gods of Olympus, of a world of Caesar Augustus, of a world with temples everywhere and cult statues everywhere. And when the early Christians come along, I had to think about what made them different. And one of the terms I use is supremacy. It's the supremacy of Jesus. So the book is really to help Christians maybe find some comfort even in the strangeness. I've said this before, I don't know how you guys feel about this, but when I think about immigrant Muslims in the United States or Jewish communities, they follow their traditions and practices. And I think the broader culture will say, "Okay, that's because they have a sectarian subculture." I think it might be time that Christianity becomes a new sectarianism in the sense that we need to hold true to our culture, traditions, and values and be okay with being different. We obviously want to spread the beauty. We want to spread the goodness, the righteousness, the message. But at the beginning, we actually have to decide what are things that we're never going to compromise on.

Scott: So Nijay, maybe you just began to touch on it here just a second ago, but let's be really clear about it. What was Roman religion like in the time of Jesus and the apostles?

Nijay: Good question. First, you have to understand, and a lot of everyday Christians today would not understand this, but religion was built into the fabric of existence. So it wasn't a choice. It wasn't like, "If I get to it," everybody was religious in the sense that they wanted to maintain what the Romans called the pox de orum, peace with the gods or peaceful coexistence with the gods. So I think of it a lot like cosmological colonization. So think of the Roman Empire as having been colonized by these gods who are in charge. They're like magistrates. They're like divine rulers. And your goal is to keep them happy. So you establish temples and priesthoods and sacrifices to maintain this peace. There's a lot of emphasis on structure, order, tiers of power and stratification, appeasement, avoiding their wrath, speaking to them exactly the way that they wanted to be spoken to. There was a lot of fear. But if you played the game in the right way and fell in line, if you can't beat them, join them. So if you've fallen in line, you might be able to get a little bit of goodwill out of the gods and they'll bless your crops or they'll help your business grow or something like that. Roman religion was very orderly. It was very prescribed. It was built on systems of power and access. And so some people had lots of access to the gods. The closer you were to the top of the food chain in terms of wealth and class, the more access you had to temples and statues and priests. And if you're poor and a commoner or a slave or a former criminal or an immigrant, you're going to have almost no access. You're going to have almost no help from the gods except maybe once in a while there'll be a god that might give you a handout. But you're going to have trouble getting help from the gods if you aren't tied in well to these networks of power.

Sean: You know what's interesting about this is when I was studying my dissertation, the deaths of the apostles, one of the big reasons Christians were persecuted is because they would not worship the Roman gods, which was viewed as being harmful to the state and not being good citizens and bringing flood and wrath and famine and all these things. So it's not that they worship Jesus' God, but they wouldn't worship the Romans as gods.

Nijay: Yes. Yeah, they were called atheists, "atheoi." And atheists doesn't mean they don't believe in God or gods. Clearly, Christians and Jews believed in the divine. It was that they weren't willing to pay the appropriate respect to the Roman state gods. So for example, Polycarp. Now, this is after the time of the first apostles, but the early Christian Polycarp gets arrested for his advocacy of Christianity. He's brought before the emperor. The emperor says, "Swear to my spirit, to my genius." And he says, "Say to the Christians, away with the atheists." Meaning, I swear off this cult. And Polycarp boldly turns to the Roman crowds and he says, "Away with the atheists." So he actually gives kind of an insult to the Romans that are there. And so this was kind of a contest of powers. And isn't this in a sense why Jesus was crucified or why the apostles were persecuted for preaching another king other than Caesar, right?

Scott: So is that part of the reason that Jesus being crucified was so problematic for the Roman world?

Nijay: Absolutely. So Rome did everything they could to get people to conform to a certain standard of Romanness, which is falling into these tiers or stratification of power. And crucifixion, there are all kinds of forms of punishment. Stabbing and beheading and kind of drawn and quartered sorts of things. Crucifixion was a lot of works you didn't just use on anybody. This was one of the most public spectacles. We tend to think of an art like three crosses, but you have to imagine a whole highway of crosses. Sometimes thousands of people, for example, with the Spartacus revolt, right? And it was meant to be a public deterrence for people threatening the Roman order, which is why it was called a punishment of slaves, specifically of slave deviants or revolts. Because Rome had every reason to make sure slaves are good slaves. And so crucifixion was a mark of dishonor that no one could come back from, right? Cicero referred to it as the tree of shame. And so if Christians to go around promoting the man of the cross was unfathomable, we found, I talk about this in my book, we found this piece of graffiti called the Alexandonos Graffito, I think it's second century. And it depicts, it seems to be a teenager's scribbling and they scribble across with a man on it with a donkey's head and a worshiper nearby saying, and there's an inscription that says Alexandonos worships his God. And most people think this is depicting a Christian worshiping Christ. And the idea is to worship Christ is as foolish as worshiping a donkey. Because it would make no sense in the Roman world.

Sean: So two part question, did we miss anything of what made Christianity weird? And then second, the subtitle of your book is how the Christians were weird dangerous. What moved it from being weird to being dangerous?

Nijay: Yeah, I mean, we can get right into the dangerous. So Rome had a really interesting tolerance policy for new religions. They loved expansion, so they want to conquer. And when they conquered a nation, they would take in the people as slaves, they would kill a lot of them, but they'd taken people as slaves. But then they'd also welcome the deities of that nation as long as those deities were willing to fall into line in the Roman hierarchy of gods. So no one's going to be higher than Jupiter, i.e. Zeus, best and greatest. Right? No one's going to be higher than the Olympians. And so a God had to find their place. But if you're going to allow all these other religions to come in, these other cults, you're going to have to have checks and balances. You're going to have to have border security, so to speak. And you're going to have to have a vetting process. Now, we have nothing really official along these lines, but there is a general sentiment that foreign religions could fall into one of two categories. Rologio, which means authorized, permissible, safe religion, and superstitio, which means dangerous and volatile religion. Rologio religions were going to serve the Roman order, and superstitio would be a threat. So what things are you looking for? How old is your God? The older your God, the better. How ritualized are you? Regulated? Is there a playbook? Number three, are there kind of checks and balances on your religion? Right? Are there ways of making sure it doesn't get out of hand? And Rome would send kind of religion police to stop cults that got out of hand if they got into a frenzy, if they got too involved in ecstatic behavior. Well, the Christians come along and they say, "We got Jesus, and he dates back to like just 30, 40, 50 years ago." Ritual wise, like we don't have temples, we don't have priests, we don't have sacrifices. And then this is the part that gets really dangerous. They said, "You can have a deep and powerful encounter with God no matter where you are, no matter who you are, and no matter what you have, and you need no mediation. No priests, no prophets. It'd be great to have those things, and they had prophets, but they didn't have priests. So I liken this actually to fireworks. So I used to live in the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and Massachusetts had a very clear prohibition of individual citizens having fireworks. So you can't just go to the store, the grocery store, and buy fireworks because Massachusetts says it's too dangerous to put in the hands of non-professionals. Whereas in Ohio, where I'm from, around July 4th, you can go anywhere alongside the road. They'll be selling fireworks. You could blow your hand off, no problem. That's kind of how it was with Christians. In the Romans' eyes, it was like saying, "We're going to just let loose these fireworks whenever we feel like it." And Rome said, "No, you're going to blow something up." So they were really dangerous because religion in the Roman perspective, you're supposed to have a safe distance from your deity. I'm about to do taxes, and I don't plan on getting really cozy with the IRS officers. I'm not going to profess love. I'm not going to hug them or kiss them. I'm just going to pay what I need to pay, hoping for some grace, and I don't want to think about it or talk about it unless I have to. And Christians, that's how Romans viewed their gods. "We're going to just do what needs to get done. Nobody gets hurt." Christians were saying, "Let's spend time together with this God. Let's love each other." They used the word love, and that's dangerous because love is for intimate relationships, and honor is for the gods. And here, Christians are saying, "Yes, honor, but also love." And then, Roman was saying, "We have to have go betweens." Christians are saying, "No, you don't. You can be unified." Just as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, "You can't go out to a prostitute. Don't you know you're one with Jesus Christ? You're dragging Jesus into this. This idea of, 'I've been crucified with Christ. I know I'm going to live. Christ lives in me.'" Romans would see this as hugely dangerous because, number one, you're messing with categories. Number two, you're actually offending the gods, the Roman gods, and you're saying, "We don't actually need them." And there's nothing more dangerous than saying, "You don't need the gods."

Scott: So, Nije, let's shift gears just a little bit. You make a strong point in the book about the early church referring to each other as a family, brothers and sisters in Christ. What's the significance of that, and what made that such a dangerous practice in the Roman world?

Nijay: I think it's everything because if you look at the dominant paradigm of how Romans looked at religion, it would basically be government. If you were to use a metaphor or a structure for religion, it's basically the gods are like magistrates, like kings, and humans and worshipers are like subjects. So, there's a lot of clear order and hierarchy and power and structure to all of that. And the Christians shift, not all of it, but dominantly, they shift the ideas to the family. And the family was the one place, I think, in the Roman world. I mean, there was friendship, too, but the family is a place where you practiced intimacy and mutuality that got away from a lot of that cold, structural dimensions of society. Everybody in the Roman world knew what it was, to have parents that you loved, or children that you loved, or siblings that you loved. There's a scholar named Joseph Hellerman. I'm sure you guys know Joseph Hellerman.

Sean: You know it.

Scott: Faculty colleague.

Nijay: Yes, absolutely. Great guy, something I've learned so much from. And he has this really outstanding article where he talks about the Roman world was extremely competitive. It was an agonistic society, meaning you competed with each other for honor. And you did that everywhere at all times, except in your house. The people that you do not compete with are your family members, because you want to actually bring honor to your family members. And Hellerman argues off of the work of Scott Barchi that the sibling relationship was the closest relationship in the family, and the one where ideally you shared honor rather than competed in honor. So for Christians to move religion and center it in the household was to say, "God isn't a tyrant. He's a loving father." And your fellow people around you are not competitors. They're family and friends. And Paul says in Romans, "You're not meant to out-honor each other. You're meant to out-do each other in giving honor to the other." And so we see this beautiful picture of a whole paradigm shift. We're not competitors. We're equals. We're brothers and sisters. Galatians chapter 3, Paul says, "Neither Jew nor Gentile, slave or free, male and female." He doesn't mean we don't use these categories. He understands that it's okay to be proud of being Jewish, which he was. It's okay in the sense that he felt an in-group affinity. It's okay to recognize different jobs in society. But what you can't do is say someone has a leg up before God, or even a leg up as an important part of the community. And this actually has to do with inheritance rights, I think, where he says in a traditional household where they're playing into the Roman system, there might be competition for who is daddy's favorite or mommy's favorite. But in God's household, you are all the same because you share in the one unique sonship of Jesus Christ. You don't just enter the family as a child of God. You enter the family into the capacious identity of God's beloved son transferred from the realm of darkness in the kingdom of the son.

Sean: All right, Nijay, if Christianity is as weird and dangerous as you say, why would it grow so much? Why would it be so compelling to people surrounded by religion that operated on a different script?

Nijay: That's the million dollar question, isn't it? I think if we look at 1 Corinthians, if we look at Galatians, if we look at Philippians, I think a number of things come to mind. One is the powerful spirit-led activity of the early Christians. I think that would have been compelling that they see these things going on. Peter says, "Silver and gold, I have not, but what I do have, I give to you, get up and walk." How powerful is that? Paul is preaching a sermon. He stops the mill of a sermon and looks at somebody, gazes at them and says, "Do you want to be healed?" I mean, can you imagine how that's going to start a revolution? But we know that Christianity grew, especially amongst the marginalized society. 1 Corinthians, not many of you, right? He chose the foolish of the world. He chose the weak things of the world. He chose the nothings to bring shame to the some things or the nobodies to the somebodies. I talk about a story of Pliny, the elder who's not a Christian, but he was a Roman statesman on behalf of the emperor who's investigating Christianity. Pliny happens to interview, interrogate, two people, and the three things we know about them are they are deacons, they are slaves, and they are women. I mean, that is astounding. It's astounding to me that these are the two people that he talks about when he reports back to the emperor. So what we see, I think, is a kind of upside down kingdom revolution. And the apostles and the early Christian leaders had the courage to take it seriously, to say, "We're going to do this the right way. We're going to do this the Jesus way, and we'll either die doing it or this will turn into something." And when I was researching for this book, I was blown away at how brave the early Christians were in terms of doing something different. To some, that's going to be off-putting. To some, that's going to be dangerous. And to some, obviously, it's going to be compelling. I think the glue that made it all stick is the church community. The church community was probably just a very powerful environment to be in. You went into the midst of this house church, and you were taken care of. I think it was Justin Martyr, I might get this wrong, who wrote this public apology, a defense of Christianity. And he basically compared the early Christian meetings to the Greco-Roman voluntary associations, which are these kind of social clubs, kind of like a fraternity, but not for college people. And he said, "Test us. Test our integrity." He says, "You clubs out there, you collect dues to make yourself fat and rich, we collect dues to give to the poor." And he says, "Test us." And when he talks about, "Oh, they say, look how they love one another," he's saying, "They say that sarcastically because they can't handle the sickness of seeing these Christians with so much love." I just love how Justin says this so boldly because he believes if they tested it, they would find it to be true.

Scott: Nijay, one more question for you. This is super helpful. These contrasts are really sharp, and I think you made a good case for why this is so compelling. But one, you sum up at the end of the book, a couple of the main differences as instead of the Roman version of the gods, the Christian version is God with us, Emmanuel. In a movement, you say, I love this phrase, "From peace with gods to the love of God." It sounds like these ideas would have been incomprehensible to the average Roman citizen, but what do you think, briefly, what do you think made them so compelling?

Nijay: There's a famous common statement that's made on Roman tombstones, pagan Roman tombstones, and let me try to remember it. "I was not, then I was, now I am not, and I care not." This was kind of like in Latin, it looked like it rhymed, basically. And what that meant was just a sense of futility. I'm nothing, I'm not that important. And when you look at the facts and figures of exposing infants, the famous Roman practice, that if you didn't want a baby, you just put it on the side of the road or take it to a deserted area, and it would be either taken into slavery or the sex trade or killed, just died of exposure. When you look at 20, 25 to 35 percent of the inhabitants of the Roman world were slaves. And if they weren't household slaves, they had a very low chance of being freed. There was just a lot of bleakness there. How many people died of illness? How many people died in war? And the Christians come along with so much confidence in a God who actually would come to them. If you were in the Roman world and you wanted to worship, you had to go somewhere to a temple if you could afford it, to Rome if you were really rich. And here, the whole point of the gospel is God comes to you. You don't have to go anywhere. Where the Spirit of God is, there God is, and it's in you. 1 Corinthians 3:16, 6:19, so forth. What a powerful message. So I think it meant everything. I've been listening to a new podcast you guys might love called "The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God" with Justin Briarly. And he's talking about how we're seeing a disintegration of the new atheist movement, and we see secularists starting to tap into the roots of what made the West great in the beginning. And that can be traced back to the value system of the first Christians that talked about the inherent dignity of every person. This idea that God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. I mean, these are fundamentals of what made America. These are fundamentals of what made the UK. And we've gotten away from that. But I love how Justin Briarly and Tom Holland and some of those guys are saying, "There's something that we've forgotten. We're only listening to echoes. We need to go back to the living voice and hear again the caritas de, the love of God."

Scott: Here, here. That's great stuff. Hey, I want to thank you, Nije, for coming on with us. I want to commend to our listeners your book, "Strange Religion," subtitled how the first Christians were weird, dangerous, and compelling. All three of those at the same time. It's been a great conversation. So happy to have you on with us and look forward to having you at another time.

Nijay: My pleasure. Thanks, guys.

Scott: Think Biblically podcast is brought to you by Talbot School of Theology at 51ÂÜÀò, offering programs in Southern California and online, including an accelerated Bible theology and ministry program that allows students to earn bachelor's and master's degrees together in just five years. Visit biola.edu/talbot in order to learn more. Submit comments, ask questions, make suggestions on issues you'd like us to cover or guests you'd like us to consider. You can email us at thinkbiblically@biola.edu. That's thinkbiblically@biola.edu. If you enjoyed today's conversation, give us a rating on your podcast app and share it with a friend. Thanks so much for listening, and remember, think biblically about everything.