Entire books have been written on the subject of how pagans of the Greco-Roman world regarded Christians, their faith, and the chief object of their worship, i.e. Jesus of Nazareth. I can barely scratch the surface of this subject, in the span of a single article on this Web site. However, it fits in with the topic and needs to be addressed here … so here goes.
Contrary to what is often widely believed now by followers of the Abrahamic faiths (primarily Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, including all of their constituent sects), the Abrahamic religious tradition first emerged within the context of Near Eastern paganism. According to the book of Genesis, Abram son of Terah was originally from “Ur of the Chaldeans” which was located in Sumer.
As reported in Genesis 12, YHWH instructed Abram to continue on to Canaan — his father Terah had begun the migration an unknown number of years previously and had stopped in what is now southeastern Turkey. Abram was 75 years old at that time. He complies with this request, arrives in Canaan, set up an altar near Shechem — but due to a famine, he had to move on south, if only temporarily, to Egypt. He eventually returns to Canaan, and the rest (as they say) is history.
It’s worth observing that the Chaldeans who resided for a while in Sumer, from the late 9th century BCE to the end of the 6th — and even ruled the region for a time (famed kings Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II were Chaldeans) — had originally been a western Semitic people like the Aramaeans who’d arrived a bit earlier also and made their presence known in the Levant and Mesopotamia.
The Hebrew authors of Genesis (yet another western Semitic group) thus linked their own nation/tribe with a related people who’d dominated the Near East. One might consider this a form of ancient name-dropping or even bragging.
From there the Genesis account depicts Abram’s deity, YHWH, as something of a special patron and protector for him and his family, and Abram (later “Abraham” meaning “father of multitudes”) was, in turn, especially devoted to YHWH. Something that becomes apparent is that YHWH isn’t viewed as the only god in existence. He is one of a number of deities, most of which were the patrons of other clans, tribes, nations, etc. Among the others mentioned within the Old Testament are Ba’al, Ashtoreth, Molech, Chemosh, and many more.
Yes, it’s true. The “one god” of Abraham and the ancient Hebrews and Jews, was originally himself merely one of a large number of pagan deities worshipped in the Near East. It took centuries for the followers of YHWH (aka Yahweh) to view him not as their own special patron among a pantheon of possible deities, but as the only god that exists whereas all the rest do not.
Any discussion of how Christians related to pagans in the Greco-Roman world must first must first take into account the relationship between paganism and the Jewish religion from which it emerged. Greco-Roman pagans had what can best be described as a complex and conflicted view of Judaism. In some ways, they respected it:
Respect for Judaism ultimately led to the phenomenon of “the Godfearers’ i.e. Jews’ term for pagan Gentiles who latched onto their synagogues and took in their religion’s teachings, even if they didn’t actually become Jews.
On the other hand, Jews elicited no small amount of trepidation among Greco-Roman pagans:
Over the centuries since Judea was integrated in the larger Greco-Roman world, triggered by Alexander’s conquest of the Levant, this seesawing relationship grew increasingly troubled. It broke out into outright war on a number of occasions (the First Roman-Jewish War from 66 to 73 CE, the Diaspora Revolts of 115-117, and the Bar Kokhba Revolt from 132-135). All of these wars began in the context of religious crises or incidents that erupted spontaneously in several ways.
The end result of these wars was that Jews and Judaism became shunned in Greco-Roman society, especially by pagans (but also by Christians). Overall society’s seesawing treatment of Judaism became far more negative, which in turn caused Jews to become even more insular than they had been.
In many ways, pagans saw both Christians and Jews as two sides of the same religious coin. As Jews and Judaism became more suspect in the eyes of traditional Greco-Roman pagans, so too did Christianity. All of this set the stage for how Christianity was handled.
In turn, this caused Christianity — as a whole — to work harder at separating itself from Judaism, and also contributed in no small part to the faith’s growing anti-Semitism. At the same time, some Jewish-Christian sects persisted, even in the face of the emergence of “heresy-hunting” that frequently viewed them as deplorable “heretics” whose forms of Christianity were abominable and blasphemous.
Overall, therefore — and as is well-known — pagans in the Greco-Roman world had a negative opinion of Christianity. Their chief points of contention with it were many:
Perhaps the most important aspect of Christianity that presented a problem for pagans was that it was new, and was an approach to religion at variance with ancient practice. In other words, it was a force for disruption within the culture. Christians not only worshipped differently from most of the rest of society, in many cases they lived differently, as well.
Having Christians — who purposely snubbed traditional rites, many of them long embedded in daily life — around, risked upsetting social and cosmic order. Life had worked in a certain way for a very long time, but now there was this clique of people who didn’t go along with things. This created a kind of generalized anxiety for many pagans. They were unnerved by Christianity, and treated Christians accordingly.
A few pagan scholars and/or leaders had more specific critiques of Christianity, having written tracts or whole books on the matter. The philosopher Celsus in the late 2nd century offered a number of criticisms in his True Word (or True Doctrine) which has not survived except in the form of excerpts quoted by Origen in his response to Celsus, Contra Celsus. Among the most significant of those was that Christians tended to draw in the uneducated and the marginalized, the sorts of people that didn’t constitute a viable foundation for a movement, and whom upright citizens tended to avoid. He also considered the reported supernatural exploits of Jesus of Nazareth, including his resurrection, to be superstitious pablum and the religion itself to be phony philosophizing.
Overall, Celsus considered Christians to be gullible simpletons easily swayed by silly superstitions and even sillier thinkers who presumed to control the faith. He also objected to their having “rebelled” against the Judaism from which their religion had come (based on what Origen reports, he had a lot to say about Christians consciously departing from Jews). Celsus also considered it grossly illogical that the Christians’ immortal deity made him/her/itself a mortal, yet remained immortal and almighty.
Another pagan philosopher, Porphyry, in the late 3rd century penned his own takedown of Christianity, Adversus Christianos or Against the Christians. As with Celsus’s work, that hasn’t survived, but various Christians responded to him over the succeeding centuries. Porphyry’s view of Christianity was apparently harsher than that of Celsus. He argued that Christians tended to lock into strange interpretations of their own sacred scripture and were too easily taken in by “prophecies” which they didn’t even comprehend. He viewed it as idiotic to believe Jesus of Nazareth was God; instead, Porphyry insisted, he was an all-too-human preacher whose teachings were ultimately foolish.
A writer named Lucian of Samosata in the late late 2nd century wrote a satire called The Passing of Peregrinus about a con artist (i.e. the titular Peregrinus) who swindled Christians and posed as a Christian thinker (among other things). Lucian’s critiques of Christianity aren’t stated explicitly, but he does imply that Christians are simplistic, easily duped, and their belief in eternal life makes them dangerous (since they view death itself as insignificant).
A lot has been said — mostly by Christians — of their occasional poor treatment by pagans. The classical era is replete with stories about various efforts undertaken, often on an ad hoc basis, by them against Christians. It’s true that, in certain places and times, there was little love lost between them. Pagans sometimes exacted retribution against Christians for diverging from ancient tradition.
Even so, as I write elsewhere, the amount of persecution Christians endured during the Roman Empire has been overstated. Empire-wide persecutions of Christianity only happened twice and for short spans of time. Localized, spontaneous persecutions were more common, such as in Lyon in 177 CE.
In the face of pagans’ objections to their faith, Christians responded by developing apologetics. This began in the middle of the 2nd century, most famously by Justin Martyr. He, and then other Christians, penned explanations for their religion that, they believed, answered pagans’ criticisms and also explained why their beliefs were superior.
Overwhelmingly, these apologetic works had no discernible impact on pagans or paganism. Unfortunately they tended to be formulated in ways that appealed to other Christians rather than explaining the faith to pagans and winning them over.
Beyond the various specific critiques described above, as noted already, many pagans found Christianity unsettling. It’s not too far from the truth to describe this time as something of a “culture war.” That remained true even after Christianity was officially tolerated, from 313 onward, and its numbers grew through the following decades.
Thus, the “culture war” between traditional paganism and Christianity continued, but once Christianity dominated society, the script flipped. Pagans, not Christians, became targets of persecution — both official, and unofficial. Pagan institutions were closed; shrines, temples, and academies were razed; pagans were harassed, sometimes to the point of being killed (e.g. Hypatia of Alexandria). The famed Altar of Victory, with its statue of Nike, in the Roman Senate was taken down. The colleges of the Pontiffs and the Vestal Virgins were disbanded. The Eleusinian Mysteries were shut down.
Traditional paganism met its doom in the form of a series of ordinances by Emperor Theodosius I in the late 380s and early 390s, which ordered the end of various pagan practices and institutions, imposed restrictions on pagans, and generally made it difficult if not impossible for them to continue with their religion. He never explicitly declared Christianity the “official religion” of Rome (no emperor ever did such a thing), but his decrees essentially had that effect, as they were enforced over the following decade or two.
In many cases Christians justified their repression of paganism on two grounds: First, that they were simply “saving souls,” since anyone who didn’t worship Jesus of Nazareth was doomed to Hell; and second, that pagans had repressed them viciously, so (in essence) turnabout was fair play. That many Christians by that time viewed pagans as being in league with Satan only made it seem more appropriate for them to target pagans.
Sadly, most Christians then — and now! — refuse to acknowledge the hypocrisy of the massive reversal that destroyed traditional paganism. More’s the pity.
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