How Magic and Miracles Spread Christianity

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“With this, you will conquer.” The emperor Constantine took note, defeated his enemy Licinius, established Christianity as the focal religion of the Roman Empire, and changed history. All very spectacular!

It is also very misleading. It wasn’t emperors who made Christianity. It was ordinary men and women. It wasn’t governors and generals who opposed Christianity; it was ordinary men and women. The story of ordinary people—their engagement with the supernatural through magic and miracles—makes sense of the origins of Christianity.

In the ancient world, the cares and concerns of such people are mundane: How will I survive? Can I do more—can I flourish? The hazards of life, illness, accident, personal confrontations—is it possible to control these? My family, my ancestors, my offspring—how can I honor, protect, and strengthen them?

The responses to these questions rested on the belief in supernatural powers of all sorts surrounding and penetrating every aspect of life. There was no meaning, no problem solving, no hope, no society, unless these powers were recognized, mollified, and persuaded to do good—or at least to do no harm. Facing the new religion of Christianity, a polytheist’s world of many powers suddenly collapsed into a world of one almighty, and mightily jealous, God, capable of great good and great harm. This was a literally tectonic reordering of the polytheist’s bedrock beliefs. For some Jews, a fulfillment of Yahweh’s plan through a messiah meant the collapse of a world based on Moses’s Law—and the Temple priests and sacrifices—and its replacement by a self-reliant network of associations preparing for the end of the world.

Why would any ordinary polytheist or Jew voluntarily dispense with the received way of 051dealing with the supernatural and trade it in for a new model?

By about A.D. 150, four generations after the crucifixion, all eyewitnesses (ordinary folk) were dead. The new Jesus-sect (also called the Way) had begun to be interpreted, spread, and controlled by an elite within the movement. These men, closely tied intellectually and culturally to the polytheist culture around them, were mostly concerned with touting Christianity using categories of thought and action familiar to educated Romans and Greeks. This “orthodox” (literally, “straight-thinking”), elite-conceived picture elided ordinary men and women in important ways.

Retrieving the early Christians and Christianity largely unseen by the orthodox version of the beginnings—essentially writing about “invisible Christians”—is hard because ordinary people are usually voiceless in the material that survives from antiquity. It is doubly hard because discussion of early Christianity is usually written in the almost indelible ink of elite discourse—both ancient and modern. But by critically using Latin and Greek literary materials, Jewish sources, the New Testament, writings of the early church, and comparative studies of non-ancient societies, it is possible to unveil those near-invisible souls, both polytheist and Jewish, and to understand how they interacted in a world052 seeing the advent of a new Way—a Way that would eventually produce a sign under which Constantine would change the world.

We must trace the experience of ordinary Jewish men and women in their expectations about Yahweh’s covenantal relationship with them and, most specifically, about a charismatic leader (messiah) who would come to reestablish them in their proper place of success and destroy their worldly enemies. Yahweh’s failure to live up to his end of the Covenant—to protect the Jewish people—became more and more urgent. In proclaiming Jesus to be that messiah, Christianity offered a solution to this long-burning frustration within the Jewish experience, which had come to its forefront at least since the Maccabean revolt against the Greek overlords in the mid-second century B.C. and, more immediately, since the Roman conquest of Judea in 67 B.C. The early Christian proselytizers had to convince Jews that Jesus provided that resolution.

The polytheist’s experience is just as important as the Jewish to understanding Christian origins. Ordinary polytheists’ religious experience was a complete and seamless integration of all-important aspects of daily life. Polytheism was not some aberrant outlook waiting for Christian enlightenment. Rather, local and high gods, powers, and spirits provided a fully functional context for social integration and survival of life’s contingencies. Into this came neighbors and strangers talking about an approach to the supernatural that totally disrupted polytheists’ unified world by insisting that the many powers interwoven into every activity were, in fact, not powerful after all and that instead only one deity should be worshiped.

The message, aggressively preached in a startlingly new mode of active persuasion by early Christians, repelled many but attracted some. Men set themselves against other men, some proclaiming eternal punishment for053 noncompliance, others threatening violence if the society-upending preaching did not stop. Early Christians had to convince polytheists that Jesus was worth the risk of change.

These two threads, Jewish traditions and polytheist culture, become interwoven as Christianity moved outward from its homeland, Judea, into the Roman Empire. On the one hand, this Jesus-sect met with strong resistance, not so much from the Roman government, but from ordinary Jews and polytheists whose lives were being disrupted—a resistance that led to bloodshed on numerous occasions.

Yet some polytheists embraced the new sect. Such conversions did not come about on the basis of Christianity’s supposedly superior morality or philosophical treatments of life’s issues. Rather, people changed because of magic and miracles—because these were the central and virtually only mechanism for convincing ordinary people to give up their ancestral relationships to supernatural powers. In demonstrating the ability to direct supernatural power, Jesus and the early Christian apostles met polytheism on its own ground by focusing on the ability to help people deal with life’s contingencies and boasted that their Way showed itself superior. Jews, too, believed in miracles. They also could be convinced of the new sect’s legitimacy because miracles were a long-accepted proof of Yahweh’s power.

To the elite, who gradually gained control of orthodoxy, miracles were an embarrassment, evidence of everyday religiosity that circumvented their favorite method of discourse—increasingly erudite, abstract, and pagan-influenced explanations of the meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection. But for ordinary people, “show me the miracle” was the litmus test of supernatural power. Enthusiastic Christians rose to the challenge in wide-ranging and imaginative ways—and thereby won over Jews and polytheists alike.

By the end of the third century, Christianity had become a movement with an organizational structure, theology, and popular appeal. Perhaps as many as 10 percent of urban dwellers and 3 percent of rural inhabitants believed in some form of Christianity. In all likelihood, the movement would have continued as one option among many in the polytheist world—no better, no worse than others—appealing to a few, but hardly to all.

Constantine’s cross in the sky canceled that trajectory. Instead, Christianity became an imperial religion. Its appeal and spread no longer depended on meeting people’s needs through demonstrations of power. Top-down replaced bottom-up.

Hand in hand with empire, it began its march through history, Christ’s triumphant return and the vengeful end of time always receding before it. Supernatural power remained at the center, but now in the service of a much grander movement than Jesus of Nazareth could ever have imaged in the dust and heat of far-off Judea—as magic and miracles proved his authority.

In the early centuries of the Common Era, Christianity spread throughout the Roman world—gaining Jewish and polytheist converts alike. Magic and miracles played a significant role in the dissemination of this new, revolutionary religion.