As the apostles of Jesus made their way out into the pagan world, they preached and lived out something entirely new that would ultimately change the world. Now one thing must be made clear: Christianity’s impact on the Greco-Roman world was not revolutionary. There was no catastrophic revolt or upheaval within the Roman Empire because of Christianity. To use a more modern term, Christianity’s impact on the Greco-Roman pagan world was evolutionary. Or to quote C.S. Lewis, it was more like a “good infection” that slowly but surely worked its way throughout the Roman body politic.
In How Should We Then Live?, Francis Schaeffer made the claim that the reason why the early Christians faced persecution was because that they claimed to have an “absolute” by which they could judge the emperor. Well, that might be partly correct, but the reality of the early Church’s impact on the still-pagan Roman world is much more multi-faceted and complex.
To put it in as simple terms as possible, Christianity was essentially a “fulfilled Jewish messianic movement” that:
- Inherited the fundamental theological outlook of Judaism,
- Re-vamped that Jewish theological outlook in the light of the historical realities of the resurrection of Christ and the out-pouring of the Holy Spirit, and thus
- “Translated” the Gospel to speak to the pagan world of the Roman Empire.
Therefore, the mission of the early Church was not achieved through some slick empire-wide political or advertising campaign. It was achieved by living out and practicing truly revolutionary convictions, but in a slow but sure, day to day, evolutionary manner.
We can see how Christianity impacted the Roman Empire by looking at it through three primary lenses:
- The lived-out, daily acts of charity, mercy, and equality among all walks of Roman life,
- The interactions of Christian apologists with classical philosophy, and
- How the early Church dealt with opposition (in the form of persecutions) and false teachings (by means of heretics).
When in Rome…do as the Romans do: Worship Anything (but just include Caesar)
There are basically three things one must remember when trying to understand ancient Rome. First, it was thoroughly pagan, meaning it was a polytheistic culture, with countless different gods throughout the empire (Corinth alone, for example had 26 different temples). What this meant was that in the Roman Empire, religious tolerance ruled the day. It didn’t matter who or what you worshiped, it didn’t matter what practices you indulged in, in the name of your particular god—no one’s religious observances were any better or worse than any other’s. As long as your religious practices didn’t purposely hurt others, everything was tolerated, with one caveat.
This leads us to the second thing to remember about ancient Rome: Its attitude toward the Roman Emperor. Worship anything you want, just make sure you honor the emperor, make sure you offer incense to him, swear by his genius, and acknowledge that he is worthy to be worshiped as a god. If you did this one thing (and it was the one thing of which Rome was decidedly intolerant), it didn’t matter what other religious practices you observed. After all, “religion” in ancient Rome was not a matter of mere private taste—it was a decidedly public and societal obligation.
That is why the worship of any and all gods was tolerated: the more the gods are placated, the better off society will be. The one “god” you could not ignore, though, was Caesar himself, for to fail to worship Caesar was a thoroughly treasonous act. It was an unpatriotic, un-Roman threat to Roman society. A Roman citizen could worship whatever he wanted, it didn’t really matter. But the one act of worship that did matter was that which was directed toward Caesar. Slight Caesar, you slight Rome, and if you slight Rome, you are an enemy of Rome. Pure and simple.
The final thing to remember about life in ancient Rome was that it was a thoroughly immoral culture. The ethics in ancient Roman society were a direct result of the prevailing pagan worldview that viewed the gods as dangerous, petty, and immoral, and human beings as being under the constant threat of the gods, doomed to the inevitability of impersonal fate, and therefore ultimately worthless. Life was cheap, so enjoy whatever you can, however you could, as long as you wanted before you died—the only thing waiting for you was the shades of Hades anyway.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do…Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby!
If one was to get into a time machine and go back to the Roman Empire of the first century, what would one experience? First, sex—unrestrained sex…really unrestrained sex. Far from being desirable, though, it proved to be positively diabolical. Prostitution was not merely legal, it was seen as morally acceptable—the very pagan temple system promoted “sacred prostitution” as an act of worship, not to mention a considerable money-maker for the local temples. In that sense, pagan temple priests were akin to pimps, employing both men and women, both girls and boys, as temple prostitutes. And no, those girls and boys didn’t join voluntarily—sex-trafficking is the same yesterday as it is today.
Pornography was also rampant in ancient Rome. It wasn’t confined to essentially the “magazine rack behind the counter,” so to speak; pornographic paintings actually were common decorations in many homes. Many of these “art works” were found in the city of Pompeii.
In the highly sexualized Roman culture, it should come as no surprise to find that homosexual practices were widely accepted, although to call them “homosexual practices” is a bit misleading for the following reason. In ancient society, there was no concept of “sexual orientation.” The very word “homosexual” was not coined until the 1800s. People did not define themselves according to their self-perceived “sexual orientation.” Having sex was either for conceiving children or for pure pleasure.
Therefore, a man could be married, have a few kids, and regularly go to his local pagan temple and engage in sex acts with any temple prostitute he wished, women, men, girls or boys. So when we say that homosexual practices were widely accepted, we are not saying that “homosexuals were accepted” in Roman society, for the very concept of “being a homosexual” did not exist. Same-sex sexual encounters, though, were an accepted part of the culture. The attitude was simple: it’s just sex, so it doesn’t really matter if it’s with your wife, an adolescent boy, or a temple prostitute—anything goes.
It must also be said that undoubtedly part of the reason for such promiscuity was that such behavior was seen in the Roman leaders, most notably men like Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero. When Tiberius essentially retired to his private island, he had young boys to dress up as nymphs and play in his royal gardens. Then, when he would go out for his strolls, these “wood nymphs” were to then come to him and pleasure him in a variety of ways. Caligula was a pathological sadomasochist. He would host imperial banquets, and then in the middle of the feasting, he would take a guest’s wife back to his bedroom and proceed to beat and rape her. When he was finished, he would then come back out to the dining hall and proceed to tell about the sexual encounter in graphic detail. Nero was just as depraved. In fact, it was during Nero’s reign that something akin to same-sex marriage was allowed (Worshipping the State, 337).
When in Rome…well, I hope you’re not a woman or a child!
Such a sexually promiscuous culture undoubtedly had horrible consequences for women and children. After all, it was free men who were given free rein to their lusts…and it was the women and children who suffered for it. Such a promiscuous culture meant that men often simply wanted to indulge in the pleasures of sex without ever having to be burdened with families. And so, ironically, despite Roman promiscuity, there was an extremely low fertility rate in Roman society. Men simply took the needed steps to prevent conception and birth, namely sex with prostitutes, or anal sex with their wives (or with other men and women, for that matter). They would also force their wives to use various means of contraception. In addition, as Rodney Stark points out in The Triumph of Christianity, if their wives still conceived and got pregnant, “pagan husbands also often forced their wives to have abortions—which also added to female mortality and often resulted in subsequent infertility” (131).
If that didn’t work, and the wife gave birth, and if for whatever reason the husband decided he didn’t want the child, he would simply throw the newborn baby out with the trash—the practice was called “exposing infants.”
Now you might be wondering, if a pagan husband could force his wife to have an abortion, why would he wait until she gave birth, only then to expose the newborn infant? The answer is simple: men wanted to have sons to carry on the family name and to receive the family inheritance. Daughters, on the other hand, were a nuisance. Women had little or no rights in Roman society, so why would a man want the added burden of raising a daughter? And so, if a woman gave birth to a daughter, oftentimes the man would expose his infant daughter, for she was unwanted. Stark tells us that we actually have a letter from ancient Rome, written by a man to his wife concerning the upcoming birth of their child. He wrote, ‘If (good luck to you!) you should bear offspring, if it is a male, let it live; if it is female, expose it’ (126).
Not surprisingly, another common practice arose out of this practice of exposing infants: the sex-trafficking of children. People would often go through the trash to find these exposed infants, and would then raise them for one purpose: to become sex slaves and prostitutes. We’ve already touched upon the reality of prostitution—most of the women and children involved in prostitution were forced into it. This meant to call them prostitutes was really skirting the issue: in reality they were sex slaves with no rights, dignity or worth.
There is yet one other thing that must be mentioned: forced marriages. Because women had little or no rights in Roman society, many girls were forced into marriages. Stark tells us that 50% of pagan women were married by fifteen; 20% were married off by twelve; and 4% were only ten. Yes indeed, in Roman society life was cheap, unrestrained sex was a privilege of free men, and women and children suffered truly horrific indignities.
It must be pointed out that such an immoral culture stemmed directly from the pagan worldview of the day. As Rodney Stark points out, “In his Republic, Plato made abortions mandatory for all women who conceived beyond the age of forty (in order to limit population growth) and Aristotle agreed, writing in his Politics, ‘There must be a limit fixed to procreation of offspring, and if any [conceive] in contravention of these regulations, abortion must be practiced’” (132).
Any given culture will effectively live out the implications of the philosophic worldview of the day. The “big ideas” of the philosophers will trickle down and find their way to the general populace, and hence be effectively lived out on a daily level within that culture. So it was in ancient Rome. Simply put, the Greco-Roman philosophy and worldview shaped the horrific, brutal, and inhumane culture that was the pagan world.
