Chapter III — Conditions of Survival
§ 1 Popular Appeal
Overshadowed among the Jews by the common traditions of Judaism, and faced among the Gentiles by such competition as we have seen, the Christian cult had to acquire all the chief attractions of popular pagan religion if it was to outdo its rivals. Such success could never have been reached through mere superiority of ethical ideal, even had such superiority been present: by the admission even of Christian advocates, there were high moral ideals in most of the pagan ethical systems current among the educated class; but those systems never became popular, not seeking to be so. To gain the mass, the new propagandists found, the tastes of the mass had to be propitiated; and at best the more conscientious of them could but hope to control the ignorance and the superstition they sought to attract. When in the second and third centuries the more rigid Puritans, such as the Montanists, formed themselves into special communities, they were inevitably repudiated by the main body, which had to temper its doctrine to the characters of the average laity and the average clergy. Thus the development of primitive Christianity was necessarily such an assimilation of neighbouring lore and practice as we have already in part traced. The story of the Christ had to take on all the lasting dramatic features of the prehistoric worships; and the mysteries had as far as possible to embody those details in the dramatic pagan fashion. Where dramatization was going on, new details would naturally be added, all tending to the same end; and on the basis of these early dramatic inventions would arise many of the gospel narratives. This, however, must have been a matter of time.
In the earlier stages of propaganda the appeal was primarily to Jews, and secondarily to Jew proselytes; but after the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem it must have been made in an increasing degree to Gentiles, chiefly of the poorer classes, whether artisans or traders. As among the pagan religious societies before mentioned, slaves were admitted; such being not seldom in as good a position as artisans. There is also evidence that, on the avowed theological principles of the sect, men even of bad repute were received, of course on condition of repentance. “Let him that stole, steal no more,” is one of the injunctions in one of the later epistles. In the nature of the case such adherents could not be multiplied, in the teeth of the attractions of the other cults, without a continual offer of congenial entertainment; and the weekly “love-feast,” on the “day of the Lord,” would be the first mainstay. The constant warnings and admonitions in the epistles exclude the notion that these assemblies escaped the usual risks of disorder; and the standing problem of the supervisors was to maintain the social attraction without tolerating open licence. Insofar as they succeeded, for a time, it was by appeal to ideals of abstinence which, as we have seen, had long been current in the East.
In the main, the popular success of the movement must have depended on a compromise. When “freedom from the yoke of the law” went so far as to set up a serious scandal among the pagans (1 Cor. v) it was necessarily suppressed; but from the first there evidently occurred such irregularities as were later charged by Tertullian against his fellow-Christians in the matter of their nocturnal assemblies. Only out of average material could a popular movement be made, and the more the cult spread the more was it compelled to assimilate the usages of paganism, giving them whatever new colour or pretext seemed best. But to the successful manipulation of such a movement there was necessary a body of propagandists, a written doctrine, and a machinery of organization; and it was chiefly by the development of such machinery that the Christist movement secured itself in the struggle for survival. In this regard its success as against Mithraism becomes perfectly intelligible. The priests of Mithra seem never to have aimed at popular acceptance save insofar as their cult became co-extensive with the Roman army; their ideal being rather that of a religious freemasonry than that of an open community. The Christists, on the other hand, seem to have carried on from the first the Jewish impulses of fanaticism and proselytism, aiming at popularity with the acquired Jewish knowledge of the financial possibilities of any numerous movement.