DESTROYER OF THE GODS
Was Christianity really distinct from other religions?
Upon reading the title of this book review, you may recall Gozer the Gozerian, the big bad from the universally lauded film, Ghostbusters. An ancient Samarian god shows up at your doorstep to bring about your destruction in the form of your choosing. You try to clear your mind and empty your heart but suddenly ________ just pops in there.
Fill in the blank. What pops into your mind?
A fond memory from your past gift wrapped in nostalgia only for the distance of disillusionment to be your undoing.
A once in a lifetime love—the envy of the masses—yet tainted with the inescapable reality that the fairytale is flawed and subject to disappointment.
A lifelong pursuit of the perfect career that utterly consumes you in the end, alienating you from your spouse and children.
Perhaps, for those considering the idea of gods, what commonly surfaces is that all religions are the same—all paths lead to the same place. Whatever it is you have concocted in your mind, whether it be a sky father with a gray beard, universal energy, a shared consciousness, or anything else that can be conceived—all of it amounts to no fundamental differences or distinctions. Ironically, saying "it's all the same" is yet another way of looking at the world, which has its own set of faith assumptions about our origins, ultimate purpose, morality, and destiny.
Was Christianity distinct?
Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World is a book by Larry Hurtado, a distinguished scholar and historian of the New Testament, and was published in 2016. It has been a valuable contribution, not just for the academic-minded reader but for the generally skeptical. From the onset, he aims to address our widespread assumptions that all religions are the same or have the same kind of activity that can be distinguishable from other areas of life, such as science, politics, and economics. These assumptions seem to outfit our modern culture's amnesia and, dare I say, our chronological snobbery concerning our modern world's objections and misunderstandings of Christianity.
Historical Opprobrium
Hurtado showcases his mastery of the subject matter and looks to provide an accurate historical narrative, with three-quarters of the book consisting of 5 lengthy chapters and the remainder housing a sizable list of endnotes. He retraces the earliest non-Christian/pagan criticisms of the faith as a threat to society and culture in the ancient world—the perspectives of Pliny, Galen, Marcus Aurelius, Lucian, and Celsus. I was left curious as to why anyone would want to become a Christian if it meant being ostracized or a life residing on the margins of society. Nevertheless, the appeal of this new kind of faith was widespread and so very foreign to its contemporaries and predecessors. Although the book was not apologetic in nature, it gave a thoughtful and veracious historical account that can serve as a response to those who would equate Jesus to Osiris, Zoroaster, or any other deity.
Christianity was a faith commitment untethered to a specific ethnic group or identity, unlike Judaism. It didn't have cultic imagery, shrines, stone statues, or apparatuses at local worship gatherings (which is confirmed by the lack of archeological findings). Moreover, it had an exclusive claim to the Truth, which was very alien to the pluralistic world that it found itself (where worship of various gods and idols was commonplace). Yet it had a dyadic pattern of worship that honored the relationship between the Father and the Son (Jesus) and invited equal devotion to each. Hurtado continues his recounting by detailing early Christian's attempts at expressing and living out their new identity in Christ. This invited socioeconomic pressures from the family/home, the marketplace, the political square, and particular geographic areas of the ancient world. There was no impetus for religious freedom in the ancient world—it was assumed and customary for everyone to bow down to the god of their household, the god of their local market, the god of a specific vocation of work, the god of their government, and the god of a particular region.
Bookish Innovative People
One of the fascinating points Hurtado rediscovers is the bookish nature of Christianity. Namely, followers of Christ pioneered the widespread use of the codices (to keep Scriptural records) and the mass production of written documents incomparable to any other faith system in all of antiquity. There is no way to separate the literary culture from the faith that propagated that culture, especially in the urgent and meticulous manner that it kept records of letters and copies of historical accounts of the ministry and life of Jesus Christ. According to Hurtado the innovations of Christianity in the Roman world were:
The ethical prescriptions of the faith.
The decoupling of ethnic identities from the faith.
The assumption that religions are based on or organized by some sacred writing or text.
My Critique & Conclusion
The only criticism I have is that the book feels like the first installment to a series that can easily be followed up with another book. That book could focus on the implications or parallels for today and an exploration of the apologetic aspects of Christian distinctiveness. Sadly, Hurtado passed away in 2019, so we won't be getting a follow-up to this remarkable academic work. I highly recommend Destroyer of the Gods to any of my colleagues, friends, or family who are even the slightest bit interested in building an understanding of Christianity, especially if you find yourself investigating the claims of Jesus and how they impacted and shaped the lives of first-century Christians in the early Church.