Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place in Caesar’s Empire
Everyone knows that the early Christians were mercilessly persecuted in the Roman world, simply because they wouldn’t worship pagan gods. Not so, writes Boin, a history professor at St. Louis University. He explains, in this exploration, how life was actually perfectly safe for most early Christians during most of the still-pagan decades and centuries after Jesus.
One of the excellent points he makes concerns how most early Christians were “the quieter ones,” who went along with many of the civic/religious ceremonies, and may well have converted more pagans to their faith than the argumentative martyrs. Other topics include the wide variety of Christianities in those early years, Judaism, the cults of Mithras and Isis, and, most of all, just how complex religious life on the ground really was during late antiquity.
Boin gets into complicated historiography (the study of history) rather than just presenting the history, more than I prefer, but it was probably necessary. After all, his subject was how ideas layer themselves onto the historical record, and how some propaganda – like the inspiring but erroneous belief that it was inevitably risky to be a Christian in pagan Rome – came to be accepted as fact.
