COLUMN: Think Again – Christianity is a strange religion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/05/2024 (374 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Have you been washed in the blood? Are you thankful for the cross of Christ? Have you been born again?

This is the standard Christianese that we often hear in church. Even if you aren’t a Christian yourself, there’s a good chance you’ve been exposed to Christianity here in southeastern Manitoba.

However, imagine how strange these phrases must sound to someone who isn’t familiar with Christianity. Wearing symbols of a horrific instrument of torture, celebrating the shedding of an innocent man’s blood, and talking about being born a second time don’t exactly come naturally to most people.

This leads one to wonder how Christianity was initially received in first century Rome. If you’ve ever asked yourself this question, there’s a new book that you might want to check out.

Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling by Nijay Gupta provides some fascinating insight into how the early Christians were likely perceived by their contemporaries. Gupta, a professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary, gives numerous reasons why Christianity was a highly unusual religion at the time.

For example, Gupta points out that simply calling themselves “believers” separated Christians from the Roman worldview, since the Romans cared more about rituals and ceremonies than about personal beliefs.

Because Christians refused to worship Roman deities, Roman leaders called the Christians atheoi, which means godless. Interestingly, this is where we get the word atheist from. As far as the Romans were concerned, they didn’t care if the Christians worshiped Jesus, so long as they also worshiped the Roman gods, including the emperor. The fact that the Christians refused to do so made them suspect in the eyes of the authorities.

In addition, Christian worship rituals were totally unlike those of other religions. Not only did Christians not have any temples or idols, but they also didn’t offer animal sacrifices. The smoke and blood of animal sacrifices was how religious leaders of that era managed their relationship with the divine. Everyone did it—except for the Christians. The fact that Christians didn’t even have priests to guide them made them even more unusual.

Simply put, Christians were a threat to the pax deorum, a Latin phrase meaning “peace with the gods.” Roman society assumed that the gods had to be appeased and that managing the relationship with the gods was the task of highly skilled priests. By refusing to go along with these pagan rituals, Christians were considered a direct threat to the societal order.

Finally, Gupta notes that Christians had downright bizarre beliefs about equality that conflicted with societal norms. Not only did Christians believe that men and women were equal before God, but they also affirmed that there was no distinction between Jews and Gentiles or even between slaves and freemen.

A consistent theme in the New Testament is that all people are equal before God. In Galatians 3:28, the Apostle Paul says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Add to this the fact that Christians worshipped a man who had been subjected to the most humiliating and excruciating punishment at the time. Paul even said that to those who are being saved the cross is “the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18b). This sounded as weird to the Romans back then as wearing an electric chair necklace or a lethal injection needle would appear to us today.

Nijay Gupta’s book contains many more examples of the weirdness of the Christian faith. It’s definitely worth a read.

Michael Zwaagstra is a high school teacher and a Steinbach city councillor. He can be reached at mzwaagstra@shaw.ca.