By Bart D. Ehrman, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Pagan religions were very different from our modern understanding of what religion is. A very large part of the problem is that, as odd as it seems, ancient people in the Greek and Roman worlds did not even have a separate category of human life, thought, and activity which they called religion.
Religion
There’s no Greek or Latin word that means what we mean by the term religion today. There is the Latin term religions, from which we get our word religion, but in Latin, religio typically meant something rather broad, like having an appropriate respect for the gods.
Today, for most people, religion is a kind of coherent system, that, among other things, involves doctrines, beliefs, ethical standards, practice of worship, and scriptures.
In the ancient Roman world, virtually everyone worshipped the gods. Agnosticism and atheism were very rare in the ancient world.
To understand why people worshipped the Gods so broadly, it’ll help us to consider why people today might be religious in order to contrast it with people in the ancient world.
Truth, Community, and Fellowship
For many people today, religion involves a quest for truth. People have big questions, and they want to know the answers. Why are we here? How did we get here? What is the meaning of life? How should I live? Religion helps them answer the questions.
In the modern world, religion also provides a moral compass for people who want to know how they should live, and how they should act toward others, both as individuals and in community. Religion today, almost always places a heavy emphasis on ethics. Many people who are religious think that without religion there are no grounds and reasons for ethics.
Many people today think of religion as being focused on fellowship and community. People in religious communities gather together and they share worship together with other people who have pretty much same beliefs and values. With these other people in their communities, they can share their lives, their joys, their sorrows; they can converse together; they can pray for one another; and they can support one another.
So, religion is largely about community and fellowship in the modern world.
This article comes directly from content in the video series The Triumph of Christianity. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Certainty about Afterlife
In many parts of the world, especially in Western culture, religion, today, is vitally important because it provides certainty about the afterlife. What happens when we die? And how can we make sure that we’ll enjoy the glories of heaven and avoid the punishments of hell?
There are people who believe that if there’s no afterlife, there is no reason to be religious, and the afterlife is what constrains their behavior.
However, what is striking is that none of these reasons apply to the ancient world.
Pagan Religions
Truth was not a major issue of discussion or concern for people engaged in ancient religions. In pagan religions, there were no doctrines to believe, no confessions to recite, no orthodoxies to hold.
In ancient paganism, what someone personally believed had almost nothing to do with religion. Equally strange, ethics played very little role in ancient religions.
This is not to say that pagans were highly unethical. On the contrary, most were just as ethical or unethical as Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others are today. But ethics was not part of religion; it was a part of social life and philosophy. So, ethics were important just as truth was important, but they weren’t part of religion.
Moreover, there were virtually no religious communities in antiquity. And yet, possibly the most remarkable of all was the fact that ancient religions had almost no concern at all for the afterlife. Heaven and hell played almost no role in ancient paganism.
Cultic Acts of Worship
Rather than on beliefs and ethics, ancient pagan religions focused on cultic acts of worship. The term ‘cult’, like the word ‘pagan’, has no negative implications in this context. The term ‘cult’ comes from the Latin term cultus deorum, which literally means ‘the care of the gods’.
There were two main forms of cultic act in pagan religion: Prayers and offerings.
Prayers were said to the gods, much as they are today in monotheistic religions. To acknowledge the gods, to praise them, thank them, and to ask them for assistance.
In addition to prayers, there were offerings made to gods; offerings that would give the gods something that they wanted, in hope that they would give something in return. These offerings were made either in local temples where the offers were made by specially appointed priests, or in the privacy of one’s own home.
Ancient pagan religions had a perspective summed up in the Latin phrase, Do ut des, in reference to the gods Do ut des. It literally means, ‘I give, so that you may give’. That is I, the human, am giving to you, the god, so that you will give to me.
Ancient Writings
Ancient religions were based on long standing customs of worship, passed down from antiquity, and not on written texts of scripture. Ancient pagan religions didn’t have scriptures, the way that modern religions do.
There were, of course, ancient writings dealing with the pagan gods, including most famously Homer’s two epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the writings of Hesiod, but these were never treated as sacred texts that describe what people should believe, or how they should behave, or even how they should engage in their cultic activities.
In addition, there were plenty of pagan myths, many of them in written form. However, these were usually taken to be good and entertaining stories about the gods, not accounts that had to be believed in order to be in the good graces of the gods.
Thus, clearly, pagan religions were very different from what we think of as religion today.
Common Questions about Ancient Paganism and Modern Religion
Today, for most people, religion is a kind of coherent system, that, among other things, involves doctrines, beliefs, ethical standards, practice of worship, and scriptures.
The two main forms of cultic act in pagan religion were prayers and offerings.
The term ‘cult‘ comes from the Latin term cultus deorum, which literally means ‘the care of the gods’.
