By Bart D. Ehrman, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Almost everyone in the pagan Roman world who had heard about the Christians thought their religious claims were bizarre in the extreme. Christians worshiped an obscure Jewish teacher no one had ever heard of: A lower-class peasant who got on the wrong side of the law and was tortured to death for crimes against the state. For the vast majority of the pagan Roman population, this was completely ludicrous.
What Does Pagan Mean?
When scholars use the term ‘pagan’, they don’t mean anything derogatory. The term simply refers to any of the many polytheistic religions of the ancient world, all of them, by definition, recognizing and worshipping many gods.
The original meaning of the term pagan is, however, much debated. It may have been derived from the Latin word pagane, which means something like ‘rural folk’, people who live out in the countryside.
When the term pagan came into broader use in the 5th century, it referred to the uncultured masses who lived in the sticks. In the opinion of those using the term, a pagan was not sophisticated like the urban elite and so continued to subscribe to the old fashioned and now-passé religions of their ancestors. It was a Christian term to refer to the outliers.
Pagan may not be the best term to refer to these people today, since for most people, it does have a negative connotation. Moreover, ancient pagans did not use the term to refer to themselves. However, it’s hard to come up with a better term to describe everyone who is not either a Jew or a Christian. And so, scholars tend to stick with the term ‘pagan’.
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Differences and Common Features
The term paganism is even more problematic precisely because it seems to lump all the various religions together as a single thing. In fact, we’re talking about lots of different religious practices spread out over an enormous expanse, the entire extent of the Roman world, from Britain to Syria, from North Africa to Gaul; these religions worshiped different gods in different ways, following different practices based on different stories of the activities of the gods.
Even though there were so many differences, there were also some features that bound all these various religions together. It is important to know what these common features were in order to understand how Christians tried to convert pagans to their own highly unusual views and practices.
What It Means to Be a Christian
However, the term Christian is also problematic. Even today, different people have different definitions of what it means to be Christian, with some denominations and individuals thinking that if other denominations and individuals don’t accept their views, they’re not really Christian.
Many evangelical Christians think that Roman Catholics aren’t really Christians, Greek Orthodox aren’t really Christians, and neither are Mormons. So, the term in the modern world—Christian—can be problematic and it was problematic in the ancient world as well. For our purposes, we are going to be using a very broad definition, using the term Christian to refer to anyone who believed that following Jesus Christ was the way to salvation.
Full-fledged Christianity
Following Jesus Christ is the way to salvation. There’s a lot more to it than that, of course. There are a number of scholars who don’t think it is appropriate to call the earliest followers of Jesus Christians at all.
These scholars say that the authors of the New Testament are not appropriately called Christians, even authors like the apostle Paul and the people he converted. The reason scholars have that view today is mainly because what we might think of as full-fledged Christianity did not appear immediately but developed over a long period of time.
Jesus was a Jew
A lot of these earliest Christians, for example, continued to consider themselves Jews and continued to remain in their synagogues. They understood that Jesus was a Jew who followed Jewish customs and kept Jewish law, and so did they. Even though they believed that Jesus was the messiah, they thought that they had the right understanding of Judaism. They didn’t consider themselves some other kind of religion.
In the scholarly view, it’s not right to call someone Christian if they had significantly different views and practices from what later developed into what we know of as Christianity, even if they were followers of Jesus.
And so, in this view, maybe we should just call these early believers ‘Jesus’s followers’ and speak not about Christianity but about the Jesus Movement.
Common Questions about Defining Paganism and Christianity
When scholars use the term ‘pagan‘, they don’t mean anything derogatory. The term simply refers to any of the many polytheistic religions of the ancient world, all of them, by definition, recognizing and worshipping many gods.
The term paganism is problematic because it seems to lump all the various religions in the ancient world together as a single thing. These religions, in fact, worshiped different gods in different ways, following different practices based on different stories of the activities of the gods.
A lot of the earliest Christians continued to consider themselves Jews and continued to remain in their synagogues. They understood that Jesus was a Jew who followed Jewish customs and kept Jewish law, and so did they.
