Early Christian Growth: Was it Actually More Moral? (Scott Alexander & Rodney Stark)

Join us in today's episode as we delve into the remarkable rise of Christianity, examining factors like martyrdom, plagues, and moral dynamics. Building on previous discussions, this standalone exploration dives deep into how Christianity managed to outcompete other religious cultures. We discuss the impact of plagues on Christian growth, the role of martyrdom, and how early Christians' behavior during catastrophes set them apart from pagans. Gain insights into the societal and religious shifts that propelled Christianity to prominence.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be doing an episode where we. Continue exploring how did Christianity outcompete other religious cultures and grow as fast as it did. This is going to build on another podcast that we did on this subject, but it's totally okay to watch as a standalone.

The subjects that we're going to focus on most here are the topic of martyrs as a conversion mechanism.

Plagues, and did christianity actually have a more moral system than the system Against in the mind of the average person in the last time we went on this I mean, certainly when you look at the exposure of babies being a common thing and we mentioned that some like Roman philosophers complained about how and saw it as one of the evils of the Jewish people that they tried to get people to not drown their babies.

Cause they're like, you, you shouldn't expose or kill newborns. And they're like, [00:01:00] no, wait, wait, wait. That's such a Jewish, what, what a, what a Jewish and nefarious thing to complain about.

Speaker 11: I'll take care of this. Hey Clara, there's a Jew outside, trying to poison a well! Ah! Oh my God! Get away from that well, Hebrew! What? I'm putting in water purification tablets. Spanky tricked me!

Malcolm Collins: Which is one of the holdovers that came into Christianity, but let's start with martyrs. And I just want

Simone Collins: to be clear, this is Scott Alexander's book review on the Rides of Christianity by Rodney Stark, in case you want to look at it yourself.

Martyrs. Martyrdom not only occurred in public, often before a large audience, but it was often the culmination of a long period of preparation, during which those faced with martyrdom were the object of intense face to face adulation.

Consider the case of Ignatius of Antioch. Ignatius was condemned to death as a Christian, but instead of being executed in Antioch, He was sent off to Rome in the custody of 10 Roman [00:02:00] soldiers, thus begun a long leisurely journey during which local Christians came out to meet him all along the route, which passed through many of the more important sites of early Christianity in Asia Minor.

on its way to the West. At each stop, Ignatius was allowed to preach and meet with those who gathered, none of whom was in any apparent danger, though their Christian identity was obvious. Moreover, his guards allowed Ignatius to write letters to many Christian congregations and cities bypassed along the way, such as Ephesias in Philadelphia.

As William Schnoedl remarked, quote,

Malcolm Collins: Hold on, hold on, before we go further with this. The thing insane is this, so you, I kill you, but you

Simone Collins: get to go on tour first. So don't worry.

Malcolm Collins: No, he's like a famous musician or something. Like, it's like, we're going to have you fed to the lions, but you know, on the way, like imagine, okay.

So this is basically what happened here. You know, the guy who killed the like in, in UNH the, the, you[00:03:00]

If the U. S. arrested him, but then had him do public speaking events in every major U. S. city, while also, like, the cities he didn't get to, he created, like, podcast recordings for, so he could do the rounds in the media as well. Like, are you insane? And the guards apparently were like, cool, is it? So they were like, yeah.

Sure. But also

Simone Collins: then he had the social proof of being flanked by 10 Roman guards, so he looked important.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. That he would have looked like a rapper, like walking into these cities. Well, and this actually, this, this

Simone Collins: shows up in some press coverage of Luigi Mangione. He looks super badass surrounded by all these, these policemen.

Malcolm Collins: It's really funny. Yeah. No, no. It shows like, it shows that Rome, and this is what's so great about this, right? So it shows that Rome from all these guards around him, saw him as a threat. Yeah. Yeah. But he had done nothing to attack Rome. He had done nothing to threaten Rome. He [00:04:00] just wanted to share his ideas.

Now if I knew that the state saw this guy as a threat for just his ideas and I can go to one of these speeches I'm gonna go I'd be like christian curious at this point. I'm like,

Simone Collins: yeah,

Malcolm Collins: what are these ideas that are scaring Rome so much? Yeah, yeah

Simone Collins: Speaker on tour coming to my town soon. This is great before he gets fed to the lions, you know You don't want to miss this speech So then I can go watch the Lion

Malcolm Collins: King in Rome, you know, you know, I, I get, you get the whole thing here.

Like the level of, I think rockstar status that these individuals would have had in the Christian community. I was going to talk about this later, but like they, they knew that like the other people who had done this before people like, Kept their bones and like giant reliquaries or like their, their toe bone would be have like magical powers and people would pray to it.

And like all of this, like, you're going to be like, Oh s**t. Like, and in a world that's bad, I mean, you don't know, these people could be living with chronic pain. These people could be living with, you know, [00:05:00] that the world of Rome was pretty horrifying. Right. That you could get this kind of status is huge.

And he talked before this in a bit I cut out about how previous people acted like the martyrs were like these big masochists. Not true. They were not big masochists. You can see that there is other reasons to want to be a martyr. I probably even would have liked being a martyr in this environment. Like it's just so pro martyr.

Actually, as a negative result of this, early Christian culture grew up to be so pro martyr that there was a huge problem when the Roman Empire legalized Christianity. Like, apparently when this first happened, they were, they were almost, like, sort of broken for a second, where they kept trying to get themselves martyred by doing, like, escalating things, and they quit.

And it was out of this that the monastic movement formed where some of the people who previously would have gone to do like martyrdom, they just like went out into the desert or the [00:06:00] wilderness. And there were so many of these people who did this sort of self martyrdom of like walking out into the wilderness that they just like kept writing into each other in the wilderness.

And they're like, Oh s**t, like, I guess we're starting a thing here. Or like one of them would go out into the wilderness and be like, Oh. Me, philosopher, I'm going to go, you know, like, you know, live this incredibly hard life in the deserts of like Egypt or whatever. And then he's out there for a bit.

And then a couple months later, like more people come and they're like, Hey, we're big fans. We're going to do the same thing. And then you, you end up getting this like big community doing this and it's like, Well, I guess we'll build