Jesus’s lucky break?
ALEC RYRIE has some doubts about an entertaining new book that attributes the rise of ‘orthodox’ Christianity in the ancient world largely to chance
Ritualised orgies! Horrible tortures! Jesus selling his twin brother into slavery! A resurrected cockerel in the sky! The Virgin Mary burning a woman’s hand off with her vagina!
If this is your idea of fun, you’re in for a treat. Catherine Nixey’s second book – revisiting themes from her The Darkening Age (2017) – is rollicking stuff, written with enviable vim, full of characters like the pauper in an improving story who drops dead “with the briskness and lack of fuss required of the poor in such tales”. You’ll zip through it.
Nixey’s core point is that Christianity was originally a much more diverse tradition than we have remembered, and had an embarrassing amount in common with the riotous carnival of Roman religion. The emergence of ‘orthodox’ Christianity, she insists, was not “natural and preordained”. “Had history tilted slightly differently,” any number of different Christianities might have emerged; instead, one variant “enjoyed serendipity and called it destiny”. It is the Life of Brian argument. The ancient world was ready for a messiah: which one it chose was a roll of the dice.
This is all engagingly polemical. Nixey is plain about her reaction against her Catholic childhood, and the book is aimed chiefly at the Catholic church – or, as she calls it a couple of times, “the greatest organised persecuting force in human history”. Her heroes are sardonic ancient critics of Christianity like Celsus, Porphyry and Julian.
On the way she lands some sharp punches.
It is the Life of Brian argument. The ancient world was ready for a messiah: which one it chose was a roll of the dice
Some long-established Christian doctrines – eternal hellfire, the perpetual virginity of Mary – really aren’t grounded in the New Testament, but, as she points out, in the later ‘apocryphal’ gospels.
But the book also has quite a lot of padding, repetition and gratuitous ‘atmosphere’. One chapter begins with two pages on how Roman cities smelled; sidesteps into a brief, dubious story about an orgiastic sect that says almost nothing about these people’s religion; and then ends with seven pages on Roman transport networks, apparently unconnected to the rest.
We often find the wildest version of every tale rehearsed uncritically, or, in conspiracy theory mode, the absence of evidence cited to suggest that evidence has been deliberately destroyed. More seriously, Nixey seems to be having so much fun with her religious freakshow that some questions are missed.
Such as: why Jesus? As she points out, you could hardly step into a Roman street without bumping into an itinerant miracle-worker. Pagan writers were baffled as to why Christians thought this one was special. Yet as the wild diversity of Jesus-based sects demonstrates, plainly a lot of people did. ‘Serendipity’ is not much of an explanation.
Many scholars might suggest that the strikingly distinctive spiritual, ethical, political and apocalyptic vision of Jesus’s recorded teachings had something to do with it; but Nixey studiously avoids that subject. Or they might see Jesus’s Jewishness as critical to his success; but Nixey deliberately does not cover Judaism in this book.
Instead she dwells on the so-called ‘apocryphal’ gospels as alternative Christianities that might have been. But these texts are all decades or centuries later than the (mostly) more sober New Testament texts. Nixey leans heavily, for example, on the third-century Acts of Thomas, here taken to represent the Thomas Christians of south India, on the rather shaky basis that the text was eventually known to them – but she dates that community’s foundation to the century before the Acts of Thomas was written.
I’m as ready to believe in historical contingency as the next person, but to ascribe the emergence of Christianity to mere dice-rolls and conspiracies would stretch even the credulity of people 2,000 years ago. Like it or not, this was a religion based around a very distinctive figure, and the version of it that won out was the one based on its most ancient texts. A terrible mistake? Perhaps. But no accident.
Alec Ryrie is professor of the history of Christianity at Durham University. His books include Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (William Collins, 2019)
On 19 November 1316, a four-day-old baby died. This was not an unusual occurrence in medieval France, but the loss of this particular infant was a constitutional disaster as well as a personal tragedy. That’s because he was King John I, the last in the unbroken father-son Capetian line that had ruled France for more than three centuries.
This was, as Justine Firnhaber-Baker tells us in her superb account of the rise, apogee and fall of the Capetian line, “the beginning of an era’s end” for the dynasty.
This is Firnhaber-Baker’s first foray into writing popular history, and one can only hope that there will be many more. The breadth and depth of her research are evident throughout, yet the narrative zings along at an enjoyable and very readable pace.
The usual suspects are all here, but one of the great joys of the book is the way in which the lesser-known early Capetian kings come to life in glorious technicolour. Philip I, the “incorrigible adulterer”; Robert II, who “embodied the spirit of his millennial generation” and once tried to burn down a monastery because it was in his way; and Henry I, who was loath to marry, and “purposefully chose wives too young or too far away to present any immediate danger of having to consummate the marriage”.
Women also get plenty of airtime, all the way from Adelaide of Aquitaine, whose husband, Hugh Capet, called her “the companion and sharer of our realm”, right through to Isabella, the last child of Philip IV left standing after the deaths of her three brothers and her baby nephew John I.
Firnhaber-Baker deserves some kind of medal for so heroically untangling the protagonists who share the same names. Team Louis triumphs, with 12 index entries, just ahead of Charles and Robert (11 each) and Philip (10). But by the time you’ve read this sparkling account of their lives, you’ll feel like you know them all personally.
Catherine Hanley is the author of Two Houses, Two Kingdoms: A History of France and England (Yale, 2022)