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Paleo-Christianity and Its Challenges
How did the Jewish and non-Jewish environment of Christianity look? And what about the world from – let’s say – a century earlier? To what extent does the new religion fulfill the old ones, or, in other words, to what extent does Christianity represent something absolutely novel? These are questions that historian Robert Knapp (1946–2023) addresses with noble precision. In a work published in 2018, translated into Romanian as The Dawn of Christianity: People and Gods in an Age of Magic and Miracles (Humanitas, Bucharest, 2024), he invites us to reframe the Jesus movement within the diverse ancient world.
Robert C. Knapp / Source: University of California, Berkeley
The undertaking is no simple task. “Researching ancient history is a major challenge. It relies on fragmentary sources that have survived. Yet these sources never provide as much information as we would like. They rarely agree with one another. Each has its own perspective, a particular criterion by which it selects and arranges facts into a narrative. Piecing together a coherent picture from these fragments can be frustrating or even exasperating. The sources form a giant smorgasbord...”
The historian ultimately must accept this enduringly provisional situation. The theologian, in turn, must proceed accordingly, attempting to offer a coherent perspective from a doctrinal standpoint. But acknowledging the scarcity (and variety) of sources is already a step closer to the truth. In a way, this very objective shortcoming keeps us humble and diligent.
For those who delve into the details, any final or definitive stance is fundamentally excluded as long as the puzzle remains incomplete.
Even so, through this work, the author returns to the “mental world” of ordinary Romans from a different perspective. He focuses on how Jewish and polytheistic communities interacted with the divine and how these mindsets and practices may or may not have influenced the emergence of Christianity. Once again, his very readable and beautifully illustrated book concentrates on primary sources from the 1st century BCE to the end of the 1st century CE.
The author skillfully illustrates the common ground shared by all the mentioned communities (he intentionally uses "polytheist" throughout), populated by multiple gods, deities, and demons, and full of a variety of shared divinatory practices, including thaumaturgy, sorcery, and miracles. As a result, Robert vividly demonstrates why Christianity was very much part of the ordinary, far more so than some of his readers might have assumed.
The world in which Christianity was born and developed was profoundly religious. It was a landscape radically different from what we have today, shaped by modern ideological transformations. "In antiquity, people lived in a world where the existence of gods was accepted. Those in the Jewish tradition, as well as polytheists, used these gods to make life easier. Any change in the relationship with the gods was problematic and considered dangerous.
Nevertheless, during the first century AD, a new idea emerged, spread, and came to dominate the Western world. How and why did people make such a shift? The explanation lies in how the people of that time understood the supernatural and in the shared experiences of monotheism and polytheism."
Now, to reach such an understanding, we need a thorough analysis. The book is rich in technical details but—rest assured—it reads easily. The scholar takes his work seriously, but he’s still mindful of his intended audience. Admittedly, at times, additional background information might feel necessary, but overall, everything flows smoothly.
The reward of such a reading is an informed contextualization of early Christianity, that innocent era toward which we all look, each from our own denomination.
Ghita Mocan
The article highlights the Romanian release of Robert Knapp’s book, The Dawn of Christianity: People and Gods in a Time of Magic and Miracles. This reference work in historiography provides valuable insights into the environment in which the Christian movement began and developed during its early centuries.
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