Bart Ehrman's Six Differences Between Ancient Paganism and Monotheism Today
The following is a transcription of a segment of lecture 2 (“The Greco-Roman Context”) of Bart Ehrman’s Great Courses series on the New Testament:
One way to understand the religious cults scattered throughout the Roman Empire is to contrast them with what we might think of as religion today. For most people today, it only makes sense to say that there's one God. If there's any God, there's one God. For most ancient people, that common sense, in fact, was nonsense. Most ancient people couldn't understand at all the idea that there would be only one God. Most people throughout antiquity, in fact, virtually everybody throughout antiquity except for the Jews and then the Christians, were polytheists, believing in many gods. There were, of course, the great gods known to us today through ancient mythology, Greek gods like Zeus and Ares and Aphrodite, or the Roman equivalents, Jupiter and Mars and Venus. But there were lots of other gods, gods who were local deities, who protected and cared for cities or towns and villages, even less powerful gods who were in charge of even smaller places, gods who were in charge of a forest or of a river or of a road. Families had their own gods, gods who oversaw every human function and activity, the crops, the cupboard, the hearth, the personal health of a family member, childbirth. Gods in charge of virtually every function. These ancient religions then, first of all, differed from ours in that they subscribed to polytheistic views.
Second of all, most people today think that only one religion can possibly be true. If one religion is true, then others have to be false. Ancient people simply didn't see it that way. Since there were lots of gods, there was no reason to think that one god was any better than any other god, or that only one god was to be worshiped and praised. They were all gods, and so they all deserve to be worshiped. For this reason, the religions of the Greco-Roman world were far more tolerant of one another than most religions are in our world today. We might think of Roman religion as being intolerant because of what we know happened to the Christians who were persecuted by Romans. I'll say some things about that in a later lecture. By and large, a more striking feature of Roman religion was that it was highly tolerant precisely because it was so widely polytheistic. You could worship any gods you wanted to in any way you wanted to, and nobody else really much cared. Everyone was, of course, expected to worship the state gods. These were the gods that had made the Roman Empire great, and so, of course, they deserve to be worshiped, and if you refuse to worship them, then you must have some ulterior motive for refusing. In other words, it was seen to be a political offense not to worship the state gods. These gods were often worshiped at major state festivals which were looked forward to and enjoyed as a time of vacation from work and a time with family and friends, a time to feast and to drink. Christians, of course, refused to participate in these state cults because they thought to worship these other gods was to compromise one's commitment to the true God. Most other people, in fact, virtually everybody else, though, didn't see a problem with worshiping the state gods along with their local gods and along with their family gods. So, first point, ancient religions were polytheistic. Second point, they tended not to look upon one religion as true and others as false.
Third point, for most people today, religion is a matter of constant devotion to God. For ancient people, on the other hand, religion was a periodic matter. Not a matter of continual devotion, but a matter of periodic attention to the gods. These gods didn't demand constant devotion. They simply demanded sacrifices at set times in the calendar and as the occasion arose. Most gods, in fact, in the ancient world, were completely uninterested in how people lived their daily lives. They were uninterested in how people lived their daily lives. This is not to say that ancient people were unconcerned with matters of ethics. Ancient people were concerned about ethics as much as we are today. But in this ancient world, ethics were a matter of philosophy, not a matter of religion. There were very few ethical activities that were considered to be relevant to religion. Religion then was almost exclusively a matter of ritual performances of sacrifice and prayer, not of daily devotion.
Fourth, for most people today, it only makes sense to say that religion is a matter of proper belief. What you believe is what matters about religion. Oddly enough, for most ancient people, this wasn't the case at all. Far less important than what you believed about the gods was that you performed the proper cultic acts in their honor. Sacrifices of animals and foodstuffs and prayers performed at home, occasionally at the local temple, and on big occasions at civic festivals. Odd as it might seem to us today, in the ancient world, it didn't much matter what you believed about the gods, only how you worshiped them through cultic acts. And so there weren't set doctrines to be believed. There weren't sacred books to study. There weren't creeds to recite. As a result, there was no such thing in these religions as a heretic or a false believer. You either practiced them or you didn't.
Fifth, for many people today, the question of religion is a question of securing the afterlife. In other words, for many people, religion today is a matter of acquiring proper fire insurance. Most of my students think that if there's no afterlife, then there's no point in religion. I mean, if you're not going to go to heaven if you're good or go to hell if you're bad, then why not party all the time? Ancient people, interestingly enough, didn't see it this way at all. As it turns out, most people in the ancient world didn't even believe in an afterlife. There is talk about afterlife in some literary texts from the ancient world, but recent studies of inscriptions on tombstones and other material remains demonstrate pretty clearly that most people thought that when you died, that was the end of the story. Why then would you bother to be religious? For most ancient people, religion wasn't a matter of the afterlife. It was a matter of securing the favor of the gods in the here and now. These were people who lived life close to the edge for the most part. In a world where there are no modern methods of irrigation. When there are not massive possibilities of transportation of goods, when there isn't any advanced technology or sophisticated machinery, when there isn't modern medicine, things are very different. This is a world in which getting a tooth abscess will normally kill you. This is a world in which every adult woman of childbearing age has to bear an average of five children in order to keep the population constant. This is a different world from ours in which life is lived on the edge. The worship of the gods is not meant to secure the afterlife, it's to secure the present life. By worshiping the gods, you can convince them to help you win your battles, secure the love of the woman next door, keep healthy, grow your crops. You can sustain life in the present.
Sixth, for many people today, God is far beyond us in every imaginable way. God is the creator above all who has an unbridgeable chasm between where he is and what he is and what we are. The ancients didn't quite see it that way. The ancients did, of course, think of the divine realm as something fantastically great, but there was not an unbridgeable chasm between the gods and humans. As I've already indicated, within the polytheistic system, there was a kind of a hierarchy of the gods. We might think of it as a kind of divine pyramid. With the most powerful god or gods at the very top, some ancient pagans did believe in one ultimate god who was overall. Under this great god, there were the other gods, say the gods of Mount Olympus that we know about from mythology, the state gods who are far beyond what we can imagine in terms of power and strength. Below these gods, there are various local gods who aren't quite as powerful as state gods. Below them would be family gods and various smaller local gods. All of these gods, of course, are far beyond human capacity, but near the bottom of this divine pyramid, there's another kind of layer of divine beings that are a lot more like us, in fact, people who might be called divine men. Divine men, human beings who are born to the union of a god and a mortal who are more powerful than the rest of us, someone like Hercules or Greek Heracles, or someone who's completely awe-inspiring like the Roman emperor, or somebody who is supernaturally wise like Plato. Ancient people believe that there were, in fact, divine humans.