Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling

By Nijay K. Gupta. Brazos Press, 2024. 240 pages. $39.99/hardcover; $19.99/paperback; $18.99/eBook.

Comparing the Greco-Roman assumptions about religion and the gods with what early Christians said and did, as Nijay Gupta details in Strange Religion, presents a stark contrast that illuminates why Christians were considered weird, strange, and perhaps compelling. Gupta, a professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary in Illinois, was inspired to research and write this book after one of his students asked: “Why did the early Christians call themselves ‘believers’?”

Gupta starts by painting a picture of life in first-century Athens, when the dominant Mediterranean cosmology was very hierarchical with supreme deities, middle-level divinities, and demigods. Humans mirrored this with a pecking order from top elite rulers down to slaves. The function of religion was “to keep the peace”: to stay in right relation with various powerful but capricious gods. It was purely transactional. Humans were to offer respect, mainly through ancient rituals usually involving blood sacrifices. Pax deorum was the goal: peace with the gods. Priests were usually elite men who were trained to carry out the prescribed rituals. Their personal morals were quite irrelevant. The rituals took place in special temples, before statues of the specific god. Religion was about saying the right prayers, building or owning statues or amulets, and expecting in return to receive good things. “[P]eople weren’t asking, ‘How can I be a better person?’” Instead, prayers were related to “travel and safety, relationships and love, work and prosperity, health and illness, and victory in sport and battle.”

Gupta makes a big deal out of early Christians identifying themselves as believers. Romans might argue over which god did what, whether they cared about humans, and so on, but never about belief. Gods existed: that was an accepted fact; belief was not a part of Roman religion. Christians conflated belief and faith. Jesus spoke often about and called for faith. He envisioned a “covenantal relationship of trust and mutuality.” Christians were also called upon to “believe the unbelievable”: the resurrection of Christ.

There were also huge differences in lifestyles between the great majority of people living around the Mediterranean and the “weird believers” called “Christians.” A major difference was equality. Instead of the age-old pecking order, Christians seemed to accept women, working people, and even slaves along with the accepted spectrum of men, each knowing his proper place in civil society. Perhaps the most distinctive difference was the Christian emphasis on family as their model of social organization. Worship occurred in houses, that is, people’s homes, rather than separate, designated sacred places. Instead of meals being an occasion of social pride and position, they were opportunities for humility: to follow Jesus’s instruction to head for the lowest seat and let the host promote them rather than suffering the humiliation of being asked to sit farther down, away from the elites. Meals in a home were not that formal, and everyone in the family was invited to partake.

Gupta does point out the early Christians were not perfect. The epistles tended to be written because there were “issues” arising in various Christian communities. In addition, he acknowledges major faults of the early church, especially the Pauline version that triumphed: they did not condemn slavery, and they used harsh, negative, and judgmental stereotypes of the Jews.

The book focuses on the contrast between the then-common understanding of “religion” and the new and radical understanding promulgated by followers of Jesus. The frustration with this focus, for me, was Gupta’s definition of these early Christians. His sources are the book of Acts; the Epistles, especially of Paul; and a few later “fathers.” The emphasis is on belief as it became defined in the orthodox system.

Nowhere is there a hint of the wide variety of interpretations of the words and example of Jesus as seen, for example, through Elaine Pagels’s exploration of the Gnostic Gospels or between Pauline and Johannine versions. The radical challenge of Jesus’s ministry to the Empire, as described, for example, by John Dominic Crossan, is muted. Gupta mainly finds those Christians weird, strange, off-putting, and dangerous because they challenged the pax deorum. Over its first three centuries, Christianity became patriarchal, institutionalized, and co-opted by the Empire. None of this is mentioned. And yet, what he does describe—belief in the presence of a divine spirit within each human; a God of intimacy, love, and guidance; and with the absence of priests, statues, holy places, elaborate rituals, and hierarchies—silently accuses today’s institutions. It also points to what George Fox and early Friends found so compelling and enabled them to claim they had found and were living “primitive Christianity revived.”

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Marty Grundy, a member of Wellesley (Mass.) Meeting, finds the Bible and the early Jesus movement fascinating, especially as reflected in the Society of Friends.