I recently came across a couple of interesting pieces on Substack. The first is a discussion with historian Tom Holland who had been an atheist but whose study of history was a catalyst for his return, or at least partial return, to Christianity. The interview is conducted by Bari Weiss who's a secular, lesbian Jew, but who seems not unsympathetic with what Holland has to say.
Here are a few excerpts from the conversation:
Bari Weiss: Your book opens with the crucifixion. Your argument is that the turning point is not Jesus’s birth, but his death, at 33 years old, at the hands of the Roman authorities. Why is this the pivotal moment?
Tom Holland: It is very difficult to overemphasize how completely mad it was for everybody in the ancient world that someone who suffers crucifixion could in any way be the Messiah, let alone part of the one God. In the opinion of the Romans, crucifixion is the fate that should properly be visited on slaves. Not just because it is protracted and agonizing, but also because it is deeply humiliating.
When you die, you will hang there like a lump of meat. This is a demonstration, in the opinion of the Romans, that essentially their might is right. That if a slave rebels against his master, this is what happens.
I think what is radical about what Christians come to believe is not the fact that a man can become a god. Because for most people in the Mediterranean that is a given. What is radical is that the man Christians believe was divine was someone who had ended up suffering the worst fate imaginable—death by crucifixion—which, in the opinion of the Romans, was the fate visited on a slave.
The reason that Jesus suffers that fate is that he is part of a conquered people. He’s not even from Judea. He’s from Galilee. Galilee is not properly under the rule of the Romans. It’s franchised out to a client king. He is the lowest of the low. Even the Judeans look down on him.
The fact that such a person could conceivably be raised up by citizens of the Roman Empire as someone greater than Caesar himself, greater than Augustus, is a completely shocking maneuver. Judeans, Greeks, Romans—it’s shocking to them all.
The radical message of the crucifixion is that, in Christ’s own words, the last shall be first, and the first shall be last....
BW: I've always been so interested in how Christianity goes from being the bane of the powerful to being the faith of the emperor. Constantine, the emperor who could have been a god, instead converts to the faith whose god died on a cross. How does that happen?
TH: Christianity spreads through most of the major cities of the empire. It’s not difficult to see what the appeal is. In a society without any hint of a welfare state, a state in which no value at all is put upon the weak or the poor or the sick, what the church offers is the first functioning welfare state.
If you are a widow or an orphan or in prison or hungry, the likelihood is that you will be able to find relief from the church. And that offers a kind of power because bishop literally means an overseer—the figure of a bishop who has charity to dispense. That’s quite something. You are in a position of authority that even your pagan neighbors might come to respect.
BW: To join a community not based on the lineage of your family or where you are born, but based on a belief—that still feels so radical to me, even in 2024.
TH: To the Romans, it’s bewildering. They are very puzzled. Who do the Christians think they are? They don’t have a land. They don’t have a mother city. Because they claim a universal identity, to the Romans, it seems they have no identity at all. This is a tension that runs throughout Christianity.
There's much more at Substack. The next to the last question Weiss asks is what brought Holland back to Christianity. You can read his answer at the link.
I'll discuss the second article tomorrow.
