Among the Gentiles

Luke Timothy Johnson’s Among the Gentiles is an illuminating comparative study.  Johnson’s goal is to demonstrate that although Greco-Roman religion and early Christianity disagreed on many specific beliefs and practices, their ways of being religious (i.e. their approaches to divine power) were fundamentally congruous.  

In the first three chapters Johnson addresses the debate to which he hopes to contribute, the method and perspective he follows, and the model he employs.  Tracing the polemic of Christianity against “pagan” religion from the first century CE to the present, Johnson suggests in the first chapter that such debates about the relationship between the two religious complexes have proven unfruitful and not a little dissimulating.  Chapter two outlines a fresh approach to the discussion from the field of religious studies.  Johnson provides a definition of religious experience that understands religion as a collection of human responses to what is perceived as ultimate power (often referred to throughout the book as “divine dynāmis”), a definition he has also argued for elsewhere.

The third chapter outlines the main characteristics of Greco-Roman religion and Johnson’s fourfold typology of Greco-Roman religiousness.  Johnson describes Greco-Roman religion as pervasive, public, political, pious, pragmatic and polytheistic.  In addition he points to some specific practices of Greco-Roman religion:  prophecy (including oracles and divination), healing, initiation into Mysteries, pilgrimages, and magic.  The four types of religiosity to which all of these practices and characteristics can be reduced are: A) Participation in divine benefits; B) moral transformation; C) transcending the world; D) stabilizing the world.  The next four chapters fill in these four types by closer examination of the writings of Aelius Aristides (A), Epictetus (B), the Hermetic Poimandres (C), and Plutarch (D).  The key to each of these types is the location of ultimate power as perceived by the subjects under analysis.  By Religiousness A Johnson indicates the common conception of ancient religion as obtaining favor from the gods in various aspects of life.  Religiousness B, on the other hand, posits moral transformation as the site of divine power.  Religiousness C disaffirms all material reality as the arena of divine power, and Religiousness D is expressed in the maintenance of religious polity (e.g., donating statues or buildings, serving as priest or prophet).

The remainder of the book analyzes early Christianity with respect to these four types of Greco-Roman religion.  After a brief analysis of first-century Judaism according to the four-fold typology (chapter 8) and a cursory introduction to the rise of Christianity (chapter 9), Johnson finds types A (chapter 10) and B (chapter 11) in first-century Christianity (chapters , particularly in the Corinthians to whom Paul writes, the Gospels and Acts (A); Paul himself, James and Hebrews (B).  The spectrum widens further in the second and third centuries.  Locating type A in the apocryphal acts and gospels, Montanism and martyr piety (chapter 12), and type B in the Clementine Letters, Polycarp and the Apologists (chapter 13), Johnson finds type C among the early Christian Gnostics (chapter 14) and type D in the increased role of the bishop among the early rules for church order, in Irenaeus, and in Cyprian (chapter 15).  Chapter 16 rounds off the discussion by showing how each of the types of being religious is found in post-Constantine Christianity in yet new ways (especially monasticism [type B] and Manichaeism [type C]).  

Johnson closes the book with an Epilogue that summarizes the study as a whole, draws some implications for the study of religion and for inter-religious dialogue, and briefly offers theological suggestions on the basis of the book.

The value of the book is Johnson's determination to develop an apparatus for comparison of divergent religious phenomena that does not reduce one to the limited particularities of the other.  Through the framework of constructivist religious studies, Johnson is able to analyze Greco-Roman religion and early Christianity in a genuine comparison, rather than in a search for dependence or influence (277).  The book serves its purpose well:  it enables the comparison of the two religious traditions apart from the polemical suppositions usually found in such comparison. 

Unfortunately, the value of the book could also be its greatest flaw.  Considering the complexity of the phenomena he is investigating, Johnson’s analysis of Greco-Roman religion is far too cursory.  Although much of the documentation for his work is found in the lengthy endnotes, the choice of exemplars to support his typology necessarily weakens his typology.  Rather than supporting the types of religiousness from a variety of sources, Johnson chooses just one figure or text from the Greco-Roman world for each.  These figures can by no means serve as “typical” figures, however, since they are generally personalities (or texts) that are quite extraordinary with respect to their peers.  In addition, one might well wonder whether this typology need to have arisen as a distinctive matrix of Greco-Roman religion.  Are these four types of religiosity not applicable to most of the world’s religions and ideologies?  Johnson himself thinks they may be (281-2).  In that case, why frame the typology as one arising from Greco-Roman piety, unless there is a tacit claim of a genetic relationship between Greco-Roman religion and early Christianity?

It must be said that all typologies share this burden.  They are all constructed for the particular aims of the scholar, as J. Z. Smith rightly notes.  Therein lies their explanatory power, and their ultimate limits.  Johnson's goal is really theological and ecumenical.  The entire study is framed as a response to strident exclusivist claims and inter-religious polemic having to do with Christianity.  Johnson's point is that if Christianity could resonate with the piety of the dominant Greco-Roman culture, it can resonate still with other religious traditions without invective.  For this scholarly aim, Johnson's typology is effective overall, and at the book's present length we can be thankful that Johnson did not spend time discussion a great deal more evidence for his typology. 

Luke Johnson has provided a valuable volume for understanding early Christian piety vis-a-vis Greco-Roman religious and philosophical piety, but also for contemporary ecumenical discourse that focuses less on doctrines and beliefs, and far more on practices and religious experience.  Different audiences are bound to find the book variously useful, but the heart of the study represents a great step toward a description of early Christianity as a religion, precisely in its religious context.  Whatever the potential flaws Johnson’s constructed framework, the book sheds light on early Christianity and its ways of being religious.