Edinburgh University Press (2024) h/b 316pp £95 (ISBN 9781399510066)
This is not a general history but a collection of twelve pieces previously published over many years, revised to make a coherent book. Stanley Stowers is a distinguished and prolific American scholar of ancient religion who ranges with ease over classical, Jewish and Christian sources. He is self-consciously revisionist: we are repeatedly told that the ‘standard account’ of this or that is wrong. He envisages a religious koine in the Mediterranean world, playing down stark opposition between Hebrew and Hellene. An aphorism of Wittgenstein—‘A picture held us captive, and we could not get outside it’—sums up the challenge of getting behind centuries of church tradition. There is a sustained effort to justify the study of Christian origins (suitably buttressed by theory) in a secular academic environment, though at times the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. An extended introduction describing fashions in modern scholarship is uncannily similar to the subsequent account of factions in the early church.
S. rightly has no truck with the idea that ‘religion’ is a modern western construct, seeing it rather as a social reality with several sub-kinds. The first section of the book looks at the ‘religion of everyday social exchange’ (in contrast with civic religion and the religion of literate experts). Here the gods are approached as if they were people. Animal sacrifice is seen as part of festive hospitality rather than a means of expiation or a matter for guilt. The warm user-friendliness echoes the works of Jon Mikalson on popular Greek religion, in contrast to the chilly and vindictive gods of grand epic and tragedy, and the demonstration of diversity is in line with the pointed plural of Simon Price’s Religions of the Ancient Greeks. S. has a nice turn of phrase: exchange took place with ‘the famous dead, the beloved dead and the annoying dead’. He evinces some nostalgia for a time before ‘mind goods’ replaced agricultural ones in reciprocity with the divine.
The next two sections focus on Paul as a ‘freelance religious expert’ and the context of his letters. S. favours a late date for Acts (well into the second century) and takes a low view of its historicity, though much more conservative commentators accept that Luke’s picture of the earliest church is tidied up and idealised. Within the narrative, Paul encounters rival religious practitioners who are variously brought on side, exorcised, or dismissed. The outside-the-picture question is how different Paul himself would have seemed: S.’s answer is ‘not very’ (there is some analogy here with debates about whether Socrates would be seen as a Sophist).
Both Acts and the letters imply congregations of believers, sometimes recalcitrant (notably in Corinth): for S. these are largely fictitious, with Paul offering no plans for an ongoing institution. The letter to the Romans with its complex interpretation of scripture is seen as written for ‘those educated and interested in this niche’ rather than a general audience. Paul can certainly get carried away, but the famous passages of high rhetoric, e.g. ‘If God be for us, who can be against us’ in ch.8, are readily accessible (there is some analogy here with debates about Greek tragedy: the impact of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon is not dependent on audience ability to follow every choral lyric at first hearing). A separate piece asking whether Paul’s moral teachings are designed for ordinary mortals does acknowledge provision both for normal human life and for something beyond it. S. sees the Pauline concept of participation in Christ as a means for the baptised to be assimilated to him and for Gentiles to acquire descent from Abraham, but he explores too the idea of being imaginatively ‘caught up’ in a story: as often, the categories of literary criticism and of theology overlap.
The final section, under a heading of ‘critical historiography’, further contests the idea of community in early Christianity and pursues the relation of religion and philosophy that has been present throughout. The Cynics were like Jesus in ‘swinging free of household and city’. Paul knew and used both Platonist and Stoic terms. Matthew in his adaptation of Mark simultaneously increases the Jewishness of Jesus and makes him resemble a Stoic moral teacher and sage, notably in the Sermon on the Mount. A concluding piece considers secrecy in Mark and John, Kafka and Kermode. S. comes clean as an ‘explainer’, impatient with the idea that mystery is central to religion and sympathetic to ‘the struggle of the everyday to resist being swallowed up’ in it.
The standard of copy editing and proofreading is generally high, though there are oddities: ‘Attik’ orators, ‘lightening’ for ‘lightning’. Alphabetical order falters once in the bibliography and once in the index.
John Taylor