Larry Hurtado - Destroyer of the Gods

Hello everyone and welcome tonscript. This is Matt Lynch. I'm a co-host of the podcast along with Matt Bates, Drew Johnson, Aaron Heim, Chris Tilling and Amy Brown Hughes. And I want to say welcome and also a special word of appreciation for all of you who said hello to us at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. It's always great to connect with people that we've known for a while, but also people who have listened to embedded from the podcast and just stop by to say hello. So we appreciate you reaching out to us at SBL, the SBL meeting. This episode is a little bit different today. We're re-releasing an older episode that Matt Bates did in 2016 with Professor Larry Hurtado, who some of you will know he just passed away this last week. And we thought it'd be appropriate to release this interview that Matt did with him about his book Destroyer of the Gods. It's a fascinating book and one that I've gone back to several times since reading it. Hurtado was a legend in the field of New Testament studies. He published widely, probably his most significant book is Lord Jesus Christ devotion to Jesus in early Christianity. And in addition to publishing widely, he published in the lives of many students and was very devoted to his students and had a big impact in that realm too. He started his career at Regent College in Vancouver and went to the University of Manitoba and then spent the rest of his career at the University of Edinburgh where he eventually became a professor emeritus where he was still very active until he passed away. So he will be missed greatly by many of us who have benefited from his work and I'm sure from people who knew him more personally. So we hope you enjoy this episode as a way of remembering Larry Hurtado and his work. And if you haven't discovered him before, have a look at some of his other books as well. His work is just really fantastic. So enjoy the episode and thanks for listening. In the second century AD, an elderly Christian bishop named Pauli Carp who was hiding in a local home was arrested for being a Christian. He was taken to the stadium where the Pro-Cancel sought to persuade him to deny Christ, saying "Swear by the genius of Caesar and respect your old age." The Pro-Consul pleaded with Pauli Carp to change his mind about Christ and to exclaim "Away with the atheists." With his "Away with the atheists" it might surprise us to learn that the Pro-Consul was referring to Christians, that he considered Christians atheists. Where did such an idea come from? In what other ways were early Christian beliefs perceived differently in their ancient contexts in comparison with their modern? And how has all this shaped our contemporary views of "religion." Larry Hurtado was with us today to help us think through such matters. We'll be discussing his exciting new book, "Destroyer of the Gods." As for Pauli Carp, he did not deny Christ, but remained faithful. He turned to the pagans who had crowded into the stadium, pointed at them and shouted "Away with the atheists" before dying as a martyr. Larry, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Where are you speaking with us from today? From my office in the University of Edinburgh. Well, thanks so much for joining us. We're really excited to have you as a guest. Now, Larry, we've corresponded professionally a couple times and I've heard you speak before, but I've never met you personally, so I think we need to get to know you question. So here's a question that hopefully at least will give us a window into your life a little bit. And here's my question. What's a typical day look like in the life of Larry Hurtado? Well, now that I'm emeritus retired, it's very different than it was. I don't have any regular teaching responsibilities or marking responsibilities or committee or administration or as I refer to it, administrative responsibilities. Pretty much most days from nine to five, I'm simply working on research questions that I'm interested in responding to requests for writing and publication and producing things. I've still got about two or three PhD students whom I'm finishing up with. And so periodically, I meet with them and discuss their work or read some of their work. I'm reading manuscripts for publishers and making comments on it. Or grant applications occasionally, that sort of thing, but it's pretty much just devoted to my subject. Because I say to people, I retired from my job, but not from my subject. Yeah, that sounds pretty ideal, especially those of us who are still caught up in the administrative red tape of daily life in the university. I reckon retirement very much. Yes, well, you know, if you can move me along there to that process somehow, you know, that would be great. Now I finished your book, Larry, "Distroir of the Gods" a week or two ago. Really enjoyed it. It's a really nice contribution. Congratulations on that. And in fact, one of my colleagues immediately was requesting my copy that I had received. And he'd already heard about the book and was excited to get it too. And he'd snatched away my hardcover that I had received. So anyway, it's a nice book and I'm grateful for it. So I wanted to hear a little bit more from you about how you first conceptualized this project or your book projects in general. What led you to this particular topic? How do you go about your process? Well, in most cases, it's a kind of combination of formulating questions and considering questions that I think are intriguing. In a number of cases, they aren't new questions necessarily, but it's a combination of saying that's an interesting question and looking at what's been said about it and saying to myself, in some cases, I'm not satisfied at the adequacy of the answers that have been given or the persuasiveness of some of the answers that have been given. So I'm going to have a go out at myself. In this particular case, I was a bit of both. I formulated to view some years back actually. In this book, I've been planning since I retired in 2011. It's only in the last couple of years that I've had the time to get to it. But back then, even just before my retirement, I had come to the view that with great appreciation for the many studies that are coming out and have come out over the last few decades, emphasizing how very much early Christianity was a part of its Roman world and has to be understood in that setting and in historical terms, with which I totally agree. But I felt that there wasn't as much attention being given to ways in which early Christianity was dissonant, and so there was perhaps unintentionally on the part of scholars, a bit of a distorted image coming over. Along with that, I think there was in my mind, the popular notion, which scholars have in some cases even promoted. But certainly, the widely popular notion that what we call religion is a fixed category, pretty much a kind of obvious intuitive category of human life. And it's pretty much the same throughout all cultures, all religious people, pretty much have very similar views with minor variations, but their variations are an important and so on. And I think as a student of religion across various cultures and down through centuries, I know that to be dead wrong, that the category that we use religion is a basket in which we throw a whole lot of often in commensurate things. And the differences among religions are sometimes more important actually than what they have in common. It seems to me more historically significant. So that also motivated me to say, judging as I did that early Christianity had some distinctive features that were worth noting, I thought, I want to write about that. When I got started going in the book, as I got into it, I started noticing that the features that I kind of identified and wanted to discuss, one by one, as I considered them, I thought, you know what? It's interesting. Each of these has now become for us a kind of cultural commonplace. That is, it fits into the generalizations that we often make about religion. But actually, these commonplaces, these generalizations don't just drop from the atmosphere. They clearly come from this early period of Christianity. So those are my two points, one a historical point and one that I spent a bit less time on, to try to do try to underscore a bit, is that early Christianity had several distinct features and these distinct features have become for us kind of unexamined cultural commonplaces. Yeah, I have a couple follow up questions on that. But first, I guess, do you think that these commonplaces about how we're understanding religion and whatnot? Are they, what is it that's reinforcing them as ongoing cultural artifacts in our society? What is it that keeps these ideas in place and sort of masks us from seeing the way that they're culturally conditioned or structured? Gosh, that would require probably a much more sophisticated modern historian than I, but I'll throw a few guesses on things. I think it's natural for people who are immersed in a given culture to presume that their culture is the natural thing that what their culture presents to them as beliefs or as truths or values are just intuitively true. They don't need to be examined. So it's not so much an era on our part to think that about these things. They come to us through our cultural heritage, particularly the European and European influence cultural heritage. in places like North America and elsewhere. It's part of our heritage, and I think we're less inclined to examine things from our heritage or say to ourselves where the heck do these things come from. And they are widely shared by people who don't necessarily, for example, a lot of the common places that I talk about are such as a point out, you know, in our setting, even modern day atheists presume that there's only one God to deny. So the notion of a kind of implicit monotheism that you either line yourself up with or dissent from, but everybody sort of presumes, we're talking about one God, right? And there either is the God or there isn't. But that's a bizarre notion in the history of the world, and in most of the world today, it's still a very bizarre notion. But for us, it seems like just everybody thinks that? And the answer, definitely not. So I think it's both the long-term longevity of some of these things persisting across many generations that have caused us to, you know, familiarity, brief contempt. We no longer pay attention to where they come from. And the fact that, as I say, these particular common places are widely shared across people who otherwise differ from one another. One of the things you at least touched on the book, but you didn't develop very much, because the degree to which religious studies departments, just by their very existence and the way they do comparative religion, might be an agent that sort of, you know, continues this cultural assumption about, yeah, go ahead and speak to that, sure. Well, I think that's true. And I don't think anybody sets out necessarily to do that as such. It's purely a corollary, a kind of unintended consequence in some way, of the way in which universities are organized, you know, as everybody knows, in academia, the organization of departments and departmental groups and so on, is a somewhat artificial enterprise. And so, you know, when I was at the University of Manitoba in the Department of Religion, sometimes people would say, why do we have a department of religion? Why don't we just put some of you in sociology and some of you in psychology and some of you in philosophy? Because, you know, sociology talk about religion, psychology talks about religion, say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you don't do it in the way in which we do it. You know, we focus on it for you. It's kind of background noise for us. It's the focus of attention. So that's one difference. But yeah, we, but in the process then, when you put all of the people who study the various religions into one department, it can give the implicit message that not only these religions, but all the things that we call religions are basically just variations like, you know, different colored suits or different flavors of ice cream. And I don't know that we intend necessarily say that, although some of our colleagues may want to hold that view. But I would simply say I think that's a fallacy. Now, I want to circle back actually to the first question that I asked you about, you know, how you first conceptualize your project. And you mainly spoke to that in terms of, you know, the scholarly factors. And how about more specifically with this project, with the story of the gods, were there any personal factors beyond just scholarly ones that drew you to the subject? Well, I take scholarship personally. So, I mean, not to be coy, but I mean, no, I really do mean it that for me, as I think it's true with people generally who are involved in a given academic subject. I take it very personally. That is, I'm very interested in it. I'm very keen on it. Very passionate about it. And I think for me, it's, I have a high personal investment in simply trying to understand the period that I focused in, or earliest Christianity. I'm guilty of being a Christian myself. But for me, the study of early Christianity isn't so much done to kind of reinforce my own beliefs, but just simply to inquire about my religious ancestors. And as is the true with, you know, if you study your ancestors of any kind, you have to be prepared for finding that some of them were outlawed, some of them were bad guys, some of them you wouldn't want to be associated with. Some of them may have been admirable. And a great many of them were probably mixtures of both. And I think the same thing is true. You have to be prepared, you know, for me as a Christian, I think I have to be prepared to encounter the same kind of ambiguity when it comes to the study of early Christianity. But it doesn't matter. I don't, I don't feel any need to try to make early Christians all heroes are good guys. Some of them were pretty bad guys. And some of them were, many of them, I'm sure, were much more ambiguous. The way we probably are in our values, but it's just, I guess a kind of, you know, I find almost anything about the origins of Christianity fascinating because it seems to me that it is a quite remarkable historical phenomenon, just considered in those terms, apart from whether you were sent to its beliefs or not, it's really quite a remarkable and of course highly influential historical phenomenon. So that, that passion is enough really in some respects, whatever, whatever my findings, I'm driven by that kind of fashion. Yeah, I appreciate that as I knew you were a Christian, but also you've chosen in your work very deliberately to work as a historian more than a theologian it would seem across your publishing career. And I think that helps, helps explain a little bit about why to me, which, you know, is a perfectly acceptable choice. Other people make other choices, but I think that both, both the process are probably needed and they complement one another. I agree. Yeah. So one of the things that I guess that's looms large in terms of the topic of your book is topics of diversity with an early Christianity. And, and, you know, I would say that we're in the midst of a tidal wave of interest in diversity and early Christianity. As I think we're all hopefully more aware today that the gospel of John is not the same as, you know, the letter to the Romans is not the same as, you know, the gospel of Thomas, the different theology, different kind of social world out of which they emerge. But in the midst of that tendency to maybe devalorize diversity, it seems that there's some risk of perhaps scholarship overplaying its hand. Are there some places where you think it's most keenly overplaying its hand and are there some points of unity that you think that we should, that we should also champion. Yeah, I mean, in one sense you could say it's kind of ironic if you entertain the criticism that I gave earlier of the field of early Christian studies by saying that that in some respects, it may underplay the ways in which early Christianity was distinctive in the larger environment of the Roman world. Ironically, one could say perhaps almost the reverse is the case for at least some scholarship on early Christianity that there is there is a tendency to play up the diversity in early Christianity and perhaps ignore or not do justice to ways in which early Christianity in its diversity without denying that diversity. Also had certain overlapping and shared things at least versions of early Christianity, you know, at least we can talk about clusters of early Christian diversity. I mean, for example, the emerging New Testament writings, which grow from sometime perhaps about 180 on down through into the late fourth century before you have something like a kind of list of our 27 present New Testament writings. But as the New Testament grows across that period and writings come to form part of an emerging body of writings that are treated quasi as scripture. There's diversity in those writings, as you see the gospel of John, the so-called synoptic gospels differ, the synoptic gospels have different infacies from one from another as specialist in Matthew or specialist in Mark or Luke would want to emphasize Paul and James. Good heavens. How do you put those two things together in the same collection? But it's interesting. The early Christians do. And the only thing I can say is that the New Testament, the emerging New Testament, bears witness to both the diversity of early Christianity and the readiness of at least significant clusters of that diversity to find common cause to see in one another sufficient family resemblance to strike up a relationship, so to speak. And the New Testament in some sense bears witness to that. It's a collection that represents a significant ecumenical, so to speak, diversity in early Christianity and that ecumenical attitude is there. Now you also have versions of Christianity that are quite sectarian. And of course that's the original meaning of the word heresy is a sect or a group that says, you know, our way or the highway. And there are versions of early Christianity that take that view that refuse to recognize any diversity, anything other than itself, some of the sort of elitist and so-called gnostic versions of Christianity seem to me to be examples of this. But the emerging, what seems to be in numerical terms, the emerging mainstream of Christian groups by the late second century certainly seems to me to be that body of that cluster of different Christian groups. And so that is that are represented broadly in the New Testament writings. They find common cause. I mean, they all, for example, a few things that I've identified in an earlier book that comprised what what other people with other people I refer to as proto-orthodoxy or formative orthodoxy. And that is, you know, that they all, for example, treat what Christians came to call the Old Testament as scripture, unlike say Marcy andites and other versions, some of the versions that reject the God of the Old Testament and reject the Old Testament. And so that is really Christians of in the main, the emerging mainstream, affirm the Old Testament as scripture, affirm the God of Genesis, the Creator God as the true and high God, not an inferior God. They value tradition. They are suspicious in some sense of innovation a bit and value tradition, beliefs and things that have been held for some time. There's an emerging appreciation of tradition in them. So there are certain things that hold them together. They insist also, for example, upon both the high kind of divine status of Jesus as worthy of worship and praise. But equally, I think in the diversity we have in the New Testament writings insist upon the reality of him being a human being, a mortal who could die and who could be killed, just like any other human. So there are certain things that it seems to me form a kind of overlapping center of some sort, like a Venn diagram with different versions of Christianity each having its distinctives, but clusters of them that have a sufficient overlap that they can make common cause of one another. I like that phrase you used in particular talking about the New Testament as a document that will as it emerged, finally, as having ecumenical diversity. And that's a nice turn, I think, and a good way of putting it. So in your first chapter, you explore how early Christians were perceived by non-Christians, so you're kind of focusing on the non-Christian response. You speak about Jewish responses on the one hand, but then you turn to pagan responses, including Tacitus, Plenty, Galen, Lucien of San Missada, and then Orgents, Contra, Kelsum, and other things like that. I was wondering if you could walk us through a couple of your favorite examples, especially maybe on the pagan responses. I think the Jewish responses are maybe a little more well-known. Are there a couple that stick out in your mind as being particularly interesting, maybe Plenty or Lucien or whatever it might be? It's hard to choose there on. There was a very interesting, I mean, I think in his historical terms, and from one standpoint, I find Plenty, Plenty of the Youngers exchange with Trajan, his letters back and forth with Trajan, concerning the Christians who have been denounced to him in his role as Roman magistrate governor in Bethinia and Pontus, parts of modern Turkey. I find this exchange very interesting because it's to my knowledge. The earliest report that we have of a Roman official, somebody in an official capacity, both commenting on Christianity and indicating how he responded to them. And Plenty's letter exchange with Trajan takes us back to early, second centuries, sometime between 113, 1415, and so it's interesting what he says. He says that he doesn't know of any, there's nothing in the policy and procedures manual to tell him what to do about Christians, and yet he knows that he needs to do something about them. That tells us something, even though there hasn't been any kind of legislation or formal policy document that's been issued to governors, he believes he knows that he must do something about this. And the action that he takes is interesting. He says, "I demanded that these people conform religiously, that they reverence the image of the gods, that they swear by the genius of the emperor, and interestingly, and that they curse Christ, so they not only have to affirm the Roman gods, they have to curse Christ." It's very interesting. And he says, "And if they refuse to do this, I executed them." Unless they were Roman citizens, in which case he said, "I then bound them over and sent them to Rome for you to deal with them, O'amperer." Now, you think to yourself, "Wait a minute, this is very interesting. This guy says, "I haven't been present at previous trials. I can't really find any direction on what to do on the matter, but I've kind of winged it, and here's what I've done." It's pretty damn decisive action that he's taken, a pretty confident bold action when you're putting people to death. So it's a remarkable early statement of how Roman, at least that Roman magistrate, with a consent and approval, interestingly, from the emperor subsequently, how that particular Roman magistrate, at least, is dealing with Christianity. And what he says is very interesting, because he says he may be exaggerating. We don't know. But he says that this odious Christian message has not only gone into the cities, but has even penetrated out into the small villages, that it's spreading like a social disease. He says, "But my very firm action, I'm quite sure, will rescue the situation. The now vacant temples will be frequented again, and those who produce livestock and sacrificial offerings for them will, again, have their living restored." So he appears to say, unless he's exaggerating, he appears to say that the spread of Christianity has had very profound, not only religious impact, but very profound economic impact. So I find that a very interesting report, a lot is packed into that letter. The other one, of course, that I guess I would pick out is the classic critique of Christianity, the full-scale critique that survives, attributed to the Roman orator and writer Kelsus, written in the late second century. And there, because that one, he says, and it's quite clear that he did, that one rests upon a lot of research about Christianity, including reading early Christian texts. I mean, he's able to point out, for example, apparent contradictions among the accounts and the gospels. So he's actually gone through doing a good deal of reading and research, of Christian texts for the purpose of mounting this critique. And of course, it just drips with ridicule. So it's a wonderful reflection of how sophisticated, Roman sophisticated of the time, fairly widely, thought of Christianity. As I point out in the book, one of the things that's interesting is that Kelsus portrays Christianity as a religion of women and children and slaves and ignoramuses. And he says, they would never dare to talk to anybody who has a head on his shoulders in any education. They scurry away like, like, vermin and so on. And one of the things I point out is, well, if that were really the case, if the only people Christianity was converting was the insignificant people who had no power, no influence, no significance, whatsoever, he wouldn't have invested so much effort in trying to refute it. The fact that he's invested so much effort, the fact that he's written his full skill critique suggests to me that in fact, early Christianity is beginning to recruit in his eyes the wrong kind of people. And I mean by that, not the vermin that he talks about, but people probably up in more influential circles of society, people in higher echelons of Roman society. And it's that that's got him worried because that's when a religion becomes dangerous down through history is when it starts moving up the social ladder and starts converting people who are supposed to represent the establishment. And instead, they start taking on some radical new option. >> Yeah, I think your observations there that Christianity was something that just penetrated the upper class too. It seems like it compliments some other results that used to be assumed. That all of the Christians were all lower class, but I think a Wayne Meeks is first serving Christians or other books like that that have said no, it seems like Christianity emerged in a way that permeated all the social classes probably from the beginning, or at least perhaps. It's hard to know as our historical records are so spotty. >> Yes. Yeah, the Meeks and of course Edwin Judge and Mel Herby and people from the 70s who did some real pioneering work on social description of really Christianity all drew upon kind of precipographical analysis of the people who were mentioned and what is said about them in particularly Paul's letters. And there you do have evidence, yes, of people who seem to be small business people, traders, merchants doing translocal mercantile transactions. So not simply slaves, not simply ignoramuses or uneducated people, but people who are in Meeks's term, he referred, I think, to them as in my own language, a sort of upwardly socially aspiring people, people who had acquired some money, some property, and who were interested in acquiring status. It does seem as though certainly in socioeconomic terms that they included that. And more recently, some of the people I point out in the book, recently scholars have argued that although those were probably the majority of the kinds of Christians that are lower and those kind of socially aspiring classes, that there were also, it appears, people even in higher classes by the end of the second century, we have good indications I think that there are people in the equestrian classes, the sort of the knights of the Roman era, and perhaps even the occasional person in the senatorial class who is beginning to dabble in Christianity. And as I say, I think it's that kind of development that probably causes Kelsus to pull out all the stops in an attempt to put a stop to this thing. Well, your second chapter is a new kind of faith, and you've framed a chapter by a discussion of the category of religion. And it seems like you're dancing carefully around definitions of religion and wanting to tread lightly there. What are some of the factors that make the category of "religion" and potentially misleading for modern Westerners as the approach to Christian origins? Well, as, and here I want to tip my hat to a very interesting book that by Brent Nongbri, which I cite in the book, and what Nongbri has such shown in other people as well, I think, prior to him, is that the term "religion" as we use it tends to mean a sort of discrete sphere of life. I mean, we talk about economics, politics, religion, music, whatever. As if these are all separate pastimes, quite distinguishable spheres of life. Religion is something you do in church or synagogue or mosque or in your private devotional practice, politics is something you do then out in the public or whatever, and we think of them as not being tightly connected at all. In the Roman world and in really ancient societies, and indeed probably in in very traditional societies to this day, the gods, so to speak, or what we would call religion, is all inseparable from the fabric of life, from what we call politics or family or society or whatever. It's all woven together. There is no separate notion of a separate sphere of life called religion in the Roman world. So it's basically that that I'm trying to say, if we go looking for religion as something that you can isolate, it's hard to find it in the Roman world. Everything is religious, you could say, and there is really no secular space. All family activities, social occasions, politics, all rest upon, all invoke the gods and involve either quite explicit or strongly implicit reference to them. And so that's the first thing we have to adjust ourselves to is to look at religion playing a very different role than it does, particularly in Western, more secular societies. I want to kind of jump to a slightly different topic here, and this is something I guess that I've been pondering a lot myself, and you've obviously written a lot on in the past, but I wanted to have you weigh in a little bit on where you're at on this topic currently. And that has to do with the way in which the Jesus movement is a novel mutation within ancient Jewish tradition, in the sense that we begin to see early Christian, early Christians who are firmly convinced that there is only one god, nevertheless worshiping Jesus. Now, Bachum and many others who follow Richard Bachum feel comfortable speaking of Jesus as, quote unquote, "within the divine identity" in discussing this matter. And I wonder, and I may be detecting you wrong here, but maybe I'm detecting you correctly, that you seem a little bit reluctant to use this language. I myself have some reluctance, and I was curious to hear if you would develop on that little bit. Yeah, I've written an essay recently in a volume of essays honoring Richard Bachum called "In the Fulness of Time", which has appeared, and I'm one of the contributors, and in it I take occasion to write what I intend is a very appreciative essay acknowledging Bachum's influence and importance, and in particular also influence of some of his early work in shaping the research project that I commenced back in the late 70s, early 80s, on the emergence of devotion to Jesus. And I'm still very, very much appreciative of that. One of the things that I engage in at is his more recent talk about Jesus being included within the divine identity. I think I understand what he means by that most of the time at least, and we have had some email exchanges in which I've tried to make sure, am I really understanding you, Richard? And by and large, I've got some information from him saying, "Yes, yes", and all that to say, as I understand him, his emphasis on divine identity is not what he calls an "untick" category. That is, he's not talking about particularly Jesus being included within the divine essence or being or whatever, to use the later terms of Nicaea. But instead, he says God's identity is primarily God is the creator of all things, and the ruler and judge of all things. That's primarily the way in which the God of the Bible, the Old Testament is really known. Okay, and then he says, "Now notice, in the New Testament, Jesus is programmatically included within both of those functions. He is the agent through whom God has made all things." Not as John says, gospel to John, not one thing that was made was made without him. So he's just as universal, so to speak, in his role as God is, and folded within that divine function of creation. And Richard says, "I likewise look, you know, the New Testament proclaims that future salvation and the kind of final judgment and so on, that it portrays Jesus will again be the one who executes this. He will be the agent through whom God does this." So he's again sort of included within this function or role, distinguishing role of God as judge and redeemer and so on and of all. So he says, "We can include, you know, if that comprises the divine identity, Jesus is included within it. I don't have any problem with it as long as it's defined that way. That's what you mean. It's not always clear to me that that's what some people mean when they use the expression. And occasionally I have to say it's not always clear to me that that's what Richard means. I mean, we just had some recent exchanges on my blog site where he's used expression, "Can't we really say that Jesus is really and truly God?" And I sort of pull back at that. That it seems to me if you take it at its face value is with respect to Richard overly simplified. Because the New Testament certainly and the early Christian writings don't certainly in the first century writings in particular, they're very rare to find Jesus being called God or using, you know, Thales type language. Of course, he is included within the discourse about God. As I point out in a little book I did in 2010, if you look at the way in which God has talked about or discourse about God in the New Testament, it seems to me that Jesus is constitutive. You cannot talk about God adequately without including him in the discourse. And likewise, you cannot worship God adequately without including him in programmatically within the pattern of worship practice. So he's constitutive of early Christian worship and constitutive of early Christian discourse about God. To say Jesus is God as such is it seems to me implicitly to bring in what philosophers, I guess, would call ontological categories of being and essence and so on, which it seems to me only emerge somewhat later. Now that's not to say that that that's an illegitimate move in terms of looking at where Christianity and its thought went or ought to go. That's a theological judgment. But I think it's running the risk of oversimplifying and potentially anachronistic to apply that language too freely to the New Testament writing. Yeah, I do wonder a little bit as I think about Bachum's project. If one can sever the functional and the ontological is neatly or tidally as he does, he's sort of a search one can. I do wonder if that needs to be probed more. And certainly as he sees, I guess God's divine identity or however you want to discuss this as narratively constructed as you mentioned the idea of ruler and judge and so on and so forth, a creator. Yeah, I do wonder also if we run into obstacles around language of agency. If agency is a precise enough tool to probe that to the degree we need to. Anyway, I'm turning my own mind around these topics a fair bit myself lately, so I appreciate you offering your thoughts. Jumping over to something a little bit different here then. In your third chapter, you talk about different kinds of Christian constructions of identity. You discuss the imperial cult and a variety of other things. One of the things that grabbed my attention was your discussion about religious liberty. This was sort of the end of the chapter. And you mentioned that Tertullian actually was the first person really to introduce this idea, that idea that somehow or another we should have religious freedom. I'm going to read the extract from Tertullian just for the sake of the audience and for you to remind you of the quote here. And then I have a question that's a follow-up on the basis of that. But here's from your page 103 then. According to Tertullian, "It is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that everyone should worship according to one's own convictions. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion. A Christian is enemy to none, least of all to the emperor of Rome, who he knows to be appointed by God and so cannot but love and honor, and whose well-being more over the Christian must desire, with that of the empire over which he reigns." So here's my question. Regarding early Christian ideas of religious liberty, is there a lesson here that you think for the world? What is it that, I guess, as we kind of come to our contemporary situation and religious liberty is prized here, and we're in a tense political season, both in terms of over the pond, with Brexit and whatnot over here, with Trump and Clinton being so widely disliked? Is there something that we should take away from this, I guess, for our contemporary scene? Any thoughts on that? Yeah, I think that in living as we are in professionally pluralized, so societies in which there is no official religion that compels people to a cent to it. There is instead religious liberty, modern democracy such as the United States, Canada, Britain and others. Living in society as we are like this, I would say I think that that early Christianity, Pritalian, other writings, I think give Christians in particular their own resources and basis for affirming these kinds of societies. I mean there's a sense in which I sometimes get the impression that some Christians recoil against the pluralization of society and recoil against the diminution of Christianity as the official or quasi official religion. In Britain, of course, in England, the Church of England remains constitutionally sort of the official religion of England, although of course it the government and the current operation makes room for plurality of religious options. In the United States, you don't have an official religion, full religious liberty supposed to be guaranteed. There are however, very often strident Christian voices who say, "Yeah, but this is a Christian nation, damn it." So my George, they've taken the nativity scene off the county square. This is an outrage or students aren't praying the Lord's prayer in school anymore. Oh, we're all going to hell. And it seems to me that that's a totally misguided response. First of all, it's totally historically cock-eyed because Jefferson and the founding father set up the United States, and I say this as somebody who still has his American passport, so I have the right to say so. Jefferson and the founding father set up the United States to be a society in which there was no official religion and in which people had freedom of conscience and freedom of religious diversity. The second thing to say is that it's totally misguided from a Christian standpoint to try to seek some sort of hegemony, religious hegemony. Instead, Christians, it seems to me ought to be based on their early stage of writers such as New Testament, or telling, ought to be at the forefront of people who are arguing for full religious liberty, full freedom of conscience, and religious diversity. What Tertelian means when he says that this is natural and that Christianity cannot be compelled, of course, is it seems to me that he's alluding to the well-known emphasis from the New Testament onward that in Christian terms, the only way you can be related to God, you know, salvifically and meaningfully, is through the act of faith, which God may prompt, but which it is up to the individual to respond to and to exercise. And for there to be faith that is an uncompelled, freely offered faith that is responding to nothing but God's prompting requires a public space and a social space in which there is absolutely as little religious compulsion, one way or the other, as possible. Because insofar as a scent to Christian faith is compelled, it is inauthentic faith. It is inauthentic ascent. And in the theological interest of securing a space in which authentic Christian faith can be expressed, it I think perforce requires a situation in which there is maximum religious liberty. Yeah, it seems like that instead of compulsion, we need to have persuasion. And that's absolutely, yes. I think that as in the political arena, we have, you know, the political parties contend with one another, but no one party has, you know, the de Jure right to rule over the others. I mean, if a political party wins the election, it has the right to serve and to lead the country or the city or whatever for that term of office until the next election. But there's no, you know, you aren't, it'll present and take for life, you know, you have to seek the consent of the govern. And so political parties contend with each other, they disagree and so on. And it seems to me that when I say religious diversity, I want to allow for the opportunity for religions to contend with each other as well. There are those voices who would want to say, you know, oh, no, we don't want to have a religious conversion. Well, I want to have an opportunity when people can convert and can change their mind. And that means converting in almost any direction. Yes, it does mean a situation in which a person who is once a Christian or brought up a Christian may choose to become a Buddhist or whatever. I would want to, maybe as a Christian, I'd want to reason with them about that choice, but I want to ensure that they have that choice. They have that opportunity. Larry, time is flying by here and I don't want to keep you too long. So I want to, I'm in a lump. Actually, I was going to ask you separate questions about chapters four and five, but I think I'm in a lump. I'm here. And just give you the freedom to talk about whatever you would wish to talk about with regard to that. Well, chapter four had to do with the degree to which religion is bookish, or excuse me, that the Christian tradition was uniquely bookish. And then the fifth chapter really with Christian ethics, a new way to live. And is there anything in particular that you like to share? I enjoyed your material on Christianity's bookishness a lot. Is there anything that you find that you particularly enjoy sharing with others about the oddities of Christianity's bookishness? Well, let me give an illustration. One of the things I think I mentioned in the book is there's a recent study, for example, of a cult known as the Jupiter-Dolacanos cult, which was a very successful, rapidly spreading new cult that appeared roughly contemporary with early Christianity. And in the first two or three centuries, it's spread quite widely. And you can trace it and you can see it's success. You can study the kind of people who were part of it and so on because there are shrines that are built wherever the Dolacanos cult spread, there are physical shrines that are built. And so archaeologists have discovered them and can analyze them. And from the donation inscriptions, that is, they often have inscriptions where they'll say that the following shrine was paid for by so and so and so and so and so and so and so. And so you can tell who they were, their names, and something often of their social rank. So it becomes clear, for example, that the cult of Jupiter-Dolacanos was a very popular cult. It appears among the officer corps of the Roman army. But the interesting thing is we do not have a single text from them. I mean, other than these donation inscriptions, not a single text, exactly what they believed, exactly what their rituals were, exactly what kind of lifestyle they promoted, only God knows. We have no notion. In the case of early Christianity, in the same period in the first two or three centuries, we have virtually no physical, in the ordinary sense of the word, no physical archaeological remains. I mean, by that shrines or temples or altars or images, none of that. Instead, however, we have this phenomenally huge body of texts that are produced by Christians in this period for such a small group. As I mentioned in the book, by one count, one catalog of early Christian texts that I consulted and trolled through, by about 250 AD, we have well over 200 Christian writings that we know about. And there probably were many more that we don't know about at all. I don't know of anything comparable. Christians were producing texts maniacally in comparison to practically any other group in antiquity. And the same kind of comparison can be made with myth-raism or with ISIS worship or with any of the traditional gods. The so-called mystery cults are partly called mystery because we don't know bloody much about what they did. We don't know much about them. And the reason is because they didn't write text. We know far more about early Christianity. It's beliefs, ethos, its practices, and so on. Far more about early Christianity, I would say, than any other religious movement in the Roman world. And that's just phenomenally, and it's basically because early Christianity was so given to composing, copying, and distributing texts. The other thing early Christian behavior, the point that, I guess, the major point I would want to make there is that there are observable similarities between some of the values that early Christians promote. The notion, for example, that a husband should be chased to his wife, just as a wife is expected to be chased to her husband. That's a sort of view that someone like, say, Musonius Rufus held as well, a stoic philosopher of the time. So it isn't as though the ideas, the behavioral ideas or teachings of Christianity, are all categorically new. There is a certain amount of overlap, particularly with the kind of stoic tradition of the time. But the crucial difference it seems to me in historical terms is this. The stoic philosophers of the time gathered about them little circles of disciples and put them through the demanding and prolonged training necessary to learn how to think like a stoic, because thinking like a stoic, let's face it, is not an intuitive way of living or thinking. You have to really rewire your brain to operate like a stoic and practice these kinds of values. But there's no indication that they intended or had much of a large scale effect upon changing the values of people at large. Early Christianity, however, is from the beginning an aggressively propagandizing evangelistic, depending on the term you want to use, movement that is proclaiming its values and its message through the masses out into the streets. And from the point of baptism onward is expecting these kinds of behavioral norms to be observed by their followers. However, successfully they did or didn't, that's the aim and the interest. So considered as a social project, I think there's no comparison between early Christianity and the cynic-storic philosophers. And the other, by the way, the other sidelight is one of the things I was very intrigued to find in the course of doing the research for that, is the studies by my Canadian colleague, John Martens, who has identified in one particular area, for example, a "peteresty," which is widely practiced in the Roman world. And what John has shown is how in early Christian texts it appears that you have Christians inventing a new kind of terminology by which to refer to "peteresty," which terminology that is intended to convey there utter disapproval of it. So instead of the word, for example, "peterestace," that is literally a child lover or boy lover in the sexual sense of the word, Christians referred to the person doing this as a pedophoros, a child corrector, or a child destroyer. And they use a verb form of that to describe instead of "peteristoe," to child lover, boy love, they refer to it as "child corruption." So interesting how they don't just condemn it, they actually invent a new vocabulary to express their condemnation of it. Really quite interesting art, you might say linguistic artifacts of early Christianity. Thanks for sharing that. And I think, kind of, as a follow-up to that, if we today then find, you know, different certain practices that we just assume are abhorrent, like "Peteresty" and like "The Exposure of Infants," I think that one of the things your book does show is the large degree to which our culture has inherited this from the Christian tradition. All right, taking you on to, I have to make sure I get this in somewhere as this is a question that we're asking all of our on-script guests. And so it's sort of our big idea question that I wanted to make sure we got to. And here it is. So are you ready for this? Okay. All right, so what's one idea in new testament studies that needs to die? One idea that needs to die? Oh goodness. Gosh, I'll have to say that's a creative question. I suppose that I would come back to one of the things that I mentioned earlier. And that would be, I don't know that it's a widely held idea, but I think it is sufficiently widely held to identify it. And that is the notion that early Christianity is this kind of radically diverse set of, you know, one scholar, I think for example, is described as a bunch of independent experiments that developed. And then gradually found, found themselves forming a thing they came to call Christianity. I just don't think that there's any analogy for that in the history of world religions. And it certainly doesn't match up to what goes on in early Christianity. I think instead, early Christianity is certainly has a certain amount of diversity, but also there is a kind of historical rooted to it. And that rooted includes, I think, the emphasis and the impact of the ministry of Jesus as well as subsequent powerful religious experiences. Yeah. Well, it's hard to think of a version, for instance, of early Christianity where the crosses at Central. I mean, some people have argued that we might have, you know, two documents or things where it wasn't or, but those are hypothetical documents, right? We don't really know of any. So there does seem to be something common there and that I think you're right that sort of wild ideas of diversity. We need to recover an appropriate diversity, right? But wild ideas about diversity, maybe need to be curbed. Well, I think that I don't, I think what you mean, what I would certainly want to emphasize is by the only curb I would put on scholarly development is that is the curb of the data. I keep thinking, you know, we need to come back to the data. And data is not, and that includes not only the direct data of the texts and the evidence of early Christianity, but also I think we're free to employ for corroboration purposes or for heuristic purposes analogous phenomena in other cultures and other settings and other new religious movements. But putting all that together, I think the only curb I would put is that is that speculations or proposals should be answerable to the relevant data and speculation that that can't that seems to engage in it just for its own sake and doesn't seem to stand up to the data test. It seems to me, it can quite deservedly be scotched. Larry, in this book, you've articulated and very cogently, I think, the degree to which are contemporary views of religion, you know, are indebted to Christianity. And all of this is undoubtedly useful for the world. And I think that a large part of your audience is certainly intended to go beyond practicing Christians. But I do wonder if you have a specific word for practicing Christians. And they'll certainly form a large part of your audience. Is there any event speaks uniquely, do you think, or that you would hope speaks uniquely to practicing Christians maybe for apologetics or ethics or preaching from your book? Well, not directly maybe, but I guess I would want for Christians to read the book, modern Christians, particularly sort of, you know, people who aren't specialists in early Christianity, just kind of white or public to read the book. And I guess the overall thing I would want to say is, I think the book and the phenomena that it talks about are worth your time because it will introduce you to the roots of the faith that you may not know. It will, as you say, it's like finding out on a more grand scale where your people come from or your family comes from or what gives you your particular kind of identity. And I think that the other thing I would say is that as we move into a more and more post-christendom world in which Christianity is once again one competing option among others, I think it's the documents and the people and the developments of the first two or three centuries that are actually the most important. There are actually the most valuable resources for learning how to live by your wits again as Christians in a world where you don't exercise thegemony, but you have to live by your ability to commend your faith to the consciences of people. Larry, that's a passionate and I think very fitting final reflection for us. So I want to thank you so much for the conversation. I really enjoyed it. I was really emotional. And obviously I want to thank our listeners too for helping to make the show a success. This is Matthew Bates for OnScript. Our guest today has been Larry Hurtado. We've been discussing his new book, "Destroyer of the Gods", published by Baylor University Press. Our website has more information about the book and a link for purchasing. We definitely recommend it. Thanks everyone.