The Market of the Gods

Paganism as Both Source and Receiver of Monotheism

As my research progressed, I understood that we cannot really talk about Christians in the first century AD and that I was on the wrong track in my efforts to understand the shift from invention to innovation, i.e. the spread of Christianity as a social process that led to the religious novelty being received. Rather, the innovation I needed to focus on was not so much the origin of Christianity but of “oriental” monotheism, and more specifically from the “fertile crescent” from the Nile to the Tigris and Euphrates, from where Jewish and then Christian monotheism emerged, albeit not in a linear fashion. I then realized that it would be difficult to solve the mystery of the origins of monotheism because there was no pure, single, visible start to this invention. Like most innovation processes, there is no clear-cut start or finish.

There was another mystery hidden in the invention of monotheism: the mystery of how it spread throughout a polytheistic Greco-Roman world that was completely hostile to it. Until the fourth century AD, the dominant political and magico-religious circles of the western and northern Mediterranean believed in multiple deities. Martin P. Nilsson cites an author who says “somewhat exaggeratedly that the Gods outnumbered the men⁷”. Beliefs to the east and south were more ambivalent. Here, monotheism was already emerging in Egypt, along the east coast of the Mediterranean in the Levant, and in Mesopotamia.

I discovered that in a polytheistic agrarian civilization, adopting monotheism represented a significant risk to food security and human health. This, as I will show below, was the case in the Jewish world between the sixth century BC, after the Jewish elite returned from the Babylonian captivity, and the first century BC, at the time of the construction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem. This obstacle to the reception of monotheism should have been insurmountable.

In some ways, monotheism should never have succeeded beyond its initial era of influence because it excluded other religions, unlike polytheism which is inclusive, which does not mean non-violent. Rather than exclude, polytheism looks for equivalences with existing divinities⁸. It looks for things that are comparable and includes them in the world of its own deities⁹. With the Hellenization of Palestine in the fourth century BC, Greek polytheism began to strongly influence Jewish culture, as we will see later with the matter of circumcision. Jewish monotheism felt that it was under threat from Hellenization. Later on, it would be polytheism’s turn to feel threatened. As I investigated, I discovered that around the first century AD, at the time of Jesus, Judaism was expanding and gaining significant ground across the Greco-Roman world from Mesopotamia to Italy. Between 6 % and 8 % of the population of the Roman Empire were Jewish. In my investigations into Jewish and Christian monotheistic innovation in a polytheistic world, I came to understand as much about the “Christian Jewish” invention as about the difficulties of it being received into a Greco-Roman world that perceived monotheism as superstitious atheism, an irrational religion and a threat to the community¹⁰.

Jewish and then Christian monotheism are therefore analyzed as “inventions” that became innovations. This distinction is the foundation of Norbert Alter’s interpretive model on innovations, itself inspired by Schumpeter. With the hindsight of history, it is clear that Jesus’ objective was more to create “incremental innovation” designed to clear the dead wood out of the Jewish religion than “disruptive innovation”¹¹ in the form of a new religion.

This places us at the heart of the enigma posed by all innovation processes: what is it that allows an innovation to develop successfully in a context that it disrupts so strongly? How much continuity and discontinuity is there between the invention in its original context and its reception into a new one¹²? How much of its adoption is forced and how much is voluntary or by imitation? And when it succeeds, who wins and who loses? Ultimately, in the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus states that he has not come to abolish the Law of Moses but to accomplish its purpose (Matt. 5:17). He positions himself in continuity with Judaism. This is why new wine is in fact often stored in old wineskins.

The meeting of two worlds that occurs in innovation processes is rarely fluid. Most of the time, these processes involve conflict and end with winners and losers.