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I'm still in Israel collecting stuff for future episodes and also leading a history tour for our friends at Sila Travel. So we've got a bonus for you this week. Last week we played the extended interview with John Lennox. This week so many people loved the interview with Teresa Morgan from Oxford University. We're going to play the whole thing including stuff you didn't get in the episode itself. I'm John Dixon and this is Undeceptions.
Every week we'll be exploring some aspect of life, faith, history, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're going to try and undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.
Teresa, what is Classics? Classics is, broadly speaking, the study of the Mediterranean world and the Near East between about sort of the end of the Bronze Age, something like about 12-1100 BC, something like that, and sort of the end of the Roman Empire, which is at different dates in different places, but sometime between about 400 AD and, well, the 14th century, if you go right into the Greek East.
So the very word classic or classical sounds a bit snobbish. Is it really just a snobbish discipline?
It's really not a snobbish discipline. It's a universal discipline because so many things that arose in the ancient world, whether political systems or ideas or religions or forms of art, are still with us and all around us today. And we're still thinking about them and talking about them today. And that's why classics as a subject matters for as many people to study and to get to grips with and to learn something about and to look at for fun as possible because...
The products of the classical world are still all around us and they're still framing our thinking today. Everything from democracy to Christianity to pediments and columns on architecture to the female nude or the male nude. Everywhere around us there are the products of the classical world and understanding where they came from, what and why they are today.
It's fascinating. It's informative. It helps us understand who we are and why we are the way today. Were you always into classics? Were you this 12-year-old reading Plato? Actually, I really was. I was lucky that I grew up in a bookish household, I guess. And there were translations of Plato on my parents' bookshelves. And there were translations of Greek tragedy and Homer. And I did read them when I was very young. And I was gripped. You know, this is...
astonishing material. Apart from anything else, this is just wonderfully interesting, thought-provoking material. People often say that classics, ancient history as subjects, are really just focused on elites and the victors, because after all, it's only those who win who leave the sources. But you've made a real effort to study, I don't know, history from below, the popular mindset. What are our sources? How do we get to those people? Yes, it's a fascinating question. As a historian, I'm interested in how societies work.
And a society is not just the elite. It's not just the ruling classes. It is also vitally the slaves, the poor agricultural workers, the craftspeople, the great mass of ordinary people who make the wheels turn of any society. So I'm always interested in
how they live and how they think, because I'm a historian of ideas and a historian of mentality. I'm crucially interested in how people think. And they have left us more traces than you might expect. So, for instance, I've done a lot of work over the years on popular morality, on popular moral thinking.
And there are two genres of popular moral thinking which have very good claim to come up from the working classes and then the lowest classes and then to get embedded in higher level literature. And those are proverbs and fables across the ancient world and actually cross-culturally around the world. Both proverbs and fables seem to tend to come up from the lowest classes of society.
But so we tend to find them either because they have got into educational texts. They're used to teach children to read and write. Now, that might still only be the top 10, 15 percent of society, but at least it's a bit more than the absolute elite. But also things like proverbs and fables, they get into the writings of the elite. The elite are very interested in. Aristotle made the first ever collection of Greek proverbs, and he called proverbs the original philosophy. So actually, these are very interested in popular stuff. But also there are things like
gnomic sayings from the poets or exemplary stories about great men and women from history which get detached from their original context and kind of filter down the social scale and meet and mingle with proverbs and fables to create what I've suggested is the popular moral thinking of the great mass of Greeks and Romans.
So that's how you find this stuff. You find it because it's come up from the lower ranks of society into our literary record, or it's filtered down from sort of the elites into things like school texts, sub-literary texts like school texts and people's private letters, for instance.
So before we talk specifically about morality and ethics, what were the main sort of life concerns of one of these average families living on the outskirts of, say, Rome in the first century? I think the key thing must simply be survival. This is a world of vast economic and social inequality.
And for the great mass of people, enormous economic insecurity. Most people are living on the breadline or very close to the breadline, which means that one bad harvest will mean your family go hungry. Two bad harvest will probably mean you lose your land and you starve. And it's a world without social safety nets. You know, there is there's no old age pension. There's no free health care. There's no free social support of any kind.
If you lose your livelihood, if you lose your land, you're on the streets. It's that simple. It's absolutely brutal. So sheer survival from day to day must have been the dominant factor in the thinking. It must have steered the thinking of almost everybody all the time. And in that context, what was their main vision of the good life, the moral life? Well, the good life and the moral life...
might be slightly different things. I guess that many people's idea of the good life is probably being at least a bit better off and a little bit more secure than they were in practice.
people's vision of the good life is a kind of negotiation, I think, between the way that they would like to live themselves in a perfect world and what is practicable and what they can realistically hope for, I guess, and what they might hope to be able to get out of society or the gods. So, for instance, a degree of wealth is probably everybody's desire, but there's also...
in moral thinking, popular moral thinking, quite a strong sense that wealth is, it's a practical good, but it's not necessarily an absolute good. You know, people realise that wealth can be misused, or it can be had but not enjoyed. So it's not an intrinsic good, but it might actually be very nice to have, you know, in a perfect world. Friendship,
Friendship is something which people don't talk about as wanting in the way that they might want a bit more wealth, but they know it's incredibly important and therefore it's a moral good. It's also very difficult because the people who...
composed the Proverbs and circulated the Proverbs and the fables and the gnomic sayings from the poets, they seem to have found trust and friendship very difficult. They seem to have found most people not reliable in their world. And so friendship is highly desirable. It's an absolute good, but it's really difficult to achieve. You make an interesting comment about friendship in your book because you say that the flip side of being a good friend is
is harming one's enemies and that that's equally praiseworthy doesn't sound terribly friendly. That's true. Well, I don't know. It depends what your value system is. Don't you think that's uncomfortably close to the values of much of social media nowadays? Help your friends and harm your enemies seems to me pretty much how a lot of people are operating these days, actually. So yes, harming your enemies, I suppose, again, it is an ethic of survival.
It's a dog-eat-dog world, this world, for many people. And if my survival comes at the cost of doing you down, then that's what I'm going to do. Because you don't throw your sort of extra friendship around because there isn't extra. There isn't extra. There isn't extra of anything for anybody. How relevant were the gods and religion generally to the popular ethics? When we think about the gods in the ancient world,
We usually either think about the gods as they're portrayed by philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, or we think about the gods as they're portrayed in high literature, Homer or Greek tragedy or Fijilian epic, say. And there's an interesting split here because for philosophers, the divine is good, is good and creative and very reliable, but...
Non-anthropomorphic on the whole. In populist deicism, God might have a few anthropomorphic features, but on the whole, the divine is impersonal in philosophical thinking. It's the ideal of the good. In the thinking in, as it were, high literature, gods are highly personified, they're highly anthropomorphic.
But they're also, at best, fairly amoral. Their interests are not the interests of human beings on the whole. They don't act consistently in favour of human beings. Or they're positively immoral. They simply toy with human beings for their own entertainment.
But in popular thinking, we find a slightly different picture again. Ordinary people really seem to have been quite invested in the gods. They quite like the idea that the gods are reliably just. So the justice of Zeus or the justice of Olympus is good justice, reliable justice.
So Demeter and Korad, mother and daughter, are proverbial of family love, of good family relationships. They seem to want to have a positive view of the gods. And I strongly suspect that, again, that is to do with their vulnerability. You know, when you are in a society where you are, life is very fragile and you are chronically vulnerable and
A higher power, an alternative higher power to the people who are ruling you, which might just help you out if you are good enough at your cult, is a pretty attractive proposition. You say that a whopping 21% of the proverbs from the popular level are about intelligence and foolishness. Why is this such a big value? I think this is one of the decisive moral values of this world today.
And again, it is to do with the fragility of life and the importance of sheer survival. Practical intelligence, sometimes we might translate it wisdom, but it's not the wisdom of the sage or the wisdom of the guru. This is the kind of street smarts that will get you successfully to the end of the day. And actually...
There are quite a lot of proverbs and fables about intelligence, but there are even more about foolishness. If you're trying to catch the wind in a net or plough the water or cut a lentil in half or scrub yourself white, if you're a kind of average Mediterranean brown, but you want to be whiter and look more upper class white,
Those are all things which are stupid. Fables are full of stories of people who aspire to be bigger or better than they're ever realistically going to be and become a horrible cropper. And quite often they die and the last thing they say is, I deserve this because I was stupid. Think about the famous fable of the lizard who wanted to be a snake. So it stretched itself and stretched itself and stretched itself until it just burst apart in the middle. Its last words are, I deserve this. I was stupid.
It's a really, it's a powerful idea and it's really the measure of how different this moral thinking is from ours because that, I think to us, the idea that sheer street smarts is one of the most important virtues you can have is pretty foreign, is surprising. This may relate to the kind of survival mentality of the ancients because you needed the street smarts just to survive the day. Yeah, absolutely.
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Can we jump over into the New Testament? Because you're one of those rare classicists that happily plays in the classics classics and then jaunts over into the New Testament. What's it like for someone steeped in classics...
to then look at those 27 little documents called the New Testament? Are they the same kind of literature or different? Yeah, that's a really good question. One of the fascinating things about early Christian texts in general, the New Testament text, but also the other very early non-canonical texts,
is that they are exactly the kind of evidence for the ancient world that we have very little of. And I find particularly fascinating because these are not the productions of the elite. You know, very few early Christians were probably wealthy or highly educated Christians.
This is very subaltern literature. This is the literature of sort of the middle classes, mostly probably the people who were actually writing the stuff, but a lot of the people who would have been listening to early Christian writings would have been much poorer than that. So this really is the community literature of very ordinary people. And as such, it's actually a priceless, I mean, aside from its religious value, it's a priceless document in social history of the lives of people
a community of really pretty ordinary people in the early Roman Empire, of a kind that we have almost no parallel for. I mean, it's a very rare corpus of documents just for a social historian. And on that ethical question, which you have such an interest in, how would you describe the difference in the moral universe of those 27 texts compared to the stuff you've been talking about? One of the
The things I find fascinating about approaching New Testament literature, say, is that when I approach it as a classicist, I see it in such a different light from the light in which I've seen it all my life as a Christian. I was brought up as a Christian. I've been a practicing Christian for 50 years. But when I look at my own religious sources...
As a classicist, as a historian, I see them in a whole new light. And this is another of the reasons why it's intrinsically interesting to study the classical world, because many of the productions of the classical world, for instance, the religious texts of Judaism and Christianity, you know, are still with us. But we read them now through a lens of the last 2000 odd years of history and interpretation.
When I put my classicist hat on and I go back to those texts, I suddenly see how extraordinary they were in their world. And I would pick up three or four things, particularly on the ethical side, which you mentioned. Three things which classically go together for early Christians, faith, hope, love. And I would probably add to those justice.
And you might also talk about peace, you might talk about grace and gratitude, but faith, hope, love, justice. Those are four key things which Christians radically rethink in the world of the empire. So love, for instance, friendship, love. We've already talked a little bit about how difficult ordinary people found friendship in the world of the early Roman Empire.
But Christians are taught that God loves them absolutely, unshakably. And that on that basis, they can trust in God, they can love God. And because they are given such an abundance of love, they can afford to love one another with enormous, unreserved generosity. That's a completely different model of love.
with your fellow human beings and how your relationship with God affects your relationship with human beings from anything in ancient religious thinking in general, actually, I think, apart from Judaism, we talk about mainstream Greek and Roman thinking. It's certainly completely different from anything that is in kind of popular moral consciousness, which would have been the background of most early Christians.
So that's a completely new idea. And with that idea of love goes something like, you know, care of the vulnerable, for instance. I've already said this is a world with no social safety nets, but Christians create social safety nets. They are the people who are notorious for looking after the widows, the poor, the orphans, the people who in most of society just slung out onto the street.
So that's, you know, it's a radically different approach to the world. Did this give Christians moral credibility? Because from our perspective, it looks like, oh, there's jolly good Christians doing that. Or did it almost ally them with nature's leftovers? Yes. Well, certainly some commentators who are hostile to early Christians do.
do attack them as being nature's leftovers, as being low, unimportant people who have, of course, they also had a leader, a founding figure in Jesus Christ who was crucified. And crucifixion is the form of execution for the lowest of the low. So Christians were certainly attacked as being the lowest of the low. And they were attacked for being naive and
They were also attacked for being hypocritical. I mean, when their detractors couldn't get them on anything else, they said, well, you know, when they say they love each other, they're lying.
But actually, there are also traces that they were admired. I mean, Tertullian says that people go around saying, see how these Christians love one another. You know, he thinks that that's something which in the late second century makes an impression on people. And it has often been suggested, and I think it's very credible, that the fact that Christians looked after each other, looked after their own in a very exceptional way,
actually may have been one of their great attractions for ordinary people, one of the reasons why the movement grew and actually grew quite quickly. As new religious movements go in the early Roman Empire, there are an awful lot of them. None of the rest of them grew to anything like the size of Christianity all so quickly.
Christianity was highly unusual in its social commitment. I want to ask you about that rapid expansion of Christianity in a moment, but I want to know what drove this emphasis on love and loving the lowly in particular, because someone like Nietzsche and his famous critique of Christianity thought it was just the slave mentality. They were slaves, so they didn't like power. They just grobbled around looking after each other with a kind of crushed mentality. But is that...
What was it? What was it that drove Christian love? It's very important to remember, of course, that love God and love one another, which is attributed to Jesus as a summary of the law, as close to the heart of his teaching, really. That's a Jewish idea. I mean, it is a summary of the law of Moses. So it's there. It's been there for a long time.
Love God and love your neighbour has been there for a long time in Judaism. So Jesus is emphasising a really central strand of Judaism. And a lot of people would suggest that what he is doing there is
reminding people that that is what should be front and centre in everybody's relationship with God and that you shouldn't get too distracted by all the other aspects of religion, the social aspects and the ritual aspects and whatever else, the political aspects and the power seeking and all that. You should really just focus in on loving God and loving the other. So part of it is kind of, part of the Christian message is bringing people back to what for many early Christians with a Jewish background was a traditional teaching. And that's an important part of it. Another
strand in it is surely that it speaks to the powerless, to the poor, to
Think about something like the Magnificat, the song which Luke gives to Mary when she does discover she's pregnant. She talks about this child will bring about a social reversal. He'll bring down the mighty, he'll raise up the poor. So there certainly is a strand in Christianity from the beginning which is about looking after the poor and the vulnerable. Christians certainly didn't see that as defeatist. They saw it as empowering.
And they also, of course, had a very big vision. I mean, they thought that at the final judgment, when Jesus Christ returned and the kingdom of God was brought into full effect...
They would be honoured citizens of the kingdom and children of God. So they had a very high view of where all this was leading. You know, they certainly didn't see themselves as kind of permanently the underdog. They saw themselves as, you know, being raised to glory as the children of God. So it was a very kind of great hope, a very positive vision of the future. So it was transformational. What do you think were the key factors or key factor in the expansion of Christianity in the Roman world up to, say, the fifth century?
It is, in some ways, a great mystery because I say, as I said, this is a world with a great many new religious movements in it. The Remlampa in some ways seems to have been very hospitable to new religious movements and religious thinking.
None of the rest of them grew in the way that Christianity did. And it's been a puzzle for scholars for generations. Quite what was the key reason? One reason, as I've suggested, is often thought to be their care for each other. This is a group of people that people might have wanted to join because actually they're a very strong and a very caring social group in a world where that's vanishingly rare, really.
So the social side of it may have been very important. There's a big argument about whether Christians make at least a handful of quite high profile politically and socially high profile converts quite early on. Some people think there may have been converts in the imperial court even as early as the end of the first century, though it is very controversial and we can't prove it. So we do have quite a lot of evidence that Judaism was fashionable historically.
in some quite socially high up circles in the early Roman Empire. And Christianity, similarly, you know, it may just have been, there may have been an element of fashion about it in some circles. But even so, how many Christians there were by the beginning of the fourth century, how much the movement had grown by the beginning of the fourth century is very much contested, still we really don't know because we don't have a lot of material remains apart from anything else. So they may have been,
really quite a small and scattered but quite prominent and visible body. They made themselves visible by refusing to sacrifice to the emperor and therefore getting persecuted periodically in different parts of the empire. So they may have been very small but high profile or they may have been actually quite large and high profile. We really don't know.
But the tipping point is clearly the conversion or at least the conversion to sympathy with Christianity of the Emperor Constantine at the beginning of the fourth century. The Emperor Constantine engaged in a battle for soul power over the Roman Empire.
with his fellow emperor, sees a sign in the sky before a crucial battle. Cairo, he's told, under this sign you'll conquer. This is a sign of Christ. So he thinks, OK, this is the God for me. So he buys into Christianity. Quite on what level he is converted to Christianity is a big question, but he buys into it. It becomes then a legal cult, a legitimised cult.
A generation or two later, it becomes the official, the sole cult of the empire. Another couple of centuries after that, in the mid-6th century, all the other temples and cults are shut down. So the tipping point is undoubtedly imperial patronage, really, for Christians.
The podcast is called Undeceptions. What for you is the biggest myth about the ancient world and Christianity in it? And can you undeceive us? Well, I might take those questions separately, actually, because I think this deserves two at least brief answers.
The biggest myth about the classical world is that it's not relevant. It is so relevant. You know, if you think democracy is relevant, if you think modern religion is relevant, if you think imperialism is relevant, if you think rhetoric is relevant, the way that we communicate, the way that so many of the things that, you know, so many of the ways that we think about the modern world, so many of the things we do in the modern world, so much of the material culture we live among in the modern world,
comes directly from the classical world, understanding that world is about understanding ourselves. The biggest myth about the classical world is that it's not relevant to us. It's all around us. It's so relevant. And Christianity in the Roman world? I think a really key thing about early Christianity is the language of what we call faith. The word that we translate as faith normally in Greek is pistis, in Latin is fides. Those are the languages that dominate the early Roman Empire and early churches.
And, but the heart of the meaning of those words is not faith in all the modern complexity of the term. And it's not belief either, belief that things are true. Though both of those things come to be important in later Christianity. It's trust. The heart of pistis and fides is trust, trustworthiness and faithfulness and good faith. That cluster of meanings around trust. And so for the very early Christians...
The heart of their proclamation is that you can and you should put your trust in God and put your trust in Christ because they are holy, unshakably, always trustworthy to you, faithful to you.
And I think that's an enormously important aspect of early Christianity, which we've a little bit forgotten. We have got very interested in belief in doctrine. We've got very interested in mysticism and the leap of faith that people need to make to become people of faith. But actually sheer trust, trust in God, faithfulness to God, because God trusts you and is faithful to you, is vital.
Hey, I hope you enjoyed that. Next week, we return to normal transmission with an episode all about how if you follow your brain too far, you could lose your atheism and find Christ.