The rest of the book is pretty much about elective cults. This a good phrase which I don't think I've specifically seen used anywhere else- basically, an elective cult seems to mean 'a religion in which a substantial number of worshippers have consciously opted-in', rather than a religion which is just the default option for anyone who grows up in a particular culture. So early Christianity was an elective cult, but Judaism was not (not sure whether I'd count medieval European Christianity as an elective cult or not, since for most people choosing to stop participating in worship was presumably not really an option. I guess it was elective in the sense that Jews were theoretically allowed to convert, at least in some nations and periods, and maybe the Reformation made it elective in the sense that people in many nations had to choose which side they were on, denomination-wise. So it's obviously not a completely hard and fast distinction, but it at least articulates that variation exists here, so that's better than nothing).
Quick note on the word 'cult': it's not being used in the pejorative sense of "an organisation which brainwashes its followers", or anything like that. It's just the word which seems to get used by historians and social scientists to refer to groups of worshippers which are a subset of that culture's greater religious system. So I guess that in a pagan Roman context, you could say that pretty much everyone 'believes in' Jupiter to some extent, but not everyone is necessarily part of the 'Jupiter cult' in that they're going out and actively worshipping him by making offerings at his temple, or whatever. I think it's sort of weird that the word 'cult' is used this way in this context when its associations in other contexts seem uniformly negative. I assume it's a holdover from the Bad Old Days of nineteenth-century comparative theology, but I can't think of a more convenient term so I guess we'll just have to stick with the caveats.
Another necessary caveat is that what's 'elective' for some people in a society isn't necessarily 'elective' for everyone- a nice example of how this could work is found on a second century AD inscription honouring an upper-class woman named Agrippinilla (see p. 271). Under her name are the names of 420 devotees to Dionysus, arranged in a system of either 25 or 26 grades of initiation (not sure why there's uncertainty over the number; maybe the inscription is damaged or something). Many of the names sound Oriental (as in, from the bit of the Meditteranean east of Rome, not as in what we'd now call east Asian). This could be interpreted as evidence that Oriental migrants to Rome had established their own Dionysus cult within the city, perhaps in order to preserve some aspects of their home culture.
However, Beard et al. think it's more likely that something else was going on. Agrippinilla's family traced their ancestry to Lesbos, where Dionysus-worship was important. The 420 people on the list were probably neither born in the Orient nor voluntary converts to the cult: it's more likely that they were the family's slaves and ex-slaves, who were subject to compulsory initiation.
Obviously, either explanation would seem to imply that Dionysus-worship wasn't exactly elective in this case (since neither a family cult nor a cult that was the default for a particular ethnic minority sounds very 'elective' to me). But it highlights the fact that you could hypothetically have an upper-class Roman who made a conscious choice to worship some god and then insisted that their family and slaves did so too. I don't know if that actually happened much, but the fact that it's theoretically possible suggests a need to be careful about how we use the terminology.
On the other hand, some cults were apparently more elective than we'd normally assume (and also more elective than the Roman establishment would have liked). Tacitus condemns the wickedness of Jewish prosletytes- people who weren't ethnically Jewish, but who committed themselves to Judaism as much as they were able, going further than those referred to as merely "god-fearing gentiles"). Tacitus felt these people were abandoning their ancestral religion. Later, Cassius Dio records that Domitian executed his cousin and exiled his wife on charges of 'atheism', because both had allegedly "drifted into Judaism". Beard et al. argue that the Roman authorities were more or less ok with the Jews having their own religious practices, but felt very threatened by the possibility of Jews recruiting Roman citizens to their religion (p.276).
Under those circumstances, it's not surprising that the authorities took an even dimmer view of Christianity's active attempts to convert people. It sounds as though the type of evangelism seen as most dangerous was not the soapbox-preaching which I've usually imagined Paul engaging in, but the attempts by less prominent Christians to share testimonies with others in private. Non-Christians writer seem to have gotten a mental image of Christians as people who were so low-status as to be almost invisible, allowing them to insinuate themselves into people's households and secretly corrupt the women and children (p.276).
Another interesting thing (p.284) is that the 'alternative' cults seem to have been more reliant on written texts than the standard civic religion of Rome (presumably because adult converts had to be brought up to speed on some relatively specific doctrine or worship practice, whereas one could just pick up the necessary basics of the civic religion from childhood socialisation. Some Roman intellectuals DID spend quite a lot of time trying to write out and study explicit systems of exegesis for the Roman civic religion, but this seems to have been an emically optional aspect of worship which most Romans presumably ignored, if they were even aware of its existence).It also sounds as if most of these sacred texts were for the benefit of priests who were teaching/ initiating the convert, not for the converts themselves (which I guess makes sense in a context where literacy was presumably pretty low).
The obvious examples of sacred texts in this period are the Christian ones (which hadn't yet been collated into the Bible) and Jewish scriptures (especially the Pentateuch, which synagogues read out to worshippers over the course of a year). But there were also other texts which might have played quite different roles in their respective cults- for instance, the Isis cult apparently put great stress on the importance of their sacred texts, which allegedly originated in Egypt. But from the description given it sounds a bit like the basic fact that priests could say "we have sacred writings from Egypt, you know! Written in Egyptian and everything!" might have been more important to the average worshipper than any actual translation or exegesis of the texts (could be wrong about that, though).
Interestingly, Christianity also seems to be the only religion in this area which had a proliferation of different texts, with people actively trying to weed out the 'true' from the 'heretical' accounts (see p.284). They also seem to have been the only people who spent a substantial amount of time trying to systematically argue against the validity of other people's worship (p.310). Mithras-worshippers don't seem likely to have had particularly high opinions of Isis worship, but they don't seem to have felt it was something worth writing polemics about either. Additionally, Christians seem to have been the only elective cult to put substantial effort into building their owncentralised hierarchies of religious authority. Groups like Mithras-worshippers had internal hierarchies in the sense that there were different grades of initiation, but it sounds as though they weren't especially interested in establishing a system where there was one central body which all Mithras cults everywhere accepted as leader (p.304).
The elective cults seem to have often emphasised the issue of the afterlife more than the civic religion did (p.289-90). In The Golden Ass (the best-known example of fiction written from an Isis-worshipper's perspective), Isis tells Apuleius that if he devotes himself to her, she'll extend his life beyond that granted to him by fate, and after death he'll find her shining in the darkness of the underworld. The Mithras cult linked the different stages of initiation to different planets. It seems like they believed that the initiate's soul rose up and away, eventually achieving 'apogenesis' somewhere far from the material world. And obviously Christianity stressed spiritual immortality in a somewhat different sense. But not all the elective cults did this: worshippers of Attis and Jupiter Dolichenus (an aspect of Jupiter with Syrian influences) don't seem to have thought about the afterlife any more than worshippers of the civic religion did.
There's some indication that elective cults gave rise to emically identifiable subcultures. Being part of a distinct religious minority group didn't normally cut you off from the structures of normal Roman society (except in the case of Christianity). However, it DOES seem to have shaped identities in a way that the civic religion didn't (except for natives in the provinces, where the question of one's attitude towards gods with Roman names was a bit more of a self-conscious and politically tense decision- see p.339). If 99% of the people you know sacrifice to a particular collection of gods, then it's hard to define your identity in terms of being yet another person who does that too. People seem to define themselves in opposition to other things- you can't really get excited about defining yourself as a 'Roman pagan' until there are significant numbers of Christians or non-Roman pagans in your immediate social world. Likewise, it sounds as though it was hard to strongly self-identify as 'a worshipper of Jupiter' in pagan Rome, because it doesn't sound like there was a community of Jupiter-worshippers to join (just a disparate group of people who happened to sacrifice to Jupiter without seeing that as a salient part of their identity). But you COULD potentially self-identify as a worshipper of Jupiter Dolichenus and so gain access to a community of other devotees with their own idiosyncratic worship practices.
Having said this, it's unclear to what extent people outside your subculture would notice or care about this aspect of your identity (except again in the case of Christianity, where knowing someone was a Christian presumably had a significant impact on how pagans saw them, at least if the accusations that Christians were unpatriotic and dodgy are any indication). For instance, Isis-worshippers apparently had some sort of special purity rules (p.289), but Beard et al. don't go into details and so it's hard to gauge how much impact this typically had on interactions with non-Isis devotees (did they eat separately from non-devotees? Take days off work for festivals? Wear little bracelets saying 'What Would Sarapis Do?'). They did apparently sometimes have different dress codes than normal Romans, which is probably one reason why you don't see men from the senatorial class joining these cults until after Christianity takes over (after which, things seem to become more a case of "Christianity vs all the different urban paganisms teamed up together", as people stop caring about the fact that they think Magna Mater is inferior to Mithras, and reflect that at least her priests aren't trying to ban animal sacrifices. See p.291, 383).
It's probably also significant that most elective cults don't seem to have had a distinct emic name for their own followers. For example, Mithras-worship has the names for different initiation grades, but no generic word for 'Mithras-worshipper'. 'Mithraist' is a word created by later scholars with no precise Latin equivalent- except possibly 'sacratus' (devotee) or 'syndexios' ('he who has performed the sacred handshake'). 'Judaeus' (Jew) is a common Latin word, but it was an ethnic descriptor as well as a religious one. The Isis cult sometimes used the word 'Isiacus' to mean 'Isis-devotee', but it doesn't seem to have been a very common word (p.307).
Christianity was clearly unusually exclusive, in that so many prominent Christians argued that one could not be a Christian AND a worshipper of other cults (we have no evidence of the other cults doing anything similar). However, we should clarify that there were probably at least some Christians who were less hardline on this issue than the famous Christians were (e.g. Christians who aren't famous martyrs because they decided to go along with imperial sacrifices and hope God didn't mind). There are also the Naassenes, who explicitly argued that the Magna Mater cult was actually worshipping the Christian God, and so it was ok for Christians to go to their rituals (although the Naassenes didn't castrate themselves as Magna Mater's priests did). They seem to have been declared heretical pretty quickly (p.311).
(Incidentally, wiki notes something else interesting about them:
"The Naassenes (from the Hebrew word na'asch meaning snake) were a gnostic Ophite sect from around 100 A.D. The Naassenes, the Sethians, the Mandaeans, the Perates, and the Borborites are the known Ophite sects. Naassenes worshipped the serpent of Genesis as the bestower of knowledge. The Ophites' point of view on the biblic perception is this: The serpent is the hero, the one that calls himself God is called Yaldabaoth, Samael, or Saklas. Yaldabaoth was seen as the creator of the material world, but not as God, but as the will of God.[citation needed] Samael can be compared to the angel of death or the Devil. Saklas means 'fool' in the ancient language of Aramaic."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naassenes )
Final interesting thing: we've apparently found copies of a message that the Roman governor of Egypt circulated, informing the province that the Emperor Claudius did NOT want the Alexandrians to worship him as a god. This message was complicated by the fact that it was attached to a covering edict referring to him as "our god Caesar". Not sure what the precise word was, though (presumably this was all written in Latin?) See p.313. Similarly, one high-ranking Roman apparently wrote approvingly that at least one German tribe worshipped Augustus (before his death), and that their leader had crossed the Elbe in a canoe so that he could touch Augustus' heir Tiberius, who they also saw as divine (p.352).
Sadly, Beard et al. don't really get into the topic of pagan monotheism in the classical period. They briefly mention that some Isis-devotees explicitly argued that Isis was the same being as the goddesses worshipped under names such as 'Venus', 'Minerva' and 'Magna Mater' (p.281). I guess I'll have to go chase this up properly at some point.So, follow-up questions:
-How systematic/organised was Christian evangelism in the early churches? How does that compare to the post-Constantine period? Do we know how much of it was based around public preaching, vs how much of it involved approaching people one-on-one in private?
-If we look at religions besides Christianity which were explicitly founded by one person (e.g. Islam, Buddhism), do their early followers also show a concern with producing a very large number of texts about their founder and then making sure they denounce any 'heretical' versions?
-Early Christianity was distinctive in several ways. It was exclusive (it banned its members from joining other cults). It was extremely evangelistic, in that it sought to systematically convert the world. It was very concerned with writing texts for worshippers to learn from, and then vetting these texts for possible error. It was also very concerned with writing texts to persuade others to convert (apologetics and polemics against other faiths). And it was unusually centralised. To what extent are all these traits linked? For example, was it centralised BECAUSE Christians felt they needed a central authority to make decisions on which texts were heretical?
-If we look at people following religions which DON'T stress the idea of a happy afterlife for devotees, how do they tend to respond when they encounter members of religions which do? Assuming they don't convert, do they tend to dismiss the idea as wishful thinking, or just not as anything worth thinking about too much, or what? In the long term, does regular contact (or competition) with religions that promise a happy afterlife tend to make other religions develop a Heaven-concept of their own?
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