What made early Christians a peculiar people?
“One second-century pagan critic of Christianity was willing to tolerate everything else about Christians if they would only worship the gods.”
Larry Hurtado has focused much of his research on the early development of devotion to Jesus. His books include One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (1988) and How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? (2005). His latest book, Destroyer of the Gods, highlights the distinctiveness of Christian beliefs within the religious world of the Roman Empire. Hurtado is professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, where he established the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins.
Because Christians’ belief in one God precluded them from worshiping other gods, early Christians refused to worship local gods or join in other religious ceremonies. How peculiar was this behavior in the ancient Roman world?
So far as we know, the only religious groups that took this stance were those of Judaism and early Christianity. Of course, what became Christianity originated among early first-century Jewish followers of Jesus, and the stance against worshiping the traditional gods of the larger Roman world was inherited from the ancient Jewish matrix of the Jesus movement.
