Who Would Join an Intolerant Cult?
James Holding quotes DeSilva’s comment that “the message about this Christ was incompatible with the most deeply rooted religious ideology of the Gentile world, as well as the more recent message propagated in Roman imperial ideology.” He concludes, therefore, that Christianity would have been “doomed” without something “to overcome Roman and even Jewish intolerance,” and even more, to overcome a popular distaste for the “arrogance and exclusivity” of the Christian’s monotheistic, uncompromising soteriology. Hyperbole aside, all this is basically correct–and we will see later what it actually took to convince people to abandon the most popular ideological assumptions of their day and radicalize themselves (as desperate peoples tend to do) into extreme intolerance (the example of Islam comes to mind). Holding’s conclusion does need some tempering, however. First, in terms of number, we already know a large number of Gentiles had long been attracted to the “intolerant” monotheism of the
