Mission and Conversion Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire

Written by Martin Goodman Reviewed By D. F. Wright

The author is Reader in Jewish Studies at Oxford and well known for his studies of Judaea and Galilee in the first centuries ad. He argues here for a conspicuous absence of proselytizing attitudes in first-century Judaism. This absence is paralleled by a scarcity of evidence from the Hellenistic and early Roman periods of Jewish hostility to pagan idolatry so long as it took place on pagan territory; if it trespassed into the land of Israel, that might be different. Nor does a scrutiny of Graeco-Roman religious cults or philosophies throw up any models of a universalist, proselytizing mission. Polytheists might engage in apologia or propaganda (Goodman distinguishes four kinds of mission, in general terms, in this period: information, education, apologetic and proselytizing), with proselytizing rare (but found, e.g., in the imperial cult), and philosophical ideals spread by imitation and emulation rather than the deliberate winning of converts.

In Talmudic Judaism, on the other hand, not only is a clear (but far from general) shift evident towards ‘a practical denigration of gentile paganism wherever it occurred’, but a change is also obvious by the third century in the direction of rabbinic espousal of the cause of proselytizing mission. This latter development is illustrated by the recasting of Abraham as the great missionary.

I must leave to others more versed in early Judaism to assess the validity of this strongly revisionist case. Not its least novel aspect is the claim that far from Judaism influencing Christianity (‘The origins of the proselytizing impulse within the Church should be sought elsewhere’), the Christians’ pursuit of converts was followed by rabbinic Jews (and indeed by others in the ancient world). Yet, paradoxically, not even early Christianity, after the initial fervour of the Pauline generation, was on this reading unambiguously affirmative of Christ’s commission to convert all humanity.

The short, somewhat desultory, chapter on ‘Mission in the Early Church’, while recognizing the undoubted ‘triumphs’ of the Christian proselytizing mission, wanders into some odd speculative byways in searching for its doctrinal foundations. Goodman shows a propensity for turning theoretical possibilities into assumed realities, such as an apologetic and educational mission which ‘will not have presupposed that the audience … should join any new community’. ‘Christians thus sought new members for the wider Church, but they did not necessarily therefore also expect them to become part of a local Christian community.’ But how did one become a ‘member’ of ‘the wider Church’ without baptism into the local church?—by sending a membership form to Jerusalem, or to Rome? We find an anachronistic reference to subscribing to ‘a particular religious denomination’, dead-end unhistorical hypotheses about Paul (‘in theory the only group to which he felt himself to belong and to which he appealed was co-existence with humanity’) and Christian God-fearers (‘it was in theory just as possible to be a sympathizer close to, but outside, a Christian ecclesiaas it was to be a sympathizer on the fringes of Judaism’)—both of which Goodman sooner or later kills off—and a failure to find any ‘early Christian text [which] states explicitly that it is desirable to turn non-Christians into Christians by converting them and enrolling them as members of their local churches’. May I recommend the Protrepticus of Clement of Alexandria, or even Matthew 28:18–20 (taking baptism seriously), or the Acts of the Apostles in toto?

Goodman’s eventual contribution to the resolution of his problem—how to account for the origins of the Christian mission (which, it seems, have nothing to do with Christ)—is the tentative suggestion that the imperative of a universal mission crystallized out of arguments over the admission of Gentiles; ‘this was not only permitted, it was positively desirable’. This merits further examination. (One might posit the reverse sequence: only the conviction that the gospel was for all, Gentile as well as Jew, sustained the pioneers against all opposition.)

This provocative book evokes some concluding reflections. Goodman is not the first to point to the paucity of missiological self-consciousness in early centuries. Yet the missionary success of patristic Christianity is incontrovertible. How does late-second-millennium Western Christianity recover a missionary thrust that is more instinct-driven than missiologically tutored?


D. F. Wright

Edinburgh