of these plagues. This failure provided early Christianity, which did provide
an explanation, with a window of opportunity to attract new members.
There are several points to be evaluated here.
A basic principle of data collection is to have as large a sample as pos-
sible: it is a pity that Stark did not follow this practice in his survey of his-
torical information. Stark’s three-sentence assessment of the entire range
of pagan religions draws upon a single citation of the early twentieth cen-
tury German scholar Adolf von Harnack (see Stark 1996, 79, citing Harnack
1908, no page given). Stark lets Cicero (quoted from a secondary source)
speak for Greco-Roman philosophy. Ancient science and medicine get sim-
ilarly short shrift. Even for an author so admittedly impatient with histor-
ical specificity (Stark 1998, 261, 265; critiqued by Mack 1999, 133; also
Leyerle 1997, 308; Porpora 1997, 773; J.Z. Smith 1997, 1165) and reliant
upon experts in the field (Stark 1996, xi–xiv), such breathtaking general-
izations by Stark are sure to make historians and classicists shudder. The
Greco-Roman world is worth a more informed and nuanced assessment, if
it is not to be a caricature or a straw man (cf. Beck, chapter 11). Stark
adopts the dualistic view of his Christian sources, finding that Christian-
ity is completely different from all other religions (see Stark 1996, 82; cri-
tiqued by Castelli 1998, 230, 237; also J.Z. Smith 1997, 1164; Braun 1999,
130, who comments on the theme of the “triumph of virtue,” which is
common in Christian historical self-narration, a point also raised by Vaage,
chapter 1).
Were cognitive explanations the overriding concern for people in antiq-
uity, which they are for moderns? In stating that “humans are driven to ask
why,” does Stark (1996, 79) anachronistically project a twentieth-century
view onto the first century CE? Would crises have caused a pagan to ques-
tion and possibly to abandon his or her faith? Did the ancients even have
faith as we understand the term? The so-called failure of pagan religions
to provide conceptual answers may be a modern identification of an issue
that was not significant to ancient people (cf. Mack 1999, 135).
Stark likely is closer to the mark when he notes that people may form
new religious affiliations when their old religion seems to be unavailing in
a practical way against disasters (1996, 77). For example, we know that the
Asclepius cult was introduced in Rome during the great plague of 293 BCE,
when appeals to the conventional state gods and all other measures had
failed (Walton 1894, 15). Amundsen and Ferngren (1982a, 83) note that
widespread pestilence was responsible for the introduction of a number
of foreign deities from Greece and elsewhere, when Rome’s own gods failed
to avert disease. But even here the matter is not so cut and dried. The fact
nora
(Nora)
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