and the giving of a voice to those traditionally excluded from its
structures on account of gender, race or class. In turn, this has
led to the emergence of different ways of studying the past,
reflecting the interests of these newly empowered groups in
society, and resulting, for example, in the growing importance of
the history of social underclasses or gender in the ancient world.
Hence the study of the ancient world acts as an intriguing mirror
of the society in which we live and our efforts to understand it.
Within the discipline of classical studies, religion has been
one of the beneficiaries of this shift in emphasis from the tradi-
tional focus on the grand narratives of war and politics, and of
the rise of approaches to the study of antiquity informed by
anthropology and literary theory. Studies of religion in the Roman
world into which Christianity was born have made enormous
advances in recent decades, particularly in terms of sensitivity to
the cultural differences between the ancient world and our own.
At one stage, pagan religion was considered to be of marginal
importance to ancient society and, moreover, was thought to be
clearly in decline by the early centuries of the Christian era,
thereby making inevitable the eventual triumph of Christianity.
This view was taken largely because scholars felt that ancient
paganism failed to match the criteria they set for a successful reli-
gion. As recent studies have emphasized, however, these criteria
were based on a set of assumptions largely influenced by modern
Christianity. In other words, the various pagan religions of the
ancient Mediterranean were judged in terms of whether or not
they satisfied the needs that modern Christianity was deemed
to satisfy. By these standards, ancient religion, which did not
boast an organized clergy and did not emphasize the personal
nature of the relationship with the divinity (articulated through
private prayer and the influence of religion on private morality),
was considered inadequate. More recent studies of ancient reli-
gion, many of them informed by anthropological studies of
non-Christian religions, have rejected this traditional approach,
seeing its interpretations of Roman paganism as clouded by
what are termed ‘Christianizing assumptions’, and therefore as
WHAT IS EARLY CHRISTIANITY?1
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