prestige if their behavior is actually neutral or detrimental with respect to
reproductivefitness. Achieving social positions of high prestige in professional
life while having few or no children in Western societies is a case in point.
Cultural transmission can become a runaway process that generates values
and beliefs that make us behave in ways that are irrational in terms of
biologicalfitness. High status in early Christianity (as far as the sources tell
us) was often associated with behaviors such as self-imposed poverty, itinerant
lifestyle, sexual abstinence, life in the desert, and martyrdom. The imitation of
such examples was attractive for many, irrespective of the detrimental conse-
quences of these behaviors for the reproductivefitness of the individual. The
spread of cultural traits based on the imitation of people with high prestige
but low reproductivefitness has its limitations. If nobody raised children,
humankind would disappear. If the early Christ followers had decided to
forego procreation altogether or move to the desert collectively, Christianity
would have remained an interesting but short-lived phenomenon of religious
Antiquity. As we know, this did not happen. In fact, it has been argued that the
demographics of the Christ movement was excellent and was one of the
reasons behind the success of the movement (Stark, 1996, pp. 95–128).
Were early Christians hypocrites, who celebrated role models they did not
themselves follow?
A closer look at biographical traditions in the ancient Near East and the
Eastern Mediterranean reveals a distinction between two types of biographical
example. The notion of ideal biography was introduced by Egyptologist
Eberhard Otto (1966), who used it to describe a tradition of Egyptian biograph-
iesthatweremeanttoreflect ideals rather than a direct presentation of the
events of their protagonist’s lives.^10 The notion of the ideal biography implies
that suchvitaewere not written with the purpose of being imitated: after all, can
anybody imitate the dealings of a (divine) hero with the gods? It makes only
sense that kings, prophets and saints are supposed to represent high moral
standards (while each standing for different ideals), yet peasants, artisans,
merchants, and soldiers cannot and in fact should not imitate them. The same
applies to the Homeric heroes or Moses and other holyfigures of Israelite
historiography. If these biographies were examples at all, they were aristocratic
or priestly ideals. It can be argued that such literary patterns shaped the public
perception and written biographies of kings, priests, and aristocrats rather than
their actual behavior. Further, the use of literary biographies as models for
imitation was very much confined by the low rates of literacy in Antiquity.
The traditional estimate of 10–15 percent literates for Roman society might
seem even too optimistic in light of more recent studies; there is no reason to
(^10) Klaus Baltzer (1975) applied the concept to the Old Testament, Detlev Dormeyer (1999) to
the Gospel of Mark, and myself (Czachesz, 1995, 2007a) to the canonical and apocryphal Acts of
the Apostles.
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