Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place in Caesar’s Empire by Douglas Boin (review)

“I have a confession to make. For a long time, I’ve been uncomfortable around early Christians” (1). This is the opening sentence in Boin’s “new history of the rise of Christianity in Rome” (6). Boin is uncomfortable with how some early Christians depicted themselves and with the way that the history of early Christians and early Christianity has been told until now. Until Boin discovered that this history was written in a misleading way, he loved all the Greek and Roman heroes, the ancient city of Rome and its architecture, and he was convinced that the stubborn Christians were to blame for bringing this excellent ancient Roman culture to its end. After he started to do his own research, Boin discovered that this was not the true story. There is another story—or rather many other stories—about early Christians that paint other pictures. These other stories demonstrate that not all early Christians were stubborn, angry, violent, aggressive, oppressive, etc. (1–2). Such characteristics only apply to church leaders, e.g., bishops, strongly believing Christians, and the like. Most early Christians were, according to Boin, not like that. They were humble and meek; they did not claim that Christianity was the only true religion; they accepted and participated in many cults; they worshipped the emperor; they took part in the pagan festivals. It is the stories about these Christians with their many identities that Boin wants to tell. This is, however, not a new story anymore.

The reader of this review will probably take what I wrote above to be a caricature. It is in fact a fair reproduction of what Boin writes in the preface to his book, and representative of the general attitude of his book. The problem with this is not the concrete stories that he retells. They are more or less well written and well documented. The first problem is the claim that he can paint a truer (or even the true) picture of early Christianity by picking out a number of individual stories, which all add up to the picture of ordinary Christians as being good Romans, and representatives of the Christian establishment (bishops, etc.) as being violent and stubborn. The second and even more serious problem is that Boin ends up claiming that his story “is the history of nearly 60 million Romans” (6). He seems to forget his own poststructuralist claim that history cannot be written in definite articles (3). There are strong reasons to criticize the stereotypes, which characterize many early modern and modern descriptions of early Christianity, and to try to take as many differences and facets of early Christianity into account as possible. However, it is not helpful to exchange one stereotypical description of early Christianity with another—especially not if the latter is driven by personal sympathies and antipathies, which seems to be the case here.

In all fairness to Boin, this review should also include a résumé of the content of the book. In Chapter One, Boin describes the politically and religiously critical situation in Rome in 63 b.c.e., and he makes some important methodological statements (12). In Chapter Two, he presents the idea of his book—to give a voice to the quieter ones, the Christians who tried to fit into Roman society. Boin admits that it is difficult to know much about these quieter Christians—precisely because they were quiet. Nevertheless, Boin seems to know quite a lot. His project is relevant because it would give us a much better understanding of early Christianity in the Roman society, if we were able to know more about the quieter ones. However, the problem in the book is that Boin dislikes the “traditional Christians,” and he therefore misrepresents them, their ideas and attitudes, and the research that has mainly relied on these Christians...