In our Christmas imagery, ancient symbols such as fir trees, mistletoe, holly and ivy sit alongside the baby Jesus, Virgin Mary, angels and shepherds. This mixture of pagan and Christian traditions reminds us that Christmas was superimposed on to much older midwinter festivities. Yet had it not been for a devastating pandemic that swept through the Roman empire in the third century AD, the birth of Jesus would probably not feature at all in our winter solstice celebrations.
If the New Testament is to be believed, Jesus managed to fit a great deal into his short life. But despite all his wise words, good deeds and miracles – not to mention the promise of everlasting life – Christ was nothing more than the leader of an obscure sect of Judaism when the Romans crucified him in AD33.
The Bible informs us that Jesus had 120 followers on the morning of his ascension to heaven. Peter’s preaching swelled the number to 3,000 by the end of the day – but this exponential growth did not continue.
After the Jews in Palestine failed to convert en masse, Jesus’s followers turned their attention to Gentiles. They made some headway, but the vast majority of people across the empire continued praying to the Roman gods.
There were about 150,000 Christians scattered across the empire in AD200, according to Bart D Ehrman, author of The Triumph of Christianity. This works out to 0.25% of the population – similar to the proportion of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the UK today.
Then, towards the end of the third century, something remarkable happened. The number of Christian burials in Rome’s catacombs increased rapidly. So did the frequency of Christian first names in papyrus documents preserved by arid desert conditions in Egypt. Christianity was becoming a mass phenomenon. By AD300 there were approximately 3 million Christians in the Roman empire.
In 312, Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. Sunday became the day of rest. Public money was used to build churches, including the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem and the Old St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Then, in 380, Christianity became the empire’s official faith.
At the same time, paganism suffered what Edward Gibbon called a “total extirpation”. It was as if the old gods, who had dominated Greco-Roman religious life since at least the time of Homer, simply packed up and left.
If the Romans had not embraced Jesus so enthusiastically in the third and fourth centuries, it is hard to envisage an alternative route by which Christianity would have metamorphosed into a world religion. To understand what caused this momentous change, we must consider why Roman society was so receptive to casting off its old belief system and adopting a new religion at that time.
At its peak, the Roman empire reached from Hadrian’s Wall to the Red Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean to the Black Sea. The imperial capital had about 1 million inhabitants. Alexandria’s population was around half that, and Antioch and Carthage’s were just over 100,000.
Goods and people moved back and forth across the Mediterranean, although merchants ventured much farther afield. Size, connectedness and urbanisation made the Roman world remarkable; but it also created the perfect conditions for devastating pandemics to spread.
The Plague of Cyprian was first reported in Egypt in 249. The pandemic hit Rome in 251 and lasted for at least the next two decades. Some historians argue that it caused the period of political instability and economic disruption known as the Crisis of the Third Century, which nearly caused the empire to collapse. For other historians, the Cyprian plague was just one aspect of this ancient polycrisis.
We cannot be sure about the pathogen’s identity. Bishop Cyprian of Carthage, who gave his name to the pandemic, described symptoms including high fever, vomiting, diarrhoea and bleeding from the ears, eyes, nose and mouth. Based on this account, a viral haemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola is the most likely candidate. According to one chronicle, at its height the pandemic killed 5,000 people a day in the capital. Alexandria’s population is estimated to have dropped from about 500,000 to 190,000. Even accounting for exaggeration, it was clearly a terrifying pandemic.
When your friends, family and neighbours are dying, and there is a very real prospect that you will die soon too, it is only natural to wonder why this is happening and what awaits you in the next life. The historian Kyle Harper and sociologist Rodney Stark argue that Christianity boomed in popularity during the Plague of Cyprian because it provided a more reassuring guide to life at this unsettling time.
Greco-Roman deities were capricious and indifferent to suffering. When Apollo was angry, he would stride down Mount Olympus firing arrows of plague indiscriminately at the mortals below. Pagans made sacrifices to appease him. Those who could, fled.
Paganism offered little comfort to those struck down by disease. The old gods did not reward good deeds, so many pagans abandoned the sick “half dead into the road”, according to Bishop Dionysius, the Patriarch of Alexandria. Death was an unappealing prospect, as it meant an uncertain existence in the underworld.
In contrast, Jesus’s message offered meaning and hope. Suffering on Earth was a test that helped believers enter heaven after death. Everlasting life in paradise is quite the prize, but Christianity provided another more tangible benefit, too.
Christians were expected to show their love for God through acts of kindness to the sick and needy. Or as Jesus put it: whatever you do for the least of my brothers and sisters, you do for me.
Emboldened by the promise of life after death, Christians stuck around and got stuck in. Dionysius describes how, “heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need”. Early Christians would have saved many of the sick by giving them water, food and shelter. Even today, hydration and nutrition are important elements of the World Health Organization’s Ebola treatment guidelines.
As Stark and Harper point out, the fact that so many Christians survived, and that Christians managed to save pagans abandoned by their families, provided the best recruitment material any religion could wish for: “miracles”.
Without these miracles, Romans would not have adopted Jesus’s message so enthusiastically, and Christianity would probably have remained an obscure sect. In this alternative reality, it’s likely we would still decorate our homes with evergreen plants to symbolise nature’s resilience and vitality at midwinter. The nativity story, however, would be lost in the dustbin of history.
Jonathan Kennedy teaches politics and global health at Queen Mary University of London and is the author of Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History
