Charisma, Converts, Competitors: Societal and Sociological Factors in the Success of Early Christianity - Book Review

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 2003 by Barbara R. Walters

JACK T. SANDERS. London: SCM Press, 2000, 223 pp. $27.00 (paper).

Jack T. Sanders, Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oregon, has authored numerous articles as well as five books on the New Testament and various facets of early Christianity. In this, his sixth and most recent book, he employs "insights from the social sciences and historico-sociological methods" (p.xiii) to analyze the success of Christianity relative to other new religious movements during its first two centuries in the Greco-Roman world. This is an ambitious project and one that merits the attention of a distinguished emeritus. Hopefully, Charisma, Converts, and Competitors will be the prelude to a more expansive treatment and greater work to come.

Sanders position his study within the context of landmark works in the area of New Testament studies, especially those by Adolf Harnack, Robert Grant, Walter Burkert, and E.R. Dodds. Within the compass established by Harnack's watershed work (1908), he seeks to examine the setting, message, and that fostered the success of early Christianity. In this Familiar landscape already explored by scholarly giants Sanders locates an unresolved problem posed by the existence of real competitors for Paul's version of Christianity such as the mystery cults and non-Pauline Christian forms, a question initially formulated by Jonathan Z. Smith. These competitors had much more in common with each other than historical scholars have to date acknowledged.

Sanders structures his analysis using three chapters which address three major questions: (1) Why did people follow Jesus? (2) Why did Gentiles become Christians? (3) Why did Christianity succeed in the Roman Empire? Chapter one uses sociological theory coupled with recent works in biblical scholarship, such as E.P. Sanders, Dominic Crossan, Ben Meyer, and John Meier, to define Jesus as the charismatic leader of a new religious movement. Sanders here uses the distinctive features of the charismatic type: "being called, performing wonders, providing teachings, calling disciples, responding to a situation of distress, using randomness to maintain charisma, and provoking hatred" (p. 70). Chapter two provides a thorough and informative review of Hew Testament and sociological literature to draw parallels between specific early conversions to Christianity and empirical examples of conversion to new religious movements in the contemporary world. Chapter three addresses the more specific thesis of the book and Sanders' analysis of why Christianity prevailed over its competitors. Here he devotes thirty pages to a critical review of sociologist Rodney Stark's The Rise of Christianity and Anthony Blasi's Early Christianity as a Social Movement, again relying on an extensive bibliography in religious studies.

Sanders draws several conclusions from his study. First, a number of factors, such as the promise of eternal life, aided both early Christianity and other new religious movements and therefore cannot explain the success of the former. Second, each of the competitors to early Christianity lacked something which Christianity had that posed evangelical limitations, such as the restricted geographical locale of the Elysian mysteries or the lack of moral direction in the cults of Dionysus. Third, the only real competitor to Christianity was the religion of Isis. Finally, Sanders concludes that Christianity "offered a superior product" (p. 170), even to Isis, during the first two centuries in four ways: its care for the sick, the status and roles it granted to women, its cohesiveness as expressed through transnational societal formations, and its perpetual adaptability.

Several things detract from the lasting contribution of this book. First, the charisma of Jesus is not connected to his specific social context and the needs of his followers in the immediate historical period. Sanders recognizes this problem in his final concluding remarks and attempts recovery with a gloss that extends the mantle of Jesus' charisma to the leaders of the expansion by flat. Only then does he acknowledge that he is really treating a transitional stage "between charisma and its routinization" (p. 171). Further, he needs to address issues raised by N. T. Wright in his 1992 work on the New Testament. And, even while the literature review is excellent, the sociological application remains a bit mechanical Nonetheless, the fence between scholars in religious studies and historical sociologists of religion needs mending and Jack T. Sanders here begins what I hope will he the preliminary steps toward interdisciplinary collaboration and a truly great work.

Barbara R. Walters

City University of New York--Kingsborough

Brooklyn, New York