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Introduction to Roman Faith and Christian Faith (OUP, 2015)
Teresa Morgan
The evolution of any book takes a meandering course: rising, often, out of the
foothills of some other project; finding its own route through one’s existing interests;
winding out of familiar into increasingly unfamiliar territory until it arrives at an
outfall on what may be quite an unexpected sea. One hopes then that the place will
develop into a harbour, where new meetings can take place and new ideas be
exchanged. I am fortunate that Roman Faith and Christian Faith has found its way to
a new and multicultural space, where historians, biblical scholars, theologians, and
philosophers can meet and exchange ideas of common interest.
Roman Faith arose from my existing interests in ancient history, biblical
studies and early Christianity, and particularly my interests in the history of mentality
and the relationship between mentality, social practices and institutions. It seeks to
answer two interlocking questions: how do the attitudes and social practices
encompassed by the language of pistis and fides (complex terms whose central
meanings include ‘trust’, ‘trustworthiness’, ‘faithfulness’ and ‘good faith’) operate in
the world of the early Roman empire? And within this world, why is pistis/fides
(which in this context we often translate ‘faith’) uniquely important to early Christian
communities?
The book begins by observing that the language of pistis/fides is central to
Christianity as to no other ancient community and no other ancient or modern
religious tradition. Without it, it is impossible to do justice to Christian
understandings of the relationship between God, Christ and humanity. Its importance,
moreover, predates our earliest records. In Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians,
dated to c. 49/50 and probably the earliest book of the New Testament in its current
form, pistis language appears fourteen times in five short chapters, and followers of
Jesus Christ are referred to as hoi pisteuontes as if the term will already be familiar to
them. Thereafter the ‘pistis lexicon’ (pistis and all its cognates in all forms, as
opposed to the ‘pistis lexeme’, which consists of forms of the noun pistis) appears
throughout every book of the New Testament apart from 2 John, in every layer of
redaction, and more often than any of the New Testament’s other key concepts
including love, righteousness, salvation, and hope.
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It is therefore surprising that the reasons why pistis was so important to early
Christians are almost unexamined. Biblical scholars and theologians take the
importance of Christian faith, if not always its meaning, for granted (Morgan 2015,
212-443 and passim), while classicists are interested in pistis/fides in the Greek and
Roman worlds in general, but not among Christians. There is, however, prima facie a
question to be answered, and it prompts another, closely linked: how did early
Christians understand the meaning and operation of pistis/fides? It is only when we
understand this that we can properly understand why pistis was so important to
Christians.
To many theologians, axiomatically, Christian faith is, from its very
beginnings, sui generis both as to its object, God’s saving action in Christ, and as to
its twin modes of operation: what Augustine (De Trin. 13.2.5) influentially defined as
fides quae and fides qua (Morgan 2015, 28-30). On this view Christian pistis/fides
never shared its meaning, operation or significance with pistis or fides in the world
around it. This seemed to me most unlikely to be true. As I put it in what Professor
Howard-Snyder, in a recent article, dubbed ‘Morgan’s maxim’ (Howard-Snyder 2017,
33),
communities forming themselves within an existing culture do not typically take
language in common use in the world around them and immediately assign to it
radical new meanings. New meanings may, and often do, evolve, but evolution takes
time. This is all the more likely to be the case where the new community is a
missionary one. One does not communicate effectively with potential converts by
using language in a way which they will not understand. In its earliest years,
therefore, we should not expect the meaning of Christian pistis (or fides) language to
be wholly sui generis. We should expect those who use it to understand it within the
range of meanings which are in play in the world around them… (Morgan 2015, 4)
Roman Faith set out to test the hypothesis that the meaning and operation of pistis in
the earliest Christian communities, as evidenced by the writings of the New
Testament, were very similar to those of pistis and fides in the contemporary Graeco-
Roman and Jewish worlds, that Christians evolved new understandings and practices
of trust or faith only gradually, and that any explanation of the importance of pistis to
Christians must take this into account. The book took a ‘history of mentality’
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approach: surveying the surviving literary, papyrological and epigraphic sources of
the period (c.100 BCE to 200 CE) to identify large-scale patterns of thinking, and
reading a large number of texts (including all the New Testament texts) closely, to
identify distinctive ideas about pistis/fides in influential individual writings. To
inform this approach it drew on recent writing in the sociology, anthropology,
philosophy, economics, management theory and modern historiography of trust, all
fields in which important work has been published in recent years. Particularly
stimulating was the idea, recently developed in anthropology and early modern
history, that the shape of trust and related concepts and practices is unique to the
community in which it operates, forming a distinctive pattern based on who trusts, or
does not trust, or finds it difficult to trust, whom and what, on what grounds, and to
what ends (Morgan 2015, 22-3). The shape of pistis/fides in the different communities
under scrutiny became one of the study’s focal points.
After the Introduction, the first three chapters of the book discuss the Greek
and Latin speaking societies of the late Hellenistic and early imperial worlds. They
explore who trusted whom or what, and on what basis; when and why pistis/fides was
easy or difficult to achieve; and, in the latter case, how fragile human trust could be
deferred to more trustworthy objects or relationships (such as divinities) and how it
could be reified into objects of shared trust (such as oaths or legal documents). These
chapters discuss pistis/fides in oneself and pistis and fides relationships in the
household, among masters and slaves, among friends, patrons and clients, in rhetoric,
in gossip and hearsay, and in literary discourse; in the military, politics, inter-state
relations, economic activity, in the law, at the foundations of states, and in times of
crisis, and, last but not least, between human beings and gods. They conclude that
pistis/fides was always important, but the degree to which it was seen as reliable
varied significantly. Oneself and the evidence of one’s senses, for example, are
widely regarded as relatively trustworthy at this period. So, on the whole, are family
members, including slaves, and experts in any field. Friends, in contrast, are rarely
presented as wholly trustworthy, however desirable trustworthiness may be in
principle – a source of detectable distress to many writers. Laws and magistrates
attract perhaps unexpectedly strong trust, but kings and emperors little or none. Most
strikingly, in almost every human situation, trust is to some degree fragile and
contestable, cut with mistrust, doubt, fear or scepticism. I explored the ways in which
agents in the early principate sought to palliate the defects of pistis/fides by
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‘deferring’ trust and ‘reifying’ it. For example, one might defer trust in a rumour to
the production of evidence, or trust in a friend to proof, at some future point, of her
goodwill. If my friend and I find it difficult to trust one another, we might reify the
trust we wish to have in an oath, a credit agreement, or a legal trust: an object which
we both find easier to trust than we do one another.
Chapter 4 deals with divine-human trust in Greek and Roman religiosity. It
argues that there is more evidence for pistis/fides in Greek and Roman divine-human
relations than historians usually assume. In particular, there is a certain amount of
evidence that the gods are seen as trustworthy by human beings and that it is widely
seen as appropriate that human beings should trust the gods. At the same time, the
evidence of this period suggests that propositional belief in the gods is more difficult
than trust, especially when one begins to examine the bases in which one might
believe propositions. Of the bases for pistis/fides that are canvassed in our sources,
personal experience (for instance in dreams or visions), and tradition are both treated
as relatively secure. Reason and report are less so, and a persistent concern is
detectable about the difficulty of detecting false beliefs. Above all, belief in the
trustworthiness of the gods is based on foundationalist and coherentist claims about
the nature of the world. As Cicero puts it in On the Nature of the Gods, the gods must
be able and willing to help us, because if they are not, our piety is hollow and
pointless, and if we abandon piety, justice, good faith, and society itself cannot stand
(1.2.3-4). This is no cynical functionalist statement that religion shores up society. It
attests, rather, Cicero’s sense that his society’s understanding of the gods and of itself
are so intertwined that if it abandoned one it would lose both and collapse.
Greek and Roman religious thinking shares with Hellenistic Judaism another
feature of divine-human pistis/fides: that human beings’ shared trust in the divine and
its trustworthiness enables human beings to trust one another. This finding came into
focus when it emerged, surprisingly, that it is not true of early Christianity. Christians
are regularly told to love one another and live in peace with one another, but they are
never told, simply as community members, to trust one another.
Outside the Septuagint and the works of Philo and Josephus, relatively little
language of pistis/fides survives from Hellenistic Jewish sources. Philo’s use of pistis
is mainly in line with that of other Platonists in this period, and Josephus’ mainly in
line with that of other Greek historians, so they are discussed alongside their Greek
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peers. Chapter 5, on the Septuagint, traces the evolution of pistis from the Pentateuch
to the Hellenistic wisdom books.
In Genesis and Exodus, divine-human pistis can is presented as closely
analogous to intra-human pistis, except that God is consistently trustworthy. Divine-
human pistis evolves gradually, through initiatives of trust, doubt, assurances, proofs
and reifications of trust on both sides, to create new relationships which, over time,
foster the development of the people of Israel. By the Hellenistic period, divine-
human and intra-human trust are diverging. Trust in God becomes a non-negotiable
obligation for human beings, even if it brings no positive consequences in their
lifetime. Israelites’ main reassurance, if pistis needs one, lies in scripture and
tradition, which affirm that God has never let Israel down, and the Deuteronomic law,
which comes from God and confirms Israel’s covenant with God. If the Lord
sometimes seems distant, and trust in the Lord a challenge, the Lord’s commandments
provide a way of expressing daily one’s trust and faithfulness towards God. These
developments in Hellenistic Jewish pistis are significant not least as forming part of
the immediate context of emerging Christianity.
The heart of the book consists of five chapters on the writings of the New
Testament: two on Paul, one on most of the other epistles, one on the synoptic gospels
and Acts, and one on the Johannine corpus. These offer close readings of all the New
Testament passages in which pistis language occurs and extended engagement with
the history of exegesis, which is dense and often conflicted. They discuss Christianity
both in its own right, and as a rare example of a new community in evolution within
the ancient world from which we have a rich insider perspective.
At the start of the project I was particularly interested in the overall shape of
pistis in primitive Christian communities; in where pistis is perceived as easy or
difficult to enact, in where it is cut with mistrust, doubt, fear or scepticism, and in the
bases on which people put their trust or believed in God and Christ. By the end I was
equally struck by the way different writers use pistis language to express the different
ways in which they understand the nature and actions of Jesus Christ. In more than
one writer an unsuspected connection emerged between pistis and predestination.
Almost every writer presented some form of what I called a ‘cascade’ of pistis,
flowing from God, through Christ and the apostles to community leaders and
community members. This last finding liberates pistis from the silo which it has long
inhabited as a ‘theological virtue’, making clear that it is not only theological but,