ABSTRACT
Only the establishment of Christendom in the fourth century created the conditions which make the typical modern use of the word historically realistic. It was of course a Roman word before that. But it is hard to see how anyone could seriously have related the phenomenon of Christianity to the practice of religion in its first century sense. From the social point of view, the talkative, passionate and sometimes quarrelsome circles that met to read Paul's letters over their evening meal in private houses, or the pre-dawn conclaves of ethical rigorists that alarmed Pliny, were a disconcerting novelty. Without temple, cult statue or ritual, they lacked the time-honoured and reassuring routine of sacrifice that would have been necessary to link them with religion. *
Now, there is always value in reminding historians of the dangers of anachronism and of hidden agendas in their work. It is likely, for example, that the self-conscious counterpointing of the abstract nouns 'religion' and 'society' would have appeared strange to Paul and his contemporaries for whom heaven and earth were intimately and supernaturally related. We must beware, therefore, of reductionist possibilities in our accounts of both religion and society in the time of Paul. But this need not lead us to deny the appropriateness, even the inevitability, of evaluating Paul in modern terms: 'What a text (or other phenomenon) "means" depends at least in some important degree on what the interpreter wants to know.'2
