"He is Risen!": A Cultic Sales Pitch?
"He is Risen!": A Cultic Sales Pitch?
Michael D. Langone
Michael D. Langone
During the early years of Christianity, “he is risen!” proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christianity spread through the Roman Empire in large part because people came to believe that Jesus was crucified, buried in a tomb, and then walked again in bodily form among his followers.
The claim that Jesus was raised from death has, of course, been challenged from ancient times to the present. Writing in the late 170s, the acerbic pagan critic of Christianity, Celsus, incisively lays out an anti-resurrection argument that has been repeated and expanded over the centuries:
But who really saw this? A hysterical woman, as you admit and perhaps one other person - both deluded by his sorcery, or else so wrenched with grief at his failure that they hallucinated him risen from the dead by a sort of wishful thinking. This mistaking a fantasy for reality is not at all uncommon; indeed, it has happened to thousands. Just as possible, these deluded women wanted to impress the others - who had the good sense to have abandoned him - by spreading their hallucinations about as “visions.” After getting some few to believe them, it was a small matter for the fire of superstition to spread.¹
Not surprisingly, many Christian scholars have challenged resurrection skeptics. The arguments tend to revolve around the credibility of eyewitness testimonies, the empty tomb, the Pauline letters, the psychological transformation of the disciples, and the rapid growth of the early Church.²
Having built a career on studying cults and helping victims of abusive groups,³ I have often wondered, as have some of my colleagues, if cultic dynamics might explain why the belief that "he is risen" arose in the first place, and why that belief, if false, spread so quickly and so far. I will offer my answer to this question after providing some background and exploring hypothetical and skeptical scenarios relating to Jesus and early Christianity.
Background
Paul emphasized the importance of the resurrection:
13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ cannot have been raised either,
14 and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is without substance, and so is your faith.⁴
Paul’s faith in the risen Christ was normative in the West until modern times, when a secularism rooted in science began to challenge the Christian worldview. Today, even some Christians have come to doubt the historicity - the physical reality - of the resurrection.
Lorenzen finds "a strange silence about the resurrection in many pulpits". He writes that among some Christians, ministers and professors, it seems to have become "a cause for embarrassment or the topic of apologetics."⁵
To counter skepticism about the historicity of the resurrection, a significant number of Christian scholars have proposed arguments that support the traditional view, including, N. T. Wright,⁶ whose argument for the resurrection of Jesus may be summarized as follows:
When he was alive, Jesus was a charismatic, influential teacher whom some considered a prophet or the Messiah, in part because of miracles attributed to him.
Biblical and non-biblical historical evidence strongly suggests that Jesus was crucified.
Judaism did not expect messiahs to die, especially by such a disreputable death as crucifixion. The followers of the many purported messiahs who died, e.g., in battle, either found another to follow or skulked away in despair.⁷
Thus, for all intents and purposes Jesus's death would have ended his movement.
But, contrary to expectation, the movement was energized by two events: (a) an empty tomb and (b) post-death appearances of Jesus.
The resurrection trumped all the social-historical forces that argued for the dissolution or fragmentation of the Jesus movement. The diffusion of the phrase, “he is risen,” was central to the rise of Christianity, although other factors, particularly the kindness and generosity of Christian communities, certainly came into play.⁸
Not only did the movement continue, but it spread rapidly throughout the Roman Empire.
Given that all communication and transportation during ancient times was very slow, the growth of Christianity in a sometimes very hostile empire is remarkable.
Beginning with less than 1000 people, by the year 100, Christianity had grown to perhaps one hundred small household churches consisting of an average of around seventy (12–200) members each.[78] These churches were a segmented series of small groups.[79] By 200, Christian numbers had grown to over 200,000 people, and communities with an average size of 500–1000 people existed in approximately 200–400 towns. By the mid-3rd century, the little house-churches where Christians had assembled were being succeeded by buildings adapted or designed to be churches complete with assembly rooms, classrooms, and dining rooms.[80] The earliest dated church building to survive comes from around this time.[81]
In his mathematical modelling, Rodney Stark estimates that Christians made up around 1.9% of the Roman population in 250.[82] . . . Stark, building on earlier estimates by theologian Robert M. Grant and historian Ramsay MacMullen, estimates that Christians made up around ten percent of the Roman population by 300.[82] . . . By the middle of the [fourth] century, it is likely that Christians comprised just over half of the empire's population.[82] (From Wikipedia⁹)
Wright makes a compelling, but certainly not air-tight, case for the historicity of the resurrection, i.e., that it really happened. A fundamental part of his argument is that the kind of resurrection associated with Jesus would have been completely unexpected in the Jewish (and certainly in the Greco-Roman) culture of the time:
But it remains the case that resurrection, in the world of second-Temple Judaism, was about the restoration of Israel on the one hand and the newly embodied life of all YHWH’s people on the other, with close connections between the two; and that it was thought of as the great event that YHWH would accomplish at the very end of “the present age’, the event which would constitute the ‘age to come’, ha ‘olam haba. . . . But nobody imagined that any individuals had already been raised, or would be raised in advance of the great last day.¹⁰
Given this proposition, Wright argues:
. . . the world of second-Temple Judaism supplied the concept of resurrection, but the striking and consistent Christian mutations within Jewish resurrection belief rule out any possibility that the belief could have generated spontaneously from within its Jewish context. . .
Neither the empty tomb by itself, however, nor the appearances by themselves, could have generated the early Christian belief. The empty tomb alone would be a puzzle and a tragedy. Sightings of an apparently alive Jesus, by themselves, would have been classified as visions or hallucinations, which were well enough known in the ancient world.
However, an empty tomb and appearances of a living Jesus, taken together, would have presented a powerful reason for the emergence of the belief.¹¹
Among possible arguments against Wright are:
One or a small number of followers who hallucinated (or had a delusion that they saw) a resurrected Jesus convinced many others that “he is risen,” that Jesus promised eternal life to his followers, and that living according to Jesus’s teaching would bring many benefits. As a result, the movement spread.
Jesus was a religious innovator and, contrary to Jewish beliefs of his day, proposed the immediate resurrection of the Messiah and prepped his followers to expect that. When he died, they were initially dispirited, but some thought they saw him and convinced others.
The empty tomb was a fiction made up to strengthen the credibility of visions of the resurrected Jesus. Presumably, Jesus’s body was disposed of along with the other crucified men and eaten beyond recognition by animals.
One or a small number of followers (or observers) saw an opportunity to capitalize on Jesus’s fame by perpetrating a hoax, which could have included secretly removing Jesus’s body from the tomb.
Habermas rebuts hallucination theories in general.¹² My focus here is to explore from a cultic studies perspective the possibility that hallucinations (and/or delusions) or a hoax could account for the belief in resurrection among Christians.
The four hypotheses above can be integrated into two cultic scenarios, one in which the leadership is sincere and one in which the leadership deliberately lies. Before exploring these two possibilities, let me first say a few words about cults and cultic dynamics.
Cults
Theologically based conceptualizations of “cult” examine the degree to which a group’s teachings diverge from some baseline orthodoxy. In this essay I view cult from a psycho-social perspective that focuses on behaviors, rather than beliefs, although behaviors and beliefs can certainly interact.
A frequently cited definition of a cult is one that I wrote with the late Louis J. West, then director of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute.¹³ We use the qualifier “totalist type” to distinguish the cults that cause concern from related but less oppressive groups. Here is the definition and a couple of explanatory paragraphs:
Cult (totalist type): a group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea, or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control (e.g., isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heighten suggestibility and subservience, powerful group pressures, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgment, promotion of total dependency on the group and fear of leaving it, etc.), designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders, to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community. . .
Totalist cults are likely to exhibit three elements to varying degrees: (1) excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment to the identity and leadership of the group by the members, (2) exploitative manipulation of members, and (3) harm or the danger of harm. Totalist cults may be distinguished from "new religious movements," "new political movements," and "innovative psychotherapies" (terms that can be used to refer to unorthodox but relatively benign groups), if not by their professed beliefs then certainly by their actual practices.
It should be noted that many groups do not fit neatly into these categories. Furthermore, groups may change their characters over time, becoming more or less like cults, totalist or otherwise.¹⁴
Cults and cult-adjacent groups are characterized by a high degree of manipulation to induce members to do, believe, and/or feel what the manipulators desire. Manipulation differs from coercion in that the latter is overt and transparent, whereas the former is deceptive. Cults differ from other manipulative (i.e., cult-adjacent) groups in that the former tend also to be leader-centered, exploitative, totalistic, and harmful to members. The Jesus movement might have originated as a true cult or as a relatively benign cult-adjacent group, or perhaps it wasn’t at all cultic.
Before examining possible cultic scenarios, a few words are in order about the credibility of the Bible, and especially the New Testament. If Wright and other scholars are correct that Jesus indeed rose from the dead, then it is certainly not unreasonable to conclude that the Bible is an inspired and credible source, although some interpretation of texts may be appropriate. If, on the other hand, Jesus did not rise from the dead, then it is not unreasonable to question the credibility of biblical accounts and to suspect that some events in the Bible may be made up or distorted and others intentionally left out or inserted even though fictional. Please keep this in mind when evaluating the ideas below.
Skeptical Scenarios
Let us now examine several possible cultic scenarios.
Scenario 1: Jesus was a narcissistic cult leader.
This scenario is the cynic’s first choice. Certainly, many cult leaders have successfully projected an image of piety or spirituality. I always smiled, for example, when I saw films of Rajneesh walking in his Oregon ashram. “He has the guru walk down pat,” I thought. So, it is not unreasonable to suppose that a first century Jew might have accumulated a number of devoted followers who believed their leader was a holy man because he projected that image. And maybe Jesus was clever enough to distinguish himself from other charismatic leaders by promoting beliefs that appealed to the oppressed and poor people to whom he preached. First, he promulgated a message of love, which was the opposite of the cold brutality that sustained the Roman power that Jews hated. Second, he emphasized the Pharisees' belief in bodily resurrection, but with a twist. Knowing that he had enemies among the authorities, he taught his followers that he, the Messiah, would return to them in a body after his death.¹⁵ It is quite possible that he sincerely believed what he preached. Some cult leaders, if not initially delusional, may become so because of the intoxicating effect of adulation from a multitude of people.
Most people who listened to Jesus may have dismissed him as a religious fanatic. But a wise cult leader is willing to lose 10 or 20 potential recruits in order to find the one recruit who will believe and be compliant and loyal. Through such a selective process, Jesus might have been able to surround himself with a band of followers who may have been high in the trait of hypnotic susceptibility, which would have made them easier to control and more likely to hallucinate seeing him after his death. Jesus, loyal to his own delusions, “kept the faith” until he died. His close followers, in accordance with Jesus’s teachings, “saw” him in the flesh after his death. They proclaimed the message of love and “he is risen,” and Christianity spread through the Roman Empire.
Scenario 2: Jesus was a sincere, non-cultic religious visionary who predicted his resurrection and prepared his disciples to expect it, but he died much sooner than he expected.
Jesus predicts his death and resurrection in five Bible verses.¹⁶ However, according to some Bible verses, his disciples do not grasp the significance of what he said. Preconceived notions (e.g., the Messiah will free Israel, not die), difficulty understanding what they thought might have been figurative language rather than predictions, and perhaps fear and denial might all have played a part in the disciples’ confusion. On the other hand, it is possible that some disciples understood what Jesus was predicting.
One might conjecture that Jesus was a sincere and innovative visionary who modified the Pharisees’ view of resurrection and taught his disciples that the Messiah would appear in a resurrected spiritual body sometime soon after death. Jesus might have sincerely believed this, but didn’t expect to die soon. Perhaps Jesus used hypnotic or dissociation-inducing experiences to affirm these beliefs.¹⁷ When he was about to enter Jerusalem, perhaps Jesus expected to be feted, although he may have feared that he could be killed, but was firm enough in his beliefs to take that chance. His death by crucifixion was a psychological blow to his disciples. One disciple - perhaps Peter - dealt with this cognitive dissonance by hallucinating or developing a delusion that a resurrected Jesus, consistent with his unorthodox teaching, had appeared to him. Peter then used the persuasive, and perhaps hypnotic, techniques Jesus taught him (or that he learned by watching) to convince other disciples that they had seen Jesus in the flesh, as he had predicted they would. Assuming that Jesus’s body was disposed of with the other crucified criminals and eaten beyond recognition by animals, Peter and/or other followers made up the empty tomb story to magnify the credibility of the appearance accounts. (Some cultic groups use colorful language to rationalize lying, e.g., “heavenly deception,” “transcendental trickery.”) Stories of Jesus predicting his death would strengthen his credibility and lend an aura of prophecy to the event, so the predictions might have been inserted into early accounts. Jesus’s teachings about love and compassion motivated his followers to form caring communities that appealed to outsiders. Since many people wished for a life after death, the claim that “he is risen” might have had considerable “sales appeal,” without necessarily being placed in a cultic context. The welcoming kindness and generosity of communities following Jesus’s teachings would have added to the movement’s appeal. These two factors enabled Christianity to spread throughout the Roman world as a benign, cult-adjacent group.
Scenario 3: One or more disciples exploited Jesus’s untimely death to gain influence and power within the network of Jesus’s followers.
When a cult leader dies, the group usually follows one of three trajectories; (1) it dissolves, (2) it splits into factions with different leaders, (3) it continues under the leadership of another member, usually a lieutenant of the founder. It is possible that Jesus was a sincere religious visionary and that, after his death, one of his prominent followers took over leadership of the group and promulgated myths about the founder to indirectly elevate the new leader’s stature. Perhaps when Jesus was crucified, James, who was learned, saw an opportunity to become a leader like the half-brother he may have secretly envied.
“James evidently was not a follower of Jesus during his public ministry. Paul attributes James’s later conversion to the appearance of Christ resurrected (1 Corinthians 15:7). Three years after Paul’s conversion, James was an important leader in the Jerusalem church (Galatians 1:18–19), where he assumed even more significance after King Herod Agrippa I of Judaea in about AD 44 beheaded the Apostle St. James, son of Zebedee, and after Peter fled from Jerusalem (Acts 12:1–17).”¹⁸
Or perhaps Peter took over the group as the designated successor, and maybe James gained power in Jerusalem as Peter sought to spread the master’s message elsewhere. Or maybe Peter hallucinated the risen Jesus and James saw an opportunity to rise to leadership by promoting Peter’s delusion and convincing others that they too had seen the resurrected Jesus. Or maybe Peter made the whole story up to gain control of the small group, perhaps even removing the body from the tomb. Given how little information bears on the intra- and inter-personal dynamics of Jesus’s followers, successor scenarios will be as varied as one’s imagination and willingness to go down rabbit holes of plausibility.
I am sure that Christian Bible scholars could make compelling arguments against each of these scenarios. But such arguments are likely to rely on biblical accounts, which are credible only if the resurrection did indeed occur and the Holy Spirit guided the formation of the biblical canon. So, one’s evaluation of the evidence depends, at least partly, upon whether one first believes or rejects the proposition, “he is risen.” Uncertainty seems to underlie all conclusions one might be inclined to make.
Was the Jesus Movement Cultic?
The scenarios above suggest that “he is risen” might indeed have been a plausible cultic sales pitch designed to save and spread the Jesus movement. Plausibility, however, is a low bar. I believe that consideration of other cult factors will weaken the plausibility of these and other cult scenarios that might be proposed.
The essence of a cultic dynamic is control, inducing people to act, think, and feel according to the controller’s preferences. Even in a relatively mild, cult-adjacent situation (e.g., a well-intentioned but egotistical pastor who will manipulate people so they will do what he thinks is right), and certainly in full-fledged cults, some people, including relatives outside the group, will push back against the manipulation.¹⁹ And members of cultic groups often become disillusioned or resentful if they become aware of how they are manipulated.²⁰ Thus, despite sometimes high levels of psychological control, most cults lose substantial numbers of members over time.²¹ This is partly why so many cultic groups must isolate themselves geographically and/or psychologically isolate members from family and friends.
Modern cultic groups that are large and dispersed have depended upon technology to maintain high levels of control across large distances. Selected leaders are brought together for intensive training. Written and video training modules are developed. Regular communication with the group’s central authorities is maintained. Members will be brought together for intensely emotional gatherings, e.g., the mass weddings of the Unification Church. All this is possible because telephones, computers, and airplanes enable groups to maintain strong connections between members, sub-leaders, and the high leadership.
Even with these advantages, cultic groups have a hard time hanging onto members and maintaining group coherence, especially when the leader dies. I know of no studies that systematically assess how even a large number, let alone a representative selection, of cults change when the leader dies. Clinical observations suggest that when a leader dies, his/her lieutenants tend to compete for power. Sometimes, one leader takes control of the group, but more often the group fragments into factions. That is why few cultic groups endure for long periods, and those that do endure tend to change in order to adapt to the wider society, at least partially (e.g., the Mormons abandonment of polygamy).
In the 1970s and 1980s, when cults first became a national issue, the most famous large cults were ISKCON (International Society of Krishna Conscious - “Hare Krishna” group), the Unification Church (“the Moonies”), The Way International, Scientology, the Children of God, the People’s Temple, and Divine Light Mission. In all but the latter group, the leader died. A mere 50 years later, these groups are shadows of what they were in the 1970s and 1980s. The People’s Temple, which perpetrated a mass suicide/murder in the jungle of Guyana in 1978, is defunct. Scientology is the only group that appears to have maintained tight control of the membership after the death of the leader, L. Ron Hubbard, mainly because a capable organizer seized power soon after Hubbard’s death and aggressively challenged whistleblowers and splinter groups. ISKCON has maintained some organizational coherence because it made significant reforms, including moving from a communal to a congregational structure and inviting numerous Hindu immigrants to worship in ISKCON temples.²²
The Jim Roberts group, or “the Brethren,” (often called “the garbage eaters” by the media because members were sometimes observed looking for food in dumpsters) was a small and interesting group of about 150 members before the leader’s death in 2015. The Roberts group tried to imitate the early Christian church, most visibly by dressing like they came from the first century. Roberts, who tended to be paranoid and isolated, would send members out in pairs to evangelize. Roberts, however, had a great advantage over first-century Christian group leaders. He could reliably and rather quickly communicate with members using pay phones or the general delivery service of the United States Post Office. Moreover, members would come together regularly. If this group existed in the first century, it would have had a much harder time maintaining communication and group coherence.²³
In modern times the most successful cultic or cult-adjacent group (depending upon one’s point of view) is the Mormons. Like the early Christian churches, the Mormons encountered sometimes fierce resistance in the culture from which it was drawing members. How did they survive, especially after the leader, Joseph Smith, died in 1844? Brigham Young, a capable lieutenant of the founder, led the group to the Great Salt Lake, where they could prosper and multiply in their own territory without being harassed.
In the first century, a cult leader might have been able to hold a small group together in a specific geographic area, as Brigham Young did with the Mormons. Perhaps the Essenes were an ancient cult or cult-adjacent group. Because of their disgust for the Sadducees and Pharisees, the Essenes “moved out of Jerusalem and lived a monastic life in the desert, adopting strict dietary laws and a commitment to celibacy.”²⁴ The Essenes did not spread through the Roman world because, like the Mormons in their early days, they isolated themselves geographically.
Christianity, however, was anything but isolated. By 100 A.D. Christian communities could be found in Jerusalem, Galilee, Asia Minor, Syria, Macedonia, the Greek peninsula, Rome, Southern Gaul, Egypt, Ethiopia, North Africa, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Georgia, and even India.²⁵ The four million Thomas Christians of India are especially interesting because they trace their origins to the apostle Thomas. “That the historicity of this advent cannot be verified does not gainsay evidence—such as extant inscriptions on stone crosses and on copper plates—that Christians have been on the Malabar Coast since the 2nd or 3rd century.”²⁶
Though Jesus’s instruction to the 12 apostles to spread his word is well known, Jesus had other disciples, including early emissaries of Jesus mentioned in the Gospel of Luke. The number of those disciples varies between either 70 or 72 depending on the manuscript. These disciples are named in a “Greek text titled On the Seventy Apostles of Christ [which] is known from several manuscripts.”²⁷ Under very difficult circumstances, Jesus’s followers carried his message to all parts of the Roman Empire and beyond.
If the Resurrection had been a fiction, the argument ran, the apostles would not have risked their lives for it. The faith of a handful of ill-educated fishermen had spread with astonishing rapidity to reach from India to Mauritania, from the Caspian to the utterly barbarous tribes of Britain. The agents of this diffusion had not been great orators or subtle reasoners, and they had had to meet the opposition of prejudiced and angry mobs and of a hostile government. Nevertheless, the churches had expanded with extraordinary and embarrassing speed.²⁸
Maintaining a cultic level of control over 12 apostles who traveled with their leader is certainly feasible. Maintaining that control over 70+ disciples scattered through Israel and regularly encountering family and friends who would push back against their loved one’s subservience to a cult leader would be extremely difficult. But for Jesus’s successors to maintain a cultic level of control over a far-flung movement would have been virtually impossible. Getting a message from Jerusalem to Rome, a distance of more than 4000 kilometers (about 2400 miles) would have taken at least 100 days on foot, 50 days on horseback, and 25 days by sea. Thus, the Jesus movement was too quickly and too widely dispersed to succeed as a cultic group.
One might counter by hypothesizing that various disciples reproduced the cultic dynamics of the Jerusalem church in different cities across the empire. But what is the likelihood that so many would-be cult leaders could maintain even a modest continuity of doctrine and that their successors nearly three centuries later could convene in the Council of Nicaea and come up with a common creed?
Take, for example, Asyncritus, bishop of Hyrcania, and one of the 70 listed disciples.²⁹ Hyrcania “is a historical region composed of the land south-east of the Caspian Sea in modern-day Iran and Turkmenistan.”³⁰ Hyrcania is at least 1000 miles from Jerusalem - 50 days by foot. It is likely that years would go by before Asyncritus would have any contact with the Jerusalem church, or even other satellite churches. Moreover, Asyncritus would encounter people with a language and customs that would be strange to him. If he tried to use cultic manipulations to persuade some of them to believe in a risen Jesus, he would run into resistance and extreme skepticism. Suppose for the sake of argument that he succeeded in persuading a small group to believe in the early creed, such as the one Paul states in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5: "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve." When the cultic Asyncritus died, rivalries among his would-be successors would likely lead to dissolution or fragmentation of the small group of believers. When the Council of Nicaea was convened in 325 A.D., would the group still exist? And if the group still did exist, would it have maintained even a minimal coherence of belief?
In a cult, belief is a modifiable tool that the leader exploits to get his way. If the founders of the far-flung Christian communities functioned as cult leaders, doctrinal continuity would be unlikely. Even in new religious movements that are not necessarily cultic, “sudden, unexpected reversals of policy are a common, almost a defining, attribute of charismatic founders”. . [and leaders] “are always at risk of rejection by their followers, who may break away as individuals or to follow another leader and found another movement.”³¹ In a cultic group, loyalty to the leader, not to the doctrine, is paramount. Hence, beliefs are likely to change if a cult continues to exist through several generations of leadership, especially if there are rival leaders. Of course, a group can begin as a cult and then over time evolve into a community or movement centered on doctrine rather than a leader. But if all, or even most, of the Christian communities started by the early evangelists were characterized by a cultic dynamic, would they all evolve into belief-centered groups that maintained continuity of doctrine? I doubt it. I believe most would have dissolved or fragmented into rival groups centered on narcissistic or psychopathic leaders who would readily change doctrine to maintain control and feed their egos.
Belief Over Leader
That followers of Jesus bothered to write the four gospels which would later be part of the canon reflects a perceived need to preserve and safeguard the original creed and story of Jesus. That there were more than 40 gospels that were not part of the canon³² attests to the tendency among some supposed followers of Jesus to distort his teachings and the stories of his miracles, death, and resurrection. “Heresy was born of the itch for something new.”³³
There are many ways by which a cultic or cult-adjacent leader might elevate himself by claiming to share the teachings, especially the “secret” teachings, of the one human being in history who is said to have risen from the dead. Here are a few examples that sound remarkably similar to what we have seen in contemporary cults:
“Irenaeus charged that the Gnostic Markos used to seduce women by talking to them in complimentary terms.”³⁴
Carpocratians believed that wives should be common property and that they based this unrestricted promiscuity on the words of Jesus: “Give to everyone who begs from you.”³⁵
Around 170 A.D. a “Phrygian named Montanus was seized by the Spirit and, together with two women, Prisca and Maximilla, delivered utterances of the Paraclete in a state of “ecstasy,” i.e., not being in possession of his faculties. . . . The Montanists did not expect all the Lord’s people to be prophets, but rather required their fellow Christians to acknowledge the supernatural nature of the utterances of the Paraclete’s chosen three: to reject them was blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. This demand split the churches in Asia Minor, some thinking the New Prophecy divine, others diabolical.³⁶
Paul condemns the destructive tendency to place personality over belief:
For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarreling among you, my brethren. What I mean is that each one of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’ Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?³⁷
The natural human tendency to follow leaders, especially charismatic leaders, is possibly the motivation for the idea of apostolicity, i.e., remaining faithful to the teachings and practices of Jesus’s apostles. The letters of Ignatius (d. 110 A.D.), who was one of the early Church fathers and, according to tradition, a disciple of the Apostle John,³⁸
abound in warnings against false doctrines and false teachers. . . [He] apparently fought two groups of heretics: (1) Judaizers, who did not accept the authority of the New Testament and clung to such Jewish practices as observing the Sabbath, and (2) docetists (from the Greek dokein, “to seem”), who held that Christ had suffered and died only in appearance. Ignatius untiringly affirmed that the New Testament was the fulfillment of the Old Testament and insisted upon the reality of Christ’s human nature.”³⁹
Through apostolicity the early Church was able to counter the many cultic and cult-adjacent personalities who made claims that those with direct ties to Jesus and/or his disciples believed to be false because they had heard from witnesses to the events of Jesus’s life and resurrection or to people who heard directly from those witnesses. Gary Wills says:
The orthodox excluded a few heretics only because the latter had excluded whole chunks of history, large bodies of believers, and vast amounts of Jewish and Christian writing. In this context, the orthodox were the includers, the heretics were the excluders.⁴⁰
Chadwick describes Hippolytus of Rome’s orthodox reply to Montanus’s “quest for miraculous gifts.” The “supreme miracle is conversion, and therefore every believer alike has the gifts of the Spirit; the supernatural is discerned in the normal ministry of word and sacrament, not in irrational ecstasies which lead to pride and censoriousness.”⁴¹ Orthodoxy, then, focused on the apostolic teachings and resisted the tendencies toward grandiosity, magical thinking, and excitement that characterize many cultic groups.
Orthodoxy also touched deep needs in people of all social strata:
At a deeper level, the Christian Gospel spoke of divine grace in Christ, the remission of sins and the conquest of evil powers for the sick soul, tired of living and scared of dying, seeking for an assurance of immortality and for security and freedom in a world where the individual could rarely do other than submit to his fate.⁴²
Thus, cultic groups that developed in the early days of Christianity were more likely to occur among fringe, ostensibly Christian groups than among communities adhering to the orthodoxy of the early creeds.
When one studies early Christian creeds, one is struck immediately by two things: how many there are and how similar they are. Creeds were used by the early Christians in two main ways. First, in a predominantly illiterate society, memorization and recitation of creeds allowed teachings to be fixed in an oral rather than textual way. In preparation for baptism, catechumens would hear a series of lectures on a creed-like summary of the Christian faith and would then be required to recite the creed during the ceremony. . . .
In the second place, creeds were used to identify and interpret Scripture in the context of false teachers and false scriptures. . . .But in the earliest Church they were still discerning which writings were authentic and which ones were heretical counterfeits. They were having arguments about the meaning of Scripture that would eventually lead to the clarity we now take for granted.⁴³
Christian communities defined themselves by, and found unity in, a set of beliefs, not a living leader. Paul’s short statement of faith from 1 Corinthians (about 53 A.D.) quoted above had to derive from earlier “rules of faith,” or “creeds,” which were “used in the questions put to candidates for baptism.”⁴⁴ Historian Tom Holland tellingly says: “Never before had there been anything quite like it; a citizenship that was owed not to birth, not to descent, nor to legal prescriptions, but to belief alone.”⁴⁵
A skeptic might argue that the level of doctrinal agreement among the many scattered churches suggests a cultic level of control. However, as I indicated above, geographic dispersal and succession power struggles would incline cultic groups to differentiate according to the predilections of the person who gains control of the local group. As Wills indicated, this happened to the heretical groups, such as the Gnostics and Docetists, not to the communities that remained orthodox, that kept their focus on belief, not personality, and that retained their connection to the apostolic teachings.
The centrality of doctrine to Christianity becomes even more apparent in the first few centuries after Jesus’s death. A variety of heresies challenged the orthodox views articulated in the gospels, which are believed to have been written between 70 and 100 A.D. Leaders in the early church responded against numerous heresies⁴⁶ and apocryphal gospels.⁴⁷ Disagreements sometimes became violent.⁴⁸ But a sifting process appeared to have taken place during the first four centuries. There were probably many cultic groups focused on a charismatic and narcissistic or psychopathic leader. These groups would tend to fragment or dissolve when the leader died. More robust intellectual movements like Arianism, which maintained that “the Son, who is mutable, must, therefore, be deemed a creature who has been called into existence out of nothing and has had a beginning,”⁴⁹ withstood orthodox critiques for several centuries. But eventually, orthodox arguments prevailed. The Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. promulgated the Nicene Creed, which, though modified slightly in the centuries ahead, gave form to the early creeds recited by catechumens about to be baptized during Christianity’s early years, when many who knew Jesus personally were still alive.
Future councils refined and solidified orthodoxy. Once Christianity became the official religion of the Empire in 380, it had to contend with a range of political, social, and cultural challenges that were not present during the religion’s infancy. And it had to find ways, which were sometimes as brutal as the punishments of the Empire, to contend with challenges to orthodoxy, including the cultic groups that would erupt now and then. Over the next 1650 years, Christianity itself split and fragmented many times, and the splitting continues to this day. However, it is astonishing that nearly all denominations and sects resulting from this fragmentation still adhere to the basic beliefs outlined in the Nicene Creed of 325. A resilient set of beliefs has resisted nearly two thousand years of disagreements and charismatic personalities bent on changing the world according to their idiosyncratic visions.
Conclusion
Was the statement “he is risen” a cultic sales pitch? I think not. It was an appealing idea for sure, so it may have been an important factor in converting people to the Jesus movement. Some otherwise orthodox, but self-important evangelists here and there probably lost their ethical bearings in their enthusiasm and may have used the phrase to exploit people.⁵⁰ But I doubt that cultic dynamics characterized the movement as a whole. It simply spread too far too quickly in an age when, compared to the modern era, transportation and communication moved at a snail’s pace.
Indeed, the rapid growth of Christianity in a hostile environment is astounding. If the Christian church had died out or hung on as an inconsequential sect, and today’s fictional non-Christian society’s major libraries had copies of four gospels and some letters telling about a fellow named Jesus whose followers said he had risen from the dead, only scholarly specialists would pay any attention. Certainly, nobody would ask if Jesus’s reputed resurrection actually happened. All would presume it was simply another religious myth. Thus, the success of the Church gives credibility to its founder, Jesus, who indirectly predicted the success of his church when he said, “By their fruits you will know them.” That success began with the utter transformation of Jesus’s disciples into fearless evangelists who risked and often met death as they brought Jesus’s message of salvation to a mostly hostile, pagan world. Is it any wonder, then, that Christians believe that a Holy Spirit guides their Church?
Can we conclude that “he is risen” is a true statement, that the resurrection did happen? History cannot provide a definitive answer. And neither can reasoning. It is possible that Christianity began as a cult and that, as Celsus bitingly declared, “after getting some few to believe them, it was a small matter for the fire of superstition to spread.” But, as I hope this essay demonstrates, there are sound reasons to doubt such skeptical and cynical explanations for the resurrection. But that does not mean the event occurred. Plausible arguments can be made against and for the resurrection.
Those of us who deem the question of the resurrection’s historicity important can only make a judgment call. That judgment should consider the information and theories about Jesus and the movement he created. The judgment call will also necessarily reflect what we have experienced, who we are in a deep sense, and, if God exists, grace. Whatever personal conclusion we may reach about the historicity of the resurrection, then, is an expression of faith, which may be grounded in materialism or in a worldview that accepts the supernatural. Faith is not easily explained. At heart, it is a mystery, and mysteries oblige us to be humble.
Sources
1 Corinthians
Barker, E. (Ed.). (2013). Revisionism and diversification in new religious movements. Surrey, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate
Benko, S. (1984). Pagan Rome and the early Christians. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
Chadwick, H. (1967, 1993). The early church (revised edition). London/New York: Penguin Books.
Eichel, S. (2016). The theory that won’t go away: An updated review of the role hypnosis plays in mind control. ICSA Today, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2016, 23-27. https://www.icsahome.com/elibrary/topics/articles/the-theory-that-won-t-go-away-an-updated-review-of-the-role-hypnosis-plays-in-mind-control-doc
Giambalvo, C., Kropveld, M., & Langone, M. (2013). Changes in North American cult awareness organizations. In Barker, E. (Ed.). (2013). Revisionism and diversification in new religious movements. Surrey, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Guerra, J. (2000). From Dean's List to Dumpsters: Why I Left Harvard to Join a Cult. Pittsburgh, PA: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Habermas, G. R. (2001, 2009. June 9; 2023, July 27). Explaining away Jesus’ resurrection: The recent revival of hallucination theories. Christian Research Journal, 23(4). https://www.equip.org/articles/explaining-away-jesus-resurrection-hallucination/
Holland, T. (2019). Dominion: How the Christian revolution remade the world. New York: Basic Books.
International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) Collections:
Jewish Virtual Library
Langone, M. (Web posting). Prevalence. https://www.icsahome.com/elibrary/topics/articles/prevalence
Merrick, J. (2020, Feb. 7). Differences between the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds. https://media.ascensionpress.com/2020/02/07/differences-between-the-nicene-and-apostles-creeds/
michaellangonephd.com: https://sites.google.com/site/michaellangonephd/my-background?authuser=0
West, L. J., & Langone, M. D. (1986). Cultism: A conference for scholars and policymakers. Cultic Studies Journal, 3(1), 85-96. Available at https://sites.google.com/site/michaellangonephd/article-mdl/cultism-a-conference-for-scholars-and?authuser=0
Wikipedia:
Wills, Gary. (2002). Why I am a Catholic. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Wright, S. A. (1987). Leaving cults: The dynamics of defection. Society for the Scientific Study of Religion Monograph Series, Number 7. https://bookreviews.icsahome.com/book-reviews/book-review-leaving-cults--the-dynamics-of-defection-csj-8-1 (book review).
Wright, N. T. (2003). The resurrection of the son of God. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.
Endnotes
1 Hoffman, R. J. (Ed.). (1987). Celsus on the True doctrine: A discourse against the Christians. New York/Oxford: OUP, p. 60. Quoted in Wright, N. T. (2003). The resurrection of the son of God. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, p. 521.
2 Resurrection of Jesus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_of_Jesus; Artificial intelligence search of magisterium.com for question, What is the historical evidence for Jesus' resurrection?
3 See https://sites.google.com/site/michaellangonephd for my background and publications.
4 1 Corinthians: 13-14
5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_of_Jesus
6 Wright, N. T. (2003). The resurrection of the son of God. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.
7 See Wright p. 244 and p.558.
8 “By 251 the church in Rome supported more than 1500 widows and needy persons . . . the distribution of alms was not confined only to believers.” Chadwick, H. (1967, 1993). The early church (revised edition). London/New York: Penguin Books, p. 56.
9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_the_Christianization_of_the_Roman_Empire (the sources of the footnotes in the quotation are available in the Wikipedia entry)
10 Wright, p. 205
11 Wright, p. 686.
12 Habermas, G. R. (2001, 2009. June 9; 2023, July 27). Explaining away Jesus’ resurrection: The recent revival of hallucination theories. Christian Research Journal, 23(4). https://www.equip.org/articles/explaining-away-jesus-resurrection-hallucination/
13 For a detailed discussion of definitional issues pertinent to the concept of cult, see a special issue of ICSA Today (published by International Cultic Studies Association) available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4dmoPK1tYNjcmVDWllvYU1hWFU/view?resourcekey=0-dRZDlwAxlr7ZbArXdfFqMA
14 West, L. J., & Langone, M. D. (1986). Cultism: A conference for scholars and policymakers. Cultic Studies Journal, 3(1), 85-96. Available at https://sites.google.com/site/michaellangonephd/article-mdl/cultism-a-conference-for-scholars-and?authuser=0
15 Wright diminishes the strength of his argument on page 686, i.e., that belief in the resurrection of the Messiah could not have sprung from Judaism. On page 129 Wright says: “Almost any position one can imagine on the subject [life after death] appears to have been espoused by some Jews somewhere in the period between the Maccabaean crisis and the writing of the Mishnah, roughly 200 BC to AD 200.” It is not unreasonable, then, to conjecture that Jesus might have taught an innovative view on life after death, including the death of the Messiah.
16 Matthew 20:17-19, Mark 10:32-34, Luke 18:31-34, Matthew 16:21-23, John 2:19-22. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_predicts_his_death
17 Such experiences are common in mainstream religions as well as cults, e.g., concentrating on a mantra, chanting, repetitive prayer. Although hypnosis and hypnotic susceptibility may significantly affect some religious conversions, those effects should not be exaggerated. See Eichel, S. (2016). The theory that won’t go away: An updated review of the role hypnosis plays in mind control. ICSA Today, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2016, 23-27. https://www.icsahome.com/elibrary/topics/articles/the-theory-that-won-t-go-away-an-updated-review-of-the-role-hypnosis-plays-in-mind-control-doc
18 St. James. Britannica.com. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-James-the-Lords-brother
19 The impetus for the creation of organizations such as International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) in the late 1970s and early 1980s was the concern that thousands of parents expressed regarding their young adult children who had joined cultic groups. See Giambalvo, C., Kropveld, M., & Langone, M. (2013). Changes in North American cult awareness organizations. In Barker, E. (Ed.). (2013). Revisionism and diversification in new religious movements. Surrey, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
20 See, for example, Wright, S. A. (1987). Leaving cults: The dynamics of defection. Society for the Scientific Study of Religion Monograph Series, Number 7. https://bookreviews.icsahome.com/book-reviews/book-review-leaving-cults--the-dynamics-of-defection-csj-8-1 (book review).
21 The research on departure rates is thin and methodologically weak, in large part because departure rates may vary markedly from group to group and may be influenced by events, such as members discovering that a supposedly celibate leader is having sex with women. Prevalence research, which also has its limitations, indicates that at any given time one-to-three percent of the population has had at least a transient involvement in a cult. (https://www.icsahome.com/elibrary/topics/articles/prevalence) Given this participation rate, and given how long cults have been recruiting, the departure rate must be high; otherwise, a large percentage of the population would be cult members today!
22 For reports on how some cultic groups changed over time, see: Barker, E. (Ed.). (2013). Revisionism and diversification in new religious movements. Surrey, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
23 See: Guerra, J. (2000). From Dean's List to Dumpsters: Why I Left Harvard to Join a Cult. Pittsburgh, PA: Dorrance Publishing Co.
24 https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/pharisees-sadducees-and-essenes
25 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Christianity
26 https://www.britannica.com/topic/Thomas-Christians
27 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventy_disciples
28 Chadwick, p. 71.
29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventy_disciples
30 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyrcania
31 Barker, 2013, p. 3.
32 For a comprehensive list of gospels see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gospels
33 Chadwick, p. 82.
34 Benko, S. (1984). Pagan Rome and the early Christians. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, p. 63.
35 Benko, p. 64.
36 Chadwick, p. 52.
37 1 Corinthians 1:11-13
38 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_of_Antioch
39 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Ignatius-of-Antioch
40 Wills, Gary. (2002). Why I am a Catholic. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, p. 62.
41 Chadwick, p. 53.
42 Chadwick, p. 55.
43 Merrick, J. (2020, Feb. 7). Differences between the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds. https://media.ascensionpress.com/2020/02/07/differences-between-the-nicene-and-apostles-creeds/
44 Chadwick, p. 45.
45 Holland, T. (2019). Dominion: How the Christian revolution remade the world. New York: Basic Books, pp. 116-117.
46 For a chart listing early heresies, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heresies_in_the_Catholic_Church.
47 For a comprehensive list of gospels see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gospels
48 Chadwick, p. 179: “But within thirty years of Basil’s death, the bishop of Caesarea was using his monks to terrorize the city militia when it was protecting the exiled John Chrysostom.”
49 https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arianism
50 This assertion should not surprise because cultic groups sometimes develop within contemporary mainstream religions, although accountability mechanisms within the religion tend ultimately to reign in or expel the cultic “nodule.” The Legion of Christ within the Catholic Church is a notable example: https://www.icsahome.com/elibrary/topics/catholic Also see ICSA’s collection on Buddhist aberrations: https://www.icsahome.com/elibrary/topics/buddhist-aberrations