The Triumph of Christianity (16 page)

A pioneering study of age at marriage, based on Roman funerary inscriptions, was able to distinguish Christian from pagan women. The data show very substantial differences. Twenty percent of the pagan women were twelve or younger when they married (4 percent were only ten). In contrast, only 7 percent of Christians were under thirteen. Half of pagan women were married before age fifteen, compared with 20 percent of Christians—and nearly half of Christian women (48 percent) had not married until they were eighteen or older.
³⁵
These data alone would not settle the matter since the results are based on only a few hundred women. But given that they fully support the extensive “literary” evidence, it seems certain that Roman pagan girls married very young, and much younger than did most Christians.

It must be noted that marriages involving child brides were not marriages in name only. They usually were consummated at once, even when the girl had not yet reached puberty. There are reports of the defloration of wives as young as seven!
³⁶
This practice caused Plutarch to condemn Roman marriage customs as cruel, reporting “the hatred and fear of girls forced contrary to nature.”
³⁷
Very few Christian girls suffered similar fates. Most married when they were physically and emotionally mature; most had a say in whom they married and enjoyed a far more secure marriage.

Divorce

T
HE
C
HRISTIAN POSITION ON
divorce was defined by Jesus: “And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery” (Matt. 19:9). This was a radical break with past customs. A survey of marriage contracts going all the way back to ancient Babylon found that they always contained a divorce clause specifying payments and divisions of property and the cause of divorce need be nothing more than a husband’s whim.
³⁸
Jewish law specifically stated that a divorced wife was now free “to go to be the wife of any Jewish man that you wish.”
³⁹
But the early church was unswerving in its commitment to the standard set by Jesus, and this soon evolved into the position that there were no grounds for remarriage following divorce.
⁴⁰
In addition, although like everyone else early Christians prized female chastity, unlike anyone else they rejected the double standard that gave men sexual license. As Henry Chadwick explained, Christians “regarded unchastity in a husband as no less serious a breach of loyalty and trust than unfaithfulness in a wife.”
⁴¹

Sexuality

F
REQUENTLY, THE REJECTION OF
divorce and of the double standard has been dismissed as incidental to a Christian revulsion against sexuality and a strong bias in favor of celibacy. Often this is illustrated by reference to Paul’s statement that it is “better to marry than to burn” (1 Cor. 7:9
KJV
), which is taken as a very grudging acknowledgement of sexual drives. In fact, even Paul was very supportive of marital sexuality as is entirely evident in the verses leading to the one quoted above: “The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does. Do not refuse one another except perhaps by agreement for a season, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, lest Satan tempt you through lack of self-control” (1 Cor. 7:3–5).

In fact, devout Christian married couples may have had sex more often than did the average pagan couple, because brides were more mature when they married and because husbands were less likely to take up with other women.

Sex Ratios and Fertility

O
NE REASON
R
OMAN MEN
so often married very young girls was their concern to be sure of getting a virgin. But an even more important reason was a
shortage of women
.
⁴²
A society cannot routinely dispose of a substantial number of female newborns and not end up with a very skewed sex ratio, especially when one adds in the high mortality rate associated with childbirth in all ancient societies. Thus, writing in the second century, the historian Dio Cassius noted the extreme shortage of Roman women. In a remarkable essay, Gillian Clark pointed out that among the Romans, unmarried women were so rare that “we simply do not hear of spinsters.... There is not even a normal word for spinster.”
⁴³
As further evidence of the acute shortage of women, it was common for them to marry again and again, not only following the death of a husband, but also after their husbands had divorced them. In fact, state policy penalized women under fifty who did not remarry, so “second and third marriages became common,”
⁴⁴
especially since most women married men far older than themselves. Tullia, Cicero’s daughter “was not untypical... married at 16... widowed at 22, remarried at 23, divorced at 28; married again at 29, divorced at 33—and dead, soon after childbirth, at 34.”
⁴⁵
Another woman was said to have married eight times within five years.
⁴⁶
Apparently, there always was a considerable surplus of marriageable men.

The best estimate is that there were 131 males per 100 females in Rome, rising to 140 males per 100 females in the rest of Italy, Asia Minor, and North Africa.
⁴⁷
In contrast, the growing Christian communities did not have their sex ratios distorted by female infanticide, on top of which they enjoyed an excess of women to men based on the gender difference in conversion.

This would have resulted in very substantial differences in overall fertility between pagans and Christians even had the average woman in each group had the same number of children. If women made up 43 percent of the pagan population of Rome (assuming a ratio of 131 males to 100 females), and if each bore four children, that would be 172 infants per 100 pagans, making no allowance for exposure or infant mortality. But if women made up, say, 55 percent of the Christian population (which may well be low), that would be 220 infants per 100 Christians—a difference of 48 infants. Such differences would have resulted in substantial annual increases in the proportion of the population who were Christians, even if everything else were equal.

But there are compelling reasons to accept the testimony of ancient historians, philosophers, senators, and emperors that everything else was
not
equal, that the average fertility of pagan women was so low as to have resulted in a declining population, thus necessitating the admission of “barbarians” as settlers of empty estates in the empire and especially to fill the army.
⁴⁸
The primary reason for low Roman fertility was that men did not want the burden of families and acted accordingly: many avoided fertility by having sex with prostitutes rather than with their wives,
⁴⁹
or by engaging in anal intercourse.
⁵⁰
Many had their wives employ various means of contraception which were far more effective than had been thought until recently;
⁵¹
and they had many infants exposed.
⁵²

Pagan husbands also often forced their wives to have abortions—which also added to female mortality and often resulted in subsequent infertility.
⁵³
Consider the instructions the famous Roman medical writer Aulas Cornelius Celsus offered to surgeons in the first century. Having warned that an abortion “requires extreme caution and neatness, and entails very great risk,” he advised that the surgeon first kill the fetus with a long needle or spike and then force his “greased hand” up the vagina and into the uterus (there was no anesthesia). If the fetus is in a headfirst position, the surgeon should then insert a smooth hook and fix it “into an eye or ear or the mouth, even at times into the forehead, and then this is pulled upon and extracts the foetus.” If the fetus was positioned crosswise or backward, then Celsus advised that a blade be used to cut up the fetus within the womb so it could be taken out in pieces. Afterward, Celsus instructed surgeons to tie the woman’s thighs together and to cover her pubic area with “greasy wool, dipped in vinegar and rose oil.”
⁵⁴

Given that this was the recommended technique used in an age before soap, let alone any effective treatment of infections, little wonder that abortions killed many women and left many survivors sterile. So why did they do it? Probably mainly because it usually was a man, not a pregnant woman, who made the decision to abort. It is hardly surprising that a culture that gave husbands the right to have babies exposed also gave them the right to order abortions. Roman law did advise husbands not to order their wives to abort without good reason, but there were no penalties specified. Moreover, the weight of classical philosophy fully supported abortion. In his
Republic,
⁵⁵
Plato made abortions mandatory for all women who conceived beyond the age of forty (in order to limit population growth) and Aristotle agreed, writing in his
Politics,
“There must be a limit fixed to procreation of offspring, and if any [conceive] in contravention of these regulations, abortion must be practiced.”
⁵⁶

In contrast, consistent with its Jewish origins, the early church condemned abortion. The second chapter of the
Didache
(an early Christian text probably written in the first century) orders: “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born.”

Both Plato and Aristotle linked their positions on abortion to threats of overpopulation, but that was not the situation in the Roman Empire in the days of early Christianity. Rome was threatened by a declining population and, consequently, there was much concern to increase fertility. In 59
BCE
Julius Caesar secured legislation giving land to fathers of three or more children (he himself had only one legitimate child, but many bastards, one with Cleopatra). Cicero proposed that celibacy be outlawed, but the Senate did not support him. In 9
CE
Augustus promulgated laws giving political advantages to men who fathered three or more children and imposing political and financial penalties on childless couples, unmarried women over the age of twenty, and upon unmarried men over the age of twenty-five. Most subsequent emperors continued these policies and Trajan even provided substantial subsidies for children.
⁵⁷
But nothing worked. By the start of the Christian era, Greco-Roman fertility had fallen below replacement levels
⁵⁸
so that by the third century
CE
there is solid evidence of decline in both the number and the populations of Roman towns in the West.
⁵⁹

Recently Bruce Frier contested the claim that Roman fertility was low, asserting that “no general population” has ever limited its fertility prior to modern times.
⁶⁰
That contradicts considerable anthropological evidence, dismisses Roman concerns to increase fertility as groundless, ignores weighty evidence of “manpower” shortages, and ultimately misses the point. Perhaps even more remarkable is that following a great deal of discussion as to why powerful demographic methods such as Coale-Trussell models and the Gompertz relational fertility model need to be brought to bear, Frier then applied these sophisticated techniques to data based on
172 women
living in
rural Egypt
“during the first three centuries
AD
.” He found that their fertility was high and then confidently extended this finding to “the Roman world.”

Even if that were the case, even if Roman women had lots of kids, the fact that there was such a shortage of women in the empire seems sufficient to have produced the apparent population decline. And it most certainly gave Christians a significant advantage, not only in fertility, but also in producing substantial rates of conversion through marriage.

Secondary Conversions

A
S EXPLAINED IN CHAPTER
4, conversion flows through social networks. Most people convert to a new religion because their friends and relatives already have done so—when their social ties to the religious group outweigh their social ties to outsiders. One such social tie is, of course, marriage. Some people convert after their spouses have done so or when they marry someone who already belongs to the religious group. However, the special intimacy of the marriage tie has given rise to a distinction between
primary
and
secondary conversion.
Those involved in
primary
conversions take a relatively active role in their shift of religious identity. Although their decision is supported and influenced by their attachments to others who already belong, in the end their choice is relatively freely made.
Secondary
conversion involves yielding to considerable pressure and having sufficient reluctance to convert so that the choice is not nearly so freely made. Secondary conversions are very common in Latin America today: wives join a Pentecostal Protestant congregation and eventually, after much effort, many of them succeed in getting their husbands to join as well. These men are secondary converts. Once they are active members of a Pentecostal church, many of these men become highly committed to their new faith, but the fact remains that they never would have joined had their wives not done so and then managed to bring them along.
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