Any movement in order to become popular, in order to 'get over' to the general public, has to operate within the limits set by this psychology. The amount of change, adaptation, and development necessary before a movement can fit into these limitations and express itself powerfully within them is so considerable that no historical example can probably be found where the required accommodation has been accomplished in less than three generations. It is the purpose of this chapter to trace, so far as the surviving source material permits, the steps of this accommodation in the case of early Christianity.
For some time before Christ the Jewish people had been restless. Their desires and aspirations for national and religious greatness had been repressed and inhibited. The unrest thus generated took various forms; patriotic uprisings, religious revivals, etc. Christ was at first considered merely as another Theudas or Judas of Galilee or John the Baptist. In the pagan world the pax Romana produced a somewhat similar restlessness. Travel increased; wandering, much of it aimless, characterized whole classes of people;[1] there was a marked increase in crime, vice, insanity, and suicide which alarmed all the moralists. This condition of affairs was eminently suitable for the first beginnings of a crowd movement; indeed no great crowd movement can begin except under such circumstances. The wanderings of St. Paul and the other Christians apostles--called missionary journeys--were really only particular cases of a general condition. The same organic demand for new stimulation, the same sense of shattered religious and philosophic ideals prevailed in the pagan as in the Jewish world. It would be hard to find a greater contrast of character than Christ and Lucian. Yet the fiery earnestness with which Christ denounces contemporary Jewish religiosity and the cool cynicism with which Lucian mocks at the pagan piety of the same age have a like cause. Economic pressure on the lower strata of society contributed to the unrest. The slave, the small shopkeeper, and the free artisan had a hard time of it in the Roman world. Economically oppressed classes are material ready to the hand of the agitator, religious or other. In the crowd movements recorded in the Acts we can trace the first beginnings of the Christian populace.[2] "In Iconium a great multitude both of Jews and of Greeks believed but the Jews that were disobedient stirred up the souls of the Gentiles and made them evil affected against the brethren. But the multitude of the city was divided and part held with the Jews and part with the apostles." At Lytra there was a typical case of mob action where the apostles were first worshipped and then stoned. In the cases of the mobs at Philippi and Ephesus we see the economic motive, the threatened loss of livelihood, entering along with anger at an attack on the received religion. In the case of the Jerusalem and Athenian crowds we see acceptance, or at least acquiescence, on the part of the crowd up to the point where Christianity breaks with their tradition. In general we see anger on the part of the crowds only after agitation deliberately stirred up by interested parties; priests, sorcerers, craftsmen or the like. Generally speaking the antipathy is no part of the crowd psychology, and on occasion the crowd may be on the side of the missionaries of the new religion. In general also the Christians were not sufficiently numerous to make a counter crowd demonstration of their own.
