I was reading The Subversion of Christianity by Jacques Ellul when this book dropped into my hands. I was just dipping into it to see what it was all about and got so absorbed I dropped Subversion and continued with this. Actually, this book could very well have been titled "The Subversion of Christianity." It covers many of the same issues as Jacques Ellul, but is less of a harangue and instead delves into the reasons why early Christianity was so susceptible to external influences.

The book was originally published in 1929 and reprinted in 1967, so it is not exactly current, and it would be interesting to see how scholarship has changed in the interim. However, Angus gives a pretty thorough survey of the various types of pagan religions and philosophies -- Mithraism, mystery religions, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Astralism, Gnosticism, Cosmology, etc. -- that were flourishing in the Mediterranean world in the first centuries of the Common Era. He discusses how from almost the moment of Jesus' death the church began to change -- to be subverted, if you will -- in subtle ways at first. But as time went on and the locus of church activity moved from Palestine to Asia Minor, Greece and Egypt, a kind of competition ensued, resulting in the Christians out-paganing the pagans by absorbing some of the practices that were widespread at the time in an effort to gain converts.

The aha! moment for me appeared towards the end of the book when the author pointed out that the Christian community while Jesus was alive was focused on the Parousia (end times, apocalypse) and consequently was unconcerned with the cosmological framework that most other religions of the time operated within. That framework included concepts of, among many other things, life after death, the nature and influence of heavenly bodies -- in short, a cosmological world view. It occurred to me at that moment that this lack could explain to a large degree the susceptibility of Christianity to incursion of ideas and practices from all sides, including all those mentioned above. Within a very few generations of Jesus' death, Christians had moved in very different directions from what was presented in the synoptic gospels.

If this seems like quite a leap, all is explained in great detail in the course of the book. Having previously crawled through 900-plus pages of W.H.C. Frend's Rise of Christianity to try to understand some of these issues, I did not come away satisfied in this particular quest -- although, don't get me wrong, Frend's magisterial work is packed with information, just not what I was particularly looking for in this respect, or possibly I missed the forest for the trees. The Angus book, on the other hand, deals squarely with the issues that I was trying to understand when I picked up Ellul's Subversion of Christianity. This lays it all out methodically and I came away with a much clearer understanding of the religious and philosophical atmosphere that prevailed in those days. In some ways I wish I had read this book first. It would have provided an excellent background for other reading. ( )