DeConick A.D

282
THE PI OF POLITICS
This sanctioned cultic behavior guaranteed that the gods would protect
the city and care for its populace.
In this relationship, humans were viewed as inferior clients whose patrons
and guardians were the superior gods. Showing respect to the gods
as their superiors, honoring the authority of the ancestors, and fulfilling
their moral obligations to one another were extremely important values
that regulated their families and social lives and staved off disaster (Martin
2012, 34–40).
To the Romans, “new” signified “suspect” and “dangerous.” In fact,
new things meant revolution, because the Romans feared that new things
had the potential to be destructive, to lead to social disorder (22). This
resulted in an uneasiness, even xenophobia, when it came to the worship
of imported or “foreign” gods. The Romans made a distinction between
authentic state religion and “superstition,” which was anything that deviated
from the traditional cult taught by their ancestors. Particularly suspect
were ecstatic practices such as prophecy, direct contact with the gods,
and other unmediated and unregulated activities (Turcan 1996, 10–12).
These were countercultural practices that messed up the fine-tuned traditional
relationship between the gods and the Romans in ways that could
be revolutionary and disastrous.
Given these values, the Romans suspected that the early Christians in
general were deviants, and they criticized the Christians’ religion as “new”
and “superstitious.” This depiction was costly for Christian groups generally,
something that the emerging Catholics recognized and decided to
remedy. By the early second century, the Apostolic Catholic leaders intentionally
began to create a better interface between their religion and the
traditional values of Rome. Even though the Catholics rejected aspects
of Roman society as decadent and heathen, they began to settle in and
accommodate their new religion to Rome, to promote it as a “public” religion
that claimed old ancestral customs linked to Judaism. The Catholics
began writing treatises to assure the Roman rulers that they were good,
“moral” citizens.
For the most part, this domestication did not happen among the Gnostic
Christian groups, who prized the new, the revelatory, the unmediated
experiences of the God beyond the gods of civic duty and the patron–
client relationship. The Gnostic Christians made little claim to an ancestral
past, preferring to sever the tie with Judaism and market their Gnostic