ANTIOCH and EPHESUS, Turkey -- When we associate the origins of Christian faith with shepherds in the field, keeping watch over their flocks at night, it's easy to distance ourselves from history's key event. But a visit to these ancient cities makes it clear that Christianity grew up in an affluent urban society not entirely unlike our own.
Antioch was the city where, as the Book of Acts notes, "the disciples were first called Christians." It was also the third largest city of the Roman Empire, after Rome and Alexandria, with a population that topped out probably at half a million. And it was a prosperous city whose residents enjoyed politics, wine and pornography.
Just as American technology is improving and our ethics probably regressing, so Antioch's engineering impressed all, but its morals depressed even pagans. The first century Roman satirist Juvenal wrote that Antioch "has poured its sewage into our native Tiber -- its lingo and manners, its flutes, its outlandish harps ... and the whores who hang out round the race-course."
The Romans could bring water from afar by impressive aqueducts and could even move rivers. A tunnel at Antioch's port city, Seleucia Pieria (now called Cevlik), shows that this last claim was no exaggeration. With the harbor silting up and winter rains leading to flooding, Emperor Vespasian (A.D. 69-79) succeeded in changing a river's path by constructing a diversion canal almost a mile long.
And yet, early Christian leaders were not overawed by Roman power. Instead of trying to fit in, they turned aside from the marvelously pillared temples that awed visitors. Christianity's first church was probably a natural cave on the western slope of Antioch's Mt. Silpius. Peter, Paul and Luke are all said to have preached in what is now called St. Peter's Church, with its interior of fissured limestone from erosion and dripping water, and nothing else: no organ, no statues and no pew cushions (and not even any pews).
What a contrast between the cave's simplicity and the decadence of Antioch or of Ephesus, the city where Paul stayed the longest on his missionary trips! The Roman Empire could have had the traditional DuPont Co. slogan, "Better things for better living" -- and the Christians challenged that by asserting that better things without God are idols for destruction.