Book Review: The Road to Bithynia

Title: The Road to Bithynia

Author: Frank G. Slaughter

Date: 1951

Publisher: Peoples Book Club

ISBN: none

Length:327 pages

Quote: ":Of all the many odd customs of the early Christian faith, none is stranger or more startling than the true history of men living with virgins, as husband and wife in everything except a physical sense."

I've found stranger ones. In the history of the early church many questions arose about which groups could fairly be called Christians. The first few centuries after Christ's time were a time of great religious and philosophical ferment. Greek, Roman, Egyptian, African, European, and Asian Pagans each had their own reaction to what they had heard about Christianity. Much was denounced by the core of the early Church. Protestants say that, especially in the case of Europe, more should have been.

It's not particularly strange that ancient Rome was overcrowded, like a modern city. Several ancient cities were. Though the world as a whole had a low human population, walled cities were places where people who felt unable to defend land outside the walls huddled inside the walls in filthy slums. Many people believed their prospects in the afterlife depended on having grandchildren to remember them in this world. Many people were, as they are in cities today, claiming sexual aberrations that exempted them from the duty to give their parents grandchildren.

Some Jews at this period thought their best prospect for survival lay in proselytizing, making people honorary Jews, but as Judaism has no single clear doctrine about the afterlife, the proselytizing did not affect the young people's reluctance to add to the local population problem.

But Christianity positively preached a different sort of hope for the afterlife. The apostolic church also quickly became known for its communal care of the disabled elderly. For young people literally feeling the local population problem in their unwillingness to become parents, those features of Christianity provided solid, selfish reasons for some people to declare themselves Christians when what they were was closer to our current image of "gay." Any expression of "love" other than making babies seems to have been allowed in some "religious communities. The Bible specifically forbids anal intercourse but it seems, if anything, to favor same-sex kissing and embracing--and these "Greek Christian" communards had not necessarily read the Bible. (The Bible had been translated into Greek, but scrolls were expensive.) In some groups women who renounced marriage and motherhood were said to have "made themselves men." In some ways historical descriptions of these early Christian heretics reminds the modern reader of descriptions of 1960s communes--most of which didn't even last long enough to annoy people, while a few rose above the promiscuous sex and welfare-cheating to become really Christian communities and accomplish good in the world. Early Christian communities are remembered as the homes of great saints, but some of them were also the homes of badly mixed-up kids.

So, for practical reasons that appealed to many people who took some of Jesus's warnings literally, a compromise Paul endorsed was for a couple to contract a legal marriage with the understanding that they wouldn't have babies. This gave Christians with incomes a way to help Christians without incomes, and also gave the couples a way to find out whether they really wanted to be marries in a more traditional sense after a few years as intimate friends.

It may have been startling to Frank Slaughter but it's not so to people who grew up in the 1960s. Unlike the communal sex groups or the castration cults (Paul recognized Christians as having "made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom," though it seems to have been more common in the cults of some Pagan gods, notably Vulcan), the "Josephite marriages" actually worked for those who contracted them.

In fact, though Paul emphasized that Christianity did not forbid marriage, some subsequent leaders of the early church wanted to make the church a cult of lifelong virginity, claiming that marriage was tolerable only "for the sake of producing virgins." A little later, of course, pressure from oldfashioned Roman parents persuaded the Roman Church that marriage, as early and with as many babies as possible, was the duty of those not called to a life of absolute abstinence, with self-flagellation and other "mortifications of the flesh" to discourage impure thoughts.

In the Roman Empire people knew about many so-called birth control techniques, though what they knew would probably have been that the ones that worked did so by making people too sick to have babies. Then as now, the technique that worked was, well, abstinence from the specific act that makes babies, The early Christians recognized everything else as an expression of love, though those of Jewish heritage still believed, as Paul did, that "it is good for a man not to touch a woman" outside of marriage. Only after the papacy had reached what Protestants consider to be a blasphemous level of arrogance did early popes presume to tell people that safe sex was a sin because every sexual act was meant to produce a baby.

This history is not hard to find today, though in Frank Slaughter's time it may have been suppressed. Today you can find discussions of sexuality and birth control in the ancient world in any public library. The most succinct is in Philippe Aries' History of Private Life. In historical fact, Roman elders' greed for grandchildren failed to destroy their civilization. Nature has other ways, and the contributors to Aries' series discuss those, too.

Slaughter's Road to Bithynia draws on this detail of apostolic church history and on the extrabiblical record that St. Luke died in Bithynia, a rural area in the section of land in between the European and Asian ends of the continent. To give shape to his novel, Slaughter invents an older friend who took Luke to Bithynia, showed him a beautiful landscape, and confided that his goal was to retire to Bithynia. Slaughter imagines Luke internalizing this idea of Bithynia as the ideal place to settle down, own a farm, rear a family, and grow old, in order to give Luke something to give up for the sake of his Christian practice, during the events of the story.

But I suspect Slaughter's real purpose was to write a novel about Christianity addressed to a skeptical generation. In the early twentieth century a Secular Humanist was the trendy thing to be. To admit you took being a Christian seriously invited taunts about the neurotic fantasy of God as a father figure, and what had gone wrong in your "psychosexual development," and so on. If you believed in a better world to come, wouldn't that be sure to distract you from the important business of tis world? and so on. Slaughter perhaps presumes to give those intellectual doubts to his fictional vision of St. Luke.

Who was the author of the Gospel According to St. Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, anyway? He was a self-effacing, private gentleman. What we know about him from the Bible record is that he was a "physician" who had studied what was known about medicine in the first century of the Christian Era, which wasn't much. The Twelve Apostles were young enough to call a man in his early thirties Rabbi. It's easy to imagine Luke being younger than they were, though it's also possible to imagine him being older, one of the Seventy who were sent to prepare the way for Jesus ad the Twelve. He addressed his books to somebody called Theophilus, which means "lover of God" in Greek. His own name seems to have meant "man from Lucania in Italy," though people in the Roman Empire were mobile enough that an individual might be known as having come from a place other than where his ancestors came from. We don't really know St. Luke's age or ethnicity, whether he ever was married or had children, whether other members of his family were Christians. It was prudent not to make people easy to identify in the ancient Roman Empire, especially if they were Christians. Scholars who hope to be rewarded for nitpicking say that we can't even e sure that St. Luke actually wrote his books, since it was fairly common for students to write things in the names of their teachers--either submitting their work for the teachers' approval, or selling it after the teachers were dead and couldn't complain.

Slaughter imagines Luke as Greek. He gives Luke a brother called Apollonius. (A father called Theophilus might have been a lover of any god, perhaps Apollo.) Greek physicians were considered the best, possibly because of the fame of Hippocrates. Greeks were also the ethnic group most likely to express a sort of sophisticated skepticism that resonated with early twentieth century skepticism. It was easy for a Greek of real spirituality and intelligence to say, "I know this world must have been intelligently designed, but I don't believe God is a cannibal" (Zeus supposedly ate his father) "or that God has a wife and abuses her" (Zeus supposedly married or at least raped all the major goddesses worshipped in places the Greeks brought into their empire) "or that God, even a lesser god, wants us to get drunk and run through the streets terrorizing the people" (Paul admonished the church ladies at Corinth not to let themselves be mistaken for the cult of Bacchus). It was possible for Greeks and Romans to read the teachings of Jesus on human relationships and think that Jesus was merely a human philosopher who had annoyed the Jews, whom Greeks and Romans saw as stubbornly hostile barbarians, by telling the Jews to be nice to one another in the same way various Greek and Roman philosophers had taught them to be nice to one another. Jesus said much more than that, but nice manners could have been a comfortable resting point for students of Greek or Roman origins.

The real St. Luke was familiar with more of Jesus' teachings than the parts that sounded like common-sense Greek "philosophy" about how to live with other people, but Slaughter imagines his Luke in the years before he wrote his books, a politely skeptical, sophisticated Greek, not interested in the afterlife but impressed by the influence Jesus had on His Jewish disciples. His Luke worries that Paul's teaching about the afterlife goes beyond Jesus's., and thinks the only benefit of preserving what fictional Luke didn't recognize as Jesus's vision of the afterlife must be to gain the sympathy of the majority in a group of Jews.

I'm not enthusiastic about the wide differences this element of Slaughter's writing puts between his Luke and the little we know about the real St. Luke, but it's not really impossible. The historical St. Luke included more material than any of Jesus' other biographers but seems to have been a meticulous fact checker, rejecting stories other "apocryphal gospel" writers let in. Probably he was good, even in youth, at listening with reservations, making a distinction between what someone else seemed to believe and what he believed.

Slaughter's Luke falls in love with Mariamne, who turns out to be related to Mary Magdalene, but after they've been separated for a few years she's more attracted to Apollonius than to Luke, so Luke happily becomes her brother-in-law. Then he meets Thecla, an apocryphal saint who was miraculously delivered from martyrdom and impressed by Paul's advice to preserve her virginity. Uncomfortable with this idea, Slaughter has Thecla fall in love with Luke, who becomes, shall we say, the physical means of her miraculous deliverance. In Slaughter's version, Paul likes Thecla too, and, recognizing that she prefers Luke to him, advises Thecla to preserve her virginity even in marriage since she's determined to marry another man. Slaughter's Luke doesn't like this idea of marriage but loves Thecla enough to agree to a few years of it before Thecla admits that she really likes babies. Slaughter has the good taste to keep this decision a sub-plot, at least, and not allow it to take over the Bible story he is retelling. By this point in the story Luke and Paul are having some of the adventures described in the Acts.

Whether Slaughter's imagination ran out or the scope he'd planned for the ovel cuts off the story, we never see Luke actually separating from Paul and the others and taking his own "road to Bithynia." He and Thecla dream of settling down there but, for the duration of the novel, there's always one more adventure to be had along with the other apostles.

And what about Slaughter's Luke's scanty information about Jesus? Yes, scholars think it's likely that before Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John completed their studies, this was the way early Christians remembered the words of Jesus. He didn't publish a book. They would have gathered to repeat and remember the words they'd heard Him say, and second-generation Christians might or might not have had access to a scroll containing some part of what Jesus said to this or that congregation, or only to what the older people could repeat to them. Scholars refer to those first-generation scrolls as Q, or Quelle, "the source"; no Q-scrolls exist today but Q-scrolls seem likely to have been the source for the material the first three Gospels share,

What Slaughter seems to be trying to do, and succeeding in doing, is portraying how a man who has doubts about the afterlife or about God's ever supernaturally intervening in human affairs can still accept the teaching of Jesus about how to live in this world, follow that advice, and be considered a good Christian. Christians who do believe in "the supernatural elements" in Christianity, as the real St. Luke evidently did, might reply, "Of course the thing can be done, but why?" Jesus did not promise worldly benefits to those who practice Christianity in this life, nor do people consistently find any. Some people are impressed by being treated better than they treat others; some people are merely encouraged to go on treating others badly, since that is what the "nicer than thou" Christian seems to like. (Christians really have to work on making sure we are, in fact, accomplishing good when we do good to those who have not been particularly good to us, and not merely playing "nicer-than-thou" games that don't actually do any good to anybody.)

Overall the result is a nice, wholesome story about the early Christians, good for train or bedtime reading. Fiction often diverges form history and the real St. Luke's real books are easy to compare with tis novel.