Gibbon’s snark with respect to Christianity would, I suspect, amuse those congenitally opposed to it. I am not one of those people, but he does make the excellent point that the two new things Christianity brought were fear and radical intolerance.
Fear, of eternal damnation, which was assumed to be the lot of most of humanity.
Intolerance, of anyone unwilling to accept this idea, because of the FEAR that their ideas would lead to apostasy and then Hell.
Now, the Romans and Jews really didn’t think too much about an after-life. Nor did either group feel any need to proselytize. As polytheists, the Romans were always happy to add another altar; and as de facto xenophobes, the Jews simply wanted to be left alone. They did not want to convert anyone, or add new people. No need.
Only Christianity adds this fear of eternal damnation, which itself makes intolerance a virtue, since no one who fails to become a Christian has any hope of salvation.
All this is quite easy to miss if you simply read the scriptures in red, talking about turning the other cheek, and the Sermon on the Mount.
And if you REALLY think about it, Christianity and Islam are morphologically very similar, with the difference that Islam is less hypocritical. Both are imbued with the notion that no one who fails to adopt their creed can expect anything but literally unending misery in the next and most important life. Both are driven by fear more than love, even if Christianity nominally talks more about love.
And both religions have burst out into the world through aggressive violence. Islam is perhaps more obvious, in the wars it fought, the Jizya, the Dhimmis, the Sword.
But why do they speak Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America? Was Christianity not an important part of the cultural imperialism of Europe? Why are there Christians in Nigeria? Kenya? China? Vietnam? Australia?
As I say from time to time–and I seem to recall saying it relatively recently–I cannot partake of a religion based on a human sacrifice demanded by an allegedly merciful and benevolent God. I am quite willing to accept a high spiritual status for Jesus, but not for those who listened to Him, who garbled His words, and who misunderstood nearly everything he taught.
I say again as well that contextualizing all this is a quite interesting exercise. Within the presumed lifetime of the disciples, the Temple was destroyed again, and with it the ability to perform the sacrifices commanded in what I will call the Pentateuch (Talmud, Torah? I’m not literate enough). A new revelation was needed.
And as Gibbon notes, the entire idea of an after-life, of heaven, was quite new to the Jews. Do you pick the religion that promises nothing in that regard, or the one which grants eternal bliss? They were used to an avenging and protective God, but only in this life.
Gibbon even recites a version of Pascal’s Wager, which he assumes–likely correctly–exercised among the Romans of antiquity an authoritative force, at least among those of a more thoughtful persuasion.
Science, I say, can be our means for testing metaphysical claims, and science can be our means for developing rituals and behaviors which further our growth as animals on the way to being angels via the dangerous path of being human.