Megachurch Grifters Were Also a Problem for Jesus’ Disciples

Over the past year, a number of prominent ministers and pastors have faced public disgrace. Jeremy Foster, the former leader of Hope City Church in Houston, Texas—the fastest growing church in America—resigned in January when it emerged he was engaged in an affair. In March, Brian Houston, the co-founder and global pastor of the celebrity-endorsed Hillsong Church, resigned from his position after it emerged that complaints had been made about his conduct towards two women. And just last month it was revealed that Father Richard Murphy, an Irish-born priest who lived in Florida and died in 2020, had allegedly embezzled $1.5 million.

Corruption in the clergy is nothing new. From selling indulgences in medieval Europe to peddling sham healings in 19th-century America, there are many grifters who have made money off of God. Sexual abuse, harassment, and misconduct aside, profiteers remain a problem. What might come as a surprise is the realization that the phenomenon is nothing new.

The problem of a potentially fraudulent minister was more acute in antiquity than it was today. The social world of the ancient Mediterranean was governed by the cross-cultural principle of hospitality: you were supposed to extend generosity to strangers. In religious terms this was because celestial beings sometimes hid in human form as beggars or travelers, but in general hospitality was about a network of trust that kept people safe. Given that travel was the only way to deliver goods and messages, it was a civilizational building block. When you married these general rules about being nice to strangers to the Christian principle of treating your fellow Christians as family, there was a lot of pressure for people to welcome traveling ministers into their homes.

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For a certain kind of person, however, this also presented an opportunity. An entrepreneur might be able to leverage these rules and regulations into not just free room and board, but also cold hard cash. Starting towards the end of the first century, therefore, Christians started to legislate around the problem. What happens if someone shows up, unannounced, and tells your community that they are a prophet? How do you decide if the person is a messenger of God or just someone out to make a quick buck.

One text, composed around the end of the first or beginning of the second century and known as the Didache or the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, tackles the problem head on. At the time that it was written, the church was still finding its feet. It was a religious movement on the go, with preachers—sometimes personal acquaintances of Jesus—traveling the Empire. They used Roman roads to establish small assemblies of Jesus followers in urban areas dotted around the Mediterranean. Some of them had flashy spiritual gifts—the ability to prophesy, to heal, or to speak in tongues—and some were just enormously charismatic. The problem was one of authenticity. As anyone following the story of Anna Delvey or the Tinder Swindler knows, charm is also the chief skill of the confident trickster.

The solution offered by the Didache is a series of guidelines for evaluating self-proclaimed apostles, prophets, or religious teachers. The first is fairly straightforward—do they know the basic tenets of Christian belief and follow the same sort of liturgical rituals? It’s not so bad to supplement traditions, but those who contradict received tradition should be shunned. While some wandering ministers might have claimed ties to religious heroes, these claims were difficult to authenticate. It’s not as if one could pick up a phone and find out if they had really interned with St. Peter. It was easier, therefore, to ground the authenticity of an individual’s claim to leadership in their conduct. Did they acquit themselves in the manner befitting men of God? Did they have the right spiritual habits?

Then there’s the financial issue. If a new arrival is in transit and wants to stay a single night, then he should be welcomed like Jesus, but if he wants to stay longer than two days, things start to get sticky. No one likes a freeloader. If they stay too long, then they have to get a job.

When a traveling apostle left the community, they were to be given nothing except for bread. This is striking because the audience of the Didache, like many early Christians, seemed to have practiced a sort of strong philanthropy or loose socialism: if a fellow Christian needed something then you should give it to them. This rule did not apply to potentially fraudulent traveling preachers. Apostles, according to the Gospels, should not carry purses or be amassing wealth (Mark 6:8; Matt. 10:8). According to the Didache, Christian leaders were supposed to practice what Aaron Milavec has called a kind of “radical homelessness” and trust that God would look after them. It was a bit of a red flag for an itinerant missionary to ask for funding.

So far, so good but there was one arena where the rules might go out the window and that was prophecy. What if a minister was overcome by the Holy Spirit and began to prophesy? And what if, in the midst of religious ecstasy, the prophet asked for money, food, a private jet or luxury mansion? The Didache has some strong feelings: anyone who asked for material possessions was blaspheming against the Spirit and was a fraud. The Gospels specify that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit was an unforgivable sin.

It’s worth noting that, in antiquity, the problem of fraudulent religious experts was not only a Christian one. The Roman writer Juvenal reports that there was a Judean High Priestess working on the streets of Rome who claimed to be able to interpret oracles and the law (given that ancient Judaism does not appear to have permitted female priests, some details of her biography feel far-fetched). The Syrian writer Lucian of Samosata devoted a whole work—Alexander the False Prophet—to trashing the wonder-worker Alexander of Abonoteichus. Lucian writes that Alexander had dispatched representatives to foreign countries to advertise the shrine he had established to the snake-god Glycon. Though Lucian depicts this oracle as nothing more than a glorified sock-puppet, Alexander was a genuine ancient celebrity. The risk of frauds was everywhere.

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While the guidelines in the Didache might seem a little austere—don’t people have to eat?—they certainly safeguard Christian communities from predatory pastors looking to exploit their good will. A study by Todd Johnson, Professor of Mission and Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, reported that in 2013 “Ecclesiastical Crime” accounted for $37 billion worldwide (approximately six percent of giving to churches worldwide). As criminal justice expert Walter Pavlo put it for Forbes, “Fraud is thriving in U.S. churches.” Perhaps if modern churches were a little more careful about evaluating the financial and personal conduct of their leaders, they wouldn’t find themselves in such difficulties.

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