In the book Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God, author Catherine Nixey, after discussing how basically Paul's Christianity incorporated stories of pagan god-men performing miracles and in doing so replaced all the Greco-Roman gods and demi-gods. What occurred to me reading this section was that these pagan gods were tied to the ethnicity of these pagans. For the pagan gods had ties to "Gentile" ethnic lineages, so Paul was not just meeting them to abandon their worship of these pagan gods but he was effectively convincing them to believe they were literally abandoning their ethnolinguistic tribe to be adopted into a new tribe or race through a Jewish god-man and his specific Jewish lineage. After I had already read Matthew Thiessen on Pneumatic Gene Therapy. On page 24, Nixey quotes the pagan philosopher Porphyry, who was alive during the early Christian movement, who wrote:
"... 'that I man should taste human flesh, and drink the blood of the same tribe's members and race -- and by doing so he should partake of eternal life.' [15].
So you can see that this was the understanding of Christianity which fits Matthew Thiessen's scholarship on Pneumatic Gene Therapy. It occurred to me that the "carrot and stick" that motivated non-Jews to abandon their religio-ethnic tribe and "household gods (tutelary deities) [that] were intrinsic to the family structure" (source) and "household spirits that were treated as direct members of the family" (source). This article explains that in the dynamics of marriage: lineage was heavily tied to these gods. When a woman married into a new household, custom typically dictated that she transfer her spiritual loyalty to her husband’s family gods, officially cementing her integration into his lineage."
This video explains that as families expanded into tribes, their shared identity required a broader spiritual anchor. Historians note that ancient tribes frequently utilized eponymous ancestors—fictional or semi-mythical founders after whom the tribe or village was namelifes. By claiming they were all literal "sons" of the same ancestral figure or tribal god, independent clans could forge strong political and cultural alliances. This article explains, that for example, the Classic Maya used polity-wide patron deities to unify rival elite lineages and negotiate dynastic upheavals, reinforcing collective tribal loyalty through large-scale religious festivals.
This site explains that in antiquity, religion was deeply bound to ethnicity (ethnos, originally meaning a family bloodline or distinct group of people). The concept of modern, biological "race" did not exist; instead, populations were categorized by their shared language, customs, geography, and specific deities.
Most ancient mythologies operated under the assumption of "Ethnic Polytheism"—the belief that different gods created or governed different nations. For instance, biblical texts heavily reference the "gods of the nations," where entities like Chemosh belonged to the Moabites and Milcom belonged to the Ammonites. A person's loyalty to their ethnic god was considered a natural byproduct of the land they were born into and the people they belonged to (source; source).
Thus, rejecting their ethnic gods and household spirits (deceased kin), Pauline converts were essentially losing their ethnic identity and cultural ties to kin and replacing it with a foreign deity, the god-man Jesus-character. So you needed the incentive of eternal life as Porphyry mentions in his quote above. According to Bart Ehrman, the success of Christianity was in part due to later Christians, after Paul died, inventing the harder "stick" of the threat of Hell (Eternal Conscious Torment), a made up belief not found in the Bible itself. When this was combined with Roman State Power after Constantine -- and used coercion, violence and torture to promote the new Constantinian Nicene Christian dogma -- one can see how it was possible for so many ethnic peoples to abandon their ethnic tribal kinship religions and choose to "taste human flesh, and drink the blood of [another] tribe's members and race" (a foreign cult: Paulianity), that had gained power through Rome after Constantine.
