Early Christianity

Mark Humphries

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134627165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Examining sources and case studies, this book explores early Christianity, how it was studied, how it is studied now, and how Judaeo-Christian values came to form the ideological bedrock of modern western culture.

Looking at the diverse source materials available, from the earliest New Testament texts and the complex treaties of third century authors such as Lactantius, to archaeology, epigraphy and papyrology, the book examines what is needed to study the subject, what materials are available, how useful they are, and how the study of the subject may be approached.

Case study chapters focus on important problems in the study of early Christianity including:

• the book of Acts as a text revelatory of the social dynamics of cities and as a text about the inherent tensions in Hellenistic Judaism
• orthodoxy and organization in early Christianity
• early Christianity and the Roman empire.

Also including a comprehensive guide for students that lists major collections of literary and non-literary sources, major journals and series, and major text books, it is an excellent aid to the study of Christianity in history.

Chapter 1

What is early Christianity and why does it deserve study?

The shape of early Christianity

It may be worth beginning with a definition of what is meant in this book by ‘early Christianity’. Let me take ‘early’ first. I will be analysing Christianity between the life of Jesus Christ, in the early first century AD, and the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine (306–37) to Christianity at the beginning of the fourth. By setting these limits and by describing the Christianity in this book as ‘early’ it will seem that I am imposing upon it the traditional approach of dividing the past up into distinct periods (e.g. ‘ancient’, ‘medieval’, ‘early modern’, etc.). Such periodization, as it is called, is rather out of fashion with historians these days. Of course, human activity does not neatly fall into such categories. They are devised, rather, by historians looking back on the past and trying to impose some ‘structure’ on a rather more chaotic reality. For that reason, therefore, such periods may be described better as historians’ concepts rather than as historical ones (cf. K. Jenkins 1991: 16). It was not the case, after all, that Christians leaped out of bed one morning and exclaimed that early Christianity was at an end and that late antique or medieval Christianity had begun. Indeed, one recent study has shown that deciding where early Christianity ends is difficult to determine, and that the change to medieval Christianity was something that happened gradually and fitfully over a number of centuries (Markus 1990). Yet one has to begin somewhere and, pedagogically, periods provide manageable chunks that can be comprehended easily by students. Even so, I ought to offer some justification for the limits set on the particular period I have chosen if they are not to appear entirely arbitrary.

My choice is dictated by a happy coincidence of the practicalities of publishing and what I discern as ancient realities. It is anticipated that this series will contain another book on the period after Constantine’s conversion, so it seemed appropriate for me to draw my study to an end at that point. But that decision imposed by the publisher reflects a real difference between the character of Christianity in the pre- and post-Constantinian periods. After Constantine’s conversion, the Roman state generally accorded Christianity its support, and emperors (with the exception of the pagan convert Julian ‘the Apostate’, who ruled for about a year and a half between 361 and 363) were also vigorous in promoting the interests of the Christian community (E. D. Hunt 1998). In other words, the Christian church now began to be an important institution of – as opposed to just in – the Roman empire. As such, Constantine’s conversion marks an important stage in the process by which the Christian church was to become the major political and social as well as religious institution of medieval Christendom.

Before Constantine’s conversion the situation was rather different. Far from enjoying the adherence or support of the emperors, Christianity periodically experienced their wrath in the form of persecution (although, as we shall see in chapter 6, this was never a uniform process and defies easy generalizations). So what unifies the Christianity described here is that it existed within an intermittently hostile environment whose form it could not determine and whose destiny it could not dictate, for all its aspirations to do so. This political circumstance was reflected in a variety of other social realities that influenced the development of Christianity before Constantine. Limited resources, wedded perhaps to a fear of intermittent persecution, meant that prior to Constantine’s conversion early Christianity was unable, except at a local or regional level, to construct public administrative institutions (by which we might mean – in modern terms – a hierarchy of bishops) that could oversee the affairs of all Christian communities throughout the whole of the Roman empire.¹ As a result, individual Christian groups often developed in isolation from each other. This meant that when, under Constantine, they were at last able to engage in free communication with each other, they often found that their approaches to certain aspects of ritual, organization, and the articulation of belief threw up numerous opportunities for debate (see chapter 5). In short, during the period between Christ and Constantine, Christianity evolved as a religion within the society of the ancient Mediterranean, heavily influenced by, but with very little capacity to shape, that society. It is this that gives unity to the subject of this book.

Of course, the conversion of Constantine, while it represents an important landmark, does not mark a complete break in the development of Christianity. Christians and their leaders did not immediately start behaving in radically different ways, except, perhaps, in their attitude to the Roman emperor and imperial institutions (such as the city).² Rather, the history of Christianity is marked by significant continuities between the periods before and after Constantine. The support of the Roman empire and its personnel was not given to the church unconditionally: some Christians continued to experience harassment from the imperial authorities even after Constantine’s conversion (see chapter 6). Similarly, the world into which Christianity was born did not change immediately with the birth of Jesus, however much some Christians, both now and in the past, might wish to believe that this was so (see chapters 3 and 6). Nor did the development of Christianity occur in a vacuum, unaffected by the society in which it evolved. If we are to understand the particular circumstances that influenced the origins and development of Christianity, then, we will need to look back in time before Jesus’ career and the activities of his followers. Hence, while the focus of this book is the period between Christ and Constantine, it will sometimes be necessary to range beyond these limits to explain particular aspects of early Christianity.

At the risk of seeming facetious, I should also say something on what the word ‘Christianity’ means in this book. As various chapters below will argue, early Christianity possessed certain characteristics that distinguish it from modern Christianity. We would be making a serious error if we wished to make early Christianity fit in every respect expectations derived from study or experience of its modern descendant. For example, any debate as to whether or not the emperor Constantine was ‘really a Christian’ (a hoary question favoured by a certain style of scholar) would go seriously awry if the emperor’s Christianity was expected to conform neatly with modern definitions of what a Christian is. To assess Constantine’s Christianity, we need to comprehend what Christianity meant generally in the early fourth century and, altogether more specifically, we should attempt to determine what it might have meant to Constantine himself.

More importantly, I wish to distinguish between my approach to ‘early Christianity’ and more traditional accounts of ‘the early church’. To talk in terms of ‘the early church’ is to give priority to institutional manifestations of Christianity. What is worse, perhaps, is that treatments of ‘the early church’ risk becoming partisan. Sometimes they privilege one particular definition of ‘the church’, emphasizing continuities that may be discerned in its development as an organization and in its definitions of belief. Such approaches tend to focus on the affairs of bishops, theologians, and their opponents, and thus to marginalize (or even omit) other groups, such as women and the laity at large (cf. Rousseau 2002: 5). A significant repercussion of this approach is that traditional histories of ‘the church’ often stress how throughout history it had a monopoly on ‘orthodox’ or ‘correct’ doctrine (see chapters 2 and 5 below). Groups that deviated from this ‘church’ are dismissed as ‘heretical’ and portrayed as temporary aberrations from what came to be identified with ‘the church’. Such partisanship, it should be noted, reveals the extent to which modern scholars of early Christianity can be regarded as prisoners of the sources upon which they rely: many early Christian writings – from the first-century texts that make up the New Testament to Eusebius of Caesarea’s early fourthcentury Ecclesiastical History – are concerned (in part at least) with precisely such questions of authority and correct belief within the Christian community. As I will argue later in this book (especially in chapter 5), however, such a perspective represents only one particular view of what early Christianity should be; there were other views and they are as much a part of the early Christian story as ‘the church’. Indeed, some modern scholars have argued that the diversity of practice and belief apparent in early Christian writings makes it difficult to identify a single, easily defined phenomenon that can be called ‘Christianity’ in this period. For that reason, it has become fashionable in some circles to talk in terms not of a single early Christianity but of plural early Christianities.³ In sum, then, the Christianity described in this book may seem surprisingly strange and diverse to readers expecting it to be little different from, say, modern Presbyterianism or Catholicism. That, however, is part of its fascination.

A further factor influencing the scope of this book on early Christianity is that it is published in a series called Classical Foundations. It therefore approaches early Christianity as a topic for study within the classical world, the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome. But such civilizations were diverse, and even within a university Classics department you might receive very different definitions of what is ‘important’ in the study of classical antiquity if you were to ask, on the one hand, a scholar of fifth-century BC Greek literature or, on the other, an archaeologist working on the Roman army. In other words, the shape and contents of a book on early Christianity for Classical Foundations will be influenced by the author’s own view of the Classical world. Before proceeding further, therefore, it will be worthwhile to explain what that authorial perspective is.

I am writing this book as someone trained and employed as a Roman historian, with interests primarily in social and cultural history. For the period between Christ and Constantine this means that I am concerned with the society of the Roman empire which, for most of that time, stretched from Britain in the north to the Sahara desert in the south, from the Atlantic coast of Spain and Portugal in the west to Syria and Jordan in the east. At the heart of this enormous expanse of territory lay the Mediterranean Sea which, for many Greeks and Romans, was viewed as the centre of the inhabited world. As a Roman historian approaching the topic of early Christianity, it is the Mediterranean and the lands bordering it that will form the focus of my study. From this perspective, early Christianity was a phenomenon that was born in the Middle East, that spread out from there through the eastern Mediterranean to Asia Minor and Greece, and which from there made its way to the west, to Africa, Gaul, and, at the centre of the empire, to Italy and Rome itself. Of course, this perspective is not the only one possible. A classicist who works on philosophy rather than social history, for example, would take a very different view of what is important in the study of early Christianity (e.g. Jaeger 1962; Pelikan 1993). Similarly, Christianity did not only spread from the Middle East to the west, but in other directions too: east to Armenia and central Asia, and south to Ethiopia, Arabia, and beyond. This last topic, however important it certainly is, lies outside the interests of most scholars working on early Christianity from the perspective of the classical world, and so is not considered here. Let us return, therefore, to the Mediterranean.

It is only fair to advise readers that I consider the Mediterranean background crucial to understanding the evolution of early Christianity. This is hardly an original insight; attempts have been made, for example, to appraise the career of Jesus as that of ‘a Mediterranean Jewish peasant’ (Crossan 1991). But not everyone who studies the ancient Mediterranean interprets it in the same way, and what they mean by ‘the Mediterranean background’ will depend on the criteria they use to define it. Some, for example, talk about Mediterranean culture in terms of its unity, emphasizing characteristics that may be found throughout its length and breadth (e.g. Esler 1994: 19–36). I must confess that, while I have some sympathy with this approach, my overall view is somewhat different. Although there are certainly some features – both now and in antiquity – that unite the Mediterranean, the region as a whole is equally a mosaic of smaller cultural units. My thinking here is influenced by Fernand Braudel (1902–85), the great twentieth-century French historian who did so much to emphasize the unity of the Mediterranean but also highlighted its diversity. He wrote:

The Mediterranean is not a single sea but a succession of small seas that communicate by means of wider or narrower entrances . . . [T]here is a series of highly individual narrow seas between the land masses, each with its own character, types of boat, and its own laws of history . . . Even within these seas smaller areas can be distinguished, for there is hardly a bay in the Mediterranean that is not a miniature community, a complex world itself.

(Braudel 1972: I, 108–10)

Braudel’s analysis, although it drew on data from all periods, concentrated on the sixteenth century. Late in life, he turned his attention to the Mediterranean in antiquity (and prehistory); but the results were not published until after his death (Braudel 2001). Even so, Braudel’s influence on historians of the Mediterranean in the classical world has been considerable, particularly where modern historians of the ancient world have chosen to study developments over the long term (what Braudel called the longue durée) rather than focus on the events of traditional political history. Indeed, recent studies have similarly emphasized for antiquity and the middle ages that the unity of the Mediterranean can be only loosely defined. Moreover, such unity is held in tension by the diversity of the region’s constituent environments and cultures (Hordern and Purcell 2000: 9–49, 485–523).

It is to this view of the ancient Mediterranean that I tend, and it is important to stress this at the outset since I see it as the canvas upon which early Christianity was painted. This canvas comprises not just unifying elements, such as those characteristics that we may identify as ‘Greek’ or ‘Roman’, but also the diverse patchwork of myriad local cultures. For example, the New Testament Acts of the Apostles, when describing the visit of the apostle Paul and his assistant Barnabas to the city of Lystra in Lycaonia in the middle of Asia Minor, notes that locals, when reacting to Paul’s activities, spoke in their local Lycaonian language (Acts 14.11; cf. Mitchell 1993: I, 172–3). From such accounts we get a taste of the diverse cultural landscape that confronted the early Christians.

Amid all this cultural diversity it is important to stress the religious diversity of the ancient Mediterranean. The world inhabited by early Christianity was, to quote the title of a recent and important book on this subject, ‘a world full of gods’ (K. Hopkins 1999). Christianity competed with other gods – the Jewish God and the multifarious deities of Mediterranean paganism – and the way in which the Christian message was received was heavily conditioned by the religious expectations of the inhabitants of this cultural milieu (chapter 4). In some cases, this could lead to confusion and mistakes. A famous example comes from the aforementioned visit of Paul and Barnabas to Lystra in Lycaonia. Paul, in one of his efforts to display the power of Jesus Christ, effected a miraculous cure on a man crippled from birth. Needless to say, the locals were impressed, but they did not at first attribute the miracle to what Paul himself would have deemed to be the correct source. ‘The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!’ they exclaimed, before identifying Barnabas with Zeus and Paul, because he talked so much, with Hermes, the messenger of the gods (Acts 14.8–12).

Such misapprehensions could afflict Christians too. I always feel rather sorry for Hermas, the second-century author of a work on penance and forgiveness called The Shepherd, whose own sins and errors were typified by his misunderstanding of the Christian visions he experienced. Hermas recounts how, in the days when he was a rather lapsed Christian, he was travelling to Cumae on the Bay of Naples when he had a vision of an old woman who presented him with a book of mysterious prophecy. At first poor Hermas failed to realize that the old woman was a personification of the church, and that the books she had given him were full of teachings about Christian virtues. Instead, he thought that the woman was the Sibyl, a pagan prophetess, and that the books were full of pagan prophecy (The Shepherd of Hermas, vision 2.1.3–4; 2.4.1). It is hard to blame him for interpreting his vision this way: after all, in antiquity Cumae was reputed to have been the home of a particularly famous Sibyl, whose prophecies were contained, moreover, in books (Parke 1988: 77–99, 152–6).

From its origins, then, Christianity was a religion that, in both its action and its self-representation, was deeply embedded in the Mediterranean contexts within which it developed. Wherever we look in early Christian literature, we see the activities of Jesus, his followers, and their successors touched by the diverse experiences of life in the Mediterranean world of the Roman empire. Its social, political, economic, and cultural rhythms permeate the writings of the New Testament and later Christian authors. Such were the frameworks within which early Christians defined themselves, their aspirations, and their expectations. Yet it is not simply the case that early Christianity conformed supinely to the constraints presented by this Mediterranean context. On the contrary, Christianity sought to overcome such obstacles. That it did not fragment entirely, but endeavoured to maintain its integrity and identity, indicates the measure of its success in meeting these challenges.

Approaching early Christianity in the twenty-first century

Why do we study early Christianity? Why do the lives of early Christians still matter to us as we begin the third millennium? Twenty years ago, the Oxford historian Robin Lane Fox, beginning his own study of the rise of Christianity and its eclipse of paganism, felt that the answers to such questions were obvious. ‘The subjects of this book’, he remarked, ‘need no apology for their importance’ (Lane Fox 1986: 7). Not everyone today would share this confidence, as we shall soon see. There can be no straightforward answers to the questions set out above, and any answers will be contingent on when, where, and by whom the questions are asked, and who gives the response. Indeed, even Lane Fox knew that his own approach to the subject was peculiarly personal, the product of his upbringing and education (Lane Fox 1986: 8). I have no doubt that this is as true for the answers that I am about to give as for those offered by others who have approached the subject.

Today, I feel, we cannot dispense with the apology that Lane Fox deemed unnecessary. The religious contours of our society have changed considerably since the early 1980s, when Lane Fox was writing. In many parts of the modern industrialized world, especially in its Anglophone regions, religion in general – and, some might feel, Christianity in particular – seems to have been on the retreat in the face of growing secularization. This phenomenon embraces the effects (not necessarily coextensive) of more widespread education, greater popular awareness of science, political disengagement from or suppression of religion, and the rise of materialist consumerism (Park 1994: 48–54; cf. J. Taylor 1990). In such circumstances, religion, having once occupied a central place in society and its debates, moves to a more marginal position. Writing this book against an Irish backdrop has thrown these trends into sharp relief. In the late 1980s, when I became a university student, the Roman Catholic church was still a very powerful force in Irish politics and society. Since then, however, its influence has waned precipitously. A succession of scandals has undermined the church’s moral eminence, while the economic prosperity associated with the rise of the Celtic Tiger has enabled Irish people to pursue their personal goals independent of religious precepts. Hand in hand with this have come wide-ranging changes in public morality, such as in attitudes to marriage (and divorce), contraception, and the place of women in Irish society.

In such circumstances, the intrinsic importance of studying religious traditions, early Christianity among them, would seem to have declined correspondingly. The rest of this chapter aims, therefore, to justify the study of early Christianity in this context. Of course, there can be no single argument in support of this field of study: different people will approach the subject for different reasons. As such, then, I aim to appeal here to a wide constituency of opinions. Not everyone will find each of the various reasons given below equally convincing; indeed, they may even reject some of them. I do not see this as a problem, however: we humans are a varied and individualistic bunch, and our reasons for studying or being interested in a particular subject are correspondingly diverse.

Modern Christians and early Christianity

It may be as well to begin with those for whom the study of early Christianity would appear to be least controversial. There are many modern Christians for whom the study of early Christianity does not need justification, being perfectly explicable as a search for their religious roots. For them this chapter – and even this book – might seem an unnecessary exercise (thus J. Kelly 1991; contrast R. Williams 2005). Many will seek affirmation of their own beliefs an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction: how to use this book
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Notes
• Bibliography