Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200-450 CE

Éric Rebillard

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780801465550
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

For too long, the study of religious life in Late Antiquity has relied on the premise that Jews, pagans, and Christians were largely discrete groups divided by clear markers of belief, ritual, and social practice. More recently, however, a growing body of scholarship is revealing the degree to which identities in the late Roman world were fluid, blurred by ethnic, social, and gender differences. Christianness, for example, was only one of a plurality of identities available to Christians in this period.

In Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200–450 CE, Éric Rebillard explores how Christians in North Africa between the age of Tertullian and the age of Augustine were selective in identifying as Christian, giving salience to their religious identity only intermittently. By shifting the focus from groups to individuals, Rebillard more broadly questions the existence of bounded, stable, and homogeneous groups based on Christianness. In emphasizing that the intermittency of Christianness is structurally consistent in the everyday life of Christians from the end of the second to the middle of the fifth century, this book opens a whole range of new questions for the understanding of a crucial period in the history of Christianity.

Chapter 1

Setting the Stage

Carthage at the End of the Second Century

In his magisterial study of Tertullian, Timothy Barnes notes: “It can surely be no accident that Tertullian’s three earliest extant works are De Spectaculis, De Idololatria and what appears in modern editions as the second book of De Cultu Feminarum. All three address themselves to similar problems: how ought Christians to live out a life of faith in a pagan society?” (1985: 93). To present the conciliation of Christian faith and social life in Carthage at the end of the second century as a problem is to implicitly adopt Tertullian’s own point of view. Indeed, most scholars have underestimated how crucial it was to Tertullian’s rhetorical strategy to challenge Christians on this “problem.” In this chapter, I will show that not all Christians saw conciliation as an issue, as Christianness was only one of the multiple identities that mattered in their everyday life.

Tertullian and the Christian Organization(s) in Carthage

Little is known about Tertullian himself. Our main sources of information are a notice of Jerome in the De viris illustribus (53) and various remarks in Tertullian’s own works.1 The dates of his birth and death are uncertain, but we do know that he wrote during the reigns of Septimius Severus (193–211) and Caracalla (211–217). Tertullian was born in Carthage, where he also spent most of his life. He was not raised as a Christian, but we have no details of his conversion. His writings attest to a good education, and he was very likely of equestrian status (Schöllgen 1985: 183–184). Current scholarship rejects the identification with the jurist Tertullianus.

Jerome says that Tertullian was a presbyter of the church of Carthage, and this statement was for a long time viewed in the light of his later alleged schism with the Montanists, or the New Prophecy, a movement originating in Phrygia (Trevett 1996). Nowadays, scholars tend to reject the claim that Tertullian was a schismatic as anachronistic (Mattei 1990; see Rankin 1995). His sympathy for the prophetic movement and growing dissatisfaction with the Christians he calls the psychici do not imply an official separation, especially in an ecclesiastical context where the relations between Christian organizations were rather fluid (Mattei 1990; Van der Lof 1991; Brent 1995). Although Tertullian was familiar with the ecclesiastical hierarchy of bishop, presbyters, and deacons (see, for instance, bapt. 17; see also Mattei 2000), this does not make it the case that there was one bishop overseeing all the Christians of Carthage. Indeed, we know very little about Carthaginian bishops before Cyprian: one Optatus is mentioned in the Passio Perpetuae 13.1, and one Agrippinus is referred to by Cyprian in context of a synod held probably around 230 (Clarke 1989: 196–199; Y. Duval 2005: 59, 107–110). There is no attempt in our sources to reconstitute an episcopal list before the bishopric of Cyprian (Maier 1973). Thus, it is more likely that there were several Christian organizations in Carthage at the time of Tertullian, organizations that were independent, though sharing a common sense of belonging to the church.

Because Tertullian, in at least one text, clearly includes himself among the clergy (anim. 9.4; see Braun 1972: 74), I see no reason to reject the information given by Jerome, and I accept that Tertullian was presbyter. Such status would also have lent him more legitimacy when addressing Christians on pastoral and disciplinary matters, even if his standing as a “sophisticated literate” had, of itself, given him some authority (Tabbernee 2001: 380–381, following Hopkins 1998).

How many Christians were there in Carthage at the time of Tertullian? As with all numbers in antiquity, we can arrive at only a reasonable guess. The population of Carthage in the second century is now estimated at about 70,000 inhabitants (Gros 2000), and Keith Hopkins suggests as a serviceable estimate, though quite likely too high, that Christians composed one-thirtieth of the total urban and metropolitan population of the Empire (1998: 195). If we apply these estimates to Carthage we arrive at a total of fewer than 2,500 Christians in 200 CE.2 Although this number is very low, perhaps even statistically insignificant, it does not tell the whole story. Indeed, in the pamphlet he addresses to Scapula, the proconsul of Africa, Tertullian warns that persecution of Christians would devastate Carthage, “as everyone would recognize among them relatives and friends” (Scap. 5.2). As Timothy Barnes asks, “Could Scapula have confidence that Tertullian was wrong?” (1985: 69). The recent debate about banning the niqab in western Europe similarly shows that a subgroup within a population can become the focus of attention disproportionate to its statistical significance (Scott 2007).

Christian Membership

Definition

First we should consider how Christian membership was defined. Tertullian clearly counts catechumens among the Christians. In the De corona militis, he explains that no faithful ever bear a crown and that this is true of all, “from the catechumens to the confessors and martyrs or even the deniers” (coron. 2.1). Even if we do not find in Tertullian, as we do in later writers, clear distinctions between the various stages of Christian membership, it seems that Christian membership was broadly understood to start before baptism with admission to the ranks of the catechumens.

Tertullian does not describe how entrance into the ranks of the catechumens was accomplished. He does not mention any specific rite or any sort of screening, but his silence on this matter does not mean that no such rite or screening existed. What seems clear is that there was no fixed catechumenal system, as there would be later on: rules and practices regarding entrance, duration, and instruction probably changed from one organization to another (Saxer 1988: 122–124). Tertullian recommends that baptism not be granted too readily to children and unmarried young people (bapt. 18) and insists that it is better to delay baptism than to accept it presumptuously (paenit. 6), which confirms, along with the fact that he addresses catechumens in most of his pastoral treatises (bapt. 1.1; paenit. 6.1; spect. 1.1), that he regards them as Christians.

Maintenance

Maintenance of membership does not receive a lot of attention and was probably of no great concern. Tertullian nowhere lists duties that Christians would need to perform in order to remain in good standing. It is true that in the second book of the Ad uxorem, for instance, he mentions the “devotions and the duties of the believers” (fidelium studia et officia; uxor. 2.4.1) that a non-Christian husband might try to prevent his Christian wife from performing: keeping a fast, participating in some charitable expedition, celebrating the Easter vigil, welcoming a foreigner, etc. The performance of these duties would satisfy the Lord according to the requirements of the discipline (pro disciplina; uxor. 2.4.1). However, Tertullian—who unabashedly sensationalizes the subject to the extent that he portrays all non-Christian men who would marry Christian women as fortune hunters—does not say that failure to perform these duties would jeopardize their Christian membership. Rather, what seems to have been critical was the bishop’s recognition of an individual as Christian, which recognition entailed permission to participate in Christian gatherings (Mattei 2007).

Loss

Could Christian membership be lost? The issue is not explicitly discussed. For instance, we have no information about what happened to catechumens who had received several refusals to be admitted to baptism. In the same vein, if a major sin were committed after baptism there was a unique possibility of atonement, the so-called public penance, but Christians who committed a second major sin were not cast out of the Christian organization. It is probable that they simply stayed in the ranks of the penitents for the rest of their lives (Poschmann 1964: 44–49). In the Apologeticum, where Tertullian compares Christian membership to memberships more familiar to a non-Christian audience, he seems to imply that sinners were absolutely denied Christian membership (apol. 39.4). This is clearly an overly simplistic and apologetic statement, since Tertullian’s comments elsewhere, even in the De pudicitia, where he holds his most rigorous position on the question of penance, are more nuanced (see Micaelli and Munier 1993: 85–92). In the same passage from the Apologeticum, to which I will return, Tertullian also says that there is no “entrance-fee” for Christian membership (apol. 39.5).

Rules about Christian membership were seemingly less relevant to the internal life of Tertullian’s organization than they were useful for distinguishing it from other organizations that were claiming to be Christian (Mattei 2007). However, because of the nature of our evidence, we can catch glimpses of the everyday Christianity only of the Christians that Tertullian addresses, and it is difficult to evaluate how different this was for the Christians of other organizations.

Expressing Christian Membership

Thus far I have considered how one became and remained a member of a Christian organization. Now I want to ask when and how this membership was made known to outsiders.

External Markers

Shaye Cohen in The Beginnings of Jewishness asks the same question about Jews in the Diaspora, and he begins his investigation by appraising a series of external markers: looks, clothing, speech, names, and occupations (1999: 25–68). We can profitably apply a similar appraisal in our own study.

No pagan author attacks Christians for their distinctive looks or speech, and no Christian author complains about such attacks (Labriolle 1934; Benko 1980). Christians in a city like Carthage might have been of Oriental origin, but so were many of the other inhabitants, and this was not enough to distinguish them (Lassère 1977: 406–412).

What about clothing? Tertullian seems to have been sensitive to the importance of clothing as an extension of identity. He notes that Jewish women were distinctive because they wore veils in public (coron. 4.2), and that Arabian women even covered their whole face (virg. vel. 17.4). Even if these comments are not the result of direct observation—it seems that the evidence on Jewish women derives from the Hebrew Bible (Cohen 1999: 31 and n. 19)—they show that Tertullian was aware of the social (and religious) significance of clothing. This is also confirmed by his polemic tractate on the veiling of virgins, De virginibus velandis (see Schultz-Flügel 1997), and by his short piece De pallio, in which he encourages—whether seriously or not has long been debated (see more recently Brennan 2008)—Carthaginian men to abandon the traditional Roman toga and to adopt the Greek-style dress of the philosophers, the pallium. However, nowhere does he suggest that Christians wore, or should wear, some distinctive clothing.

While Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria between 248 and 265, notes that Christian children are often named after Peter and Paul (Eusebius Caesariensis, HE 7.25.14), no such observations appear in the writings of Tertullian or Cyprian. Because Christian names (on the difficulty of identifying them as such, see Choat 2006: 51–56) disseminated slowly in onomastics (Kajanto 1963; Marrou 1977; Pietri 1977), and because the epigraphic material identified as Christian is of a later date, I will postpone the discussion on names to chapter 3. In the meantime, it can be stated with some certainty that names were not an external marker of Christianity in second- and third-century Carthage (see Rives 1995: 223–224 on the names of the Scillitan martyrs).

As for occupations, some seemed to have been more or less incompatible with Christian membership (see Schöllgen 1982: 3–13 and discussion below), but none were reserved exclusively for Christians. It was therefore impossible to identify a Christian on the basis of his occupation.

In sum, there were no external markers of Christian membership, a situation that Tertullian illustrates in two passages. First, in the De spectaculis, Tertullian addresses an imaginary Christian going to the amphitheater to watch a gladiatorial game. He asks: “What will you do if you are caught in the heat of these impious applauses? It’s not as if you could suffer anything from men (nobody recognizes you as a Christian), but think about what will happen in heaven” (spect. 27.2). There is of course much sarcasm in the rhetorical question. However, the general sense of the message depends on the truth of the assertion that a Christian cannot be identified through external markers. A second passage reinforces this conclusion. In the Ad Scapulam, Tertullian states that Christians are “known rather as individuals than as a group,” and that they “can be recognized only for the reformation of their former vices” (Scap. 2.10). Since the statement is clearly apologetic, we can disregard the opposition between individuals and group. However, individual qualities hardly constitute an external marker, and thus Tertullian confirms that Christian membership could not be determined unless a Christian wished it so.

By Association

Despite the above observations, Timothy Barnes states: “The ordinary Christians of Carthage were a group who could easily be defined and recognized” (1985: 90). Yet this is less at odds with the preceding conclusion than it appears: Barnes goes on to mention Tertullian’s affirmation that, unlike heretics and Gnostics, Christians do have fixed meeting places (praescr. 42.10). With th...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Primary Sources
• Introduction
• 1. Setting the Stage: Carthage at the End of the Second Century
• 2. Persecution and the Limits of Religious Allegiance
• 3. Being Christian in the Age of Augustine
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography