6
Social Change
Decius’ call for civic sacrifice caused an uproar among certain Christian individuals and communities who felt they were being “persecuted” for their beliefs. Ancient church historians like Eusebius and modern church historians, like the acclaimed twentieth‐century scholar Henry Chadwick, chose to write history from their vantage. In The Early Church Chadwick described Decius’ policy as “a systematic persecution” and “a deliberate attempt to catch people” (London: Penguin, 1993, p. 188). As we saw from evidence in the last chapter, Decius’ policy was much more open‐ended. There is no evidence to suggest the emperor maliciously designed it to entrap citizens.
Nevertheless, by the second half of the third century CE, two of Decius’ successors – Emperor Valerian (r. 253–260) and Emperor Diocletian (r. 284–305) – would begin to force Christians, by law, to participate in civic events. These decrees did specifically target Rome’s Christian community. They are the first and only historical instances in which the Roman government deliberately and with malice used the legal mechanisms of the state to discriminate against Jesus’ followers.
Only in the most general terms can the policies of Valerian and Diocletian be seen as an attempt to unify Rome’s cities. For at their heart, by explicitly identifying one minority group as the source of the empire’s larger social problems, these laws stained Rome’s long‐standing tradition of pluralism. This pluralism had, at times, been granted begrudgingly by Romans who feared the makeup of their changing cities, the foreign identity of merchants, or the advancement of non‐Roman groups. Yet for centuries, this system had worked, inspiring forms of civic participation that had allowed foreigners, initiates of mystery cults, even followers of an alleged superstitio – like Jews – to find their home in the empire. By the third century, in particular, many Jews had begun to build synagogues with the help of wealthy donors and patrons. From Ostia, where a dedication records the creation of a Torah Shrine “on behalf of the Roman Emperors,” to Dura Europos in Roman Syria, where Jews transformed a house into a worship space with colorful paintings, third‐century Rome witnessed an exciting rise in the visibility of many groups that otherwise are unattested in the archaeological record for previous centuries. To tell the history of the third century as one of widespread decline overlooks these smaller but no less important triumphs.
After a century that had seen emperors attempt to keep Roman society from fracturing, however, and against the backdrop of a state that was hemorrhaging leaders, Emperors Valerian and Diocletian had resorted to extreme steps to persuade the Christian population to join in the enterprise of being Roman. In doing so, they doubled down on the worst of many Romans’ cultural fears: by crafting legislation to punish Christians specifically for their beliefs. These laws were disastrous for the empire’s morale. They also succeeded in driving a wedge between the empire’s Christian communities who were, just as they had been from their first generation, divided amongst themselves about how to live in the Roman Empire. This Christian “identity baggage” would only grow more pronounced throughout the fourth century CE and, later, change many Roman towns.
To understand how and why these changes happened, we need to conclude our narrative of the third century with close‐up attention to events at the top of society combined with a wide‐angle view of what was happening at the bottom.
6.1 Rome’s Laws Against Christians
Emperor Valerian, 257–258 CE
Textual sources suggest that Emperor Valerian issued two decrees against Christians. The first, announced in 257 CE, is known from a third‐century Christian account modeled on contemporary trial records, the Proconsular Judicial Proceedings. According to this Latin text, Valerian ordered everyone in cities throughout the empire who did not recognize “the worship practice [religio] of the Roman people … to acknowledge Roman rituals” (Acta Proconsularia 1.1, trans. by H. Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs [Oxford, 1972]). Based on its imprecise language, this decree appears consistent with Decius’ own policy and would not, therefore, have posed an existential problem for all of the empire’s Christians – unless they specifically chose to claim a special social status.
In 258 CE, however, Valerian’s hostility grew more pronounced. A second decree, known from a Christian source, describes the emperor’s revised edict in this way. According to the writer, Valerian now decreed that:
[B]ishops, presbyters, and deacons should immediately be punished; [and] that [Christian] senators, men of importance, and Roman knights should both lose their dignity and, moreover, be deprived of their property. Furthermore, if, when their means were taken away, these people should persist in identifying as “Christians,” then they should also lose their heads. Wealthy women should be deprived of their property and sent into banishment. Finally, Christians in the imperial household … should have their property confiscated and should be sent in chains by assignment to Caesar’s estates.
(Cyprian, Letter 81.1, trans. by R. Wallis in the series ANF, slightly modified [1886])
This legislation, directed specifically at the Christian hierarchy, as well as financially well‐connected Romans, both male and female, must have had a profoundly disruptive effect on the Christian community. Unlike the decree of the previous year, which gave some latitude to Christians to make their own choices about sacrifice, now Christians had no legal recourse or room for creative manoeuvring. Their institutional structure was under assault, as was their donor class.
The situation ended thanks to Sasanian Persia. When Sapur I captured Emperor Valerian in 260 CE, the emperor’s discriminatory policy was no longer enforced. Christians must have been joyous. Later, by the early fourth century, they were passing down stories that Valerian’s capture had been divine punishment for his ill‐conceived campaign against Christians (Lactantius, On the Death of the Persecutors 5).
Christian sacrifice in context on the eve of the Rule of Four
In the long history of Christians living in the Roman Empire up until the third century, Valerian’s laws stand out as an aberration, but they can often distract scholars from seeing the broader picture. Throughout the empire’s cities, many intensely personal dramas were playing out both before and after the political programs of Decius and Valerian as Christians were making complicated decisions about whether to participate or not in Rome’s civic sacrifices. Many chose to do so for a variety of reasons, including, perhaps, the need for the approval of their family, friends, and clergy.
Some likely weighed the potential for personal and political advancement. When the government turned against them, in 258 CE, the range of emotions among them – especially among Christians who worked “in the imperial household” (a fact we just learned) – must have run the gamut: from betrayal to resignation to disappointment with their political leadership. One Christian writer working in the early to middle third century CE, Origen of Alexandria, gives us some sense of the panicked conversations that must have been filling the taverns and laundry mats and markets during this turbulent time.
Origen (b. c.185–d. c.255 CE) reports on a conversation he had with a non‐Christian, a man named Celsus, who expressed skepticism that Christians could ever really be good citizens of the empire. “To this [assertion],” Origen explained to his Christian readers, “our answer is”:
[W]e do give divine help to the emperors, if I may say, by putting on the whole armor of God when occasion requires. And this we do in obedience to the injunction of the apostle [who said]: “I exhort you, therefore, that first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgiving be made for all men, for emperors, and for all who are in authority” [quoting 1 Timothy 2.1–2].
(Origen, Against Celsus 8.73, trans. by F. Crombie in the series ANF [1885], slightly modified)
The fact that a third‐century Christian like Origen could appeal to “Paul,” “the apostle,” (“1 Timothy”) to support his argument that Christians were not a threat to the empire shows the malleability of Christian tradition in the hands of Late Antique thinkers. It conforms, too, with the broader picture we can piece together from material culture, such as at the excavations at Dura Europos, Syria, where a well‐integrated Christian home‐owner succeeded in renovating his house – turning it into a Christian worship space – without neighbors handing him over to the authorities. This Christian church, the earliest worship space ever excavated in a Roman city, dates to the decades prior to 256 CE before a Sasanian army destroyed the town. The construction of the church in the age before Valerian suggests that not all Christians in the third century feared either being seen or heard in their local towns.
It is indisputable, of course, that other members of the Christian faith stood up and stood out during this same time as loud champions of resistance. These Christians did so by suggesting that to call oneself a “Christian” required a non‐negotiable commitment to blood and martyrdom. Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, advocated exactly that position by appealing to the language of militancy, arguing that Christians everywhere were required to act as “God’s soldiers” (Letter 8). The Roman government may have tried to punish Christians or even torture them, Cyprian wrote, but it was Christian blood which was the real “spectacle … to the Lord. How sublime, how great, how acceptable to the eyes of God,” he claimed, “[was] the allegiance and devotion of His soldiers” when they stood up and opposed the Roman state (Cyprian, Letter 8, trans. by R. Wallis in the series ANF [1886]).
Bishop Cyprian’s words are similar to those of an earlier third‐century writer, Tertullian, who claimed that “the blood of the martyrs” was the “seed” that led to the demographic growth of the church (Tertullian, Apologeticus 50). This imagery also would have harmonized, to many Christians, with the words of the writer of Revelation, who – in a cosmic drama fought by angels and demons – framed “Rome” as a corrupt, decadent, and depraved new “Babylon” (Revelation 17.5). That was a gloomy tune the writer of the text called 1 Peter had sung, as well (1 Peter 5.13). All these texts may have taught Christians to see a value in cultural separation. And yet they are not the whole story of early Christianity, either.
In the records of a church meeting at Elvira, in Roman Spain, c.305–306, the hierarchy turned its attention to several challenges facing Roman Christians on the Iberian peninsula. The obsessive list of complaints which they drew up in Latin, which survives as the Canons of the Council of Elvira, is a quizzical look at what church leaders feared at the turn of the fourth century. “Persecution” was decidedly not one of them. Among the first five recommendations which the council passed, three addressed the status of Christian flamines – priests of the local imperial cult – who were also active members of the Christian community. These canons, or “rules,” were designed to limit Christian participation in this important public office. The mere fact that the church leadership had to articulate these rules suggests the ease with which many Christians fulfilled their high‐profile duties as Roman politicians, even before Christianity was officially legalized.
There is no reason for historians to try to blur, collapse, or artificially harmonize this conflicting evidence. In the third century and the early fourth century, just as in the first and second centuries, Christians did not see eye‐to‐eye with their own peers on how to participate in Roman city life. Whether Rome’s emperors ever recognized this fact is entirely unclear. What is clear is that by 303 CE, the policy drafted in the palace would be the most discriminatory against Christians yet.
6.2 The End of the Third Century and the Rise of the Rule of Four
By the 280s, Rome’s empire had weathered a tempestuous century, militarily, politically, and economically. Gaius Valerius Diocles, a soldier from the city of Salona in Roman Croatia (b. 244–d. 312 CE), engineered the foundations of a new stable state. After being proclaimed emperor by his troops in 284 CE, Diocles began a dedicated campaign to keep the empire from slipping back into civil war and military and political turmoil.
It was a challenging task for anyone, let alone a man from the provinces whom one fourth‐century writer reports was the son of a freed slave. In fact, perhaps because of the stigma Diocles felt as an outsider, he soon adopted a more stereotypically Roman – which is to say, Latin‐sounding – version of his name: Diocletian. (For these details, we can thank the fourth‐century Latin writer Aurelius Victor [On the Emperors] 39.1.)
Diocletian’s vision ensured that the fifty years of political turnover in the palace soon came to an end. Immediate rivals were quickly eliminated. By 293 CE, a form of power‐sharing was instituted among senior‐level leaders and junior counterparts. This new constitutional system, in which two senior “Augustuses” (Latin plural, Augusti) oversaw the political formation of two junior “Caesars” (Latin plural, Caesares), may have helped Diocletian identify future, capable administrators and bring them into the governmental system without risk of civil war or overt political conflict. This Tetrarchy, or “Rule of Four,” was implemented across the empire, with the Augusti and Caesares residing in capitals in the eastern and western provinces. Trier in Roman Germany, Antioch in Roman Syria, Nicomedia in Roman Turkey, and Thessaloniki in Roman Greece all emerged as important government centers during the administration of the Tetrarchs. (Exploring Culture 6.1: The Many Lives of Rome’s “Colosseum.”)
For the citizens of the late third‐century empire, who watched the profile of these cities grow, the new attention must have made a powerful statement: The Tetrarchs were investing in the future of Rome, the stability of its government, and the security of its people. We should look at the building program in one of these cities.
6.3 A View from Thessaloniki, Roman Greece, Late Third Century CE
Thessaloniki was a city of tradesmen and guilds strategically located on the Via Egnatia, the east–west road that helped travelers cross from Europe to Asia Minor (and vice versa). Because the city was so well integrated into the empire’s roads, for example, it is, perhaps not surprisingly, the first city from which we have any written evidence for Paul, one of Jesus’ first followers who stopped here in the late 40s and early 50s CE on his way south to Athens and Corinth. Three centuries later, the junior “Caesar” of the eastern empire, Galerius, set up his imperial residence here. Galerius ruled as “Caesar” from 293–305 CE and was promoted to Augustus in 305. He held that senior title until his death in 311.
Galerius’ urban investments
With Diocletian’s help, Galerius began a new building program in the city. It included a race track. (The Greek‐derived word for “race track” is a hippodrome; the Latin‐derived word, “circus.” Galerius’ entertainment structure can be referred to with either term.) Galerius and Diocletian also paid for the construction of a new palace, as well as a mausoleum, or monumental tomb, that was supposed to be the final resting place of Galerius and his family. Thessaloniki’s palace had many of the amenities an emperor would have found on the Palatine Hill in Rome: secluded courtyards for whispered meetings, audience halls to host public receptions, dining rooms to entertain clients. There were also comfortable living quarters. These details are known from careful study of the remains of Galerius’ palace, which exists today as a mass of truncated brick walls.
Archaeologists still don’t have the complete picture of Galerius’ palace, but one of its most lasting features, its main entryway, is still standing. This large monument is a four‐sided arch, erected at the intersection of two roads. It originally stood at the very crossroads of the Via Egnatia, the entry to Galerius’ palace, and the path to the emperor’s mausoleum; Galerius had picked prime real estate for his residence. The Arch of Galerius, as it is called, is for historians one of the most important pieces of material culture from the period of the “Rule of Four.” For everyone coming into and out of Thessaloniki would have seen it. It communicated the impressive reach of Galerius’ authority (Figure 6.1).
Figure 6.1 This view of the city of Thessaloniki, Greece, looking northeast, shows two important Late Antique monuments: the arch and the rotunda built by the Roman ruler Galerius. The Arch of Galerius, c.298–303, commemorated the Roman Empire’s recent victories over the Persians. It crossed one of the most important Roman roads in Thessaloniki, the Via Egnatia, which led to the Black Sea and onward to Asia Minor. The arch also formed part of the vestibule, or entrance way, for Galerius’ palace. In the distance is the rotunda, or round building, which was likely planned as Galerius’ mausoleum. After being promoted from the rank of Caesar to Augustus in 305 CE, he would rule for six years but was eventually buried in modern Serbia, rendering the rotunda a vacant imperial property. By the fifth or sixth century CE, it would be transformed into a church for Saint George, called Agios Georgios in Greek.
Photo credit: © Pete Titmuss/Alamy Stock Photo.
The political messages of Galerius’ arch and palace vestibule
Unfortunately, the arch is only partially preserved, but several of its sculptural reliefs are still in place on the northwest and southwest piers. These panels celebrated the Tetrarch’s deeds and accomplishments and depicted selected events from Galerius’ life, such as his military victory over the Sasanian Persians and the peace treaty he signed with them in 298 CE. As a whole, the panels speak to the Tetrarchs’ commitment to the social cohesiveness of the empire.
Each scene was divided into registers, or panels. One shows Galerius on a magistrate’s chair. In it, dignitaries come to him as supplicants, offering prayers and honors on his behalf. Another shows the emperor in a paludamentum, the popular military cloak of the third‐century rulers (such as Valerian wears in the Persian cameo [Figure 4.4]). Galerius himself is protected by foreign bodyguards at his side – their hairstyle has been taken to signify their idenity as “German” – and the emperor is shown welcoming a foreign embassy (Figure 6.2). Sasanian ambassadors kneel before the emperor. This reverential act was called a proskynesis from the Greek verb proskuneo [προσκυνέω], meaning “to kneel down in an act of worship.”
Figure 6.2 A close‐up view of three sculpted scenes from the Arch of Galerius at Thessaloniki, Greece (c.298–303). In the top panel, which art historians call a register, Caesar Galerius addresses his troops and is surrounded by foreign bodyguards, who are distinguished by their non‐Roman dress. In the middle register, Galerius receives an embassy of Sasanians, whom he has just conquered; the three Persian men kneel before the Roman ruler to recognize his power and authority. In the lower register, a traditional Roman sacrifice is taking place. The arcade, at right, acts as an urban backdrop, showing how the sacrifice brought leading figures of the town together to give thanks for Galerius’ victory. Some attendees wear togas with their heads covered as a sign of Roman piety. Galerius, in his military uniform, stands at center and offers incense at the altar.
Photo credit: © Danita Delimont/Alamy Stock Photo.
By Late Antiquity, “obeisance” to the ruler was a regular political display. In the third century BCE, while traveling and fighting in Persia, the accomplished Macedonian general Alexander the Great had seen it performed by Persians, who used it to show deference to their ruler, treating him in a divine way. In accounts of his campaigns, Alexander and his advisors argued over whether such an act of godly deference towards another human being might be appropriate for Alexander himself (Arrian, Campaigns of Alexander [Anabasis] 4.10–12). The idea was scuttled as being too scandalously strange for Alexander’s subjects, too culturally tainted by its Persian origins. Centuries later, as the Arch of Galerius shows, this form of ancient Persian honor had become a widely recognizable aspect of Rome’s imperial cult.
Whether the Roman citizens of Thessaloniki cared about the Persian origins of “proskynesis” during a time of Roman–Persian conflict is uncertain, but by the time of the “Rule of Four,” Romans were regularly using a Persian practice as part of their own repertoire for worshipping the Roman emperor. A ritual which had its roots in fifth‐century BCE Persia was now being used by the Sasanian’s own rivals to emphasize the glory and divine grandeur of their own ruler. Regardless of the irony, the public advertisement of Galerius’ triumphs on the arch must have been a welcome message for the people of Thessaloniki. Like many others throughout the Roman world, they may have heard horror stories of recent emperors captured or killed in battle on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. The arch was a sign that Rome’s greatness had returned.
Other scenes on the arch announced important changes, such as the new constitutional system of the empire and the order that Diocletian had brought to the state. In another panel, the two ruling senior emperors, Diocletian and his colleague Maximian, are enthroned atop the personification of the Heavens, the Roman god Caelus; and a personification of the Known World, known in Greek as the Oikoumene, the root of our word economy. This visual arrangement – of having the emperors buttressed by the heavens and the personification of the universe – promoted a powerful ideology: that the two senior Tetrarchs were “rulers of the known world.” That is, they were, in the language of the day, cosmocratores (from the Greek words cosmos, meaning “universe,” and κρατέω [krateo], meaning “to rule”).
Two junior partners, Constantius Chlorus and Galerius, were seated at the sides of this pair of chief executives. They are surrounded by several deities from Mt. Olympus, the home of the traditional gods. In all, the panels’ message reinforces the divine source of the emperors’ power. Two additional figures are also present on the arch. They are each winged, female figures who represent the divine idea of Victory (Victoria is the goddess’s name in Latin; in Greek, she is called Nikē and was an important local goddess, incorporated into the name of Thessaloniki itself).
In sum, Galerius’ building projects at Thessaloniki – at a major intersection promoting the imperial house and located on a main road which united the empire – communicated, like a billboard, the stability of the new government. The scenes from the palace’s vestibule, or arch, are also particularly significant for recognizing how the members of the “Rule of Four” promoted their diplomatic and military relationship with Sasanian Persia. New imperial capital cities like Thessaloniki, then, were not tangential to the story of later Rome. At the end of the third century CE, they witnessed first‐hand new, important developments and stepped proudly before the townspeople as a herald announcing the strength of Rome’s empire (Key Debates 6.1: Catastrophe or Continuity? Or a False Choice?; Figure 6.3).
Figure 6.3 A plan of the old agora, or market center, of Athens, Greece, c.400–700 CE. For centuries, its stoas (shaded porticos), temples, shrines, fountains, and wells had seen countless lively characters walk in their midst, from philosophers like Socrates to anonymous wives and daughters of Athenian families out for a day’s chores. Even under Rome, emperors and citizens continued to live in the shadow of Pericles’ Parthenon and Athens’ historic monuments. That story began to change in the middle of the third century CE. When a tribe of foreigners, the Heruli, attacked Athens c.267 CE, the Romans of Athens decided to build a new set of defenses. These walls can be seen on this plan to the east and southeast of the old agora. They were built along the road to the Acropolis, site of the city’s precious Temple of Athena, and even incorporated older monuments in the agora, like the Stoa of Attalos. The central area of the old agora would be excluded from the much smaller walled city at this time. Plan courtesy of John Camp, The Athenian Agora: Excavations in the Heart of Classical Athens (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), p. 199 with author’s modifications.
6.4 Diocletian’s Edict against Followers of Mani, 296 CE or 302 CE
While military campaigns continued on the borders, particularly against the Sasanian state, the maintenance of traditional worship, incorporating animal and incense sacrifice for Rome’s gods, including the deified emperors, was seen as the best strategy for promoting cultural cohesion and articulating shared Roman values. The Arch of Galerius draws attention to this point, as the sculptural panels show several scenes of Romans partaking in incense sacrifice at public altars. Diocletian himself was not content to leave civic sacrifices to the whim of the Roman people, however. Like Decius, he too would summon the apparatus of the state to enforce participation. And like Valerian, he would address his decrees to two specific communities whom he felt needed to be policed: the followers of Mani, on the one hand, and the followers of Jesus, on the other.
Mani (b. 216–c.275) was born in Parthia, became a follower of Jesus, and later founded his own prophetic movement. It was at once dualistic yet largely pessimistic about the material world and human bodies. Mani was executed by the Zoroastrian Sasanian state for his teachings.
Much of what historians know about his life can be reconstructed from an extraordinary artifact: “a lump of parchment fragments the size of a matchbox” (“Cologne Mani Codex,” EI vol. 6.1, pp. 43–46) which contains, in Greek, a fifth‐century CE biography of the prophet. The text, written in 1 mm high letters, tells of Mani’s calling; how he “was led astray in this disgusting flesh,” a detail that refers to his negative view of the human body; and how he was given visions of “boundless heights and the fathomless depths” of his soul’s existence (translations of the Cologne Mani Codex from A. D. Lee, Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity [London: Routledge, 2000], pp. 176–177). A second document, written in Coptic, gives more detail about Mani’s worldview. “This whole world stands firm for a season, here … So soon as that builder will finish,/the whole world will be dissolved and set on fire…” (excerpts from The Manichaean Psalmbook, Psalm 223, trans. in Lee [2000], pp. 178–179). This text also helps us see that Mani saw creation as a battle between forces of Good and Evil, Light and Darkness. In this unending battle, learning to become aware of the properties in matter – such as how many particles of light may have been contained in plants and other foods – was a vital step for measuring one’s success against the demonic cosmic forces. Foods with more light particles steeled the believer against them. Based on the teachings contained in both these documents, it is extremely likely that Mani’s followers would have harbored a strong apocalyptic worldview.
What the evidence does not support is the notion that Mani consciously or deliberately founded a separate “religion” called “Manichaeanism.” On this point, the evidence would suggest that Mani considered himself to be a believer in Jesus. He was someone who borrowed freely from Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian ideas; and he was a creative thinker who transformed these ideas into a community of like‐minded believers. It won a wide following.
After Mani’s death, his teachings spread to Asia. By 296 CE or 302 CE, they had come to the Roman Empire. We know because at that time the Emperor Diocletian issued a decree categorizing Mani’s followers as adherents of a superstitio. Furthermore, although Mani had been executed by a Persian king, the prophet’s teachings were now spoken of by the Roman government as if they were culturally equivalent to the “accursed customs and perverse laws of the Persians” (Comparison of Mosaic and Roman Law 15.3, trans. in N. Lewis and M. Reinhold, Roman Civilization 2 [1990], pp. 548–550). Did Emperor Diocletian believe that Mani’s followers were secretly transmitting Sasanian values into the heart of his empire? We cannot say for sure, but looking at this period from the ground‐up, we do get a different perspective.
In Solona in Roman Dalmatia (modern Croatia), a tombstone with a Greek inscription records the burial of a woman named Bassa. She was a young girl, a virgin, and a native of Lydia in Asia Minor who died in the late third or early fourth century CE, probably around the time that Diocletian was issuing his decree. On Bassa’s tomb, she was specifically remembered as a member of a “Manichaean” community (Texte zum Manichäismus [Texts for the Study of Manichaeanism], ed. by A. Adam [Berlin, 1954], no. 67). We should try to imagine her reaction to the world of Diocletian’s anti‐Manichaean policy. To her, Diocletian’s conviction that he could use the power of the state to unite the Roman people would not have been an abstract political campaign. It was a plan that would have directly affected her life and the lives of other real citizens, at least one of whom, Bassa, died in the very city where Diocletian had been born.
6.5 The Rise of Christianity: Assumptions and Starting Points
By 303 CE, a similar set of legal proscriptions would be enacted against Christians. The story of Diocletian’s persecution, its repeal, and the rewriting of the constitution to include a legally recognized place for Christian worship is one that will be taken up in the next chapter on law and politics. Before we do so, we should conclude this chapter by looking carefully at three assumptions that have driven research on the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire.
“Christianization” and evangelization
Much work on Late Antiquity involves investigations into what historians have traditionally called the “Christianization” of Rome’s cities. This shorthand is used to describe how Christians changed urban life and Roman society over the course of the third and fourth centuries CE after their community was granted legal status. As an umbrella term for cultural change, however, “Christianization” carries too much baggage to be useful.
For one, it is too imprecise. Sometimes scholars have used “Christianization” when the phenomenon they are really interested in describing is the spread of the Christian message, a phenomenon more properly called “evangelization.” Second, even when historians qualify their use of it in a broader sense – to refer generically to the spread of Christian ideas, imagery, and laws – the use of the term still places researchers “inside the ring” during the middle of an important fight. Since the founding of the movement in the first century CE, many followers of Jesus had adapted perfectly well to life in their local Roman cities and had accommodated their worship and beliefs to the practices of their non‐Christian family, friends, and neighbors. Other Christians did not.
The job of the historian is not to take sides in this debate. It is, rather, to stand outside this conversation and play the role of an impartial umpire. That means starting from well‐grounded first principles. The first principle would be this: For three hundred years, it is documented fact that many Christians didn’t want to “Christianize” anything about the Roman world they lived in. So why should historians assume they had to do so starting in the late third century or early fourth century? (Political Issues 6.1: Emperor Constantine in Jerusalem.) For these reasons and more, Christianization as a word will always be a sloppy way of talking about historical change because it shows a stubborn refusal to engage with Christian politics.
Maps which purport to illustrate the “Christianization” of the Roman Empire are particularly unhelpful for historians since they never explain what, exactly, they are registering as an example of “Christian” identity or “Christian” behavior. In this regard, the dangers of using the word “Christianization” in the writing of history can best be grasped by looking at the way some political commentators have written about the “Islamization” of contemporary Europe or America. As used in these current contexts, the word “Islamization” implies a cultural threat from the Muslim community; and it is based around the assumption that Muslims are incapable of living peacefully alongside their neighbors without radically wanting to impose “their” law or “their” customs on “traditional Western values.”
The belief that all members of a monotheistic faith are unable to live in diverse social settings without wanting to change them is a shaky foundation for doing historical research. In this same manner, to tell the story of Late Antiquity as if it were the gradual, inevitable march of Christian customs across the landscape of traditional Roman values perpetuates gross stereotypes about Christians as a group.
Christian demographics and faith‐based narratives of rapid conversion
Other questionable presumptions have guided scholarship on Christians and city life in the Roman Empire. A second one is that the ranks of the Christian faithful must have swelled over the course of the third and fourth centuries CE because Romans of this time were gradually becoming more disenchanted with their own faith traditions, abandoning their temples and letting the sacred spaces of their cities decay. Christianity succeeded, in this scenario, because Rome’s worship failed. This approach gained its strongest support in the 1980s and 1990s when one sociologist, Rodney Stark, tried to connect Christianity’s allegedly meteoric rise in Rome to the exponential growth that was then being predicted for the Mormon community in America.
In the last few decades, however – notwithstanding an increase in the group’s social visibility – membership in the Church of Latter Day Saints in the U.S. has not risen as exponentially as sociologists once forecasted. It now appears, by contrast, that minority religious groups in a pluralistic society can remain demographic minorities for much longer than scholarly models once predicted. This reality does not deny that certain individuals within a minority group can find a level of integration which is ultimately disproportionate to their group’s population. Contemplating the case of the 2008 U.S. Republican presidential campaign, which featured a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints, might be a useful comparative exercise. Although a milestone in American politics, the rise of this one Mormon presidential candidate cannot be used to explain, across the United States, a new tide of new conversions to the Church of Latter Day Saints. Public visibility and conversion are two social phenomena that are not necessarily correlated.
With this case study in mind, we should be extremely cautious about connecting the rise of early Christian visibility with notions of widespread Christian conversion throughout the Roman Empire. Even attempts at measuring Christian demographics in Rome may be a bit of misdirection.
Many historians, for example, still assume that Christians did succeed in growing their numbers through sermons, outreach, good works, and Bible education. That’s how a small 10 percent of the empire eventually converted the remaining 54 million people of the Roman world over time. In these reconstructions, researchers need Christian numbers to grow over the course of the fourth century, for only then can they truly begin to explain why Christianity was declared the official “religion” of the empire in the late fourth century. If Romans overwhelmingly embraced Christianity by the middle of the fourth century CE, this argument goes, Christian politicians would have been perfectly within their rights to outlaw older “pagan” practices.
There are problems with this model of history, too. To begin, it assumes that Christianity’s rise in Rome was the result of a quasi‐democratic political process by which everyone in the empire gradually came to recognize the superiority of the new faith. Comforting as that vision may be to some Christians today, it nevertheless silences the voice of Rome’s non‐Christians during some of the most intense political debates of Late Antiquity. Second, it also lumps all “the Christians” into one undifferentiated group and presumes that every self‐professed “follower of Jesus” would have made the same political choices – that is, to outlaw other people’s religious options and to establish Christianity as the official worship of Rome as their faith allegedly required them to. Many of these approaches silently drive many scholarly studies today. Sometimes, they are even regular starting points for scholars working on Late Antique Christianity, but it is important for us to recognize that, as approaches to historical questions, most of them are faith‐driven. And all of them are swimming in a stew of highly questionable notions about how monotheistic faiths must necessarily feed intolerant behavior.
Recognizing political disagreement among Rome’s Christian community
How the Roman Empire became a Christian state remains today an unsettled question. The widely accepted view is that, at most, 10 percent of the population was Christian in 313 CE, and there may be little use in trying to compile any more precise data. Relevant evidence is slim. That’s why, rather than starting our conversation from the assumption that the majority of the Roman world was flocking towards Christianity by the end of the fourth century CE, we should leave room to entertain other models.
One alternate approach would be to consider the idea that Christianity’s imposition on the Roman world was exactly that: an imposition. Today, some scholars are likely hesitant to support this view because it will sound, superficially, like a return to the eighteenth‐century bigoted idea that Christians advocated an “intolerant zeal.” (Indeed, that’s how Edward Gibbon characterized Christianity in his famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1776].) We don’t need to fall into Gibbon’s trap, however, assuming that all Christians subscribed to the same political behavior, to recognize the benefits of taking a top‐down approach to this important question. As a decision imposed on the Roman people, the establishment of a Christian state – through legal mechanisms by which traditional worship was outlawed and stigmatized – may have been the product of competing Christian political visions for the Roman state. Consequently, the decision to outlaw traditional worship practices may have been one that not every Christian citizen of the Roman Empire would have chosen to support.
This model has at least one strong benefit. It suggests that counting the number of Christians in the empire, although a noble endeavor, is not crucially important for understanding Rome’s social change. To the contrary, the transformation of Rome into a Christian empire would be dependent on the ideologies of its Christian politicians and their advisors, not on the democratic or spiritual wishes of its citizens (Working With Sources 6.1: Descriptions of the City of Constantinople).
Summary
For four hundred years, Christians were a tiny fraction of the empire’s 60 million people. As such, they faced the same stigmas – bigotry, public and private hostility, and stereotyping – that other minority groups had faced throughout the empire. What we also saw in the beginning of this chapter is that, like Jews, foreigners, and other minority groups, Christians could also use similar strategies for managing their stigmas. They could participate in civic sacrifice, like they did during Cyprian’s day. And they could make connections to patrons in their cities, as they did in Dura Europos. These acts took place in the context of a growing, almost manic desire on the part of many third‐century emperors to find a way to legislate social and political cohesion.
The evidence seen here also tells us that the rise of Christianity is probably more complex than a simple tale of how Jesus’ followers converted their friends and neighbors through acts of “martyrdom.” For, notwithstanding Valerian’s or Diocletian’s attempts at legalized discrimination, the political successes of the empire’s Christians may have been dependent on long‐term strategies for acceptance that Christian individuals and groups had been undertaking for centuries. Balancing the long, complicated legacy of Christians finding ways to embrace Roman values with the more widely known history of Christians who rejected any cultural compromises is essential for writing the history of the empire and its cities in the fourth and fifth centuries.
Study Questions
- Who was Mani? Who was Cyprian of Carthage?
- How did Emperor Galerius change the city of Thessaloniki?
- In the age before Diocletian’s legal persecution, what was it like for Christians to live in Roman cities?
- In your own words, state some of the reasons why the word “Christianization” might be problematic for historians to rely upon when describing the fourth century CE.
Suggested Readings
- Douglas Boin, Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place in Caesar’s Empire (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).
- Laura Nasrallah, Charalambos Bakirtzis, and Steve Friesen (eds.), From Roman to Early Christian Thessaloniki: Studies in Religion and Archaeology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Theological Studies, 2010).
- Michael Peppard, The World’s Oldest Church: Bible, Art, and Ritual at Dura‐Europos, Syria (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).
- Christine Shepardson, Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).