2 The Rise of Christianity

Women and the spread of Christianity - Christianity as an urban phenomenon - Christian exceptionalism and martyrdom - Early Christian attitudes to warfare - Christians in the Roman army - Military martyrs and warrior saints

Christianity falls into the category of private religious worship, which would normally be allowed to operate as a spiritual supplement to official Roman state cults. At the time of Constantine’s birth, Christianity was a faith growing rapidly. Its popularity can be attributed in large part to its message, some of which it shared with contemporary cults that promised personal salvation. It has been estimated that the number of Christians grew at a rate of forty percent per decade, through reproduction and conversion. From a tiny pool of believers, the number of Christians grew slowly at first, but eventually exponentially. The period of exponential growth began in the later third century, when from around one million in AD 250, there were more than six million Christians in AD 300, and almost thirty-four million in AD 350. The total population of the empire remained relatively constant at this time, with few reported epidemics or famines after a devastating pandemic of measles or, more likely, smallpox in the 260s. Thus, in the century that embraced Constantine’s reign, the empire went from having a tiny minority to a majority of Christians.

Our task is to determine the impact of the emperor’s conversion: whether it allowed Christianity to continue to grow at the pace it had established by making advances into new areas. That is, to see whether the fact that Constantine adopted the faith allowed it to spread from the cities of the eastern Mediterranean, where it had made great headway before his birth, into the empire’s northern and western provinces, into inland cities and towns, and also into army camps. First, then, we must assess how Christianity grew before Constantine.

Women and the spread of Christianity

Why did Christianity grow, and at the expense of which religions? The answer is vast and complicated, but for the sake of clarity it may be reduced to sex, health and arithmetic. These are to the fore in compelling studies by the sociologist Rodney Stark, which have changed the way we see the religious landscape of the later Roman Empire.^* Most converts to Christianity in the earliest centuries were Hellenized Jews. Christianity was a cult, whose adherents bruited a new set of beliefs but still lugged around a great deal of cultural baggage. That baggage, notably the books that the Christians called their Old Testament, was familiar to Hellenized Jews, as was the language in which it was written: Greek. Only the Jews of Palestine spoke and read Hebrew and Aramaic, whereas the vast majority in the diaspora spoke Greek and read their holy books in an authoritative Greek translation, the Septuagint, so called for the seventy (or seventy-two) Jewish scholars who produced it. After AD 70, as the Jewish Wars set the population of Palestine against the Romans, there was a still better reason for the diaspora Jews to distance themselves from their co-religionists, and many, it would appear, embraced Christianity. Jewish converts made up the bulk of new Christians for at least two centuries. But as the number of Christians began to rise rapidly in the third century, most converts were former adherents of the traditional Roman gods, whom we know as pagans, employing a pejorative term coined by the Christians. Pagans converted for a number of very good reasons, many of them spiritual and intellectual. But the most profound reason is surely the indisputable fact that Christianity offered a better life to women and their children.

Women endured a lowly status in the Graeco-Roman world because they were proportionately few and thus, as a precious commodity, carefully controlled by men. If the population of the Roman Empire was sixty million at the time of Constantine’s birth, only around twenty-four million of these were women. Given that boys are more problematic in the womb, more sickly as infants and more inclined to die at a young age in military activity or by violence, this figure is quite remarkable and can be explained only by the fact that baby girls were frequently murdered. It was rare for all but the wealthiest families to raise more than one daughter, however many were born, and infanticide was the surest way to dispose of unwanted girls. It was legal, philosophically justified and widely practised. An infamous letter sent by a man to his pregnant wife in 1 BC instructs her: ‘if it’s a boy keep it, if it’s a girl throw it away.’ One can no longer point to a drain in Ashkelon, in southern Israel, where a hundred skeletons of discarded infants have been found, as corroboration. DNA analysis on nineteen femurs from the pit has revealed fourteen to be of boys. Still, the weight of evidence suggests that far fewer girls than boys were allowed to grow to maturity, that is to child-bearing age, and consequently the general rate of reproduction in the late Roman world was kept artificially low. One must add to this the high rate of infant mortality and the death of mothers in childbirth or from complications and infections arising from it. Moreover, abortion was widely practised, although the gruesome descriptions one may read in Roman medical treatises make one wonder why women did not run the lesser risk of full-term delivery. The answer, of course, was men. Roman husbands and fathers had complete control over their wives’ and daughters’ fates, and could order that abortions be carried out as surely as they could order the exposure of a healthy baby girl.

Christianity offered a new vision, where both abortion and infanticide were forbidden, and virginity before marriage was prescribed. Christians discouraged marriage below a certain age and banned consummation of a marriage between a man and a child bride, such that the average age of marriage for Christian women became twenty, whereas for pagan women it was twelve. One must add that the rate of reproduction among pagans was very low: men favoured birth control (including anal and, less commonly, oral sex), indulged in homosexual sex, took concubines and patronized both male and female prostitutes, who in turn favoured various methods of birth control and abortion when necessary. All of these practices were forbidden to Christians, as most were to Jews. Roman men who converted to Christianity were obliged to have vaginal intercourse with their wives, and if pregnancy resulted, were obliged to have a child and raise it, regardless of its sex. Moreover, a Christian woman would have a community to support any resistance she offered to the directives of a pagan husband to do otherwise. As a consequence of this moral code the Christian population reproduced far more effectively than other Romans, and there were rapidly far more Christian women than pagan women, as a proportion of their communities.

According to modern sociological observation, setting aside the advantages outlined thus far of conversion to Christianity in its earliest centuries, women are far more likely than men to convert to any new religious faith, particularly one with a strong spiritual dimension. Thus, the conversion of women to Christianity in greater numbers need not be accounted for wholly by the higher status accorded to women and the greater care taken of children of both sexes. But given that women did convert, for a variety of reasons, they would often then persuade their husbands to accept or join their new faith. And once men converted, if they were of sufficient status, it was expected that the whole household, including slaves and perhaps even clients and freedmen, would also convert, thus augmenting a local Christian community considerably. That there were relatively high rates of intermarriage between Christian women and pagan men was inevitable given the disparity between numbers of pagan women and men. Moreover, such intermarriage was not banned by the Church. St Paul expected it, although that was a function of his having written when there were perhaps fewer than one thousand Christians in total. But the fact that Tertullian, writing Christian tracts from the later second century, condemns interfaith marriage so vociferously demonstrates how prevalent the practice still was. Thus, the male pool of potential secondary converts was large, and even if the husband remained a pagan, the Church prescribed that children of such marriages be raised as Christians. So it was that entire families of Christians emerged, even if the father refused to convert.

There are interesting contrasts to be drawn here with other henotheistic and monotheistic cults that appealed principally, or were open exclusively, to men. These could not be inherited religions, for only mature men could enter some cults, for example that of Mithras. Without women, there was no possibility that a cult would grow into a church. Moreover, military men worshipped for specific reasons, notably their safety in battle, and swore vows to that end. They were drawn to military cults for the camaraderie and hierarchy that mirrored camp life. Once they left the camps, however, and were allowed to live with their wives, these constraints no longer applied. Certainly, those who lived in colonies - settlements of discharged army veterans - would be able to continue with former practices if they chose, but in different groups, as their comrades in arms might remain elsewhere on active duty and the need to pray to military gods was no longer so apparent. Others, however, with their prior connections sundered, might enter new networks and manifest new spiritual needs. A maxim central to Rodney Stark’s analysis applies here: ‘To the extent that we value our relationships with others, we will conform in order to retain their esteem.’ One might easily find former adherents of military mystery cults now drawn to Christianity, even with its explicit ‘love command’ as articulated in its New Testament. We shall turn to this shortly. Where the ‘love command’ was subverted, and where one might wish to retain the esteem of a trusted commander (or indeed of an emperor who now openly identified himself as a Christian and surrounded himself with other Christians), one might expect to find many new converts to Christianity.

Christianity as an urban phenomenon

Religions, like diseases, spread most effectively in urban contexts. Christianity was not unique in this, but over time it began to define itself by its urban context. Christians chose to group all traditional religious practices under the heading ‘paganism’, for the pagan (in Latin paganus) was by definition ‘of the countryside (pagus)’ - what we might call in various argots a ‘bumpkin’, ‘hick’ or ‘redneck’. Although at any one time perhaps seven or eight of every ten Romans would live in the countryside, they were not out of reach. These country folk regularly made their way into the cities of the empire, driven by the search for opportunity, advancement, an education, a career, or by crop failure and blight, famine and war. The mortality rate in the empire’s cities was high, so there was always room for newcomers. And immigrants were prime targets for conversion, as they had left behind their firmest bonds, to family and friends. They would be most open to the approaches and kindness of strangers.

Life in late Roman cities was nasty, brutish and short. It was not, however, solitary, as the population density of Roman cities was far greater than in most modern cities. The population density of Rome itself was far greater than modern Manhattan (even with its vertical emphasis), dwarfed London, and once one accounts for the vast areas given over to public works and spaces, surpassed Mumbai and Kolkata. The Tiber was a morass of filth, and the streets were, for the most part, open sewers, as indeed were most of the sewers. Faeces rained down from tall buildings, ancient tenement blocks that frequently burnt or fell down. In a rare reversal of fortunes the poorest, who occupied the highest floors, might survive more easily in a collapse, as there was less to fall on their heads. In such crowded and unsanitary quarters, accidents and diseases were daily concerns, and Christian women were particularly prone to the latter, since childbirth led to both immediate and chronic infections, compromising immune systems already sorely tested by the ubiquity of excrement and bad water.

Rodney Stark highlights two epidemics that swept across the Roman Empire: one in AD 165-80, which was most likely smallpox and was described by Galen; and another which began in AD 260, which was measles or smallpox and was described by Cyprian (see p. 2 above). Both had high, if disputed, levels of mortality. Stark opts for a fairly high thirty percent mortality rate. Even if his figures are flawed and his message daubed with the broadest brush, still it is persuasive: Christians nursed their sick and therefore saved far more lives than pagans, who more frequently abandoned theirs. That is to say, there was no imperative for non-Christians to nurse those to whom they had no close relationship. Consequently, non-Christians did not develop immunity, as did certain Christians who survived early exposure and were able to move among the diseased freely. Instead, by fleeing the site of an outbreak, pagans acted as vectors for the spread of the disease. Of those who fell ill but were nursed, most, perhaps two-thirds, survived. Of those who were abandoned, less than a third survived. Moreover, Christians did not nurse only their own but offered succour to sick pagans. Between those whom they saved and those who witnessed their greater rates of survival and selflessness, the Christians found many fresh converts. Furthermore, where pagan social networks were fractured or destroyed by death and displacement, new Christian networks emerged. And within these circles, Christians offered explanations for the epidemics: it was not random, but rather God’s means of separating those who worshipped correctly and those who did not. Or: Christians who died would be rewarded, for they would join their Lord and later be reunited with loved ones who had survived. Paganism offered no justifications, no promises and no systematic nursing.

By its community nursing programmes, Christianity became more efficient than other cults in maintaining its own social networks and recruiting individuals from others that fractured. This it did in cities where it had established a substantial presence, and Stark’s analyses of thirty-one Roman cities with populations over 30,000 demonstrate statistically what common sense has suggested to others. Stark’s statistical research demonstrates that:

– Cities closest to Jerusalem, the point of origin of Christianity, had communities of Christians earlier than others; and once Rome had established a large Christian community, this acted in similar fashion.

– Cities furthest from Jerusalem, and later from Rome, took far longer to Christianize.

– Cities with a Hellenic culture absorbed Christianity more ably than others, for reasons explored above, namely that the new faith ‘maximized’ the value of pre-existing knowledge (especially for Hellenized Jews).

– Larger cities absorbed Christians more easily, if with a slightly lower correlation than that between Christianity and Hellenism, because the larger a population, the more easily a deviant group can reach critical mass to sustain its enterprises.

– Port cities of the eastern Mediterranean, just as they were more susceptible to trade-borne disease, were more receptive to new religious ideas; they had greater turnover in population and were ethnically more diverse.

– Consequently, port cities had established Christian churches sooner than any others.

– Many of these considerations apply also to the cults of Cybele emanating from Phrygia and of Isis emanating from Egypt, both of which flourished in the Hellenic port cities of the eastern Mediterranean in the years before Christianity took hold.

These are but a few of the observations in Stark’s Cities of God, a compelling study, albeit one that repeats a great deal from his earlier Rise of Christianity. Together, these works allow us to observe that the task left to Christianity in Constantine’s age was to establish itself more effectively in the vast rural landscape, more especially in the north-western provinces, which were never urbanized and whither ideas had further to travel. To this we might add that Christianity needed to make ground in those places where one might expect most resistance, for example in the army camps where state religio and masculine cults were best established. A map plotting the locations of Mithraea in the third century shows that their distribution is almost a mirror image of that of Christian churches, being concentrated primarily in inland areas, disproportionately in the sparsely populated but heavily militarized frontier provinces of the north and west. Again, we shall return to these matters, for they are crucial to understanding the impact of Constantine’s reign.

Christian exceptionalism and martyrdom

How, then, did Christianity rise with so little state interference? The answer is that it did and also that it did not. The Roman state was generally tolerant of religious faiths so long as they did not interfere with state religio and so long as they were not considered barbaric, decadent or corrupting. Thus, certain oriental cults met with disfavour in conservative Roman circles, but only two religions were regularly proscribed and their communities actively persecuted, for limited periods of time and in certain areas. In the province of Britannia, the northernmost of the Roman world, druidism was outlawed for its practice of human sacrifice, and on occasion its priests were hunted down and executed. Far more common and widespread, although still infrequent, was persecution of Christians, who proved to be useful, frequently enthusiastic, scapegoats for misfortunes that befell the state.

Few cults posed any threat to the state, and those that proved popular were absorbed into the system as supplements, rather than alternatives, to ancestral beliefs. Christianity was different, for its adherents were nominally forbidden to participate in the state religion and it had particular misgivings about the veneration of the emperors. How energetically and regularly this prohibition was applied one cannot know, but at the insistence of certain fundamentalist writers and community leaders, Christians periodically resisted directives to participate in public rites. As the Christian population grew, such recalcitrance was considered a significant betrayal of the interests of the state. This was surely the cause of the crises that struck the empire in the third century, pagans believed, and it had to be punished severely. And so in the mid-third century one encounters for the first time systematic persecution of Christians across the empire. We shall turn to this below. But while they were a tiny minority in a sea of pagans, this caused little concern, and they were made scapegoats at little political cost, as for example in the AD 60s, when Nero blamed Christians for the fire he had set in Rome. Those killed at that time, later legend holds, included St Peter. A half-century later, Pliny the Younger was content to carry out Trajan’s orders to persecute Christians in his province of Bithynia, but sought guidance from the emperor on correct procedure. The exchange is worth citing at length. Pliny asks:

It is my practice, my lord, to refer to you all matters concerning which I am in doubt. For who can better give guidance to my hesitation or inform my ignorance? I have never participated in trials of Christians. I therefore do not know what offences it is the practice to punish or investigate, and to what extent. And I have been not a little hesitant as to whether there should be any distinction on account of age or no difference between the very young and the more mature; whether pardon is to be granted for repentance, or, if a man has once been a Christian, it does him no good to have ceased to be one; whether the name itself, even without offences, or only the offences associated with the name are to be punished. Meanwhile, in the case of those who were denounced to me as Christians, I have observed the following procedure: I interrogated these as to whether they were Christians; those who confessed I interrogated a second and a third time, threatening them with punishment; those who persisted I ordered executed. For I had no doubt that, whatever the nature of their creed, stubbornness and inflexible obstinacy surely deserve to be punished. There were others possessed of the same folly; but because they were Roman citizens, I signed an order for them to be transferred to Rome.

Trajan replies:

You observed proper procedure, my dear Pliny, in sifting the cases of those who had been denounced to you as Christians. For it is not possible to lay down any general rule to serve as a kind of fixed standard. They are not to be sought out; if they are denounced and proved guilty, they are to be punished, with this reservation, that whoever denies that he is a Christian and really proves it - that is, by worshipping our gods - even though he was under suspicion in the past, shall obtain pardon through repentance. But anonymously posted accusations ought to have no place in any prosecution. For this is both a dangerous kind of precedent and out of keeping with the spirit of our age.

As the letters reveal, when read in full, Christianity was considered a problem by Trajan because it categorically forbade adherents to participate in the state religio. Even those who were not citizens were held accountable and put to death, whereas citizens were shipped off to Rome, one might suggest to die in the arena for the edification of the plebs. But all were given a number of opportunities to recant, and only the most ardent would have preferred death to such a lapse. The number that refused to recant, according to the compelling hypothesis of G. W. Bowersock, was greatest exactly when and where Pliny governed: Asia Minor in the second century.

Christian martyrs rejected engagement with the world of paganism, and with it Roman authority. If the number of Christians who died in this manner for their faith was extremely small, their sacrifice was enacted publicly and theatrically. Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, condemned to die in the arena in the reign of Trajan, was allowed a triumphal journey to Rome punctuated by preaching and letter-writing. His greatest concern was that rich friends in the city would intervene and save him, and this he wrote to prevent, for he revelled in his celebrity, knowing his name would live forever in this world, even as his entry into the next was guaranteed. Those who could witness neither Ignatius’ journey nor his ultimate sacrifice were regaled with his story by Polycarp and later by Eusebius of Caesarea, who collated the tales of all the male martyrs of Palestine.

As pagans witnessed the martyrs’ willingness to die and the brutality with which the state punished their conviction, most could not fail to be impressed. What sort of god must these zealots worship that he offered them no protection and delivered them not from the hands of their accusers? Few would initially have appreciated the perspective of the Christians - that their god did not work for their protection in this world but rather delivered them from its pain to the place he had prepared for them, presided over by Christ. Their sacrifice mirrored that of their Lord, and the most fortunate of them would be executed in the same manner, on the cross. In choosing death, the martyrs firmly rejected the Roman predicate that divinities intervened in human affairs to offer protection or victory, and thus they refused to acknowledge the premise on which they were persecuted: that their refusal to sacrifice had brought down divine retribution upon the Romans. This point is striking, as we shall see how enthusiastically some Christians embraced the apparent intervention of their god in human affairs, as he ordered the death of the persecutors at the hand of his champion, Constantine. This was the resurrection of the Old Testament god, who had strengthened the right arms of the Hebrews and directed the slaughter of their enemies. But this must wait a short while longer.

If the theatricality of the martyrs impressed the masses, witnessing their sacrifices in the empire’s public spaces, Christianity was explained to the educated by others. Philosophically inclined pagans who observed the sacrifice of the Christians may have been impressed by their adherence to a Socratic principle, albeit practically reversed. Christians died for that in which they believed, whereas Socrates had died for refusing to assert that in which he believed, or did not. The educated were engaged in debate by Christian apologists, whose task was to interact with those of other faiths and to build bridges. Apologists explored the role of classical education and culture, paideia, in the emergence and development of Christian thought and practice, and explained their beliefs in terms others could comprehend. Such intellectual engagement kept Christianity within the public realm, preventing it from becoming an entirely closed sect. The apologists’ task became easier as others turned towards forms of henotheism - belief in a greatest god who reigned over other, lesser deities. These are generally conflated with pagan monotheisms - forms of belief in a single god. Two of the foremost apologists, Tertullian and Origen, held influential views on warfare, to which we shall now turn, for they present the essential background to understanding Constantine’s interpretation of the faith.

Early Christian attitudes to warfare

One cannot overstate the essential messiness of early Christianity, which was not a monolithic set of beliefs but countless local sets of ideas and practices. Moreover, we know primarily the views of an elite group of scholars whose writings have been preserved, most frequently because they suited later tastes for reasons of style and theology. Therefore, to attempt to discern one coherent Christian attitude to warfare in the centuries before Constantine is wrongheaded. However, before this was made plain by the revolution in studies of late antiquity, estimable scholars, often moved to write by personal and denominational convictions or formed by experiences of modern war, had compiled long lists of pertinent quotations from scripture and the Church fathers. The pacifist line was expounded most fully in English shortly after the First World War by C. John Cadoux, who intended ‘to show how strong and deep was the early Christian revulsion from and disapproval of war, both on account of the dissension it represented and of the infliction of bloodshed and suffering which it involved’. The quotations he presented were intended to ‘show further how closely warfare and murder were connected in Christian thought by their possession of a common element - homicide’.

The crux of the pacifist interpretation of early Christianity is the New Testament’s ‘love command’, the familiar instructions to ‘turn the other cheek’ and to ‘love thy neighbour’, presented in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, as preserved in the Gospel of Matthew (5:38–45). This is evidently still the modern popular understanding of the early Christian position on war, and it runs as follows in the King James Version:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have [thy] cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

Widely reported by the evangelists is Christ’s aversion to the sword, of which his assertion that ‘all who take the sword shall perish by the sword’ is emblematic, foreshadowed by the prophecy in Isaiah (2:2-4) that at the end of days: ‘He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.’ But a coherent pacifist ethic cannot be identified in the New Testament, because Jesus never addressed the matters of military service or killing in war.

Militant language is frequently employed in the New Testament, although not to encourage violent actions. Christians are increasingly urged to ‘fight the good fight’ (1 Timothy 1:18). St Paul was particularly fond of military metaphors and referred to missionaries like himself as milites Christi, ‘soldiers of Christ’. Paul compared his service to that of an army officer. He urged the Thessalonians to gird themselves with the breastplate of faith and love and the helmet of salvation; the Corinthians to don the armour of righteousness; and the Ephesians (6:17), having girt their loins with truth, to add to these the shield of faith and ‘the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God’. Consequently, it was rather common for patristic authors to employ military language. This cannot be taken as an endorsement of warfare, but it does reflect the ubiquity of strife, and of soldiers, in the world they occupied. As Cadoux astutely observed, ‘they were fond of speaking of the Christian life itself as a warfare and of themselves as soldiers of Christ. Scripture taught them to think with reverence and esteem of the warriors of old as men acting with the approval and under the guidance of God. Many of them looked forward to a great military triumph of Christ over his enemies at the end of the age.’ Here he is thinking of the New Testament’s clearest contradiction to the ‘love command’, the message of its last book, the Book of Revelation, where Christ turns not the other cheek but comes in majesty to avenge wrongdoing, seated on a white horse, ‘just in judgement and just in war’, a sword projecting from his mouth to smite the nations. ‘For he it is who shall rule them with an iron rod and tread the winepress of the wrath and retribution of God,’ we are told. He is identified by the inscription on his robes: ‘King of kings and Lord of lords.’ But Revelation was a problematic text for the compilers of the New Testament and was generally rejected before the fourth century. It was most likely the changed circumstances of Constantine’s reign, and the influence of Eusebius of Caesarea, that saw Revelation become part of the canon.

Patristic authors frequently use militaristic imagery, often to draw a contrast with their message. For example, Clement of Rome, who was pope until AD 98, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, urges his addressees to turn to peace and to follow peaceable rulers, but he employs the language of war:

Christ is our leader, and we His soldiers. Let us then, men and brethren, with all energy act the part of soldiers, in accordance with His holy commandments. Let us consider those who serve under our generals, with what order, obedience, and submissiveness they perform the things which are commanded them. All are not prefects, nor commanders of a thousand, nor of a hundred, nor of fifty, nor the like, but each one in his own rank performs the things commanded by the king and the generals. The great cannot subsist without the small, nor the small without the great.

A century later, Clement of Alexandria employs military language to contrast soldiers with Christians, stating that their trumpets were the Gospels. The most abundant use of military analogies is to be found in the writings of Cyprian, bishop of Carthage (d. AD 258), who considered the world to be the battlefield of the army commanded by Christ, whose soldiers fought battles known as persecutions against forces arrayed behind the devil.

Marcion, who led a movement within the Church of the second century to differentiate Jehovah, the god of Israel, from the god of the New Testament, the Stranger, did not consider the devil to be the principal problem. Christ was the messenger of the Stranger, who dwelt in a heaven above that of the Creator and wished to liberate the souls of man trapped in the ‘hyle’ of Creation by the angry god worshipped by the Jews. Marcion’s arguments placed opponents in the awkward position of having to defend the atrocities of the vengeful Old Testament god or to explain away the war history as allegory. Most adopted the latter course. Indeed, although Marcionism was perhaps the most widely practised form of Christianity in second-century Syria, we know of Marcion’s ideas only through the lengthy refutation penned decades later by Tertullian (c.155-230).

Origen (185-c.254), Tertullian’s younger contemporary, took on another dead second-century thinker, the philosopher Celsus, whose views represented an archetype of the challenges posed by the Roman state to Christian communities. Origen denies that Christians are seditious and assigns to them the task of praying for the victories of those who fight righteous wars for Rome. Among Celsus’ charges is that if all converted to Christianity and thus neglected state religio, the empire would inevitably fall to the barbarians:

Celsus: ‘You surely do not say that if the Romans were, in compliance with your wish, to neglect their customary duties to gods and men, and were to worship the Most High, or whatever you please to call him, then he will come down and fight for them, so that they shall need no other help than his. For this same God, as you yourselves say, promised of old this and much more to those who served him, and see in what way he has helped them and you! They, in place of being masters of the whole world, are left with not so much as a patch of ground or a home; and as for you, if any of you transgresses even in secret, he is sought out and punished with death.’

Celsus attempts to queer Origen’s pitch by observing the sorry fate of the martyrs. But Origen will have none of it:

The question stated is, ‘What would happen if the Romans were persuaded to adopt the principles of the Christians, to despise the duties paid to the recognized gods and to men, and to worship the Most High?’ This is my answer … God rejoices in the agreement of rational beings, and turns away from discord. And what are we to expect, if not only a very few agree, as at present, but the whole of the empire of Rome? For they will pray to the Word, who of old said to the Hebrews, when they were pursued by the Egyptians, ‘The Lord shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace’; and if they all unite in prayer with one accord, they will be able to put to flight far more enemies than those who were discomfited by the prayer of Moses when he cried to the Lord, and of those who prayed with him. Now, if what God promised to those who keep His law has not come to pass, the reason of its non-fulfilment is not to be ascribed to the unfaithfulness of God. But He had made the fulfilment of His promises to depend on certain conditions, namely that they should observe and live according to His law; and if the Jews have not a plot of ground nor a habitation left to them, although they had received these conditional promises, the entire blame is to be laid upon their crimes, and especially upon their guilt in the treatment of Jesus.

Evidently he is not seeking out Jewish converts, but Origen has now identified scapegoats for the failure of the Christian god to deliver on a promise. On the other hand:

If all the Romans, according to the supposition of Celsus, embrace the Christian faith, they will, when they pray, overcome their enemies; or rather, they will not war at all, being guarded by that divine power which promised to save five entire cities for the sake of fifty just persons.

Evidently, Origen did not expect Celsus’ supposition to come to pass, for although the pace of conversion of Romans to Christianity was healthy during his lifetime, he could not have anticipated the exponential increase that took hold at the end of the third century. But Origen appears to have had a fairly low opinion of the quality of most Christians. They were, to his mind, too weak generally to disengage themselves from society and act as ‘soldiers of Christ’. He thought that task should fall to ascetics, the monks who had begun to replicate Christ’s isolation in the deserts of North Africa and Syria, fighting demons on his behalf and for the good of weaker fellow Christians engaged in civilian life.

Origen was later described by Eusebius as ‘possessed with such a passion for martyrdom’ that he urged it upon his own father. Origen was a passionate youth, who began his career as a literal interpreter of scripture, apparently giving up wearing shoes and even, possibly, castrating himself, after reading Christ’s admonition in Matthew (19:12). However, after his early days, as an instructor to catechumens, he turned to more mature reflection, and to allegory. He saw the Bible as an extension of the incarnation and recognized that it was essential for its words to penetrate minds so that listeners might partake of the body of Christ. Scripture was, he wrote, ‘the one perfect and harmonized instrument of God, which from different sounds gives forth one saving voice to those willing to learn.’ Each word of scripture had, potentially, three senses: literal, moral and spiritual, although not all had all three. This corresponded to humans, with body, soul and spirit. All scripture had spiritual elements, but not all could be interpreted literally. Thus, he was among the first to interpret the more martial books of the Old Testament allegorically. His gloss on the Book of Joshua, among the most violent in the Old Testament, is a tour de force. Origen suggests that the narratives were preserved to teach us spiritual lessons. Joshua, who in Greek bears the name ‘Jesus son of Nun’, prefigures Christ. Origen interprets the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites as an allegory for each Christian’s lifelong spiritual struggle. Therefore, he states, the heretics are wrong to regard the god of the Old Testament as cruel, just as they provide no justification for religious violence. But Origen would not have been surprised to find Christians serving in the army, as they certainly did in his lifetime.

Christians in the Roman army

The first suggestion that Christian soldiers were actively campaigning is to be found in accounts of the Danube campaign of Marcus Aurelius in AD 173. According to Apollinarius of Hierapolis, whose work is not extant but is cited by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History (HE^* 5.5) and later by Tertullian (Apology 5), Christian soldiers of the Twelfth Legion Fulminata prayed for rain to alleviate thirst, and it came in the form of a lightning storm, appropriate to their name, the ‘thunderstruck legion’. It is not true that the legion received the name ‘thundering’ from the emperor at this time. The episode is depicted on the Aurelian column in Rome (fig 9), where Marcus Aurelius is himself shown praying and on contemporary coins; it is also mentioned by the pagan historians Dio Cassius and Capitolinus, both of whom attribute it to prayers to a pagan god, either Jupiter Pluvius or Hermes Trismegistus. None makes mention of Christians.

This record, then, is equivocal, but Tertullian provides unequivocal evidence that Christians served in the Roman army in the late second century and early third century. Tertullian was well informed about army life, although there is no corroboration for St Jerome’s later claim that he was the son of a North African centurion. Tertullian gives numerous examples in his Apology (chapters 4, 37, 42), perhaps aimed at grumbling pagans, of Christians serving faithfully. There is no indication of widespread disfavour for such service, and Christian soldiers of his time who felt obliged to justify their position did so by reference to Old Testament precedents, some of which Tertullian enumerates in chapter 19 of his tract ‘On Idolatry’:

But now inquiry is made about this point, whether a believer may turn himself unto military service, and whether the military may be admitted unto the faith, even the rank and file, or each inferior grade, to whom there is no necessity for taking part in sacrifices or capital punishments. There is no agreement between the divine and the human sacrament, the standard of Christ and the standard of the devil, the camp of light and the camp of darkness. One soul cannot be due to two masters – God and Caesar. And yet Moses carried a rod, and Aaron wore a buckle, and John the Baptist is girt with leather and Joshua the son of Nun leads a line of march; and the People warred: if it pleases you to sport with the subject. But how will a Christian man war, nay, how will he serve even in peace, without a sword, which the Lord has taken away? For albeit soldiers had come unto John, and had received the formula of their rule; albeit, likewise, a centurion had believed; still the Lord afterward, in disarming Peter, disarmed every soldier.

This tract was written later in Tertullian’s career, when he had become a Montanist. A heretic in the eyes of the later Church, Montanus declared that the Holy Spirit had offered him new revelations. Montanus’ ‘new prophecy’ has been eradicated from the written record, but Tertullian implies that it was concerned with church discipline rather than doctrine and held that Christians who fell from grace could not be redeemed. This would explain his new rigour in condemning military service, for he identified the impossibility that an active soldier could extricate himself effectively from the religious world of the camps, where devotion to the emperors and to the genius of the legion and its standards was required.

Indeed, Tertullian’s disapproval of Christian participation in military matters is not principally provoked by the potential for violence occasioned by army life. Rather, his particular distaste is for the requirement for all soldiers in the Roman army to participate fully and regularly, without fail or resistance, in state religio, according to the dictates of the religious calendar, the feriale. In his De corona, ‘On the Crown’, Tertullian condemns Christian soldiers who do not display the courage of their convictions, but instead wear the symbols of idolaters, in this case the laurel wreaths of victors. The author recounts a tale for edification and emulation of a soldier who refused to wear the wreath and was consequently martyred.

Very lately it happened thus: while the bounty of our most excellent emperors was dispensed in the camp, the soldiers, laurel-crowned, were approaching. One of them, more a soldier of God, more steadfast than the rest of his brethren, who had imagined that they could serve two masters, his head alone uncovered, the useless crown in his hand – already even by that peculiarity known to every one as a Christian – was nobly conspicuous. Accordingly, all began to mark him out, jeering him at a distance, gnashing on him near at hand. The murmur is wafted to the tribune, when the person had just left the ranks. The tribune at once puts the question to him, ‘Why are you so different in your attire?’ He declared that he had no liberty to wear the crown with the rest. Being urgently asked for his reasons, he answered, ‘I am a Christian’. O soldier! Boasting thyself in God. Then the case was considered and voted on; the matter was remitted to a higher tribunal; the offender was conducted to the prefects. At once he put away the heavy cloak, his disburdening commenced; he loosed from his foot the military shoe, beginning to stand upon holy ground; he gave up the sword, which was not necessary either for the protection of our Lord; from his hand likewise dropped the laurel crown; and now, purple-clad with the hope of his own blood, shod with the preparation of the gospel, girt with the sharper word of God, completely equipped in the apostles’ armour, and crowned more worthily with the white crown of martyrdom, he awaits in prison the largesse of Christ.

The account, which continues through fifteen chapters, demonstrates several things. First, it clearly shows that it was not unusual for Christians to be on active military duty in c.AD 200. Only one man here is said to deserve the name Christian, but there are several, perhaps many others in this single, albeit fictive, unit who accept the wreath of victory and thus occasion Tertullian’s scorn. Second, it shows that the issue of idolatry, insofar as wearing the crown was such an act, was not considered a major problem by most Christians, even though the wreath appears to have been a sacred symbol to those who worshipped Mithras, as Tertullian later reveals. Third, it shows that some Christians questioned the wisdom of the soldier’s stand, believing him naive and foolish to make such a show and thus to question the faith of others, who are willing to accept the garland. In gaol he becomes truly a soldier of Christ, fighting the good fight against persecutors and earning the martyr’s crown, blessed in Tertullian’s eyes but clearly a fool in the eyes of less rigorous believers.

De corona is the only work in early Christian literature devoted uniquely to the military. It is also the only work to preserve a coherent description of an aspect of Mithraism: its last chapter recounts the initiation of a worshipper to the third rank, that of ‘soldier’ (miles). Still condemning those Christian soldiers who do not support their Christian comrade in casting off the crown, Tertullian writes:

Blush, ye fellow-soldiers of his, henceforth not to be condemned even by him, but by some soldier of Mithras, who, at his initiation in the gloomy cavern, in the camp, it may well be said, of darkness, when at the sword’s point a crown is presented to him, as though in mimicry of martyrdom, and thereupon put upon his head, is admonished to resist and cast it off, and, if you like, transfer it to his shoulder, saying that Mithras is his crown. And thenceforth he is never crowned; and he has that for a mark to show who he is, if anywhere he be subjected to trial in respect of his religion; and he is at once believed to be a soldier of Mithras if he throws the crown away – if he say that in his god he has his crown. Let us take note of the devices of the devil, who is wont to ape some of God’s things with no other design than, by the faithfulness of his servants, to put us to shame, and to condemn us.

In his later writings, which include De corona, Tertullian urged Christians to sacrifice themselves, rather than sacrificing beasts to false idols, both those of the state religion and those of the cult so favoured by soldiers, Mithraism. His firm line is that ‘if one is pressed to the offering of sacrifice and the sheer denial of Christ by the prospect of torture or of punishment’, one is less of a Christian than one who ‘dreads denying [Christ] and [is willing] to undergo martyrdom’. More than wearing the crown, Tertullian condemns any soldier’s willingness to swear the sacramentum, the regular oath of loyalty to the Roman emperor, since baptism was the only sacrament that they should observe. He uses the same term for both, as he does when comparing a soldier’s regular duty as nightwatchman to his Christian duty to keep vigil, fasting. But nowhere does he condemn soldiers for being soldiers. Rather, he echoes the admonition of John the Baptist to Roman soldiers, as recorded by the evangelist Luke (3:14): ‘And the soldiers likewise demanded of him, saying, And what shall we do? And he said unto them, Do violence to no man, neither accuse [any] falsely; and be content with your wages.’ These were not, of course, Christian soldiers, but John does not advise them to leave the service. Rather, his wish is to ensure that they do not exploit their monopoly of violence for personal gain, at the expense of others. He is concerned with extortion, not killing. Jesus did not condemn a centurion for his service, but rather healed his servant (Matthew 8:5–13; Luke 7:1–10).

Beyond the limited scope of Tertullian’s refined prose, there must have been many and varied prescriptions for regulating the behaviour of Christian soldiers, so that they would not violate the tenets of their faith. Some are preserved in extant church orders. These documents, including the third-century Apostolic Tradition, were manuals for church leaders, so that they might correctly instruct and discipline Christian communities and order the liturgy. They were regularly revised and updated, and circulated, each version drawing on the last and perhaps several others. So they reflect the changing views, over time and space, of Christian thinkers on a variety of subjects, including warfare and military service. They bear witness most clearly to the diversity of early Christianity, revealing that attitudes were mutable and can only be understood in their appropriate geographical and temporal contexts. As importantly, they are not the works of refined intellectuals writing for educated readerships, but practical guides used by those who recruited and educated converts in communities across the empire.

The Apostolic Tradition survives in Latin, Coptic, Ethiopic and Arabic translations, although a Greek original has been lost. All versions concern themselves with military service, in a section advising Christian leaders on screening potential converts. All prescriptions are different. The Coptic and Arabic versions allow for soldiers to be baptized as Christians and accepted into a community, so long as they swear not to kill and so long as they are not men of rank. The Ethiopic version is stricter, banning all soldiers from becoming catechumens; it determined that such a vocation rendered them senseless to the Christian message. (The Latin version of this chapter is missing.) Soldiers in command positions were excluded in all versions, and the reason for this must be that they were incapable of absenting themselves from the quotidian idolatrous rituals of army life. The familiar issue of the soldier’s oath, the sacramentum, is raised, and it is held in all versions to be incompatible with the Christian sacrament of baptism. All versions forbid confirmed Christians and catechumens from enrolling voluntarily in the army (which would require them to swear the oath). This implies two things: first, that this was not an unfamiliar event; and second, that those who were conscripted were not to be penalized, but their behaviour was to be moderated.

Military martyrs and warrior saints

It is during Decius’ reign that we meet the first of the great warrior saints of Byzantine tradition, St Mercurius. A far later and entirely fictional Passion sees Mercurius visited by an angel, converting, and refusing to abjure Christ before the emperor himself, who invites him to sacrifice to Artemis. Later still, the story migrates to the fourth century, when Mercurius is believed to have hurled the javelin that killed Julian the Apostate, thus securing an imperial future for the faith of Constantine. The stories of the military martyrs became notable only later, because only later was a Christian empire in need of warrior saints. Initially, the deaths of Christian soldiers were treated no differently to those of bishops or others, because no Christian writer in the religion’s first three centuries formulated a fully developed ethical theory of pacifism, according to which the actions of soldiers might be measured differently. But it is clear that most who were later considered orthodox found the notion of killing repugnant, and to heretics like Marcion it was abhorrent. Tertullian took a firmer line against military service when he became a Montanist, but he was not alone in appearing more concerned with the idolatry of army life than with the prospect that a Christian soldier might kill. This point serves to illuminate how diverse were those in the first three centuries who called themselves Christians and considered their views orthodox. What was orthodox could only be enforced when the state’s monopoly of violence was seen to back decisions taken by bishops at well-attended meetings, synods, sponsored by the administration and directed to serve the best interests of the state by the promotion of a single, universal viewpoint. At that time, what was orthodox and what was heretical took on new meaning. But this came later, and as we shall see, Constantine was instrumental in the change, and willing, indeed anxious, to enforce unity. For now, the Christian Church was a loose agglomeration of disparate communities, and many views could be expressed.