This book tells the story of the origins and development of ancient Mediterranean Christianity up to the fifth century in the post-Roman West. It is easier to see when this story ends than when it begins.
How odd, the reader might think. The story obviously begins with Jesus and then passes to the apostles, thence to Paul. That is the implication of the order of the books in the modern New Testament: first the four Gospels, then the Acts of the Apostles, and then Paul’s letters.
The New Testament, however, as a closed and stable collection of texts, is the product of the fourth century. Its twenty-seven writings represent but a small selection of the many gospels, letters, acts of apostles, and books of revelations that circulated in the years between the mid-first century (from which we have our earliest evidence, the letters of Paul) and the establishment of an imperial church in the course of the fourth. The impression of the origins and development of Christianity given in the New Testament is the construction of these later, fourth-century initiatives, a story retrospectively generated. If we use our peripheral vision, if we look to other noncanonical and paracanonical texts, if we consider the materials available through archaeology, and if we trace the lively interactions of all these data with the wider Mediterranean world in which they were embedded, a different, richer, and much less linear story emerges.
My goal is to introduce the reader to the complexities and ambiguities, the ironies and surprises, the twists and turns of this richer story. Rather than follow a temporal arc from Jesus to the late empire—a tale first told by Eusebius and repeated, with variations, by many modern textbooks on Christian origins—it is organized thematically. Each chapter surveys materials from these five centuries. This thematic presentation avoids the impression of linear development that a single temporal arc can convey.
The story of the evolution of Christianity—really, of Christianities—involves a large cast of characters, superhuman as well as human: not only theologians, bishops, and emperors, but also gods and demons, angels and magicians, astrologers and charismatic wonder-workers, idiosyncratic ascetics and aristocratic patrons and millenarian enthusiasts. All these played their part in the development of what began as and would always remain a vigorously variegated form of biblical religion.
This is a story of many different peoples, and many different gods. Ancient empire had accommodated many different gods as a matter of course. Gods and humans were conceived as forming family groups: peoples were linked by tradition and history to the gods that they worshiped. The people group—what we call “ethnicity”—was another expression of cultic identity, a people’s worship of their own particular gods. In a world of so many peoples connected to so many gods, in a world where good government depended on good relations between heaven and earth and where public worship was a sort of civil defense, in a world where local gods presided over specific cities and where disregarding the honor of the gods risked sharp celestial reprisals, a practical religious pluralism had long prevailed. How, then, over the course of four centuries, did one particular god end up the focus of late Roman imperial law and piety?
Answering this question requires identifying some of the defining peculiarities of Jewish religious culture. Jews shared much with their pagan contemporaries. They too, saw their god as in a parental relationship with his people, their “father.” They, too, conceived of cult as an ethnic designation, and ethnicity as a cultic designation. They too inherited customs and commitments, both religious and social, which they regarded as “ancestral traditions”—or, as Paul says, “the traditions of my fathers” (Galatians 1.14). And they, too, like their scriptures, acknowledged the existence, and thus the reality, of non-Jewish gods. They considered these other gods lesser or lower than Israel’s god (“All the gods bow down to him,” sang the Psalmist in Psalm 97.7). But in a world where any god was more powerful than any human, these other superhuman forces had to be treated with a certain caution. In the Greek translation of Exodus, Moses himself advised as much: “Do not revile the gods” (Exodus 22.28). Commenting on this passage, the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Paul’s, endorsed it, observing matter-of-factly that “reviling each other’s gods always leads to war” (Questions in Exodus 2.5).
But the Jewish god was also different from other gods in some respects. In a culture where gods were often worshiped before their cult images—frequently depicted as idealized, out-sized, beautiful humans—the Jewish god had insisted on imageless worship. Neither his temple in Jerusalem nor the many Jewish assemblies (“synagogues”) outside of the homeland held his divine image, a fact that pagan observers remarked on. And in a culture where the city’s well-being depended on displays of respect and loyalty to local presiding deities, the Jewish god demanded that he be the sole recipient of his people’s worship.
God’s insistence on exclusive worship thus could cause complications for those Jews—the vast majority—who lived outside the land of Israel, and who had to deal with the gods of their cities of residence. Their general avoidance of civic cult occasioned some arch comment from pagan observers: both the Jews and their god, pagan critics complained, were antisocial. Indeed, said some, Jews were guilty of “atheism,” that is, of not showing respect to the gods of the majority. One Alexandrian pagan, Apion, annoyed by Jewish residents pushing to be recognized as full citizens of that city, asked, “Why, if they are citizens, do they not worship the same gods as the Alexandrians?” (Josephus, Against Apion 2.65). If we remember the way that heaven and earth lined up over the ancient city, and the way that civic cult was a part of civil defense, we can see the reasonableness of Apion’s question.
Some streams of prophecy, however, took this idea of exclusive Jewish worship even further. They universalized it. Texts that ultimately became part of the Jewish canon (like Isaiah, or Micah, or Zechariah) and those that did not (like Tobit, or 1 Enoch, or the Sibylline Oracles) looked forward to the day when normal time would end, when the gentile nations would destroy their cult images, disavow their own gods, and turn, too, to worship Israel’s god alone. In the two centuries to either side of Jesus’s and Paul’s lifetime, we see an intensification of this type of prophecy about the coming of God’s kingdom. Its scope enlarged. Its time frame shifted from “someday in the future” to “soon” to “now.”
“Apocalypse” is the Greek word for “revelation.” An “eschaton” is a final thing. Apocalyptic eschatology is the term that scholars use to describe this particular genre of end-time sensibility. Such prophecies expressed a baggy bundle of expectations, hopes, predictions, visions. They suggested ways to discern the signs of the times. Celestial and terrestrial anomalies—earthquake, eclipses, darkness at noon—might herald the approach of the End. The End might be preceded by a final battle between the forces of good and evil. Sometimes the apocalyptic battle is fought by legions of angels, sometimes led by a messiah, sometimes by an archangel, sometimes by God himself. Some traditions speak of an ingathering of the tribes of Israel, of the rebuilding or aggrandizement of Jerusalem’s temple, of the resurrection of the dead and a final judgement of all humanity. Others speak of the transposition of the redeemed into the starry firmament. And these prophecies conclude with the conviction that the whole world—human and superhuman—will acknowledge the sovereignty of Israel’s god. Jewish apocalyptic eschatology, in other words, broke antiquity’s normal and normative bond between peoples and pantheons, between ethnicity and (what we call) “religion.”
It is from this seedbed of Jewish apocalyptic expectation in the first century that the movement around Jesus of Nazareth bloomed and spread. Early in its formative period, Greek became its primary linguistic medium, the ancient city its social matrix. It is from these apocalyptic traditions that Paul and other apostles constructed their “good news,” evangelion in Greek, which they brought to Jews—and, surprisingly, to non-Jews as well. Within four centuries of constant adjustment, reinterpretation, and change, this message would eventually reconfigure traditional relations between government and religion, between peoples and their gods, between heaven and earth.
When and how do these movements that formed around the memory and message of Jesus grow into something that is recognizably not Judaism—indeed, that is occasionally even virulently opposed to Judaism? Where and why does such individuation begin? How does a message centered on the impending end-time redemption of Israel become a message centered on the idea of a stable, uniform, universal Roman church?
We begin with late Second Temple Judaism, the world of both Jesus and Paul. Chapter 1, “The Idea of Israel,” tracks the ways that the gospel message developed and altered once the movement(s) spread out from Jerusalem into the wider Greco-Roman world. Some Jews were Christ followers, and some gentile Christ followers assumed Jewish practices; but the future lay with those gentile communities that disengaged, in various ways, from their Jewish heritage. And as different gentile communities evolved different theologies, so too did different social relations evolve between Christians and Jews. Ultimately, the church sponsored by Constantine would claim the title “Israel” for itself.
Chapter 2, “The Dilemmas of Diversity,” explores these different theologies. Already audibly in the late first century, increasingly loudly in the second, diversity was repudiated, difference condemned as “heresy.” Contesting communities each developed their own definitions of true Christianity. What began as intracommunal invective became, with Constantine, an indictment with real social consequences. Christian diversity, in the course of the fourth century, would be criminalized, actively suppressed by the Christian Roman state.
Empire could prosper, ancient people were convinced, only if heaven were happy. Proper religion went far toward maintaining good relations between heaven and earth. Chapter 3, “Martyrdom and Persecution,” investigates the ways that this conviction led to Roman anti-Christian actions, both before Constantine and (perhaps surprisingly) even after. The memory of these actions, preserved and cultivated in the stories of the martyrs, came to serve as powerful vehicles for communicating idealizations of Christian identity.
Veneration of martyrs led to the development of the cult of the saints: joyous, even raucous celebrations around the tombs of the martyred dead in anticipation of life in the Kingdom of God. Chapter 4, “The Future of the End,” surveys these millenarian enthusiasms, and the ways that bishops eventually channeled them. Ultimately, the Christian message of salvation, and proclamations about an end-time resurrection of the body, were broadcast through stories about heaven and hell.
What does it mean, for a god to have a “son”? And why would a theological question become, ultimately, a concern of the state? Chapter 5, “Christ and Empire,” untangles the political, social, and intellectual complexities that led to controversies over the nature of Christ, and thus of God. The interventions of imperial government, far from settling these issues, only compounded them.
Chapter 6, “The Redemption of the Flesh,” explores the ways that convictions about the end of time, and the experience of its delay, combined with ideas about the soul’s relation to the body to produce not only novel Christian teachings—about sexuality, about asceticism, and about voluntary poverty—but also novel Christian behaviors. Men and women experimented with different kinds of spiritual achievement: lifetime virginity; celibate marriages; individual and communal forms of radical asceticism. The evidence of sermons and the canons of church councils, meanwhile, affords glimpses of the conduct of “the silent majority.”
When and why is the word and the concept “pagan” invented? When is ritual expertise a sacrament; when is it “magic”? What makes an amulet un-Christian, a saint’s relic Christian? Why does the notional heart of the empire, the city of Rome, become the premier Christian capital of the West? What beliefs and behaviors, in short, give the measure of “Christianization”? Chapter 7, “Pagan and Christian,” considers all these questions. In the end, Christianity offered not an alternative to traditional Mediterranean Roman culture but, finally, an expression of it.
Each chapter treats the evidence originating in the first century as inflections of late Second Temple Judaism. What we think of as “Christianity” began to emerge, in different ways and in different places, only in the late first and early second centuries, as the ethnicity of the movements’ members began to shift from predominantly Jewish to predominantly gentile.
To trace these developments, we begin where Jesus and Paul began: with the idea of Israel.