“Christianity.” “The faith.” “The church.” By using these terms in the singular, we repeat the rhetoric of the retrospectively “orthodox,” and we obscure the vital variety that always characterized this protean movement.
As we know from Paul’s letters, the message of imminent redemption in Christ was already multivocal in the mid-first century, when it was still a form of Second Temple Judaism. This variety never ceased. By the second century we see very disparate communities contesting with each other. What united them was the common conviction that “salvation” (itself variously defined) had been wrought through Christ.
But there agreement ended. Some Christians were recognizably sympathetic to Jewish practices, or indeed were Jews themselves. Others roundly repudiated Jewish texts and traditions, holding that the Jewish god was an unknowing, perhaps errant subordinate of a higher god who was the father of Christ. Still others, while rejecting Jewish practices, insisted on reading Jewish scriptures in Greek as prophecies of Christ and of their own gentile communities. Others celebrated Easter according to the Jewish date of Passover. Others continued to receive ever-refreshed revelations. Some still expected the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom; others denounced such views as “Jewish.” By the fourth century, imperial initiatives will attempt to suppress this variety. Yet even within the imperial church—as we see in the convulsions over Christology, in the condemnations of “magic,” in the tensions around the cult of the martyrs, as well as in the continuing synagogue activities of some gentile Christians, including clerics—unanimity, though asserted, was never established.
Christian ideas about the body—its relation to spirit, thus to self; its relation to Christ, thus to redemption—particularly illustrate this absence of unanimity. Paul, like many ancient Mediterranean thinkers, had juxtaposed “flesh” to “spirit,” and seen the transformation of the former into the later as the measure of final redemption. Through the spirit of Christ, the fleshly body at the End would become a body of spirit. The body was not shed, but changed, becoming like Christ’s risen body, to take its place in the heavens, that is, among the stars. Later gospel writers, Luke and John, had on the contrary insisted on the fleshly physicality of Christ’s risen body. This cohered with later visions of final redemption that anticipated the saved individual’s physical body reuniting with its soul, to dwell for a thousand years on a transformed earth—a vision celebrated in the energetic cult of the martyr and in the transformative charisma of saints’ relics.
What to do with the fleshly body itself in the meanwhile became a question. How could one best prepare it for redemption? Run a well-ordered household? Perform regular rituals of purification? Confession of sins? Ascetic withdrawal, fasting, abstention from sex? Joining a community dedicated to such disciplines? And what would happen to the soul while it awaited reunification with the body? Would it simply “sleep”? Would some souls, either immediately or eventually, ascend to the presence of God? Would others be tormented in hell, where they would remain for eternity thereafter? What, indeed, was the scope of salvation—for all (as Origen urged), for some (as imagined by the authors of apocryphal Acts), for few (so Augustine)? All these different ideas swirled around as various Christian traditions formed. Even on so fundamental an issue—the meaning of redemption in Christ—no single view ever prevailed.
Nor could Christians agree on the nature of the divine. Was God absolutely unique? How divine, in comparison with the Father, was the Son? If the Son were less than fully divine, how could he effect salvation? If he were less than fully human, how could he effect salvation? The higher the Son’s divinity, the more tenuous his relation to humanity. If he did assume flesh, was it the flesh common to all humanity? Or was it flesh of a unique and special sort? Theologians argued endlessly, councils convened, and eventually even imperial government weighed in. The divisions that arose from these questions shape modern Christian communities to this day. We have to bear all this diversity in mind when we speak of “the triumph of Christianity.” The question remains: which Christianity?
The triumphant literature that emerges especially in the wake of imperial patronage speaks of the movement’s spreading and growing with incredible speed. Modern historians often repeat the claim. But we know little about rates of growth, because we have no firm data to draw on. We do not know how many Christians of any and all sorts lived in the empire by the year 100. Nor do we have any figures for the years 200, or 300, or 400. Nor do we know how many people in general the empire held in any era, though numbers—fifty million? sixty million?—are frequently floated and repeated. With Manichaean Christianity, we can at least have a sense of speed. Mani died in Persia in 276; his church was already condemned in the West by Diocletian some two decades later. But Mani had a network of already-established Christian communities as a base to draw on.
How did these Christianities spread? How did churches—of all persuasions—come to be formed? After Paul’s generation, for how long did associations (whether synagogue communities or professional groups) incubate these movements? Scholars speculate that networks, whether personal or professional, were major conduits. Individual households also played a key role. If a head of house joined the movement, presumably his whole household—wife, children, slaves, freedmen, clients—would join as well. Conversions in this way would branch. Outsiders in search of healing, exorcisms, and divining the future might frequent a Christian group and, if these needs were met, decide to affiliate. Perhaps the celebrations in cemeteries, replete with acts of charismatic healing, attracted outsider notice. Later, imperial sponsorship brought new incentives. Over the course of three centuries, clustering chiefly in cities, the numbers of affiliates of all sectarian persuasions clearly grew; the better the organizational infrastructure, especially as it formed around the figure of the monarchical bishop, the stronger the community, because the stronger and more organized the mechanisms of support. But (recalling Pliny’s letter to Trajan) traffic went in both directions: Christians could become ex-Christians, too.
How did this apocalyptic Jewish messianic movement, with its odd outreach to pagans in the face of the world’s imminent end, transmute within three centuries into an arm of the late Roman state? Or to phrase the question more traditionally: what accounts for the “triumph of Christianity”?
In chapter 15 of that masterpiece of Enlightenment historical writing, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon famously ventured five answers. First, he named the “inflexible and intolerant zeal of the early Christians,” which he saw as derived from Judaism, now released from the limitations of ethnicity. Second, Christianity’s doctrine of a future life. Third, the miraculous powers ascribed to the early church. Fourth, the pure and austere morals of the early Christians. And fifth, the union and discipline of the “Christian republic.” To this list have been added the arguments that paganism was itself losing steam, dying a natural death; and that Judaism, after the unsuccessful Judaean revolts of 66–73 and 132–35, withdrew from the gentile world. Circumstances, in other words, conspired to neutralize these other religious options.
Our aerial tour of antiquity’s historical terrain has called much of this reconstruction into question. Christians were not the only ones who conceived of an afterlife, though they did elaborately develop and narrativize their ideas about it. Pagans and Jews had their wonder-workers too—Apollonius of Tyana in the first instance, Honi the Circle-Drawer in the second—but their stories are unfamiliar because they are preserved in less mainstream writings. The “purity and austerity” of Christian morals was an ideal enunciated particularly in writings about martyrs, monks, and saints’ lives, and in letters exhorting great ladies to an ascetic lifestyle. Sermons, conciliar canons, and contemporary histories, however, tell the quite different story of Christians acting pretty much like their non-Christian contemporaries: complying with imperial edicts; soliciting the services of astrologers and assorted ritual experts, especially healers; having sexual relations with prostitutes and slaves; beating their slaves; participating in imperial cult (whether pre-Constantine or post); attending gladiatorial contests, horse races, and other spectacles; prevailing through applications of coercive force. And especially after the great ecumenical councils, we see how factious the “orthodox” bishops and populations could be. Constantine may well have wished for the “union” and “discipline” of Gibbon’s “Christian republic.” But he wished, and worked, in vain.
What about the triumph over other religious options? Paganism would not have to have been so targeted by Christian legislation had it been quietly dying of its own accord. And, as we have seen, “paganism” was too amorphous a phenomenon to be restricted, or complaints about the Christian celebration of civic holidays and the Christian recourse to healers, astrologers, and ritual experts would not be so loud in the record. Jews in Roman antiquity, outside of the early generations of the Christ movement, had not run missions to convert gentiles; but they continued their close social interactions with them, continuing to take their place within majority culture. Jews erected large public buildings, where they welcomed non-Jewish patronage and involvement, and cocelebrated their holidays with non-Jews—much to the irritation of some Christian spokesmen and clerics. Christian Rome legislated against Jews, too, demanding that they be barred from positions in the military and in government service—which means that they were there. Conversions to Judaism were forbidden by imperial law, which implies that such conversions occurred. Legislation both ecclesiastical and secular aimed to isolate these communities, which suggests that they were not just fading away. On the evidence, both were too much part of the Mediterranean mix for such initiatives to entirely succeed.
What stands out in the process of Rome’s Christianization, distinguishing one particular sort or sect of Christianity both from other sorts and from non-Christian communities, is the strong institutional organization, centered around the bishop, that emerges clearly by the mid-third century. It was the church of the bishops that captured Constantine’s allegiance, his continuing supervision and toleration of traditional and imperial cults notwithstanding. Bishops by that point had weathered the storms of occasional state coercion, whether through resistance, subterfuge, or acquiescence. Despite the problems of discipline that always followed in the wake of the imperial persecutions, and the rigorist abreactions of the Novatianists, the Donatists, and the Melitians, communities continued to muster around their bishops, to receive both sacraments and the patronage of charity.
Originally chosen for their lifetime appointments by acclamation of the laity, bishops transitioned to being approved by other bishops and, in some cases, later, appointed by the emperor. They worked within structured translocal organizations that sought to coordinate doctrine, calendars, financial resources, community mores, and liturgical protocols. They served as urban patrons and, after Constantine, as local strongmen. Their authority was enhanced by their new relation to the state, by their monopolizing of local charity and (thanks to monks and “hospital workers,” parabalani) by their mobilization of local muscle, by their influence that spread through an expanding web of relations to wealthy patrons, ascetics and monks, the poor and the almost poor. They were the executives of a movement, in short, that cultivated a broad social reach.
The roots of Constantine’s personal piety trace back to his military victory in 312. The particular church that he ended up sponsoring had articulated institutional structures. How and why he made the specific choice that he did is less than clear, the dramatic clarity of later accounts of it notwithstanding. But if his decision was in part prompted by concern to unify a fractured empire, Constantine chose well: the bishops provided the emperor with an alternative and effective functioning magistracy, a more immediate foothold in the cities, a way (at least notionally) to bind together the empire. The emperor provided the bishops with new wealth and, thus, new power. It was a synergistic relationship, ultimately to the bishops’ advantage: even once the empire dissolved in the West, the scaffolding of presiding bishops perdured.
Still, the question remains: Why did Christianity—that is, this particular Christianity—emerge as the sole official religion of the empire? Later emperors, though Christian, might have followed the earlier examples of Gallienus in 260 and Galerius in 311. They could have allowed all the various Christianities to take their place among the many other cults of the empire as, briefly, did Julian. A practical pluralism might once again have prevailed.
But it did not. Instead, emperors beginning with Constantine moved to suppress other kinds of Christians, qua heretics. They interfered with and impeded traditional cult practices. They cut funding to ancient cults. They singled out Jews and Judaism for special opprobrium. Why?
Here we need to consider what Gibbon identified as the “inflexible and intolerant zeal of the Christians.” This in no small part sprang from and was undergirded by the rhetorical training of second- and third-century elite spokesmen. It manifests in the written record of the proto-orthodox of the second and third centuries, with their insistence on homonoia, unanimity, and their consequent vilification of Christian rivals, as well as of Jews and of pagans, which shaped so much of the ideological patrimony of imperial Christianity. Agonistic rhetoric polarized options, sweeping away the clutter of choice. Only one way—the speaker’s way—could be the right way.
This rhetorical patrimony, and ideological inflexibility, in turn fed into two quite different concerns post-Constantine: the empire’s perennial focus on right religio as a bulwark against catastrophe, and the bishops’ commitment to a principled exclusivism—one that their own congregations very often did not share.
The focus on right religio, long traditional, protected against divine anger. This mentality had motivated Augustus to assume the priestly office of pontifex maximus in the dawning days of the empire. It motivated Theodosius II centuries later, when he convened an ecumenical council in 429: he acted, he said, so that the condition of the church might honor God and contribute to the safety of the empire. After 312, deity’s identity may have changed, but this religious conceptualization of the celestial/terrestrial pax remained the same. Right religio pleased heaven, no matter what heaven’s denomination. Christianization proceeded precisely because its impetus, from the government’s side, was so Roman.
Christian exclusivism, on the other hand, the insistence on the worship of one god only, was indeed, as Gibbon charged, an inheritance from Judaism. But this insistence was specific to a particular mood of Judaism. Israel’s god had long demanded that he be the sole focus of his own people’s piety. But other peoples had their gods—occasionally derided in Jewish texts as “godlings,” daimonia, or as mere images—just as Israel had theirs. “Every people walks, each in the name of its god,” the prophet Micah observed, “but we shall walk in the name of the Lord our god forever” (Micah 4.5). This “ecumenical” posture, variously expressed in Jewish scriptures and manifestly true in daily experience, allowed for the live-and-let-live ethic of the Diaspora, where synagogue communities accommodated the involvement and welcomed the patronage of interested pagans. In this view, other people’s worship of other gods was entirely normal.
But Jewish apocalyptic eschatology—the motor of the earliest movement—universalized the exclusivism of Jewish traditions, holding up Israel’s god as the final and sole deity of all peoples. At the end of days, so these traditions held, all nations would worship Israel’s god alone. Foreign deities were to be demoted or denied. Even after Christianities outgrew their originary apocalypticism (and Judaism); even after they disagreed between themselves on the identity of the high god; even after they went their separate ways into different regional churches within the empire, this exclusivist, universalizing impulse remained. Ultimately, this exclusivism was supported by politics: One god, one church, one empire, one emperor.
In the fourth century, this exclusivism combined with the Roman dread of religious irregularity to produce the church of the state. Right religio was defined as only one type of Christianity (“orthodox”), and, especially after Theodosius I, as only one type of orthodox Christianity, namely Nicene Christianity. Suppression of religious difference ensured the common weal. This mentality combining concern for legitimate religion together with public safety had led to the sporadic persecution of Christians in the first three centuries. In the course of the fourth century, this very same mentality propelled imperial Christianity to its position as the defining religion of the empire.