On Jewish apocalyptic eschatology as the matrix for the generation of Jesus and of Paul, see Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018). The effects of Paul’s gentile audience on his Jewish message are explored by Matthew Thiessen in Paul and the Gentile Problem (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) and, by the same author, A Jewish Paul (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023), and also in the essays collected in Paul within Judaism, edited by Mark D. Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015). On the intrinsic Jewishness of Paul’s message, see Anders Runesson, Judaism for Gentiles (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2022).
For Jewish settlement in the western diaspora, see the work of John Barclay, Jews in the Western Mediterranean Diaspora, from Alexander to Trajan [323 BCE to 117 CE] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), and studies by Erich Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) and Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). On Jews in that premier pagan establishment, the bath (with its mixed-ethnic clientele and mixed-gendered public nudity, Yaron Z. Eliav, A Jew in the Roman Bathhouse: Cultural Interaction in the Ancient Mediterranean (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univerity Press, 2023). Menachem Stern assembles and comments on classical authors’ remarks in Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, 3 volumes (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974–84). On the Jews’ writings as cultural capital, see Tessa Rajak, “The Mediterranean Jewish Diaspora in the Second Century,” in Christianity in the Second Century: Themes and Developments, edited by James Carleton Paget and Judith Lieu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Timothy Michael Law, When God Spoke Greek (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). For Jews in pagan places and pagans in Jewish places, see Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 32–60; see also 61–93 on “eschatological gentiles.”
Paul can plausibly be placed within the webbing of synagogue communities, but he may also have networked via trade associations. John S. Kloppenborg explores the social organization of these groups in Christ’s Associations: Connecting and Belonging in the Ancient City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). For the place of pagan God-fearers in the ancient synagogue, see Joyce Reynolds and Robert Tannenbaum, Jews and God-Fearers at Aphrodisias (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1987). The inscription that they dated to the third century has since been redated to the fourth or fifth. See also the essays in The Ways That Never Parted, edited by Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007).
When do Christ followers become distinguished as a new group by a new term, “Christians”? When does Christ following become “Christianity”? The Acts of the Apostles (early second century) retrojects the word “Christian” back into the mid-first century (“It was in Antioch that the disciples were first called Christianoi,” Acts 11.26; cf. 26.28), as does the Roman historian Tacitus, early second century, when he describes the scapegoating of this group by Nero (Annals 15.44). Suetonius (another historian, at Nero 16) and Pliny (a Roman governor, in his famous Letter 10.96, discussed in chapter 3), both Tacitus’s contemporaries, also use “Christian.” The word, in short, first appears in texts that cluster in the late first / early second century, the zone of time by which these new social groups form. David Horrell investigates this construction of Christian identity in Ethnicity and Inclusion (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020).
Rosemary Radford Ruether first drew attention to the dynamics of developing theologies and Christian anti-Judaism in Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seaberry, 1976). On the ways that different forms of Christianity “thought with Jews,” see John G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: A Study of the Relations between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire, 135–425 (1948; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), though dated, remains fundamental. On the entanglements of anti-Jewish and antiheretical thinking, see Mattijs den Dulk, Between Jews and Heretics: Refiguring Justin Martyr’s “Dialogue with Trypho” (London: Routledge, 2018). Specifically on anti-Judaism and the charge of deicide, see J. Christopher Edwards, Crucified: The Christian Invention of the Jewish Executioners of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2023).
Polemics against animal sacrifice, pagan piety, and Jews are all entangled as gentile Christianities develop—and compete with one another—in the second and third centuries. Two incisive examinations of this snarl of themes are offered by Daniel Ullucci, The Christian Rejection of Animal Sacrifice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), and several of the essays in Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice, edited by Jennifer Wright Knust and Zsuzsanna Várhelyi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Karin Hedner Zetterholm explores Jewish configurations of Christianity in “Between Paganism and Judaism: The Law of God in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies,” in In Search of Truth in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies: New Approaches to a Philosophical and Rhetorical Novel of Late Antiquity, edited by B.M.J. De Vos and D. Praet (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2022), 317–34; and “Christ Assemblies within a Jewish Context: Reconstructing a Social Setting for the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies,” in Negotiating Identities: Conflict, Conversion, and Consolidation in Early Judaism and Christianity (200 BCE–600 CE), edited by Karin Hedner Zetterholm, Anders Runesson, Cecilia Wassén, and Magnus Zetterholm (Lantham, MD: Lexington Books / Fortress Academic, 2022), 329–49. See further James Carleton Paget, “Jewish Christianity,” in Cambridge History of Judaism, volume 3, The Early Roman Period, edited by William Horbury, W. D. Davies, and John Sturdy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 731–75; and Annette Reed, Jewish Christianity and the History of Judaism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018).
Finally, for developments across this period through to the late empire, see Paula Fredriksen and Oded Irshai, “Christianity and Judaism in Late Antiquity: Polemics and Policies,” in Cambridge History of Judaism, volume 4, The Late Roman and Rabbinic Period, edited by Steven T. Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 977–1035; many of the other essays in the volume are also pertinent. See too the essays collected in Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire, edited by Natalie B. Dohrmann and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Two contemporary church fathers, Chrysostom in the East and Augustine in the West, contributed importantly to Christian theologies of Judaism, on which, see especially Robert L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); and Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). Christian legislation on Jews and Judaism is collected in two volumes by Amnon Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997) and The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1987).
The second and third centuries witnessed a great diversity of Christianities, and the period has been likened to a laboratory. For two excellent surveys of these movements and the issues attendant on them, see especially the essays assembled in Christianity in the Second Century: Themes and Developments, edited by James Carleton Paget and Judith Lieu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), and The Cambridge History of Christianity: Origins to Constantine, edited by Margaret M. Mitchell and Frances M. Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). In the latter collection, see especially the contributions by David Brakke (Gnosticism), Denis Minns (Irenaeus), Gerhard May (monotheism and creation) and Frances M. Young (Christian paideia). Further on paideia, see Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). On the great diversity in the city of Rome alone, see Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003). Finally, on constructions of the idea of “heresy,” see Alain LeBoulluec, The Notion of Heresy in Greek Literature in the Second and Third Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, an English translation of the 1985 French original).
The idea of “Gnosticism” as a discrete phenomenon has been challenged: some scholars insist that it be regarded more as a sensibility or a style of thinking than as a defined sect with a discrete body of doctrine. Key authors in this area are Michael Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); David Brakke, The Gnostics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Einar Thomassen, The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the “Valentinians” (Leiden: Brill, 2008); and, in A Companion to Second-Century Christian “Heretics,” edited by Antti Marjanen and Petri Luomanen (Leiden: Brill, 2005), the essay by Ismo Dunderberg, “The School of Valentinus,” 64–99. On the rhetorical advantages of the heresiologists’ accusations of Docetism (“appearance” Christology), see David Wilhite, “Was Marcion a Docetist? The Body of Evidence vs. Tertullian’s Argument,” Vigiliae Christianae 70 (2016): 1–36.
The texts from Nag Hammadi in English translations are available in The Nag Hammadi Library, revised edition, edited James M. Robinson (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), and in The Gnostic Scriptures, second edition, by Bentley Layton and David Brakke (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021). Pertinent texts are also available in the collection edited by Werner Foerster, Gnosis: A Selection of Gnostic Texts, 2 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972); see especially 1:121–61 on Ptolemy, with the text of the Letter to Flora, excerpted from Epiphanius, at 1:155–61.
On Marcion, see the exhaustive treatment by Judith Lieu, Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), with generous bibliography. Jason D. BeDuhn, The First New Testament: Marcion’s Scriptural Canon (Salem, OR: Polebridge, 2013), situates Marcion within the swirl of mid-second-century Christianities and presents a reconstruction of Marcion’s gospel and of his collection of Pauline letters. For a recent prosopography of all these various second-century Christian figures, see M. David Litwa, Found Christianities: Remaking the World of the Second Century CE (London: T&T Clark, 2022). Marcion’s legacy lived on in the later revelations of Mani, a third-century Mesopotamian Christian visionary and also a dedicated Paulinist. Iain Gardner and Samuel N. C. Lieu provide an excellent overview in Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jason D. BeDuhn orients his discussion around ritual practices in The Manichaean Body in Discipline and Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). For Augustine’s continuing entanglements with Manichaeism, see BeDuhn’s two-volume study Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010 and 2013).
On Paul’s many afterlives, see Benjamin L. White, Remembering Paul: Ancient and Modern Contests over the Image of the Apostle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), and the texts and interpretations collected by Wayne A. Meeks and John T. Fitzgerald, in The Writings of St. Paul, second edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). J. Albert Harrill traces the post-Pauline trajectory in the Roman world in Paul the Apostle: His Life and Legacy in their Roman Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 97–166.
Women and Christian Origins, a classic study edited by Ross Shephard Kraemer and Mary Rose D’Angelo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), investigates representations of Christian women both in ancient texts and in modern scholarship. See also by Kraemer Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). For images of women and the gendered discourse of ancient religious texts, see Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, edited by Karen L. King (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988). Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) both established and explored the way that “rhetorical” women do theological and political work in patristic texts. Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History, edited and translated by Kevin Madigan and Carolyn Osiek (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), gathers references to women as deacons, presbyters, and bishops, but the meaning of the words presbytera and episcopa is contested. For a maximalist assessment of this evidence, arguing that women indeed functioned in ordained church offices, see the essays gathered in Patterns of Women’s Leadership in Early Christianity, edited by Joan E. Taylor and Ilaria L. E. Ramelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). For “pagan” women in Roman society, see two excellent essays by Ramsay MacMullen, “Women in Public in the Roman Empire” (Historia, 1980) and “Women’s Power in the Principate” (Klio, 1986), now gathered in MacMullen’s Changes in the Roman Empire: Essays in the Ordinary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 162–68 and 169–76.
Heresiology grows to be its own literary genre. On the double helix of anti-Jewish and antiheretical polemics in Justin, see especially Mattijs den Dulk’s monograph Between Jews and Heretics: Refiguring Justin Martyr’s “Dialogue with Trypho” (London: Routledge, 2018). On the features of early heresy writing as a literary genre, see Geoffrey S. Smith, Guilt by Association: Heresy Catalogues in Early Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); for heresiology’s debt to classical ethnography, see Todd S. Berzon, Classifying Christians (Oakland: University of California Press, 2012). See too the essays collected by Eduard Iricinschi and Holger M. Zellentin in Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008).
The fourth-century involvement of the Christianizing state raised the stakes in this intra-Christian argument, when forms of schism became classified as “heresies” with legal disabilities. A premier instance of this is the construction and fate of “Arianism,” which will be discussed in chapter 5, “Christ and Empire.” On that fourth-century heresy hunter par excellence and the haunting of imperial Christianity by heretical “others,” see Andrew S. Jacobs, Epiphanius of Cyprus: A Cultural Biography of Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021). The impact of Christianity on Roman law, and the development of legal definitions of religious deviance, are explored in the essays collected by R. McKitterick, C. Methuen, and A. Spicer, The Church and the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
See two collections of martyr narratives: Herbert Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), and Éric Rebillard, Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). For a general history, W.H.C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), though now dated, remains a classic. Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 418–62, provides a brisk and insightful overview, though his analysis of the martyrdom of Pionius (462–92), like that of Frend in general, takes the embedded anti-Judaism of the tale at its word as a description of flat fact. A gold-standard treatment remains the work of G.E.M. de Ste. Croix: his important essays are collected in Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy, edited by Michael Whitby and Joseph Streeter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). James Corke-Webster proposes a radically revisionist reconstruction of events, based on de Ste. Croix’s fundamental model, in “By Whom Were the Early Christians Persecuted?,” Past and Present 20 (2023): 1–45 (open access). Various Christians, he argues, may have been the ones who initiated the prosecution of Christian others.
Candida Moss, The Other Christs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), and Ancient Christian Martyrdom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), has compellingly presented the case for looking at martyrdom as a type of discursive practice. As Daniel Boyarin has wryly commented, “Being killed is an event. Martyrdom is a literary form”; see Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 116; for his critique of Frend, see 127–30. Further on the idea of martyrdom and Christian identity formation, see Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Lucy Grig, Making Martyrs in Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 2004); and Shelly Matthews, Perfect Martyr: The Stoning of Stephen and the Construction of Christian Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). On the “salience” of identity—its indeterminacy, and its situational activation—see Éric Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity: North Africa, 200–450 CE (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012). On pre-Constantinian Christians as town councilors—men of means who sat on city councils, maintained public works, and even funded public spectacles—see Frank R. Trombley, “Christianity in Asia Minor: Observations from Epigraphy,” in Cambridge History of Religions in the Ancient World, vol 2, edited by William Adler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 341–68.
Éric Rebillard, The Early Martyr Narratives: Neither Authentic Accounts nor Forgeries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), has drawn attention to the formal fluidity of these texts. In light of the difficulties that they bring to any reconstruction of a chronology of events, he urges that they be entirely decoupled from the history of anti-Christian persecutions. On the proliferation of martyr narratives composed in the post-Constantinian period, with texts, see Michael Lapidge, The Roman Martyrs: Introduction, Translations, and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Peter Brown explores the cultic expression of martyr piety in The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). For the continuities of martyr cults with traditional Roman practices around the veneration of the dead, see Ramsay MacMullen, The Second Church: Popular Christianity A.D. 200–400 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009).
For Decius’s mandate to sacrifice as a security measure for the empire, see the classic article by James B. Rives, “The Decree of Decius and the Religion of the Empire,” JRS 89 (1999): 135–54; see also Allen Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On the religious motivation of Diocletian’s action, see Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, A Threat to Public Piety: Christians, Platonists, and the Great Persecution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
On the abiding invective of classical ethnographies, readily repurposed by pagans, Jews, and Christians alike when regarding the ethnic, thus religious “other,” see especially Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); see also The Routledge Handbook of Identity and Environment in the Classical and Medieval World, edited by Rebecca Futo Kennedy and Molly Jones-Lewis (New York: Routledge, 2020). For historical context, in the Edinburgh History of Ancient Rome series, see the volumes by Jonathan Edmundson, Imperial Rome AD 14 to 192: The First Two Centuries; Clifford Ando, Imperial Rome AD 193 to 284: The Critical Century; and Jill Harries, Imperial Rome AD 284 to 363: The New Empire. On the politics of religious identity in the late empire, see Stephen Mitchell, A History of the Later Roman Empire AD 284–641 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 276–300. Specifically on Roman public entertainments, the narrative setting of many of the martyr stories, see Donald G. Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge, 2001). On inter-Christian violence, and the ways that this compelled and supported the Donatists’ identification as the church of the martyrs, see Brent D. Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). On the intra-Christian repurposing of the rhetoric of martyrdom, see Heirs of Roman Persecution: Studies on a Christian and Para-Christian Discourse in Late Antiquity, edited by Éric Fournier and Wendy Mayer (London: Routledge, 2021). Fournier speaks of deployments of martyr rhetoric against the Vandals in “Eternal Persecutions: Cultural Memory, Trauma and Martyrs in Vandal North Africa,” in The Making of Saints in Late Antique North Africa, edited by Sabine Panzram and Nathalie Klinck (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, forthcoming).
Further on intra-Christian violence, see Michael Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). On Christian violence more generally, Peter Brown, “Christianization and Religious Conflict,” in Cambridge Ancient History: The Late Empire, A.D. 337–425, edited by A. Cameron and P. Garnsey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 632–64.
Visions of the End were powerfully woven into the messianic movement that formed around Jesus: the End, after all, was when redemption would be realized. But would this end-time redemption be at the individual’s end (thus, immediately after death) or corporate (thus, delayed until Christ’s Second Coming)? Paul, our earliest evidence, speaks of the dead as having “fallen asleep.” They will awaken at the coming of Christ. On Paul’s vision of apocalyptic redemption, and its location in the heavens (Philippians 3.20), see Matthew Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), especially 129–60. For the ways that Paul’s ideas on pneumatic transformation sit within broader Greco-Roman patterns, see M. David Litwa, We Are Being Transformed: Deification in Paul’s Soteriology (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2012) and Posthuman Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Insistence on the resurrection of the physical body, by contrast, supported terrestrial visions of God’s kingdom, with corresponding hopes for effortless abundance, peace, progeny, and plenty. For an exploration of these teachings, and the ways that they are reinterpreted, see Paula Fredriksen, “Apocalypse and Redemption: From John of Patmos to Augustine of Hippo,” Vigiliae Christianae 45.2 (1991): 151–83. See also Outi Lehtipuu, Debates over the Resurrection of the Dead (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). On the “scientific” strategy of dating the End, see Richard Landes, “ ‘Lest the Millennium Be Fulfilled’: Apocalyptic Expectations and the Pattern of Western Chronography,” in The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, edited by W. Verbeke, D. Verhelst, and A. Welkenhuysen (Louvain: Presses Universitaires, 1988), 137–211, with copious citations to primary materials; see also Oded Irshai, “Dating the Eschaton: Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Calculations in Late Antiquity,” in Apocalyptic Time, edited by Albert Baumgarten (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 113–53. On Augustine’s secularization of time—his strategy for calming millenarian countdowns—the classic essay is Robert Markus’s Saeculum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
On varying visions of the afterlife—and their imbrication in the economics of piety and the impulse to asceticism—see Peter Brown, The Ransom of the Soul. Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Ideas on the fate of the dead vary widely, but all presuppose an afterlife. Alan F. Segal, Life After Death (New York: Doubleday, 2004), and Richard Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1998), offer two rich explorations. Tours of heaven and hell became a Christian literary genre, on which most recently, see Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022). Primary texts may be found in Edgar Hennecke and Wilhelm Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, 2 volumes (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963 and 1965); and in The Apocryphal New Testament, edited by J. K. Elliott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). On the “invention of damned bodies,” see Meghan R. Henning, Hell Hath No Fury (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021); on their (aestheticized) heavenly counterparts, see Candida Moss, Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). Henning and Moss have together explored the relation of visions of heaven and hell with Roman techniques of torture and bodily fragmentation and with ancient medical ideas about wholeness, health, and identity in “Pulling Apart and Piecing Together: Wholeness and Fragmentation in Early Christian Visions of the Afterlife,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 20 (2023): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfac069.
For a comparison of Origen and Augustine on the afterlife—thus, on salvation—see Paula Fredriksen, Sin: The Early History of an Idea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), chapter 3, “A Rivalry of Genius.” Finally, on Augustine’s construction of eschatological flesh, both of the damned and of the saved, see David G. Hunter, “Books 21 and 22: The End of the Body; Heaven and Hell in the City of God,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine’s “City of God,” edited by David Vincent Meconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 276–96.
In Jewish scriptures, the nation of Israel is designated as God’s “son” (e.g., Exodus 4.22; Hosea 11.1). So are the kings of David’s line, which is to say, “son of God” can function as a messianic title. On the Jewish backstory for this term, see especially Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins, King and Messiah as Son of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008); on the term’s referential flexibility, see Matthew V. Novenson, The Grammar of Messianism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). On divine sons not begotten but made—that is, by adoption—see Michael Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman World: Divine Sonship in Its Social and Political Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). On the early divinization of Jesus, see M. David Litwa, Jesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014). James B. Rives provides an excellent orientation in the richly diverse world of traditional cults in Religion in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
John Dillon, The Middle Platonists (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), and R. T. Wallis, Neoplatonism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), introduce the broad outlines of these two schools of thought, which were fundamental to later developments in Christian theologies. Primary texts are collected in George Boys-Stones, Platonist Philosophy 80 BC to AD 250: An Introduction and Collection of Sources in Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). On Philo, the essays collected in The Cambridge Companion to Philo, edited by Adam Kamesar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). The question of Paul’s Christology is addressed by several of the essays in Monotheism and Christology, edited by Matthew V. Novenson (Leiden: Brill, 2020).
Henry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966) and The Early Church (London: Penguin Books, 1967, rev. ed. 1993) orient the reader in the congested world of patristic theology and the development of Christian doctrines: further bibliographies are included in both of these texts as well. Texts are collected in A New Eusebius: Documents Illustrating the History of the Church to AD 337, edited by J. Stevenson, revised by W.H.C. Frend (London: SPCK, 1987); in Christianity in Late Antiquity, 300–450 C.E., edited by Bart D. Ehrman and Andrew S. Jacobs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); and—with a nice leavening of pagan materials—Paganism and Christianity, 100–425 C.E.: A Sourcebook, edited by Ramsay MacMullen and Eugene N. Lane (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992). See also the texts gathered and translated in The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings, volume 3, Christ: Through the Nestorian Controversy, edited by Mark DelCogliano (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Mountains of scholarship have formed on the question of Constantine and his effects on evolving Christianities. On the interrelation of empire, bishops, and power politics, see especially H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000; with extensive bibliography); see also T. D. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantine: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). On the urban violence orchestrated by contesting bishops, see Carlos Galvão-Sobrinho, Doctrine and Power: Theological Controversy and Christian Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). Beginning in the fourth century, bishops were well integrated with urban elites and functioned like them: see Claudia Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), especially 208–33.
On Constantine’s Roman religious context, see J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, Continuity and Change in Roman Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). On Constantine and civic politics, see Noel Lenski, Constantine and the Cities (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). See too James Corke-Webster, Eusebius and Empire: Constructing Church and Rome in the “Ecclesiastical History” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), and Jeremy M. Schott, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). On the theological (and political) ins and outs of the Christological debates, see Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); exhaustively, R.P.C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: Arian Controversy 318–381 AD (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988); and the essays gathered in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Origins to Constantine, edited by Margaret M. Mitchell and Frances M. Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). A still valuable survey of the period is Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire, AD 100–400 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984). On the ways that church councils did (and did not) work, see also by Ramsay MacMullen Voting about God in Early Church Councils (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). See too Gillian Clark, Christianity and Roman Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Texts are available in P. R. Coleman-Norton, Roman State and Christian Church: A Collection of Legal Documents to AD 535 (London: SPCK, 1966).
For the Roman historical context, see Jill Harries, Imperial Rome AD 284 to 363: The New Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012); A. D. Lee, From Rome to Byzantium, AD 363 to 565 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Stephen Mitchell, A History of the Later Roman Empire, AD 284–641 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). On the unanticipated shift from “pagan” to “Christian” in the fourth century, and the ways that things changed as well as stayed the same, see Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation: Rome’s Unexpected Path to Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). “The story of this century,” observes H. A. Drake, meaning the tale of this transition between Constantine and Theodosius, “is a story of a change in the meaning of what it meant to be a Roman. An important marker of this change is the power and leverage over public affairs that came to be exercised by Christian bishops”; see A Century of Miracles: Christians, Pagans, Jews, and the Supernatural, 312–410 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 3.
Éric Fournier speaks of the repurposing of martyr rhetoric against the Vandals in “Eternal Persecutions: Cultural Memory, Trauma and Martyrs in Vandal North Africa,” in The Making of Saints in Late Antique North Africa, edited by Sabine Panzram and Nathalie Klinck (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, forthcoming). Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), traces the effects of the economy on the dissolution of the western empire, and the ways that this relates to “barbarian” immigrations; his earlier essay Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992) gives a riveting tour through the political and cultural thickets of this period. Brown’s World of Late Antiquity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971) remains an indispensable guide to the period.
Peter Brown’s Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), gives a vivid overview of the development of ascetic ideas and behaviors in antiquity. That they were more honored in the breach than in the observance prompted his discussion of the Christian “silent majority.” Robin Lane Fox’s chapter, “Living Like Angels,” in Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean World from the Second Century to the Conversion of Constantine (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 336–74, provides a learned and lively review of these same issues. For an astringent assessment of ascetic spirituality, see the classic essay by E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965).
On the development of the discourse of asceticism, see especially Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). See also her study The Origenist Controversy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), which includes a sensitive consideration of its late Latin inflections in the arguments between Jerome, Jovinian, Augustine, and Pelagius. Kathy L. Gaca, responding to Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, contextualizes the development of Christian ideologies of asceticism within a consideration of foregoing Greek traditions, in The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
On the wild and woolly asceticism of the Desert Fathers, and the transition through different genres of practice to the organized monastery, a classic study is Derwas Chitty’s The Desert a City (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966). The argument that the flight to the desert was stimulated by the loss of the option of martyrdom—asceticism replacing martyrdom—is frustrated by chronology: Anthony precedes Diocletian. David Brakke has investigated the ways in which different styles of Egyptian asceticism reiterated contests over different models of authority—that of the school (Clement, Origen, Hieracas), which tolerated theological speculation, focused on the charismatic teacher, and welcomed the active participation of women; and that of the bishop, which focused on urban politics, control of church welfare networks, female seclusion, and doctrinal “policy” (Alexander and Athanasius)—in Athanasius and Asceticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). On the monk’s participation in the cosmic struggle between angels and demons, and the ways that this distinguished charismatic Christian figures from pagan competitors, see Brakke’s Demons and the Making of the Monk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Further on the development of monasticism, also by Brakke, see “Holy Men and Women of the Desert,” in The Oxford Handbook of Christian Monasticism, edited by Bernice M. Kaczynski, with Thomas Sullivan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 35–50. On the surprisingly intergenerational quality of monastic life, and the experience of children in monasteries, see Carolyn Schroeder, Children and Family in Late Antique Egyptian Monasticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
The prominence of aristocratic women in Christian ascetic movements has commanded a huge amount of attention. Elizabeth A. Clark’s contributions have remained fundamental: see her classic study Ascetic Piety and Women’s Faith: Essays on Late Ancient Christianity (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1986). She has also edited a collection of important articles by various specialists in “Asceticism, Monasticism and Gender in Early Christianity,” a virtual issue of Church History 90 (2021). See too Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), on the social and religious changes wrought by the developing ascetic sensibility; and Susannah Elm, Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), for an exhaustive examination and comparison of female asceticism in Asia Minor and in Egypt. For the ways that asceticism could tip over into accusations of heresy, see Virginia Burrus, The Making of a Heretic: Gender, Authority, and the Priscillianist Controversy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). For women in Egyptian monasticism, see Rebecca Krawiec, Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
For an appreciation of Manichaean asceticism and its ritual expressions, see the study by Jason D. BeDuhn, The Manichaean Body: In Discipline and Ritual (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
Controversies raged in the Latin West over the status of marriage vis-à-vis celibacy and virginity, on which, see David G. Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy and Heresy in Ancient Christianity: The Jovinianist Controversy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Augustine’s voice ultimately dominated. For Augustine’s views on the resurrection of the flesh, see again David G. Hunter, “Books 21 & 22: The End of the Body; Heaven and Hell in The City of God,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine’s “City of God,” edited by David Vincent Meconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 276–96. For a comparison with Origen, see Paula Fredriksen, Sin: The Early History of an Idea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 97–134; for Augustine’s contest both with Manichees and with Pelagians, see Paula Fredriksen, “Beyond the Body/Soul Dichotomy: Augustine on Paul against the Manichees and the Pelagians,” Recherches augustiniennes 23 (1988): 87–114.
For a consideration of the origins of the word paganus and its fourth-century application, see Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 14–32. He asks, “How did Latin paganus come to acquire its most famous meaning?” He also challenges the older view that the late fourth century saw something like a pagan “last stand,” a reconstruction that dramatizes the removal of the altar of the goddess Victory from the Senate in 382. Christians within the city at that time were consumed with (or distracted by) an internal controversy, namely the status of the married Christian versus that of the virgin or celibate, Damasus and Jerome championing asceticism against the more moderate position of Helvidius: see Robert R. Chenault, “The Controversy over the Altar of Victory,” in Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome, edited by Michele Salzman, Marianne Sághy, and Rita Lizzi Testa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 46–63. See also, in the same volume, the essays by Thomas Jürgash (“Christians and the Invention of Paganism in the Late Roman Empire,” 115–38) and by Alan Cameron (“Were Pagans Afraid to Speak Their Minds in a Christian World? The Correspondence of Symmachus,” 64–111). Cameron concludes, “Ecclesiastics might thunder against paganism in all its forms, but in the real world government turned to those with influence, whatever their religious beliefs.”
On the vicissitudes of the city of Rome in late antiquity, see especially Michele Renee Salzman, The Falls of Rome: Crises, Resilience, and Resurgence in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). On the (slow) Christianization of the senatorial elite, see also by Salzman, The Making of a Christian Aristocracy: Social and Religious Change in the Western Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), attempted a demographical study of the early churches based on a mathematical model of a steady rate of growth of 40 percent per decade. That rate derived from his study of modern sectarian conversions. He began with an estimate figure of one thousand as the total number of Christians in the year 40 CE and then ran the numbers to the year 350, by which time, he opined, there would have been 33,882,008 Christians out of a total population of sixty million. Unfortunately, Stark read the literature of the proto-orthodox as representative of Christianity in toto. He also uncritically took it at its word, especially about its own superior morality. This meant, Stark said, that Christian men rejected the sexual license that characterized pagan men (which would have come as news to Augustine); that Christians did not commit adultery, so that intact families guaranteed the growth rate; that Christians did not practice infant exposure as a means of reproductive control, again propelling growth rate; that martyrs evinced composure that “amazed and unsettled many pagans,” inspiring conversions, which propelled growth rate; and so on. The patina of scientific thinking and the reassuring enlistment of numbers, figures, and percentages masks the degree to which Stark did not know how to read his sources. The Rise of Christianity is in many ways an act of demographical wistful thinking.
Bart D. Ehrman’s popular treatment The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018) adapts some of Stark’s method to explain why and how Rome became Christian.
“Magic” as a contested type of ritual performance is investigated by David Frankfurter, “Christianity and Paganism: Egypt,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Constantine to c. 600, edited by Augustus Casiday and Frederick W. Norris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 173–88. He argues there that “syncretism is essential to Christianization, not its by-product” (175). He also speaks there inter alia about “oracular tickets” as amulets. Frankfurter has also edited the definitive Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic (Leiden: Brill, 2019). The same Cambridge History volume investigates local paganisms in Asia Minor (Frank R. Trombley, 189–209), Italy (Michele Salzman, 210–30), and North Africa (Anna Leone, 231–47). On the ways that both “magic” and “paganism” function as discursive categories—a verbal way of “othering”—in Christian polemics and in Roman law, see Maijastina Kahlos, Religious Dissent in Late Antiquity, 350–450 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). Demons figure prominently in Christian discourse on traditional cult: for the mid-second century, see e.g., Justin, Dialogue with Trypho and his First Apology and Second Apology; for the early third century, see Tertullian, On Spectacles and On Idolatry, and Origen, Against Celsus; for the fourth century, see especially books 7 through 9 of Augustine’s City of God.
Pagan “monotheism” has been explored in three excellent anthologies: Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, edited by Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire, edited by Stephen Mitchell and Peter van Nuffelen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and, by the same editors, Monotheism between Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity (Leuven: Peeters, 2010). On what I have called the neutralization of pagan civic cults in the interests of public peace, see the classic study by Robert A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Ramsay MacMullen has traced the seesaw of Christians and pagans for this whole period. See especially his Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100–400) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984) and, on the cemetery celebrations of the cult of the saints, The Second Church: Popular Christianity A.D. 200–400 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009). The quotation about the Triune God in chapter 7, on page 194, comes from The Second Church, page 106. Christians of all social classes honored the martyrs: there was no split between popular and elite spirituality when it came to the cult of the saints. See Architects of Piety: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Cult of the Martyrs by Vasiliki M. Limberis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). On the development of Christian identity as a three-way process, involving Jews as well as pagans, see Isabella Sandwell, Religious Identity in Late Antiquity: Greeks, Jews and Christians in Antioch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); also, more generally on the “indeterminancy” of Christian identity, see Éric Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity: North Africa, 200–450 CE (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012). Finally, on the bishops’ demonizing of outsiders (heretics, pagans, and Jews) and their spaces (especially the temple and the synagogue) while developing sacramental rituals against them, see Dayna S. Kalleres, City of Demons: Violence, Ritual and Christian Power in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
The Theodosian Code ultimately contained more legislation against heretics (some thirteen laws) than against pagans (only six), supporting the conclusion that heresy was considered the greatest threat to imperial well-being. Pragmatism sometimes prevailed—when fending off external threats, emperors might briefly relax internal antiheretical directives—but the restoration of stability was invariably accompanied by a return to repression. Éric Fournier investigates this dynamic in “Anticipating Disasters: Forbearance and the Limits of Religious Coercion in Late Roman North Africa,” Studies in Late Antiquity, forthcoming. For the primary texts of imperial legislation, see Clyde Pharr, The Theodosian Code (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952). Book 16 contains the rulings on right religion.
On the effects of Christianization on other Mediterranean religious cultures, see Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); see also the important essay by Jaclyn Maxwell, “Paganism and Christianization,” in The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, edited Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 849–75. Finally, on how Christianization affected a change in ways of conducting learned argument, and even a change in the concept and format of the book, see Mark Letteney, The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).