Pagans and Christians

In the West, in short, early Christianity has lost its history, but there is one general point on which we can be more confident. An older view that heretical types of Christianity arrived in many places before the orthodox faith has nothing in its favour, except perhaps in the one Syrian city of Edessa.²⁴ In Lyons and North Africa, there is no evidence of this first heretical phase and the likelier origins are all against it. In Egypt, the argument has been decisively refuted from the evidence of the papyri. Details of practice and leadership did differ widely, but the later existence of so many heresies must not obscure the common core of history and basic teaching throughout the Christian world.

In the Eastern Empire, the spread of the Christians is marginally clearer, though the origins of the local churches are most obscure. They confronted a lively variety of sites and languages, the great Greek city of Ephesus, the incestuous families of Egypt’s townships, the royal valley of Petra, the tribal camps in the adjoining desert, the huge conglomeration of people and houses across the border in Parthian Ctesiphon, and always beckoning beyond, the roads to Iran and the East and the sea route of the Persian Gulf, where a whole day’s journey can be seen in a single glance to the horizon. To know these sites is to wonder how Christians wormed their way into them, the developing temples of pagan Pergamum, the hotter and less predictable society of Edessa in Syria with its Macedonian name and the Arabic spoken in its streets, the smaller townships of inland Phrygia, where the gods were invoked by sceptres and the people were known for their sober ethic and their aversion, even, to swearing oaths.

The best early evidence for the eastward diffusion of Christianity lies in the allusive verse epitaph of a Phrygian bishop, Abercius, and its hints of his journeys: “to Rome he sent me to behold a kingdom and to see a queen in golden sandals and robes: a people I saw there who have a fine seal: I also saw the plain of Syria and the cities and Nisibis, crossing east over the Euphrates. Everywhere I had fellow [kinsmen] having Paul as my [guardian]…” Abercius’s journey belongs well into the second half of the second century and he implies that he met Christians “everywhere” he went. Nisibis lay far beyond the river Euphrates in the region of Adiabene, whose queen mother and heir had become Jewish converts in the 30s A.D.²⁵ Did this Jewish presence help Christianity to gain its foothold? Certainly, we must allow for this type of contact in the general area of Syriac-speaking culture which stretched from Antioch to Adiabene, but a Jewish contact was not Christianity’s only point of entry.

In 165, Nisibis was recaptured by Rome and brought under her control: in 196, it received the honorary title of “colony.” When Abercius visited, it was within the Empire’s boundaries. We can compare the military post at Dura, to the west on the Euphrates. Its Christian community in the 220s and 230s has been connected with the presence of Greek-speaking troops in the Romans’ service, not with natives or local Jews: a few names were found in inscriptions from the Christian house-church, and almost all of them were connected with Greek or Latin names, not native names in Dura.²⁶ Fragments of an early version of Scripture were found in Greek, not Syriac: the church’s wall paintings were not very similar to those in the Jewish synagogue. These hints are reminders of the possibilities, nothing more, but they warn against tracing the core of every community to converts from Jews and local families. At Nisibis, too, the Christian presence may owe as much to the presence of Roman troops as to any Jewish or native element. At Dura, the Jews’ synagogue continued to grow, looking much more impressive than the Christians’ little house-church.²⁷

One of the most striking features of Rome’s eastern frontier is the movement of people and ideas across it: Christianity was no exception, and no single pattern of transit will explain it in regions which saw so many travellers, traders and movements of men with their gods. The Christians in Dura with Greek names were only one of many possible types. Further south, we can already find Christians with a strong Jewish heritage who lived beyond the reach of Rome. During the second and third centuries, groups of Baptists could be found in the district between the mouths of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, where they lived under the nominal control of the Parthians. They acknowledged Christian teachings among severe beliefs which had the stamp of Jewish influence. Here, they had presumably begun as a splinter group from Jewish settlers and we have come to know only recently how they combined a respect for Jesus with a strong stamp of Jewish practice and an honour for their original leader, the prophet Elchesai, who had taught in Mesopotamia c. 100–110 A.D.²⁸ Their sect, then, was quite old and traced back to a heretical Christian teacher, busy in this area at an early date. It is a reminder that very varied sects and small groups could multiply in the Mesopotamian area, just out of the range of Greek and Roman historians: Christian groups, already, were not limited to the area of Roman rule.

These Baptists’ district was frequented by traders and travellers who moved freely between the cities of Roman Syria, the Persian Gulf and India. The new religion could travel yet further eastwards and in Christian tradition there are two distinct stories that it did. The area was the setting for scenes in the fictitious “acts” of the Apostle Thomas, which were compiled in Syriac, probably at Edessa, before c. 250. They told how Thomas, a carpenter, had seen Christ in a vision and had been sold into the service of King Gundophar, the Parthian ruler whom we know to have ruled at Taxila in the Punjab during the mid-first century. The story was well imagined.²⁹ Like Thomas, goods and art objects from Roman Alexandria and Syria were reaching the Indus River and its upper reaches in the period of Gundophar’s reign. However, we do not know if there is any truth in the legend of Thomas’s mission. Possibly some settled groups of Christians did exist in the Punjab and encouraged this story of an Apostle’s visit to explain their origin. If so, they are a sad loss to history. In Taxila, during the first and second centuries, they would have lived in a society of rich household patrons, some of whose houses adjoined a large Buddhist shrine. Here we would have to imagine the two religions’ meeting, made without the intervening barrier of pagan gods.

The second story of an Indian mission is largely true. Eusebius reports that an educated Christian, Pantaenus, left Alexandria, evidently c. 180, and went as a missionary to India, where he found Christians who already claimed to trace back to St. Bartholomew.³⁰ They owned a copy of Matthew’s Gospel in “the Hebrew script” which the Apostle was supposed to have left with them. Contacts between Alexandria and the southwestern coast of India make it easy to credit this visit. Eusebius reports it as a “story,” but he seems to be expressing his own surprise at the adventure, not his doubt at its source. The Gospel “in Hebrew letters” need not disprove it: “Hebrew letters” may refer to Syriac script, and we cannot rule out an early Syriac translation of the Gospels for use in the East.

If Christians availed themselves of these wide horizons, they were not alone among the travellers on Rome’s eastern frontier: soon afterwards, the Christian teacher Bardaisan was able to give us the best ancient description of India’s Brahmins from his vantage point at Edessa, in Syria. In a pupil’s memoir of his teaching, he also alluded to Christians in “Bactria,” beyond the Hindu Kush Mountains, though not specifically in southern India.³¹ His silence does not refute the stories of Christians in that region: he was not giving a complete list of churches. He does, however, cast light on Christianity in his own Edessa, where it attracted something more remarkable: the patronage of a king.

The old city of Edessa lay beyond the Euphrates, to the west of Nisibis, and its fictions have left an enduring mark on Christian history. Its king, Abgar V, was believed to have exchanged letters with Jesus, “copies” of which were on show in Syriac in the city’s archives by the late third century: the disciple “Judas Thomas” was believed to have visited this Abgar, to have cured him and many others at the court and then converted him. Copies of the “letter” to Abgar were later inscribed and distributed across the Empire as far as Spain. They became objects of pilgrimage and special power for their city, and at Edessa, they were eventually joined by a “miraculous” image of Jesus’s face, a fake “portrait” which originated in the mid-sixth century.³² The origin of this legend is tantalizing and open to historical dissection. A later King Abgar, Abgar VIII, was described by Africanus, a Christian scholar who visited his court, as “a holy man”: another acquaintance, Bardaisan, refers to an Abgar who “believed” and “decreed that anyone who castrated himself should have his hand cut off.” Probably, this Abgar is also Abgar VIII. His decree had a specific aim, as it struck at a local pagan practice, but it is very hard to accept that two local Christians would describe a king whom they knew personally as “believing,” let alone as “holy,” unless he was a Christian sympathizer.³³

King Abgar VIII’s sympathies are all the more tantalizing because his career brought him into conflict, then close contact with Rome. Reinstated as a king, he eventually journeyed to Rome, where he enjoyed a magnificent reception late in his life.³⁴ We do not know if he was already, or still, a Christian supporter at the time of his visit. However, his sympathies may well have encouraged the legend of the earlier Abgar’s letters from Jesus. A king’s Christianity deserved a noble ancestry, so the Edessans invented one. Perhaps we can also pin down their emphasis on “Judas Thomas,” the city’s supposed evangelist. We have learned recently that the heretical prophet Mani corresponded with the people of Edessa in the mid-third century and sent them his “apostle” Addai, also called “Thomas,” as the preacher of his new missionary gospel. Perhaps this heretical Thomas was exploiting an existing Edessan interest in “Judas Thomas,” the supposed “apostle” of Christ. More probably, the Edessan Christians replied to his heretical presence by stressing their own connection with the “true” Judas Thomas, the Christian evangelist.³⁵

We do not know the degree or effects of King Abgar VIII’s Christian sympathies: they have left no mark on his coins or his city’s monuments. Nonetheless, they are the first pointer to Christianity’s appeal to a ruler. Locally, they served Edessa very well. Whereas Nisibis had no royal connection with Jesus, Edessa could now boast letters and an apostolic visit. Thirty miles away, her old rival, Harran (or Carrhae), remained famously pagan, perhaps partly in response to Edessa’s new identity. While Edessa’s fictions drew pilgrims and tourists from all over the Christian world, Harran was to remain a pagan stronghold, obscured by its neighbour until it profited ingeniously from the Muslim conquests. Then, its pagans claimed a new identity as the lost “Sabian” worshippers whom the Arabs’ Koran had mentioned. Edessa’s rise is one more chapter in the lively history of the rivalries of local cities.³⁶ As with the new Ionopolis, religion gave her a fresh claim to fame. Her neighbours’ contrary response is another proof of the patchiness of early Christian conversions: one town’s faith could be its neighbour’s poison.

In the East, however obscurely, we have seen some of Christianity’s ways of spreading, with travellers and perhaps with traders, through the presence of troops from the Roman East and among groups who had folio wed Jewish practice. By 210 it already extended from humble Baptists to the court of a local king. These means of entry were joined by two others: war and persecution. Persecution always scattered Christians, and in the 250s, we know of many who withdrew to the countryside in order to escape it.³⁷ At the same date, schisms began among Christians themselves, and again, the “true” Christian minorities tended to withdraw from their fellow Christians in order to keep their sect alive. Pagan and Christian intolerance were constant agents of diffusion, and it is to them, therefore, that we can best trace the thick scatter of bishops in North Africa’s towns. Sometimes, perhaps, a community asked for its own bishop in order to keep up with its neighbour, but such a quantity of bishops was especially advisable in a province where heresy and schism led an early, flourishing life.

If persecution could push Christians into remote townships, it could also push them across the Roman frontier. In the late fourth century, some of the towns in Mesopotamia claimed that their churches had attracted Christian exiles from the Roman Empire who had fled persecution during the reign of Hadrian. The claim is unverifiable, but similar pressures may have brought Christians soon afterwards into another eastern kingdom: the wilds of Armenia. Again, we have learned recently that Christians were thought to be prominent in the company of its king in the mid-third century. The source for this point is a later story by followers of the heretic Mani which depicted their own mission in the area.³⁸ It may well be correct on this detail, an anticipation of the kingdom’s conversion in the age of Constantine: perhaps here, too, the first Christians were seeking a safe retreat.

Wars, we also know, were effective spreaders of the faith elsewhere between Rome and her eastern neighbours. In the Near East, the 240s and 250s saw resounding victories by the Persian monarchs and the consequent return of prisoners across their borders among the spoils. Their captives included Christians, inadvertent imports from the West. In a famous inscription, the chief Magus at the Persian court later told how “demonic” teachings had been destroyed in the Persian Empire (c. 280–293), including those of the “Nazareans and Christians,” terms which seem to refer to two different types of Christian. The neatest explanation is that the “Nazareans” were native Aramaic-speaking Christians converted inside the Persians’ Empire by some unknown type of contact, whereas the “Christians” were royal imports, originally prisoners from Greek-speaking towns. Their Greek language isolated them from wider contact with Iranian society, yet even here there were some odd opportunities.³⁹ In the 270s, one prisoner, the charming Candida, is said to have risen high by her personal talents. She was taken prisoner and brought to the Shah’s harem, and if we can trust a detailed Syriac version of her martyrdom, her “astonishing beauty” earned her the greatest favour with King Vahram. She ushered in a sequence of Christian sympathizers among the many grades of queen and concubine at the Persian court. Her progress was not without precedent. At Rome, in the 180s, the Emperor Commodus had already favoured a concubine, Marcia, who used her backstairs influence to intercede for Christians who had been sentenced to hard labour in the mines. The men were more obdurate: when the powers at court altered, Candida was put to death by the Shah’s new advisers.

These various avenues of Christianity’s spread are all informal, but they recur in later Christian history, repeating themselves from the fourth to the ninth century. What we lack is anything more formal, any sign of a mission directed by the Church leaders. Except for Pantaenus in India and one other whom we will examine in a later chapter, we cannot name a single active Christian missionary between St. Paul and the age of Constantine.⁴⁰ Should we look for other obstacles besides the attitude of Christians themselves? In the Near East and the areas beyond the Euphrates, missionary religions were exposed to obvious barriers of language. By the 250s, we can see the consequences in the preaching of a new and determined heresy, the “Gospel of Light,” which was spread by the young missionary Mani. Unlike Jesus, Mani had conceived his religion to be a universal faith within the immediate duration of this world. Before long, he and his fellow apostles were using Greek and Syriac, Coptic and Persian to teach it in the Near East. Some Christians, by contrast, give the strong impression of identifying their faith with the Greek language only. In the later fourth century, a strong body of Christian opinion held that at Pentecost the miracle of the tongues had affected the crowd, not the Apostles. So far from giving the Christians the gift of languages, it had enabled all their audience to understand Greek.⁴¹

In antiquity, a refusal to translate a creed or culture was the privilege of a ruling power: Alexander and his successors used Greek, which they imposed on their supporters and even on their Macedonians; the Romans kept their laws and legal teaching in Latin; the Arabs kept their laws and religion in Arabic. Language proved itself the “perfect instrument of Empire,” as Christian conquerors of the New World later described it. The Christians did not emerge with the backing of superior force or a history of conquest behind them: to have confined their teaching to the Greek of their Gospels would have been untrue to this pattern of language and culture. It is not, then, so surprising that Christians soon came to have translations of their texts.⁴² Books of Latin Scripture are attested in 180 and were probably much older in their parts or entirety. By c. 180, Gospels are attested in Syriac, the language which served as a common medium from the coast of Syria to western Iran. In Egypt, by the 270s, the Gospels are known to have been heard in Coptic: in 303, the “reader” in a small Egyptian church was “illiterate,” presumably in Greek, and therefore read the Bible from a Coptic text: his father’s name, Copreus, meant “off the dung heap,” a man, then, of humble status who had been exposed at birth but rescued by others from death. Teaching in these versatile languages was older than our first attestations, as we can deduce from Origen’s underexploited contrast between Plato and the Christians. Writing in the late 240s, he remarked that if Plato had wished to spread his truths to barbarians, he would have preached them in Syrian or Egyptian languages. He implied, then, that Christians were already using both.

Were there other languages in the Empire which had a living literary tradition?⁴³ Hebrew was one, more vigorous than was once believed, but elsewhere the picture is more dubious. Inland in Asia Minor, we continue to find inscriptions in which Phrygians invoke their gods in native Phrygian curses, but these fixed formulae do not make Phrygian a literary language which could cope with a written translation of Scripture. In the early third century, the lawyer Ulpian did remark that a type of trust would be acceptable under Roman law whether it was composed in “Greek or Latin, Punic or Celtic or some other language.” His words have been pressed to show that people of property were writing documents in Punic and Celtic, but in context, they are hypothetical: his essential point is to contrast a trust with a will, which had to be written in Latin only. We need better evidence that any of these dialects had a literary use.

In Punic, however, we can find hints of it.⁴⁴ The Phoenicians had first exported this Semitic language to North Africa, southern Spain and Sardinia c. 800 B.C. Its areas became Roman provinces, and although simple stylized inscriptions in Punic did persist in North Africa, at least until c. 200, they are known only in contexts which used or presupposed Latin too. The main exception exists outside Africa, in a text from Sardinia which records public dedications by the “people of Bitia,” an Emperor’s name (Marcus Aurelius) and the titles of local magistrates. The text was cut in an archaic style of lettering, harking back to the eighth century B.C., when Sardinia had had other such inscriptions, not far from Bitia. Nonetheless, this hint that civic notables could still read and write Punic does find support from St. Augustine, c. 400 A.D. He tells how Christians in North Africa could compose psalms in Punic, arranging them in the form of an acrostic. People who were capable of such artistry could certainly have written translations of the Gospels. Yet no Christian is known to have exploited Punic’s forgotten potential.

The omission may not be too significant. The heretical followers of Mani had no hesitation about using non-classical languages, but they, too, are not known to have used Punic for their texts. Like the Christians’, their mission concentrated on townspeople, among whom we should allow for widespread bilingualism, in Latin or Greek as well as Punic. Anyone who was skilled enough to read or write was likely to know Greek or Latin anyway. The neglect of written Punic is less telling than the more general lack of official encouragement. None of the other translations of the Bible is known to have been promoted by Church leaders or officials: when Tatian produced his “Gospel harmony” in Syriac as well as Greek, it was a personal work, undertaken to serve his own heretical interests. Yet even this apathy should not be pressed too far. We think naturally of a written canon of texts and Scriptures, but the acceptance of a basic body of written books was a slow development in the early churches. Above all, a lack of official interest in written translations need not entail a lack of missionary interest. In eighteenth-century Europe, many keen Christians argued that the Bible should not be translated from Latin for fear that vulgar Christians would then read it for themselves and find the wrong things in it. Preaching, meanwhile, continued in vernacular languages, while “experts” monopolized Scripture in a learned tongue. “In 1713, the Papal bull Unigenitus condemned the proposition. ‘The reading of the Bible is for everyone.’ ”⁴⁵

In Christianity’s spread, the relevant question, therefore, is not whether Christians exploited all possible literary languages for their Scripture, but whether they were hampered by ignorance of spoken dialects in their missionary work. Here we enter very difficult ground, not least because the very nature or occasion of any “preaching” is itself obscure. Church services were held in one of the major written languages of culture: even in the fifth century, we find interpreters rendering what was being read and spoken in Greek or Latin into a second, vernacular language for the congregation’s benefit.⁴⁶ During a service, we are not even sure when “preaching” was usual or who undertook it. We have no historical text which refers to formal, open-air sermons outside a church after the Apostolic age. For “preaching,” then, we should think essentially of teaching to individuals and small groups whom Christians encountered on their travels. Even so, a traveller did not have to go far in the Roman Empire before he confronted the effects of Babel.⁴⁷ Celtic was spoken in the West, Iberian in Spain, Punic and a Libyan dialect in Africa, Coptic dialects in Egypt and “Arab speech” in parts of the Near East. At Edessa, pagans and Christians alike wrote in Syriac, but the names of the city’s families suggest people who spoke a form of Arabic. In the hinterland of Pontus, so many languages were recognized that Rome’s great enemy of the 80s B.C., King Mithridates, had been credited with fluency in twenty-two: some, but by no means all, died out in the Imperial period. Educated townsmen did not hesitate to project a picture of rural dialect onto the countryside beyond them. Around the mid-third century, a pagan novel assumes that on entering Cappadocia its hero had needed a native-speaking guide. He was embarking on lands which St. Paul had never touched. Lucian, we have seen, complained how the “false prophet” and his snake had given replies to questions in Syriac and in Celtic, presumably for the benefit of nearby Galatians, whose names and inscriptions show a Celtic tenacity. The complaint had to seem plausible.

Did Christians preach in these spoken dialects? The absence of written Christian translations in these languages proves nothing, as they lacked any literary history and often any alphabet, let alone a literate public. Unfortunately, our written evidence throws very little light on the question of Christians’ speech. There is only one reference to “barbarian dialect,” and it occurs in the preface to the books on heresy which were composed in Greek by Irenaeus of Lyons, c. 180. Apologizing for his Greek prose style, he referred to his “exertions” in barbarian dialect, a remark which has long been upheld as a proof of his preaching in Celtic.⁴⁸ The deduction is not justified. Even if Celtic was needed in the modest hinterland of Lyons, a Roman colony, Irenaeus was only making a lettered man’s excuse for his literary style. His remark has even been referred to his use of “barbarian” Latin, current in the Latin-speaking colony. That extreme view is also unconvincing: no Greek of the period called Latin a “barbarian dialect.” Instead, we should remember the witty apologies of Ovid, another man of letters who wrote on the edge of the classical world. In exile at Tomi, Ovid referred playfully to “speaking Getic and Sarmatian.” The remarks were only the amused comments of a literary man lost in a sea of barbarity which he wished to emphasize: Ovid never bothered with dialect. Irenaeus’s comment was set in the preface of his long work, where an apology for style was quite conventional. It was a literary disclaimer, not a genuine excuse.

This allusion has to be treated carefully because it is the only one to survive in all the evidence for the churches before Constantine. However, our written evidence derives from Christians who wrote in the bigger cities, and we cannot be entirely sure what a minor preacher in a small African or Pontic township may have tried for his missionary ends. We cannot rule out exceptional individuals, Christians like Ulfilas, whose parents had been taken captive by the Goths on a raid in Cappadocia, c. 260. Ulfilas then invented a Gothic alphabet in the 350s and taught the people the Scriptures in his own translation, “omitting only the books of Kings because the Goths were already too fond of fighting.”⁴⁹ When we have wider evidence in the fourth century and later, we find monks who did allow for a wide linguistic diversity in their monasteries. Of many examples, the best is Father Theodosius, near Antioch, in the early fifth century. He used to herd four groups together to sing bits of the mass in their own tongues and in their own churches: Greek, Armenian, “Bessian” and that uncharted dialect, the speech of lunatics who were possessed by demons. This chorus of the cuckoo’s nest ascended, men said, in perfect harmony. The sequel was less informal. The three sane choruses processed into one inner hall while the lunatics kept silence outside. Within, however, the final liturgy was read in Greek.

By the period of these monasteries, the countryside was being Christianized more widely and the problems of dialect had become inescapable. Even so, a strong note of snobbishness and contempt for barbarous speech remained in the sermons of urban bishops. We can even find it in the preaching of John Chrysostom (c. 390). At Antioch and Constantinople, he paid scant respect to the Gothic- and Aramaic-speakers in his audiences while haranguing them in Greek.⁵⁰ No doubt the same attitudes had coloured many lesser men, leaders of urban churches in the years before Constantine.

Did these attitudes cut the Church off from many accessible converts? Here, we must be more careful, for the evidence of barbarian dialect is often accompanied by evidence of an easy bilingualism. At Lystra, the people were believed to have hailed Paul and Barnabas in Lycaonian and promptly to have understood a sermon in Greek. As a bishop, Augustine was aware of the value of Punic-speaking clergy and took pains to promote a young priest because of his linguistic gifts. Yet he also tells how farmers in the countryside round Hippo would translate a conversation to and fro between Latin and Punic. We should not pin a knowledge of dialect too closely to one social class: there must have been a degree of “shame-faced bilingualism” even among educated Greek-speakers, not least among bailiffs and tenants who had to deal with their local work force. The Christians’ use of Coptic and Syriac made Egypt and a great wedge of the Near East accessible to their teaching if they chose to follow up the opening. The likelihood of a bilingual audience was high in and around the towns, and much lower, naturally, in the remoter villages and further countryside.⁵¹ The linguistic barrier thus merges into a wider one, the line between town and country.

Christianity’s impact on the towns and countryside has been variously assessed. Before Constantine Christianity has been confined to the towns: it has been characterized as a “cockney” religion, which clung essentially to the humbler members of big cities; between c. 250 and 310, by contrast, it has been held to have “won the countryside” and made its promotion under Constantine more or less inevitable.⁵² The variety of views reflects the extreme scarcity of evidence, but also a varying conception of where a line between town and country can be drawn significantly. Like early Islam, Christianity was a faith which presupposed convenient places of meeting. Its congregations had to finance the continuing costs of a bishop and his staff. It is not, then, surprising that bishoprics were distributed by cities or that early Christianity, like early Islam, is essentially known in an urban setting. Throughout antiquity, the towns were the seats and agents of religious change.

There are, however, some hints of a wider presence. In c. 110, Pliny wrote as a provincial governor to his Emperor, Trajan, and told him that the Christian “superstition” pervaded the local “villages and fields” as well as the towns. He had encountered it on an assize tour, perhaps as far afield as Amastris in Pontus on the southern shore of the Black Sea (northern Turkey).⁵³ Was he, perhaps, exaggerating? Recent persecutions, including his own, may have scattered Christians into the countryside, but the picture is not one of a narrow, urban faith. We do not know if the Christians concerned spoke anything other than Greek: further west, in Pliny’s Bithynian district, the villages round Nicomedia are known as seats of the Greek language from their local inscriptions. His remark is of uncertain scope, but it does warn us that the line between town and village was not everywhere a strict one and that Christians, like others, could cross it, perhaps especially in times of persecution.

The evidence does not end abruptly with Pliny.⁵⁴ In 257/8, Eusebius refers to three Christian martyrs who, “they say,” were living in the countryside before going up to be tried in the nearby city of Caesarea; between c. 245 and 270, we have the legends and oral traditions of a widespread conversion of “villages” in “inland Pontus,” worked by one exceptional missionary; in 248, Origen does rebuke Celsus’s sneer at Christian exclusiveness by referring to Christians who “have undertaken to go round not only cities but villages and farmsteads too, in order to win more believers in God”; in the first councils after Constantine, rules are laid down in the East for the duties and role of “country bishops,” who must, it seems, have existed previously in Anatolia and Palestine; earlier, in North Africa, the acts of the council in 256 reveal four bishops out of more than eighty whose sees may have lain in village communities, not recognized towns or their constituent parts.⁵⁵

There is a difference, however, between a rural mission and a rural presence, and throughout the years before Constantine, Christians had a special reason for retreating to the countryside: they were liable to persecution in the towns. In 250, we already hear of Christians in Egypt retreating into the mountains and desert: Eusebius’s three martyrs may only have taken refuge outside Caesarea, until their consciences pricked them and they returned and “volunteered” to die. While in retreat, this type of Christian may sometimes have persuaded other country people to become Christians too, but the results owed nothing to a deliberate “mission.” The episodes in “inland Pontus” raise problems of historicity which we will have to examine later: their framework, however, is essentially the group of Greek-speaking cities which made up Pontus’s provincial “league.” The story is exceptional, and we will see how it grew with the telling. The “country bishops” are more tantalizing.⁵⁶ They are not securely attested until the years after Constantine’s conversion, when Church councils in the East tried to regulate their duties. By 325, they existed in Palestine as well as in inland Anatolia and Pontus, and we also hear of local “country elders.” In the underurbanized regions of Anatolia, there were few recognized cities for Christians to serve, and yet a strong Christian presence is obvious in the area by the mid-fourth century. Significantly, the “country bishops” are compared by one council with Jesus’s seventy Apostles “because they serve the very poor.” They did not operate entirely away from recognized towns, but they do seem to have been active in humble circles, presumably in villages, to account for their name: their same concern for the poor emerges from Bishop Basil’s letters, written in the 380s to country bishops in central Anatolia.⁵⁷

When, though, did such “country bishops” begin? Here, Origen’s remark is suggestive. He does not limit the activities of his rural missionaries to the past. He stresses their poverty and their willingness to travel with few goods; was he, perhaps, thinking of country bishops already serving the poor in Cappadocia and Anatolia, regions which he had visited? Perhaps he was also thinking of Christians in the Syriac-speaking Near East, around and just beyond other places which he knew. Here, as in Palestine, barriers of language did not divide so many townships from their territories. From other evidence, we can glean a picture of Christian “sons of the Covenant” in this area, wandering as “strangers” through the country and its roads, heirs to the Syriac tradition of holiness and a life apart.⁵⁸

Like the Christian presence in Anatolia, this evidence blurs the suggestion that Christianity was a religion solely of the bigger towns. How far, though, does it point towards a true rural mission? Once again, it is hard to draw a firm line between town and “country,” when so many “villages” were themselves seats of a culture which reflected urban forms. At its most extreme, the worlds of peasant village and town were indeed separate worlds, as we can see especially in the Syriac evidence. Whether early Christianity went across this extreme dividing line remains highly doubtful: there was no missionary “winning” of the countryside around cities like Antioch and Apamea until a generation or more after Constantine’s conversion.⁵⁹ There was no specific appeal to the rural peasantry in anything which is known from the earliest Syriac sources. The four “ural” bishops known in Africa in 256 are not necessarily bishops outside a community which focussed on a village; only in the fifth century does a similar list reveal bishops of particular estates or country regions.⁶⁰ When we do find evidence of a rural mission, its bias is still significant. In the later Christian Empire, the conversion of country people was often the work of monks or holy men. Here, there is none so telling as the little-known exploits of one Symeon, nicknamed the Mountaineer, whose life at the start of the sixth century was later written up in Syriac by John, his friend and, eventually, the bishop of Ephesus. John himself was remembered as a great converter of the countryside, so his comments on Symeon’s mission are doubly revealing.⁶¹

Around 510, Symeon had found himself beyond the territory of Claudias, in mountains on the very edge of the Euphrates’s west bank. He was intrigued by a large sprawling village, visible in the hills, and on asking some visiting shepherds, he was appalled to find that they had little or no idea of Scripture. They had heard a few things from their fathers, but they had never seen a copy of a book. They never went near a church except to baptize some of their children: indeed, they confessed that as herdsmen “we live on these mountains like animals.” “Well said, ‘like animals,’ my sons,” Symeon was believed to have answered, “yet animals are much better than you…”

Symeon kept on pondering this meeting: “How is it that these men are like animals on these mountains?” A sense of divine mission entered him and he ascended to one of their places, “a sort of village.” He saw a small church, shaded by a vine, but found it filled with wood, stones and dust. The older men approached him for a blessing and revealed that they had no priest: “it is not our custom.” Symeon took up residence in the church and, after inquiry, invited all the families to hear him. As he preached, they stared in amazement, “like some idiotic animal,” John commented, “which only gapes and stares when a man tries to teach it.” The older men, again, knew a little of the Scriptures by hearsay: the others had no idea. First Symeon scared them with tales of hell and then he told them to go away and fast. When he asked them why their children had not been made “sons of the covenant” and been taught in church, they told him, “Sir, they have no time to leave the goats and learn.”

Touched by this admission, Symeon announced a great family service for the following Sunday. At the end, he told the parents to leave the church while he gave their children a special present. Ninety girls and boys stayed behind; Symeon and a friend forcibly segregated thirty of them, locked them into the church and cut off all their hair with a razor. When he let out these shaven children of God, their mothers were appalled. Symeon merely laughed and then warned them not to provoke his curses: rudely, they told him to “try cursing the Huns, who are said to be coming and wrecking Creation.” However, two of his opponents died soon after Symeon’s execrations, whereupon the others submitted and gave him their children. Symeon provided writing tablets and the Scriptures and taught the girls and boys to read and write, schooling them until adolescence. The hills echoed with their newly learned hymns, and for twenty-six years Symeon wielded authority in the mountain villages. The story is not only an excellent example of a holy man who forced himself on villagers against their will. It is told in a way which puts its hero’s and narrator’s views of rustics beyond doubt. They were brute “animals.” John talked often to Symeon and heard him tell of the “savagery of that people, their subjugation and all the torments they had inflicted on him.” We begin to see why totally rural missions were slow to start.

These attitudes do not belong with ideas of the Church’s early “winning of the countryside.” Even the “country bishops” faced formidable difficulties. Although countrymen might sometimes pick up the new faith while visiting a nearby urban centre, there were difficulties in taking the faith out to them. Access to dependent workers on the bigger country estates relied on the connivance of the upper classes or their agents, people who had to be exhorted to build private estate churches and convert their farm workers far into the Christian Empire.⁶² Before Constantine, such access and support were rarely, if ever, available. Within the towns, meanwhile, bishops were hard pressed to maintain the Christian unity and discipline for which God held them personally to account. Their duties were thought to involve arbitration, not missionary conversion: in a pagan Empire, it is not surprising if they shrank from further expansion and attended to this responsibility. It is hard, too, to exclude altogether the priorities of Church finance. “Mass preaching” was most likely to attract poorer converts and increase the burdens on the Church’s charity. The clergy, meanwhile, were paid from dividends off their congregation’s offerings. Like it or not, there would come a point at which too many rustics and slaves would strain the Church’s resources. It was more useful, though not more pious, to win three or four richer converts and thread them through the obliging “eye of the needle.”

Essentially, the evidence for an early “winning of the countryside” in the third century lies elsewhere on the scale between town and country. It does not concern the rustic peasantry, but many persons in small townships, people who had some contact with the forms of a higher culture. Here, Christianity is especially evident to us in the provinces of Egypt, Phrygia and North Africa. In 180, a group of martyrs in North Africa came from towns with outlandish titles, but even though some of them had Punic names, they all spoke Latin and read a Latin Bible. They were condemned to death by the penalty of beheading, which was becoming a privilege of the “more respectable classes,” and if the governor was being precise, they must have been men of a recognized social status in their home towns.⁶³ In 256, the bishops at North Africa’s council are very frequently bishops from bizarre townships, strung out along the main roads, not always towns of recognized status but almost always identifiable from other evidence on the African provinces’ map.⁶⁴

Inland in Asia, we have the direct evidence of inscribed funerary monuments at a similar date. In the small towns of mountainous Phrygia, their texts identify their patrons as “Christians for Christians.” This openness was not a proof of militancy or heretical belief.⁶⁵ The patrons of these monuments were using the same materials, even the same workshops, as their pagan contemporaries. The earliest dated text belongs in 248/9, and the series of these Greek epitaphs record their Christians among scenes of ploughs and oxen, vines, horses and shepherd’s crooks. The women, both pagan and Christian, were shown with their spindles and their wool: some patrons also put up pictures of their pens and writing tablets, proof that they knew how to write.⁶⁶ This significant constituency was neither rustic nor lower-class, but it can be aptly compared with the evidence of Christian papyri of the later third century in Egypt. These texts derive from lesser townships as well as from the more prestigious metropoleis: their Greek form and style have been classed with the “tradesmen and farmers and minor government officials, men to whom knowledge of, and writing in, Greek was an essential skill but who also had few or no literary interests.”⁶⁷

In these smaller townships, Christianity was not giving direction to a new “rejection of classicism and a renewal of native, pre-Roman ways of life.” There was no such “renewal” and no concern to preach in Phrygian or write Scripture in Punic. The art of these smaller townships has been best understood as the rise of a “sub-antique” style which grew from the debris of high classical forms.⁶⁸ It sought to participate in a wider culture, not to reject it. As the faith of a “universal Church,” Christianity sat well with this type of self-expression. Its widespread presence in these smaller townships makes it something more than a “cockney” religion based essentially in the bigger cities. The significant point is not that it prospered in these larger, untypical city centres but that it was in them that it found its literary expression. Of the major Christian authors between 100 and 250, all except Irenaeus wrote in one of the Empire’s few great cities of culture, Rome and Carthage, Alexandria, Ephesus and Antioch. However, these well-educated authors are not necessarily the best evidence for early Christian life as a whole, especially if we only attend to the views which they express in their own persons. It is often more useful that they criticize explicitly the simpler views of the Christian majority, people who thought that Christ would literally return on a cloud, who believed that Peter had confounded Simon Magus’s attempts to fly,⁶⁹ who did everything to avoid martyrdom and who knew better than to heed moralists’ complaints about smart clothing and the pagan games, athletics, hairstyles and the irresistible ways of women. In the smaller townships, higher education was not locally available, and in the larger cities, very few Christians could afford it.

Christianity, then, was present in towns and cities of all ranks and degrees; its Gospels, by the mid-third century, were preached in the major literary languages, but not (so far as we know) in minor dialects; Christians were not totally unknown in the surrounding countryside, but they were very much the exception. There was certainly no “winning of the peasantry” in the Greco-Roman world of the third century. How, then, were Christians distributed round the other great barriers of the age: sex and class?

In c. 110, Pliny wrote to Trajan that Christians were to be found in Pontus among people of “every rank, age and sex.” Around 200, Tertullian repeated the same phrase in an essay addressed to the provincial governor of Africa.³ Since the great studies of the 1890s, evidence for the social composition of the early Church has not increased significantly, but the topic has attracted an abundant literature. On a broader view, rather more has been added by continuing study of the first Christian inscriptions, known from c. 200 onwards.⁴ In Phrygia, we have the epitaphs of “Christians for Christians,” one of which is datable to the mid-third century. We know of Christians who served on the city council of a Phrygian town and of a Christian who paid for the expense of civic games as the official “agonothete” and also served as the “first magistrate” of a Bithynian city. These unexpected figures all belong in the third century. So, too, does a cultured Christian lawyer, Gaius, whose elegant verse epitaph, around 250, stressed his contentment with relative poverty, his devotion to the Muses, his conventional views on death and pleasure and his ingenious concern for number symbolism. His tomb lay in Phrygian Eumeneia, the city where we know of Christians on the town council, and it also contained “Rouben,” a Christian with a Jewish name whom Gaius evidently revered. “Rouben” remained a powerful figure, even after death. The epitaph of a neighbouring Christian’s tomb invoked “God and the angel of Rouben” against anyone who disturbed it. These texts take us into the less familiar sides of Christian views on death: burial with or beside a respected Christian figure and faith in a dead man’s angel as a continuing protector in daily life. If Rouben had once been a Jew, the picture is even more intriguing.

Also in Eumeneia, we find the unexpected figure of a Christian athlete, nicknamed Helix (again: “the Creeper”), who had won prizes in a whole range of pagan games from Asia to Brindisi. Like many athletes, he enjoyed citizenship in several cities, and in Eumeneia, he was a councillor and member of the body of elders (gerousia). If Christians in other cities had only put up as many inscriptions as these confident figures in Eumeneia, what curious diversity might we not discover? From an epitaph at Nicomedia, again in Bithynia, we know of a third-century Christian who was a wood-carver, originally from Phoenicia; in Phrygia, we find a Christian butcher; in Ostia, the Italian port, we know of a Christian whose names correspond suggestively with those of a member of the boat owners’ guild in the year 192. This evidence is particularly valuable because it widens the range of Christians’ activities beyond the constricting horizons of so many Christian tracts.⁵ It reminds us that their authors’ ideals were not necessarily typical. It does not, however, show us the humblest Christians, people who did not pay for the expense of inscriptions. This type of evidence only concerns the better-off, but at least we are continuing to find a few Christians in their varying social contexts.⁶

It is as well to begin a broader survey at the very bottom. The bottom, throughout antiquity, meant slaves, and in slavery, the Church met a social barrier which the Jesus of the Gospels had nowhere discussed. Paul’s short letter to Philemon nowhere suggested that there was a Christian duty to free a slave, even a Christian slave: Christian commentators on the letter took his silence for granted.⁷ His other letters confirmed the view that social status was not relevant to spiritual worth and that believers should remain in the status in which they were called. Slaves should “serve the more,” honouring their higher master, or kyrios, Christ. However, it is worth dwelling on Christian views of slavery, less, perhaps, for the appeal of their faith among slaves than for its appeal among those classes who still relied on them. Slaves were essential to the households of the rich, the mines, the agriculture of both tenanted and directly farmed estates in many provinces of the Empire. It is in this sense that we can still describe it as a slave society: slavery was entrenched in the social order of most regions in the second and third centuries.

Christian leaders did nothing to disturb it. When Christian slaves in an Asian church community began to propose that their freedom should be bought from community funds, Ignatius of Antioch advised firmly against the suggestion. He feared, he wrote, that they would become “slaves to lust.” Like the Stoics, these Christian leaders began from a principle of the equality of man, yet argued that worldly differences of status should continue undisturbed.⁸ The greater slavery was man’s slavery to his passions. As if to prove it, pagan slaves continue to show up in the ownership of Christians, even of bishops. In Africa, Tertullian discusses the interesting case of a Christian whose pagan slaves had adorned his house with the trappings of pagan worship for a celebration of the Emperor’s successes. Though innocent himself, the Christian was “chastised” in a vision. However, the right type of religion could not always be enforced. In Spain, c. 320, acts of the province’s first known Church council advised Christians to “forbid, so far as they could, that idols be kept in their homes. But if they fear violence from their slaves, they must at least stay pure themselves.” This fascinating glimpse of tenacious paganism in the household is matched by an absence of advice that Christians should convert their slaves as a matter of course.⁹ Paul’s letters already showed the varying practice: there were some “households” of Christians, but others where Christians lived in a non-Christian establishment. Paul had not left any encouragement for mass baptism in Christian masters’ “families.”

This silence is all the more telling because it contrasts with much Jewish opinion and a certain amount of practice.¹⁰ Jewish teachers cited biblical texts to support the view that a Jewish master should circumcise his Gentile slaves. If the slaves disagreed, it was a common opinion that they should be given a year to think the matter over. If they still refused, they should be sold to a pagan master. These opinions were not altogether ignored. After the Jewish revolt of 132–135, the Emperor Hadrian restricted the circumcision of Gentiles, a practice whose prime victims, presumably, had been the pagan slaves of Jewish owners. The circumcision of slaves had played an important part in the spread of the Jewish faith and the conspicuous numbers of Jewish freedmen. By circumcision, slaves were “brought under the wings of the Shekinah.” The medical handbooks of pagan doctors are a reminder that the operation was extremely painful.

A Church order of discipline, deriving from the early third century, proposed that all potential Christians must bring references with them when applying for teaching and that the slave of a Christian master must be denied baptism unless his owner had given him a good testimonial. The slave, then, was not alone in needing a reference, but the burden lay on his master’s good faith: only if his master permitted was he allowed to hear the faith. The advice resembles the rules of many pagan religious societies where slaves were only to be admitted with a master’s prior approval. Christians, however, faced a further category of applicants: slaves of pagan masters who came, nonetheless, to be taught. Here, there could be no question of asking for permission, and instead, the slave was told to “please” his master in order to avoid the risk of “blasphemy” and trouble. Whenever we cite this order, the so-called Apostolic tradition of Bishop Hippolytus, we face the same set of problems: is it evidence for practice, and did anyone observe it? Even if they did not, its value for the accepted attitudes of some Christian leaders is not in doubt. Its priorities are not those of a faith concerned to free slaves from their masters, or to urge masters to let them be released.¹¹

On the conduct of slaves, Christian texts were unanimous. The Pauline epistles stated very clearly that slaves must submit, and for most Christian authors their words sufficed. If they were expanded, they were emphasized: slaves must obey masters as the “image of God.” The grammar of Paul’s commands has been traced to Semitic influence, but it is quite unclear if orders of this type were already current among Jews in their synagogues.¹² It is also unclear whether simpler Christians were naturally inclined to obey the advice. The repeated address to slaves perhaps suggests that some of them were minded to act differently. In a mixed household, disobedience could bring Christians into further disrepute: the orders to slaves in I Timothy address Christian slaves in pagan service and tell them to submit “the more” in order to avoid blasphemy.¹³ At most, Christian slaves were consoled and comforted. One hint of this attitude occurs in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, the text we have explored in connection with Edessa. When Thomas saw slaves carrying the litter of a noble lady, he reminded them that Jesus’s words of comfort for the “heavy laden” referred to them. “Although you are men,” he said, “they lay burdens on you like animals without the power of reason; those with power over you suppose that you are not human beings, as they are.” But he did not preach open disobedience.¹⁴

Once again, we might isolate this Syriac evidence as untypical of the Greek world, but it does find a direct parallel in the writings of Clement, the educated Alexandrian (c. 200). When Clement attacked the idleness and lack of exercise of ill-behaved contemporaries, he ended by urging them “not to use slaves like beasts of burden.” He was not only thinking of the unhealthiness of being carried in a litter. He went on to exhort Christian masters to show “patience, equity and philanthropy” when dealing with slaves. Moral advice to the master was not unknown in pagan philosophy, especially Stoicism, but Christians, this text reminds us, could add it to their spiritual ideals.¹⁵ Did the advice somehow humanize the relationship, as if a truly Christian master was no longer a slave owner, but a fellow man? Such a view puts too heavy a weight on ideals in the face of a debasing relationship. Christian masters were not specially encouraged to set a slave free, although Christians were most numerous in the setting of urban households where freeing was most frequent: our pagan evidence for the practice is overwhelmingly evidence for the freeing of slaves in urban and domestic service: the pagan authors on agriculture never discussed freedom for rural slaves, not even for slave bailiffs. Among Christians, we know that the freeing of slaves was performed in church in the presence of the bishop: early laws from Constantine, after his conversion, permit this as an existing practice.¹⁶ This public act does not entail an accompanying encouragement to perform it. We do not hear of any, and indeed freeing did not presuppose an opposition to slavery. Many masters required slaves to buy their freedom or to leave a child in their place, so that a younger slave could be bought or acquired on release of an older, wasting asset. To free slaves for nothing was much rarer, and only once, in a work of advice to Christians in third-century Syria, do we find Christians being exhorted to spend money on freeing slaves. It took more than a random word of advice to stop Christians from using whatever slaves they could: pagan slaves were better value, economically, as they would not have to stop work on a weekly day of rest. In Sardinia, a collection of slave collars has recently been studied and dated to c. 400 A.D. Some of them were stamped with the sign of the cross and a telling name: “Felix, the archdeacon.”¹⁷

In one particular, indeed, Christians narrowed antiquity’s most travelled route to freedom. Before baptism, Christian men were required to marry or give up their concubines.¹⁸ If, as often, the woman was a slave, she would presumably be freed first. After baptism, sex with a slave was a promiscuous sin and strictly forbidden to Christians. Yet pagan masters’ sexual interest in their male and female domestic slaves frequently led to their eventual freeing. To well-behaved Christians, this route was closed

To the churches, we can only conclude, these niceties were irrelevant. Christian teaching was not concerned with worldly status, because it was inessential to spiritual worth. So far from freeing others as a spiritual duty, some Christians were prepared to enslave themselves voluntarily. In Rome in the 90s, one group of Christians sold themselves into slavery in order to ransom fellow Christians from prison with the proceeds. Not until the fourth century and the rise of monastic communities do we find clear hints of Christian attempts to better the slave’s position. In the 340s, the Council of Gangra threatened excommunication and the dire “anathema” against anyone who provoked slaves into disobedience “under pretext of piety”: we would much like to know whom the council had in mind. Monks, certainly, were cautioned against receiving fugitive slaves into their company, as many Christian leaders took a wary view of runaways.¹⁹ In the pagan Empire, slaves who had a grievance against their masters could seek asylum at any statue of the Emperor or within the precincts of certain specified temples. Their case was investigated and if justified, they were sold to another master or made into temple slaves of the god. In the Christian Empire, slaves could take refuge in church, but they were returned after inquiry to the same master. The only remedy was a rebuke to whichever party deserved it; Christians aimed to reform the heart, not the social order.²⁰ The appeal of their faith did not lie in a reversal of the barriers which disfigured pagan society. When we find Christianity among the higher classes, we should allow for the effects of this welcome reticence.

Where, then, did its centre of gravity lie? Not, surely, among slaves, when such care was advised before accepting them into the Church and when no orders were given for teaching a Christian’s slaves the Gospel as a matter of course. We should recall the social order which we sketched for all but the largest cities: the absence of clearly defined middle or “merchant” classes and the sharply tapering pyramid, in which a narrow group of benefactors and notables paid for the amenities of civic life for the “people,” the “poor.” In such a social order, a Christian community of any size cannot be equated with a broad “middle class” or only with its known converts of higher position. Two or three inscriptions which mention Christian town councillors do not make the Church into a faith predominantly for the higher classes. “Not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called, but God chose the foolish things of the world.” So Paul told the Corinthians; we must do justice to the exceptions, while looking for a guide to the “foolish” majority. Outsiders had no doubt.²¹ “In private houses nowadays,” claimed the pagan Celsus, c. 170, “we see wool workers, cobblers, laundry workers and the most illiterate rustics who get hold of children and silly women in private and give out some astonishing statements, saying that they must not listen to their father or schoolteachers, but must obey them. They alone know the right way to live, and if the children believe them, they will be happy. They whisper that they should leave their teachers and go down to the shops with their playmates in order to learn to be perfect…” The Christian Origen did protest at this allegation, but his book answering Celsus assumed the existence of Christians superior to the simple majority in the Church. Other Alexandrians wrote in the same manner, and it was left to Tertullian to accept the low status of many Christians and argue from their crude faith to the “natural” Christian instincts of the human soul. Significant evidence lies in the gem of early Latin Christian literature, the Octavius by Minucius, a work whose date is best placed between Tertullian and Cyprian in the early third century, perhaps c. 230.

This charming dialogue reports the conversion of a prominent pagan, Caecilius, by the Christian Octavius. Set at Ostia by the seaside, it is imagined in the “summer recess,” while the law courts were shut at Rome. Three eminent advocates meet and discuss their beliefs, agreeing finally on the Christian faith. The Ciceronian style and colour of the dialogue were themselves a demonstration that Christianity could appeal to a man of high culture. So, too, was the dialogue’s conclusion: it is highly likely that Caecilius was a local dignitary from North Africa, known in inscriptions at Cirta. Yet when he begins by complaining that Christians assemble the “lowest dregs of society” and “credulous women, an easy prey because of the instability of their sex,” the Christian Octavius cannot entirely refute him.²² He merely answers that everybody is capable of thinking and arguing, that the ordinary man can discuss theology too, that a rough literary style does not obscure clear thought and that “poor people of our rank have discovered the true wisdom.” The assumptions in his answer are very revealing. In the writings of Clement, c. 200, we find a sharp awareness that Christians in Alexandria were divided between the simple, believing masses and those few who wanted a more intellectual faith without lapsing into heresy. This division, too, suggests a Church of many humbler Christians with a few educated and broader minds in their midst. In the Octavius, the impression is confirmed by a Christian author who attaches it to a social context: “most of us,” Octavius admits, “are considered to be poor.”

The hard core of these churches’ membership lay in the humbler free classes, people who were far removed from higher education and at most controlled a very modest property of their own. It is against this silent majority that the exceptions should be seen, although the exceptions generally wrote the surviving texts and addressed exceptional Christians. To find a text which emphasized the mission to the poor, but not the rich, after the earliest period, we have to look to the fictitious “Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles.”²³ It is thought to have begun as a text of the mid- to late second century. While other apocryphal acts in Greek tended to place the Apostles in the highest provincial society and sometimes dropped very well-chosen names, this fiction told how Jesus dressed as a poor seller of pearls and went out into the cities. The rich heard his sales talk, looked down from their balconies and sneered at his pretensions. The poor and the destitute pressed round him, asking at least for a glimpse of so precious an object as a pearl: “We will say to our friends proudly that we saw a pearl with our own eyes, because it is not found among the poor.” Jesus promised not merely to show one but to give it to whoever followed his route in poverty and came to the holy city. The seller of pearls then appeared as Christ, who sent the Apostles on their mission, ordering them to show no favour to the scornful rich. The story is best set in Christian Syria, where the values of poverty and dependence on God lived among the wandering “sons of the covenant.” In Alexandria, by contrast, the intellectual Origen could write frankly that “not even a stupid man would praise the poor indiscriminately: most of them have very bad characters.”²⁴

The bias of most of our early Christian texts inclined in his direction. A scarlet tradition of woes against the rich had lain to hand in the Jews’ apocalyptic literature.²⁵ However, the proper use of riches was a topic which no surviving letter by Paul had discussed. Educated Christians in Alexandria were heirs to the old allegorical skills of Philo and his Jewish contemporaries, and it was their achievement to deny the tradition’s plain meaning by widening the eye of the needle and shrinking the camel to a pinhead. Clement’s pamphlet “Whether the Rich Man Can Be Saved” presupposed some very rich Christian converts who wished for advice on their predicament. He was aware of a certain paradox, as he pleaded for the rich man’s salvation and advised him not to give everything away; he told him to take on a chaplain in his personal household to teach him ethics privately and intercede for the good of his soul.²⁶ Riches were in themselves “morally indifferent,” as the Stoic philosophers taught: what mattered was their use. For a Christian, their best use was almsgiving to the exceptionally pious, the poor. Almsgiving would assist the rich man’s salvation, while the poor, in return, would pray hard for his soul. The Sermon on the Mount seems a distant antecedent.

Around 200, a similar audience lies behind several of Tertullian’s writings in Carthage.²⁷ Like Clement, Tertullian has a connoisseur’s eye for fashionable females’ makeup and hairstyles, and he also discusses the difficulties of Christians who have to hold civic office. Citing the precedent of Joseph, he enlarges on their proper attitude, while revealing that these questions had only been raised recently in the churches: Tertullian gives the impression of a community for which the problems of high society were being felt and experienced more widely for the first time.

In the 170s, Celsus had criticized Christians who refused to “hold office in their fatherland.” He must have been referring to local civic magistracies, and among his protests at the Christians’ low status, his comment is unexpected.²⁸ By the mid-third century, however, inscriptions from the Phrygian town of Eumeneia show us Christians of this rank. They were serving the city as councillors, a presence which literary texts had not led us to anticipate. The class of city councillors was socially rather varied, and by 250, quite humble men of modest fortunes might find themselves compelled into its duties. The duties involved pagan worship, but somehow these Christians compromised and avoided giving offence.

The best evidence for prominent Christians lies in the letter of an Emperor. In 258, Valerian prescribed penalties for Christian senators, men of “egregious” position, Roman knights, respectable women (matronae) and Imperial slaves. Their properties were to be confiscated if they persisted in their faith. Perhaps some of these categories were more imaginary than real, for by the 260s, Eusebius could name only one senator who was a Christian, a man who had been particularly prominent near Eusebius’s own Caesarea. But modern studies of the senatorial order are unable to pin down any other.²⁹ Were all Valerian’s Christian suspects somewhat hypothetical?

There is no doubt about the faith of certain Imperial slaves. In Paul’s first churches, “those in Caesar’s household” had sent their greetings to the Christians of Philippi. In the 90s, the bearers of the “epistle of Clement” to Corinth bore names which suggest that they had been slaves in the Imperial familia.³⁰ Irenaeus and Tertullian both used Christian “slaves in the royal household” as an accepted example in their writings. We can support them from three excellent types of evidence: a letter, a graffito and a group of inscriptions.³¹

In the Severan period, a funerary inscription at Rome reveals a Christian, Prosenes, as a servant “of the bedchamber,” who stood very high in the Emperor’s household; another puts a young Christian in the training school for the elite of Imperial officials. Both types of Christian are supported by literary evidence. To these inscriptions, we can add the famous graffito at Rome, found in 1856, which sketched a man with a donkey’s head hanging on a cross. It was captioned “Alexmenos worships his God,” and from Tertullian we learn that a similar “blasphemy” had been paraded in the arena at Carthage. The Roman graffito is unusually interesting because of its place of discovery: it was scratched in the scola Palatina at Rome, on the wall of the training ground for many of the Emperor’s most capable servants. A parody of Christianity was thought especially apt there, and if we look closely at one of the letters of Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, we can support the impression. In 258, Cyprian had a foreknowledge of the Emperor’s legal rescript, which is only intelligible if he knew highly placed Christians in the Emperor’s entourage: Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, remarks how Valerian’s household was “full of the faithful,” and this type of evidence helps us to locate them without undue surprise.

Imperial slaves spanned a wide social range, and these hints of Christians in their midst at Rome do not exhaust the possibility of Christians in the order as a whole: others may have existed on the Emperor’s many properties throughout the Empire, although their identification has often been hypothetical.³² “Egregious” Christians of equestrian or higher status are more elusive in our evidence: we must remember, however, “most excellent” Theophilus, to whom the third Gospel and Acts were dedicated. As we shall see, this “most excellent” sympathizer was a figure of very high standing.

In a different group of servants, the free soldiery, we find clear evidence for Christians by the later second century. Their presence raises many more difficulties than we can solve, whether they were converted while serving or whether, less probably, they were Christians when they were first recruited; how, indeed, they coped with the long calendar of pagan sacrifices which coloured army life.³³ The army’s lack of religious commitment in the later conflicts of the fourth century is a fact of the first importance. We should allow, once again, for Christians who were ready to compromise to a degree which their leaders’ moral sermons would not contemplate. The few military martyrdoms which are known to us before 300 arise from the victim’s own unusual intransigence. Tertullian (c. 200) tells of a Christian who refused to wear his wreath on a pagan occasion, and we can best understand the story by connecting this refusal with an exemption which was enjoyed by the pagan worshippers of Mithras. Only when fellow Christians mocked the man for masquerading as a Mithraist was he interrogated. He was not put to death until he had refused to compromise after two separate interviews. It is quite clear that other Christians in his unit had had no such scruples and had been allowed to survive without bother.

We know much more, inevitably, about Christians who were prominent for their education, especially in the Greek-speaking world. Like the Christian magistrates and councillors whom we meet in inscriptions, they had the leisure and fortune to acquire a higher education, and from an early date there were Christians able to communicate with the literary culture of their age. As a “religion of the book,” Christianity had a particular relationship with texts.³⁴ In Rome, several paintings in the burial chambers of the catacombs show Christians arriving at the Last Judgement clutching their books. When the governor of Africa asked a group of Christian prisoners what they had brought with them to court, they replied, “Texts of Paul, a just man.” One of the fundamental contrasts between pagan cult and Christianity was this passage from an oral culture of myth and conjecture to one based firmly on written texts. In the first communities, there had already been a significant break with contemporary habits of reading: Christians used the codex, or book, for their biblical texts, whereas pagans still vastly preferred the roll. The Christian codex was made of papyrus, not parchment. It was more compact and better suited to people on the move, and it was an easier form in which to refer to and fro between texts. This Christian revolution lies at the beginnings of the history of the modern book; for scriptural texts, on present evidence, it seems to have been universal.

Gradually, this concern for the book extended to pagan culture too. In Paul’s letters, we are reading an author who is capable of alluding at second hand to themes of the pagan schools but who remains essentially an outsider with no grasp of their literary style or content: Paul’s echoes of pagan philosophy derive at best from the culture of other Greek-speaking Jews, but not from a pagan or philosophic education. His companion, the author of Acts, has also been mistaken for a Hellenistic historian and a man of considerable literary culture; in fact, he has no great acquaintance with literary style, and when he tries to give a speech to a trained pagan orator, he falls away into clumsiness after a few good phrases.³⁵ His literary gifts lay, rather, with the Greek translation of Scripture, the Septuagint, which he knew in depth and exploited freely: to pagans, its style was impossibly barbarous. In the 90s, the author of the “epistle of Clement” showed a more elegant manner, but his allusions to pagan culture, though more unusual, were still secondhand.³⁶

In the early second century, the picture changes importantly.³⁷ A Christian, Aristeides, addressed an “Apology” to the Emperor Hadrian and described himself specifically as “the philosopher from Athens.” The contents say little for his philosophy, but the claim and the form of this piece are most revealing. Aristeides was followed by at least six other apologists in the Antonine age who compared and defended their faith beside pagan myths and philosophies. In the Antonine age, a shared literary and philosophical education united senatorial Romans and prominent figures in the Greek-speaking cities. It helped the wide and disparate upper class to communicate on common ground and to maintain a sense of personal contact. Respect for this common culture was shared by Emperors and their households: by presenting Christianity in similar terms, Christians of varying education attempted to join the high culture which distinguished the period and gave cohesion to its governing classes. The claim to be a philosopher from Athens was beautifully suited to the Emperor Hadrian’s cultural interests. We can be fairly certain that no second-century Emperor bothered to read these long apologies. One of them, Athenagoras’s Embassy, was cast in the form of a speech, but it is not credible that a Christian was allowed to weary the Emperor’s patience by delivering it in his presence while his faith was a criminal offence. The setting is a literary fiction.³⁸ However, it is quite credible that some or all of these apologies were despatched or delivered to the Emperor’s officials. They are no odder than several other petitions which reached him, and in one case, it does seem that a pagan critic was aware of their contents. In the 170s, the pagan Celsus’s book is best understood as rebutting the impudent link between Platonism and Christianity which apologists like Justin had proposed in petitions to the Emperor.

In the Severan age of the early third century, the known addressees of Christian books are rather different. They are no longer the Emperors but their womenfolk. We know of letters which Origen addressed to women in the Imperial family, while Hippolytus’s book On the Resurrection is dedicated to an unnamed “queen.” The apologies disappear, along with that particular surge of cultural exchange between prominent citizens, senators and Emperors whose exceptional degree had characterized the Antonine period. In the early third century, we find Christians among people of a wide and varied culture, wider, even, than the first apologists’. Naturally, they are most evident in the books which were written in the big cities, and they are nowhere more evident than in the guide to Christian conduct which Clement composed in Alexandria c. 200. This remarkable work, the Paedagogus, urged an ethic of simplicity on Christian readers in language which was the very denial of its ideal.³⁹ Readers were expected to savour a tour de force of literary erudition which paraded its pure Attic style and its knowledge of Homer and the old comic poets. Like his teacher, Pantaenus, Clement was steeped in the ethic of Stoic philosophy. To its moderate precepts, he added the comfort of God’s attendant Word, present and willing to assist each Christian in his progress. Yet he also respected the later Stoa’s accommodations to rank and degree, its disdain for vulgar and ignoble actions and its sense that the wise man was set far above the common herd. Clement’s passionate attachment to culture was evident in every section of his book: his educated ear even led him to misunderstand Scripture, mistaking a lowly use of Greek in the Gospel of Luke. Some of his examples of worldly extravagance were more bookish than real, but they are proofs, nonetheless, of the range and stamina of a cultured Christian author and his audience. The pagan schools had produced nothing more dazzling. Clement wrote for the smart minority in the Church of his home city, whom he impressed by alluding to anything under the sun, to the marvels and wonders in nature, strange facts about pregnancy, the use of the mastic tree as a source of chewing gum and the deplorable sex habits of the female hyena. In Carthage, Tertullian had sounded a similar note, combining philosophy, rhetoric and the massive erudition of the higher schools. Culture, in these great cities, was finding fluent expression in Christian books.

By the 230s, we can watch this combination in a Christian, Julius Africanus, whose work and life spanned most of the interests of educated society. This fascinating figure implies in his writings that his “ancient fatherland” was the pagan colony Aelia Capitolina, which stood on the site of Jerusalem.⁴⁰ Early in the third century, he visited the court of Abgar VIII at Edessa and was sufficiently intimate with the courtiers to ride with them out hunting. His picture of their skills is very lively. He admired the extraordinary marksmanship of Abgar’s young son and remarked how he once shot a bear in both eyes, using two consecutive arrows. He witnessed an even better display of archery by Bardaisan, whom we would otherwise mistake for a sedentary Christian and an armchair intellectual. Eusebius then implies that in 222 Africanus went on an embassy to the Emperor Severus to win support for the rebuilding of the local site of Emmaus: if so, we would much like to have his speech, as the Christian associations of Emmaus must have been in his mind. There is no reliable evidence that Africanus had ever been a Jew, but his culture is unmistakable. He tells us himself that he was appointed architect for the “handsome library” which Alexander Severus built “in the Pantheon” at Rome and completed c. 227. He was also a traveller, a critic and man of letters. He visited the supposed site of Noah’s Ark; he toured the Holy Land; he knew various manuscripts of Homer which lay in civic libraries from the old site of Jerusalem to that fine city Nysa in Caria. He had travelled to Alexandria to hear a Christian philosopher and he conducted a famous correspondence with Origen: when Origen cited the episode of Susannah in the Book of Daniel as if it was history, Africanus showed crisply and decisively that the story was fiction. His Chronography set the comparative dating of Jewish, Christian and pagan history on a sound and influential footing. His literary Miscellany, or Kestoi, had the range of a polished man of letters, discussing anything from magical spells to battles with elephants, weaponry and a host of little-known facts about horses and how to keep them sound.

By the end of Africanus’s life, men of good education were emerging as bishops in the bigger cities of the Empire. We can match them with Christians of similar tastes whom we can detect in the contemporary papyri.⁴¹ We began with the intriguing papyrus letter which a Christian in Rome sent to brethren in Arsinoë c. 265. It is no less intriguing that a subsequent Christian jotted the opening of the Epistle to the Hebrews in one of its margins and added verses from Genesis in another, using not one, but two Greek translations of the Bible. Clearly, he was a person with a particular interest in texts. Perhaps another was Hermogenes, magistrate and councillor in Egypt’s Oxyrhynchus, who used the back of a page from a copy of Africanus’s Miscellany to write his will, adding a special compliment to his wife’s fitting conduct during their married life. The page came from a Christian’s text, and the compliment has been seen as a Christian’s touch of courtesy. This interest in culture and philosophy was not confined to the grandest Christians. In Rome of the late 180s, we know of Greek-speaking Christians from Asia Minor who were led by one Theodotus, a “leather worker by trade, but very learned nonetheless.”⁴² They studied Euclid’s geometry, Aristotle’s philosophy, and “almost worshipped Galen,” an author who had once remarked on the Christians’ reluctance to argue their first principles instead of relying on blind faith. These Christians were a living reply to his criticisms, but in due course they were excommunicated by the bishop of Rome. A strong opinion held that heresies originated in the various Greek philosophies from which they descended like “schools.”

What, finally, of Valerian’s other category, the “matrons,” or women of respectable birth? Here we can be more positive. Not only were Christian women prominent in the churches’ membership and recognized to be so by Christians and pagans: in Rome, c. 200, we have a precious insight into their social status and balance in the community.⁴³ Bishop Callistus, himself a former slave, was reviled for a ruling which permitted Christian women to live in “just concubinage” with Christian men whom they had not formally married. Although his rule was mocked as a licence to adultery, it must be understood through the marriage laws of the Roman state. If a highborn lady married far beneath her rank, she was deprived of her former status and legal privileges: Callistus’s ruling belongs in a community whose well-born women outnumbered its well-born men. This impression meets us in other Christian evidence,⁴⁴ in Tertullian’s remarks on women who preferred to marry “slaves of the Devil” rather than humble Christian men, Valerian’s rescript on Christian “matrons” and the concerns of the first Church council in Spain to match an excess of Christian women to a deficiency of Christian men. Well-born Christian women were sufficiently familiar to attract a sharp comment on the Christians’ “female Senate” from the pagan Porphyry c. 300; we know of governors whose wives were Christian sympathizers, as were female members of the Severan Imperial house; high-ranking women took good care of Origen in Alexandria; when Apollo spoke on the problem of Christian obduracy, he was answering a pagan husband’s question about his Christian wife. In Rome, Bishop Callistus was trying to allow prominent women to take Christian partners without suffering a legal penalty. The problem was not unknown elsewhere in society. Marriages between women of high status and prominent slaves in the Imperial service were already familiar and had caused problems of legal disability: in a Christian community, men of high, free birth were rarer and Callistus allowed women their social mésalliances in order to evade the secular laws.

This conspicuous female presence in the churches can be taken further. Like the Jewish communities, the churches offered charity to widows. Unlike the Jews, many Christian teachers followed Paul in regarding remarriage as a poor second best, while a minority declared it entirely sinful. One of the major demographic contrasts between an ancient and a modern population lies in the ancients’ higher proportion of young widows. Because the age of girls at marriage was frequently very low, as low as thirteen, older husbands were likely to die first, leaving their wives to the second marriages which secular laws encouraged: under Augustus’s rules, widows were penalized if they did not remarry within two years. In the churches, however, widowhood was an honoured status and remarriage was often seen as a concession to the weak: an early council legislates strongly against women who marry two brothers, presumably in sequence, the natural course for a widow in many pagan families after one brother’s early death.⁴⁵ Christian teaching thus tended to keep widows as unattached women, and their presence became significant. Only a minority of the “fifteen hundred widows and poor people” whom the Roman church tended in 251 would have been widows of any property, yet this minority was not without effect. The rules of female inheritance in most of these women’s home cities would allow them to control or inherit a proportion of their husband’s property. The Church, in turn, was a natural candidate for their bequests. Before Constantine, we do not know under what legal title these bequests were made, but it is not long before we have vivid evidence of their importance. In July 370, the Emperor Valentinian addressed a ruling to the Pope of Rome that male clerics and unmarried ascetics must not hang around the houses of women and widows and try to worm themselves or their churches into their bequests, to the detriment, even, of the women’s families and blood relations. It is even more revealing that, twenty years later, in August 390, his successor deplored these “despoilers of the weaker sex,” yet admitted reluctantly that the law was unworkable and would have to be abolished. Ingratiating monks and clergymen had proved too strong for secular justice.⁴⁶

Nor did the churches profit only from widows. They exalted virginity, and their young female membership actually practised it, a point which greatly struck Galen in Rome. Again, these women grew up without any family, yet they were heiresses to parts of their fathers’ and mothers’ property.⁴⁷ Bequests were antiquity’s swiftest route to social advancement and the increase of personal capital. By idealizing virginity and frowning on second marriage, the Church was to become a force without equal in the race for inheritance.

It is highly likely that women were a clear majority in the churches of the third century. We hear something of the mixed marriages of pagan husbands to Christian wives: on this general topic, Paul’s moderate advice prevailed, that the Christian partner should not simply divorce his pagan equivalent. Yet we never hear of a Christian husband with a pagan wife. In a powerful comment, Tertullian remarks on the ease with which Christian wives found willing pagan husbands: the husbands were keen to seize and abuse their wives’ dowries, treating them as their “wages of silence” about the women’s beliefs. Perhaps we should only note the continuing evidence of Christian women and leave the proportions to guesswork:⁴⁸ in 303, however, when the church in the North African town of Cirta was seized during a persecution, it is suggestive that only sixteen men’s tunics were found, whereas there were thirty-eight veils, eighty-two ladies’ tunics and forty-seven pairs of female slippers.

Pagans would not have been surprised by such an imbalance: the wife, said their moralists, should strictly adopt her husband’s gods and “bolt the door to excessive rituals and foreign superstition.” It was a well-established theme in their literature that strange teachings appealed to leisured women who had just enough culture to admire it and not enough education to exclude it: few women were as well equipped as Plutarch’s admired friend Clea. “It is not possible,” Strabo had remarked around the years of Jesus’s birth, “for a philosopher to influence a group of women by using reason, nor to exhort them to piety and faith: for this, he needs to use superstition too.” Christians, on one view, had merely proved him right: the Resurrection, complained Celsus, rested on nothing better than the tales of hysterical females.⁴⁹ The male leaders of the Church shared the stereotype. The “letter of Timothy” accepted a general view of woman as the prey to emotion and irrationality, whose nature made her a natural culprit for the spread of heresy. Tales of the promiscuity of heretical teachers enjoyed a wide currency and the theme became a standard accusation.⁵⁰ They were a distinctive Christian slander, as women were particularly prominent in Church life, but perhaps we should not always dismiss them. The afternoons were long in a Gnostic’s company; myths of the Aeons and Abysses were complex and impenetrable: the case histories of Montaillou remind us that there were many ways of pledging support for a man with a rare and special doctrine.

By the mid-third century, this feminine presence showed in the Christians’ ideas of their founders. Just as Jesus was shown in art as a philosopher and teacher, so his mother, Mary, had been upgraded socially, to rival the smarter women in the Church. She had already been given rich and well-born parents in an influential fiction of her life: by the 240s, Origen was praising her deep reading of the Bible, and in subsequent art, she was raised to the status of a bluestocking.⁵¹

The next four chapters concentrate on aspects of the Church in or around the mid-250s: we can summarize its general composition with some confidence. The Christians were a small minority, hardly known in the Latin West or the underbelly of Northern Europe, on which so much of the military effort of third-century Emperors was to be expended. They were not only concentrated in the bigger cities, but they were prominent in towns of varying rank and degree; they used the living literary languages, but not, so far as we know, the many local dialects. Their centre of gravity lay with the humbler free classes, not with the slaves, whom they did little to evangelize. There were Christians in the army and in the Imperial household, though, so far as we know, no more than one, perhaps two, Christian senators. Women of all ranks were conspicuous and there was a notable presence in some churches of women of high status. This profile has had to be deduced indirectly, but it matches, most gratifyingly, the one sample of a church’s membership which we can appreciate in any detail between the Apostolic age and the conversion of Constantine. In the early fourth century, we have the records of an interrogation of church officers in the North African city of Cirta.⁵² Apart from its high proportion of female clothing, this church included a teacher of Latin literature, who was also a town councillor, albeit only in the second generation of his family; a fuller, who could nonetheless be alleged to have distributed a huge bribe; a woman of the highest status, a clarissima, whose bribes were twenty times bigger and had disrupted, people said, an entire election in her own Carthage; a sarsor, or worker of coloured stones for decoration; an undifferentiated body of simple laymen, harassed by a crowd of “rustics” who were not Christians themselves but were alleged to include prostitutes and quarry workers, people who could be bribed and incited: there were also the loyal Christian gravediggers, underground heroes of the Christian cemeteries and catacomb tunnels, the diggers whom we can still see with their picks and lamps in wall paintings of the catacombs in Rome.

On one final point, we can be more confident. In pagan cities, young men were frequently organized in groups and societies of self-styled “youths,” yet we never hear of Christianity spreading horizontally between people of the same age. In 203, the Carthaginian martyr Perpetua tells a graphic story of her own resistance to her pagan father’s pleas. “He fell before me weeping,” she recorded, “and I pitied him as he called me no longer his daughter, but mistress and lady.” Yet Perpetua and her companions owed their faith to an older Christian, Saturus, just as Cyprian owed his to the older Caecilius, and Justin remarked on the decisive advice of an elderly Christian whom he had met by the seashore. In Edessa, a pupil recalled how the great Bardaisan had rebuked a fellow pupil, Awida, who had started to put theological questions to his own “age-mates.” “You should learn from somebody older than them,” Bardaisan told him: Christianity did not open a generation gap in families.⁵³ It tended to spread vertically, not horizontally, from older teachers, from a Christian parent or a Christian head of a household.

III

Would God ever send a second instalment, a further gift? Once, he had given it to individual prophets, but by the first century B.C., surviving Jewish literature had little to say on the possibility.³ Philo did believe such a gift was available, but only to exceptional individuals who had engaged in a long and arduous progress through faith to self-knowledge. At last, through God’s grace, they would receive a fresh gift of his Spirit which would “drive out” reason and possess them with divine ecstasy. Philo himself had known a faint approximation to this state. He had felt it, he wrote, in the course of his studies on Scripture, when sometimes he was granted a slight inspiration, in a sudden “flash,” we would say, the “bright idea” of a scholar. Careful study of Philo’s writings shows how rare and faint these scholarly “flashes” were.

Only in one place do we find a strong sense of the Spirit’s guidance and its imminent coming to a Jewish community at the Last Day: in the scrolls of the Dead Sea sect, awaiting the end of the world. In the first Christian churches, both Jewish and Gentile, this presence suddenly came true. While Philo hoped for a gift of the Spirit to the minds of exceptional men, humble Christians across the Aegean were experiencing this very contact in their hearts, a presence which made them cry out, “Abba, Father,” in a sudden burst of immediacy. The Spirit, said Paul, was bestowed on their communities as a “deposit” or “advance payment” against the greater gift of the Last Day. It amounted to more than an empty “speaking with tongues,” that recurrent experience in Pentecostal history: this “speech” is no sudden gift of linguistic skill, but a random jumble, as neutral observers have often demonstrated.⁴

Among the first Christians, the Spirit belonged with a continuing change in personality and in people’s understanding of themselves. It was attached, nonetheless, to the old Scriptural tradition. Though “alive” in the power of the new Spirit, Paul retained the fine and ancient imagery of Genesis. He, too, stressed the Spirit as a continuing link between God and man, like the first puff of divinity given by God at Creation. To Paul, as to Philo, the Spirit was the source of man’s knowledge of himself, a power of conscience which pagan teaching had not recognized. The Spirit was divine, distinct from the “spirit” which pagan philosophy made an immanent power in the world. It distinguished the higher man from the lower, and in Paul’s Christian churches, it was now present in a sudden new outpouring, the source of love and joy, peace and kindness, the reward of faith, the mark of the new “sons of God.” To become a Christian was to learn of this new and immediate miracle: a potential change in human nature itself.

In Acts’ opinion, the Spirit was the primary force in the mission’s early direction. It “seized” and guided its Christian beneficiaries and helped them to preach and prophesy.⁵ Paul’s epistles differed only in their emphasis: in Paul’s opinion, its effects in his first communities would have amazed any pagan who saw them: and if properly used, would begin to convert him. Such overt enthusiasm could not last. As the End receded and a Church hierarchy developed, the Spirit became dimmed, though not removed, from early Christian life. The force which had accompanied the first missions no longer impelled preachers to new places. There was less of its direct action to astound outsiders. Conversion had always depended on other presences too, and as time passed, it was through them that Christian numbers rose.

Gibbon identified five causes of the Christians’ continuing missionary success: an “intolerant zeal,” derived from the Jews but purged of their “narrow and unsocial spirit”; the “menace of eternal tortures”; the miracles and “awful ceremony” of exorcism; the “serious and sequestered life,” whose “faults, or rather errors, were derived from an excess of virtue”; the government of the Church, with its scope for ambition and authority. Modern accounts tend to stress one or other aspect and lose Gibbon’s delicacy of phrasing. They also relate conversion to the social order and particular groups within it. There is more to be said about the Jews and their “narrowness”; our previous study of pagan worship tells against the idea that people were generally “sceptical” before Christianity brought a new faith. How, then, can Gibbon’s views be enlarged and adjusted?

It is as well to begin with the scope of conversion and the means by which outsiders could become aware of the new religion. Those means were not greatly advertised and promoted by the Church’s own leaders after the Apostolic age. There were no public harangues, no mass meetings to evangelize pagan crowds. Compared with the preachers of popular philosophy, Christians kept a low profile. The leaders of a modest third-century church were advised to post a lookout on the door to check visiting strangers, while a Church order of conduct, as We saw, advised that potential converts should bring a good reference with them and be introduced by a fellow Christian. It remained a firmly held view of the Church leadership that unmarried Christians should marry Christians only: Paul had advised the same to Christian widows. These restrictions were not idle advice.⁶ They tell very strongly against extravagant views of the churches’ growth, once a core of believers had been won in a new town.

In these towns, Christianity’s most public advertisement was martyrdom. Although most people in the crowds of spectators would simply have thought that these criminals were stubborn and totally misguided, a few might have second thoughts, wondering what exactly was this “atheism” for which such old and harmless people faced death, girls and women among them. Only Christian authors claim that these second thoughts sometimes led to conversion, but they are readily believed.⁷ Martyrs were also capable of impassioned speeches whose warnings and threats of hell were not lost on their hearers.

However, martyrdoms were rare occasions, and for most of the time, Christianity spread informally between individuals. Here, the lack of privacy in most people’s lives was very relevant. The fraction of a rented apartment or the bazaar economy of petty artisans left ample scope for inquiry, a little private encouragement and the circulation of news. For all Celsus’s contempt, it was at work or in private houses that he located the Christians’ approaches to “women and children.” If we look beyond their moralists’ texts, we can see that Christians’ lives were not so “sequestered” as Gibbon implied. They continued to serve in the army, attend pagan weddings and parties and enjoy the games and shows in the circus. The history of the persecutions reveals pagan communities who could easily identify their suspects, although they found it harder to catch them before they hid or ran away. By the mid-third century, the public epitaphs of “Christians for Christians” in a few Phrygian towns were quite open about their families’ faith to anyone who bothered to stop and read them: the older view, that they commemorated heretics, was partly based on the false belief that orthodox Christians were always secretive.⁸ Of course, Christians knew how to hold their tongue and lie low when necessary, but at other times, they could try a little exhortation on a suitable friend. In an eighth of a rented room or a twentieth of a house in an Egyptian township, it was simply not possible or necessary to conceal one’s prayers or worship of God from everyone’s eyes.

Within the family, there was obvious scope for exhortation and dispute. Mixed marriages were not commended, but wives in an existing marriage might be converted and then an avenue opened for further conversions. In Christian opinion, backed by St. Paul, the wife should not leave her pagan husband but should try to win him over too. In higher society, she seldom succeeded, but there was hope for her subsequent children: fathers might object less to the mother’s instruction of the girls or to her prudent baptism of infants at a time of sickness in order to stave off the stories of hell.⁹ Some, a very few, of these infants might survive, perhaps impressing the father with the power of his wife’s new God. It is in this domestic context that many of the Christian exorcisms of non-Christians were probably worked. We should not be misled by the apocryphal legends of public “contest” or the later crowd scenes which gathered round Christian saints, blessing and cursing in the different setting of the later Christian Empire.¹⁰

Above all, we should give weight to the presence and influence of friends. It is a force which so often escapes the record, but it gives shape to everyone’s personal life. One friend might bring another to the faith; a group of friends might exclude others and cause them to look elsewhere for esteem. When a person turned to God, he found others, new “brethren,” who were sharing the same path. Here, the earliest Church orders of discipline conform to a description by Origen and the precepts of the first councils.¹¹ Interested parties would rank nominally as “Christians” from their first reception, but two or three years had to pass before an interested party could progress to baptism, advice which remained constant across the third century. No doubt there were shortcuts, and thus the advice had to be given, but Origen’s words are proof that it was not a vain counsel. Christians were not made in a hurry, unless they happened to have been baptized as an insurance by one or other Christian parent. The Christian apprentice, or catechumen, was watched for signs of misconduct. He was taught the details of the faith by fellow Christians and allowed to attend the church services in a special group, with his fellow apprentices. At the community’s meal, he was supposed to receive “bread of exorcism,” which was distinct from the baptized Christian’s bread. He had no place at the Lord’s table when the baptized Christians met and dined and prayed mindfully for their host. During the years of instruction, he was not supposed to sin, and if he did, he would be demoted for a while to the status of a “hearer” who was not receiving instruction. When his preparation was complete, he was brought forward for the final weeks of teaching, accompanied by fasting, frequent exorcisms and confession of sins. Only then was he fit to be baptized.

Perhaps this pattern was shortened sometimes but it does not conform to some modern historical views of the Church. The understanding of conversion is not the understanding of an unrecoverable first moment when a person decided to go along to church and give the sect a try. It is certainly not a process dominated, or largely explained, by sudden miracles. Historically, it is less significant that Christianity could bring in a diversity of persons for a diversity of initial reasons than that it could retain them while imposing these long apprenticeships. The years of instruction and preparation became, in their turn, one of the faith’s particular appeals. People felt that they were exploring a deep mystery, step by step. They were advancing with a group of fellow explorers along a route which required a high moral effort.

The length of this journey is one further reason for keeping the total number of Christians in perspective: their faith was much the most rapidly growing religion in the Mediterranean, but its total membership was still small in absolute terms, perhaps (at a guess) only 2 percent of the Empire’s total population by 250. Within this small sample, was it especially likely to appeal to particular social groups? This dimension is one which we would now stress more explicitly than Gibbon.¹² The social context and position of Christian converts does not allow us to lay down “laws” or to predict Christianity in this or that group, but it does suggest tendencies, especially negative tendencies, and it bears on the faith’s more general appeal.

A simple theory of “social compensation” will not stand up to the evidence. The link between Christianity and victims of worldly oppression was neither simple nor obvious. The Church was not primarily a haven for slaves and least of all for slaves in the mines or dependent workers on the land, yet on these groups the burdens of the towns and the Empire lay most heavily. In contrast, recent social theories of the Church have tended to emphasize the more prominent named Christians and to relate them to notions of status and social mobility. These attempts tend to overlook the churches’ hard core among the humbler free residents in a town.

They have been applied most freely to the age of the Apostles, where Acts and Paul’s epistles do allow us a glimpse of specific converts. Here, however, we are often witnessing secondary conversions. It is quite clear that Christian preaching began by attracting sympathizers from the Jews’ own synagogues, sometimes full converts, but also, notoriously, the “God-fearers,” who were probably Gentile hearers, not full members of the Jewish community.¹³ Here, Christianity was not drawing people primarily because of their particular social class or status, but because of their prior attraction to Judaism. The more we know from the cities of Greek Asia, the less it is possible to reduce the Jewish presence to a “narrow and unsocial” minority. In the Diaspora, the evidence for prominent local synagogues is greater after the final war in Judaea (135 A.D.): the communities continued to win supporters and converts and attract interest from Christians themselves. Inscriptions in Miletus, Smyrna, Aphrodisias and several Phrygian cities put the social respectability of the Jewish communities beyond doubt. Above all, we have to adjust to the discovery that a central building in the main area of civic life in Sardis was taken over by the Jews as a synagogue and enlarged for their use, perhaps in the late second century and certainly by the mid-third.¹⁴ In Caesarea and Antioch and Carthage, Jews were a powerful and continuing presence, although Christian authors are varyingly informed about their life.¹⁵ In the early third century, the Emperor made Jews eligible for service on the cities’ councils, a testimony to their property and education. Even by 250, it is not clear that the Christian community would have been the most conspicuous in many famous cities. Until recently, the best-known testing ground was Dura-Europos, out east on the Euphrates, where the Jewish synagogue was bigger and much better-decorated than the little house-church and was continuing to be enlarged after the mid-240s. However, Dura was a distant town and even the Jewish paintings in the synagogue have been related to special concerns of Jewish teachers in the East.¹⁶ It did not seem a typical site to compare with religions further west, but the recent discoveries in Greek Asia have made it easier to see the continuing strength of its Judaism as a wider pattern elsewhere. It would be fascinating to have the history of a Jewish Eusebius, describing the Jews’ continuing prominence and growth in the Diaspora until 300 A.D.

Between the two communities, however, the traffic seems to have gone essentially in one direction. After the Apostolic age, we do not hear of Christians preaching as missionaries in synagogues. The Jews were alert to the danger; the Roman authorities had distinguished the Christians and allowed them to be persecuted; the failure of the Jewish wars further divided the Church from its Jewish ancestry. As an old and unpersecuted religion, Judaism did continue to attract Christian sympathizers, whereas Christians did not attract more than the odd Jewish renegade. In the Antonine and Severan age, therefore, Christian conversions were no longer secondary conversions and social theories might apply more directly to the process.

In the Apostolic age, Christianity has been connected with two particular social theories: “social mobility” and “status inconsistency.”¹⁷ Do they help us to place the subsequent converts more clearly, after the break with a ready-made Jewish clientele? We must be wary of claiming that the faith appealed “primarily” to such groups “because” of these social features. Much depended on how, if at all, the various groups encountered Christian preaching. If the first converts tended to be people of modest property, living in towns, the reason may lie, not in their particular view of their “status,” but in the fact that they happened to hear most about the faith from people to whom they could relate. The scarcity of converts in the highest or lowest classes may reflect on their lack of occasion to learn about Christianity from a teacher whom they could take seriously. The class and ability of the teacher are as relevant as any inconsistency in the social position of the hearer.

In the years after Constantine’s conversion, there is indeed some force in a connection between social mobility and Christianity: the faith seems particularly prominent among the new governing class who were promoted to the Emperor’s Christian court and the new city of Constantinople.¹⁸ However, this connection cannot be carried back with confidence into the previous centuries. Then, Christianity was a persecuted atheism which sat very badly with the aims of men “on the make.” It was very sparsely represented in the army, the Empire’s greatest centre of social mobility, and its roots lay in the Greek-speaking towns where social mobility was limited. The Emperor’s promotion and patronage were the main agents of social advancement, yet Christianity was not particularly prominent in the two orders which were most open to it, the Senate and the Imperial “household.” Although we know of Christians among the Emperor’s slaves, we lack their biographies and we cannot distinguish those who converted after a sudden advancement from those who had already brought their faith from their family backgrounds. We cannot, then, argue that social promotion encouraged these Christians’ conversions in the first place. When Justin was brought to trial in the 160s, he was accompanied by Euelpistus, “a slave in Caesar’s household,” who had had Christian parents in Cappadocia, probably before he passed into the Emperor’s service.¹⁹ His promotion did not influence or coincide with his faith: it merely brought him to our notice. Social mobility did not necessarily turn a person against prevailing traditions. If it distanced him from his humbler origins, it also made him embarrassingly keen, as always, to be accepted in the social circles to which he had aspired. The literature, the poetry and the inscriptions of the Imperial period are eloquent witnesses to the efforts of the parvenu to copy traditions and be thought respectable. The Christianity of the new men at Constantinople should be seen in this light: by then, the court looked up to a Christian Emperor.

What, then, of the notion of “status inconsistency,” the condition of people whose view of their status does not altogether agree with the status which others ascribe to them? The concept has been applied to Paul’s first communities, to the “independent women with moderate wealth, Jews with wealth in a pagan society, freedmen with skill and money, but stigmatized by origin, and so on.”²⁰ People’s views of their own status are enchantingly complex and unexpected, and perhaps “consistency” is a rarer condition than its theorists imply. Yet even in these particular groups, “status” may not have been the inconsistent element. The “Jews with wealth” could find an ample role in their own synagogues; known Christian “freedmen with skill and money” are not easily found and their sense of “social stigma” can be exaggerated if we look only at the judgements of Rome’s ruling class: here, any “status inconsistency” was short-lived. The children of freedmen are well attested in our Latin evidence for that socially accepted class: the councillors and magistrates of the towns. Their families’ ambitions often lay in this conventional direction: freedmen are a primary source of public inscriptions in Latin, an accepted claim to honour by which they, too, could bid for public esteem. It was not, then, for lack of prospects that they adopted a persecuted faith. The “independent women” are better attested, but “status inconsistency” may not be the aptest term for their condition. Their sex universally denied them the social role which their economic position gave to its other possessors. Their status meanwhile, was only too clear, and we have no evidence that women did other than accept it. It is quite untrue that Paul and the teaching of his epistles coincided with an existing movement for “liberation” among women, which they curbed.

A person cannot be the victim of “status inconsistency” without some conscious awareness on his own part; for the condition to apply, he himself must hold a conscious variant view of his own social position. We do not know that any type of Christian convert held such views. Even if they did, we still have to fathom why they resolved the inconsistency by taking to Christianity rather than to any other cult. The Jew had his synagogue; the prosperous freedman, the cult of the Emperors; the woman, the priesthoods of other divinities, through which, already, she could enjoy a public role. Why, then, become a Christian? The view that such converts wished to dominate a new cult and earn “clients” is also implausible. The concern for “clientship” belonged in social orders higher than those of almost any known Christian convert. Nor was the Christian community designed for easy “dominance.” The first churches had no fixed leaders, and when they did develop them, they adopted a system of leadership by life appointment. Unlike the pagan cult society, the Church thus kept apart the roles of benefactor and leader: dominance was not easily assured.²¹

It is this aspect, rather, that we can usefully explore. By its own image and moral stance, the Christian community stood opposed to the open pursuit of power. It did not resolve “inconsistency” by offering a new outlet: rather, it claimed to sidestep status and power altogether. We would do better to view its appeal not against inconsistency but against a growing social exclusivity. Christianity was least likely to attract the people who were most embedded in social tradition, the great families of Rome, the upper families who filled the civic priesthoods and competed in public generosity for the gods. There were exceptions, but it was also least likely to attract the teacher and antiquarian who were steeped in pagan learning. It could, however, offer an alternative community and range of values to those who were disenchanted by the display of riches, by the harshness of the exercise of power and the progressive hardening of the gradations of rank and degree.²² Only a simple view of human nature will expect such people to be none but the poor and the oppressed themselves. There were people, too, who turned away from the power and property which others of their rank admired or exercised. It will cause no surprise if some of those who were most disenchanted contrived, nonetheless, to attain power and rank in their new community, or if others believed in charity, provided that charity did not have to begin at home.

On a longer view, the rise of Christianity owed much to a broader initial change, a loosening of the civic cohesion of the Greek city-state. Even in the classical city, the citizen had not been limited to his city’s public cults, but as groups of non-citizens multiplied through migration from place to place and as tighter restrictions were placed on the holding of local citizenship, the general connection between a city’s cults and its citizens had been greatly weakened. In the Roman period, the gap between citizenship and residence in or near a city was compounded by the growing gap between citizenship and the exercise of political power. As civic life depended ever more on a city’s notables, the home town meant most to the sum total of its residents when contrasted with the honours of another town or when busy with its own shows and athletic games. It was one thing to exhibit a keen “observer participation” in the doings of a town’s great families, but it was not the same as belonging to a community and feeling that one’s presence mattered.

As the political value of citizenship declined, the older type of community and equality had receded in civic life. During the second century, the frank expression by Roman judges of “one law for the more honourable, another for the more humble” compounded the explicit division of cities into a few rich notables and the people, now openly called the “poor.” Differing penalties for these differing classes did not supplant a system of legal equality: previously, Roman citizenship had brought legal privilege and there were gainers, as well as losers, from the change. Although the distinction only applied in criminal cases, its bluntness speaks for a wider attitude which is very significant. Officially, the “more humble” were now declared particularly vile and servile, and nothing prevented governors from treating them like slaves. Respectable contempt is quick to filter downwards. Governors could be quite blunt about their priorities: “If you were one of the rustics,” the governor of Egypt was alleged to have told Phileas, the Christian bishop, in the year 303, “who have given themselves up out of need, I would not spare you. But since you have acquired such a surplus of property [the very word: periousia] that you can nourish and care not only for yourself, but the city too, please spare yourself for this reason and pay a sacrifice to the gods.”²³

Christianity had begun to spread before these legal categories had been openly stated and accepted. They were, however, already implicit in superiors’ dealings with their inferiors, so much so that the Christians’ contrary image of community had immediate point. As the first Messianic hope receded and the end of the world became less of an issue, these social divisions had continued to harden throughout the second century. Christianity’s contrary values thus gained in relevance, although the two primary points of its doctrine lost their immediacy.²⁴ While pagan priests and magistrates competed in their “love of honour,” Christians termed it “vainglory.” While civic cults paid honour to the presiding “manifest” divinities of the town, the Christians’ “city” lay in heaven and their “assembly” was the assembly of the people of God “throughout the world.” The cults and myths gave pagans a focus for their “feverish civic patriotism,” yet Christians obeyed one law, the same from city to city. Those whose loyalties were less engaged by the home town, or enlarged by travel beyond it, could respond to this image of a universal “assembly” and ethic. They saw it put firmly into practice. At their festivals, the great pagan families made distributions to the small class of councillors, to the male citizens and lastly, if at all, to their women. Christians brought their funds to those in need, men and women, citizen and non-citizen: Christian “charity” differed in range and motive from pagan “philanthropy”: it earned merit in heaven and sustained those dear to God, the poor. The idea of “doing unto others as you would wish them to do unto you” was not foreign to pagan ethics, but there was no precedent for the further Christian advice to “love one’s enemies.”²⁵ At its best, such selflessness has always been its own best argument, but never more so than in the civic life of this period. Admittedly, Christians did not always live up to it, least of all in their attitude to the slaves whom they continued to own: if Christian women beat their maidservants to death, so an early council in Spain decided, they were to be punished with several years’ denial of communion.²⁶ The mild scale of punishment was hardly less revealing than the existence of such sinners. We should remember, however, the words of Plutarch and Galen’s friends, that it was worse to batter a door than a slave and that a lashing was appropriate, so long as it was not administered in anger. Rational pagan philosophy was capable of even greater heartlessness.

To the poor, the widows and orphans, Christians gave alms and support, like the synagogue communities, their forerunners. This “brotherly love” has been minimized as a reason for turning to the Church, as if only those who were members could know of it.²⁷ In fact, it was widely recognized. When Christians were in prison, fellow Christians gathered to bring them food and comforts: Lucian, the pagan satirist, was well aware of this practice. When Christians were brought to die in the arena, the crowds, said Tertullian, would shout, “Look how these Christians love one another.” Christian “love” was public knowledge and must have played its part in drawing outsiders to the faith.

On taking an interest, they found other values exalted which pagan society did not assert. Among pagan authors, “humility” had almost never been a term of commendation. It belonged with ignoble and abject characters. Men were born “sons of God,” said the Stoics, and thus they should cherish no “humble or ignoble” thoughts about their nature. The humble belonged with the abject, the mean, the unworthy. Christianity, however, ascribed humility to God’s own Son and exalted it as a virtue of man, his creature whom he had redeemed.²⁸ Through its Jewish heritage, Christianity idealized “abject poverty,” ptocheia. It was not specifically material poverty, but poverty in the broader sense of an utter dependence on God. Pagans had never seen any spiritual merit in the status of the poor. Ptochoi, they thought, were down-and-outs, worse than poor men of a certain independence.

These alternative values belonged with a powerful ideal of community. From the start, Paul’s letters had abounded in the language of a “family” and a brotherhood, supported by his luxuriant use of compound verbs, formed with the prefix “together.” This language was not entirely novel. In the papyri, pagans, too, address each other as “brother”:²⁹ Christians, however, combined this language with a tighter control on their group. The cohesion of brotherly “equals” required the rigorous exclusion of anyone who threatened to confuse it: Paul was already reminding his Corinthians of a man whom he had excommunicated and handed over to Satan. Among pagans, “anathema” had begun as the word for a “dedication” to the gods, but had then been extended to cover the “dedication” of a person to the powers who were invoked in a curse. Christians were heirs to its extension. As in the Jewish sect of the Dead Sea scrolls, so in the first Christian communities, an “anathema” dedicated victims to Satan and thus to eternal hell.³⁰ At the Council of Gangra, we may recall, the “anathema” was the bishops’ punishment for Christians who encouraged slaves to disobey their masters.

This tightly guarded “brotherhood” can be contrasted with the cult societies which we encountered in the example of the Iobacchic group at Athens. Whereas pagan trade societies and most of their religious groups segregated the sexes among their membership, Christians included men and women alike. In the Greek world, slaves were generally excluded from these pagan groups: Christians even admitted slaves of pagan masters.³¹ The Iobacchi’s awareness of a worldwide group of Bacchic worshippers was exceptional: among Christians, however, the universal (or “catholic”) Church was a constant presence.³² In any one town, their membership was several times greater than the largest known cult society’s. Unlike any such society, they were reviled by crowds in the stadiums as a “third race,” distinct from pagans and Jews: the classical city had had no room for this “state within a state.”³³ Its organization differed from any known in pagan or Jewish cult. The powers and elections of its bishops were distinctive, as were its roles for giver and leader.³⁴ In a pagan cult, the patrons and givers were also the leaders: their ranks and titles offered the members “pale and vulgar reproductions of the hierarchy of a real aristocracy.” In the churches, a bishop might happen to be rich, and electors soon saw the advantage if he was, but officially, the richer Christians gave alms, while a separate hierarchy administered their use. This hierarchy was chosen to serve for life. In a growing Church, therefore, the number of richer Christians would far exceed the number of vacant posts in the hierarchy of power. Divorced from office, “benefaction” was seen as almsgiving, a charity for all alike.

By its form and ideals, therefore, the Christian “brotherhood” offered very different scope to the potential benefactor. At the same time, it did not have the blunt, unsettling appeal of a faith which directly assaulted social barriers. It sidestepped them in the name of spiritual equality, while leaving them in place. This pattern had already been traced by Stoicism, which had remained the dominant ethic among the philosophies. It allowed Christianity to appeal to many more people of higher rank and property than if it had attacked their riches and status in plain material terms.

Although the growing exclusivity of civic life gave force to the Christians’ alternative image, it did not, by itself, produce converts. They had to be held by Christian teaching and the Church’s type of community during the long years of apprenticeship. For a start, this teaching introduced them to Satan, a novel “explanation of misfortune.”³⁵ Through his demons, it explained what we have identified as the living heart of pagan religiousness: the oracles and epiphanies and accompanying anger of the gods. Paganism was reclassified as a demonic system: it was most misleading when it seemed to be most effective. To deceive people, these demons worked mischief by curing and occasionally predicting the future, yet, finally, they would go bankrupt, however impressive their interim results. Satan, their manager, had entered the last stage of a long “rake’s progress.” Since Jesus’s mission, God’s old accusing agent had been cast out of heaven and left to wander as his adversary on earth.³⁶ While Jewish teachers feared Satan’s continuing access as an accuser before God, Christians knew that he had fallen for ever and that his rival kingdom had only a brief while left.

With this new and powerful myth of evil went an altered perception of the supreme misfortune, death. Unlike the pagans, Christians did not die or fade into the disembodied life of the soul. Their remains were contained in “cemeteries,” or sleeping places, while their souls were stored in the capacious bosom of Abraham. At the Last Day, the dead would awake and return to bodies of varying degrees of glory. Pagans had not been clear or unanimous in their belief in an afterlife, but those who credited it could look to mystery cults for insurance in their future. Christians were much more positive. Since Jesus’s death, they had not only won immortality: they had triumphed over death itself. They would rise, body and all, and like the pagan burial clubs, their Church offered every adherent a proper place of rest. Unlike the burial clubs the Church offered it whether or not a person had paid contributions for the purpose.³⁷

Both these “explanations of misfortune” had their darker side. If Satan was the source of error and evil, false teaching and wrongdoing were not merely mistaken: they were diabolic. The division between a Christian community of goodness and an outer world of evil could easily become too pronounced. The idea of Satan magnified the difference between “true” and “false” Christians and between Christian sinners and saints. So, too, the triumph over death was a triumph for believers only, and even they had to pass a searching Last Judgement. There was an ample place, therefore, for plain fear in Christian conversions, and Christian authors did not neglect it: their martyrs’ words on hell and the coming Judgement were believed to be an advertisement every bit as effective as their example at the stake. Terrors in the next world were not unfamiliar to pagans, but Christians insisted on their certainty and imminent realization. Clever Christians were well aware of their power: just as a Platonist like Plutarch could write freely on the terrors of the underworld as an “improving myth,” so Origen argued that the literal terrors of hell were false but they ought to be publicized in order to scare the simpler believers. In Acts, it was when Paul talked of “justice, self-control and the judgement to come” that Felix, the corrupt governor, “begged him to stop.”³⁸ This teaching was reinforced by an equally powerful ally, the Christian idea of sin. Sin was not just the sin of an action, or even an intention, but also the sin of a thought, even a passing interest in an appealing man or woman. This combination of rarefied sin and eternal punishment was supported, as we shall see, by books of vision and revelation which were probably more widely read than modern contempt for “pseudepigraphic” forgeries allows: acquaintance with the Apocalypse of “Peter” would make anyone think twice before leaving the Church. If fears for Eternity brought converts to the faith, one suspects that they did even more to keep existing converts in it.

Like Satan, therefore, the Last Judgement was a force which Christians exaggerated and then claimed to be able to defeat. The teaching impressed people who already knew the sting of death and misfortune, the gap between good actions and good intentions and the continuing core of a paganism which could be seen as well as heard. These forces, the Christians said, were defeated by their miracles of bodily resurrection and exorcism, Gibbon’s “awful ceremony.” Did these signs and wonders, perhaps, account for many conversions to the Church?

There is no doubt that wonders were felt to occur. Pagans had had no organized order of exorcists, because they accepted no organized “kingdom of Satan”: invasive daimones of ambiguous status were sometimes cast out by spells or particular lines of Homer, but the experts in this field were the Jews. Their Most High god had no name and was felt to be particularly powerful against lesser spirits who could be identified, named and expelled: to name a force, then too, was to tame it and bring it nearer control. To the Jews, demons were not the ambiguous intermediaries whom pagans placed between gods and men: they were outright agents of evil, the troupe of Satan himself. The Christians’ view was similar, yet they insisted that their own exorcists succeeded where Jewish exorcists failed.³⁹

We know too little about the process and its case histories to test the truth of this claim. Both Jews and Christians aimed to make the “demon” name himself and confess his own divine master: we have one early polemic against verbose formulae uttered by Christians in order to seem impressive; Cyprian pictures the action of the Spirit on a man’s inner demon in terms which are a compound of torture, burning and beating. Ejection, it seems, involved a rough combat of powers, with few holds barred. Unlike the Jews, Christians did also assert that Satan was doomed by Christ’s kingdom and perhaps they did lay a greater emphasis on faith. In a tantalizing scene in their Gospels, Jesus is said to have remarked that he could not work wonders among an unbelieving people.⁴⁰ Once, he was believed to have healed a child who had not seen him, but in this case the exceptional faith of its father sufficed. His followers, one suspects, never worked miracles at long range. Faith and a willingness to accept the exorcist’s grim and awful explanation were probably central to these cures by sudden release. Perhaps Jewish exorcists required some such faith, but they were not heirs to stories of such a master and founder of the art as Jesus in the Gospels. Pagans, certainly, never worked in such a tradition or demanded faith as a precondition.

To educated pagans, exorcism was tommy-rot. The Emperor Marcus classed it with idiocies like cockfighting, and the philosopher Plotinus reacted with real horror to the notion that an imbalance of nature could be corrected by a supposed expulsion of intruders.⁴¹ Yet these intruders were exactly what Christians detected and tried to remedy. They extended their myth into new areas. In the past, the misfortune of epilepsy had been understood as the effect of the heavenly bodies: it was caused by the sympathy of the universe working on an excess of one “humour” in a patient’s constitution. To Origen, despite his knowledge of philosophy, epilepsy was the work of an intruding demon and therefore curable by Christian exorcism.⁴² Pagan thinkers had seen health as a “concord” or “blend” of opposing qualities, terms which interrelate with their language for the body politic. Christians connected health with faith and an absence of sin, a state which had to be maintained against outside invaders and tempters. Their image of the human body conformed to their image of the Church as a sinless Body, set apart from a demonic world.

The fame of the Christian exorcists was widely known. Their apologists appealed repeatedly to their achievements, and according to Tertullian, they had even been summoned to practise in the household of the Emperor Severus: in this case, historians may wonder if they succeeded. Exorcisms were not the “short, sharp shock” we might imagine: they worked “sometimes,” remarked Theophilus, a Christian author in the 180s. Candidates for Christian baptism underwent several, and while they waited between treatments, we can understand how they might grow to a faith in the accompanying “myth” and help the process, finally, to seem successful.⁴³

Did these exorcisms win many new converts in the first place? The orders of Christian exorcists were always busy with fellow Christians who needed the “awful ceremony” repeatedly before baptism. However, their fame did influence others.⁴⁴ In Acts, the author tells how a misuse of Jesus’s name by Jewish exorcists at Ephesus led to a sensational mishap which terrified “all the Jews and Greeks” and brought added honour to the faith. Miracles certainly continued to be credited; in c. 177, at Lyons, the doctor Alexander was martyred, a man who was by birth a Phrygian but who had spent many years in Gaul and was “known by everyone for God’s love of him: he was not without a share of the charisma of the Apostles.” Presumably, he worked miracles of healing. His contemporary Irenaeus wrote that miracles were still frequent, but when he adds that “very often indeed” the “spirit of a dead man has returned at the prayers of the brethren” after a period of intent fasting, the claim slightly weakens his point. In the 240s, Origen was more restrained: “traces” of miraculous power, he said, still persisted “in some measure” among the Christians. Between the Apostolic age and the fourth century A.D., we know of no historical case when a miracle or an exorcism turned an individual, let alone a crowd, to the Christian faith. The silence may reflect on our ignorance, but as Justin observed in the 130s, miracles only impressed their eyewitnesses. Although the legendary “acts” of Apostles laid great weight on the signs and wonders which their heroes worked, they were not historical texts, nor were they written to win pagan converts: they aimed to impress Christian readers and spread the views of a minority of fellow Christians through vivid fiction.

A successful exorcism would certainly win credit, and if it was worked on a pagan, it would probably make him a believer. No doubt cases occurred, but it is also significant that this type of conversion was alleged of a Christian heretic in order to discredit him: evidently, it was not felt to be a very honourable motive for entering the Church.⁴⁵ In view of the long apprenticeships which followed, it was not a sufficient motive. Even in Acts, Paul does not only heal and cast out demons: he preaches and instructs, persuades and discusses for days and nights on end.⁴⁶ It is this tireless work which he recalls persistently in his letters to his churches. To believe that Christians were fully won by the sight of a wonder or an exorcism is to shorten a long process and ultimately to misjudge the extreme canniness of Mediterranean men. These events might awaken their interest, but why should they accept that the God behind them was the only god and that all their previous gods were false? Whereas pagan cults won adherents, Christianity aimed, and contrived, to win converts. It won them by conviction and persuasion, long and detailed sequels to the initial proof that faith could work.

It is not, then, surprising that Christianity made the least-expected social groups articulate. The “free speech” of unlettered Galileans had already alarmed the authorities in Acts. It continued to characterize their followers.⁴⁷ Cyprian was troubled by a turbulent female, a seamstress by trade; Dionysius marvelled at humble villagers’ debates and arguments in Egypt; in the 170s, the group of Christians who studied Aristotle and Scripture in Rome were led by a leather worker. It was an old slander that a particular doctrine was fit only for women and the lower classes, but when pagan critics repeated it against Christian teaching, they were not false to the facts. These people also formed schisms and supported heresies, adhering to particular principles and points of doctrine not because of miracles but because the ideas appealed to them. Christianity’s theology combined simple ideas which all could grasp but which were also capable of infinite refinement and complexity. They made converts because they won faith: it was not just because of some past miracle that simple Christians were prepared to die agonizingly for their religion.

This conviction extended to thinking people, too, both the early Christian authors and their audiences. In the pagan cities, popular philosophy had begun to claim the authority of the gods. We have heard how their gods spoke the higher wisdom of Plato, and we have seen that their worshippers were sometimes exhorted to worship “with a pure heart.” The Christians, meanwhile, united ritual and philosophy and brought the certainty of God and history to questions whose answers eluded the pagan schools. While men like Lucian and Galen surveyed the philosophers’ disagreements with a certain detachment, Christianity captured their near-equals, Justin and Tatian, by giving them a firm dogma. They idealized faith and gave a powerful counter to anxiety.⁴⁸ Among second-century authors, it is the Christians who are the most confident and assured. There is a magnificent optimism in the theology of Irenaeus and its faith that by redemption man could rank higher than an angel; confidence is never far from the writings of Justin and his “sunny open-heartedness and innocent optimism… even when it leads him into naivety. Nothing could be less haunted than Justin’s mind and conscience.”⁴⁹ Expectation of the End did not lead most Christians into pessimism about the world or the flesh. Their authors wrote as warmly as any Stoic about the “providence” of God’s Creation. They looked to the future reign of themselves, as saints, and the resurrection of their bodies, improved and enhanced. Their asceticism, as we shall see, was grounded in positive, conscious aspirations, not in an alienation from the material world.

This confident tone cut through the doubts of the pagan schools and the note of anxiety which we have sometimes caught in questions to the pagan gods. It also went with a sense of Christianity’s newness. So much of Christians’ writing in the second and third centuries can be related to the need for a balance between the newness and the tradition of their faith. Here, too, we must allow for the setting of contemporary pagan culture. In the Antonine age, to be old and traditional was to be respectable, for a city or a philosophy, a cult or an individual: respect for antiquity extended to the very ways in which men of culture spoke and wrote. In many of their books, Christians excelled this intellectual fashion. Through their Jewish heritage, they could claim to be heirs to the ancient “wisdom of Moses,” which Greek philosophers had borrowed without acknowledgement. They could go back further to the “practice of Abraham” and even to the “philosophy” which God had laid on man at his Creation and which Jews and other peoples of the East had subsequently corrupted.⁵⁰ Of the world’s major religions, only Buddhism made a complete break with tradition at its birth: Christianity made no such claim. It could meet the traditionalist culture of pagan contemporaries on equal terms.

However, there was a tension in stressing Christianity’s “antiquity” too strongly, and some fellow Christians felt it. Many of them were new converts, made, not born, to their faith. Some of them were content to relate the change in their beliefs to existing philosophies: all the literary Christian “apologists” were such people, converts from paganism who were concerned to make sense of their new faith by stressing its continuity with older wisdom. Others did not wish to lose the sense of a deliberate break with the past, and this wish lay at the root of the great Christian heresies of the second century. Already, before Christianity, pagan writings had begun to emphasize revelation and personal “awareness” as the sources of a new religious knowledge which gave truths about the gods and the world, the fate of the soul, the exercise of reason.⁵¹ To this existing pagan literature of knowledge and revelation, Christians brought the wholly new idea of man’s Redemption. The more extreme “newborn” Christians developed these ideas into a separation of their new “knowledge” from God’s previous Creation and the dark and ignorant past. This tendency was exemplified in the writings of “knowing” Christian Gnostics, who dissolved history and the Gospels into a complex myth of Creation and the human predicament.⁵² Even so, these “knowing” Christians were not pessimists reacting against an anxious age. Like Buddhist mystics, they knew their souls were eternal, waiting to return to their heavenly home. Unlike existentialist philosophers, they combined their talk of “alienation” from the material world with a faith in salvation and spiritual renewal.⁵³ Other Christians were more specific. At Rome in the 140s, the recent convert Marcion shocked the Church by denying any connection between the Gods of the Old and New Testament. By rewriting Scripture, he presented a powerful case. The Creator, he argued, was an incompetent being: why else had he afflicted women with the agonies of childbirth? “God” in the Old Testament was a “committed barbarian” who favoured bandits and such terrorists as Israel’s King David. Christ, by contrast, was the new and separate revelation of an altogether higher God. Marcion’s teaching was the most extreme statement of the newness of the Christian faith. Combined with virginity and a rejection of marriage, it became “Marcionism” and continued to attract followers, especially in the Syriac-speaking East, far into the fourth century.⁵⁴

This pursuit of newness through heresy did not weaken the strength of the Church. Like “structuralism” in literary studies, pretentious heretical teachings provoked sensible Christians to state their own faith in history and tradition and to set out the texts of their Gospels more firmly and explicitly. Heretical ideas and groups survived, catering for those who wished to be perverse, but by c. 180 Christianity had been strengthened by great conservative statements, none finer than Irenaeus’s “Overthrow of the So-Called Knowledge” and “Demonstration of the Apostolic Teaching”: it is particularly apt that papyrus fragments of a handsome early copy of the “Overthrow” have been found in Egypt’s Oxyrhynchus. It had been written very soon after the work’s appearance in Lyons, from where it had hastily travelled east as a weapon in the battle against heretical folly.⁵⁵

Unlike any pagan cult or heretical system, the main stream of Christianity took its stand on history. It also cited its antiquity and its Jewish prophecies, some of which, in Greek mistranslations, appeared to have been fulfilled.⁵⁶ Both were powerful weapons in a culture which respected tradition and oracular prediction. Surviving texts say less about Jesus’s own personal qualities, but perhaps we should be wary of minimizing this aspect just because our few discussions of conversion ignore it.⁵⁷ The example of the Lord was urged on martyrs in prison and later was imitated by Christian holy men: did the model of his life really fail to impress the other Christians who do not happen to have written books? It is, however, true that articulate, thinking Christians tended, rather, to emphasize the general certainty which they found in their new faith.⁵⁸ Justin told of his tour of the philosophers in search of a satisfying doctrine, and Tatian wrote of his own independent disgust with the grossness of polytheism. Fictions repeated this theme: in the Octavius, a discussion of the role of Providence led to an intellectual conversion without any concern for Scripture. The long and ingenious Christian novel The Recognitions begins with the young Clement’s anxiety about the immortality of the soul, a worry which left him only when he met St. Peter. Our study of questions to Apollo has shown how these topics could indeed turn people to their gods. We might think that no Christian encountered the Scriptures until after his conversion, as their Greek was too repellent to outsiders’ taste. Yet Tatian cites his meeting with biblical writings as a decisive turn when doubts had begun to trouble him: he found “doctrines other than those of the Greeks, and more divine,” in books whose speakers lacked “arrogance and excessive art.” He admired the “easy account of Creation,” the “foreknowledge of the future,” the “extraordinary” precepts, the idea of One God. He was persuaded, then, by the Old Testament as well as the New. To his admiration of biblical Greek, it may be relevant that his own first language had been Syriac.

To Greek-speaking converts, the “Messiah” had lost all its meaning: many of them did not even understand the idea of “anointing” contained in the Greek word “Christ.” By the mid-second century, the end of the world was also receding in many Christians’ expectations. Yet the faith whose texts had emphasized these two ideas was still spreading and growing and by the later second century was making the progress among more prominent people which Eusebius rightly noted. Perhaps we can now see why. Since the 160s, there is clear evidence in legal texts of the division between the rich minority and a humbler majority in the ranks of the cities’ councils. Exemptions and migration had thinned the ranks of potential benefactors, and service in these bodies was quite often unwilling. These tendencies were not new, but they had attained a new prominence. They brought lesser people into the councils’ recruitment. They widened the gap between existing members, leaving a few powerful and very rich benefactors among many who found office more burdensome. At the same time, the division of legal penalties into “one law for the rich, another for the poor” had become explicit. The older restraints of “modesty” (aidos) and “insolence” (hybris) in Greek city life were losing their force.

Both these tendencies worked to Christianity’s advantage. The recruitment of lesser families into civic service might bring existing Christians or their friends into the upper orders of a town. The social divisions within the upper order and between that order and the rest gave particular force to Christianity’s contrary image. It could appeal to people with a conscience, without unsettling the material distinctions of their rank and riches. Above all, Christianity had come to be presented as a teaching to which people of rank could respond. The general social changes of the later second century coincided with a crucial inner change in the faith’s public image. It is no accident that the progress Eusebius noted followed and overlapped with the efforts of thinking Christians to relate their faith to existing philosophies and ethics. Even if the Christian apologists’ books were not widely read, their existence was a proof that Christianity was now respectable. It offered the certainty which eluded the philosophical schools and an ethic which was not entirely dissimilar. The teaching could now be heard from educated people, not stray Galilean missionaries, and as converts began to be won in higher places, more people could hear of the faith from people to whom they could relate. In turn, they attracted more texts on points of particular interest to them, from Clement or Hippolytus or even, in some moods, Tertullian. The dimming of the End and the fading of the Messianic hope were not obstacles to this progress. If anything, they helped it.

The continuing spread of Christianity, therefore, was not only due to its offer of goods which pagan “religiousness” had never centrally comprised. It was also due to faults in pagan society. In cities of growing social divisions, Christianity offered unworldly equality. It preached, and at its best it practised, love in a world of widespread brutality. It offered certainty and won conviction where the great venture of Greek philosophy was widely perceived to have argued itself into the ground. By 250, it was still the persecuted faith of a small minority, but its progress was sufficient to reflect on a growing failure of the pagan towns.