by Douglas Boin
Many people might suppose that, by Constantine’s day, a standard “Bible” was known to every Christian. That’s only partly true. The divine authority of many commonly revered written documents did help many Christians structure their life and liturgy and were often used to chastise others. For long stretches of Roman history, however, Christians argued passionately about which foundational documents actually mattered. Many conversations about the Christian canon led to arguments over writings that were deemed heretical or have now been lost. Christianity’s relationship to its Jewish roots – a winding, sometimes tortured relationship – would also influence the creation of “The Bible.”
The first attempt at a Christian canon, or list of agreed‐upon scriptures, would not be proposed until c.140 CE. According to Marcion, Jewish Scriptures were irrelevant to Christians, and so he excluded them. By the 170s CE Irenaeus of Lyon countered these claims, making reference for the first time to an “Old Testament” and a “New Testament.” Many Christians still maintain this highly inflammatory terminology, separating Jewish and Christian Scripture into “old” and “new,” as if the living traditions of Jews had been replaced by Christianity’s arrival. For historians, the use of these terms is not recommended practice.
Even Irenaeus’ suggested list was open to challenge. Almost one hundred and fifty years later, debates about what constituted Christian Scripture were still ongoing. Eusebius reports that, when it came to the apocalyptic Book of Revelation, some considered it canonical. Others “rejected the book altogether, criticizing it chapter by chapter, and pronouncing it without sense or argument” (Eusebius, Church History 7.25, trans. by A. McGiffert in the NPNF series [1890]). In 394 CE a church council at Carthage took up the issue – and gave their blessing to the book. By that time, John Chrysostom of Constantinople seems to have been the first to refer to all these writings as “ta biblia,” that is, as “The Bible.” Today, it is impossible to be historically precise when using this term.
Even the outbreak of a devastating disease, a plague that struck North Africa between 249 and 270 CE, conspired to spread the Christian faith in pagan Rome because Romans had no innate ability, no resilient traditions of their own, to cope emotionally with a sequence of such catastrophic events. Numbers of Jesus’ followers swelled, and the emperors rushed to restore order to the third century. Soon, they would start to pursue more discriminatory policies against Jesus’ followers.
Emperor Aurelian stopped the territorial hemorrhaging. During a short but transformative five‐year reign, between 270 and 275 CE, he repaired the torn empire, even humiliating “Queen” Zenobia by marching her through the streets of Rome as a prisoner of war. Rome, too, was the canvas for his most daring venture. Residents watched as a towering brick wall gave a new shape to the city on the Tiber. It included, for the very first time in Rome’s history, residents who lived on the city’s second largest hill, the Janiculum – on the west side of the Tiber – and it encompassed neighborhoods, like the Campus Martius, which for centuries had not properly been integrated into the city. Rome was changing. It was growing. Its cityscape and its people were witnesses to that evolution.
Constitutional stability followed, led by the brilliant administrative mind of Emperor Diocletian (r. 284–305 CE). Power‐sharing was the new managerial principle of the day. In 294 CE, two Augustuses (Augusti, in the Latin plural) were assigned two halves of the empire and two junior partners, Caesars (Caesares), were posted to train under them. In effect, a Rule of Four now oversaw a Mediterranean state that had, since the time of Augustus, been guarded by a single man. Shockingly, none of these constitutional innovations were written down. As with the series of negotiations that had brought Augustus to power, the Senate and the People of Rome operated by consensus, not by formal document. There never was nor would there ever be in its thousand‐year history a piece of writing that functioned as the “Roman Constitution.” Power, personality, prestige, compromise, respect for tradition, and a recognition that innovation was sometimes necessary to save the state: this was the language of the Roman government. It was a system written in shared ideas and values, not set in stone.
The fact that Diocletian, a military child from the Adriatic coast, was able to marshal consensus during a period of political rupture is a testament to his charisma. Rome’s third‐century storm had been weathered.
All that remained, as Diocletian walked away from power in 305, was for the shell‐shocked Roman people to come into their city centers to survey the damage of a century of war, to pick up the pieces of their towns, and begin the process of repairing the civic fabric of their lives. The unresolved issue – what no one had ever provided guidance on – was what things to keep and what to throw away.
The fourth‐century crisis
As the Rule of Four moved into imperial palaces now strategically being erected throughout the Mediterranean and as Diocletian himself moved out – the first Roman ruler in nearly a century to voluntarily set aside his constitutional power – Rome would come to face a fourth‐century crisis. This crisis was social, not a military one, but that doesn’t mean it can’t or shouldn’t be characterized in the same terms as the events of the last century. At its heart was a debate about who was allowed to be included in the body of the Roman state. This battle, too, would threaten to tear Rome apart from the inside‐out.
In 303 CE, before leaving power, Diocletian had inaugurated a vicious anti‐Christian program directed at purging the empire of a community who had gained significant visibility during the last century. The “Great Persecution” would target Christian property and worship spaces, earmarking them for government confiscation. Churches were burned without any legal ramification, and Christians themselves, under penalty of law, were required to turn over both their sacred books and their community funds (Key Debates 2.1: Are There Forgeries in Christian Scripture?). By the time a new emperor, someone sympathetic to Christian Romans, could address the terrible damage, the compromises that had given birth to the Rule of Four, including an acknowledgment of each individual’s proper turf, were no longer respected.
Key Debates 2.1 Are There Forgeries in Christian Scripture?
Around 256 CE, Cyprian, a Christian bishop in North Africa, decided to meddle in church affairs in Spain. Cyprian wrote a letter attacking a Spanish bishop who had been seen participating at a Roman sacrificial banquet. Cyprian insisted that the bishop, Martial, be removed from church office.
Martial’s “deceitful” decision to participate in the banquet “cannot profit him anything,” Cyprian wrote, “since he who also is involved in great crimes should not hold the office of bishop since the apostle also warns and says, ‘A bishop must be blameless as the steward of God’” (Cyprian, Letter 67.5, translation slightly adapted from R. Wallis in the ANF series [1886]). To support his argument against Martial, Cyprian has quoted the words of “the apostle,” Paul, a central figure of the first‐century church, as preserved in the text known as the Letter to Titus (1.7). Cyprian’s appeal to “history” was an attempt to show the Spanish bishop that he was straying far from the traditions of the earliest church. Martial was acting against teachings of Paul, or so Cyprian wanted his readers to believe.
There’s one problem. Paul didn’t write the Letter to Titus. In fact, of the fourteen writings in Christian Scripture attributed to “Paul,” only half of them – seven – are securely thought to be authentic. These are: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, Galatians, and Philemon. The Pauline authorship of the remaining books is either strongly doubted or widely agreed upon to be “pseudepigraphic,” that is, falsely written.
The debated documents are Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians. The doubtful ones are 1 and 2 Timothy, as well as Titus, which Cyprian has quoted as if it had Paul’s stamp of authority. Beyond these now canonical texts, there are still other forged texts from Late Antiquity which are associated with Paul’s name and memory. These include a highly fanciful meeting between Pa
ul and the first‐century CE Roman philosopher Seneca.
Which is an authentic text and which is a forgery is much more than an innocent, antiquarian exercise played by biblical scholars. Who used what texts and when – and what authority later writers, like Cyprian, presumed such false documents to have – is an important subtext to many Late Antique Christian arguments. Getting these facts right has important implications for how history is told.
Consider this short overview of the office of “bishop,” the title Cyprian held and the one which he tried to deny to Martial in Spain. “It is striking that the word episkopos [meaning “overseer” in Greek] and its cognates appear only rarely in the New Testament,” one Late Antique historian has observed. “It … appears in the letters of the apostle Paul for a total of seven times… . In the most significant passage … Paul advised his close associate Timothy on how to regulate the internal structure of the Christian communities (1 Timothy 3:1–7)” (in C. Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005], p. 25). On first look, that’s certainly what the “New Testament” texts appear to suggest. According to this interpretation, the office of bishop is ancient, dating back to the very first documents of church history.
Other scholars, more attuned to the issues surrounding the authentic, debated, and pseudepigraphic letters in Pauline studies, might write the history of the office of “bishop” in a different way. Since Titus was written at the end of the first century CE, a generation after Paul, it testifies to a growing need for organization in the young church – a social feature of the Jesus community that was absent from Paul’s own day.
In 312 CE, Diocletian’s system entered cardiac arrest. That year, the junior emperor Constantine – stationed at York, England, with his troops – would march on Rome to acquire the capital for his own portfolio, breaking the political consensus that had been so important to Rome’s recovery. By the year’s end, the ruler of Rome, Emperor Maxentius, would be dead. Constantine had drawn him and his army out of the city to the northernmost bridge over the Tiber River, the Milvian Bridge. The climactic battle between two leaders was one that likely shocked those who heard about it or watched it from the river banks. Two generals, fighting a civil war to control the capital, must have seemed to many like a horrible, frustrating flashback to an age that was supposed to have come to an end.
Constantine’s calculus, however disrespectful it had been of Diocletian’s settlement, did provoke a change in policy in other regards. The emperor, according to some, had converted to Christianity before his victory – a momentous personal experience that would haunt political conversations for centuries to come. Its effects were immediate.
In 313, as Augustus of the west, Constantine and his now co‐ruler, Licinius in the east, would meet in Milan to address the status of Roman Christians. Christians, the two emperors acknowledged, were no longer to be discriminated against by Roman law. They were to be given full rights to worship as members of the Roman state, and nothing in their legal status would stigmatize them anymore as second‐class citizens. The “Edict of Milan,” as the emperors’ decision is known, gave Jesus’ followers an explicit legal protection that had never before been granted to any other worship community in Rome, not even Jews, who had been worshipping openly throughout the empire for centuries.
This decision about the empire’s Christian community marked a monumental reversal – a true social triumph – for Jesus’ followers. It also re‐ignited a poisonous debate, one that had been kindling within the Christian community for three centuries, about whether being “Christian” allowed one to participate in all the facets of Roman social life or whether it required believers to oppose Roman customs and values, without any compromise. Christians were not in agreement on this point (Political Issues 2.1: What Role Did Martyrdom Play in the Rise of Christianity?). In the aftermath of Constantine and Licinius’ major policy announcement, their disputes with each other would begin to flare up again. By the century’s end, it would also ensnare non‐Christian politicians, as well. On the outside, these arguments, by turns intense and occasionally sophomoric, must have looked – only to the most naive – as proof of a clash of cultures.
Political Issues 2.1 What Role Did Martyrdom Play in the Early Church?
Tertullian (160–220 CE) enjoyed defending Christianity almost as much as he did instigating his opponents. In The Apology, he savages Roman culture – the mainstream culture of the early third century CE – and couples his criticisms with unwavering claims of Christian superiority.
“You accuse us of refusing to worship the gods and to spend money on sacrificing for the emperors,” he wrote. “We cease to worship your gods, from the moment we learn that they are no gods!” (Apology 10, trans. by A. Souter [1917]). Tertullian’s public denial of the gods would have struck quite a shrill, even treasonous tone in the public square, but he was likely talking to a much smaller audience. As with other examples of “apologetic,” or defense, literature, the Apology was probably designed to be read by those already within the Christian community.
The extent to which Christians antagonized their non‐Christian family, neighbors, and Roman public officials is a thorny question. It is also related to the issue of martyrdom and the growth of the church. Tertullian claimed that “the blood of the martyrs was like the seed” that grew the early church (Apology 50), a germination process that had taken root as early as Nero (Apology 21). A century later, Eusebius would use the same framework to tell his version of the History of the Church. “[P]ublicly announcing himself as the first among God’s chief enemies, Nero [r. 54–69 CE] was led on to the slaughter of the apostles,” Eusebius wrote (2.25, trans. by A. McGiffert in the NPNF series [1890]).
Scholars are extremely interested in the sources for these early “martyrdoms.” Many Greek and Latin texts which purport to tell of these brutal executions date centuries after the “martyrs’” deaths. The Martyrdom of Polycarp, about the bishop of Smyrna who died in the mid‐second century CE, is filled with so many allusions to Jesus’ passion and the Maccabean resistance that some scholars question its historical reliability.
The presence of literary borrowings, even outright invention, does not deny that “martyrs” could and did become powerful cultural symbols. For many of Jesus’ followers, “martyr” stories confirmed that being Christian meant always acting in a counter‐cultural way.
Perhaps to support those claims – which not every Christian in Rome agreed with – Eusebius was adamant about verifying the history behind the martyr legends. For example, although there is not a single piece of reliable evidence to confirm whether Peter or Paul were actually killed in Nero’s Rome, Eusebius claimed otherwise. “[T]heir names are preserved in the cemeteries of that place even to the present day” (Church History 2.25). According to a source allegedly seen by Eusebius, a man named “Gaius” who lived c.217 CE had spoken about these burial sites, “these places where the sacred corpses of the aforesaid apostles are laid [saying]: ‘But I can show [you] the trophies of the apostles. For if you will go to the Vatican [Hill] or to the Ostian Road, you will find the trophies of those who laid the foundations of this church” (Church History 2.25).
What do historians make of this testimony? Given that so many links in the chain of evidence are broken, it is difficult to know what is real and what is fiction. This conundrum has led some historians to ask different kinds of research questions, focusing instead on the ideology of martyrdom as it was articulated by living Christian writers or on the construction of gender codes as presented in the martyr stories.
At stake in these battles (and the prize awaiting those who fought hardest in them) was possession of the palace. Since the Rule of Four, this residency was more a traveling road‐show than any one prestige building. The Palatine Palace in Rome had not disappeared. A majestic architectural residence, of marble‐clad hallways, luxurious rooms, and over‐life‐size emperors whose names were synonymous with the glory of Rome –
Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius – the Palatine would continue to host rulers when they lived in the city through at least the sixth century CE. But the military mayhem that had devolved upon the empire in the third century had given Diocletian and many of his advisors the idea that the emperor and his staff should be more mobile.
Trier in Germany, Antioch in the eastern Mediterranean, Nicomedia in the vicinity of the Black Sea: the location of the imperial court in the early fourth century reflected a keen desire that, however big the empire, it would help the administration to have a power base nearby. Constantine would add yet another capital city to that list, the year he treated Romans to the gift of an empire ruled again by one man, not four.
In 324 CE, Constantine removed Licinius from power and dismantled the last vestiges of Diocletian’s system. For the first time in a generation, the Roman Empire was governed by one Augustus, evoking the glory of a bygone age. That year, Constantine also set in motion plans to build a capital city in Licinius’ old territory, at the ancient Greek city of Byzantium, now to be named after Constantine. Six years later, in 330 CE, Constantinople’s streets would be filled with joyous citizens for its inauguration. By decade’s end, in 337, the Christian emperor who had done so much to fight for the Christian community of the wider Roman world would be dead.
Like all conscientious dynasties, Constantine’s sons would make sure power did not leave the family at the emperor’s last breath. From 337–363, a member of the Constantinian household would govern Rome from its multiple capitals. All were raised Christian, even the last, Emperor Julian (361–363 CE). And contrary to the way scholars characterize their mission, none of them knew anything about the “Byzantine Empire.” Not one fourth‐century ruler of Constantinople ever believed their capital was anything but a branch of Rome’s power in the wider Mediterranean.
