by Douglas Boin
Yet people who live through such acute moments of change are not exactly scrubbed clean of their memories when they wake up from them. In the days, months, and sometimes years that follow, the past stays with them. In this way, history doesn’t just move forward, a series of names and dates cascading endlessly in time. Time itself can be torn, or snagged on past events. Scholars who try to study this phenomenon are searching for the traces of social or cultural memories.
Memory was an important concept in classical antiquity. One Roman writer conceived of it like a vast mental mansion, where objects or emotions could be retrieved by walking through the rooms. In the slowly changing Roman Empire of Late Antiquity, memory could awaken in many individuals and communities a sense of nostalgia or inspire a new course of action for the future. “There are present within me,” Augustine of Hippo wrote in his Confessions, “heaven, earth, sea, and whatever I could think on therein – besides what I have forgotten. There also I meet with myself and recall myself and when, where, and what I have done and under what feelings. There is everything which I remember [in the “vast court” of memory], either on my own experience or on another’s credit” (Confessions 10.8, trans. adapted from Pusey [1907]). In Augustine’s retelling, the sum of his past experiences profoundly shaped the person whom he became. Or so he wanted us to believe.
The process of remembering and its opposite, forgetting, can work in different ways for different people. Historians need to be carefully attuned to these traces of the “past in the past.”
The life of the Greek philosopher Proclus (412–485 CE), who taught in Athens in the fifth century CE, testifies to competing value systems – and memories – aswirl in major metropolises. Athens itself offered many opportunities for Christians and non‐Christians to reflect on the cultural importance of the past.
According to the philosopher’s biography, the aspect of Athenian life which Proclus appreciated most was owning a home next to several historic landmarks. “This indeed was one of Proclus’ good fortunes: that he lived in the house that suited him best … It was in the vicinity of the Temple of Asklepios [the healing god] which the tragedian Sophocles had immortalized. It was also next to the Temple of Dionysus near the theater and was in sight of the Acropolis, too [the hill dedicated to Athena]” (Marinus, Life of Proclus 29–30, trans. adapted from Guthrie [1925]). Even with the increasing legislation against non‐Christian worship that had taken place during the Theodosian period, Proclus prided himself on his proximity to these majestic venues, haunted by larger‐than‐life figures, like the ghost of the talented literary star Sophocles.
For Proclus the memories of this culturally sophisticated age were so strong, in fact, that, when a group of Christian citizens tried to remove the cult statue of Athena from the Parthenon, he took the statue into his house (Marinus, Life of Proclus 30). Proclus’ “house of memories” would have looked quite a bit different from Augustine’s.
3.3 Acquiring Cultural Competence: The Study of Religion in History
The fact that Rutilius himself never once, in his entire poem, clearly or unequivocally states his religious identity makes it all the more important to understand what was happening in Late Antique society and culture. Rutilius himself was an equal opportunity religious critic. Passing an island of Christian ascetics – followers of Jesus who had retreated to an isolated world where they could deepen their faith and their connection to each other – he characterizes their choices as the “silly fanaticism (rabies, in Latin) of a distorted brain” (On His Return to Gaul 1.445, LCL trans.). Because of Rutilius’ low, apparently equal disregard for Jews and Christian monks, some scholars describe Rutilius as a “pagan,” that is, a non‐Christian.
There is no need for us to be so gullible or naive. Nothing prohibits a Christian, either then or now, from looking upon many of the beliefs and practices of their Christian peers and seeing the “silly fanaticism of a distorted brain.” In fact, there were many Christians in Late Antiquity who thought the same thing about their own Christian peers.
Lactantius and Augustine were two men who spoke out about the degrees of Christian madness around them. Lactantius wrote at the end of the third century CE and start of the fourth century; Augustine at the end of the fourth century and into the first three decades of the fifth century. Both were Christians, and both were aghast at some of the eyebrow‐raising beliefs held by their peers. Some in Lactantius’ community were prophesying that Antichrist would soon arrive in the guise of the beast, Emperor Nero, and that with Nero’s arrival, the world would come to an end. Lactantius called these Christians deliri, or “crazies,” for assuming they could foresee the future and for speculating wildly about the return of a dead emperor (On the Death of the Persecutors 2.8).
Augustine, writing nearly a century later, observed a similarly inexplicable phenomenon among Christians who were trying to make sense of difficult scripture passages. At issue was the interpretation of a difficult passage in his Bible. In the text known as “Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians,” the writer hints that “the secret power of lawlessness is already at work [in society]; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way” (2 Thess 2.7 [NRSV]). This text was written in the late first century CE, and Augustine confesses that he is “completely at a loss” as to what the writer of the passage was saying.
Augustine also states that many Christians of his own day were absolutely certain that they knew the secret meaning behind it:
Some suggest that [it means] Nero himself will rise again and will become Antichrist; others think that [Nero] was not slain, but was rather withdrawn so that he might be thought to have been slain and that he is still living in concealment in the vigor of the age that he had reached at the time when he was supposed to have died until in his own time he shall be revealed and restored to his kingdom. But I am amazed at the great audacity of those who hold these opinions. (Augustine, City of God 20.19, LCL trans. by W. Greene [1960])
According to Augustine, then, some Christians of his day believed that Nero would return from the dead and play the role of “Antichrist.” When he did, his reappearance would inspire the Second Coming of the Messiah, Jesus.
The nature of these convictions will likely astonish scientifically attuned ears. The important point here is to note that they were equally baffling to Christian men of the fourth and fifth century. Both Christian writers, Augustine and Lactantius, were disturbed by those people who, just like them, identified as “Christians” yet held these kinds of groundless beliefs. Lactantius’ disdain for these “crazies” and Augustine’s amazement that some Christians had the “great audacity” to read and interpret the Bible in this fantastical way provide us a useful warning. For historians who write about religion, it is extremely difficult to draw a complete picture of someone’s religious identity by making inferences from the poems they write, the goods they leave behind in their tombs, or even from the politicians they may support.
In the end, a writer like Rutilius Namatianus may not tell us anything about his own religious identity, but his blanket hatred for the Jewish people and his disdain for the “silly fanaticism” of monks do not make him a “pagan” by default. They certainly don’t disqualify him from being a Christian. The study of Late Antiquity requires a careful attention to social and cultural forces that shaped individual and community beliefs and behavior (Key Debates 3.1: Can We Ever Really Know What Happened?). Most important of all, there is no reason for historians to expect that all members of a religious group acted the same way at all times or even according to gross stereotypes.
Key Debates 3.1 Can We Ever Really Know What Happened?
Is history a science? In the field of modern history, it can sometimes seem that way. Data collection – from U.S. census figures to polling numbers to inflationary spending – shapes the questions historians ask about the past. In the field of ancient history, by contrast, archives filled with raw numbers rarely exist. Will anci
ent historians ever know what happened to the same degree of specifity?
The parallel lives of two nineteenth‐century German men illustrate the nature of this challenge and its lasting impact on contemporary ideas about doing history.
Leopold van Ranke (1795–1886) grew up in a world shaped by Enlightenment values of rationalism, empirical inquiry, and hard fact. Later, he excelled as a scholar of classical and European history. He was committed to using contemporary evidence, not secondary materials; and he advocated (though not always faithfully practiced) the importance of giving proper citations. Van Ranke believed his scientific methods would help scholars recover the past in a fresh way. “History has had assigned to it the office of judging the past and of instructing the present for the benefit of the future ages,” he commented in the preface to his History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations from 1494 to 1514 (1824). “To such high offices, the present work does not presume: it seeks only to show what actually happened,” translated by R. Wines in The Secret of World History (New York: Fordham University Press, 1981), p. 58.
This short German phrase, wie es eigentlich gewesen, “as it actually happened,” would nag, puzzle, and hound generations of historians, curious students, and dedicated amateurs.
Heinrich Schliemann (1812–1890) belongs in the latter category. Schliemann, a sly businessman, was deeply interested in what really happened. Using his wealth to hunt for gold, he set off to search for the legendary city of Troy. Schliemann’s “excavations” in modern Greece and Turkey succeeded in uncovering many spectacular artifacts, like gold jewelry and funerary masks, which still dazzle museum‐goers. Almost all these objects have little or nothing to do with the time of Homer.
Today, many scholars would prefer to cover the tracks of men like van Ranke and Schliemann, as well as their quest to discover history “as it really was.” Statues, paintings, and objets d’art are no longer used, like Schliemann once advocated, to dress up the “real” history deduced from textual sources; archaeological methods have become more precise, and material culture is now seen as an important source of primary evidence. Other researchers have turned a critical eye to the rhetorical nature of ancient texts. When discussing the lives of women, foreigners, or political opponents, these “primary sources” may not be as innocent as van Ranke once trusted they were. History as it actually happened seems a fool’s errand.
So where does that leave ancient historians? Is the study of the past merely the study of rhetoric, or can it still be something more comprehensive – a narrative?
One prominent twentieth‐century scholar has suggested a middle road between these extremes. “Wie es eigentlich gewesen [means] the right portrayal of relations” (M. Finley, Ancient History: Evidence and Models, 1985, p. 52). As the amount of Late Antique evidence expands to include new texts and new archaeological discoveries, the “right portrayal of relations” among these disparate pieces might be the best historians can aim for.
A cultural competency talking about religion in people’s lives is one of the first techniques an aspiring Late Antique historian has to master before advancing in the field. A key component of this competency is being able to recognize that the values which can bring people together – and the disputes that drive them into different factions and constituencies – can frequently cross the theological aisle. Just because someone identifies with the label “Christian” doesn’t mean they believe or act the same way as their neighbors, their family, or even their bishop.
3.4 Linking, not Disconnecting, Different Periods of Early Christianity
In the case we just examined, many Christians living in the fourth and fifth centuries CE were passionately fixated on the notion that the Roman Empire would very soon come to an end. To them, signs of Rome’s fall would be clear: “Antichrist,” the cosmic opponent of the Messiah, would arrive as a harbinger of the approaching battle. Then, Jesus’ Second Coming would follow. How had these odd seeds taken root in the landscape of later Rome? Where had they blown in from, and when? To answer these questions requires that we build a sturdy bridge between the time of Jesus and his first followers and the later world of “Late Antiquity Christianity.”
The need to link events in the first century CE to the fourth century CE will seem basic to many history students. That’s what historians are trained to do. They laboriously construct a framework for their analysis by looking carefully at everything that happened before. What could be more foundational to the study of Late Antiquity, then, than to follow the footsteps of people from Jesus’ time into the later landscape of Lactantius and Augustine? Ruefully, very few historical narratives interrogate the rise of Christianity from the first century to the fourth century without relying explicitly or implicitly upon assumptions about the superiority of the Christian faith.
The following examples illustrate why the Second Temple period of Jewish history and early Christian history cannot be so easily cut off from the world of Late Antiquity.
Paul and the context of the late Second Temple period
Paul is the Jewish writer who left behind, in ancient Greek, the earliest written accounts of the Jesus movement. In 2014, one historian of Late Antiquity called him “a Jewish convert to Christianity,” but this characterization is regretfully inaccurate. Paul was a Jewish man who believed that the risen Jesus (the “Christ,” a Greek adjective which means “the Anointed One,” or the “Messiah”) provided a path to salvation without the need for him to abandon his own Jewish upbringing. Perhaps for this reason, Paul never referred to the early Jesus movement as a separate religion – which we call “Christianity” – nor did he ever preach about the moral requirements of being a “Christian” or even self‐identify with that label.
We know these things because seven of Paul’s writings have been preserved in Christian Scripture, and neither the word “Christianity” nor the term “Christian” appears in any of them. All of these authentic texts date to the 50s CE, making them earlier even than the Gospels. In not one does Paul ever claim to be “a Jewish convert to Christianity.” Even in sentences which might imply, in English, that Paul has parted ways from his Jewish roots, the reality is more complex.
At the one place where Paul mentions his “earlier life in Judaism” (Galatians 1.13), he uses the Greek word Ioudaïsmos. Often erroneously translated as “Judaism,” this word did not refer to the “religion of the Jewish people,” as we might use that English word now. Invented in the second century BCE by the anonymous author of the text known as Second Maccabees, Ioudaïsmos was a curious, contested word. It had been coined during a Jewish revolt against the Hellenistic rulers of Jerusalem, a military battle which led to the creation of the festival of Hanukkah in 164 BCE. This victory also gave a Jewish family, the Hasmoneans, direct control over the priesthood of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The Maccabean revolt is one of the most important, transformational events of the late Second Temple period.
According to the writer of Second Maccabees, the word Ioudaïsmos was being waved like a political banner during this polarizing age. On the one hand, it united Jews who were fighting with the Maccabees against the incursion of Hellenistic influences on Jerusalem. On the other hand, given that many of their Jewish friends and family were quite comfortable adapting to Hellenistic customs and social practices, this word would have divided Jews as much as it united them. Ioudaïsmos advocated only one specific way of being Jewish. (The ultimate irony is that the text of Second Maccabees, which laments the spread of Hellenistic influences, was written in Hellenistic Greek.)
Paul is the first person we know of in all of Greek literature to use the word Ioudaïsmos after the Second Maccabees, and for that reason, we can be certain he was drawing upon the meaning of the word as it was used in the late Second Temple context. And so, when he claims to have left behind his “earlier life in Ioudaïsmos,” he was not stating that he had radically parted ways from his Jewish upbringing. He was making an alternate claim about “being Jewish.” For him, it wa
s one that now depended upon a belief that Jesus had been the Messiah. Many of Jesus’ first followers, raised in the Jewish tradition, would make the same faith leap.
Paul’s legacy, forged texts, and the rise of Christianity
This conversation continued after Paul’s death, often in his name and obviously without his knowledge. According to a majority of biblical scholars, the text Augustine was looking at, “Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians,” was not written by Paul. It had been composed after Paul’s death (d. c.62–64 CE) by someone pretending to be him. For that reason, scholars categorize it as a “pseudepigraphic” text. This technical term is derived from the Greek words meaning “to write” [graphein] “falsely” [pseudos].
The idea that there might be forgeries in Christian Scripture shocks students who have been taught to believe that the “Bible” is the literal word of God and that it would not contain such falsehoods and deceits. But Second Thessalonians is not the only pseudepigraphic text in the Bible. The First and Second Letters to Timothy, as well as the Letter to Titus, are the three other pseudepigraphic texts of Christian Scripture. Like the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, all were written and circulated after Paul’s death. The circumstances that led a now‐anonymous writer to draft a sequel to Paul’s “First Letter to the Thessalonians” are fascinating. In his own letter, Paul had used language which alluded to a coming end time (1 Thess 5.1–3).
Because the world did not end in Paul’s lifetime, however, many who had remembered hearing Paul preach may have started to doubt his authority in the years after he died. For if Paul had been mistaken about the timetable for the Second Coming of the Messiah, what else might he have gotten wrong, they would have wondered? The writer of “Second Thessalonians” invented a creative way to airbrush these concerns. Drafting a letter that mimicked Paul’s style, the now‐anonymous author expanded, elaborated on, and corrected Paul’s teachings about “The End.” By including predictions that even Augustine found impossible to understand (“[T]he one who now holds [the mystery of lawlessness] back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way”), the writer who forged this document reinforced the core of Paul’s authority while casually updating Paul’s teachings. “Second Thessalonians” reassured the wider community that Paul had not been wrong about the Second Coming after all.
