by Douglas Boin
Like many other Christians in the Roman Empire, Augustine of Hippo didn’t actually care whether Paul had authored Second Thessalonians. Nor did many other Christian writers ever take care to distinguish Paul’s genuine letters from the ones forged in his name. They simply included these texts in their Bible and began relying upon them as authoritative documents. Bishop Cyprian of Carthage, who lived in the middle of the third century CE, shows us the power these texts could have. Cyprian wanted to convince follow bishops to stop attending civic events in their Roman cities, so he appealed to the authority of Scripture: “[T]he Apostle [Paul] warns [you] and says, ‘A bishop (episkopos, written in Greek) must be blameless being the steward of God’” (Cyprian, Letter 67.5, trans. adapted from R. Donna). The text which Cyprian quotes is not the “Apostle,” however. It is the pseudepigraphic “Letter of Titus” (Titus 1.7), written after Paul’s death.
These later texts were undeniably instrumental in giving shape to early Christianity as an institution. Many of them articulated an organizational structure – of deacons, priests, and bishops – that helped the Jesus movement gain momentum as a group. But historians of Late Antiquity cannot treat these early texts so carelessly. One scholar has proposed the following reconstruction about the history of church leadership: “Paul advised his close associate Timothy on how to regulate the internal structure of the Christian communities,” and then, “Paul repeated several of these injunctions in his Letter to Titus” (1 Timothy 3.1–7 [NRSV]). Unfortunately, neither text, First Timothy or the Letter to Titus, was written by Paul. In fact, none of Paul’s authentic letters sheds any light on the status of “bishops” in the early church because the office did not exist in the middle of the first century CE. In history, facts are still important.
That’s why, whether one is exploring the role of martyrs in promoting or damaging the profile of the early church, or investigating how a hierarchy of church offices developed over time, historians of Late Antiquity can’t simply bypass the bridge connecting early Christian history to later Christian history. Late Antique Christians did not live in a self‐enclosed world, cut off from the roots of the Jesus movement. Jesus’ followers in the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries CE were inventing a future for themselves by actively engaging with the memory of who they were, where their movement had come from, and where Christianity was going (Political Issues 3.1: Emperor Galerius’ Edict of Toleration, 311 CE).
Political Issues 3.1 Emperor Galerius’ Edict of Toleration, 311 CE
In 303, many Christians in the Roman Empire were suddenly nervous. Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea Maritima and writer of a contemporary church history, explains why.
It was in the nineteenth year of the reign of Diocletian, in the month Dystrus [a way of recording time used in Macedonia, roughly February], called ‘March’ by the Romans, when the feast of the Savior’s passion was near at hand, that royal edicts were published everywhere, commanding that the churches be leveled to the ground and the scriptures be destroyed by fire, and ordering that those who held places of honor be degraded, and that the household servants, if they persisted in the profession of Christianity, be deprived of freedom. (Eusebius, Church History 8.2, trans. by A. McGiffert in the NPNF series [1890])
For only the second time in Rome’s history, Jesus’ followers were being targeted with legal discrimination. The first period of Roman conservative ire had come two generations earlier. In 257–258 CE, two years before being killed in a battle with the Sasanians, the short‐lived Emperor Valerian had compelled wealthier Christians to forfeit their property. Valerian also singled out institutional leaders – deacons, priests, and bishops – for arrest. That, at least, is the account given in the one source, a third‐century Christian text known as the Proconsular Acts of St. Cyprian.
A half century later, Roman authorities remained convinced that “Christians,” as these people called themselves, were enemies of the state. Within a few months of Diocletian’s hostile campaign against them, “other decrees were issued,” Eusebius reports, which ordered “that all the rulers of the churches in every place be first thrown into prison and afterwards by every artifice be compelled to sacrifice” (Eusebius, Church History 8.2). For individuals and families who suffered through these two, intense periods of state‐sanctioned prejudice – the only two documentable periods of “persecution” on record in the first four hundred years of Christian history – the emotional, even physical toll must have been high.
The politician traditionally seen as ending this age of intolerance is the emperor and general Constantine. In 312 CE, after seeing a vision in the sky, he instructed soldiers to emblazon their shields with the chi‐rho, the two‐letter Greek monogram corresponding to the word for the “Messiah” (“Christ”). One year later, he and his co‐ruler Licinius gave Christians the legal protection they had been seeking.
Constantine’s beliefs and the reasons behind his toleration decree have been endlessly debated ever since. Amid the fixation on Constantine’s Christianity, though, another edict, published by an equally fascinating figure, remains relatively overlooked.
In 311 CE, Emperor Galerius made a similar decree. After Galerius’ death, it was quickly repealed, but its import cannot be dismissed. Galerius’ act of toleration shows that at least one high‐powered official, a non‐Christian, was ready to accept Christians as part of society.
Constantine’s conversion makes for a more compelling drama, naturally. So, too, does Galerius’ death. One Christian writer claimed Galerius was devoured by worms, the same malady that had stricken Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 2 Maccabees (Lactantius, On the Death of the Persecutors 33). Scholars can debate the veracity of Galerius’ death, but Christianity’s acceptance was not necessarily dependent on having a Christian in the imperial palace.
The bridge from the Christianity of today to the Christianity of the ancient Roman world zig‐zags quite a bit; it is not a straight crossing. But the world of the Second Temple period, of Jesus and of Paul provides an essential context for understanding the concerns of Christians, Jews, and others in the third through eighth centuries CE. The time has now come to shine our spotlight on them.
3.5 Pre‐Modern vs. Early Modern History: A Note on Sources
Where will we look for our evidence? A historian of the medieval or modern period has access to caches of documents. These can include town archives, state archives, journalists’ interviews, newspaper accounts, and legal documents. These historians also use material culture – Thomas Jefferson’s writing desk, family photographs, posters advertising the sale of humans into slavery in the Caribbean – to broaden the body of evidence on which they draw. The result is a mash‐up of voices, recorded from different sources, that allow us to see history from multiple perspectives.
For pre‐modern history, such as that of the Mediterranean world in Late Antiquity, the challenges of our evidence are similar but different. Although there are no state archives to visit, there are certainly texts: sermons, law codes, records of church councils, letters, even treatises on various subjects like architecture and war. There is very little data, however, which directly pertains to the kinds of questions a historian of the modern period might want to ask: no data‐heavy economic reports, no government white papers on trade or inflation, no public policy memos on health issues or plague. The ancient historian’s task is made more difficult by the fact that many features of the pre‐modern landscape do not map easily onto the terrain of the modern world (Working With Sources 3.1: Was There an Ancient Word for Our Idea of “Religion”?).
Working With Sources 3.1 Was There an Ancient Word for Our Idea of “Religion”?
The Edict of Galerius and the Edict of Constantine and Licinius pose challenges for historians. One of the foremost issues is how to translate the technical ancient terms. The Latin word religio (plural religiones), a concept rendered in Greek by the word threskeia, is a particularly vexing case. Adding an ‐n to the Latin word makes it look like a familiar E
nglish one. But is that what it meant to Greek and Latin speakers?
In recent years, this question has captivated scholars of religion. One researcher has observed that most studies on ancient “religion” treat the topic with “a surprising, and amusing similarity [to] the way people talk about defining hard‐core pornography,” that is, “I know it when I see it” (B. Nongbri, Before Religion [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013], p. 15). Some find this call for more precise definitions too pedantic, but the issues are not trivial. The categories scholars use to classify their subjects can say much more about their own interests than they do about how the people of the past saw themselves.
Consider the word religio in the two edicts granting Christians freedom of worship. Galerius’ edict is known from a Latin text. Constantine and Licinius’ is preserved in both a Greek and a Latin version.
Galerius uses religio exactly once. The emperor claimed he had been motivated to act because Christians were refusing to demonstrate “the care and proper worship (cultus et religio) owed to the gods” (Lactantius, On the Death of the Persecutors 34.4). Here, the translation, “proper worship,” makes the most sense because it is consistent with four hundred years of Latin usage.
To Romans, religio was a word that referred to the socially acceptable way that people of all classes and backgrounds showed their respect and reverence for the gods. Anyone who dared to harness the power of the gods for their own gain – by putting a hex on their neighbor, for example, or by praying for the ruin of a former lover – practiced a different kind of worship, one that was socially unacceptable. When Romans talked about these devious ne’er‐do‐wells, they denigrated them as engaging in superstitio, or “delusion.”
Today’s observer might describe both of these behaviors as forms of religion. But to Romans, only those rituals that benefited the state could properly be termed a religio. It’s an important distinction, and one that the emperors Constantine and Licinius understood, as well.
In the so‐called Edict of Milan, the two men explained the rationale behind their decree. They wanted “to give to Christians and to everyone else a free ability to follow the form of worship (religio) which each person wished” (Lactantius, Death of the Persecutors 48.2; Eusebius, in his Greek version, uses thrēskeía, Church History 10.5.2). By rendering this legal language in a more precise, culturally sensitive and specific way, it becomes clear that Christians were not being granted “religious liberty” in the modern sense of the term – as if they were now released from the basic rules of decent, civic engagement.
Christians were now expected to worship in a socially acceptable way that benefited the state, just like everyone else. Neither edict established Christianity as the state religion.
What we have, in short, is a massive puzzle – of tens of thousands of seemingly random pieces, strewn across the borders of the sixty‐two modern nations where the Roman Empire once existed – with no cardboard box cover to show us what our final picture should look like. How is it possible to take these pieces and assemble a historical landscape? In the following chapters, you will begin to learn how, as Late Antiquity, magically, begins to appear.
Summary
The task of a historian is challenging. By comparing and contrasting sources, drawn from textual and material culture, historians not only try to determine what happened in the past; they also try to explain change over time. To do so, sources are evaluated in their specific context, giving proper attention to time and place. As we learned from the example of Stilicho’s statue base in Rome, however, or from Rutilius Namatianus’ opinions about Jews, historians also need to investigate how memories of other times and places can shape or even warp an individual’s thoughts, actions, and motives. When studying the nature of people’s religious beliefs or how they might affect political behavior, historians also need to exercise care, so as not to suggest that all members of a faith group are programmed to act in an identical fashion. The fact that both Lactantius and Augustine tried to push back against irrational tendencies within their own communities – as evidenced by those who were interpreting current events as if they heralded the coming of the Antichrist – demonstrates that Christians did not always share the same understanding of their scriptures, either in the early fourth century or the early fifth century CE.
Finally, we looked at the long, complicated process by which Christianity sprouted from its Jewish roots. This topic, which includes having a greater understanding of the Jewish figure Paul, cannot be left unaddressed by Late Antique historians because it affects how we read texts that were written in his name. The emergence of the church office of bishop, for example, is a development in Christian leadership that dates to the early second century CE, not the period of Paul.
Study Questions
Who was Stilicho and what did Claudian, the public relations poet, think of him? How did other people view Stilicho?
In your own words, retell the story of Jesus’ followers in the first century CE. What about the group had changed by the fourth century CE? What had stayed the same?
In this chapter we saw that history is an argument, based on evidence, about who should be remembered and why. Can you think of another example that illustrates this idea?
Explain some of the challenges ancient historians face in finding historical evidence.
Suggested Readings
Bart Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Karl Galinsky (ed.), Memory in Ancient Rome and Early Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (New York: HarperOne, 2013).
L. Michael White, From Jesus to Christianity (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001).
Part II
Late Antiquity Appears
4
Power
How did people understand their place in the Late Antique world? How did political boundaries define their allegiances, and how did their identities change when those boundaries were redrawn? How is it even possible for us to stand outside some groups, looking out, while adopting the perspective of other groups, looking in? The questions are difficult to answer in any period. They are especially hard to tackle when the two groups we have our eyes trained on didn’t give much thought to engaging each other in neutral terms. Is it fair, for example, to stigmatize an entire population of Late Antique men and women as “uncultured,” “uncivilized,” or “barbaric” simply because they had the misfortune of being on the wrong side of our written sources?
The third century CE is an excellent starting point for this discussion, for it witnessed the rise of Sasanian Persia, which would parry with the Roman state both militarily and politically over the next three hundred years. Although the relationship between these two empires can be told as one of hostilities and conflict, as we saw in Chapter 2, this chapter digs beneath that rough exterior to find signs of more constructive communication. Both Roman and Sasanian monuments, rituals, artifacts, and texts reveal the nature of this quieter conversation unfolding in the background of so much political bluster. This chapter begins, then, not at the bottom of history but with the shifting power dynamics that affected the Mediterranean and broader world at the top.
4.1 Third‐Century Politics
For Rome in the third century CE, an empire that had dominated ancient Mediterranean life for more than three hundred years, the balance of power was about to change. Their new geopolitical neighbor was assembling that empire out of the pieces of old Parthia. It was an empire that would encompass modern Iran and, to its west, Iraq (the so‐called Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers), as well as land to the north and west: portions of modern Armenia and territory in the southern regions of the Caucasus Mountains, between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. Founded in 226 CE when a member of the Sasanian family deposed the previous ruling dynasty, the
Arsacids, the Sasanian Empire would remain a crucial power player in Late Antique history through the reign of its last king, 651 CE. Its capital was located at Ctesiphon, a suburb of modern Baghdad.
Romans had a long strategic interest in this region. They captured it once but ultimately decided not to control it. In the early second century CE, Emperor Trajan (r. 98–117) envisioned creating an official Roman province here, “Mesopotamia.” That political territory was carved from the land belonging to the Parthians, whom Trajan’s army had defeated. But the project never went forward. For much of the second and early third centuries, the Parthians continued to govern the land that lay just beyond the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Their presence there also kept several smaller, political entities in check. Territories in Armenia, Osrhoene (a kingdom to the northwest of Mesopotamia), and Hatra (a kingdom located south of Mosul, Iraq) were governed by local officials who allied with Parthia or Rome when, or if, they thought it convenient.
