by Kevin Reilly
As a consequence, Christians often found themselves on the wrong side of Roman law and tradition. Sometimes Roman governors were as confused as Christians about what their proper relationship should be. Pliny, governor of the Roman province of Bithynia, wrote to the emperor Trajan (98–117) to ask if it was proper to seek out Christians for persecution or respond only when they were brought to trial. Trajan urged restraint, but other emperors did not. Nero (54–68) stocked the gladiatorial slaughters with willing martyrs. “Sometimes they were killed with the axe,” the Christian historian Eusebius wrote. “Sometimes they were hung up by the feet over a slow fire.”11 The story of young Perpetua of Carthage may not have been uncommon. Having survived the attack of a wild animal and the unsteady sword of the executioner, she grabbed the blade herself and directed it to her throat.12 The example of Christian martyrs would be a memory with which others might build the faith, and their blood would fortify the soil in which the Christian community would be raised.
Conversion of the Roman Empire
It would be interesting to know if Christianity spread rapidly under the relatively tolerant policies of Trajan and his successors from 90 to 160. Or did Christianity thrive more in the harsh years that began with Marcus Aurelius in 161, when the “barbarian” attacks and war with the Parthian Empire brought an end to the century of peace? The years of war, economic crisis, and plague could have increased the following for all religious cults, including Christianity, but their prominence likely increased the popular reaction against them. These were years in which Marcus Aurelius sought refuge in his Meditations in Stoicism (a philosophy not unlike Christianity in that it counseled acceptance, even surrender to adversity). But the years after the plague of 165 also witnessed an increase in Christian persecutions, even demonstrations where mobs chanted, “Christians to the lions,” a scapegoating that might also indicate a greater prominence for the new faith.
The fact is that we know little about how quickly Christianity grew. The historian Gibbon estimated that about 5 percent of the Roman population was Christian in 250; modern historians think the percentage was much less. Constantine’s biographer, the historian Eusibius, saw three surges in Christian conversions: the early period of Paul and the apostles, the era of the great theologians in the 180s, and the period just before Constantine’s conversion in 312. But like us, he had no records or statistics and may have been more impressed by the proliferation of theological works in these periods.
The Eastern Roman Empire and Beyond . Christians were more numerous in the Eastern Roman Empire. This might be surprising because Americans and western Europeans usually envision a map of Christianity centered on Rome. But such a map would include only Roman or Latin Christianity. Before the rise of Islam, there were numerous Christian traditions. Greek, Syrian (Nestorian), and Armenian Christian churches prospered throughout eastern Europe and Asia. Egyptian (Coptic) and Ethiopian Christianity spread in Africa before Europe. A map of early Christianity might best be centered in Syria, where it began, and from where adherents established churches in Mesopotamia, Persia, central Asia, India, and even China, as well as the Mediterranean, North Africa, and Europe.
East of Rome, even east of Athens, lay all the Hellenistic cities with their ancient Jewish communities as well as legions of soldiers. From Syria to Persia, great cities attracted peoples from Rome to India. Christianity thrived in this land of cities; Christians used the word pagans, for “country people”—to designate non-Christians. The cities of the Middle East were cauldrons of changing faiths and newly forged sects. A modern historian describes one group of ancient Christians near modern Basra, Iraq, that demonstrates their variety:
During the second and third centuries, groups of Baptists [Christians] could be found in the district between the mouth 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.13
From a community like this came the prophet Mani, whose Manichaeism combined elements of Christianity and Persian Zoroastrianism. From here, missionaries sailed out the Persian Gulf to India, where Christian communities traced their origins back to a first- or early second-century apostle called Judas Thomas. In the middle of the second century, Christians in India wrote to Syria asking for a bishop since their previous one had died. The early Christian world was one of great diversity.
Soldiers and Emperors . Like Buddhism, Christianity was ultimately successful thanks to the support of important political leaders: kings and emperors. Even before the Roman emperor Constantine supported Christianity in 312, kings in Syria had converted, contributing legitimacy and numerous followers.
We do not know precisely why Constantine supported Christianity after 312. Probably no more than 10 percent of the empire’s inhabitants were Christians when Constantine embraced the faith. Many were no doubt women, his mother among them. But soldiers also converted to Christianity, especially in the eastern and African provinces. The story is told of Constantine’s predecessor, the emperor Maximian, relying on a legion from Upper Egypt to conquer the tribes of the Alps. To celebrate their success, Maximian asked them to execute some Christian captives. But all the 6,600 men of the Theban legion were also Christians. Under their leader Maurice, they refused and offered their own necks to Roman swords. To commemorate the sacrifice of this Egyptian legion, the town of Aquanum (in modern Switzerland) changed its name to St. Maurice, or St. Moritz. For Maximian’s successor, the loyalty of Roman troops would have been a matter of great importance.
In 312, the historian Eusibius tells us, on the night before Constantine was forced to do battle with Maximian’s son to secure the crown, Constantine saw a flaming cross in the sky inscribed with the words, “In this sign thou shalt conquer.” Subsequently, he embraced Christianity and won the battle. The following year (313), Constantine issued an edict making Christianity an officially tolerated religion throughout the Roman Empire. Less than a century later, Christianity was proclaimed the official religion of the Roman Empire.
The Tribes of Europe . An emperor may be wise to take the religion of his soldiers, and anyone who seeks the favor of the emperor would be wise to share his religion, but what of the common people of the empire? The various tribes of Europe—the Helvitii in the Alps and the Germans, Gauls, Celts, and Saxons—had their own tribal gods, festivals, and celebrations. What did they need of the emperor’s religion, especially after the empire had vanished? How did the tribes of Europe become Christian? Some, no doubt, were persuaded by the idea of a single god; some embraced the Christian promise of life after death. But the language of the Christian scriptures was as Greek to the tribes of Europe as Indian Buddhism was Sanskrit to the Chinese. To make the message intelligible, Christian missionaries molded it to European tribal traditions. They adopted pagan feast days, setting, for instance, the birthday of Jesus at the time of the winter solstice and northern fire festivals that marked the returning sun. They set a place for tribal deities at the table of Christ as saints and angels, integrating their stories, attributes, and holidays. Pope Gregory the Great instructed Augustine, his missionary to England, not to destroy the pagan temples. “Only remove their idols. Then sprinkle them with holy water and build altars. Pagans will be more willing to worship the true God in familiar surroundings.”14
Sometimes, however, tribal deities had to be confronted rather than accommodated. After converting to Christianity, the Hessians of Germany reverted to their pagan ways. Around 719, the pope sent Boniface to bring the Hessians back to the true faith. According to the saint’s disciple and biographer, Boniface gathered the people around a large oak tree, known from antiquity as the Oak of Ju
piter. He then raised an ax and brought it down into the tree, slicing into the bark. Just as he did so, a great wind blew from the heavens, knocking the tree down, cutting it into four equal pieces. “At the sight of this extraordinary spectacle, the heathens who had been cursing ceased to revile and began, on the contrary, to believe and bless the Lord.”15 In gratitude, they split the logs into lumber and built a church to St. Peter, we are told. Like Buddhism, Christianity spread amid tales of miracles.
Orthodoxy, Heresy, and Assimilation . In order to be successful, a new religion must choose its fights carefully. Missionaries must know where to bend and where to resist. Churches must distinguish what is important from what is inconsequential. For Christians, pagan feast days, holy sites, and physical buildings were secondary. The word of God was important: the holy writ, ideas, theology, and beliefs. We have seen that Buddhists also worked to keep their sacred writings. But for Buddhists, the sacred writings constituted more of an archive than commandments. They provided continuity of tradition, not the demands of God. Chinese Buddhists continued to honor their parents and ancestors and even visit Confucian and Daoist shrines and temples.
Because Christians believed that they possessed the word of God, correct ideas were crucial. The right doctrine was everything. Especially since Christians after Paul believed that faith or belief was sufficient for salvation, what one believed was a matter of eternal life or death.
But there were many different Christian beliefs during the first Christian centuries. A basic matter like the nature of Christ was hotly debated. Some said that Jesus was a human prophet, much like John the Baptist. Others said that Christ had two natures: human and divine. Some believed that Christ was all divine. Still others said that Christ was part of a trinity that included God the Father and the Holy Ghost. In general, particular interpretations tended to hold sway in particular sees or bishops’ cities. Antioch, for instance, was a hotbed for believers in a human Christ. The bishops of the great cosmopolitan cities of Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople generally heard wider-ranging debates than did the bishops of Rome, but all sought to achieve some uniformity of belief.
The bishops called councils of church leaders together to determine which beliefs were proper and which were not. A series of these councils, many of their locations testifying to the importance of Eastern cities (Nicea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon), finally led to the designation of certain beliefs as orthodox and others as heresies.
Orthodoxy defined and fought heresy, but it also prevented assimilation. The problem is that by underlining the differences between proper and improper ideas, orthodoxy also created heresies. Some heresies had staying power, but most eventually died out, their adherents eventually assimilating or waiting for the next orthodoxy.
Christianity in Europe and China . We often think of Christianity as a European religion despite its obvious Middle Eastern origins. But in the early centuries, before the rise of Islam, Christianity also spread widely in Egypt and North Africa. The Egyptian and Syrian churches sent missionaries to Ethiopia, Yemen, India, and central Asia. Ethiopia to this day hosts a large Christian population. In central Asia and China, Christians congregated in oasis towns and market cities. But Christianity, unlike Buddhism, failed to put down deep roots in China.
One historian, Jerry H. Bentley, argues that the failure of Nestorian Christianity to win China was due to the tendency of its missionaries to assimilate too thoroughly. They not only translated Christianity through Daoism but also eventually became Daoists. Bentley points to an early eighth-century document attributed to a Persian missionary who was head of the Nestorian Christian church in the Chinese capital of Chang’an:
The treatise portrays Jesus teaching Simon Peter and other disciples, but the doctrines advanced there are specifically and almost exclusively Daoist. To attain rest and joy, according to the Jesus of this sutra, an individual must avoid striving and desire but cultivate the virtues of nonassertion and non-action. These qualities allow an individual to become pure and serene, a condition that leads to illumination and understanding. Much of the treatise explains four chief ethical values: non-desire, or the elimination of personal ambition; non-action, the refusal to strive for wealth and worldly success; non-virtue, the avoidance of self-promotion; and non-demonstration, the shunning of an artificial in favor of a natural observance of these virtues. The treatise in fact does not offer a single recognizably Christian doctrine but offers instead moral and ethical guidance of the sort that Daoist sages had taught for a millennium.16
Were all Nestorians as indifferent to orthodoxy or as willing to assimilate? Probably not. Earlier Nestorians taught monotheism—God as creator of all things, Jesus Christ as savior—and related many of the stories of the life of Jesus presented in the New Testament. Nestorian Christians in India maintained Christian beliefs and practices as they lived as a separate community although treated by Hindus as a separate caste. Nestorian missionaries along the Silk Road won converts among the Turkic-speaking tribes of the great grasslands. Many Mongols married into Nestorian families in fact. Only among the Mongols were Nestorian traders able to gain preferential treatment, and that provoked a Muslim reaction.17 Elsewhere, the Nestorians lacked the close bond of merchants and political leaders that benefited the spread of Buddhism and Islam. Nowhere east of Syria did Nestorians win the exclusive political backing of a monarch or major tribal chieftain.
The Nestorian church was cut off from its political foundations in Antioch by charges of heresy and the imposition of Roman and Byzantine orthodoxy. Nestorian monasteries in central Asia and China floated in alien seas with neither local moorings nor distant, safe harbors. They breathed an atmosphere of acceptance of (or indifference to) new religious ideas. Orthodoxy seemed far away.
Christianity in Europe enjoyed the backing of the state in both Rome and Constantinople. With one exception, the emperors after Constantine were Christian. By the end of the fourth century, Christianity was the religion of the empire, east and west. Orthodoxy was enforced by the Roman emperor in the fourth century as well as by the Roman pope. After the breakdown of imperial authority in the west, the Roman pope alone held the reins of orthodoxy over the tribes of western Europe. While the Roman pope had a say with the patriarchs of other sees in doctrinal disputes east of Italy, the Roman church had a free hand in the west. Thus, even after there was no longer an emperor in Rome, the doctrines of the Roman church were taught from Ireland to Italy.
Increasingly after the eighth century, however, the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch declined to take direction from Rome. A final break came between Rome and Constantinople in 1054, but by then centuries of separate language (Latin vs. Greek), culture, and development had created a schism that has lasted to the present day. Eastern orthodox churches tended to be more tied to national governments. The first officially Christian nation was declared by King Tira-dates of Armenia in 301, 12 years before Constantine’s conversion. In the Byzantine Empire, centered in Constantinople after the sixth century, the emperor often played a forceful role in the church (a political dominance that came to be known as Caesaro-Papism). But the missionaries from Constantinople brought the same doctrine to Russia that they brought to Bulgaria. Despite national differences, Orthodox churches tended to bring a similar kind of piety throughout the newly Christianized domains of the later medieval period. In piety, liturgy, and beliefs, these churches were not very different from those that spread from Rome.18
In summary, Christianity spread a common culture from Ireland to central Asia. Despite differences in dogma or institutional loyalties, a common identity as Christians was strong enough to encourage pilgrimages, missionaries, and (after 1095) crusades on behalf of the shared faith. In Jerusalem, Egypt, or central Asia, Christians met not only fellow Christians but also representatives of the other increasingly global cultures—the missionaries of southernization, of Buddhism, and, beginning in the seventh century, the bearers of a new
universal faith called Islam.
The Rise of Islam: The Making
of a Modern World Civilization
The Islamic world was the third universal cultural system to spread across Eurasia in the first millennium CE. In many ways, it was the successor of the universal religious systems that preceded it. Islam, the religion of Muslims, was (and is) a continuation of the monotheistic salvation religion that sprang from the scriptures of Jews and Christians. For Muslims, Muhammad was the last of a line of prophets that included Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. But for Muslims, the most recent of God’s revelations was received by the last and greatest of the prophets, Muhammad. The Quran (or Koran), Muslims believe, was dictated to Muhammad by the archangel Gabriel in the early seventh century CE. Muhammad recited the words, which were later compiled into the present book.
Salvation, Endings, and Beginnings
The Quran continued to stress many of the themes of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity. Prominent among these were the ideas of a cosmic struggle, a last judgment, and the prospect of heaven for the righteous. But the Islamic idea of salvation was much more optimistic than the Christian. Christian salvation (like Buddhist) held out a balm for a suffering world. Christians and Buddhists appealed generally to the less prosperous classes of the Roman and Chinese empires, and they entered the mainstream during the empires’ decline after the second century CE.
