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Jewish pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which had flourished at the time of Herod the Great, probably disappeared for the most part with the destruction of the Second Temple, though it is possible that some forms still survived (see Grossmark 2012, 92; Wilken 1992, 105–108). Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land is usually supposed to begin in the fourth century CE, specifically with the visit by Constantine’s mother Helena in 312 CE (in the course of which the True Cross was allegedly discovered), which, since her son was the emperor, resembles an imperial journey (Holum 1990). The famous early pilgrims are dated after that: the Bordeaux Pilgrim in 333 CE; Egeria, and Paula, recorded in a letter of Jerome (both late fourth century).29 Before then, it is questionable to what extent early Christians were interested in particular locations. At the same time, there are indications of visits by Christians as early as the second half of the second century CE, coinciding with the great resurgence of Greco-Roman paganism at that time.30 A bishop of Sardis called Melito, cited by Eusebius (Hist. eccl. 4.26.14; Bitton-Ashkelony 2005, 27), claimed to have visited “the East and the place where these things were preached and done”; and Alexander, a bishop in Cappadocia, also travelled to Jerusalem according to Eusebius (Hist. eccl. 6.11.2) for the purpose of prayer and “enquiry (historia) of the places,” a term which suggests the world of elite paideia (a connection made by Hunt 1984).
FURTHER READING
There best general study of pilgrimage in the Second Sophistic is Petsalis-Diomidis 2010. For pilgrimage to the oracle at Claros, see Busine 2005 and Lane Fox 1986, chapter 5. For pilgrimage by the educated elite see Galli 2005. Several articles by Jaś Elsner cover fundamental aspects: 1992, 1997a, and 1997b. For pilgrimage within Egypt, see Rutherford 2012. For pilgrimage in the Greek Romance, see Rutherford 2013, 349–354.
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CHAPTER 40
EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION
AARON P. JOHNSON
THE Christians who are the focus of the following discussion probably would have been dismayed to see that they were limited to a section entitled “Religion and Religious Literature” in the present Handbook. It is not that they did not explore the issues of the nature of the divine and the practices appropriate to their conception of true piety—issues we might readily place within the category of “religion” today. Within their conceptual framework, however, they did not differentiate their religious sensibilities as an identifiable category distinct from the categories of culture, ethnicity, literature, history, and philosophy. On the contrary, Christian thinkers of the second and third centuries saw themselves as the practitioners of true philosophy who embodied the cultural ideals of an ancient nation and its literature, which stood for them as the fount of all that was best in civilization. Conversion to Christianity was often conceived as a transfer of identity from one’s previous ethnic affiliations to membership within the Hebrew ethnos, whose ancient forefathers and way of life became one’s own. Even if not all Christians “on the street” of a Mediterranean city or village articulated or lived out such an identity transference, the representation of Christian identity in such terms is a persistent feature of Christian intellectual discourses of the early centuries of Christianity (Johnson 2006; Kimber Buell 2005; Lieu 2002, 2004; Olster 1995).
At the same time, elite Christian intellectuals of the second and third centuries were products of complex negotiations and resistances to ongoing imperial Hellenizing processes. It is thus something of a modern scholarly oddity that intellectuals such as Justin Martyr, Tatian, or Athenagoras are often omitted from studies of the Second Sophistic (whatever cultural and literary phenomena might be subsumed under that problematic label) and limited to treatments of the “rise” of Christianity, as though cultured men, pepaideumenoi, who self-identified as Christians (or as adherents of Hebrew philosophy) were somehow inhabiting different discursive traditions or cultural sites of performanc
e than those of Lucian or Aelius Aristides. While we should not underestimate the impact of the transfer of ritual (often exclusively) to a different deity, or the adoption of a different corpus of literature as the canon of philosophical truth, or the transfer of loyalties to different imagined communities and their narratives of shared history, there remains a significant rootedness of early Christian literature within literary and performative contexts of the imperial Mediterranean (Brent 2006; Nasrallah 2010). In particular, several early Christian philosophers played the role of the eloquent rhetor advising those in power, including the emperor; they negotiated the multiple valences of the logos in their own logoi; and they participated in the same ongoing “culture wars” of imperial Hellenism that Plutarch, Lucian, and others were engaged in, and even adopted many of the same strategies.
40.1 SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER
In response to unsympathetic representations and unjust treatment, some Christian intellectuals are recorded as addressing their concerns to the emperor himself. Beginning with Hadrian and continuing to Marcus Aurelius, a series of apologetic works named the emperor as their addressee.1 The earliest known apologetic treatise, of which only a single fragment survives, was addressed to Hadrian by a certain Quadratus (Euseb. Hist. eccl. 4.3.1–2). The same emperor was likewise the ostensible recipient of Aristides of Athens’s Apology (Euseb. Hist. eccl. 4.3.3), a work that was otherwise lost until the discovery in the second half of the nineteenth century of an explicitly attributed fragment of an Armenian translation sparked the identification of Syriac and Greek versions and fragments of the text. Melito of Sardis addressed an apology, of which only fragments remain, to Marcus Aurelius (Euseb. Hist. eccl. 4.13.8; 4.26.1–11). Justin Martyr’s well-known First Apology addressed itself to Antoninus Pius and his two sons, Verissimus (Marcus Aurelius) and Lucius, as well as the Senate and people of Rome. Finally, Athenagoras of Athens’s Legatio was an ambassadorial speech (logos presbeutikos) to Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus (Grant 1988b, 101). It remains debatable whether some or any of these apologies were read to the emperors, presented personally by their authors during eastern imperial tours (Grant 1988a), or were merely “open letters” to the emperors with no concrete attempts made to provide the emperor with a copy. The possibility that the apologists had genuine ambitions of being heard by the emperor cannot be too easily dismissed: submitting petitions to the emperor was a frequent practice of imperial subjects and, after all, they could have drawn on Philo of Alexandria as a model in this, as they would in so many other areas beginning in the late second and early third centuries. On the other hand, there seems to be no clear impact on the emperors if they ever did make it so far. It may be best to take the imperial dedications in these Christian texts as at least providing an important mode of self-presentation on the part of their authors: with a freedom of speech deriving from their heightened philosophical sensibilities and virtues, men like Justin had the courage to speak truth to power, bravely represent the interests of their fellow-Christians, and advise rulers in the ways of justice (cf. mutatis mutandis, Whitmarsh 2001, 186–190).