Our view of Christians in the Roman Empire during their first three hundred years is profoundly affected by what happened both to Christianity and to the empire in the course of the fourth century. In 312 ce, Constantine began Christianity’s conversion to a form of imperial Roman religion. Becoming the patron of one branch of the church, he used his prestige, his authority, and a good deal of publicly-funded largesse on behalf of this now-favored community. As Constantine consolidated his own power, so too did those urban bishops upon whom he increasingly relied as ad hoc administrators of welfare and justice (Drake 2000: 309-440). Throughout the course of the fourth century, interrupted dramatically but only briefly by the reign of Constantine’s pagan nephew Julian (361-3), imperial and ecclesiastical politics grew increasingly entwined. The emperors were always unambiguously supreme. Their support for projects important to the bishops, however, ultimately enabled the bishops to have a profound effect not only on their own contemporaries, whether Christian, Jewish, or pagan (Fowden 1978; Bradbury 1994), but also on their distant cultural descendants, modern historians of ancient Christianity.
The long shadow cast by these bishops gives the measure of their commitment to the ideology of orthodoxy. ‘‘Orthodoxy’’ means ‘‘right opinion.’’ In the period before Constantine, this term might serve as a self-designation for any Christian group: ‘‘orthodoxy’’ is always ‘‘my doxy.’’ All the various Christian communities, in their rivalry with each other, claimed to represent the ‘‘true faith,’’ the only way. We see this as early as the late first century, when Matthew’s Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, repudiates other Christians whose views and practices are, presumably, different from those of Matthew’s community (Mt 7:15-23). And we see this in the generation after Constantine, when the political split between East and West Rome corresponded to differing theological constructions ofthe person ofChrist. Each side viewed itself as ‘‘orthodox,’’ and accused the other of heresy (Hunt 1998: 7-43).
What changed with Constantine, however, was the nature, and thus the consequences, of the argument. Earlier, the intra-Christian polemic between different groups had fundamentally been name calling; now, the invective of one side could inform government policy. The first Romans to feel the negative effects of Constantine’s new religious allegiance, in short, were other Christians. The emperor ordered them to disband, outlawing their assemblies, exiling their bishops and burning their books (Euseb. Eccl. Hist. 10.5.16, 6.4, 7.2; VC 64-6; cf. CTh. 16.5.1). Such legislation, difficult to enforce, clearly met with uneven success, and ‘‘heretical’’ (that is, non-enfranchised) churches long continued to exist (T. D. Barnes 1981: 224). But an atmosphere of intimidation could easily be conjured, and various Christian communities could be and were targeted. By the early fifth century, in North Africa, imperial legislation and even military force would impose the policies of the orthodox or ‘‘catholic’’ (‘‘universal’’) bishops against Christians of a rival church (Frend 1952: 227-74; Brown 1967: 226-43).
The imperial bishops’ battle against Christian diversity affected more than the lives of their contemporaries. It affected, as well, both the past and the future. By banning the texts of ‘‘deviant’’ Christians, burning their books, or simply ceasing to allow them to be copied, the bishops got to remake the past in their own image. The only documents to survive were the ones that they approved. Countless gospels, apocryphal acts, sermons, letters, commentaries, and theological treatises simply disappeared. Some lucky manuscript finds in the twentieth century - most spectacularly, the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt, on which more below - have off-set this ancient triage. But the loss has been immense, and much of the record of the Christian past was simply effaced by the church itself.
The bishops filled this void of their own making by recreating the past in their own image, the ‘‘true’’ history of the ‘‘true’’ church - that is, of their church. Through biblical exegesis and ecclesiastical histories, they constructed a genealogy of orthodoxy that stretched from the prophets of ancient Israel (in their view, witnesses to Christ) through the appearance in the flesh of God’s son, through his apostles (who in their view were their early counterparts, the first bishops), and ultimately to themselves. Christians outside of their own communities they condemned as excessively influenced by Judaism, or by pagan philosophy, or by pride. ‘‘Heretics’’ were innovators; the orthodox, guardians of true tradition. Orthodoxy, in this view, was stable across the ages and prior to all other confessions. Discernible in the Jewish Bible (if that were interpreted ‘‘correctly’’), it was revealed once for all by Christ, and preserved unchanging and uniquely, from his time to theirs, in his true church, the church of the imperial bishops. Diversity was simple - and damnable - deviance.
The language of modern scholarship witnesses to the continuing power of this ancient orthodox rhetoric. Surveys of pre-Constantinian Christianity perforce identify these other Christian communities, marginalized only in the fourth century, as ‘‘heretical’’ already in the late first, the second, and the third centuries (Chadwick 2001). Such an approach implicitly takes ‘‘orthodoxy’’ to mean ‘‘intrinsically authentic,’’ somehow in some special way ‘‘true.’’ What primarily distinguished the orthodox from their rivals, however, was power. After 312, one group won in the imperial patronage sweepstakes, and the others lost. To think otherwise is simply to recapitulate in academic language the claim of the orthodox bishops themselves.
Even scholars sensitive to this problem nonetheless continue to identify these communities, as did the orthodox before them, by the names of their prominent leaders - ‘‘Marcionites’’ (followers of Marcion), ‘‘Valentinians’’ (followers of Valentinus), ‘‘Montanists’’ (followers of Montanus), and so on. This practice has the virtue of easily distinguishing these communities from their proto-‘‘orthodox’’ contemporaries. But it only reinforces the orthodox victory, for these people, in their own eyes, were simply followers of Christ, and thus, Christians. Finally, even the terms of ancient polemic have passed into modern scholarship as categories of analysis. Historians have also described various Christian sects as overly influenced by classical philosophy, or by esoteric forms of Judaism, or by oriental cults. They do so seemingly unaware of the degree to which their views and even their analytic terms derive from and recapitulate the perspective of the orthodox, whose texts often provide our only glimpse of these otherwise lost and silenced communities (K. L. King 2003).
If the fourth century so obscures our view of earlier intra-Christian diversity, it obscures no less our view of how these ancient Christians interacted with their Jewish and pagan neighbors. Orthodoxy presents a story of almost universal hostility directed against the true church, stretching from the murder of Christ through the persecution of his saints until, miraculously, history reached a moment of dramatic reversal with Constantine’s conversion. It foregrounds an image of heroic resistance to relentless attacks from furious Jews and murderous pagans, while belittling non-orthodox Christians and denying that they showed such resolve. It presents orthodox identity as distinct, unambiguous, and unchanging, preserved through a principled separation from the world, with ‘‘true’’ Christians assiduously avoiding synagogue and civic rituals, and any sort of friendly - or even normal - contact with pagans and Jews.
The messiness of real life rarely obliges the clarity of ideology. Embedded in the very texts that promulgate the orthodox view lies the evidence of a more complicated - and more interesting - story. To understand and appreciate the diverse practices, experiences, and commitments of these many different sorts of ancient Christians in the period before any one group could impose its own views is the goal of this chapter. To re-imagine them, we have to place ourselves back in their world: a world thick with gods and different ethnic (thus, religious) groups; a world where communal eating and public celebration were the measure of piety, which was a concern of the state. Further, and despite its roots in the farming villages of the Galilee, Christianity as soon as we meet it in its earliest texts - the letters of Paul (c.50 ce) and the writings of the canonical evangelists (c.70-100) - was essentially and already an urban phenomenon. And for its first three centuries, Christianity in all its varieties remained an urban phenomenon. To re-imagine these ancient Christians, then, we also have to place ourselves in a world where life and time were measured by the rhythms of the Greco-Roman city.
World History
