Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (24 page)

The switch to Latin in Christian Rome may have been made by one of the bishops at the end of the century, Victor (189-99).
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He may indeed have been the first monarchical bishop in Rome; he was one of that generation of Church leaders, like Irenaeus in Lyons and Demetrius in Alexandria, intent on creating a Church with a single source of episcopal authority and a single doctrinal standard which would be affirmed by other bishops elsewhere (see pp. 129-30). It was Victor, with the encouragement of Irenaeus, who narrowed the diversity of belief which a Bishop of Rome would consider acceptable, by ending the long-standing custom of sending Eucharistic bread and wine which he had consecrated to a variety of Christian communities in the city - including Valentinian gnostics, Montanists and various exponents of Monarchian views on the Trinity (see pp. 145-6).
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This was in effect a punitive action; as such, it was a pioneering form of a favourite device in later centuries, excommunication - cutting off offenders from fellowship with the Christians in a particular place. Nothing could better illustrate the new formal role of the bishop as teacher and guardian of discipline. Successive bishops emphasized their unifying role in the vastness of the city by visiting the various places of Christian worship in turn; during the third century, as more churches achieved permanent sites instead of congregations casually meeting in Christian houses, this became the basis of a liturgical rota of 'stational' papal visits which still survives in the liturgical year in Rome. Many other bishops in large and potentially divided cities followed the Bishop of Rome's example later.
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Already, therefore, during the third century, the Bishop of Rome was consolidating a role which was likely to give him a special prominence in Western Churches. The first surviving use of the title '
papa
' in Rome occurs in the time of Bishop Marcellinus (296-304), in a funerary inscription for his deacon Severus in one of the catacombs in the city.
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There was, after all, no other Church in the West which could lay claim to the burial place of two Apostles and pilgrimage was beginning to draw Christians to Rome. The surroundings of St Peter's original shrine are covered in early graffiti from pilgrims, and although these are not easily datable, there are similar graffiti in a shrine out on the Via Appia to the south-east of the city, below the present Church of San Sebastiano. This roadside shrine seems to have sheltered the remains of both Peter and Paul for some time after persecutions of Christians in the mid-third century: the names and the often ill-spelled forms of expression used in the graffiti there suggest that they were made by visitors to the city, and quite humble visitors too.
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The only possible rival to the position of Rome was the Church of the North African coast, which was probably the first major centre of Latin-speaking Christianity, but North Africa, despite its many martyrs in the late second and third centuries, did not possess any counterweight to two Apostles. It was a dispute in 256 between Bishop Stephen of Rome and the leading Bishop of North Africa, Cyprian of Carthage, that produced a Roman bishop's first-known appeal to Matthew 16.18: Christ's pronouncement to Peter that 'on this rock I will build my Church' might be seen as conferring particular authority on Peter's presumed successor in Rome (see pp. 173-6). This was a claim which met with modified rapture in North Africa, and which likewise would at the time have been greeted with polite scepticism in the eastern Mediterranean. Rome's place in the Christian Church remained subject to many accidents of history, as we will discover.

MONTANISM: PROPHECY RENEWED AND SUPPRESSED

The disappearance of charismatic wandering Christian teachers or prophets and the assertion of the authority of bishops were probably sealed by the Catholic Church's confrontation in the later second century with a movement known as Montanism or 'the New Prophecy'. Montanus was a native of Phrygia in the mountains of Asia Minor, which was already emerging as one of the earliest centres of Christian numerical strength and enthusiasm during the second century. Asia Minor was, after all, the setting for the prophetic poem of John the Divine, and the hesitant reception of his Book of Revelation into the New Testament may reflect ecclesiastical worries about this recurrent theme of prophecy among Christians in Asia Minor. Like so many converts, Montanus passionately proclaimed his enthusiasm for his new-found faith, but that extended (at a date uncertain, but probably around 165) into announcements that he had new revelations from the Holy Spirit to add to the Christian message. It was not so much the content of these messages that worried the existing Christian leadership of the area as the challenge which they posed to their authority. By what right did this man with no commission, in no apostolic succession, speak new truths of the faith and sweep crowds along with him in his excitement?

What made matters worse was that Montanus was accompanied by female prophetesses who spoke in states of ecstasy. The position of women leadership in the Church had steadily diminished over the previous century, and this combination of female assertiveness and prophecy seemed dangerously reminiscent of the female seers at ancient cultic centres: the worst possible resonance for a cult seeking to demonstrate its separation from other religions. So the Church in Asia was riven: was Montanus a blessing or a danger? Both sides appealed to other Churches around the Mediterranean, and to the great distress of the Montanists, they found themselves condemned by Eleutherius, the Bishop of Rome. As is often the case, opposition and hostility drove them into ever wilder statements about their own mission; their total and final exclusion from the Catholic Church by a council of bishops was sadly inevitable after this. Elsewhere in the Christian world, only in North Africa, which came to have a tradition of high-temperature Christianity, did their passionate commitment to the Holy Spirit find a lasting sympathy among prominent Christian activists, especially the distinguished early-third-century Christian writer Tertullian (see pp. 144-7). Yet in their Phrygian homeland, the Montanists persisted obstinately until at least the sixth century. Then in 550 the morale of the proud descendants of the 'New Prophecy' was finally broken when the Byzantine Emperor Justinian sent in his troops to wreck their great shrine of the founder-prophets in the now-venerable Montanist stronghold at Pepouza. Eventually even Pepouza's whereabouts were forgotten and only recently has the enthusiasm of researchers revealed its probable site.
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Yet less than a century after the imperial vandalism at Pepouza a new 'New Prophecy' began tearing at the fabric of the Byzantine Empire, as Muslim armies swept north from Mecca and beat at the frontiers of Asia Minor. Maybe there were still Montanists in Asia Minor to welcome the fervour of the new arrivals.

While the Montanists early on became firmly convinced that they were about to see the New Jerusalem descend on earth at Pepouza, their enthusiasm contrasted sharply with the Catholic Church's general abandonment of Paul's original conviction that the Lord Christ would soon be returning. Generally in the next few centuries, such beliefs were to be found in marginal Christian groups. Among the Montanists' contemporaries in the mainstream leadership, only Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons showed positive enthusiasm for a vision of the world's last days coming in his lifetime, and his views on this caused such embarrassment to the next generations of Christians that their original expression in Greek has entirely disappeared and even many of the manuscript copies of its Latin translation censor out its passages on this subject. The Latin translation of what Irenaeus had said turned up only in the late sixteenth century and was then equally embarrassing to the Counter-Reformation Church of Rome, which was not pleased to find one of the bastions of the Catholic faith saying the same sorts of things as contemporary radical Protestants.
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One might regard the Montanist emphasis on new revelations of the Spirit as a natural reaction to the gradual closing of the New Testament canon, but there was little that could actually be described as heretical in what they said. The problem was one of authority. The Church leadership's strong reaction against Montanus might reflect tensions between the urban Christianity of the late first century, which was gradually evolving leadership around one man in a city congregation, and a new expansion of Christian enthusiasm out in rural backwaters.
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The Church was settling on one model of authority in monarchical episcopacy and the threefold ministry; the Montanists placed against that the random gift of prophecy. The two models have a long history of conflict in the subsequent Christian centuries: the significance of the Montanist episode is that this is the first time the clash appears. Later it would be seen in the first Protestant rebels against Rome, in the radicals beyond the Protestants, in Methodists and Millerites, in Pentecostals and African-initiated Churches; we will meet them all. And one should not forget the other conflict which has returned as an active issue in the Church after two millennia, well summed up in the dark warning of a Victorian clergyman-professor in a reference work still useful in many respects: 'If Montanism had triumphed, Christian doctrine would have been developed, not under the superintendence of the church teachers most esteemed for wisdom, but usually of wild and excitable women.'
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Gnosticism and Montanism thus both had a marked effect on the Church, causing it to shut doors on all sorts of possibilities for new Christian identities. The most dramatic effect of the fight against gnosticism was to halt Christianity's march away from its Jewish roots, that process which had begun so early and had dominated its life in the first century. From the earliest days Christians had searched the Tanakh in their anxiety to find pre-echoes of their own passionate convictions about the God-Man Jesus Christ. Now even more self-consciously, in quotations in its literature and in the reading of sacred texts in communal worship, the Church vigorously reaffirmed the worth of what it called the Old Testament alongside the New. Nevertheless the new episcopal guardians of doctrine were still faced with the problem of presenting their faith in an urban culture which stretched all round the Mediterranean and beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire, dominated by highly literate elites steeped in Greek learning, literature and ways of thinking. Paul of Tarsus had probably not experienced a conventional advanced education; there is certainly no trace of it in his literary style or the content or shape of his writings. He does not even bother mentioning philosophy; indeed, it attracts precisely one mention in the New Testament, where, in the words of Paul's admirer who wrote Colossians, it is dismissed as 'empty deceit'.
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A hundred years later, such a cavalier approach would not do. A good education was becoming more common among prominent Christians and that would affect their view of their faith. They had now accepted many of the social values of this world; they had also rejected some of the more extreme ways in which gnostics had adapted the Christian message to other systems of thought. That left large questions about the relationship of the Catholic Church to Greek and Roman high culture, which in the work of a series of authors from the later years of the first century CE reached a new peak of literary creativity and self-conscious pride in the Greek cultural past, conventionally now called the 'Second Sophistic'. It was not surprising that thoughtful Christians who listened to the self-confident voices which dominated cultured conversations in the world around them went on to find ways of drawing on the best of this culture for their own purposes. But the problems were great. Could one call on Plato or Aristotle or their new interpreters in contemporary society to help in preaching the Gospel? The Second Sophistic offered wisdom which owed nothing to the Christian revelation in scripture; was its wisdom then worthless? A series of highly intelligent and thoughtful Christians thought that the answers to these questions were obvious: the Greek inheritance was indispensable to the Church. In their efforts to harness it to the Christian message, they can be said to have created or manufactured Christian teaching on a heroic scale, and for good or ill the Church universal has never ceased to look back at and build on what they achieved.

JUSTIN, IRENAEUS, TERTULLIAN

A series of Christians tackled these questions during the second century, without closing them down. Christianity has never ceased to debate the relationship between truth revealed from God in sacred text and the restless exploration of truth by human reason, which on a Christian account is itself a gift of God. It is a mark of how far Christianity had spread by the second century that some of the most prominent in the writings which have survived to us - Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian - worked mainly in Rome and Churches of the western Mediterranean. Two others - Clement of Alexandria and Origen - came from the great intellectual and commercial centre of Alexandria. Nevertheless all of them except Tertullian thought and wrote in Greek: this was still the common currency of the Church throughout the Mediterranean, even in the Latin-speaking West, which is an indication that Western Christianity was still largely dominated by an urban population maintaining ready links with the Greek East. Indeed, Justin and Irenaeus revealed this continuing mobility and interconnectedness in Christianity by their move from eastern to western cities in the empire.

Justin was born in Samaria and tells us how he came to Christian faith in a little piece of autobiography which is also a parable of his position in the revelation/reason debate - in fact it may be no more than a parable. He tells us that he travelled to Ephesus for his higher education and had a series of disappointments. He started predictably enough with a tutor in the most influential philosophy of the age, Stoicism, but that tutor could tell Justin nothing about God: Stoicism, after all, was designed to cultivate and regulate the self rather than illuminate the nature of God. Justin had no more luck with an exponent of Aristotle, who was mainly concerned with fixing a fee for his services - perhaps a dig at the practical and systematizing concerns of Aristotelianism. A Pythagorean was no help to him, because he demanded that Justin should first become expert in music, astronomy and geometry before contemplating the mysteries which these skills illustrated. Finally Justin went to a Platonist and found satisfaction in what he learned - but then, in a field near the Ephesus seashore, he met an old man who culminated a long conversation by speaking to him of the Hebrew prophets who had foretold Christ.
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Justin's journey was complete. His clinching point in the saga was that the wisdom of the prophets was older than that of the Greeks, and in an age which was inclined to see oldest as best, this was the most promising argument open to any exponent of the new faith in Christ. Yet Justin never ceased to wear his philosopher's cloak (
pallium
), as distinctive a mark of identity as the modern Christian clerical collar - or perhaps a better analogy would be with the gown and square cap of the properly dressed Oxford don, since to wear the cloak was to make a claim to be a teacher in a school for advanced students. It was also a dramatic and continual visual sign in his everyday life and in his teaching that Justin was committed to the proposition that two traditions might speak as one.