Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (27 page)

Predictably given this proposition, Origen had no time for Irenaeus's and Justin's millenarian vision of a selection of saints ruling in triumph in an End Time, and he bequeathed his scepticism to the Greek Churches in general. Yet the Church in both East and West turned its back on Origen's vision of a universal salvation. Such a notion was indeed hard to square with some of the Gospels' records of Jesus talking of final separation between sheep and goats. By rejecting it, Christianity was committing itself to the idea that God has made eternal choices, separating all people into the saved and the damned, although the debate continued as to when and through whom this separation comes about - human or divine initiative? Perhaps if Catholic Christianity was to maintain the character which had been apparent from its earliest days as a religion hungry for souls, this drawing back from universal salvation was inevitable: could there be urgency in a mission to win converts if the end of time and the cosmos inevitably saw the return of all things to their creator? Origen might say that the purpose of proclaiming Christianity was to proclaim truth and wisdom, regardless of any initiative like an escape from damnation. For the Church as a whole, this delight in wisdom was not enough. Salvation mattered more. And large sections of the Church were now about to pursue a different sort of universalism: an engagement with secular power, which would take Christianity from being the Church of the outsiders and the despised into the heart of politics, and towards the domination of all society.

5

The Prince: Ally or Enemy? (100-300)

THE CHURCH AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE (100-200)

It took the Romans some time to distinguish between Christians and the other quarrelling segments of Judaism, but once Jews and Christians had separated, Christianity could not hope for any sort of official recognition. Normally the Roman authorities were tolerant of the religions in their conquered territories; as long as a religion had a tradition behind it, they could accept it as having some vague relationship to the official gods of Rome. All that they demanded was that subjects of the empire accept in turn some sort of allegiance to the official cult of the emperors, alive and dead. Even Judaism, an exceptionally exclusive religion which refused to make this concession, with an awkward insistence on regarding every other religion as untrue, could be accepted because it had a long pedigree (see p. 109). Christianity had no such tradition to excuse it, despite the claim by many of its exponents that it could share the antiquity of the Hebrew prophets. Particularly when its episcopal or Catholic form, with its increasingly fixed canon of scripture and carefully constructed creeds, began shouldering aside gnostic forms of Christian belief, Christianity made exclusive claims for its three-in-one God. That attitude is already aggressively promoted in its earliest surviving literature, the letters of Paul. At the beginning of his letter to the Romans, he develops at some length the idea that all religion directed away from the true God and towards 'images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles' is a perversion, a theme which he goes on to elaborate in the most lurid terms that a Jewish tent-maker from Tarsus could imagine.
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The unnerving self-confidence of Christians and their view of every other form of religion as demonic contrasted with the comfortable openness to variety normal in contemporary religious belief. The only exception Christians made was for Judaism, despite their increasingly tense relations with it; and unlike Judaism, they seemed actively to be aiming for total monopoly of the religious market.
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Greek-speaking Christians, like Jews before them, called all non-Christians who were not Jews 'Hellenes', a word to which a sneer was attached, but it was probably during the third century that Western Latin-speaking Christians developed their own contemptuous term for this same category:
pagani
. The word means 'country folk', and the usual explanation is that urban Christians looked down on rural folk who stuck like backwoodsmen to traditional cults. More likely is that the word was army slang for 'non-combatants': non-Christians had not enrolled in the army of Christ, as Christians did in baptism.
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Christians cut across the normal courtesies of observing the imperial cult and that made them a potential force for disruption in Roman life. Indeed, the language they used in their enthusiasm for their saviour seems almost to be borrowed from the language which the imperial cult was developing in the lifetime of Jesus. So a Greek inscription found in Ephesus calls Julius Caesar 'god made manifest'; the Emperor Augustus's birthday was called 'good news' and his arrival in a city the '
parousia
' - exactly the same word which Christians used for Christ's expected return.
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It would be easy for sensitive Romans to hear such Christian usages as deliberate and aggressive plagiarism.

For the authorities, one feature of the Christians' exclusivity was particularly alarming: their frequently negative attitude to military service. No Christian of the first three centuries CE would fit easily into the army, since military life automatically demanded as routine attendance at official sacrifices as today it demands salutes to the flag and parades. The legacy of Christian sacred literature to state violence was contradictory. On the one hand there was the demonstrative imperial loyalty of Paul of Tarsus, alongside the memory of the victories won by the Maccabees and the frequent militancy described in the Tanakh, which centred on a land won by military conquest. On the other was the Saviour who had made forgiveness his watchword and who had rebuked his defender Peter for using a sword. Such uncertain messages made for perplexity: the debates produced a number of martyr stories of Christian soldiers who suffered because they refused to conform to military discipline, most of which were probably fabricated in an effort to encourage waverers to keep to a principled line. A more complicated fabrication was the story promulgated by Bishop Apollinaris of Hieropolis in Phrygia (Asia Minor) that the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161-80) had recently recruited a legion of Christian soldiers, who saved him from defeat not by their military prowess, but by successfully praying for a strategically placed storm on the River Danube (conveniently for Apollinaris, a location a long way away from Phrygia).
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Apollinaris's confident report of what was no doubt a pious rumour clearly reflected Christians' anxiety to have their cake and eat it: to demonstrate their active and useful loyalty to an exceptionally capable and respected emperor (who was in reality hostile to them), while keeping within guidelines of acceptable Christian behaviour. The Roman priest Hippolytus was the probable author of a pioneering guide to Christian life of around 200 entitled
Apostolic Tradition
. One of its surviving versions, now preserved only in a variant of Coptic but probably closest to the original Greek text on this point, deals fairly ineptly with the problem when listing occupations which were acceptable or unacceptable for Christian membership. It stipulates that soldiers could be admitted to the Church only on condition that they do not kill or take the military oath. Hippolytus, however, was a notoriously crotchety moralist who inclined to extremes, and versions of his text preserved in other languages than Coptic modify his unrealistic demand.
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Against his hard line, it is worth placing a funerary inscription to a man from Phrygia called Aurelius Mannos, who made no bones about proclaiming both his Christianity and his profession as a soldier. His monument commemorated his death in the 290s, at a time when the imperial authorities were about to stage their greatest confrontation yet with the Christian Church.
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As Christian communities established themselves as recognizable communities in cities, they often did not endear themselves to people. This was not because they lived austere lifestyles which made a painful contrast to a world of debauchery and luxury around them; that is a later Christian caricature which ignores the austere and world-denying character of much Greek thought in the early empire. Nor was it because they indulged in much public proclamation or systematic soliciting of converts, in the manner of modern Evangelicals. After the descriptions of such activity in the New Testament, there is very little indication that early Christians continued as flamboyant public proclaimers of the Gospel, unless they were cornered in time of persecution. What really offended was the opposite: Christian secretiveness and obstinate separation into their own world.

For Christians, such separation was inevitable, given their sense of the falsity of all other religions: ancient life was saturated with observances of traditional religion, and to play any part in ordinary life was to risk pollution, particularly in public office. Christians generally avoided public baths; and the full enormity of this refusal can only be appreciated if one visits the surviving public baths of Eastern Europe or the Middle East and sees the way in which they serve as centres of social life, politics and gossip. One interesting exception is the popular story that John the Divine once entered a public bathhouse, but when he noticed the gnostic Cerinthus there, he fled screaming, terrified that God in his anger might cause the bath roof to fall in.
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Yet even this enjoyable tall tale describes a visit to the baths which proved less than successful, and it might have been intended as a warning about the sort of people that one might find there. The consequence may have been that Christians smelled less sweet than their non-Christian neighbours.

The separate nature of Christian life is symbolized in a puzzling peculiarity of their literature: with remarkable consistency, they recorded their sacred writings not in the conventional form of the scroll, like their Jewish predecessors and like everyone else in the ancient world, but in gatherings of sheets of parchment or paper in the form of our modern book (the technical Latin name is
codex
, and that has no Greek equivalent word, telling us something significant about its origins).
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Why this was so has been the subject of much debate. Before the Christians made it so universal, the codex form had been used for scribbling jottings in low-status notebooks. It is possible that material which became one of the first Gospels was scribbled in this form and that this accident gave the codex a special status in liturgy, when the words of the Lord were solemnly recited. Another possible explanation lies in the Christian insistence that the new good news of Jesus Christ was foretold in the ancient writings of the prophets, an argument which was embedded in the Gospel texts themselves and which we have noted, for instance, as a central plank of Christian apologetics in the writings of Justin Martyr (see p. 142). This impulse might result in a constant need to flick between one text and another, Gospel and prophecy, and that is much easier to do in little books laid side by side than in scrolls. The contrast between Judaism, the religion of the scroll, and Christianity, the religion of the book, would have been evident in their liturgies when the codex of scripture was used as a performed chanted text. The surviving fragments of early biblical texts have a set of consistent abbreviations singling out sacred words, the most frequent being the especially reverenced name 'Jesus'. One would have to be specially informed to know how to interpret these abbreviations (known as sacred terms,
nomina sacra
), for they do not occur in other literary works (see Plate 1).
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Maybe they were sung in a special way when the text was chanted liturgically.

Christians also jealously guarded their ceremonies of Baptism and Eucharist from the uninitiated. It is indeed one of the peculiarities of their surviving literature from the first century CE (mostly the books of the New Testament) that although it talks a great deal about Baptism, it almost seems deliberately to avoid mention of the Eucharist - after Paul's description of the Eucharist when writing to the Corinthians in the mid-first century, and the parallel descriptions in the Gospels, there is hardly any reference to it except in the writings of Ignatius of Antioch and the
Didache
, both perhaps from the beginning of the second century (see p. 120). As a result, these ceremonies were thoroughly misunderstood by intelligent and sensitive Roman observers. There arose reports of incest from their talk of love-feasts, of cannibalism from the language of eating and drinking body and blood. As they attracted converts, many unsympathetic outsiders became convinced that Christian success must be the result of erotic magic, strong enough to tear wives away from non-Christian husbands; after all, a number of Christian accounts of martyrdom did indeed describe women leaving their husbands or fiances for Christian life or death. The second-century African comic novelist Apuleius, who clearly detested Christianity, described an adulterous Christian wife as turning to an old witch to regain the love of her wronged and furious husband - but the scheme went wrong and a murderous ghost goaded the poor man into suicide.
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It was a small step from such suspicion and righteous indignation to violence and riots. It was equally understandable that the Roman authorities, paranoid about any secret organizations, sought to suppress troublemakers who wasted taxpayers' money by provoking disturbances of the peace. In the early days of the spread of Christianity, the first Christians in cities had usually begun proclaiming their 'good news' within the Jewish communities, and when they did so, they often provoked violence from angry Jews. One of the first mentions of a Christian presence in Rome, for instance, is a remark by the second-century historian Suetonius that the Emperor Claudius (reigned 41-54 CE) expelled the Roman Jews for rioting 'at the instigation of Chrestus' - probably a garbled reference to Christian preaching within synagogue communities, a decade or more after the crucifixion of Christ.
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