Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (28 page)

Yet the separateness and dogmatism of the early Christians were as much strengths as weaknesses; they produced a continuing stream of converts. This inward-looking community could attract people seeking certainty and comfort, not least in a physical sense. Christians looked after their poor - that was after all one of the main duties of one of their three orders of ministry, the deacons - and they provided a decent burial for their members, a matter of great significance in the ancient world. It may be that the first official status for a Christian Church community was registration as a burial club: a considerable irony in view of Jesus's dismissive remark, 'Leave the dead to bury their own dead.' Outside the periods of persecution, which, however brutal while they lasted, were extremely episodic until the last savagery under Diocletian (see pp. 175-6), the normal interaction between a Roman official and a Christian leader would have been to transact bureaucracy around cemeteries. Burial remained an important function within any Christian community: when seventeen staff of the Christian Church in the city of Cirta (now Constantine in Algeria) were arrested and interrogated during the last great persecution of Christians in 303-4, six of those listed were gravediggers, and there were other gravediggers unnamed.
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In Rome, towards the end of the second century, the Church was already acquiring rights to excavate tunnels for burial in the soft tufa stone of the region, the first Christian catacombs - not refuges from persecution, as pious Counter-Reformation Catholics assumed in the sixteenth century, just places for decent and eternal rest (see Plate 2). The whole system of catacombs in Rome (named after one particular complex of tunnels beside the Appian Way in a sunken valley,
In catacumbas
, knowledge of which survived when all the others were forgotten) eventually extended over sixty-eight square miles and house an estimated 875,000 burials made between the second and ninth centuries.
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What is interesting about the earliest of these burials is the relative lack of social or status differentiation in them: bishops had no more distinguished graves than others, apart from a simple marble plaque to record basic details such as a name. This was a sign of a sense of commonality, where poor and powerful might be all one in the sight of the Saviour. The picture was already changing by the mid-third century, when it becomes apparent that wealthier members of the Church wanted to make more of an artistic splash with elaborate wall paintings or expensive sculpted stone coffins.
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The upper classes were beginning to arrive at church.

The Christian sense of certainty in belief was especially concentrated in their celebration of constancy in suffering, even to death. From time to time, they faced mob harassment and official persecution, which in the worst cases ended in public executions preceded by prolonged torture and ritual humiliation, the victims stripped naked in front of a gleeful crowd in sporting arenas. Among the early victims were such Christian leaders as Peter, Paul, Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna, a very old man when he died around 155 and the first Christian to be recorded as having been burned alive. That grisly fate Christians later visited on each other a good deal once they gained access to power, yet alongside a continuing Christian inclination to persecute other Christians, there has survived an intense celebration of martyrdom. The first people whom Christians recognized as saints (that is, people with a sure prospect of Heaven) were victims of persecution who died in agony rather than deny their Saviour, who had died for them in agony on the Cross. Such a death, if suffered in the right spirit (not an easy matter to judge), guarantees entry into Heaven. We have seen how many gnostics questioned this cult of death: it was an important part of their objections to the Church of the Catholic bishops (see p. 125).

The attractive feature of a martyr's death was that it was open to anyone, regardless of social status or talent. Women were martyred alongside men, slaves alongside free persons. The necessary ability was to die bravely and with dignity, turning the agony and humiliation into shame and instruction for the spectators. Martyrs' bones were treasured and their burial places became the first Christian shrines. From the end of the third century onwards, even while martyrdoms were still being suffered, there is evidence of Christians wanting to be buried near such tombs.
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The stories of the martyrs were lovingly preserved as an example to others; the earliest datable document from the Latin-speaking Church in the West is an account from 180 of martyrdom in North Africa, in a village called Scillium or Scilla.
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Characteristically, these accounts include what sound like authentic transcriptions of conversations between victims and persecutors, so the reader could learn by imitation, as one might in modern times learn a foreign language through listening to dialogues on CD or tape. So Speratus, one of those Scillitan martyrs, retorted in echoes of the Gospels when Saturninus, the proconsul of Africa, demanded that he swear by the
genius
(guardian spirit) of the emperor:

I do not recognize the empire of this world; but rather I serve that God, whom no man has seen nor can see. I have not stolen, but if I buy anything, I pay the tax, because I recognize my Lord, the King of Kings and Emperor of all peoples.

When a great deal of later inauthentic imitation has been sifted out, the most compelling of these accounts are more than just edifying guides to do-it-yourself sainthood: they preserve portraits of people in the most extreme of situations, the circumstances of which have released them to behave well beyond convention. Most surprising is the journal of sufferings written in the first decade of the third century by an unusually well-educated, spirited (and Montanist) North African martyr called Perpetua. One of the most remarkable pieces of writing by a woman surviving from the ancient world, its content caused problems to both its editors and to subsequent conventionally minded devotees because it was shot through with her determined individuality and self-assertion. She did not simply defy the authorities but went against the expectations of everyday society (including, of course, Christian everyday society) by disobeying her father, who desperately wanted her to abandon her faith:

'Father', I said, 'for the sake of argument, do you see this vase, or whatever you want to call it, lying here?'

And he said, 'Yes, I see it'.

And I said to him, 'Can you call it by any other name than what it is?'

And he said 'No, you can't'.

'So', I said, 'I cannot call myself anything other than what I am - a Christian'.

Merely hearing this word upset my father greatly. He threw himself at me with such violence that it seemed he wanted to tear my eyes out . . .
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In that charged encounter is a characteristic moment of tension for Christianity: how does one form of authority relate to another, and which is going to prevail? Perpetua was disobedient not just to her father but to the institutional Catholic Church which later enrolled her among its martyrs, because she was a Montanist. Some of the most remarkable passages in her account occur in her description of the second and third dreams or visions that she had in her prison cell. She saw her younger brother Dinocrates, who had died of cancer at the age of seven without being baptized as a Christian, in a dark place, very hot and thirsty, and just out of reach of a cooling pool of water. She prayed for him. In the third dream, she watched him drink from the pool, and 'play joyfully as young children do'; the cancerous growth in his face melted away. Perpetua did not comment on this vision of release, but the likelihood is that she would not have needed to for the contemporary readership she envisaged. What she was saying was that, through prayer, she had been granted the power to release the dead from suffering because of her faith in the 'New Prophecy'. Dinocrates needed no institutional Church or cleric to remedy his lack of sacramental grace.

But perhaps the most agonizing moral choice of all for Perpetua was whether to be a martyr or a good mother. In choosing to affirm her faith and face imprisonment and death, she was forced to abandon her suckling baby. There followed a miserable alternation of separation and return of the child, in which in the end she was told in her prison cell that her baby no longer wanted her breasts. Seldom do we read a Christian text which so brutally exposes what a Christian commitment might mean: it returns us to the terrifying story of Genesis 22, when God commanded the Patriarch Abraham to make a human sacrifice of his own young son, Isaac, and only countermanded the order as the butcher's knife was raised. In counterpoint to the Church's pronounced drive towards conformity with society's often perfectly reasonable expectations, which we have noted as such a characteristic feature of the later literature in the New Testament (see pp. 114-18), Christian obedience repeatedly plays a troubling wild card. It is the Apostle Peter's impudent retort to the angry high priest of the Jerusalem Temple, recorded in Acts 5.29: 'We must obey God rather than men.' Not so long after Perpetua brutally confounded her father's natural expectations and set herself up as the agent of God's forgiveness, bishops including Peter's self-styled successor in Rome would come to find themselves cast in the role of the high priest: furious at the disobedience of Christians to their own authority and in the end even condemning Christians to death, as once Peter had been by the Roman authorities.

More often than such incidents of dramatic intensity as Perpetua's sufferings, persecution petered out rather inconclusively, as the Roman authorities felt that they had better things to do than to try and wipe out a group of troublesome fanatics. One little instance of this untidiness is preserved among the papers of a highly cultivated and conscientious Roman provincial administrator, the younger Pliny, writing to his equally urbane and thoughtful emperor, Trajan. Pliny, newly appointed about 112 to sort out the chaotic affairs of the province of Bithynia in Asia Minor, found among a host of other problems a strong and aggressive body of Christians, which was emptying the temples and ruining local trade by following Paul's old recommendation and boycotting sales of meat previously offered in sacrifice. Pliny rounded up Christians who had been anonymously denounced to him and he interrogated under torture some who appeared important, but he was puzzled as to what to do next with people who seemed to him deluded but comparatively harmless. He asked for advice from Trajan, whose reply was soothing but hardly much help, since his most definite advice was to ignore anonymous denunciations about anyone, 'a very bad example and unworthy of our time'.
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There must have been many encounters like this in the first and second centuries, and there was no central organization in what persecution there was. It came about as the result of some personal initiative, like the pogrom unleashed in Rome in the 60s CE by the increasingly unbalanced Emperor Nero (Christians were not the only victims of his megalomaniac caprice), or the angry response of some local provincial governor to a particular outbreak of trouble. At the end of the second century, this random response began to change because of the sheer visibility of Christianity around the empire. By then, it had established itself throughout the Mediterranean world and into the Middle East. It is impossible to estimate the numbers of converts involved; Pliny's experience in Bithynia would suggest that in Asia Minor at least, right at the beginning of the second century, Christians could form an economically significant part of the population. That likelihood of a precocious Christian presence there is reinforced by the prominent part played by Asia Minor in the theological ferment already discussed (see Ch. 4) and by archaeological finds which show that during the third century Christians in Asia Minor were putting up blatantly Christian tombstones, presumably in public places - generations before the appearance of similar openly Christian material in provincial settings elsewhere.
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Beyond Asia Minor, Christian communities were probably quite small, particularly in the West outside Rome, and even there their numbers were dwarfed by the immense scale of the city. What was impressive, and increasingly noticed by non-Christians, was not so much the numbers of any one community but the geographical spread of the Church throughout the empire and beyond, and its sense of community. We have no definite witness to Christianity in Britain before the early fourth century, and not much from the far end of the Mediterranean in Spain, but from the late second and early third centuries there is evidence elsewhere of well-established communities, invariably with an episcopal organization which had been in existence for some time. This is true, for instance, in North Africa around Carthage, in Alexandria and in the south of France at Lyons. Fragments preserved from letters of the late-second-century Bishop Dionysius of Corinth shed sudden shafts of light on Christian Churches in Athens, Crete and Pontus (a section of the southern coast of the Black Sea).
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The largest cities of the empire produced the largest and most important Christian communities - Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage - and while Rome pointed back to an authentic presence of the Apostles Peter and Paul in its early past, others which had not had an episcopal organization or were founded later on are likely to have confected lists in which a line of bishops could be traced back to Apostles of the first generation. Athens, for instance, pointed to Paul's convert Dionysius the Areopagite (usefully mentioned in Acts 17.34), while Alexandria claimed foundation by the evangelist Mark himself. The genuineness of such claims is less important than the witness they give to the way in which apostolic succession had now established itself as a vital idea in the thinking of the Church, and to the self-confidence which these communities could feel in the ownership of a common tradition which involved many others. In what may be the earliest datable Christian sculpted inscription, a self-composed epitaph from before 216, Abercius, Bishop of Phrygian Hieropolis, in the next generation from Bishop Apollinaris, proudly describes his Mediterranean adventures in terms of the travels of Paul of Tarsus. It is notable that among the places he describes, Judaea and Jerusalem do not figure. The Catholic Church had already rewritten the history of its past and there was no longer much need for Jerusalem to play an active role in it.
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