This is the third and, alas, final post by Paula Fredriksen, William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of Scripture, emerita, at Boston University, on her new book Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years. As you’ll see, it is smart, interesting, and accessible.  You can find it most anywhere you buy books.

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Why should it matter, to have a historical grasp of the origins and development of early  Christianities?  

For those of us who value history, the answer is obvious: better to have a clear vision of  the past rather than a blurry one. But because we still live with the consequences of events that  happened in the first through fifth centuries, I think that a more adequate understanding of that  past matters. Having a clearer sense of what those events were and were about gives us some  critical purchase on where we find ourselves, now. 

Eusebius gave us our first history of the church. The traditional story, hung from his  scaffolding, is still familiar. Jesus, said Eusebius, inaugurated a new religion separate from and in  many ways hostile to Judaism. For this reason, the priests conspired to have Pilate crucify him.  After his resurrection, traditions from and about Jesus spread abroad in the wider world,  mediated through his apostles and through Paul. With the Roman destruction of Jerusalem – divine punishment for the Jewish rejection of Jesus – Judaism all but ended. Various heretical  teachers – Simon Magus, Valentinus, Marcion, Basilides – threatened Christian orthodoxy, the  sole true preserve of the Christian message. Pagan Rome bore down on Christians, persecuting  them with malicious fervor especially in the arena and in the amphitheater, where their courage  impressed the watching pagan crowds. As a result, the movement, unstoppable, spread with  amazing speed. Then Constantine, victorious in battle, converted to orthodox Christianity and  became its champion. Imperial persecution of Christians ceased; heretics were vanquished; and  the church embarked on a new period of harmony and peace. 

How do we get behind this narrative to the history that it conceals?  

For our first line of evidence, we are inevitably dependent on texts – of the documents  collected in the New Testament; of the writings of the church “fathers” (“patristics”); of the  contemporary writings of Jewish, pagan, and other Christian authors. This already causes  complications, for two reasons. First, the texts themselves have passed through the hands of  many copyists, who whether accidently or deliberately have made many omissions and additions.  With New Testament texts, this problem is particularly acute, precisely because we have so many  copies – thus, almost numberless variants. Compounding the problem, we also have “fragments”  – quotations in later patristic sources – that differ among themselves and from received versions  of the New Testament. The texts themselves in general, and New Testament texts in particular, in  other words, are unstable.

Second, ancient texts were shaped by the rhetorical conventions of the times, and by the  rhetorical commitments of their authors. Their goal was not to render a neutral report of an event  or an accurate description of an adversary, but to convince their audience of their own particular  message. Rhetoric’s goal of persuasion combined with its tools of diatribe and of speech in  character, of ekphrasis (verbal visualization), and, of course, of trash talk – invective – the art of  presenting invidious caricature as description. These techniques were routinely deployed by  those people (mostly men) with the level of education needed to produce a text. All were trained  in how to manipulate these rhetorical tools and, thus, in how to manipulate their audience.  

If we know this, then we have to read these texts with caution. Just because, say,  Tertullian accuses Christian opponents of allowing women to teach and to baptize, it does not  follow that they actually allowed women to teach and to baptize. Ancient language of value was  itself highly gendered, deploying male/female binaries in which male was always superior and  positive and female, by comparison, always inferior and negative. Male was rational, female  irrational. Male was ordered, female disordered. Tertullian, when describing female prominence  in the “other” Christian sect, is actually gendering confusion, bad management, intellectual  muddiness and social disorder, imputing those flaws to his competition. He gives us polemic  disguised as description.  

Inscriptions can modulate the tyranny of texts. Writings preserved on papyri, because less  formal, help to get a sense of what’s going on at ground level. Archaeological finds, from  amulets to architecture, help us to reconstruct actual social context. Context gives us purchase on  content. And some spectacular manuscript discoveries of the last century – the “gnostic” Coptic  library in Egypt; the scrolls by the Dead Sea – have enabled us to widen our peripheral vision.  

Speaking of widening our field of vision, we also have to allow ancient people the  courtesy of taking their view of agency seriously. Their geocentric universe was heavily  populated by superhuman forces: big gods and lesser gods, spirits and daimonia, still-sentient  ancestors and angels. I am not saying that we need to believe that these forces really exist. I am  saying that we have to take seriously that ancient people thought that they existed, and that they  had real effects. Superhuman forces account for a lot of the ways that all ancient peoples acted,  Jews and Christians included. We must always bear in mind that any god was more powerful  than any human. And in antiquity, though in graded registers of power, all gods existed. The  question for any ancient person was not whether to “believe in” the gods, but to know how to  deal with them.  

Finally, we have to resign ourselves to acknowledging what we cannot know. Ancient  demography, for example, is a black box. We cannot know how many people at any given time  lived in the Roman Empire. We therefore cannot know what proportion of them, at any given  time, was Christian. This means that we cannot with any accuracy reconstruct a rate of growth for the new movement (and for which sects of this new movement?). The numbers and charts  and percentages that decorate recent efforts at scientifically estimating such growth are,  accordingly, a form of wistful thinking. We simply cannot – and do not – know. 

How does bearing these things in mind affect how we reconstruct the early history of  Christianities?  

Let’s begin with the relations between Christians and Jews. First, the initial followers of  Jesus, both before and after his crucifixion, were themselves Jews. They did not cease to be Jews  in proclaiming that Jesus, as risen messiah, was about to return to inaugurate the kingdom of his  divine father. (Nor did such a proclamation violate Jewish principle. In Jewish scriptures, God  proclaims himself to be the father of the kings [“messiahs”] of David’s line.) With the help of the  Dead Sea Scrolls on the one hand and the rich trove of Hellenistic Jewish texts on the other, we  can appreciate the vibrant variety of late Second Temple Judaism, of which the earliest Christ followers were a part. Paul went to pagans not despite his Jewishness but because of his  particular stream of it: as an apocalyptic thinker, convinced that he knew the time on God’s  clock, he proclaimed the exclusive worship of Israel’s god to (ex) pagans in line with the great  prophecies of Isaiah: in the End time, the nations too would turn to Israel’s god. 

Unrelieved hostility between Christians and Jews? Not enough of it, complains Origen in  the third century and Chrysostom in the fourth, who regret the co-celebration of gentile  Christians with Jews in the cities of the western empire. Not enough of it, regret the bishops of  the Council of Elvira, who condemn co-religionists who solicit rabbis to bless their fields and  who lament that Christians and Jews intermarry. And here archaeological finds fill out the  picture. The synagogue at Sardis, incorporated into the city’s gymnasium architecture, large  enough to accommodate 1000 worshipers, some of whom non-Jews (were they Christians?), flourished until an earthquake struck in the seventh century. The synagogue at Huqoq in the  Galilee was richly refurbished generations after Constantine. Jews had not withdrawn from  Graeco-Roman society, nor were they uniformly suppressed by Christian imperial power. And evidence of Christian Judaism, no less than for Judaizing Christianity, perdures well into the late  imperial period. 

Let’s reconsider Christian “orthodoxy.” First of all, the Christian texts that survived, that  we have to hand, were the ones that obliged the post-Constantine fourth-century triage. Justin  and Irenaeus made the cut; Tatian and, most spectacularly, Origen of Alexandria did not. And the  apocalyptic aspects of both Justin’s and Irenaeus’s theology were quietly disregarded or dropped  from their manuscripts: no one in the fourth or fifth century wanted to hear about an  eschatological thousand-year reign of the saints impending in the second century. Each Christian  sect that we know of – often obliquely, through the voices of their inimical competitors – claimed to embody the truth. The Valentinian Ptolemy, in his letter to Flora, invoked apostolic authority for his teaching. In the period before Constantine, in short, accusations of heterodoxy  were just a form of name-calling. It is only once one sect of Christians had access to the coercive  power of the state –which is to say, with Constantine – that accusations of “heresy” had real  social consequences. 

Roman persecution of Christians? The legal mechanisms for arraigning Christians before  Roman magistrates are completely obscure: no Roman law before Valerian in the late 250s made  Christian practice illegal. And Roman law was reactive, not proactive: accusations of Christianity  had to be brought before the magistrate before any hearing could commence. Rome did not hunt  Christians down. Most anti-Christian activity seems to have been random and sporadic,  stimulated by local circumstances (fires, floods, earthquake, famine: all registers of divine  displeasure). Christian demurral from showing the gods respect was thought to alienate heaven. How many in the period before the emperor Decius (ca. 250) suffered? “Not many,” said the  Christian theologian Origen, “whose number can be easily counted” (Against Celsus 3.8). 

Things change with imperial initiatives, with Decius ca. 250, with Valerian ca. 257-260,  with Diocletian, long decades later, in 303. Christians were targeted with demands to conform, in  the interests of the wellbeing of the state.  

But with Constantine, after 312, things change again. In the perspective of those whom  Constantine sponsored, there was a new period of peace and prosperity. But in the perspective of  those other Christians targeted by Constantine’s bishops, imperial persecution continued and  even increased. More Christians were persecuted, and persecuted more thoroughly, after  Constantine’s conversion than before. The difference was that the imperial church now deemed  targeted Christians to be heretics, not martyrs; and the coercive force brought against them was  not “persecution” but disciplina. Heretical communities were ordered to disband, their books  burnt, their leaders sent into exile. (Such effort met with only mixed success. Heretical churches  continued.) And the new period of harmony and peace, much trumpeted by Eusebius, actually  dissolved into paroxysms of controversy as battles raged over the theological status of Christ, of  the Holy Spirit, and of Mary the mother of Christ – thus of God. The fissures within the  “orthodox” church resulted in separate Christian communities that perdure to this day. 

What do we gain by so problematizing Eusebius’s smooth picture of triumph? First of all,  a more realistic account, and a truer account, of the religious changes roiling the empire from the  first century to the fifth. But why should that matter? Because it combats the ideological  complacency and the toxic simplicity of identity-confirming narratives. It allows the human face  of history, in all its complexity, to emerge. 

And perhaps most importantly, history teaches us to respect human difference. Cultures  are only notionally continuous. “Christianity” is not the same thing now that it was in the first century, nor could it ever be. We no longer live in a first-century universe. We are no longer first century people. By looking at ancient actors in all their irreducible otherness, living in a world so  different from our own, we can better appreciate the benefits of a principled tolerance. Both for  doing history and for living in society, respect for human difference is the beginning of wisdom.