SCM Classics

From the Beginnings to 461

W.H.C. Frend

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780334029090
• eBook ISBN: 9780334048572
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Aimed at the undergraduate academic and interested lay person, this is a classic history of the formative period of the Church. It includes an account of Rome and 1st-century Judaism, the Gnostics and the conflicts of Eastern Christendom and examines such figures as Origen, Arian and St Augustine of Hippo. A bibliography of general works on Church history is also included.

PART ONE

1

Rome and the Mediterranean World

Even today the observant traveler in the Mediterranean will find much to remind him of the Greco-Roman past. Whether it is the tradition of the beast-combats and gladiatorial shows of the arena preserved in the bullfights of the Spanish peninsula, whether the survival of Romano-African building technique in the tiled penthouse roofs of the Kabyle homestead, whether the wooden plows and burnooses of the North African peasant, the terraced cultivation of the vine, the ubiquitous olive and, above all, the donkey, there is a living past unchanged since the days of Augustus. The ruins of great cities like Timgad, Leptis Magna and Baalbek speak of an urban life which once had been, but the life of the countryside has remained as it was 2,000 years ago.

It is against the background of the Mediterranean world that we start this brief survey of early Christian history. How did the Church gradually conquer this world, until by the mid fourth century it had become a great popular movement expressing the hopes of earthly prosperity and future salvation of townsman and peasant alike? What were the ideas that inspired this movement? How were they expressed in organization, liturgy and creed? Who were its leaders, and what did they represent? Why did unity, at least in the sense of uniformity, elude the Christian congregation from the very moment that its Lord ascended into the heavens?

The year is 27 B.C., the date which may be taken to mark the transition from Roman Republic to Roman Empire. Roman power had reached its “natural frontiers,” the Rhine, the Danube, the Euphrates and the Sahara Desert. What was added by the Empire, namely Britain, Dacia, Arabia and Mauretania, were buttresses to protect what had already been won. Octavian’s victory over Mark Antony at Actium in 31 B.C. had been hailed alike in Italy, Asia Minor and even, after the death of Cleopatra, in Egypt as the beginning of a new era. Order would now reign where chaos had prevailed. In the eastern provinces, the victor was proclaimed “bringer of good news” (evangelion), “savior,” and “manifestation of Zeus.” Within a few years temples were being erected in his honor in the provincial capitals, and the calendar of Asia (western Asia Minor) revised so as to begin the year with the birthday “of the god and savior of the whole human race."¹

In Rome the sequence of events was no less momentous for being clothed in constitutional forms. On 11 January 27 B.C. Octavian had closed the doors of the temple of Janus to mark the return of peace—for the first time in 200 years. Five days later the Senate bestowed on its hero the title of Augustus. The text of the great inscription at the entrance of the temple of Augustus at Ancyra (Ankara), which expresses the ideas of the Emperor’s immediate circle, reads:

In my sixth and seventh consulships (28–7 B.C.), when I had extinguished the fires of civil war after receiving by common consent absolute control of affairs, I handed the commonwealth over from my own control to the free disposal of the Senate and the people of Rome. For this service done by me I received the title of Augustus by decree of the Senate, and the doorposts of my house were officially covered with laurels; a civic crown was put up over my door, and a golden shield was placed in the new Senate-house [built by Julius Caesar], with an inscription recording that it was a gift to me from the Senate and people of Rome in recognition of my valour, my clemency, my justice, and my fulfilment of duty (pietas). After that time I took precedence of others in dignity, but I enjoyed no greater power than those who were my colleagues in any magistracy (tr. Ernest Barker, From Alexander to Constantine, p. 229).

In theory, Octavian was only the chief citizen of the Republic; in practice, he was its absolute ruler. First, the term Augustus. Contemporaries, poets such as Ovid, pointed out its connection with the sacred language of worship.² Two centuries later, the romanized Bithynian civil servant, Dio Cassius, recorded how the title implied that its bearer was somewhat more than mortal.³ The appearance of the bay leaves of Apollo on Augustus’s head on his coinage suggests that the Emperor believed himself to be under Apollo’s special protection. This “special relationship” with the world of the gods was symbolized alike for Roman citizen and subject provincial in the cult of the Emperor’s “genius.” In veiled form it was the worship of the Emperor himself, for the genius was more than “guardian spirit.” It had something in the nature of essence, the energizing and life-giving force of a personality, in this case the divine power assuring the permanence of the imperial house.⁴ In the provinces the “genius of Caesar” was a common form of oath in commercial and personal transactions, and to refuse it could be interpreted as disloyalty.

The inscription does not refer to some of the more material props to the Emperor’s power. These included command over some thirty legions stationed on the frontiers or in provinces where disturbance was likely. Governors, such as Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea from A.D. 27 to 36, were his agents subject to his appointment and recall. There were also the imperial freedmen who made up the lower and middle ranks of a considerable civil service, “they of Caesar’s household” (Phil. 4:22). There was, finally, the Emperor’s personal inviolability through the perpetuation of his power as tribune. He was the center of the system to whom all looked for security and good government, and, as one of the Augustan inscriptions found at Cyrene shows, the Emperor made it plain “to all who inhabit the provinces how much I and the Senate take care that none of our subjects suffer wrong or extortion.”⁵ The imperial providentia watched over the interests of all.

The system brought immense benefits to the inhabitants of the Mediterranean world. Apart from local though severe wars such as the Jewish war of 66–73, the provinces away from the frontiers enjoyed almost unbroken peace between 30 B.C. and A.D. 193, and then from 197 to the death of Alexander Severus in 235. A public orator, Aelius Aristides of Smyrna, could address Antoninus Pius in circa 150, “Wars have so far vanished as to be regarded as legendary events of the past. A man can travel from one country to another as though it were his native land . . . to be a Roman citizen, nay even one of your subjects is sufficient guarantee of personal safety.”⁶ Thirty years later, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, no friendly critic of the existing world, wrote, “The world has peace thanks to the Romans. Even the Christians can walk without fear on the roads and travel whithersoever they please.”⁷

Peace, ease of communications and trade went together. Flavius Zeuxis had to face nothing worse than the storms off Cape Malea on his seventy-two business trips from Hierapolis to Phrygia to Rome. There were Greek-speaking trading colonies in Lyons and Vienne, and at Salona, which were eventually to play a part in bringing Christianity to their fellow provincials.⁸ There was trade in pottery, glass and grain between Gaul, the Rhineland and Britain. St. Paul’s journeys across what even today is among the roughest country in Asia Minor, including the Taurus passes and the high plateau of Phrygia, show what was possible in the first century A.D. “Perils of robbers” did not deter him from planning voyages to Spain and Illyria; and there were other missionaries almost as adventurous, such as Epaphras who evangelized the towns on the headwaters of the Maeander, and the disciples of John who must have been Palestinians by origin settled in Ephesus. The catalog of peoples and tongues at Pentecost shows something of the cosmopolitan character of the Jerusalem pilgrimages. Whether St. Thomas ever reached south India or not, Roman merchants did.⁹

Language and ideas followed trade. The native languages did not die out. Phrygian, Berber and Celtic continued to be spoken, but one effect of the unification of the Mediterranean under Augustus and his successors was the emergence of two common languages, Latin in the West, and Greek in the East. The language boundary, crossing the Balkans between Skopje and Sofia and the Mediterranean between Malta and Crete, was to be of tremendous significance for the evangelization of the provincials and the development of Christian doctrine and practice.

Provincial administration enhanced the unifying factors within the Empire. In all the provinces there were some cities which possessed full Roman franchise, the coloniae, settled originally by Roman citizens, such as retired veterans, and other towns, the municipia where citizenship had been conferred on a native community. But below these, the civitates, tribal or cantonal capitals, could aspire to rise to the higher status, and members of local native aristocracies could and did acquire Roman citizenship. By the end of the first century, the Emperor was a Spaniard (Trajan) and his best generals an Anatolian (C. Julius Quadratus Bassus) and a Moor (Lusius Quietus). Add to this a uniform system of justice which, while respecting local customs, applied the principles of Roman law, an appellate system which enabled a citizen to take his case to the Emperor himself, and a common currency, and one can visualize a community of life and interest such as the Mediterranean peoples have not enjoyed before or since. Moreover, the prosperity seeped down into the remotest frontier area, giving the peoples of the Roman world wealth and ease of life which was not to be theirs again before the close of the fifteenth century.¹⁰

There was, however, a price to pay. Despite prevailing security and relative prosperity, the first two centuries A.D. were not among the great progressive ages of humanity, ages in which new technical advances produce new patterns of life. One looks in vain for the development of a scientific outlook or even for the application of what had already been discovered for productive use. There was seemingly no advance in the techniques of agriculture and seafaring. Despite considerable literary output and readership no one thought of the printing press. Despite large and assured markets no serious improvement in spinning and weaving techniques took place, and despite the discovery of the use of steam in Alexandria circa 40 B.C., Hero did not anticipate James Watt. Even Pliny the Elder, one of the very few men in the ancient world who lost his life through a scientific interest in natural phenomena,¹¹ produced few original ideas of his own. His Natural History in thirty books, written circa A.D. 75, was mainly a vast handbook of existing knowledge. With Ptolemy (circa 150) the current idea that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun and stars revolved around it became received doctrine, with serious results for the development of religion and science in Europe for the next fifteen hundred years.

Ignorance of the physical nature of man and the universe led directly to astrological and metaphysical speculations which colored the religious thought of the time. All classes and, it would appear, all parts of the Mediterranean shared these speculations. The familiar words of St. Paul to his Galatian converts, “How turn ye back to the weak and beggarly rudiments whereunto ye desire to be in bondage again?” (Gal. 4:9), provide an interesting example. The key word is “rudiments,” Greek stoicheia, meaning demonic beings or forces in the universe to whom Paul believed men and women had been enslaved before their conversion. Equally significant are the words used by Seneca to his friend Marcia in A.D. 60 when in a message of comfort to her after the death of her child, he portrays the journey of the soul through the stars. “You will see,” he says, “the five planets pursuing their different courses and sparkling down to earth from opposite directions. On even the slightest motion of these hang the fortunes of nations and the greatest and smallest events are shaped to accord with the progress of a kindly or unkindly star.”¹² Horoscopes were avidly compiled and interpreted. The most important deity to the ordinary mortal was not Zeus but Chance (Tyche) or Fate. This was the power who ended life, and from whose thralldom salvation must be sought.

An unprogressive society ruled by impersonal forces whose nature was not understood might also have been morally degenerate. This was not the case. Innumerable grave memorials testify to the affection of family life, as do surviving papyrus letters to its decency and sobriety. But there was also gross impurity unrestrained by effective censorship. Some of the wall paintings and objects from Pompeii or the motifs of lamps from the legionary fortress of Vindonissa on the Danube leave no doubt as to the existence of this aspect of life. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” or “Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die” were not merely Christian and Jewish satire.¹³ But the cheery hedonism that inspired many of the grave memorials¹⁴ had its darker side. There was heartlessness too, shown in the exposure of unwanted children and gross exploitation of the underprivileged, the slaves, the conquered peoples who formed the bulk of the peasant population and the urban poor. The life also of an intelligent woman must have been only a degree less boring and frustrating than that of the harem. It is not surprising that Christian apologists wrote of their Faith “changing men’s tyrannical dispositions,”¹⁵ and reforming their morals, or of women and slaves hearing the liberating message both of Judaism and Christianity gladly.

How did the cults and philosophies of the ancient world meet the needs of its inhabitants? Let us consider religion under two headings, social and personal. The social aspect was designed to ensure the existing world order, and in particular the eternity and prosperity of the Roman people. The fear of chaos if the Roman Empire fell was shared even by the Jews¹⁶ and Christians.¹⁷ So the Roman public religion was not a creed to which one subscribed so much as a series of cult acts performed by professionals, the priests, designed to win a right relationship between the gods and men. On the resultant pax deorum depended the welfare of the State and its inhabitants. The Emperor by his example of pietas and virtus promoted the safety of his subjects, and acted as intermediary between them and the gods. Roman citizens were expected to revere and serve the Roman gods and not to practice any alien cult. Customarily, however, they might do so as long as the cult did not offend the laws and usages of Roman life, i.e., outrage to the gods through political or social crimes.

Two examples, either side of the beginning of the Christian era, show the store set on conformity to the State cults. First, Polybius, the pro-Roman Greek historian of the Republic writing circa 150 B.C. “But the quality in which the Roman commonwealth is most distinctly superior (over the Greeks) is in my opinion the nature of their religious convictions. I believe that it is the very thing which among other peoples is an object of reproach, I mean superstition, which maintains the cohesion of the Roman State.”¹⁸ Secondly, Celsus the pagan apologist writing about A.D. 178 based his final appeal to the Christians to return to the faiths of their ancestors in order to save the Empire from destruction, and as a token of loyalty to the Emperor himself. “Even if someone tells you to take an oath by an emperor among men, that also is nothing dreadful. For earthly things have been given to him, and whatever you receive in life you receive from him.”¹⁹ A generation later, in 212, the Emperor Caracalla conferred Roman citizenship on nearly all the free inhabitants of the Roman world with the object as the preamble of the edict s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Preface by Carol Harrison
• Preface by the Author
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART ONE
• 1. Rome and the Mediterranean World
• 2. Rome and First-Century Judaism
• 3. The Primitive Community 41–70
• 4. The Old Israel and the New 70–135
• 5. The Gnostics. Marcion 130–80
• 6. A Generation of Crisis 160–85
• 7. Three Cities: Rome, Carthage and Alexandria 185–235
• 8. Origen
• 9. Decius–Valerian: A Decade of Persecution 249–59
• 10. The Dawn of the New Era 260–303
• 11. The Great Persecution 303–12
• 12. East and West to Nicaea
• PART TWO
• 13. The Arian Controversy 325–60
• 14. Julian the Apostate 361–3
• 15. The Triumph of Orthodoxy 363–82
• 16. Ambrose of Milan and Theodosius 381–95
• 17. Asceticism and the Monastic Movement in the Fourth Century
• 18. St. Augustine of Hippo 354–430
• 19. The Conflicts of Eastern Christendom 381–431
• 20. The Development of the Papacy from Damasus to Celestine 378–440
• 21. Leo and Chalcedon 440–61
• 22. Church and People from Constantine to Leo
• A Bibliography of General Works on Church History
• Chronological Guide: Events Relevant to Church History to 461
• Notes
• Index