Esler, Philip Francis, ed. The early Christian world. Vol. 1. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. isbn=9781138200074
Esler, Philip Francis (2017). "The Mediterranean Context of Early Christianity". The early Christian world. Vol. 1 (second ed.). Routledge. ISBN9781138200074.
Christian origins and development:
Christianity began in the agrarian heartland of the Roman Empire impacted by, and impacting, everyday Mediterranean society.[1] Around the ancient Mediterranean, large groups of peasants were ruled by a small group of urban elites (2 - 5 % 0f the population) who controlled the means of economic production, had a monopoly on literacy, and most of the political power.[2] Life for these peasants was not easy, hunger was common, and many were forced to surrender their lands to the elites and become tenant farmers or landless laborers.[3] 'Religion' in this context did not exist separately from politics or the family.[4]
During its first four centuries, Christianity developed an alternative elite in the form of Christian Bishops.[2] The first local churches, based on households, would each have been led by a single episkopos whose primary role was economic.[5][6] Any liturgical role for these original bishops was linked to the substantial character of the Christian eucharistic meal and the resources needed for its early charitable distribution.[5] Voluntary associations known as collegia were common and influential as a model for these early communities. It is unlikely that Christian offices were derived from the synagogue.[5]
Stewart, Alistair C. (2014). The Original Bishops: Office and Order in the First Christian Communities. Baker Academic. ISBN9781441245700.
Book reviews:
in McGowan, Andrew B. Ecclesiology. 2016, Vol. 12 Issue 3, p370-372. 3p. DOI: 10.1163/17455316-01203010.
p=370 - "what leadership and ministry first looked like in the emerging Christian movement."p=372
"the primary role of such local episkopoi (and of diakonoi) was economic, and owed at least something to the use of such titles in government and in associations. He emphasizes the logistical demands of the Christian eucharistic meal and its early link with charitable distributions, seeing the emergence of any liturgical role for these original bishops as linked to the substantial character of the meal and the resources needed for it. While nodding to the influence of collegia on these models, Stewart prefers to see households as themselves the more basic model for the earliest communities, and rejects recent as well as older attempts to derive Christian offices from the synagogue. "[5]
" honour as the primary value in Mediterranean society,"[7]
early Jewish tradition
gospel writers
second and third centuries
community formation and maintenance:
mission and expansion
hierarchy: challenges
monks
Christian culture
sexuality
women
beliefs
artistic inheritance
Rosenwein, Barbara (2009). A Short History of the Middle Ages. Vol. I: from c.300 to c.1150 (third ed.). University of Toronto. ISBN978-1-4426-0122-2.
all of this is the 2009 volume 1, Rosenwein, from the archive
- don't use google the page numbers are different!!!
Early twenty-first century scholarship agrees that the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple by Roman Emperor Titus in 70 was a major event for both Judaism and early Christianity.[8][9]
Köstenberger, Andreas J. (2005). "The destruction of the second temple and the composition of the fourth gospel". Trinity Journal. 26 (2): 205–242.
and page 214 of Koostenburger: "recent scholarship demonstrates, the destruction of the second temple exerted a universal impact on Jews in both Palestine and the Diaspora, owing to the temple’s status as a national religious symbol"
add ref on monks lives p=47
Taggia Sophia page 54
Byzantine empire circa 777
Islam c.750
Western Europe circa 750; p=79
Europe 814, p=115
Add Treaties???
Byzantine Empire 1025,
Kievan Rus, 1050
ninth and tenth century invasions by Vikings etc. p=153
Byzantine empire 917, p=103
Early MA
After 476 new order in the East
p=29, Justinian, Haggia Sophia
plague
Eastern Roman Empire becoming Middle Eastern in a similar manner to Persia, p=29
p=34, retrenchment in the East; recapture past glory
2 superpowers -
relocated holy, p=34
600 - 750, p=39
emergence of Byzantium and Islam
p=48
p=61, by 700
the emergence of the Franks
p=63, Roman admin, etc. etc. the royal court, Balthild
aristocrats like kings of small kingdoms
no one married in a church! p=63
p=63; Women: had control of their dowries, some participated in land selling and buying; widows received a portion of the family property;
Anglo-Saxon vs. Roman, p=66
Spain p=73; Berbers
Lombards in Italy, conversion to Catholicism
Western Euroope circa 1100, p=192
pages 200+
the Ottoman Empire p=309
Burgundy p=316
western Europe 1450, p=320
Peace of God movement begins 989
large scale centralized governments of the ninth century dissolved in the tenth, Rosenwein, page 115, 2014 edition
A concise history of the mediaeval church
by Frank, Isnard Wilhelm, 1995, Continuum, 9780826408280
Alliance between king and Pope under Charlemagne; effect of feudalism on church; - relationship between secular and spiritual power in High Middle Ages
the papacy after investitureheresy and fight agaijnst it, page 121, Frank,
conciliarism??
ADD::
Westcott, Brooke Foss (2005). A General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament. Wipf and Stock Publishers. ISBN9781725214231.
It was the bureaucratic clerics, along with the Mendicant monks and the elite from the international universities, who were central to developing early-modern concepts of power, authority, and orthodoxy.[11][12][13][14]
The church of the High Middle Ages consolidated its territory and established a bureaucracy.[11][12][13][14]
Church and state were linked, but competition developed as kings and Popes claimed legal jurisdiction, and the right to collect taxes, from the same people.[18]
Everywhere in Christian Europe, the papacy, bishops, theologians, poets, and rulers made efforts to support coherence and order.[19][20]
Ullmann, W. (1965). "The Papacy as an Institution of Government in the Middle Ages". Studies in Church History (2): 78–101. doi:10.1017/S0424208400005131.
Møller, Jørgen; Doucette, Jonathan Stavnskær (2022). The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500. Oxford University Press. ISBN9780192857118.
Logan, F. Donald (2013). A History of the Church in the Middle Ages (illustrated ed.). Routledge. ISBN9780415669948.
Rosenwein, Barbara H. (2014). A Short History of the Middle Ages. Vol. 1 (fourth ed.). University of Toronto Press. ISBN9781442606111.
Jordan, William Chester (2004). Europe in the High Middle Ages (reprint ed.). Penguin. ISBN9781101650912.
Arts
ADD Matthews and Platt
Women
"Between 1100 and 1500, the "inadequacy of women to think, to make moral judgments, to endure hardship, to exercise authority, and to lead" was generally accepted.[27] In the church, women were excluded from taking Holy Orders and had no access to education within the institutions of the church. There were some women in nunneries who became extremely distinguished.[27]
"While the papacy was turning into a monarchy, other rulers – some of them women, such as Matilda of Canossa – were beginning to turn their territories into states. They discovered ideologies to justify their hegemony, hired officials to work for them, and found vassals and churchmen to support them."[28]
"Women partook in this seemingly all-male world in ways large and small. Countess Matilda, key to the success of Gregory VII, was also deeply involved in the building of the cathedral of Modena, which lay in her territory. Other women took advantage of the new learning of the schools; Abelard fell in love with one of the best-educated women of his day, Heloise, who shared in his philosophical breakthroughs. Other women partook in the new religious fervor of the era, and women’s reformed monasteries proliferated at the same time as those of men. Women were involved in the crusades – as wives, as prostitutes, as suppliers of retinues, and as members (though probably not as warriors) of the military orders. But in the next century (as we shall see in Chapter 6) they, like so many others, found themselves increasingly silenced by sometimes overwhelming forces of conformity and intolerance."[29]
Concordat of Worms (1122)
Divides the investiture ritual into two, one part granting the spiritual office, the other the material things that go with it.
social structures - Almohads begin to displace Almoravids
1145
the Age of Innocent
Pope Innocent III (Latin: Innocentius III; 22 February 1161 – 16 July 1216),[1] born Lotario dei Conti di Segni (anglicized as Lothar of Segni), was the head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 8 January 1198 until his death on 16 July 1216.
- Reign of Saladin 1171–1192
In 1187, at the battle of Hattin, the Muslim leader Saladin (1171–1192) conquered Jerusalem.{{sfn|Rosenwein|2014|p=212}
Death of Frederick II
1250
Grandson of Frederick Barbarossa, he tries mightily to unify Sicily with Germany, but his ambitions are thwarted by the papacy (which even declares a crusade against him), and he loses the adherence of the German princes. After his death, Italy and Germany are no longer linked as an empire.
"Although the Germanic tribes that forcibly migrated into southern and western Europe in the 5th century were ultimately converted to Christianity, they retained many of their customs and ways of life. "
"The Migration period lasted from the fall of Rome to about the year 1000, with a brief hiatus during the flowering of the Carolingian court "
Title "Reitervölker im Frühmittelalter : Hunnen - Awaren - Ungarn"
Statement of Responsibility Bodo Anke, László Révész, Tivadar Vida
Publisher
Theiss
Publication Year
c2008
page- #??
"From around 780, Europe saw the last of the barbarian invasions[31] and became more socially and politically organized".
Hummer, Hans J. (2006). Politics and Power in Early Medieval Europe: Alsace and the Frankish Realm, 600–1000. Vol. 65. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511497209. ISBN9780511497209.. page- #??
The Papacy as an Institution of
Government in the Middle Ages
WALTER ULLMANN
Ullmann, Walter (1965). "The Papacy as an Institution of Government in the Middle Ages". Studies in Church History (2): 78–101. doi:10.1017/S0424208400005131.
principles of government animating the mediaeval papacy[33]
can't USE
Momentous changes in economic and political structures were taking place.[34]
Medieval Christian life was characterised by the creative dialectical processes in parishes and universities, among men and women, learned people and illiterate enthusiasts, in toleration and violent aggression, and by uniformity and diversity". [35]
Momentous changes in economic and political structures were taking place.[34]
The Magyars ceased their expansion in the 10th century, and by the year 1000, a Christian Kingdom of Hungary had become a recognized state in Central Europe that was forming alliances with regional powers. With the brief exception of the Mongol invasions in the 13th century, major nomadic incursions ceased.
Croke, Brian (2020). "Looking, Listening and Learning: Justinian's Hagia Sophia". In Gador-Whyte, Sarah; Mellas, Andrew (eds.). Hymns, Homilies and Hermeneutics in Byzantium. Vol. 25. Brill. pp. 139–167. ISBN978-90-04-43956-6.
Before Christianity, the wealthy elite of Rome mostly donated to civic programs designed to elevate their status, though personal acts of kindness to the poor were not unheard of.[38][39][40] Salzman writes that the Roman practice of civic euergetism ("philanthropy publicly directed toward one's city or fellow citizens") influenced Christian charity.{{sfn|Salzman|2017|pp=65–85}
Twenty-first century thinking in sociology suggests Christianity's "new ideas" first spread among non-elites.[41][42]
Apostolic Age (30 - 100) when the first apostles were still alive.{{sfn|Schaff|!!! can't find page numbers!!!
{{cite book |last1=Schaff |first1=Philip |author-link1=Philip Schaff |orig-year=1867|year=2022 |title=History of the Christian Church |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Y6fBpjjN64sC |volume=2: Ante-Nicene Christianity. A.D. 100–325 |publisher=Books on Demand|isbn=9783752572445|edition=reprint}
Dickson, John (2021). Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History. Zondervan. ISBN978-0310118367.
This period was diverse in terms of beliefs and practices, and experienced frequent change that sometimes resulted in internecine conflicts and syncretic adoption.[44]
Raschle, Christian R.; Dijkstra, Jitse H. F., eds. (2020). Religious Violence in the Ancient World From Classical Athens to Late Antiquity. Cambridge University Press. ISBN9781108849210.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
Bremmer, Jan N. (2020). "2". In Raschle, Christian R.; Dijkstra, Jitse H. F. (eds.). Religious Violence in the Ancient World From Classical Athens to Late Antiquity. Cambridge University Press. ISBN9781108849210.
Brown, Peter (1998). "21 Christianization and religious conflict". In Garnsey, Peter; Cameron, Averil (eds.). The Cambridge Ancient History, volume 13. Cambridge University Press. ISBN9780521302005.
Thompson, Glen L. (28 June 2012). "Constantius II and the first removal of the Altar of Victory". In Aubert, Jean-Jacques; Várhelyi, Zsuzsanna (eds.). A Tall Order. Writing the Social History of the Ancient World: Essays in honor of William V. Harris (illustrated ed.). Walter de Gruyter. ISBN9783110931419.
Salzman, M.R., The Making of a Christian Aristocracy: Social and Religious Change in the Western Roman Empire (2002), p. 182
Kaegi, W. E. 1966. "The fifth-century twilight of Byzantine paganism", Classica et Mediaevalia 27(1), 243-75
REDO **
Overt pagan-Christian religious conflict was once the dominant view of Late Antiquity.[45] Twenty-first-century scholarship indicates that, while hostile Christian actions toward pagans and their monuments did occur, they were not a general phenomenon.[46][47][48]Jan N. Bremmer writes that "religious violence in Late Antiquity is mostly restricted to violent rhetoric".[49]
According to Peter Brown, it is anti-pagan legislation that forms the "religious drama" of the fourth-century Roman empire.[50] Non-Christians were subject to a variety of hostile and discriminatory imperial laws aimed at suppressing sacrifice and magic and closing any temples that continued their use.[51] Blood sacrifice was abhorrent to Christians, but it had been a central rite of virtually all religious groups in the pre-Christian Mediterranean.[52] Scott Bradbury writes that "Its gradual disappearance is one of the most significant religious developments of late antiquity" and "must be attributed to the atmosphere created by imperial and episcopal hostility".[53]
Polytheism in the Roman Empire had been slowly declining for centuries, but Constantine and his successors did not bring about its end.[54] Despite threatening imperial laws, occasional mob violence, and imperial confiscations of temple treasures, paganism remained widespread into the early fifth century, continuing in parts of the empire into the seventh century, and into the ninth century in Greece.[55][56][57][note 1]
There was no legislation forcing the conversion of pagans until the sixth-century, during the reign of the Eastern emperor Justinian I, when there was a shift from generalized legislation to actions that targeted individual centers of paganism.[62][63][64]
While some historians have focused on cataclysmic events such as the destruction of the Serapeum at Alexandria, archaeology indicates the Serapeum was the only Graeco-Roman temple in Egypt violently destroyed in this period.[68][69]
The anti-pagan legislation of the Christian emperors drew on the same polemical rhetoric that modern scholars are now all too aware of their limitations as historical evidence.[70]
Paganism had been slowly declining for centuries, but Constantine and his successors did not bring about its end.[54]
"There are many signs that a healthy paganism continued into the fifth century, and in some places, into the sixth and beyond.[71]: 108–110 [56][72][73]: 165–167 [74]: 156
The decline of paganism in most places was peaceful and non-confrontational.[75]
Sources are filled with episodes of conflict between pagans and Christians.[76][45]
Yet sources conflict. Eusebius credited Constantine with destroying pagan temples. The ancient chronicler Malalas also wrote that Constantine destroyed all the temples, and that Theodosius destroyed them all, and that Constantine converted all the temples to churches.[77] Archaeological research has confirmed the destruction of only 4 of the 43 temples attested to in written sources.[78][79]
Roman temples in Egypt are "among the best preserved in the ancient world".[68][69])
Imperial religious laws defined and punished the activities of pagans, apostates, heretics and Jews.[80]: 10–19 Their language is uniformly vehement and the penalties are harsh and frequently horrifying.[81]
Events were dramatized in the historical record for ideological reasons.
From Constantine forward, the Christian intelligentsia wrote of Christianity as fully triumphant over paganism despite Christians representing only ten to fifteen percent of the empire's population in 313.[82][83]
Ramsay MacMullen writes that this has misrepresented religious history.[84]: 4
CHAPTER 21
CHRISTIANIZATION AND RELIGIOUS CONFLICT
PETER BROWN
"From Gibbon and Burckhardt to the present day, it has been assumed that the end of paganism was inevitable once confronted ... by threats and disabilities, if not by the direct use of force."[45]
Christian hostility toward pagans and their monuments is seen by most twenty-first-century scholars as far from the general phenomenon that the law and literature implies.[46][85]: 2
"The most potent social and religious drama in the fourth-century Roman empire was not conversion - it was triumph... Most Christians were content with a 'minimalist' definition of the triumph of their church."[50]
"In many areas, polytheists were not molested as long as they kept their beliefs to themselves in front of Christians; and, apart from a few ugly incidents of local violence, die Jewish communities enjoyed a century of stable, even privileged existence. Both non-Christian groups enjoyed a tolerance based on contempt."[86]
"Rather than becoming uniformly 'Christianized', the Roman empire remained a land of religious contrasts."[86]
paganism slowly declined for a full two centuries[87]: xv
Christians of the fourth-century believed Constantine's conversion was evidence the Christian God had conquered the Hellenist gods in Heaven.[88][82][83] This "triumph of Christianity" became the primary Christian narrative in writings of the late antique age despite Christians representing only ten to fifteen percent of the empire's population in 313. As a minority, triumph did not, generally, involve an increase in violence aimed at the polytheistic majority.[89][90]
"According to Salzman: "Although the debate on the death of paganism continues, scholars ...by and large, concur that the once dominant notion of overt pagan-Christian religious conflict cannot fully explain the texts and artifacts or the social, religious, and political realities of Late Antique Rome".[85]: 2
"Bayliss states that the Christian sources have greatly influenced perceptions of this period, to the extent that the impression of the conflict which they create has led scholars to assume that the conflict existed on an empire-wide level.[91] However, archaeological evidence indicates that the decline of paganism was peaceful in many places throughout the empire, for example Athens, was relatively non-confrontational.[75]
According to Bayliss, this fact means that the archaeological evidence might show that Christian responsibility for the destruction of temples has been exaggerated.[92]"
"Brown and others such as Noel Lenski[93] and Glen Bowersock say that "For all their propaganda, Constantine and his successors did not bring about the end of paganism".[54]
Previously undervalued similarities in language, society, religion, and the arts, as well as current archaeological research, indicate that paganism slowly declined for a full two centuries and more in some places, thereby offering an argument for the ongoing vibrancy of Roman culture in late antiquity, and its continued unity and uniqueness long after the reign of Constantine.[87]: xv "
Conflict was more rhetorical than actual, with a few exceptions.[96][49][97]Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page without content in them (see the help page).
Muir, Steven C. (2006). "10: "Look how they love one another" Early Christian and Pagan Care for the sick and other charity". Religious Rivalries in the Early Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. ISBN978-0-88920-536-9.
Hart, David Bentley (2009). Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (unabridged ed.). New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN978-0-300-15564-8.
Scholer, David M. (1993). Women in Early Christianity (illustrated ed.). Taylor & Francis. ISBN978-0-81531-074-7.
{{cite book| last=Langlands| first=Rebecca| title=Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome|year=2006| publisher=Cambridge University Press| location=Cambridge, UK| isbn=978-0-521-85943-1}
Gathercole, Simon. "The Alleged Anonymity of the Canonical Gospels." The Journal of Theological Studies 69.2 (2018): 447-476.
Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the eyewitnesses: the gospels as eyewitness testimony. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2008.
Work, Telford. "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony." (2008): 290-295.
review - excellent
Baum, Armin. "The Anonymity of the New Testament History Books: A Stylistic Device in the Context of Greco-Roman and Ancient Near Eastern Literature." Novum Testamentum 50.2 (2008): 120-142.
Watty, William W. "The significance of anonymity in the Fourth Gospel." The Expository Times 90.7 (1979): 209-212.
Aland, Kurt. "The problem of anonymity and pseudonymity in Christian literature of the first two centuries." The Journal of Theological Studies (1961): 39-49.
Jokinen, Mark. "THE FOUR CANONICAL GOSPELS WERE NEVER ANONYMOUS." McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry 15 (2013): 4.
Beck, David R. "‘Whom Jesus Loved’: Anonymity and Identity. Belief and Witness in the Fourth Gospel." Characters and Characterization in the Gospel of John 461 (2013): 221.
Pitre, Brant. The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ. Image, 2016.
Goswell, Gregory. "AUTHORSHIP AND ANONYMITY IN THE NEW TESTAMENT WRITINGS." Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 60.4 (2017).
Hefner, Robert W. (1993). Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation (illustrated ed.). University of California Press. ISBN9780520078352.
Moffett, Samuel Hugh (2014). A History of Christianity in Asia, Vol. I: Beginnings to 1500. Orbis Books. ISBN9781608331628.
1) Mostly fundy/some evangelical scholars:
Bill T. Arnold, Professor of Old Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary;
Linda Belleville is Professor of New Testament & Greek at Bethel College;
Barry J. Beitzel,
Daniel I. Block,
Darrell L. Bock is a Humboldt Scholar (Tübingen University in Germany), the author of over 40 books and commentaries;
Joyce Baldwin Caine, Trinity College, Bristol;
Gregory Beale, is Prof of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary;
Craig Blomberg, Prof. Emeritus of NT at Denver Seminary;
Gary M. Burge, Wheaton College, his page here refers to him as a NT scholar
Philip W. Comfort, NT translator;
Peter H. Davids,
Raymond Bryan Dillard,
Norman Ericson,
Mark D. Futato, Prof of OT at Reformed Theological Seminary;
Robert P. Gordon,
Robert Guelich, Fuller Theological Seminary, NT,
George Guthrie, prof of NT at Regent College,
Victor P. Hamilton ,
Harold Hoehner,
J Gordon McConville is professor of Old Testament at the University of Gloucestershire;
J. A. Thompson,
Marianne Thompson,
Hugh G. M. Williamson.
Use The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity
By Philip Jenkins to expand section on Asia per peer review
and The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity
Future of Christianity Trilogy, Philip Jenkins
Author Philip Jenkins
for Quora? Article X of the Formula of Concord:
Therefore we believe, teach, and confess that the congregation of God of every place and every time has, according to its circumstances, the good right, power, and authority [in matters truly adiaphora] to change, to diminish, and to increase them, without thoughtlessness and offense, in an orderly and becoming way, as at any time it may be regarded most profitable, most beneficial, and best for [preserving] good order,
[maintaining] Christian discipline [and for εὐταξία worthy of the profession of the Gospel], and the edification of the Church. Moreover, how we can yield and give way
with a good conscience to the weak in faith in such external adiaphora, Paul teaches Rom. 14, and proves it by his example, Acts 16, 3:21, 26; 1 Cor. 9, 19. (Triglotta p. 1055)
In Conversion to C, add
Add Psychology -
Bazmi, Mahsa Jabari; Khalil, Allahvirdiyani (2011). "Relationship of religious orientation (inward-outward) with depression, anxiety and stress". Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences. 30: 2047–2049.
“Ancient history is a global field”, p.112 MacMullen, Ramsay. "Top Scholars in Classical and Late Antiquity." History of Classical Scholarship 2 (2020): 105-114.
‘The Church’ is a term that implies a coherent organization that could ensure the uniformity of Christian teachings and practices that did not exist before the 800s.[105]
According to Chris de Wet, slavery suffered a complete systemic collapse in the fifth century due to the lack of supply and demand, however, the decline of slavery had begun in the second century.[107] Slaves began being replaced when "Rome debased the value of citizenship" from 212 because the massive influx of 'barbarian' citizens which allowed the elite to use the coloni instead of having to buy slaves.[108]: 198 Renunciation of wealth, the spread of ascetism throughout society, and the proliferation of chastity among slaves may have lessened their sexual use and their reproductive value.[109]: 13
After 212, the massive influx of barbarians who were granted citizenship contributed to the decline of its value: virtually everyone was a citizen. The declining status of citizens was imposed by the elite to prevent the peasantry from gaining economic power of their own.[110]
Slaves began being replaced when "Rome debased the value of citizenship" from 212 into the fourth century and its massive influx of 'barbarian' citizens.[108]: 198
Early Christianity never openly called for the abolition of slavery, and while abolition was not a possibility in Paul's day, many early Christians were slave owners.[111][112] Christianity's role in slavery has been controversial, but there are ways Christianity does seem to have impacted its practice.[113][114][115]
First, Paul's Epistle to Philemon, indicates that Christianity worked to transform the slave-holding household to recognize Christian brotherhood and manumit slaves who had become Christian.[116][117] Manumission was an established Roman practice, but evidence indicates a higher rate of manumission by the sixth and seventh centuries than there had been in pagan times.[118]
In addition, Christianity adopted slavery as a metaphor claiming that all humans are slaves to sin.[114][119] In legal historian Joshua C. Tate's view, that metaphor meant that through baptism, all equally became free sons of God as joint-heirs with Christ, and that in turn impacted how people thought and felt about slavery.[120][116]
Next, historian Chris L. de Wet writes that bishops like John Chrysostom, who were themselves celibate, attempted to "guard the sexual integrity of the slave by desexualizing the slave's body and criminalizing its violation. Slaves were no longer morally neutral ground – having sex with a slave while married was adultery and if unmarried, fornication".[121]
These teachings impacted thinking about slavery.[120][116] Combined with the proliferation of chastity among slaves who became Christian,[122] and the spread of ascetism through Roman society, this may have lessened their sexual use and their reproductive value making them less desirable as investments.[116]
By the 600s-800s, the enslavement of Christians by other Christians had become taboo in Latin Christendom.[123] It gradually moved from taboo to ideology to an anti-slavery rule of law enforced by a combination of church authorities and secular rulers approved by the church.[124] This had a definite and increasing effect on Christianized barbarians which contributed to Europe becoming a no-slaving zone by the High Middle Ages.[125]
By the eleventh century, slaves could still be brought in from outside at great expense, but all avenues for creating slaves had been shut down within Latin Christendom.[126] In the next two centuries, from 1100 to 1200 at the latest, Latin Christians were prevented from enslaving other Latin Christians by both taboo and legislation, and soon thereafter, ceased to enslave non-Christians as well.[118] About this time, Latin Christendom phased out slavery entirely in favor of serfdom.[118]
Economics was a factor in this, but Jeffery Fynn-Paul writes that "this is remarkable in so far as it was the first time in history that a philosophical system, rather than a political force, maintained the integrity of a large-scale no-slaving zone".[127] It wasn't until the 1500s that slavery was revived in the West.
According to Bayliss, "There is no single law of the Theodosian Code containing a specific order for the destruction of temples that does not include the pretext of sacrifice or idolatry. Even Theodosius’ law of 435, seen by most scholars as the coup de grace of surviving temples only applies to the temples of pagans who had committed illegal acts of sacrifice. It is quite possible that the significance of this law has been overemphasized by scholars".[128]
The Christian Church did not begin from writings. The Christian Church produced those writings - after salvation had been provided by Jesus, and after the church had already begun. Then came the New Testament scriptures about Jesus - out of that environment and context - as a record both inspired and human. As Chrysostum wrote: ...nowhere is any of [the gospel writers] found to have disagreed, [on] these points: That God became man, that He wrought miracles, that He was crucified, that He was buried, that He rose again, that He ascended, that He will judge, that He hath given commandments tending to salvation, that He hath brought in a law not contrary to the Old Testament, that He is a Son, that He is only-begotten, that He is a true Son, that He is of the same substance with the Father, and as many things as are like these; for touching these we shall find that there is in them a full agreement." Writers and readers of the first century had a belief in the accuracy of these truths but no concept of inerrancy.
In the Church there are no stone tablets with letters inscribed by a Divine finger. ... He Who established the Church wrote nothing...
Was the Incarnation of the Only-begotten Son of God necessary only in order to write a book and entrust it to mankind? Was it absolutely essential for Him to be the Only-begotten Son of God just to write a book?
If the Church insisted with such determination on the Divine dignity of her Founder, then obviously [that church] did not regard writing to be the essence of His work. It was the Incarnation of the Son of God that was necessary for the salvation of mankind, and not a book. No book is able, nor could it ever have been able to save mankind. Christ is not the Teacher but precisely the Savior of mankind. It was necessary to regenerate human nature, which had become decayed through sin, and the beginning of this regeneration was laid by the very Incarnation of the Son of God — not by the books of the New Testament.
This truth was expressed with the utmost resolve by Church theologians as early as the second century. Inerrancy is a stumbling block of modern invention, a reactionary response to the early twentieth century. It has no place in honest scholarship or sincere Christian belief. The Moslems put their faith in the absolute inerrancy of their writings. Christians only put that kind of faith in the person of Christ. That's why I feel sorry for Bart Ehrman. His faith was never in the person of Christ. His faith began and ended in a book. True faith in Jesus has never been based on a belief in the inerrancy of a set of writings gathered by men. "There is no basis for supposing the Bible to be inerrant. This was well understood and accepted by the Church Fathers." Too bad that came as such a shock to Ehrman.
Quoting from [3] and Holy Scripture and the Church by Hilarion Troitsky, a Russian Orthodox theologian who died in 1927 at a Gulag.
John Chrysostom (4th century) wrote, for example: "And why can it have been, that when there were so many disciples, two write only and ... in many places they are convicted of discordance.” Nay, this very thing is a very great evidence of their truth. For if they had agreed in all things exactly even to time, and place, and to the very words, none of our enemies would have believed but that they had met together, and had written what they wrote by some human compact; ... But now even that discordance which seems to exist in little matters delivers them from all suspicion, and speaks clearly in behalf of the character of the writers. ...
"The notion that this one short period of time (of under a century) witnessed the 'death of paganism'; the concomitant notion that the end of polytheism was the 'natural' consequence of a long prepared 'triumph of monotheism' in the Roman world; the presentation of the political and religious history of the period as fraught with high drama, as a succession of Christian emperors, from Constantine to Theodosius II, played out their God-given role in abolishing the entire 'error of the Greeks', despite moments of dramatic but hopeless resistance by the devotees of the old gods; and the view that the definitive humiliation of the Jews throughout the Roman world was a further, logical corollary of these momentous events: all this amounts to a 'representation' of the religious history of the age, constructed by a brilliant generation of Christian writers, polemicists and preachers in the last decade of our period.
[This] Christian 'representation' of the history of the fourth century has survived, in thinly laicized form, in the majority of modern narratives of the period. From Gibbon and Burckhardt to the present day... The 'roar' of [this] Christian narrative has made it exceptionally difficult to recapture the mentalities of the fourth and fifth centuries... It is difficult to get behind the deceptive trenchancy of such narrative structures..."[129]
The ecclesiastical authorities claimed instant, supernatural victory.[130]
presupposed a universe filled with serried ranks of invisible powers.[131] An ancient, more compartmentalized model of the universe gave the average Christian freedom of manoeuvre in a society where the stability of the Roman order still rested, at this time, on a tolerance of ambiguity.[131]
The fourth century was the Age of Authority par excellence[81]
The most potent social and religious drama in the fourth-century Roman empire was not conversion - it was triumph...[50]
It was sufficient that non-believers should be humble and keep to themselves.[50]
Both Jews and pagans of the fourth century enjoyed a tolerance based on contempt.[86]
there was no determination to use the laws to convert unbelievers. It was sufficient that non-Christians should keep a low profile.[86]
The cumulative effect of the laws was to set in place a religious ordering of society[132] we can follow in the laws the emergence of a language of intolerance shared by the Christian court and by vocal elements in provincial society.[132]
Christian writers and imperial legislators alike drew on a rhetoric of incessant conquest and reconquest that affected every facet of upper-class society.[50]
After the Serapeum was destroyed, Serapis' devotees explained that Serapis had not been defeated, but had instead withdrawn to heaven "saddened that such blasphemy should have occurred in his beloved city". His priests produced prophecies in which Serapis had foretold his own departure, the desecration of his shrine and, even, the victory of the sign of the cross. Years later, Christians as far away as Carthage were impressed by the power of the gods to foretell their own defeat (Aug. De Divinatione Daemonum I.I). What had happened merely reflected on earth a conflict of mighty invisible beings in the heavens. Seen through Egyptian eyes, no further questions needed to be asked, and life could resume as usual.[130]
Rome in early Empire had been "a rare example of real pre-industrial economic growth".[108]: 85 Decline began sometime in the late second century,[108]: 195 and by late Antiquity, "much of the grandeur was gone. Population had declined, sometimes dramatically, cities were much smaller, interregional trade had declined, industrial and agricultural production were less than before, and for many, their standard of living was much lower than before".[108]: 187
USE: The expansion and advancement of many new men into the aristocracy by Constantine meant certain provincials, men from newer families, and those in the imperial bureaucracy more readily approached Christianity.[161]: 219 but in the end, Salzman concludes aristocrats were converted in the same manner the masses were: through "the company of their family and friends".[161]: 219
"Modern and ancient historians agree that women were especially responsive to the early Christian movement. It also is agreed that women were accorded considerably higher status within Christian circles than in the surrounding pagan societies".[162]: 229
((Imperial cult became a focus of theological and political debate during the ascendancy of Christianity under Constantine I. The emperor Julian failed to reverse the declining support for Rome's traditional cults: Theodosius I adopted Christianity as the Imperial State religion. Officially, the "Imperial cult" was abandoned, along with all cults other than Imperially sanctioned forms of Christianity.[163])) remove summary as it's all factually incorrect!!
J.N.D. Kelly explains that from the beginning of Christianity, there was a broad outline of doctrine that was seen as sacrosanct; it was accepted by early believers that this doctrine was handed down from those Apostles who had known Jesus and been taught by him.[164]: 4 The Old Testament was also immeasurably important.[164]: 32 The Apostolic Fathers refer to the Old Testament prophets, and what they regarded as "the teaching derived from Christ's Apostles" to provide the message, or kerygma of the early church.[164]: 31, 34
Ignatius of Antioch (c. 108/140 AD)) writes what becomes doctrinal, that conformity to Jesus and to the Apostles, is the ideal.[164]: 33
Second century church fathers gave different versions of church doctrine than fifth century theologians.[164]: 3–4
From the Apostolic age to the mid second century, New Testament books were being written, read, copied and passed along, and regularly referred to, but there was no official Christian canon.
The importance of the Old Testament in forming Christian doctrine cannot be over–stated.[164]: 32
Clement was bishop of Rome from 88 to 99 AD. He wrote that the Apostles received the gospel from Jesus; Ignatius sets up conformity to Jesus as he is portrayed in the New Testament writings, and the Apostles, is the ideal.[164]: 33
Gradually, theology asserted the need for more precise understandings of New Testament writings. For some unknown reason, East and West developed their own interpretations independently of one another, with the West being traditional, reiterating the doctrines in the scriptures, and the Eastern church being more adventurous in their thinking.[164]: 4
In the Patristic period, Christianity was already developing along more than one doctrinal path.[165]: 1–2
Christian teachings took moral reasoning out of the province of the educated and made it available to ordinary folk. It included a high moral standard and a powerful ideology which provided symbols for understanding the evil in the world. It offered a sense of the moral structure of the universe. It included an ideology of justice. Christianity had a sacramental system that offered its practitioners repentance from sins, the overcoming of sin, and the eventual overcoming of death itself.
These beliefs made Christianity appealing to Romans already dissatisfied with their status quo.
According to Peter Brown, the harsh penalties of fourth century laws were not intended to be enforced (or force conversion), but were instead meant to re-order society's public practices along religious lines.[166] The threat itself (following the tradition in Roman Law) was seen as a deterrent aimed at certain practices such as animal sacrifice and magic, not as a deterrent of paganism itself.[167][168] Blood sacrifice was most abhorrent to Christians.[166][169] Altars used for sacrifice were routinely smashed by Christians who were deeply offended by the blood of slaughtered victims.[170] Public sacrifices disappeared completely in many towns and cities as a result,[53][171] yet there are many signs that pagans, and paganism (sans sacrifice), continued into the seventh century.[71]: 108–110 [56][72][73]: 165–167 [74]: 156
From 303–312, The Great Persecution of Christians under Diocletian included the burning of scriptures, other Christian books (EH 8.2) and the death and apostacy of many.[172][173][174][175][176]
305 Donatist schism begins
Historian Maureen Tilley has written that, during the Great Persecution "When Roman soldiers came calling, some of the [Catholic] officials handed over the sacred books, vessels, and other church goods rather than risk legal penalties" over a few objects.[177] These cooperators became known as traditores. The term originally meant one who hands over a physical object, but it came to mean "traitor".[177] The North African Christians who were the rigorists who became known as Donatists, continued to resent Roman government even after Diocletian left, and refused to accept the traditores back into church leadership positions.[178] Catholics wanted to wipe the slate clean and accommodate the government. There were also different views of baptism and some other practices, but Alan Cameron explains that Donatism was not an actual heresy with differences in important doctrine, it was a schism over differences in practices.[179]
As an alternative form of the innovation, Donatism spread rapidly in competition with catholic Christianity. The rivalry between the two factions caused the landscape of Roman North Africa, to be, as Brown describes it, "covered with a white robe of churches"; Donatists and Catholics built church after church, often in the same towns, as they competed with each other for the loyalty of the people.[180][181] The Donatists survived until the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb in the closing years of the seventh century.[182]
Blood sacrifice of animals was the element of pagan culture most abhorrent to Christians, though Christian emperors often tolerated other pagan practices.[183] There is a long history of scholarly disagreement over whether or not Constantine, as the first Christian emperor, outlawed public sacrifice.[note 4]
While many scholars see it as likely that Constantine did so, what is known with some certainty is that, in places that were, as Lavan says, "under the emperor's nose", such as Constantinople and Antioch, the public ritual killing of animals largely disappeared from civic festivals by the time of Julian (361 to 363). Private domestic sacrifices continued to be performed, and away from the imperial court, efforts against sacrifice were not effective or enduring until the fifth and sixth centuries.[143][142] Still, Bradbury asserts that the complete disappearance of public sacrifice "in many towns and cities must be attributed to the atmosphere created by imperial and episcopal hostility".[189]
370/380 Religious change through "new men": According to Brown, "The fourth century scramble for gold ensured that the rural population was driven" hard.[190] Eighty percent of the population provided the labor to harvest 60% of the empire's wealth, very little of which ever benefitted them.[191] This contributed to civil unrest.[192] Constantine and his successors reached out to the provincial elite to deal with this and other issues, enlarging the Roman Senate's membership from about 600 to over 2,000.[193] This also contributed to unrest and change as the novi homines ("new men", first in their family to serve in the Roman Senate) were more willing to accept religious change.[194] Bishops became intercessors in society, lobbying the powerful to practice Christian benevolence toward those that depended upon them.[195] Money, power and prestige began shifting toward the bishops and the church.[196][197][198]
380 – 430 Early Christian habits of giving had originally been part of what had broken down traditional social boundaries. Believers of all classes had contributed what they could to care for the poor, the church, and the clergy thus creating a distinctive Christian style of giving.[199] Strong bonds between the clergy and the rank and file existed, as leaders were not an elite, but were instead teachers and friends.[200] All of this started to change between 380 and 430.[196][197][198]
In 382, Theodosius I issued a decree of death for all Manichaean monks.[201]
In 391, in Egypt, the Serapeum of Alexandria was destroyed. Several conflicting accounts exist. It is not known with any certainty whether it was destroyed by a Christian mob or by Roman soldiers, but it is known that politics and rioting were involved.[202] Recent archaeology has shown that the Serapeum was the only temple in Egypt destroyed in this period.[203][note 5] Alan Cameron describes the Roman temples in Egypt as "among the best preserved in the ancient world".[69] After the temple was destroyed, Serapis' devotees explained that Serapis had not been defeated by the Christian god, but had instead simply withdrawn from the temple and returned to Heaven "saddened that such blasphemy should have occurred in his beloved city". His priests produced prophecies in which Serapis had foretold his own departure, the desecration of his shrine and, even, the victory of the sign of the cross. Years later, Christians as far away as Carthage were impressed by the power of the gods to foretell their own defeat (Aug. De Divinatione Daemonum I.I).[130]
Roman temple, Maiden Castle
Archaeological evidence from around the entire Mediterranean Basin for the violent destruction of temples in the fourth century is limited to a handful of sites. There are 43 incidents of temple destruction in church records and hagiographical accounts, but only 4 have been confirmed by archaeological evidence.[78][206] Archaeologists Lavan and Mulryan write that, "As a result of recent work, it can be stated with confidence, that temples were neither widely converted into churches nor widely demolished in Late Antiquity".[78] Archaeologist Richard Bayliss has written that this is significant because it can no longer be argued that a universal 'fall of the temples' was caused by Constantinian legislation.[207][note 6]
392 Theodosius I issued a law on 8 November 392 that has been described by some as a universal ban on paganism effectively resulting in making Christianity the official religion of the empire.[135][216] The law does not mention Christianity, and it was addressed only to Rufinus in the East, but it does ban all forms of magic divination including all forms of private domestic sacrifice which had previously been tolerated: the lares, the penates and the genius.[140][217] The term lares could be used as a synonym for "home" because the god has to take care of everything about the domus thereby guaranteeing its prosperity;[139] the genius was fixed on a person, either the household head or the emperor, and it was the job of the pater familias to establish those domestic shrines;[140] and the penates were the divinities who provided and guarded the accumulated food and possessions of the household. Regular sacrifices were essential.[218] The law of 392 gave the imperial government the right and means to implement a policy against all domestic forms of pagan sacrifice.[185]
In 443, Sozomen writes a history of the church and evaluates the impact of this particular law of 392 as having had only minor significance at the time it was issued.[144] Sacrifice had already largely disappeared by 392.[142]
Moderate tolerance of Jews and pagans, intolerance of heretics
The status of Judaism within the Roman Empire had been established as a 'religio licita', a 'permitted religion', before the rise of Christianity. According to recent Jewish scholarship, the approach of toleration it implied was maintained under Christian emperors.[219]Anna Sapir Abulafia writes that, "Most scholars would agree that, with the marked exception of Visigothic Spain (in the seventh century), Jews in Latin Christendom lived relatively peacefully with their Christian neighbors through most of the Middle Ages."[220][221] Jewish historian Jeremy Cohen says historians generally agree this is because Catholic thought on the Jews before the 1200s was guided by the teachings of Augustine.[222]
In the fourth century, tolerance is exemplified in the writings of Augustine who believed God had chosen the Jews as a special people.[223] He rejected those who said the Jews should be killed or forcibly converted, and argued against them, by saying that Jews should be allowed to live in Christian societies and practice Judaism without interference.[224] The sentiment sometimes attributed to Augustine that Christians should let the Jews "survive but not thrive" is apocryphal and is not found in any of his writings.[225]
Coexistence did occasionally lead to violence between Jews, pagans and Christians, but such outbreaks tended to be local and relatively infrequent.[226][227][note 7] In a comparative study of levels of violence at various stages of Roman society, German ancient historian Martin Zimmermann [de], concludes there was no increase in the level of violence in the Empire in Late Antiquity under Christian emperors.[239][240] Brown says pagans were mostly left alone, since Christianity saw them as essentially defeated.[241]
Augustine's support of the state's use of coercion in dealing with the Donatists has led modern liberals to describe him as the "prince and patriarch of persecutors".[242] The harsh realities Augustine faced can be found in his Letter 28 written to bishop Novatus around 416. Donatists had cut out the tongue and cut off the hands of a Bishop Rogatus who had recently converted to Catholicism, also attacking an unnamed count's agent who had been traveling with Rogatus.[243] The empire responded with force and coercion, and Augustine eventually came to support that approach.[244][245][246]
He did not support coercion because he believed it could or would convert someone, but he did observe that suffering softened Donatists enough to make reasoning with them possible. Augustine hoped his reasoning would then lead to their voluntary agreement, repentance, and change.[247][248] Brown says Augustine lived in a harsh, authoritarian age of punitive punishment; nevertheless, this approach to the Donatists demonstrates an eloquent early attempt at advocacy for correction as reformation of the wrongdoer instead of payment for wrongdoing.[249][250][251] Augustine's correspondence after 405 contains multiple references to his use of the bishop's right - as well as all his personal influence with Imperial officials - to intercede and make sure the death penalty for Donatists was avoided.[252] The state responded with the law of January 409 which allowed that "the authorities could politely by-pass the 'bishop, the persuader of mercy' in arresting and punishing culprits".[252]
397? Saint Ninian evangelizes the Picts in Scotland
318 Arianism: religious change within the innovation. The Arian controversy, which lasted 56 years, was a Christological doctrine which asserts Christ as created by God and not fully equal to God.[253] Bishop John Kaye says it started in Alexandria, between the bishops Arius and Alexander and quickly spread through Egypt and Libya and the other Roman provinces.[254]
In 325, from 20 May–19 June, the First Council of Nicaea was called by Constantine to confront and resolve the Arian doctrine and unify Christology. The council decreed the Original Nicene Creed as a result. It also addressed the Easter controversy and passed 20 church laws called Canon laws, such as Canon VII which granted special recognition to Jerusalem. It did not decree or discuss anything about the canon of scripture.
325 The Kingdom of Aksum (Modern Ethiopia and Eritrea) declares Christianity as the official state religion.
330, 11 May: Constantine moves the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople
In 380, on 28 February, Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica, the Cunctos populos in Latin.[257]
The Edict declared that "the [Nicene] religion that is followed by the Pontiff Damasus and by Peter, Bishop of Alexandria" shall be practiced by all "who are ruled by the administration of Our Clemency" and that those who "sustain the infamy of heretical dogmas" will receive both divine and earthly vengence.[258][note 9] The Edict was addressed directly to the people of the city of Constantinople, but it was also valid throughout the Eastern part of the empire – but only the Eastern Empire. Theodosius was emperor only in the East and did not become emperor of both East and West until 392.[260][261]
The Edict opposed Arianism, and attempted to establish unity in Christianity and suppress heresy.[149] German ancient historian Karl Leo Noethlichs [de] writes that the Edict of Thessalonica was neither anti-pagan nor antisemitic; it did not declare Christianity to be the official religion of the empire; and it gave no advantage to Christians over other faiths.[262] It is clear from mandates issued in the years after 380 that Theodosius had made no requirement for pagans or Jews to convert to Christianity.[149][note 10] In the Theodosian Code, a collection of laws from this period, Theodosius is credited with including tolerance of Judaism as a protected religion by recording that "It is sufficiently established that the sect of the Jews is prohibited by no law" - (a statement that was later excluded under Justinian).[219]
On 24 November of 380, Emperor Theodosius I was baptized. According to Robinson Thornton, Theodosius began taking steps to repress Arianism immediately after his baptism.[266] On 26 November 380, two days after he had arrived in Constantinople, Theodosius expelled the Homoian bishop, Demophilus of Constantinople, and appointed Meletius patriarch of Antioch, and Gregory of Nazianzus, one of the Cappadocian Fathers from Cappadocia (today in Turkey), patriarch of Constantinople.[267]
Salzman writes that, for most of this period, the papacy had only a limited influence, while the senatorial aristocracy played the central role. By the end of this period, these two powers had switched places.[268][269]
400 – 415 violent conflict and rioting in Alexandria between Christians and pagans
415 Murder of Hypatia – Ancient writer Socrates Scholasticus presents Hypatia's murder as politically motivated and makes no mention of any role Hypatia's paganism might have played in her death, but other sources of the time say differently.[270][271][272] Cameron et al conclude: "Hypatia's murder was the consequence of a complex of factors that had little to do with her religious beliefs, teaching, or standing in the Alexandrian community during the quarter century of her friendship with Synegius".[273]
432 Saint Patrick begins his mission in Ireland. Almost the entire nation is Christian by the time of his death.
440 Mosaic from Reims depicting gladiators (Musée Saint-Remi)Gladiator shows were never officially politically abolished, but Christians did speak out against them, and the rising number of Christians in the population caused the popularity of the games to decline.[274] It is likely the games ended from lack of public support before 440.[275]
440–461 Pope Leo the Great: sometimes considered the first pope by non-Catholics.
472 civil war – Roman fought Roman, doing more damage to the city than any previous event.[276] Afterwards, senators returned to Rome determined to support the generals that had taken over.[277] This produced a decade of recovery. It meant a western emperor would never again reside in Rome, but it also meant Roman senators had new power and remained a dominant influence to the end of the fifth century.[278] It also meant these senators played an increasing role in church politics. For example, they helped the Roman papacy assert its independence from the East. This had long-term implications for both groups.[279]
The weight of wealth after the fifth century turned Christianity in a new direction.[280] What followed was an age of managerial bishops, administrators, and their clerical staffs.[280]Clergy became increasingly separate and different from the laity.[281][282] In Late Antiquity, people had felt no need for special holy men who could access the divine for them, but the gradual "magicization" of the church's sacraments and devotions also increased the role of "holy men" who could provide that special access.[283] For the laity, that meant that their donations, which had previously been aimed for the maintenance of the church and the poor, instead became donations for the dead to insure their salvation after death.[284]
In 535, the eastern emperor Justinian I attempted to assert control over the Italian Peninsula in the Gothic War (535–554) which became a guerrilla war that lasted for 20 years. After fighting ended, surviving senators, along with the pope and clergy of Rome, looked forward to a period of reconstruction.[285] Instead, in 554, Justinian did assert control over Italy through what is known as the "Pragmatic Sanction". The Sanction effectively removed the supports that had allowed the senatorial aristocracy to retain power. The resilience of the Roman senatorial aristocracy began to dissipate as the functions of the Senate declined.[286]
Herrin asserts that, under Justinian, this new full "supremacy of Christian belief involved considerable destruction".[287] The decree of 528 had already barred pagans from state office when, decades later, Justinian ordered a "persecution of surviving Hellenes, accompanied by the burning of pagan books, pictures and statues" which took place at the Kynêgion.[287] Most pagan literature was on papyrus, and so it perished before being able to be copied onto something more durable. Herrin says it is difficult to assess the degree to which Christians are responsible for the losses of ancient documents in many cases, but in the mid-sixth century, active persecution in Constantinople destroyed many ancient texts.[287]
Paula Fredriksen
If it weren't for the translation of the Jewish Bible into Greek, and if it weren't for Diaspora Jewish communities living in synagogues, rimming the edge of the Mediterranean, Christianity could not have spread. But Christianity [is] an interpretation of the idea of Israel. And the way Christianity is able to spread as it does is through the lifelines of these Diaspora synagogues. The language of the movement, as soon as we have actual evidence from [it], is Greek. The Bible it refers to is the Greek Bible. The communities that serve as the matrix for the message are synagogue communities, and we get stories in Matthew or stories in John about this particular community being kicked out of the other synagogues. So what do they do? They form their own group. Business as usual, again.
But I think it's really because there is an international population that resonates with these great religious ideas of God as the Creator, of righteousness pouring down like waters, of a Kingdom of God and what that would mean in terms of the way a community socially constitutes itself ... it's because of that, because of Diaspora Judaism, which is extremely well established, that Christianity itself, as a new and constantly improvising form of Judaism, is able to spread as it does throughout the Roman world.
Jews joined the movement because it is a particular articulation of Jewish religious hope seen through this one figure of a redeemer. But it's certainly consistent within what we know as the different options of Judaism. The intriguing thing is why did gentiles join? And, here we have, again, the evidence of Paul's letters in 50. He thought it was miracle. These are gentiles, who are going in and out voluntarily from the synagogue, who, on the basis of the message they're getting about the Son of God being on the verge of coming back, are suddenly enabled -- Paul says, through the Holy Spirit -- [to] abandon idol worship. They make a commitment to this particular community.
If you look at the way the movement spreads sociologically, as opposed to theologically, if you look [at] what distinguishes Christianity from all the other religious options in the Mediterranean, it doesn't distinguish it from Judaism. Both groups meet at least once a week. Both groups have very articulate ethical norms. Both groups have a tremendous ethic of community charity. Both groups have revealed ethical patterns of behavior.... No promiscuity. Don't kill the kids. Don't worship idols. Don't go to whore houses. This whole thing that serves to build up community and create a kind of support system. Also, there's this tremendous religious prestige, thanks to the antiquity of the Jewish Bible, which by entering into the church, these Christians enter into that history as well. That's tremendously prestigious and important. Judaism itself is, for all its peculiarities, considered prestigious because of its antiquity. And so there are lots of reasons, sociologically and practically, why Christianity would appeal.
According to demographics, over half of the population of the empire, including many aristocrats, had already become Christian by the 390s when many of the religious laws threatening armed force were first issued.[161]: 183
Judith Herrin writes that it wasn't until the sixth century Byzantine Emperor Justinian (r. 527–565), who was the major influence in getting Christian ideals and legal regulations integrated with Roman law, that "the full force of imperial legislation against deviants of all kinds, particularly religious" ones, was actually applied in practice.[288]: 213 Justinian revised the Theodosian codes, and introduced many Christian elements into law effectively putting "the word of God on the same level as Roman law, combining an exclusive monotheism with a persecuting authority".[288]: 213
As individuals in a society become more like one another, they show greater sympathy for those among them who suffer, and as a result the law of the society becomes milder.[289]: 160
"It was an insight of de Tocqueville that social values and attitudes are intimately related to patterns of social stratification".[289]: 160
MacMullen also emphasizes that the mere existence of such laws doesn't automatically correlate to how often a capital penalty was in fact applied.[290]: 265–266
Prior to 200 AD, the empire had the death penalty for about 20 crimes. During this same period, there is a steady degradation in the legal right of the individual to decent treatment.[291]: 208
These were all a direct or indirect result of the substitution of Monarchy for Republic. Thus the theory that the severity of penalties is related to the nature of government is indeed confirmed by the case of Rome.[289]: 159
Garnsey page 159
The following factors begin to explain the extended use of harsher penalties under the Roman Empire: absolutist tendencies in government and the growth of a ruler cult; the increased activity but continued inefficiency of the central administration in the sphere of law enforcement; the removal of limitations within the judicial system through the substitution of flexible for rigid and formalized procedures, and the expansion of the criminal law. These were all a direct or indirect result of the substitution of Monarchy for Republic. Thus the theory that the severity of penalties is related to the nature of government is indeed confirmed by the case of Rome.
the downgrading of the position of the humble citizen virtually to that of the free alien was a development of the first century A.D. (The poor citizen was favored above the alien if both were defendants on the same charge. Garnsey 152
The references in the legal sources to the exemption of the provincial elite from "plebeian" penalties begin in the early second
century and are scattered through the Antonine and Severan periods. They
testify to the desire of the central government to protect this group (there were
sound political and economic as well as social reasons for doing so) and to the
practical difficulties involved in achieving this Garnsey 153
The reforms which might seem relevant to the present theme include
the disappearance of the penal powers of a husband over his wife, the placing
of legal restrictions on the power of discipline of a father over his child, and
the protecting of slaves against overharsh punishment by cruel masters. It has
been thought that these and other reforms came about largely as a result of the
humanizing influence of Stoicism and Christianity. 154
Late Antiquity comprises the end of empire. It can also be viewed as a kind of cultural frontier, and frontier situations push regimes to limit ambiguities, and define power more openly and actively, while at the same time transforming the basis of that power and the knowledge that underpins it.[292]: 4
"Religion has the power to alter social practice in fundamental ways".[292]: 3 Therefore, the study of the use of violence and physical force cannot be omitted from "explorations of the relations of power". The use of violence is at one end of a continuum of practices crucial to maintaining and developing relations of power.[292]: 3 All participants in a social and religious group are agents of power and influence over that group
Early Church Fathers advocated against adultery, polygamy, homosexuality, pederasty, bestiality, prostitution, and incest while advocating for the sanctity of the marriage bed.[293]: 20
Bad attitudes
The legal language runs parallel to the writings of the Christian apologists, such as Augustine of Hippo and Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and heresiologists such as Epiphanius of Salamis, who drew on a rhetoric of conquest.[166] These writings were commonly hostile and often contemptuous toward a paganism Christianity saw as already defeated.[294][295] Christian historians wrote vividly dramatized accounts of pious bishops doing battle with temple demons, and much of the framework for understanding this age is based on the “tabloid-like” accounts of the destruction of the Serapeum of Alexandria, the murder of Hypatia, and the publication of the Theodosian law code.[296]: 26, 47–54 [297]: 121–123 These Christian sources with their violent rhetoric, have had great influence on modern perceptions of this period.[91] Outside of violent rhetoric, non-Christian, (non-heretical), groups of pagans and Jews lived peacefully alongside their Christian neighbors through a tolerance based on contempt throughout most of Late Antiquity.[298][299]: 133–134
According to Salzman, "scholars ...by and large, concur that the once dominant notion of overt pagan-Christian religious conflict cannot fully explain the texts and artifacts or the social, religious, and political realities of Late Antique Rome".[85]: 2 [note 11]
there were only a small and limited number of isolated incidents of actual violence between Christians and pagans.[75]
Wayne Meeks asks: "What was there about this movement which could make that kind of appeal to people? ...In the final analysis, I think we don't know. We can speculate, we can say it offers a kind of community, which is rare in any society and certainly rare in antiquity. It offers a closeness, it offers a powerful ideology which explains the evil in the world, or at least it provides powerful symbols for understanding that evil, it offers a sense of the moral structure of the universe.... It has an ideology of justice, which will be guaranteed by God, finally. It offers a community which shapes the basic moral intuitions of its members, which brings that kind of moral admonition, which otherwise, in the Roman world, we find... only in the schools of philosophers, which after all, is an elite phenomenon, limited to a very small stratum of highly educated people. [Christianity] makes this [morality] available to perfectly ordinary folk.
So, we can talk about a lot of these factors, which we say must have entered into this, and yet finally there is hidden behind the difficulties of our sources, but hidden more behind, I think our final inability to penetrate the deepest structures of the human personality, there is the fact that countless individual decisions were made that added up to a profound cultural change in the whole Empire....
".[303]
The Roman approach to empire building included a cultural permeability that allowed foreigners to become a part of it, but the Roman religious practice of adopting foreign gods and practices into its pantheon did not apply equally to all gods: "Many divinities were brought to Rome and installed as part of the Roman state religion, but a great many more were not".[304]: 31 This characteristic openness has led many, such as Ramsay MacMullen to say that in its process of expansion, the Roman Empire was "completely tolerant, in heaven as on earth", but to also go on and immediately add: "That [tolerance] was only half the story".[305]: 2
Christian hostility toward pagans is seen by most modern scholars as far from the general phenomenon the law implies.[46] It is largely based on literary sources, most of which are Christian, and are known to exaggerate.[306] Christian hagiography of the time recorded instances of violence with much rhetoric, interpreting events in a way that upheld their image as powerful patrons and intercessors and to further the cult of the martyrs in the West. Much of the framework for understanding this age is based on the “tabloid-like” accounts of the destruction of the Serapeum of Alexandria, the murder of Hypatia, and the publication of the Theodosian law code.[296]: 26, 47–54 [297]: 121–123 What limited evidence there is indicates both Christian clergy and Roman magistrates preferred the power of words and the use of positive incentives over violence.[290]: 266–267, 272 There is no evidence to indicate that conversion through force was a standard method of Christianization.[290]: 268–269
Rita Lizzi Testa, Professor of Roman history, Michele Renee Salzman, and Marianne Sághy quote Alan Cameron as saying that the idea that religious conflict is the cause of the swift demise of paganism is pure historiographical construction.[85]: 1
According to our texts, neither church leaders nor civic officials were typically initiators of violence against pagans. Rather, the clergy could and did call in civic officials to help to restore order.[290]: 284–285
Only in Gaul is the militant Martin represented as deploying physical violence against pagans and his very violence made him unique among Christian bishops of the fourth-century western Empire.[290]: 284–285
central to the rhetorical strategy of all three authors is a conception of nobility that privileged virtue over wealth and birth. Ultimately, then, the rhetoric of corruption served as a means of assimilation in an era of unprecedented social mobility.[307]: 1
Generous 'gifts' were the conventional way for people from the emperor on down, to build ties with others in a system that depended upon connections.[161]: 191 Emperors and other aristocrats wanted to be honored as generous patrons. That meant not only doing favors for friends and family but also listening to the recommendations of powerful supporters for job placements. Both giver and receiver accrued honor through this patronage and gift giving while also putting the receiver in debt to the giver.[161]: 191–192 In societies like Rome's, where access to power and position was dominated by connections and patronage, the payment of money offered an important, alternative channel of advancement. "For peasants, the payment of fees offered a simple and affordable means of mollifying a hostile and ever-threatening officialdom".[308]
When it came to the central functions of the Roman state, even the vivid Ambrose was a lightweight. He could attack the avarice of private persons, conjuring up their abuses in the old-fashioned language of the Italy of an earlier age. He could not attack the fiscal system from which so much of the wealth around him must have derived.[309]: 146
MacMullen asserts that the church, and Christians in government, were universally corrupt.[299]: 342
.. he continues to maintain the existence of a shift from the responsible exercise of influence by the Roman elite ... to the indiscriminate exchange of favors for money under the later Roman empire of the fourth and fifth centuries. "Such practices as bribery and extortion had always existed among the 'slaves, freedmen, supply sergeants, and petty accountants' of the empire", he argues, "but only in the Roman imperial government of the fourth and fifth centuries do such individuals occupy positions of substantial authority".
The historian Ramsay MacMullen, for example, attributes to the fourth-century expansion of the imperial bureaucracy the spread of an ethos of venality and the displacement of aristocratic networks of patronage by the indiscriminate exchange of favors for money. Christopher Kelly, on the other hand, sees such descriptions as merely a rhetorical manifestation of elite anxieties over their loss of influence in an increasingly heterogeneous society. Tim Watson argues that neither of these views is wholly correct.[307]
Quotes from Watson:Subsequent studies have contested and moderated this perspective, but it remains a "revelation" that practices considered “corrupt” by modern Western standards might in some ways promote government efficiency and prove beneficial to the goal of modernization.[307]: 4
Watson says that "Even if agreement can be reached on what exactly constituted “corrupt” behavior, there is simply not enough data" to prove this debate one way or the other. This, in turn, gives rise to the tendency of ancient historians to adopt their own personal perspectives.[307]: 6
"The continued acceptance of activities which we would regard as corrupt has been seen by some commentators as a sign of an unchecked moral and administrative malaise. These conclusions should be handled with care".
Some scholars have taken this at face value.[307]: 2 A major proponent of this interpretation is the historian
Historian Robert Markus also says “the image of a society neatly divided into ‘Christian’ and ‘pagan’ is the creation of late fourth-century Christians", And the category of “the Greco-Roman world” collapses considerable temporal and geographical differences, to say nothing of cultural and ethical ones, and that even the category of "Christianity" is a heuristic one. Elizabeth A. Castelli points out that this often obscures rather than illuminates a difficult and controversial topic.[310]: 229–231
Alan Bowman and Andrew Wilson describe all large-scale demographic estimates as "fragile", and reference Walter Scheidel's work on Egypt[311] as demonstrating the "geopolitical idiosyncrasies of Egypt", saying there is "no consensus on the size of Egypt's population in classical antiquity" and that "scholarly debate remains vigorous".[312]: 317 .[312]: 2
Robert Couzin uses the Christian sarcophagi of Rome to estimate the city's population. He says Rome's numbers were steadily declining from 250 to 400. In the year 300, he estimates the population of Rome at 800,000 with Christians at 20%. By 350, the population of Rome had dropped to 700,000 while the percentage of Christians increased to 40%. In the year 400, Rome had dropped to 600,000 people and 75% of them were Christian.[313]
Couzin from page 11:
In a world where natality did not outstrip mortality, this required sustained and relentless conversion. Based on earlier scholarly guesstimates of the Christian population at various dates, R. Stark and K. Hopkins both proposed an implicit average growth rate of 3.4% per annum.61 Of course, the actual rate of expansion was not linear, but a high average is necessary: there is no other way to get from marginal beginnings to “Christian triumph” within a few centuries.
With respect specifically to Rome, Eusebius reported that c.250 the urban population included 155 Christian clergy and 1500 widows and paupers to be maintained and fed.62 A Harnack surmised that this would require a community of between 30,000 and 50,000 Christians, and most modern scholars have (more or less enthusiastically) followed his opinion.63 Growth in the decades after 250 is suggested by another citation in Eusebius. He remarked that Maxentius sought to appease the Christians in 306 as a means to flatter “the Roman people”, hardly demographic evidence but nonetheless a soft corroboration of the significant Christian expansion in the capital that one would anticipate.
Stark 1996 and 1998; Hopkins 1998. More sophisticated mathematical models for the shape of the expansion curve could affect certain assumptions but not the general tendency of the numerical hypotheses. See Schor 2009, 472-98. The average growth rate is not very sensitive to the opening figure or the precise timing of milestones.
Hopkins, K. 1998. “Christian number and its implications,” J. Early Christian Stud. 6, 185-226.
use Quantifying the Sources of Slaves in the Early Roman Empire, [[4]]
use stuff from Christian graves - Couzin??? and Settlement, Urbanization, and Population edited by Alan Bowman, Andrew Wilson; review by Welch and Pulham [[5]]
His Table has the total number of Christians in the year 313, when Constantine became emperor, between 16.8% to 20.4%. By 393, the population of Egyptian Christians was between 46.2 and 56.1% of the overall population. By comparison, Stark's Table 1.1 has Christians in the year 330 at 10.6% of the population, and in the year 350, they are at 56.5% of the population.[314]: 7
The sizes of cities can be related to the sizes of territories and rural settlements.[312]: 2 Thomas A. Robinson has problems with numbers that are based on the assumption that early Christianity was an urban religion. He acknowledges that the urban view "is the view of almost every recent scholar of the early church."[315]: 14–17 However, he also points out that the Roman empire was 80-90% rural and maybe 10% urban, which Helen Rhee says "is agreed by all scholars".[315]: 17 [316]: 1171 This creates a mathematical dilemma. If 10% of the empire was urban, and Christians were mostly urban and made up 10% of the empire, then Christians must have made up the entire population of all urban areas by the year 300 - an impossible scenario.[316]: 1171 On the other hand, if Christians made up 10-20% of the urban population, then Christians would have constituted only 1% to 4% of the overall population in the year 300, "a scenario perhaps more problematic and hardly supported by the scholars in the field".[316]: 1171–1172 Due to this mathematical constraint, Robinson contends that Christians must have been as rural as they were urban.[315]: 19, cf.40 [316]: 1171–1172 There is a good bit of written evidence suggesting a rural dimension to early Christianity.[315]: 19 Archaeology has identified a half and half balance between urban and rural in Italy.[315]: 35 Rhee says it is likely the church had a "presence in the countryside early and was more rustic in its complexion and character than the dominant urban thesis allows, while cities were more Christianized than the countryside".[316]: 1173
In rural Egypt, Eusebius’ account of a conflict between Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria (248–264/5) and a village bishop named Nepos, points to the presence of Christianity there, going against the view that Christianity only took off in Egypt at the end of fourth century. The story of Antony and his parents indicates the presence of rural forms of Christianity in Egypt prior to 250 CE.[316]: 1172
Christian writings and Roman writings prior to 250 CE, take for granted a Christian presence in the countryside.[316]: 1172 In Phrygia, there is well known evidence for Christianity’s second-century presence in the small towns and the countryside. Eusebius suggests “the presence of rural, non-Montanist Christians prior to Montanism”.[315]: 154 In Egypt, Eusebius’s account of the conflict between Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria (248–264/5) and a village bishop named Nepos, points to a much earlier presence of Christianity in rural Egypt, going against the notion that rural Christianity only took off in Egypt at the end of fourth century. The story of Antony and his parents indicates the presence of rural forms of Christianity prior to 250 CE.[316]: 1172
Tabbernee edited a volume by leading researchers in a range of geographical areas important to early Christianity, all with a careful eye to archaeological evidence in particular.33 Tabbernee comments about this volume: “From the data presented, there are some surprises in store for those who think that early Christianity was primarily an urban phenomenon.”34 In regard to Italy, for instance: this
look at page 27 and 12, Robinson
Robinson fundamentally questions whether historians “must” or “can count accurately” the population of the Roman Empire,[316]: 1171
Therefore Robinson argues for a substantial rural element in the church prior to 300 CE [316]: 1172
population went back and forth [316]: 1172 and other guy... on migration; Robinson addresses language barriers and other obstacles;
Having a unified church was important to the church, but it was not less important to the state.[317]: 37 Brown points out that, when Roman authorities saw Christians as a threat to the well-being of the empire, they had shown no hesitation in "taking out" the Christian church, and Constantine and his imperial successors responded the same to the threat of heresy, for the same reasons.[318]: 74 Cameron observes that, "before Constantine was a Christian emperor, he was a typical emperor".[319]
Arianism was a 'foe' of orthodoxy, and the conflict lasted 56 years with power going back and forth between the two groups who repeatedly excommunicated one another.[320]: 28, 29, 31 [321]: 23 Manichaeism lasted much longer and may have been the most persecuted of all the heresies.[322]: viii
Christian history professor Maureen Tilley asserts that Constantine's approach to the Donatists of North Africa was not so much a "Christian" response as it was a response of the Roman state to Circumcellion violence and the need for public order.[323]: xxv The first Donatist' martyr stories begin in 317 and last until 321 when Constantine acknowledged failure and cancelled the laws against the Donatists. For the next 75 years, both Donatists and Catholics existed, often directly alongside each other, with a double line of bishops for the same cities.[323]: xv
"By the sixth century, anathematized, vilified as a 'defilement', its leaders beheaded, their followers exiled, impoverished or also slain, Manichaeism was extinguished, and with its books destroyed, left only its name to the Christian world as a term of abuse for dualisms generally".Lieu
Using data from the third century, and the twentieth century as a model, Stark concludes that as a result of these epidemics, by 260 there was one Christian for every four pagans in the city of Rome, whereas before it had been one for every eight.[324]: 780 Stark suggests that the Christian response to such calamities did much to commend their faith to the pagans.[314]: 82
Kelly says, "Unsalaried officials in Roman empire, charged fees for their services as a way of securing an income and regulating demands on their time".[308]
This virtue is rather fulsomely articulated by the panegyrist Pacatus in his address to the emperor Theodosius: “By your deeds, and not merely by words you have affirmed that the feelings of a prince ought to be all the more benevolent toward his subjects the greater his fortune is, for you act with equal loyalty and generosity, and as emperor you extend to your friends what you had wished for them when a private citizen.”64
The Byzantine emperor Justinian I, also known as Justinian the Great (527-565), enacted legislation with repeated calls for the cessation of sacrifice well into the 6th century.
Laws were not leading the way as much as reinforcing the influences in society that had by this date made Christianity a respectable option for western aristocrats, indeed an option that was increasing in prestige and honor.[161]: 197
These capital laws were not leading the way as much as they were simply reflecting what was happening in society.[161]: 197
In early Christian literature the care of widows and orphans as a duty of the church are usually listed together, but this is more than just a stylized way of referencing those in need. Sources indicate the presence and even the role of children in the early church.[325]: 173 Interest in the Christian socialization of children is evident in the New Testament books, Colossians, and Ephesians, and in the writings of the Apostolic fathers.[325]: 173–174
While asserting that there is not a single factor but a series of factors that made Christianity successful, Stark does "suggest that gender holds one of the answers to how it was done - that women played a critical role in the rise of Christianity".[162]: 229 Early Christian communities were highly inclusive in terms of social stratification and other social categories, like gender, much more so than were the Roman voluntary associations.[303]: 79, 81
Household codes page 175; male authors 176; Stark's open network 177 and mixed marriages 179-181 MacDonald in Osiek's book
By the time of Valentinian I, the idea that virgins and widows deserved extra respect instead of neglect is evidenced by him exempting them from the poll tax.[326]: 132
In 370 the Emperor Valentinian issued a written order to Pope Damasus I requiring the Christian missionaries to cease calling at the homes of pagan women. Although some classical writers claimed that women were easy prey for any "foreign superstition," most recognized that Christianity was unusually appealing because within the Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large (Fox 1987; Chadwick 1967; Harnack 1908)".[162]: 231
The apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, "reveal elements of the attraction" ascetic Christianity may have held for ceretain women.Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).: 13
By and large, the Christian emperors did not want to alienate pagan aristocrats".[161]: 193
Stark credits the superiority of Christian doctrine for Christianity's rise while Salzman says such claims are unprovable.[314]: 211, 215 [161]: xi
As the emperor, Constantine openly supported Christianity after 324, but there are indications he remained relatively tolerant of pagans.[327]: 3 He never engaged in a purge. Opponents' supporters were not slaughtered when Constantine took the capital; their families and court were not killed.[328]: 304 There were no pagan martyrs.[329]: 74, 75 Laws menaced death, but during Constantine's reign, no one suffered the death penalty for violating anti-pagan laws against sacrifice.[78][330]: 87, 93 "He did not punish pagans for being pagans, or Jews for being Jews, and did not adopt a policy of forced conversion."[328]: 302 Pagans remained in important positions at his court.[328]: 302 He ruled for 31 years and never outlawed paganism; in the words of an early edict, he decreed that polytheists could "celebrate the rites of an outmoded illusion," so long as they did not force Christians to join them.[331]
According to Rodney Stark, since Christians most likely formed only sixteen to seventeen percent of the empire's population at the time of Constantine's conversion, they did not have the numerical advantage to form a sufficient power–base to begin a systematic persecution of pagans.[332]: 13
Extant evidence concerning corruption generally comes from a moralizing rhetoric intended to damn an opponent in as many memorable ways as possible. It is within this framework that texts on corruption should be read.[308].
, "in discussing the ideological climate in which late antique laws were written, one cannot avoid coming to grips with the rise of
Christianity, which clearly affected the way many people thought about themselves, about each other, and about their God".[333]: 126
Bearing in mind this fifth-century emphasis on the misericordia (compassion) of the collector, Justinian's reform falls more clearly into focus, although its status as a legislative and ideological milestone remains undiminished. [333]: 138
Sin, Citizenship, and the Salvation of Souls: The Impact of Christian Priorities on Late-Roman and Post-Roman Society by Sabine MacCormack
God's Presence: A Contemporary Recapitulation of Early Christianity By Frances Young: Key concepts, page 1
Regulating Sex in the Roman Empire
Ideology, the Bible, and the Early Christians
David Wheeler-Reed
The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries
By Wayne A. Meeks
Roman Slave Law and Romanist Ideology
Author(s): Alan Watson
Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship
By Eric Gregory
and "The role of Christianity in the abandoning of most western gladiatorial combat was nil".[299]: 331
One of the first things that is important about this, in Malcolm Errington's view, is how much this legislation was applied and used, which would show how dependable the laws are as a reflection of what actually happened to pagans in history.[335] Brown says that, given the large numbers of non-Christians in every region at this time, local authorities were "notoriously lax in imposing them. Christian bishops frequently obstructed their application.[336] The harsh imperial edicts had to face the vast following of paganism among the population, and the passive resistance of governors and magistrates, thereby limiting their impact.[337][338] But not eliminating impact altogether, as recent studies on the nature of "the presence" of the state, how it made itself felt, "the subtle nature of power" and the elimination of public sacrifice show.[334]: 25
page 153 - pagans and Christians lived together in peace MacMullen, Paganism
It is a well-known fact that Christian Apologists of the second century took pains to emphasize the similarities rather than the divergences that existed between their beliefs and the pagan wisdom of the Roman Empire.[339]: 212
Constantine penalized infant exposure by legally removing patriapotestus - that a father indefinitely retained the right to reclaim the exposed child - as an act of mercy. "Constantine was discouraging parents from exposing their children by depriving them of future power over them".[340]
When there was no father in the picture, a newborn was unlikely to be raised and likely to be exposed.[341] page 85
One of the main methods for maintaining the supply of slaves was natural reproduction.[109]: 14 Slaves who had many children were rewarded.[109]: 13 Chrysostom attempted to guard the sexual integrity of the slave by desexualizing the slave's body and criminalizing its violation. "Slaves were no longer morally neutral ground - having sex with a slave while married was adultery and if unmarried, fornication".[109]: 276 The renunciation of wealth, the promotion of ascetism, and the proliferation of chastity among slaves may have lessened their sexual use and their reproductive value.[109]: 13
Christians also interfered with some of the other methods for resupply such as kidnapping and child exposure.[109]: 142 Kidnapping was not as significant a contributor numerically as child exposure was.[342]
Slavery was of immense significance to society and "greatly influenced early Christian life and rhetoric".[343]: 359
Glancy asks: "How would a new identity as a Christian affect an urban slave, and how did the presence of slaves and slaveholders in the population affect the growth and practices of the churches"?[342]: 40 [109]: 10 Onesimus, a slave, had run away from his master Philemon, but both had become Christians, and Paul sends Onesimus back home with a letter. In that letter Paul insists on Philemon's acceptance of Onesimus, no longer as a slave, but as a "beloved brother". Wessels says Marianne Thompson argues convincingly that "a reading of the letter to Philemon which views Paul as asking for Onesimus' spiritual reception as a brother in Christ, without the setting free of his body as a slave, assumes a 'dualistic anthropology' in Paul which his writings do not confirm".[344]: 166 Paul's understanding of the church as a 'body' meant that, once Onesimus was accepted into the group as a brother, it would become impossible to treat him as chattel and sell him off if the price was right.[344]: 163, 165 J. H. Roberts also asserts that "The phrase, 'you will do even more than I say', can really only have one meaning: Philemon should set Onesimus free".[344]: 164
There are no extant sources written from the perspective of the slave,[109]: 6
Slaveholders characterized their slaves as 'bodies'[342]: 3 in the first century and into the fourth when Constantine became emperor.
they were property not human beings[109]: 13
Scholarship takes three views: a minority do not believe Paul intended to challenge slavery or encourage the slave Onesimus' manumission;[344]: 162 a second group agree that the letter describes an altered relationship between Philemon and his former slave: they will no longer be slave and slaveholder but will be two Christian brothers. Paul alludes to "doing more", but for this group, it is unclear what is intended.[344]: 162–163
A third group of scholars argue that there is nothing ambiguous in Paul's insistence on Philemon's acceptance of Onesimus as a "beloved brother". J. H. Roberts asserts that "The phrase, 'you will do even more than I say', can really only have one meaning here: Philemon should set Onesimus free".[344]: 164 "Paul's message could be refused by Philemon, but it could not be misunderstood".[344]: 164 It is not clearly stated because Paul was first and foremost a church builder, and Philemon was the head of the infant church at Colossae, and his position must be upheld by respect. So Paul uses his own authority subtly.[344]: 164
MacMullen points out that John Chrysostom saying "you have herds upon herds of slaves" and "you deem it a disgrace if you do not lead whole flocks of them around with you" makes it clear Christians did own slaves.[299]: 324–326
The church even adopted slavery as a metaphor. Paul refers to himself as a "slave of Christ" (Rom. 1:1),[109]: 10 and even Jesus is described as having accepted the "form of a slave" (human) in Philippians 2. [342]: 101
Wayne A. Meeks says "We can speculate, we can say it offers a kind of community, which is rare in any society and certainly rare in antiquity. It offers a closeness, it offers a powerful ideology which explains the evil in the world, or at least it provides powerful symbols for understanding that evil, it offers a sense of the moral structure of the universe.... It has an ideology of justice, which will be guaranteed by God, finally. It offers a community which shapes the basic moral intuitions of its members, which brings that kind of moral admonition, which otherwise, in the Roman world, we find... only in the schools of philosophers, which after all, is an elite phenomenon, limited to a very small stratum of highly educated people. [Christianity] makes this available to perfectly ordinary folk".[346]
According to Russell it is possible to see how Augustine himself had evolved from his earlier Confessions to this teaching on coercion and the latter's strong patriarchal nature: "Intellectually, the burden has shifted imperceptibly from discovering the truth to disseminating the truth."[347]: 129 The bishops had become the church's elite with their own rationale for acting as "stewards of the truth".[347]: 129 (Russell points out that Augustine's views are limited to time and place and his own community, but later, others took what he said and applied it outside those parameters in ways Augustine never imagined or intended.[347]: 129 )
Augustine placed limits on the use of coercion, recommending fines, imprisonment, banishment, and moderate floggings, preferring beatings with rods which was a common practice of the ecclesial courts.[348]: 164 He opposed severity, maiming, and the execution of heretics.[349]: 768 While these limits were mostly ignored by Roman authorities, Michael Lamb says that in doing this, "Augustine appropriates republican principles from his Roman predecessors..." and maintains his commitment to liberty, legitimate authority, and the rule of law as a constraint on arbitrary power. He continues to advocate holding authority accountable to prevent domination, but affirms the state's right to act.[350] H. A. Deane, on the other hand, says there is a fundamental inconsistency between Augustine's political thought and "his final position of approval of the use of political and legal weapons to punish religious dissidence" and others have seconded this view.[a]
Constantine called church leaders to convene in 325 in Nicea, in Bithynia, (in present-day Turkey) to settle the issue of Arianism.[321]: 23 [321]: 33–36 The result was the Nicene Creed, from which five bishops abstained. They were banished for a time, then they returned, the orthodox Athanasius was ousted, forced into exile, and lived much of the remainder of his life in a cycle of forced movement.
Donatists rejected the conclusions of multiple imperial and ecclesiastic commissions and refused to cooperate or compromise.[351]: 67 Therefore, Tilley says, it became Constantine's imperial duty to impose it.[323]: xxiv
Gibbon saw the rise of the ascetic movement amongst the aristocracy, with its emphasis on sexual chastity and celibacy, as the lowest point for Roman society leading directly to its breakdown.[352]: 44 For Gibbon, religious ideas were "folly" and superstition.[352]: 40 Gibbon saw the structures of society as limiting the degree such folly could be practiced. He thought that once beliefs became woven into society, they hardened into concrete prejudices and values that could then be "controlled and modified" through institutions and legal practices.[352]: 41 Loosen, or cut, those societal controls, and "the enduring human propensity for 'folly' would run amok destroying the society that contained it.[352]: 42 In Gibbon's view, this meant the decline and Fall of Roman empire began with the monks whom he saw as having escaped the controls of society because their lives were lived in penance, privation and solitude, distant and separated from society's normal interactions.[352]: 43–44
Contemporary studies show humans distribute across at least five different levels of ethical behavior.[353] At the highest levels, ethical behavior is "the ideal conduct we hope to find in the best of us" while the most widespread and most "common behavior" tends to reflect the middle to lower levels of ethical conduct.[354] Studies demonstrate that leaders promoting a "higher ethical commitment above and beyond codes and enforcement" is beneficial for developing ethical behavior, but those same studies also indicate this kind of higher ethical commitment is not the most common.[355][356]
Justin Martyr (100–165 CE) wrote his First Apology (155–157 CE) against heretics, and is generally attributed with inventing the concept.[357]: 6, 174–178 Yet, according to historian Geoffrey S. Smith, Justin writes only to answer objections and defend friends from ill treatment and even death. He quotes Justin in a letter to the emperor as saying he is writing: "On behalf of those from every race of men who are unjustly hated and ill-treated, being one of them myself."[357]: 6
Yet, it is within this same period that use of the term "heretic" in Christian writings becomes derogatory.[358]: 59–62
It was the emperor's job to keep the pax deorum (‘the benevolence of gods’) – the peace between Heaven and earth.[323]: xxv
"Early Christianity was not a monolithic religion characterized by systematic, official theology clearly separated from heresy.”[359]
Guy Stroumsa says early Christianity promoted inclusivity, yet invented the concept of heresy at the same time.[360]: 174–179
So, we can talk about a lot of these factors, which we say must have entered into this, and yet finally there is hidden behind the difficulties of our sources - but hidden more behind, I think, our final inability to penetrate the deepest structures of the human personality - there is the fact that countless individual decisions were made that added up to a profound cultural change in the whole Empire.... Meeks, the great appeal
[323]: xv Christians expected Constantine to be the arbiter of all religious disputes. It was simply part of the emperor's job.[323]: xxiv Harold A. Drake says that, "since the Jovian dynasty when Diocletian established the empire as one expressly based on divine support, the lack of consensus on religious matters was no small thing."[327]: 8
Tertullian, a second-century Christian intellectual and lawyer from Carthage, advocated for religious tolerance in an effort to convince pagan readers to be more tolerant of Christianity.[360]: 174, 175 Yet Stroumsa argues that Tertullian knew co-existence meant competition, so he attempted to undermine the legitimacy of the pagan religions by comparing them to Christianity at the same time he advocated for tolerance from them.[360]: 175
In section five and the discussion of definitions that are inaccurate or irrelevant and not benign in their use and application includes the requirement that persecutors must intend to punish their victims.Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).
"Within the genre of religious persecution, particularly state-sponsored persecution, we may distinguish the following forms: inter-religious persecution; intra-religious persecution; secular v. religious; and religious v. secular." [362]
^Siker 2000, pp. 233–235. sfn error: no target: CITEREFSiker2000 (help)
^ abcdBrown 1998, pp. 633. Cite error: The named reference "FOOTNOTEBrown1998633" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
^ abcdeBrown 1998, p. 640. Cite error: The named reference "FOOTNOTEBrown1998640" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
^MacMullen, Ramsay (1997) Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, Yale University Press
^ abcdePagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome: Conflict, Competition, and Coexistence in the Fourth Century. United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 2016.
^ abcdBrown 1998, pp. 641. Cite error: The named reference "FOOTNOTEBrown1998641" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
^ abCite error: The named reference OHLA-2015 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Stark 1996, p. 5. sfn error: no target: CITEREFStark1996 (help)
^Salzman 2006, pp. 266–267, 272, 285. sfn error: no target: CITEREFSalzman2006 (help)
^ abBayliss, p. 68. sfn error: no target: CITEREFBayliss (help)
^Bayliss, p. 70. sfn error: no target: CITEREFBayliss (help)
^Lenski, Noel. "Noel Lenski". Yale Department of Classics. Yale University. Professor of Classics and History.
^Lenski, Noel, ed. (2006). "Introduction". The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine (Volume 13 ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN9780521521574.
^Sanmark 2004, p. 15. sfn error: no target: CITEREFSanmark2004 (help)
^Gregory 1986, p. 234. sfn error: no target: CITEREFGregory1986 (help)
^de Wet 2015, p. 8; 195. sfn error: no target: CITEREFde_Wet2015 (help)
^ abcdeJongman, Willem M. (2007). "GIBBON WAS RIGHT:THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN ECONOMY". In Hekster, Olivier; De Kleijn, Gerda; Slootjes, Daniëlle (eds.). Crises and the Roman Empire: Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop of the International Network Impact of Empire (illustrated ed.). Brill. ISBN9789004160507.
^ abcdefghijCite error: The named reference Chris L. de Wet 2015 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^ abBilias and Grigolo 2019, pp. 80, 82. sfn error: no target: CITEREFBilias_and_Grigolo2019 (help)Cite error: The named reference "FOOTNOTEBilias and Grigolo201980, 82" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
^ abcBradbury 1995, p. 343 sfnm error: no target: CITEREFBradbury1995 (help); Cameron 2011, pp. 65–68 sfnm error: no target: CITEREFCameron2011 (help). Cite error: The named reference "FOOTNOTEBradbury1995343Cameron201165–68" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
^Harald Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics, vol. 2: Augustine’s Attitude, Studia Graeca et Latina Gothoburgensia (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1967), 601–630.
^ abBrown, Peter. Late antiquity. Harvard University Press, 1998
^ abCameron, Averil. Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse. United Kingdom, University of California Press, 1994.
^ abcdCite error: The named reference MacMullen 1986 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Cameron, A. 1991. Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire. London. 121-4
^Markus, R. 1991. The End of Ancient Christianity. Cambridge.
^Trombley, F. R. 1995a. Hellenic Religion and Christianisation, c. 370-529. New York. I. 166-8, II. 335-6
^ abMeeks, Wayne A. "HUMAN APPEAL OF CHRISTIANITY". The Great Appeal. PBS. Retrieved 4 September 2021. Cite error: The named reference "Meeks" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
^Orlin, Eric (2010). Foreign Cults in Rome: Creating a Roman Empire. Oxford University Press. ISBN9780199780204.
^MacMullen, Ramsay (1981). Paganism in the Roman Empire (unabridged ed.). Yale University Press. ISBN9780300029840.
^Scheidel, Walter (2001). Death on the Nile: Disease and the Demography of Roman Egypt (illustrated ed.). Brill. ISBN9789004123236.
^ abcBowman, Alan; Wilson, Andrew, eds. (2011). Settlement, Urbanization, and Population (illustrated ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN9780199602353.
^Couzin, Robert (2014). "The Christian sarcophagus population of Rome". Journal of Roman Archaeology. 27: 275–303. doi:10.1017/S104775941400124X.
^ abcCite error: The named reference Stark was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^ abcdefRobinson, Thomas Arthur (2017). Who Were the First Christians?: Dismantling the Urban Thesis. Oxford University Press. ISBN9780190620547.
^ abcdefghijkRhee, Helen. “Who Were the First Christians? Dismantling the Urban Thesis. By Thomas A. Robinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Xi 297 Pp. $78.00 Cloth.” Church History, vol. 87, no. 4, 2018, pp. 1171–1173., doi:10.1017/S0009640719000039.
^Cite error: The named reference Peter Brown 2003 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Cameron 2010, p. 9,11. sfn error: no target: CITEREFCameron2010 (help)
^Cite error: The named reference Ray was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^ abcCite error: The named reference Kaye1853 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Lieu, Samuel N. C. (1985). Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China: A Historical Survey (illustrated, reprint ed.). Manchester University Press. p. 138. ISBN9780719010880.
^ abcdefTilley, Maureen A., ed. (1996). Donatist Martyr Stories The Church in Conflict in Roman North Africa. Liverpool University Press. ISBN9780853239314.
^Volz, Carl A. Church History, vol. 66, no. 4, 1997, pp. 779–780. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3169215. Accessed 23 Aug. 2021.
^ abCite error: The named reference MacDonald 2003 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Cite error: The named reference Geoffrey Nathan 2002 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^ abH. A. Drake, LAMBS INTO LIONS: EXPLAINING EARLY CHRISTIAN INTOLERANCE, Past & Present, Volume 153, Issue 1, November 1996, Pages 3–36, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/153.1.3
^ abcCite error: The named reference Leithart2010 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Brown, Peter (2013). Through the Eye of a Needle Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD. Princeton University Press. ISBN9781400844531.
^Cite error: The named reference Thompson was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Peter Brown, Rise of Christendom 2nd edition (Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2003) p. 74.
^Stark, Rodney (2020). The Rise of Christianity A Sociologist Reconsiders History. Princeton University Press. ISBN9780691214290.
^ abCite error: The named reference Joshua C. Tate 2015 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Bradbury 1994, pp. 133–139. sfn error: no target: CITEREFBradbury1994 (help)
^Whittaker, John (1979). "Christianity and Morality in the Roman Empire". Vigiliae Christianae. 33 (3).
^Grubbs, Judith Evans (2009). "Church, State and children: Christian and Imperial attitudes toward infant exposure in Late Antiquity". In Cain, Andrew; Lenski, Noel Emmanuel (eds.). The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity (illustrated ed.). Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. pp. 120–124. ISBN9780754667254.
^Grubbs, Judith Evans; Parkin, Tim, eds. (2013). The Oxford Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World. Oxford University Press. p. 85. ISBN9780199781607.
^ abcdGlancy, Jennifer A. (2002). Slavery in Early Christianity. Fortress Press. p. 79. ISBN9781451410945.
^Hezser, Catherine (2002). "Jennifer Α. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity". Scripta Classica Israelica. OUP: 359–362.
^ abcdefghCite error: The named reference Wessels 2010 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Scheidel, Walter (2011). "chapter 14 The Roman slave supply". In Bradley, Keith; Cartledge, Paul (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Slavery. Cambridge University Press. ISBN9781316184349.
^ abcCite error: The named reference Russell2 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Hughes, Kevin L.; Paffenroth, Kim, eds. (2008). Augustine and Liberal Education. Lexington Books. ISBN9780739123836.
^Herbermann, Charles George, ed. (1912). "Toleration, History of". The Catholic Encyclopedia An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church. University of Michigan. pp. 761–772.
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^ abcdeBrown, Peter (1977). "Gibbon's Views on Culture and Society in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries". In Bowersock, G. W.; Clive, John; Graubard, Stephen R. (eds.). Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (illustrated ed.). Harvard University Press. ISBN9780674239401.
^Christensen, Burke A. (1995). "Ethics by definition". Journal of the American Society of CLU & ChFC;. 49 (5). Bryn Mawr: 32.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
^ Miller, M. "Cognition and moral argumentation: five developmental levels." conference on Social Interaction and Sociocognitive Development, Max Planck Institut, Starnberg, W. Germany. 1981.
^Grisaffe, Douglas B.; Jaramillo, Fernando (2013). "Toward Higher Levels of Ethics: Preliminary Evidence of Positive Outcomes". Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management. 27 (4): 355.
^Ellemers, Naomi; van der Toorn, Jojanneke; Paunov, Yavor; van Leeuwen, Thed (2019). "The Psychology of Morality: A Review and Analysis of Empirical Studies Published From 1940 Through 2017". Personality and Social psychology review. 23 (4): 332–333. doi:10.1177/1088868318811759.
^ abOsborn, Eric (1973). Justin Martyr. Tübingen: J.C.B.Mohr. ISBN3-16-133261-X.
^Smith, Geoffrey S. (2015). Guilt by Association: Heresy Catalogues in Early Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 59–62. ISBN978-0-19938-678-9.
^Lommel, Arle (2011). "THE MADNESS OF THE HERETICS: MADNESS AND THE EARLY CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW". Lacus Forum. 36: 196.
^ abcStroumsa, Guy (1998). "Tertullian on Idolatry and the Limits of Tolerance". In Graham N.Stanton; Guy G. Stroumsa (eds.). Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 174–179. ISBN978-0-521-59037-2.
^Eltayeb, Mohamed S. M. (2013). "A Human Rights Framework for Defining and Understanding Intra-Religious Persecution in Muslim Countries". In Ghanea-Hercock, Nazila (ed.). The Challenge of Religious Discrimination at the Dawn of the New Millennium. Springer. pp. 83–105. ISBN9789401759687.
"Christianity began its existence as one among several competing Jewish sects or movements. Judaism was not one thing, either in Judea and Galilee or in the Diaspora, nor were the boundaries among the varieties of Judaism fixed or impermeable".[2]: 26 Paul's writings reflect a mix of Hellenism and Judaism and Christianity.[2]: 167
^ abHays, Richard (1996). The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethic. Harper Collins. ISBN9780060637965.
^ abcEngberg-Pedersen, Troels (2001). Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide (illustrated ed.). Westminster John Knox Press. ISBN9780664224066.
^Schreiner, Thomas R. (2006). Paul, Apostle of God's Glory in Christ: A Pauline Theology (reprint ed.). InterVarsity Press. ISBN9780830828258.
Use some of this for alternative theories on both Decline and on C. and P. **
Earlier versions of the chapters: "The Class Basis of Early Christianity" appeared in Sociological Analysis, vol. 47 (1986): 216-25; [1]
"Epidemics, Networks, and Conversion" appeared as "Epidemics, Networks, and the Rise of Christianity," in Semia 56 (1992): pp 159-75 (L. Michael White, guest editor); [2]
"The Role of Women in Christian Growth" was given as the Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture, 1994;[3]
chapter authored by McDonald, "Was Celsus right?" page 157 - in book Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue url= [7] edited by David L. Balch, and Carolyn Osiek
"Christianizing the Urban Empire: A Quantitative Approach" appeared as "Christianizing the Urban Empire," in Sociological Analysis 52 (1991): 77-88; [4]
"Urban Chaos and Crisis: The Case of Antioch" appeared as "Antioch as the Social Situation for Matthew's Gospel," in Social History of the Matthean Community , ed. David L. Balch (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 189-210;[5]
the theoretical propositions included in "The Martyrs: Sacrifice as Rational Choice" appeared in Rodney Stark and Laurence R. Iannaccone, "Rational Choice Propositions about Religious Movements," in Religion and the Social Order: Handbook on Cults and Sects in America , ed. David G. Bromley and Jeffrey K. Haddon (Greenwhich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1992), 241-61; and Rodney Stark and Laurence R. Iannaccone, "A Supply-Side Reinterpretation of the 'Secularization' of Europe/' Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol 33, 1994, pages 230-252[6]
[7]
Anna Leone says, "Temple closures and the prohibition of sacrifices had an impact... After AD 375 the majority of [pagan] religious offices disappear completely from the epigraphic record".[8]: 83
The senatorial aristocracy is usually held to be the center of the violent anti-Christian movement. our evidence of private pagan attitudes is largely confined to the senatorial aristocracy,[9]: 58
the fourth century marked a watershed in the historical role of the senatorial aristocracy[9]: 41
In the centuries after Augustus, Roman society steadily moved toward taking political power and authority away from the landed aristocracy and putting it into the hands of professional administrators who tended to be less well-born but better qualified. The Diocletianic reforms accelerated this process. By the late fourth century, emperors and their courts were spending much of their time on the military frontiers, which led to a revival of the aristocracy: as a by-product of the growing external crisis, the importance of the great landowners increased. This importance was chiefly for government at the most elemental local level as lower and middle classes gradually lost what liberty they had.[9]: 58–59
Scholarship on the demise of paganism has traditionally accepted at face value the view that Antique Roman society was divided into two opposing segments: Christians and pagans. This was introduced by the Christians of the fourth century "who had axes to grind" and was not representative of the true complexity of Roman society.[9]: 48–52
Group norms that are based on what is legally and socially acceptable are minimal, they are not the higher ethic based on awareness that other's needs are as important as one's own.[10]
Stark explains the rise of Christianity through the dynamics of upper class preferences for new religious movements, profiles of why mission activity succeeds, the effects of networking in close social circles, the demographic impacts of epidemics and birthrates, women's attraction to the religion, urbanization cost benefit analyses, martyrdom and personal sacrifice as a rational human choice. [11]: 198 For MacMullen, it is Christianity's appeal to the masses,[12] and for Bagnall, Christianity's ability to
Stark concludes Christianity grew because of its various virtues such as its peculiar type of community.[13]: 196 [page needed]
Elizabeth Clark:
John Carlisle Kilgo Professor of Religion and Director of the Graduate Program in Religion Duke University
DIFFERENT DEGREES OF DEVOTION
Elaine H. Pagels:
The Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion Princeton University
Wayne A. Meeks:
Woolsey Professor of Biblical Studies Yale University
The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul: Wayne A. Meeks: 9780300098617: Amazon.com: Books
the religious landscape of the Mediterranean continued to be characterized by a patchwork of religious communities. Regions that boasted a triumphant, long-established Christianity were often flanked by equally tenacious settlements of polytheists.Brown CAH 1998
By the time of Late Antiquity, the city was characterized by an increasingly secular municipal life. It was no longer embedded with any particular religious tradition.[8]: 13 Late Antiquity witnessed the "vigorous flowering of a public culture that Christians and non-Christians alike could share"; the two religious traditions co-existed and tolerated each other, in social practice, throughout most of the period.[8]: 13, 42
This heritage, and their shared commitment to Jesus as the Christ, still left room for disagreement.
mysteries of the kind on which it laid such stress were not ‘oriental’ but Greek in origin and inspiration, the oldest and most famous being those of Demeter and Kore at eleusis, and that there were in fact no comparable mysteries in the native traditions of eastern cul- tures (for references, see Burkert 1987: 2 n. 9). in the 1950s, other scholars showed that the figure of a dying and rising god, which cumont and espe- cially Reitzenstein had regarded as central to the mystery religions, was much more of a modern scholarly construct than a genuine cross-cultural religious pattern (for references, see, e.g., sfameni Gasparro 1985: xv-xvi; smith 1990: 89-111, especially 100-101).[14]: 257
Burkert, a major scholar of Greek religion, chose the subject of ‘ancient mystery cults’ for a series of lectures that he delivered at Harvard University in 1982. in its published form, this provided a ‘comparative phenomenology of ancient mysteries’ (Burkert 1987: 4), in which he systematically reviewed the evidence for personal needs, organization and identities, myth and theology, and ‘the extraordinary experience’ in five cults: those of Demeter at eleusis, Dionysus, cybele, isis and mithras. it also, perhaps incidentally, constituted a thorough rejection of the earlier paradigm. Last but not least was smith’s historiographical deconstruction of the scholarly program of comparing early christianity with Graeco- Roman mysteries (1990).[14]: 258
the very word ‘oriental’ is now regularly viewed as a problematic term that perpetuates western stereotypes[14]: 258
Throughout much of the Christian aristocracy of the late fourth century there was hostility toward classical philosophy by a few Christian writers, and a wave of asceticism swept through much of the urban aristocratic class, but for the most part, the Christian elite were still being educated in the classics just the same as their counterparts.[15]: 7–8
By the early 5th century (c. 410) a revived Platonic Academy (which had no connection with the original Academy) was established by some leading Neoplatonists.[16]
At some time around the first century, the members of the Roman military began to adopt the mystery cult of Mithraism; this sun-god related cult arose from obscure non-Roman origins, and the first surviving reference dates to Plutarch's mention of a 67 BC observation of certain Mediterranean pirates practising it. As the Roman legions gradually moved around, so too Mithraism spread throughout the Roman Empire; in the beginning it was mainly soldiers who followed its precepts, but it was also adopted by freedmen, slaves, and merchants, in the locations where the legions rested, particularly in frontier areas.
Mithraism wasn't exclusive - it was possible and common to follow Mithraism and other cults simultaneously. It eventually became popular within Rome itself, gradually gaining members among the more aristocratic classes, and eventually counting some of the Roman senators as adherents; according to the Augustan History, even the emperor Commodus was a member. Although, for reasons currently unknown, Mithraism completely excluded women, by the third century it had gained a wide following; there are over 100 surviving remains of temples to Mithras, 8 in Rome itself, and 18 in Ostia (Rome's main port), with Rome having over 300 associated Mithraic monuments.
From the reign of Septimius Severus, other, less gender-specific, forms of sun-worship also increased in popularity throughout the Roman Empire.[17]
Elagabalus used his authority to install El-Gabal as the chief deity of the Roman pantheon, merging the god with the Roman sun gods to form Deus Sol Invictus, meaning God - the Undefeated Sun, and making him superior to Jupiter,[18] and assigning either Astarte, Minerva, Urania, or some combination of the three, as El-Gabal's wife.[19] He rode roughshod over other elements of traditional religion, marrying a Vestal Virgin[20] (who were legally required to remain unmarried virgins during their service),[21] and moved the most sacred relics of Roman religion (including the fire of Vesta, the Shields of the Salii, and the Palladium) to a new temple dedicated exclusively to El-Gabal.[22] As much as the religiously conservative senators may have disapproved, the lavish annual public festivals held in El-Gabal's honour found favour among the popular masses, partly on account of the festivals involving the wide distribution of food.[19]
By 423, emperor Theodosius II declared that polytheism no longer existed, and so "large bodies of polytheists, all over the Roman empire, simply slipped out of history". They continued to exist, in spite of such proclamations, enjoying "for many generations, [a] relatively peaceable, if cramped, existence".[23]
"In a world in which differences of religious opinion were assumed to be perfectly normal and natural results of a polytheistic universe ... insistence on the exclusivity of one's own cult is more than an annoyance; it threatens the whole basis of the peaceful coexistence of religious cults in society".[9]: 50
religion was a matter of convenience, tied rigidly to considerations of class and culture, completely unfanatical, in just the pattern we have come to identify as typical of pagan attitudes.[9]: 73
The panoply of religious experience in the Roman world before Constantine was simply bewildering: from back-yard fertility rites through public, state-supported cults to the mystical ascents of which Platonic philosophers wrote with such devotion — and everything between, over, under, and all around such phenomena. There were public cults indigenous to the various parts of the empire, ... the divinity of the emperors, and a vast array of private enthusiasms. That such a spectrum of religious experiences should produce a single-minded population capable of forming itself into a single pagan movement with which Christianity could struggle is simply not probable.[9]: 48
The non-Christian side of Roman society was diverse, while Christianity saw itself as possessing "a privileged narrative of the salvation history of mankind as a whole".[9]: 50 This led to what Pliny referred to as 'pig-headedness'.[9]: 49
Anna Leone says, "Temple closures and the prohibition of sacrifices had an impact... After AD 375 the majority of [pagan] religious offices disappear completely from the epigraphic record".[8]: 83
All records of anti-pagan legislation by Constantine are found in the Life of Constantine, written by Eusebius as a kind of eulogy after Constantine's death.[24] It is not a history so much as a panegyric praising Constantine. The laws as they are stated in the Life of Constantine often do not correspond, "closely, or at all", to the text of the Codes themselves.[24]: 20 Eusebius gives these laws a "strongly Christian interpretation by selective quotation or other means".[24]: 20 This has led many to question the veracity of the record.[25][26]
Scott Bradbury argues that anti-pagan laws served as an ideal or ethical law: something to aspire to rather than something to be enforced. He gives examples of this type of law, and shows that anti-pagan legislation was only cautiously and partially enforced as late as 398.[27]
References in the Theodosian code 16.10.2 and Libanius’ autobiography suggest that such laws were passed but not enforced.
Others (such as Curran) have argued that anti-pagan legislation was never passed, and such records by Eusebius only reflect the emperor’s personal inclinations. Unfrequented temples may have been torn down to build churches, and such incidences were reinterpreted by Eusebius in light of Constantine’s personal detest for pagan sacrifices.
Scott, Bradbury, “Constantine and the Problem of Anti-Pagan Legislation in the Fourth Century.” Classical Philology 89, no. 2 (April 1994): pp:120-139.
John Curran, Pagan City and Christian Capital (Oxford 2000), chapter 5, “The Legal Standing of the Ancient Cults in Rome,” esp. pp. 169-81.
Use somewhere!! "No emperor ever ordered the destruction of a major functioning temple in a major city". Cameron last pagans page 799
The growing significance of religious sentiment from 250 - 311 is well attested. The conversion of Constantine crystallized these sentiments by linking empire and Christianity both of which had universalist ambitions.
Three centuries later the expansion of Islam was another example of convergence between a monotheistic religion and a politics of imperial domination. The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity
edited by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, page 6
In the fifth and sixth centuries, what occurs at this period is a division, sharper than ever before, between the military and civilian aspects of government.[9]: 59 allegiance was to class and culture first, and a remarkable indifference to details of creed [9]: 60 ambiguous religious sociology of this class of aristocrats, its wavering allegiances,
Occurred on both sides [9]: 60
"There exists a large, remarkably homogeneous literature on the conflict between paganism and Christianity in the last decades of the fourth century."[9]: 45
Ammianus Marcellinus is almost universally admired as a historian, while his personal allegiance to something other than Christianity is not disputed.[9]: 45 It is a diverse world of religious phenomena which Ammianus reports. The singular thing about Christianity in Ammianus is thus its unsingularity. Ammianus treats it as just another cult in the diverse world of late Rome. It is difficult to ignore our traditional pagan-Christian dichotomy and see this, but the evidence is there. He writes much of paganism and little of Christianity. Most of the participants in his dramas, insofar as they reveal their allegiance, live in a non-Christian world.[9]: 57 Is Ammianus representative of the attitudes of non-Christian Roman society ? If we confine our examination to the Western empire at this period, the answer must be yes.[9]: 58
The expression of opinion, even opinion favoring pagan gods and traditions, was never made the object of imperial repression.[9]: 78
misinterpretation characterized pagan response to Christianity at all times; the pagans did not understand their rival, they underrated its strength, and they were continually baffled and thwarted in attempting to hold their own against it.[9]: 76
Depictions in the catacombs suggest that Christians readily adapted common motifs such as the "Good Shepherd", which in Roman culture represented "philanthropy", and the "orans" image, which indicated "piety".[28]
The conversion to Christianity took place gradually and unevenly in late antiquity and in the early Byzantine world. Customary funeral rituals remained. These included the belief that at the time of death angels and demons contest for the decedent's soul. Macarius of Egypt writes of such a contest, which is only resolved by the intervention of the person's guardian angel -roughly equivalent to Plato's daimon.[29] A second belief was that the soul was weighed in the scales of justice; a concept that Eustathius of Thessalonica found in the Iliad.[29] Both ideas precipitated loud lamentation, which Gregory of Nyssa and others attempted to modify to the singing of psalms and hymns.
The paintings of the Roman catacombs may startle some present- day viewers with their slapdash execution. the purpose of catacomb paintings was not to give the viewers a pleasant aesthetic experience but to prompt a spiritual experience [30]
Modern scholars think there is little evidence these laws aimed at converting pagans.[31][32][33][34][35][36]
the Christian emperors of the fourth century down to Valentinian and Valens were almost all less than wholeheartedly devoted to a harsh pagan-Christian dichotomy ... and their policy toward paganism tended toward lenience (tempered only by a revulsion from magical arts and nocturnal sacrifices). [9]: 53
[In addition to the decline in imperial support] the religious economy had become extremely volatile. Faiths from the "Orient" did seem to come into sudden vogue and attract many participants. [13]: 215
The similarity of religious developments throughout the empire reflected the fact that all local elites tended to have similar interests and concerns.[14]: 279 Hence, the religious cultures of the Roman empire can be described as open, yet integrated systems that followed similar patterns and restraints (1997: 57).[14]: 280
The narrative concerning Rome has tended to focus around two distinct themes: first, the formalism and intrinsic inadequacy of traditional Roman religion,[14]: 247 [note 12] and second, Roman religion's neglect by the Roman elite during the last century of the Republic.[14]: 247
Stark points out that, "although Christians stood in formal, official disrepute for much of the first three centuries, informally, they were free to do pretty much as they wished, in most places, most of the time".[13]: 191 As an example, he says that Henry Chadwick reported that when a Roman governor in Asia Minor began a persecution of Christians during the second century, "the entire Christian population of the region paraded before his house as a manifesto of their faith and as a protest against injustice" (1967:55). The more significant part of this story is not that the Christians had the nerve to protest, but that they went unpunished. Within the first few centuries AD of Roman Empire, Christianity was prosecuted, on and off, sometimes with vigor. Christianity was seen as a superstition as it had no tradition, and so it was prosecuted. Rome did not routinely oppress other religions, it absorbed them, and made them Roman. Countless local gods and goddesses were provided with a classical name and were then worshiped as “Roman” deities. Even when Rome could not fully adopt alternate religions, there was still legal provision for tolerating them on the grounds they were sanctified by ancient tradition such as the Jews had. Yet despite this, by the early second century the Roman governor of Bithynia (on the Black Sea) had no hesitation in sending to immediate execution those who had been denounced as being Christians.
Evidence of significant freedom of movement - Christians visiting and supporting those arrested in jail (such as we see in the case of Perpetua), or Christians in custody visiting churches despite having been arrested (as we see in the case of Ignatius of Antioch)-implies what the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan clearly states: simply being a Christian did not suffice to have action brought. The admiring many, who recorded and preserved acts of the martyrs, surely outnumbered the heroic, and perhaps voluntary, few.[37]: 240
Lavan and Mulryan|2011
The great regional diversity of late antique paganism suggests that the time has come to abandon a single compelling narrative of 'the end of the temples' based on legal sources and literary accounts. Although temple destructions are attested, in some regions the end of paganism was both gradual and untraumatic, with more co-existence with Christianity than one might have expected.
[38] Religion in antiquity has a unique role as a system of culture.[38]: 3
Claim: Christianity might have remained an obscure religious movement had the many religions making up Roman pluralism been vigorous.
[1c] The god's Failure to protect
Plague, famine, and barbarian invasions made life short and uncertain.
earthquakes
Some blamed Christians for the failures of the Gods to protect and guide, but it was seen as the God’s failure.
For example, the first-century-bce scholar m. terentius varro's statement, which is in fact not a direct quotation but a paraphrase of augustine’s (City of God 6.2), comes from his learned study of Roman religious antiquities; it has more to do with touting his own research into ancient and obscure traditions than with assessing the health of Roman religion. in contrast, valerius maximus, who in the third decade of the first century ce compiled a vast number of historical anecdotes as a resource for orators and students of rhetoric, included a whole range of stories that illustrate the power of the traditional Roman gods and their intervention in human life, stories that he clearly felt would still resonate with contemporary audiences (mueller 2002). again, much evidence for the neglect of temples and traditional priesthoods in the late Republic is deduced from the various revivals and refurbishments that took place under augustus. But it was of course to augustus’s advantage to exaggerate any earlier neglect of religion so that he could gain all the more credit for its restoration. When he boasts that he restored eighty-two temples of the gods in 28 bce (Res Gestae Divi Augusti 20.4), we should probably think not so much of rebuilding half-collapsed structures as of a few minor repairs and a new paint job.
On the other hand, there is also ample evidence in Rome during the first century bce for new institutions and the ongoing adaptation of old ones. moreover, contemporary accounts of manipulation and charges of sacrilege are now seen more as evidence for the continued vitality of traditional religion than for its irrelevance and decay. as the authors of the current standard account of Roman religion point out, the
The Hellenistic era, far from witnessing any decline, ‘was ... a period of dramatic growth and development’ (Billows 2003: 196). [14]: 247 Assumptions that a loss of local autonomy and increasing internationalization resulted in the erosion of communal ties and in widespread deracination and alienation are now almost universally rejected. [14]: 246–247 Whatever cities may have lost in terms of political autonomy they seem to have more than made up by their importance for local and communal identity. People continued to identify themselves by their affiliation with their city and to take pride in this identity; the rivalry of civic elites to promote their own city over its rivals fueled the massive programs of public improvements whose remains even now can impress. [14]: 247
under-population and a lack of productive hands in the direct hinterlands of large armies did not go hand-in-hand with sound military logistics.[39]: 53 First of all, there were movements of Roman and enemy forces, over more than twenty years, which had a negative impact on the density and prosperity of the regional populations. Secondly, there were deportations. The most spectacular one was the deportation of many people from Philippopolis, but there must have been more, in such a long period of invasion and armed violence. Thirdly, there was a voluntary concentration of people within the walls of fortified towns, as at Nicopolis ad Istrum. Fourthly there was forced migration, for example of at least a large part of the Roman population of abandoned Dacia into Moesia inferior. And last but not least, there was resettlement to repair demographic decay and strengthen the logistical basis of strong border garrisons. The conclusion must be that successive events in the lower Danube regions In the third quarter of the third century AD events show that prolonged intensive warfare in a region unavoidably results in manifold mobility and migration.[39]: 54
second century, when the empire seemed an invincible superpower
Whereas, Harries and Wood say, "The contents of the Code provide details from the canvas but are an unreliable guide, in isolation, to the character of the picture as a whole".[40]: 95
Religion in antiquity has a unique role as a system of culture.[38]: 43
Previously undervalued similarities in language, society, religion, and the arts, as well as current archaeological research, indicate paganism slowly declined, and that it was not forcefully overthrown by Theodosius I in the fourth century.[41]: xv
Political and social change had begun before Constantine with the new order of imperial rule under the Tetrarchy in 293.[42]
Constantine's recognition of Christianity gave a boost to changes already taking place in society, which included religion, but also extended far beyond religion, and far beyond Constantine.[8]: 13–15 [43]
This was connected to the difficulty of maintaining such large monumental spaces rather than religious issues.[8]: 30
The few official destructions on record were carried out by the army, and there are only a few instances of destruction of temples by Christians are mentioned in the sources, and there is no clear archaeological support.[8]: 32
In Africa Proconsularis (Bulla Regia) the temple of Apollo went out of use sometime in the fourth century when the city center shifted.[8]: 30
It has been assumed, on the strength of this articulate body of Christian opinion, that the iron logic of intolerance demanded that, once they possessed such formidable
power, Christians should use it to convert as many non-Christians as possible — by threats and disabilities, if not by the direct use of force[44]
Christian writers of the period stylized their accounts claiming instant victory, and this has made it exceptionally difficult to recapture the mentalities of the fourth and fifth centuries.[45]
In this period, at least, the quid pro quo of Christian dominance was inexplicit but firm. In many areas, polytheists were not molested as long as they kept their beliefs to themselves in front of Christians; and, apart from a few ugly incidents of local violence, die Jewish communities enjoyed a century of stable, even privileged existence.[23]
the rule seems to have been the convivencia of a triumphant Christianity with a
tenacious, if discreet, polytheism, and with confident Jewish communities.
Not for the last time in the history of the Near East, it was agreed that
strong fences made good neighbours[46]
Modern scholarship indicates paganism was a lesser concern than heresy for Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries, which was the case for Ambrose.[47]: 375
The cumulative effect of the laws was to set in place a religious ordering of society.[48] By A.D. 425 Roman society could be categorized as fourfold: there was the Catholic church; all that Catholic bishops might denounce as 'errors' hostile to the true faith. Then there were the two great outsiders: 'the madness of the Jewish impiety' and 'the error and insanity of stupid paganism' {C.Th.xv.5.5 and xvi.5.63).[48]
There was no determination to use the laws to convert unbelievers. It was sufficient that non-Christians should keep a low profile and not disturb the rhetoric of triumph.[23]
To take only one, chilling example: the threat of flogging with leaden whips (a punishment known to be almost certainly lethal) was decreed against a minor heretical leader, Jovinian, at Rome, prior to his exile (C.Th. xvi.5.3; Aug. Ep. io*.4.3, ed. J. Divjak, CSEL LXXXVIII. Vienna, 1981,48)".[49]
it wasn't possible in the fourth century for the church or the government on its behalf to take the kinds of overt actions taken by Justinian and Heraclius and the Visigothic kings of Spain.
It took a further century of social and religious changes before Justinian could envisage the compulsory baptism of remaining polytheists, and a further
century yet until Heraclius and the Visigothic kings of Spain attempted to baptize the Jews.
In the fourth century, not only were such ambitious schemes a physical impossibility, given the large numbers of non- Christians in every region: the horizons of the possible, that enabled such adventures to be contemplated, did not exist. They were blocked by an alternative narrative of success.
"By 425, laws against polytheists, Jews and heretics had congealed into a system which, for the first time in the history of Rome, presented correct religious adherence as a requirement for the full enjoyment of the benefits of Roman society".[50]
That ordering would thereafter prove to be an inseparable adjunct of imperial rule, in the empire itself and, later, in the sub-imperial states of the west.[48]
Christianity did not replace the offices and customs the Roman state had established in pagan religion with Christians, they invented new ones.[8]: 13 [48]
It is revealing that, as early as 370, the imperial chancery should have adopted the term pagani, (pagans), as the official term for polytheists (C.Th. xvi.2.18; cf. xvi.5.46). This term was circulated by Christians as a 'lump word' for all who were not heretics or Jews.[48]
The fourth century was an age of religious ferment comparable to the Reformation of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.[51]: 6
The late antique period witnessed several experiments in the imposition, upon a wider society, of religious norms upheld by a determined and articulate group. The period is characterized by the successful imposition of a rabbinic interpretation of Judaism among the Jewish communities in Palestine, Mesopotamia and elsewhere, and by the formalization and propagation of Zoroastrianism throughout the Sasanian empire. in our evidence, this process is not simply misrepresented by our Christian sources: it is rendered largely invisible [52]
To recapture the horizons of the possible, within which late Roman persons actually experienced the changes associated with the post-Constantinian empire,[53]
By the time of Constantine, Christianity had also changed.[54][55]
In 186 BC, the Bacchic associations that offered a new kind of religious choice, were dissolved, leaders were arrested and executed, women were forbidden to hold important positions in the cult, no Roman citizen could be a priest, and strict control of the cult was thereafter established. Jörg Rüpke says this became a pattern for how the Roman empire dealt with religions it saw as a threat to peace, unity or Roman values.[56]: 32–33 : 32–33 By the first century AD, there were "periodic expulsions of astrologers, philosophers and even teachers of rhetoric... as well as Jews and...the cult of Isis".[56]: 34 Druids also received the same kind of treatment, as did Christians.[57][56]: 34
Archaeologist Luke Lavan explains that private religious rituals, which were often associated with secret plots against the emperor, carried the threat of banishment and execution in the late Hellene and early imperial periods.[59]: 200, fn.32 [60]
In 186 BC, the Bacchic associations were dissolved, leaders were arrested and executed, women were forbidden to hold important positions in the cult, no Roman citizen could be a priest, and strict control of the cult was thereafter established. Jörg Rüpke says this became a Roman imperial pattern dealing with religions it saw as a threat to peace, unity and Roman values.[56]: 32–33 : 32–33 By the first century AD, there were "periodic expulsions of astrologers, philosophers and even teachers of rhetoric... as well as Jews and...the cult of Isis".[56]: 34 Druids also received the same treatment, as did Christians.[57][56]: 34
Changes in urban topography signalled this shift: as bodies of the dead \vere brought not just into the city precincts, but right to the altars of churches, the notion that the church was one community was highlighted in spatial ways.[61]
The Romans thought of themselves as highly religious, and attributed their success as a world power to their collective piety (pietas) in maintaining good relations with the gods. The Romans are known for the great number of deities they honored
Fredriksen says: "Rome was not tolerant - another anachronistic term, drawn from our own liberal political context. Religious pluralism simply became the norm of ancient society. As long as frontiers were quiet, internal peace maintained, and taxes and tribute collected, as far as the imperial government was concerned, all was well".[37]: 240–241
(Recall: cult makes gods happy. If deprived of cult, gods can grow resentful, then angry. Unhappy gods make for unhappy humans.)
It mis-describes Judaism and, by extension, Christianity, and clouds understanding of how religions were commonly constituted in antiquity.
For polytheists of the Roman empire, showing respect to the gods of others was a common sense courtesy which did not require rejection of one’s own gods.[37]: 236
Paul, for example - a monotheist - complains about the lesser divinities who try to frustrate his mission (2 Cor. 4:4). "The divinities formerly worshipped by his congregations in Galatia are not gods by nature, he tells them, but mere stoicheia, cosmic light-weights unworthy of fear or of worship (Gal.4: 8-9; note that Paul only demeans the cosmic status of these beings, but does not deny their existence). Paul certainly believes in these other gods, meaning that he knows that they exist and that they can have and have had real effects. He just does not worship them. Neither, he insists, should his Gentiles.[37]: 241–242
When Paul describes what Gentiles-in-Christ are doing, he uses two other images: turning, and adoption.[37]: 237 They are admonished by Paul not to 'convert' to ’Judaism'; they are not responsible for practicing ancestral Jewish customs. Israel is not their family. The family connection for these people is a very Roman idea: adoption. Roman adoption was both a legal and a religious act making them "sons" who can inherit and even cry out to their Abba:Father (Rom.8:15;cf.Gal.4:6) who is not Abraham (the primal patriarch of Israel) nor Moses (through whom God gave Israel the Law) but is for them, the god of Israel, the god of the universe.[37]: 237 This is the proper context for understanding the beginnings of Christianity
Rome tended to identity the gods with specific locales, giving them distinguishing epithets that linked them to particular temples, cities, tribes, or topographical features. But there was also a balancing tendency "to associate these local gods with each other by the use of shared names, iconography and cult practices, and thus to acknowledge that ‘the gods that one group worshipped in one place were “the same” as the gods another group worshipped in another’ (Rives 2007: 86)."[14]: 272–273
we might best interpret the decree mandating universal sacrifice issued by the emperor Decius in the mid-third century ce as in effect a response to the new realities of the empire: ‘by insisting that every inhabitant of the Roman empire had a specific and immedi-ate religious obligation to the imperial government’, the decree ‘defined at least one aspect of what we may reasonably call “the religion of the Roman empire”’ (Rives 1999: 152).[14]: 273
Rives provides a general framework for exploring the variety of religion in the Roman empire: "personal experience of the divine; the role of religion in the construction of communities at the levels of the household, association, and city; the various mechanisms that served to promote some degree of religious integration throughout the empire".[14]: 280–281
In the first three centuries AD of Carthage, the only model for religious identity in the Roman world was a civic model, "one which linked the individual to a particular city".(Rives 1995: 5)[14]: 272
Rives says "in recent decades every one of the assumptions that underlie [this master narrative] has been exploded, and new models and approaches have been developed instead".[14]: 242
Rives asserts that these assumptions were only confirmed by a selective and arbitrary use of evidence that tended to privilege literary texts over documentary sources and define certain types of texts as more significant than others.[14]: 250, 251 "Scholars who want to see a profound change in religion during Hellenistic and Roman times turn again and again to the same authors and texts: Plutarch and Apuleius, Marcus Aurelius and Aelius Aristides, Hermetic treatises and gnostic scriptures.[14]: 250 Rives says modern studies have shown this approach can no longer be maintained.[14]: 251 "As a result, there is currently a rather bewildering array of approaches and models for understanding religious life in the Roman provinces".[14]: 279
it is important to note that the new picture of the continued vitality of traditional religion does not mean that earlier scholarship has lost all its utility; the narratives of decline that informed them were wrong, not because the phenomena that these scholars discussed did not exist, but because they were only a part of the story, and a much smaller part than those scholars assumed.[14]: 251
although these two terms ought properly to denote distinct phenomena, they tend to be used interchangeably.[14]: 257
the word ‘paganism’ is now seen by many scholars as problematic. Some object to ‘pagan’ having originated as a derogatory term devised by christians "that continues to be freighted with heavy, and largely negative, conceptual baggage" (e.g., Remus 2004). Some scholars now use ‘polytheist’ and ‘polytheism’ instead, but these terms emphasize only one aspect of the varied religious traditions in the Roman world.(North 2005: esp. 134-37)[14]: 243
In this narrative, political and social developments such as the uprooting, isolating and alienating of people from their native cultures, and the insecurity, breakdown of standards and values, and loss of identity, that resulted had produced ‘an era of insecurity and anxiety’.[14]: 241, 244 ‘The shift from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, from the secure isolated city-state to the larger Empire which seemingly embraced the whole known earth, provided many with a feeling of alienation and insecurity.’[14]</ref>: 241 As a result, confidence in the traditional cults and their gods, that served as the basis of the political, social, and intellectual life, waned. (tripolitis 2002: 2).[14]: 241
References
^Stark, Rodney. “The Class Basis of Early Christianity: Inferences from a Sociological Model.” Sociological Analysis, vol. 47, no. 3, 1986, pp. 216–225. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3711376. Accessed 22 Aug. 2021.
^Stark, Rodney 1934-. "Epidemics, Networks, and the Rise of Christiannity." Semeia , vol. 56, 1992, pp. 159-175.
^Stark, Rodney. “Christianizing the Urban Empire: An Analysis Based on 22 Greco-Roman Cities.” Sociological Analysis, vol. 52, no. 1, 1991, pp. 77–88. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3710716. Accessed 22 Aug. 2021.
^Stark, Rodney. "Antioch as the Social Situation for Matthew’s Gospel." Social history of the Matthean community: Cross-disciplinary approaches (1991): 189-210.
^Stark, Rodney, and Laurence Iannaccone. "Rational choice propositions about religious movements." Religion and the Social Order A 3 (1993): 241-261.
^Brown, Peter (1977). "Gibbon's Views on Culture and Society in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries". In Bowersock, G. W.; Clive, John; Graubard, Stephen R. (eds.). Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (illustrated ed.). Harvard University Press. ISBN9780674239401.
^ abcdefghijCite error: The named reference Anna Leone was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^McLynn, pp. 330–333. sfn error: no target: CITEREFMcLynn (help)
^Hebblewhite, chapter 8. sfn error: no target: CITEREFHebblewhite (help)
^Cameron, pp. 65–66. sfn error: no target: CITEREFCameron (help)
^Errington 2006, pp. 248–249, 251. sfn error: no target: CITEREFErrington2006 (help)
^Errington 2006, pp. 247–248. sfn error: no target: CITEREFErrington2006 (help)
^Woods, Religious Policy. sfn error: no target: CITEREFWoods (help)
^ abcdefgCite error: The named reference Fredriksen was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^ abcLössl, Josef; Baker-Brian, Nicholas J., eds. (2018). A Companion to Religion in Late Antiquity. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN9781118968109.
^ abCite error: The named reference Lukas de Blois was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^{{cite book|author1-last=Harries|author1-first= Jill |author2-last=Wood| author2-first= Ian N.| year=1993|title= The Theodosian Code: studies in the Imperial law of late antiquity|publisher=University of Michigan|isbn=9780715624289
^The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity. United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 2015.
^Salzman, Michele Renee. "The Evidence for the Conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity in Book 16 of the 'Theodosian Code.'" Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte, vol. 42, no. 3, 1993, pp. 362–378. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4436297. Accessed 2 June 2020.
^Brown, Peter (1971). The world of late antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad. Thames and Hudson. p. 82. ISBN978-0500320228.
^Cite error: The named reference Demarsin was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^ abcdefRüpke, Jörg (2007). Gordon, Richard (ed.). The Religion of the Romans (illustrated ed.). Polity. ISBN9780745630144.
^ abBeard, Mary; North, John S.; Price, Simon (1998). Religions of Rome: Volume 1, A History. UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 341. ISBN0-521-30401-6.
Peter Brown (1997) So �debate the world of Late Antiquity revisited, Symbolae Osloenses, 72:1, 5-30, DOI: 10.1080/00397679708590917
Then I found that I had to become, for the first time in my life, a historian of religion. page 18
Religious statements could not be understood without reference to the structure of the society in which they occurred. They were tightly-encoded messages that regulated social interaction. They reflected social structures by the manner in which they determined forms of personal interchange, as much with gods as with men, and regulated, with a silent but firm hand, the possibilities of action on every level, including the seemingly intimate options of isolated individuals, such as the ability to speak with a god in dreams, to command a demon, to emerge as a new person from a transforming ritual.page 21
If, in some sense, varieties of religious experience also reflected, in an intimate if studiously unverbalized manner, varieties of social experience, then the persons
known to us ...could be assumed to carry with them, in the texts themselves, clues as to the social context in which they moved. ... holistic vision of the age might dare to entertain the notion of the constant presence of the social order in the religious world itself, as a mute reflection of fluctuating social structures, some rigid, some increasingly fluid, that characterized Roman society as a whole, as that society developed, without notable catastrophe, from the age of Marcus Aurelius to that of Justinian.page 22 , then it was possible to write about as massive and as decisive a change as the transformation of late classical paganism and the rise of Christianity without disquiet and without shrill value-judgements, in the same way as it was possible to follow, without undue foreboding, the slow emergence, across the Mediterranean and the Middle East, of post-classical forms of government, of social relations, of urban life and of profane culture.
The World of Late Antiquity.
the cultural and social implications of the limes, of the regions adjacent to the Roman frontier between. the Germans in the North and the heart of the empire. The Rise of Western Christendom (Brown 1996). it is the proliferation of Christian kingdoms and Christianized regions on the peripheries of the eastern Roman empire which marks the difference between the monolithically universal empire of Constantine and Constantius II and the more loose-knit "Monophysite Commonwealth" of the late sixth century. Garth Fowden Empire t o commonwealth pages 23-24
Recent studies, from all directions, if with widely differing degrees of measure or exaggeration, have brought the late Roman state back into the heart of late Roman society. page 24. the century that follows the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine can be acclaimed, without any sense of deprecation,
as the apogee of the Roman state. The ability to make itself present to its subjects, after 300 A.D., is all the more impressive in the light of recent evidence,
from as far apart as Augsburg and the Euphrates, of how close the empire had come to disintegration.21 The imperial laws, for instance, are now allowed to speak for themselves. They are no longer panned for nuggets of fact, as Jones had done in 1964. Their tone of voice is impressive. As Marie Thérèse Fögen has shown, in the case of imperial legislation on magic, we are dealing with a bid to monopolize knowledge, to generalize and to define, that had hitherto been absent (Fögen 1993). Not only did the empire preach its own notions of the social order as persistently as did any Christian bishop; the unremitting presence of the tax-collector, and the cultural practices that this presence fostered, had the effect of widening the range of literacy, even so far as to provoke the origins of a Coptic literature, in a manner that no Christian church could equal (Hopkins 1991)page 25
From The Vanishing Paradigm of the Fall of Rome
Glen W. Bowersock
Peter Brown's survey of 1971, entitled The World of Late Antiquity, encapsulated a new vision of the post-Constantinian age as the beginning of something grand and distinctive rather than as the end of the classical world every-one knew and admired... traced the origins of this late antique culture to the high Roman Empire of the second
and third centuries : 34
The obsession with the fall of Rome that Momigliano identified as starting in the eighteenth century and still with us when he wrote in 1973 has now been dramatically altered. The obsession is not with describing the causes of Rome's fall, or locating it, but with denying it altogether ... one might perhaps be inclined to question altogether the eighteenth-century origins of the modern fascination with the fall of Rome
Brown's reading of late antiquity has rendered concepts of crisis and decline impossible. "Recently, however, periodization has made a comeback and the decline and fall of the Roman Empire again seems worthy of consideration." {{A Long Late Antiquity?: Considerations on a Controversial Periodization|Arnaldo Marcone|Journal of Late Antiquity Johns Hopkins University Press Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 2008 pp. 4-19}}
John Kaye correctly characterizes the conversion of Constantine and his accession to the throne as among the most important things to ever happen to the Christian church.[1]: 1 Yet Constantine cannot be seen as a fixed beginning of either the decline of paganism or the rise of Christianity.[2]
Many cults had already begun their decline in the second century.[3] The Crisis of the Third Century (AD 235–284) continued to negatively impact funding to maintain the large temple complexes and their festivals.[4][5]: 60 Political and social change had already begun with the new order of imperial rule under the Tetrarchy (293).[6] Constantine inherited these changes. By 300, Christianity had also changed and adapted to 'Romanness'. Indeed, without what Peter Brown has called "the conversion of Christianity" to the culture and ideals of the Roman world, Constantine would never have converted. He inherited the changes in the church as well.[7][8]
The reasons for the decline of paganism in the Roman empire are as many and varied as its reasons for becoming one of the largest and most successful empires in the world. [9]
Religion in ancient Rome includes the ancestral ethnic religion of the city of Rome that the Romans used to define themselves as a people, as well as the religious practices of peoples brought under Roman rule, in so far as they became widely followed in Rome and Italy. The Romans thought of themselves as highly religious, and attributed their success as a world power to their collective piety (pietas) in maintaining good relations with the gods. The Romans are known for the great number of deities they honored
The Roman Empire expanded to include different peoples and cultures; in principle, Rome followed the same inclusionist policies that had recognised Latin, Etruscan and other Italian peoples, cults and deities as Roman. Those who acknowledged Rome's hegemony retained their own cult and religious calendars, independent of Roman religious law.[10] Military settlement within the empire and at its borders broadened the context of Romanitas. Rome's citizen-soldiers set up altars to multiple deities, including their traditional gods, the Imperial genius and local deities – sometimes with the usefully open-ended dedication to the diis deabusque omnibus (all the gods and goddesses). They also brought Roman "domestic" deities and cult practices with them.[11] By the same token, the later granting of citizenship to provincials and their conscription into the legions brought their new cults into the Roman military.[12]
Traders, legions and other travellers brought home cults originating from Egypt, Greece, Iberia, India and Persia. The cults of Cybele, Isis, Mithras, and Sol Invictus were particularly important. Some of those were initiatory religions of intense personal significance, similar to Christianity in those respects.
the study of Antiquity is an inclusive endeavor; no one religion has precedence over another; no region can stake claim to being the center of the late antique world[13] Religion in antiquity has a unique role as a system of culture.[13]: 3
In 112 Pliny the Younger writes Trajan of shrines in Asia Minor having been neglected and deserted while trade in sacrificial meats was nearly wiped out by people's lack of interest in the traditional religions.[13]: 43
Twenty-first century historians of Antiquity depict the world of Late Antiquity as one in which the stagnation of paganism began in the second century as it failed to challenge the emergence of Christianity and failed to adjust successfully to its less favourable position.[14] Archaeologist Richard Bayliss writes that Roman civilization and its many cults were already in decline long before the Christian emperors of Antiquity.[3]Roger S. Bagnall cautions that “One should not assume that the decline of pagan religion and the rise of Christianity are simply related, like children at opposite ends of a see-saw”.[15] In regions away from the imperial court, the end of paganism was, for the most part, both gradual and untraumatic.[16][17]: 5, 41 [18]: 643 [19]: 375
Peter Brown"s 1971, The World of Late Antiquity, encapsulated a new vision of the post-Constantinian age as the beginning of something grand and distinctive rather than as the end of the classical world everyone knew and admired. A subsequent volume of lectures, delivered at Harvard in 1976, traced the origins of this late antique culture to the high Roman Empire of the second and third centuries, seen as a kind of seed-bed for wonderful and exotic plants that wereto come into bloom several centuries later. Those lectures and the book that followed bore the title The Making of Late Antiquity. This was a deliberate provocation, answering Sir Richard Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages with a strong affirmation that the pivotal time was really late antiquity, not theMiddle Ages.
This debate and subsequent work have gone on still further to annihilate those secure boundaries with which we all once felt comfortable in contemplating the ancient past.[20]: 34
Its implications for Gibbon's theme are portentous, as are its implications for us : 35 in the last third of this century, those who think about these things seem ready to announce that Rome's fall was an illusion : 35
It might be helpful to recall that our modern obsession with the fall of Rome not only began in the eighteenth century but also ... bore the Gibbonian stamp : 36
The move away from the fall of Rome to a creative and vibrant late antiquity in scholarship : 38
Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, E. R. Dodds, published in 1965: Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety before. "One may like or dislike Christianity," Auden wrote in his review, "but no one can deny that it was Christianity and the Bible which raised western literature from the dead.": 40 Auden wrote, "At its best the movement produced characters of impressive integrity and wisdom, with great psychological understanding, charity and good-humour. We owe the Desert Fathers more than we generally realise. The classical world knew many pleasures, but of one which means a great deal to us, it was totally ignorant until the hermits discovered it, the pleasure of being by one's self" : 41 . Peter Brown, The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity, 1971;
In 1966 Lynn White, wrote "The Transformation of the Roman World" about "Gibbon's problem after two centuries: 41–42 on decline of empire
the decline of the classical world was the rise of late antiquity : 42 en two widely divergent perspectives on the past
Now, in 1995, it is probably fair to say that no responsible historian of the ancient or medieval world would want to address or acknowledge the fall of Rome as either fact or
paradigm. It has ended up as a construction that has its own place in modern history, across the two hundred years that followed the first volume of Gibbon's work in 1776.: 42
Mikhail Rostovtzeffs Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire-- Rostovtzeff's theme of the collapse of urban civilization : 12
The social revolution of the third century destroyed the foundations of the economic, social and intellectual life of the ancient world.: 6 ... Both authors conveyed a powerful impression of the sheer resilience of the Roman empire of the fourth and early fifth centuries — at least, until the onslaught of the Germanic invasions. The world in which Augustine grew to manhood was far from being a "disaster zone". Ancient civilization was not a drained corpse, : 10–11 . the sheer resilience of a pre-Christian society and culture at the very moment of the triumph of the Christian church within the Roman empire... Evidence of the joining of the sacred and the profane, of the intimate dependence of Christianity on its cultural, social and political context in an ancient world that plainly had not grown pale by 400 A.D.—a joining that was a peculiarly marked feature of the post-Constantinian Christian Empire ... the intimate links between late classical civilization and the thought-forms and culture of the great Christian writers of the Patristic age. This tradition gave me my first sighting of a pre-medieval Christianity, of unexpected warmth, richness and flexibility, and, above all, of a Christianity held at a safe distance from the present, by having been firmly planted back where it belonged, in its native, ancient soil.: 11
the rise of the Christian church in North Africa and the emergence, in combative and tenacious Christian form, of the non-Roman, Berber substratum of an entire region. It was in the century between Constantine and Augustine, and not at the time of the Islamic conquests, that Roman Africa had begun to become Barbary. No matter how much I came to dissent from Frend's picture of North Africa, as I settled down to write my biography of Saint Augustine and to produce articles on religious dissent, on religious coercion and on the relation between local languages and religious change (always taking Augustine's Africa as my starting-point), there was no Englishscholar who showed, with such conviction, that the history of late antique Christianity—and especially of its "dissenting" variants—must be seen rooted in a real world, with real social structures and real social conflicts, among local cultures whose particularity was revealed, by Frend the archaeologist, : 12
a view of the last centuries of the ancient world t was a world less depleted by catastrophe than I had been led to suppose d less divided within itself by irreversible and unbridgeable chasms. The center held, and could still control and even attract into itself the new "non-classical" forces along its periphery. Even the "democratization of culture" that characterized the period was shown to have co-existed with strong vertical links, , in a "pyramidal" society, which ensured that the idioms, the outlook and the resources of the masses remained, for the most part, caught in the net of firm and adaptable upper-class leadership : 13
it was precisely the fluidity of the elites of the fourth century empire, drawn in around the court from relatively humble backgrounds, that fostered the spread of
Christianity in the governing classes.: 13 the "steel framework" of the late Roman state, of which Baynes had spoken, together with the opportunities for advancement opened up in its newly-created partner, the established Christian church, ensured that a healthy flow of talent constantly circulated towards the top, bridging the many potential fissures of a relentlessly-governed but cohesive society: 13
an impressive degree of social mobility in both the teaching profession and the bureaucracy: 14 a pattern of vertical mobility, up and down the social and intellectual scale, associated with the rise and diffusion of religious ideas, and, most especially, with the rise of Christianity.: 14
without invoking an intervening catastrophe and without pausing, for a moment, to pay lip service to the widespread notion of decay.: 15
a social and cultural history that could be narrated, from end to end, almost in terms of ever-widening ripplesof change, as different strata of the Roman world, and eventually, indeed, much of its non-Roman periphery, came to participate in a core of central concerns. "New" men, from hitherto neglected social groups and regions, brought with them to the centers of power new ideas, new, distinctly "nonclassical" religious options and, with these, a heightened need to find, within the continuing classical tradition itself, the basis for a new equilibrium between the old and the new. Put bluntly: from the point of view of religious and cultural creativity, "the shaking of an ancient regime" could do nothing but good to a traditional society (Brown 1971b, 37). : 14–15
The notion of newly-organized empires as agents of quickening fluidity - the "New Model Army" of the late third century - to the Constantinople of Theodosius II, to the Ctesiphon of Khusro I Anoshirwan and eventually even to the social and cultural origins of the revolution that led to the formation of the Abbasid Califate. - it was possible to find, in the peculiar balance of fluidity and stability that characterized the social "style" of the later empire, a clue to the unabated religious and cultural ferment which was so marked a feature of other aspects of the period.
The inner frontier within the Roman empire, between its Mediterranean and non-Mediterranean regions, now seemed to be a more significant dividing-line, along which to align the history of the later empire : 17 geography eroded the traditional, political definition of the field
s E.R. Dodds' Pagans and Christians in an Age of Anxiety : 19 - we did not agree : 20
the role of religion in society in the entire late classical period.
References
^KAYE, John. Some account of the Council of Nicæa in connexion with the life of Athanasius. United Kingdom, n.p, 1853.
^Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome: Conflict, Competition, and Coexistence in the Fourth Century. United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 2016.
^Brown, Peter. Late antiquity. Harvard University Press, 1998
^Cite error: The named reference Salzman2 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
Really like the description of morals at beginning of introduction in[1] Christian Ethics: Four Views |
use intro to four views, pages 7 onward for history too; page 15 - ; *Virtue ethics was the dominant approach through the early medieval period page 7; remained popular in modern period but assumed new forms page 9;
communities and traditions central to virtue ethics; once the individual became the focus in the enlightenment, that was undermined 9-10
use Brown rise of western Christendom page 20??
dwell among the ruins of previous moral traditions page 5 Banner
add Francesco Braschi from page 7 of Ambrose of Milan to history of CE and Ambrose/impact of martyrdom
also this one: St. Ambrose on Violence and War by Louis J. Swift*
According to ethicist Michael Banner the story of ethics in the West has largely been the story of Christian ethics.[2]: 5, 6–7 Christian ethics has not been alone in its cultural influence; it has, itself, been influenced by other religious traditions, by politics, economics, and even by its opponents, but Banner insists that making social, political and cultural sense of where western civilization is in the twenty-first century requires some understanding of the history of Christian ethics.[2]: 5
This is not, let it be noted, a claim about the present authority of Christianity or about its hold on contemporary intellectual and moral allegiances, but rather about the part it has had in shaping the practices, values and attitudes of everyday life... if history has a place in giving us an understanding of the moral concepts, categories and expectations which shape our world (where "our" means "the modern West's"), that history has to be, in large part, a history of Christian life and thought.[2]: 5–6
According to philosopher and ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre, knowledge of this moral history is not only relevant, but needed, for the twenty-first century world.[3] Banner quotes MacIntyre's classic work After Virtue, as saying that in the modern debates that so deeply divide western culture, opponents often have no means of reconciling differences because modern people are without a sense of their own ethical history. This prevents them from having the knowledge of what common ground could provide resolution. MacIntyre refers to this ignorance of our moral roots as the "salient characteristic of the moral culture of modernity".[3]
Banner points out that while some specific issues are new to the modern day, the ethical questions that underlie them are not: "nuclear weapons are new, but the question of killing non-combatants in war is not. Cloning is new, but the question of the dignity and value of the individual is not. Climate change is a new dilemma, but the question of how much man should shape his environment is not".[2]: 2 Mark Noll, distinguished professor of history at Notre Dame, asserts that a study of the history of Christian ethics provides concrete examples of principles and problems, perspective and context, and the ability to connect "grand historical consequences with sharply focused critical events".[4]: 4–5
Christian ethics has aspects of virtue ethics (character oriented), deontological ethics (rule oriented), natural law ethics (human nature) and prophetic ethics (social justice). It began with the ministry of Jesus (c. 27-30), emerged out of the heritage shared by both Judaism and Christianity, and originally depended upon the Hebrew canon as well as important legacies from Greek and Hellenic philosophy.[5]: 1, 16 [6][7]: 51
Mark Noll writes that "Christianity was born in the cradle of Judaism".[4]: 16 Within the first decade after Christ, it is estimated there were maybe 1000 Christians.[8]: 5, 6 Christian ethics among this early group was mostly about seeking "moral instruction on specific problems and practices".[5]: 2, 24 These were not sophisticated ethical analyses, but were instead the practical application of Jesus' teachings and example to confront specific issues.[5]: 24
The first ethical stance taken by the fledgling church was that made at the Council of Jerusalem, circa 50 AD, as reported in Acts 15. Its decree, known as the Apostolic Decree, to abstain from blood, sexual immorality, meat sacrificed to idols, and the meat of strangled animals, was held as generally binding for several centuries and is still observed today by the Greek Orthodox church.[9]
Early Christian writings give evidence of the hostile social setting in the Roman empire of the first century. Claudius expelled "the Jews" in 49AD, but Chrys C. Caragounis of Lund university in Sweden asserts it was "mainly Christian missionaries and converts who were expelled", i.e. those Jews associated with the name Chrestus.[10][note 13] Caragounis and Peter Richardson at the University of Toronto, point out that "believers in Christ were reckoned ethnically and religiously as belonging totally to the Jews" at that time.[10]: 118 Richardson adds that the term Christian "only became tangible in documents after the year 70 AD.[10]: 118 Suetonius and Tacitus used the terms "superstitio" and "impious rites" [profani] in describing the reasons for the expulsion, terms not applied to Jews, but commonly applied to believers in Christ at that time.[10]: 202–205
"Persecution of the Christians", Young Folks' History of Rome (1878).Nero's Torches, by Henryk Siemiradzki (1878). According to Tacitus, Nero used Christians as human torches
In Rome, citizens were expected to demonstrate their loyalty to Rome by participating in the rites of the state religion which had numerous feast days, processions and offerings throughout the year.[11]: 84–90 [12] The Christian had exacting moral standards that included avoiding such events and those who participated in them.[13]
"Christian attendance at civic festivals, athletic games, and theatrical performances were fraught with danger, since in addition to the 'sinful frenzy' and 'debauchery' aroused, each was held in honour of pagan deities. Various occupations and careers were regarded as inconsistent with Christian principles, most notably military service and public office, the manufacturing of idols, and of course all pursuits which affirmed polytheistic culture, such as music, acting, and school-teaching (cf. Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 16). Even the wearing of jewelry and fine apparel was judged harshly ... as was the use of cosmetics and perfumes".[14]: 316
As a result, sociologist Joseph M. Bryant says "the ordinary Christian lived under a constant threat of denunciation and the possibility of arraignment on capital charges".[14]: 316 [15] Christians were seen by those outside the faith as belonging to an illicit religion that was anti-social and subversive.[16]: 87 [17]: 60 Life as a Christian required daily courage, "with the radical choice of Christ or the world" facing the believer every day.[14]: 316
According to Tacitus and later Christian tradition, Nero blamed Christians for the Great Fire of Rome in 64AD.[18]: 105–152 Joseph Bryant asserts that "Nero's mass executions ...set a precedent, and thereafter the mere fact of 'being a Christian' was sufficient for state officials to impose capital punishment.[14]: 314 While it is generally agreed that from Nero's reign until Decius's widespread measures in 250, Christian persecution was isolated and localized, with Governors playing a more consistent role than emperors, it still presented life-threatening challenges to the emerging church.[19]
These challenges would be answered by the emergence of an organized church system "constructed around locally powerful bishops" similar to Roman governors, within one or two generations after Nero.[4]: 23 [18]: 105–152 By the year 300, Stark estimates there were between 5 - 7.5 million Christians out of a population of 60 million.[8]: 6
The destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70AD is an early turning point in the history of Christianity. It marked "the close of the period when Christianity could be regarded as simply a variety of Judaism.... From 70 onward the divergence of the paths of Jewish Christianity and orthodox Judaism was decisive".[4]: 17 This left Christianity to define for itself what it meant to be a Christian, distinct from paganism and Judaism.[20]: 1 Early Christian writers worked to reconcile the Jewish founding story, the Christian gospel of the Apostles, and the Greek tradition of knowing the divine through reason.[21]: 1, 10 [20]: 1
John Kaye characterizes the conversion of Constantine, and the council of Nicaea that Constantine called, as two of the most important things to ever happen to the Christian church.[22]: 1 Throughout his reign, Constantine's involvement with the church was dominated by its many conflicts defining orthodoxy versus heterodoxy and heresy.[23]: 861 The worst of the heresies was the 56-year long Arian controversy with its debate of Trinitarian formulas.[24]: 69
Constantine got news of the Arian conflict sometime before his last war with Licinius, and was deeply distressed by it.[22]: 23 After fruitless letter writing, and the sending of bishops to promote reconciliation, the emperor called for all church leaders to convene in 325 in Nicea in Bithynia (in present-day Turkey) to settle the issue.[22]: 23 Constantine himself presided at the council. Kaye references Sozomen as saying Constantine opened with a speech in which he exhorted the bishops as friends and ministers to resolve conflict and embrace peace. Sozomen says the bishops accordingly broke out in mutual accusation. The emperor intervened, mediated, occasionally severely corrected, persuaded, and praised, and Sozomen says, eventually brought them to agreement.[22]: 33–36
The result was the Nicene Creed, from which five Arian bishops abstained. The abstainers were banished for a time, then returned, resulting in Athanasius, the champion of orthodoxy, being ousted from his bishopric in Alexandria in 336, forced into exile, and thereafter living out much of the remainder of his life in a cycle of forced movement as power went back and forth between the two groups.[25]: 28, 29, 31 Athanasius died in 373, but his orthodox teaching was a major influence in the West, especially on Theodosius who became emperor in 381.[26]: 20 The Nicene creed remains the official creed of the catholic church, and is used as such by many Protestant denominations as well.[25]: 28, 29, 31
From its earliest days, the church interacted with the Greek and Roman philosophies that surrounded it.[1]: 7, 8 These influences are seen in the NT writings such as Hebrews, the gospel of John, and parts of Paul. Christianity's virtue ethic also owes much to Plato, as it adopted Plato's four virtues, moderation, courage, wisdom and justice, adding them very early in Christian history to the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, thereby creating the cardinal virtues.[1]: 6 [5]: 22
Christianity, which had begun in the first century as a "marginal, persecuted, and popularly despised Christian sect", changed into a fully institutionalized church capable of embracing the entire Roman empire by the third century.[14]: 304 Without this "conversion of Christianity to the culture and ideals of the Roman world", Brown says Constantine would never have converted.[27] However, this "momentous transformation" also threatened the survival of the marginal Christian religious movement because it naturally led to divisions, schisms and defections: 'heresies'.[14]: 317, 320
According to Moorhead, Ambrose is an example of the attitudes of Late Roman aristocracy moving into the church through the episcopate.[28]: viii
Brown Through a needle page 146 - "the first manual of Christian ethics"
"In creating in a major western city a christian community sheathed in an aura of inviolable cohesion, Ambrose had begun a work that would be continued in many other cities of the West. He gave a language to this great enterprise. He conjured up an imagined community in which the distinction between the poor and the plebs was deliberately blurred. He brought the poor into the catholic community. He presented the care of the rich for the poor as a necessary consequence of the unity of all Christians. Last but not least, Ambrose presented the unity of the catholic community of Milan as the living core of human society as a whole. A fractured human race could regain its long-lost solidarity by entering the catholic church. It was by his attention to social issues, judged in the light of that great hope, that Ambrose came to forge a language that proved to be well adapted to the ambitions of a religion that had dared to think of itself—at last and for the very first time—as a true “majority religion,” as the church rose “like a moon waxing in brightness” above the Roman world."51
Religious Dissent in Late Antiquity, 350-450 By Maijastina Kahlos, page 1 Battle of Frigidus 394
page 2 challenges to traditional view of Christianization; rigorist writers made a lot of noise; "Rhetoric and realities"
page 3 wide variety of religious movements, sometimes violence but mostly not; constant flux between moderation and coercion marked minorities and majorities, government and religious groups;
After Christianity became legal in the fourth century, the range and sophistication of Christian ethics expanded and had a defining and lasting influence upon Christian thought through such figures as Augustine of Hippo.[6]: 774 Augustine (354–430) built his treatise on Christian piety, Enchiridion, as an exposition of faith, hope and love, concluding that, "when there is a question of whether a man is good, one does not ask what he believes, or what he hopes for, but what he loves".[29]
Augustine's ethic regarding the Jews meant that, according to Anna Sapir Abulafia, "Most scholars would agree that, with the marked exception of Visigothic Spain in the seventh century, Jews in Latin Christendom lived relatively peacefully with their Christian neighbors through most of the Middle Ages" until to the 1200s.[30]: xii [31]: 3 Jeremy Cohen says historians generally agree this is because, before the 1200s, the church followed the ethic of Augustine of Hippo who had rejected those who argued that the Jews should be killed, or forcibly converted. Augustine taught that Jews should be allowed to live in Christian societies and practice Judaism without interference because they preserved the teachings of the Old Testament and were living witnesses of the truths of the New Testament.[32]: 78–80
use Ambrose: XD-US. By Boniface Ramsey, page 2, it was Augustine who introduced self-reflection to the church
The Later Roman Empire, 284-602: A Social Economic and ..., Volume 2. By Arnold Hugh Martin Jones page 882
There Is no Crime for Those who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire. (Transformation of the Classical Heritage.) by Michael Gaddis has a chapter that discusses the Council of Chalcedon pages 251-322
Augustine's pathbreaking autobiography Confessions characteristic metaphor - influenced Christian view of the ideal life as passing from the ordinary, earthly, materially bound world into the spiritual, extraordinary, celestial world - to allow creatures of the earth to rise above themselves and their earthly circumstances gave monasticism its foundation and motivation [4]: 84–85 . led to:
Benedict and the practice of the Christian life
Augustine and the theory of the Christian life: Banner
Bryant explains that, "once those within a sect determine that the 'spirit' no longer resides in the parent body, 'the holy and the pure' typically find themselves compelled – either by conviction or coercion – to withdraw and establish their own counter-church, the 'gathered remnant' of God's elect".[14]: 317
Mark A. Noll, professor of history at Notre Dame, writes that major turning points for early Christianity included the Fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon in 325 and 451 respectively, and the life and teachings of St. Benedict.[4]: vii
Brown calls Constantine's conversion a "very Roman conversion."[33]: 61 "He had risen to power in a series of deathly civil wars, destroyed the system of divided empire, believed the Christian God had brought him victory, and therefore regarded that god as the proper recipient of religio..[33]: 61 Brown says Constantine was over 40, had most likely been a traditional polytheist, and was a savvy and ruthless politician when he declared himself a Christian.[33]: 60, 61
One belief of the early church fathers was that women were responsible for sin in the world.[34]: 23 Hebrew Bible scholar Tykva Frymer-Kensky says unlike other ancient literature, the Hebrew Bible does not portray women as deserving of less because of their naturally evil or innately inferior feminine natures as is found in some Ancient and Classical Greek and Roman writings.[35]: 166–167 The Bible's metaphysical view of male and female shows both as "created in the image of God" with neither inherently inferior in nature.[36]: 41, 42
Laws concerning the loss of female virginity have no male equivalent. These and other gender differences found in the Torah suggest that, within those texts, women are subordinate to men.[37]: 163, 171
Adultery was defined differently for men than for women: a woman was an adulteress if she had sexual relations outside her marriage, but if a man had sexual relations outside his marriage with an unmarried woman, a concubine or a prostitute, it was not considered adultery on his part.[38]: 3 Non-conforming sex – homosexuality, bestiality, cross dressing and masturbation – are described as being punishable. Stringent protection of the marital bond and loyalty to kin is portrayed as very strong.[39]: 20 [36]: 20, 21
The Old Testament contains strict purity laws, both ritual and moral.[40]: 176 Near Eastern scholar Eve Levavi Feinstein writes "The concepts of pollution and sexuality seem inextricably linked", yet the views in the Bible vary more than is generally recognized.[40]: 5 Pollution terminology is used for illegal sexual contact such as rape and adultery, and it is also used for legal and licit sexual intercourse, menstruation, and for some perhaps unavoidable diseases. This makes the Bible's view of the relationship between temporary ritual pollution and more serious moral pollution "murky."[40]: 2 Pollution concepts in the Hebrew Bible are connected to certain areas of experience such as sex, death, and certain kinds of illnesses and food.[40]: 3 The Hebrew term for pollution appears 286 times and the term for purity appears 207 times.[40]: 3 Feinstein says the Hebrew Bible never uses the term 'pure' (טָהֵר) to describe virginity, but does use it to describe a married woman who has not committed adultery (Numbers 5:28).[40]: 2 Wanton, unrepentant sins are seen as having a contaminating effect on the sanctuary similar to environmental pollution.[40]: 8
Marco da Montegallo, Libro dei comandamenti di Dio ("Book of the Commandments of God"), 1494
In its earliest form, the Christian ethic was a call to live virtuously in "two dimensions": "vertically towards God, and horizontally towards one's neighbor".[2]: 9, 12
Monastic, mystical, the confessional, Thomistic synthesis; add Banner's Natural law here/Aquinas
An early list of 8 sins comes from Evagrius (346–399) and was modified by Gregory I (c.540–604) who reduces the number to seven and identifies pride as "the queen of sins".[41][1]: 8
In the centuries following the fall of the Roman empire, practices of penance and repentance, using books known as penitentials were carried by monks on their missionary journeys thereby spreading the ethic.[7]: 52–56, 57 In the middle ages there are "7 capital sins... 7 works of mercy, 7 sacraments, 7 principle virtues, 7 gifts of the Spirit, 8 beatitudes, 10 commandments, 12 articles of faith and 12 fruits of faith".[42]: 287 The medieval and renaissance periods saw a number of models of sin listing the seven deadly sins and the virtues opposed to each. The crusades were products of the renewed spirituality of the central Middle Ages when the ethic of living the Apostolic life and chivalry began to form.[43]: 177 [44]: 130–132
In the centuries following the fall of the Roman empire, practices of penance and repentance, using books known as penitentials were carried by monks on their missionary journeys thereby spreading the ethic.[7]: 52–56, 57 In the middle ages there are "7 capital sins... 7 works of mercy, 7 sacraments, 7 principle virtues, 7 gifts of the Spirit, 8 beatitudes, 10 commandments, 12 articles of faith and 12 fruits of faith".[42]: 287 The medieval and renaissance periods saw a number of models of sin listing the seven deadly sins and the virtues opposed to each. The Christian ethic of Augustine of Hippo toward the Jews meant that, "with the marked exception of Visigothic Spain in the seventh century, Jews in Latin Christendom lived relatively peacefully with their Christian neighbors through most of the Middle Ages".[30]: xii [31]: 3 The crusades were products of the renewed spirituality of the central Middle Ages when the ethic of chivalry began to form.[43]: 177 [44]: 130–132
Prudence: also described as wisdom, the ability to judge between actions with regard to appropriate actions at a given time
Justice: also considered as fairness, the most extensive and most important virtue[46]
Temperance: also known as restraint, the practice of self-control, abstention, and moderation tempering the appetition
Courage: also termed fortitude, forbearance, strength, endurance, and the ability to confront fear, uncertainty, and intimidation
Faith: belief in God, and in the truth of His revelation as well as obedience to Him (cf. Rom 1:5:16:26)[47][48]
Hope: expectation of and desire of receiving; refraining from despair and capability of not giving up. The belief that God will be eternally present in every human's life and never giving up on His love.
Charity: a supernatural virtue that helps us love God and our neighbors, the same way as we love ourselves.
defining crusade page 12 Constable
Hierarchical and popular 13
Peace and Truce of God p.14
oaths taken by the crusading leaders to the Byzantine emperor
Christian thought had generally frowned upon participation in the military, but that became increasingly difficult to maintain in the Middle Ages. A new ideal of the religious warrior who fought for justice, defended truth, and protected the weak and the innocent formed. Such a knight was ordained only after proving his spiritual and martial worth: robed in white, he would swear an oath before a cleric to uphold these values and defend the faith.[44]: 131 Chivalry is sometimes seen as one of the strangest offshoots of Christian theology to ever develop, but develop it did during the centuries of the crusades.[44]: 130 The religious aspect of knighthood was eventually replaced with "courtly love" and devotion to a lady instead of God, and that too was replaced by the development of non-martial courtiers in the High Middle Ages.[44]: 130–132
In 1096, the church launched the First crusade as a just war response to a call to defend others. Jonathan Riley-Smith says the crusades were products of the renewed spirituality of the central Middle Ages as much as they were of political circumstances.[49]: 177 Senior churchmen of this time presented the concept of Christian love to the faithful as the reason to take up arms.[49]: 177 From its early days, Christian ethics had generally frowned upon participation in the military, but in the Middle Ages, the idea of chivalry began to form, and the ideal of the religious warrior who fought for justice, defended truth, and protected the weak and the innocent was created.[44]: 130–132 Riley-Smith concludes, "The charity of St. Francis may now appeal to us more than that of the crusaders, but both sprang from the same roots."[43]: 180, 190–2 The crusades made a powerful contribution to Christian ethics through the concept of Christian chivalry, "imbuing their Christian participants with what they believed to be a noble cause, for which they fought in a spirit of self-sacrifice. However, in another sense, they marked a qualitative degeneration in behavior for those involved, for they engendered and strengthened hostile attitudes..."[50]: 51
A sharper line of separation between philosophy and theology, and between ethics and moral theology, developed in the the Middle Ages. Albertus Magnus (1193–1280), devoted the last tractatus of his work, De Bono, to a theory of justice and natural law. It was the only work specifically devoted to natural law written by a theologian or philosopher up until his day.[51]Bonaventure (1221–1274), Bonaventure wrote that philosophy was not an autonomous discipline that could be pursued successfully independently of theology.[52]Duns Scotus (1274–1308) emphasized God's will and human freedom in all philosophical and ethical issues.[53]
The veneration of the Virgin Mary began to flourish in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries with the invention of "affective piety" that grew from empathy with the human suffering Christ that exhibited itself in compassion toward the suffering of others.[54]
From about 1000 onward, the monastic school system that had briefly existed under Charlemagne, was revived. By 1200 the Universities arose.[55]: 219 The curriculum was based on the seven liberal arts codified by Boethius in the sixth century: "the trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, astronomy, geometry and music)".[55]: 220 There was no department of ethics, no separate class of ethics.[56]
Inaccurate Latin translations of classical writings were replaced in the twelfth century with more accurate ones. This led to an intellectual revolution called scholasticism, which was an effort to harmonize Aristotelian and Christian thought.[55]: 220, 221 In response, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) wrote "one of the outstanding achievements of the High Middle Ages", the Summa Theologica, that became known as Thomism, containing many ethics that continue to be used.[55]: 222
Classical writings, notably those of Aristotle, which had previously been known only through inaccurate Latin translations, were replaced in the twelfth century with more accurate translations from copies in Arabic left by Muslims with the Jews in Spain.[55]: 221 Their arrival caused an intellectual revolution, and by 1300, Aristotle's writings monopolized school curriculum at every level and elevated Aristotle to "the status of an authority whose word could not be questioned".[55]: 220, 221 This led to the body of thought called scholasticism.[55]: 221
The influx of Greek thinking caused controversy. On the one hand, the theological faculty in Paris were scholastics, and on the other hand was the art's faculty, (called Latin Averroists after the Arabic philosopher Ibn Rushd known in the West as Averroes), who wanted philosophy separated from theology and reason fully divorced from faith.[55]: 221 The view that resolved the conflict was the via media, the view of Thomas Aquinas. He avoided the pure rationalism of the Averrosits while still giving Aristotle a central role and honoring Christian beliefs. Known as Thomism, "this theological system in its complex design and sheer elegance remains one of the outstanding achievements of the High Middle Ages".[55]: 222
In general, scholasticism involved harmonizing Aristotelian and Christian thought, but it was also a system of reasoning and a method of debate. It used deductive logic to clarify existing issues and explore the intellectual ramifications of any particular topic. The debate method was the favorite of the universities who regularly held quodlibetals, or what Americans might call "Town hall meetings", where questions were not limited to friend or foe.[57] Quodlibetal is from the Latin quod (what) + libet (it pleases), meaning the topic of these debates was “whatever pleased” the debaters.[58] The most famous of the quodlibetal leaders is probably Thomas Aquinas who, as a professor at the University of Paris two separate times (1252 to 1259 and again from 1269 to 1272), answered "questions from the floor in a public context".[57][55]: 221
Aquinas, Natural law and the loss of the Christian ethic - Banner
The impact of the rediscovery of Aristotle is evident in part two of the Summa Theologiae, where he discusses the intellectual virtues in question 57, and immediately following that, discusses the moral and theological virtues in questions 58-62.[59][1]: 9
For Aquinas, there are two key features of the natural law found at Question 94 of the Prima Secundae (the second division of Part one) of the Summa Theologiae. The first is that, for Aquinas, natural law is an aspect of divine providence.[60] For example, he discusses the ethics of buying and selling and concludes that although it may be legal (according to human law) to sell an object for more that it is worth, Divine law "leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary to virtue".[61] The question of beatitudo, perfect happiness in the possession of God, is posited as the goal of human life. Thomas also argues that the human being by reflection on human nature's inclinations discovers a law, that is the natural law, which is "man's participation in the divine law".[62]
Aquinas says reason and faith are both paths to truth, and human senses are the only source for human knowledge.[55]: 222 He saw secular life as natural and necessary and believed that "natural law - which derived from the divine order - offered a correct guide to individuals and society". Rejecting Augustine's view, he followed Aristotle in "claiming that a settled society with justice for all is the highest human goal on earth".[55]: 222
Aquinas defined "love" for the Christian believer as "to will the good of another".[63] Aquinas supported tolerance as a general principle. He taught that governing well included tolerating some evil in order to foster good or prevent worse evil.[64] But in his Summa Theologica II-II qu. 11, art. 3, he adds that heretics — after two fruitless admonitions — deserve only excommunication and death.[65] Thomism had a lasting impact on Christian ethics. Six hundred years after his death, the papacy declared (in 1874) that Thomism was the official philosophy of Roman Catholic thought.[66][55]: 222
R. I. Moore calls the 1100s "pivotal" because this is when Europe began laying the foundation for its gradual transformation from the medieval to the early modern era of the 1400s.[67]: 154 [67]: ix According to Moore, and other contemporary scholars such as John D. Cotts and Peter D. Diehl "the growth of secular power and the pursuit of secular interests, constituted the essential context of the developments that led to a persecuting society."[67]: 4, 5 [68]: 8–10 [69]: 224 Moore explains that the church "played a significant role in the formation of the persecuting society but not the leading one."[67]: 146 Still, the centralization and secularization that was going on in society also took place within the church, and the church gradually began to resemble its secular counterparts in its conduct, thought, objectives, and ethics.[70]: 72
By the 1200s, both civil and canon law had become such a major aspect of ecclesiastical culture that law began dominating Christian ethics.[71]: 382 Most bishops and Popes were trained lawyers rather than theologians.[71]: 382 The legal regulations of the church, and divine moral law, became confounded, and the moral principle was lowered to the level of jural legislation.[42]: 286 "This mixing of the ethical and the juridicial was communicated to the whole thinking of the age".[42]: 292 In the High Middle Ages, the religion that had begun centuries before by decrying the power of law (Romans 7:6), developed the most complex religious law the world has ever seen. It was a system in which the ethics of equity and universality were largely overlooked.[71]: 382 Ethics of this period became little more than an extension of law which was then used to aid the state in the production of new rhetoric, patterns, and procedures of exclusion and persecution.[69]: 224 [68]: 8–10
Heresy was a religious, political, and social issue, and "the first stirrings of violence against dissidents were usually the result of popular resentment". This resentment was often demonstrated by mobs murdering heretics. Most historians agree this breakdown of social order was what led to the medieval inquisitions.[20]: 189 Leaders reasoned that both lay and church authority had an obligation to step in when sedition, peace, or the general stability of society was at issue.[20]: 189 Because the Late Roman Empire had developed an inquisitorial system of justice that seemed useful in these circumstances, that system was revived in the Middle Ages. Essentially, the church reintroduced Roman law in Europe in the form of the Inquisition when it seemed that Germanic law had failed.[72] This revival of Roman law made it possible for Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) to make heresy a political question when he took Roman law's doctrine of lèse-majesté, and combined it with his view of heresy as laid out in the 1199 decretal Vergentis in senium, thereby ethically, and theologically, equating heresy with treason against God.[72]
Jacob J. Schacter and Elisheva Carlebach reference eminent historian David Berger saying historians agree that the period which spanned the eleventh to the thirteenth century was a turning point in Jewish-Christian relations.[73]: 2 This led the church to sometimes support mistreatment of Jews, and at other times, still oppose it and protect them. Political authorities maintained order by keeping groups separated both legally and physically in what would be referred to in the twenty-first century as segregation.[74]: 7, 8 Christian ethics said nothing to oppose this because, in 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council, known as the Great Council, had met and accepted 70 canons of church law, the last three of which required Jews to distinguish themselves from Christians in their dress, prohibited them from holding public office, and prohibited Jewish converts from continuing to practice Jewish rituals.[73]: 58 [67]: 7 "Officially, the medieval Catholic church never advocated the expulsion of all the Jews from Christendom, or repudiated Augustine's doctrine of Jewish witness... Still, late medieval Christendom frequently ignored its mandates..."[75]: 396 [76]: 222
By the 1200s, both civil and canon law had become such a major aspect of ecclesiastical culture that law began dominating Christian ethics.[71]: 382 Most bishops and Popes were trained lawyers rather than theologians.[71]: 382 The legal regulations of the church, and "divine moral law", became confounded, and the moral principle was lowered to the level of jural legislation.[42]: 286 "This mixing of the ethical and the juridicial was communicated to the whole thinking of the age".[42]: 292
Part four *Martin Luther against ethics /Banner
Luther and Calvin, counter reformation and humanism, the radical reformation; use Banner?
The unity of the universal church, for which Thomas Aquinas had provided elaborate theological rationale, broke under the weight of moral corruption and a lack of responsiveness to movements of reform. While the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century appeared as a vast theological and ecclesial revolution, ... It also played an important role in shaping the modern world.[77]: 108
By the time of the early Reformation, (1400 — 1600), the conviction developed among many early Protestants that pioneering the ethics of religious freedom and religious toleration was necessary.[78]: 3 There was a concerted campaign for tolerance in mid-sixteenth century northwestern Switzerland in the town of Basle. Sebastian Castellio, who was among the earliest of the reformers to advocate both religious and political tolerance, had moved to Basle after he was exiled from France. Castellio's argument for toleration was essentially theological and ethical: "By casting judgment on the belief of others, don't you take the place of God?"[79]: 907, 908 He also pled for social stability and peaceful co-existence.[79]: 908 Making similar arguments were, Anabaptist David Joris (1501 - 1556) from the Netherlands, and the Italian reformer Jacobus Acontius (1492 - 1566) who also gathered with Castellio in Basle. Other advocates of religious tolerance, Mino Celsi (1514 - 1576) and Bernardino Ochino (1487–1564), joined them, publishing their works on toleration in that city.[78]: 3 [80] In time, many would follow.
Benjamin Warfield is quoted as saying the Reformation was a "triumph of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the church". Grace was the basic ethic of Reformation thinkers Martin Luther and John Calvin, and ironically, the fourth century Catholic Augustine was a source for both Reformers.[77]: 109 Luther, in his classic treatise On Christian Liberty argued that moral effort is a response to grace. Luther said humans are not made good by the things they do, but if they are made good by God's love, they will be impelled to do good things.[77]: 111 Luther posited "two kingdoms": the temporal and the spiritual. This sharp delineation meant secular power must not be used to enforce spiritual ends, and spiritual authorities must not have the temporal power to enforce any law or decree on others without their consent.[77]: 115
John Calvin adopted and systematized Luther's main ideas. In His Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin grounds everything in the sovereignty of God, "transforming every act of human self-seeking into a radical endeavor to bring every aspect of human existence into conformity with the divine will".[77]: 120 Since all Christians are equally "called by God to a morally responsive life", that can be expressed in whatever manner is appropriate to our situation including secular pursuits.[77]: 116 This had the effect of liberating the concept of vocation from being limited to the priesthood and monastic orders.[77]: 120 In Calvin's view, all humans have a vocation, a calling, and in all our callings, the guiding measure of its value is simply, and profoundly, whether it impedes or furthers God's will. This gives a 'sacredness' to the most mundane and ordinary of actions.[77]: 122 The Reform ethic contributed to ideas of popular sovereignty asserting human beings are not "subjects of the state but are members of the state".[77]: 125
Moral law, according to Calvin, has three purposes: as evidence of our moral powerlessness to keep it apart from the grace of God, as a teaching tool for believers, and as constraint upon the wicked.[77]: 118, 119 He upheld the separation of the spiritual and temporal asserting that one important role of civil government is to provide restraint for evildoers.[77]: 122, 123 Thus, Calvin also supported just war in opposition to the pacifism of the Anabaptists of his time.[77]: 124 Calvin upheld the concept of private property but also taught that all property is held in trust for God and will require an accounting for its use.[77]: 122 This combination of principles produced what is sometimes called the Protestant work ethic.[77]: 116
In an extended discussion of moral will, Calvin explores the classical philosophical writings of Plato, Aristotle, Themistius, some of the early church fathers, and Augustine. With Augustine, Calvin affirms human will, for good or evil, but also says we are like animals following the inclination of a corrupt nature without deliberation.[77]: 117, 118
Luther, in his classic treatise On Christian Liberty argued that moral effort is a response to grace. Humans are not made good by the things they do, but if they are made good by God's love, they will be impelled to do good things.[5]: 111 John Calvin adopted and systematized Luther's main ideas grounding everything in the sovereignty of God.[5]: 120 In Calvin's view, all humans have a vocation, a calling, and the guiding measure of its value is simply whether it impedes or furthers God's will. This gives a 'sacredness' to the most mundane and ordinary of actions leading to the development of the Protestant work ethic.[5]: 116–122 Calvin upheld the separation of the spiritual and earthly asserting that one important role of civil government is to provide restraint for evildoers.[5]: 122, 123 Thus, Calvin also supported just war in opposition to the pacifism of the Anabaptists of his time.[5]: 124 The Reform ethic contributed to ideas of popular sovereignty asserting human beings are not "subjects of the state but are members of the state".[5]: 125 During the Reformation, Protestant Christians pioneered the ethics of religious toleration and religious freedom.[78]: 3
The Roman Catholic church of the 1600s responded to Reformation Protestantism in three ways.[55]: 335 Papal reform began with Pope Paul III (1534 - 1549). New monastic orders grew with the most influential being the Society of Jesus commonly known as the Jesuits.[55]: 336 The Jesuits commitment to education put them at the forefront of many colonial missions.[55]: 336 The third response was by the Council of Trent in 1545 and 1563. The Council asserted that the Bible and church tradition were the foundations of church authority, not just the Bible as Protestants asserted; the Vulgate was the only official Bible and other versions were rejected; salvation was through faith and works, not faith alone; and the seven sacraments were reaffirmed. "The moral, doctrinal and disciplinary results of the Council of Trent laid the foundations for Roman Catholic policies and thought right up to the present".[55]: 337
Christian humanism taught that any Christian with a "pure and humble heart could pray directly to God" without the intervention of a priest.[55]: 338 They believed that imitating the early church would revitalize Christianity and restore its original purpose. "The outstanding figure among the northern humanists — and possibly the outstanding figure among all humanists — is the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus".[55]: 338 His ethical views included advocating for education in the humanities, "emphasizing the study of Classics, and honoring the dignity of the individual. He promoted the philosophy of Christ as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount and in living a humble and virtuous life".[55]: 339
rationalism and revival
- use Part five Banner's Butler, Kant aND KIERKEGAARD
Nietzsche
revival, philosophy, slavery and feminism
Christian ethics separated from theology in the Enlightenment era.[81]: 41 The authority of the Bible, faith and religion itself were challenged by pietism and rationalism.[82]: 465 This eventually led to the post-modern view that no appeal to authority can be accepted as sufficient to establish truth.[81]: ix "The appeal to inner experience, the renewed interest in human nature, and the influence of social conditions upon ethical reflection introduced new directions to Christian ethics [in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries]. This period is filled with "Formal Discourses" treating both normative ethics [morals to follow] and meta-ethics [what ethics itself is]".[82]: 511–512 The primary concern of the early modern period was the nature of human nature. This included discussion of where moral authority comes from and what defines human responsibility, free will, the nature of the self, and moral character. "Beginning with the rise of Christian social theory, ... ethics is heavily oriented toward discussion of nature and society, wealth, work, and human equality".[82]: 511–512
Barth and John Paul II rediscovering Christian ethics - Part 6
social gospel, formative thinkers, Vatican II, liberation theology
Barth and John Paul
Wogamen; Christian Ethics
A Historical Introduction; 1993
There are multiple Christian ethics in the modern era. It has been influenced by different strands of thought, such as that of Immanuel Kant who grounded morality in nature, independent of theology, and the Social gospel's attempt to respond to the effects of modern industrialization.[81]: 41 Stanley Hauerwas asserts that the Social gospel, along with all modern ethics and theology, accepted and accommodated that Kantian separation, thereby making both ethics and theology "impoverished".[81]: 42 In the twenty-first century, this has often resulted in Christian ethics on one side of a discussion and secularism on the other, with Christian ethics fighting for relevancy.[81]: 2 William J. Meyer asserts the answer to this difficulty lies in embracing secular standards of rationality and coherence while refusing secular conclusions.[81]: 5 On the other hand, James M. Gustafson asserts that modern ethics must be grounded in natural law while addressing both theology and ethics in "an integrative process" that is careful to consider circumstances, method, and procedures for decision making, and "gathers relevant information and knowledge from the social and natural sciences".[83]: xvi The "struggle to embrace modernity without abandoning faith ... is arguably the critical fault line in the contemporary world".[81]: 5
John Carman says the central question of Christian ethics is, and has always been, how the Christian and the church relates to the surrounding social and political world.[82]: 463 "This has led to the development of three distinct types of modern Christian ethics: the church, sect and mystical types".[82]: 463 In the church type of Roman Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism, the Christian ethic is lived within the world, in marriage, family, and work, while living within and participating in municipal counties, cities and nations. This ethic is meant to permeate every area of life and is largely responsible for the great Christian societies. The ethic of the sect works in the opposite direction. It is practiced by withdrawing from the world, minimizing interaction with it while living outside or above the world in communities separated from other municipalities. The mystical type advocates an ethic that is purely an inward experience of personal piety and spirituality. It often includes asceticism.[81]: 465 In the last century and a half, a fourth formulation of the Christian ethic as social reform has also developed. There is also geographic diversity in modern Christian ethics.[82]: 464
Genetics, philosophy and the present Christian life
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^ abcdeBanner, Michael (2009). Christian Ethics A Brief History. Wiley. ISBN9781405115179.
^ abMacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition (Third ed.). University of Notre Dame Press. pp. ix–x. ISBN978-0268035044.
^ abcdefNoll, Mark A. (2012). Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity (Third ed.). Baker Books. ISBN9781441238801.
^ abcdefghijWogaman, J. Philip (2011). Christian Ethics A Historical Introduction. Westminster John Knox Press. ISBN9780664234096.
^ abKenney, John Peter. "Patristic philosophy". In Craig, Edward (ed.). The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Taylor & Francis. p. 773. ISBN9781134344086.
^ abcLong, D. Stephen (2010). Christian Ethics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN9780199568864.
^ abStark, Rodney (1997). The Rise of Christianity: How the obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a few centuries (reprint ed.). Harper Collins. ISBN9780060677015.
^ abcdeCaragounis, Chrys C. (1998). Donfried, Karl P.; Richardson, Peter (eds.). Judaism and Christianity in First-century Rome. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. p. 205. ISBN9780802842657.
^Lee, A.Doug (2016). Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity: A Sourcebook (Second ed.). New York: Routledge. ISBN978-1-138-02031-3.
^Green, Bernard (2010). Christianity in Ancient Rome: The First Three Centuries. A&C Black. p. 126-127. ISBN9780567032508.
^ abcdefgBryant, Joseph M. (1993). "The Sect-Church Dynamic and Christian Expansion in the Roman Empire: Persecution, Penitential Discipline, and Schism in Sociological Perspective". The British Journal of Sociology. 44 (2). doi:10.2307/591221. JSTOR591221. Cite error: The named reference "Joseph M. Bryant" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
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^Timothy D. Barnes, Chapter 11 ("Persecution") in Tertullian (1971, revised 1985). p. 145.
^ abcdPeters, Edward, ed. (1980). Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe. Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN0-8122-1103-0.
^González, Justo L. (2014). A History of Christian Thought: In One Volume. Abingdon Press. pp. Part one, chapter 10. ISBN978-1-4267-6369-4.
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^Salzman, Michele Renee. "The Evidence for the Conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity in Book 16 of the 'Theodosian Code.'" Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte, vol. 42, no. 3, 1993, pp. 362–378. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4436297. Accessed 2 June 2020.
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^Olson, Roger E. (1999). The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform. Downer's Grove, In.: InterVarsity Press. p. 172. ISBN978-0-8308-1505-0.
^Brown, Peter (1971). The world of late antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad. Thames and Hudson. p. 82. ISBN978-0500320228.
^Moorhead, John (2017). Ambrose: Church and Society in the Late Roman World. Routledge. ISBN978-1138181427.
^St. Augustine of Hippo (1961). Paolucci, Henry (ed.). The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love. Translated by Shaw, J. F. Henry Regnery Company. p. 135.
^ abAbulafia, Anna Sapir, ed. (2002). Religious Violence Between Christians and Jews: Medieval Roots, Modern Perspectives. UK: Palgrave. ISBN978-1-34942-499-3.
^ abBachrach, Bernard S. (1977). Early medieval Jewish policy in Western Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN0-8166-0814-8.
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^Frymer-Kensky, Tykva (2012). Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of Their Stories. New York: Schocken Books. ISBN978-0-8052-1182-5.
^ abBlumenthal, David R. (2005). "The Images of Women in the Hebrew Bible". In Broyde, Michael J.; Ausubel, Michael (eds.). Marriage, Sex and Family in Judaism. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. ISBN0-7425-4516-4.
^Hauptman, Judith (2005). "Women". In Blumenthal, Jacob; Liss, Janet L. (eds.). Etz Hayim Study Companion. New York: The Jewish Publications Society. ISBN978-0-82760-822-1.
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^Berger, Michael S. (2005). "Marriage, Sex and Family in the Jewish Tradition: A Historical Overview". In Broyde, Michael J.; Ausubel, Michael (eds.). Marriage, Sex, and Family in Judaism. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. ISBN0-7425-4516-4.
^ abcdefgFeinstein, Eve Levavi (2014). Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-939554-5.
^Gregory I, Pope (1850). Morals on the Book of Job (volume 40 ed.). J. Parker. p. 489.
^Pickar, C. H. (1981) [1967]. "Faith". The New Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 5. Washington D.C. p. 792.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^Cunningham, Stanley. Reclaiming Moral Agency: The Moral Philosophy of Albert the Great. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University Of America Press, 2008 p.207
^Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, vol. 2 (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1950), p. 248.
^Wells, Samuel; Quash, Ben (2010). Introducing Christian Ethics. Wiley. p. 84. ISBN9781405152778.
^ abDavies, Brian; Nevitt, Turner, eds. (2019). Thomas Aquinas's Quodlibetal Questions. Oxford University Press. p. xxiii. ISBN9780190069520.
^Delany, Sheila, ed. (2002). Chaucer and the Jews : Sources, Contexts, Meanings. p. 144 note 19. ISBN9780415938822.
^St. Thomas Aquinas; Knight, Kevin. "The Summa Theologiæ of St. Thomas Aquinas". Summa Theologiae. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New Advent. Retrieved 7 March 2021.
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^Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica, "Of Cheating, Which Is Committed in Buying and Selling." Translated by The Fathers of the English Dominican Province. pp. 3 [1]Archived 27 November 2012 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 19 June 2012
^Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, q. 10, art. 11, obj. 3. Translated by the Catholic Mind from the French version of J. Thomas-d'Hoste which appeared in Documentation Catholique, Paris, March 15, 1959. Reprints are available from the America Press, 920 Broadway, N .Y. no page #s available
^Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler (2011). Systematic Theology Roman Catholic Perspectives. Fortress Press. p. 27. ISBN9781451407921.
^ abcdeMoore, R. I. (2007). The Formation of a Persecuting Society (second ed.). Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN978-1-4051-2964-0.
^ abCotts, John D.. Europe's Long Twelfth Century: Order, Anxiety and Adaptation, 1095–1229. United Kingdom, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
^ abChristendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1000–1500. Spain, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
^McClintock, John, and Strong, James. Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature: Rh-St. United States, Harper, 1880.
^ abcdeHASTINGS, Ed; Mason, Alistair; Hastings, Adrian; Pyper, Hugh S., eds. (2000). The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought. Oxford University Press, USA. ISBN9780198600244.
^ abSchacter, Jacob J. (2011). Carlebach, Elisheva; Schacter, Jacob J. (eds.). New Perspectives on Jewish-Christian Relations: In Honor of David Berger. Netherlands: Brill. ISBN978-9-00422-118-5.
^Johnson, Noel D.; Koyama, Mark (2019). Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom. UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN9781108425025.
^Cohen, Jeremy (October 2009). "Review: Revisiting Augustine's Doctrine of Jewish Witness". The Journal of Religion. 89 (4). The University of Chicago Press: 564–578. doi:10.1086/600873. JSTOR10.1086/600873.
^Saak, Eric Leland (2017). Luther and the Reformation of the Later Middle Ages. UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-1-107-18722-1.
^ abcdefghijklmnoCite error: The named reference Wogamen was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^ abcScribner, Robert W.; Grell, Ole Peter; Scribner, Bob, eds. (2002). Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. ISBN9780521894128. Cite error: The named reference "Scribner" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
^ abcdefghMeyer, William J.; Schubert M., Schubert M. (2010). Metaphysics and the Future of Theology The Voice of Theology in Public Life. Wipf and Stock Publishers. ISBN9781630878054.
^ abcdefCarman, John (1991). Carman, John; Jürgensmeyer, Mark; Darrow, William (eds.). A Bibliographic Guide to the Comparative Study of Ethics. Cambridge University Press. ISBN9780521344487.
^Gustafson, James M. (2007). Gustafson, James M.; Boer, Theodoor Adriaan; Capetz, Paul E. (eds.). Moral Discernment in the Christian Life Essays in Theological Ethics. Westminster John Knox Press. ISBN9780664230708.
Norman Geisler has a book titled Christian Ethics Contemporary Issues & Options, which lists many of the same issues you list in this article. The title let's readers know, up front, this book is limited to "current" issues. [[8]]
Christian Ethics Moral Theology in Light of Vatican II: General Moral Theology · Volume 1 [[9]] has the same definition as Pinckaers on page 3.
The Divine Imperative: A Study in Christian Ethics [[10]] has a truly interesting discussion of what CE isn't and is in the second paragraph on page 85. It's essentially the same as above.
[[11]] says that it "Redefines the field of Christian ethics along three strands: universal (ethics for anyone), subversive (ethics for the excluded), and ecclesial (ethics for the church). It is a contemporary redefinition, but it begins with history on page 1.
Moral Discernment in the Christian Life: Essays in Theological Ethics[12] defines Christian ethics on page 7 as "faith doing". I particularly like that one. It's simple and elegant.
This simple virtue ethic became the dominant ethical approach that lasted into and through most of the Middle Ages.[1]: 16
In four centuries, between the reigns of Marcus Aurelius (161 - 180) and Justinian (527 - 565), the Mediterranean world passed through a series of profound transmutations that affected the rhythms of life, the moral sensibilities, and the concomitant sense of the self of the inhabitants of its cities, and of the countryside around them... The life of the individual, the life of the family, even matters as intimate as the body itself came to be seen in relation to changing social contexts, associated with the rise of new forms of community.[2]
This history can be questioned, Banner says, because it is a worthy question "about whether and how we can frame our [own] individual [ethical] and social lives, and what sort of world there will be".[3]: 8 [4]: xxv
The Nicene creed has remained the official creed of the church.[5]: 28, 29, 31
Romans believed Christians, who were thought to take part in strange rituals and nocturnal rites, cultivated a dangerous and superstitious sect.[6]: 125
The fourth century was an age of religious ferment and controversy that would not be seen again until the Reformation.[7]: 6
(USE??) Moorhead says "Ambrose' character, the job he held, and the position of the city in which he held it, ensured his importance in the history of the later Roman empire".[8]: 3
When it came to the central functions of the roman state, even the vivid Ambrose was a lightweight. He could attack the avarice of private persons, conjuring up their abuses in the old-fashioned language of the Italy of an earlier age. He could not attack the fiscal system from which so much of the wealth around him must have derived. It was only a decade later, in a more crisis-laden situation when the Roman state itself was maimed by barbarian invasions, that Christian writers and preachers turned explicitly against taxation and tax collectors. But in the italy of the 380s and 390s this development still lay in the future.[9]: 146
References
^Cite error: The named reference Wogaman93 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Brown, Peter (1998b). Late Antiquity (illustrated, reprint ed.). Harvard University Press. p. 1. ISBN9780674511705.
^Cite error: The named reference Michael Banner was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
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^Cite error: The named reference Ray was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
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^Cite error: The named reference John Moorhead was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Cite error: The named reference Brown, Eye was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
The "good life" was thought to be a life lived in a community built on relationships characterized by love.[1]: 12
Some specific issues are new to the modern day, but Banner points out that the ethical questions that underlie them are often not new: "nuclear weapons are new, but the question of killing non-combatants in war is not. Cloning is new, but the question of the dignity and value of the individual is not. Climate change is a new dilemma, but the question of how much man should shape his environment is not".[2]: 2
Christian virtue theorists look to Philippians 4:8 (which says humans should focus on what is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent or worthy of praise); Philippians 2:5–11 (which advocates humility); and Galatians 5:22–23 (which lists the "fruit of the Spirit": love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control) as their biblical foundation.[1]: 13
environmental ethics
Western preoccupation with wilderness cannot be understood apart from consideration of early ascetic traditions... rooted in the period when Christianity became the official religion of a Roman empire whose eastern hinterlands took on new political significance with the movement of the political capitol to Constantinople. Between the fourth and seventh centuries, desert... became established as a principle character rather than a simple backdrop..." [3]: 10
use page 12 on Christianity reversing the classic valuation of wilderness - prime staging, newly valorized 'ascetic landscape' - "The shift in moral valence of city and wilderness; bottom of 15; "redemptive space of the first order" page 17; pagan critics -17- top of 18; page 22 - these ancient traditions can be regarded as "pre-modern forms of philosophical anthropology and environmental philosophy".[3]: 22
According to ethicist J. Philip Wogaman, "two millennia of confronting moral questions, has produced a rich legacy of thought much of which proves strikingly relevant to contemporary issues".[4]: ix Mark Murphy writes that "Every introductory ethics anthology that includes material on natural law theory includes material by or about [Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas”].[5] Judith Adler writes that environmental ethics can be seen as having begun with Christianity reversing the classic Greek and Roman view of wilderness and reconceptualizing it as "redemptive space of the first order".[3]: 17 As John Muir said: "The deserts of the Old Testament were never far from the imaginations of the first American conservationists who organized the movement to "save" the wilderness".[3]: 29
The doctrine that Christ had two natures, one fully human and one fully divine, also insisted that Christ had two wills, since the will is a property of the nature.[6] This claimed the human will conformed naturally to the divine will, yet a person does not merely have a soul or a mind or a will; a person is wholly constituted as being that soul and mind and will.[7]: 7, 8 If Jesus' Being embraced two complete beings, one a fully functional and separate human body, soul and will, that amounts to a second part of the divine Logos. They would not be one person; they would instead be "a theological and metaphysical counterpart to conjoined twins".[7]: 3 The two natures doctrine has a tendency to destroy the unity of Christ, and Jesus' mission as divine depended upon his unity with the will of the Father.[8]
One effort to resolve this produced Monophysitism. Monophysitism took the sentence "the word was made flesh" John 1:14 believing it meant the divine nature, when changed into the human, absorbed and changed the human, making the two natures into one divine nature.[9][10] Being solely divine treads upon the real human suffering of the cross.[11] This led to the fourth ecumenical council in 451, the Council of Chalcedon, which wrote the Definition in response.[10][12]: 67
The insight of the Chalcedonian Definition is seeing the Incarnation as a personal or hypostatic union. Hypostasis is a Greek term for the substance that underlies and supports all of reality.[12]: 68 Two natures of Christ form one ontological entity with two manners of existence. "The significant difference between Chalcedonian and monophysite Christologies lies in their respective capacities for accommodating putative contradictions. Supposing that the list of necessary divine attributes conflicts with the list of necessary human attributes, Chalcedonianism can, and monophysitism cannot, allow that the incarnate divine person is truly God and man, with all the attributes entailed by each nature".[13]
By the seventh century in the Byzantine empire, emperor Heraclius decided he wanted to win back the "excommunicated and persecuted Monophysites of Egypt and Syria".[14]: 60 The Patriarch of Constantinople, Sergius, understood how serious these issues were for the church and thought a teaching that had been going around in Egypt might provide the bridge between orthodoxy and monophysitism and heal the breach.[14] This new teaching asserted two natures but only one will: monothelitism. In 638, Heraclius issued the "Statement of faith" that formulated the position explaining that the divine and human natures in Christ, while quite distinct, had but one will (thelēma) and one operation (energeia).[14] "Unfortunately, this led to such intense controversy that Heraclius's successor, Constans II (r.641-668 CE) had to issue an edict in 648 CE forbidding all discussion of the question".[14]
The controversy revived under emperor Constantine IV in 668 CE. In order to avoid tearing apart Jesus' unity, the Sixth Ecumenical Council of 680 CE, also held in Constantinople, declared that, while Jesus had two natures, his human will was determined by the divine will.[8] Taken strictly, this omits Jesus' voluntary capacity necessary for atonement.[8] Monothelitism was condemned and declared a heresy in 680.[14]: 291
Taken from: Cross, Richard. "A Recent Contribution on the Distinction between Monophysitism and Chalcedonianism." The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review, vol. 65 no. 3, 2001, p. 361-383. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/tho.2001.0001.[[13]]
Chalcedonian insight that the Incarnation is to be understood in terms of a personal or hypostatic union,
For Chalcedonians, the body-soul analogy is used to highlight the fact ofthe union (182). For monophysites, however, the analogy is used to clarify the manner of the union: two natures united together form a tertium quid. As Weinandy understands it, this new nature will exhibit either predominantly 1 Thomas G. Weinandy, Does God Suffer? (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 2000).
According to Weinandy, then, the significant difference between Chalcedonian and monophysite Christologies lies in their respective capacities for accommodating putative contradictions. Supposing that the list of necessary divine attributes conflicts with the list of necessary human attributes, Chalcedonianism can, and monophysitism cannot, allow that the incarnate divine person is truly God and man, with all the attributes entailed by each nature
Weinandy's crucial Chalcedonian insight, from which all else is developed, is that two natures-divine and human-are united in one person, in such a way that they do not form some new, third sort of thing (a union of the two natures, in Weinandy's Chalcedonian language), but rather are possessed by one and the same person. According to Weinandy, a nature is a "manner of existence," and a person a "who" that exists in such-and-such a manner (197). Using this understanding of person and nature, Weinandy proposes the following summary ofwhat I am labeling "Chalcedonianism": "Jesus is one ontological entity, and the one 3 Generally, my target is not Weinandy himself. He is a particularly lucid and persuasive representative of a Christological tradition that goes back to Cyril of Alexandria. MONOPHYSIDSM AND CHALCEDONIANISM 363 ontological entity that is Jesus is the one person of the divine Son of God existing as a complete and authentic man" (174). According to Chalcedonianism, there is one ontological entity, one who; this entity has two manners of existence-divine and human. Weinandy makes it dear that what I am labeling Chalcedonianism entails that all (concrete} predicates can be ascribed to the person.4 He sees the fault of non-Chalcedonian positions as lying in their propensity to...
Hypostasis (Greek: ὑπόστασις, hypóstasis) is the underlying state or underlying substance and is the fundamental reality that supports all else. ... In Christian theology, the Holy Trinity is consisted of three hypostases: Hypostasis of the Father, Hypostasis of the Son, and Hypostasis of the Holy Spirit.
Similar to Gnosticism, it asserted one nature for Christ as solely divine even though he took on a human body.[16]
"Which one?", is the question that got Monothelitism condemned at the Third Council of Constantinople, the sixth of the Seven Ecumenical Councils.[7]: 1 The Two–Minds view claims Jesus assumed a fully functioning human mind and will that was its own self separate from the divine self.[7]: 1 This creates a kind of "theological conjoined twins".[7]: 3
The controversy originated in the attempts by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius to win back for the church and empire the excommunicated and persecuted Monophysites of Egypt and Syria. In Armenia in 622, Heraclius first suggested to the head of the Severian Monophysites that the divine and human natures in Christ, while quite distinct in his one person, had but one will (thelēma) and one operation (energeia).
The controversy surrounding these questions in the sixth and seventh centuries rested largely on how will was defined: "volition and action, the capacity for causal origination or causal genesis or self-determination, driven by desires and abilities commensurate with one’s nature".[7]: 7
In 638 Heraclius issued the Ekthesis (“Statement of Faith”), which formulated the "one will" position. This led to such intense controversy that Heraclius’ successor, Constans II, issued an edict in 648 forbidding all discussion of the question.
This led to such intense controversy that Heraclius’ successor, Constans II, issued an edict in 648 forbidding all discussion of the question. This secured silence, despite the protest of the Western church at the Lateran Council of 649.
According to Agatho, the will is a property of the nature, so that, if there are two natures, there are two wills; but the human will conforms to the divine will. The third Council of Constantinople condemned Monothelitism and asserted two wills in the person of Christ.
The most directly relevant creedal affirmation of the two wills of Christ is the Third Council of Constantinople (hereafter: TCC), which states:
And we proclaim equally two natural volitions or wills in him and two natural principles of action which undergo no division, no change, no partition, no confusion, in accordance with the teaching of the holy fathers. And the two natural wills not in opposition, as the impious heretics said, far from it, but his human will following, and not resisting or struggling, rather in fact subject to his divine and all powerful will.30
Although Gregory Nazianzus was directly referenced in the TCC, it is the thought of Maximus the Confessor that is the major conceptual engine for the TCC.31 Ian McFarland aptly summarizes that there are two senses of will, the immediately interesting one to us being the natural will (qe/lma
fusiko/n or simply qe/lma).32 This is the ability for causal origination, to be the first mover for an action. Say if I wish to move my body to drink a glass of milk, it is I who move my body and not something other than me, such as the Big Bang causing the cosmos and this cascading sequence that determinatively leads up to my body moving.33 According to McFarland, Maximus thought that the mark of creatureliness is the capacity for motion, noting that “each creature moves in its own distinctive way, correspondingto its proper end as the particular kind of creature it is.”34 For humans, that distinctive way is in accordance with both the sets of desires shared with other animals and the rationality that makes humankind distinct. “In short,” writes McFarland, “because they are agents, human beings are willing creatures, which is to say that their movements are characterized by agency rather than being unconscious or automatic. In short, motion is not just something that happens to me; I move.”35 Demetrios Bathrellos concurs: “For Maximus, the faculty of will encapsulates both the irrational and the rational self-determining aspects of the human soul,” though Maximus “emphasizes the preponderance of the rational self-determining aspects of man’s will over those which are irrationalimpulsive.”36 Subsequent contemporary theologians have likewise construed the will as such.[7]: 7, 8
This has one!! De Andrade, José H. Fischel. "On the development of the concept of ‘persecution’in international refugee law." (2006): 23.
The German Code of Crimes against International Law punish the persecution of ‘an identifiable group or collectivity by depriving such a group or collectivity of fundamental human rights, or by substantially restricting the same, on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural or religious, gender or other grounds that are recognized as impermissible under the general rules of international law’. Amnesty International [[14]]
analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world.
The Government Restrictions Index is based on 20 indicators of ways that national and local governments restrict religion, including through coercion and force. In addition to government restrictions, violence and intimidation in societies also can limit religious beliefs and practices. Accordingly, Pew Research Center staff tracked more than a dozen indicators of social impediments on religion. The Social Hostilities Index is based on 13 indicators of ways in which private individuals and social groups infringe on religious beliefs and practices, including religiously biased crimes, mob violence and efforts to stop particular religious groups from growing or operating. The study also counted the number and types of documented incidents of religion-related violence, including terrorism and armed conflict.
Government favoritism of religious groups
Government laws and policies restricting religious freedom includes some of the most common types of restrictions ranging from a constitution’s stated commitment to religious freedom (or lack thereof) to the regulation or registration of religious groups.
Government limits on activities of religious groups and individuals – such as restrictions on religious dress, public or private worship or religious literature.
Government harassment of religious groups measures types of harassment ranging from violence and intimidation to verbal denunciations of religious groups and formal bans on certain groups. An increasing number of governments in MENA have reportedly used force against religious groups (including detention and forced displacement) since 2007.
Interreligious tension and violence involves acts of sectarian or communal violence betweenreligious groups.
Religious violence by organized groups includes the actions of religion-related terrorist groups, religion-related conflict, and the use of force by organized groups to dominate public life with their perspective on religion.
Social harassment of religious groups is a broad category that ranges from actions by individuals to mob violence.78 Harassment also can include discrimination or publishing of articles or cartoons that are derogatory toward a certain group. This category also includes property damage, detentions or abductions, displacement, physical assault and deaths of members of religious groups caused by private individuals or social groups.
The methodology used by Pew Research Center to assess and compare restrictions on religion was developed by former Pew Research Center senior researcher and director of cross-national data Brian J. Grim in consultation with other Pew Research Center staff members, building on a methodology that Grim and Professor Roger Finke developed while at Penn State University’s Association of Religion Data Archives.
"The goal was to devise quantifiable, objective and transparent measures of the extent to which governments and societal groups impinge on the practice of religion."[15]
First, Pew Research Center coded (categorized and counted) data from more than a dozen published cross-national sources, providing a high degree of confidence in the findings. Second, Pew Research Center staff used extensive data-verification checks that reflect generally accepted best practices for such studies, such as double-blind coding (coders do not see each other’s ratings), inter-rater reliability assessments (checking for consistency among coders) and carefully monitored protocols to reconcile discrepancies among coders. Third, the coding took into account whether the perpetrators of religion-related violence were government or private actors. The coding also identified how widespread and intensive the restrictions were in each country.
The 198 countries and self-administering territories covered by the study contain more than 99.5% of the world’s population. They include 192 of the 193 member states of the United Nations as of 2017, plus six self-administering territories – Kosovo, Hong Kong, Macau, the Palestinian territories, Taiwan and Western Sahara.
Primary sources used by PEW for it's most recent report (2017)
Country constitutions
U.S. State Department annual reports on International Religious Freedom
U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom annual reports
U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief reports
Human Rights First reports in first and second years of coding; Freedom House reports in subsequent years of coding
Human Rights Watch topical reports
International Crisis Group country reports
United Kingdom Foreign & Commonwealth Office annual report on human rights
Council of the European Union annual report on human rights
START Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland
European Network Against Racism Shadow Reports
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reports
U.S. State Department annual Country Reports on Terrorism
Anti-Defamation League reports
U.S. State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices
Uppsala University’s Uppsala Conflict Data Program, Armed Conflict Database
Human Rights Without Frontiers “Freedom of Religion or Belief” newsletters
Amnesty International Country Profiles
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Population Statistics Database
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre Global Internal Displacement Database
U.S. government reports with information on the situation in the United States
U.S. Department of Justice “Religious Freedom in Focus” newsletters and reports
FBI Hate Crime Reports
The Uppsala Armed Conflict Database provides information on the number of people affected by religion-related armed conflicts, supplementing other sources.
Human Rights Without Frontiers is a nongovernmental organization based in Brussels that has affiliated offices throughout the world.
Since 2013, Pew Research Center has used data from the Global Terrorism Database, maintained by the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), along with the International Crisis Group’s country reports, Uppsala University’s Armed Conflict Database and the State Department’s annual Country Reports on Terrorism, for information on religion-related terrorism. The Global Terrorism Database is one of the most comprehensive sources on terrorism around the world and is the source for the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism. The addition of this source thus provides greater context and information on terrorism.
Coding the United States presented a special problem since it is not included in the State Department’s annual reports on International Religious Freedom. Accordingly, Pew Research Center coders also looked at reports from the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI on violations of religious freedom in the United States, in addition to consulting all the primary sources, including reports by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, the International Crisis Group and the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office, many of which contain data on the United States.
There's this one: [16] that is the full pdf text of this: [17] which says "In addressing the persecution of Christians, we are focusing on what is probably the largest and widest manifestation of religious persecution in the world today." Sage goes on and on about his qualifications and that, before it was published in this journal, it was first a research article presented to the Advisory Committee to the U.S. Secretary of State on Religious Freedom Abroad. Not really a study per se, but still a research article.
I really like this one: [Johnson, T.M., Zurlo, G.A. Christian Martyrdom as a Pervasive Phenomenon. Soc 51, 679–685 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-014-9840-8] it's at [17]. Resource Request is attempting to get full access for me. It references this one [18] which is crammed full of data and Tables and all kinds of statistics. Unfortunately, I can find stats on Christian persecution but not a comparative statistic along the lines of who is most persecuted. Table 4-10 might be it but I can't see it, so I'll make another request for that and we'll see what it says.
This is an actual study: [19] which I will quote part of here: "Chapter 8 takes the detailed results from the previous four chapters and examines the larger trends which emerge from these findings. These trends include (1) the consistent rise of religious discrimination across world regions ..., (2), (3), (4) and that on average, Christians are the most persecuted religious minority worldwide and Muslims are the least persecuted, (5), (6) ..."
This one [20] says "Christians are the world's most persecuted religious group" on page 255. It's published by Image publishing [18] which is Catholic, so you may not like it anymore than the "Lutheran" one.
That's what I've got so far. More to come hopefully.
References
^ abCite error: The named reference Steve Wilkens was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Cite error: The named reference Michael Banner was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^ abcdAdler, Judith (2006). "Cultivating Wilderness: Environmentalism and Legacies of Early Christian Asceticism". Comparative Studies in Society and History. 48 (1). Cambridge University Press: 4–37.
^Wogaman, J. Philip (2011). Christian Ethics A Historical Introduction. Westminster John Knox Press. ISBN9780664234096.
^Murphy, Mark (Summer 2019). Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "The Natural Law Tradition in Ethics". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. Retrieved 7 March 2021.
^McManners, John, ed. (2001). The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity. Oxford University Press. p. 140. ISBN9780192854391.
^ abcPannenberg, Wolfgang (1977). Jesus - God and Man. Westminster John Knox Press. p. 294. ISBN9780664244682.
^von Hefele, Karl Joseph; Plumptre, Edward Hayes; Oxenham, Henry Nutcombe (1883). Clark, William Robinson (ed.). A History of the Christian Councils: A.D. 431 to A.D. 451. Harvard University. p. 182; fn1.
^ abRhodes, Ron (2015). The Complete Guide to Christian Denominations Understanding the History, Beliefs, and Differences. Harvest House Publishers. p. 315. ISBN9780736952927.
^Weinandy, Thomas (2000). Does God Suffer?. University of Notre Dame Press. p. Preface. ISBN9780268161668.
^ abGaddis, Michael; Price, Richard, eds. (2005). The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (Volume 1 ed.). Liverpool University Press. ISBN0-85323-039-0.
^ abcdeDjukic, Ljudmila (2019). LePree, James Francis; Djukic, Ljudmila (eds.). The Byzantine Empire: A Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. ISBN9781440851476.
^O'Reilly, Jennifer (2019). "6". In Scully, Diarmuid; MacCarron, Máirín (eds.). History, Hagiography and Biblical Exegesis Essays on Bede, Adomnán and Thomas Becket. Taylor & Francis. ISBN9780429588617.
^Sabo, Theodore (2018). From Monophysitism to Nestorianism AD 431-681. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 111. ISBN9781527509597.
^Christopher R. Guidry, Christopher R. Guidry; Peter F. Crossing, Peter F. Crossing (2001). World Christian Trends Ad30-ad2200 (hb) Volume 2 of World Christian Trends, AD 30-AD 2200: Interpreting the Annual Christian Megacensus, Todd Michael Johnson. William Carey Library,. ISBN9780878086085.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
^Fox, Jonathan (2016). The Unfree Exercise of Religion: A World Survey of Discrimination against Religious Minorities. Cambridge University Press. p. 9. ISBN9781316546277.
^Allen, John L. (2016). The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution. Image. p. 255. ISBN9780770437374.
[[19]] is a reference to a non-Christian public policy think tank called the CATO Institute. They designate 14 "countries of particular concern" about religious freedom: Burma, China, Eritrea, India, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Vietnam. These countries are all also on Open Doors' list of the 50 most dangerous countries for Christians.
In the UK, [20] 24 of the 30 countries listed as priority countries are also on Open Door's list.
CATO references 'The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom': [21]. Unfortunately, I have the same problem with this data that I have with the State department's--it's country by country, and often doesn't include numbers I could collate if I wanted to. Open Doors does the collating - at least they say they use this and the State department's data [22] and other NGO's - which is exactly what PEW does. To find those numbers you have to go to the original data, one country at a time - for 144 countries. I've made it through about 50 of them so far - enough to know your claims of exaggeration are the opposite of what is actually going on in the world.
Open Doors documents cases based on direct evidence wherever this is available, but it also makes conservative estimates based on indirect evidence.[1] This approach dramatically lowers the numerical count.
According to PEW, the top ten countries with the highest levels of national governmental harassment of all religious groups (not just Christian) are: Russia, Vietnam, Iran, China, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, which are communist or formerly communist, along with Malaysia, Indonesia, Syria, and Egypt, which are Muslim majority countries.[2] Of the 20 countries in the Middle Eastern region, 17 have Islam as their state religions and two have it as their preferred, favored religion. Only Lebanon does not have a favored religion.[2] The Middle East has high levels of religious restriction, and religious favoritism there is twice as high as any other regional average.[2]
In the ancient societies of Egypt, Greece and Rome, torture was an accepted aspect of the legal system.[3]: 22 Gillian Clark says violence was taken for granted in the fourth century as part of both war and punishment; torture from the carnifex, the professional torturer of the Roman legal system, was an accepted part of that system.[4]: 137
Marjoka van Doorn, says "tolerance is not by definition good..."[5]: 907, 908
Of the Greeks, Peter Garnsey asks: "is the language of toleration appropriately applied to the religious climate of classical Athens? I do not think so. The Athenians actively defended their gods against, as they put it, impiety (asebeia)."[6]: 4, 5 Using the example of what is often referred to as the Roman empire's tolerance of the Jews, Garnsey says, "ancient documents regularly acknowledge that the Romans are extending privileged treatment to the Jews because of services rendered. And that is all. No further motivation or justification is offered. There is an absolute lack of any apologia for religious pluralism or religious freedom. ... Nor does anything of the kind surface in pagan literature as a whole. It is particularly noteworthy that the philosophical skeptics were barren of ideas in this area."[6]: 11 In Late Republican and early imperial Rome, the Isis cult and astrologers were violently repressed based on the perception of 'proper Roman identity'.[7] Roman-style polytheism was disposed to expand and absorb or at least neutralize other gods, not to tolerate them.[6]: 8
biblical authority has been assaulted by biblical criticism, through the "autonomy of reason" that the approach promulgated, from the Enlightenment onward.[8]: 2
John Barton, The Nature of Biblical criticism, page 10; "The recognition of "problems" in the Bible is not in itself a sufficient condition for us to speak of "biblical criticism." There must also be present a certain approach to solving such problems."
Events in Late Antiquity were often dramatized for ideological reasons.[9]: 5
"Religious violence in Late Antiquity is mostly restricted to violent rhetoric: 'in Antiquity, not all religious violence was that religious, and not all religious violence was that violent'."[9]: 9 add to ref, author Jan. M. Brenner, chapter 2
The thesis of polytheistic tolerance and monotheistic intolerance has long been proved incorrect.[9]: 6 also Chapter 6 by Andreas Bendlin:
add this discussion to Women in the Bible : [[24]]
Write up--new article: "Multiple Source theory of gospel origins"
image on page 158, Encountering the New Testament: A Historical and Theological Survey … by Elwell, Walter A., Yarbrough, Robert W.
^Much of the decline of paganism in the late empire can be tied to economics.[58] The economic crisis of the third-century produced a decline of urbanism and prosperity. Further economic disruption in the fourth and fifth centuries occurred when various Germanic peoples sacked Rome, invaded Britain, Gaul, and Iberia, and seized land.[59] Such disruption made fewer public funds and private donations available to support expensive pagan festivals and temples.[60][61]
^While Eusebius also credited Constantine with the temple's destruction and the end of sacrifice, sources conflict. For example, the ancient chronicler Malalas wrote that Constantine destroyed all the temples, that Theodosius destroyed them all, and that Constantine converted all the temples to churches.[77]
^Scholars generally agree that Theodosius began his rule with a cautiously tolerant attitude and policy toward pagans. Three successive laws issued in February 391 and in June and November of 392 have been seen by some as a marked change in Theodosius' policy putting an end to both tolerance and paganism.[133] Roman historian Alan Cameron has written on the laws of 391 and June 392 as never intended to be binding on the population at large.[134]
The law of 8 November 392 has been described by some as the universal ban on paganism that made Christianity the official religion of the empire.[135][136] The law was addressed only to Rufinus in the East, it makes no mention of Christianity, and it focuses on practices of private domestic sacrifice: the lares, the penates and the genius.[137][138] The lares is the god who takes care of the home, write archaeologists Konstantinos Bilias and Francesca Grigolo.[139] The genius was fixed on a person, usually the head of the household.[140] The penates were the divinities who provided and guarded the food and possessions of the household.[137] Sacrifice had largely ended by the time of Julian (361-363), a generation before the law of November 392 was issued, but these private, domestic, sometimes daily, sacrifices were thought to have "slipped out from under public control".[141][142][143]Sozomen, the Constantinopolitan lawyer, wrote a history of the church around 443 where he evaluates the law of 8 November 392 as having had only minor significance at the time it was issued.[144]
There is little, if any, evidence that Theodosius I pursued an active policy against the traditional cults.[145][146] Historical and literary sources, excepting the laws themselves, do not support the view that Theodosius created an environment of intolerance and persecution of pagans.[147][148] During the reign of Theodosius, pagans were continuously appointed to prominent positions, and pagan aristocrats remained in high offices.[149] During his first official tour of Italy (389–391), the emperor won over the influential pagan lobby in the Roman Senate by appointing its foremost members to important administrative posts.[150] Theodosius also nominated the last pair of pagan consuls in Roman history (Tatianus and Symmachus) in 391.[151] Theodosius allowed pagan practices – that did not involve sacrifice – to be performed publicly and temples to remain open.[152][153][154]
He also voiced his support for the preservation of temple buildings, but failed to prevent damaging several holy sites in the eastern provinces which most scholars believe was sponsored by Cynegius, Theodosius' praetorian prefect.[154][155][156] Some scholars have held Theodosius responsible for his prefect's behavior. Following Cynegius' death in 388, Theodosius replaced him with a moderate pagan who subsequently moved to protect the temples.[157][145][158] There is no evidence of any desire on the part of the emperor to institute a systematic destruction of temples anywhere in the Theodosian Code, and no evidence in the archaeological record that extensive temple destruction took place.[159][160]
T. D. Barnes and others maintain that Constantine did ban sacrifice, concluding that "paganism was now a discredited cause. A change so sudden, so fundamental, so total, shocked pagans...".[184] Except there is no evidence of such a shock; the extant record is characterized by a complete absence of reaction. As a result, others such as H. A. Drake and R. Malcolm Errington have challenged the existence and substance of such a law.[184]
Errington concentrates on Constantine's letter to the eastern provinces, noting that it explicitly states both Christianity and paganism were allowed.[184] Classical language professor Scott Bradbury has written that Constantine did ban sacrifice because his sons later referenced him as having done so, but other possible explanations for that reference have been offered, and that explanation raises the problem that emperors Constans (337-50) and Constantius II (337-61) at first only outlawed public and nocturnal sacrifice.[185]
Brown notes that the language of the anti-sacrifice laws "was uniformly vehement", and the "penalties they proposed were frequently horrifying", evidencing the intent of "terrorizing" the populace into accepting this change.[81] Bradbury acknowledges that there is no record of anyone in Constantine's era being prosecuted for sacrificing, nor is there evidence of any of the horrific punishments ever being enacted.[186] Bradbury concludes that Constantine must have written the laws but did so without ever expecting them to be enforced.[187]
A number of scholars have assumed toleration was incompatible with Christianity, yet others have allowed that forbearance toward polytheism would not have been impossible for the first Christian emperor. A few authors suggest that "true Christian sentiment" might even have motivated Constantine, since he held the conviction that, in the realm of faith, only freedom mattered.[187]
Marie Roux asserts that it has been established by Roman historian Lucio De Giovanni that, under Constantine, "only the practice of divinatory sacrifices performed in a private context (sacrificia domestica) or during the night were prohibited. Those practices were seen as having slipped out from under public control, whereas traditional haruspicina, (the consultation and interpretation of the entrails of the sacrificed victims by official priests in a public context), remained authorized.[188] This kind of legislation was already in place in Tiberius' reign indicating that Constantine’s policy did not differ from that of previous emperors.[188]
^Brown says evidence for the extent of Christian iconoclasm is inconclusive.[204] Calculated acts of desecration - removing the hands and feet of statues of the divine, mutilating heads and genitals, setting fire to temples - were committed. While seen as 'proving' the impotence of the gods, pagan icons were also seen as having been “polluted” by the practice of sacrifice; they were, therefore, in need of "desacralization" or "deconsecration": (a practice not limited to Christians).[205] While it was in some ways studiously vindictive, it was not indiscriminate. Once these objects were detached from 'the contagion' of sacrifice, they were seen as having returned to innocence. Many statues and temples were then preserved as art.[204]
^A number of elements coincided to end the temples, but none of them were strictly religious.[208] Earthquakes caused much of the destruction of this era.[209] Civil conflict and external invasions also destroyed many temples and shrines.[210] Economics was also a factor.[208][211][61] The Roman economy of the third and fourth centuries struggled, and traditional polytheism was expensive and dependent upon donations from the state and private elites.[212] Roger S. Bagnall reports that imperial financial support declined markedly after Augustus.[213] Lower budgets meant the physical decline of urban structures of all types. This progressive urban decay was accompanied by an increased trade in salvaged building materials, as the practice of recycling became common in Late Antiquity.[214] Economic struggles meant that necessity drove much of the destruction and conversion of pagan religious monuments.[208][211][61] In many instances, such as in Tripolitania, this happened before Constantine the Great became emperor.[215]
According to Alan Cameron, most violence committed by Christians was against property, was unofficial, perpetrated primarily by monks and radicals, and done without the support of Christian clergy or state magistrates.[69][228] There are only a few examples of Christian officials having any involvement in the violent destruction of pagan shrines. In the 380s, one eastern official (generally identified as the praetorian prefect Cynegius), used the army under his control and bands of monks to destroy temples in the eastern provinces.[98]
Salzman says pagans were more likely to commit violence against persons, and that this was often done with the support of municipal elites.[228][78]) Harold A. Drake writes that Christians did pick up the practice of book burning from pagans, but that many previous assertions of Christian violence have recently been modified, (such as temple destruction), and many have been overturned by modern scholarship.[229][230] For example, for over 60 years there has been a thesis claiming the demise of paganism included a short attempt at pagan revival at the end of the fourth century which culminated in the "last pagan stand" at the Battle of the Frigidus (394).[231] Salzman explains that "two newly relevant texts – John Chrysostom's Homily 6, adversus Catharos (PG 63: 491–492) and the Consultationes Zacchei et Apollonii, re-dated to the 390s, reinforce the view that religion was not the key ideological element" in the Battle of the Frigidus.[232] The story is now seen as "romantic myth".[233][234]
In Gaul, some of the most influential textual sources on pagan-Christian violence concerns Martin, bishop of Tours (c .371–397), the Pannonian ex-soldier who is "solely credited in the historical record as the militant converter of Gaul".[235] These texts have been criticized for lacking historical veracity, even by ancient critics, but they are still useful for portraying the world of late fourth century Gaul.[236] The portion of the sources devoted to attacks on pagans is limited, and they all revolve around Martin using his miraculous powers to overturn pagan shrines and idols, but not ever to threaten or harm people.[237] Salzman concludes that "None of Martin's interventions led to the deaths of any Gauls, pagan or Christian. Even if one doubts the exact veracity of these incidents, the assertion that Martin preferred non-violent conversion techniques says much about the norms for conversion in Gaul" at the time Martin's biography was written.[238]
^After the death of Eusebius in 370 and the election of Basil as bishop of Caesarea, the new bishop established the early church's first formal soup kitchen, hospital, homeless shelter, hospice, poorhouse, orphanage, reform center for thieves, women's center for those leaving prostitution and many other ministries. Basil was personally involved and invested in the projects and process, giving all of his personal wealth to fund the ministries. Basil himself would put on an apron and work in the soup kitchen. These ministries were given freely regardless of religious affiliation. Basil refused to make any discrimination when it came to people who needed help saying that "the digestive systems of the Jew and the Christian are indistinguishable."[255][256]
^This text has been translated to English by Clyde Pharr in the following way: Emperors Gratian, Valentinian, and Theodosius Augustuses An Edict to the People of the City of Constantinople. It is Our will that all the peoples who are ruled by the administration of Our Clemency shall practice that religion which the divine Peter the Apostle transmitted to the Romans, as the religion which he introduced makes clear even unto this day. It is evident that this is the religion that is followed by the Pontiff Damasus and by Peter, Bishop of Alexandria, a man of apostolic sanctity; that is, according to the apostolic discipline and the evangelic doctrine, we shall believe in the single Deity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, under the concept of equal majesty and of the Holy Trinity. We command that those persons who follow this rule shall embrace the name of Catholic Christians. The rest, however, whom We adjudge demented and insane, shall sustain the infamy of heretical dogmas, their meeting places shall not receive the name of churches, and they shall be smitten first by divine vengeance and secondly by the retribution of Our own initiative, which We shall assume in accordance with the divine judgment. Given on the third day before the kalends of March at Thessalonica in the year of the fifth consulship of Gratian Augustus and the first consulship of Theodosius Augustus. – 28 February 380.[259]
^ Hungarian legal scholar Pál Sáry explains that, "In 393, the emperor was gravely disturbed that the Jewish assemblies had been forbidden in certain places. For this reason, he stated with emphasis that the sect of the Jews was forbidden by no law. It is also important to note that during the reign of Theodosius pagans were continuously appointed to prominent positions and pagan aristocrats remained in high offices."[149] The Edict applied only to Christians, and within that group, only to Arians.[263] It declared those Christians who refused the Nicene faith to be infames, and prohibited them from using Christian churches. Sáry uses this example: "After his arrival in Constantinople, Theodosius offered to confirm the Arian bishop Demophilus in his see, if he would accept the Nicene Creed. After Demophilus refused the offer, the emperor immediately directed him to surrender all his churches to the Catholics."[264] Christianity became the religion of the Late Empire through a long evolutionary process, of which the Edict of Thessalonica was only a small part.[265]
^Salzman concludes that, in the first 200-250 years of Christian empire, Christians overturned pagan idols and shrines, but they did not attack people. "It was the pagans who consistently used violence against people" which is "indicative of their relatively disempowered status in the western Roman empire of the late fourth and early fifth centuries. The harsh laws of 391 and 392 in the Theodosian Code, therefore, do help to explain the outbreaks of pagan anti-Christian violence in the western empire.[290]: 284–285 When confronted with attacks on their shrines and idols, pagans had limited legal avenues to redress their situation. Given their relative lack of political influence, some pagans in some cases turned to the only means of protest available for an increasingly marginalized group, violence against individuals".[290]: 283 This is at odds with a commonplace view that “passionate angry collisions within their cities [was seen] as something distinctively Christian.[290]: 283
^Cumont’s Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (1911; note especially the 2006 republication of the fourth French edition, "Cumont ascribed the success of the ‘oriental religions’ in the Roman world to the fact that ‘those religions gave greater satisfaction first, to the senses and passions, secondly, to the intelligence, finally, and above all, to the conscience’ (1911: 28). [14]: 247
^According to Peter Richardson, "The confusion between chrestus and christus was natural enough. At that point in time, the distinction in spelling and pronunciation was negligible. In the manuscript tradition of the New Testament, the confusion is reflected in the spelling of the name "Christian" in Acts 11:26 and 26:28; and 1 Peter 4:16 where the uncial codex Sinaiticus reads...chrestianos...it was quite popular among those who were not Christians to exchange the two forms. The urge to identify the founder of the new "superstition" with a common slave name may have been too difficult to resist. Several of the early apologists [i.e. Justin, Tertullian, Lactantius] complain that pagans often confuse the two spellings, much to the dismay of the Christians".[10]: 204–206
Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).: xi, 3 However, there is evidence of similar ideals in pre-modern Christian thought (and other religious thought and philosophy) that can be seen as the long and somewhat torturous "prehistory" of tolerance.[13]: xiii [14]: 456 Changes which took place in European society of the High Middle Ages reflect the state's focus on garnering power through persecution, with Christian thought of that period developing new rhetoric, patterns, and procedures that supported and aided in that persecution.[15]: 4, 5, 146 Eventually, this would help form the conviction among the early Protestants that pioneering the concept of religious toleration was necessary.[16]: 3
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 included the first statement of freedom of religion in modern history.[17]: 737
Persecution and tolerance are both the result of alterity, the state of otherness, and the question of how to properly deal with those who are 'outside' the defined identity.[5]: 907, 908 Like the other Abrahamic religions, Christian thought has included, from its beginnings, two ideals which have affected Christian responses to alterity: inclusivity, (also called universality), and exclusivity, or as David Nirenberg describes them, our "mutual capacities for coexistence and violence." [18]: viii–ix There is an inherent tension in all the Abrahamic traditions between exclusivity and inclusivity which is theologically and practically dealt with by each in different ways.[19]: 4, 5 Both concepts are evident throughout the history of Christian thought.[19]: 4, 5
Peter Gervers has said that toleration as a value grew out of humanity's earlier experiences of social conflict and persecution, and that the kind of toleration that is now seen as a virtue, is part of the legacy garnered from this.[20]: xiii Before the modern era, religious intolerance and even persecution were not seen as evils. They were instead, seen as necessary and good for the preservation of identity, for truth, and for all that people believed depended upon those truths.[21]: 16 There was—and still is for many—fear, with some justification, that tolerance contributes to the erosion of identity.[22] That's why tolerance has not been, and is not, always seen as a virtue.[5]: 907, 908
Establishing toleration as a value that is considered good and necessary for peace and survival, is a complex process that Richard Dees indicates is more a product of context than rationality.[23] Because the development of identity often involves contradiction, ('what we are not' as much as 'what we are'), James L.Gibson indicates that strong social-group identities, such as those produced by nationalism and religion, often produce intolerance.[24]: 93 [25]: 64 The greater the attitudes of group loyalty and solidarity, and the more the benefits of belonging are perceived to be, the more likely a social identity will become intolerant of challenges. Gibson goes on to say this indicates intolerance is largely a social process and not as much an individual one.[24]: 94
Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).
^Stanley, Elizabeth (2008). Torture, Truth and Justice The Case of Timor-Leste. Taylor & Francis. ISBN9781134021048.
^Clark, Gillian (2006). "11: Desires of the Hangman: Augustine on legitimized violence". In Drake, H. A. (ed.). Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices. Routledge. ISBN978-0754654988.
^ abcvan Doorn, M (2014). "The nature of tolerance and the social circumstances in which it emerges". Current Sociology. 62 (6): 905–927. doi:10.1177/0011392114537281.
^Raschle, Christian R. (2020). "4". In Raschle, Christian R.; Dijkstra, Jitse H. F. (eds.). Religious Violence in the Ancient World From Classical Athens to Late Antiquity. Cambridge University Press. p. 9. ISBN9781108849210.
^Davaney, Sheila Greeve (2006). Historicism: The Once and Future Challenge for Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ISBN9781451418316.
^ abcRaschle, Christian R.; Dijkstra, Jitse H. F., eds. (2020). Religious Violence in the Ancient World From Classical Athens to Late Antiquity. Cambridge University Press. ISBN9781108849210.
^Cite error: The named reference Brown1964 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^H. A. Drake, LAMBS INTO LIONS: EXPLAINING EARLY CHRISTIAN INTOLERANCE, Past & Present, Volume 153, Issue 1, November 1996, Pages 3–36, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/153.1.3
^Gervers, Peter; Gervers, Michael; Powell, James M, eds. (2001). Tolerance and Intolerance Social Conflict in the Age of the Crusades. Syracuse University Press. ISBN9780815628699.
^Wood Jr., James E. (1996). "An Apologia for Religious Human Rights". In Van der Vyver, Johan David; Witte Jr., John (eds.). Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective: Religious Perspectives. Vol. 1. the Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. ISBN90-411-0176-4.
^Moore, R. I. (2007). The Formation of a Persecuting Society (second ed.). Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN978-1-4051-2964-0.
^Scribner, Robert W.; Grell, Ole Peter; Scribner, Bob, eds. (2002). Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. ISBN9780521894128.
^Christenson, Gordon A., "Liberty of the Exercise of Religion in the Peace of Westphalia" (2012).Faculty Articles and OtherPublications.Paper 282.http://scholarship.law.uc.edu/fac_pubs/282
^Nirenberg, David. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages – Updated Edition. United Kingdom, Princeton University Press, 2015.
^ abCite error: The named reference Hastings was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Gervers, Peter; Gervers, Michael; Powell, James M., eds. (2001). Tolerance and Intolerance: Social Conflict in the Age of the Crusades. Syracuse University Press. ISBN9780815628699.
^ Zagorin, Perez. How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West. United States, Princeton University Press, 2013.
^Jinkins, Michael. Christianity, Tolerance and Pluralism: A Theological Engagement with Isaiah Berlin's Social Theory. United Kingdom, Taylor & Francis, 2004. Chapter 3. no page #s available
^Dees, Richard H.. Trust and Toleration. N.p., Taylor & Francis, 2004. chapter 4. no page #s available
^ abGibson, James L., and Gouws, Amanda. Overcoming Intolerance in South Africa: Experiments in Democratic Persuasion. United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
^Heisig, James W.. Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School. United States, University of Hawai'i Press, 2001.
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