Until the advent of materialism and 19th c. dogma, Western Civilisation was superior to anything Islam had developed. Islam has not aided in the development of the modern world; in fact civilisation has only been created in spite of Islam. Proof of this resides in the 'modern' world and the unending political-economic and spiritual poverty of Muslim states and regions. Squatting on richer civilisations is not 'progress'. Islam is pagan, totalitarian, and irrational.
Part of a series found here
On the second day of the Egyptian month of Epeiph, in the first year of the emperor Decius — 26 June 250 AD an old farmer from a village in the Fayum called Alexander’s Island presented himself before a local committee and handed over a small sheet of papyrus. It survives. It reads, in full:
To the commissioners of sacrifices of the village of Alexander’s Island, from Aurelius Diogenes, son of Satabous, of the village of Alexander’s Island, aged about seventy-two, with a scar on his right eyebrow. I have always sacrificed to the gods, and now in your presence, in accordance with the terms of the edict, I have sacrificed and poured the libation and tasted the sacred offerings, and I request you to certify this below. Farewell.
Beneath it, in a second hand, two officials have signed that they saw him do it.
Some forty-odd of these certificates — libelli — have come out of the sands of Egypt. They are almost all identical, filled in from a standard template, and they are the most chilling documents in the history of the early Church precisely because there is nothing chilling about them. They are forms. Aurelius Diogenes was very probably not a Christian at all; nor was Aurelia Ammonous, a priestess of the crocodile god Petesouchos, whose certificate also survives. The edict required everyone to do it. That was the point.
For two hundred years the Christians had been a problem the Roman state managed when somebody complained. In the winter of 249–250, for the first time, the state stopped waiting for complaints. It was decided to put every inhabitant of the empire through a test the whole population, household by household, village by village, from Britain to the Euphrates and to issue each one who passed a receipt. It was the first empire-wide religious mobilisation in human history, and it was aimed, whatever its authors said, at the one group of people who could not pass it.
This folio covers the century that began with that question and ended with its answer: roughly 205 to 312 AD. It is the century in which the Roman world very nearly fell apart, and in which the Church, hunted by two emperors with systematic minds and then by a third with a whole machinery of state — discovered what it was. It came out of the furnace with a theory of itself, a network of charity that outperformed the state, a new form of holiness in the desert, and a doctrine, forged by its victims, that the conscience cannot be compelled. By every reasonable calculation it should not have come out at all.
The Severan dynasty, founded by the African Septimius Severus in 193, gave the empire forty years of something like stability. They were not years of hostility to the Church. The women of the dynasty were intellectually curious Syrians, and around 232 the empress-mother Julia Mamaea, wintering at Antioch, summoned Origen under military escort to explain Christianity to her (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 6.21). A late and untrustworthy source claims that her son, Severus Alexander, kept statues of Abraham and Christ in his private chapel alongside Orpheus and Apollonius of Tyana, and had the golden rule — what you do not wish done to yourself, do not do to another inscribed on the walls of his palace. Whether true or not, the story tells us that by the 230s it was thinkable.
In March 235 Severus Alexander was murdered by his own troops in a camp near Mainz, and the empire fell off a cliff.
The next fifty years are what historians call the Crisis of the Third Century, and the phrase understates it. More than twenty men were recognised as emperor between 235 and 284, besides a crowd of usurpers who never were; almost all of them died by violence, most at the hands of their own soldiers. The throne became a prize for whichever frontier army could march on Rome fastest. At the same time the empire’s enemies became organised in ways they had not been before. In the east, the old Parthian monarchy was overthrown in the 220s by the Sasanian dynasty of Persia aggressive, centralised, and ideologically committed to recovering the lands of Cyrus and Darius. In the north, the loose tribes of the Rhine and Danube coalesced into larger confederations, and a new people, the Goths, arrived on the Black Sea from the Baltic.
The disasters are almost a litany. In 251 the Goths killed the emperor Decius and his son in the marshes at Abritus, in what is now Bulgaria the first Roman emperor ever to fall in battle against barbarians. Through the 250s and 260s Gothic fleets raided the coasts of Asia Minor and the Aegean; the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the seven wonders of the world, was burned; in 267 the Heruli sacked Athens. The Persian king Shapur I took Antioch, the third city of the empire, and in 260 took the emperor Valerian himself prisoner. The empire split into three: a breakaway Gallic Empire in the west under Postumus, a Palmyrene realm under Queen Zenobia in the east, and a rump in between. The silver coinage was debased until the antoninianus, nominally a silver coin, was a bronze disc with a silver wash of a few per cent; prices soared, and the state began to collect its taxes in kind because its own money was worthless. And through all of it, from around 249 for perhaps twenty years, ran a pestilence so terrible that some cities appear to have lost a majority of their population.
By 271 the emperor Aurelian was building a new wall around the city of Rome itself — a city that had not needed walls since Hannibal. It still stands.
For the argument of this series, the Crisis matters for two reasons. The first is the one set out at the end of the last folio. In the ancient mind, disaster was a religious event. If the gods were withdrawing their protection from Rome on this scale, somebody was offending them, and it was not hard to see who. The second reason is less obvious. When an empire is losing its grip, it looks for something that will bind its people together, and the Roman answer to that question was religious too. The emperors of the Crisis did not persecute the Church because they were cruel. They persecuted it because they were trying to save the state.
The first hint of the new mood came immediately. Maximinus Thrax, the soldier who replaced Severus Alexander in 235, struck at the leaders of the Church at its clergy rather than its laity and the bishop of Rome, Pontianus, was deported with the learned presbyter Hippolytus to the lethal mines of Sardinia. Pontianus resigned his office on 28 September 235, so that the Roman church would not be left without a head, and it is the first precise date in the history of the papacy. Both men died on the island.
Then came a decade of calm. Philip the Arab, emperor from 244 to 249, was so friendly that later Christians claimed he was one of them; Eusebius repeats a story that he tried to join the Easter vigil at Antioch and was made by the bishop to stand among the penitents until he had confessed his sins (Hist. Eccl. 6.34). Origen corresponded with him and with his wife. In 248 Philip presided over the celebration of Rome’s thousandth birthday, with games and sacrifices on a colossal scale. The next year he was dead, killed in battle at Verona by the commander of the Danube armies, Gaius Messius Quintus Decius.
Decius was a Roman of the old stamp, a senator from Pannonia who took the name Trajan as a statement of programme. He believed sincerely, and not unreasonably, by the lights of his world that the empire’s troubles came from the neglect of the gods who had made it great. Within months of his accession, probably late in 249, he issued an edict that every inhabitant of the empire was to sacrifice to the gods of Rome, pour a libation, and eat of the sacrificial meat, in the presence of local commissioners, by a fixed date, and receive a certificate to prove it.
The text of the edict does not survive, and James Rives has argued persuasively that it was not framed as an anti-Christian measure at all, but as a positive act of empire-wide piety a universal supplication to the gods in a time of peril, by which the whole population would renew its bond with heaven (Rives, 1999). That is almost certainly how Decius saw it. But a general order to sacrifice was, for Christians, a general order to apostatise, and everybody understood that. It had an elegance that the old system had lacked. There was no longer any need for an informer, a governor, a trial or a mob. Every Christian, simply by failing to appear before the commission with the rest of his neighbours, would identify himself.
The Church was not ready. The previous generation had grown up in peace, and it had grown comfortable. Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, is unsparing in his account of what happened when the order came. Christians did not wait to be arrested; they ran to the Capitol to sacrifice before they were asked. So many came that the magistrates had to turn some away until the next day, and there were those who pleaded to be allowed to finish before nightfall. Some brought their children to be polluted with them. Wealthy men who had estates to protect were the worst (Cyprian, De Lapsis 8–9). Dionysius, the bishop of Alexandria, describes the same scene there: some pale and trembling as though they were themselves the victims to be sacrificed, others bold and brazen, insisting they had never been Christians at all (Hist. Eccl. 6.41).
Others found a third way. The commissions were staffed by local officials, and local officials could be bribed. For a fee, a Christian could obtain a certificate stating that he had sacrificed without ever going near the altar — or could send a slave or a pagan friend to do it in his name. These were the libellatici, the certificate-holders, and there were a great many of them.
And some stood firm. Fabian, the bishop of Rome, was executed on 20 January 250, one of the first to die. Babylas of Antioch died in prison and asked to be buried in his chains. Alexander of Jerusalem, an old man, died in prison at Caesarea. Origen, now in his mid-sixties and the most famous Christian in the world, was arrested at Caesarea and put through a long and carefully calculated series of tortures the iron collar, the stocks, his legs stretched to the fourth hole designed not to kill him but to break him into recanting, because an apostate Origen would have been worth more to the state than a dead one. He did not break. He was released when the persecution ended, and died of what had been done to him a few years later, at Tyre, at the age of sixty-nine (Hist. Eccl. 6.39; 7.1).
Many bishops fled, and this was not, at the time, generally regarded as cowardice; the Gospel had told the disciples, when persecuted in one city, to flee to the next. Cyprian went into hiding outside Carthage and governed his church by letter. Dionysius of Alexandria was actually arrested, and then rescued by a party of peasants on their way to a wedding, who stormed the house where he was held and carried him off into the countryside against his protests (Hist. Eccl. 6.40). And in Egypt, Dionysius records, multitudes of ordinary Christians simply walked out into the desert and the mountains, where many of them died of hunger, thirst and exposure, or were taken by nomads and sold as slaves (Hist. Eccl. 6.42). Remember that detail; we will come back to the desert.
Then, in June 251, Decius rode into the marshes at Abritus and did not come out, and the persecution fizzled. It had lasted barely eighteen months. It left the Church with a problem that nearly destroyed it more thoroughly than the edict had.
The problem was this. When the persecution ended, the churches of the empire found themselves full of people who had denied Christ and now wanted to come back. They were called the lapsi, the fallen, and they came in grades: those who had actually sacrificed; those who had merely burned a pinch of incense; those who had bought a certificate without sacrificing; those who had sent someone else. What was to be done with them?
The question was not academic, and it was not merely about discipline. The early Church had been founded on the belief that it was a community of the saved, and that there were certain sins apostasy, murder and adultery foremost among them which placed a baptised person outside it, possibly for good. The second-century Shepherd of Hermas had allowed one repentance after baptism, and no more. Tertullian, in his rigorist old age, had furiously denied that the Church had power to forgive the gravest sins at all. And now a large part of the Church had committed the gravest of them, not under torture but, in many cases, with indecent haste.
Into this vacuum stepped the confessors those who had been arrested, had refused to sacrifice, and had survived. In the popular mind, and to some extent in their own, they possessed a spiritual authority that came directly from their suffering: they had stood where Christ stood, and the martyr’s power to bind and loose was theirs. From their prisons, and after their release, they began to issue what were called libelli pacis, letters of peace, directing that this or that lapsed Christian be readmitted to communion. It was a direct echo of the survivors of Lyons interceding for the fallen seventy years earlier. But in Carthage it got out of hand. A confessor named Lucianus issued letters wholesale, in the names of martyrs who were already dead, in the form let so-and-so be received into communion with his family a blank cheque for a whole household (Cyprian, Ep. 27). Some of the Carthaginian presbyters, who had their own quarrels with their bishop, began readmitting the lapsed on these letters without penance of any kind.
Here, then, was the second-century conflict between charisma and office, which the synods of Asia had faced over the New Prophecy, in its sharpest form. Who spoke for the Church: the man who had suffered for it, or the man who held its office? And it was complicated by a question of moral seriousness. Cyprian himself had fled. The confessors had not. What standing did a bishop in hiding have to overrule men with the scars of the rack on their bodies?
Cyprian’s answer, worked out in a stream of letters and then in a treatise called On the Lapsed, was that the confessors deserved every honour, but that the reconciliation of sinners was the business of the bishop in council with his clergy and people, after due penance, and after the persecution was over, so that the matter could be settled by the Church as a whole and not by individuals. In the spring of 251 he returned to Carthage and convened a council of African bishops, which laid down a graduated policy. Those who had only obtained certificates could be readmitted after a period of penance. Those who had actually sacrificed must do penance for the rest of their lives, and would be readmitted at the point of death. Each case would be examined on its own merits. A year later, with a new persecution threatening under the emperor Gallus, a second council went further and readmitted all who had shown true repentance, on the grounds that those about to face the test again needed the strength of the Eucharist.
At Rome, the same crisis produced an actual schism. The Roman see had been vacant for fourteen months after Fabian’s execution, too dangerous to fill. When in March 251 the clergy elected Cornelius, who took Cyprian’s moderate line, a gifted Roman presbyter named Novatian, author of the first great work of Latin theology written at Rome, a treatise On the Trinity had himself consecrated as a rival bishop. Novatian’s position was that the Church had no authority to readmit apostates at all: it could exhort them to penance and commend them to God’s mercy, but it could not restore them to communion. His followers called themselves the Katharoi, the Pure, and his church survived as a separate body for three centuries.
The Church, in other words, chose mercy and paid for it with a split. That choice deserves more attention than it gets. The rigorist position was not stupid, and it had the logic of the early Church’s self-understanding behind it. What the majority decided, under the leadership of Cyprian and Cornelius, was that the Church was not a society of the pure but a hospital for sinners, in which the gravest failure could be repented and forgiven, provided the repentance was real and the process was public, ordered and supervised. It was a decisive step towards the Church as it would exist in the West for the next fifteen hundred years a body that contained the weak as well as the heroic and it laid the foundations of the whole system of penance which would shape the Western conscience, and the Western idea of the relationship between guilt, confession and restoration, for a millennium.
A letter written by Cornelius during the controversy gives us, by accident, the first statistical snapshot of a Christian church in history. In order to ridicule Novatian’s pretensions, Cornelius enumerates the establishment of the church of Rome in 251: forty-six presbyters, seven deacons, seven subdeacons, forty-two acolytes, fifty-two exorcists, readers and doorkeepers and more than fifteen hundred widows and persons in distress, all of whom were being fed by the grace and kindness of the Master (Hist. Eccl. 6.43). A church which was supporting fifteen hundred dependants, week in and week out, from voluntary contributions, in the middle of a persecution, must have had a congregation in the tens of thousands. The persecutors were right to be worried.
Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus was a wealthy Carthaginian, a teacher of rhetoric of some distinction, who had been baptised only around 246 and was acclaimed bishop by the people of Carthage within two or three years, over the protests of some of the senior clergy. He was a born administrator and a natural aristocrat, and he read Tertullian every day; his secretary recorded that he used to ask for his writings with the words da magistrum — hand me the master. He took Tertullian’s language and Tertullian’s legal cast of mind and put them in the service of a completely un-Tertullianic goal: the unity of a Church which contained sinners.
His short treatise On the Unity of the Catholic Church, written in 251 against the twin schisms of Novatian at Rome and the laxist faction in Carthage, is the first work in Christian history devoted to the question of what the Church actually is. Its most famous sentences have never ceased to echo. He cannot have God for his father who has not the Church for his mother (De Unit. 6). Outside the Church there is no salvation (Ep. 73.21). The Church is the seamless robe of Christ, which the soldiers at the cross would not divide; it is the ark of Noah, outside which all were drowned; it is one as the sun has many rays but one light, as a tree has many branches but one trunk rooted in firm ground.
What held it together? Cyprian’s answer was the bishops. Every legitimate bishop, chosen by his people and consecrated by his fellow bishops in succession from the apostles, was a guarantor of the Church’s unity in his own place. And together they formed a single college — episcopatus unus est, cuius a singulis in solidum pars tenetur: the episcopate is one, and each bishop holds his share of it in full and for the whole (De Unit. 5). The phrase in solidum is a technical term from Roman property law, describing a joint tenancy in which each co-owner holds the whole. The Church was being thought about, for the first time, as a legal corporation with a constitution.
That constitution would be tested almost immediately, and from an unexpected direction. Christians baptised by heretics or schismatics were now seeking admission to the Catholic Church. Should they be baptised again? The African tradition, and Cyprian’s instinct, was yes: there was only one Church, only the Church had the Spirit, and so a baptism performed outside it was no baptism at all. The Roman tradition was no: baptism in the name of the Trinity was valid whoever performed it, and the returning heretic needed only the laying on of hands in penance. The bishop of Rome, Stephen, a forceful man, insisted on the Roman practice everywhere, and appealed in support to his position as successor of Peter. His ruling, preserved in Cyprian’s quotation, is a masterpiece of conservative compression: nihil innovetur nisi quod traditum est — let there be no innovation beyond what has been handed down (Cyprian, Ep. 74.1).
Cyprian convened a council at Carthage on 1 September 256. Eighty-seven bishops attended, and the minutes survive, bishop by bishop, each giving his vote in a sentence. Cyprian opened it with a declaration that is as good a statement of conciliar government as the ancient Church produced: none of us sets himself up as a bishop of bishops, or by tyrannical terror forces his colleagues to obedience, since every bishop has his own freedom and power of decision, and can no more be judged by another than he himself can judge another. The council voted unanimously against Stephen. Firmilian, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, wrote to Cyprian in support, in a letter which mocks Stephen’s claims to Peter’s authority with open contempt (Cyprian, Ep. 75).
It is the Easter controversy of 190 again, with the same actors in the same positions — a Roman bishop claiming the right to impose a single practice, and the churches of other provinces answering that each bishop answers to God and his colleagues in council — except that this time the argument was about a sacrament and not a calendar. It too came to nothing in the short term. Stephen died in 257, and within a year the persecution came back and put the question into abeyance. In the long run the Roman view prevailed, and it prevailed precisely because Augustine, a century and a half later, working against the Donatists who claimed Cyprian as their patron, drew out its implication: that the validity of a sacrament does not depend on the personal worthiness of the man who performs it, but on Christ who acts through it. That principle — that an office and its acts are valid independently of the private virtue of the officeholder — is one of the quiet foundations of Western institutional life.
But Cyprian’s model endured as well. The West would argue for the next thirteen centuries, and in some quarters still argues, about whether the Church is governed from Rome or by the college of bishops in council. The Council of Constance, which in 1415 asserted its authority over a divided papacy, was invoking the principle of Carthage, and the conciliarist theorists of the fifteenth century who argued that authority in any body politic ultimately resides in the whole rather than the head have a place in the genealogy of European constitutional thought (Tierney, 1955; Oakley, 2003). Cyprian did not know he was founding a political theory. He was trying to keep a church together.
Beneath the persecution, and far more lethal than it, was the plague.
It appears around 249, apparently out of Ethiopia and Egypt, and moves through the empire for at least fifteen years. We call it the Plague of Cyprian because the bishop of Carthage is our fullest witness, and his description in his sermon On Mortality is specific: bowels loosened into a constant flux, a fire in the throat, relentless vomiting, eyes burning red with the injected blood, and in some cases the loss of feet or other limbs to putrefaction, or of sight or hearing (Cyprian, De Mort. 14). Kyle Harper has argued that this symptom profile points not to smallpox or measles but to something like a viral hemorrhagic fever a filovirus, akin to Ebola (Harper, 2015; 2017). That cannot be proved, but whatever it was, Dionysius of Alexandria reports that the population of his city had fallen so far that the number of citizens aged between fourteen and eighty was now smaller than the number aged between forty and seventy had been before (Hist. Eccl. 7.21). If that is even approximately true, Alexandria had lost more than half of its people.
The pagan response, as far as we can reconstruct it, was the rational one, if we set aside compassion. The sick were abandoned, often by their own families. Bodies lay unburied in the streets. People fled the cities for the countryside, and the physicians such as there were fled with them. Galen himself had done precisely this in the Antonine Plague. And the Christian response was different, and was recognised as different at the time.
In an Easter letter written during the worst of it, Dionysius of Alexandria describes what his people did:
Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbours and cheerfully accepting their pains… The heathen behaved in the very opposite way. At the first onset of the disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead and treating unburied corpses as dirt. (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 7.22)
This is partisan, obviously, and it was written for a Christian audience. But it is corroborated from the other side of the Mediterranean. Pontius, the deacon who wrote Cyprian’s life, describes how the bishop of Carthage gathered his congregation during the plague and told them that it was no great thing to care only for their own; that anyone could love his friends; that the Christian must overcome evil with good and pray for his persecutors, and so must care for the pagan sick as well as the Christian. He then organised the whole church, rich and poor, into a system of relief the rich giving money, the poor giving labour for the city as a whole (Pontius, Vita Cypriani 9–10). At the very moment the Roman state was trying to identify the Christians so that it could kill them, the Christians were organising the only functioning public-health system in Carthage.
Rodney Stark, a sociologist of religion rather than an ancient historian, made a famous argument from this material: that basic nursing — food, water, warmth would by itself have dramatically reduced mortality among the sick, that Christians therefore survived epidemics at higher rates than pagans, that pagans who were nursed by Christians survived and were grateful, and that the arithmetic of successive plagues alone could account for a large part of the Church’s growth from perhaps one or two per cent of the empire’s population in the mid-third century to perhaps ten per cent by 300 (Stark, 1996). The numbers are speculative. The mechanism is not. There is a direct line from the deacons of Carthage in 252 to the hospitals of Basil of Caesarea in the 370s, the first purpose-built public hospitals in the West, and from there to the entire Western tradition of institutional care for the sick poor. The idea that a stranger’s suffering lays an obligation on you — that the plague victim in the gutter is your neighbour in the sense of the parable — was not a Roman idea. It is a Christian one, and it was proved in practice in the 250s, in the worst possible conditions, by people who were simultaneously under sentence of death.
Cyprian’s network did not stop at plague relief. In 253 Berber raiders from the desert fringe carried off a number of Christian men and women from the churches of Numidia. Cyprian raised, within days, a collection of a hundred thousand sesterces from the church of Carthage and sent it to the Numidian bishops to ransom them, with a list of the donors’ names so that the captives could pray for them and a promise of more if needed (Cyprian, Ep. 62). The ransoming of captives from those who raided the Christian world would become, across the next fifteen centuries, one of the great permanent works of Christian charity — through the religious orders founded in the Middle Ages specifically to buy Christians back from the slave markets of North Africa. Its first recorded instance is here.
Gallus, the emperor who followed Decius, briefly renewed the persecution; Cornelius of Rome was exiled to Centumcellae and died there in 253. But the second great systematic assault came under Valerian, a senior senator who became emperor in 253 and was at first well disposed. In 257, at the prompting, Dionysius believed, of his finance minister Macrianus, he changed his mind.
Valerian had learned from the failure of Decius. The Decian edict had tried to force the whole population into conformity; it had created a vast bureaucratic effort, produced a great many apostates who returned to the Church as soon as it was over, and left the institution of the Church intact. Valerian’s policy was designed to destroy the institution. His first edict, in 257, ordered bishops, presbyters and deacons to sacrifice to the gods of Rome on pain of exile, and forbade Christians to hold assemblies or to enter their cemeteries. The Church, for the first time, was treated as what it had become — a corporate body with property, officers and meeting places — and the state struck at the corporation.
In 258 a second rescript went much further. Cyprian, in exile, received a report of its terms from Rome and passed them on to his colleagues:
That bishops and presbyters and deacons should be executed forthwith; that senators and men of rank and Roman knights should lose their dignity and be deprived of their property, and if, when their possessions have been taken, they still persist in being Christians, they too shall be beheaded; that matrons shall be deprived of their property and sent into exile; and that the members of Caesar’s household who had confessed before, or should confess now, shall have their property confiscated and be sent in chains to the imperial estates as slaves. (Cyprian, Ep. 80)
The rescript is revealing about what the state now understood. It aimed at the clergy, because the clergy held the Church together; and it aimed at Christians of rank and property, and at the imperial household itself, because the Church had evidently penetrated all three — which is to say, it had penetrated the governing class of the empire.
On 6 August 258, Sixtus II, bishop of Rome, was seized while seated on his episcopal chair, preaching to his congregation in the cemetery of Callistus on the Appian Way, and beheaded on the spot with four of his deacons. A few days later, on 10 August, his archdeacon Lawrence followed him. The story that Lawrence, ordered to hand over the treasures of the church, assembled the city’s poor and sick and presented them as the church’s treasure, and was then roasted on a gridiron and asked to be turned over because he was done on that side, is found first in Ambrose more than a century later and cannot be trusted in its details. But it lodged in the imagination of Western Christendom because it captured something true: the church of Rome was feeding fifteen hundred widows, and when the state came for its wealth, the wealth was people.
Cyprian had been arrested in the first wave, in August 257, and interrogated by the proconsul of Africa, Aspasius Paternus. The record of the proceedings survives, and it is almost a model of civil discourse between two educated Romans who understand each other perfectly. Cyprian confirmed that he was a Christian and a bishop, said he knew no gods but the one God who made heaven and earth, and that Christians prayed day and night for the emperors; he declined to give the names of his presbyters, observing that the laws themselves forbade informing; and he was sent into exile at Curubis, a pleasant coastal town, where he stayed a year. When the second rescript came, he was recalled to Carthage. He refused to hide this time. On 14 September 258 he was brought before the new proconsul, Galerius Maximus, in the presence of an enormous crowd. The proconsul asked him if he was Thascius Cyprianus; he said he was. He was told that the most sacred emperors had commanded him to perform the rites; he said I will not do so. He was advised to consider; he said do what you have been ordered; in so just a matter there is no need of consideration. The sentence was read from a tablet: it is decided that Thascius Cyprianus be executed with the sword. Cyprian said: Deo gratias — thanks be to God.
The crowd of Christians shouted that they should be beheaded with him. He was taken out to an open field outside the city, where he took off his cloak, knelt, and prayed; he handed his dalmatic to his deacons and ordered that twenty-five gold pieces be given to the executioner; and he tied the blindfold over his own eyes (Acta Proconsularia Cypriani 3–5). The Christians spread cloths and napkins on the ground in front of him to catch his blood.
He was the first bishop of Carthage to be martyred. He had been a Christian for twelve years.
Two years later, Valerian led an army east to recover Mesopotamia from Shapur, was defeated near Edessa, and was taken prisoner — the only Roman emperor ever to be captured alive by a foreign enemy. He died in Persian captivity. The great rock relief of Shapur at Naqsh-e Rustam, near Persepolis, still shows the Roman emperor kneeling before the mounted king of kings. Lactantius, writing half a century later with undisguised satisfaction, claimed that Shapur used him as a mounting block to climb on to his horse, and that after his death his skin was flayed, dyed red and hung in a Persian temple as a trophy (Lactantius, De Mort. Pers. 5). Much of that is probably embroidery. Christians did not need to embroider much to draw the lesson.
Valerian’s son and co-emperor, Gallienus, now sole ruler of a disintegrating empire, immediately reversed his father’s policy. In 260 or 261 he issued rescripts to the bishops of Egypt and elsewhere, ordering that the places of worship be restored to them and that nobody should molest them, and a further rescript giving them back their cemeteries (Hist. Eccl. 7.13).
This was a legal event of the first importance, and it has received less notice than it deserves. It was not quite toleration in the modern sense: Christianity was not declared a lawful religion. But the imperial government had, for the first time, addressed the bishops as bishops, and had acknowledged that the Church, as a corporate body, owned property which the state was obliged to restore to it. The Church had acquired, in practice if not in theory, something like legal personality — the capacity of a body that is not a person to hold property in its own name and to have that title recognised by the state. The corporation, the charitable foundation, the university, the chartered company, the whole landscape of self-governing bodies intermediate between the individual and the state that would characterise European society has one of its first practical precedents here.
The point was underlined in 272 in a case that could hardly have been invented. Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch and simultaneously a senior financial official of the Palmyrene queen Zenobia, taught a theology which reduced Christ to a man indwelt by the divine Word, and he conducted himself in a manner his colleagues found intolerable: a throne on a raised platform, a private audience chamber, choirs of women singing hymns to himself, and a bodyguard. A synod of bishops at Antioch deposed him in 268. He refused to leave the church house. When the emperor Aurelian recaptured Antioch from Zenobia in 272, the Christians appealed to him — a pagan emperor, a devotee of the sun — to adjudicate the property dispute. Aurelian ruled that the building belonged to those to whom the bishops of the Christian religion in Italy and in the city of Rome should write (Hist. Eccl. 7.30). A Roman emperor had resolved a church dispute by reference to communion with the bishop of Rome. It is an extraordinary sentence, and it tells us that by the 270s the Church’s internal constitution was a fact that a Roman court could recognise.
The four decades from 260 to 303 were called by later Christians the Little Peace of the Church, and they were the decades of its greatest growth. The evidence is scattered but consistent. Eusebius, who grew up in them, remembered the great crowds that filled the houses of prayer, and new and spacious churches being built in every city because the old buildings were no longer large enough (Hist. Eccl. 8.1). Christians served as governors of provinces, and were excused from sacrifice; they filled the imperial household, and the palace at Nicomedia had Christian servants and Christian officials. In Pontus, the missionary bishop Gregory the Wonderworker, a pupil of Origen, was said to have found seventeen Christians in Neocaesarea when he arrived and to have left seventeen pagans when he died. The story is too neat to be true, but the conversion of whole regions of Asia Minor in this period is not in doubt.
In 1932 archaeologists working at Dura-Europos, a Roman garrison town on the Euphrates on the Persian frontier, found the oldest surviving church building in the world. It was an ordinary private house, converted around 232 to Christian use, with a meeting room that could hold perhaps sixty or seventy people and a small room fitted out as a baptistery, its walls painted with the earliest securely dated Christian images: the Good Shepherd with a sheep on his shoulders, Adam and Eve, the healing of the paralytic, Christ and Peter walking on the water, the women coming to the tomb. In 256 the Persians besieged Dura, and the Roman garrison, preparing its defences, filled the buildings along the city wall with earth to strengthen it. The church was among them. The town fell anyway, was abandoned, and the painted baptistery lay buried until the twentieth century. A few streets away, the same rampart preserved a synagogue decorated with an astonishing cycle of biblical paintings. That juxtaposition will matter in the next folio.
The empire’s enemies, too, were carrying the faith beyond its frontiers, though they did not intend to. When Shapur sacked Antioch, he deported large numbers of its inhabitants into Persia, and tradition holds that among them was the city’s bishop, Demetrianus; the deportees became one of the seeds of the Church of the East, which would one day carry the gospel along the Silk Road to China. When the Goths raided Cappadocia in the 250s, they carried off Christian captives to their homeland north of the Danube, among them the grandparents of Ulfilas, who in the fourth century would become the apostle of the Goths and translate the Bible into Gothic, inventing an alphabet to do it (Philostorgius, Hist. Eccl. 2.5). The Church, raided and deported by the pagan powers pressing on the empire’s frontiers, converted its captors. It would do so again with the Franks, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Magyars. It is one of the most remarkable recurring patterns in European history, and it begins here.
Paganism, meanwhile, was also changing. At Rome from 244 to his death in 270 the Egyptian-born Plotinus taught the philosophy we call Neoplatonism — the last and most sublime synthesis of Greek thought, a mystical ascent of the soul through the levels of reality towards the One from which all things emanate. His pupil Porphyry, a Phoenician of formidable learning, wrote around the 270s or later a work in fifteen books Against the Christians, which was the most intelligent attack on Christianity produced in antiquity. Porphyry was a genuine textual critic. He pointed out the contradictions in the Gospels; he argued, correctly as almost all modern scholars agree, that the Book of Daniel was not written by a prophet in the Babylonian exile but by someone living through the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes in the 160s BC, since its prophecies were accurate up to that point and then wrong; and he attacked the Christians for abandoning the ancestral religion of their own people and the religion of the Jews alike. Christian emperors would later order his book burned, and it survives only in fragments quoted by its refuters. But its significance is that the pagan intellectual world had now taken Christianity seriously enough to engage it at the highest level of scholarship, and that a philosophical case had been constructed for defending the ancestral gods against it. Within a generation, that case would be in the hands of men who had the power to act on it.
Somewhere in these decades of peace, around 270, a young Coptic farmer called Antony, from the village of Coma in Middle Egypt, walked into church and heard the Gospel being read: If you would be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me. He was about twenty. His parents had recently died, leaving him three hundred arourae of good land and a younger sister to care for. He went out of the church, gave the land to the villagers, sold the rest of the property, placed his sister with a community of consecrated virgins, and began a life of ascetic discipline on the edge of his village under the guidance of an old man who had done the same (Athanasius, Vita Antonii 2–3).
Then he went further. He moved into an empty tomb some distance from the village. Around 285 he crossed the Nile and shut himself inside an abandoned Roman fort at Pispir, on the edge of the eastern desert, where he remained in near-total solitude for twenty years, his food passed to him over the wall. When his admirers finally broke down the door, around 305, he came out, Athanasius says, as if from a shrine where he had been initiated into divine mysteries neither emaciated nor bloated, but in perfect balance of body and soul. The desert filled up with imitators. Later in his life he withdrew further still, to a mountain near the Red Sea, where the monastery that bears his name has stood since the fourth century. He died in 356 at the age of a hundred and five.
Antony was not the first Christian ascetic; the Church had always had its virgins and its widows vowed to prayer, and in Syria there were bands of celibate “sons of the covenant.” Nor was he quite the first hermit; Jerome would later write a charming and largely fictional life of a Paul of Thebes who was said to have fled into the desert during the Decian persecution and never come back. But the flights into the desert of 250, which Dionysius of Alexandria had recorded, are suggestive. The Egyptian desert was a place Christians had already learned to go when the world became unbearable, and Antony went there when it did not have to be.
Peter Brown, whose work on this period is foundational, has taught us to see the desert fathers not as eccentrics who ran away from society but as the pioneers of a new kind of social figure the holy man, whose authority came from his demonstrated mastery over the body and the self, and who would become, in the villages of the late Roman East, a patron, arbiter and protector in a world where the old structures were failing (Brown, 1971; 1988). The desert was also a theatre of spiritual combat. Antony’s life is full of demons, and the struggle against them was understood as a continuation of the martyr’s struggle in the arena by other means. When the persecutions ended, and the opportunity of dying for Christ ended with them, the ascetic life would become the “white martyrdom” a daily death of the self which kept alive the heroism of the age of the martyrs.
The long consequences for the West are hard to exaggerate, and they will take several future folios to trace. From Antony’s solitude came, within a generation, Pachomius’s communal monasteries in Upper Egypt, with their written rule, their fixed hours, their common work and their organised economies; from there the monastic ideal travelled to Gaul, to Ireland, to Italy and the Rule of Benedict; and from Benedict’s monasteries came the preservation of classical literature through the Dark Ages, the reclamation of wasteland and forest for agriculture across half of Europe, the regulation of the day by bells at fixed hours which, many historians have argued, created the first demand for accurate mechanical timekeeping, and a theology of labour — orare est laborare — which gave manual work a dignity that neither Greek nor Roman culture had ever accorded it. All of that begins with a young Egyptian farmer taking a sentence of the Gospel literally.
In 284 the army proclaimed a Dalmatian officer of humble birth named Diocles as emperor. He took the name Diocletian, and in twenty years he did what none of his predecessors had managed: he stopped the rot. He divided the empire among four rulers two senior emperors called Augusti, himself in the East and Maximian in the West, each with a junior colleague called a Caesar, Galerius and Constantius so that every frontier had an emperor within reach of it. He doubled the number of provinces and separated military from civil command. He reformed the coinage, fixed maximum prices by edict, reorganised taxation on a regular census, and turned the principate of Augustus into an openly sacred monarchy, in which the emperor was approached with prostration and his associates were styled the sons of Jupiter and Hercules. The system he created would outlast him by two centuries in the West and by more than a thousand years in the East.
Diocletian was a restorer, and restoration in Roman terms meant religious restoration: the gods whose favour had made Rome great must be honoured again, and everything that undermined their worship must go. In 302 he issued a savage edict against the Manichaeans, followers of the Persian prophet Mani, ordering their leaders burned alive with their scriptures; its preamble condemned the madness of those who set new and unheard-of sects against the older religions, and declared that it was the greatest of crimes to reconsider what had once been fixed and established by the ancients. The same logic applied to the Christians, and they must have known it.
The provocations came from inside the court. Lactantius, a teacher of Latin rhetoric whom Diocletian had brought to Nicomedia, the eastern capital, and who therefore watched what followed at close quarters, records that at a public sacrifice in Antioch around 299 the haruspices the priests who read the future in the entrails of animals could not find the usual signs, and their chief, Tages, blamed the Christian officials in attendance, who had made the sign of the cross to protect themselves. Diocletian flew into a rage and ordered everyone in the palace to sacrifice, and all soldiers to sacrifice or be discharged (De Mort. Pers. 10). A purge of the army followed. Earlier, in 295, a young man named Maximilian of Theveste had refused induction into the army with a line that has echoed ever since among Christian conscientious objectors: I cannot serve, I cannot do evil; I am a Christian. He was executed.
Galerius, the Caesar in the East, was the driving force; Lactantius loathed him above all men and paints him as a savage. Diocletian was reluctant. He was an old man; he knew how much blood would be shed, and how many of his own officials and household were Christians; he argued that it would be enough to forbid Christianity to the palace and the army. A council of advisers was convened, and they said what advisers say. The oracle of Apollo at Didyma was consulted, and replied Constantine, who was at court as a young man, later said he heard the story himself that the just ones on earth were preventing the god from speaking truly (Eusebius, Vita Const. 2.50–51). Among the advisers was Sossianus Hierocles, governor of Bithynia, who had written a book called The Lover of Truth comparing Jesus unfavourably with the pagan wonder-worker Apollonius of Tyana; Lactantius calls him the author and adviser of the persecution (De Mort. Pers. 16). The philosophers had provided the arguments; the politicians now acted on them.
At dawn on 23 February 303 the feast of the Terminalia, the festival of the god of boundaries, chosen, Lactantius says, as the day on which a limit would be set to the Christian religion the praetorian prefect and a company of officers and soldiers broke down the doors of the great church of Nicomedia, which stood on high ground in full view of the imperial palace. They searched it for an image of the Christian god and found none; they burned the scriptures; and then the Praetorian Guard came up in battle order with axes and crowbars and in a few hours levelled the building to the ground, while Diocletian and Galerius watched from the palace (De Mort. Pers. 12).
The next day the first edict was posted. All churches throughout the empire were to be destroyed; all scriptures were to be surrendered and burned; Christians were forbidden to assemble for worship; Christians of rank were stripped of their privileges and made liable to torture; Christians of any status were forbidden to bring actions in the courts, so that they could be robbed, assaulted or defrauded without recourse; and imperial freedmen who persisted were to be reduced to slavery. A Christian in Nicomedia, Eusebius says a man of some distinction, tore down the edict in the forum, mocking the emperors’ victories over the Goths and Sarmatians; he was roasted alive (Hist. Eccl. 8.5). Two fires broke out in the palace within a fortnight, and were blamed on Christians. Diocletian’s own wife and daughter, Prisca and Valeria, who were believed to be sympathisers, were made to sacrifice.
A second edict ordered the arrest of all clergy; the prisons filled so completely with bishops, presbyters, deacons, readers and exorcists that, Eusebius says, there was no room left for the ordinary criminals. A third, in November 303, marking the twentieth anniversary of Diocletian’s reign, offered freedom to clergy who sacrificed and torture to those who did not. A fourth, early in 304, did what Decius had done fifty-four years before: it ordered the entire population, men, women and children, to sacrifice.
The enforcement varied enormously with the ruler. In the West, Constantius, the Caesar of Gaul and Britain whose son Constantine would become the first Christian emperor limited himself, according to Lactantius, to pulling down a few churches, “the walls, which could be restored,” while preserving “the true temple of God, which is in men” (De Mort. Pers. 15). Whether St Alban, Britain’s protomartyr, died in these years, as Bede believed, or half a century earlier under Decius, or a century earlier under Septimius Severus, historians have been unable to decide. In Italy and Africa, under Maximian, the edicts were enforced hard for two years. In the East, under Galerius and later under his nephew Maximinus Daia, the persecution lasted, with intermissions, for the best part of a decade.
The record is in Eusebius, who lived through it in Palestine, and it is often almost unreadable. In the Thebaid in Upper Egypt, he says, the killing went on for years, sometimes ten, sometimes twenty, once as many as a hundred in a single day, men, women and children, until the swords were blunted and the executioners worked in relays because they were exhausted (Hist. Eccl. 8.9). In Phrygia, soldiers surrounded a small town whose whole population, including its chief magistrate and officials, was Christian, and set fire to it with the people inside, as they called on Christ (Hist. Eccl. 8.11). In Palestine, where Eusebius himself watched it, Christians were blinded in one eye and hamstrung in one leg and sent to the copper mines of Phaeno in the desert. His own teacher, Pamphilus, a scholar who had built the library at Caesarea on the foundation of Origen’s books, was beheaded in 310.
The attack on the scriptures produced a crisis of its own, which would shape the Church in Africa for a century. Many clergy, when the soldiers came, handed over the sacred books to be burned, or handed over other books and pretended they were scripture. They became known as the traditores the handers-over, the word from which we get traitor. Others refused. On 15 July 303 Felix, bishop of the small African town of Thibiuca, was ordered to give up the scriptures and said: It is better that I should be burned than the divine scriptures. He was beheaded. At Abitinae in 304, some forty-nine Christians were arrested while celebrating the Eucharist in a private house, in defiance of the edict. Asked why they had disobeyed, one of them, Emeritus, in whose house they met, said: sine dominico non possumus — we cannot live without the Lord’s Supper (Acta Abitinensium 11). When the persecution was over, the question of what to do with the traditores, and whether a bishop who had surrendered the scriptures could validly ordain another, would split the African church in two, in the Donatist schism a quarrel in which both sides would claim Cyprian as their authority.
On 1 May 305 Diocletian did something no Roman emperor had ever done: he retired. Worn out and ill, he abdicated at Nicomedia and compelled a reluctant Maximian to do the same in the West, and went home to grow cabbages in his vast fortified palace at Split on the Dalmatian coast. His system of succession broke down almost immediately. Within seven years there were at one point six men claiming imperial titles, and the empire was once more at war with itself.
The persecution failed. It is necessary to state that plainly, because it is so easy to know the end of the story and forget how improbable it was. The Great Persecution was the most systematic and sustained effort ever made by the Roman state to eradicate a religion, carried out by the most capable administration Rome had had in a century, with every resource of law, army, prison and propaganda. In the East it lasted for eight years. And it did not work. The churches were rebuilt as fast as they were pulled down; the people who had sacrificed under compulsion came back; the martyrs’ tombs became places of pilgrimage; and the provincial governors, many of whom were by now bored and disgusted, enforced the edicts with less and less conviction.
In April 311 Galerius — the architect of the persecution, now senior emperor and dying of a disease which Lactantius describes with a physician’s detail and a moralist’s relish, an ulcer of the genitals which spread and rotted until the stench filled the palace and the worms bred in his living flesh — issued from his sickbed at Nicomedia an edict which admitted defeat. It is one of the most remarkable documents of the ancient world, and it deserves quoting at length:
Among the other arrangements which we are always making for the advantage and benefit of the republic, we had wished to set everything right in accordance with the ancient laws and public discipline of the Romans, and to see to it that even the Christians, who had abandoned the religion of their ancestors, should return to a good disposition… But since many persist in their purpose, and we see that they neither offer the worship and reverence due to the gods, nor honour the god of the Christians, we, in view of our most mild clemency… have thought fit to extend our indulgence to these also, so that they may once again be Christians and may hold their meetings, provided they do nothing contrary to good order… Wherefore, in accordance with this our indulgence, they ought to pray to their god for our safety, and for that of the republic, and for their own. (Lactantius, De Mort. Pers. 34; Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 8.17)
He died a few days later. The edict is grudging and resentful and absurd — a man who had spent eight years trying to exterminate a religion now asking its adherents to pray for his recovery — and it is the first formal act of toleration of Christianity by a Roman emperor. Maximinus Daia in the East ignored it within months, and renewed the persecution with a new and modern refinement: he had a forged document, the Acts of Pilate, full of blasphemies against Christ, circulated throughout his territories and ordered it taught in the schools, so that children would learn it by heart (Hist. Eccl. 9.5). He encouraged the cities of his provinces to petition him to expel their Christians, and inscribed his favourable replies on bronze. It was propaganda of a kind the twentieth century would recognise. Peter, bishop of Alexandria, was beheaded in November 311; Lucian, the great teacher of Antioch, was martyred at Nicomedia in January 312. But the tide had turned.
It remains to say what the Christians had learned from being hunted, because it is one of the most important things they ever taught the West.
A century earlier, writing to the proconsul Scapula around 212, Tertullian had made a claim which no Roman had ever thought to make. It is a matter of human right and natural power, he wrote, that each person should worship according to his own convictions; one man’s religion neither harms nor helps another. It is no part of religion to compel religion, which must be adopted freely, not by force (Tertullian, Ad Scap. 2). The phrase humani iuris — of human right — is one of the earliest uses in Latin of anything close to our idea of a human right, and it was applied, from the start, to the freedom of conscience.
In the years of the Great Persecution, Lactantius, stripped of his post and living in poverty, wrote the Divine Institutes, the first attempt at a complete, systematic presentation of Christianity in Latin for educated pagans. In its fifth book he returned to Tertullian’s theme and pressed it home. Religion cannot be compelled, he wrote; the matter must be carried on by words rather than by blows, so that the will may be moved. Nothing is so much a matter of free will as religion… Religion is to be defended not by killing, but by dying; not by cruelty, but by patience; not by crime, but by faith (Lactantius, Div. Inst. 5.19–20). Those sentences were written by a man who had watched the church of Nicomedia pulled down from a few hundred yards away. They would be quoted by the defenders of religious liberty in the seventeenth century, and the principle they state — that belief extracted by coercion is worthless, and that the state has no business compelling the conscience — would pass into the constitutional settlements of the modern West.
It is one of the great ironies of history, and one of the central arguments of Tom Holland’s Dominion, that the ideal of religious liberty was first articulated not by the tolerant pagans of Rome but by the Christians they were trying to exterminate (Holland, 2019). The ironies would not end there. Within a century, some of Lactantius’s Christian successors, with the power of the state now in their hands, would forget what he had said; and it would take another thirteen hundred years, and the wars of religion, for the West to recover the principle that the persecuted Church of the third century had discovered in the furnace. But it was discovered there.
In 312, none of that was yet visible. What was visible was this. In the autumn of 312, the son of Constantius — proclaimed emperor by his father’s troops at York in 306, and now master of Gaul, Britain and Spain — crossed the Alps with a small army and marched on Rome to fight Maxentius, the usurper who held Italy. Somewhere on the march, he later told Eusebius, under oath, he and his whole army saw a sign in the sky. On 28 October, at the Milvian Bridge over the Tiber, the two armies met.
By 312, then, the Church had been through the fire and had come out of it changed.
It had survived two deliberate, systematic, empire-wide attempts to destroy it — the Decian and the Valerianic and a third, the Great Persecution, that was the most thorough the ancient state ever mounted. It had survived, too, the barbarian invasions, Persian conquests, civil wars and plagues that nearly destroyed the empire around it, and had carried the faith across the frontiers in the persons of the captives the invaders took.
It had a theory of itself. Cyprian had worked out, under pressure, what the Church was — one body, held together by a college of bishops in succession from the apostles, deliberating in council — and in doing so had set the terms of the West’s long argument about whether authority rests in the head or in the whole.
It had chosen mercy over purity. In deciding that the lapsed could be forgiven, it had become a Church of sinners rather than of saints, and laid the foundations of the Western understanding of penance, confession and restoration.
It had shown, in the plague years, that it could organise care for the sick and the destitute on a scale the state could not match, and had established the principle that the suffering stranger is a neighbour.
It had acquired, in practice, the legal status of a corporate body that could own property, and in doing so had created one of the first precedents for the self-governing institutions of European society.
It had discovered the desert, and with it the monastic ideal that would preserve and transform the culture of the West.
And its victims had articulated, for the first time in history, the principle that religion cannot be compelled and that the conscience is free.
The Roman state had spent the third century finding out what it was dealing with. What it found was a body that could not be killed, and it was about to make peace with it.
Next in the series: Folio VII will step back from the chronological line to trace a parallel story — the conflict between the Church and the synagogue from the time of Christ to the time of Constantine: the stoning of Stephen and Saul’s commission from the high priests; the killing of James the son of Zebedee by Herod Agrippa and of James the brother of the Lord by the high priest Ananus in 62; the expulsions from the synagogue and the long debate over the Birkat ha-Minim; the fate of the Jewish Christians during the Bar Kokhba revolt; the Jews of Smyrna at the burnings of Polycarp and Pionius; Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho; and the shared, bitter, entangled inheritance of two communities who read the same scriptures and parted ways — together with the question of how far the Christian sources can be trusted on it, and what the later Church made of this memory.
Ancient works are cited in the text by author and standard abbreviated title with book and section numbers (for example, Cyprian, De Unit. 5), which is the convention in classical and patristic scholarship and allows any edition to be used. Cyprian’s letters are cited by the numbering of the Hartel/Clarke editions. The editions and translations consulted are listed below under Primary Sources. Modern works are cited Harvard style by author and date.
Acts of the Abitinian Martyrs (1996) in Tilley, M. A. (trans.) Donatist Martyr Stories: The Church in Conflict in Roman North Africa. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Acts of Maximilian and Acta Proconsularia Cypriani (1972) in Musurillo, H. (ed. and trans.) The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Athanasius of Alexandria (1980) The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus. Translated by R. C. Gregg. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press.
Cyprian of Carthage (1984–1989) The Letters of St. Cyprian of Carthage. Translated and annotated by G. W. Clarke. 4 vols. Ancient Christian Writers 43, 44, 46, 47. New York: Newman Press.
Cyprian of Carthage (1971) De Lapsis and De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate. Edited and translated by M. Bévenot. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Cyprian of Carthage (1886) On the Mortality and other treatises, in Roberts, A. and Donaldson, J. (eds.) Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 5. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co.
Eusebius of Caesarea (1989) The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine. Translated by G. A. Williamson, revised by A. Louth. London: Penguin Classics.
Eusebius of Caesarea (1999) Life of Constantine. Translated with introduction and commentary by Averil Cameron and S. G. Hall. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Knipfing, J. R. (1923) ‘The Libelli of the Decian Persecution’, Harvard Theological Review, 16(4), pp. 345–390.
Lactantius (1984) De Mortibus Persecutorum. Edited and translated by J. L. Creed. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lactantius (2003) Divine Institutes. Translated with introduction and notes by A. Bowen and P. Garnsey. Translated Texts for Historians 40. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Philostorgius (2007) Church History. Translated by P. R. Amidon. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.
Pontius the Deacon (1886) The Life and Passion of Cyprian, in Roberts, A. and Donaldson, J. (eds.) Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 5. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co.
Porphyry (1994) Porphyry’s Against the Christians: The Literary Remains. Edited and translated by R. J. Hoffmann. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
Tertullian (1885) To Scapula, in Roberts, A. and Donaldson, J. (eds.) Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 3. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co.
Barnes, T. D. (1981) Constantine and Eusebius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Barnes, T. D. (2010) Early Christian Hagiography and Roman History. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Brent, A. (2010) Cyprian and Roman Carthage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, P. (1971) ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies, 61, pp. 80–101.
Brown, P. (1988) The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Brown, P. (2013) The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000. 10th anniversary rev. edn. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Burns, J. P. (2002) Cyprian the Bishop. London: Routledge.
Chadwick, H. (1993) The Early Church. Rev. edn. London: Penguin Books.
Chadwick, O. (1958) John Cassian: A Study in Primitive Monasticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chitty, D. J. (1966) The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Clarke, G. W. (2005) ‘Third-Century Christianity’, in Bowman, A. K., Garnsey, P. and Cameron, Averil (eds.) The Cambridge Ancient History, Volume XII: The Crisis of Empire, A.D. 193–337. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 589–671.
Corcoran, S. (2000) The Empire of the Tetrarchs: Imperial Pronouncements and Government, AD 284–324. Rev. edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Digeser, E. D. (2000) The Making of a Christian Empire: Lactantius and Rome. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Frend, W. H. C. (1965) Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Frend, W. H. C. (1984) The Rise of Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Harper, K. (2015) ‘Pandemics and Passages to Late Antiquity: Rethinking the Plague of c. 249–270 Described by Cyprian’, Journal of Roman Archaeology, 28, pp. 223–260.
Harper, K. (2017) The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Holland, T. (2019) Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. London: Little, Brown.
Kraeling, C. H. (1967) The Excavations at Dura-Europos, Final Report VIII, Part II: The Christian Building. New Haven: Dura-Europos Publications.
Lane Fox, R. (1986) Pagans and Christians. London: Viking.
Oakley, F. (2003) The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church, 1300–1870. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Potter, D. S. (2014) The Roman Empire at Bay, AD 180–395. 2nd edn. London: Routledge.
Rives, J. B. (1999) ‘The Decree of Decius and the Religion of Empire’, Journal of Roman Studies, 89, pp. 135–154.
Rousseau, P. (1985) Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schaff, P. (1884) History of the Christian Church, Volume II: Ante-Nicene Christianity, A.D. 100–325. 3rd edn. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Stark, R. (1996) The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tierney, B. (1955) Foundations of the Conciliar Theory: The Contribution of the Medieval Canonists from Gratian to the Great Schism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tilley, M. A. (1997) The Bible in Christian North Africa: The Donatist World. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
Williams, S. (1985) Diocletian and the Roman Recovery. London: Batsford.
• New Advent: Church Fathers — Cyprian’s letters and treatises, Pontius’s Life of Cyprian, Lactantius’s Divine Institutes and On the Deaths of the Persecutors, Athanasius’s Life of Antony, and Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History and Life of Constantine.
• Early Christian Writings — translations of the Acts of Cyprian and other martyr acts.
• Tertullian Project — To Scapula in Latin and English, and an extensive collection of other patristic texts including Porphyry’s fragments.
Part of a series found here
In the summer of 177 AD, in the amphitheatre of Lugdunum or Lyons, at the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône, the administrative capital of the Three Gauls, a slave girl was hung on a stake in the arena in the posture of a crucifixion and left as bait for the beasts. She had already been tortured from dawn to dusk by relays of men working in shifts, who admitted afterwards that they were exhausted and had run out of things to do to her. Her name was Blandina. Her fellow prisoners, watching from the sand, said that in her they saw with their outward eyes, in the form of their sister, the one who was crucified for them.
The beasts, that day, would not touch her. She was taken down and returned to prison to wait, and on the last day of the games she was brought out again, scourged, set on a heated iron chair, wrapped in a net and thrown to a bull. The Roman crowd admitted that no woman among them had ever endured so much.
The letter which records all this was written within months by the survivors of her church and sent to the congregations of Asia and Phrygia, from which most of them had originally come. Eusebius copied great stretches of it into his Ecclesiastical History a hundred and forty years later, and it is the reason we know anything at all about the Christians of Roman Gaul in the second century (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 5.1). It is the single most harrowing document the early Church produced, and it was written by people who thought they were reporting good news.
This folio covers the four decades either side of that summer, roughly 165 to 205 AD. They are the years in which the Church acquired, under pressure, the three things it had so far lacked: a systematic theology, a Latin tongue, and an intellectual academy. They are also the years in which the Roman state began, hesitantly and without ever quite admitting it, to move from prosecuting Christians when somebody complained to prosecuting Christianity as such. What had been a matter of provincial temper was becoming a matter of policy. And in the same decades, almost unnoticed, the Church discovered that it could no longer settle its own disputes by the methods it had used in Polycarp's day — a conversation, a shared chalice, and a parting in peace.
The emperor who presided over Lyons may have been, for all his faults, the best man ever to hold the office, and this is the fact that has to be faced before anything else about the period makes sense.
Marcus Aurelius came to the purple in 161 and spent almost his entire reign at war. The Parthians attacked in the east; his generals won, and the returning legions brought back with them, from the sack of Seleucia in 165, the disease that we call the Antonine Plague. Galen, who watched it and fled it, describes black pustular eruptions, fever, and a stench of decay from the mouth; modern epidemiologists suspect smallpox, though the diagnosis cannot be secure. It burned through the empire in waves for fifteen years, killed something between a tenth and a third of the urban population in the places it struck hardest, gutted the army's manpower, and — as far as anyone can tell — never entirely went away. It may have taken Marcus's co-emperor Lucius Verus in 169. It very possibly took Marcus himself in 180.
Behind the plague came the Germans. In 166 or 167 the Marcomanni and the Quadi crossed the Danube, broke through the frontier defences, and swept as far as Aquileia at the head of the Adriatic — the first invaders to reach Italian soil in two and a half centuries. Marcus spent the rest of his life on the northern frontier, campaigning in the mud of what is now Austria, Slovakia and Hungary, selling the palace furniture in the Forum to fund the war because he would not raise taxes on provinces already emptied by disease.
It was in those camps, in Greek, for nobody's eyes but his own, that he wrote the book we call the Meditations — the most admired document of pagan spirituality that survives, a sustained exercise in Stoic self-command by a man who did not much want to be emperor and did the job anyway. It contains exactly one reference to Christians, and it is worth quoting in full because of how little it contains:
How admirable is the soul which is ready and resolved, if it must this moment be released from the body... but this readiness must come from a man's own judgement, not from mere obstinacy, as with the Christians, and must be considered and dignified and, if others are to be persuaded, free from all stage-heroics. (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.3)
Some scholars have argued that the clause naming the Christians is a later gloss, and the case is not frivolous. But whether Marcus wrote it or a reader added it, the attitude is exactly the one the Apologies of the previous generation had been trying to dislodge, and it explains a great deal. Marcus did not hate Christians. He did not think about them often. What he saw, when he did, was a species of theatrical stubbornness a willingness to die that came not from reasoned philosophical detachment but from herd feeling and a taste for an audience. For a Stoic, dying well was a considered act of the rational will. Dying in a crowd, singing, was not dying well. It was hysteria dressed as virtue.
And here is the difficulty which every modern reader has to sit with. The persecution of Christians in the second century was not the work of monsters. Nero was a monster and Domitian was a paranoiac, but Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius were conscientious administrators, and it was under them that the legal machinery settled into place. Trajan's rescript to Pliny do not hunt them out, do not accept anonymous denunciations, but punish those who are accused and will not recant — had been the operative rule for seventy years. Tertullian pounced on its incoherence with a lawyer's glee: what other crime is it forbidden to investigate and obligatory to punish (Tertullian, Apol. 2)? But incoherence was the point. The rule was not designed to eliminate Christians. It was designed to keep the peace, and to give a governor something to do when a town erupted.
What made towns erupt was misfortune. Plague, invasion, famine, a bad harvest, a flooded river in the ancient world these were not natural events but symptoms of divine displeasure, and displeasure had causes. The gods were owed sacrifice, and the Christians would not sacrifice. Tertullian's summary of the popular logic is a caricature only in its compression: "If the Tiber rises to the walls, if the Nile fails to rise to the fields, if the sky stands still, if the earth moves, if there is famine, if there is plague — at once the cry goes up, Christians to the lion!" (Tertullian, Apol. 40). A generation of plague and barbarian invasion was, in precisely this sense, the worst possible weather for a small, exclusive, conspicuously anti-social sect. The Christians of Lyons died because a decent emperor's empire was having a very bad decade.
Lyons was a Greek-speaking Christian colony inside a Latin-speaking Gallic city. The congregation had come up the trade routes from Asia Minor merchants, artisans, slaves from Phrygia and Ionia and it kept the language and the temper of the churches of Smyrna and Ephesus. Its bishop, Pothinus, was over ninety years old, which means he had been born within living memory of the apostolic generation and had very probably known Polycarp.
The trouble began as a social boycott. The letter records that the Christians were first barred from the baths, the markets and the public spaces; then abused in the street; then stoned, robbed and dragged before the civic magistrates in the forum, who held them until the governor arrived. Under interrogation, the pagan household slaves of Christian masters terrified, and told what to say confessed to the standard rumours: Thyestean banquets and Oedipodean intercourse, cannibal feasts and incest in the dark. These charges had been circulating for a century; they arose from a lethal blend of half-understood language (a meal of the Lord's body and blood, exchanged between brothers and sisters, behind closed doors) and the ordinary human appetite for filth about outsiders. Once a slave under torture had sworn to them, the crowd's fury was unappeasable.
What the letter describes next is not a trial but a pogrom conducted under legal supervision. The Christians were held in a crowded suffocating prison while the governor's tribunal worked through them. Vettius Epagathus, a young man of rank, stood up in court to protest that no godlessness or impiety had been proved, and was asked whether he too was a Christian; he said he was, in a clear voice, and was taken. Sanctus, a deacon from Vienne across the river, answered every question name, city, nation, status with the same four Latin words, Christianus sum, until the interrogators gave up and applied red-hot plates of brass to the tenderest parts of his body. Biblis, a woman who had denied under the first torture, came back to herself on the rack and said that Christians could not eat children because they were not permitted to eat even the blood of animals a sentence which incidentally tells us that the apostolic decree of Acts 15 was still being observed in Gaul a hundred and twenty years later. Pothinus, the old bishop, was dragged before the tribunal and asked who the god of the Christians was. "If you are worthy," he said, "you shall know." He was beaten and kicked by the mob and died in prison two days afterwards.
At this point the governor ran into an administrative problem: some of his prisoners were Roman citizens, and a citizen could not simply be thrown to the beasts. He wrote to Marcus Aurelius for instructions. The emperor's reply, on campaign, was terse and, by the standards of the day, perfectly correct: those who confess are to be executed; citizens are to be beheaded; those who deny are to be released. The letter's most damning aside is that the governor then threw Attalus of Pergamum a citizen, and one of the pillars of the church to the beasts anyway, to please the crowd, before putting him in the iron chair.
The dead numbered forty-eight. Their bodies were exposed unburied for six days, then burned, and the ashes swept into the Rhône, with the explicit taunt the letter records the crowd shouting it that now let us see whether they will rise again, and whether their God can help them. The pagans of Lyons had understood the Christian hope precisely well enough to try to destroy it at the level of the body. That is a more interesting fact than it first appears: the resurrection of the flesh was known in the streets of Gaul as the thing these people believed, and it was resented as the thing that made them impossible to finally kill.
Two details in the letter deserve to be lifted out, because they mark something genuinely new in the ancient world.
The first is Blandina herself. She was a slave, she was a woman, and her own mistress — also arrested — is described as having been anxious in case Blandina proved too weak to confess. In the letter, she is the hero: the small, despised, physically unimpressive one through whom "Christ proved that the things which appear mean and unsightly and contemptible among men are held worthy of great glory with God." A Roman reader would have found the arrangement grotesque. The gladiatorial arena existed precisely to display and enforce the hierarchy of the social order; the crowd watched the worthless die for entertainment. What the letter does is take that machinery and invert it, so that the slave in the arena is the aristocrat of the story and the magistrate on the podium is the extra. Tom Holland's argument that the moral instincts modern Westerners take for granted are the residue of Christian theology has few better exhibits than this letter (Holland, 2019). Nobody had ever written about a tortured slave this way before.
The second is the letter's insistence that the survivors of the torture who had not yet died refused to be called martyrs — witnesses — at all. That title, they said, belongs to Christ, the faithful and true witness, and to those who have already finished. They asked the brethren to pray that they might be finished too, and they used their standing to intercede for those who had denied Christ under torture, writing to Rome to urge that the lapsed be received back. Within seventy years, the question of what to do with those who had denied under persecution would nearly split the Church in two. The Christians of Lyons, with the burns still on them, were already arguing for mercy.
One man of that church was not in the city in the summer of 177. The congregation had sent him to Rome carrying a letter to the bishop, Eleutherus, on a related matter of discipline. Because of that errand, he lived and when the survivors reassembled they made him their bishop in Pothinus's place. His name was Irenaeus.
Irenaeus was born in Smyrna, probably in the 130s, and he had one qualification that nobody else of his generation possessed. As a boy he had sat at the feet of Polycarp. He remembered it with startling vividness where the old man sat when he taught, how he walked, how he looked, and the accounts he gave of his conversations with John and with the others who had seen the Lord (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 5.20). There is a chain of three links between Irenaeus and the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and he knew it, and it is the foundation of everything he wrote.
Around 180 he produced, in five books, the work whose Greek title means The Detection and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So Called, and which everyone has always called Against Heresies. The first book is a patient, deadpan, almost anthropological exposition of the Valentinian system — Irenaeus takes the trouble to set out exactly what his opponents taught, on the excellent theory that in this case exposition is refutation. It is, incidentally, the reason we could check the heresiologists' accuracy when the Nag Hammadi codices came out of the ground in 1945, and on the whole he checks out rather well. The remaining four books dismantle it from scripture and from the Church's own confession.
But the reason Irenaeus matters is not that he refuted the Gnostics. It is that in order to refute them he had to say, in an ordered way, what Christians actually believed — and nobody had ever done that before. Justin had argued Christianity's case against outsiders; Ignatius had exhorted; Hermas had dreamed. Irenaeus built. What he produced is the first Christian systematic theology, and its architecture has never been demolished.
Its load-bearing wall is the proposition the Gnostics denied: that the God who made the world and the God who redeems it are the same God, and therefore that the whole story — creation, Israel, incarnation, cross, resurrection, the age of the Church, the age to come — is one story with one author. Irenaeus called the plot of that story anakephalaiosis, recapitulation, borrowing the word from the first chapter of Ephesians: God's purpose is to sum up all things in Christ. Christ is the second Adam, who passes through every stage of a human life — infancy, childhood, youth, maturity — sanctifying each by inhabiting it; where the first Adam disobeyed at a tree, the second obeys at a tree; where a virgin's disobedience tied the knot, a virgin's obedience unties it. Salvation, on this account, is not the escape of a spark from matter. It is the healing and completion of the human creature, body and all, and its destiny is not disembodiment but the vision of God. Hence the sentence of Irenaeus's which is quoted more than any other and usually mistranslated into something softer than he meant: Gloria enim Dei vivens homo — the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man is the vision of God (Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 4.20.7).
To make the argument stick he needed a court of appeal, and this is where his second great contribution lies. The Gnostic teachers claimed a secret tradition, passed privately from the apostles to a chosen few. Irenaeus answered with an argument of brutal simplicity: if the apostles had secret knowledge, they would have entrusted it to the men they put in charge of the churches — and we can name those men, in every apostolic city, in order, down to the present day. He then does it, giving the succession of the bishops of Rome from Linus to Eleutherus (Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 3.3.3) and pointing out that the churches of Smyrna and Ephesus can do the same. What comes down that public, traceable, boringly institutional chain is the regula fidei, the rule of faith — the baptismal confession, identical in Gaul and Egypt and Spain and among the churches of the Germans who have no written language at all, since the Church "though scattered through the whole world, guards this preaching and this faith as carefully as if it dwelt in one house."
Three consequences followed from that move, and all three are still with us.
Publicity became a criterion of truth. A doctrine which could only be taught to initiates was, by that fact alone, suspect. The instinct that religious claims must be open to public examination — an instinct the modern world imagines it invented in opposition to the Church — was forged by the Church as a weapon against esotericism.
Office became independent of charisma. What authenticated a bishop was not his spiritual attainments but his place in a verifiable public succession. That is the germ of a quite general idea: authority attaches to the office and is accountable to a rule, not to the personal brilliance of the man who holds it. Western constitutionalism has a long and tangled genealogy, but this is one of its roots.
And the fourfold gospel was locked. Irenaeus's argument that there can be neither more nor fewer than four gospels four zones of the earth, four winds, the four faces of the cherubim persuades nobody now and was not really meant as a proof so much as a decoration on a settled fact. What matters is the settlement. By 180 the four are a given, in Gaul as in Rome, and the Church has chosen to live permanently with four accounts that do not perfectly agree rather than tidy them into one.
Irenaeus also wrote, for Christians rather than against heretics, a short catechetical work called the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching. It was lost for fifteen hundred years and turned up in an Armenian manuscript in a church library in Yerevan in 1904 — one of those recoveries which reminds us how much of this period we know by luck.
Almost as soon as the Church had an answer for the heretics, it ran into a problem for which that answer did not work.
Sometime around 165 to 175, in a village in Phrygia in the high, strange, ecstatic country of inland Asia Minor, where the old cults of Cybele had always run to frenzy a recent convert named Montanus began to prophesy. He did not prophesy in the ordinary way, as an inspired man speaking about God. He fell into trance and spoke in the first person as God: "I am the Lord God Almighty dwelling in man"; "Behold, man is as a lyre, and I fly over him as a plectrum." Two women of substance, Priscilla and Maximilla, left their husbands and joined him, and prophesied likewise. The movement called itself simply the New Prophecy. Its enemies called it the Phrygian heresy, and later ages called it Montanism.
Its content was not doctrinally exotic. The Montanists confessed the same creed as everybody else; the Church's own writers admit this and are visibly frustrated by it. What the New Prophecy offered was intensity. The Paraclete promised in John's Gospel was speaking now, through these mouths, with a new and final discipline for the last days: longer and stricter fasts, no remarriage after widowhood, no flight from persecution but rather the active seeking of the crown, and the expectation that the heavenly Jerusalem was about to descend upon the Phrygian villages of Pepuza and Tymion. Maximilla's last recorded oracle was a complaint: "After me there will be no prophetess, but the end."
It was, in other words, a revival a protest from the charismatic edge against a Church that was becoming an institution, mounted by people who believed the Spirit was not confined to the past and could not be domesticated by a list of bishops. And the Church of Asia had a genuinely hard problem on its hands, because the New Testament itself commands the faithful not to quench the Spirit and not to despise prophecy.
What the bishops of Asia did about it is more historically significant than how it came out. They met. Eusebius, quoting an anonymous opponent writing around 192, records that "the faithful in Asia met often and in many places" to examine the new teaching, and having examined it, pronounced it profane and excluded its adherents from communion (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 5.16). These gatherings are the first synods in Christian history of which we have any record. Faced with a dispute that no single congregation could settle, the churches of a region convened, deliberated, and issued a collective judgement binding on all of them.
That is the invention of the council, and it is a constitutional event. Within a century and a half it would produce Nicaea; within a millennium and a half, by a long and indirect road running through cathedral chapters, monastic orders, Italian communes and the corporate law of the medieval canonists, it would help produce parliaments. The habit of settling contested questions by an assembly of office-holders, deliberating under a rule and issuing a decision in the name of the whole body, was not a Greek habit or a Roman one. The Greek assembly voted; the Roman senate advised a magistrate. The synod did something else: it sought a common mind, in the belief that the Spirit spoke through the gathered Church, and it bound the parts to the decision of the whole.
The tests the bishops applied are worth noting too, because they reveal what the second-century Church thought spiritual authority actually was. They asked whether a genuine prophet loses control of his faculties the consensus was no: the prophets of scripture knew what they were saying. They asked about money, noting that the New Prophecy's officers took salaries. They asked about the prophetesses' domestic arrangements. And they asked, with some relish, whether the predictions had come true, observing that Maximilla had promised wars and tumults and that thirteen years of unbroken peace had followed. It is not an elevated set of criteria. It is a practical one, and it comes down to this: test the spirits by the rule of faith, by the fruits, and by the accounts.
The New Prophecy did not die. It survived in Phrygia for centuries, and in the 200s it captured the most brilliant Christian writer in the Latin world.
Until the last quarter of the second century, Christianity in the West spoke Greek. The church of Rome was a Greek-speaking immigrant community; its bishops wrote in Greek, its liturgy was Greek, its scriptures were Greek, and its most famous members Justin, Valentinus, Marcion, Hermas were easterners. There was, as yet, no such thing as Christian Latin. The language of Cicero and Virgil had no word for baptism, no word for resurrection of the flesh that did not sound absurd, and no vocabulary whatever for a God who is three and one.
That changed in North Africa, and the first document of the change is a court transcript.
On 17 July 180, in Carthage, twelve Christians from the town of Scilli were brought before the proconsul Vigellius Saturninus. The exchange is short and flat and one of the most valuable texts of the century. Saturninus offers the standard escape: swear by the genius of our lord the emperor and you may go home. Speratus answers that he does not recognise the empire of this world, that he has paid his taxes and committed no theft, and that he acknowledges his Lord, the King of kings and emperor of all nations. The proconsul asks what is in the case the Christians have brought with them. "The books, and the letters of Paul, a just man" (Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs 12).
That sentence tells us that by 180 there were Christians in a provincial African town carrying a satchel of scripture including the Pauline corpus and the transcript is in Latin, the first dated Christian document in the language. Somewhere in North Africa, in the preceding decades, somebody had translated the Bible into Latin for congregations who could not read Greek. Saturninus offered them thirty days to think it over; Speratus said there was nothing to think about; they were beheaded. Their names, and the names of the women among them Donata, Vestia, Secunda are the first Latin Christian names we know.
Within seventeen years, that African church produced Tertullian.
Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus was born in Carthage around 155, converted as an adult, and wrote in a Latin of such compressed, furious, epigrammatic force that he is genuinely difficult to translate and impossible to forget. He had the training of a rhetorician and possibly of a lawyer; his prose moves like cross-examination. In 197 he published the Apologeticum, addressed to the governors of the province, and it is a different kind of document from Justin's patient philosophical appeal. Tertullian does not ask to be understood. He prosecutes.
He points out that Christians are condemned for a name; that the law forbids hunting them yet requires punishing them; that torture is normally used to extract confession but here is used to extract denial, which is an inversion of the entire legal principle; that the empire tolerates every cult in the world and proscribes only this one; that Christians pray for the emperor, pay their taxes, fill the forum, the market, the baths and the army, and could bring the empire to a halt by mere departure. And he ends with the line that has outlived everything else he wrote: plures efficimur, quotiens metimur a vobis; semen est sanguis Christianorum we multiply whenever you mow us down; the blood of Christians is seed (Tertullian, Apol. 50).
It was not a sentimental boast. It was an observation about a mechanism he had watched work. Public executions of the obstinate were meant to be pedagogical theatre, demonstrating the power of the state and the folly of defiance. When the victims went to them calmly, forgave the executioner, and refused the offered escape, the theatre produced the opposite of its intended effect on some portion of the audience. Tertullian himself may have been converted by watching it.
What Tertullian did to the Latin language is the more lasting achievement, and it is almost invisible now because we swim in it. He needed words for things Latin had never had to say. So he built them, from the vocabulary of Roman law and Roman military life, and the Western Church has used his vocabulary ever since. Trinitas — trinity: his coinage. Persona and substantia, put to work to say that God is one substance in three persons: his formula, arrived at around 213 in Against Praxeas, a hundred and twelve years before the Council of Nicaea and in the terms Nicaea's Western heirs would use. Sacramentum, the soldier's oath of loyalty, lifted across to name the Christian rites. Satisfactio, meritum, testamentum, vitium originis the whole scaffolding of Western theology, including the parts the Reformation would later fight over, is in some measure a set of Latin legal metaphors selected by an angry Carthaginian in the 190s. Harnack's judgement is not much exaggerated: the West would think about God in juridical terms, and the East in ontological ones, and Tertullian is a large part of the reason.
He also gave the tradition its sharpest statement of the case against Justin. "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?... We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel" (Tertullian, De praescr. haer. 7). He did not mean it as absolutely as it sounds — he was a learned man deploying learning — but the question has never stopped being asked, and the tension between Justin's answer and Tertullian's runs through the whole history of Western thought, from the twelfth-century quarrel over dialectic to the modern argument about faith and science.
Around 207 Tertullian went over to the New Prophecy, having concluded that the bishops were becoming too willing to forgive serious sin and too reluctant to be martyred. It is characteristic. The Latin Church's founder was a rigorist who ended outside the communion whose vocabulary he invented, which is a fact the Latin Church has always handled with a certain embarrassment.
And in Carthage, on 7 March 203, the same church produced the document that stands beside the letter from Lyons: the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity. Vibia Perpetua was a well-born young woman of about twenty-two with an infant at the breast; Felicity was her pregnant slave. The central section of the text is Perpetua's own prison diary her father's visits, his pleading, his rage, his final collapse into grief; the baby brought to her in the cell; her visions of a ladder guarded by a dragon and of herself stripped and turned into a male gladiator to fight an Egyptian in the arena.
It is the earliest surviving writing by a Christian woman, one of the earliest by any woman in the ancient world, and the note it strikes is not hysteria but a formidable, almost administrative calm. Asked at the end whether she is a Christian, she says she is; her father is beaten in front of her; she records that she felt the blow as if she had been struck herself. She and Felicity died in the arena at Carthage during games for the emperor's birthday, and the Church of Africa read her diary aloud in the liturgy for two centuries afterwards, until Augustine had to remind his congregation that she was not on a level with scripture.
At the other end of the Mediterranean, in the intellectual capital of the ancient world, Christianity was doing the opposite of what it did in Carthage. It was making peace with Athens.
Alexandria had the greatest library in existence, a Jewish community of enormous size and sophistication that had produced Philo's allegorical synthesis of Moses and Plato, a tradition of textual scholarship developed over four centuries on the text of Homer, and a philosophical scene about to produce Plotinus. It also had, by the 180s, a Christian school — the Didaskaleion — which appears to have begun as a private catechetical class for converts and became something much more.
Its first known head was Pantaenus, a converted Stoic of whom we know almost nothing except that Clement thought him the best of his teachers and that he is said to have travelled as a missionary as far as "India." He was succeeded around 190 by Titus Flavius Clemens or Clement of Alexandria and Clement is the first Christian writer who is unmistakably an intellectual of the Greek world writing from inside it rather than at it.
His three major works form a deliberate progression, and the progression is itself the argument. The Protrepticus is an exhortation addressed to pagans, urging them out of idolatry; the Paedagogus, the Tutor, takes the new convert and instructs him in the astonishingly practical details of Christian living — how to eat, how to bathe, how to laugh, how to sleep, what to wear, how to conduct a marriage — on the principle that the Word who converts also domesticates; and the Stromateis, the Miscellanies, is an unsystematic, deliberately unruly collection of "carpet-bags" of material for the advanced, ranging across Greek philosophy, scripture, ethics and the higher reaches of the spiritual life.
Clement's central claim is Justin's, developed and made structural. Philosophy, he says, "was given to the Greeks as their own kind of covenant, a stepping-stone to the philosophy which is according to Christ"; it was to the Hellenes what the Law was to the Jews, a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ (Clement, Strom. 1.5). God gave Greece Plato as he gave Israel Moses, and both gifts came from the same hand.
The implications of that sentence are hard to overstate. Clement is asserting that pagan learning is not merely permissible as a tool but positively providential as a preparation; that the truth in Homer and Plato is God's truth, owned by no one; and therefore that the Christian scholar's task is to gather it in. His own writing is saturated with quotations from some three hundred classical authors, many of whom we know only because he quoted them. The Christian tradition of preserving, copying and teaching the pagan classics the tradition that carried Greek and Latin literature through the collapse of the Western empire in the monasteries, and handed it back to the Renaissance intact has its charter here and in Justin. The men who thought they were rescuing antiquity from the Church in the fifteenth century were reading manuscripts the Church had spent a thousand years copying because Clement of Alexandria had told it to.
Clement also produced the first sustained Christian treatment of what we would now call social ethics, in a tract on the rich young ruler titled Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved? His answer was that the renunciation demanded is of the attachment, not necessarily of the property, and that wealth is an instrument whose use determines its moral character. This is the beginning of a very long Western argument about property, stewardship and obligation which runs through the medieval canonists to the modern debates about capitalism. He was, characteristically for his city, a moderate.
In 202 the persecution reached Alexandria and Clement left. Among the dead was a man named Leonides, beheaded and his property confiscated, leaving a widow and seven children. The eldest, aged about seventeen, had written to his father in prison urging him not to change his mind on the family's account, and had to be prevented from going to the authorities himself — his mother hid his clothes. His name was Origen, and he is the greatest mind the early Church produced.
Most of Origen's work belongs to the third century and to the next folio, but the shape of it must be sketched here because it is the culmination of everything Alexandria had been building. He took over the catechetical school at eighteen. He learned Hebrew almost unheard of among Greek Christians and compiled the Hexapla, a monumental parallel edition setting the Hebrew text, a Greek transliteration of it, and four Greek translations in six columns across the page, so that the disputes with the synagogue could be conducted on the evidence. That is the first work of critical biblical scholarship in history, and it took him something like twenty-eight years. In On First Principles he attempted what Irenaeus had not: not a rule of faith defended, but a complete speculative account of God, creation, freedom, the fall of souls, providence and final restoration, explicitly labelling which parts were the Church's settled teaching and which were his own inquiry the first work of theology in the sense a modern university means the word. In Against Celsus he answered, point by point and seventy years late, the most formidable pagan critique ever written, and preserved it in the process. He produced commentaries and homilies on almost every book of the Bible. And he ended, in his late sixties, tortured under the Decian persecution in a manner calculated to keep him alive, and died of it.
Some of his speculations the pre-existence of souls, the possible final restoration of all things including the devil were condemned three centuries after his death, and his reputation has been contested ever since. It does not much matter. The method he established, which is that the sacred text can and must be studied with the full apparatus of critical scholarship and that inquiry is an act of devotion, is one of the foundations on which the university would eventually be built.
Meanwhile, in Rome, the Church discovered that it now had the capacity to break itself.
We left Polycarp and Anicetus in the 150s, disagreeing about the date of Easter and parting in peace. The churches of Asia kept the Pascha on the fourteenth of Nisan — the Passover date, whatever day of the week it fell on and were called Quartodecimans, Fourteenthers, for doing so. Rome and most of the rest kept it on the following Sunday. For forty years this had been an untidiness that everyone lived with.
Around 190 the bishop of Rome, Victor, decided that they would not live with it any longer. Victor was probably an African, and he is the first Roman bishop of whom we can say with some confidence that he conducted the church's business in Latin. He wrote to the churches of the world asking them to hold synods on the question and they did, in Palestine, in Pontus, in Gaul, in Osrhoene, in Corinth, all of them reporting back in favour of Sunday. Asia did not. Polycrates of Ephesus replied on behalf of his province with a magnificent piece of defiance, listing the "great luminaries" who slept in Asia and had kept the fourteenth Philip and his daughters, John who leaned on the Lord's breast, Polycarp, Melito and adding that he had gone through the whole of scripture and was not frightened by threats, for those greater than he had said that we must obey God rather than men. He was, he noted, sixty-five years old and had seven relatives who had been bishops before him.
Victor's response was to attempt to excommunicate the entire province of Asia.
It is the first time anything of the sort had been attempted. And what happened next is as significant as the attempt: the other bishops would not have it. Eusebius records that "this did not please all the bishops," who urged Victor to consider peace and unity and love, and that the sharpest rebuke came from Irenaeus at Lyons who agreed with Victor about Sunday and told him roundly that he had no business cutting off whole churches for observing a custom handed down to them, reminding him of the presbyters before Soter who had differed among themselves and kept the peace, and of Anicetus and Polycarp parting in friendship. "The difference in the fast," Irenaeus wrote, "confirms the agreement in the faith" (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 5.24). Eusebius adds, drily, that Irenaeus was well named, since his name means peaceful.
Victor backed down, or at any rate the excommunication came to nothing. Two things had nonetheless been established. Rome had claimed a right of supervision over the practice of the universal Church, which would be claimed again, with steadily increasing confidence, for the next thirteen centuries. And the episcopate as a body had checked it. The whole future argument about the constitution of the Church — primacy against collegiality, the see of Peter against the council of bishops, and by a long derivation the argument about sovereignty and consent in Western political thought — is visible in miniature in the correspondence of the year 190.
Rome in these decades was becoming something else, too. Under Commodus, the appalling son of Marcus Aurelius, the Church enjoyed an odd interval of favour: the emperor's mistress Marcia was sympathetic, and Eusebius reports that many in Rome of wealth and family came over with their whole households (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 5.21). Marcia obtained from Victor a list of Christians condemned to the mines of Sardinia and had them released, among them a former slave and financier named Callistus who would end up bishop of Rome himself. Not everyone was so lucky: Apollonius, a Roman senator, was denounced by his own slave around 185, made a reasoned defence before the Senate, and was beheaded. Persecution in this period was arbitrary in the fullest sense, it depended on who complained, who governed, and who had the emperor's ear.
Commodus was strangled in his bath on the last day of 192. The civil war that followed put on the throne an African from Lepcis Magna, Septimius Severus, whose advice to his sons was reportedly to enrich the soldiers and despise everyone else.
The early part of his reign was not hostile to Christians; Tertullian says Severus had been cured by a Christian named Proculus and kept him in the palace, and that he protected men and women of rank who were Christians from the fury of the mob (Tertullian, Ad Scap. 4). But from about 202 there is a wave of persecution in Egypt and North Africa, the wave that killed Leonides in Alexandria and Perpetua in Carthage. The Historia Augusta, a late and famously unreliable source, says that Severus forbade conversion to Judaism and to Christianity under heavy penalties. Whether such a rescript existed has been seriously doubted, Timothy Barnes made the influential case that it did not, and that the persecutions of 202–3 were local outbreaks of the familiar kind (Barnes, 1968; Frend, 1965, takes the other view).
The dispute matters less than the direction of travel, which is unmistakable. The pattern of the second century had been reactive: a mob complains, a governor acts, the emperor is asked for a ruling and gives one that changes nothing. By the turn of the third century, the state was beginning to notice that the sect was no longer negligible. It had spread into the propertied classes, the army and the imperial household. It had its own literature, its own schools, its own officers, its own finances, its own courts of arbitration, and a network of communication linking Gaul to Egypt. It was, in the Roman sense of the word, a corpus illicitum — an unauthorised corporation — of a size and coherence the empire did not tolerate in anyone.
And the logic that would eventually be applied to it was already implicit in the popular reaction to the plagues of Marcus's reign. If the empire's health depended on the favour of the gods, and if the gods were withdrawing their favour, then a body of people who systematically refused to sacrifice was not an eccentricity but a public danger. Once an emperor with a systematic mind put those two premises together and acted on them across the whole empire in a single coordinated order, the position of the Church would change entirely. That emperor was Decius, and he was fifty years away.
Summary
By 205, then, the Church had changed in kind, not merely in size.
It had a theology, one coherent account of God, the world, humanity and history, worked out by Irenaeus against the Gnostics, capable of being taught and defended and built upon.
It had a Latin tongue, and with it the beginnings of a Western way of thinking about God in the categories of law, obligation, covenant and satisfaction, which would shape the moral and legal imagination of Europe for fifteen hundred years.
It had an academy at Alexandria, committed to the proposition that rigorous critical scholarship and the classical inheritance of Greece belonged inside the household of faith and not outside it.
It had a procedure: the synod, by which a dispute too large for one congregation could be referred to an assembly of office-holders deliberating under a rule.
It had a growing consciousness of Rome as a centre and the first demonstration that the rest of the Church would answer back.
And it had, in Lyons and Scilli and Carthage, discovered what it would look like when the thing was tested. A slave girl on a stake in the Rhône valley; twelve villagers with a satchel of Paul's letters in a Carthaginian courtroom; a young mother writing in a prison cell and guiding the shaking hand of a novice gladiator to her own throat. The Roman state had not yet understood what it was dealing with. It was about to spend the third century finding out.
Next in the series: Folio VI will take the story into the third century — the empire's descent into fifty years of civil war, plague and near-collapse; the first genuinely empire-wide persecutions under Decius and Valerian and the agonising question of what to do with those who had bought their way out; Cyprian of Carthage and the birth of a theory of the Church; the rise of the desert; and the road to the Great Persecution and to Constantine.
Ancient works are cited in the text by author and standard abbreviated title with book and section numbers (for example, Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 4.20.7), which is the convention in classical and patristic scholarship and allows any edition to be used.
Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs (1972) in Musurillo, H. (ed. and trans.) The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Clement of Alexandria (1885) Exhortation to the Heathen, The Instructor, The Stromata and Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved?, in Roberts, A. and Donaldson, J. (eds.) Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 2. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co.
Eusebius of Caesarea (1989) The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine. Translated by G. A. Williamson, revised by A. Louth. London: Penguin Classics.
Galen (1968) On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body. Translated by M. T. May. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Irenaeus of Lyons (1885) Against Heresies, in Roberts, A. and Donaldson, J. (eds.) Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 1. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co.
Irenaeus of Lyons (1997) On the Apostolic Preaching. Translated by J. Behr. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press.
Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons (1972) in Musurillo, H. (ed. and trans.) The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Also preserved in Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 5.1–3.)
Marcus Aurelius (2011) Meditations: Books 1–6. Translated with commentary by C. Gill. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Origen (1973) On First Principles. Translated by G. W. Butterworth. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.
Origen (1953) Contra Celsum. Translated with introduction and notes by H. Chadwick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Passion of Perpetua and Felicity (1972) in Musurillo, H. (ed. and trans.) The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Tertullian (1885) Apology, On the Prescription of Heretics, Against Praxeas and To Scapula, in Roberts, A. and Donaldson, J. (eds.) Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volumes 3 and 4. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co.
Tertullian (1931) Apology and De Spectaculis. Translated by T. R. Glover. Loeb Classical Library 250. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Barnes, T. D. (1968) 'Legislation against the Christians', Journal of Roman Studies, 58(1–2), pp. 32–50.
Barnes, T. D. (1985) Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study. Rev. edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Behr, J. (2013) Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Birley, A. R. (1987) Marcus Aurelius: A Biography. Rev. edn. London: Batsford.
Brown, P. (1988) The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Brown, P. (2013) The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000. 10th anniversary rev. edn. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Chadwick, H. (1966) Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition: Studies in Justin, Clement and Origen. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Chadwick, H. (1993) The Early Church. Rev. edn. London: Penguin Books.
Crouzel, H. (1989) Origen. Translated by A. S. Worrall. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
Dunn, G. D. (2004) Tertullian. London: Routledge.
Ferguson, E. (2013) Church History, Volume One: From Christ to Pre-Reformation. 2nd edn. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
Frend, W. H. C. (1965) Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Frend, W. H. C. (1984) The Rise of Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Harnack, A. von (1908) The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries. 2nd edn. Translated by J. Moffatt. London: Williams and Norgate.
Holland, T. (2019) Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. London: Little, Brown.
Lane Fox, R. (1986) Pagans and Christians. London: Viking.
Littman, R. J. and Littman, M. L. (1973) 'Galen and the Antonine Plague', American Journal of Philology, 94(3), pp. 243–255.
Markschies, C. (1999) Between Two Worlds: Structures of Earliest Christianity. Translated by J. Bowden. London: SCM Press.
Minns, D. (2010) Irenaeus: An Introduction. London: T. & T. Clark.
Osborn, E. (2001) Irenaeus of Lyons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Osborn, E. (2005) Clement of Alexandria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rankin, D. (1995) Tertullian and the Church. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Salisbury, J. E. (1997) Perpetua's Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman. New York: Routledge.
Schaff, P. (1884) History of the Christian Church, Volume II: Ante-Nicene Christianity, A.D. 100–325. 3rd edn. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Stark, R. (1996) The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tabbernee, W. (2007) Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments: Ecclesiastical and Imperial Reactions to Montanism. Leiden: Brill.
Trevett, C. (1996) Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trigg, J. W. (1998) Origen. London: Routledge.
• New Advent: Church Fathers — the complete Ante-Nicene Fathers, including Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria and Origen, and Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History.
• Early Christian Writings — translations of the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons, the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs and the Passion of Perpetua.
• Tertullian Project — texts, translations, bibliography and manuscript information for the whole Tertullianic corpus.
Part of a series found here
In the spring of 132 AD, in the hill country of Judaea, a man named Simon ben Kosiba raised a revolt against Rome. Within months he had cleared the province of Roman troops, struck his own coinage bearing the legend "Year One of the Redemption of Israel," and taken for himself the title Nasi — Prince. The greatest rabbi of the age, Akiva ben Joseph, is said to have looked at him and applied to him the oracle of Balaam from the Book of Numbers: a star shall come forth out of Jacob. From that moment Simon ben Kosiba was Simon Bar Kokhba, Son of the Star. He was, Akiva declared, the Messiah.
There were, by then, Jews living in those same villages who believed the Messiah had already come, a hundred years earlier, and had been executed by a Roman prefect on a hill outside Jerusalem. They could not follow Bar Kokhba without denying everything they held. Justin Martyr, writing twenty years afterward and in a position to know, records what happened to them: in the war, Bar Kokhba "ordered Christians alone to be subjected to dreadful punishments, unless they should deny Jesus as the Messiah and blaspheme him" (Justin, 1 Apol. 31). It is a small notice, easily passed over. It is also one of the hinges on which the history of the West turns. For two generations, Jews and Christians had been quarrelling family — bitterly, in the way only families quarrel, but within one house. In the ruins of Bar Kokhba's rebellion, the house divided for good.
This folio follows the Church through the decades either side of that rupture — roughly 130 to 165 AD. They are years in which Christianity ceased to be a Jewish sect and became something else; years in which its deadliest enemies turned out to be not emperors but its own brilliant, restless insiders; and years in which, for the first time, Christians stopped talking only among themselves and began to argue their case in public, in Greek, on the philosophers' own ground. Everything that would later be called Christendom — a faith with a fixed book, a defined doctrine, a universal claim, and an intellectual nerve — takes recognisable shape in these thirty-five years.
Hadrian was, by the standards of Roman emperors, a civilised man: a traveller, a builder, a Hellenist, a lover of Greek art and Greek boys, the architect of the Pantheon's dome and of the wall that still crosses northern Britain. He was also entirely incapable of understanding why the Jews were as they were. Somewhere around 130, touring the eastern provinces, he resolved to rebuild the wreckage of Jerusalem — untenanted since Titus levelled it sixty years before — as a proper Roman colonia. It would be called Aelia Capitolina, after his own family name, Aelius, and after Jupiter Capitolinus, to whom a temple would rise on the platform where the God of Israel had been worshipped. Cassius Dio adds that this, more than anything, provoked the war (Dio, 69.12). A later tradition, harder to date securely, holds that Hadrian also banned circumcision as a species of mutilation, sweeping up the Jews in a general prohibition aimed at nobody in particular — which, if true, is the more revealing detail. To Hadrian, the covenant cut into Jewish flesh was simply barbarism. To the Jews it was the covenant.
The revolt that followed was not the ragged despair of 70 AD. It was organised, funded, supplied, and led — letters in Bar Kokhba's own name, recovered in the 1950s and 1960s from caves in the Judaean desert near the Dead Sea, show him requisitioning palm fronds and citrons for the Feast of Tabernacles and tearing strips off subordinates for slackness. He held Judaea for something close to three and a half years. Hadrian had to recall his best general, Sextus Julius Severus, all the way from Britain to deal with it, and the Romans, having learned the cost of set-piece battles against zealots, ground the rebellion down by siege, blockade and starvation, fortress by fortress, cave by cave. The last stronghold, Betar, fell in the summer of 135. Dio's casualty figures — 580,000 Jewish dead by the sword alone, 985 villages destroyed, fifty fortified strongholds razed, the country left so depopulated that wolves and hyenas howled in the towns — are the sort of round numbers ancient historians reached for, but no modern scholar doubts the scale of the catastrophe (Schäfer, 2003). Akiva himself was flayed alive with iron combs. Judaea, as a name, was abolished; Hadrian renamed the province Syria Palaestina, deliberately resurrecting the name of Israel's ancient Philistine enemies, and Jews were forbidden on pain of death to enter Jerusalem at all.
For the Church, the consequences were as decisive as they were unintended.
The first was the extinction of the Jerusalem mother church as a Jewish body. Since the beginning, the congregation in Jerusalem had been led by men of Jesus's own family and people — James the Just, then his cousin Symeon, then a line of bishops whom Eusebius lists as fifteen in succession, "all of whom were of the circumcision" (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 4.5). After 135, with all Jews barred from the city, the church of Aelia Capitolina reconstituted itself under a bishop named Marcus, a Gentile, presiding over a Gentile congregation in a Roman colony. The link between the Christian movement and the city, the people, and the family from which it had sprung was not merely loosened. It was legally severed.
The second was the hardening of the boundary from the other direction. Rabbinic Judaism, deprived of Temple, land, priesthood and now even its holy city, rebuilt itself around Torah, synagogue and school — at Yavneh, then Usha in Galilee, in a labour of consolidation that would issue around 200 AD in the Mishnah of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi. That rebuilding had no room for Jews who confessed a crucified Messiah. The Birkat ha-Minim, the malediction against sectarians inserted into the daily synagogue prayer — a text whose precise date and original targets remain genuinely disputed among scholars (Boyarin, 2004) — had the practical effect, wherever and whenever it was applied to them, of making it impossible for a Christian Jew to pray in a synagogue without cursing himself.
There is a third symptom, quieter and more poignant than either. For three centuries the Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora had read its scriptures in the Septuagint, the Greek translation made in Alexandria under the Ptolemies and revered as almost miraculously inspired. In the second century, Jews abandoned it — because Christians had made it their own, quarrying it for prophecies of Jesus, above all Isaiah's parthenos, the virgin who would conceive. New, more literal Greek versions were commissioned: Aquila, a proselyte working around 130 under Akiva's influence, then Symmachus and Theodotion. Judaism gave up a book rather than share it. Justin, debating the Jew Trypho around 160, accuses the rabbis of cutting passages out of scripture; Trypho accuses the Christians of inventing them. Two communities were now reading the same texts as strangers, each convinced the other had stolen the keys.
What remained in between — the Jewish Christians, the Ebionites who kept the Law and denied the virgin birth, the Nazoreans who kept the Law and did not — dwindled into curiosities, described by later heresiologists with a puzzled distaste and eventually squeezed out of existence between a Church that found them too Jewish and a Judaism that found them not Jewish at all. Tom Holland's observation about the longer arc holds precisely here: the faith that would conquer the West did so as the bearer of a Jewish inheritance it had comprehensively appropriated and from which it had been comprehensively evicted (Holland, 2019).
By 140, in other words, a Christian was no longer a kind of Jew. He was something new in the world, and would now have to explain to that world exactly what.
It is a peculiarity of this period that the Church was growing fastest precisely where we can see it least. There were no chroniclers of mission, no statistics, no roll of converts. What survives is fragmentary and oblique: a scrap of papyrus, a hostile aside, an epitaph.
The scrap of papyrus is worth dwelling on. Now catalogued as P52, held in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, it is a piece of a codex page not much larger than a credit card, bearing a few lines of the trial of Jesus before Pilate from the eighteenth chapter of John's Gospel. It was bought in a job lot in Egypt. Palaeographers have dated it, with the usual caution and a genuine range of opinion, to somewhere in the first half or middle of the second century. What matters is not the precise decade but the place: a gospel written at Ephesus around the 90s was being copied and read, within a generation or two, by ordinary Christians in a provincial town in Middle Egypt, far up the Nile, in a church for which we have not one name, not one bishop, not one story. There is no account of the evangelisation of Egypt. There is only the evidence that it had happened.
The same pattern repeats across the map. By the middle of the second century there were Christians in Edessa beyond the Euphrates, at the edge of Roman power, where the faith would develop in Syriac rather than Greek and produce its own austere, poetic tradition. There were Christians in Carthage and the towns of Roman Africa, in numbers sufficient that within a generation the province would produce Tertullian and a Latin theological vocabulary. There were Christians in Lyons and Vienne in the Rhône valley — Greek-speaking immigrants from Asia Minor, following the trade routes — whose community would be mauled in the pogrom of 177 and whose survivors would produce Irenaeus. There were Christians in Rome in sufficient numbers and sufficient variety that the city had become, by the 140s, a kind of clearing-house where every teacher with a doctrine to sell came to try his fortune.
How many? The honest answer is that nobody knows, and every figure offered is an extrapolation. The sociologist Rodney Stark's much-discussed model, which assumes a steady growth rate of roughly forty per cent per decade — the rate observed in modern new religious movements — yields something on the order of forty thousand Christians in the entire empire by 150 AD, out of perhaps sixty million people (Stark, 1996). Keith Hopkins reached comparable orders of magnitude by a different route (Hopkins, 1998). Both would put the Christian population in our period at well under one in a thousand. That estimate, if anything, sharpens the point rather than diminishing it: a movement of that size, with no wealth and no political friends, was already causing enough disturbance to generate imperial correspondence, philosophical refutations, and satire in Athens.
The mechanism of that growth was almost entirely unspectacular. It moved along the ordinary channels of ancient social life — households, workshops, trade networks, families — carried by artisans and traders and slaves rather than by orators (MacMullen, 1984). A weaver was converted, and his apprentices heard about it. A wife was converted, and the household followed, or did not, and either way the neighbours noticed. What the neighbours noticed, above all, was behaviour. The pagan satirist Lucian of Samosata, writing around 165 with the intention of mocking Christian credulity, describes how the Christians of Asia Minor mobilised on behalf of an imprisoned charlatan, Peregrinus: their officials camped outside the prison, old women and orphans were brought to the gates, funds poured in from the churches of the province. "The poor wretches," Lucian sneers, "have convinced themselves that they are going to be immortal and live for all time, in consequence of which they despise death and even willingly give themselves into custody, most of them. Furthermore, their first lawgiver persuaded them that they are all brothers of one another" (Lucian, Peregr. 13). He meant it as a joke about gullibility. Read from the other side, it is a description of an insurance network, a welfare system and a burial society available to people the Roman world had left to fend for themselves — and this, more than any argument, is what the Church had to sell. Galen, the greatest physician of the age and no friend of Christian reasoning, conceded around the same time that Christians displayed a contempt of death, a self-discipline in food and sex, and a pursuit of justice which put them "not inferior to genuine philosophers."
That was the quiet growth. It would not have mattered in the slightest, however, had the Church not simultaneously survived a crisis that came from inside.
Sometime in the mid-second century, a Christian teacher in Alexandria or Rome or Antioch — we can rarely be certain which — would gather a circle of the more serious sort of convert and explain to them that the account of things they had received at baptism was true as far as it went, but that it was the version for beginners.
The real story, they would be told, was this. The material world is not the good creation of a good God. It is a mistake, or a catastrophe, or a prison. Beyond and above it lies the Pleroma, the Fullness, an unfolding hierarchy of divine emanations, or Aeons, issuing from an utterly unknowable Father. In the depths of that hierarchy something went wrong: the last and youngest Aeon, Sophia — Wisdom — reached beyond her station, and from her fall and anguish there came into being a botched, ignorant, arrogant lesser deity, the Demiurge, the Craftsman. It was he who made the material cosmos out of the debris of her error. It was he who, in his ignorance, announced from Sinai that he was the only God and there was no other. It was he, in short, who is the God of the Jews and of the Old Testament. Trapped in the matter he fashioned are sparks of the higher, true divinity — and the mission of Christ, a being of the Pleroma who put on the appearance of a body as a man puts on a coat, was to come down through the spheres and wake the sleepers with a word of knowledge. Not to atone. Not to die, exactly; the divine cannot die. To inform. And the knowledge — gnosis — is what saves those capable of receiving it.
Everything about this was attractive, and everything about it was fatal.
It was attractive because it solved, at a stroke, the problem that most tormented an educated ancient mind: how can the world be so full of filth, pain and stupidity if a good God made it? The Gnostic answer — he didn't — was elegant. It was attractive because it flattered: humanity divides into the pneumatics, the spiritual, who are saved by nature; the psychics, ordinary church Christians muddling along on faith, who might scrape through; and the hylics, the merely material, who cannot be saved at all. It was attractive because it was sophisticated, esoteric, allegorical, and required a teacher — it had all the charm of an initiation. And it was attractive because it dispensed with the embarrassments of the Christian story: the messy Jewish scriptures with their jealous, local, thundering God; the scandal of a deity with a digestive system; the vulgarity of a crucifixion.
Its exponents were not cranks. Basilides taught in Alexandria in the 120s and 130s and wrote a twenty-four-volume commentary on the gospel. Valentinus, an Egyptian trained in Alexandria and a man of formidable literary gift, came to Rome around 140 and was, according to Tertullian, so plausible a figure that he expected to be made bishop of the city and turned against the Church in part out of pique at being passed over (Tertullian, Adv. Val. 4). Whether or not that is fair, the fact that the story could be told at all says something: Valentinus was not an outsider hammering on the door. He was an insider who very nearly held the keys. His pupils — Ptolemy, Heracleon, Theodotus — produced the first sustained commentaries on the Gospel of John in Christian history. When Irenaeus set out to refute them a generation later, he complained that they were everywhere, and that the trouble with their teaching was not that it was obviously alien but that it was so nearly the same: they used the same scriptures, the same words, the same rites, and rearranged the pieces into a different picture, as a man might break up a mosaic portrait of a king and reassemble the stones into a dog (Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 1.8.1).
For most of Christian history these people were known only through the polemics of their enemies, which is not an ideal way to know anybody. That changed in December 1945, when two Egyptian peasants digging for fertiliser near the village of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt broke open a sealed jar containing thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices — fifty-two Coptic texts, most of them previously unknown, including the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Philip, the Apocryphon of John, and the Gospel of Thomas with its hundred and fourteen sayings of Jesus stripped of narrative, death and resurrection alike. The discovery transformed the field, and the scholarly argument it set off is still running. Elaine Pagels made the case that these texts represent a suppressed, more inward and less authoritarian Christianity, and that the victory of the bishops was a victory of institution over insight (Pagels, 1979). Others have questioned whether "Gnosticism" is a coherent category at all, rather than a heresiological construct imposed on a very miscellaneous body of writing (Williams, 1996; King, 2003). Bart Ehrman's framing — that the second century contained not one Christianity but many, and that the one we inherited won a contest whose outcome was not foreordained — has become the popular version of the story (Ehrman, 2003).
It is worth being clear-eyed about what was actually at stake, because the modern instinct is to see a power struggle and stop there. The dispute between the Gnostic teachers and the bishops was not, at bottom, about authority. It was about whether matter is good. A faith which held that the Creator is the Father of Jesus Christ, that he made the world and called it good, that the Word became flesh and that flesh was raised, was committed — whether it yet understood the implications or not — to the propositions that bodies matter, that history is going somewhere, that the physical universe is orderly because a rational God ordered it, and that the poor and the illiterate are as savable as the clever. A faith which held that matter is wreckage, history an accident, the body a tomb, and salvation the private property of those with the intellectual equipment to receive secret knowledge was committed to something else entirely. The Church that emerged from this fight is the Church that would, a thousand years later, build universities to study the creation and hospitals to repair bodies. That was not an accident of temperament. It was the second-century decision, working itself out.
Of all the men who tried to remake Christianity in these decades, the most formidable was not strictly a Gnostic at all, and he came nearer to success than any of them.
Marcion was from Sinope, a port on the Black Sea coast of Pontus, and he was rich — a shipowner, by all accounts, in an age when that meant something. Around 139 he came to Rome and joined the church there, making it a gift of two hundred thousand sesterces, a sum that would have bought a senatorial estate. For perhaps five years he worked within the Roman congregation. In July of 144 the Roman presbyters examined his teaching, expelled him, and returned his money.
What they had heard was this. The God of the Old Testament is real, and he is exactly as described: a God who commands wars, orders massacres, hardens hearts, punishes children for the sins of fathers, and administers a stern and mechanical justice. Marcion had no interest in allegorising these passages away, as educated Jews and Christians alike had been doing for two centuries. He read them literally, and he believed them, and he found them intolerable. This Creator — just, harsh, jealous, and thoroughly competent within his sphere — is not the Father of Jesus Christ. The Father of Jesus Christ is a wholly unknown, wholly alien God of pure mercy, who had no dealings whatsoever with this world or its maker until, out of sheer unmotivated love, he sent his Son into it to buy out of it those who would believe. The Law and the Gospel have nothing to do with one another; Marcion set them out in parallel columns in a book called the Antitheses to prove it. The Old Testament is not a Christian book and never was. The Jewish Messiah is a different figure altogether, still to come, and welcome.
This was a gospel of grace pushed to a point of incandescent purity, and its appeal is not hard to feel. Adolf von Harnack, the greatest of the liberal Protestant historians, wrote a whole book arguing that Marcion was the only man in the second century who had genuinely understood Paul, and very nearly said in print that he had been right (Harnack, 1921). It is worth noticing what such a Christianity would have cost: a faith cut loose from the Hebrew scriptures loses the doctrine of creation, the goodness of the material order, the whole moral architecture of prophetic justice, and any reason to believe that the God who saves is the same God who made — which is to say, it loses the ground on which the West's convictions about history, law, nature and the dignity of the body were actually built.
Marcion's second move was the one with the longer consequences. Having decided which God he believed in, he had to decide which books. He concluded that the apostles, being Jews, had corrupted the gospel with Judaising additions almost immediately, and that only Paul had grasped the truth. So he assembled a scripture: one Gospel — Luke's, which he associated with Paul, edited to remove the nativity and everything else that rooted Jesus in Israel — and ten letters of Paul, similarly purged. Eleven books. No Old Testament. Nothing else.
It was, so far as we can tell, the first fixed, closed, published Christian canon in history. And it was a scandal.
The Church's reaction was immediate and furious — Polycarp's "first-born of Satan," flung at Marcion in the street, was the mild end of it — but the important reaction was slower and structural. Until 144 the Church had possessed authoritative writings without needing a list. It had four gospels and a bundle of letters, read in worship, quoted in argument, universally assumed. Marcion made assumption impossible. To say he was wrong required saying what right looked like: which gospels, which letters, and on what ground. Hans von Campenhausen put the paradox in a sentence that has been quoted ever since — the Christian Bible was created in response to Marcion's creation of one (von Campenhausen, 1972). That has been qualified since; John Barton and others have shown that the fourfold gospel and the Pauline corpus were already functioning as scripture well before Marcion, and that the process was more organic than a single reaction can explain (Barton, 1997). But the timing is difficult to argue with. The Church had been carrying its scriptures the way a family carries its furniture — without an inventory — until a man walked in and started throwing pieces out of the window.
By the middle decades of the second century, four things had happened to Christian texts which, taken together, amount to the formalisation of a scripture.
The first was the settling of the fourfold gospel. Justin, writing in Rome in the 150s, refers repeatedly to "the memoirs of the apostles" — apomnemoneumata, a word chosen with an eye to his pagan readers, who knew Xenophon's Memorabilia of Socrates — and says these were "drawn up by his apostles and those who followed them," which precisely covers two apostles (Matthew, John) and two followers (Mark, Luke). He records that they are read aloud at the Sunday assembly alongside the prophets (Justin, 1 Apol. 66–67). He does not argue for them; he assumes them. A generation later Irenaeus would famously insist that there could be neither more nor fewer than four gospels, since there are four zones of the world and four winds (Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 3.11.8) — an argument that persuades nobody today but which tells us that by then the number four was a fact requiring justification rather than a proposal requiring support.
The second was the impulse to harmonise, and its rejection. Around 170, Justin's own pupil Tatian took the four and wove them into a single continuous narrative, the Diatessaron — "through the four" — which became the standard gospel text of the Syriac-speaking churches for over two centuries until bishops laboriously suppressed it in favour of the separate four. The instinct was natural: why four accounts, with their awkward divergences, when one would do? The Church's eventual answer — that it would keep the four, discrepancies and all, rather than tidy them into a single official version — is one of the more remarkable decisions in its history, and not the decision an institution primarily interested in control would have made.
The third was technological, and is easy to overlook. The ancient book was a scroll. Christians, almost uniquely and almost from the start, wrote their scriptures in codices — leaves stacked and bound at the spine, the form of every book you have ever held. Of the surviving second- and third-century Christian biblical manuscripts, the overwhelming majority are codices, at a period when pagan literary texts remain overwhelmingly rolls (Roberts and Skeat, 1983). The reasons were probably practical — a codex is cheaper, since you write on both sides; it is portable, concealable, and it can be searched by flipping rather than unrolling twenty feet of papyrus; and, crucially, it can hold four gospels or all of Paul between two covers, which a scroll cannot. The physical form and the idea of a collection reinforced each other. The same manuscripts show another distinctively Christian habit, the nomina sacra: the words for God, Lord, Jesus and Christ contracted to their first and last letters and marked with an overbar, a scribal reverence found across the empire from Egypt to Rome, evidence of a shared bookish culture linking congregations that had never met.
The fourth was the emergence of a rule by which disputed texts could be judged. It could not simply be antiquity, since the heretics produced ancient-sounding books by the dozen — gospels of Thomas, of Peter, of Judas, of Mary; acts of every apostle; correspondence of Paul that Paul never wrote. Nor could it be inspiration felt in the reading, since Valentinus's Gospel of Truth is a beautiful piece of writing. What the Church settled on, over the following decades, was a triple test that Irenaeus would articulate but which was being worked out in our period: apostolic origin, use in the churches that could trace their foundation to apostles, and agreement with the regula fidei, the rule of faith — the baptismal confession, handed down publicly and identically in Rome and Smyrna and Carthage and Lyons, that there is one God, maker of heaven and earth, and one Lord Jesus Christ, born, suffered, died, risen. Against a movement whose whole claim rested on secret knowledge transmitted privately to an elite, the Church's counter-claim was almost aggressively banal: whatever the apostles knew, they told everybody, out loud, and here are the cities where they told it and the men who remember.
Until about 125 AD, every Christian text we possess was written by Christians for Christians. Then something changes. Beginning in Hadrian's reign, Christians start addressing the emperor.
The first, so far as Eusebius knew, was Quadratus, who presented a defence to Hadrian around 125. A single paragraph survives, and it is a striking one: the works of our Saviour, he writes, were always present, for they were true — those who were healed, those who rose from the dead, were seen not only when healed and raised but were always present, and remained so for a considerable time, some of them even surviving to our own day (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 4.3). It is an argument from living memory, made at the very last moment such an argument could be made. Aristides of Athens wrote a similar Apology in the same era, lost for centuries and then recovered — in Syriac, from a monastery on Sinai, in 1889 — in which he divides mankind into barbarians, Greeks, Jews and Christians, and argues that only the fourth have got God right, before turning to the evidence of Christian conduct: they do not commit adultery, they rescue exposed infants, they fast to feed the poor, and when one of them dies they escort him as though he were moving house.
But the figure who matters most, and the one who gave the century its intellectual shape, is Justin — called ever afterwards Justin Martyr, since that is how he ended.
He was born around 100 in Flavia Neapolis in Samaria, modern Nablus, of pagan Greek parents, in the country of the Samaritan woman at the well, and he came to Christianity by way of philosophy rather than the synagogue or the household. He tells the story himself at the opening of the Dialogue with Trypho, and it is the first Christian intellectual autobiography: a young man tries a Stoic, who knows nothing of God and thinks it unnecessary; a Peripatetic, who asks for his fee up front; a Pythagorean, who demands he first master music, astronomy and geometry; and finally a Platonist, under whom he flourishes, expecting daily to behold God face to face, "for this is the goal of Plato's philosophy." Then, walking by the sea, he meets an old man who asks him a series of quiet questions about the soul and the vision of God, dismantles his Platonism, and directs him to the Hebrew prophets, who "both glorified the Creator and foretold events which were to happen." Justin was converted — and, crucially, did not stop being a philosopher. He kept the philosopher's cloak, the pallium, for the rest of his life, opened a school in Rome in lodgings above the baths of a man named Martinus, and taught Christianity as what he called it in so many words: the only sure and profitable philosophy.
That claim is the hinge of the whole apologetic enterprise, and Justin backed it with an idea of genuine audacity. The Logos, the Word, the divine Reason through whom John's Gospel says all things were made, is not confined to Judaea or to the years of Tiberius. Every human being possesses a seed of it — the logos spermatikos, the seminal Word — and therefore whatever any man has ever thought truly, he thought by participation in the same Reason that became flesh in Christ. From which Justin drew the conclusion that made him famous and, to some of his contemporaries, alarming: "Those who lived in accordance with reason are Christians, even though they were called godless — such as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus and men like them" (Justin, 1 Apol. 46). Socrates, executed by Athens on charges of atheism and corrupting the young, was a Christian before Christ, and had died for the same reason and at the hands of the same ignorance.
Consider what that single move accomplishes. It gives the Church a warrant to plunder the classical inheritance rather than burn it. It makes philosophy a preparation for the gospel as the Law had been for the Jews. It means that when Christians eventually inherit the libraries of the ancient world, they will have a theological reason to copy Plato and Aristotle rather than scrape the parchment clean. Every medieval scriptorium copying pagan authors, every scholastic quoting "the Philosopher," every Renaissance humanist who thought he was recovering antiquity against the Church when he was in fact using the texts the Church had preserved for him, is downstream of Justin's decision that truth is not the property of the party that utters it. It is not too much to say that the survival of classical civilisation into the Western future was made theologically possible in a rented room above a Roman bathhouse in the 150s.
Justin's practical arguments to the emperor were shrewder than they are often given credit for. Antoninus Pius was being asked, in the First Apology, to notice that his officials were punishing a name rather than a crime: men were being executed for confessing the word "Christian," while the actual charges — atheism, incest, cannibalism — were never investigated, because everybody involved knew they would evaporate. If we are criminals, Justin says, try us for the crime. If we are not, why does the name alone convict? He then does something no Christian writer had done in public: he describes exactly what happens at a Christian service — the readings, the sermon, the prayers, the kiss, the bread and the cup of wine mixed with water, the collection for orphans, widows, the sick, prisoners and strangers — laying the mysteries open on the reasonable assumption that the truth was less alarming than the rumours.
He was not alone for long. Tatian, his Assyrian pupil, wrote an Address to the Greeks of magnificent bad temper, informing the Hellenes that their philosophy was plagiarised from Moses, who was older than Homer, and their gods a menagerie of criminals; he later drifted into a rigorist sect and out of the Church's good books, but the argument from antiquity — our books are older than yours — became a standard weapon. Melito of Sardis addressed Marcus Aurelius and made, perhaps for the first time, the fateful argument that the Church and the Empire had been born in the same reign and flourished together, so that the emperor's interest and the Christians' were one — an idea with an enormous and not uniformly happy future. Athenagoras and Theophilus of Antioch followed in the 170s and 180s. And somewhere in these decades an unknown writer produced the brief, luminous Epistle to Diognetus, which explains that Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country nor language nor custom, that they live in their own homelands as resident aliens, obey the established laws and surpass them in their own lives, and that what the soul is to the body, Christians are to the world.
Against them the pagan world was beginning to organise a counter-attack of its own. Fronto, the great rhetorician and tutor to Marcus Aurelius himself, wrote a speech against the Christians which survives only in the refutation of it; Lucian mocked them; and around 177, just beyond our window, a Platonist named Celsus produced the True Word, the first serious, informed philosophical assault on Christianity — an attack so effective that Origen was still answering it seventy years later, and preserved most of it in doing so. The argument had been joined, and both sides now knew they were in one.
It would be misleading to leave the impression that these decades were spent entirely in controversy. Underneath the argument, the ordinary life of the congregations was settling into forms that would prove astonishingly durable.
We can see this most clearly in Rome, where the sources happen to cluster. Under the bishops Hyginus, Pius and Anicetus, the Roman church of the 140s and 150s was a loose federation of household congregations, Greek-speaking, presided over by presbyters, with a bishop whose authority was real but nothing like monarchical. It contained Valentinus and Marcion, at least for a while, and also a visionary of quite different temper: Hermas, whose Shepherd — a rambling, earnest, strangely moving series of visions and parables about repentance, addressed to ordinary Christians worried about sins committed after baptism — was so widely loved that for a century some churches read it as scripture. The Muratorian Fragment, an early canon list of disputed date, says Hermas was the brother of Pius the bishop. If so, the Roman church of the 140s was a place where the bishop's brother wrote apocalypses and a shipowner from Pontus was trying to abolish the Old Testament in the next room.
We can see it, too, in a small incident around 155 which deserves to be better known. Polycarp of Smyrna, by now a very old man, travelled to Rome to see Anicetus. The churches of Asia kept Easter on the fourteenth of Nisan, the Jewish Passover date, whatever day of the week it fell on; Rome kept it on the following Sunday. Neither could persuade the other. Polycarp said he had always kept it with John and the other apostles; Anicetus said he must maintain the custom of the presbyters before him. And so, Irenaeus records, "they communicated with each other" — Anicetus invited Polycarp to celebrate the Eucharist in his own church as a gesture of honour — "and in the Church Anicetus conceded the Eucharist to Polycarp, manifestly out of respect, and they parted from each other in peace" (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 5.24). A generation later, the same dispute would end in excommunications. In 155 it ended in an old bishop being handed the chalice by his host. It is a glimpse of an institution that had not yet decided how much uniformity it required, and it is worth remembering when the period is described only in terms of the hardening of orthodoxy.
And we can see it, finally, in the way this generation died. Around the year 156 — the date is disputed, and some scholars prefer 167 — Polycarp himself was hunted down during a festival at Smyrna after the crowd in the stadium had bayed for him by name. The account written by his own church and circulated to others, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, is the earliest document of its kind and set the pattern for everything in the genre that followed. Brought before the proconsul and urged to swear by the emperor's fortune and revile Christ, the old man answered: "Eighty and six years have I served him, and he has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?" He was burned in the stadium; his people gathered his bones, "more precious than jewels," and kept the anniversary.
Justin followed, in Rome, around 165, tried before the urban prefect Junius Rusticus — a Stoic philosopher and a tutor of Marcus Aurelius, which is its own small irony — together with six of his students, one of them a slave. The court record survives, terse and administrative. Rusticus asks what doctrines Justin practises; asks where they assemble; asks whether he really supposes that he will ascend into heaven if beheaded. Justin says he does not suppose it, he knows it. They were scourged and beheaded.
The men who had argued that Christianity was the true philosophy died in the manner of Socrates, and everybody in the empire capable of reading a court transcript could see the parallel. That was the point. It had been the point since Ignatius wrote to the Romans half a century earlier. What is new by 165 is that the Church could now say why, in Greek, to an emperor, out of a book it had learned to define — and could show that the argument and the dying came from the same conviction.
By the middle of the 160s, then, the pieces are on the board. Christianity has been evicted from the Jewish world and has stopped trying to get back in. It has faced down, though not yet finished off, an internal reinterpretation which would have cut it loose from creation, history and the body. It has been forced by an enemy to say what its scriptures are, and has begun to say so. It has planted a claim to the whole intellectual inheritance of Greece. And it has discovered that its most effective public argument is the willingness of its members to be killed rather than say four words.
What it has not yet faced is a persecution mounted by the Roman state as a matter of deliberate imperial policy, empire-wide, with the machinery of government behind it — nor an empire in such crisis that it would need someone to blame.
Next in the series: Folio V will carry the story from Marcus Aurelius to the eve of the third century — the pogrom at Lyons in 177, the emergence of Irenaeus and the first systematic Christian theology, the Latin church of Tertullian and the school of Alexandria under Clement and Origen, and the beginnings of a persecution no longer left to the whim of provincial governors.
Ancient works are cited in the text by author and standard abbreviated title with book and section numbers (for example, Justin, 1 Apol. 46), which is the convention in classical and patristic scholarship and allows any edition to be used. The editions and translations consulted are listed below under Primary Sources. Modern works are cited Harvard style by author and date.
Aristides of Athens (1891) The Apology of Aristides. Translated by J. R. Harris and J. A. Robinson. Texts and Studies 1.1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cassius Dio (1925) Roman History, Volume VIII: Books 61–70. Translated by E. Cary. Loeb Classical Library 176. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Epistle to Diognetus (2003) in Ehrman, B. D. (ed. and trans.) The Apostolic Fathers, Volume II. Loeb Classical Library 25. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Eusebius of Caesarea (1989) The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine. Translated by G. A. Williamson, revised by A. Louth. London: Penguin Classics.
Hermas (2003) The Shepherd, in Ehrman, B. D. (ed. and trans.) The Apostolic Fathers, Volume II. Loeb Classical Library 25. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Irenaeus of Lyons (1885) Against Heresies, in Roberts, A. and Donaldson, J. (eds.) Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 1. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co.
Justin Martyr (1885) First Apology, Second Apology and Dialogue with Trypho, in Roberts, A. and Donaldson, J. (eds.) Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 1. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co.
Lucian of Samosata (1936) The Passing of Peregrinus, in Lucian, Volume V. Translated by A. M. Harmon. Loeb Classical Library 302. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Martyrdom of Polycarp (2003) in Ehrman, B. D. (ed. and trans.) The Apostolic Fathers, Volume I. Loeb Classical Library 24. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Musurillo, H. (ed. and trans.) (1972) The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Greek and Latin texts with translation of the Martyrdom of Polycarp and the Acts of Justin and Companions.)
Robinson, J. M. (ed.) (1990) The Nag Hammadi Library in English. 3rd, rev. edn. Leiden: Brill.
Tatian (1885) Address to the Greeks, in Roberts, A. and Donaldson, J. (eds.) Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 2. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co.
Tertullian (1885) Against Marcion and Against the Valentinians, in Roberts, A. and Donaldson, J. (eds.) Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 3. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co.
Yadin, Y. (1971) Bar-Kokhba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Second Jewish Revolt against Imperial Rome. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. (Publication of the Judaean Desert letters and documents.)
Barnard, L. W. (1967) Justin Martyr: His Life and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barton, J. (1997) The Spirit and the Letter: Studies in the Biblical Canon. London: SPCK.
Boyarin, D. (2004) Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Brown, P. (1988) The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Brown, P. (2013) The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000. 10th anniversary rev. edn. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Chadwick, H. (1966) Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition: Studies in Justin, Clement and Origen. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Chadwick, H. (1993) The Early Church. Rev. edn. London: Penguin Books.
Droge, A. J. (1989) Homer or Moses? Early Christian Interpretations of the History of Culture. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr.
Ehrman, B. D. (2003) Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ferguson, E. (2013) Church History, Volume One: From Christ to Pre-Reformation. 2nd edn. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
Frend, W. H. C. (1965) Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Frend, W. H. C. (1984) The Rise of Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Gamble, H. Y. (1995) Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Harnack, A. von (1921) Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs. [English translation: (1990) Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God. Translated by J. E. Steely and L. D. Bierma. Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press.]
Holland, T. (2019) Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. London: Little, Brown.
Hopkins, K. (1998) 'Christian Number and Its Implications', Journal of Early Christian Studies, 6(2), pp. 185–226.
Hurtado, L. W. (2006) The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
King, K. L. (2003) What Is Gnosticism? Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Lieu, J. M. (2015) Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
MacMullen, R. (1984) Christianizing the Roman Empire, A.D. 100–400. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Metzger, B. M. (1987) The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pagels, E. (1979) The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House.
Roberts, C. H. and Skeat, T. C. (1983) The Birth of the Codex. London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy.
Schaff, P. (1884) History of the Christian Church, Volume II: Ante-Nicene Christianity, A.D. 100–325. 3rd edn. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Schäfer, P. (ed.) (2003) The Bar Kokhba War Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Stark, R. (1996) The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Von Campenhausen, H. (1972) The Formation of the Christian Bible. Translated by J. A. Baker. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Williams, M. A. (1996) Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
● Early Christian Writings — translations of Justin, Tatian, Aristides, the Epistle to Diognetus, the Martyrdom of Polycarp and the Nag Hammadi texts.
● New Advent: Church Fathers — the complete Ante-Nicene Fathers series, including Irenaeus, Justin and Tertullian's Against Marcion.
● The Gnostic Society Library: Nag Hammadi Library — full English texts of the 1945 Coptic codices.
● Tertullian Project — texts, translations and bibliography for Tertullian and the second-century apologists.