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History of Christianity

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High Middle Ages (1000–1300)
The High Middle Ages is no longer seen as a unified pious "golden age" of Christendom. Instead, scholars see Latin Christendom as composed of a variety of Christian ideals and societies that overlapped and competed with each other and inherited folklore, as well as secular intellectualism, across a wide spectrum of belief. Institutional centralization, the spread of Mendicant monks, the international universities, and the printing press promoted both the uniformity and the diversity of this age. The clergy, and the laity, became "more literate, more worldly, and more self-assertive" and they did "not always agree with the decisions made by the hierarchy". This era produced religious devotion, crusade, inquisition, scholasticism, mysticism and renaissance.

As population doubled, the church became a church of the town and the village more than the city. The parish church emerged and became one of the fundamental institutions of medieval Europe. Fundamentals that affected all Christian lives - "the meaning of the sacraments, the just price and reward for labour, the terms of Christian marriage, the nature of clerical celibacy and the appropriate lifestyle for priests" - were conceived in the twelfth century. Purgatory became an official doctrine, and in 1215, confession became required for all.

The church of the High Middle Ages became a more imposing institution with a more formal theology. "The educated men of the church advised kings, managed ecclesiastical estates, negotiated treaties and acted as judges". More than any other single characteristic, the papacy of this period can be characterized by its focus on canon law. Popes from 1159 to 1303 were predominantly lawyers not theologians. Church law became a complex system of laws in which earlier principles of equity and universality were largely left out.

National monarchies supported different approaches to religious devotion for their own people, often using their own vernacular languages.

Church and State
Instead of rejecting state authority, bishops became grateful toward Roman authority, and this change in attitude proved to be critical to the further growth of the Church.

After a disagreement, Pope Boniface VIII issued the bull Unam Sanctam asserting again that, since "one sword must be under the other," the church must be supreme. This was followed in 1303 by the excommunication of Philip the Fair of France. Philip responded by sending his men to arrest the Pope.


 * This is all late middle ages stuff


 * this is copied from an older version of History of Christianity but all this content has since then been deleted. I don't know how to designate that - please don't violate me for this!  I may not use any of it.

Quoting: between 1100 and 1520 The church's entanglement with the secular and lay exploitation were both deeply rooted and difficult to overcome.


 * use. his? tKings and noblemen frequently drafted competent bishops to improve their own governments leaving those diocese without spiritual leadership.

Civilization itself was changing its character. The Old Order was being challenged.


 * The influence of educated and wealthy lay people increased as the influence of clergy waned.


 * Practices meant to Christianize people had become "burdensome" and contributed to discontent.

By the 1300s, nations were becoming more formidable opponents than they had been in the 1100s when the struggle over papal superiority first took political form.


 * Evidence of decline in papal power can be found by 1302.

Franciscans provided evidence against Pope John XXII (1316-1334) as the failings of a succession of popes contributed to criticism.

The combination of catastrophic events, both within the church and in those events beyond its control, undermined the moral authority and constitutional legitimacy of the church opening it to local fights of authority and control.


 * end quote

In High Middle Ages????





High Middle Ages (1000–1300)

In the High Middle Ages, the church became a more imposing institution. It asserted itself to establish the limits of state over the church and developed a more formal theology. The Third Lateran Council in 1179 determined that only a Cardinal could become Pope. Purgatory became an official doctrine and confession a required practice in 1215.

E. Ann Matter writes that, during this period, "The western church becomes more of a “church of the town,” as the parish church emerges as one of the fundamental institutions of medieval and Old Europe. Both clergy and the laity become "more literate, more worldly, and more self-assertive" and "do not always agree with the decisions made by the hierarchy".

The High Middle Ages is no longer seen as a unified pious "golden age" of Christendom. Instead, scholars see Latin Christendom as composed of a variety of Christian ideals and societies that overlapped and competed with each other, as well as inherited folklore, and the new secular intellectualism of the university elites, across a wide spectrum of belief.


 * Key disputes between 1100 and 1500, shaped by what new ideas and procedures, made the church into a more formidable institution???

Church critics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had challenged papal authority. Kings and councils asserted their own power, while vernacular gospels created challenges amongst the laity. The new mendicant friars, university elite and bureaucratic clerics were central to developing early modern concepts of power, authority and orthodoxy.

Beginning with the Portuguese, peaceful trade and not conquest reintroduced the slave trade to Europe.



Late Middle Ages (1300–1500)
In Europe of the Late Middle Ages, people experienced plague, famine and war. There was social unrest, urban riots, peasant revolts and renegade feudal armies. The many great calamities of the "long fourteenth-century" led folk to believe the end of the world was imminent. This sentiment ran throughout society and became intertwined with anticlerical and anti-papal sentiments. Attitudes and behaviours against the clergy identify the period from around 1100 to 1349 as an era of “anticlerical revolution".

Multiple strands of criticism of the clergy between 1100 and 1520 were voiced by clerics themselves. Such criticism condemned abuses and sought a more spiritual, less worldly, clergy. However, there is a constancy of complaints in the historical record that indicates most attempts at reform in this period failed. Tensions and conflict spread even as church-related activities increased. The drive to have a say in the work and privileges of the church drove more and more lay people (king, burghers, patron, and parishioners) to involve themselves. There were "more canon lawyers, more friar preachers, more relics and shrines, more local devotions."

By the fourteenth-century, papal power had stopped increasing. Kings had substantively gained and consolidated power for themselves and their nations allowing them to become more formidable opponents to papal supremacy than they had been in the 1100s. The combination of catastrophic events, both within the church and those beyond its control, undermined the moral authority and constitutional legitimacy of the church opening it to local fights of authority and control. Diarmaid MacCulloch adds that, "Even before Luther, challenges were being posed by some of the best minds in Europe".

Use Van Engen's chapter in the Handbook for Late Middle Ages


 * need reference that says pope was threatened with removal of troops

Before 1478, neither the medieval church nor the secular kings possessed the kind of social-political apparatus, sufficient material resources, or the political support needed for persecution to become truly institutional or regularized.

Exposure to other cultures through colonialism impacted all of Europe.

After about 1540 the world of the church changed decisively as central authority hardened, and humanist and protestant reformers disassembled Christendom. The early modern era was an era of political and scientific revolution. Humanism and the supremacy of reason develop. Slavery, which had been virtually eliminated in the west in the Middle Ages, returns in a new form. After Reformation, Catholic and Protestant began developing differing religious legacies.


 * By 1500, kings had freed their national churches from papal control. The church had faced serious problems since the fourteenth century as anti-clericalism rose.







The office of cardinal first appeared in the eighth-century.

By the 12th century, the Third Lateran Council declared that only a Cardinal could become Pope.

Key institutions
By the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, the parish church emerged as one of the fundamental institutions of medieval and Old Europe. Formed from local needs, the parish church became the center of medieval village life. By the thirteenth century, "parish" could refer indiscriminately to both village and church.

In the 12th century, the Third Lateran Council declared that only a Cardinal could become Pope. During the same century, the curia received its first major structural reform.



The Catholic church is self-defined as both a human institution with government and structure, and a spiritual institution called the "body of Christ" (1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12, Ephesians 1 and Colossians 1). Shane Dwyer 2019 Catholic Church Structure - An Introduction at

1123: First Ecumenical Lateran Council. 1139: Second Ecumenical Lateran Council, promulgated a rule forbidding diocesan or secular priests to marry. 1215: Fourth Ecumenical Lateran Council opened by Pope Innocent III.

1216: The Order of Preachers (Dominican Order) founded by Dominic is approved as a body of Canons Regular by Pope Honorius III on December 22

1229: Inquisition founded


 * Find refs for councils and inquisition!!!

1231: Charter of the University of Paris granted by Pope Gregory IX.

1254: Pope Innocent IV grants to Oxford University a charter (via the papal bull, Querentes in argo).

Add citation to growth of lay piety?? Macdonald page 35

Zwingli Macdonald page 36


 * USE

By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there were agreements between the papacy and various monarchs with the French king in particular having an incredible degree of control over the church.



Following the era of Innocent III (1198–1216), the Papacy stood as the highest ecclesiastical authority in the West for nearly two centuries, yet the degree of the Pope's practical influence is being called into question by twenty-first century scholars.

Add:

W. H. C. Frend in his Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church and R. A. Markus in a characteristically distinguished slim volume, Christianity in the Roman World, have made clear that:"The parting of the ways between east and west springs from the ways in which Christianity adapted itself to its Roman environment... In the west, the church maintained its 'twice-born' attitudes. It stood to one side of the saeculum [age]. West Roman society and culture, first shunned as demonic, was firmly entzaubert [disenchanted] by Augustine: no mystique but the most sinister was allowed to rest upon it. Later, when this society was in the hands of barbarians, it sank to the status of a passive and potentially refractory laity dominated by a clearly defined clerical elite. The contrast with eastern Christianity, whose apologists had early acclaimed a harmony between Christianity and Greek culture, and whose emperors, from Constantine onwards, had negotiated endlessly for the unanimity of church and state, stands out in pointed contrast to that situation."

Of the eighty councils convened in Frankish Gaul between 511 and 768 (the ascension of Charlemagne to the Frankish throne), rulers convoked 60% of them."



11 - Russian piety and Orthodox culture 1380–1589 pp 251-275 By Stella Rock

12 - Art and liturgy in Russia: Rublev and his successors pp 276-301 By Lindsey Hughes

15 - Russian piety and culture from Peter the Great to 1917 pp 348-370 By Chris Chulos

In societies owing their Christianity mainly to Byzantium, certain themes and motifs recur.




 * add to Crusades:

last=Kennedy|first=Hugh|chapter=The Mediterranean Frontier: Christianity face to face with Islam, 600–1050|pages=178-196



The nature of Byzantine empire and ideology had left their foreign policy open to misinterpretation by Western Europeans who saw those actions as dishonorable and failing to support the defense of Jerusalem and the Holy Land.

After 1204, emperor, patriarch and City still presided on the Bosporus for two more centuries.

Edited by Thomas F. X. Noble, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Julia M. H. Smith, University of Glasgow Publisher: Cambridge University Press Online publication date: March 2010 Print publication year: 2008 Online ISBN: 9781139054225 DOI: https://doi-org.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521817752
 * Checking every chapter for mention of East. in Volume 3: Early Medieval Christianities, c.600–c.1100

have already used in Antiquity section By Peter Brown
 * Introduction: Christendom, c. 600 pp 1-18

Late Roman Christianities Philip rousseau

also already have

The emergence of Byzantine Orthodoxy, 600–1095 andrew louth already have



Beyond empire I: Eastern Christianities from the Persian to the Turkish conquest, 604–1071 Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev - already have

Non-Chalcedonian churches and the Church of the East: two Christologies in synopsis Divergent conceptions of the Incarnation, which were articulated in opposition to the theology adopted by the empire, stood at the core of the distinctive doctrinal and cultural identities of the churches of Syria, Egypt, Persia, and Armenia and were to play a decisive role in their history during the seventh century.



H. A. Drake writes that Constantine’s greatest accomplishment was creation of “a consensus in favor of a broadly inclusive monotheism under which both Christians and most pagans could live in harmony.”

History of Christianity



taking Jerusalem in 614 and annexing its eastern provinces, giving the Shah access to divisions among the Christians that he could exploit.

Cambridge History of Christianity Volume 3: Early Medieval Christianities, c.600–c.1100 Edited by Thomas F. X. Noble, Julia M. H. Smith

Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev Beyond empire I: Eastern Christianities from the Persian to the Turkish conquest, 604–1071|year=2008|isbn= 9781139054225|doi=10.1017/CHOL9780521817752

Quote: "towards the end of the sixth century, two chief kinds of ecclesiastical communities could be distinguished in the Byzantine East, each with its own clergy.1 On the one hand, there were the churches centered on the hellenophone cities, which were characterized by their special bond to the ongoing theological elaborations of Byzantium which perpetuated classical Greek philosophical categories. On the other, there were the churches attached above all to the ascetic traditions moulded in the two cradles of Christian monasticism, Egypt and Syria." monophysites - distinguish them from the “dyophysites” who professed Christ “in two natures"  which was the Church of the East, called Nestorian By the end of the sixth century, in spite of the imperial persecutions, the miaphysites constituted the majority in the Syriac-speaking regions

The hellenophone Chalcedonian communities, by contrast, represented the majority in western Syria and Palestine and especially in the coastal cities.

The situation in Egypt was comparable to Syria: the Chalcedonian faith had been accepted or enforced mainly in the cities, which were culturally and linguistically Greek.

The Coptic monks, however, supported by the rural population, were largely opposed to the innovative Christological language introduced by the Council of Chalcedon. The rural areas of Upper Egypt were all miaphysite strongholds.During the second half of the sixth century, Coptic missionaries advanced up the Nile, allowing the miaphysite faith to become the prevalent form of Christianity in Nubia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia.

The Syro-Mesopotamian desert, through which ran the frontier between Byzantium and the Persian Empire, was inhabited by Arab tribes

END QUOTE

Bundy D. Early Asian and East African Christianities. In: Casiday A, Norris FW, eds. The Cambridge History of Christianity. Cambridge University Press; 2007:118-148.

Christianity was the ‘glue of empire’ within Byzantium.

Late Antiquity:

Religious houses acted as major socioeconomic forces, and the papacy was seated firmly in Rome, but the most influential figure in any local church of this period was probably not the Pope. The greatest influence would have been held by each house's, or church's, proctor as the administrator of daily business.

Calling himself "the apostles' equal" and "bishop for external affairs," Constantine and his successors attempted to fit the Church into their political program. The Church resisted. Ambrose launched attacks against imperial tyranny. Pope Gelasius I formulated the principle of "two powers", and development of the papacy defended the western Church's freedom from State control. But intersection with the secular state in fourth century Roman Empire boosted the church's authority and wealth. Over the next 800 years, the Catholic Church gradually changed from a politically independent institution to one circumscribed by secular governments.

For the next 800 years, the church struggled between recognition of the State as willed by God and defense of church's autonomy and spiritual superiority to the world.


 * East page xv

ancient church struggled for freedom
 * Constantine

Use: ????

ADD to Early Middle ages "With the twelfth century, the principles and norms from Roman law and canon law melded to form the ius commune. Neither purely ecclesiastical nor purely secular, it shaped legal structures still relevant today."

"Compilers of canonical collections of the early Middle Ages, for example, would draw directly upon Roman legal norms.

The Breviarium Alarici, also known as the Lex Romana Visigothorum, was a collection of various Roman legal texts published and compiled at the request of the barbarian Alaric II, king of the Visigoths (484–507), in 506.

Roman civil law legislated on ecclesiastical matters and, as such, paved the way for the symbiotic relationship between the two entities.

Conciliar policy regarding the Jews at the Councils of Clermont (535) and Mâcon (581/583) added the phrase aut tolonari (“or toll collectors”) to previous conciliar legislation that had forbidden Jews from being iudices (judges) over Christian peoples. The additional wording further clarified, and restricted, Jewish influence.

ADD To Late Antiquity " transition of the Catholic Church from a politically independent institution to one circumscribed by secular governments and relegated almost exclusively to social policy begins with Rome.

intersection with the secular state boosted the church's authority


 * Roman and canon Law intertwined - The Church’s social and political influence progressively grew from the fourth century and was its strongest between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. This was in large part because canon law possessed an outward focus, intersecting at different levels with the secular realm.


 * To Modern era????

Canon law has left an indelible mark on Western society's understanding of judicial procedure and due process, marriage and the importance of consent, private ownership and the right to dispose of it through last wills and testaments, problems inherent in corporate organization and structure, the proper relationship and extent of the corporate head’s power over the members, and whether members could impose constraints on the head. Canonists were integral to the concept that a state’s leader must be subject to the same rules as its citizens.

every Pope of significance between 1159 and 1303 was a trained canon lawyer

colonialism: https://qr.ae/ps7fpM

Scholars of the past thought the Christianization of Western society had advanced in an evolutionary manner. Medieval historians writing in the early twenty-first century speak of periods of sporadic change, periods with discernible patterns of change, and periods of stability, without the whole fitting into an evolutionary process.

Elite Italian families used their wealth to obtain episcopal offices.

Under missionaries:


 * Add Bartolomé de las Casas and the Goa Inquisition



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These sentiments grew as devoted and virtuous nuns and monks became increasingly rare, and monastic reform, which had been a major force, became largely absent. Some claimed the clergy did little to help the suffering, although records indicate a high mortality rate amongst the clerics as many continued to care for the sick. Others claimed it was the "corrupted" and "vice-ridden" clergy that caused what people believed were punishments from God. Gabriel de Mussis decried the clergy and priesthood as a “treacherous and maleficent fellowship,” dogged by nepotism, simony, and selfishness. Popes of the fourteenth century were focused primarily on power and politics.

--

Historian Martin Hengel says the first Christian authors used the religious language of their environment, in the forms of their time, with an authority that did not rest on inspiration but, instead, rested on the truth-claims inherent in the events they describe.

Hengel writes that ancient history is primarily expressed in stories because of the nature of human memory. Memory is structured to retain easily repeatable elements in a narrative framework rather than a chronological sequence of events. According to Hengel, "the construction of a narrative framework presupposes fixed reminiscences or a fixed tradition".

During Jesus' lifetime his sayings were being collected.

page 57, page 63 Paul pages 17 - 18

Early Christian gospels are largely biographical in character. The ancient biography cannot be measured by the standards of a modern one. Quote from page 24 - Jesus created fixed impressions

A modern historian must search with great care for evidence of the historical.

Old text: Christianity remained a Jewish sect for centuries, diverging gradually from Judaism over doctrinal, social and historical differences.

Dimadick's concern:

under twentieth century or decline???

Historian Dana L. Robert has written that missionaries "go out" among those who have not heard the gospel and preach.
 * Don't use?

Alan Neely writes that, "wherever Christianity (or any other faith) is carried from one culture to another, intentionally or not, consciously or not, it is either adapted to that culture or it becomes irrelevant."

In his book Christian Mission, Neely provides multiple historical examples of adaptation, accommodation, indigenization, inculturation, autochthonization and contextualization as the means of successful Christianization through missions. Neely's definitions are these:

Just Another Cringy Username

User talk: Diannaa

Tunica molesta

Leviticus 18

Christianization

Historical reliability of the Gospels Add minority view:

Gathercole, Simon. "The Alleged Anonymity of the Canonical Gospels." The Journal of Theological Studies 69.2 (2018): 447-476.

Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the eyewitnesses: the gospels as eyewitness testimony. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2008.

Work, Telford. "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony." (2008): 290-295.
 * review - excellent

Baum, Armin. "The Anonymity of the New Testament History Books: A Stylistic Device in the Context of Greco-Roman and Ancient Near Eastern Literature." Novum Testamentum 50.2 (2008): 120-142.

Watty, William W. "The significance of anonymity in the Fourth Gospel." The Expository Times 90.7 (1979): 209-212.

Aland, Kurt. "The problem of anonymity and pseudonymity in Christian literature of the first two centuries." The Journal of Theological Studies (1961): 39-49.

Jokinen, Mark. "THE FOUR CANONICAL GOSPELS WERE NEVER ANONYMOUS." McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry 15 (2013): 4.

Beck, David R. "‘Whom Jesus Loved’: Anonymity and Identity. Belief and Witness in the Fourth Gospel." Characters and Characterization in the Gospel of John 461 (2013): 221.

Pitre, Brant. The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ. Image, 2016.

Goswell, Gregory. "AUTHORSHIP AND ANONYMITY IN THE NEW TESTAMENT WRITINGS." Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 60.4 (2017).

Conversion to Christianity

create new history section using Kling and these:







1) Mostly fundy/some evangelical scholars: Bill T. Arnold, Professor of Old Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary; Linda Belleville is Professor of New Testament & Greek at Bethel College; Barry J. Beitzel, Daniel I. Block, Darrell L. Bock is a Humboldt Scholar (Tübingen University in Germany), the author of over 40 books and commentaries; Joyce Baldwin Caine, Trinity College, Bristol; Gregory Beale, is Prof of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary; Craig Blomberg, Prof. Emeritus of NT at Denver Seminary; Gary M. Burge, Wheaton College, his page here refers to him as a NT scholar Philip W. Comfort, NT translator; Peter H. Davids, Raymond Bryan Dillard, Norman Ericson, Mark D. Futato, Prof of OT at Reformed Theological Seminary; Robert P. Gordon, Robert Guelich, Fuller Theological Seminary, NT, George Guthrie, prof of NT at Regent College, Victor P. Hamilton , Harold Hoehner, J Gordon McConville is professor of Old Testament at the University of Gloucestershire; J. A. Thompson, Marianne Thompson, Hugh G. M. Williamson.

(2) scholarly evangelicals N.T.Wright, Donald Guthrie, Bruce Metzger, F.F. Bruce, Gerd Theissen, Frederic G. Kenyon, Alan Millard, James K. Hoffmeier, Harry A. Hoffner, Wayne A. Meeks, Michael R. Licona, Richard Bauckham, Paul Rhodes Eddy, Greg Boyd, Larry Hurtado, Daniel B. Wallace, Craig A. Evans, Andreas J. Köstenberger, Gregory Beale, Ben Witherington III, Michael Bird, Simon J. Gathercole, R. T. France, Raymond E. Brown, James Dunn, Martin Hengel, Chris Tilling, Richard B. Hays, Brant J. Pitre, D.A. Carson, Richard Hess, Bruce Waltke, John H. Walton, K. Lawson Younger Jr. and the incomparable John P. Meier.

3) Those at the far left: Bart Ehrman, Mitchell G. Reddish, David Oliver Smith, Marcus Borg, Johnnie Colemon, Robert W. Funk, John Dominic Crossan, Burton L. Mack, Barbara Thiering, Harold W. Attridge, Lloyd Geering, Stephen L. Harris, Robert M. Price, Karen Leigh King, Maurice Casey, James H. Charlesworth, John S. Kloppenborg, Andrew T. Lincoln, Thomas P. Nelligan, Steve Moyise, and James F. McGrath. Some of these are on the fringes of scholarship and should not be included without a caveat according to WP guidelines.

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Christianization. Peer review/Christianization/archive1

By Philip Jenkins to expand section on Asia per peer review
 * Use The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

and The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity Future of Christianity Trilogy, Philip Jenkins Author	Philip Jenkins

for Quora? Article X of the Formula of Concord: Therefore we believe, teach, and confess that the congregation of God of every place and every time has, according to its circumstances, the good right, power, and authority [in matters truly adiaphora] to change, to diminish, and to increase them, without thoughtlessness and offense, in an orderly and becoming way, as at any time it may be regarded most profitable, most beneficial, and best for [preserving] good order, [maintaining] Christian discipline [and for εὐταξία worthy of the profession of the Gospel], and the edification of the Church. Moreover, how we can yield and give way with a good conscience to the weak in faith in such external adiaphora, Paul teaches Rom. 14, and proves it by his example, Acts 16, 3:21, 26; 1 Cor. 9, 19. (Triglotta p. 1055)

In Conversion to C, add Add Psychology -



-

--

Francis Drake

https://qr.ae/prKaxG

https://qr.ae/prMFtx

https://qr.ae/priiAy

unconscious bias

Resurrection of Jesus

come back and add women to Crusading movement

“Ancient history is a global field”, p.112 MacMullen, Ramsay. "Top Scholars in Classical and Late Antiquity." History of Classical Scholarship 2 (2020): 105-114.

‘The Church’ is a term that implies a coherent organization that could ensure the uniformity of Christian teachings and practices that did not exist before the 800s.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Christianity

Christianization

Christianity and colonialism

Slavery
According to Chris de Wet, slavery suffered a complete systemic collapse in the fifth century due to the lack of supply and demand, however, the decline of slavery had begun in the second century. Slaves began being replaced when "Rome debased the value of citizenship" from 212 because the massive influx of 'barbarian' citizens which allowed the elite to use the coloni instead of having to buy slaves. Renunciation of wealth, the spread of ascetism throughout society, and the proliferation of chastity among slaves may have lessened their sexual use and their reproductive value.

After 212, the massive influx of barbarians who were granted citizenship contributed to the decline of its value: virtually everyone was a citizen. The declining status of citizens was imposed by the elite to prevent the peasantry from gaining economic power of their own.

Slaves began being replaced when "Rome debased the value of citizenship" from 212 into the fourth century and its massive influx of 'barbarian' citizens.

Early Christianity never openly called for the abolition of slavery, and while abolition was not a possibility in Paul's day, many early Christians were slave owners. Christianity's role in slavery has been controversial, but there are ways Christianity does seem to have impacted its practice.

First, Paul's Epistle to Philemon, indicates that Christianity worked to transform the slave-holding household to recognize Christian brotherhood and manumit slaves who had become Christian. Manumission was an established Roman practice, but evidence indicates a higher rate of manumission by the sixth and seventh centuries than there had been in pagan times.

In addition, Christianity adopted slavery as a metaphor claiming that all humans are slaves to sin. In legal historian Joshua C. Tate's view, that metaphor meant that through baptism, all equally became free sons of God as joint-heirs with Christ, and that in turn impacted how people thought and felt about slavery.

Next, historian Chris L. de Wet writes that bishops like John Chrysostom, who were themselves celibate, attempted to "guard the sexual integrity of the slave by desexualizing the slave's body and criminalizing its violation. Slaves were no longer morally neutral ground – having sex with a slave while married was adultery and if unmarried, fornication".

These teachings impacted thinking about slavery. Combined with the proliferation of chastity among slaves who became Christian, and the spread of ascetism through Roman society, this may have lessened their sexual use and their reproductive value making them less desirable as investments.

By the 600s-800s, the enslavement of Christians by other Christians had become taboo in Latin Christendom. It gradually moved from taboo to ideology to an anti-slavery rule of law enforced by a combination of church authorities and secular rulers approved by the church. This had a definite and increasing effect on Christianized barbarians which contributed to Europe becoming a no-slaving zone by the High Middle Ages.

By the eleventh century, slaves could still be brought in from outside at great expense, but all avenues for creating slaves had been shut down within Latin Christendom. In the next two centuries, from 1100 to 1200 at the latest, Latin Christians were prevented from enslaving other Latin Christians by both taboo and legislation, and soon thereafter, ceased to enslave non-Christians as well. About this time, Latin Christendom phased out slavery entirely in favor of serfdom.

Economics was a factor in this, but Jeffery Fynn-Paul writes that "this is remarkable in so far as it was the first time in history that a philosophical system, rather than a political force, maintained the integrity of a large-scale no-slaving zone". It wasn't until the 1500s that slavery was revived in the West.

will need to add :



According to Bayliss, "There is no single law of the Theodosian Code containing a specific order for the destruction of temples that does not include the pretext of sacrifice or idolatry. Even Theodosius’ law of 435, seen by most scholars as the coup de grace of surviving temples only applies to the temples of pagans who had committed illegal acts of sacrifice. It is quite possible that the significance of this law has been overemphasized by scholars".

The Christian Church did not begin from writings. The Christian Church produced those writings - after salvation had been provided by Jesus, and after the church had already begun. Then came the New Testament scriptures about Jesus - out of that environment and context - as a record both inspired and human. As Chrysostum wrote:  Writers and readers of the first century had a belief in the accuracy of these truths but no concept of inerrancy.

Inerrancy is a stumbling block of modern invention, a reactionary response to the early twentieth century. It has no place in honest scholarship or sincere Christian belief. The Moslems put their faith in the absolute inerrancy of their writings. Christians only put that kind of faith in the person of Christ. That's why I feel sorry for Bart Ehrman. His faith was never in the person of Christ. His faith began and ended in a book. True faith in Jesus has never been based on a belief in the inerrancy of a set of writings gathered by men. "There is no basis for supposing the Bible to be inerrant. This was well understood and accepted by the Church Fathers." Too bad that came as such a shock to Ehrman.

Quoting from and Holy Scripture and the Church by Hilarion Troitsky, a Russian Orthodox theologian who died in 1927 at a Gulag.

Arbitrary Break
According to Peter Brown: "The notion that this one short period of time (of under a century) witnessed the 'death of paganism'; the concomitant notion that the end of polytheism was the 'natural' consequence of a long prepared 'triumph of monotheism' in the Roman world; the presentation of the political and religious history of the period as fraught with high drama, as a succession of Christian emperors, from Constantine to Theodosius II, played out their God-given role in abolishing the entire 'error of the Greeks', despite moments of dramatic but hopeless resistance by the devotees of the old gods; and the view that the definitive humiliation of the Jews throughout the Roman world was a further, logical corollary of these momentous events: all this amounts to a 'representation' of the religious history of the age, constructed by a brilliant generation of Christian writers, polemicists and preachers in the last decade of our period.

[This] Christian 'representation' of the history of the fourth century has survived, in thinly laicized form, in the majority of modern narratives of the period. From Gibbon and Burckhardt to the present day... The 'roar' of [this] Christian narrative has made it exceptionally difficult to recapture the mentalities of the fourth and fifth centuries... It is difficult to get behind the deceptive trenchancy of such narrative structures..."

"mopping up"

a drastic stylization of reality.


 * The ecclesiastical authorities claimed instant, supernatural victory.

presupposed a universe filled with serried ranks of invisible powers. An ancient, more compartmentalized model of the universe gave the average Christian freedom of manoeuvre in a society where the stability of the Roman order still rested, at this time, on a tolerance of ambiguity.

The fourth century was the Age of Authority par excellence The most potent social and religious drama in the fourth-century Roman empire was not conversion - it was triumph...

It was sufficient that non-believers should be humble and keep to themselves.

Both Jews and pagans of the fourth century enjoyed a tolerance based on contempt.

there was no determination to use the laws to convert unbelievers. It was sufficient that non-Christians should keep a low profile.

The cumulative effect of the laws was to set in place a religious ordering of society we can follow in the laws the emergence of a language of intolerance shared by the Christian court and by vocal elements in provincial society.

Christian writers and imperial legislators alike drew on a rhetoric of incessant conquest and reconquest that affected every facet of upper-class society.

After the Serapeum was destroyed, Serapis' devotees explained that Serapis had not been defeated, but had instead withdrawn to heaven "saddened that such blasphemy should have occurred in his beloved city". His priests produced prophecies in which Serapis had foretold his own departure, the desecration of his shrine and, even, the victory of the sign of the cross. Years later, Christians as far away as Carthage were impressed by the power of the gods to foretell their own defeat (Aug. De Divinatione Daemonum I.I). What had happened merely reflected on earth a conflict of mighty invisible beings in the heavens. Seen through Egyptian eyes, no further questions needed to be asked, and life could resume as usual.




 * USE:

Rome in early Empire had been "a rare example of real pre-industrial economic growth". Decline began sometime in the late second century, and by late Antiquity, "much of the grandeur was gone. Population had declined, sometimes dramatically, cities were much smaller,  interregional  trade  had  declined,  industrial  and  agricultural  production were less than before, and for many, their standard of living was much lower than before".

USE: The expansion and advancement of many new men into the aristocracy by Constantine meant certain provincials, men from newer families, and those in the imperial bureaucracy more readily approached Christianity. but in the end, Salzman concludes aristocrats were converted in the same manner the masses were: through "the company of their family and friends".

"Modern and ancient historians agree that women were especially responsive to the early Christian movement. It also is agreed that women were accorded considerably higher status within Christian circles than in the surrounding pagan societies".

rewrite section from Religion in ancient Rome

((Imperial cult became a focus of theological and political debate during the ascendancy of Christianity under Constantine I. The emperor Julian failed to reverse the declining support for Rome's traditional cults: Theodosius I adopted Christianity as the Imperial State religion. Officially, the "Imperial cult" was abandoned, along with all cults other than Imperially sanctioned forms of Christianity. )) remove summary as it's all factually incorrect!!

J.N.D. Kelly explains that from the beginning of Christianity, there was a broad outline of doctrine that was seen as sacrosanct; it was accepted by early believers that this doctrine was handed down from those Apostles who had known Jesus and been taught by him. The Old Testament was also immeasurably important. The Apostolic Fathers refer to the Old Testament prophets, and what they regarded as "the teaching derived from Christ's Apostles" to provide the message, or kerygma of the early church.

Ignatius of Antioch (c. 108/140 AD)) writes what becomes doctrinal, that conformity to Jesus and to the Apostles, is the ideal.

Second century church fathers gave different versions of church doctrine than fifth century theologians.

From the Apostolic age to the mid second century, New Testament books were being written, read, copied and passed along, and regularly referred to, but there was no official Christian canon.

The importance of the Old Testament in forming Christian doctrine cannot be over–stated.

Clement was bishop of Rome from 88 to 99 AD. He wrote that the Apostles received the gospel from Jesus; Ignatius sets up conformity to Jesus as he is portrayed in the New Testament writings, and the Apostles, is the ideal.

Gradually, theology asserted the need for more precise understandings of New Testament writings. For some unknown reason, East and West developed their own interpretations independently of one another, with the West being traditional, reiterating the doctrines in the scriptures, and the Eastern church being more adventurous in their thinking. In the Patristic period, Christianity was already developing along more than one doctrinal path.

Christian teachings took moral reasoning out of the province of the educated and made it available to ordinary folk. It included a high moral standard and a powerful ideology which provided symbols for understanding the evil in the world. It offered a sense of the moral structure of the universe. It included an ideology of justice. Christianity had a sacramental system that offered its practitioners repentance from sins, the overcoming of sin, and the eventual overcoming of death itself. These beliefs made Christianity appealing to Romans already dissatisfied with their status quo.

Arbitrary break #2
According to Peter Brown, the harsh penalties of fourth century laws were not intended to be enforced (or force conversion), but were instead meant to re-order society's public practices along religious lines. The threat itself (following the tradition in Roman Law) was seen as a deterrent aimed at certain practices such as animal sacrifice and magic, not as a deterrent of paganism itself. Blood sacrifice was most abhorrent to Christians. Altars used for sacrifice were routinely smashed by Christians who were deeply offended by the blood of slaughtered victims. Public sacrifices disappeared completely in many towns and cities as a result, yet there are many signs that pagans, and paganism (sans sacrifice), continued into the seventh century.
 * Use this:

Competition increased diffusion

 * From 303–312, The Great Persecution of Christians under Diocletian included the burning of scriptures, other Christian books (EH 8.2) and the death and apostacy of many.

Historian Maureen Tilley has written that, during the Great Persecution "When Roman soldiers came calling, some of the [Catholic] officials handed over the sacred books, vessels, and other church goods rather than risk legal penalties" over a few objects. These cooperators became known as traditores. The term originally meant one who hands over a physical object, but it came to mean "traitor". The North African Christians who were the rigorists who became known as Donatists, continued to resent Roman government even after Diocletian left, and refused to accept the traditores back into church leadership positions. Catholics wanted to wipe the slate clean and accommodate the government. There were also different views of baptism and some other practices, but Alan Cameron explains that Donatism was not an actual heresy with differences in important doctrine, it was a schism over differences in practices.
 * 305 Donatist schism begins

As an alternative form of the innovation, Donatism spread rapidly in competition with catholic Christianity. The rivalry between the two factions caused the landscape of Roman North Africa, to be, as Brown describes it, "covered with a white robe of churches"; Donatists and Catholics built church after church, often in the same towns, as they competed with each other for the loyalty of the people. The Donatists survived until the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb in the closing years of the seventh century.

Animal sacrifice and diffusion through adaptation
Blood sacrifice of animals was the element of pagan culture most abhorrent to Christians, though Christian emperors often tolerated other pagan practices. There is a long history of scholarly disagreement over whether or not Constantine, as the first Christian emperor, outlawed public sacrifice.

While many scholars see it as likely that Constantine did so, what is known with some certainty is that, in places that were, as Lavan says, "under the emperor's nose", such as Constantinople and Antioch, the public ritual killing of animals largely disappeared from civic festivals by the time of Julian (361 to 363). Private domestic sacrifices continued to be performed, and away from the imperial court, efforts against sacrifice were not effective or enduring until the fifth and sixth centuries. Still, Bradbury asserts that the complete disappearance of public sacrifice "in many towns and cities must be attributed to the atmosphere created by imperial and episcopal hostility".


 * 370/380 Religious change through "new men": According to Brown, "The fourth century scramble for gold ensured that the rural population was driven" hard. Eighty percent of the population provided the labor to harvest 60% of the empire's wealth, very little of which ever benefitted them. This contributed to civil unrest. Constantine and his successors reached out to the provincial elite to deal with this and other issues, enlarging the Roman Senate's membership from about 600 to over 2,000. This also contributed to unrest and change as the novi homines ("new men", first in their family to serve in the Roman Senate) were more willing to accept religious change. Bishops became intercessors in society, lobbying the powerful to practice Christian benevolence toward those that depended upon them. Money, power and prestige began shifting toward the bishops and the church.


 * 380 – 430 Early Christian habits of giving had originally been part of what had broken down traditional social boundaries. Believers of all classes had contributed what they could to care for the poor, the church, and the clergy thus creating a distinctive Christian style of giving. Strong bonds between the clergy and the rank and file existed, as leaders were not an elite, but were instead teachers and friends. All of this started to change between 380 and 430.

Intolerance of heresy grows

 * In 382, Theodosius I issued a decree of death for all Manichaean monks.

Archaeological evidence from around the entire Mediterranean Basin for the violent destruction of temples in the fourth century is limited to a handful of sites. There are 43 incidents of temple destruction in church records and hagiographical accounts, but only 4 have been confirmed by archaeological evidence. Archaeologists Lavan and Mulryan write that, "As a result of recent work, it can be stated with confidence, that temples were neither widely converted into churches nor widely demolished in Late Antiquity". Archaeologist Richard Bayliss has written that this is significant because it can no longer be argued that a universal 'fall of the temples' was caused by Constantinian legislation.
 * In 391, in Egypt, the Serapeum of Alexandria was destroyed. Several conflicting accounts exist. It is not known with any certainty whether it was destroyed by a Christian mob or by Roman soldiers, but it is known that politics and rioting were involved. Recent archaeology has shown that the Serapeum was the only temple in Egypt destroyed in this period. Alan Cameron describes the Roman temples in Egypt as "among the best preserved in the ancient world". After the temple was destroyed, Serapis' devotees explained that Serapis had not been defeated by the Christian god, but had instead simply withdrawn from the temple and returned to Heaven "saddened that such blasphemy should have occurred in his beloved city". His priests produced prophecies in which Serapis had foretold his own departure, the desecration of his shrine and, even, the victory of the sign of the cross. Years later, Christians as far away as Carthage were impressed by the power of the gods to foretell their own defeat (Aug. De Divinatione Daemonum I.I).


 * 392 Theodosius I issued a law on 8 November 392 that has been described by some as a universal ban on paganism effectively resulting in making Christianity the official religion of the empire. The law does not mention Christianity, and it was addressed only to Rufinus in the East, but it does ban all forms of magic divination including all forms of private domestic sacrifice which had previously been tolerated: the lares, the penates and the genius. The term lares could be used as a synonym for "home" because the god has to take care of everything about the domus thereby guaranteeing its prosperity; the genius was fixed on a person, either the household head or the emperor, and it was the job of the pater familias to establish those domestic shrines; and the penates were the divinities who provided and guarded the accumulated food and possessions of the household. Regular sacrifices were essential. The law of 392 gave the imperial government the right and means to implement a policy against all domestic forms of pagan sacrifice.

In 443, Sozomen writes a history of the church and evaluates the impact of this particular law of 392 as having had only minor significance at the time it was issued. Sacrifice had already largely disappeared by 392.

Moderate tolerance of Jews and pagans, intolerance of heretics

 * 396–430 Augustine of Hippo, becomes bishop of Hippo Regius. He is considered the founder of formal Christian theology.

Acceptance (inclusivity)
The status of Judaism within the Roman Empire had been established as a 'religio licita', a 'permitted religion', before the rise of Christianity. According to recent Jewish scholarship, the approach of toleration it implied was maintained under Christian emperors. Anna Sapir Abulafia writes that, "Most scholars would agree that, with the marked exception of Visigothic Spain (in the seventh century), Jews in Latin Christendom lived relatively peacefully with their Christian neighbors through most of the Middle Ages." Jewish historian Jeremy Cohen says historians generally agree this is because Catholic thought on the Jews before the 1200s was guided by the teachings of Augustine.

In the fourth century, tolerance is exemplified in the writings of Augustine who believed God had chosen the Jews as a special people. He rejected those who said the Jews should be killed or forcibly converted, and argued against them, by saying that Jews should be allowed to live in Christian societies and practice Judaism without interference. The sentiment sometimes attributed to Augustine that Christians should let the Jews "survive but not thrive" is apocryphal and is not found in any of his writings.

Coexistence did occasionally lead to violence between Jews, pagans and Christians, but such outbreaks tended to be local and relatively infrequent. In a comparative study of levels of violence at various stages of Roman society, German ancient historian Martin Zimmermann, concludes there was no increase in the level of violence in the Empire in Late Antiquity under Christian emperors. Brown says pagans were mostly left alone, since Christianity saw them as essentially defeated.

Coercion (exclusivity)
Augustine's support of the state's use of coercion in dealing with the Donatists has led modern liberals to describe him as the "prince and patriarch of persecutors". The harsh realities Augustine faced can be found in his Letter 28 written to bishop Novatus around 416. Donatists had cut out the tongue and cut off the hands of a Bishop Rogatus who had recently converted to Catholicism, also attacking an unnamed count's agent who had been traveling with Rogatus. The empire responded with force and coercion, and Augustine eventually came to support that approach.

He did not support coercion because he believed it could or would convert someone, but he did observe that suffering softened Donatists enough to make reasoning with them possible. Augustine hoped his reasoning would then lead to their voluntary agreement, repentance, and change. Brown says Augustine lived in a harsh, authoritarian age of punitive punishment; nevertheless, this approach to the Donatists demonstrates an eloquent early attempt at advocacy for correction as reformation of the wrongdoer instead of payment for wrongdoing. Augustine's correspondence after 405 contains multiple references to his use of the bishop's right - as well as all his personal influence with Imperial officials - to intercede and make sure the death penalty for Donatists was avoided. The state responded with the law of January 409 which allowed that "the authorities could politely by-pass the 'bishop, the persuader of mercy' in arresting and punishing culprits".


 * 397? Saint Ninian evangelizes the Picts in Scotland
 * 398–404 John Chrysostom becomes Patriarch of Constantinople


 * 314 King Urnayr of Caucasian Albania adopts Christianity as a state religion


 * 318 Arianism: religious change within the innovation. The Arian controversy, which lasted 56 years, was a Christological doctrine which asserts Christ as created by God and not fully equal to God. Bishop John Kaye says it started in Alexandria, between the bishops Arius and Alexander and quickly spread through Egypt and Libya and the other Roman provinces.


 * In 325, from 20 May–19 June, the First Council of Nicaea was called by Constantine to confront and resolve the Arian doctrine and unify Christology. The council decreed the Original Nicene Creed as a result. It also addressed the Easter controversy and passed 20 church laws called Canon laws, such as Canon VII which granted special recognition to Jerusalem. It did not decree or discuss anything about the canon of scripture.

337, 22 May: Constantine the Great dies (baptized shortly before his death)
 * 325 The Kingdom of Aksum (Modern Ethiopia and Eritrea) declares Christianity as the official state religion.
 * 330, 11 May: Constantine moves the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople
 * 337? Mirian III of Iberia (present-day Georgia) adopts Christianity.
 * 360 Julian (called the Apostate by the Catholic church) becomes the last non-Christian Roman Emperor
 * 370–379 Basil the Great becomes Bishop of Caesarea and builds the first public hospital for the poor.

The Edict declared that "the [Nicene] religion that is followed by the Pontiff Damasus and by Peter, Bishop of Alexandria" shall be practiced by all "who are ruled by the administration of Our Clemency" and that those who "sustain the infamy of heretical dogmas" will receive both divine and earthly vengence. The Edict was addressed directly to the people of the city of Constantinople, but it was also valid throughout the Eastern part of the empire – but only the Eastern Empire. Theodosius was emperor only in the East and did not become emperor of both East and West until 392.
 * In 379, Theodosius I ascended the eastern throne, initially spending a year and a half in Thessalonica before moving on to Constantinople.
 * In 380, on 28 February, Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica, the Cunctos populos in Latin.

The Edict opposed Arianism, and attempted to establish unity in Christianity and suppress heresy. German ancient historian Karl Leo Noethlichs writes that the Edict of Thessalonica was neither anti-pagan nor antisemitic; it did not declare Christianity to be the official religion of the empire; and it gave no advantage to Christians over other faiths. It is clear from mandates issued in the years after 380 that Theodosius had made no requirement for pagans or Jews to convert to Christianity. In the Theodosian Code, a collection of laws from this period, Theodosius is credited with including tolerance of Judaism as a protected religion by recording that "It is sufficiently established that the sect of the Jews is prohibited by no law" - (a statement that was later excluded under Justinian).


 * On 24 November of 380, Emperor Theodosius I was baptized. According to Robinson Thornton, Theodosius began taking steps to repress Arianism immediately after his baptism. On 26 November 380, two days after he had arrived in Constantinople, Theodosius expelled the Homoian bishop, Demophilus of Constantinople, and appointed Meletius patriarch of Antioch, and Gregory of Nazianzus, one of the Cappadocian Fathers from Cappadocia (today in Turkey), patriarch of Constantinople.

Salzman writes that, for most of this period, the papacy had only a limited influence, while the senatorial aristocracy played the central role. By the end of this period, these two powers had switched places.


 * 410, 24 August: Sack of Rome by Alaric I and the Visigoths
 * 400 – 415 violent conflict and rioting in Alexandria between Christians and pagans
 * 415 Murder of Hypatia – Ancient writer Socrates Scholasticus presents Hypatia's murder as politically motivated and makes no mention of any role Hypatia's paganism might have played in her death, but other sources of the time say differently. Cameron et al conclude: "Hypatia's murder was the consequence of a complex of factors that had little to do with her religious beliefs, teaching, or standing in the Alexandrian community during the quarter century of her friendship with Synegius".


 * 432 Saint Patrick begins his mission in Ireland. Almost the entire nation is Christian by the time of his death.
 * 440 Reims - musée Saint-Remi (15).JPGator shows were never officially politically abolished, but Christians did speak out against them, and the rising number of Christians in the population caused the popularity of the games to decline. It is likely the games ended from lack of public support before 440.


 * 440–461 Pope Leo the Great: sometimes considered the first pope by non-Catholics.


 * 472 civil war – Roman fought Roman, doing more damage to the city than any previous event. Afterwards, senators returned to Rome determined to support the generals that had taken over. This produced a decade of recovery. It meant a western emperor would never again reside in Rome, but it also meant Roman senators had new power and remained a dominant influence to the end of the fifth century. It also meant these senators played an increasing role in church politics. For example, they helped the Roman papacy assert its independence from the East. This had long-term implications for both groups.


 * 476, 4 September: Emperor Romulus Augustus is deposed in Rome, marked by many as the fall of the Western Roman Empire
 * 482 Justinian I is born
 * 496 Clovis I, King of the Franks, is baptized

Alms for the dead
The weight of wealth after the fifth century turned Christianity in a new direction. What followed was an age of managerial bishops, administrators, and their clerical staffs. Clergy became increasingly separate and different from the laity. In Late Antiquity, people had felt no need for special holy men who could access the divine for them, but the gradual "magicization" of the church's sacraments and devotions also increased the role of "holy men" who could provide that special access. For the laity, that meant that their donations, which had previously been aimed for the maintenance of the church and the poor, instead became donations for the dead to insure their salvation after death.


 * 535–536 Volcanic winter of 536. Unusual climate changes recorded due to the eruption of a volcano.


 * In 535, the eastern emperor Justinian I attempted to assert control over the Italian Peninsula in the Gothic War (535–554) which became a guerrilla war that lasted for 20 years. After fighting ended, surviving senators, along with the pope and clergy of Rome, looked forward to a period of reconstruction. Instead, in 554, Justinian did assert control over Italy through what is known as the "Pragmatic Sanction". The Sanction effectively removed the supports that had allowed the senatorial aristocracy to retain power. The resilience of the Roman senatorial aristocracy began to dissipate as the functions of the Senate declined.
 * 541–542 Plague of Justinian

Herrin asserts that, under Justinian, this new full "supremacy of Christian belief involved considerable destruction". The decree of 528 had already barred pagans from state office when, decades later, Justinian ordered a "persecution of surviving Hellenes, accompanied by the burning of pagan books, pictures and statues" which took place at the Kynêgion. Most pagan literature was on papyrus, and so it perished before being able to be copied onto something more durable. Herrin says it is difficult to assess the degree to which Christians are responsible for the losses of ancient documents in many cases, but in the mid-sixth century, active persecution in Constantinople destroyed many ancient texts.


 * 550 Saint David converts Wales, crucifix introduced
 * 563 Columba goes to Scotland as part of the Hiberno-Scottish mission, in order to evangelize the Picts. He establishes the Iona Abbey
 * 565 Justinian died.

Paula Fredriksen If it weren't for the translation of the Jewish Bible into Greek, and if it weren't for Diaspora Jewish communities living in synagogues, rimming the edge of the Mediterranean, Christianity could not have spread. But Christianity [is] an interpretation of the idea of Israel. And the way Christianity is able to spread as it does is through the lifelines of these Diaspora synagogues. The language of the movement, as soon as we have actual evidence from [it], is Greek. The Bible it refers to is the Greek Bible. The communities that serve as the matrix for the message are synagogue communities, and we get stories in Matthew or stories in John about this particular community being kicked out of the other synagogues. So what do they do? They form their own group. Business as usual, again.

But I think it's really because there is an international population that resonates with these great religious ideas of God as the Creator, of righteousness pouring down like waters, of a Kingdom of God and what that would mean in terms of the way a community socially constitutes itself ... it's because of that, because of Diaspora Judaism, which is extremely well established, that Christianity itself, as a new and constantly improvising form of Judaism, is able to spread as it does throughout the Roman world.

Jews joined the movement because it is a particular articulation of Jewish religious hope seen through this one figure of a redeemer. But it's certainly consistent within what we know as the different options of Judaism. The intriguing thing is why did gentiles join? And, here we have, again, the evidence of Paul's letters in 50. He thought it was miracle. These are gentiles, who are going in and out voluntarily from the synagogue, who, on the basis of the message they're getting about the Son of God being on the verge of coming back, are suddenly enabled -- Paul says, through the Holy Spirit -- [to] abandon idol worship. They make a commitment to this particular community.

If you look at the way the movement spreads sociologically, as opposed to theologically, if you look [at] what distinguishes Christianity from all the other religious options in the Mediterranean, it doesn't distinguish it from Judaism. Both groups meet at least once a week. Both groups have very articulate ethical norms. Both groups have a tremendous ethic of community charity. Both groups have revealed ethical patterns of behavior.... No promiscuity. Don't kill the kids. Don't worship idols. Don't go to whore houses. This whole thing that serves to build up community and create a kind of support system. Also, there's this tremendous religious prestige, thanks to the antiquity of the Jewish Bible, which by entering into the church, these Christians enter into that history as well. That's tremendously prestigious and important. Judaism itself is, for all its peculiarities, considered prestigious because of its antiquity. And so there are lots of reasons, sociologically and practically, why Christianity would appeal.

According to demographics, over half of the population of the empire, including many aristocrats, had already become Christian by the 390s when many of the religious laws threatening armed force were first issued.

Judith Herrin writes that it wasn't until the sixth century Byzantine Emperor Justinian ((r. 527 – 565)), who was the major influence in getting Christian ideals and legal regulations integrated with Roman law, that "the full force of imperial legislation against deviants of all kinds, particularly religious" ones, was actually applied in practice. Justinian revised the Theodosian codes, and introduced many Christian elements into law effectively putting "the word of God on the same level as Roman law, combining an exclusive monotheism with a persecuting authority".

As individuals in a society become more like one another, they show greater sympathy for those among them who suffer, and as a result the law of the society becomes milder.


 * "It was an insight of de Tocqueville that social values and attitudes are intimately related to patterns of social stratification".

MacMullen also emphasizes that the mere existence of such laws doesn't automatically correlate to how often a capital penalty was in fact applied.

Prior to 200 AD, the empire had the death penalty for about 20 crimes. During this same period, there is a steady degradation in the legal right of the individual to decent treatment.

These were all  a  direct  or indirect  result  of  the  substitution of  Monarchy for Republic. Thus the  theory that  the  severity  of  penalties is  related to  the  nature of  government is  indeed confirmed  by  the  case  of  Rome.

Garnsey page 159 The following factors  begin to  explain the  extended use  of  harsher  penalties under the  Roman  Empire: absolutist  tendencies in  government and the  growth of a ruler cult;  the  increased  activity  but  continued  inefficiency  of  the  central  administration  in  the sphere  of  law  enforcement;  the  removal  of  limitations  within  the judicial system through the substitution of flexible for rigid and formalized procedures, and  the  expansion  of  the  criminal  law. These were all  a  direct  or indirect  result  of  the  substitution of  Monarchy for Republic. Thus the  theory that  the  severity  of  penalties is  related to  the  nature of  government is  indeed confirmed  by  the  case  of  Rome.

the downgrading of the  position of  the  humble citizen virtually to  that  of the  free alien  was  a development of  the  first  century  A.D. (The  poor  citizen  was  favored above the  alien if both were defendants  on the same charge. Garnsey 152

The references  in  the  legal  sources to  the exemption  of the  provincial  elite  from "plebeian" penalties  begin in  the  early  second century and are scattered through the Antonine and Severan periods. They testify to  the  desire  of  the  central  government  to  protect  this  group (there  were sound  political  and  economic  as  well  as  social  reasons  for  doing  so) and  to  the practical difficulties  involved  in achieving  this Garnsey 153

The reforms which might seem relevant to  the  present theme  include the disappearance of  the  penal powers  of  a  husband over  his  wife,  the  placing of legal  restrictions  on  the power of  discipline  of a  father  over his child,  and the protecting  of  slaves  against  overharsh  punishment by cruel masters. It has been thought  that  these  and  other  reforms  came  about  largely  as  a  result  of  the humanizing influence of  Stoicism  and  Christianity. 154

Late Antiquity comprises the end of empire. It can also be viewed as a kind of cultural frontier, and frontier situations push regimes to limit ambiguities, and define power more openly and actively, while at the same time transforming the basis of that power and the knowledge that underpins it.

"Religion has the power to alter social practice in fundamental ways". Therefore, the study of the use of violence and physical force cannot be omitted from "explorations of the relations of power". The use of violence is at one end of a continuum of practices crucial to maintaining and developing relations of power. All participants in a social and religious group are agents of power and influence over that group

Early Church Fathers advocated against adultery, polygamy, homosexuality, pederasty, bestiality, prostitution, and incest while advocating for the sanctity of the marriage bed.

Bad attitudes The legal language runs parallel to the writings of the Christian apologists, such as Augustine of Hippo and Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and heresiologists such as Epiphanius of Salamis, who drew on a rhetoric of conquest. These writings were commonly hostile and often contemptuous toward a paganism Christianity saw as already defeated. Christian historians wrote vividly dramatized accounts of pious bishops doing battle with temple demons, and much of the framework for understanding this age is based on the “tabloid-like” accounts of the destruction of the Serapeum of Alexandria, the murder of Hypatia, and the publication of the Theodosian law code. These Christian sources with their violent rhetoric, have had great influence on modern perceptions of this period. Outside of violent rhetoric, non-Christian, (non-heretical), groups of pagans and Jews lived peacefully alongside their Christian neighbors through a tolerance based on contempt throughout most of Late Antiquity.



According to Salzman, "scholars ...by and large, concur that the once dominant notion of overt pagan-Christian religious conflict cannot fully explain the texts and artifacts or the social, religious, and political realities of Late Antique Rome". there were only a small and limited number of isolated incidents of actual violence between Christians and pagans.

Salzman page ix

Wayne Meeks asks: "What was there about this movement which could make that kind of appeal to people? ...In the final analysis, I think we don't know. We can speculate, we can say it offers a kind of community, which is rare in any society and certainly rare in antiquity. It offers a closeness, it offers a powerful ideology which explains the evil in the world, or at least it provides powerful symbols for understanding that evil, it offers a sense of the moral structure of the universe.... It has an ideology of justice, which will be guaranteed by God, finally. It offers a community which shapes the basic moral intuitions of its members, which brings that kind of moral admonition, which otherwise, in the Roman world, we find... only in the schools of philosophers, which after all, is an elite phenomenon, limited to a very small stratum of highly educated people. [Christianity] makes this [morality] available to perfectly ordinary folk.

So, we can talk about a lot of these factors, which we say must have entered into this, and yet finally there is hidden behind the difficulties of our sources, but hidden more behind, I think our final inability to penetrate the deepest structures of the human personality, there is the fact that countless individual decisions were made that added up to a profound cultural change in the whole Empire.... ".

The Roman approach to empire building included a cultural permeability that allowed foreigners to become a part of it, but the Roman religious practice of adopting foreign gods and practices into its pantheon did not apply equally to all gods: "Many divinities were brought to Rome and installed as part of the Roman state religion, but a great many more were not". This characteristic openness has led many, such as Ramsay MacMullen to say that in its process of expansion, the Roman Empire was "completely tolerant, in heaven as on earth", but to also go on and immediately add: "That [tolerance] was only half the story".

Christian hostility toward pagans is seen by most modern scholars as far from the general phenomenon the law implies. It is largely based on literary sources, most of which are Christian, and are known to exaggerate. Christian hagiography of the time recorded instances of violence with much rhetoric, interpreting events in a way that upheld their image as powerful patrons and intercessors and to further the cult of the martyrs in the West. Much of the framework for understanding this age is based on the “tabloid-like” accounts of the destruction of the Serapeum of Alexandria, the murder of Hypatia, and the publication of the Theodosian law code. What limited evidence there is indicates both Christian clergy and Roman magistrates preferred the power of words and the use of positive incentives over violence. There is no evidence to indicate that conversion through force was a standard method of Christianization.

Rita Lizzi Testa, Professor of Roman history, Michele Renee Salzman, and Marianne Sághy quote Alan Cameron as saying that the idea that religious conflict is the cause of the swift demise of paganism is pure historiographical construction.

According to our texts, neither church leaders nor civic officials were typically initiators of violence against pagans. Rather, the clergy could and did call in civic officials to help to restore order.

Only in Gaul is the militant Martin represented as deploying physical violence against pagans and his very violence made him unique among Christian bishops of the fourth-century western Empire.

central to the rhetorical strategy of all three authors is a conception of nobility that privileged virtue over wealth and birth. Ultimately, then, the rhetoric of corruption served as a means of assimilation in an era of unprecedented social mobility.

Generous 'gifts' were the conventional way for people from the emperor on down, to build ties with others in a system that depended upon connections. Emperors and other aristocrats wanted to be honored as generous patrons. That meant not only doing favors for friends and family but also listening to the recommendations of powerful supporters for job placements. Both giver and receiver accrued honor through this patronage and gift giving while also putting the receiver in debt to the giver. In societies like Rome's, where access to power and position was dominated by connections and patronage, the payment of money offered an important, alternative channel of advancement. "For peasants, the payment of fees offered a simple and affordable means of mollifying a hostile and ever-threatening officialdom". "When it came to the central functions of the Roman state, even the vivid Ambrose was a lightweight. He could attack the avarice of private persons, conjuring up their abuses in the old-fashioned language of the Italy of an earlier age. He could not attack the fiscal system from which so much of the wealth around him must have derived."

MacMullen asserts that the church, and Christians in government, were universally corrupt. .. he continues to maintain the existence of a shift from the responsible exercise of influence by the Roman elite ... to the indiscriminate exchange of favors for money under the later Roman empire of the fourth and fifth centuries. "Such practices as bribery and extortion had always existed among the 'slaves, freedmen, supply sergeants, and petty accountants' of the empire", he argues, "but only in the Roman imperial government of the fourth and fifth centuries do such individuals occupy positions of substantial authority".

"The historian Ramsay MacMullen, for example, attributes to the fourth-century expansion of the imperial bureaucracy the spread of an ethos of venality and the displacement of aristocratic networks of patronage by the indiscriminate exchange of favors for money. Christopher Kelly, on the other hand, sees such descriptions as merely a rhetorical manifestation of elite anxieties over their loss of influence in an increasingly heterogeneous society. Tim Watson argues that neither of these views is wholly correct."

Quotes from Watson:Subsequent studies have contested and moderated this perspective, but it remains a "revelation" that practices considered “corrupt” by modern Western standards might in some ways promote government efficiency and prove beneficial to the goal of modernization.

Watson says that "Even if agreement can be reached on what exactly constituted “corrupt” behavior, there is simply not enough data" to prove this debate one way or the other. This, in turn, gives rise to the tendency of ancient historians to adopt their own personal perspectives.

"The continued acceptance of activities which we would regard as corrupt has been seen by some commentators as a sign of an unchecked moral and administrative malaise. These conclusions should be handled with care". Some scholars have taken this at face value. A major proponent of this interpretation is the historian

Historian Robert Markus also says “the image of a society neatly divided into ‘Christian’ and ‘pagan’ is the creation of late fourth-century Christians", And the category of “the Greco-Roman world” collapses considerable temporal and geographical differences, to say nothing of cultural and ethical ones, and that even the category of "Christianity" is a heuristic one. Elizabeth A. Castelli points out that this often obscures rather than illuminates a difficult and controversial topic.

Alan Bowman and Andrew Wilson describe all large-scale demographic estimates as "fragile", and reference Walter Scheidel's work on Egypt as demonstrating the "geopolitical idiosyncrasies of Egypt", saying there is "no consensus on the size of Egypt's population in classical antiquity" and that "scholarly debate remains vigorous". .

Robert Couzin uses the Christian sarcophagi of Rome to estimate the city's population. He says Rome's numbers were steadily declining from 250 to 400. In the year 300, he estimates the population of Rome at 800,000 with Christians at 20%. By 350, the population of Rome had dropped to 700,000 while the percentage of Christians increased to 40%. In the year 400, Rome had dropped to 600,000 people and 75% of them were Christian.

Couzin from page 11: In a world where natality did not outstrip mortality, this required sustained and relentless conversion. Based on earlier scholarly guesstimates of the Christian population at various dates, R. Stark and K. Hopkins both proposed an implicit average growth rate of 3.4% per annum.61 Of course, the actual rate of expansion was not linear, but a high average is necessary: there is no other way to get from marginal beginnings to “Christian triumph” within a few centuries. With respect specifically to Rome, Eusebius reported that c.250 the urban population included 155 Christian clergy and 1500 widows and paupers to be maintained and fed.62 A Harnack surmised that this would require a community of between 30,000 and 50,000 Christians, and most modern scholars have (more or less enthusiastically) followed his opinion.63 Growth in the decades after 250 is suggested by another citation in Eusebius. He remarked that Maxentius sought to appease the Christians in 306 as a means to flatter “the Roman people”, hardly demographic evidence but nonetheless a soft corroboration of the significant Christian expansion in the capital that one would anticipate.

Stark 1996 and 1998; Hopkins 1998. More sophisticated mathematical models for the shape of the expansion curve could affect certain assumptions but not the general tendency of the numerical hypotheses. See Schor 2009, 472-98. The average growth rate is not very sensitive to the opening figure or the precise timing of milestones.

Hopkins, K. 1998. “Christian number and its implications,” J. Early Christian Stud. 6, 185-226. use Quantifying the Sources of Slaves in the Early Roman Empire, [] use stuff from Christian graves - Couzin??? and Settlement, Urbanization, and Population edited by Alan Bowman, Andrew Wilson; review by Welch and Pulham []

His Table has the total number of Christians in the year 313, when Constantine became emperor, between 16.8% to 20.4%. By 393, the population of Egyptian Christians was between 46.2 and 56.1% of the overall population. By comparison, Stark's Table 1.1 has Christians in the year 330 at 10.6% of the population, and in the year 350, they are at 56.5% of the population.

The sizes of cities can be related to the sizes of territories and rural settlements. Thomas A. Robinson has problems with numbers that are based on the assumption that early Christianity was an urban religion. He acknowledges that the urban view "is the view of almost every recent scholar of the early church." However, he also points out that the Roman empire was 80-90% rural and maybe 10% urban, which Helen Rhee says "is agreed by all scholars". This creates a mathematical dilemma. If 10% of the empire was urban, and Christians were mostly urban and made up 10% of the empire, then Christians must have made up the entire population of all urban areas by the year 300 - an impossible scenario. On the other hand, if Christians made up 10-20% of the urban population, then Christians would have constituted only 1% to 4% of the overall population in the year 300, "a scenario perhaps more problematic and hardly supported by the scholars in the field". Due to this mathematical constraint, Robinson contends that Christians must have been as rural as they were urban. There is a good bit of written evidence suggesting a rural dimension to early Christianity. Archaeology has identified a half and half balance between urban and rural in Italy. Rhee says it is likely the church had a "presence in the countryside early and was more rustic in its complexion and character than the dominant urban thesis allows, while cities were more Christianized than the countryside".

In rural Egypt, Eusebius’ account of a conflict between Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria (248–264/5) and a village bishop named Nepos, points to the presence of Christianity there, going against the view that Christianity only took off in Egypt at the end of fourth century. The story of Antony and his parents indicates the presence of rural forms of Christianity in Egypt prior to 250 CE.

Christian writings and Roman writings prior to 250 CE, take for granted a Christian presence in the countryside. In Phrygia, there is well known evidence for Christianity’s second-century presence in the small towns and the countryside. Eusebius suggests “the presence of rural, non-Montanist Christians prior to Montanism”. In Egypt, Eusebius’s account of the conflict between Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria (248–264/5) and a village bishop named Nepos, points to a much earlier presence of Christianity in rural Egypt, going against the notion that rural Christianity only took off in Egypt at the end of fourth century. The story of Antony and his parents indicates the presence of rural forms of Christianity prior to 250 CE.

Tabbernee edited a volume by leading researchers in a range of geographical areas important to early Christianity, all with a careful eye to archaeological evidence in particular.33 Tabbernee comments about this volume: “From the data presented, there are some surprises in store for those who think that early Christianity was primarily an urban phenomenon.”34 In regard to Italy, for instance: this

look at page 27 and 12, Robinson

Robinson fundamentally questions whether historians “must” or “can count accurately” the population of the Roman Empire,

Therefore Robinson argues for a substantial rural element in the church prior to 300 CE


 * population went back and forth and other guy... on migration; Robinson addresses language barriers and other obstacles;

Having a unified church was important to the church, but it was not less important to the state. Brown points out that, when Roman authorities saw Christians as a threat to the well-being of the empire, they had shown no hesitation in "taking out" the Christian church, and Constantine and his imperial successors responded the same to the threat of heresy, for the same reasons. Cameron observes that, "before Constantine was a Christian emperor, he was a typical emperor".

Arianism was a 'foe' of orthodoxy, and the conflict lasted 56 years with power going back and forth between the two groups who repeatedly excommunicated one another. Manichaeism lasted much longer and may have been the most persecuted of all the heresies.

Christian history professor Maureen Tilley asserts that Constantine's approach to the Donatists of North Africa was not so much a "Christian" response as it was a response of the Roman state to Circumcellion violence and the need for public order. The first Donatist' martyr stories begin in 317 and last until 321 when Constantine acknowledged failure and cancelled the laws against the Donatists. For the next 75 years, both Donatists and Catholics existed, often directly alongside each other, with a double line of bishops for the same cities.

"By the sixth century, anathematized, vilified as a 'defilement', its leaders beheaded, their followers exiled, impoverished or also slain, Manichaeism was extinguished, and with its books destroyed, left only its name to the Christian world as a term of abuse for dualisms generally".Lieu

Using data from the third century, and the twentieth century as a model, Stark concludes that as a result of these epidemics, by 260 there was one Christian for every four pagans in the city of Rome, whereas before it had been one for every eight. Stark suggests that the Christian response to such calamities did much to commend their faith to the pagans.

Kelly says, "Unsalaried officials in Roman empire, charged fees for their services as a way of securing an income and regulating demands on their time". This virtue is rather fulsomely articulated by the panegyrist Pacatus in his address to the emperor Theodosius: “By your deeds, and not merely by words you have affirmed that the feelings of a prince ought to be all the more benevolent toward his subjects the greater his fortune is, for you act with equal loyalty and generosity, and as emperor you extend to your friends what you had wished for them when a private citizen.”64

The Byzantine emperor Justinian I, also known as Justinian the Great (527-565), enacted legislation with repeated calls for the cessation of sacrifice well into the 6th century.

Laws were not leading the way as much as reinforcing the influences in society that had by this date made Christianity a respectable option for western aristocrats, indeed an option that was increasing in prestige and honor.

These capital laws were not leading the way as much as they were simply reflecting what was happening in society.

In early Christian literature the care of widows and orphans as a duty of the church are usually listed together, but this is more than just a stylized way of referencing those in need. Sources indicate the presence and even the role of children in the early church. Interest in the Christian socialization of children is evident in the New Testament books, Colossians, and Ephesians, and in the writings of the Apostolic fathers.

While asserting that there is not a single factor but a series of factors that made Christianity successful, Stark does "suggest that gender holds one of the answers to how it was done - that women played a critical role in the rise of Christianity". Early Christian communities were highly inclusive in terms of social stratification and other social categories, like gender, much more so than were the Roman voluntary associations.


 * Household codes page 175; male authors 176; Stark's open network 177 and mixed marriages 179-181 MacDonald in Osiek's book

By the time of Valentinian I, the idea that virgins and widows deserved extra respect instead of neglect is evidenced by him exempting them from the poll tax.

In 370 the Emperor Valentinian issued a written order to Pope Damasus I requiring the Christian missionaries to cease calling at the homes of pagan women. Although some classical writers claimed that women were easy prey for any "foreign superstition," most recognized that Christianity was unusually appealing because within the Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large (Fox 1987; Chadwick 1967; Harnack 1908)".

The apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, "reveal elements of the attraction" ascetic Christianity may have held for ceretain women.

the conversion stories follow a similar pattern with a woman of relatively high status, responding to an apostle's teaching, who converts and adopts a "sexually continent way of life". The principle male in her life opposes this decision and both the woman and the apostle are scourged or imprisoned. Only rarely does the husband convert. The woman does not denounce asceticism in any account.

Rodney Stark uses sociology to explain the importance of a few major conversions and friendship networks in the initial stages of the steady expansion of the religion.
 * But, in the end aristocrats came to adopt Christianity in the company of their family and friends. . **Stark here!! same way everyone else did!

Review Reviewed Work(s): The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries by RODNEY STARK Review by: John W. Welch and Kathryn Worlton Pulham Source: Brigham Young University Studies, 2000, Vol. 39, No. 3 (2000), pp. 197-204 Published by: Brigham Young University Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43044187

Review by: John W. Welch and Kathryn Worlton Pulham Early Christianity offered a financially inexpensive, popular form of worship compared with the extremely expensive and aristocratic models of patronage and temple building and cult observances common in Greek and Roman religions ( Stark page 198)  page 202 Welch and Pulham

"In theory, emperors had absolute control over appointments to office. If religious conversion was the sole concern, Christian emperors would have appointed only Christians. They did not; even by the end of the fourth century, when there was a larger pool of Christians to choose from, Christianizing emperors like Gratian and Theodosius continued to appoint pagan aristocrats to office".

Aristocrats did have to adapt in certain ways to become Christian, but what is often missed is that Christianity also adapted as it came into contact with the aristocracy. What it meant to be an aristocrat changed. Humility and charity for the poor, for example, loomed larger. But what it could mean to be a Christian also changed, as concerns for amicitia (friendship), honos (honor), culture, and nobilitas (nobility) entered the discourse of the community of the faithful.

Christian leaders fashioned the rhetoric of Christianity to make it pleasing to educated elite listeners shaped the message of Christianity in public and private so as to appeal to aristocrats, achieving a fit between Christian and aristocratic social concerns and values. As they spoke to issues at the heart of aristocratic status cul- ture—honor, office, wealth, culture, friendship, nobilitas—they sought to change the aristocracy. Ironically, they also “aristocratized” Christianity’s message, incorporating certain key elements of aristocratic status culture.
 * Christianity came to appeal to late Roman aristocrats by achieving a fit between Christian and aristocratic social concerns and values.

The interaction between aristocrats’ status culture and the message of Christianity helps us to understand how Christianity came to appeal to late Roman aristocrats and how, in its efforts to convert the aristoc- racy, Christianity was “aristocratized.” Church leaders accepted as important certain central aristocratic ideals—such as nobilitas, amicitia, and honos— even as they attempted to redefine them to be consonant with a Christian message.

Constantine and his successors granted privileges to the church that the pagan cults and their priests had long enjoyed but also went beyond that by granting prestige and honors to the church and its clergy. an emperor’s religious preferences were publicized and determined which cults would be most lavishly funded and celebrated with public monies. But the participation of the now Christian emperors in traditionally pagan civic events posed something of a problem, as did their involvement in Christian rites and celebrations. Over the course of the fourth century the rituals and public ceremonies gradually evolved so as to incorporate the emperor’s Christianity.

By incorporating Christian meanings within traditional imperial activities, and by patronizing the church and its officials, the emperor himself became a symbolic model of religious change. Emperors could show by their example not only their general support for Christianity, but how they, as any aristocrat, could embrace this new religion.

patronage made visible the new prestige of the church and its officials in society.

they proclaimed imperial gratitude for victories owed to the Christian God; even the meaning of victory changed to include concern for the dead.83

To rule successfully, the emperor needed to build ties to members of the aristocracy, and to the military aristocracy in particular. Traditionally, emperors could build such ties in two ways, by making marriage alliances and by advancing friends and family to high office. The emperor, as patron, was enmeshed in an interlocking network of relationships that reinforced his social prestige within elite society. Since that was true, there were limits on what emperors could do to influence the religious choice of any one individual. And that is why even the most ardently Christian emperors appointed pagans to high office. {{rp|192}.

"Even the most zealous emperors of the fourth century did not marshal their resources in a single-minded way to support Christians nor were they always motivated by religious ends". The emperor had to act in such a way that he won their approval. Paganism had long been a component of elite culture and was intimately linked to notions of prestige. In dealing with those aristocrats whose pagan leanings remained strong, the late Roman emperor could not go beyond a certain range of actions without endangering both his honor and his relationships. emperors could not coerce conversion with- out going against the norms of religious freedom and autonomy that aristo- crats traditionally enjoyed. To take an aggressive stand against pagan aristo- crats could undermine the basis of imperial honor and unravel a network of relationships that worked to their mutual benefit. No wonder then that Constantius II, when in Rome, filled the pagan priesthoods rather than risk losing the support of a group whose approval he sought. Active Christianizing emperors sought the support of the aristocracy in their quest for honor. A variety of considerations limited the ability of even the most zealous emperors to use appointments to office to influence the religious choices of aristocrats. Specific political interests, status concerns and patronage ties were more important than religion. Constantine was emperor of an empire that was still 80-90% pagan. By and large, the Christian emperors did not want to alienate pagan aristocrats".

Stark credits the superiority of Christian doctrine for Christianity's rise while Salzman says such claims are unprovable.

As the emperor, Constantine openly supported Christianity after 324, but there are indications he remained relatively tolerant of pagans. He never engaged in a purge. Opponents' supporters were not slaughtered when Constantine took the capital; their families and court were not killed. There were no pagan martyrs. Laws menaced death, but during Constantine's reign, no one suffered the death penalty for violating anti-pagan laws against sacrifice. "He did not punish pagans for being pagans, or Jews for being Jews, and did not adopt a policy of forced conversion." Pagans remained in important positions at his court. He ruled for 31 years and never outlawed paganism; in the words of an early edict, he decreed that polytheists could "celebrate the rites of an outmoded illusion," so long as they did not force Christians to join them.

According to Rodney Stark, since Christians most likely formed only sixteen to seventeen percent of the empire's population at the time of Constantine's conversion, they did not have the numerical advantage to form a sufficient power–base to begin a systematic persecution of pagans.

Extant evidence concerning corruption generally comes from a moralizing rhetoric intended to damn an opponent in as many memorable ways as possible. It is within this framework that texts on corruption should be read. .

, "in discussing the ideological climate in which late antique laws were written, one cannot avoid coming to grips with the rise of Christianity, which clearly affected the way many people thought about themselves, about each other, and about their God".

Bearing in mind this fifth-century emphasis on the misericordia (compassion) of the collector, Justinian's reform falls more clearly into focus, although its status as a legislative and ideological milestone remains undiminished.

Sin, Citizenship, and the Salvation of Souls: The Impact of Christian Priorities on Late-Roman and Post-Roman Society by Sabine MacCormack

God's Presence: A Contemporary Recapitulation of Early Christianity By Frances Young: Key concepts, page 1

Regulating Sex in the Roman Empire Ideology, the Bible, and the Early Christians David Wheeler-Reed

The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries By Wayne A. Meeks

Roman Slave Law and Romanist Ideology Author(s): Alan Watson

Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship By Eric Gregory

and "The role of Christianity in the abandoning of most western gladiatorial combat was nil".

other laws

child exposure  slavery

One of the first things that is important about this, in Malcolm Errington's view, is how much this legislation was applied and used, which would show how dependable the laws are as a reflection of what actually happened to pagans in history. Brown says that, given the large numbers of non-Christians in every region at this time, local authorities were "notoriously lax in imposing them. Christian bishops frequently obstructed their application. The harsh imperial edicts had to face the vast following of paganism among the population, and the passive resistance of governors and magistrates, thereby limiting their impact. But not eliminating impact altogether, as recent studies on the nature of "the presence" of the state, how it made itself felt, "the subtle nature of power" and the elimination of public sacrifice show.

page 153 - pagans and Christians lived together in peace MacMullen, Paganism

It is a well-known fact that Christian Apologists of the second century took pains to emphasize the similarities rather than the divergences that existed between their beliefs and the pagan wisdom of the Roman Empire.

Constantine penalized infant exposure by legally removing patriapotestus - that a father indefinitely retained the right to reclaim the exposed child - as an act of mercy. "Constantine was discouraging parents from exposing their children by depriving them of future power over them".

When there was no father in the picture, a newborn was unlikely to be raised and likely to be exposed. page 85

One of the main methods for maintaining the supply of slaves was natural reproduction. Slaves who had many children were rewarded. Chrysostom attempted to guard the sexual integrity of the slave by desexualizing the slave's body and criminalizing its violation. "Slaves were no longer morally neutral ground - having sex with a slave while married was adultery and if unmarried, fornication". The renunciation of wealth, the promotion of ascetism, and the proliferation of chastity among slaves may have lessened their sexual use and their reproductive value.

Christians also interfered with some of the other methods for resupply such as kidnapping and child exposure. Kidnapping was not as significant a contributor numerically as child exposure was.

Slavery was of immense significance to society and "greatly influenced early Christian life and rhetoric".

Glancy asks: "How would a new identity as a Christian affect an urban slave, and how did the presence of slaves and slaveholders in the population affect the growth and practices of the churches"? Onesimus, a slave, had run away from his master Philemon, but both had become Christians, and Paul sends Onesimus back home with a letter. In that letter Paul insists on Philemon's acceptance of Onesimus, no longer as a slave, but as a "beloved brother". Wessels says Marianne Thompson argues convincingly that "a reading of the letter to Philemon which views Paul as asking for Onesimus' spiritual reception as a brother in Christ, without the setting free of his body as a slave, assumes a 'dualistic anthropology' in Paul which his writings do not confirm". Paul's understanding of the church as a 'body' meant that, once Onesimus was accepted into the group as a brother, it would become impossible to treat him as chattel and sell him off if the price was right. J. H. Roberts also asserts that "The phrase, 'you will do even more than I say', can really only have one meaning: Philemon should set Onesimus free".

There are no extant sources written from the perspective of the slave,

Slaveholders characterized their slaves as 'bodies' in the first century and into the fourth when Constantine became emperor. they were property not human beings

Scholarship takes three views: a minority do not believe Paul intended to challenge slavery or encourage the slave Onesimus' manumission; a second group agree that the letter describes an altered relationship between Philemon and his former slave: they will no longer be slave and slaveholder but will be two Christian brothers. Paul alludes to "doing more", but for this group, it is unclear what is intended.

A third group of scholars argue that there is nothing ambiguous in Paul's insistence on Philemon's acceptance of Onesimus as a "beloved brother". J. H. Roberts asserts that "The phrase, 'you will do even more than I say', can really only have one meaning here: Philemon should set Onesimus free". "Paul's message could be refused by Philemon, but it could not be misunderstood". It is not clearly stated because Paul was first and foremost a church builder, and Philemon was the head of the infant church at Colossae, and his position must be upheld by respect. So Paul uses his own authority subtly.

MacMullen points out that John Chrysostom saying "you have herds upon herds of slaves" and "you deem it a disgrace if you do not lead whole flocks of them around with you" makes it clear Christians did own slaves. The church even adopted slavery as a metaphor. Paul refers to himself as a "slave of Christ" (Rom. 1:1), and even Jesus is described as having accepted the "form of a slave" (human) in Philippians 2.

Wayne A. Meeks says "We can speculate, we can say it offers a kind of community, which is rare in any society and certainly rare in antiquity. It offers a closeness, it offers a powerful ideology which explains the evil in the world, or at least it provides powerful symbols for understanding that evil, it offers a sense of the moral structure of the universe.... It has an ideology of justice, which will be guaranteed by God, finally. It offers a community which shapes the basic moral intuitions of its members, which brings that kind of moral admonition, which otherwise, in the Roman world, we find... only in the schools of philosophers, which after all, is an elite phenomenon, limited to a very small stratum of highly educated people. [Christianity] makes this available to perfectly ordinary folk".

According to Russell it is possible to see how Augustine himself had evolved from his earlier Confessions to this teaching on coercion and the latter's strong patriarchal nature: "Intellectually, the burden has shifted imperceptibly from discovering the truth to disseminating the truth." The bishops had become the church's elite with their own rationale for acting as "stewards of the truth". (Russell points out that Augustine's views are limited to time and place and his own community, but later, others took what he said and applied it outside those parameters in ways Augustine never imagined or intended. )

Augustine placed limits on the use of coercion, recommending fines, imprisonment, banishment, and moderate floggings, preferring beatings with rods which was a common practice of the ecclesial courts. He opposed severity, maiming, and the execution of heretics. While these limits were mostly ignored by Roman authorities, Michael Lamb says that in doing this, "Augustine appropriates republican principles from his Roman predecessors..." and maintains his commitment to liberty, legitimate authority, and the rule of law as a constraint on arbitrary power. He continues to advocate holding authority accountable to prevent domination, but affirms the state's right to act. H. A. Deane, on the other hand, says there is a fundamental inconsistency between Augustine's political thought and "his final position of approval of the use of political and legal weapons to punish religious dissidence" and others have seconded this view.

Constantine called church leaders to convene in 325 in Nicea, in Bithynia, (in present-day Turkey) to settle the issue of Arianism. The result was the Nicene Creed, from which five bishops abstained. They were banished for a time, then they returned, the orthodox Athanasius was ousted, forced into exile, and lived much of the remainder of his life in a cycle of forced movement.

Donatists rejected the conclusions of multiple imperial and ecclesiastic commissions and refused to cooperate or compromise. Therefore, Tilley says, it became Constantine's imperial duty to impose it.

Arbitrary break for Gibbon
Gibbon saw the rise of the ascetic movement amongst the aristocracy, with its emphasis on sexual chastity and celibacy, as the lowest point for Roman society leading directly to its breakdown. For Gibbon, religious ideas were "folly" and superstition. Gibbon saw the structures of society as limiting the degree such folly could be practiced. He thought that once beliefs became woven into society, they hardened into concrete prejudices and values that could then be "controlled and modified" through institutions and legal practices. Loosen, or cut, those societal controls, and "the enduring human propensity for 'folly' would run amok destroying the society that contained it. In Gibbon's view, this meant the decline and Fall of Roman empire began with the monks whom he saw as having escaped the controls of society because their lives were lived in penance, privation and solitude, distant and separated from society's normal interactions.

Contemporary studies show humans distribute across at least five different levels of ethical behavior. At the highest levels, ethical behavior is "the ideal conduct we hope to find in the best of us" while the most widespread and most "common behavior" tends to reflect the middle to lower levels of ethical conduct. Studies demonstrate that leaders promoting a "higher ethical commitment above and beyond codes and enforcement" is beneficial for developing ethical behavior, but those same studies also indicate this kind of higher ethical commitment is not the most common.

Justin Martyr (100–165 CE) wrote his First Apology (155–157 CE) against heretics, and is generally attributed with inventing the concept. Yet, according to historian Geoffrey S. Smith, Justin writes only to answer objections and defend friends from ill treatment and even death. He quotes Justin in a letter to the emperor as saying he is writing: "On behalf of those from every race of men who are unjustly hated and ill-treated, being one of them myself." Yet, it is within this same period that use of the term "heretic" in Christian writings becomes derogatory.

It was the emperor's job to keep the pax deorum (‘the benevolence of gods’) – the peace between Heaven and earth.

"Early Christianity was not a monolithic religion characterized by systematic, official theology clearly separated from heresy.”

Guy Stroumsa says early Christianity promoted inclusivity, yet invented the concept of heresy at the same time.

So, we can talk about a lot of these factors, which we say must have entered into this, and yet finally there is hidden behind the difficulties of our sources - but hidden more behind, I think, our final inability to penetrate the deepest structures of the human personality - there is the fact that countless individual decisions were made that added up to a profound cultural change in the whole Empire.... Meeks, the great appeal

Christians expected Constantine to be the arbiter of all religious disputes. It was simply part of the emperor's job. Harold A. Drake says that, "since the Jovian dynasty when Diocletian established the empire as one expressly based on divine support, the lack of consensus on religious matters was no small thing."

Tertullian, a second-century Christian intellectual and lawyer from Carthage, advocated for religious tolerance in an effort to convince pagan readers to be more tolerant of Christianity. Yet Stroumsa argues that Tertullian knew co-existence meant competition, so he attempted to undermine the legitimacy of the pagan religions by comparing them to Christianity at the same time he advocated for tolerance from them.

Persecution of Christians

.

In section five and the discussion of definitions that are inaccurate or irrelevant and not benign in their use and application includes the requirement that persecutors must intend to punish their victims.

Christian ethics

"Christianity began its existence as one among several competing Jewish sects or movements. Judaism was not one thing, either in Judea and Galilee or in the Diaspora, nor were the boundaries among the varieties of Judaism fixed or impermeable". Paul's writings reflect a mix of Hellenism and Judaism and Christianity.

Earlier versions of the chapters: "The Class Basis of Early Christianity" appeared in Sociological Analysis, vol. 47 (1986): 216-25;
 * Use some of this for alternative theories on both Decline and on C. and P. **

"Epidemics, Networks, and Conversion" appeared as "Epidemics, Networks, and the Rise of Christianity," in Semia 56 (1992): pp 159-75 (L. Michael White, guest editor);

"The Role of Women in Christian Growth" was given as the Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture, 1994;

chapter authored by McDonald, "Was Celsus right?" page 157 - in book Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue url= edited by 	David L. Balch, and Carolyn Osiek

"Christianizing the Urban Empire: A Quantitative Approach" appeared as "Christianizing the Urban Empire," in Sociological Analysis 52 (1991): 77-88;

"Urban Chaos and Crisis: The Case of Antioch" appeared as "Antioch as the Social Situation for Matthew's Gospel," in Social History of the Matthean Community, ed. David L. Balch (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 189-210;

the theoretical propositions included in "The Martyrs: Sacrifice as Rational Choice" appeared in Rodney Stark and Laurence R. Iannaccone, "Rational Choice Propositions about Religious Movements," in Religion and the Social Order: Handbook on Cults and Sects in America, ed. David G. Bromley and Jeffrey K. Haddon (Greenwhich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1992), 241-61; and Rodney Stark and Laurence R. Iannaccone, "A Supply-Side Reinterpretation of the 'Secularization' of Europe/' Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol 33, 1994, pages 230-252

Anna Leone says, "Temple closures and the prohibition of sacrifices had an impact... After AD 375 the majority of [pagan] religious offices disappear completely from the epigraphic record".

The senatorial aristocracy is usually held to be the center of the violent anti-Christian movement. our evidence of private pagan attitudes is largely confined to the senatorial aristocracy,

the fourth century marked a watershed in the historical role of the senatorial aristocracy

In the centuries after Augustus, Roman society steadily moved toward taking political power and authority away from the landed aristocracy and putting it into the hands of professional administrators who tended to be less well-born but better qualified. The Diocletianic reforms accelerated this process. By the late fourth century, emperors and their courts were spending much of their time on the military frontiers, which led to a revival of the aristocracy: as a by-product of the growing external crisis, the importance of the great landowners increased. This importance was chiefly for government at the most elemental local level as lower and middle classes gradually lost what liberty they had.

Scholarship on the demise of paganism has traditionally accepted at face value the view that Antique Roman society was divided into two opposing segments: Christians and pagans. This was introduced by the Christians of the fourth century "who had axes to grind" and was not representative of the true complexity of Roman society.

Group norms that are based on what is legally and socially acceptable are minimal, they are not the higher ethic based on awareness that other's needs are as important as one's own.

Stark explains the rise of Christianity through the dynamics of upper class preferences for new religious movements, profiles of why mission activity succeeds, the effects of networking in close social circles, the demographic impacts of epidemics and birthrates, women's attraction to the religion, urbanization cost benefit analyses, martyrdom and personal sacrifice as a rational human choice. For MacMullen, it is Christianity's appeal to the masses, and for Bagnall, Christianity's ability to

Stark concludes Christianity grew because of its various virtues such as its peculiar type of community.

Elizabeth Clark: John Carlisle Kilgo Professor of Religion and Director of the Graduate Program in Religion Duke University DIFFERENT DEGREES OF DEVOTION

Elaine H. Pagels: The Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion Princeton University

Wayne A. Meeks: Woolsey Professor of Biblical Studies Yale University

The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul: Wayne A. Meeks: 9780300098617: Amazon.com: Books

the religious landscape of the Mediterranean continued to be characterized by a patchwork of religious communities. Regions that boasted a triumphant, long-established Christianity were often flanked by equally tenacious settlements of polytheists.Brown CAH 1998

By the time of Late Antiquity, the city was characterized by an increasingly secular municipal life. It was no longer embedded with any particular religious tradition. Late Antiquity witnessed the "vigorous flowering of a public culture that Christians and non-Christians alike could share"; the two religious traditions co-existed and tolerated each other, in social practice, throughout most of the period.

This heritage, and their shared commitment to Jesus as the Christ, still left room for disagreement.

mysteries of the kind on which it laid such stress were not ‘oriental’ but Greek in origin and inspiration, the oldest and most famous being those of Demeter and Kore at eleusis, and that there were in fact no comparable mysteries in the native traditions of eastern cul- tures (for references, see Burkert 1987: 2 n. 9). in the 1950s, other scholars showed that the figure of a dying and rising god, which cumont and espe- cially Reitzenstein had regarded as central to the mystery religions, was much more of a modern scholarly construct than a genuine cross-cultural religious pattern (for references, see, e.g., sfameni Gasparro 1985: xv-xvi; smith 1990: 89-111, especially 100-101).

Burkert, a major scholar of Greek religion, chose the subject of ‘ancient mystery cults’ for a series of lectures that he delivered at Harvard University in 1982. in its published form, this provided a ‘comparative phenomenology of ancient mysteries’ (Burkert 1987: 4), in which he systematically reviewed the evidence for personal needs, organization and identities, myth and theology, and ‘the extraordinary experience’ in five cults: those of Demeter at eleusis, Dionysus, cybele, isis and mithras. it also, perhaps incidentally, constituted a thorough rejection of the earlier paradigm. Last but not least was smith’s historiographical deconstruction of the scholarly program of comparing early christianity with Graeco- Roman mysteries (1990).

the very word ‘oriental’ is now regularly viewed as a problematic term that perpetuates western stereotypes

Throughout much of the Christian aristocracy of the late fourth century there was hostility toward classical philosophy by a few Christian writers, and a wave of asceticism swept through much of the urban aristocratic class, but for the most part, the Christian elite were still being educated in the classics just the same as their counterparts.

By the early 5th century (c. 410) a revived Platonic Academy (which had no connection with the original Academy) was established by some leading Neoplatonists.

At some time around the first century, the members of the Roman military began to adopt the mystery cult of Mithraism; this sun-god related cult arose from obscure non-Roman origins, and the first surviving reference dates to Plutarch's mention of a 67 BC observation of certain Mediterranean pirates practising it. As the Roman legions gradually moved around, so too Mithraism spread throughout the Roman Empire; in the beginning it was mainly soldiers who followed its precepts, but it was also adopted by freedmen, slaves, and merchants, in the locations where the legions rested, particularly in frontier areas.

Mithraism wasn't exclusive - it was possible and common to follow Mithraism and other cults simultaneously. It eventually became popular within Rome itself, gradually gaining members among the more aristocratic classes, and eventually counting some of the Roman senators as adherents; according to the Augustan History, even the emperor Commodus was a member. Although, for reasons currently unknown, Mithraism completely excluded women, by the third century it had gained a wide following; there are over 100 surviving remains of temples to Mithras, 8 in Rome itself, and 18 in Ostia (Rome's main port), with Rome having over 300 associated Mithraic monuments.

From the reign of Septimius Severus, other, less gender-specific, forms of sun-worship also increased in popularity throughout the Roman Empire.

Elagabalus used his authority to install El-Gabal as the chief deity of the Roman pantheon, merging the god with the Roman sun gods to form Deus Sol Invictus, meaning God - the Undefeated Sun, and making him superior to Jupiter, and assigning either Astarte, Minerva, Urania, or some combination of the three, as El-Gabal's wife. He rode roughshod over other elements of traditional religion, marrying a Vestal Virgin (who were legally required to remain unmarried virgins during their service), and moved the most sacred relics of Roman religion (including the fire of Vesta, the Shields of the Salii, and the Palladium) to a new temple dedicated exclusively to El-Gabal. As much as the religiously conservative senators may have disapproved, the lavish annual public festivals held in El-Gabal's honour found favour among the popular masses, partly on account of the festivals involving the wide distribution of food.

By 423, emperor Theodosius II declared that polytheism no longer existed, and so "large bodies of polytheists, all over the Roman empire, simply slipped out of history". They continued to exist, in spite of such proclamations, enjoying "for many generations, [a] relatively peaceable, if cramped, existence".

"In a world in which differences of religious opinion were assumed to be perfectly normal and natural results of a polytheistic universe ... insistence on the exclusivity of one's own cult is more than an annoyance; it threatens the whole basis of the peaceful coexistence of religious cults in society".

religion was a matter of convenience, tied rigidly to considerations of class and culture, completely unfanatical, in just the pattern we have come to identify as typical of pagan attitudes.

"The panoply of religious experience in the Roman world before Constantine was simply bewildering: from back-yard fertility rites through public, state-supported cults to the mystical ascents of which Platonic philosophers wrote with such devotion — and everything between, over, under, and all around such phenomena. There were public cults indigenous to the various parts of the empire, ... the divinity of the emperors, and a vast array of private enthusiasms. That such a spectrum of religious experiences should produce a single-minded population capable of forming itself into a single pagan movement with which Christianity could struggle is simply not probable."

The non-Christian side of Roman society was diverse, while Christianity saw itself as possessing "a privileged narrative of the salvation history of mankind as a whole". This led to what Pliny referred to as 'pig-headedness'.

Anna Leone says, "Temple closures and the prohibition of sacrifices had an impact... After AD 375 the majority of [pagan] religious offices disappear completely from the epigraphic record".

All records of anti-pagan legislation by Constantine are found in the Life of Constantine, written by Eusebius as a kind of eulogy after Constantine's death. It is not a history so much as a panegyric praising Constantine. The laws as they are stated in the Life of Constantine often do not correspond, "closely, or at all", to the text of the Codes themselves. Eusebius gives these laws a "strongly Christian interpretation by selective quotation or other means". This has led many to question the veracity of the record.

Scott Bradbury argues that anti-pagan laws served as an ideal or ethical law: something to aspire to rather than something to be enforced. He gives examples of this type of law, and shows that anti-pagan legislation was only cautiously and partially enforced as late as 398.

References in the Theodosian code 16.10.2 and Libanius’ autobiography suggest that such laws were passed but not enforced.

Others (such as Curran) have argued that anti-pagan legislation was never passed, and such records by Eusebius only reflect the emperor’s personal inclinations. Unfrequented temples may have been torn down to build churches, and such incidences were reinterpreted by Eusebius in light of Constantine’s personal detest for pagan sacrifices.

Scott, Bradbury, “Constantine and the Problem of Anti-Pagan Legislation in the Fourth Century.” Classical Philology 89, no. 2 (April 1994): pp:120-139.

John Curran, Pagan City and Christian Capital (Oxford 2000), chapter 5, “The Legal Standing of the Ancient Cults in Rome,” esp. pp. 169-81.


 * Use somewhere!! "No emperor ever ordered the destruction of a major functioning temple in a major city". Cameron last pagans page 799

The growing significance of religious sentiment from 250 - 311 is well attested. The conversion of Constantine crystallized these sentiments by linking empire and Christianity both of which had universalist ambitions. Three centuries later the expansion of Islam was another example of convergence between a monotheistic religion and a politics of imperial domination. The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity edited by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, page 6

In the fifth and sixth centuries, what occurs at this period is a division, sharper than ever before, between the military and civilian aspects of government. allegiance was to class and culture first, and a remarkable indifference to details of creed ambiguous religious sociology of this class of aristocrats, its wavering allegiances, Occurred on both sides

"There exists a large, remarkably homogeneous literature on the conflict between paganism and Christianity in the last decades of the fourth century."

Ammianus Marcellinus is almost universally admired as a historian, while his personal allegiance to something other than Christianity is not disputed. It is a diverse world of religious phenomena which Ammianus reports. The singular thing about Christianity in Ammianus is thus its unsingularity. Ammianus treats it as just another cult in the diverse world of late Rome. It is difficult to ignore our traditional pagan-Christian dichotomy and see this, but the evidence is there. He writes much of paganism and little of Christianity. Most of the participants in his dramas, insofar as they reveal their allegiance, live in a non-Christian world. Is Ammianus representative of the attitudes of non-Christian Roman society ? If we confine our examination to the Western empire at this period, the answer must be yes.

The expression of opinion, even opinion favoring pagan gods and traditions, was never made the object of imperial repression.

misinterpretation characterized pagan response to Christianity at all times; the pagans did not understand their rival, they underrated its strength, and they were continually baffled and thwarted in attempting to hold their own against it.

Depictions in the catacombs suggest that Christians readily adapted common motifs such as the "Good Shepherd", which in Roman culture represented "philanthropy", and the "orans" image, which indicated "piety".

The conversion to Christianity took place gradually and unevenly in late antiquity and in the early Byzantine world. Customary funeral rituals remained. These included the belief that at the time of death angels and demons contest for the decedent's soul. Macarius of Egypt writes of such a contest, which is only resolved by the intervention of the person's guardian angel -roughly equivalent to Plato's daimon. A second belief was that the soul was weighed in the scales of justice; a concept that Eustathius of Thessalonica found in the Iliad. Both ideas precipitated loud lamentation, which Gregory of Nyssa and others attempted to modify to the singing of psalms and hymns.

The paintings of the Roman catacombs may startle some present- day viewers with their slapdash execution. the purpose of catacomb paintings was not to give the viewers a pleasant aesthetic experience but to prompt a spiritual experience

Modern scholars think there is little evidence these laws aimed at converting pagans.

the Christian emperors of the fourth century down to Valentinian and Valens were almost all less than wholeheartedly devoted to a harsh pagan-Christian dichotomy ... and their policy toward paganism tended toward lenience (tempered only by a revulsion from magical arts and nocturnal sacrifices).

[In addition to the decline in imperial support] the religious economy had become extremely volatile. Faiths from the "Orient" did seem to come into sudden vogue and attract many participants.

The similarity of religious developments throughout the empire reflected the fact that all local elites tended to have similar interests and concerns. Hence, the religious cultures of the Roman empire can be described as open, yet integrated systems that followed similar patterns and restraints (1997: 57).

The narrative concerning Rome has tended to focus around two distinct themes: first, the formalism and intrinsic inadequacy of traditional Roman religion,  and second, Roman religion's neglect by the Roman elite during the last century of the Republic.

Stark points out that, "although Christians stood in formal, official disrepute for much of the first three centuries, informally, they were free to do pretty much as they wished, in most places, most of the time". As an example, he says that Henry Chadwick reported that when a Roman governor in Asia Minor began a persecution of Christians during the second century, "the entire Christian population of the region paraded before his house as a manifesto of their faith and as a protest against injustice" (1967:55). The more significant part of this story is not that the Christians had the nerve to protest, but that they went unpunished. Within the first few centuries AD of Roman Empire, Christianity was prosecuted, on and off, sometimes with vigor. Christianity was seen as a superstition as it had no tradition, and so it was prosecuted. Rome did not routinely oppress other religions, it absorbed them, and made them Roman. Countless local gods and goddesses were provided with a classical name and were then worshiped as “Roman” deities. Even when Rome could not fully adopt alternate religions, there was still legal provision for tolerating them on the grounds they were sanctified by ancient tradition such as the Jews had. Yet despite this, by the early second century the Roman governor of Bithynia (on the Black Sea) had no hesitation in sending to immediate execution those who had been denounced as being Christians.

Evidence of significant freedom of movement - Christians visiting and supporting those arrested in jail (such as we see in the case of Perpetua), or Christians in custody visiting churches despite having been arrested (as we see in the case of Ignatius of Antioch)-implies what the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan clearly states: simply being a Christian did not suffice to have action brought. The admiring many, who recorded and preserved acts of the martyrs, surely outnumbered the heroic, and perhaps voluntary, few.

Lavan and Mulryan|2011 The great regional diversity of late antique paganism suggests that the time has come to abandon a single compelling narrative of 'the end of the temples' based on legal sources and literary accounts. Although temple destructions are attested, in some regions the end of paganism was both gradual and untraumatic, with more co-existence with Christianity than one might have expected.

Religion in antiquity has a unique role as a system of culture.

Claim: Christianity might have remained an obscure religious movement had the many religions making up Roman pluralism been vigorous.

[1c] The god's Failure to protect Plague, famine, and barbarian invasions made life short and uncertain. earthquakes Some blamed Christians for the failures of the Gods to protect and guide, but it was seen as the God’s failure.

For example, the first-century-bce scholar m. terentius varro's statement, which is in fact not a direct quotation but a paraphrase of augustine’s (City of God 6.2), comes from his learned study of Roman religious antiquities; it has more to do with touting his own research into ancient and obscure traditions than with assessing the health of Roman religion. in contrast, valerius maximus, who in the third decade of the first century ce compiled a vast number of historical anecdotes as a resource for orators and students of rhetoric, included a whole range of stories that illustrate the power of the traditional Roman gods and their intervention in human life, stories that he clearly felt would still resonate with contemporary audiences (mueller 2002). again, much evidence for the neglect of temples and traditional priesthoods in the late Republic is deduced from the various revivals and refurbishments that took place under augustus. But it was of course to augustus’s advantage to exaggerate any earlier neglect of religion so that he could gain all the more credit for its restoration. When he boasts that he restored eighty-two temples of the gods in 28 bce (Res Gestae Divi Augusti 20.4), we should probably think not so much of rebuilding half-collapsed structures as of a few minor repairs and a new paint job.

On the other hand, there is also ample evidence in Rome during the first century bce for new institutions and the ongoing adaptation of old ones. moreover, contemporary accounts of manipulation and charges of sacrilege are now seen more as evidence for the continued vitality of traditional religion than for its irrelevance and decay. as the authors of the current standard account of Roman religion point out, the

The Hellenistic era, far from witnessing any decline, ‘was ... a period of dramatic growth and development’ (Billows 2003: 196). Assumptions that a loss of local autonomy and increasing internationalization resulted in the erosion of communal ties and in widespread deracination and alienation are now almost universally rejected. Whatever cities may have lost in terms of political autonomy they seem to have more than made up by their importance for local and communal identity. People continued to identify themselves by their affiliation with their city and to take pride in this identity; the rivalry of civic elites to promote their own city over its rivals fueled the massive programs of public improvements whose remains even now can impress.

under-population and a lack of productive hands in the direct hinterlands of large armies did not go hand-in-hand with sound military logistics. First of all, there were movements of Roman and enemy forces, over more than twenty years, which had a negative  impact  on  the  density  and  prosperity  of  the  regional  populations. Secondly, there  were  deportations. The most  spectacular  one  was  the  deportation  of  many  people  from  Philippopolis,  but  there  must  have  been  more,  in  such  a  long  period  of  invasion  and  armed  violence. Thirdly, there  was  a  voluntary  concentration of people within the walls of fortified towns, as at Nicopolis ad Istrum. Fourthly there  was  forced  migration,  for  example  of  at  least  a  large  part  of  the  Roman  population  of  abandoned  Dacia  into  Moesia  inferior. And last but not least, there was resettlement to repair demographic decay and strengthen the logistical basis of strong border garrisons. The conclusion must be that successive events in the lower Danube regions In the third quarter of the third century AD events show that  prolonged intensive warfare in a  region unavoidably results in manifold mobility and migration.

second century, when the empire seemed an invincible superpower

Whereas, Harries and Wood say, "The contents of the Code provide details from the canvas but are an unreliable guide, in isolation, to the character of the picture as a whole".

Religion in antiquity has a unique role as a system of culture.

Previously undervalued similarities in language, society, religion, and the arts, as well as current archaeological research, indicate paganism slowly declined, and that it was not forcefully overthrown by Theodosius I in the fourth century.

Political and social change had begun before Constantine with the new order of imperial rule under the Tetrarchy in 293. Constantine's recognition of Christianity gave a boost to changes already taking place in society, which included religion, but also extended far beyond religion, and far beyond Constantine.

This was connected to the difficulty of maintaining such large monumental spaces rather than religious issues.

The few official destructions on record were carried out by the army, and there are only a few instances of destruction of temples by Christians are mentioned in the sources, and there is no clear archaeological support. In Africa Proconsularis (Bulla Regia) the temple of Apollo went out of use sometime in the fourth century when the city center shifted.

It has been assumed, on the strength of this articulate body of Christian opinion, that the iron logic of intolerance demanded that, once they possessed such formidable power, Christians should use it to convert as many non-Christians as possible — by threats and disabilities, if not by the direct use of force

Christian writers of the period stylized their accounts claiming instant victory, and this has made it exceptionally difficult to recapture the mentalities of the fourth and fifth centuries.

In this period, at least,  the  quid pro  quo of  Christian  dominance  was  inexplicit  but  firm. In many areas, polytheists were not  molested  as long as they kept their  beliefs to  themselves in front  of Christians; and,  apart  from  a few  ugly  incidents of  local violence, die Jewish communities  enjoyed  a century of  stable, even privileged  existence.

the rule seems to have been the convivencia of  a triumphant  Christianity with a tenacious, if discreet, polytheism, and with confident Jewish communities. Not for  the  last  time in the history of the  Near  East, it was  agreed  that strong fences made good  neighbours

Modern scholarship indicates paganism was a lesser concern than heresy for Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries, which was the case for Ambrose.

The cumulative effect of  the laws was to set in place a religious ordering of  society. By A.D.  425  Roman society could be categorized as fourfold: there  was the Catholic church; all that Catholic bishops might denounce as 'errors' hostile to the true  faith. Then there  were  the  two great  outsiders: 'the  madness of the Jewish  impiety'  and  'the  error  and  insanity  of  stupid  paganism' {C.Th.xv.5.5 and xvi.5.63).

There was no determination to use the laws to convert unbelievers. It was sufficient that non-Christians should keep a low profile and not disturb the rhetoric of triumph. To take only one, chilling example: the threat of flogging with leaden whips  (a punishment  known  to be almost  certainly  lethal)  was decreed against a minor heretical leader, Jovinian, at Rome, prior to his exile (C.Th. xvi.5.3;  Aug.  Ep. io*.4.3,  ed. J.  Divjak,  CSEL LXXXVIII.  Vienna, 1981,48)".

it wasn't possible in the fourth century for the church or the government on its behalf to take the kinds of overt actions taken by Justinian and Heraclius and the Visigothic kings of Spain.

It took a further century of  social  and  religious  changes  before  Justinian  could envisage  the  compulsory  baptism of remaining polytheists, and  a  further century yet until Heraclius and the Visigothic kings of Spain attempted to baptize  the Jews.

"By 425, laws against polytheists, Jews and heretics had congealed into a system which, for the first time in the  history of Rome, presented correct religious adherence as a requirement for the full enjoyment of the benefits of Roman society".
 * In the fourth  century,  not  only  were  such  ambitious schemes  a  physical impossibility, given  the  large numbers  of  non- Christians in every region: the horizons of the possible, that enabled such adventures  to be contemplated, did not exist. They were blocked by an alternative narrative of success.

That ordering would thereafter prove to be an inseparable adjunct of imperial rule, in the empire itself  and, later, in the sub-imperial  states of the west.

Christianity did not replace the offices and customs the Roman state had established in pagan religion with Christians, they invented new ones.

It is revealing that, as early as 370, the imperial chancery should have adopted the term pagani, (pagans), as the official term for polytheists (C.Th. xvi.2.18; cf. xvi.5.46). This term was circulated by Christians as a 'lump word' for all who were not heretics or Jews.

The fourth century was an age of religious ferment comparable to the Reformation of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The late  antique  period  witnessed  several  experiments in the imposition, upon  a wider society, of religious norms  upheld by a determined  and  articulate group. The period  is characterized  by  the successful  imposition of a rabbinic interpretation  of  Judaism  among  the Jewish  communities  in Palestine, Mesopotamia  and elsewhere, and by the formalization  and propagation of  Zoroastrianism throughout the Sasanian empire. in our evidence, this process is not simply misrepresented by our Christian  sources: it is rendered  largely invisible

To recapture  the horizons  of the  possible,  within  which  late  Roman  persons  actually  experienced  the changes  associated  with  the post-Constantinian  empire,

By the time of Constantine, Christianity had also changed.

In 186 BC, the Bacchic associations that offered a new kind of religious choice, were dissolved, leaders were arrested and executed, women were forbidden to hold important positions in the cult, no Roman citizen could be a priest, and strict control of the cult was thereafter established. Jörg Rüpke says this became a pattern for how the Roman empire dealt with religions it saw as a threat to peace, unity or Roman values. By the first century AD, there were "periodic expulsions of astrologers, philosophers and even teachers of rhetoric... as well as Jews and...the cult of Isis". Druids also received the same kind of treatment, as did Christians.

As the Roman Empire expanded, it included different peoples and cultures; those who acknowledged Rome's hegemony retained their own cult and religious calendars. Religion in the Roman empire from the first century AD to the seventh century included the traditional religions of ancient Greece that had been absorbed and transformed into Roman religion; the official Roman imperial cult; various mystery religions, such as the Dionysian and Eleusinian Mysteries, the mystery cult of Cybele, and the eastern religions such as the worship of Mithras, Isis, Christianity, Judaism, along with a variety of other smaller religious groups such as Druids.

"Doing was equal to believing".

Archaeologist Luke Lavan explains that private religious rituals, which were often associated with secret plots against the emperor, carried the threat of banishment and execution in the late Hellene and early imperial periods.

In 186 BC, the Bacchic associations were dissolved, leaders were arrested and executed, women were forbidden to hold important positions in the cult, no Roman citizen could be a priest, and strict control of the cult was thereafter established. Jörg Rüpke says this became a Roman imperial pattern dealing with religions it saw as a threat to peace, unity and Roman values. By the first century AD, there were "periodic expulsions of astrologers, philosophers and even teachers of rhetoric... as well as Jews and...the cult of Isis". Druids also received the same treatment, as did Christians.

Changes in urban topography signalled this shift: as bodies of the dead \vere brought not just into the city precincts, but right to the altars of churches, the notion that the church was one community was highlighted in spatial ways.

The Romans thought of themselves as highly religious, and attributed their success as a world power to their collective piety (pietas) in maintaining good relations with the gods. The Romans are known for the great number of deities they honored

Fredriksen says: "Rome was not tolerant - another anachronistic term, drawn from our own liberal political context. Religious pluralism simply became the norm of ancient society. As long as frontiers were quiet, internal peace maintained, and taxes and tribute collected, as far as the imperial government was concerned, all was well".

(Recall: cult makes gods happy. If deprived of cult, gods can grow resentful, then angry. Unhappy gods make for unhappy humans.)

In antiquity, all gods exist.

It mis-describes Judaism and, by extension, Christianity, and clouds understanding of how religions were commonly constituted in antiquity.

For polytheists of the Roman empire, showing respect to the gods of others was a common sense courtesy which did not require rejection of one’s own gods.

Paul, for example - a monotheist - complains about the lesser divinities who try to frustrate his mission (2 Cor. 4:4). "The divinities formerly worshipped by his congregations in Galatia are not gods by nature, he tells them, but mere stoicheia, cosmic light-weights unworthy of fear or of worship (Gal.4: 8-9; note that Paul only demeans the cosmic status of these beings, but does not deny their existence). Paul certainly believes in these other gods, meaning that he knows that they exist and that they can have and have had real effects. He just does not worship them. Neither, he insists, should his Gentiles.

When Paul describes what Gentiles-in-Christ are doing, he uses two other images: turning, and adoption. They are admonished by Paul not to 'convert' to ’Judaism'; they are not responsible for practicing ancestral Jewish customs. Israel is not their family. The family connection for these people is a very Roman idea: adoption. Roman adoption was both a legal and a religious act making them "sons" who can inherit and even cry out to their Abba:Father (Rom.8:15;cf.Gal.4:6) who is not Abraham (the primal patriarch of Israel) nor Moses (through whom God gave Israel the Law) but is for them, the god of Israel, the god of the universe. This is the proper context for understanding the beginnings of Christianity

Rome tended to identity the gods with specific locales, giving them distinguishing epithets that linked them to particular temples, cities, tribes, or topographical features. But there was also a balancing tendency "to associate these local gods with each other by the use of shared names, iconography and cult practices, and thus to acknowledge that ‘the gods that one group worshipped in one place were “the same” as the gods another group worshipped in another’ (Rives 2007: 86)."

we might best interpret the decree mandating universal sacrifice issued by the emperor Decius in the mid-third century ce as in effect a response to the new realities of the empire: ‘by insisting that every inhabitant of the Roman empire had a specific and immedi-ate religious obligation to the imperial government’, the decree ‘defined at least one aspect of what we may reasonably call “the religion of the Roman empire”’ (Rives 1999: 152). Rives provides a general framework for exploring the variety of religion in the Roman empire: "personal experience of the divine; the role of religion in the construction of communities at the levels of the household, association, and city; the various mechanisms that served to promote some degree of religious integration throughout the empire".

In the first three centuries AD of Carthage, the only model for religious identity in the Roman world was a civic model, "one which linked the individual to a particular city".(Rives 1995: 5) Rives says "in recent decades every one of the assumptions that underlie [this master narrative] has been exploded, and new models and approaches have been developed instead".

Rives asserts that these assumptions were only confirmed by a selective and arbitrary use of evidence that tended to privilege literary texts over documentary sources and define certain types of texts as more significant than others. "Scholars who want to see a profound change in religion during Hellenistic and Roman times turn again and again to the same authors and texts: Plutarch and Apuleius, Marcus Aurelius and Aelius Aristides, Hermetic treatises and gnostic scriptures. Rives says modern studies have shown this approach can no longer be maintained.  "As a result, there is currently a rather bewildering array of approaches and models for understanding religious life in the Roman provinces".

it is important to note that the new picture of the continued vitality of traditional religion does not mean that earlier scholarship has lost all its utility; the narratives of decline that informed them were wrong, not because the phenomena that these scholars discussed did not exist, but because they were only a part of the story, and a much smaller part than those scholars assumed.

although these two terms ought properly to denote distinct phenomena, they tend to be used interchangeably.

the word ‘paganism’ is now seen by many scholars as problematic. Some object to ‘pagan’ having originated as a derogatory term devised by christians "that continues to be freighted with heavy, and largely negative, conceptual baggage" (e.g., Remus 2004). Some scholars now use ‘polytheist’ and ‘polytheism’ instead, but these terms emphasize only one aspect of the varied religious traditions in the Roman world.(North 2005: esp. 134-37)

In this narrative, political and social developments such as the uprooting, isolating and alienating of people from their native cultures, and the insecurity, breakdown of standards and values, and loss of identity, that resulted had produced ‘an era of insecurity and anxiety’. ‘The shift from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, from the secure isolated city-state to the larger Empire which seemingly embraced the whole known earth, provided many with a feeling of alienation and insecurity.’ As a result, confidence in the traditional cults and their gods, that served as the basis of the political, social, and intellectual life, waned. (tripolitis 2002: 2).

Peter Brown (1997) So �debate the world of Late Antiquity revisited, Symbolae Osloenses, 72:1, 5-30, DOI: 10.1080/00397679708590917 Then I found that I had to become, for the first time in my life, a historian of religion. page 18

Religious statements could not be understood without reference to the structure of the society in which they occurred. They were tightly-encoded messages that regulated social interaction. They reflected social structures by the manner in which they determined forms of personal interchange, as much with gods as with men, and regulated, with a silent but firm hand, the possibilities of action on every level, including the seemingly intimate options of isolated individuals, such as the ability to speak with a god in dreams, to command a demon, to emerge as a new person from a transforming ritual.page 21

If, in some sense, varieties of religious experience also reflected, in an intimate if studiously unverbalized manner, varieties of social experience, then the persons known to us ...could be assumed to carry with them, in the texts themselves, clues as to the social context in which they moved. ... holistic vision of the age might dare to entertain the notion of the constant presence of the social order in the religious world itself, as a mute reflection of fluctuating social structures, some rigid, some increasingly fluid, that characterized Roman society as a whole, as that society developed, without notable catastrophe, from the age of Marcus Aurelius to that of Justinian.page 22, then it was possible to write about as massive and as decisive a change as the transformation of late classical paganism and the rise of Christianity without disquiet and without shrill value-judgements, in the same way as it was possible to follow, without undue foreboding, the slow emergence, across the Mediterranean and the Middle East, of post-classical forms of government, of social relations, of urban life and of profane culture.

The World of Late Antiquity.

the cultural and social implications of the limes, of the regions adjacent to the Roman frontier between. the Germans in the North and the heart of the empire. The Rise of Western Christendom (Brown 1996). it is the proliferation of Christian kingdoms and Christianized regions on the peripheries of the eastern Roman empire which marks the difference between the monolithically universal empire of Constantine and Constantius II and the more loose-knit "Monophysite Commonwealth" of the late sixth century. Garth Fowden Empire t o commonwealth pages 23-24

Recent studies, from all directions, if with widely differing degrees of measure or exaggeration, have brought the late Roman state back into the heart of late Roman society. page 24. the century that follows the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine can be acclaimed, without any sense of deprecation, as the apogee of the Roman state. The ability to make itself present to its subjects, after 300 A.D., is all the more impressive in the light of recent evidence, from as far apart as Augsburg and the Euphrates, of how close the empire had come to disintegration.21 The imperial laws, for instance, are now allowed to speak for themselves. They are no longer panned for nuggets of fact, as Jones had done in 1964. Their tone of voice is impressive. As Marie Thérèse Fögen has shown, in the case of imperial legislation on magic, we are dealing with a bid to monopolize knowledge, to generalize and to define, that had hitherto been absent (Fögen 1993). Not only did the empire preach its own notions of the social order as persistently as did any Christian bishop; the unremitting presence of the tax-collector, and the cultural practices that this presence fostered, had the effect of widening the range of literacy, even so far as to provoke the origins of a Coptic literature, in a manner that no Christian church could equal (Hopkins 1991)page 25

--- From The Vanishing Paradigm of the Fall of Rome Glen W. Bowersock Peter Brown's survey of 1971, entitled The World of Late Antiquity, encapsulated a new vision of the post-Constantinian age as the beginning of something grand and distinctive rather than as the end of the classical world every-one knew and admired... traced the origins of this late antique culture to the high Roman Empire of the second and third centuries

The obsession with the fall of Rome that Momigliano identified as starting in the eighteenth century and still with us when he wrote in 1973 has now been dramatically altered. The obsession is not with describing the causes of Rome's fall, or locating it, but with denying it altogether ... one might perhaps be inclined to question altogether the eighteenth-century origins of the modern fascination with the fall of Rome -

Brown's reading of late antiquity has rendered concepts of crisis and decline impossible. "Recently, however, periodization has made a comeback and the decline and fall of the Roman Empire again seems worthy of consideration." ---

--- John Kaye correctly characterizes the conversion of Constantine and his accession to the throne as among the most important things to ever happen to the Christian church. Yet Constantine cannot be seen as a fixed beginning of either the decline of paganism or the rise of Christianity.

Many cults had already begun their decline in the second century. The Crisis of the Third Century (AD 235–284) continued to negatively impact funding to maintain the large temple complexes and their festivals. Political and social change had already begun with the new order of imperial rule under the Tetrarchy (293). Constantine inherited these changes. By 300, Christianity had also changed and adapted to 'Romanness'. Indeed, without what Peter Brown has called "the conversion of Christianity" to the culture and ideals of the Roman world, Constantine would never have converted. He inherited the changes in the church as well.

The reasons for the decline of paganism in the Roman empire are as many and varied as its reasons for becoming one of the largest and most successful empires in the world.

Religion in the Roman empire from the first century of the common era to the seventh century included the traditional religions of ancient Greece that had been absorbed and transformed into the traditional polytheistic Roman religion; the official Roman imperial cult; various mystery religions, such as the Dionysian and Eleusinian Mysteries, the mystery cults of Cybele, Mithras, and the syncretized Isis, Christianity, Judaism, and a variety of others.

Religion in ancient Rome includes the ancestral ethnic religion of the city of Rome that the Romans used to define themselves as a people, as well as the religious practices of peoples brought under Roman rule, in so far as they became widely followed in Rome and Italy. The Romans thought of themselves as highly religious, and attributed their success as a world power to their collective piety (pietas) in maintaining good relations with the gods. The Romans are known for the great number of deities they honored

The Roman Empire expanded to include different peoples and cultures; in principle, Rome followed the same inclusionist policies that had recognised Latin, Etruscan and other Italian peoples, cults and deities as Roman. Those who acknowledged Rome's hegemony retained their own cult and religious calendars, independent of Roman religious law. Military settlement within the empire and at its borders broadened the context of Romanitas. Rome's citizen-soldiers set up altars to multiple deities, including their traditional gods, the Imperial genius and local deities – sometimes with the usefully open-ended dedication to the diis deabusque omnibus (all the gods and goddesses). They also brought Roman "domestic" deities and cult practices with them. By the same token, the later granting of citizenship to provincials and their conscription into the legions brought their new cults into the Roman military.

Traders, legions and other travellers brought home cults originating from Egypt, Greece, Iberia, India and Persia. The cults of Cybele, Isis, Mithras, and Sol Invictus were particularly important. Some of those were initiatory religions of intense personal significance, similar to Christianity in those respects.

Early Christianity grew gradually in Rome and the Roman Empire from the 1st to 4th centuries. In 313 it was legally tolerated and in 380 it became the state church of the Roman Empire with the Edict of Thessalonica. Nevertheless, Hellenistic polytheistic traditions survived in pockets of Greece throughout Late Antiquity until they gradually diminished after the triumph of Christianity.

the study of Antiquity is an inclusive endeavor; no one religion has precedence over another; no region can stake claim to being the center of the late antique world Religion in antiquity has a unique role as a system of culture.

In 112 Pliny the Younger writes Trajan of shrines in Asia Minor having been neglected and deserted while trade in sacrificial meats was nearly wiped out by people's lack of interest in the traditional religions.

Twenty-first century historians of Antiquity depict the world of Late Antiquity as one in which the stagnation of paganism began in the second century as it failed to challenge the emergence of Christianity and failed to adjust successfully to its less favourable position. Archaeologist Richard Bayliss writes that Roman civilization and its many cults were already in decline long before the Christian emperors of Antiquity. Roger S. Bagnall cautions that “One should not assume that the decline of pagan religion and the rise of Christianity are simply related, like children at opposite ends of a see-saw”. In regions away from the imperial court, the end of paganism was, for the most part, both gradual and untraumatic.

Peter Brown"s 1971, The World of Late Antiquity, encapsulated a new vision of the post-Constantinian age as the beginning of something grand and distinctive rather than as the end of the classical world everyone knew and admired. A subsequent volume of lectures, delivered at Harvard in 1976, traced the origins of this late antique culture to the high Roman Empire of the second and third centuries, seen as a kind of seed-bed for wonderful and exotic plants that wereto come into bloom several centuries later. Those lectures and the book that followed bore the title The Making of Late Antiquity. This was a deliberate provocation, answering Sir Richard Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages'' with a strong affirmation that the pivotal time was really late antiquity, not theMiddle Ages.

This debate and subsequent work have gone on still further to annihilate those secure boundaries with which we all once felt comfortable in contemplating the ancient past.

Its implications for Gibbon's theme are portentous, as are its implications for us in the last third of this century, those who think about these things seem ready to announce that Rome's fall was an illusion

It might be helpful to recall that our modern obsession with the fall of Rome not only began in the eighteenth century but also ... bore the Gibbonian stamp

The move away from the fall of Rome to a creative and vibrant late antiquity in scholarship

Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, E. R. Dodds, published in 1965: Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety before. "One may like or dislike Christianity," Auden wrote in his review, "but no one can deny that it was Christianity and the Bible which raised western literature from the dead." Auden wrote, "At its best the movement produced characters of impressive integrity and wisdom, with great psychological understanding, charity and good-humour. We owe the Desert Fathers more than we generally realise. The classical world knew many pleasures, but of one which means a great deal to us, it was totally ignorant until the hermits discovered it, the pleasure of being by one's self". Peter Brown, The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity, 1971;

In 1966 Lynn White, wrote "The Transformation of the Roman World" about "Gibbon's problem after two centuries  on decline of empire Now, in 1995, it is probably fair to say that no responsible historian of the ancient or medieval world would want to address or acknowledge the fall of Rome as either fact or paradigm. It has ended up as a construction that has its own place in modern history, across the two hundred years that followed the first volume of Gibbon's work in 1776.
 * the decline of the classical world was the rise of late antiquity en two widely divergent perspectives on the past

Mikhail Rostovtzeffs Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire-- Rostovtzeff's theme of the collapse of urban civilization

The social revolution of the third century destroyed the foundations of the economic, social and intellectual life of the ancient world. ... Both authors conveyed a powerful impression of the sheer resilience of the Roman empire of the fourth and early fifth centuries — at least, until the onslaught of the Germanic invasions. The world in which Augustine grew to manhood was far from being a "disaster zone". Ancient civilization was not a drained corpse,. the sheer resilience of a pre-Christian society and culture at the very moment of the triumph of the Christian church within the Roman empire... Evidence of the joining of the sacred and the profane, of the intimate dependence of Christianity on its cultural, social and political context in an ancient world that plainly had not grown pale by 400 A.D.—a joining that was a peculiarly marked feature of the post-Constantinian Christian Empire ... the intimate links between late classical civilization and the thought-forms and culture of the great Christian writers of the Patristic age. This tradition gave me my first sighting of a pre-medieval Christianity, of unexpected warmth, richness and flexibility, and, above all, of a Christianity held at a safe distance from the present, by having been firmly planted back where it belonged, in its native, ancient soil.

the rise of the Christian church in North Africa and the emergence, in combative and tenacious Christian form, of the non-Roman, Berber substratum of an entire region. It was in the century between Constantine and Augustine, and not at the time of the Islamic conquests, that Roman Africa had begun to become Barbary. No matter how much I came to dissent from Frend's picture of North Africa, as I settled down to write my biography of Saint Augustine and to produce articles on religious dissent, on religious coercion and on the relation between local languages and religious change (always taking Augustine's Africa as my starting-point), there was no Englishscholar who showed, with such conviction, that the history of late antique Christianity—and especially of its "dissenting" variants—must be seen rooted in a real world, with real social structures and real social conflicts, among local cultures whose particularity was revealed, by Frend the archaeologist,

a view of the last centuries of the ancient world t was a world less depleted by catastrophe than I had been led to suppose d less divided within itself by irreversible and unbridgeable chasms. The center held, and could still control and even attract into itself the new "non-classical" forces along its periphery. Even the "democratization of culture" that characterized the period was shown to have co-existed with strong vertical links,, in a "pyramidal" society, which ensured that the idioms, the outlook and the resources of the masses remained, for the most part, caught in the net of firm and adaptable upper-class leadership

it was precisely the fluidity of the elites of the fourth century empire, drawn in around the court from relatively humble backgrounds, that fostered the spread of Christianity in the governing classes. the "steel framework" of the late Roman state, of which Baynes had spoken, together with the opportunities for advancement opened up in its newly-created partner, the established Christian church, ensured that a healthy flow of talent constantly circulated towards the top, bridging the many potential fissures of a relentlessly-governed but cohesive society

an impressive degree of social mobility in both the teaching profession and the bureaucracy a pattern of vertical mobility, up and down the social and intellectual scale, associated with the rise and diffusion of religious ideas, and, most especially, with the rise of Christianity.

without invoking an intervening catastrophe and without pausing, for a moment, to pay lip service to the widespread notion of decay.

a social and cultural history that could be narrated, from end to end, almost in terms of ever-widening ripplesof change, as different strata of the Roman world, and eventually, indeed, much of its non-Roman periphery, came to participate in a core of central concerns. "New" men, from hitherto neglected social groups and regions, brought with them to the centers of power new ideas, new, distinctly "nonclassical" religious options and, with these, a heightened need to find, within the continuing classical tradition itself, the basis for a new equilibrium between the old and the new. Put bluntly: from the point of view of religious and cultural creativity, "the shaking of an ancient regime" could do nothing but good to a traditional society (Brown 1971b, 37).

The notion of newly-organized empires as agents of quickening fluidity - the "New Model Army" of the late third century - to the Constantinople of Theodosius II, to the Ctesiphon of Khusro I Anoshirwan and eventually even to the social and cultural origins of the revolution that led to the formation of the Abbasid Califate. - it was possible to find, in the peculiar balance of fluidity and stability that characterized the social "style" of the later empire, a clue to the unabated religious and cultural ferment which was so marked a feature of other aspects of the period.

The inner frontier within the Roman empire, between its Mediterranean and non-Mediterranean regions, now seemed to be a more significant dividing-line, along which to align the history of the later empire geography  eroded the traditional, political definition of the field

s E.R. Dodds' Pagans and Christians in an Age of Anxiety - we did not agree

the role of religion in society in the entire late classical period.

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History of Christian ethics
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 * Really like the description of morals at beginning of introduction in Christian Ethics: Four Views |

communities and traditions central to virtue ethics; once the individual became the focus in the enlightenment, that was undermined 9-10
 * use intro to four views, pages 7 onward for history too; page 15 - ; *Virtue ethics was the dominant approach through the early medieval period page 7; remained popular in modern period but assumed new forms page 9;

use Brown rise of western Christendom page 20??

dwell among the ruins of previous moral traditions page 5 Banner --- also this one: St. Ambrose on Violence and War by Louis J. Swift*
 * add Francesco Braschi from page 7 of Ambrose of Milan to history of CE and Ambrose/impact of martyrdom

Notability
According to ethicist Michael Banner the story of ethics in the West has largely been the story of Christian ethics. Christian ethics has not been alone in its cultural influence; it has, itself, been influenced by other religious traditions, by politics, economics, and even by its opponents, but Banner insists that making social, political and cultural sense of where western civilization is in the twenty-first century requires some understanding of the history of Christian ethics. "This is not, let it be noted, a claim about the present authority of Christianity or about its hold on contemporary intellectual and moral allegiances, but rather about the part it has had in shaping the practices, values and attitudes of everyday life... if history has a place in giving us an understanding of the moral concepts, categories and expectations which shape our world (where 'our' means 'the modern West's'), that history has to be, in large part, a history of Christian life and thought."According to philosopher and ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre, knowledge of this moral history is not only relevant, but needed, for the twenty-first century world. Banner quotes MacIntyre's classic work After Virtue, as saying that in the modern debates that so deeply divide western culture, opponents often have no means of reconciling differences because modern people are without a sense of their own ethical history. This prevents them from having the knowledge of what common ground could provide resolution. MacIntyre refers to this ignorance of our moral roots as the "salient characteristic of the moral culture of modernity".

Banner points out that while some specific issues are new to the modern day, the ethical questions that underlie them are not: "nuclear weapons are new, but the question of killing non-combatants in war is not. Cloning is new, but the question of the dignity and value of the individual is not. Climate change is a new dilemma, but the question of how much man should shape his environment is not". Mark Noll, distinguished professor of history at Notre Dame, asserts that a study of the history of Christian ethics provides concrete examples of principles and problems, perspective and context, and the ability to connect "grand historical consequences with sharply focused critical events".

Definition
Christian ethics has aspects of virtue ethics (character oriented), deontological ethics (rule oriented), natural law ethics (human nature) and prophetic ethics (social justice). It began with the ministry of Jesus (c. 27-30), emerged out of the heritage shared by both Judaism and Christianity, and originally depended upon the Hebrew canon as well as important legacies from Greek and Hellenic philosophy.

First century
Mark Noll writes that "Christianity was born in the cradle of Judaism". Within the first decade after Christ, it is estimated there were maybe 1000 Christians. Christian ethics among this early group was mostly about seeking "moral instruction on specific problems and practices". These were not sophisticated ethical analyses, but were instead the practical application of Jesus' teachings and example to confront specific issues.

The first ethical stance taken by the fledgling church was that made at the Council of Jerusalem, circa 50 AD, as reported in Acts 15. Its decree, known as the Apostolic Decree, to abstain from blood, sexual immorality, meat sacrificed to idols, and the meat of strangled animals, was held as generally binding for several centuries and is still observed today by the Greek Orthodox church.

Early Christian writings give evidence of the hostile social setting in the Roman empire of the first century. Claudius expelled "the Jews" in 49AD, but Chrys C. Caragounis of Lund university in Sweden asserts it was "mainly Christian missionaries and converts who were expelled", i.e. those Jews associated with the name Chrestus. Caragounis and Peter Richardson at the University of Toronto, point out that "believers in Christ were reckoned ethnically and religiously as belonging totally to the Jews" at that time. Richardson adds that the term Christian "only became tangible in documents after the year 70 AD.  Suetonius and Tacitus used the terms "superstitio" and "impious rites" [profani] in describing the reasons for the expulsion, terms not applied to Jews, but commonly applied to believers in Christ at that time. In Rome, citizens were expected to demonstrate their loyalty to Rome by participating in the rites of the state religion which had numerous feast days, processions and offerings throughout the year.  The Christian had exacting moral standards that included avoiding such events and those who participated in them. "'Christian attendance at civic festivals, athletic games, and theatrical performances were fraught with danger, since in addition to the 'sinful frenzy' and 'debauchery' aroused, each was held in honour of pagan deities. Various occupations and careers were regarded as inconsistent with Christian principles, most notably military service and public office, the manufacturing of idols, and of course all pursuits which affirmed polytheistic culture, such as music, acting, and school-teaching (cf. Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 16). Even the wearing of jewelry and fine apparel was judged harshly ... as was the use of cosmetics and perfumes'." As a result, sociologist Joseph M. Bryant says "the ordinary Christian lived under a constant threat of denunciation and the possibility of arraignment on capital charges". Christians were seen by those outside the faith as belonging to an illicit religion that was anti-social and subversive.   Life as a Christian required daily courage, "with the radical choice of Christ or the world" facing the believer every day.

According to Tacitus and later Christian tradition, Nero blamed Christians for the Great Fire of Rome in 64AD. Joseph Bryant asserts that "Nero's mass executions ...set a precedent, and thereafter the mere fact of 'being a Christian' was sufficient for state officials to impose capital punishment. While it is generally agreed that from Nero's reign until Decius's widespread measures in 250, Christian persecution was isolated and localized, with Governors playing a more consistent role than emperors, it still presented life-threatening challenges to the emerging church.

These challenges would be answered by the emergence of an organized church system "constructed around locally powerful bishops" similar to Roman governors, within one or two generations after Nero. By the year 300, Stark estimates there were between 5 - 7.5 million Christians out of a population of 60 million.

The destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70AD is an early turning point in the history of Christianity. It marked "the close of the period when Christianity could be regarded as simply a variety of Judaism.... From 70 onward the divergence of the paths of Jewish Christianity and orthodox Judaism was decisive". This left Christianity to define for itself what it meant to be a Christian, distinct from paganism and Judaism. Early Christian writers worked to reconcile the Jewish founding story, the Christian gospel of the Apostles, and the Greek tradition of knowing the divine through reason.

Constantine through Antiquity
John Kaye characterizes the conversion of Constantine, and the council of Nicaea that Constantine called, as two of the most important things to ever happen to the Christian church. Throughout his reign, Constantine's involvement with the church was dominated by its many conflicts defining orthodoxy versus heterodoxy and heresy. The worst of the heresies was the 56-year long Arian controversy with its debate of Trinitarian formulas.

Constantine got news of the Arian conflict sometime before his last war with Licinius, and was deeply distressed by it. After fruitless letter writing, and the sending of bishops to promote reconciliation, the emperor called for all church leaders to convene in 325 in Nicea in Bithynia (in present-day Turkey) to settle the issue. Constantine himself presided at the council. Kaye references Sozomen as saying Constantine opened with a speech in which he exhorted the bishops as friends and ministers to resolve conflict and embrace peace. Sozomen says the bishops accordingly broke out in mutual accusation. The emperor intervened, mediated, occasionally severely corrected, persuaded, and praised, and Sozomen says, eventually brought them to agreement.

The result was the Nicene Creed, from which five Arian bishops abstained. The abstainers were banished for a time, then returned, resulting in Athanasius, the champion of orthodoxy, being ousted from his bishopric in Alexandria in 336, forced into exile, and thereafter living out much of the remainder of his life in a cycle of forced movement as power went back and forth between the two groups. Athanasius died in 373, but his orthodox teaching was a major influence in the West, especially on Theodosius who became emperor in 381. The Nicene creed remains the official creed of the catholic church, and is used as such by many Protestant denominations as well.

From its earliest days, the church interacted with the Greek and Roman philosophies that surrounded it. These influences are seen in the NT writings such as Hebrews, the gospel of John, and parts of Paul. Christianity's virtue ethic also owes much to Plato, as it adopted Plato's four virtues, moderation, courage, wisdom and justice, adding them very early in Christian history to the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, thereby creating the cardinal virtues.

Christianity, which had begun in the first century as a "marginal, persecuted, and popularly despised Christian sect", changed into a fully institutionalized church capable of embracing the entire Roman empire by the third century. Without this "conversion of Christianity to the culture and ideals of the Roman world", Brown says Constantine would never have converted. However, this "momentous transformation" also threatened the survival of the marginal Christian religious movement because it naturally led to divisions, schisms and defections: 'heresies'.

Ambrose
According to Moorhead, Ambrose is an example of the attitudes of Late Roman aristocracy moving into the church through the episcopate. Brown Through a needle page 146 - "the first manual of Christian ethics" "In creating in a major western city a christian community sheathed in an aura of inviolable cohesion, Ambrose had begun a work that would be continued in many other cities of the West. He gave a language to this great enterprise. He conjured up an imagined community in which the distinction between the poor and the plebs was deliberately blurred. He brought the poor into the catholic community. He presented the care of the rich for the poor as a necessary consequence of the unity of all Christians. Last but not least, Ambrose presented the unity of the catholic community of Milan as the living core of human society as a whole. A fractured human race could regain its long-lost solidarity by entering the catholic church. It was by his attention to social issues, judged in the light of that great hope, that Ambrose came to forge a language that proved to be well adapted to the ambitions of a religion that had dared to think of itself—at last and for the very first time—as a true “majority religion,” as the church rose “like a moon waxing in brightness” above the Roman world."51

Religious Dissent in Late Antiquity, 350-450 By Maijastina Kahlos, page 1 Battle of Frigidus 394 page 2 challenges to traditional view of Christianization; rigorist writers made a lot of noise; "Rhetoric and realities" page 3 wide variety of religious movements, sometimes violence but mostly not; constant flux between moderation and coercion marked minorities and majorities, government and religious groups;

Augustine
After Christianity became legal in the fourth century, the range and sophistication of Christian ethics expanded and had a defining and lasting influence upon Christian thought through such figures as Augustine of Hippo. Augustine (354–430) built his treatise on Christian piety, Enchiridion, as an exposition of faith, hope and love, concluding that, "when there is a question of whether a man is good, one does not ask what he believes, or what he hopes for, but what he loves".

Augustine's ethic regarding the Jews meant that, according to Anna Sapir Abulafia, "Most scholars would agree that, with the marked exception of Visigothic Spain in the seventh century, Jews in Latin Christendom lived relatively peacefully with their Christian neighbors through most of the Middle Ages" until to the 1200s. Jeremy Cohen says historians generally agree this is because, before the 1200s, the church followed the ethic of Augustine of Hippo who had rejected those who argued that the Jews should be killed, or forcibly converted. Augustine taught that Jews should be allowed to live in Christian societies and practice Judaism without interference because they preserved the teachings of the Old Testament and were living witnesses of the truths of the New Testament.

use Ambrose: XD-US. By Boniface Ramsey, page 2, it was Augustine who introduced self-reflection to the church

Council of Chalcedon
The Later Roman Empire, 284-602: A Social Economic and ..., Volume 2. By Arnold Hugh Martin Jones page 882

There Is no Crime for Those who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire. (Transformation of the Classical Heritage.) by Michael Gaddis has a chapter that discusses the Council of Chalcedon pages 251-322

Benedict's Rule
Augustine's pathbreaking autobiography Confessions characteristic metaphor - influenced Christian view of the ideal life as passing from the ordinary, earthly, materially bound world into the spiritual, extraordinary, celestial world - to allow creatures of the earth to rise above themselves and their earthly circumstances gave monasticism its foundation and motivation. led to:
 * Benedict and the practice of the Christian life


 * Augustine and the theory of the Christian life: Banner

Bryant explains that, "once those within a sect determine that the 'spirit' no longer resides in the parent body, 'the holy and the pure' typically find themselves compelled – either by conviction or coercion – to withdraw and establish their own counter-church, the 'gathered remnant' of God's elect".

Mark A. Noll, distinguished professor of history at Notre Dame, writes that major turning points for early Christianity included the Fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon in 325 and 451 respectively, and the life and teachings of St. Benedict.

Brown calls Constantine's conversion a "very Roman conversion." "He had risen to power in a series of deathly civil wars, destroyed the system of divided empire, believed the Christian God had brought him victory, and therefore regarded that god as the proper recipient of religio. He did all of this without according religio to the traditional gods". Brown says Constantine was over 40, had most likely been a traditional polytheist, and was a savvy and ruthless politician when he declared himself a Christian.

One belief of the early church fathers was that women were responsible for sin in the world. Hebrew Bible scholar Tykva Frymer-Kensky says unlike other ancient literature, the Hebrew Bible does not portray women as deserving of less because of their naturally evil or innately inferior feminine natures as is found in some Ancient and Classical Greek and Roman writings. The Bible's metaphysical view of male and female shows both as "created in the image of God" with neither inherently inferior in nature. Laws concerning the loss of female virginity have no male equivalent. These and other gender differences found in the Torah suggest that, within those texts, women are subordinate to men. Adultery was defined differently for men than for women: a woman was an adulteress if she had sexual relations outside her marriage, but if a man had sexual relations outside his marriage with an unmarried woman, a concubine or a prostitute, it was not considered adultery on his part. Non-conforming sex – homosexuality, bestiality, cross dressing and masturbation – are described as being punishable. Stringent protection of the marital bond and loyalty to kin is portrayed as very strong.

The Old Testament contains strict purity laws, both ritual and moral. Near Eastern scholar Eve Levavi Feinstein writes "The concepts of pollution and sexuality seem inextricably linked", yet the views in the Bible vary more than is generally recognized. Pollution terminology is used for illegal sexual contact such as rape and adultery, and it is also used for legal and licit sexual intercourse, menstruation, and for some perhaps unavoidable diseases. This makes the Bible's view of the relationship between temporary ritual pollution and more serious moral pollution "murky." Pollution concepts in the Hebrew Bible are connected to certain areas of experience such as sex, death, and certain kinds of illnesses and food. The Hebrew term for pollution appears 286 times and the term for purity appears 207 times. Feinstein says the Hebrew Bible never uses the term 'pure' (טָהֵר) to describe virginity, but does use it to describe a married woman who has not committed adultery (Numbers 5:28). Wanton, unrepentant sins are seen as having a contaminating effect on the sanctuary similar to environmental pollution.

Medieval Christianity


In its earliest form, the Christian ethic was a call to live virtuously in "two dimensions": "vertically towards God, and horizontally towards one's neighbor".

Monastic, mystical, the confessional, Thomistic synthesis; add Banner's Natural law here/Aquinas An early list of 8 sins comes from Evagrius (346–399) and was modified by Gregory I (c.540–604) who reduces the number to seven and identifies pride as "the queen of sins".

In the centuries following the fall of the Roman empire, practices of penance and repentance, using books known as Penitential were carried by monks on their missionary journeys thereby spreading the ethic. In the middle ages there are "7 capital sins... 7 works of mercy, 7 sacraments, 7 principle virtues, 7 gifts of the Spirit, 8 beatitudes, 10 commandments, 12 articles of faith and 12 fruits of faith". The medieval and renaissance periods saw a number of models of sin listing the seven deadly sins and the virtues opposed to each. The crusades were products of the renewed spirituality of the central Middle Ages when the ethic of living the Apostolic life and chivalry began to form.

In the centuries following the fall of the Roman empire, practices of penance and repentance, using books known as Penitential were carried by monks on their missionary journeys thereby spreading the ethic. In the middle ages there are "7 capital sins... 7 works of mercy, 7 sacraments, 7 principle virtues, 7 gifts of the Spirit, 8 beatitudes, 10 commandments, 12 articles of faith and 12 fruits of faith". The medieval and renaissance periods saw a number of models of sin listing the seven deadly sins and the virtues opposed to each. The Christian ethic of Augustine of Hippo toward the Jews meant that, "with the marked exception of Visigothic Spain in the seventh century, Jews in Latin Christendom lived relatively peacefully with their Christian neighbors through most of the Middle Ages". The crusades were products of the renewed spirituality of the central Middle Ages when the ethic of chivalry began to form.

The medieval and renaissance periods saw a number of models of sin listing the seven deadly sins and the virtues opposed to each. The seven Christian virtues are from two sets of virtues: the cardinal and theological. The four cardinal virtues are Prudence, Justice, Restraint (or Temperance), and Fortitude. The cardinal virtues are the basic requirements of a virtuous life. The three theological virtues, are Faith, Hope, and Love (or Charity). Christian ethics also recognizes the additional virtues known as the "Fruit of the Holy Spirit," found in.


 * Prudence: also described as wisdom, the ability to judge between actions with regard to appropriate actions at a given time
 * Justice: also considered as fairness, the most extensive and most important virtue
 * Temperance: also known as restraint, the practice of self-control, abstention, and moderation tempering the appetition
 * Courage: also termed fortitude, forbearance, strength, endurance, and the ability to confront fear, uncertainty, and intimidation
 * Faith: belief in God, and in the truth of His revelation as well as obedience to Him (cf. Rom 1:5:16:26)
 * Hope: expectation of and desire of receiving; refraining from despair and capability of not giving up. The belief that God will be eternally present in every human's life and never giving up on His love.
 * Charity: a supernatural virtue that helps us love God and our neighbors, the same way as we love ourselves.

Crusade
page 168

three periods page 2 Constable

defining crusade page 12 Constable Hierarchical and popular 13 Peace and Truce of God p.14

oaths taken by the crusading leaders to the Byzantine emperor Christian thought had generally frowned upon participation in the military, but that became increasingly difficult to maintain in the Middle Ages. A new ideal of the religious warrior who fought for justice, defended truth, and protected the weak and the innocent formed. Such a knight was ordained only after proving his spiritual and martial worth: robed in white, he would swear an oath before a cleric to uphold these values and defend the faith. Chivalry is sometimes seen as one of the strangest offshoots of Christian theology to ever develop, but develop it did during the centuries of the crusades. The religious aspect of knighthood was eventually replaced with "courtly love" and devotion to a lady instead of God, and that too was replaced by the development of non-martial courtiers in the High Middle Ages. In 1096, the church launched the First crusade as a just war response to a call to defend others. Jonathan Riley-Smith says the crusades were products of the renewed spirituality of the central Middle Ages as much as they were of political circumstances. Senior churchmen of this time presented the concept of Christian love to the faithful as the reason to take up arms. From its early days, Christian ethics had generally frowned upon participation in the military, but in the Middle Ages, the idea of chivalry began to form, and the ideal of the religious warrior who fought for justice, defended truth, and protected the weak and the innocent was created. Riley-Smith concludes, "The charity of St. Francis may now appeal to us more than that of the crusaders, but both sprang from the same roots." The crusades made a powerful contribution to Christian ethics through the concept of Christian chivalry, "imbuing their Christian participants with what they believed to be a noble cause, for which they fought in a spirit of self-sacrifice. However, in another sense, they marked a qualitative degeneration in behavior for those involved, for they engendered and strengthened hostile attitudes..."

A sharper line of separation between philosophy and theology, and between ethics and moral theology, developed in the the Middle Ages. Albertus Magnus (1193–1280), devoted the last tractatus of his work, De Bono, to a theory of justice and natural law. It was the only work specifically devoted to natural law written by a theologian or philosopher up until his day. Bonaventure (1221–1274), Bonaventure wrote that philosophy was not an autonomous discipline that could be pursued successfully independently of theology. Duns Scotus (1274–1308) emphasized God's will and human freedom in all philosophical and ethical issues.

Mary
The veneration of the Virgin Mary began to flourish in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries with the invention of "affective piety" that grew from empathy with the human suffering Christ that exhibited itself in compassion toward the suffering of others.

Scholasticism and Thomism
From about 1000 onward, the monastic school system that had briefly existed under Charlemagne, was revived. By 1200 the Universities arose. The curriculum was based on the seven liberal arts codified by Boethius in the sixth century: "the trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, astronomy, geometry and music)". There was no department of ethics, no separate class of ethics.

Inaccurate Latin translations of classical writings were replaced in the twelfth century with more accurate ones. This led to an intellectual revolution called scholasticism, which was an effort to harmonize Aristotelian and Christian thought. In response, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) wrote "one of the outstanding achievements of the High Middle Ages", the Summa Theologica, that became known as Thomism, containing many ethics that continue to be used.

Classical writings, notably those of Aristotle, which had previously been known only through inaccurate Latin translations, were replaced in the twelfth century with more accurate translations from copies in Arabic left by Muslims with the Jews in Spain. Their arrival caused an intellectual revolution, and by 1300, Aristotle's writings monopolized school curriculum at every level and elevated Aristotle to "the status of an authority whose word could not be questioned". This led to the body of thought called scholasticism.

The influx of Greek thinking caused controversy. On the one hand, the theological faculty in Paris were scholastics, and on the other hand was the art's faculty, (called Latin Averroists after the Arabic philosopher Ibn Rushd known in the West as Averroes), who wanted philosophy separated from theology and reason fully divorced from faith. The view that resolved the conflict was the via media, the view of Thomas Aquinas. He avoided the pure rationalism of the Averrosits while still giving Aristotle a central role and honoring Christian beliefs. Known as Thomism, "this theological system in its complex design and sheer elegance remains one of the outstanding achievements of the High Middle Ages".

In general, scholasticism involved harmonizing Aristotelian and Christian thought, but it was also a system of reasoning and a method of debate. It used deductive logic to clarify existing issues and explore the intellectual ramifications of any particular topic. The debate method was the favorite of the universities who regularly held quodlibetals, or what Americans might call "Town hall meetings", where questions were not limited to friend or foe. Quodlibetal is from the Latin quod (what) + libet (it pleases), meaning the topic of these debates was “whatever pleased” the debaters. The most famous of the quodlibetal leaders is probably Thomas Aquinas who, as a professor at the University of Paris two separate times (1252 to 1259 and again from 1269 to 1272), answered "questions from the floor in a public context".

The impact of the rediscovery of Aristotle is evident in part two of the Summa Theologiae, where he discusses the intellectual virtues in question 57, and immediately following that, discusses the moral and theological virtues in questions 58-62.
 * Aquinas, Natural law and the loss of the Christian ethic - Banner

For Aquinas, there are two key features of the natural law found at Question 94 of the Prima Secundae (the second division of Part one) of the Summa Theologiae. The first is that, for Aquinas, natural law is an aspect of divine providence. For example, he discusses the ethics of buying and selling and concludes that although it may be legal (according to human law) to sell an object for more that it is worth, Divine law "leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary to virtue". The question of beatitudo, perfect happiness in the possession of God, is posited as the goal of human life. Thomas also argues that the human being by reflection on human nature's inclinations discovers a law, that is the natural law, which is "man's participation in the divine law".

Aquinas says reason and faith are both paths to truth, and human senses are the only source for human knowledge. He saw secular life as natural and necessary and believed that "natural law - which derived from the divine order - offered a correct guide to individuals and society". Rejecting Augustine's view, he followed Aristotle in "claiming that a settled society with justice for all is the highest human goal on earth".

Aquinas defined "love" for the Christian believer as "to will the good of another". Aquinas supported tolerance as a general principle. He taught that governing well included tolerating some evil in order to foster good or prevent worse evil. But in his Summa Theologica II-II qu. 11, art. 3, he adds that heretics — after two fruitless admonitions — deserve only excommunication and death. Thomism had a lasting impact on Christian ethics. Six hundred years after his death, the papacy declared (in 1874) that Thomism was the official philosophy of Roman Catholic thought.

Persecution
R. I. Moore calls the 1100s "pivotal" because this is when Europe began laying the foundation for its gradual transformation from the medieval to the early modern era of the 1400s. According to Moore, and other contemporary scholars such as John D. Cotts and Peter D. Diehl "the growth of secular power and the pursuit of secular interests, constituted the essential context of the developments that led to a persecuting society." Moore explains that the church "played a significant role in the formation of the persecuting society but not the leading one." Still, the centralization and secularization that was going on in society also took place within the church, and the church gradually began to resemble its secular counterparts in its conduct, thought, objectives, and ethics.

By the 1200s, both civil and canon law had become such a major aspect of ecclesiastical culture that law began dominating Christian ethics. Most bishops and Popes were trained lawyers rather than theologians. The legal regulations of the church, and divine moral law, became confounded, and the moral principle was lowered to the level of jural legislation. "This mixing of the ethical and the juridicial was communicated to the whole thinking of the age". In the High Middle Ages, the religion that had begun centuries before by decrying the power of law, developed the most complex religious law the world has ever seen. It was a system in which the ethics of equity and universality were largely overlooked. Ethics of this period became little more than an extension of law which was then used to aid the state in the production of new rhetoric, patterns, and procedures of exclusion and persecution.

Heresy was a religious, political, and social issue, and "the first stirrings of violence against dissidents were usually the result of popular resentment". This resentment was often demonstrated by mobs murdering heretics. Most historians agree this breakdown of social order was what led to the medieval inquisitions. Leaders reasoned that both lay and church authority had an obligation to step in when sedition, peace, or the general stability of society was at issue. Because the Late Roman Empire had developed an inquisitorial system of justice that seemed useful in these circumstances, that system was revived in the Middle Ages. Essentially, the church reintroduced Roman law in Europe in the form of the Inquisition when it seemed that Germanic law had failed. This revival of Roman law made it possible for Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) to make heresy a political question when he took Roman law's doctrine of lèse-majesté, and combined it with his view of heresy as laid out in the 1199 decretal Vergentis in senium, thereby ethically, and theologically, equating heresy with treason against God.

Jacob J. Schacter and Elisheva Carlebach reference eminent historian David Berger saying historians agree that the period which spanned the eleventh to the thirteenth century was a turning point in Jewish-Christian relations. This led the church to sometimes support mistreatment of Jews, and at other times, still oppose it and protect them. Political authorities maintained order by keeping groups separated both legally and physically in what would be referred to in the twenty-first century as segregation. Christian ethics said nothing to oppose this because, in 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council, known as the Great Council, had met and accepted 70 canons of church law, the last three of which required Jews to distinguish themselves from Christians in their dress, prohibited them from holding public office, and prohibited Jewish converts from continuing to practice Jewish rituals. "Officially, the medieval Catholic church never advocated the expulsion of all the Jews from Christendom, or repudiated Augustine's doctrine of Jewish witness... Still, late medieval Christendom frequently ignored its mandates..."

By the 1200s, both civil and canon law had become such a major aspect of ecclesiastical culture that law began dominating Christian ethics. Most bishops and Popes were trained lawyers rather than theologians. The legal regulations of the church, and "divine moral law", became confounded, and the moral principle was lowered to the level of jural legislation. "This mixing of the ethical and the juridicial was communicated to the whole thinking of the age".

Reformation and enlightenment
Part four *Martin Luther against ethics /Banner Luther and Calvin, counter reformation and humanism, the radical reformation; use Banner?

"The unity of the universal church, for which Thomas Aquinas had provided elaborate theological rationale, broke under the weight of moral corruption and a lack of responsiveness to movements of reform. While the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century appeared as a vast theological and ecclesial revolution, ... It also played an important role in shaping the modern world."

Tolerance
By the time of the early Reformation, (1400 — 1600), the conviction developed among many early Protestants that pioneering the ethics of religious freedom and religious toleration was necessary. There was a concerted campaign for tolerance in mid-sixteenth century northwestern Switzerland in the town of Basle. Sebastian Castellio, who was among the earliest of the reformers to advocate both religious and political tolerance, had moved to Basle after he was exiled from France. Castellio's argument for toleration was essentially theological and ethical: "By casting judgment on the belief of others, don't you take the place of God?" He also pled for social stability and peaceful co-existence. Making similar arguments were, Anabaptist David Joris (1501 - 1556) from the Netherlands, and the Italian reformer Jacobus Acontius (1492 - 1566) who also gathered with Castellio in Basle. Other advocates of religious tolerance, Mino Celsi (1514 - 1576) and Bernardino Ochino (1487–1564), joined them, publishing their works on toleration in that city. In time, many would follow.

Benjamin Warfield is quoted as saying the Reformation was a "triumph of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the church". Grace was the basic ethic of Reformation thinkers Martin Luther and John Calvin, and ironically, the fourth century Catholic Augustine was a source for both Reformers. Luther, in his classic treatise On Christian Liberty argued that moral effort is a response to grace. Luther said humans are not made good by the things they do, but if they are made good by God's love, they will be impelled to do good things. Luther posited "two kingdoms": the temporal and the spiritual. This sharp delineation meant secular power must not be used to enforce spiritual ends, and spiritual authorities must not have the temporal power to enforce any law or decree on others without their consent.

John Calvin adopted and systematized Luther's main ideas. In His Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin grounds everything in the sovereignty of God, "transforming every act of human self-seeking into a radical endeavor to bring every aspect of human existence into conformity with the divine will". Since all Christians are equally "called by God to a morally responsive life", that can be expressed in whatever manner is appropriate to our situation including secular pursuits. This had the effect of liberating the concept of vocation from being limited to the priesthood and monastic orders. In Calvin's view, all humans have a vocation, a calling, and in all our callings, the guiding measure of its value is simply, and profoundly, whether it impedes or furthers God's will. This gives a 'sacredness' to the most mundane and ordinary of actions. The Reform ethic contributed to ideas of popular sovereignty asserting human beings are not "subjects of the state but are members of the state".

Moral law, according to Calvin, has three purposes: as evidence of our moral powerlessness to keep it apart from the grace of God, as a teaching tool for believers, and as constraint upon the wicked. He upheld the separation of the spiritual and temporal asserting that one important role of civil government is to provide restraint for evildoers. Thus, Calvin also supported just war in opposition to the pacifism of the Anabaptists of his time. Calvin upheld the concept of private property but also taught that all property is held in trust for God and will require an accounting for its use. This combination of principles produced what is sometimes called the Protestant work ethic.

In an extended discussion of moral will, Calvin explores the classical philosophical writings of Plato, Aristotle, Themistius, some of the early church fathers, and Augustine. With Augustine, Calvin affirms human will, for good or evil, but also says we are like animals following the inclination of a corrupt nature without deliberation.

Luther, in his classic treatise On Christian Liberty argued that moral effort is a response to grace. Humans are not made good by the things they do, but if they are made good by God's love, they will be impelled to do good things. John Calvin adopted and systematized Luther's main ideas grounding everything in the sovereignty of God. In Calvin's view, all humans have a vocation, a calling, and the guiding measure of its value is simply whether it impedes or furthers God's will. This gives a 'sacredness' to the most mundane and ordinary of actions leading to the development of the Protestant work ethic. Calvin upheld the separation of the spiritual and earthly asserting that one important role of civil government is to provide restraint for evildoers. Thus, Calvin also supported just war in opposition to the pacifism of the Anabaptists of his time. The Reform ethic contributed to ideas of popular sovereignty asserting human beings are not "subjects of the state but are members of the state". During the Reformation, Protestant Christians pioneered the ethics of religious toleration and religious freedom.

The Roman Catholic church of the 1600s responded to Reformation Protestantism in three ways. Papal reform began with Pope Paul III (1534 - 1549). New monastic orders grew with the most influential being the Society of Jesus commonly known as the Jesuits. The Jesuits commitment to education put them at the forefront of many colonial missions. The third response was by the Council of Trent in 1545 and 1563. The Council asserted that the Bible and church tradition were the foundations of church authority, not just the Bible as Protestants asserted; the Vulgate was the only official Bible and other versions were rejected; salvation was through faith and works, not faith alone; and the seven sacraments were reaffirmed. "The moral, doctrinal and disciplinary results of the Council of Trent laid the foundations for Roman Catholic policies and thought right up to the present".

Christian humanism taught that any Christian with a "pure and humble heart could pray directly to God" without the intervention of a priest. They believed that imitating the early church would revitalize Christianity and restore its original purpose. "The outstanding figure among the northern humanists — and possibly the outstanding figure among all humanists — is the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus". His ethical views included advocating for education in the humanities, "emphasizing the study of Classics, and honoring the dignity of the individual. He promoted the philosophy of Christ as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount and in living a humble and virtuous life".

Eighteenth and Nineteenth century
rationalism and revival - use Part five Banner's Butler, Kant aND KIERKEGAARD revival, philosophy, slavery and feminism
 * Nietzsche

Christian ethics separated from theology in the Enlightenment era. The authority of the Bible, faith and religion itself were challenged by pietism and rationalism. This eventually led to the post-modern view that no appeal to authority can be accepted as sufficient to establish truth. "The appeal to inner experience, the renewed interest in human nature, and the influence of social conditions upon ethical reflection introduced new directions to Christian ethics [in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries]. This period is filled with "Formal Discourses" treating both normative ethics [morals to follow] and meta-ethics [what ethics itself is]". The primary concern of the early modern period was the nature of human nature. This included discussion of where moral authority comes from and what defines human responsibility, free will, the nature of the self, and moral character. "Beginning with the rise of Christian social theory, ... ethics is heavily oriented toward discussion of nature and society, wealth, work, and human equality".

Twentieth century
social gospel, formative thinkers, Vatican II, liberation theology Barth and John Paul
 * Barth and John Paul II rediscovering Christian ethics - Part 6

Wogamen; Christian Ethics A Historical Introduction; 1993

There are multiple Christian ethics in the modern era. It has been influenced by different strands of thought, such as that of Immanuel Kant who grounded morality in nature, independent of theology, and the Social gospel's attempt to respond to the effects of modern industrialization. Stanley Hauerwas asserts that the Social gospel, along with all modern ethics and theology, accepted and accommodated that Kantian separation, thereby making both ethics and theology "impoverished". In the twenty-first century, this has often resulted in Christian ethics on one side of a discussion and secularism on the other, with Christian ethics fighting for relevancy. William J. Meyer asserts the answer to this difficulty lies in embracing secular standards of rationality and coherence while refusing secular conclusions. On the other hand, James M. Gustafson asserts that modern ethics must be grounded in natural law while addressing both theology and ethics in "an integrative process" that is careful to consider circumstances, method, and procedures for decision making, and "gathers relevant information and knowledge from the social and natural sciences". The "struggle to embrace modernity without abandoning faith ... is arguably the critical fault line in the contemporary world".

John Carman says the central question of Christian ethics is, and has always been, how the Christian and the church relates to the surrounding social and political world. "This has led to the development of three distinct types of modern Christian ethics: the church, sect and mystical types". In the church type of Roman Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism, the Christian ethic is lived within the world, in marriage, family, and work, while living within and participating in municipal counties, cities and nations. This ethic is meant to permeate every area of life and is largely responsible for the great Christian societies. The ethic of the sect works in the opposite direction. It is practiced by withdrawing from the world, minimizing interaction with it while living outside or above the world in communities separated from other municipalities. The mystical type advocates an ethic that is purely an inward experience of personal piety and spirituality. It often includes asceticism. In the last century and a half, a fourth formulation of the Christian ethic as social reform has also developed. There is also geographic diversity in modern Christian ethics.

Twenty-first century
Conflicting tendencies
 * Genetics, philosophy and the present Christian life

Additional reading

 * Norman Geisler has a book titled Christian Ethics Contemporary Issues & Options, which lists many of the same issues you list in this article. The title let's readers know, up front, this book is limited to "current" issues. []


 * Christian Ethics Moral Theology in Light of Vatican II: General Moral Theology · Volume 1 [] has the same definition as Pinckaers on page 3.


 * The Divine Imperative: A Study in Christian Ethics [] has a truly interesting discussion of what CE isn't and is in the second paragraph on page 85. It's essentially the same as above.


 * [] says that it "Redefines the field of Christian ethics along three strands: universal (ethics for anyone), subversive (ethics for the excluded), and ecclesial (ethics for the church). It is a contemporary redefinition, but it begins with history on page 1.


 * Moral Discernment in the Christian Life: Essays in Theological Ethics defines Christian ethics on page 7 as "faith doing". I particularly like that one.  It's simple and elegant.

Detritus
This simple virtue ethic became the dominant ethical approach that lasted into and through most of the Middle Ages.

"In four centuries, between the reigns of Marcus Aurelius (161 - 180) and Justinian (527 - 565), the Mediterranean world passed through a series of profound transmutations that affected the rhythms of life, the moral sensibilities, and the concomitant sense of the self of the inhabitants of its cities, and of the countryside around them... The life of the individual, the life of the family, even matters as intimate as the body itself came to be seen in relation to changing social contexts, associated with the rise of new forms of community."

This history can be questioned, Banner says, because it is a worthy question "about whether and how we can frame our [own] individual [ethical] and social lives, and what sort of world there will be".

The Nicene creed has remained the official creed of the church. Romans believed Christians, who were thought to take part in strange rituals and nocturnal rites, cultivated a dangerous and superstitious sect.

The fourth century was an age of religious ferment and controversy that would not be seen again until the Reformation.

(USE??) Moorhead says "Ambrose' character, the job he held, and the position of the city in which he held it, ensured his importance in the history of the later Roman empire". "When it came to the central functions of the roman state, even the vivid Ambrose was a lightweight. He could attack the avarice of private persons, conjuring up their abuses in the old-fashioned language of the Italy of an earlier age. He could not attack the fiscal system from which so much of the wealth around him must have derived. It was only a decade later, in a more crisis-laden situation when the Roman state itself was maimed by barbarian invasions, that Christian writers and preachers turned explicitly against taxation and tax collectors. But in the italy of the 380s and 390s this development still lay in the future."

The "good life" was thought to be a life lived in a community built on relationships characterized by love.

Some specific issues are new to the modern day, but Banner points out that the ethical questions that underlie them are often not new: "nuclear weapons are new, but the question of killing non-combatants in war is not. Cloning is new, but the question of the dignity and value of the individual is not. Climate change is a new dilemma, but the question of how much man should shape his environment is not".

Christian virtue theorists look to Philippians 4:8 (which says humans should focus on what is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent or worthy of praise); Philippians 2:5–11 (which advocates humility); and Galatians 5:22–23 (which lists the "fruit of the Spirit": love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control) as their biblical foundation.

environmental ethics


 * Western preoccupation with wilderness cannot be understood apart from consideration of early ascetic traditions... rooted in the period when Christianity became the official religion of a Roman empire whose eastern hinterlands took on new political significance with the movement of the political capitol to Constantinople. Between the fourth and seventh centuries, desert... became established as a principle character rather than a simple backdrop..."


 * use page 12 on Christianity reversing the classic valuation of wilderness - prime staging, newly valorized 'ascetic landscape' - "The shift in moral valence of city and wilderness; bottom of 15; "redemptive space of the first order" page 17; pagan critics -17- top of 18; page 22 - these ancient traditions can be regarded as "pre-modern forms of philosophical anthropology and environmental philosophy".

According to ethicist J. Philip Wogaman, "two millennia of confronting moral questions, has produced a rich legacy of thought much of which proves strikingly relevant to contemporary issues". Mark Murphy writes that "Every introductory ethics anthology that includes material on natural law theory includes material by or about [Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas”]. Judith Adler writes that environmental ethics can be seen as having begun with Christianity reversing the classic Greek and Roman view of and reconceptualizing it as "redemptive space of the first order".  As John Muir said: "The deserts of the Old Testament were never far from the imaginations of the first American conservationists who organized the movement to "save" the wilderness".

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User:Gog the Mild/Typos of Constans FAC draft
The doctrine that Christ had two natures, one fully human and one fully divine, also insisted that Christ had two wills, since the will is a property of the nature. This claimed the human will conformed naturally to the divine will, yet a person does not merely have a soul or a mind or a will; a person is wholly constituted as being that soul and mind and will. If Jesus' Being embraced two complete beings, one a fully functional and separate human body, soul and will, that amounts to a second part of the divine Logos. They would not be one person; they would instead be "a theological and metaphysical counterpart to conjoined twins". The two natures doctrine has a tendency to destroy the unity of Christ, and Jesus' mission as divine depended upon his unity with the will of the Father.

One effort to resolve this produced Monophysitism. Monophysitism took the sentence "the word was made flesh" believing it meant the divine nature, when changed into the human, absorbed and changed the human, making the two natures into one divine nature. Being solely divine treads upon the real human suffering of the cross. This led to the fourth ecumenical council in 451, the Council of Chalcedon, which wrote the Definition in response.

The insight of the Chalcedonian Definition is seeing the Incarnation as a personal or hypostatic union. Hypostasis is a Greek term for the substance that underlies and supports all of reality. Two natures of Christ form one ontological entity with two manners of existence. "The significant difference between Chalcedonian and monophysite Christologies lies in their respective capacities for accommodating putative contradictions. Supposing that the list of necessary divine attributes conflicts with the list of necessary human attributes, Chalcedonianism can, and monophysitism cannot, allow that the incarnate divine person is truly God and man, with all the attributes entailed by each nature".

By the seventh century in the Byzantine empire, emperor Heraclius decided he wanted to win back the "excommunicated and persecuted Monophysites of Egypt and Syria". The Patriarch of Constantinople, Sergius, understood how serious these issues were for the church and thought a teaching that had been going around in Egypt might provide the bridge between orthodoxy and monophysitism and heal the breach. This new teaching asserted two natures but only one will: monothelitism. In 638, Heraclius issued the "Statement of faith" that formulated the position explaining that the divine and human natures in Christ, while quite distinct, had but one will (thelēma) and one operation (energeia). "Unfortunately, this led to such intense controversy that Heraclius's successor, Constans II (r.641-668 CE) had to issue an edict in 648 CE forbidding all discussion of the question".

The controversy revived under emperor Constantine IV in 668 CE. In order to avoid tearing apart Jesus' unity, the Sixth Ecumenical Council of 680 CE, also held in Constantinople, declared that, while Jesus had two natures, his human will was determined by the divine will. Taken strictly, this omits Jesus' voluntary capacity necessary for atonement. Monothelitism was condemned and declared a heresy in 680.

Taken from: Cross, Richard. "A Recent Contribution on the Distinction between Monophysitism and Chalcedonianism." The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review, vol. 65 no. 3, 2001, p. 361-383. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/tho.2001.0001.[] Chalcedonian insight that the Incarnation is to be understood in terms of a personal or hypostatic union,

For Chalcedonians, the body-soul analogy is used to highlight the fact ofthe union (182). For monophysites, however, the analogy is used to clarify the manner of the union: two natures united together form a tertium quid. As Weinandy understands it, this new nature will exhibit either predominantly 1 Thomas G. Weinandy, Does God Suffer? (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 2000).

According to Weinandy, then, the significant difference between Chalcedonian and monophysite Christologies lies in their respective capacities for accommodating putative contradictions. Supposing that the list of necessary divine attributes conflicts with the list of necessary human attributes, Chalcedonianism can, and monophysitism cannot, allow that the incarnate divine person is truly God and man, with all the attributes entailed by each nature

Weinandy's crucial Chalcedonian insight, from which all else is developed, is that two natures-divine and human-are united in one person, in such a way that they do not form some new, third sort of thing (a union of the two natures, in Weinandy's Chalcedonian language), but rather are possessed by one and the same person. According to Weinandy, a nature is a "manner of existence," and a person a "who" that exists in such-and-such a manner (197). Using this understanding of person and nature, Weinandy proposes the following summary ofwhat I am labeling "Chalcedonianism": "Jesus is one ontological entity, and the one 3 Generally, my target is not Weinandy himself. He is a particularly lucid and persuasive representative of a Christological tradition that goes back to Cyril of Alexandria. MONOPHYSIDSM AND CHALCEDONIANISM 363 ontological entity that is Jesus is the one person of the divine Son of God existing as a complete and authentic man" (174). According to Chalcedonianism, there is one ontological entity, one who; this entity has two manners of existence-divine and human. Weinandy makes it dear that what I am labeling Chalcedonianism entails that all (concrete} predicates can be ascribed to the person.4 He sees the fault of non-Chalcedonian positions as lying in their propensity to...

Hypostasis (Greek: ὑπόστασις, hypóstasis) is the underlying state or underlying substance and is the fundamental reality that supports all else. ... In Christian theology, the Holy Trinity is consisted of three hypostases: Hypostasis of the Father, Hypostasis of the Son, and Hypostasis of the Holy Spirit.

Monothelitism was a seventh century phenomenon.

Similar to Gnosticism, it asserted one nature for Christ as solely divine even though he took on a human body.

"Which one?", is the question that got Monothelitism condemned at the Third Council of Constantinople, the sixth of the Seven Ecumenical Councils. The Two–Minds view claims Jesus assumed a fully functioning human mind and will that was its own self separate from the divine self. This creates a kind of "theological conjoined twins".

The controversy originated in the attempts by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius to win back for the church and empire the excommunicated and persecuted Monophysites of Egypt and Syria. In Armenia in 622, Heraclius first suggested to the head of the Severian Monophysites that the divine and human natures in Christ, while quite distinct in his one person, had but one will (thelēma) and one operation (energeia).

The controversy surrounding these questions in the sixth and seventh centuries rested largely on how will was defined: "volition and action, the capacity for causal origination or causal genesis or self-determination, driven by desires and abilities commensurate with one’s nature".


 * Monophysitism

Diophysitism A History of the Christian Councils: A.D. 431 to A.D. 451 page 182


 * The orthodox Chalcedonian position


 * Heraclius's Ecthesis

In 638 Heraclius issued the Ekthesis (“Statement of Faith”), which formulated the "one will" position. This led to such intense controversy that Heraclius’ successor, Constans II, issued an edict in 648 forbidding all discussion of the question.


 * The relevant bits of the Lateran Council of 649

This led to such intense controversy that Heraclius’ successor, Constans II, issued an edict in 648 forbidding all discussion of the question. This secured silence, despite the protest of the Western church at the Lateran Council of 649.


 * Ditto the Third Council of Constantinople

According to Agatho, the will is a property of the nature, so that, if there are two natures, there are two wills; but the human will conforms to the divine will. The third Council of Constantinople condemned Monothelitism and asserted two wills in the person of Christ.

The most directly relevant creedal affirmation of the two wills of Christ is the Third Council of Constantinople (hereafter: TCC), which states: And we proclaim equally two natural volitions or wills in him and two natural principles of action which undergo no division, no change, no partition, no confusion, in accordance with the teaching of the holy fathers. And the two natural wills not in opposition, as the impious heretics said, far from it, but his human will following, and not resisting or struggling, rather in fact subject to his divine and all powerful will.30 Although Gregory Nazianzus was directly referenced in the TCC, it is the thought of Maximus the Confessor that is the major conceptual engine for the TCC.31 Ian McFarland aptly summarizes that there are two senses of will, the immediately interesting one to us being the natural will (qe/lma fusiko/n or simply qe/lma).32 This is the ability for causal origination, to be the first mover for an action. Say if I wish to move my body to drink a glass of milk, it is I who move my body and not something other than me, such as the Big Bang causing the cosmos and this cascading sequence that determinatively leads up to my body moving.33 According to McFarland, Maximus thought that the mark of creatureliness is the capacity for motion, noting that “each creature moves in its own distinctive way, correspondingto its proper end as the particular kind of creature it is.”34 For humans, that distinctive way is in accordance with both the sets of desires shared with other animals and the rationality that makes humankind distinct. “In short,” writes McFarland, “because they are agents, human beings are willing creatures, which is to say that their movements are characterized by agency rather than being unconscious or automatic. In short, motion is not just something that happens to me; I move.”35 Demetrios Bathrellos concurs: “For Maximus, the faculty of will encapsulates both the irrational and the rational self-determining aspects of the human soul,” though Maximus “emphasizes the preponderance of the rational self-determining aspects of man’s will over those which are irrationalimpulsive.”36 Subsequent contemporary theologians have likewise construed the will as such.

Possible sources

 * Persecution


 * Church and State during the Reign of Emperor Constantin IV (668-685)


 * ‘Willing Is Not Choosing’: Some Anthropological Implications of Dyothelite Christology - on Maximus the Confessor


 * The Church of Ravenna, Constantinople and Rome in the seventh century


 * Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium - Typos of Constans


 * The lure of the West: The Italian campaign of Constans II


 * Crisis of Empire: Doctrine and Dissent at the End of Late Antiquity


 * THE "LIVES" OF POPE MARTIN I AND MAXIMUS THE CONFESSOR : SOME RECONSIDERATIONS OF DATING AND PROVENANCE


 * The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God


 * A New Approach to the Context of the Great Schism

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consider creating:
 * David R. Blumenthal


 * Academics

Women in the Bible

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Definition of persecution

 * This has one!! De Andrade, José H. Fischel. "On the development of the concept of ‘persecution’in international refugee law." (2006): 23.

The German Code of Crimes against International Law punish the persecution of ‘an identifiable group or collectivity by depriving such a group or collectivity of fundamental human rights, or by substantially restricting the same, on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural or religious, gender or other grounds that are recognized as impermissible under the general rules of international law’. Amnesty International []

analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world.

The Government Restrictions Index is based on 20 indicators of ways that national and local governments restrict religion, including through coercion and force. In addition to government restrictions, violence and intimidation in societies also can limit religious beliefs and practices. Accordingly, Pew Research Center staff tracked more than a dozen indicators of social impediments on religion. The Social Hostilities Index is based on 13 indicators of ways in which private individuals and social groups infringe on religious beliefs and practices, including religiously biased crimes, mob violence and efforts to stop particular religious groups from growing or operating. The study also counted the number and types of documented incidents of religion-related violence, including terrorism and armed conflict.

Government favoritism of religious groups

Government laws and policies restricting religious freedom includes some of the most common types of restrictions ranging from a constitution’s stated commitment to religious freedom (or lack thereof) to the regulation or registration of religious groups.

Government limits on activities of religious groups and individuals – such as restrictions on religious dress, public or private worship or religious literature.

Government harassment of religious groups measures types of harassment ranging from violence and intimidation to verbal denunciations of religious groups and formal bans on certain groups. An increasing number of governments in MENA have reportedly used force against religious groups (including detention and forced displacement) since 2007.

Interreligious tension and violence involves acts of sectarian or communal violence betweenreligious groups. Religious violence by organized groups includes the actions of religion-related terrorist groups, religion-related conflict, and the use of force by organized groups to dominate public life with their perspective on religion.

Social harassment of religious groups is a broad category that ranges from actions by individuals to mob violence.78 Harassment also can include discrimination or publishing of articles or cartoons that are derogatory toward a certain group. This category also includes property damage, detentions or abductions, displacement, physical assault and deaths of members of religious groups caused by private individuals or social groups.

Sources of data
The methodology used by Pew Research Center to assess and compare restrictions on religion was developed by former Pew Research Center senior researcher and director of cross-national data Brian J. Grim in consultation with other Pew Research Center staff members, building on a methodology that Grim and Professor Roger Finke developed while at Penn State University’s Association of Religion Data Archives. "The goal was to devise quantifiable, objective and transparent measures of the extent to which governments and societal groups impinge on the practice of religion."

First, Pew Research Center coded (categorized and counted) data from more than a dozen published cross-national sources, providing a high degree of confidence in the findings. Second, Pew Research Center staff used extensive data-verification checks that reflect generally accepted best practices for such studies, such as double-blind coding (coders do not see each other’s ratings), inter-rater reliability assessments (checking for consistency among coders) and carefully monitored protocols to reconcile discrepancies among coders. Third, the coding took into account whether the perpetrators of religion-related violence were government or private actors. The coding also identified how widespread and intensive the restrictions were in each country.

The 198 countries and self-administering territories covered by the study contain more than 99.5% of the world’s population. They include 192 of the 193 member states of the United Nations as of 2017, plus six self-administering territories – Kosovo, Hong Kong, Macau, the Palestinian territories, Taiwan and Western Sahara.

Primary sources used by PEW for it's most recent report (2017)

Country constitutions U.S. State Department annual reports on International Religious Freedom U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom annual reports U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief reports Human Rights First reports in first and second years of coding; Freedom House reports in subsequent years of coding Human Rights Watch topical reports International Crisis Group country reports United Kingdom Foreign & Commonwealth Office annual report on human rights Council of the European Union annual report on human rights START Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland European Network Against Racism Shadow Reports United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reports U.S. State Department annual Country Reports on Terrorism Anti-Defamation League reports U.S. State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices Uppsala University’s Uppsala Conflict Data Program, Armed Conflict Database Human Rights Without Frontiers “Freedom of Religion or Belief” newsletters Amnesty International Country Profiles United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Population Statistics Database Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre Global Internal Displacement Database U.S. government reports with information on the situation in the United States

U.S. Department of Justice “Religious Freedom in Focus” newsletters and reports FBI Hate Crime Reports The Uppsala Armed Conflict Database provides information on the number of people affected by religion-related armed conflicts, supplementing other sources.

Human Rights Without Frontiers is a nongovernmental organization based in Brussels that has affiliated offices throughout the world.

Since 2013, Pew Research Center has used data from the Global Terrorism Database, maintained by the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), along with the International Crisis Group’s country reports, Uppsala University’s Armed Conflict Database and the State Department’s annual Country Reports on Terrorism, for information on religion-related terrorism. The Global Terrorism Database is one of the most comprehensive sources on terrorism around the world and is the source for the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism. The addition of this source thus provides greater context and information on terrorism.

Coding the United States presented a special problem since it is not included in the State Department’s annual reports on International Religious Freedom. Accordingly, Pew Research Center coders also looked at reports from the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI on violations of religious freedom in the United States, in addition to consulting all the primary sources, including reports by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, the International Crisis Group and the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office, many of which contain data on the United States.

There's this one: that is the full pdf text of this:  which says "In addressing the persecution of Christians, we are focusing on what is probably the largest and widest manifestation of religious persecution in the world today." Sage goes on and on about his qualifications and that, before it was published in this journal, it was first a research article presented to the Advisory Committee to the U.S. Secretary of State on Religious Freedom Abroad. Not really a study per se, but still a research article.

I really like this one: [Johnson, T.M., Zurlo, G.A. Christian Martyrdom as a Pervasive Phenomenon. Soc 51, 679–685 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-014-9840-8] it's at. Resource Request is attempting to get full access for me. It references this one which is crammed full of data and Tables and all kinds of statistics. Unfortunately, I can find stats on Christian persecution but not a comparative statistic along the lines of who is most persecuted. Table 4-10 might be it but I can't see it, so I'll make another request for that and we'll see what it says.

This is an actual study: which I will quote part of here: "Chapter 8 takes the detailed results from the previous four chapters and examines the larger trends which emerge from these findings. These trends include (1) the consistent rise of religious discrimination across world regions ..., (2), (3), (4) and that on average, Christians are the most persecuted religious minority worldwide and Muslims are the least persecuted, (5), (6) ..."

This one says "Christians are the world's most persecuted religious group" on page 255. It's published by Image publishing which is Catholic, so you may not like it anymore than the "Lutheran" one.

That's what I've got so far. More to come hopefully. Jenhawk777 (talk) 05:11, 6 October 2020 (UTC)


 * [] is a reference to a non-Christian public policy think tank called the CATO Institute. They designate 14 "countries of particular concern" about religious freedom: Burma, China, Eritrea, India, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Vietnam. These countries are all also on Open Doors' list of the 50 most dangerous countries for Christians.


 * In the UK, 24 of the 30 countries listed as priority countries are also on Open Door's list.


 * CATO references 'The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom': . Unfortunately, I have the same problem with this data that I have with the State department's--it's country by country, and often doesn't include numbers I could collate if I wanted to. Open Doors does the collating - at least they say they use this and the State department's data and other NGO's - which is exactly what PEW does. To find those numbers you have to go to the original data, one country at a time - for 144 countries.  I've made it through about 50 of them so far - enough to know your claims of exaggeration are the opposite of what is actually going on in the world.

Open Doors documents cases based on direct evidence wherever this is available, but it also makes conservative estimates based on indirect evidence. This approach dramatically lowers the numerical count. ---

According to PEW, the top ten countries with the highest levels of national governmental harassment of all religious groups (not just Christian) are: Russia, Vietnam, Iran, China, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, which are communist or formerly communist, along with Malaysia, Indonesia, Syria, and Egypt, which are Muslim majority countries. Of the 20 countries in the Middle Eastern region, 17 have Islam as their state religions and two have it as their preferred, favored religion. Only Lebanon does not have a favored religion. The Middle East has high levels of religious restriction, and religious favoritism there is twice as high as any other regional average.

--- In the ancient societies of Egypt, Greece and Rome, torture was an accepted aspect of the legal system. Gillian Clark says violence was taken for granted in the fourth century as part of both war and punishment; torture from the carnifex, the professional torturer of the Roman legal system, was an accepted part of that system.

Marjoka van Doorn, says "tolerance is not by definition good..."

Of the Greeks, Peter Garnsey asks: "is the language of toleration appropriately applied to the religious climate of classical Athens? I do not think so. The Athenians actively defended their gods against, as they put it, impiety (asebeia)." Using the example of what is often referred to as the Roman empire's tolerance of the Jews, Garnsey says, "ancient documents regularly acknowledge that the Romans are extending privileged treatment to the Jews because of services rendered. And that is all. No further motivation or justification is offered. There is an absolute lack of any apologia for religious pluralism or religious freedom. ... Nor does anything of the kind surface in pagan literature as a whole. It is particularly noteworthy that the philosophical skeptics were barren of ideas in this area." In Late Republican and early imperial Rome, the Isis cult and astrologers were violently repressed based on the perception of 'proper Roman identity'. Roman-style polytheism was disposed to expand and absorb or at least neutralize other gods, not to tolerate them.

______________________________________________________________________

biblical authority has been assaulted by biblical criticism, through the "autonomy of reason" that the approach promulgated, from the Enlightenment onward.

John Barton, The Nature of Biblical criticism, page 10; "The recognition of "problems" in the Bible is not in itself a sufficient condition for us to speak of "biblical criticism." There must also be present a certain approach to solving such problems."

Events in Late Antiquity were often dramatized for ideological reasons.

"Religious violence in Late Antiquity is mostly restricted to violent rhetoric: 'in Antiquity, not all religious violence was that religious, and not all religious violence was that violent'." add to ref, author Jan. M. Brenner, chapter 2

The thesis of polytheistic tolerance and monotheistic intolerance has long been proved incorrect. also Chapter 6 by Andreas Bendlin:

article on Thessalonian massacre archived at


 * Trying Alan's thing here

add this discussion to Women in the Bible : []

Write up--new article: "Multiple Source theory of gospel origins" image on page 158, Encountering the New Testament: A Historical and Theological Survey … by Elwell, Walter A., Yarbrough, Robert W.

pax deorum (‘the benevolence of gods’)

adding a note:

article must have ==Notes== two curly bracketsreflist|group=notetwo curly brackets for it to work

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Persecution of pagans in the Late Roman empire

History of Christian thought on persecution and tolerance Religious policies of Constantine the Great

Augustine of Hippo

Do Augustine and the Donatists, then

Do Circumcellions next

Brown says Augustine is alone amongst the church fathers in reflecting on this rather than simply accepting it as the status quo.

Brown concludes that "any attempt to draw a scale of violence in this period must place the violence of Christians toward each other at the top.

Tolerance
Tracing tolerance as a concept before the 1400s is not possible because its history does not reach back before the Reformation and the subsequent Enlightenment period. However, there is evidence of similar ideals in pre-modern Christian thought (and other religious thought and philosophy) that can be seen as the long and somewhat torturous "prehistory" of tolerance. Changes which took place in European society of the High Middle Ages reflect the state's focus on garnering power through persecution, with Christian thought of that period developing new rhetoric, patterns, and procedures that supported and aided in that persecution. Eventually, this would help form the conviction among the early Protestants that pioneering the concept of religious toleration was necessary.

The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 included the first statement of freedom of religion in modern history.

Persecution and tolerance are both the result of alterity, the state of otherness, and the question of how to properly deal with those who are 'outside' the defined identity. Like the other Abrahamic religions, Christian thought has included, from its beginnings, two ideals which have affected Christian responses to alterity: inclusivity, (also called universality), and exclusivity, or as David Nirenberg describes them, our "mutual capacities for coexistence and violence." There is an inherent tension in all the Abrahamic traditions between exclusivity and inclusivity which is theologically and practically dealt with by each in different ways. Both concepts are evident throughout the history of Christian thought.

Peter Gervers has said that toleration as a value grew out of humanity's earlier experiences of social conflict and persecution, and that the kind of toleration that is now seen as a virtue, is part of the legacy garnered from this. Before the modern era, religious intolerance and even persecution were not seen as evils. They were instead, seen as necessary and good for the preservation of identity, for truth, and for all that people believed depended upon those truths. There was—and still is for many—fear, with some justification, that tolerance contributes to the erosion of identity. That's why tolerance has not been, and is not, always seen as a virtue.

Establishing toleration as a value that is considered good and necessary for peace and survival, is a complex process that Richard Dees indicates is more a product of context than rationality. Because the development of identity often involves contradiction, ('what we are not' as much as 'what we are'), James L.Gibson indicates that strong social-group identities, such as those produced by nationalism and religion, often produce intolerance. The greater the attitudes of group loyalty and solidarity, and the more the benefits of belonging are perceived to be, the more likely a social identity will become intolerant of challenges. Gibson goes on to say this indicates intolerance is largely a social process and not as much an individual one.