Reconceiving religious conflict : new views from the formative centuries of Christianity 9781315387635, 1315387638, 9781315387642, 1315387646, 9781315387659, 1315387654, 9781315387666, 1315387662

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
List of abbreviations
Part I Foundations
1 Re-theorizing religious conflict: early Christianity to late antiquity and beyond
2 Religious violence and its roots: a view from antiquity
Part II Rhetorical and literary trajectories
3 Blindness in early Christianity: tracking the fundamentals of religious conflict
4 Religious conflict, radicalism, and sexual exceptionalism in the rhetoric of John Chrysostom
5 Give it up for God: wealth, suffering, and the rhetoric of religious persecution in John of Ephesusâ#x80
#x99
s Church History. 6 Epiphanies and religious conflict: the contests over the Hagiasma of ChonaiPart III Christianization
7 Contested domains in the conflicts between the early Christian mission and Diaspora Judaism according to the Book of Acts
8 Christianisation and late antique patronage: conflicts and everyday nuisances
Part IV Threats of violence
9 Religious violence in late antique Egypt reconsidered: the cases of Alexandria, Panopolis, and Philae
10 â#x80
#x9C
A wise madnessâ#x80
#x9D
: a virtue-based model for crowd behaviour in late antiquity
Part V Ancient and modern intersections. 11 Collaboration and identity in the aftermath of persecution: religious conflict and its legacy12 The usefulness of violent ends: apocalyptic imaginaries in the reconstruction of society
Index.

Citation preview

RECONCEIVING RELIGIOUS CONFLICT

Reconceiving Religious Conflict deconstructs instances of religious conflict within the formative centuries of Christianity, the first six centuries CE. It explores the theoretical foundations of religious conflict; the dynamics of religious conflict within the context of persecution and martyrdom; the social and moral intersections that undergird the phenomenon of religious conflict; and the relationship between religious conflict and religious identity. It is unique in that it does not solely focus on religious violence as it is physically manifested, but on religious conflict (and tolerance), looking too at dynamics of religious discourse and practice that often precede and accompany overt religious violence. Wendy Mayer is Professor and Associate Dean of Research at Australian Lutheran College, University of Divinity, and Research Fellow in Biblical and Ancient Studies at the University of South Africa. Chris L. de Wet is Associate Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Studies at the University of South Africa, and Honorary Research Fellow at Australian Lutheran College, University of Divinity.

ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN WORLD Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World offers monographs and edited collections which explore the most cutting-edge research in Early Christianity. Covering all aspects of world of early Christianity, from theology, archaeology and history, to urbanism, class, economics, and sexuality and gender, the series aims to situate these early Christians within the wider context of Late Antiquity. Comprising both regional studies and broader thematic surveys, this series explores what changed with the advent of Christianity, what remained the same, and how early Christians interacted with, made sense of, and shaped the world around them. Aimed at early Christian scholars, classicists and historians alike, Studies in the Early Christian World is an invaluable resource for anyone researching this fascinating period. https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-the-Early-Christian-World/ book-series/SECW

Available: RECONCEIVING RELIGIOUS CONFLICT: NEW VIEWS FROM THE FORMATIVE CENTURIES OF CHRISTIANITY Edited by Wendy Mayer and Chris L. de Wet JEWISH GLASS AND CHRISTIAN STONE: A MATERIALIST MAPPING OF THE ‘PARTING OF THE WAYS’ Eric C. Smith MASCULINITIES IN THE COURT TALES OF DANIEL: ADVANCING GENDER STUDIES IN THE HEBREW BIBLE Brian Charles DiPalma THE SLAVE METAPHOR AND GENDERED ENSLAVEMENT IN EARLY CHRISTIAN DISCOURSE: DOUBLE TROUBLE EMBODIED Marianne Bjelland Kartzow

Forthcoming: THE CAPTIVE MONK: SLAVERY AND ASCETICISM IN EARLY SYRIAN CHRISTIANITY Chris L. de Wet SEXUALITY, CELIBACY, AND MARRIAGE AMONG THE EARLY CHRISTIANS John Martens

RECONCEIVING RELIGIOUS CONFLICT New Views from the Formative Centuries of Christianity

Edited by Wendy Mayer and Chris L. de Wet

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Wendy Mayer and Chris L. de Wet; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Wendy Mayer and Chris L. de Wet to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-22991-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-38766-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Preface List of abbreviations

vii x

PART I

Foundations1 1 Re-theorizing religious conflict: early Christianity to late antiquity and beyond

3

WENDY MAYER

2

Religious violence and its roots: a view from antiquity

30

JAN BREMMER

PART II

Rhetorical and literary trajectories 3

Blindness in early Christianity: tracking the fundamentals of religious conflict

43 45

PIETER J. J. BOTHA

4

Religious conflict, radicalism, and sexual exceptionalism in the rhetoric of John Chrysostom

70

CHRIS L. DE WET

5

Give it up for God: wealth, suffering, and the rhetoric of religious persecution in John of Ephesus’s Church History86 CHRISTINE SHEPARDSON

v

C ontents

  6 Epiphanies and religious conflict: the contests over the Hagiasma of Chonai

110

ALAN H. CADWALLADER

PART III

Christianization

137

  7 Contested domains in the conflicts between the early Christian mission and Diaspora Judaism according to the Book of Acts

139

CHRISTOPH STENSCHKE

  8 Christianisation and late antique patronage: conflicts and everyday nuisances

182

MAIJASTINA KAHLOS

PART IV

Threats of violence

209

  9 Religious violence in late antique Egypt reconsidered: the cases of Alexandria, Panopolis, and Philae

211

JITSE H. F. DIJKSTRA

10 “A wise madness”: a virtue-based model for crowd behaviour in late antiquity

234

PETER VAN NUFFELEN

PART V

Ancient and modern intersections

259

11 Collaboration and identity in the aftermath of persecution: religious conflict and its legacy

261

ELIZABETH DEPALMA DIGESER

12 The usefulness of violent ends: apocalyptic imaginaries in the reconstruction of society

282

GERHARD VAN DEN HEEVER

Index

326 vi

PREFACE

In the past two decades, media reporting on global conflict has been permeated with the role of religion and religious discourse. With the rise of the Islamic State (IS), in particular, moderns tend to believe that religion serves as a key factor in the cause and persistence of violent global conflicts and wars. In 2014, for instance, a Reuters report claimed: “Violence and discrimination against religious groups by governments and rival faiths have reached new highs in all regions of the world except the Americas, according to a new report by the Pew Research Centre.”1 However, the complexity of how human conflict arises and persists hardly allows for a simplistic answer to the role of religion in global conflict. Religion is very seldom the sole cause of conflict. What is true is that in societies where religion still occupies a priority in members’ construction of meaning and belonging, the experience of conflict will very often be articulated within religious and moral discourse. This is the main point made by Mark Tomass in his work The Religious Roots of the Syrian Conflict (2016).2 Societies, which have enduring legacies of religious communities, structure their social, cultural, and political interactions in terms of religion and belief. This is especially the case when religious communities are under pressure from certain agendas of secularization. Now with the decline of colonial systems, economic development has become the responsibility of the state; however, the political mandate for economic development has also given rise to what one may call political entrepreneurs, who are often closely and influentially embedded in faith communities. Often political entrepreneurs also occupy positions in structures of religious authorities, and act on behalf of such authorities, blurring the lines even more between political and religious involvement. Thus, while one could argue from various examples that religion plays a major role in the cause and proliferation of conflict, another may forward examples of where religion served to ameliorate and even resolve a conflict. Little will be achieved from such simplistic arguments. What is perhaps easier to gauge is the effect that the representation of religion within global conflict has on religious communities. Several articles from the Pew Research Center,3 referenced earlier, indicate that global and local restrictions on religion often have

vii

P reface

a direct effect on religious tolerance in a given society. In other words, the more religion is asserted within instances of conflict (without necessarily looking at the nature and content of that religious assertion), the more likely it becomes that groups in societies will become intolerant of religion or a specific religious group. So while the causative role of religion within global conflict is complex and manifold, the result of preconceptions and representations of “religious conflict” are less elusive. One of the main strengths of Tomass’ work is that he traces the development of religious communities and traditions within areas of conflict, which then gives a better sense of the social and political ideals of said religious communities and structures of religious authority. There exists then an urgent need to conceptualize and theoreticize religious conflict in such a manner that it takes account of the complex causalities, pervasive dynamics, and historical lines of development between conflict and religion – and what may then be termed “religious conflict.” The current volume hopes to answer this call for a focused discursive and historical complexification – a “reconceiving” – of religious conflict. The lines of development in this case reach back to antiquity and the formative centuries of Christianity, from the first to around the seventh century CE. Each chapter in this collection links up with every other chapter in numerous ways. We have divided the chapters into various parts, although the parts should be seen as organizational. The cohesion of the chapters will become evident upon reading. The book starts with two chapters, both of which function as theoretically foundational and introductory to the volume. Thereafter follow chapters on rhetorical and literary trajectories of religious conflict in antiquity, Christianization, and studies problematizing violence and threats of violence. At the end of the book we have two chapters that bring ancient discourses of religious conflict into dialogue with modern cases. Finally, the studies in this volume do not aim to provide one unified “theory” or “model” of religious conflict in antiquity. Our purpose is perhaps the opposite – to question long-standing and unified theories of religious conflict; to deconstruct commonplace discourses that have, for centuries perhaps, girded the debate around religion, conflict, and violence; and to also demonstrate the variety of perspectives on religious conflict both ancient and modern. One “unifying” theme, so to speak, of the volume is this – all the studies opt for a broad view of religious conflict that is not limited to instances of explicit and overt religious violence. To examine religious conflict means to move beyond cases of violence and ask more about the nature and effect of the frameworks and presuppositions that often function prior to and behind religious violence. Chris L. de Wet Pretoria, 2017

viii

P reface

Notes 1 Reuters, “Religious Conflict in Global Rise – Report,” January 14, 2014, sec. World, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/10572342/Religious-conflict-inglobal-rise-report.html, accessed November 11, 2016. 2 Mark Tomass, The Religious Roots of the Syrian Conflict: The Remaking of the Fertile Crescent, Twenty-First Century Perspectives on War, Peace, and Human Conflict (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 3 www.pewresearch.org//search/?query=religion.

ix

ABBREVIATIONS

Modern Series ANF CCSL CCTC CIG CPJ CSCO CSEL CSHB F. Chr. FGrH Field

Ante-Nicene Fathers. Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina. Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum, ed. A Boeckh, 1828–1877. Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum ed. V.A. Tcherikover, 1957–1964. Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium. Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum. Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae. Fontes Christiani. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker ed. F. Jacoby, 1954–1964. Ioannis Chrysostomi interpretatio omnium epistularum Paulinarum, ed. F. Field, 1854–1862. FOC The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation. GCS Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten [drei] Jahrhunderte. LCL Loeb Classical Library. NPNF  Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. PG Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne, 1857–1886. PL Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 1844–1864. PLRE Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, ed. A.H.M. Jones et al., 1971–1992. PO Patrologia Orientalis. SC Sources chrétiennes.

Select ancient authors and works Aelius Aristides Or. Orationes  Orations

x

A bbreviations

Ambrose Nabuthae  De Nabuthae  On Naboth Off.  De officiis ministrorum  On the Duties of the Clergy Athanasius Contr. Ar.  Orationes contra Arianos  Orations against the Arians Hist. Ar.  Historia Arianorum  History of the Arians Syn.  De synodis Armini et Seleuciae  On the Councils of Ariminum and Seleucia Augustine C. litt. Petil.  Contra litteras Petiliani  Against the Letters of Petilian Civ.  De civitate dei  City of God Conf.  Confessiones  Confessions Enarrat. Ps.  Enarrationes in Psalmos  Expositions on the Psalms Ep.  Epistulae  Letters Serm.  Sermones  Sermons Vit. Christ.  De vita christiana  On the Christian Life Caesarius of Arles Serm.  Sermones  Sermons C.J.  Code of Justinian Cyprian Ep.  Epistulae  Letters Dio Cassius Hist. Rom.  Historia Romana  Roman History Diogenes Laertius Vit.  Vitae philosophorum  Lives of the Philosophers Ephrem the Syrian Contr. Jul.  Contra Julianum  Hymns against Julian

xi

A bbreviations

Epiphanius Pan.  Panarion (Adversus haereses)  Refutation of All Heresies Eunapius V. Soph.  Vitae sophistarum  Lives of the Sophists Eusebius of Caesarea Hist. eccl.  Historia ecclesiastica  Ecclesiastical History V. Const.  Vita Constantini  Life of Constantine Evagrius Scholasticus Hist. eccl.  Historia ecclesiastica  Ecclesiastical History Gaudentius of Brescia Tract.  Tractatus  Tractate Gregory of Nazianzus Or.  Orationes  Orations Gregory the Great Ep.  Epistulae  Letters Mor.  Moralia in Job libri  Morals on the Book of Job Herodotus Hist.  Historiae  Histories John Chrysostom Adv. Jud.  Adversus Judaeos  Discourses against Judaizing Christians Comm. Gal.  In epistulam ad Galatas Commentarius  Commentary on Galatians Hom. Act.  Homiliae in Acta apostolorum  Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles Hom. Col.  Homiliae in epistulam ad Colossenses  Homilies on Colossians Hom. Goth.  Homilia habita postquam presbyter Gothus concionatus fuerat  Homily Delivered after the Gothic Elder Hom. Heb.  Homiliae in epistulam ad Hebraeos  Homilies on Hebrews Hom. Jo.  Homiliae in Joannem  Homilies on the Gospel of John

xii

A bbreviations

Hom. Macc.  De Maccabeis homiliae  Homilies on the Maccabees Hom. Matt.  Homiliae in Matthaeum Incompr.  De incomprehensibili dei natura  On the Incomprehensible Nature of God Laed.  Quod nemo laeditur nisi a se ipso  No One Can Harm the Man Who Does Not Injure Himself Scand.  Ad eos qui scandalizati sunt  On the Providence of God Subintr.  Contra eos qui subintroductas habent virgines  Against Those Who Cohabit with Virgins Theod. laps.  Ad Theodorum lapsum  Exhortation to Theodore after His Fall John Malalas Chron.  Chronographia  Chronicle John of Ephesus Comm. b. orient.  Commentarii de beatis orientalibus  Lives of the Eastern Saints Hist. eccl.  Historia ecclesiastica  Ecclesiastical History John Scylitzes Hist.  Synopsis historiarum  Synopsis of Byzantine History Julian Contr. Gal.  Contra Galilaeos  Against the Galileans Ep. Them.  Epistula ad Themistium  Letter to Themistius Frag. Ep.  Epistulae (Fragmenta)  Letters (Fragments) Lactantius Mort.  De mortibus persecutorum  On the Deaths of the Persecutors Leo the Great Ep.  Epistulae  Letters Hom.  Homiliae  Sermons

xiii

A bbreviations

Libanius Ep.  Epistulae  Letters Or.  Orationes  Orations Maximus of Turin Serm.  Sermones  Sermons Midrash Gen. R.   Genesis Rabbah Lev. R.  Leviticus Rabbah Num. R.  Numbers Rabbah Optatus of Milevis Contr. Parm.  Contra Parmenianum Donatistam  Against Parmenian the Donatist Palladius Dial.  Dialogus de vita S. Joannis Chrysostomi  Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom Paulinus of Nola Carm.  Carmina  Poems Pausanias Descr.  Graeciae descriptio  Description of Greece Philodemus Piet.  De pietate  On Piety

Philostorgius Hist. eccl.  Historia ecclesiastica  Ecclesiastical History Plato Apol.  Apologia Socratis  Defence of Socrates Euthyphr.  Euthyphro  Euthyphro xiv

A bbreviations

Procopius Bell.  De bellis  Wars Hist. arc.  Historia arcana  Secret History Pseudo-Zachariah Hist. eccl.  Historia ecclesiastica  Ecclesiastical History Rufinus of Aquileia Hist. eccl.  Historia ecclesiastica  Ecclesiastical History Salvian of Marseilles Gub.  De gubernatione dei  On the Government of God Severus of Antioch Ep.  Epistulae  Letters Sirm.  Sirmondian Constitutions Socrates Scholasticus Hist. eccl.  Historia ecclesiastica  Ecclesiastical History Sophocles Oed.  Oedipus tyrannus  Oedipus the King Sozomen Hist. eccl.  Historia ecclesiastica  Ecclesiastical History

Themistius Or.  Orationes  Orations Theodore Lector Hist. eccl.  Historia ecclesiastica  Ecclesiastical History xv

A bbreviations

Theodoret Hist. eccl.  Historia ecclesiastica  Ecclesiastical History C.Th.  Theodosian Code Theophanes Chron.  Chronographia  Chronicle Theophylact Simocatta Hist.  Historiae  History

xvi

Part I FOUNDATIONS

1 RE-THEORIZING RELIGIOUS CONFLICT Early Christianity to late antiquity and beyond Wendy Mayer1 Religion, religious conflict, and the neuroscientific turn In their introductory essay to a volume analyzing contemporary religious conflict from three social science perspectives, Powell and Clarke both catalogue and unwittingly reinforce an assumption that has long underwritten and continues to inform theories about the intersection between religion, (in)tolerance, and conflict, namely that pre-Enlightenment societies were typically intolerant.2 At the other end of the historical spectrum and until recently the beginning point for this hostility towards religious unorthodoxy has been set at the moment of Christianity’s official adoption (313 CE) on the premise that polytheism is, by contrast, inherently tolerant.3 By polytheism is meant – with the exception of ancient and early post-Second Temple Judaism – the religions of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. While the starting point for this so-called rise in intolerance has in recent years been pushed back into the third century,4 the overwhelmingly dominant view persists that once Christianity became a religio licita and gained political power it became coercive, intolerant, and not infrequently violent.5 The nostalgic view that the classical polytheist world is one of religious tolerance and coexistence, whereas monotheism, which is exclusivist, is responsible for much of the religious violence perpetrated between the rise of Christianity and the end of pre-modern history,6 is, as Jan Bremmer and other theorists of religion have recently argued, itself an artefact of post-Enlightenment liberalism. This is an ideology which, in response to the protracted post-Reformation religious wars in Europe, conceived of religion as antithetical to the new age of science and reason and so sought to write religion permanently out of society. Henceforth it was restricted to the private domain.7 This view of religion as in its death throes and as having no future impact on society is a hallmark of secularization theory.8 Contemporary religious conflicts that engage the state are, in this view, to be attributed to a traditional or pre-modern, irrational society. This is an important point to which we will return, but for the moment let us simply point out that, with some recent significant exceptions, it continues to predicate twenty-first-century

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Western governmental responses to religious conflicts, as well as inform the ways in which Western scholars attempt to understand the phenomenon.9 As Fox and Sandler point out, scholars have been scrambling since the events of 9/11 both to explain the role of religion in an upsurge in national and transnational violence10 and to reintroduce religion as a significant social variable into social, political, and international relations theory.11 Research on this perceived new rise in religious intolerance is in some areas starting to align with insights from neuroscientific research that began to emerge in the 1980s and that have steadily been gaining acceptance, to the effect that the mind is embodied, and that affect or emotion has primacy to reasoned thought, particularly in regard to moral judgement.12 If we accept that cognitive and moral systems lie behind the evolution within human society of religion,13 then these findings have profound implications for the viability of secularization theory and a liberal view of the (negligible) social impact of religion. In fact one of the pioneers of such studies has long argued that the age of reason is a chimera that we need to move beyond, if we are to understand and accommodate morality (and thus religion) as a significant factor in human behaviour and society.14 Ironically it is precisely what the age of Enlightenment rejected (the embodied mind) in favour of a body-mind dualism that promoted the priority of reason on the basis of science that science is now asking us to re-accept. By now, the reader will be wondering what any of this has to do with religious conflict in general and the pursuit of the topic in relation to early Christianity and late antiquity in particular, but again the implications are profound. Firstly, religious tolerance is not an absolute, but in fact itself a moral virtue embraced by secularist liberal ideology.15 It is a social construct of Enlightenment thought. If the foundations of that ideology are now in question, then we must ask whether that virtue’s entailment – that religious intolerance is an evil, in that it damages the health of society – is valid. After all, as Powell and Clarke point out, liberalism itself would argue for a limit to tolerance when the tolerance of another religion is harmful to society.16 Indeed, it is precisely this argument that we see informing recent conclusions concerning the limits of the tolerance of other religions under Roman rule in the period before Constantine.17 The implication of this is that, even when we think that as scholars we are deconstructing dominant assumptions (in this case the inherent intolerance of monotheist and tolerance of polytheist religion), we need to ask ourselves whether, instead of succeeding, we are in fact simply adopting another element of the same paradigm. Secondly, if a pre-Enlightenment view of the world is how we as human beings in fact behave and act in the world from a moral-religious perspective, then this is something we should intentionally move to embrace rather than back away from. The findings of the neurosciences do not condemn us to a world of superstition and prejudice from which we thought we had escaped,18 but rather help us to accept the affective agency of religion in human society as a biological fact,19 while providing us with tools that help us to explain and understand it. Further, if religion is to be inserted back into and perhaps even foregrounded in 4

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contemporary social-scientific and political theories, then it makes sense that it is to a world that conceived of religion in a way that is aligned with embodied cognition that we should look for answers. This is particularly the case, if, as current neuroscientific studies suggest, consciously suppressing in our own minds a rationalist view of the world that has been cognitively strengthened since birth is likely to prove extremely difficult.20 While some answers may lie in taking a fresh look at traditional and/or non-Western societies and cultures,21 including those of Africa, a fresh investigation of the role of religion in the pre-Enlightenment world and in the historical period which is thought to have witnessed the (old) “rise of intolerance,” in particular – that is, the centuries immediately before and after the “rise of Christianity” – is likely to prove equally fruitful. This is particularly the case when we consider that in the ancient and late ancient Mediterranean world from the fifth century BCE up to at least the fifth century CE in elite circles a model of individual and societal health that was intimately linked to both morality and the embodied soul/mind held sway,22 while across society the excluded middle – that is, the world of the supernatural – and religion were both enmeshed and embedded.23 In these respects, whether one examines a philosophic sect, a monotheist, syncretist, hybrid, poly- or heno-theist religion in this period makes little difference. This point is important since, as we will see shortly, theorization of religious conflict in this period has been criticized for its Christianity-centred focus. Further, since social health is a desideratum not just of modern liberal ideology, but lies behind the moral foundational systems that have evolved across societies up to the present day,24 we could just as well flip the subtitle of a recent book on the embeddedness of morality in twenty-first-century American politics25 and ask: how can we understand twenty-first-century religious conflict without a first- (or second-, third-, or fourth-) century brain? Curiously this is precisely what has been proposed in a 2013 doctoral dissertation in the discipline of critical rhetoric. Appealing to Gorgias and the classical Greek theory of the sophist as social physician, the author, Brett Ingram, argues for the integration of the neurosciences into critical rhetorical theory in order to understand and address issues like the impact of rhetorical violence – a significant component in religious conflict – on the principle that current neuroscience confirms a surprising number of theories held by ancient Graeco-Roman philosophers on the embodied mind.26

Towards a new theorizing of religious conflict Having established that study of religious conflict in an historical period at first sight so distant from the twenty-first century – but, as we can now see, not so distant at all – is not just an academic exercise, but may in fact prove essential to helping us understand and negotiate religious conflict in the contemporary world, the next step is to engage in laying a fresh set of theoretical foundations that incorporate and internalize what, for lack of a better term, we will call the neuroscientific turn.27 This is important, if we are to move towards a self-conscious re-examination of religion and religious conflict in these critical(?) centuries.28 In order to do this, 5

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however, we must first step back and take stock of some of the theories and presuppositions that dominate current readings of the phenomenon in early Christianity and late antiquity. We then need to address the plethora of definitions that attach to some of the terms used and the lack of clear definition in the case of others.29 Lastly, we also need to ask ourselves what assumptions lie behind these approaches and to what subconscious ideological or moral systems they are attributable. That is, the more we lay out in the open, the better our chance of assessing what continues to be valid and what does not in a worldview that incorporates the embodied mind, as well as of improving our capacity to be self-conscious and self-critical about how and even why we study religious conflict. The latter is critical, since, as the neurosciences now point out, we ourselves rationalize the world and perform actions on the basis of what Burke would call a particular piety, that is, an individualized, internally coherent, largely subconscious moral system.30 This is a substantial undertaking and not all of these steps can be completed in one chapter. Even engaging in just the first step – a critique of dominant and current approaches – is sufficient to demonstrate, however, that the neuroscientific turn disrupts our current approaches to religious conflict, while simultaneously pointing towards a number of paths for research that have been neglected.

Current approaches Polytheism = tolerance | monotheism = intolerance When we turn to current approaches, we have already raised and largely deconstructed one of the most dominant to date, that of polytheist (i.e., pre-Christian) tolerance and monotheist (i.e., Christian) intolerance. This, as a number of scholars have recently pointed out,31 is a view that emerges within secularist liberal ideology in reaction to the bloody and protracted intra-Christian religious wars in Europe in the seventeenth century. At its crudest, the logical flow is that the Christian state was responsible for indefensible social harm, so religion (Christianity) must be excised from the political = public sphere. Since this is then enshrined as a doctrine of the separation of Church and state, the entire period during which the two were not separate, that is, the entire period in European history from the seventeenth century back to the conversion of Constantine, comes under suspicion. It thus serves to set the beginning point for Christianity’s harmful impact on society at 313 CE. In this view, a period in which no religion gained political dominance within the cultures that gave birth to Europe becomes a golden age, imbued with the virtue of religious tolerance. In this nostalgic view the Roman imperial cult is conveniently forgotten or its influence on the state not viewed as comparable to that of Christianity. In this crude outline we can see the origins of at least two other lenses through which, to date, the study of religious conflict has been filtered: 1. That the conversion of Constantine constitutes a benchmark in the decline of religious tolerance; and; 2. A narrow focus on the religions of Greece and Rome, on the one hand, and on Christianity, on the other.32 We need to note 6

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here that recently scholars have been working hard to foreground and overcome these biases.33 This activity is associated with awareness-raising that concepts like “religion,” “religious violence,” “tolerance,” and “intolerance” are not emic, that is part of the internal thought-world of Graeco-Roman society, until well beyond the fourth century CE.34 And we have to admit that the concept “religious conflict” is likewise a modern, etic construct. It needs to be noted, however, that regardless of whether we adopt more emic terms like “forbearance” and “compulsion,” as Maijastina Kahlos proposes,35 we are still in essence addressing the same concepts. As we have already pointed out, the recent turn in scholarship towards an argument that there were limits to polytheist tolerance, matched by corresponding limits to Christian intolerance, while it appears to deconstruct this overarching model, in fact operates from within the same paradigm, where religious tolerance is a (modern, liberal) socially constructed virtue.36 The religious marketplace A second dominant model, that of the religious marketplace, is related, and similarly benchmarks the conversion of Constantine and focuses attention on Christianity and the religions of Greece and Rome. In this model, derived from Rational Choice Theory, which is in turn anchored in the economic theory of Adam Smith, Christianity emerges in a pluri-religious urban society where it is in competition for converts.37 The focus here is on the rise to success of Christianity against the other available religions. Within this model, the character of the relationship between religions in the first three centuries CE is described by the four Cs: coexistence, co-operation, competition, and conflict.38 The ideas of rivalry, competition, or struggle as important social factors in turn have their basis in evolutionary and Marxist social theory.39 In scholarship deriving from the discipline of Classics as opposed to Early Christian or Biblical Studies, in terms of the relationship between cults in the Hellenistic and Roman world competition has been viewed as both a social phenomenon and as an engine of religious change.40 Both sets of ideas have been discussed and critiqued at length by Engels and Van Nuffelen in their introduction to the volume Religion and Competition in Antiquity, although it should be noted that they see the marketplace as a problematic metaphor rather than engaging directly with Stark and other rational choice of religion theorists.41 What they do usefully highlight, for our purposes, is the failure of the negative entailment of this set of ideas, that Christianity signals the end of competition.42 Of even greater significance is that this set of theories, too, emerges from within secularist liberal ideology that sees reason as a primary agent and religious pluralism as an ideal and that equates religious competition (equivalent to free market capitalism) with religious vitality.43 Here the assumption of “rational choice” as applied to religion is particularly problematic. Where previous criticism of these models has focused on the validity of the idea of choice,44 current neuroscientific findings about the primacy of affect over reason when it comes to moral judgement undermine not the idea of choice in regard to religion, but the primacy of 7

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reason in such a choice. These studies suggest, on the contrary, that emotion and intuition most likely play an initial role and that a person then rationalizes his or her choice, if at all, after the fact.45 By now it will be clear that modern sociology of religion as a discipline is to a large extent still under the influence of functionalist and secularist postEnlightenment modes of thought and we must also ask whether a theory of religious competition per se, whether applied to a pluri-religious society, as is assumed to describe Graeco-Roman society prior to the conversion of Constantine, or one in which a single religion dominates, as is assumed to be the case subsequently, should not itself be subjected to critical re-examination. That is, competition as a model may or may not be a valid tool for assessing the role of religion in society in the ancient to late ancient world. If we are to accept or reject it with confidence, however, we need at the very least to expose to critical examination the ideological origins of the model and ask whether, given that religion has no clear definition within society at this period,46 competition offers an adequate explanation. A further point is that the ideology that underlies both the (in)tolerance and competition models and their variants is fundamentally Euro- (= Western-) centric, as is the bulk of the scholarship that informs them.47 This, as we have already noted, creates an unconscious bias towards what are perceived to be the great ancestors of Europe and its Enlightenment – Greece and Rome and their religions – and to the successor majority religion that shaped the history of Europe and its colonies, Christianity. As scholars of Judaism, among others, have rightly pointed out, much scholarship on religion in classical and late antiquity to date retains these biases.48 So scholars from within the discipline of Classical studies rightly criticise scholars of New Testament, Early Christian and Late Antique studies of examining Graeco-Roman religion through Christian-coloured or monotheist lenses.49 The same criticism, however, can be levelled at much of the scholarship on Judaism, on religions beyond the borders of the Roman empire,50 and on Manichaeism in this period, where the religions are examined less in their own right than from a predominantly Graeco-Roman-religious as well as Christian perspective. Another entailment of these models and their underlying ideology, particularly in relation to the question of religious conflict, is a second subconscious bias, this time towards viewing each religion as a monolithic entity. While recent scholarship, with its emphasis on a spectrum of co-existing Judaisms, Islams, or Christianities, is beginning to unpack this bias in relation to monotheistic religions,51 this conceptualisation of religion needs to be brought into greater dialogue with the view of polytheist cults as being by nature individual and local in their expression.52 What current neuroscientific research on liberal versus conservative moral systems and on the intersection between affect, reason and behaviour suggests is that the adherents and their beliefs and practices within all religious systems are susceptible to polarization.53 This language at present appears rarely, if at all, in the literature.54 The concept of polarization itself suggests that religious conflict should be viewed not as a fixed or end state but as a process, while we need also 8

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to pay attention to the idea that all religious groups, not just monotheisms, are susceptible to sectarian fragmentation.55 Under what conditions this phenomenon occurs or fails to occur across the full range of religions that existed in the ancient to late ancient world and to what degree it is attributable to the character of the individual religion (as opposed to other factors) is an avenue of research as yet inadequately explored. Religious conflict = religious violence This leads us to a third approach that currently dominates the study of both contemporary and early Christian and late ancient religious conflicts. This is an approach that views religious conflict from the sole perspective of one of its (extreme) modes of expression, religious violence. This holds true whether the focus is physical or rhetorical violence. Bremmer in his 2014 article, “Religious Violence between Greeks, Romans, Christian and Jews,” refers to the appearance in the preceding decade of a “tsunami” of studies of the phenomenon in antiquity.56 While this is somewhat exaggerated for antiquity, it comes closer to the mark when we add in books, articles, and new journals that seek to explain the phenomenon in the twenty-first century.57 The recent increase in publications on religious fundamentalism and martyrdom both ancient and modern can be included as subsets of this approach.58 This emphasis in response to not just the events of 9/11, but the constant reporting in the media of fresh examples around the world of suicide bombings, beheadings of apostates, and destruction of cultic sites is natural and has its uses. These we will discuss in a moment. The problem arises when this overwhelming emphasis on an extreme becomes fixed in both public and academic perception as representing the whole,59 leading to the neglect not just of other potentially significant aspects of religious conflict, but of informed discussion on the question of where religious conflict in all its aspects and manifestations fits into concepts of social harm and social good. The latter is a huge question that cannot be unpacked here.60 Instead we will look briefly at the utility of just two of the numerous viewpoints and findings that have emerged from this vast body of research, one from contemporary studies, one from the study of late antiquity. Firstly, as Fox and Sandler point out, the focus on religious violence has opened up debate about the nature of the relationship between politics, ethnicity, race, and religion in national and transnational conflicts.61 We see a similar discussion emerging in the work of Engels and Van Nuffelen concerning the Graeco-Roman world, where they argue for the interweaving of religion with ethnic and cultural differences, social distinctions, and politics.62 The work of both Lakoff, in particular, and Haidt, in general, drawing on their own experimental work and that of others in the neurosciences, confirms the existence of an intimate connection at the cognitive level with morality in the case of politics.63 Secondly, among scholars who study the world of late antiquity the focus on violence has drawn attention to an observable disjunction between violent discourse or speech and violent action. This is still in the process of being 9

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unpacked, but emerges most clearly in the case of the destruction of the cultic buildings and images of one religion (in this case, a variety of Graeco-Roman cults) by another (Christianity). Here a significant discrepancy is being revealed between the reportage of acts of violence in the dominant religion’s rhetoric and the physical evidence.64 Without the benefit of verifiable evidence, a similar discussion is nonetheless opening up regarding the relationship between stories of martyrdom and persecution in the early Christian centuries and their historical reality.65 In this respect, Ingram’s insightful discussion of the impact of violent rhetoric on the brain as physiological trauma opens up an avenue for dialogue between these discussions in late antiquity, research from the neurosciences, and critical rhetoric.66 A significant aspect of religious conflict that has not been well explained by sociological theories to date is the precise nature of the relationship between what a religious leader says, the impact of that speech on a follower’s brain, and that follower’s actions. What Burke’s piety theory, the theories of Bourdieu, and the current neuroscientific research together suggest is that this is in some respects simple and in others quite complex.67

Religious conflict = identity-formation The emphasis on violence and the raising of questions about the role of the rhetoric of violence in relation to it brings us to one final influential perspective from which religious conflict in early Christianity and late antiquity has been addressed, which will be discussed only in brief. This is the analysis of conflict rhetoric through the lens of identity theory, more specifically the role of in-group/outgroup bias in constructing identity.68 This theory, adopted from social psychology, has been particularly influential in Late Antique studies, where the language of alterity, deviancy, and discussion of strategies of delegitmization of out-groups – for instance, bestial language applied to Jews, or accusations of child sacrifice against Christians – is common.69 It also lies behind the oppositional labels “heresy/heterodoxy” and “orthodoxy.”70 Here, as in the case, of the first two theories discussed, we again see a marked bias in application towards Christianity,71 this time with some slight justification in that Christianity is a newly emergent religion. The implications extend far beyond the identity-formation of Christianity and its various expressions, however, and there is much work to be done on how the rhetoric and/or praxis of other newly emerging religious groups, such as Rabbinic Judaism, Manichaeism, and Islam, was received,72 and how the rhetoric that accompanied the refashioning of the identity of existing religious groups spawned, or emerged from within (and thus reinforced), conflict.73 Slight progress has been made in broadening research into the in-group/out-group oppositional categories heresy-orthodoxy, where it is now, if slowly, increasingly being recognized that this particular bias is not specific to Christianity in particular, nor monotheisms in general.74 There is also an emerging discussion about the gap between heresy-orthodoxy discourse, which foregrounds belief, and orthopraxy, which is now thought in regard to personal religious identity in the ancient to 10

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late ancient world to have had priority.75 This has potential implications for the current direction in sociology-of-religion research, with its emphasis on religious fundamentalism. Where identity research is beginning to produce particularly valuable insights concerns an emerging recognition of the gap between rhetoric that had previously been read as indicative of historical inter-group conflict and the reality that this is an example of in-group/out-group bias where the out-group label is used to refer to a deviant other inside the same religion. That is, what is rhetorically constructed as inter-group religious conflict, such as “pagan-Christian” or “Christian-Jewish,” is now being revealed as a product of intra- or inner-group conflict in which the issue of clarifying group identity in a time of uncertainty is in the foreground. An example is the article by Douglas Boin, in which he deconstructs the previously influential oppositional categories “pagan” and “Christian.”76 This finding opens up our reading of current “Islamic-Christian” or “Islamic-Jewish” religious conflicts. Of equal interest are recent studies which show how the application of in-group/ out-group strategies in intra-group conflict can spread conflict beyond the group to the religion that is not the original target of the conflict, but is employed as the scapegoated other. Abel Mordechai Bibliowicz’s recent book arguing that antiSemitism is a by-product (an “unintended” consequence) of early intra-Christian conflict and identity-formation is an important example.77 One final avenue of interest is recent discussion of the gap between increased activity directed towards memory construction inside a religious group – this is not explicitly polemical, but might be thought to suggest a response to external pressures – and historical reality, which indicates minimal real local or regional inter-religious conflict. This research is emerging in particular from exploration of the impact on local Christianities of the Arab conquest and the rise of a competing, dominant religion, Islam.78 Such studies bring into ever-increasing question assumptions about the direct link between conflict rhetoric and conflict reality that have long held sway. Here again, the insights emerging from much of this research could be deepened by being brought more explicitly into dialogue with experimental psychology and neuroscientific research.79 As Mar Marcos argues, maybe approaches that saw Christian narratives of violence towards other religions as reflecting real violence prove problematic not because there is no direct link between such narratives and actual violence, but because they placed the cart before the horse.80 Is it possible, she asks, that the narratives of violence that arose as a part of boundary demarcation are causative? Instead of commemorating historical reality, did they subtly encourage acts of violence that occurred after the fact? The full mapping out of the agency of identity-formation in religious conflict, on the one hand, and of religious conflict in identity-formation, on the other, remains as yet some distance away.

Conclusion If we are not at the beginning of a re-theorization of religious conflict, then the neurosciences are demonstrating compellingly that we should be. In showing that 11

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the primacy of reason in moral judgement is a myth, they disrupt ways of looking at the phenomenon that have dominated research, public perception, and governmental responses. At the very least, their findings call on us to attribute greater agency to emotion in religious belief, discourse, and action, than has previously been the case. Their precise implication for a revised theory of religious conflict, on the other hand, has yet to be unfolded. We argued that the first step is to engage in laying a fresh set of theoretical foundations that incorporate and internalize what, for lack of a better term, we called the neuroscientific turn.81 In order to do that, we argued, we must first critically examine the theories that currently undergird how we describe, frame, and respond to religious conflict. This chapter has been a first step in that direction. As we suggested, even engaging in just the very beginnings of this first step – a critique of dominant and current approaches – has been sufficient to demonstrate that the neuroscientific turn disrupts our current approaches to religious conflict, while simultaneously pointing towards a number of paths for research that have been neglected or insufficiently explained. Further, this tentative step has shown how important it is for us as scholars to be more self-reflective and self-critical of our inherent Burkean pieties. One of the felicitous side-effects of this endeavour is that as scholars of religion in antiquity, late antiquity or African studies we are no longer required to find justifications for our research. On the contrary, if we are to understand why religious conflict occurs today in what is increasingly being acknowledged as the failure of the Age of Reason in what is biologically an embodied-mind world, then study of the phenomenon in the ancient to late ancient world, alongside studies of the phenomenon in historical and contemporary Africa – societies in which the embodied mind is accepted and in which religion is entwined with private and public life at every level – can now play an important, perhaps even central, role.

Notes 1 In addition to her role as Associate Dean of Research, Australian Lutheran College, University of Divinity, Wendy Mayer is also a Research Fellow in the Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies, University of South Africa. This chapter is dedicated to Luke Lavan, who first suggested the connection between current Western shock at religious conflict and European secularist ideology as a missing link in my thought. I am also deeply indebted to Jan Bremmer, who offered insightful comments on an earlier draft and pointed me towards additional supporting literature, and to Scott Bartchy, for his review and long discussion with me about the ideas presented in this article. 2 Russell Powell and Steve Clarke, “Religion, Tolerance, and Intolerance: Views from Across the Disciplines,” in Religion, Intolerance, and Conflict: A Scientific and Conceptual Investigation, ed. S. Clarke, R. Powell, and J. Savulescu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 7–10. It should be noted that the authors deconstruct this assumption to some extent for the period prior to the Enlightenment, but that their interest in ideologies that have influenced modern to postmodern conceptions lead them rather to presume that intolerance is normative across history and societies and resistant to change. 3 For critiques of this premise, see Joachim Losehand, “ ‘The Religious Harmony in the Ancient World’: Vom Mythos religiöser Toleranz in der Antike,” Göttinger Forum

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für Altertumswissenschaft 12 (2009): 99–132; Maijastina Kahlos, Forbearance and Compulsion: The Rhetoric of Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 2009), 5–6; Tessa Canella, “Tolleranza e intolleranza religiosa nel mondo tardo antico: questioni di metodo,” Vetera Christianorum 47 (2010): 249–66; Wendy Mayer, “Religious Conflict: Definitions, Problems and Theoretical Approaches,” in Religious Conflict from Early Christianity to the Rise of Islam, ed. W. Mayer and B. Neil (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 8–12, 17; David Engels and Peter Van Nuffelen, “Religion and Competition in Antiquity, an Introduction,” in Religion and Competition in Antiquity, ed. D. Engels and P. Van Nuffelen (Bruxelles: Éditions Latomus, 2014), 13, 26; and Jan Bremmer, “Religious Violence Between Greeks, Romans, Christians and Jews,” in Violence in Ancient Christianity: Victims and Perpetrators, ed. A. Geljon and R. Roukema (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 8–30, esp. 12–18. See also Jan Bremmer’s contribution in this volume. 4 See Polymnia Athanassiadi, Vers la pensée unique: la montée de l’intolérance dans l’Antiquité tardive (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2010); and Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, A Threat to Public Piety: Christians, Platonists, and the Great Persecution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012). The phrase “rise of intolerance” is itself predicated on a post-Enlightenment “rise of tolerance” in the Western world; see Powell and Clarke, “Religion, Tolerance, and Intolerance,” 7–8. 5 See Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 13. Jan Bremmer, “Religious Violence,” 12–14; and Kahlos, Forbearance and Compulsion; and ead., Dialogue and Debate: Christian and Pagan Cultures c. 360–430 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), have done much to deconstruct this view. The emerging view is summed up by Dirk Rohmann, Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity, Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 135 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), “Introduction” (p. 15, ebook version): “while religious conflicts demonstrably occurred, the Christianisation of the Roman Empire was much more peaceful and consensual than this . . . evidence implies at first glance.” See, however, David Frankfurter, “ ‘Religious Violence’: A Phenomenology,” Ancient Jew Review, February 24, 2016, www.ancientjewreview.com/articles/2016/2/24/religious-violencea-phenomenology, accessed March 26, 2017, who cautions against this overly irenic view of religion and argues for the need for a phenomenology of religious violence. 6 In situating the roots of religious violence in monotheism, the work of the Egyptologist Jan Assmann has been particularly influential. See, e.g., J. Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); id., Die Mosaische Unterscheidung oder der Preis des Monotheismus (München: Hanser Akzente, 2003); id., Monotheismus und die Sprache der Gewalt (Wien: Picus Verlag, 2006); and most recently the essay, “Monotheismus und Gewalt,” January  29, 2013, www.perlentaucher.de/essay/monotheismus-und-gewalt.html; accessed March 26, 2017; and, for a sample of critiques of his views, Losehand, “Religious Harmony,” 111–12; Jan Bremmer, “Religious Violence and Its Roots: A View from Antiquity,” Asdiwal: Revue genevoise d’ánthropologie et d’historie des religions 6 (2011): 71–9; and René Bloch, “Polytheismus und Monotheismus in der paganen Antike: Zu Jan Assmanns Monotheismus-Kritik,” in Fremdbilder-Selbstbilder: Imaginationen des Judentums von der Antike bis in die Neuzeit, ed. R. Bloch et  al. (Basel: Verlag Schwabe, 2010), 5–24. It is of interest that approaches from the perspective of evolutionary biology can arrive at the same conclusion. See, e.g., John Teehan, In the Name of God: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Ethics and Violence (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), who, although he sees the moral psychology that predisposes us towards religion as responsible for violence, not religion per se, nonetheless views the universalist/exclusivist tendencies within Christianity’s moral code as problematic. Regardless of whether he does so because the New Atheists,

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8 9

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among others, single out the three great monotheist religions as causative, his focus on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam serves unintentionally to underwrite this position. In addition to Bremmer, “Religious Violence,” 11–13, see the analyses of Powell and Clarke, “Religion, Tolerance, and Intolerance,” 1–6; and Jonathan Fox and Schmuel Sandler, “The Question of Religion and World Politics,” in Religion in World Conflict, ed. J. Fox and S. Sandler (London: Routledge, 2006), 4–6. See Fox and Sandler, “The Question of Religion,” 4; and the essay by Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu, “The Limits of Religious Tolerance: A Secular View,” in Religion, Intolerance, and Conflict, 236–52. The drive of Western liberalism is particularly evident in contemporary Anglophone studies of the phenomenon. See, e.g., in addition to the essays in Clarke et al., eds., Religion, Intolerance, and Conflict (esp. the essay by Powell and Clarke, 1–3, which raises the views of New Atheism), William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), and the lengthy review essay by Vincent W. Lloyd, “Violence: Religious, Theological, Ontological,” Theory, Culture and Society 28.5 (2011): 144–54. The blog by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, posted September 21, 2007, “Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion,” http://edge.org/conversation/moralpsychology-and-the-misunderstanding-of-religion, accessed March  26, 2017, and responses, are also instructive. Since the impact remains largely confined to Near Eastern, African, and Asian nations, this is perceived by Western scholars as being by no means as severe as the religious wars of the seventeenth century (e.g., Powell and Clarke, “Religion, Tolerance, and Intolerance,” 3). At the same time, there is some question as to whether the perception of a global increase in religious violence is justified. See the Pew Trust analysis of social hostilities involving religion 2006–2012, B.J. Grim et al., “Religious Hostilities Reach Six-Year-High,” Pew Research Center, January  14, 2014, www.pewforum.org/2014/01/14/religious-hostilities-reach-six-year-high, accessed March  26, 2017, that documents a genuine rise internationally in religious hostilities up to 2012. The updates, “Latest Trends in Religious Restrictions and Hostilities,” Pew Research Center, February  26, 2015, www.pewforum.org/2015/02/26/religious-hostilities, accessed March  26, 2017, and “Trends in Global Restrictions on Religion,” Pew Research Center, June  23, 2016, www.pewforum.org/2016/06/23/trends-in-globalrestrictions-on-religion, accessed March 26, 2017, indicate a global decline in religious hostilities since 2012, despite a rise in “religion-related terrorism.” Fox and Sandler, “The Question of Religion,” 5–6, 10; and see the sample list of resulting publications cited by Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 1 n. 1. Fox and Sandler, “The Question of Religion,” 6, document the beginnings of a reintroduction of religion as an important factor into political science theory in the 1980s, but point out that this was never mainstream. The quest for explanation has had a concurrent impact on historical research. See Bremmer, “Religious Violence,” 8 n. 1, for a list of recent books on religious violence in antiquity. See, e.g., Steve Clarke, The Justification of Religious Violence (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2014), 58–88, building on the work of Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108.4 (2001): 814–34, among others; and Brett Ingram, “Critical Rhetoric in the Age of Neuroscience” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2013). Ingram provides a substantial and extended critique of the literature to 2013. This is the view of Moral Foundations Theory, which draws in turn on the theory of Emile Durkheim (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1912) regarding the social-binding function of morality (religion). See J. Graham et al., “Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism,” Advances in Experimental

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Social Psychology 47 (2013): 55–130. Teehan, In the Name of God, applies this specifically to the topic of religious violence. See George Lakoff, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century Politics with an 18th-Century Brain (New York: Viking, 2008); id., Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Omar Sultan Haque, “Moral Creationism: The Science of Morality and the Mutiny of Romantic Relativism,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 11.1 (2011): 151–87, argues a similar case on the basis of neuroscientific research and evolutionary psychology. See Powell and Clarke, “Religion, Tolerance, and Intolerance,” 5–7, who situate it within the moral foundation system of “harm/care.” On the latter see Graham et al., “Moral Foundations Theory,” but note that the proponents of MFT themselves point out that the foundational moral systems they have thus far identified are not final. On the latter, see Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph, “How Moral Foundations Theory Succeeded in Building on Sand: A Response to Suhler and Churchland,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23.9 (2011): 2117–18. Powell and Clarke, “Religion, Tolerance, and Intolerance,” 6. A recent example of the exercise of this principle is the triple rejection by local communities of the Hasidic Lev Tahor sectarian Jewish community within the USA, Canada, and now Guatemala on the basis that their practices and ideology were socially harmful (in each case contrary to state values enshrined in law). See Ian Johnston, “Orthodox Jews Expelled from Guatemalan Refuge After Being Threatened ‘with Lynching,’ ” The Independent, Sunday August 31, 2014, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/fundamentalist-jewsexpelled-from-guatemalan-refuge-after-being-threatened-with-lynching-9701807. html, accessed September 12, 2014. Engels and Van Nuffelen, “Religion and Competition,” 13–14, who argue that the limit was reached “when a new religious form seemed to endanger the social and political cohesion of the city” or the later Roman state; and Kahlos, Forbearance and Compulsion, 9–27. Bremmer, “Religious Violence,” 14–18, is less concerned with arguing for tolerance within limits prior to the rise of Christianity than deconstructing the myth of polytheistic tolerance. The idea that modern society has evolved beyond more primitive uses of religion derives from Social Darwinism, a doctrine further developed by Marx. See Bryan Turner, “The Sociology of Religion,” in The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, ed. J.A. Beckford and N.J. Demerath (London: Sage, 2007), 285. See Ryan McKay and Harvey Whitehouse, “Religion and Morality,” Psychological Bulletin 141.2 (2015): 447–73, who argue, however, that the concepts “morality” and “religion” themselves need to be deconstructed and carefully defined, if the relationship between biology and culture is to be determined without bias. The embodied and cognitive intransigence of particular moral/value systems was first formulated by the rhetorician Kenneth Burke in Permanence and Change (1935) on the basis of his exposure to research on drug addiction. For a useful analysis of his theory of piety see Jordynn Jack, “ ‘The Piety of Degradation’: Kenneth Burke, the Bureau of Social Hygiene, and Permanence and Change,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.4 (2004): 446–68. His theory of piety has since been validated and formalised by recent neuroscientific research as set out by Ingram, “Critical Rhetoric in the Age of Neuroscience,” 55–100. I am deeply indebted to my colleague in Biblical Studies at Unisa, Johannes Vorster, for alerting me to the work of Burke on piety in the first instance. Interestingly, this theory neatly describes the anti-religious “religious” fervour of the New Atheists on the basis of their affective “addiction” to secularist rational liberal ideology.

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21 This was the approach of Haidt, leading to insights concerning three additional foundational moral systems. See his reflection on the influence of his postdoctoral research in India in the blog “What Makes People Vote Republican?” September 8, 2008, http:// edge.org/conversation/what-makes-vote-republican, accessed March  26, 2017. Durkheim himself derived many of his theories about religion and society from his study of traditional societies, especially Australian aborigines. 22 On the Greek conception of the body politic as susceptible to both disease and health, see G.E.R. Lloyd, In the Grip of Disease: Studies in the Greek Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, repr. 2009), 1–13. For an outline and analysis of the medico-philosophical-moral therapeutic approach in the classical to early imperial periods, see Christopher Gill, “Philosophical Therapy as Preventive Psychological Medicine,” in Mental Disorders in the Classical World, ed. W.V. Harris (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 339–62. The literature, both primary and secondary, on the therapy of the emotions in the ancient Graeco-Roman world is substantial. 23 On the latter point, see Bremmer, “Religious Violence,” 11–12; Engels and Van Nuffelen, “Religion and Competition,” 12. 24 On the basis of his experimental research, Haidt argues in “Moral Psychology” that, regardless of where one sits on the conservative-liberal spectrum, the foundational harm/care system is a guiding principle, whereas all of the foundational systems are concerned with regulating selfishness for the benefit of the social group. 25 Lakoff, The Political Mind, subtitled in its original printing: “Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century Politics with an 18th-Century Brain.” 26 Ingram, “Critical Rhetoric in the Age of Neuroscience,” esp. 14, 49–50. The primacy of affect/emotion over reason, one of the more significant recent neuroscientific findings, points us directly back to the Hellenistic emphasis on therapy of the affects/emotions, with significant implications for the connection between hate-filled or emotive speech and its (differentiated) impacts on the conscious mind and subconscious brain of the listener. 27 This is to distinguish it from the “cognitive turn,” a label employed in scholarly literature of the 1980s and ’90s to reference the application of findings and theories from psychology. 28 The question mark attached to “critical” is deliberate, in that the notion of a “rise of intolerance,” whether located in the third or fourth century CE, and the link drawn to the rise to political dominance of monotheism (Christianity) – language now being recycled in relation to the twenty-first century and the rise to political dominance of another monotheist religion, Islam – are both concepts that require careful critical examination. 29 This is the case not just with the terms “religion,” “tolerance,” “intolerance,” “religious conflict,” “violence,” but also with “social harm,” “social health,” and “virtue.” 30 What cognitive theorists appear to agree on, regardless of the particular aspect of cognition on which their research focuses, is that the general systems they describe are comprised of different components from within a large set of variables at the level of the individual brain. In terms of morality, two conflicting variables in the same subset, however, cannot be held by the same individual brain at the same time. On neural binding, biconceptualism and moral contradiction see Lakoff, The Political Mind, 69–72. 31 See nn. 3 and 7–8 above. Losehand, “Religious Harmony,” 104–9, provides a detailed and helpful critique of the myths associated with this ideology, tracing its development through Hume, Locke and Gibbon, among others. Canella, “Tolleranza e intolleranza,” 249–52, independently traces a similar trajectory. 32 Although they debate precisely how the conversion of Constantine was a benchmark and do not explicitly focus on issues of (in)tolerance, the work of senior scholars of late antiquity is indicative in this regard. See, e.g., Peter Brown, The Rise of Western

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33

34

35 36

37

38

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40 41 42 43

Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, AD 200–1000 (Oxford: B.H. Blackwell, 1996); Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire: A.D. 100–400 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); id., Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). The recent French, Spanish, and Canadian projects referenced in Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 9–10, 12–13, that are more explicitly concerned with issues of tolerance and intolerance, along with the articles in Une antiquité tardive noire ou heureuse? Actes du colloque international de Besançon (12 et 13 novembre 2014), Institut des Sciences et Techniques de l’Antiquité, ed. Stéphane Ratti (Besançon: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2015), likewise follow these paths. E.g., the works of Losehand, Canella, Bremmer, Kahlos, Engels, and Van Nuffelen cited (nn. 3 and 5 above). Similarly, Mar Marcos in her article, “ ‘He Forced with Gentleness’: Emperor Julian’s Attitude to Religious Coercion,” Antiquité Tardive 17 (2009): 191–204, carefully unpacks the contemporary language and avoids terms like “tolerance” or “intolerance” in favour of “coercion.” Bremmer, “Religious Violence,” 10–12; Kahlos, Forbearance and Compulsion, 2–4; Athanassiadi, Vers la pensée unique, 40; Engels and Van Nuffelen, “Religion and Competition,” passim. Canella, “Tolleranza e intolleranza,” 262–6, argues for a similar problematisation of the terms publicus, privatus, superstitio, dissimulatio, conviventia, and fides. Kahlos, Forbearance and Compulsion, 2, 6–8. We see this especially in the Critical Theory of Religion School, where religion is determinately negated and secularized in order to locate “religion” positively within a humane society. Here the proponents are responding not to the wars of the CounterReformation, but to the horrors of Auschwitz. See Rudolf Siebert, Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion, 3 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2010). The most influential proponent of this theory is Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). For an insightful overview and critique, see Jan N. Bremmer, The Rise of Christianity Through the Eyes of Gibbon, Harnack and Rodney Stark (Groningen: Barkhuis, 2010), 47–64. This model has been influential among New Testament scholars, on which see Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 8–10, the first of the Cs sometimes being replaced by scholars of Graeco-Roman religion with “cohabitation.” The model of the four Cs is set out by Richard Ascough in “Religious Coexistence, Co-Operation, Competition, and Conflict in Sardis and Smyrna,” in Religious Rivalries and the Struggle for Success in Sardis and Smyrna, ed. Richard S. Ascough (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005), 245–52. For an example of the “cohabitation” paradigm, see the articles in Beyond Conflicts: Cultural and Religious Cohabitations in Alexandria and Egypt Between the 1st and the 6th Century CE, ed. Luca Arcari (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017). See Engels and Van Nuffelen, “Religion and Competition,” 11–12; Turner, “Sociology of Religion,” 285; and Siebert, Manifesto, 1:11; although note that critical theory of religion proponents view their theory as an alternative to rational choice theory. See Warren S. Goldstein, “Introduction: Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice,” in Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice, ed. Warren S. Goldstein (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 1–2. See Engels and Van Nuffelen, “Religion and Competition,” 23–4 and literature. Engels and Van Nuffelen, “Religion and Competition,” esp. 27–9. Engels and Van Nuffelen, “Religion and Competition,” 24–6. See the critiques of Frank J. Lechner, “Rational Choice and Religious Economics,” in The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, ed. J.A. Beckford and N.J.

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45

46 47

48

49

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Demerath (London: Sage, 2007), 81–97; and David Lehmann, “An Idea, a Tribe, and Their Critics: Rational Choice and the Sociology of Religion,” in The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion, ed. Bryan S. Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 181–200. See e.g., George Lundskow, “The Concept of Choice in the Rise of Christianity: A Critique of Rational-Choice Theory,” in Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion, 223–48; and the works cited by Bremmer, Rise of Christianity, 49 n. 198, where he describes Lundskow’s critique as “amateurish.” See Haidt, “The Emotional Dog”; Ingram, “Critical Rhetoric in the Age of Neuroscience,” 59–66; Clarke, Justification of Religious Violence, 75–7. Ibid., 79–80, however, is reluctant to demote the role of reason and questions the validity of Haidt’s findings as a- or cross-cultural. On this point, see esp. the argument of Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). Although it should be noted that sociologists of religion trace a divergent path between the twentieth-century view of religion and society that developed in the European context and in North America (Turner, “Sociology of Religion,” 291–5). Rational Choice Theory, for instance, emerges from the American, Critical Theory from the European context. This explains to some degree the opposition of Lundskow, a proponent of Critical Theory, to the thesis of Stark. So Steven Fine in his review of Palestine in Late Antiquity (2008), Review of Biblical Literature, published online October  17, 2009, www.bookreviews.org, criticizes its author, Hagith Sivan, for viewing rabbinic sources through “Christianity-colored glasses.” A similar observation is made by Adiel Schremer, Brothers Estranged: Heresy, Christianity, and Jewish Identity in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5, who argues that “the assumption that the destruction of the Second Temple marks a rupture in Jewish history subscribes, in a deep sense, to a Christian theological claim.” Jörg Rüpke, “Early Christianity out of, and in, Context,” Journal of Roman Studies 99 (2009): 182–93, in his lengthy review of the first two volumes in The Cambridge History of Christianity series (2006–2007), roundly criticizes the majority of chapters in the first and a smaller number in the second for their dominant Christianitycentrism and lack of adequate contextualization. Engels and Van Nuffelen, “Religion and Competition,” 9 describe acknowledgement of this bias as “having almost become a trope.” Here use of the traditional label “oriental” in opposition to Graeco-Roman religions contains its own set of assumptions and biases. For an attempt to re-theorize the approach to “oriental” religions within the Roman Empire, see the articles in Panthée: Religious Transformations in the Graeco-Roman Empire, ed. Corinne Bonnet and Laurent Bricault (Leiden: Brill, 2013), esp. the introduction, 1–14, where the editors provide a useful discussion of the development of the label and the approach to the religions classified as “oriental” under the influence of Francois Cumont. See, e.g., Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), which proposes multiple Judaisms along a spectrum; and the articles in Entre lignes de partage et territoires de passage. Les identités religeuses dans les mondes grec et romain: “Paganismes”, “judaïsmes,” “christianismes,” Collection de la Revue des Études Juives 47, ed. Nicole Belayche and Simon C. Mimouni (Peeters: Leuven, 2009). E.g., Engels and Van Nuffelen, “Religion and Competition,” 16–18, although, as they proceed to argue in the pages that follow, there was considerable variation in the spread and type of individual cults over time between classical Greece and imperial Rome. See also the recent work of Jörg Rüpke on individual as opposed to public religion

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53

54

55

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in the ancient world; e.g., On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016). Moral biconceptualism between the poles liberal-conservative is considered a fundamental aspect of embodied cognition by Lakoff, Moral Politics; and Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (London: Penguin, 2012). Among the exceptions, see Johannes Hahn, “Gewaltanwendung ad maiorem gloriam dei? Religiöse Intoleranz in der Spätantike,” in Religionsfreiheit, Recht und Toleranz, ed. H.-G. Nesselrath et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 227–52, with respect to late antiquity; and Marta Reynal-Querol and José G. Montalvo, “A Theory of Religious Conflict and Its Effect on Growth,” WP-EC 2000-04 (Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas Working papers, May 2000), with regard to contemporary religious conflict. The different Hindu groups that emerged within India are one example. Equally illustrative is the survey of new religious movements with their roots in Indian religions, religions of south-east Asia, and in indigenous and pagan traditions in New Religious Movements: A Guide. New Religious Movements, Sects, and Spiritualities, ed. Christopher Partridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 157–302. See n. 3, to which can be added the volume in which his article appears, Violence in Ancient Christianity: Victims and Perpetrators, ed. Albert Geljon and Riemer Roukema (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Troels M. Kristensen, Making and Breaking the Gods: Christian Responses to Pagan Sculpture in Late Antiquity (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2013); Coping with Violence in the New Testament, ed. Pieter G.R. Villiers and Jan Willem van Henten (Leiden: Brill, 2012); and Rohmann, Christianity, BookBurning and Censorship. See also the articles reflecting on ten years of the SBL panel “Violence and Representations of Violence among Jews and Christians,” Ancient Jew Review, www.ancientjewreview.com/articles/2016/2/15/violence-and-representationsof-violence-section-at-10-retrospect-and-prospect, accessed March 26, 2017. See, for example, the new Journal of Religion and Violence (first issue, 2013); Clarke, Justification of Religious Violence; Jimmy Carter, A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014); Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (New York: Anchor Books, 2015); The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence, ed. Michael Jerryson et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Hans G. Kippenberg, Violence as Worship: Religious Wars in the Age of Globalization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), English translation of Gewalt als Gottesdienst: Religionskriege im Zeitalter der Globalisierung (München: C.H. Beck, 2008); Religion, Terror, and Violence: Religious Studies Perspectives, ed. Bryan Rennie and Philip L. Tite (New York: Routledge, 2008); and, for an example from the African context, Carole Rakodi, “Inter-Religious Violence and its Aftermath: Insights from Indian and Nigerian Cities,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 48.5 (2013): 557–76. Studies that seek to define the relationship between religion and political violence such as James F. Rinehart, Apocalyptic Faith and Political Violence: Prophets of Terror (New York: Palgrave, 2006); numerous articles in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence; and the foundation of a new discipline called Hate Studies, also come under this category. See, e.g., Religiöser Fundamentalismus in der römischen Kaiserzeit, ed. Pedro Barceló (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2010), although the editor and contributors have been criticized for misinterpreting fanaticism and zealotry as fundamentalism; Religious Fundamentalism and Political Extremism, ed. Leonard Weinburg and Ami Pedahzur (London: Frank Cass, 2004); Candida R. Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); ead., The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom

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61 62 63 64

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); David Cook, Martyrdom in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Michael Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); and Rubén Rosario Rodgriguez, Martyrdom and Political Violence: A Comparative Theology with Judaism and Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Bremmer, Rise of Christianity, 21 n. 90, supplies references to recent studies on voluntary martyrdom in the early Christian period, presumably inspired by the phenomenon in the twenty-first century. For studies that seek to bridge the gap between the two time periods, see Jan Bremmer, “The Motivation of Martyrs: Perpetua and the Palestinians,” in Religion im kulturellen Diskurs: Festschrift für Hans G. Kippenberg zu seinem 65. Geburtstag / Religion in Cultural Discourse. Essays in Honor of Hans G. Kippenberg on Occasion of His 65th Birthday, ed. B. Luchesi and K. von Stuckrad (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), 535–54; and id., “Felicitas: The Martyrdom of a Young African Woman,” in Perpetua’s Passions: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Passio Perpetua et Felicitas, ed. Jan N. Bremmer and Marco Formisano (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 35–53. A focus on fundamentalism has been a significant driver in revitalizing sociology of religion research as it seeks to respond to global political developments (see Turner, “Sociology of Religion,” 295–9). Charles Kurzman, The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), for instance, argues that contemporary Muslim martyrs are in fact the exception rather than the rule. Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2013), makes a similar case for the first centuries of Christianity. On this phenomenon in scholarship, Jan Bremmer remarks: “Somewhat simplifying we can say that the less sympathetic a historian is to Christianity, the lower the number of martyrs will be” (Bremmer, Rise of Christianity, 20). His observations (Ibid., 20–3) on the ideological drive behind analyses resulting in figures towards either end of the scale likely apply equally to scholarly analysis of the practice in contemporary Islam. See Powell and Clarke, “Religion, Tolerance, and Intolerance,” 23–4, who raise the possibility that for some social groups “intolerance in its various manifestations, from subtle discrimination and avoidance to outright aggression and homicide, may have been adaptive,” although they hastily claim that, even if this is an evolutionary reality, it is by no means ethically defensible. Unpalatable as it seems to be to Western sensibilities, this is nonetheless a question that needs to be tackled unprejudicially. Fox and Sandler, “The Question of Religion”; and see Reynal-Querol and Montalvo, “A Theory of Religious Conflict,” who look at the intersection between religion, ethnicity, and economic growth. Engels and Van Nuffelen, “Religion and Competition,” 12–23. See the works cited in n. 53 above. The literature on this topic is mounting as is debate concerning the precise degree of discrepancy and the impact of the rhetoric of destruction on action. For representative books and articles on this topic see: Aude Busine, “From Stones to Myth: Temple Destruction and Civic Identity in the Late Antique Roman East,” Journal of Late Antiquity 6.2 (2013): 325–46; Kristensen, Making and Breaking the Gods; Jitse Dijkstra, “The Fate of the Temples in Late Antique Egypt,” in The Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism,” ed. Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 389–436; Klaus S. Freyberger, “Zur Nachnutzung heidnischer Heiligtümer aus Nordund Südsyrien in spätantiker Zeit,” in Nesselrath et al., Für Religionsfreiheit, Recht und Toleranz, 179–226; and From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity, ed. J. Hahn, S. Emmel, and U. Gotter (Leiden: Brill, 2008). See also the chapter by Jitse Dijkstra in the present volume.

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65 The literature on this topic is growing, largely in response to and in discussion with the work of Candida Moss (see n. 58), culminating in her controversial book The Myth of Persecution. 66 Ingram, “Critical Rhetoric in the Age of Neuroscience,” 133–78. See my preliminary exploration of the applicability of this approach in Wendy Mayer, “Preaching Hatred? John Chrysostom, Neuroscience, and the Jews,” in (Revisioning John Chrysostom: New Perspectives Theories and Approaches, ed. C.L. de Wet and W. Mayer (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 67 For a summation of both Burke and Bourdieu on the intransigence of piety/habitus, see Jack, “The Piety of Degradation,” 451–3. What Burke and Bourdieu try to capture in their theories are the mechanisms described by recent studies in neuroplasticity and social and cognitive psychology in their description of how cognitive framing and metaphors function, the process of the strengthening of neural pathways by both mental and physical repetition, the priority of intuitive/subconscious affect/emotion over conscious reason, and the resistance of the resulting subconscious embodied neural pathways to change, particularly when a speaker attempts to bring persuasion about via logical discourse or reasoned argument. Ingram, “Critical Rhetoric in the Age of Neuroscience,” 55 onwards, provides a careful and detailed account of the meeting points between the theories of Burke, Bourdieu, De Certeau, and Foucault and the findings of neuroscience, with special attention to the mechanisms engaged in resistance to persuasion, in persuasion by emotional rhetoric, and the short- and long-term effects on the brain of rhetorical violence. 68 For a useful outline and discussion of this theory, see Powell and Clarke, “Religion, Tolerance, and Intolerance,” 19–22. Teehan, In the Name of God, 1–42, argues that this is intimately connected to moral psychology. 69 See, among numerous other examples, Susanna Drake, Slandering the Jews: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Jan N. Bremmer, “Early Christian Human Sacrifice Between Fact and Fiction,” in Sacrifices humains: dossiers, discours, comparaisons. Actes du colloque tenu à l’Université de Genève, 19–20 mai 2011, ed. Agnès A. Nagy and Francesca Prescendi (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 165–76; Averil Cameron, “Jews and Heretics – a Category Error?” in The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christian in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 344–60, esp. 351; and Andrew McGowan, “Eating People: Accusations of Cannibalism Against Christians in the Second Century,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 413–42. 70 There is a strong link between the theory that “orthodoxy” or purity discourse is a unique product of monotheism and the thesis that monotheism = intolerance. Again, the work of Assmann, although much criticized, has been influential in this respect. For an entry to the substantial literature on both sides of this debate, see n. 6 above. 71 This is a feature of recent discussion concerning “the parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity, for which the literature is vast. See, e.g., the articles in La Croisée des chemins revisitée: Quand l’Église et la synagogue se sont elles distinguées? ed. Simon Mimouni and Bernard Pouderon (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2012), esp. that of Annette Yoshiko Reed, and earlier literature cited. For other recent examples, see Tobias Nicklas, Jews and Christians? Second-Century “Christian” Perspectives on the “Parting of the Ways” (Annual Deichmann Lectures 2013) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014); and the articles in The Faces of the Other: Religious Rivalry and Ethnic Encounters in the Later Roman World, ed. Maijastina Kahlos (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011). 72 A recent example in this respect is the article by David Engels, “Historising Religion Between Spiritual Continuity and Friendly Takeover: Salvation History and Religious

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75 76

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Competition During the First Millennium AD,” in Engels and Van Nuffelen, Religion and Competition in Antiquity, 237–84. The reconstruction of a religion’s past in memory (mnemohistory) is the primary approach of Jan Assmann based on the work of Maurice Halbwachs. See, e.g., Jan Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis (München: C.H Beck, 2000); Naftali Cohn, The Memory of the Temple and the Making of the Rabbis (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) demonstrates the value of this approach for understanding the construction of Rabbinic identity at a time of conflicting and competing models of Judaean-/Jewishness in the second to third centuries. Robert McEachnie, “A History of Heresy Past: The Sermons of Chromatius of Aquileia, 388–407,” Church History 83 (2014): 273–96, does the same for Christianity in Italy in the later fourth century. Philip A. Cantrell, II, “ ‘We Were a Chosen People’: The East African Revival and Its Return to Post-Genocide Rwanda,” Church History 83 (2014): 422–45 offers a contemporary African example. Cantrell traces the inadvertently precarious situation that the post-genocide Anglican Church in Rwanda currently faces as a result of the construction by Tutsi refugees of a mythico-history of themselves as a divinely “chosen people” in the pre-genocide Ugandan camps. The “Revival then and its complex re-telling now,” as he summarizes, “will either promote more division or more unity” (445). See also Christopher Duncan, Violence and Vengeance: Religious Conflict and Its Aftermath in Eastern Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), who engages with the complex interaction of memory, religion, and identity in hardening and escalating local violence. See Boyarin, Border Lines, regarding the presence of these categories in late ancient Jewish as well as Christian discourse; Robert Langer and Udo Simon, “The Dynamics of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: Dealing with Divergence in Muslim Discourses and Islamic Studies,” Die Welt des Islams 48 (2008): 273–88; and John B. Henderson, The Construction of Orthodoxy and Heresy: Neo-Confucian, Islamic, Jewish and Early Christian Patterns (Albany: State University of New York, 1998). There is also an emerging discussion as to whether, in a limited way, the concepts of “heresy” and “orthodoxy” were also present in Graeco-Roman philosophy. See Polymnia Athanassiadi, “The Creation of Orthodoxy in Neoplatonism,” in Philosophy and Power in the Graeco-Roman World: Essays in Honour of Miriam Griffin, ed. Gillian Clark and Tessa Rajak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 271–92; Digeser, A Threat to Public Piety; and Vera Sauer, Relgiöses in der politischen Argumentation der späten römischen Republik: Ciceros Erste Catilinarische Rede – eine Fallstudie (Suttgart: Franz Steiner, 2013). Bremmer, “Religious Violence.” Douglas Boin, “Hellenistic ‘Judaism’ and the Social Origins of the ‘Pagan-Christian’ Debate,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 22.2 (2014): 167–96. Cf. Christopher P. Jones, Between Pagan and Christian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 6, on “pagan” as a Christian in-group label, but his interest is more in the actual state of relations between Christians and “pagans.” Abel Mordechai Bibliowicz, Jews and Gentiles in the Early Jesus Movement: An Unintended Journey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Cf. Patricia A. Power, “Blurring the Boundaries: American Messianic Jews and Gentiles,” Nova religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 15.1 (2011): 69–91, whose account of an incipient conflict in the case of the Messianic Jewish community in America offers a comparable case with markedly similar agents two millennia later. See, e.g., Arietta Papaconstantinou, “Saints and Saracens: On some Miracle Accounts of the Early Arab Period,” in Byzantine Religious Culture: Studies in Honor of AliceMary Talbot, ed. Denis Sullivan et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 323–38; ead., “Historiography, Hagiography, and the Making of the Coptic ‘Church of the Martyrs’ in Early

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Islamic Egypt,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 60 (2006): 65–86; David Engels, “Entre tolérance, désintérêt et exploitation: Les relations christiano-musulmanes en Sicilie du IXe au XIIIe siècle et leurs racines dans l’histoire religieuse de l’île,” Cahiers de Méditerranée 86 (2013): 273–300; and Glenn Peers, “Finding Faith Underground: Visions of the Forty Martyrs Oratory at Syracuse,” in Looking Beyond: Visions, Dreams and Insights in Medieval Art and History, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 84–106. 79 See Powell and Clarke, “Religion, Tolerance, and Intolerance,” 11–22, who outline a number of approaches that might prove beneficial; and, e.g., Lawrence Barsalou et al., “Embodiment in Religious Knowledge,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 5 (2005): 14–57, with relevance for understanding the role of orthopraxy; and Juliette Schaafsma and Kipling D. Williams, “Exclusion, Intergroup Hostility, and Religious Fundamentalism,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48 (2012): 829–37, which points to the radicalizing effects of marginalization and in-group/out-group exclusion. 80 Mar Marcos, “Religious Violence and Hagiography in Late Antiquity,” Numen 62.2–3 (2015): 169–96. 81 Brett Ingram’s phrase “the age of neuroscience,” with its suggestion that human society is now moving into the next age beyond that of reason, has both its advantages and disadvantages. An inherent danger is the evocation of social evolution theory or Social Darwinism, which may be precisely what the findings of the neurosciences speak against.

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Barsalou, Lawrence W., Aaron K. Barbey, W. Kyle Simmons, and Ava Santos. “Embodiment in Religious Knowledge.” Journal of Cognition and Culture 5 (2005): 14–57. Belayche, Nicole and Simon C. Mimouni, eds. Entre lignes de partage et territoires de passage: Les identités religeuses dans les mondes grec et romain: “Paganismes,” “judaïsmes,” “christianismes.” Collection de la Revue des Études Juives 47. Peeters: Leuven, 2009. Bibliowicz, Abel Mordechai. Jews and Gentiles in the Early Jesus Movement: An Unintended Journey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Bloch, René. “Polytheismus und Monotheismus in der paganen Antike: Zu Jan Assmanns Monotheismus-Kritik.” Pages 5–24 in Fremdbilder-Selbstbilder: Imaginationen des Judentums von der Antike bis in die Neuzeit. Edited by René Bloch, Simone Haeberli, and Rainer C. Schwinges. Basel: Verlag Schwabe, 2010. Boin, Douglas. “Hellenistic ‘Judaism’ and the Social Origins of the ‘Pagan-Christian’ Debate.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 22.2 (2014): 167–96. Bonnet, Corinne and Laurent Bricault, eds. Panthée: Religious Transformations in the Graeco-Roman Empire. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Boyarin, Daniel. Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Bremmer, Jan N. “Religious Violence Between Greeks, Romans, Christians and Jews.” Pages 8–30 in Violence in Ancient Christianity: Victims and Perpetrators. Edited by Albert Geljon and Riemer Roukema. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 125. Leiden: Brill, 2014. ———. “Early Christian Human Sacrifice Between Fact and Fiction.” Pages 165–76 in Sacrifices humains: dossiers, discours, comparaisons. Actes du colloque tenu à l’Université de Genève, 19–20 mai 2011. Edited by Agnès A. Nagy and Francesca Prescendi. Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études – Sciences religieuses 160. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. ———. “Felicitas: The Martyrdom of a Young African Woman.” Pages 35–53 in Perpetua’s Passions: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Passio Perpetua et Felicitas. Edited by Jan N. Bremmer and Marco Formisano. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. ———. “Religious Violence and Its Roots: A  View from Antiquity.” Asdiwal. Revue genevoise d’ánthropologie et d’historie des religions 6 (2011): 71–9. ———. The Rise of Christianity Through the Eyes of Gibbon, Harnack and Rodney Stark. A Valedictory Lecture on the Occasion of his Retirement from the Chair of Religious Studies, the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, delivered in Abbreviated Form before the University of Groningen on January 29, 2010. Groningen: Barkhuis, 2010. ———. “The Motivation of Martyrs: Perpetua and the Palestinians.” Pages 535–54 in Religion im kulturellen Diskurs. Festschrift für Hans G. Kippenberg zu seinem 65. Geburtstag/Religion in Cultural Discourse: Essays in Honor of Hans G. Kippenberg on Occasion of His 65th Birthday. Edited by B. Luchesi and K. von Stuckrad. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004. Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, AD 200–1000. Oxford: B.H. Blackwell, 1996. Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. 3rd ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984 (1935). Busine, Aude. “From Stones to Myth: Temple Destruction and Civic Identity in the Late Antique Roman East.” Journal of Late Antiquity 6.2 (2013): 325–46.

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Cameron, Alan. The Last Pagans of Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Cameron, Averil. “Jews and Heretics – a Category Error?” Pages 344–60 in The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christian in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Edited by Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 95. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003. Canella, Tessa. “Tolleranza e intolleranza religiosa nel mondo tardo antico: questioni di metodo.” Vetera Christianorum 47 (2010): 249–66. Cantrell, II, Philip A. “ ‘We Were a Chosen People’: The East African Revival and Its Return to Post-Genocide Rwanda.” Church History 83 (2014): 422–45. Carter, Jimmy. A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. Cavanaugh, William T. The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Clarke, Steve. The Justification of Religious Violence. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. Clarke, Steve, Russell Powell, and Julian Savulescu, eds. Religion, Intolerance, and Conflict: A Scientific and Conceptual Investigation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Cohn, Naftali S. The Memory of the Temple and the Making of the Rabbis. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Cook, David. Martyrdom in Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Digeser, Elizabeth DePalma. A Threat to Public Piety: Christians, Platonists, and the Great Persecution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. Dijkstra, Jitse. “The Fate of the Temples in Late Antique Egypt.” Pages 389–436 in The Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism.” Edited by Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan. Late Antique Archaeology 7. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Drake, Susanna. Slandering the Jews: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts. Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Duncan, Christopher R. Violence and Vengeance: Religious Conflict and Its Aftermath in Eastern Indonesia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. Engels, David. “Entre tolérance, désintérêt et exploitation. Les relations christianomusulmanes en Sicilie du IXe au XIIIe siècle et leurs racines dans l’histoire religieuse de l’île.” Cahiers de Méditerranée 86 (2013): 273–300. ———. “Historising Religion Between Spiritual Continuity and Friendly Takeover. Salvation History and Religious Competition during the First Millennium AD.” Pages 237–84 in Religion and Competition in Antiquity. Engels, David and Peter Van Nuffelen. “Religion and Competition in Antiquity, an Introduction.” Pages 9–44 in Religion and Competition in Antiquity. Edited by D. Engels and P. Van Nuffelen. Bruxelles: Éditions Latomus, 2014. Fine, Steven. Review of Hagith Sivan, Palestine in Late Antiquity (2008), Review of Biblical Literature, October 17, 2009. www.bookreviews.org. Accessed September 24, 2014. Fox, Jonathan and Shmuel Sandler. “The Question of Religion and World Politics.” Pages 1–10 in Religion in World Conflict. Edited by J. Fox and S. Sandler. London: Routledge, 2006. Frankfurter, David. “ ‘Religious Violence’: A Phenomenology.” Ancient Jew Review, February  24, 2016. www.ancientjewreview.com/articles/2016/2/24/religious-violence-aphenomenology. Accessed March 26, 2017.

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Freyberger, Klaus Stefan. “Zur Nachnutzung heidnischer Heiligtümer aus Nord- und Südsyrien in spätantiker Zeit.” Pages 179–226 in Für Religionsfreiheit, Recht und Toleranz: Libanios’ Rede für den Erhalt der heidnischen Tempel. Edited by H.-G. Nesselrath, O. Behrends, K. St. Freyberger, J. Hahn, M. Wallraff, and H.-U. Wiemer. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011. Gaddis, Michael. There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire. The Transformation of the Classical Heritage 39. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005. Geljon, Albert and Riemer Roukema, eds. Violence in Ancient Christianity: Victims and Perpetrators. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 125. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Gill, Christopher. “Philosophical Therapy as Preventive Psychological Medicine.” Pages 339–62 in Mental Disorders in the Classical World. Edited by W.V. Harris. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Goldstein, Warren S. “Introduction: Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion: A  Critique of Rational Choice.” Pages 1–7 in Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion. Edited by Goldstein. ———. ed. Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice. Studies in Critical Social Sciences 6. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Graham, J., J. Haidt, S. Koleva, M. Motyl, R. Iyer, S. Wojcik, and P.H. Ditto. “Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 47 (2013): 55–130. Grim, B.J., et  al. “Trends in Global Restrictions on Religion.” Pew Research Center, June  23, 2016. www.pewforum.org/2016/06/23/trends-in-global-restrictions-on-reli gion. Accessed March 26, 2017. ———. “Latest Trends in Religious Restrictions and Hostilities.” Pew Research Center, February  26, 2015. www.pewforum.org/2015/02/26/religious-hostilities. Accessed March 26, 2017. ———. “Religious Hostilities Reach Six-Year-High.” Pew Research Center, January 14, 2014. www.pewforum.org/2014/01/14/religious-hostilities-reach-six-year-high. Accessed March 26, 2017. Hahn, Johannes. “Gewaltanwendung ad maiorem gloriam dei? Religiöse Intoleranz in der Spätantike.” Pages 227–52 in Für Religionsfreiheit, Recht und Toleranz: Libanios’ Rede für den Erhalt der heidnischen Tempel. Edited by H.-G. Nesselrath, O. Behrends, K. St. Freyberger, J. Hahn, M. Wallraff, and H.-U. Wiemer. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011. Hahn, Johannes, Stephen Emmel, and Ulrich Gotter, eds. From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity. Religions of the GraecoRoman World 163. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. London: Penguin, 2012. ———. “What Makes People Vote Republican?” September 8, 2008. http://edge.org/con versation/what-makes-vote-republican. Accessed March 26, 2017. ———. “Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion.” September 21, 2007, http://edge.org/conversation/moral-psychology-and-the-misunderstanding-of-religion. Accessed March 26, 2017. ———. “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.” Psychological Review 108.4 (2001): 814–34. Haidt, Jonathan and Craig Joseph. “How Moral Foundations Theory Succeeded in Building on Sand: A Response to Suhler and Churchland.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23.9 (2011): 2117–22.

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Haque, Omar Sultan. “Moral Creationism: The Science of Morality and the Mutiny of Romantic Relativism.” Journal of Cognition and Culture 11.1 (2011): 151–87. Henderson, John B. The Construction of Orthodoxy and Heresy: Neo-Confucian, Islamic, Jewish and Early Christian Patterns. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1998. Ingram, Brett. “Critical Rhetoric in the Age of Neuroscience.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2013. Jack, Jordynn. “ ‘The Piety of Degradation’: Kenneth Burke, the Bureau of Social Hygiene, and Permanence and Change.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.4 (2004): 446–68. Jerryson, Michael, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Margo Kitts, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Johnston, Ian. “Orthodox Jews Expelled from Guatemalan Refuge After Being Threatened ‘with Lynching.’ ” The Independent, Sunday August 31, 2014. www.independent.co.uk/ news/world/americas/fundamentalist-jews-expelled-from-guatemalan-refuge-after-be ing-threatened-with-lynching-9701807.html. Accessed September 12, 2014. Jones, Christopher P. Between Pagan and Christian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Kahlos, Maijastina, ed. The Faces of the Other: Religious Rivalry and Ethnic Encounters in the Later Roman World. Cursor Mundi 10. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. ———. Forbearance and Compulsion: The Rhetoric of Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Late Antiquity. London: Duckworth, 2009. ———. Dialogue and Debate: Christian and Pagan Cultures c. 360–430. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Kippenberg, Hans G. Violence as Worship: Religious Wars in the Age of Globalization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011 (Gewalt als Gottesdienst: Religionskriege im Zeitalter der Globalisierung. München: C.H. Beck, 2008). Kristensen, Troels M. Making and Breaking the Gods: Christian Responses to Pagan Sculpture in Late Antiquity. Aarhus Studies in Mediterranean Antiquity 12. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2013. Kurzman, Charles. The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Lakoff, George. The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. New York: Viking, 2008. ———. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002 (1996). Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Langer, Robert and Udo Simon. “The Dynamics of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: Dealing with Divergence in Muslim Discourses and Islamic Studies.” Die Welt des Islams 48 (2008): 273–88. Lechner, Frank J. “Rational Choice and Religious Economics.” Pages 81–97 in The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Religion. Edited by J.A. Beckford and N.J. Demerath. London: Sage, 2007. Lehmann, David. “An Idea, a Tribe, and Their Critics: Rational Choice and the Sociology of Religion.” Pages 181–200 in The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion. Edited by Bryan S. Turner. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. Lloyd, G.E.R. In the Grip of Disease: Studies in the Greek Imagination. Reprint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 (2003).

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Lloyd, Vincent W. “Violence: Religious, Theological, Ontological.” Theory, Culture and Society 28.5 (2011): 144–54. Losehand, Joachim. “ ‘The Religious Harmony in the Ancient World’: Vom Mythos religiöser Toleranz in der Antike.” Göttinger Forum für Altertumswissenschaft 12 (2009): 99–132. Lundskow, George. “The Concept of Choice in the Rise of Christianity: A  Critique of Rational-Choice Theory.” Pages 223–48 in Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion. Edited by Warren S. Goldstein. Leiden: Brill, 2006. MacMullen, Ramsay. Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. ———. Christianizing the Roman Empire: A.D. 100–400. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984. Marcos, Mar. “Religious Violence and Hagiography in Late Antiquity.” Numen 62.2–3 (2015): 169–96. ———. “ ‘He Forced with Gentleness’: Emperor Julian’s Attitude to Religious Coercion.” Antiquité Tardive 17 (2009): 191–204. Mayer, Wendy. “Religious Conflict: Definitions, Problems and Theoretical Approaches.” Pages 1–19 in Religious Conflict from Early Christianity to the Rise of Islam. Edited by W. Mayer and B. Neil. Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 121. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. ———. “Preaching Hatred? John Chrysostom, Neuroscience, and the Jews.” In Revisioning John Chrysostom: New Perspectives Theories and Approaches. Edited by C.L. de Wet and W. Mayer. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming. McEachnie, Robert. “A History of Heresy Past: The Sermons of Chromatius of Aquileia, 388–407.” Church History 83 (2014): 273–96. McGowan, Andrew. “Eating People: Accusations of Cannibalism Against Christians in the Second Century.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 413–42. McKay, Ryan and Harvey Whitehouse. “Religion and Morality.” Psychological Bulletin 141.2 (2015): 447–73. Mimouni, Simon and Bernard Pouderon, eds. La Croisée des chemins revisitée: Quand l’Église et la synagogue se sont elles distinguées? Actes du colloque de Tours 18–19 juin 2010. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2012. Moss, Candida R. The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom. San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2013. ———. Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. ———. The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Nicklas, Tobias. Jews and Christians? Second-Century “Christian” Perspectives on the “Parting of the Ways” (Annual Deichmann Lectures 2013). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014. Nongbri, Brent. Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Papaconstantinou, Arietta. “Saints and Saracens: On Some Miracle Accounts of the Early Arab Period.” Pages 323–38 in Byzantine Religious Culture: Studies in Honor of AliceMary Talbot. Edited by Denis Sullivan, Elizabeth Fisher, and Stratis Papaioannou. Leiden: Brill, 2012. ———. “Historiography, Hagiography, and the Making of the Coptic ‘Church of the Martyrs’ in Early Islamic Egypt.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 60 (2006): 65–86.

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Partridge, Christopher, ed. New Religious Movements: A  Guide. New Religious Movements, Sects, and Spiritualities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Peers, Glenn. “Finding Faith Underground: Visions of the Forty Martyrs Oratory at Syracuse.” Pages 84–106 in Looking Beyond: Visions, Dreams and Insights in Medieval Art and History. Edited by Colum Hourihane. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Persson, Ingmar and Julian Savulescu. “The Limits of Religious Tolerance: A  Secular View.” Pages 236–52 in Religion, Intolerance, and Conflict. Edited by Clarke et al. Powell, Russell and Steve Clarke. “Religion, Tolerance, and Intolerance: Views from Across the Disciplines.” Pages 1–35 in Religion, Intolerance, and Conflict. Edited by Clarke et al. Power, Patricia A. “Blurring the Boundaries: American Messianic Jews and Gentiles.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 15.1 (2011): 69–91. Rakodi, Carole. “Inter-Religious Violence and Its Aftermath: Insights from Indian and Nigerian Cities.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 48.5 (2013): 557–76. Ratti, Stéphane, ed. Une antiquité tardive noire ou heureuse? Actes du colloque international de Besançon (12 et 13 novembre 2014), Institut des Sciences et Techniques de l’Antiquité. Besançon: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2015. Reynal-Querol, Marta and José G. Montalvo. “A  Theory of Religious Conflict and Its Effect on Growth.” WP-EC 2000-04, Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas Working papers, May 2000. Rohmann, Dirk. Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity. Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 135. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. Rosario Rodgriguez, Rubén. Martyrdom and Political Violence: A Comparative Theology with Judaism and Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Rüpke, Jörg. On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. ———. “Early Christianity out of, and in, Context.” Journal of Roman Studies 99 (2009): 182–93. Sauer, Vera. Religiöses in der politischen Argumentation der späten römischen Republik: Ciceros Erste Catilinarische Rede – eine Fallstudie. Potsdamer Altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge 42. Suttgart: Franz Steiner, 2013. Schaafsma, Juliette and Kipling D. Williams. “Exclusion, Intergroup Hostility, and Religious Fundamentalism.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48 (2012): 829–37. Schremer, Adiel. Brothers Estranged: Heresy, Christianity, and Jewish Identity in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Siebert, Rudolf. Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion. Studies in Critical Social Sciences. 3 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Teehan, John. In the Name of God: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Ethics and Violence. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Turner, Bryan. “The Sociology of Religion.” Pages 284–301 in The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Religion. Edited by J.A. Beckford and N.J. Demerath. London: Sage, 2007. Villiers, Pieter G.R. and Jan Willem van Henten, eds. Coping with Violence in the New Testament. Studies in Theology and Religion 16. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Weinburg, Leonard and Ami Pedahzur, eds. Religious Fundamentalism and Political Extremism. London: Frank Cass, 2004.

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2 RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE AND ITS ROOTS A view from antiquity Jan Bremmer It is the 4th of December 1623 in Edo, the later Tokyo, in Japan. In the local prison a group of Christians is awaiting its execution.1 Except for Father Jerome De Angelis, they were kept in the interior part, where “all suffered a great deal from the darkness of the place, the overcrowdedness and other discomforts,” elements well known from the description of the fate of early Christian martyrs. After the executioners had entered the prison and unshackled the feet of the Christians, they led them out to the place of execution. Fr. Jerome, for all like a captain, was on horseback at the head of the procession; from his shoulders hung a sign with his name inscribed in large letters. Behind him walked his faithful comrade Simon Empo and others, sixteen in all. Then there followed a similar group led by Fr. Francis Galves and the rear was brought up by a Japanese, Hara Mondo, whose fingers had already been cut off before because of his faith. Outside the city, along the road that runs toward Kami, fifty stakes had been set up on the place of execution. As soon as they reached this spot, the Christian heroes were all bound to the stakes – except the three who were on horseback and were not permitted to dismount. Then when the police applied the torches and the faggots caught fire, the flames blazed aloft on all sides while the happy souls called aloud upon the holy names of Jesus and Mary. When the fires had died out, and so too the lives of all, the others were made to dismount and were bound to the stakes. As soon as the fire was kindled these brave crusaders of Christ greeted one another and shouted mutual encouragement. Francis, who was the last to remain alive, remained standing upright even in death, leaning on the stake from which he had not shrunk even amid the most excruciating moments. Thus goes the Annual Letter of the Jesuits of 1624, from which my text is literally quoted.2 This mass execution was only the beginning of the end of Japanese Christianity. In the wake of it, a fresh hunt for Christians began and, within several decades, the Christian century in Japan, to quote the title of a famous book by the late Charles Boxer (1904–2000), a great historian of Dutch colonialism, had come to an end.3 A century later, in 1724, Christianity was also forbidden by the autocratic Chinese emperor Yong Zhen. Yet it would take a couple of decades before Christians 30

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were searched out and arrested. The reason was that the authorities of the province of Fujian, and I quote from the official report, had discovered in a village that among the people who believe in the religion of Christ there were young girls who did not get married and remained virgins. The authorities saw this as an undesirable situation as families were sources of taxable income and held their relatives and fathers responsible. In the course of further investigations they realised that there were Westerners involved and at the end of June  1746, five Spanish Dominicans were caught who had entered China via Macao. For complicated reasons that I will understandably not detail here the missionaries were suspected of letting the girls perform oral sex on them, although they, naturally, strongly denied this. Moreover, the mandarins suspected the Christians of a close proximity to the sect of the White Lotus, a Buddhist movement with millenarist and apocalyptic aspects. The xiejiao, or “harmful doctrines” of the latter sect were closely associated with the Christian doctrines of virginity and the end of the world. Unfortunately, the Dominicans were less intellectually bright than the Jesuits and the interrogations by the mandarins were full of misunderstandings, as appears from the Chinese texts, although in the Spanish report, the Dominicans pretended to have given brilliant answers. On May 26, 1747, the first Dominican was beheaded, whereas the others died as martyrs the next year.4 My third example brings us to contemporary times, to Northern India. In the course of the centuries, the interplay between Muslim rulers and the Hindu subjects at the end of the Muslim rule led to the development of a sentiment of belonging to a specific group, a feeling that was fed by the British government’s asking during the census reports to which group one belonged. This feeling grew stronger and stronger in the course of the twentieth century and it focussed on Ayodhyā, where in 1528 the first Mogul emperor had replaced a Hindu temple by a mosque, the Babri Masjid. Ayodhyā was the capital of the later de facto independent area of Avadh and the birthground of Lord Ram, the protagonist of the ancient Indian epic Ramayana. In 1949, during the aftermath of the partition, Hindus managed to install an image of Ram and his wife Sita in the mosque, and in the late 1980s the televising of the Ramayana led to an increasing popularity of Ram. In 1992, fundamentalist Hindus attacked and demolished the mosque, the image of Ram included, with a concomitant slaughtering of Muslims. The destruction of the mosque was only one of a series of clashes between Hindus and Muslims, the most bloody one undoubtedly after the partition of India in 1947, but ever since there have been eruptions caused by fundamentalist Hindus in particular. Although the Western concepts of monotheism and polytheism are perhaps not the most adequate ones to analyse Indian religion, there can be little doubt that Hinduism is traditionally more on the side of polytheism than monotheism.5 Some of my readers may have wondered why I have started with these three examples. The answer is not very difficult. Who looks at current debates about the relationship between monotheism and polytheism regarding their position visà-vis religious violence cannot be but struck by the Europe-centric scope of the debate. Even though the Near East for obvious reasons plays an important role 31

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and antiquity is not neglected either, the world seems to stop at the Euphrates and the Tigris, not even at the Indus as with Alexander the Great. Yet whoever takes the trouble to look at South-East and East Asia sees a world where polytheism has been, and often still is, just as violent as modern Europe. In fact, when we take into account that the apocalyptic Taiping rebellion (1850–1864) cost about the lives of 20 million Chinese,6 whereas the terrible Thirty Year War cost less than half,7 one may also wonder about the scale of possible religious violence. My first thesis therefore is this: Studying the roots of religious violence should be done from a global perspective.8 There is no doubt possible that the debate on the roots of religious violence, or rather religious based or motivated violence, has been much promoted and enriched by Jan Assmann’s work since his fascinating Moses the Egyptian,9 even though not all of his arguments can stand a critical evaluation. His idea that the remarkable link between the biblical Moses and Egypt is a faded reminiscence of a reform by the famous Pharaoh Akhenaten, for example, is highly imaginative, but also lacking any positive evidence, even any probability. His arguments concerning Die Mosaische Unterscheidung,10 the distinction between true and false religion and the fateful transition from polytheism to monotheism, have been much debated, especially by Old Testament scholars and theologians, Pope Benedict XVI included,11 and by historians of religion, but much less by scholars of antiquity, as a recent study of what it calls “the myth of religious tolerance in antiquity” rightly observes.12 That does not mean to say that historians of Greek and Roman religion should have nothing to contribute on the subject. On the contrary. It is hardly surprising that one of the first historians and philosophers to favour polytheism above monotheism as regards tolerance was David Hume. In his Natural History of Religion (§ 9) he noted: “The intolerance of almost all religions, which have maintained the unity of God, is as remarkable as the contrary principle of polytheists.”13 Naturally, the point was taken up, if much better rhetorically elaborated, by Gibbon, Hume’s great admirer, who noted that “as long as their adoration (viz. of the polytheists) was successfully prostituted to a thousand deities, it was scarcely possible that their hearts could be susceptible of a very sincere or lively passion for any of them.”14 If Gibbon’s remarks do not betray much enthusiasm for polytheism, it was different with another classicist, Friedrich Nietzsche, who argued in his Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882, § 143): “Im Polytheismus lag die Freigeisterei und Vielgeisterei des Menschen vorgebildet,”15 and it is not difficult to find subsequent students of ancient culture and religion who argued in the same or related spirit. John Scheid, an impeccable student of Roman religion, even noted that “polythéiste et non doctrinal, le système religieux des Romains était forcément tolerant à l’égard des pratiques religieuses privées” and that the traditional religious system of the Graeco-Roman cities did not know “aucune orthodoxie religieuse, mais simplement une orthopraxie.”16 These ideas may well be representative of the opinion of the large majority of classicists, but they are nevertheless in this form hardly persuasive. This becomes 32

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clear if we look at religious violence in antiquity, starting with the execution of Socrates on the charge of: “Socrates does wrong by not acknowledging the gods the city acknowledges, and introducing other new powers [daimonia]. He also does wrong by corrupting the young.”17 Undoubtedly, it is less helpful to say that he had transgressed “religious orthodoxy” with everything we moderns associate with that term, but Socrates certainly had offended traditional Athenian religious feelings, and early Christian martyrs and apologists did not fail to see the resemblance between the fate of their fellow Christians and that of Socrates.18 Other cases, such as that of the philosophers Anaxagoras and Diogoras, are often disputed or not wholly clear due to the lack of sufficient sources.19 Yet, although there is nothing comparable to modern excesses, the fact remains that polytheistic Athens was only tolerant to a certain degree and did not hesitate to execute those men and women that had transgressed its unstated boundaries regarding pious behaviour and religious beliefs.20 But we need not stay in Athens for polytheist religious intolerance. Think of the religious measures by the Seleucids that aroused the Maccabees. Think also of the many examples of anti-Semitic attitudes, especially from ethnic Egyptians, in Hellenistic Egypt,21 even though a real massacre by the Greeks is only attested in Alexandria in Roman times. As in India, where the coming of the British changed the relationship between Hindus and Muslims, perhaps even created both sides in religious respects, so the balance between Greeks and Jews seem to have been disturbed by the coming of the Romans and their administrative measures, probably most by the introduction of the imperial cult.22 The religious identity of the Jews as against the rest of the population must have become clearer because of this cult, and this led in AD 38 to what my compatriot Pieter van der Horst has called the “first pogrom” of the Alexandrians against their Jewish neighbours.23 The situation is slightly different in Rome. Here we may agree with Scheid that Rome had an orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy. Yet it seems odd that he states that the pagan, polytheist Romans were extremely tolerant regarding private religious practices, when we know that they were not.24 The famous counterexample is of course the Bacchanalia scandal of 186 BC. The case is too well known to need much elaboration. Suffice it to say that the Roman authorities executed or had executed by their families probably about 6,000 people for belonging to Bacchic societies.25 That message must have been sufficiently clear to the Italic population so that we do not hear of any Roman persecution before the beginning of Christianity, even though we do hear of limitations imposed on the practice of certain cults, such as that of the Magna Mater. But of course we also know of the expulsion of the Jews and worshippers of Isis in AD 19 under Tiberius, which even made Seneca (Ep. 108.22) renounce his vegetarianism, and those of Jews and astrologers under Claudius.26 We should not overdo the religious aspect of these expulsions, but we cannot fail to note that all three groups mentioned were people that did not conform to the Roman civic rituals and could be portrayed as foreign, just as Egyptian cults in the Roman Empire were tolerated only outside Rome itself. The expulsions may have happened in times of political unrest, yet the very 33

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fact that precisely these groups were selected suggests that religious motives did play a role. Finally, the persecutions of the early Christians speak for themselves. We should not forget that the Roman government was the very inventor of the phenomenon of systematic religious persecution and increasingly regulated religious life in later antiquity.27 This brings me to my second thesis: Polytheism is not inherently more tolerant than monotheism. In other words, religious violence is not the product of monotheism: it is the prominence of monotheistic religions in the West and modern violence that make it seem that way. Let us now turn to some other aspects of what we have seen so far. Although it is obvious that the violence we have noted came from the governments (local, national or even imperial) or in times of state formation, this is an important difference with today. And it is a difference that needs stressing as it is often thought that religion is an unvarying phenomenon that does not change and that can be traced to times immemorial. Yet when we look sharper we also can notice important changes. For a start, all the religions we have looked at so far – Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Greek and Roman – are local, locative, national religions. Moreover, none of these originally had a native term for religion.28 That is why there are always interminable and insolvable debates whether their acts of violence are typically religious or rather political or both. We can already see this clearly in the case of Socrates where there is a religious ground for his indictment but also a political one: the corruption of youth. This brings me to my third thesis: Religious violence in pre-modern times is often local violence and not aimed beyond the local or national borders; moreover, it is often impossible to distinguish between religious and other factors. In addition, it was virtually always the ruling class, be it political or religious, which started the violence or persecutions. Our material thus leads us easily to our fourth thesis: Religious violence in pre-modern times is often initiated by governments or the higher classes/elites. When we now turn to today, we should note far-reaching changes as regards both the nature of religion and the nature of violence in the course of the last centuries. First, an important difference with ancient times is the continuing success of monotheistic religions in the global world, whereas polytheism is much less successful in conversions, if not in reproducing. But within the monotheistic religions there are also important changes. In the West we have seen a massive shift from Christianity as a system of ethical prescriptions, religious doctrines and ritual practices to a mainly Protestant driven system of interiorised beliefs and lightly practiced rituals, whereby the ethical side has been mostly given up by mainstream churches;29 this development with its concomitant stress on belief has been so successful, we may note in passing, that modern classicists now desperately look for the notion of belief in antiquity30 – a doomed project in my view.31 The growing secularisation and individualisation in the West make religious violence there increasingly unlikely, as people less and less identify themselves in terms of religious identity.32 Moreover, the state in the West has developed a neutral attitude, ideally at least, regarding religion, which means that we will probably not see many initiatives

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from that side either relating to religious violence. As the states in the West, with the exception of the USA, also have increasingly monopolised the use and possession of weapons, violence from normal citizens also becomes less likely, even though attacks on mosques in Western Europe and the chilling murders in Paris (2015), Nice and Berlin (2016), not forgetting the recent mass killings in the USA, show that a few perpetrators, even a single one, can still make many victims. This brings me, with some hesitation but not without hope, to my fifth thesis: Modern developments in secularisation, individualisation and monopolisation of violence make religious violence increasingly unlikely in the West. And I will now come to my final point. It is clear that the factors we just identified for the lessening of religious violence in the West are not or to a much lesser extent present in other parts of the globe. Outside the West there seems to be no or little hope for an immediate lessening of religious violence, the more so, as religious identities have become more and more important in certain parts of the world, as in parts of Africa, the Near East, Western Asia and India. Yet schematic explanations such as adducing monotheism or polytheism as sources of this violence are unconvincing and overlook the fact of human agency. It is true that religions have a potential for violence, but they also have a potential for peace. It is perhaps unavoidable in the light of 9/11 and 7/7 that we concentrate on religion and violence, but we should not forget that in the twentieth century the ideologies of Nazism, fascism, communism and nationalism have been infinitely more violent than any religion in that period. Recent approaches have rightly stressed that we should look at the individual contexts of violence, as there is no inherent violence in religion or, for that matter, inherent pacifism. Historical situations, social locations and ideological developments all play a role in erupting religious violence. That is why my sixth and final thesis is this: Religious violence has no roots immemorial but depends on more or less immediate causes that are accessible to detached and persistent questioning.33

Notes 1 The present chapter reproduces my contribution to the symposium, “Religious Violence and Its Roots,” which took place at Oxford on June 23, 2011 and was organised by Guy Stroumsa. The symposium was part of a series of lectures by Jan Assmann as the Inaugural Humanitas Visiting Professor in Interfaith Studies 2011. I have kept the original text but added some references to the more recent literature. I am very grateful to Hans Bakker, Birgit van der Lans, Pieter Nanninga and Klaus Vollmer for information, to Yme Kuiper for his helpful comments and to Henry Sussmann for the correction of my English. An earlier version appeared in Asdiwal 6 (2011): 71–79. 2 For the Letter, see Hubert Cieslik, “The Great Martyrdom in Edo 1623: Its Causes, Course, Consequences,” Monumenta Nipponica 10 (1954): 1–44. 3 Charles R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1951); see also George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan, Harvard East Asian Monographs 141 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 185–211 (with detailed descriptions

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4 5

6

7 8 9 10

11

12

13 14 15

16

from contemporary accounts); Andrew C. Ross, A Vision Betrayed: The Jesuits in Japan and China 1542–1742 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 93–110. For the affair, see Hitomi Omata Rappo, “Le Christianisme chinois en tant qu’hérésie: L’arrestation et l’exécution de cinq missionaires espagnols dans le Fujian au milieu de XVIIIe siècle,” Asdiwal 4 (2009): 75–93. For Ayodhyā, see Hans T. Bakker, The History of Ayodhyā from the 7th Century BC to the Middle of the 18th Century: Its Development into a Sacred Centre (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1986); Julia Shaw, “Ayodhya’s Sacred Landscape: Ritual Memory, Politics and Archaeological ‘Fact,’ ” Antiquity 74 (2000): 693–700. Franz H. Michael, The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents, 3 vols. (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1966); Jonathan D. Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: Norton, 1966), which is wonderfully written, albeit not wholly satisfactory from the point of view of a historian of religions. See most recently, Peter H. Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War (London: Allen Lane, 2009); Heinz-Dieter Kittsteiner, Die Stabilisierungsmoderne: Deutschland und Europa 1618–1715 (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2010). For a global view of history, see the many interesting observations in Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Flughöhe der Adler (Munich: Beck, 2017), 12–79 (with bibliography). Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). On Assmann, see Jürgen Schraten, Zur Aktualität von Jan Assmann: Einleitung in sein Werk (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2011). Jan Assmann, Die Mosaische Unterscheidung oder der Preis des Monotheismus (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2003); id., The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); id., Monotheismus und die Sprache der Gewalt (Vienna: Picus, 2006). Rolf Rendtorff et al., in Assmann, Die Mosaische Unterscheidung, 193–286; Joseph Ratzinger, Glaube – Wahrheit – Toleranz: Das Christentum und die Weltreligionen (Freiburg: Herder, 2003), 170–86; Peter Walter (ed.), Das Gewaltpotential des Monotheismus und der dreieine Gott (Freiburg: Herder, 2005). For a reaction by Jan Assmann, see: www.perlentaucher.de/essay/monotheismus-und-gewalt.html. Joachim Losehand, “ ‘The Religious Harmony of the Ancient World’: Vom Mythos religiöser Toleranz in der Antike,” Göttinger Forum für Altertumswissenschaft 12 (2009): 111, http://gfa.gbv.de/z/2009; see also Christoph Markschies, Antike ohne Ende (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2008) and “The Price of Monotheism: Some New Observations on a Current Debate About Late Antiquity,” in One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire, ed. Stephen Mitchell and Peter Van Nuffelen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 100–11. David Hume, A Dissertation on the Passions: The Natural History of Religion: A Critical Edition, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), 61. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, vol. 1, 3 vols. (London: Penguin, 1995), 498. Friedrich Nietzsche, Idyllen aus Messina; Die fröhliche Wissenschaft; Nachgelassene Fragmente; Frühjahr 1881 bis Sommer 1882, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 2, Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1973), 168–9. On Nietzsche and polytheism, see Albert Henrichs, “ ‘Full of Gods’: Nietzsche on Greek Polytheism and Culture,” in Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition, ed. Paul Bishop (Rochester: Camden House, 2004), 114–37. John Scheid, “Les religions,” in Rome et l’intégration de l’Empire: 44 av. J.-C. – 260 ap. J.-C., ed. François Jacques and John Scheid, vol. 1 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 126. As regards the French quotes of John Scheid, what about: ‘being polytheistic and non-doctrinal, the religious system of the Romans was bound to be tolerant regarding private religious practices’ and ‘any religious orthodoxy, but simply an orthopraxy’.

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17 Favorinus apud Diogenes Laertius, Vit. 2.40; in Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers, ed. T. Dorandi, CCTC 50 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 174; translated in Robert Parker, Athenian Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 203; note also Xenophon, Mem. 1.1.1; in Xenophon: Memorabilia, Oeconomicus, Symposium, Apology, ed. and trans. E.C. Marchant and O.J. Todd, LCL 168 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), 2–5; Apol. 10 (LCL 168.646– 47); Plato, Apol. 24b8 – c1; in Plato: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, ed. H.N. Fowler, LCL 36 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 90–1; Euthyphr. 3b (LCL 36.8–11); Philodemus, Piet. 1696–97; in Philodemus on Piety: Critical Text with Commentary, ed. D. Obbink, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). For the charge and the trial, see Parker, Athenian Religion, 199–207; Alexander Rubel, Stadt in Angst: Religion und Politik in Athen während des Peloponnesischen Krieges (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000), 342–63 = Fear and Loathing in Ancient Athens (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 74–98; Paul Millett, “The Trial of Socrates Revisited,” European Review of History 12.1 (2005): 23–62. 18 Most recently, Klaus Döring, Exemplum Socratis: Studien zur Sokratesnachwirkung in der kynisch-stoischen Popularphilosophie der frühen Kaiserzeit und im frühen Christentum (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1979), 143–61; Ernst Dassmann, “Christus und Sokrates: Zu Philosophie und Theologie bei den Kirchenvätern,” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 36 (1993): 39; Theodor Baumeister, Martyrium, Hagiographie und Heiligenverehrung im christlichen Altertum (Freiburg: Herder, 2009), 22–8. 19 Jan Bremmer, “Atheism in Antiquity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 11–26. 20 For the execution of women in the fourth century BC on religious grounds, see Kai Trampedach, “ ‘Gefährliche Frauen’: Zu atenischen Asebieprozessen im 4. Jahrhundert v. Chr.,” in Konstruktionen von Wirklichkeit: Bilder im Griechenland des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr, ed. Ralf von den Hoff and Stefan Schmidt (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2001), 137–55; Esther Eidinow, “Patterns of Persecution: ‘Witchcraft’ Trials in Classical Athens,” Past & Present 208.1 (2010): 9–35. 21 For “anti-Semitism” in antiquity, see Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Bezalel Bar-Kochva, The Image of the Jews in Greek Literature: The Hellenistic Period, Hellenistic Culture and Society 51 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010). 22 Walter Ameling, “ ‘Market-Place’ und Gewalt: Die Juden in Alexandrien 38 n.Chr,” Würzburger Jahrbücher für die Altertumswissenschaft 27 (2003): 71–123; Klaus Bringmann, “Isopoliteia in den Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Juden und Griechen in Alexandreia,” Chiron 35 (2005): 7–21; Per Bilde, “The Jews in Alexandria in 38–41 CE,” Hephaistos 24 (2006): 257–67. 23 Pieter van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus, the First Pogrom: Introduction, Translation and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2003). 24 This is not the place to discuss the usage of the terms “pagan” and “polytheist.” For those interested, see now the recent discussions of both terms in connection with antiquity by Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); John North, “Pagans, Polytheists, and the Pendulum,” in The Religious History of the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians, ed. John North and Simon Price (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 479–502; Peter Van Nuffelen, “Eusebius of Caesarea and the Concept of Paganism,” in The Archaeology of Late Antique ‘Paganism’, ed. Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 89–109; Maurizio Bettini, Elogio del politeismo: Quello che possiamo imparare oggi dale religioni antiche (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2014), 135–6; Christopher P. Jones, Between Pagan and Christian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 1–8.

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25 The authoritative study is Jean-Marie Paillier, Bacchanalia. La repression de 186 av. J.-C. à Rome et en Italie: vestiges, images, tradition (Rome: École Française, 1988); more recently, Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier, Von Atheismus bis Zensur: römische Lektüren in kulturwissenschaftlicher Absicht (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), 33–49; Pilar Pavón, “Y ellas fueron el origen de este mal . . . (Liv. 39.15.9): mulieres contra mores en las Bacanales de Livio,” Habis 39 (2008): 79–95. 26 Jews: the evidence has been endlessly discussed; see, most recently, Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (London: Penguin, 2007), 386– 9; Birgit van der Lans, “The Politics of Exclusion. Expulsions of Jews and Others from Rome,” in People Under Power: Early Jewish and Christian Responses to the Roman Empire, ed. Michael Labahn and Outi Lehtipuu (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 67–71; Heidi Wendt, “Iudaica Romana: A  Rereading of Evidence for Judean Expulsions from Rome,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 6 (2015): 97–126. Isis and astrologers: Bruno Rochette, “Tibère, les cultes étrangers et les astrologues (Suétone, Vie de Tibère, 36),” Les Etudes Classiques 69 (2001): 189–94; Pauline Ripat, “Expelling Misconceptions: Astrologers at Rome,” Classical Philology 106.2 (2011): 115–54. 27 It is interesting to note that this insight is gaining ground: Polymnia Athanassiadi, Vers la pensée unique: La montée de l’intolérance dans l’Antiquité tardive (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011); Jörg Rüpke, Religious Deviance in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 28 For antiquity, this has recently been stressed again by Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013) and Carlin A. Barton and Daniel Boyarin, Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 29 See, for example, Jan G. Platvoet and Arie L. Molendijk, eds., The Pragmatics of Defining Religion: Contexts, Concepts, and Contests (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Jan Bremmer, “From Salvation to Empowerment: European Notes on Contemporary American Religion,” First Draft 6 (2007): 10–15; Hans G. Kippenberg et al., Handbuch Europäische Religionsgeschichte, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008). 30 Contra Thomas Harrison, Divinity and History: The Religion of Herodotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 20–2. 31 Donald S. Lopez, “Belief,” in Critical Terms for the Study of Religion, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 21–35. 32 The literature about these subjects is of course immense. Let me just mention here: Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007); Jan Bremmer, “Secularization: Notes Toward a Genealogy,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 432–7, 900–3; Manuel Borutta, “Genealogie der Säkularisierungstheorie: Zur Historisierung einer großen Erzählung der Moderne,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36 (2010): 347–76. 33 Hans G. Kippenberg, “Searching for the Link Between Religion and Violence: A Theory of Social Action,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 22 (2010): 97–115.

Bibliography Ameling, Walter. “ ‘Market-Place’ und Gewalt. Die Juden in Alexandrien 38 n.Chr.” Würzburger Jahrbücher für die Altertumswissenschaft 27 (2003): 71–123. Assmann, Jan. Monotheismus und die Sprache der Gewalt. Vienna: Picus, 2006. Translated by Robert Savage. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. The price of Monotheism, www.perlentaucher.de/essay/monotheismus-und-gewalt.html

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———. Die Mosaische Unterscheidung oder der Preis des Monotheismus. Munich: Carl Hanser, 2003. ———. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Athanassiadi, Polymnia. Vers la pensée unique: La montée de l’intolérance dans l’Antiquité tardive. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011. Bakker, Hans T. The History of Ayodhyā from the 7th Century BC to the Middle of the 18th Century: Its Development into a Sacred Centre. Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1986. Bar-Kochva, Bezalel. The Image of the Jews in Greek Literature: The Hellenistic Period. Hellenistic Culture and Society 51. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. Barton, Carlin A. and Daniel Boyarin. Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Baumeister, Theofried. Martyrium, Hagiographie und Heiligenverehrung im christlichen Altertum. Freiburg: Herder, 2009. Bettini, Maurizio. Elogio del politeismo: Quello che possiamo imparare oggi dalle religioni antiche. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2014. Bilde, Per. “The Jews in Alexandria in 38–41 CE.” Hephaistos 24 (2006): 257–67. Borutta, Manuel. “Genealogie der Säkularisierungstheorie: Zur Historisierung einer großen Erzählung der Moderne.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36 (2010): 347–76. Boxer, Charles R. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1951. Bremmer, Jan. “Religious Violence Between Greeks, Romans, Christians and Jews.” Pages 8–30 in Violence in Early Christianity: Victims and Perpetrators. Edited by Albert-Kees Geljon and Riemer Roukema. Leiden: Brill, 2014. ———. “Secularization: Notes Toward a Genealogy.” Pages 432–37 in Religion: Beyond a Concept. Edited by Hent de Vries. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. ———. “Atheism in Antiquity.” Pages 11–26 in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Edited by Michael Martin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ———. “From Salvation to Empowerment: European Notes on Contemporary American Religion.” First Draft 6 (2007): 10–15. Bringmann, Klaus. “Isopoliteia in den Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Juden und Griechen in Alexandreia.” Chiron 35 (2005): 7–21. Cameron, Alan. The Last Pagans of Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Cancik-Lindemaier, Hildegard. Von Atheismus bis Zensur: römische Lektüren in kulturwissenschaftlicher Absicht. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006. Cieslik, Hubert. “The Great Martyrdom in Edo 1623: Its Causes, Course, Consequences.” Monumenta Nipponica 10 (1954): 1–44. Dassmann, Ernst. “Christus und Sokrates: Zu Philosophie und Theologie bei den Kirchenvätern.” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 36 (1993): 33–45. Dorandi, Tiziano, ed. Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers. CCTC 50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Döring, Klaus. Exemplum Socratis: Studien zur Sokratesnachwirkung in der kynischstoischen Popularphilosophie der frühen Kaiserzeit und im frühen Christentum. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1979. Eidinow, Esther. “Patterns of Persecution: ‘Witchcraft’ Trials in Classical Athens.” Past & Present 208.1 (2010): 9–35.

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Elison, George. Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan. Harvard East Asian Monographs 141. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973. Fowler, Harold N., ed. and trans. Plato: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus. LCL 36. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914. Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Edited by David Womersley, vol. 1. 3 vols. London: Penguin, 1995. Goodman, Martin. Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations. London: Penguin, 2007. Harrison, Thomas. Divinity and History: The Religion of Herodotus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Henrichs, Albert. “ ‘Full of Gods’: Nietzsche on Greek Polytheism and Culture.” Pages 114–37 in Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition. Edited by Paul Bishop. Rochester: Camden House, 2004. Hume, David. A Dissertation on the Passions: The Natural History of Religion: A Critical Edition. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Clarendon, 2007. Jones, Christopher P. Between Pagan and Christian. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2014. Kippenberg, Hans G. “Searching for the Link between Religion and Violence: A Theory of Social Action.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 22 (2010): 97–115. Kippenberg, Hans G., et al. Handbuch Europäische Religionsgeschichte. 2 vols. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008. Kittsteiner, Heinz-Dieter. Die Stabilisierungsmoderne: Deutschland und Europa 1618– 1715. Munich: Carl Hanser, 2010. Lopez, Donald S. “Belief.” Pages 21–35 in Critical Terms for the Study of Religion. Edited by Mark C. Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Losehand, Joachim. “ ‘The Religious Harmony of the Ancient World’: Vom Mythos religiöser Toleranz in der Antike.” Göttinger Forum für Altertumswissenschaft 12 (2009): 99–132. Marchant, Edgar C. and Otis J. Todd, eds. and trans. Xenophon: Memorabilia, Oeconomicus, Symposium, Apology. LCL 168. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923. Markschies, Christoph. “The Price of Monotheism: Some New Observations on a Current Debate About Late Antiquity.” Pages 100–111 in One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire. Edited by Stephen Mitchell and Peter Van Nuffelen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ———. Antike ohne Ende. Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2008. Michael, Franz H. The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents. 3 vols. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1966. Millett, Paul. “The Trial of Socrates Revisited.” European Review of History 12.1 (2005): 23–62. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Idyllen aus Messina; Die fröhliche Wissenschaft; Nachgelassene Fragmente; Frühjahr 1881 bis Sommer 1882. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 2. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1973. Nongbri, Brent. Before Religion: A  History of a Modern Concept. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2013. North, John. “Pagans, Polytheists, and the Pendulum.” Pages 479–502 in The Religious History of the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians. Edited by John North and Simon Price. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

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Obbink, Dirk, ed. Philodemus on Piety: Critical Text with Commentary. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. Osterhammel, Jürgen. Die Flughöhe der Adler. Munich: Beck, 2017. Paillier, Jean-Marie. Bacchanalia. La repression de 186 av. J.-C. à Rome et en Italie: vestiges, images, tradition. Rome: École Française, 1988. Parker, Robert. Athenian Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pavón, Pilar. “Y ellas fueron el origen de este mal . . . (Liv. 39.15.9): mulieres contra mores en las Bacanales de Livio.” Habis 39 (2008): 79–95. Platvoet, Jan G. and Arie L. Molendijk, eds. The Pragmatics of Defining Religion: Contexts, Concepts, and Contests. Leiden: Brill, 1999. Rappo, Hitomi Omata. “Le Christianisme chinois en tant qu’hérésie: L’arrestation et l’exécution de cinq missionaires espagnols dans le Fujian au milieu de XVIIIe siècle.” Asdiwal 4 (2009): 75–93. Ratzinger, Joseph. Glaube – Wahrheit – Toleranz: Das Christentum und die Weltreligionen. Freiburg: Herder, 2003. Ripat, Pauline. “Expelling Misconceptions: Astrologers at Rome.” Classical Philology 106.2 (2011): 115–54. Rochette, Bruno. “Tibère, les cultes étrangers et les astrologues (Suétone, Vie de Tibère, 36).” Les Etudes Classiques 69 (2001): 189–94. Ross, Andrew C. A Vision Betrayed: The Jesuits in Japan and China 1542–1742. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994. Rubel, Alexander. Fear and Loathing in Ancient Athens. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. ———. Stadt in Angst: Religion und Politik in Athen während des Peloponnesischen Krieges. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000. Rüpke, Jörg. Religious Deviance in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Schäfer, Peter. Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Scheid, John. “Les religions.” Pages 111–28 in Rome et l’intégration de l’Empire: 44 av. J.-C. – 260 ap. J.-C. Edited by François Jacques and John Scheid, vol. 1. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990. Schraten, Jürgen. Zur Aktualität von Jan Assmann: Einleitung in sein Werk. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2011. Shaw, Julia. “Ayodhya’s Sacred Landscape: Ritual Memory, Politics and Archaeological ‘Fact.’ ” Antiquity 74 (2000): 693–700. Spence, Jonathan D. God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. New York: Norton, 1966. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. Trampedach, Kai. “ ‘Gefährliche Frauen’. Zu atenischen Asebieprozessen im 4. Jahrhundert v. Chr.” Pages 137–55 in Konstruktionen von Wirklichkeit: Bilder im Griechenland des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. Edited by Ralf von den Hoff and Stefan Schmidt. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2001. Van der Horst, Pieter. Philo’s Flaccus, The First Pogrom: Introduction, Translation and Commentary. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Van der Lans, Birgit. “The Politics of Exclusion. Expulsions of Jews and Others from Rome.” Pages 33–77 in People Under Power: Early Jewish and Christian Responses to

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the Roman Empire. Edited by Michael Labahn and Outi Lehtipuu. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Van Nuffelen, Peter. “Eusebius of Caesarea and the Concept of Paganism.” Pages 89–109 in The Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism.” Edited by Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Walter, Peter, ed. Das Gewaltpotential des Monotheismus und der dreieine Gott. Freiburg: Herder, 2005. Wendt, Heidi. “Iudaica Romana: A  Rereading of Evidence for Judean Expulsions from Rome.” Journal of Ancient Judaism 6 (2015): 97–126. Wilson, Peter H. Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War. London: Allen Lane, 2009.

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Part II RHETORICAL AND LITERARY TRAJECTORIES

3 BLINDNESS IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY Tracking the fundamentals of religious conflict Pieter J. J. Botha Introduction Taking a cue from the invitation to explore religious conflict “in all its more subtle (and insidious) facets,” this study focusses on delegitimisation and the consequent social oppression – in the sense of exclusion from recognition, dignity and personhood – as revealed by an early Christian narrative about the healing of a man born blind (Jn 9). Although the phrase “religious conflict” usually evokes vivid images of dramatic violence this discussion draws attention to the spectrum of conflictual behaviour and emphasise the continuity between various sets of actions, practices and values that leads to conflict. That is, “sudden” bursts of violence and spectacular conflicts tend to stand out in memory or tradition, but it is the underlying and long persistence of certain attitudes, perspectives and cultural performances which make such events possible and recurring. Studying disability in a society or community is to open a window on such pernicious forces. Also, when discussing the role of religion, it is necessary to keep in mind a range of possible references. Yet, a simple basic continuity involved can be identified: “religious” can be taken as the expressed claim (or conviction) that one is acting on behalf of, or in obedience to, the divine. Disability studies can disturb such certainties, prompting deep and serious reconsideration of religious convictions.

John 9: a compassionate, peacebuilding text? Possibly one of the most famous texts in Christian tradition dealing with antagonistic relations between groups with religious views is the narrative in the Gospel of John telling of Jesus who “opened” (ἀνέῳξεν [Jn 9.14]) the eyes of the man born blind. The conflict in this particular narrative is explicitly linked to those who see and those who are blind (e.g., Jn 9.39). The story is mostly read very positively (after all, Jesus heals a blind man).

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There is a considerable literature on John 9, almost without exception emphasising the metaphorical role blindness plays in the Johannine narrative. This metaphorical role is explained as, within the Johannine context and along with the larger controversy narrative in which it is embedded, serving to redefine what constitutes “true” blindness. As Malina and Rohrbaugh note, “The healed man is now able to identify that Jesus is from God and is obedient to him, while the blindness of the opponents is growing”.1 The entire episode (Jn 9.1–41) is a play on the significance of blindness, insofar as the man’s physical blindness is replaced not only by physical sight but also by spiritual insight, while the Pharisees, who have not lost their eyesight, display an increasing spiritual blindness through their opposition to Jesus. Neyrey proposes that we read John 9 as a status transformation rite, with the blind man transformed from being part of the world of beggars and infirm people, with a liminal period in which he is schooled to be an ideal disciple. The (no longer) blind man then experiences a “genuine rite of passage” out of the synagogue into the circle of Jesus’ disciples.2 A more recent and even more positive reading is provided by Jacobus Kok3 who sees in this text another example of Jesus “restoring” marginalised people (such as the disabled). He notes the marginalised status of the disabled, “an existential situation indicative of ‘death’, impurity and marginalization”,4 which is then changed by Jesus. Thus the tension, the negative attitudes, towards the blind man is resolved. “Even if the man is rejected by the socio-religious system, the family of God offers him a new social network, which allows him the soteriological experience of re-socialisation, ultimately resulting in new existential potentialities”.5 Note that in Kok’s reading the absolute precondition for any wonderful new potentialities are health and able-bodiedness. The soteriological experience is equalled to healing, a reading affirming the logic of sin equals blindness. Intersectionality6 teaches us to ask different questions of a text, outside the hegemonic representation of beauty and ableist embodiment. So, how would a Jew feel and what would s/he think whilst reading about these supposed wonderful potentialities in John 9? How would a blind person react to this story? Well, we actually know: [Dear Jesus] . . . I encountered you in the Gospel of John with a sense of estrangement, because I realized as I read the Gospel in Braille . . . that it was not intended for people like me. . . . When we read about the blind man in John 9 . . . you [said he was blind so] “that God’s works might be revealed in him” (v.3). In other words, the man had been blind from birth not because of some parental sin but in order to create a sort of photo opportunity for you, my Lord. .  .  . Now, Lord, an important problem: why was there not a blind person among your followers? . . . the trouble is that they [some blind people] did not become your followers until they had left their blindness behind them. . . . After all, if a blind person was invited to follow you and did so while remaining blind, everyone 46

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would have been shocked, and I dare say that even you would have been embarrassed.7 The text (Jn 9) is considered by New Testament scholars a particularly useful one to explore historical dimensions of the Johannine community, a notion well summarised by Philip Tite: “By exploring the literary context and historical implications of Jn. 9, we will better understand the community in conflict to whom this gospel was addressed”.8 The aim here is not to clarify the setting of the Johannine Gospel or John’s theology; it is an exploration of how attitudes towards disability provide us with insight into conflict and prompts toward reflection on meaningful ways to prevent and deal with (religious) conflict.

Understanding conflict Conflict is part of life and integral to history. Meaningful, developmental conflict happens where there is effective communication, where the individuals making up the respective groups are capable of inner control and have realistic self-esteem, where there are mutual respect and serious efforts at understanding, and where long-term strategies for reducing stress are maintained – these are all known to be excellent preventive measures for uncontrolled, destructive conflict. And yet, certain conflicts persist. We need to consider long-term social dynamics which are not conducive to developing and maintaining the values and sociocultural practices required for peaceableness and meaningful diversity. A  key sociopsychological dynamic (or mechanism) that leads to human beings ignoring or minimising their normative and moral restraints to engage in acts that intentionally harm others (discrimination, oppression, violent assault, destruction) is delegitimisation:9 the categorisation of a group, or groups, into extremely negative social categories that exclude it, or them, from the sphere of human groups that act within the limits of acceptable norms and/or values, since these groups are viewed as contravening basic human norms or values and therefore deserving maltreatment.10 Delegitimisation is fuelled by, and closely related to, intergroup prejudice.11 Specifically, derogation of an “other” emerges when certain situational factors are present: perceptions of dangerousness, unpredictability, disease and abuse of resources.12 The functions of prejudicial delegitimisation are epistemic (knowing who “those people” are and why they are despicable), exploitation and domination (keeping people down), norm enforcement (keeping people in), moral exclusion (hurting people) and avoidance (keeping people away).13

Blindness as a history of prejudicial delegitimisation As with the study of any other disability, the topic of blindness might lend itself to a traditional, literary-historical approach (as a theme); the supposition being that blindness is a given “object”, a given reality or symbolic entity which can be 47

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treated, written about and represented in assorted ways at different times and in different places. There is some validity in such an approach – can any attempt at historical interpretation do without it? Blindness, after all, exists. Some people do not see. Visual impairment has both psychological and social consequences, and the sighted are capable of imagining the loss of sight. But if blindness were simply a “real” phenomenon, independent of the way historical groups write and speak of it, any arbitrary selection of texts, irrespective of genres and contexts, would make no difference to “observing” the “facts” about being blind. Blindness is also a constructed category constituted by those who speak and write of it. It means very different things, indeed, it is very different things, at different times, different places and in different discourses. What Michel Foucault observed about the mad can be extended to the blind: who is considered blind depends on the kinds of statements that can be made about blindness.14 Graeco-Roman antiquity Graeco-Roman sources often link prophecy and poetry to blindness: when men are punished with blindness, this “deficiency” is often balanced by extraordinary traits. Hera blinds Tiresias, but Zeus grants him the gift of prophecy and so Tiresias epitomises the blind prophet who can “truly see”. Homer represents the quintessential blind poet.15 Dio Chrysostom (Or. 36.10–11) even records that blindness is a prerequisite for all poets, a blindness that is “contracted” from Homer.16 Thus, in antiquity, it every so often happened that supernatural abilities coincided with disabilities, divinely instigated or otherwise, and divinely induced blinding were only temporary if the blinded party made amends. The very fact, however, that disability could be associated with the supernatural reveals that the default interpretation of disability was that of marking “an other”. Blindness and varying degrees of visual impairment were widespread in the ancient Graeco-Roman world.17 Jackson18 notes that a disproportionately large part of (Graeco-) Roman medical literature concerns eye diseases.19 In Roman times an “eye doctor” (opthalmicus or medicus ocularius) treated various eye conditions using a wide range of dietary measures, baths, poultices, purgings and enemas, usually combined with the administration of drugs. Archaeological evidence confirms the widespread occurrence of eye problems. Collyrium stamps used to mark eye medicines, inscribed with the name of the doctor, the ointment, and the ailment for which it was intended make up almost half of all the collyrium stamps that have been discovered.20 Various sources inform us that eye loss resulted from botched surgery by incompetent or careless doctors.21 Eye votives are the most frequently mentioned anatomical votive in the inventory from the Asklepieion at Athens,22 though common at other healing sanctuaries as well.23 The preponderance of eye votives and their moulds in village temples across Roman Egypt indicates that eye problems were a common burden, and papyrological documents

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attest many cases of visual impairment.24 In addition, the military as well as ancient labour practices (such as mining, quarrying, woodworking, smithing, glassblowing) were dangerous settings in which many men were blinded.25 The many stories about famous men healing blind persons (ranging from Vespasian26 to many Christian heroes common in early Christian literature27) testify to the concern over blindness and the estrangement caused by visual impairment throughout Graeco-Roman times. Of course, representations of blindness in both written and material culture do not correspond to the lived experience of blind people in the ancient world. The long list of evidence about persons dealing with visual impairment reveal that at least some of them probably conceived of (or simply accepted?) blindness in ways that were less negative than what we may expect.28 In a chapter, entitled “Degrees of Sight and Blindness”, Rose29 argues against the prevalent notion that blind people were segregated and alienated from their communities and that theirs was a “fate worse than death”.30 She suggests instead that “the story of blind people in the ancient Greek world is neither glorious nor dismal and that blind people were far from exceptional”.31 Examining a range of literary sources Rose demonstrates that one can gather information, indirectly, about the daily life of ordinary blind people; she clarifies their presence in ancient Greek society by noting that “in the ancient world, sighted people knew blind and sight-impaired people well enough to understand the abilities and limitations of failing vision”, and also notes that “there was not the cultural gulf between the sighted and the blind that exists today”.32 The emphasis in historical description of disability, according to Rose should be on the integration of the blind that was practiced in historical (pre-industrialised) societies. This is a timely and important warning – and the criticism of “conventional” generalisation about disabilities in history is consequential, namely that many studies of disability history tend to be anachronistic, relying on brief historic “anecdotes”, taken out of their proper context, which are then utilised by nonspecialists who have tended to misinterpret them to present “overviews of suffering” that overly rely on elite ideologies and perceptions as interpreted from religious codes and legal texts.33 However, to speak of the “integrated disabled” in history and in particular with regard to antiquity is problematic.34 Garland’s scepticism about claims that the Roman world may have provided a more comfortable and/or accommodating environment for the disabled than is generally assumed, is fully warranted. I would certainly need more evidence to ditch the “portrait of chronic misery for imperfect people in the Graeco-Roman world” .  .  . which Goodey and Rose call into question. Graham is certainly right to remind us that the Roman world “was one that was far from completely able” and that it was “against this background that [the Romans] would have judged the bodies of others” . . . but judgement is not the whole story,

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and the sufferings of all those who, to keep body and soul alive, must have performed physical tasks in conditions that are scarcely imaginable today should not be overlooked. That, to me, is a solid matter of fact, not one of “anachronistic conjecture and retrospective diagnosis”, as is suggested.35 From a disability studies perspective the question would be this: what is meant by “[the disabled were] far from exceptional”? Survival in antiquity by definition meant some form of embeddedness in a group/family. Disability theory, however, is precisely a call to not minimise the attitudes and values involved, but to explicitly explore the constructedness of a disability. It is quite crucial to explore how blindness was talked about, what was the disability rhetoric and what did the label “to be blind” do? Building on the insight that the condition of not seeing can be constructed in different ways, Paulson details a remarkable shift during and after the Enlightenment in blindness-discourses. Broadly speaking one can distinguish a “new”, different kind of discourse with regard to blindness: no longer were blindness thought of as an incurable loss of sight, but more and more a possibly curable lack of sight. “For with widespread awareness of cures of blindness, the difference between those who do not see and those who do appears to be no longer absolute, irreversible, and incomprehensible”.36 Curability allows certain kinds of speculation, such as the possible likeness and unlikeness of the minds of those seeing and not seeing. Given a growing awareness of cures of blindness, the difference between those who do not see and those who do appears to be no longer absolute, irreversible and incomprehensible.37 With the Enlightenment fascination with cures of blindness we find a desacralisation of the blind, to employ the useful terminology of Paulson.38 Before the eighteenth century it was quite fitting to describe blindness as linked to the sacred. To say that blindness was linked to the sacred is not to imply that the blind were considered part of religion per se. It is to indicate that the difference of the blind, their “otherness”, was seen as radical. Blindness was attributed to some transcendent cause or mystery beyond the reach of human knowledge or of social control. Before surgical cures and philosophical speculation, the difference of the blind was situated in a distant and untouchable beyond: it was “unnatural”, inaccessible to rational analysis with little hope from (medical or folkloric) remedies.39 This is precisely what so many of the Graeco-Roman sources do with blind persons; the blind are seen as connected to some other-human, divine identity. Such an association is a delegitimisation strategy: the blind person is dehumanised. Categorising someone or a group as nonhuman can be done by using subhuman epithets such as “uncivilised”, “primitives” and “animals”, or by using superhuman categories with positive or negative connotations (such as “miraculous”, “inspired”, “gifted”, or “possessed”, “demon,” “monster”) or by viewing the other as lacking basic human characteristics.40 Being blind in antiquity, moreover, clearly entailed denigration and outcasting. Thus, another type of delegitimisation of the blind can easily be detected 50

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in Graeco-Roman sources, namely trait characterisation. “Trait characterization consists of attributing traits that are considered extremely negative and unacceptable in a given society”.41 For many, particularly those from outside the wealthy elite class, visual impairment, sometimes in combination with old age, was a source of ridicule and mockery. Such behaviour is an expression of the cultural value in which deformed and disabled individuals are targeted as ideal subjects for contempt and derision.42 Informative about attitudes toward visual impairment are historical information about deliberate attacks leading to eye injury, specifically through the gouging out of eyes. Nutting43 notes the Roman tendency in personal encounters to attack the eyes, precisely with the full intention to tear the eyeball from the socket. Allusions to gouging out the eyes are particularly frequent in the comedies of Plautus44 and the imperial biographies of Suetonius and the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, and even in Juvenal’s satires we find evidence of attacks on the eyes in daily life.45 Though slaves in particular are targets of their master’s cruelty, it is clear that blinding and serious eye damage were common threats, both real and implied: “gouging out of eyes was a practice all too familiar to the Romans”.46 This prejudice is also at work in deliberately damaged images. In acts of damnatio memoriae, the most violent involve the removal of the face – and especially the eyes – on statues and coins.47 The point I want to raise is the cultural value: the practice was never an abolitio memoriae. These attacks were not to negate historical traces, but the execution of certain gestures that served to dishonour the record of the person and so, in an oblique way, to confirm memory, but then as one “defaced”, distorted, disfigured.48 The process is simply affirming that honour lies in beauty and sightedness, whilst dishonour came with disability and in particular with loss of eyes. In a broad sense, such activities reflect what David Freedberg49 has noted: take away the eyes, and you remove the signs of life.50 This is a particularly apt description of a Graeco-Roman conviction, the widespread belief that the eyes revealed the very essence of a human’s being.51 Physiognomic treatises stressed the importance of the eyes, devoting extensive discussions to their shape, colour, moistness, and shine, all of which illuminated character.52 To lose one’s eye(s) and eyesight, whether partially or completely, by assault, disease, injury or old age, had significant ramifications on the way in which an individual was viewed by members of the community, and also of course in the way in which s/he viewed the community. Blindness was regarded by the ancients as a condition incurable by doctors, to be healed only by divine power.53 The available Greek and Roman sources overwhelmingly depict blindness as an undesirable, unmanly condition. Blindness tends to be gendered in that men, rather than women, are the ones who are punished with blindness, or lose the ability to see.54 Men are the ones who exercise the power of sight, and men are the ones who correspondingly have this power taken away. When this occurs, they are effectively “feminised”, for they are brought down to the level of women, who do not exercise the right to “gaze” in the first place.55 Sight indicates power in Jewish 51

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and Christian texts, and blindness indicates powerlessness, as well as ignorance and poor judgement. In Genesis, for example, physical disability clearly manifests itself along gendered lines: males become blind (Isaac and Jacob) but females are barren (Sarah and Rachel).56 According to Acts (9:1–9) Saul is struck blind for his persecution of the church; his sight is restored as confirmation of his status as God’s chosen instrument (Acts 9:10–19a). Saul/Paul strikes the magician BarJesus temporarily blind as a punishment for his sorcery and to demonstrate the power of God (Acts 13:6–12). Even in cases of the iconic blind prophet, prophetic prowess does not necessarily overcome the gendered liminality of blindness. Tiresias, for instance, is definitely not a “manly” man, as “he” is a hermaphrodite.57 Given the prominence of sight in Greek and Roman texts, it is clear that blindness or other sight impairments basically equated to the absence of power, such as ignorance, helplessness and obtuseness. Given that eye gouging (which, along with other forms of bodily mutilation), was not only a wartime practices, but common in daily life,58 it seems that blinding and blindness were considered visually “marking” the body as lacking status, to be passive, and to be under the power of another. Blindness signified a distinct position with regard to a person’s place in the domination – subordination schema. So, although visual impairment in the ancient Roman world was a common enough condition to which people could and did adjust and were sometimes supported by their families, they were seen as incomplete persons: emasculated, to be avoided and deserving of contempt. In antiquity, without considerable resources the disabled were neglected, abused, exploited and oppressed. They were defective persons, associated with (dangerous) supernatural punishments and/or “compensation” (whether malevolent or benevolent). It is highly relevant to point to the various types of delegitimisation, by means of which conflict develops and escalates, as enumerated by Bar-Tal: dehumanisation, trait characterisation, outcasting, use of political labels and negative comparative labelling59 – all these types of delegitimisation can be identified with regard to the visually impaired in Graeco-Roman antiquity. The blind were categorised into an extremely negative social category and their life-setting was one of abuse, and if not subject to direct physical maltreatment, to implied, subdued, hidden violence and oppression. Blindness in early Christianity Constructions of sight and blindness in Jewish and early Christian literature are consonant with the aforementioned constructions in the larger Graeco-Roman world.60 In early Christian writings, blindness mostly functions as a metaphor for spiritual ignorance or rejection of the gospel. All of the Gospel authors, for example, connect Isaiah’s commission to announce disability linked to disobedience (Isa 6:9–10) with Jesus’ message and its reception, and they equal “seeing” with faith and unbelief with blindness. Blindness is not just a metaphor for 52

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rejecting Jesus, it is making visible the denial of God himself. According to Matthew, the Judaeans are blind, led by blind fools (Mt 15:14, 23:17), they are the “perverted generation” (Mt 17:14–21). Similarly, Luke links Jesus’ ministry itself to the Isaianic theme of bringing sight to the blind.61 Although unnamed blind men are depicted as being objects of Jesus’ healing, and “the blind” as a group appear alongside marginalised groups such as the lame and the poor, it is clear that sight signifies power, with its correlate, blindness, signifying powerlessness, as in Greek, Roman and Jewish62 discourse. Insulting the Judaeans and the unbelievers with the label “blind” would have been meaningless if the “blind” were not already a delegitimised group. The connection of blindness with the supernatural (the “sacralisation” of disability) was altered but not ended by Christianity. There may be many disabilities, but for the early Christians supernatural force(s) are behind them all. “Never is the condition simply an expression of the various possibilities inherent in the human body. Never is the condition an accident. And never is the condition seen as a positive gift of God. Rather, the disability is always present for some other reason or purpose”.63 Rather than a malediction or chastisement, blindness becomes a negative moment . . ., necessary as a contrast and precondition to display the power of redemption and grace. . . . Christianity places divinely given cure, a miraculous end to difference, in the place of divine compensation to the blind. . . . The traditional exclusion of the blind is reinforced by their portrayal as either helpless and ridiculous or wicked and greedy, and in either case as objects of scorn. The practice of Christian charity and the reference to miraculous cures were not, in the end, incompatible with a view of the blind as mysterious, unknowable, and potentially dangerous outcasts, utterly different from the seeing.64

The delegitimisation of the blind as precursor for religious conflict Authors in the ancient and late antique world often refer to deformed and disabled individuals, human beings with physical abnormalities, and they reveal a curious interest in monstrous individuals, who were considered to be “outside the range of normal human parameters”.65 The many (important) questions relating to ancient teratology cannot be dealt with here,66 but a distinct value is obvious: disability is typically associated with the spectacular and dramatic and a discourse that objectifies, devalues and degrades such humans, both culturally and individually, is perfectly acceptable. The biblical tradition, like the ancient cultures that spawned it, regards illness and disability as undesirable and impure conditions originating 53

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in the activity of gods or malicious spirits; the sick and disabled are frequently portrayed as the objects of divine action, “marvelous plotdevices that show off the power of God or the Anointed One”.67 At stake is the similarity of referring to the disabled with othering of minorities. The attitudes and actions toward the disabled are similar to those encountered in cases of delegitimation documented and researched by social psychologists. Delegitimation, to reiterate, is prejudice justified to exert economic, social and psychological disadvantages; to explain violent and discriminatory behaviour, and to exculpate blame.68 Blindness and exclusion in John 9 In a memorable scene described by John, the idea that a congenital defect is to be understood as divine retribution is discussed by Jesus and his disciples in John 9.1–3: As he passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest [φανερωθῇ] in him”. The disciples’ question is based on the common assumption that bodily suffering is the direct result of divine punishment for ancestral or individual sins.69 Jesus replies that this man was born blind so that God’s works can be made manifest in him (τυφλὸς γεννηθῇ . . . ἵνα φανερωθῇ τὰ ἔργα τοῦ θεοῦ ἐν αὐτῷ) avoiding the assumed causal relationship between sin and suffering, at least in this particular instance. According to the Johannine Jesus, the man’s blindness provides an occasion for a “sign”, the manifestation of God’s works in the world.70 It is not difficult to grasp what the Gospel of John is doing here: by engaging its listeners/readers with well-known values, they are invited to construe a dualistic world, where “Jews” are blind, carry guilt and are condemned, whilst a small band of brothers are the only ones “seeing” and destined for salvation. In the narrative world of John, we are confronted with two groups in conflict.71 Historically speaking, this conflict eventually became intractable. According to the Johannine literature, both sides delegitimise the other; that is, both groups engage stereotypes – perceived characteristics/stored beliefs – with extremely negative connotations denying the other group’s humanity. The Johannine Jesus reviles the Jews as unbelieving descendants of the devil (8:44), they are blind, sinful and incapable of understanding their own scriptures; their obtuseness knows no bounds and they are guilty before God (9:40–41). These Jews are not from God (8:47). Conversely, Jesus, who is accused of being possessed by a demon and to be mad (10:20), and his followers are described as sinners (impure; 9:25) and must 54

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be put out of the synagogue (9:22). Both sides claim the other has nothing to do with truth. From both sides, the accusations come together in the label “they are blind”. Of course, the narrator (the Johannine author) can only do this because blindness is such a potent delegitimising label. After all, the blind man was born in utter sin (9:34); even after receiving his sight he is – according to the Jewish leaders – incapable of truth and he is “cast out” (9:34). But the Johannine Jesus confirms a link with sin (e.g., in Jn 5:14 Jesus clearly links sin and disability). Indeed, if there is no link to sin Jesus can hardly “heal” the world from their sins. In the Gospel of John the blind man (like with other disabled persons referred to) is discussed as a mere object-lesson; he is an outsider used for the purposes of others. No attempt at apology can hide the simple fact: “In John 9, a blind man gains spiritual understanding only when he also receives physical sight”.72 The report in John amply illustrates how various types of delegtimisation link up; how the moral exclusion of one group (“the blind”) foreshadows, interweaves with, and enables placing others outside the limits of acceptable norms and values, outside the boundary in which moral values, rules and considerations of fairness apply. “Those who are morally excluded are perceived as non-entities, expendable, or undeserving; consequently, harming them appears acceptable, appropriate, or just”.73 What I want to draw attention to is how the (religious) conflict visible in the Gospel of John clearly have another history, one with blindness. In the narrative, both sides delegitimise another group – the blind – and have been doing so for long enough that blindness can be a label for “not us”, for subhuman. Attitudes towards and interaction with the blind is thus a training ground for labelling, for categorising the other, specifically in the case of Christian-Jewish relations. The attribution of extremely negative characteristics to the opponent, and the associated deep mistrust that flows therefrom, have been prepared for by interaction with disability, and especially the blind. Put differently, the “metaphor” blindness interweaves all the various exclusions in the Gospel of John. Grant74 writes, It is true that at one level the healing stories are stories of inclusion in that Jesus heals and welcomes all sorts of people into God’s reign. However, the very fact that they are physically healed by Jesus suggests that physical restoration is a necessary component of their entry into the community. So in the Gospel of John, the inclusion of the delegitimised is relative, very conditional: it is an illusion. Informed by a disability studies perspective we should assess the Gospel of John in light of its effective history, and it becomes important to bring some of the problematic features in the biblical tradition to a head. We should be asking, “Who is reading this passage?”, and, “with whom do we identify?” Christian 55

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reading identifies to greater or lesser extent with the one group excluding the other. The critical question to ask is this: who do we become when we identify with this group excluding that group? For what do we become responsible in our exclusion? To reveal such exclusionary, delegitimising rhetoric and practices, consider the blind. And scrutinise the metaphors used in our religious discourse. The reason for such scrutiny is to nudge us to raise certain questions of fundamental morals, how we talk about them, and how we live these morals in a more or less coherent and convincing way. In the miracle of John 9 exclusion still operates. The seeing-no-longer-blind man is driven out of the synagogue, but becoming one of the “seeing” is not inclusion in a community. The gospel narrator is at pains not to mention the blind man again. Ellens noted the “toxic” side to this particular text: [it] has a dangerous subtext or underside that has been ignored. This subtext can have a destructive effect on person, communities, and cultures by the negative archetypes that it may generate at the unconscious psychological level.75 The danger lurking here is not in the obvious story. It is in the understory, the shadow side of the way the narrative is cast. It legitimates using people for our narcissistic advantage. It trivializes the exploitation of others, the treating of people from ulterior motives rather than forthrightly, and the handling of people in ways that are clandestine. In these ways it offers a model of abuse, certifying exactly those kinds of abuse that are most rampant in human society everywhere.76 Distinct attitudes towards the blind are carefully and systematically re-affirmed by many biblical traditions, despite the healing of several blind men. Making blindness a metaphor for all the bad things characterising the “other”, the unbelieving descendants of the devil, the sinful incapable of understanding their own scriptures and even the obtuseness of the whole world dramatically affirms intensive negative feelings and attitudes toward the blind. As such, the exclusions from John’s textual world – if his readers adopt his world – can and do result in exclusions in the real world. Worldmaking metaphors can be the most powerful and potentially dangerous types of metaphors.77

Concluding remarks Blindness should be considered for what it is, a pervasive part of human life. Ableism has prejudiced us to miss  or underestimate the persistent delegitimising achieved by attitudes and behaviours directed towards the visually impaired. Informed by disability studies, this discussion aims to show that claims of social 56

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inclusion, and practices of “being good” can be problematic and how they can remain sites of conflict and oppression. In conflict religion often plays a significant part: not by only reinscribing status, privilege and power, but obscuring and legitimating denigration, abuse and exclusion. A major source of socio-religious conflict is the distinction between us and them: a distinction powered by delegitimisation. It enables animosities toward subordinate or minority groups and extends prejudicial attitudes and behaviours. Disability can be seen as a nexus for such discriminatory, prejudicial practices: the training ground, so to speak, for who we are and who we want to be. It is crucial that the beliefs about disabled persons, and the values and ideas in the family, public institutions and the community be disrupted so that the antipathy towards those perceived as alien or strange can truly change.78 By discussing John 9, this study aims to show that the “disabled” image, instead of facilitating delegitimising the “other” (and thereby advancing pernicious conflict), should help us to think differently about life and power. There is a long-standing convention to think of power as the ability and means to discriminate and to legitimise some and thus to delegitimise others. But disability provokes us to see power not in terms of human “ableness”, as extending beauty, strength, health and competencies. Disability shows the world as immensely varied, as human beings as inherently “different”, and as an image or metaphor it jars us out of our tendency to conceive of power as unlimitedly able. Disability moves us to realise that “perfection” is not first of all, or ever, a matter of independence or completeness. The history of blindness actually problematises efforts at delegitimisation, reminding us to respect the freedom of others as much as possible and avoid the use of coercion and violence in human relations as much as possible. Disability is the area where understandings of dignity, of “what it is to be human” and “how do we live well with our fellow human beings” become visible, and it is a much-neglected perspective with which to analyse early Christian texts.

Notes 1 Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Gospel of John (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1998), 173. 2 Jerome H. Neyrey, The Gospel of John (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 175. 3 Jacobus Kok, “The Healing of the Blind Man in John,” Journal of Early Christian History 2.2 (2012): 36–62. 4 Kok, “The Healing of the Blind Man in John,” 48. 5 Kok, “The Healing of the Blind Man in John,” 57. 6 Dan Goodley, Dis/Ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism (London: Routledge, 2014), 77–100; Helma Lutz, Maria Teresa Herrera Vivar, and Linda Supik, “Framing Intersectionality: An Introduction,” in Framing Intersectionality: Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept in Gender Studies, ed. H. Lutz, M.T.H. Vivar, and L. Supik (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 1–24; Paula-Irene Villa, “Embodiment Is Always More: Intersectionality, Subjection and the Body,” in Framing Intersectionality:

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7 8 9

10

11 12

13

14

15

Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept in Gender Studies, ed. H. Lutz, M.T.H. Vivar, and L. Supik (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 171–86. John M. Hull, The Tactile Heart: Blindness and Faith (Norwich: SCM Press, 2013), 32–3. Philip L. Tite, “A Community in Conflict: A Literary and Historical Reading of John 9,” Religious Studies and Theology 15.2–3 (1996): 77. Social psychology has elucidated also such mechanisms as conformism, obedience or deindividuation that facilitate hurting other people: Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: Science and Practice, 5th ed. (Boston, MA: Pearson Education, 2009); Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper  & Row, 1974); T. Postmes and R. Spears, “Deindividuation and Antinormative Behavior: A  MetaAnalysis,” Psychological Bulletin 123 (1998): 238–59; Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007). The crucial aspect of delegitimisation is not just that it leads to violence, but the use of narrative(s) about outgroups by leaders and the connecting of such narratives with identity markers. Z. Bekerman and I. Maoz, “Troubles with Identity: Obstacles to Coexistence Education in Conflict Ridden Societies,” Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research 17.4 (2005): 341–58; F. Durante, C. Volpato, and S.T. Fiske, “Using the Stereotype Content Model to Examine Group Depictions in Fascism: An Archival Approach,” European Journal of Social Psychology 40 (2010): 465–83; R. Savage, “ ‘Disease Incarnate’: Biopolitical Discourse and Genocidal Dehumanisation in the Age of Modernity,” Journal of Historical Sociology 20 (2007): 404–40; Daniel Bar-Tal, “Sociopsychological Foundations of Intractable Conflicts,” American Behavioral Scientist 50.11 (2007): 1430–53; id., “Culture of Conflict: Evolvement, Institutionalization, and Consequences,” in Personality, Human Development, and Culture, ed. R. Schwarzer and P.A. Frensch, vol. 2 of International Perspectives on Psychological Science (New York: Psychology Press, 2010), 183–98; id., Intractable Conflicts: Psychological Foundations and Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–32, 174–212. John Duckitt, “Psychology and Prejudice: A Historical Analysis and Integrative Framework,” American Psychologist 47.10 (1992): 1182–93. W.G. Stephan and C.W. Stephan, “An Integrated Threat Theory of Prejudice,” in Reducing Prejudice and Discrimination, ed. S. Oskamp (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2000), 23–45; W.G. Stephan and C.W. Stephan, “Intergroup Relations Program Evaluation,” in On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years After Allport, ed. J.F. Dovidio, P. Glick, and L. Rudman (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 431–46. Neta Oren and Daniel Bar-Tal, “The Detrimental Dynamics of Delegitimization in Intractable Conflicts: The Israeli-Palestinian Case,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 31 (2007): 114–15; J.C. Phelan, B.G. Link, and J.F. Dovidio, “Stigma and Prejudice: One Animal or Two?” Social Science & Medicine 67 (2008): 358–67. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M.S. Smith (1969; repr., London: Routledge, 1989), 94; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 198; Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1973). Other blind prophets and poets include, inter alios, Euenius (Herodotus, Hist. 9.93– 94), Phineus (Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1.9.21), Phormion (Pausanias, Descr. 7.5.7–8), Ophioneus (Pausanius, Descr. 4.12.10, 13.3), and Stesichoros (Plato, Phaedrus 243). [For ease of reference I made use of the LCL volumes: Herodotus, Histories, vol. 4, trans. A.D. Godley, LCL (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 266–71; Apollodorus, The Library, vol. 1, trans. James G. Frazer, LCL (Cambridge:

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16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23

24

25

26

Harvard University Press, 1954), 102–3; Pausanias, Description of Greece, vol. 3, trans. W.H.S. Jones, LCL (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 194–5; Pausanias, Description of Greece, vol. 2, trans. W.H.S. Jones and H.A. Ormerod, LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), 240–1; Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, trans. H.N. Fowler, LCL (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 460–1]. Dio Chrysostom, Discourses, vol. 3, trans. J.W. Cohoon and H. Lamar Crosby, LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 430–3. Lisa Trentin, “Exploring Visual Impairment in Ancient Rome,” in Disabilities in Roman Antiquity: Disparate Bodies a capite ad calcem, ed. C. Laes, C.F. Goodey, and M.L. Rose (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 94. R.P.J. Jackson, “Eye Medicine in the Roman Empire,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 2.37.3 (1996): 2229. Including Aelius Galenus of Pergamon, Pedanius Dioscorides (De materia medica) and Paul of Aegina (De re medica). Galen distinguished 124 different eye diseases: G.C. Boon, “Potters, Oculists and Eye-Troubles,” Britannia 14 (1983): 10. In his De medicina, Aulus Cornelius Celsus devotes a chapter to eye diseases (De medicina 6.6). Celsus notes in his introduction that “there are grave and varied mishaps to which our eyes are exposed; and as these have so large a part both in the service and in the amenity of life, they are to be looked after with the greatest care”. Celsus, De medicina, vol. 2, trans. W.G. Spencer, LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 184–5. R.P.J. Jackson, “Eye Medicine in the Roman Empire,” 2239–43; Boon, “Potters, Oculists and Eye-Troubles.” Such as some epigrams in the Anthologia Graeca, and a poem by Martial (Epigrams 8.74). Georgia Petridou, “Healing Shrines,” in A Companion to Science, Technology, and Medicine in Ancient Greece and Rome, vol. 1, ed. G.L. Irby (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 444. Wolfgang Jaeger, “Eye Votives in Greek Antiquity,” Documenta Ophthalmologica 68 (1988): 9–17; Georgia Petridou, “Demeter as an Ophthalmologist? Eye Votives and the Cult of Demeter and Kore,” in Bodies of Evidence: Ancient Anatomical Votives Past, Present and Future, ed. J. Draycott and E.-J. Graham (London: Routledge, 2016). Such as P. Oxy. 12.1446.1 and P. Rein. 2.113; for a discussion of papyri and visual impairment, see Dominik Opatrný, “The Figure of a Blind Man in the Light of the Papyrological Evidence,” Biblica 91 (2010): 583–94; Dominic Rathbone, “Poverty and Population in Roman Egypt,” in Poverty in the Roman World, ed. M. Atkins and Robin Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 105–6. Eye trouble was a frequent complaint among the military: Ralph Jackson, Doctors and Diseases in the Roman Empire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 82; Gabriele Wesch-Klein, “Recruits and Veterans,” in A Companion to the Roman Army, ed. P. Erdkamp (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 441. Labour: Alysia Fischer, “The Lives of Glass-Workers at Sepphoris,” Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 60/61 (2006): 305–8; A.R. Birley, “A Case of Eye Disease (Lippitudo) on the Roman Frontier in Britain,” Documenta Ophthalmologica 81 (1992): 111–19; Boon, “Potters, Oculists and Eye-Troubles.” In general: Pieter J.J. Botha, Orality and Literacy in Early Christianity (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012), 89–90; R.P.J. Jackson, “Eye Medicine in the Roman Empire”; Albert Esser, Das Antlitz der Blindheit in der Antike: Die Kulturellen und Medizinhistorischen Ausstrahlungen Des Blindenproblems in Den Antiken Quellen, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1961). Tacitus, Histories 4.81; Suetonius, Vespasian 7.2; and Dio Cassius, Hist. Rom. 65.8. [Tacitus, The Histories, vol. 2, trans. C.H. Moore, LCL (London: William Heinemann, 1931), 158–61; Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, vol. 2, trans. J.C. Rolfe, LCL (London:

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27

28 29 30 31 32 33

34

35 36 37 38 39

William Heinemann, 1930), 298–9; Dio Cassius, Dio’s Roman History, vol. 8, trans. E. Carey, LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), 270–1]. Felix Just, “From Tobit to Bartimaeus, from Qumran to Siloam: The Social Role of Blind People and Attitudes Toward the Blind in New Testament Times” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 1997), passim, UMI Publication Number 9816895; Beth Omansky, Borderlands of Blindness (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2011), 131; Cornelia B. Horn, “A Nexus of Disability in Ancient Greek Miracle Stories: A Comparison of Accounts of Blindness from the Asklepieion in Epidauros and the Shrine of Thecla in Seleucia,” in Disabilities in Roman Antiquity: Disparate Bodies a Capite Ad Calcem, ed. C. Laes, C.F. Goodey, and M.L. Rose (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 119–21. Opatrný, “Figure of a Blind Man.” Martha L. Rose, The Staff of Oedipus: Transforming Disability in Ancient Greece (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 79–94. H.C. Covey, Social Perceptions of People with Disabilities in History (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1998), 192. Rose, Staff of Oedipus, 79. Rose, Staff of Oedipus, 93. Cf. the discussions by Anne Borsay, “History, Power and Identity,” in Disability Studies Today, ed. C. Barnes, M. Oliver, and L. Barton (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 98–120; Disability and Social Policy in Britain Since 1750: A History of Exclusion (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005); E. Bredberg, “Writing Disability History: Problems, Perspectives and Sources,” Disability & Society 14.2 (1999): 189–201; Brendan J. Gleeson, “Disability Studies: A Historical Materialist View,” Disability & Society 12.2 (1997): 179–202; Geographies of Disability (London: Routledge, 1999); Catherine J. Kudlick, “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other,’ ” American Historical Review 108.3 (2003): 763–93 as well as William Southwell-Wright, “Past Perspectives: What Can Archaeology Offer Disability Studies?” in Emerging Perspectives on Disability Studies, ed. M. Wappett and K. Arndt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 70–1. Despite the frequent reference to disability studies, these critiques lack theorising and reflect inadequate conceptualising. Trentin (“Exploring Visual Impairment in Ancient Rome,” 108–11), for instance, may be correct with the conclusion that integration and accommodation, and not isolation and alienation, characterised the lives of the disabled in antiquity. But what do we mean by “not isolation nor alienation”? Any integration of the disabled must have been very limited and “accommodation” would have been relative to status, wealth, and resources. Economic exploitation does not equal community/family integration. R. Garland, “Review of C. Laes, C.F. Goodey, and M. Lynn Rose (Eds.), Disabilities in Roman Antiquity: Disparate Bodies a Capite Ad Calcem, 2013,” Ancient History Bulletin Online Reviews 4 (2014): 27. William R. Paulson, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Blind in France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 5. “It has, to an extent, been mastered by science and brought under the control of human reason”, Paulson, Enlightenment, 5. Paulson, Enlightenment, 5. The distinction is extensively substantiated by studies such as Moshe Barasch, Blindness: The History of a Mental Image in Western Thought (London: Routledge, 2001); Eleftheria A. Bernidaki-Aldous, Blindness in a Culture of Light: Especially in the Case of Oedipus at Colonus of Sophocles (New York: Peter Lang, 1990); Berthold Lowenfeld, The Changing Status of the Blind: From Separation to Integration (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1975); Michael Monbeck, The Meaning of Blindness: Attitudes Toward Blindness and Blind People (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973).

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40 Nick Haslam, “Dehumanization: An Integrative Review,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10.3 (2006): 252–64; Oren and Bar-Tal, “The Detrimental Dynamics of Delegitimization in Intractable Conflicts: The Israeli-Palestinian Case,” 113. 41 Daniel Bar-Tal and Neta Oren, “Delegitimization,” in The Encyclopedia of Peace Psychology, A – Em, vol. 1, ed. D.J. Christie (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 321. 42 Well known are the remarks of Cicero, De oratore 2.239 and Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 6.3.7. Perceptive discussion of this: Robert Garland, “The Mockery of the Deformed and Disabled in Graeco-Roman Culture,” in Laughter Down the Centuries, ed. S. Jäkel and A. Timonen (Turku: Turun Yliopisto, 1994), 71–84; Patricia A. Watson, “Martial’s Fascination with Lusci,” Greece & Rome 29.1 (1982): 72, 75. 43 H.C. Nutting, “Oculos Effodere,” Classical Philology 17.2 (1922): 313–18. 44 Examples: Plautus, Aulularia 53; Trinummus 463–5; Persa 797. [Plautus, Comedies, vol. 1, trans. P. Nixon, LCL (London: William Heinemann, 1928), 240–1; Plautus, Comedies, vol. 5, trans. P. Nixon, LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 142–3; Plautus, Comedies, vol. 3, trans. P. Nixon, LCL (London: William Heinemann, 1930), 514–15]. 45 Benjamin Isaac, “Army and Power in the Roman World: A Response to Brian Campbell,” in Army and Power in the Ancient World, ed. A. Chaniotis and P. Ducrey (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2002), 185–6. 46 Nutting, “Oculos Effodere,” 314. 47 Eric R. Varner, “Portraits, Plots, and Politics: Damnatio Memoriae and the Images of Imperial Women,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 46 (2001): 42; Eric R. Varner, Mutilation and Transformation: Damnatio Memoriae and Roman Imperial Portraiture (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 3–4; Marina Prusac, From Face to Face: Recarving of Roman Portraits and the Late-Antique Portrait Arts (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 25. 48 Charles W. Hedrick, History and Silence: Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000), 92–4. 49 David Freedberg, “Preface to the Polish Edition,” in The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Kraków: Jagellonian University, 2007), 7, http:// academiccommons.columbia.edu/item/ac:125597. 50 “it is the eyes of an image that make plain its threat of life and liveliness. It is they that give images their vivacity, just as they do in the case of human beings”, Freedberg, “Preface to the Polish Edition,” 7. 51 Of many references, see Cicero, De Legibus 1, 9, 27; Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia 11, 145–6 [Cicero, De Re Publica, De Legibus, trans. C.W. Keyes, LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 326–7; Pliny, Natural History, vol. 3, trans. H. Rackham, LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 522–3]. 52 Elizabeth Cornelia Evans, “Roman Descriptions of Personal Appearance in History and Biography,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 46 (1935): 51. 53 Useful summary: H.C. Kee, Medicine, Miracle and Magic in New Testament Times (Cambridge: University Press, 1986), 67–70. 54 So, for example, Ovid lists a number of characters afflicted with blindness, all of whom are men (Ibis 259–74 [Ovid, The Art of Love and other Poems, trans. J.H. Mozley, rev. ed. G.P. Goold, LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 254–5]). 55 Sight played a critical role in constructions of Graeco-Roman masculinity – something that Foucault, among others, explored. This research highlights how vision, or “the gaze”, functions as an instrument and symbol of power (cf. Martin Jay, “The Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism,” Poetics Today 9 [1988]: 307–26). Feminists and cultural theorists further demonstrate how “the politics of sight” often encode men as the subject of the gaze and women as the object: Jennifer A. Glancy, “Text Appeal: Visual Pleasure and Biblical Studies,” Semeia 82 (1998): 63–78.

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56 Rebecca Raphael, Biblical Corpora: Representations of Disability in Hebrew Biblical Literature (New York: T&T Clark, 2008), 54–81. 57 Or, seven years as a woman. Tiresias’s gender liminality is connected to both sight and sex: he becomes a woman after seeing two snakes copulating, and he is turned back into a man when he sees the same snakes copulating again (Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3.6.7; Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.316–40 [Apollodorus, The Library, vol. 1, trans. J.G. Frazer, LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 360–7; Ovid, Metamorphoses, vol. 1, trans. F.J. Miller, LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 146–51]. See Luc Brisson, Sexual Ambivalence: Androgyny and Hermaphroditism in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, trans. J. Lloyd (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 115–45. 58 T.M. Lemos, “Shame and Mutilation of Enemies in the Hebrew Bible,” Journal of Biblical Literature 125.2 (2006): 225–41; Maud W. Gleason, “Mutilated Messengers: Body Language in Josephus,” in Being Greek Under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, ed. S. Goldhill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 50–85; Saul M. Olyan, Disability in the Hebrew Bible: Interpreting Mental and Physical Differences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 38–45. 59 Daniel Bar-Tal, “Delegitimization: The Extreme Case of Stereotyping and Prejudice,” in Stereotyping and Prejudice: Changing Conceptions, ed. D. Bar-Tal, et  al. (New York: Springer Science, 1989), 169–88; Daniel Bar-Tal and Phillip L. Hammack, “Conflict, Delegitimization, and Violence,” in The Oxford Handbook of Intergroup Conflict, ed. L.R. Tropp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 29–52; Bar-Tal and Oren, “Delegitimization.” 60 Just, “From Tobit to Bartimaeus, From Qumran to Siloam: The Social Role of Blind People and Attitudes Toward the Blind in New Testament Times.” 61 C.A. Evans, To See and Not Perceive: Isaiah 6.9–10 in Early Jewish and Christian Interpretation, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 64 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989). 62 Just, “From Tobit to Bartimaeus, from Qumran to Siloam: The Social Role of Blind People and Attitudes Toward the Blind in New Testament Times,” passim. 63 Jennifer L. Koosed and Darla Schumm, “Out of the Darkness: Examining the Rhetoric of Blindness in the Gospel of John,” in Disability in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Sacred Texts, Historical Traditions, and Social Analysis, ed. M. Stoltzfus and D. Schumm (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 80. 64 Paulson, Enlightenment, 8–9. 65 Rose, Staff of Oedipus, 7. 66 Teratology in antiquity: Mark V. Barrow, “A Brief History of Teratology to the Early 20th Century,” in Problems of Birth Defects: From Hippocrates to Thalidomide and After, compiled by T.V.N. Persaud (1971; repr., Lancaster: MTP Press, 1977), 18–31; Bert Gevaert and Christian Laes, “What’s in a Monster? Pliny the Elder, Teratology and Bodily Disability,” in Disabilities in Roman Antiquity: Disparate Bodies a Capite Ad Calcem, ed. C. Laes, C.F. Goodey, and M.L. Rose (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 211–30 and Robert Garland, The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the GraecoRoman World, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 2010), 67–70. 67 Mary Ann Beavis, “From the Margin to the Way: A Feminist Reading of the Story of Bartimaeus,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 14.1 (1998): 20, citing Carole R. Fontaine, “Roundtable Discussion: Women with Disabilities – a Challenge to Feminist Theology,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 10.2 (1994): 113. 68 Paul Abberley, “The Concept of Oppression and the Development of a Social Theory of Disability,” Disability & Society 2.1 (1987): 17. 69 Congenital deformity as divine punishment occurs frequently in ancient literature. Examples of acquired deformity as punishment for individual sins in biblical tradition:

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70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78

Gen 19:17–26; 2 Chr 26:19–23; Gen. R. 65.10; Lev. R. 16.1; Num. R. 13.2 [Midrash Rabbah: Genesis, vol. 2, trans. H. Freedman (London: Soncino Press, 1951), 585– 6; Midrash Rabbah: Leviticus, trans. J. Israelstam and J.J. Slotki (London: Soncino Press, 1951), 199–203; Midrash Rabbah: Numbers, vol. 2, trans. J.J. Slotki (London: Soncino Press, 1951), 502–5]; Life of Adam and Eve 8.2 (M.D. Johnson, “Life of Adam and Eve: A New Translation and Introduction,” in Expansions of the “Old Testament” and Legends, Wisdom and Philosophical Literature, Prayers, Psalms, and Odes, Fragments of Lost Judeo-Hellenistic Works, ed. J.H. Charlesworth; vol. 2 of The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha [London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1985], 273); 3 Baruch 2–3 (H.E. Gaylord, “3 (Greek Apocalypse of) Baruch: A New Translation and Introduction,” in Apocalyptic literature and testaments, ed. J.H. Charlesworth; vol. 1 of The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha [London: Darton, Longman  & Todd, 1983], 664–5). See Lynn Holden, Forms of Deformity, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 131 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 268–78. In Matthew, Mark and Luke the blind receive their sight in the context of faithfulness, the miracles emerge out of faith. But in John it is a sign; a signification that the physical state of blindness is linked to the mental state of ignorance. In Johannine scholarship it is standard to emphasise that the Johannine literature reflects a historical setting of conflict towards the end of the first century being projected onto the Jesus story (J.L. Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, 2nd ed. [Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1979]): the Johannine community are being expelled from synagogues for professing Jesus as the Christ. The harsh rhetoric in John thus exemplifies intra-Jewish conflict (R.E. Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple [London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1979], 40–3). Adele Reinhartz (Befriending the Beloved Disciple: A Jewish Reading of the Gospel of John [New York: Continuum, 2001], 37–53) suggests that it is just as likely that the impetus for the separation may have come from John’s own community – a voluntary withdrawal rather than a forceful expulsion. Koosed and Schumm, “Out of the Darkness: Examining the Rhetoric of Blindness in the Gospel of John,” 89. Susan Opotow, “Moral Exclusion and Injustice: An Introduction,” Journal of Social Issues 46.1 (1990): 1. Colleen C. Grant, “Reinterpreting the Healing Narratives,” in Human Disability and the Service of God: Reassessing Religious Practice, ed. N.L. Eiesland and D.E. Saliers (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1998), 77. J. Harold Ellens, “Introduction: Toxic Texts,” in Models and Cases of Violence in Religion, ed. J.H. Ellens, vol. 3 of The Destructive Power of Religion: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 2. Ellens, “Introduction: Toxic Texts,” 13. Koosed and Schumm, “Out of the Darkness: Examining the Rhetoric of Blindness in the Gospel of John,” 78. Harlan Hahn, “The Appearance of Physical Differences: A New Agenda for Research on Politics and Disability,” Journal of Health and Human Services Administration 17.4 (1995): 402.

Bibliography Abberley, Paul. “The Concept of Oppression and the Development of a Social Theory of Disability.” Disability & Society 2.1 (1987): 5–19. Barasch, Moshe. Blindness: The History of a Mental Image in Western Thought. London: Routledge, 2001.

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Durante, F., C. Volpato, and S.T. Fiske. “Using the Stereotype Content Model to Examine Group Depictions in Fascism: An Archival Approach.” European Journal of Social Psychology 40 (2010): 465–83. Ellens, J. Harold. “Introduction: Toxic Texts.” Pages 1–14 in Models and Cases of Violence in Religion, vol. 3 of The Destructive Power of Religion: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Edited by J.H. Ellens. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. Esser, Albert. Das Antlitz der Blindheit in der Antike: Die Kulturellen und Medizinhistorischen Ausstrahlungen Des Blindenproblems in Den Antiken Quellen. 2nd ed. Leiden: Brill, 1961. Evans, C.A. To See and Not Perceive: Isaiah 6.9–10 in Early Jewish and Christian Interpretation. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 64. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989. Evans, Elizabeth Cornelia. “Roman Descriptions of Personal Appearance in History and Biography.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 46 (1935): 43–84. Fischer, Alysia. “The Lives of Glass-Workers at Sepphoris.” Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 60/61 (2006): 301–10. Fontaine, Carole R. “Roundtable Discussion: Women with Disabilities – a Challenge to Feminist Theology.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 10.2 (1994): 100–34. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M. S. Smith. 1969. Repr. London: Routledge, 1989. ———. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979. ———. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1973. Freedberg, David. “Preface to the Polish Edition.” Pages 1–12 in The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Kraków: Jagellonian University, 2007. http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/item/ac:125597. Garland, Robert. “Review of C. Laes, C.F. Goodey, and M. Lynn Rose (Eds.), Disabilities in Roman Antiquity: Disparate Bodies a Capite Ad Calcem, 2013.” Ancient History Bulletin Online Reviews 4 (2014): 25–7. ———. The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Graeco-Roman World. 2nd ed. London: Duckworth, 2010. ———. “The Mockery of the Deformed and Disabled in Graeco-Roman Culture.” Pages 71–84 in Laughter Down the Centuries. Edited by S. Jäkel and A. Timonen. Turku: Turun Yliopisto, 1994. Gevaert, Bert and Christian Laes. “What’s in a Monster? Pliny the Elder, Teratology and Bodily Disability.” Pages 211–30 in Disabilities in Roman Antiquity: Disparate Bodies a Capite Ad Calcem. Edited by C. Laes, C.F. Goodey, and M.L. Rose. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Glancy, Jennifer A. “Text Appeal: Visual Pleasure and Biblical Studies.” Semeia 82 (1998): 63–78. Gleason, Maud W. “Mutilated Messengers: Body Language in Josephus.” Pages 50–85 in Being Greek Under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire. Edited by S. Goldhill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Gleeson, Brendan J. Geographies of Disability. London: Routledge, 1999. ———. “Disability Studies: A  Historical Materialist View.” Disability  & Society 12.2 (1997): 179–202. Goodley, Dan. Dis/Ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism. London: Routledge, 2014.

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Grant, Colleen C. “Reinterpreting the Healing Narratives.” Pages 72–88 in Human Disability and the Service of God: Reassessing Religious Practice. Edited by N.L. Eiesland and D.E. Saliers. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1998. Hahn, Harlan. “The Appearance of Physical Differences: A New Agenda for Research on Politics and Disability.” Journal of Health and Human Services Administration 17.4 (1995): 391–415. Haslam, Nick. “Dehumanization: An Integrative Review.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10.3 (2006): 252–64. Hedrick, Charles W. History and Silence: Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000. Holden, Lynn. Forms of Deformity. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 131. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991. Horn, Cornelia B. “A Nexus of Disability in Ancient Greek Miracle Stories: A Comparison of Accounts of Blindness from the Asklepieion in Epidauros and the Shrine of Thecla in Seleucia.” Pages 115–44 in Disabilities in Roman Antiquity: Disparate Bodies a Capite Ad Calcem. Edited by C. Laes, C.F. Goodey, and M.L. Rose. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Hull, John M. The Tactile Heart: Blindness and Faith. Norwich: SCM Press, 2013. Isaac, Benjamin. “Army and Power in the Roman World: A Response to Brian Campbell.” Pages 181–91 in Army and Power in the Ancient World. Edited by A. Chaniotis and P. Ducrey. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2002. Jackson, R.P.J. “Eye Medicine in the Roman Empire.” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 2.37.3 (1996): 2228–51. Jackson, Ralph. Doctors and Diseases in the Roman Empire. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. Jaeger, Wolfgang. “Eye Votives in Greek Antiquity.” Documenta Ophthalmologica 68 (1988): 9–17. Jay, Martin. “The Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism.” Poetics Today 9 (1988): 307–26. Just, Felix. “From Tobit to Bartimaeus, From Qumran to Siloam: The Social Role of Blind People and Attitudes Toward the Blind in New Testament Times.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 1997. UMI Publication Number 9816895. Kee, H.C. Medicine, Miracle and Magic in New Testament Times. Cambridge: University Press, 1986. Kok, Jacobus. “The Healing of the Blind Man in John.” Journal of Early Christian History 2.2 (2012): 36–62. Koosed, Jennifer L. and Darla Schumm. “Out of the Darkness: Examining the Rhetoric of Blindness in the Gospel of John.” Pages 77–92 in Disability in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Sacred Texts, Historical Traditions, and Social Analysis. Edited by M. Stoltzfus and D. Schumm. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Kudlick, Catherine J. “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other.’ ” American Historical Review 108.3 (2003): 763–93. Lemos, T.M. “Shame and Mutilation of Enemies in the Hebrew Bible.” Journal of Biblical Literature 125.2 (2006): 225–41. Lowenfeld, Berthold. The Changing Status of the Blind: From Separation to Integration. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1975. Lutz, Helma, Maria Teresa Herrera Vivar, and Linda Supik. “Framing Intersectionality: An Introduction.” Pages 1–24 in Framing Intersectionality: Debates on a Multi-Faceted

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Concept in Gender Studies. Edited by H. Lutz, M.T.H. Vivar, and L. Supik. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Malina, Bruce J. and Richard L. Rohrbaugh. Social-Science Commentary on the Gospel of John. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1998. Martyn, J.L. History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel. 2nd ed. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1979. Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Monbeck, Michael. The Meaning of Blindness: Attitudes Toward Blindness and Blind People. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973. Neyrey, Jerome H. The Gospel of John. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Nutting, H.C. “Oculos Effodere.” Classical Philology 17.2 (1922): 313–18. Olyan, Saul M. Disability in the Hebrew Bible: Interpreting Mental and Physical Differences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Omansky, Beth. Borderlands of Blindness. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2011. Opatrný, Dominik. “The Figure of a Blind Man in the Light of the Papyrological Evidence.” Bib 91 (2010): 583–94. Opotow, Susan. “Moral Exclusion and Injustice: An Introduction.” Journal of Social Issues 46.1 (1990): 1–20. Oren, Neta, and Daniel Bar-Tal. “The Detrimental Dynamics of Delegitimization in Intractable Conflicts: The Israeli-Palestinian Case.” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 31 (2007): 111–26. Paulson, William R. Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Blind in France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Petridou, Georgia. “Demeter as an Ophthalmologist? Eye Votives and the Cult of Demeter and Kore.” In Bodies of Evidence: Ancient Anatomical Votives Past, Present and Future. Edited by J. Draycott and E.-J. Graham. London: Routledge, 2016. ———. “Healing Shrines.” Pages 434–49 in A Companion to Science, Technology, and Medicine in Ancient Greece and Rome, vol. 1. Edited by G.L. Irby. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. Phelan, J.C., B.G. Link, and J.F. Dovidio. “Stigma and Prejudice: One Animal or Two?” Social Science & Medicine 67 (2008): 358–67. Postmes, T., and R. Spears. “Deindividuation and Antinormative Behavior: A  MetaAnalysis.” Psychological Bulletin 123 (1998): 238–59. Prusac, Marina. From Face to Face: Recarving of Roman Portraits and the Late-Antique Portrait Arts. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Raphael, Rebecca. Biblical Corpora: Representations of Disability in Hebrew Biblical Literature. New York: T&T Clark, 2008. Rathbone, Dominic. “Poverty and Population in Roman Egypt.” Pages 100–14 in Poverty in the Roman World. Edited by M. Atkins and Robin Osborne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Reinhartz, Adele. Befriending the Beloved Disciple: A  Jewish Reading of the Gospel of John. New York: Continuum, 2001. Rose, Martha L. The Staff of Oedipus: Transforming Disability in Ancient Greece. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Savage, R. “ ‘Disease Incarnate’: Biopolitical Discourse and Genocidal Dehumanisation in the Age of Modernity.” Journal of Historical Sociology 20 (2007): 404–40.

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Southwell-Wright, William. “Past Perspectives: What Can Archaeology Offer Disability Studies?” Pages 67–96 in Emerging Perspectives on Disability Studies. Edited by M. Wappett and K. Arndt. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Stephan, W.G., and C.W. Stephan. “Intergroup Relations Program Evaluation.” Pages 431– 46 in On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years After Allport. Edited by J.F. Dovidio, P. Glick, and L. Rudman. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. ———. “An Integrated Threat Theory of Prejudice.” Pages 23–45 in Reducing Prejudice and Discrimination. Edited by S. Oskamp. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 2000. Tite, Philip L. “A Community in Conflict: A Literary and Historical Reading of John 9.” Religious Studies and Theology 15.2–3 (1996): 77–100. Trentin, Lisa. “Exploring Visual Impairment in Ancient Rome.” Pages 89–114 in Disabilities in Roman Antiquity: Disparate Bodies a capite ad calcem. Edited by C. Laes, C.F. Goodey, and M.L. Rose. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Varner, Eric R. Mutilation and Transformation: Damnatio Memoriae and Roman Imperial Portraiture. Leiden: Brill, 2004. ———. “Portraits, Plots, and Politics: Damnatio Memoriae and the Images of Imperial Women.” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 46 (2001): 41–93. Villa, Paula-Irene. “Embodiment Is Always More: Intersectionality, Subjection and the Body.” Pages 171–86 in Framing Intersectionality: Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept in Gender Studies. Edited by H. Lutz, M.T.H. Vivar, and L. Supik. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Watson, Patricia A. “Martial’s Fascination with Lusci.” Greece & Rome 29.1 (1982): 71–6. Wesch-Klein, Gabriele. “Recruits and Veterans.” Pages 435–50 in A Companion to the Roman Army. Edited by P. Erdkamp. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Zimbardo, Philip G. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House, 2007.

Ancient authors Apollodorus, The Library, 2 vols. Translated by James G. Frazer, LCL. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954. Celsus, De medicina, 3 vols. Translated by W.G. Spencer, LCL. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948–1953. Cicero, De Re Publica, De Legibus. Translated by C.W. Keyes, LCL. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961. Dio Cassius, Dio’s Roman History, 9 vols. Translated by E. Carey, LCL. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914–1927. Dio Chrysostom, Discourses, 5 vols. Translated by J.W. Cohoon and H. Lamar Crosby, LCL. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949–1964. Herodotus, Histories, 4 vols. Translated by A.D. Godley, LCL. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957–1961. Martial, Epigrams, 2 vols. Translated by W. C. A. Ker, LCL. London: Heinemann, 1919–1920. Ovid, The Art of Love and Other Poems. Translated by J.H. Mozley, rev. ed. G.P. Goold, LCL. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2 vols. Translated by F.J. Miller, LCL. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956–1958.

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Pausanias, Description of Greece, 5 vols. Translated by W.H.S. Jones and H.A. Ormerod, LCL. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954–1959. Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus. Translated by H.N. Fowler, LCL. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953. Plautus, Comedies, 5 vols. Translated by P. Nixon, LCL. London: William Heinemann, 1928–1952. Pliny, Natural History, 10 vols. Translated by H. Rackham, LCL. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938–1967. Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, 2 vols. Translated by J.C. Rolfe, LCL. London: William Heinemann, 1930. Tacitus, The Histories, 4 vols. Translated by C.H. Moore, LCL. London: William Heinemann, 1925–1931.

Rabbinic literature Midrash Rabbah: Genesis, 2 vols. Translated by H. Freedman. London: Soncino Press, 1951. Midrash Rabbah: Leviticus. Translated by J. Israelstam and J.J. Slotki. London: Soncino Press, 1951. Midrash Rabbah: Numbers, 2 vols. Translated by J.J. Slotki. London: Soncino Press, 1951.

Pseudepigrapha Gaylord, H.E., “3 (Greek Apocalypse of) Baruch: A New Translation and Introduction.” Pages 653–79 in Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments. Edited by J.H. Charlesworth; vol. 1 of The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1983. Johnson, M.D. “Life of Adam and Eve: A New Translation and Introduction.” Pages 249– 95 in Expansions of the “Old Testament” and Legends, Wisdom and Philosophical Literature, Prayers, Psalms, and Odes, Fragments of Lost Judeo-Hellenistic Works. Edited by J.H. Charlesworth; vol. 2 of The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1985.

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4 RELIGIOUS CONFLICT, RADICALISM, AND SEXUAL EXCEPTIONALISM IN THE RHETORIC OF JOHN CHRYSOSTOM Chris L. de Wet Monster–terrorist–fag: religious conflict and sexual exceptionalism1 The very nature of religious conflict is intersectional, as theorists and scholars from feminist, postcolonial, and queer studies have demonstrated, and along with instances of religious violence, there are numerous invisible operations of religious conflict at work. Joseph Marchal rightly emphasises that “sexual and gender norms interact profoundly with racial, ethnic, national, and colonial formations.”2 Relying on the works of Jasbir Puar3 and Marchal, I wish to explore the locus where sexuality, specifically the formation of masculinity, intersects with religious conflict, notably in the formation of late antique religious radicalism, using the homilies of John Chrysostom (AD 347–407) as a case in point. When I speak of religious radicals and radicalism, I refer to individuals who structure their religious beliefs, practices, and identity in terms of singularity and contrast, who are prone to religious conflict and even religious violence in some extreme cases; singularity of religious identity assumes a “pure” form of the individual’s religion, perceived not to be diluted by what seems to be outside influence, and contrast refers to the creation and structuring of one’s religion as contrary to what outsiders believe.4 This making of a masculine religious radicalism in Chrysostom is perhaps in response to the fact that many people in his society, as Isabella Sandwell has shown,5 did not adopt such a puristic view of religious identity, but preferred to intermingle with different religious groups. In this sense, Sandwell has argued that religious identity in late antiquity should not be seen as fixed and clearly delineated, but rather as a habitus, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense.6 In terms of modern-day religious conflict, this pluriform manifestation of religious and social identity has been referred to as the so-called grey zone:7 a discursive (and/or physical) space where non-radicalised members of a religious group find themselves, usually characterised by a form of society or government 70

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in which the adherence to religious moral codes receives less prominence.8 Grey zones are often the areas in which conflict, both discursive and physical, take place, since polarised members of religious groups aim to increase their ranks by winning over (or eliminating) members from the grey zone.9 In a study engaging with religious conflict and notions of “just peace” in Augustine’s thought, Serena Sharma highlights the importance of identifying, problematising, and addressing historical discursive grey zones.10 This study follows a similar approach, with a focus on radicalisation through sexual exceptionalism. In what way do sexuality and formulations of masculinity impact on religious conflict? To make sense of this question, one needs to delineate the concept of sexual exceptionalism. Jasbir Puar, in her enlightening work, Terrorist Assemblages,11 explains that sexual “[e]xceptionalism paradoxically signals distinction from (to be unlike, dissimilar) as well as excellence (imminence, superiority), suggesting a departure from yet mastery of linear teleologies of progress.”12 Puar contrasts Muslim and Sikh bodies as alterior bodies, corporealities of otherness, which are racially constructed as “terrorists” and sexually constructed as “fags,” with the bodies of exceptional and elite citizens, whose bodies are constructed as patriotic, including homonationals. The sexually exceptional bodies of patriotic citizens are contrasted with the sexually perverse body of the “monster-terroristfag,” as Puar calls it. This monster-terrorist-fag must be conquered, judged, and killed by patriotic bodies – the necropolitics of sexual exceptionalism.13 Marchal is one of the first to successfully apply Puar’s notion of sexual exceptionalism and the model of the monster-terrorist-fag to biblical literature, specifically the Pauline literary corpus, and thereby shows the model’s usefulness not only for understanding terrorism in modern, especially Western, contexts, but also in ancient contexts. Although the invention of terrorism and the terrorist is a modern one at best, Marchal’s study demonstrates that the study of sexual exceptionalism and religious radicalism in antiquity may assist us in feeling the discursive tremors of the process of inventing terrorism already present in antiquity. According to Walter Laqueur, Chrysostom’s homilies against the Jews were widely cited and even reprinted during the Nazi reign of Germany.14 The relative ease with which these homilies were transmitted to a Nazi context highlights the potency of past discursive tremors of sexual exceptionalism and the monsterterrorist-fag syndrome. The formation of masculinity in terms of sexual exceptionalism and perversity therefore has a leading role in religious conflict. Marchal states: “Terrorist populations are depicted as failed men, deviant and perverted sexually and racially, but also religiously: their religious difference is marked as part of the reason for their perverse activities.”15 Two important strategies are at play in the sexual exceptionalism of religious conflict, namely a) inclusion, and b) teratogenisation (that is, making monsters of one’s enemies). While engaging with Puar’s work, what I  will do in this study is investigate how Chrysostom utilises these two strategies in the making of religious difference and sexual exceptionalism, and thereby highlight some of the more pervasive strategies of religious conflict in late antiquity. By exploring these two discursive strategies of 71

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sexual exceptionalism, the dynamics between religious conflict, radicalism, and masculinity will become more evident in Chrysostom’s thought.

A cautionary tale: sexual exceptionalism and the politics of inclusion Ironically, inclusion is a very important strategy in the affirmation of sexual exceptionalism and, more generally, religious conflict. Puar deconstructs U.S. homonationalism (as opposed to the terrorist-fag) as an example to demonstrate this point: For contemporary forms of U.S. nationalism and patriotism, the production of gay and queer bodies is crucial to the deployment of nationalism, insofar as these perverse bodies reiterate heterosexuality as the norm but also because certain domesticated homosexual bodies provide ammunition to reinforce nationalist projects.16 By adopting a stance of homonationalism, according to Puar, U.S. nationalism projects itself to outsiders as “inclusive” and “tolerant,” yet it insulates itself and manages its agenda and registers of inclusion internally by sanctioning technologies of heteronormalisation for the sake of formerly perverse bodies.17 In the schema of homonationalism, not all homosexual bodies are included, but only those subject to the technologies of heteronormalisation. The inclusion of some only serves to exclude others more intensively. Marchal shows a similar strategy of inclusion in the context of Paul’s outreach to the so-called heathens. Only those heathens who have adopted Paul’s own technologies of normalisation, e.g., baptism, not being circumcised, and not taking part in porneia, are afforded the luxury of inclusion.18 Similar strategies of inclusion are present in Chrysostom, and as Puar and Marchal highlight in their cautionary tales of inclusion, we should read inclusion and tolerance, in the context of religious conflict, as indicative of perhaps a more general strategy of exclusion. The politics of inclusion functions on an ethnic, social, and religious level in Chrysostom’s works. As far as ethnicity is concerned, I am still convinced that Chrysostom’s mission to the Goths, for instance, should be understood within this framework of inclusion for the sake of exclusion.19 The inclusion and normalisation of Gothic Christians by means of their adopting Nicene orthodoxy and especially the monastic life may have served, directly or indirectly, as a safeguard, albeit minor, against a looming political and religious crisis. Christians from various Gothic populations in Constantinople would be classified as a “grey zone” in the discursive sense. The barbarian identity of the Goths is transformed into one of Christian masculinity, especially thanks to the prevalence of Gothic monks. The inclusion of normalised Goths only serves to exclude ethnic others, such as heterodox Goths, Jews, and “Greeks,” more intensively.

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Chrysostom’s homily to the Goths contains numerous sexual and ethnic connotations. The central virtue needed for the normalisation of barbarian identity is self-mastery, that is sōphrosynē. Chrysostom sacrifices traditional external (and ethnic) markers of masculinity in favour of the new internal marker of masculinity, which is self-mastery. At the very start of the homily, Chrysostom contrasts the physical, almost leonine appearance of the barbarians, with the traditional manly image of the Greek philosopher.20 While the beard of the philosopher functions as a traditional symbol of masculinity, Chrysostom explains, the barbarians in his audience (the Scythians, Thracians, Sarmatians, and so on) do not present this traditional manly demeanour – rather, “their demeanours resemble closely those of lions rather than men.”21 “But our values are not of such a nature,” Chrysostom continues, “they do not lie in matters of appearance [en schēmati], but those matters of our philosophy reside in self-mastery [sōphrosynē].”22 In this sense, Chrysostom restructures the external habitual politics of masculinity in order to more closely align internal psychic aspects of masculinity. Chrysostom is not interested in having barbarians assume the Greek philosopher’s beard; they must assume the Christian philosopher’s soul. We find here the Christianisation of the barbarian psychē. The virtue of sōphrosynē in Chrysostom is crucial, and encompasses a very broad semantic scope, denoting a character of moderation and abstinence, sound mental and spiritual health, and selfdiscipline.23 It is particularly related to one’s sexuality in Chrysostom’s thought. In this sense, sōphrosynē also denotes a sense of modesty, discipline, and sexual purity. In this discourse, sexual purity is parallel with religious purity. This parallelism is affirmed in Chrysostom’s next statement, namely that to be concerned with external beauty is akin to prostitution – rather, like a noble and honourable young maiden covers her nakedness to vouchsafe her dignity, so too does the church shun physical beauty and a masculine habitus in favour of internal beauty that is desirable in the eyes of God.24 Paradoxically, the chaste Christian maiden, the virgin, now is the ultimate symbol of Christian masculinity because of her sōphrosynē. Rather than sporting the philosopher’s beard on the outside, the barbarian must don the modesty of the virgin on the inside. Sōphrosynē means inclusion, porneia is exclusion, and having sōphrosynē affords barbarians the greatest measure of Christian masculinity and social dignity. But the assumption is further that those who do not subscribe to the moral standards of sōphrosynē are akin to prostitutes. So although, on the surface of the argument, Chrysostom seems to negate ethnic difference, he actually needs to emphasise ethnic difference (like the beard, the inability to speak eloquently, and the leonine appearance) in order to construct his vision of Christian sexual exceptionalism. But just as a certain type of homosexual identity must be “accepted” in the process of modern heteronormalisation, ethnic difference must remain in order for sexual exceptionalism to retain its power, since the affirmation of ethnic difference (through its negation) undergirds the exceptionality of Christian sexual morality. Those outside of this moral framework automatically become

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like prostitutes. And this is exactly what we have in Chrysostom. While the masculinity of Nicene barbarians is affirmed, Chrysostom does not hesitate to label Jews and Judaising Christians as prostitutes (pornai) and effeminates (malakoi), or in modern parlance, as “whores” and “fags.”25 But even here some Jews are included. By historically transforming the Jewishness of Christ and Paul, for instance, who both represent a normalised and masculinised “Christian Jewishness,” Chrysostom finds it easier to vilify and exclude, in the most extreme terms, Jews of his own day as well as Judaising Christians.26 Ethnicity (barbarian, Greek, Jew), sexuality (chaste, whorish), and religious identity all intersect and feed into the milieu of conflict. Socially, then, we have a similar instance of inclusion. Although the celibate monastic lifestyle was considered by Chrysostom, and most other Christian authors of late antiquity, as the pinnacle of Christian masculinity, Chrysostom does allow for another, inferior masculinity – namely the married yet continent man.27 So, although the monk is absolutely sexually exceptional, the man who lives a moderate ascetic lifestyle within marriage may share in this exceptionalism. The asceticisation of marriage then serves to normalise the married man, and also makes him sexually exceptional. But who is, essentially, excluded in this politics of inclusion? Firstly, those men who act without sōphrosynē within marriage, who still frequent prostitutes, violate their slaves, visit the theatre, and indulge excessively in sexual vice. Secondly, this strategy is especially utilised in the exclusion and fierce pathologisation of the subintroductae in Chrysostom’s thought.28 By including the continent married man, the concupiscent married man and the co-habiting monks are excluded, and their masculinities are devalorised. Inclusion is therefore a very important feature in the operations of sexual exceptionalism and religious conflict. As in Puar’s excursus on U.S. homonationalism, the masculinisation of those formerly deemed to be unmanly and deviant becomes an accolade for late antique orthodox Christianity. Christine Shepardson has highlighted a similar type of rhetoric oscillating between the promotion of orthodoxy and anti-Jewish sentiment in Ephrem’s thought.29 The power of the inclusive group is intensified and its ethics of inclusion valorised; furthermore, the physical number of adherents is multiplied. The group is also easily labelled as tolerant and “open” to all. All of these effects then serve to create a religious radicalism, of which the participants are convinced that they are the “good guys,” they are the true patriots, the true Romans. They are also sexually and morally pure, and the defiling of other religious identities through the discourse of sexual immorality simply makes it easier to exclude, oppose, and exterminate them. The “true” and “pure” Christians all share in the solidarity of the new manly army of Christ, which allows all people to enter, according to Gal. 3:28, including young and old, Jew and Gentile, man and women, Greek and barbarian – as long as they have been normalised according to the precepts of Christian orthodoxy.30 Thus, when speaking about the notion of “inclusion” in the early Christian context, we must be very aware of its dynamics of power and the potential for inclusion to act as an intensified technology of exclusion. 74

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How to make a monster: teratogenisation and religious conflict With the inclusion and normalisation of previously deviant subjectivities come the extreme pathologisation and teratogenisation of those perversities that are not included. Teratogenisation, or making the other a monster, is perhaps the most perceptible characteristic in the rhetoric of religious conflict. Maijastina Kahlos also notes the common rhetorical trope of making monsters (who are also like animals or demon-possessed) out of one’s opponents, especially heretics, in late ancient Christian discourse.31 The discourse of monstrosity in Chrysostom is related to the previous discussion of sōphrosynē – pathic excess, the inability to control one’s desires, lies at the heart of the monstrosity of Chrysostom’s opponents, as we will see.32 Descriptions of opponents as monsters also serve to highlight the irrationality of the opponent, as Chrysostom states: But the man who has cast aside the rule of reason, and who has broken off from the way of life according to God, gives himself up to every passion. No longer does he become merely a wild beast, but some multiform and fickle monster, who can plead no excuse because of his nature. For all his wickedness proceeds from his will and his intellect.33 There are four discourses of teratogenisation in Chrysostom’s rhetoric against his religious opponents, and each of these discourses, in turn, is also an assault on their masculinity. These discourses are those of corporeal mutilation, psychic illness and medicalisation, demonisation, and infantilisation. Chrysostom meticulously constructs the sexual perversity of his opponents in contrast to the sexual exceptionalism of his own group. Understanding this discursive teratogenisation also assists us in unravelling the concept of the “abnormal”34 and medical persecution of heresy and Jewishness in late ancient Christian discourse. Firstly, Chrysostom describes the bodies of his opponents as mutilated. In Chrysostom’s commentary on Galatians, while discussing the problem of castration and eunuchism, he highlights the corporeal mutilation shared by real eunuchs, probably referring to the infamous galli,35 castrated priests of the cult of the Magna Mater, as well as Jews who have been circumcised, and Manichaeans who mutilate the body (probably an extreme form of invective against the Manichaeans’ negative view of the flesh,36 and especially sexual intercourse – there is no evidence, to my knowledge, for Manichaean castration in the fourth century).37 Physical castration, circumcision, and Manichaean discipline are all viewed as corporeal mutilation, and thus blasphemy against God’s creation. It is specifically the male genitals that are mutilated in this case, making them inferior males and creating an uncomfortable gender ambiguity for Chrysostom.38 The Manichaeans, as Chrysostom describes them at least, stand in contrast to real men who have castrated vice from their souls. Psychic and spiritual castration, accompanied by corporeal intactness (and freedom, unlike most eunuchs, who were enslaved), are 75

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the trademarks of Chrysostom’s superior, orthodox masculinity. Orthodox Christians should be like court eunuchs loyal to their king, who is Christ: “Eunuchs especially ought to stand by the king.” Chrysostom then continues: “By eunuchs, I mean those who are of sound mind, having no wrinkle or blemish, high-minded, having the perspective of the soul, gentle and quick-sighted, energetic and accomplished, not sleepy or supine, full of the utmost freedom.”39 As with many late ancient Christian authors,40 spiritual eunuchism, and not the type of castration that physically mutilates the body, becomes a marker of Christian identity and sexual exceptionalism. These “real” men, the spiritual eunuchs, discipline their bodies, and teach it sōphrosynē, but they do not mutilate the body. The invective of castration and eunuchism is then also extended to the subintroductae, the males of who are specifically referred to by Chrysostom as eunuchs and, even worse, as slaves to women, or gynaikodouloi: The men receive the women at the door, strutting as if they had been transformed into eunuchs, and when everyone is looking, they guide them with enormous pride. Nor do they slink away, but go so far as to glory in their performance. Even at that most awesome hour of the mysteries, they are much occupied with waiting on the virgins’ pleasure, providing many of the spectators with occasion for offense.41 Although their bodies are not physically mutilated, their bodily habitus, which is supposed to be indicative of superior monastic masculinity, has now become marred by adopting a servile disposition, douloprepeia. They are described as eunuch slaves – an unmanly disposition indeed. Secondly, along with the discourse of corporeal mutilation, we also have a very potent discourse of psychic pathologisation in Chrysostom. He describes his opponents as diseased in their very souls. Wendy Mayer has noted that Chrysostom operates in this case like a medical philosopher, and his preaching is seen as a type of therapy of the soul, a phenomenon quite common in Greek and Roman moral philosophy.42 In his homiletic series On the Incomprehensible Nature of God, the language of disease and mental illness abounds. All his opponents, including the Jews, Manichaeans, and, of course, the Anomeans are described as being psychically diseased. Of the Anomeans, Chrysostom writes: These are my reasons for encouraging all of you to speak to the Anomoeans mildly and with moderation. Try with all your might to treat them as you would treat people who have suffered a mental illness and lost their wits. Surely this doctrine of theirs is the offspring of their madness and of a mind swollen with great conceit. Their festering wounds cannot bear a touch of the hand nor endure too rough a contact. So it is that wise physicians cleanse such ulcers with a soft sponge. Since these Anomoeans have a festering ulcer in their souls, let us take a soft sponge, 76

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wet it with pure and soothing water, and bathe the ulcer with all the words I have spoken to you. In this way let us try to restrain their swollen conceit and cleanse away all their pride.43 Chrysostom describes his opponents in terms of mental illness, and orthodoxy as remedy.44 In his commentary on Galatians, the Greeks, Arians, and Marcionites are included in this psychic pathology.45 Key to this facet of teratogenisation is the notion of balance. All ancient physicians describe health, both physical and mental, as a state of balance; the humours and elements of the body need to be in correct proportion.46 But orthodoxy and heresy are also conceptualised by using the same medical terminology47 – “orthodoxy” is seen as a balanced knowledge of God, where one does not emphasise one aspect of the divine to the detriment of another; heresy is seen as a type of theological and epistemological excess, whether it is, according to Chrysostom, the Jews’ excessive adherence to the Law, the Manichaeans’ excessive stance against the physical body, or the Anomeans’ lack of balance between the divinity of the Son and the Father. This pattern is also present when Chrysostom describes his opponents as individuals who indulge excessively in the bodily passions, especially sexual lust, but also gluttony, greed, and envy. The same language of disease is used in Chrysostom’s vilification of the subintroductae. They are all diseased; servile in their bodily habitus, and, most importantly, diseased in their souls.48 The ideal male body, for Chrysostom, is a body of balance and psychic health, and sound doctrine. By describing his opponents as both physically and psychically diseased, Chrysostom also attacks their masculinity. A diseased body is a passive body, as Helen King rightly notes: “the sick role is feminised, while the doctor embodies what are considered to be the masculine virtues.”49 As a preacher of sound doctrine, Chrysostom assumes a healing role, but this healing role is also an active governing role – in the discourse of medicalisation and psychic health, there is also an overlap with the discourse of slavery, or doulology, as I term it.50 As a doctor of the soul, Chrysostom occupies the role of despotēs over those slaves of passion and heresy who are unable to govern themselves, who lack those important masculine virtues of sōphrosynē and enkrateia; in this way, Chrysostom also fashions his own masculinity from the pulpit, so to speak. Real men rule over their bodies and passions, just as they rule over their wives, children, and slaves. As master of the soul, Chrysostom makes it his responsibility to rule over slaves of the passions in order to heal and normalise them. These diseased opponents are weak and sickly, unable to join the army of Christ. Thirdly, we also have the discourse of demonisation. This is the logical consequence of the previous discussion – the diseased and unbalanced soul has the propensity to attract demons, and fall prey to them.51 As Gregory Smith has shown, demons have a similar substance to the soul,52 and the pathologically diseased soul becomes a target for demons.53 Chrysostom’s demonology is highly polemological and agonistic – he describes the spiritual life as a battle (they are “soldiers 77

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of Christ”) and agōn, or contest, against evil.54 But his opponents are unable to succeed in this battle due to their inferior spiritual masculinity. People indulging in pathic excess “are more wretched than maniacs, introducing a self-imposed demon to the soul.”55 As in the case of disease, Jews and heretics, in Chrysostom’s thought, once again occupy a passive role in relation to demons. They are not ones who can battle the demonic, but fall prey to them. Fourthly, we also have the discourse of infantilisation and puerility. Foucault marks the discourse of puerility as key to understanding social operations of teratogenisation and abnormalisation.56 The monster, in this case, occupies a body in which it does not belong, and is not capable of rational thought. In an extreme case of invective against the Jews, Chrysostom describes them as grown men still suckling on the breast of their nurse, as old men who still slavishly obey a pedagogue. Moses is frequently described by Chrysostom as a nurse, and the Mosaic Law as a pedagogue (referring to Gal. 3:24–26). For just as though the Jews had been little children, he placed Moses over them as a schoolmaster, and like little children he managed these things for them through shadowy representations, as we teach letters. For the law had a shadow of the good things to come, and not the very image of the things [Heb. 10:1]. As we both buy cakes for children and give them pieces of money, requiring of them one thing only, that for the present they would go to school; so also God at that time gave them both wealth and luxury, purchasing from them by this His great indulgence one only thing, that they would listen to Moses. Therefore He delivered them over to a schoolmaster, that they might not despise Himself as a tender, loving Father. See then that they feared him only; for they said not, Where is God? But, Where is Moses? And his very presence was fearful. . . . So that one would not be wrong in calling Moses both a teacher, and a nursing-father, and a conductor [Exod. 16:3; Num. 11:4–5]; the man’s wisdom was great. Nevertheless, it is not the same thing to guide men who are already philosophers, and to rule unreasoning children. And, if you are inclined to hear yet another particular; as the nurse says to the child, When you ease yourself, take up your garments, and for as long as you sit, so also did Moses [Deut. 23:13]. For all the passions are tyrannous in children (for as yet they have not that which is to bridle them), vainglory, desire, irrationality, anger, envy; just as in children, so they prevailed; they spat upon, they beat, Moses. And as a child takes up a stone, and we all exclaim, O do not throw it; so did they also take up stones against their father; and he fled from them.57 Nurses and pedagogues were in most cases slaves or freed persons, usually individuals of lower status58 – by highlighting the puerility of his opponents, Chrysostom again views them as people who have not yet donned the masculine toga

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of Christ and Christian teaching.59 They are like children ruled by the enslaved. We also see above that infantilisation implies a lack of sōphrosynē, that most important virtue that makes one sexually exceptional. The passions in children are still unbridled, and like children, Chrysostom sketches the Jews as uncontrolled and irrational. The infantilisation of Chrysostom’s opponents, especially the Jews, is a logical consequence of the progressive pedagogy in his theology, as David Rylaarsdam has shown.60 In this case, the Jews occupy a lower and more puerile position within the development of divine pedagogy, while orthodoxy is constructed as the advent of masculinity.

Conclusion: minimising the grey zone I have argued in this chapter that within instances of religious conflict, one means of radicalising members of a religious group was by means of sexual exceptionalism. By convincing members of a religious group that they are superior and exceptional to their opponents in terms of sexual morality, the polarisation of identity takes place more easily, and the so called grey zone of religious identity becomes less apparent. In the context of antiquity, the discourse of masculinity is crucial in the formation of sexual exceptionalism, particularly in Chrysostom. But this is a psychic masculinity, one that proceeds from the position of a healthy soul characterised, above all, by sōphrosynē. In Chrysostom’s promulgation of Christian sexual exceptionalism, two rhetorical strategies are particularly prevalent, namely inclusion and teratogenisation. In his rhetoric of religious conflict, Chrysostom simultaneously constructs his own masculinity, and that of his radical adherents (despite their ethnicity, class, gender, or age), and deconstructs the masculinity of his opponents, providing these opponents with a similar character to that of Puar’s monster-terrorist-fag. Non-orthodox Christians, particularly heretics and Jews, but also internal groups like the subintroductae bear the brunt of Chrysostom’s polemic. In some way or another, they are all monsters. For Chrysostom, the religious monsters of his own time are in fact killing themselves by their excessively evil behaviour, their lack of sōphrosynē. Sōphrosynē does not only signify psychic health, but it is also a symbol of moral and religious purity. Those from other religious groups are considered weak, effeminate, physically mutilated, diseased, demonised, puerile, but also dangerous – simply belonging to or associating with such groups carries a risk for an individual. Being part of “orthodox” Christianity means being masculine, sexually acceptable, and healthy.

Notes 1 This chapter is based on a paper presented at the 17th International Conference on Patristic Studies, Oxford, August 10–14, 2015. I especially thank Wendy Mayer and Maijastina Kahlos for their feedback on the paper. An earlier version of this study was published as: Chris L. de Wet, “Of Monsters and Men: Religious Conflict, Radicalism,

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2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

and Sexual Exceptionalism in the Works of John Chrysostom,” Journal of Early Christian History 6.2 (2016): 1–17. Joseph A. Marchal, “The Exceptional Proves Who Rules: Imperial Sexual Exceptionalism in and around Paul’s Letters,” Journal of Early Christian History 5.1 (2015): 87. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Next Wave: New Directions in Women’s Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). For more on the role of purity in religious conflict, see Günther Schlee, How Enemies Are Made: Towards a Theory of Ethnic and Religious Conflict (New York: Berghahn, 2011). Isabella Sandwell, Religious Identity in Late Antiquity: Greeks, Jews and Christians in Antioch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Sandwell, Religious Identity in Late Antiquity, 32–5. On habitus, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), esp. 166–8. See also van den Heever’s chapter in this volume for more on the dynamics of the “grey zone.” Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2001), 110–11. Heiner Bielefeldt, Nazila Ghanea, and Michael Wiener, Freedom of Religion or Belief: An International Law Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 37–8. Serena K. Sharma, “ ‘Just Peace’ or Peace Postponed: Jus post bellum and the Aftermath of Iraq,” in Religion, Conflict and Military Intervention, ed. Rosemary Durward and Lee Marsden (London: Routledge, 2016), 175–8. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 3. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 32–6. Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 48–9. Marchal, “The Exceptional Proves Who Rules,” 91. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 39. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 38–40. Marchal, “The Exceptional Proves Who Rules,” 104–5. See Chris L. de Wet, “John Chrysostom and the Mission to the Goths: Rhetorical and Ethical Perspectives,” in Sensitivity Towards Outsiders: Exploring the Dynamic Relationship Between Mission and Ethics in the New Testament and Early Christianity, ed. Jakobus Kok et al., Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 364 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 543–65. For a more extensive, yet slightly different perspective on Chrysostom’s mission to the Goths, see the study of Jonathan P. Stanfill, “Embracing the Barbarian: John Chrysostom’s Pastoral Care of the Goths” (Ph.D Dissertation, Fordham University, 2015). Hom. Goth. 1 (PG 63.501.8–11). Hom. Goth. 1 (PG 63.501.11–12). Hom. Goth. 1 (PG 63.501.12–14). Chris L. de Wet, Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 235–6. Hom. Goth. 1 (PG 63.501.14–29). See, generally, Adv. Jud. 1; see also Susanna Drake, Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts, Divinations (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 78–98. Joshua Garroway, “The Law-Observant Lord: John Chrysostom’s Engagement with the Jewishness of Christ,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 18.4 (2010): 591–615; Andrew S. Jacobs, “A Jew’s Jew: Paul and the Early Christian Problem of Jewish Origins,” Journal of Religion 86 (2006): 258–86.

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27 This is the general discourse in Chrysostom’s homilies against the subintroductae; see also Peter R.L. Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 305–22; Elizabeth A. Clark, “Sexual Politics in the Writings of John Chrysostom,” Anglican Theological Review 59.1 (1977): 3–20. 28 Elizabeth A. Clark, “John Chrysostom and the Subintroductae,” Church History 46.2 (1977): 171–85; Aideen M. Hartney, “Manly Women and Womanly Men: The Subintroductae and John Chrysostom,” in Desire and Denial in Byzantium: Papers from the Thirty-First Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, March 1997, ed. Liz James (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 1999), 41–48; Blake Leyerle, Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives: John Chrysostom’s Attack on Spiritual Marriage (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 100–42. 29 Christine Shepardson, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria, Patristic Monograph Series 20 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008). 30 See especially Chrysostom’s discussion of the “inclusive” nature of Christ’s army in Hom. Macc. 1 (PG 50.617–24). 31 Maijastina Kahlos, “Rhetorical Strategies in Jerome’s Polemical Works,” in Polemik im Neuen Testament: Texte, Themen, Gattungen und Kontexte, ed. Oda Wischmeyer and Lorenzo Scornaienchi, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 170 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 621–49. 32 Hom. Matt. 70.3 (PG 58.659.21–34). 33 Hom. Jo. 2.5 (PG 59.37.6–38.4); translation: Thomas Aquinas Goggin, trans., St. John Chrysostom: Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist: Homilies 1–47, FOC 33 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 26. 34 Michel Foucault’s work remains fundamental in this regard, and in his work on the topic he also pays attention to the intersections between monstrosity, sexual perversity, and the construction of social, cultural, and religious difference; see Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomonim, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 2003). 35 See esp. Jacob Latham, “ ‘Fabulous Clap-Trap’: Roman Masculinity, the Cult of Magna Mater, and Literary Constructions of the galli at Rome from the Late Republic to Late Antiquity,” Journal of Religion 92.1 (2012): 84–122; on eunuchs in Chrysostom’s thought: De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 256–70. 36 Maria G. Mara, “Aspetti della polemica antimanichea di Giovanni Crisostomo,” in Atti dell’undicesimo simposio Paolino: Paolo tra Tarso e Antiochia. Archeologia/storia/ religion, ed. Luigi Padovese (Rome: Pontificia Università Antonianum, 2008), 195–9. 37 Comm. Gal. 1.4 (F4.11–13); see also Chris L. de Wet, “Paul, Identity-Formation and the Problem of Alterity in John Chrysostom’s Homilies In epistulam ad Galatas commentarius,” Acta Theologica Supplementum 19 (2014): 18–41. Note: for Chrysostom’s homilies on the Pauline Epistles and Hebrews, I  use the text of Frederick Field, Ioannis Chrysostomi interpretatio omnium epistularum Paulinarum, 7 vols. (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1854–62), indicated by a “Field” followed by the volume and page number. 38 The gender ambiguity of eunuchs and those who resemble eunuchs was a cause of anxiety for many late ancient authors, as noted by Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity, The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 206–44. 39 Hom. Heb. 17.5 (Field 7:212). 40 Kuefler, Manly Eunuch, 245–82. 41 Subintr. 10.38–45; in Jean Dumortier, ed., Saint Jean Chrysostome: Les cohabitations suspectes; Comment observer la virginité (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1955), 80–1;

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42 43

44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

translation: Elizabeth A. Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends: Essays and Translations (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1979), 194. Wendy Mayer, “Medicine in Transition: Christian Adaptation in the Later FourthCentury East,” in Shifting Genres in Late Antiquity, ed. Geoffrey Greatrex and Hugh Elton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 11–26. Incompr. 2.50–51; in Jean Daniélou, Anne Marie Malingrey, and Robert Flacelière, eds., Jean Chrysostome: Sur l’incompréhensibilité de Dieu, SC 28 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1970), 182; translation: Paul W. Harkins, trans., St. John Chrysostom: On the Incomprehensible Nature of God, FOC 72 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1984), 92. See also Scand. prologue – 1.6; in Anne-Marie Malingrey, ed., Jean Chrysostome: Sur la providence de Dieu, SC 79 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1961), 52–9. See also Wendy Mayer, “Madness in the Works of John Chrysostom: A Snapshot from Late Antiquity,” in The Concept of Madness from Homer to Byzantium: History and Aspects, ed. Hélène Perdicoyianni-Paleologou, Supplementi di Lexis (Amsterdam: A.M. Hakkert, 2016), 349–73. De Wet, “Problem of Alterity,” 20–36. Gary B. Ferngren, Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 18–19. For a study on the same phenomenon in Augustine, see Jean-Paul Rassinier, “L’Hérésie comme maladie dans l’oeuvre de Saint Augustin,” Mots 26.1 (1991): 65–83. Subintr. 2 (Dumortier, Les cohabitations suspectes, 51). Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1998), 1. For doulology, see De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 1–39. Dayna S. Kalleres, City of Demons: Violence, Ritual, and Christian Power in Late Antiquity (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 77–8. Gregory A. Smith, “How Thin Is a Demon?” Journal of Early Christian Studies 16.4 (2008): 479–512. Mayer, “Medicine in Transition,” 17–18. Chris L. de Wet, “Claiming Corporeal Capital: John Chrysostom’s Homilies on the Maccabean Martyrs,” Journal of Early Christian History 2.1 (2012): 3–21. Laed. 7.37–49; in Anne-Marie Malingrey, ed., Jean Chrysostome: Lettre d’exil, SC 103 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1964), 98; my own translation. Foucault, Abnormal, 31–54. Hom. Col. 4.2 (Field 5:218–21); translation: NPNF1 13:277 (slightly adapted). See Michael J. Smith, “The Role of the Pedagogue in Galatians,” Bibliotheca Sacra 163.650 (2006): 197–214; Sandra R. Joshel, “Nurturing the Master’s Child: Slavery and the Roman Child-Nurse,” Signs 12 (1986): 3–22. De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 155–6; more generally, see J. Albert Harrill, “Coming of Age and Putting on Christ: The Toga Virilis Ceremony, Its Paranaesis, and Paul’s Interpretation of Baptism in Galatians,” Novum Testamentum 44.3 (2002): 252–77. David Rylaarsdam, John Chrysostom on Divine Pedagogy: The Coherence of His Theology and Preaching, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 105–11.

Bibliography Bielefeldt, Heiner, Nazila Ghanea, and Michael Wiener. Freedom of Religion or Belief: An International Law Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

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Brown, Peter R.L. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Clark, Elizabeth A. Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends: Essays and Translations. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1979. ———. “John Chrysostom and the Subintroductae.” Church History 46.2 (1977): 171–85. ———. “Sexual Politics in the Writings of John Chrysostom.” Anglican Theological Review 59.1 (1977): 3–20. Daniélou, Jean, Anne Marie Malingrey, and Robert Flacelière, eds. Jean Chrysostome: Sur l’incompréhensibilité de Dieu. SC 28. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1970. De Wet, Chris L. Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. ———. “John Chrysostom and the Mission to the Goths: Rhetorical and Ethical Perspectives.” Pages 543–65 in Sensitivity Towards Outsiders: Exploring the Dynamic Relationship Between Mission and Ethics in the New Testament and Early Christianity. Edited by Jakobus Kok, Tobias Nicklas, Dieter T. Roth, and Christopher M. Hays. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 364. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014. ———. “Paul, Identity-Formation and the Problem of Alterity in John Chrysostom’s Homilies In epistulam ad Galatas commentarius.” Acta Theologica Supplementum 19 (2014): 18–41. ———. “Claiming Corporeal Capital: John Chrysostom’s Homilies on the Maccabean Martyrs.” Journal of Early Christian History 2.1 (2012): 3–21. Drake, Susanna. Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts. Divinations. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Dumortier, Jean, ed. Saint Jean Chrysostome: Les cohabitations suspectes; Comment observer la virginité. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1955. Ferngren, Gary B. Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Field, Frederick, ed. Ioannis Chrysostomi interpretatio omnium epistularum Paulinarum. 7 vols. Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1854–62. Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975. Edited by Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni. Translated by Graham Burchell. London: Verso, 2003. Garroway, Joshua. “The Law-Observant Lord: John Chrysostom’s Engagement with the Jewishness of Christ.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 18.4 (2010): 591–615. Goggin, Thomas Aquinas, trans. St. John Chrysostom: Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist: Homilies 1–47. FOC 33. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000. Harkins, Paul W., trans. St. John Chrysostom: On the Incomprehensible Nature of God. FOC 72. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1984. Harrill, J. Albert. “Coming of Age and Putting on Christ: The Toga Virilis Ceremony, Its Paranaesis, and Paul’s Interpretation of Baptism in Galatians.” Novum Testamentum 44.3 (2002): 252–77. Hartney, Aideen M. “Manly Women and Womanly Men: The Subintroductae and John Chrysostom.” Pages 41–8 in Desire and Denial in Byzantium: Papers from the Thirty-First Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, March 1997. Edited by Liz James. Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 1999. Jacobs, Andrew S. “A Jew’s Jew: Paul and the Early Christian Problem of Jewish Origins.” Journal of Religion 86 (2006): 258–86.

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Joshel, Sandra R. “Nurturing the Master’s Child: Slavery and the Roman Child-Nurse.” Signs 12 (1986): 3–22. Kahlos, Maijastina. “Rhetorical Strategies in Jerome’s Polemical Works.” Pages 621–49 in Polemik Im Neuen Testament: Texte, Themen, Gattungen und Kontexte. Edited by Oda Wischmeyer and Lorenzo Scornaienchi. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 170. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010. Kalleres, Dayna S. City of Demons: Violence, Ritual, and Christian Power in Late Antiquity. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. King, Helen. Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece. London: Routledge, 1998. Kuefler, Mathew. The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity. The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Laqueur, Walter. The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Latham, Jacob. “ ‘Fabulous Clap-Trap’: Roman Masculinity, the Cult of Magna Mater, and Literary Constructions of the galli at Rome from the Late Republic to Late Antiquity.” Journal of Religion 92.1 (2012): 84–122. Leyerle, Blake. Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives: John Chrysostom’s Attack on Spiritual Marriage. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. Malingrey, Anne-Marie, ed. Jean Chrysostome: Lettre d’exil. SC 103. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1964. ———. ed. Jean Chrysostome: Sur la providence de Dieu. SC 79. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1961. Mara, Maria G. “Aspetti della polemica antimanichea di Giovanni Crisostomo.” Pages 195–9 in Atti dell’undicesimo simposio Paolino: Paolo tra Tarso e Antiochia. Archeologia/storia/religione. Edited by Luigi Padovese. Rome: Pontificia Università Antonianum, 2008. Marchal, Joseph A. “The Exceptional Proves Who Rules: Imperial Sexual Exceptionalism in and Around Paul’s Letters.” Journal of Early Christian History 5.1 (2015): 87–115. Mayer, Wendy. “Medicine in Transition: Christian Adaptation in the Later Fourth-Century East.” Pages 11–26 in Shifting Genres in Late Antiquity. Edited by Geoffrey Greatrex and Hugh Elton. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. ———. “Madness in the Works of John Chrysostom: A Snapshot from Late Antiquity.” Pages 349–73 in The Concept of Madness from Homer to Byzantium: History and Aspects. Edited by Hélène Perdicoyianni-Paleologou. Supplementi di Lexis. Amsterdam: A.M. Hakkert, 2016. The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 1. Edited by Philip Schaff. 1886–1889. 14 vols. Repr. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994. Patrologia graeca. Edited by J.-P. Migne. 162 vols. Paris, 1857–1886. Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Next Wave: New Directions in Women’s Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Rassinier, Jean-Paul. ‘L’Hérésie comme maladie dans l’oeuvre de Saint Augustin.’ Mots 26.1 (1991): 65–83. Rylaarsdam, David. John Chrysostom on Divine Pedagogy: The Coherence of His Theology and Preaching. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

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Sandwell, Isabella. Religious Identity in Late Antiquity: Greeks, Jews and Christians in Antioch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Schlee, Günther. How Enemies Are Made: Towards a Theory of Ethnic and Religious Conflict. New York: Berghahn, 2011. Sharma, Serena K. “ ‘Just Peace’ or Peace Postponed: Jus post bellum and the Aftermath of Iraq.” Pages 167–82 in Religion, Conflict and Military Intervention. Edited by Rosemary Durward and Lee Marsden. London: Routledge, 2016. Shepardson, Christine. Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria. Patristic Monograph Series 20. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008. Smith, Gregory A. “How Thin Is a Demon?” Journal of Early Christian Studies 16.4 (2008): 479–512. Smith, Michael J. “The Role of the Pedagogue in Galatians.” Bibliotheca Sacra 163.650 (2006): 197–214. Stanfill, Jonathan P. “Embracing the Barbarian: John Chrysostom’s Pastoral Care of the Goths.” Ph.D. dissertation, Fordham University, 2015. Žižek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London: Verso, 2001.

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5 GIVE IT UP FOR GOD Wealth, suffering, and the rhetoric of religious persecution in John of Ephesus’s Church History Christine Shepardson John of Ephesus (ca. 507–588/9), a Christian monk from Amida in northern Mesopotamia (modern Diyarbakır, Turkey), wrote a multi-volume Church History and a lengthy Lives of the Eastern Saints from the capital of the Byzantine Empire. His renunciation of the Council of Chalcedon of 451 and thus of imperial orthodoxy, however, plus the fact that he wrote in Syriac, meant that his writings and history, like those of most anti-Chalcedonian leaders, were rejected by the Greek and Latin Christians whose perspectives most western scholars inherit.1 Despite John’s absence until the recent era from much western scholarship on early Christianity,2 his writings nevertheless played a critical role in helping sixth-century anti-Chalcedonian Christians persist in the face of imperial pressure. A century later, John’s co-religionists claimed the title of Christian orthodoxy in regions that had become separated from the Byzantine Empire by recent Arab conquests, setting the stage for a schism within Christianity that lasts until today. Examining the rhetorical construction of violence and suffering in the surviving Parts 2 and 3 of John’s Church History offers significant insights into identity construction and the radicalization of religious difference in this period.3 John of Ephesus’s writings are saturated with a rhetoric of suffering and persecution, and his numerous stories of exiles and martyrdoms describe frequent acts of imperially sanctioned physical violence against anti-Chalcedonian Christians like himself. The effects of John’s rhetoric of suffering from persecution were strengthened, however, by the fact that he wrote to audiences in Constantinople and Mesopotamia who had also in recent memory been devastated by the ravages of the bubonic plague, crippling famines, and brutal wars with Persia.4 In this context, true Christians were not, according to John, those who escaped suffering, because people suffered as a just divine response to human sinfulness; rather, John insistently described true Christians as those who nobly faced adversity – including the loss of material comforts – without abandoning their devotion to religious truth,5 a depiction that had particularly pointed implications for wealthy individuals in his audience.

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Jan Bremmer has challenged the usefulness of the phrase “religious violence” for antiquity, given the different constructions and experiences of both violence and “religion” between the ancient world and our own.6 Scholars like David Engels and Peter Van Nuffelen have likewise noted, “given the embedded nature of religion in Antiquity, it is methodologically impossible and unsound to try to detect supposedly clear examples of religious competition.”7 Similarly, scholars have long challenged earlier tendencies to accept ancient narratives of violence and separately ancient histories at face value without questioning their rhetorical purposes.8 Such scholarship encourages us to read the descriptions of the violence of political and ecclesiastical “religious” persecution in John’s Church History in conversation with those about the suffering caused by war and plague, and to consider the potential consequences of such rhetoric in Constantinople and Mesopotamia in the years of increased anti-Chalcedonian persecution in the 570s. Knowing that Syrian Orthodox Christians (and the Coptic, Armenian, and Ethiopian Orthodox churches with which they are in communion) survive to this day has led some to accept John’s rhetoric of two sixth-century religious communities sharply divided by the steadfast resistance of one to the imperially sanctioned persecution wrought by the other.9 Reading between the lines, however, suggests that John usefully deployed a rhetoric of suffering and persecution to galvanize an audience that was not yet entirely coherent and that largely fell short of his ideals of religious zeal,10 many of whom struggled to give up even their worldly goods, let alone their lives, for the sake of anti-Chalcedonian Christianity’s survival.

The just suffering of God’s true people The ongoing suffering of God’s true followers is a recurring theme throughout John’s Church History (Hist. eccl.), a text that he produced in three parts from Constantinople, where he lived much of his life after he and the other anti-Chalcedonian monks from his home region around Amida were expelled in 536/7.11 John appears to have circulated Hist. eccl. 1 and 2 not too long before renewed antiChalcedonian persecution in the capital in 571 under the emperor Justin II.12 Hist. eccl. 3, on the other hand, does not seem to have been part of John’s initial plan, but the renewed persecution against anti-Chalcedonian Christians under Justin II prompted John to write the additional books. Hist. eccl. 3 covers events primarily in the capital from 571–588 – John produced it piecemeal in the 570s and 580s, ending by 588 when John was in his 80s and presumably near death since we never hear from him again.13 Hist. eccl. 1 is not extant, but Hist. eccl. 2 and 3 are rich resources for studying the development of anti-Chalcedonian Christianity. While it is easy to be caught up in the insistent and lurid descriptions in John’s Church History of the persecution of his fellow anti-Chalcedonian Christians at the hands of the brutal Chalcedonian Christians in charge of the empire, a close reading of the rhetoric of suffering in Hist. eccl. 2 followed by a comparison of Hist. eccl. 3 complicates the picture he presents.

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In fact, although John goes into great detail about the religiously motivated violence of a few leaders, the suffering caused by natural disasters and disease plays an exponentially greater role in his narrative. The number of monks exiled from their monasteries and of people who die in religiously motivated violence pales in comparison to the thousands who die from the destruction caused by earthquakes and the devastation of the bubonic plague.14 In this context, John weaves a clear and powerful message: since God sees and controls everything, everyone will receive a just reward, so it is in the interest of each person to persevere in religious righteousness – that is, for John, committed to the anti-Chalcedonian Christian community – come religious persecution, earthquakes, or bubonic plague.15 John writes, “We brought these things into the record of commemorated events for our successors in order that by reading, they might reflect over their final consummation.”16 Memorials play a significant role in negotiating community identity and the authority of traditions, people, and texts.17 As a lasting memorial of the greatest saints and sinners of John’s time, his History is a warning for those who are alive and still have the opportunity to choose the path of righteousness by persevering through earthly suffering – great and small – to gain eternal reward. In his Church History, John created a narrative world in which each individual’s every thought and deed was known to God and to the larger community, even in moments that seemed private or deals that at the time seemed secret, and John lauded or condemned the individuals according to how they behaved. In this text, God is an all-seeing judge, not unlike the guard of Jeremy Bentham’s panoptikon, made famous by Michel Foucault.18 John praised three Magian Persian converts to anti-Chalcedonian Christianity whom John says were martyred in 509/10, for example, as “blessed” role models whose behavior should be remembered and imitated. He applauded the converts who “ten days after their spiritual birth, departed to God in admirable martyrdom through swift death by the sword,”19 assuring his reader of the martyrs’ eternal reward. In another example from the same period, however, John describes people who called themselves Christians who provided examples of God’s willingness to punish those who behaved badly, even when their behavior seemed hidden: Satan inspired among some people the error of neither eating bread, nor drinking water. Some of the brethren of their monasteries are not known but others, archimandrites, drew upon themselves vain glory and futile infamy. They falsely declared that they did not eat bread and did not drink water, and they claimed to be abstainers from wine. But the natural feelings of hunger and thirst they impiously satisfied with the Holy Mysteries.20 In this case, while the behavior falsely appeared praiseworthy, John calls their glory “vain” and their fame “futile,” leaving little doubt to the reader that God – and, as importantly, now John and his audience – knew their deception. John

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leaves his audience with the sense that good and bad behavior, even in secret, will be rewarded or punished. Beyond the ephemeral warning about an all-knowing, all-seeing God, John’s History itself is a commemorative record for posterity of particular praiseworthy or incriminating behavior, as well as lists of individuals along with their religious status as “orthodox” or “heretic,” and if they suffered persecution, jail, or exile for “the true faith” or not. John mentions, for example, “The names of the holy bishops who were chased out of their sees” when Justin I  became emperor (r. 518–527),21 including a long list of names, “In all, fifty-four bishops,” and where they were from and if they died in exile;22 and elsewhere he writes of the year 551, “At this time these bishops are famous among the believers,”23 followed by another list of names and where they were from with the word “persecuted” following those who had earned the description. John’s History thus presents a clear message to laity, monks, and clergy alike that they will be accountable to God for their every choice, and remembered indefinitely in the texts and traditions of John’s community, for good or for ill.24 John’s narrative likewise contains a strong sense of divine control over the world and the justice of God’s actions, even in the face of what we would call “natural” disasters. John thus reads in the world around him signs that sometimes foreshadow and sometimes interpret such otherwise unpredictable events. He frequently reports signs in the sky – sometimes an eclipse or a comet – that attend the calamities he describes.25 John and his fellow citizens usually interpreted such signs as messages from God, such as when John says that in the mid-520s a star appeared in the East similar to a huge spear. . . . Fear overwhelmed everybody . . . so that many people would talk about many things they thought to be imminent in the future – a chastisement, war and perdition, because of the terrible appearance of the star. Nor was there any delay in these things: many afflictions followed quickly.26 Among other disasters that followed, in Antioch “Most of the city suddenly caught fire, as if as a result of God’s wrath, after He had given warning by the sign about the collapse and the destruction that threatened.”27 John reports that after another terrible earthquake and fire in Antioch the following year, On the third day after the collapse, which was Sunday, a cross of light appeared in the sky. . . . All who remained alive saw and were moved and cried kyrie eleison. . . . Thereafter God’s mercy and grace were shown in that thirty and forty days after, people were found alive.28 John’s History delivers a clear message that while life is subject to unpredictable disasters, God is the source of all things, and there are just reasons for God’s actions.

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John is explicit that some such catastrophes are God’s response to human sinfulness. He mentions, for example, “three bitter scourges that took place at that time [557/8] because of people angering God with their sins,” and he tells his audience, “We have put them down for the memory [cuhdānā] of posterity, in order to stir the memories [cuhdāne] of all future generations to repentance and prayer.”29 In this case, John is clear that his lengthy descriptions of human suffering should prod his audience to respect and honor God, which in John’s interpretation would require strict adherence to anti-Chalcedonian Christianity, even if it caused some discomfort in what he presents as this brief and tenuous life in the physical world. John frequently tells stories in his History that demonstrate God’s earthly punishment or reward for the behavior of a notable figure, personalizing the stories for his audience. He writes, for example, about the “heretical” bishop Macedonius under the emperor Anastasius (r. 492–518): “When many evils thus came about due to Macedonius, the heretic, God wished that his wickedness might be removed from the church of the believers and go to the synagogue of the Jews, his adherents. Then the emperor gave orders about his exile.”30 Likewise Euphrasius, the Chalcedonian bishop of Antioch, died after falling in a cauldron of pitch during the massively destructive earthquake of 526. While his flesh dissolved in the boiling cauldron, his head caught on the rim and thus stayed above the pitch so that the earthquake’s survivors could recognize him and know of his divine punishment: “For the believers, it was a wonderful thing, for they remembered the impudence of his evil deeds, his cruel plans, persecution, and pillage which he had done, and tribulations that he caused people to suffer.”31 John also, however, notes the divine rewards that good behavior receives, such as his praise of anti-Chalcedonian monks who were being persecuted: “God is good and rich in favors towards everyone who calls upon Him. When He saw them being persecuted because of His name, He did not leave them to be tormented.”32 Not only individuals but also communities could bear the brunt of God’s punishment. John sometimes, for example, attributed floods and earthquakes to “the sins” of the community, as in the story of a terrible flood in Edessa in the early 520s. Asclepius, the bishop of Edessa, had seized and tortured some antiChalcedonian monks the day before the flood, “And so it seemed to everyone,” John wrote, “that it was because of the tribulation of these blessed men that God became angry with the bishop and the city.”33 Likewise, John claimed that an earthquake in Pompeiopolis in the late 530s was “caused by our sins,”34 and an earthquake in Amida a decade later was “either because of sins, or as a test of chastisement.”35 John’s History conveys the distinct impression that a person or a community could reasonably expect a physical judgment from God in response to especially good or bad behavior. Not all divine punishments were immediately visible, however, and sometimes John was left to explain how his Chalcedonian persecutors appeared to lead successful and full lives in this world. In these cases, John relied on the promise of an eternal punishment in the afterlife, such as in his discussion of Paul, a bishop of

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Antioch who persecuted anti-Chalcedonian Christians. John writes of the bishop Paul’s death in the 520s: When Paul’s first year came to an end the emperor saw that because of his tyranny the world had severed itself from the church, and having learned about many evil things that he did, he removed him and winnowed him out from the church. He also departed this life and went to render an account of those things before God’s justice, and to obtain the retribution for his doings. That which was due for his error he would receive in his own person, as it is written. (Rom 1.27)36 Ephrem, another bishop of Antioch who persecuted John’s community, died after fleeing the city, leading John to comment ominously, “And so it befell him, and thus four years later in shame he passed away from life here. But there – God knows what was in wait for him.”37 John demonstrates in his History that human life is precarious in a world racked by devastating earthquakes, famines, and floods, even if they are all God’s just responses to human sinfulness. John’s History paints a world in which deadly disasters were frighteningly common. In fact, Hist. eccl. 2 seems at times to be an overwhelming list of destructive earthquakes, often with terrible fires, and sometimes famines in their wake. The catastrophic earthquakes in Antioch in the early sixth century, for example, leveled most of the city and destroyed buildings and lives from the quake itself and the fires that followed.38 John also describes destruction from earthquakes in Nicopolis, Arsamosata, Ptolemais, Tyre, and Sidon, Rhodes, Seleucia, and Daphne, Dyrrachium, Corinth, Anazarbos, Pompeiopolis, Laodicea, Amida, Nicomedia, Botrys, Cyzicus, and multiple times in the cities of Phoenicia, Arabia, and Palestine (i.e., Berytus, Tripoli, Tyre, Sidon, Sarepta, Byblos, and Antarados), and in Constantinople.39 Other cities suffered floods that killed innumerable people – most notably in Edessa and Berytus.40 Add to this John’s descriptions of mass cases of madness and the ravages of war,41 and the History gives the impression that the world is a dangerous place with death possible around every corner. Although many of the afflictions that John describes in his History are not caused by people, as Bremmer’s work might lead us to expect, John does not distinguish them in kind from other forms of suffering caused by active imperial and/or ecclesiastical persecution.42 By doing so, John suggests that suffering is a necessary part of humanity’s fallen existence, and that God’s true people can be distinguished not by their lack of suffering, but by their choice to persevere as God’s people despite their suffering in this world in order to claim an eternal reward in the next. This would be particularly convenient for John when he turned from the topic of earthquakes and plague to the topic of imperial persecution, since the latter could easily have been interpreted as

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God favoring John’s politically successful opponents and also often offered the choice of escaping from the suffering through apostatizing to the Chalcedonian church, something that John strongly wanted to discourage those in his audience from doing. Stories of violence and persecution against anti-Chalcedonian Christians pervade Part 2 of John’s History. There were riots in Constantinople when the emperor Anastasius tried to introduce the Trisagion into the liturgy43 and a violent riot in Edessa.44 John records numerous examples of anti-Chalcedonian bishops and monks being forced into exile under Justin I,45 highlighting the added cruelty of their removal in the middle of winter storms when they suffered not only from the expulsion but also from bitter cold and hunger.46 These descriptions go hand in hand with frequent accounts of imprisonment under Justin I, sometimes including torture, but more often the lesser torments of cold, illness, rats, and other discomforts.47 John describes that after Abraham Bar Kaili became the Chalcedonian bishop of Amida in 527, “Then Satan possessed him totally and he devoted himself to violent persecution without mercy, to pillage and the destruction of people’s souls.”48 This message is reinforced through several examples of individuals alongside the general stories of the persecution of entire monasteries or cities of anti-Chalcedonian Christians. Some like Mara, the anti-Chalcedonian bishop of Amida, actively chose suffering rather than changing their theological commitments: “But the blessed Mara chose to be driven away together with the staunch ones and to leave his see and not to succumb to loving the bishop’s chair more than the truth of the immaculate orthodox faith. So he accepted exile for the sake of Christ’s truth.”49 The reader is left with the distinct knowledge that God’s people are a people who persevere. One of John’s explicit reasons for writing is to memorialize those who have acted well and dishonor the memory of those who have not in the hope that those still alive to hear his stories will repent of any bad behavior and willingly suffer (temporary) physical misfortune in this world for the promise of eternal reward in the next.50 He writes regarding an earthquake in Constantinople that he dates to in 551, “The mercy of God the compassionate being mingled with the earthquakes summoned the people to life in repentance and thus everywhere all the people were constant in supplication in the churches, even spending nights in them in sorrow and tears of repentance.”51 This story betrays John’s hope that these lessons learned through physical adversity might lead to better behavior in the future – “better,” of course, as defined by John himself. By conflating “religious” persecution with other difficult conditions, John compounds his messages regarding the certainty of suffering and the significance of persevering without abandoning God. His History’s recurring emphasis on the violence of persecution obscures the fact that the largest numbers of people who suffer in the stories he recounts are victims of disasters that he attributes to God. Nevertheless, the underlying text of John’s narrative teaches his audience that God sees all and justly rewards or punishes each person, sometimes in this life but always in the more important and longer-lasting life to come. John circulated Hist. eccl. 2 in the beginning of Justin 92

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II’s reign, strongly suggesting that his message that it was in the interest of each person to persevere in the face of any suffering, particularly that caused by imperial or ecclesiastical persecution, was still relevant then. Those who persevered would, John promised, be commemorated gloriously in their religious community in this world and rewarded by God in the next.

Wealth or salvation: lessons from the plague While it is perhaps most difficult to persevere in the face of physical violence against one’s body, John’s History suggests that the anti-Chalcedonian community also faced attrition due to less drastic circumstances, especially regarding material wealth. Specifically, John claims that wealthy and thus powerful antiChalcedonian Christians were sometimes pressured to accept communion with the Chalcedonian episcopacy in order to protect their earthly possessions, providing examples in Hist. eccl. 2 set in the time of Justin I and in Hist. eccl. 3 from the time of Justin II. As a result, another theme of John’s History is the exponentially greater value of eternal salvation over the material riches of this world, a teaching that was – judging from John’s rhetoric – a hard sell to some of the wealthy elite in Constantinople and Amida.52 From John’s own refusal to accept material incentives to renounce his religious opposition to Chalcedon after the death of the empress Theodora (d. 548),53 to the use of lepers to ruin the material goods of wealthy anti-Chalcedonian Christians under Justin I, to the devastation and warnings wrought by the bubonic plague in the early 540s – John’s example par excellence – John’s History repeatedly stresses the folly of placing one’s hopes in the material rather than the spiritual world.54 Writing in the early years of Justin’s reign about the martyrs of Najran from the 520s, for example, John praises the wealthy couple Ruhmi and Harith, who not only persevere in the face of violent physical persecution, but also renounce their substantial material wealth in the process.55 Ruhmi walks the streets with her head uncovered, reminding the city of her “gold and silver, servants and handmaids and numerous fields and (their) products . . . 40,000 denarii, numerous golden and silver adornments, as well as pearls and beautiful and resplendent garments.”56 “From today on,” she says, “I am free of all these things. . . . I have not loved my gold, my silver and everything I possess as I love my God. . . . Now I leave upon earth all that is lovely to the eyes and the body and is transient, and I go to receive from my Lord something which is not transient.”57 Ruhmi’s husband Harith likewise chooses martyrdom rather than apostasy, and warns his persecutors about the transience of this world.58 Harith furthermore stipulates that anyone who apostatizes cannot inherit from his vast wealth after his martyrdom.59 Ruhmi and Harith emerge from John’s narrative as ideal role models who see the value of their religious commitments and renounce vast amounts of wealth – and even their lives – rather than reject their Christianity.60 A strong counterexample about the dangers of choosing material wealth over the salvation promised through the anti-Chalcedonian community comes in 93

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John’s retelling of the events surrounding a tsunami at Berytus. John describes an earthquake in the 550s that caused the sea to pull back two miles from the port city of Berytus and other cities on the coast, revealing sunken ships full of goods and treasure.61 While John notes that “this terrible thing” should “move people and bring them to contrition and repentance,” leading them to despise “not only these worldly things but also their lives,” many people instead “rushed and stepped onto the great sea in order to plunder the awesome treasures that had been hidden in the depths of the sea.”62 “Through the sin of covetousness disastrous to their lives,” John observes, thousands of people rushed after the treasure and drowned when the sea suddenly returned in a flood, and “thus they attained utter perdition.”63 In John’s view, this temptation of material wealth threatened and ultimately destroyed not only the lives but also the salvation of those who revealed their “covetous” desires when they rushed after the treasure. He presents their story as a sharp warning to his audience against the dangers that such covetousness can bring. The most forceful warning against choosing material wealth over salvation, however, comes from John’s painful depiction of the plague that racked Constantinople and other cities in the East, particularly in the capital in the early 540s. At a loss for how to convey the unfathomable scenes of the plague’s destruction, John turned to the laments of biblical prophets to try to comprehend the sudden and gruesome deaths of “innumerable people of all ages” “over the whole earth,”64 what John calls “the desolation of the entire habitable earth of humanity, which has been corrupted by its sins.”65 While John relates many stories about the ravages of the plague from Alexandria to Constantinople, a recurring theme is the critical importance of renouncing material goods that only serve to corrupt the soul and hasten death. As John writes explicitly, Such was the message of that angel who was ordered to fight people with this scourge until they should spurn all matters of this world – if not of their own will, then against it – so that everybody who might incite his mind to revolt and still covet things of this world was by him quickly deprived of life.66 While there are several stories that instruct the reader in this message, the story from a city on the Egyptian border is John’s first detailed warning on this subject. This is the story of seven men who greedily looted all the treasures of their city when they and a young boy were the only people left alive from the plague. On the third day of carrying the wealth into one house for storage, “the wrath came upon them. Immediately they fell and all of them except that little boy within one hour perished on top of what they had gathered.”67 When a rich man who had fled the city before the catastrophe sent servants to investigate what had happened to his property, one of these servants also tried to steal as much gold as he could carry, along with the young boy, and both of them quickly died. The rest of the servants

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fled “and thus were saved.”68 While the moral of the story seems hard to miss, John prefaces it with an explicit warning: Now another sign of menace and of God’s just sentence. Since in this way the riches of many people were left unguarded, gold, silver, and other things . . . if it happened that somebody wished to take and gather something in order to take possession, on the very same day the sentence would come upon him.69 The message that John read in the destruction was clear – coveting material wealth was a death knell; your only hope to escape what he understood to be a punishment from God was to shed any earthly possessions and any desire for material things and focus night and day on the salvation of your soul. John imparted this message less than thirty years later to an audience that included wealthy antiChalcedonian Christians who faced a Chalcedonian empire with a history of using material goods to encourage submission to the imperial episcopacy. John reiterated this message through other stories about the plague’s time in Constantinople, including praise for those who modeled good behavior and warnings drawn from the deaths of those who did not. In particular, John describes some in Constantinople who heard tales of the plague from elsewhere, and prepared themselves before the pestilence reached the capital, much as Noah, John says, prepared the ark before the flood began.70 John notes that these people spent the days preceding the plague’s arrival preparing by devoting themselves utterly to “almsgiving and also by distributing their possessions to the needy.”71 By ridding themselves of their material possessions, those “who feared and trembled were able to buy for themselves the kingdom.”72 By demonstrating disdain for the material world, John suggests, they had earned an eternal heavenly reward and, he implies, even safe passage in this world through the dangers of the plague. He contrasts this with a dire warning regarding those who did not behave thus, saying, “Those, however, who neglected and refused to send their riches in advance left them to others and themselves were snatched away from their possessions.”73 Alms are likewise the subject of another story in John’s History that ends with a similar refrain. Again he describes the opulence of abandoned treasure left for the taking by those struck dead by the plague, but warns his reader that whenever someone came to claim some of the material wealth, “immediately the angel of death would appear, as if standing behind the man, and he would faint and be struck down.”74 In this case, John says that this caused even those who were genuinely in need to decline any gifts they were offered, since “those who did accept, perished.”75 Some in particular who tried to amass great wealth and promptly died caused such fear in others that John records, “from now on gold, silver and also all material goods were despised in everyone’s eyes.”76 As elsewhere, John turns this story of plague and greed into a warning for religious vigilance, even – and perhaps particularly – in the face of worldly suffering, and certainly at the cost of one’s material wealth.

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The comments that John of Ephesus attributes to the martyr Harith of Najran suggest that there could sometimes be material advantages to abandoning one’s Christianity, as Harith claims to thwart those who might have expected to inherit his wealth by renouncing their religion and benefitting from his martyrdom. Indeed, Part 2 of John’s History contains two specific examples of political leaders in the time of Justin I using material wealth as a means to try to persuade lay Christians to renounce their anti-Chalcedonian affiliation, in addition to John’s claim that he himself rejected bribes to accept Chalcedon after Theodora’s death. In a story about bishop Abraham Bar Kaili’s persecution of anti-Chalcedonian Christians in Amida under Justin I, John describes the bishop’s violent use of monks and military personnel to persecute his Christian opponents.77 In addition to physical violence against their bodies, such as forcing them to take the Eucharist from a Chalcedonian priest, the bishop also employed a band of lepers to foul the personal property of wealthy antiChalcedonian Christians in Amida. John writes that the lepers moved into the targeted Christian’s house and by their malice they dropped their rottenness and filthiness on (the owners’) fine and clean household equipment and rolled in their beds filling them with filthy pus and making them repulsive.  .  .  . When they had eaten up and made repulsive everything that was in the house to which they had been sent . . . they entered (the storeroom) and opened flasks of wine or jars of oil or honey and the rest. They gathered all and plunged their hands into these vessels leaving pus and making them repulsive and filthy. . . . The consequence was therefore the total destruction of the house to which the lepers had been sent.78 In another contemporaneous example that echoes this strategy, Ephrem Bar Aphiana, then bishop of Antioch, threatened the lay Christians who were protecting the anti-Chalcedonian monks who had been exiled by promising to have the military “stay in your houses and eat up and plunder everything you have.”79 This succeeded in persuading the monks to leave rather than force the material ruin of their supporters. Part 3 of John’s History explicitly mentions imperial pressure on wealthy antiChalcedonian Christians under Justin II to renounce their rejection of Chalcedon or risk losing their possessions and status, and Hist. eccl. 2 implies that leaders forced similar choices decades earlier under Justin I (d. 527). Given that this was a strategy at least, according to John, under Justin I (r. 518–527), under Justinian I after Theodora’s death in 548, and under Justin II in the 570s, the strength of John’s warnings against letting material goods stand in the way of salvation raises the question of whether wealthy anti-Chalcedonian Christians continued to face similar pressures when John circulated Hist. eccl. 2, presumably in the late 560s.

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God and Mammon: pressing choices under Justin II While the period haunted by the bubonic plague contains the most strident warnings about the tenuous nature of human life and the importance of privileging spiritual over material goods, the themes of Part 2 of John’s History are echoed again in Hist. eccl. 3, which John produced in pieces from the 570s to 588. A brief study of Hist. eccl. 3 confirms that these recurring themes are consistent with John’s writings even though Hist. eccl. 2 survives only through its later use by Pseudo-Dionysius. Whereas Hist. eccl. 2 privileges the regions of John’s two homes of Amida and Constantinople, Hist. eccl. 3 is an addendum to his history of the empire and contains a stronger focus on Constantinople, including John’s imprisonments and the personal suffering he endured. Written by John while he was in his 70s and allegedly in furtive spurts from a prison cell,80 Hist. eccl. 3 confirms John’s insistence about the dangers of wealth and the virtue of suffering, and provides a closer look at some wealthy anti-Chalcedonian individuals such as those who seem to have been on his mind as he produced his earlier History. Hist. eccl. 3 again narrates the suffering of God’s people, but in this case more often through direct persecution, violence, imprisonment, and exile than in Hist. eccl. 2. Part 3.2 most notably emphasizes John’s personal discomfort in prison, naming everything from gout, to solitude, to lice, fleas, flies, gnats, bugs, and vermin that tortured his body and threatened his sanity during his first and longest imprisonment under Justin II, from 571–574.81 Gout plagues John again during a later eighteen-day imprisonment in the winter of 578/9 during which he also suffered from the cold and the rain that leaked into his cell, creating pools of water on the floor.82 Whether the stories are about John himself or any of the numerous monks, virgins, bishops, and laypeople he meets, the anti-Chalcedonian Christians in John’s Hist. eccl. 3 continue to be a people who suffers. As in Hist. eccl. 2, however, Hist. eccl. 3 continues John’s argument that God will mete out appropriate justice, suggesting clearly that it is in his reader’s interest to persevere through the suffering and remain true to the anti-Chalcedonian cause. The emperor Justin II is for John a poster-child of such divine justice. After six years of peace under his reign, Justin “at last had been turned [ethpek] to a difficult and undisciplined [dlā ṭaksā] persecution.”83 John describes what Philip Wood calls “the lapse of Justin into madness in 573,”84 as “the chastisement that was from heaven,” which John believes happened as a result of the emperor’s violence toward the anti-Chalcedonian Christians.85 John explicitly presents this example of Justin II so that future leaders who likewise have great power might fear “and so that the powerful judgment of God that came upon the emperor Justin” will cause fear to form “in the heart of all people.”86 Like Hist. eccl. 2, Hist. eccl. 3 teaches the dangers of persecuting God’s people, the anti-Chalcedonian Christians, and the rewards for persevering in God’s good graces. Perhaps of greatest significance for this chapter is that Part 3 of John’s History also echoes Part 2’s warnings that material possessions sometimes become

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a stumbling block between a person and his or her eternal salvation. While the stories in Hist. eccl. 3 are mild in comparison to the surreal images of heaps of abandoned wealth and mass destruction from the plague, John nevertheless notes that when anti-Chalcedonian Christians resisted efforts in the 570s under the emperor Justin II and his wife Sophia to require Chalcedonian unity, they “were continually expecting trial and the destruction of their estates and their families, and of everything they owned, and thus everyone agreed about their complete destruction.”87 That material goods were a pawn in such efforts to persuade antiChalcedonian Christians to join in communion with the Chalcedonian clergy is clear from John’s story of two women who resisted. John describes “a severe attack from all sides” upon two wealthy women “with many others of patrician rank and the rest,” with their attackers “breathing harsh threats of fire, and threatening death.”88 The other anti-Chalcedonian Christians wearied in the struggle from the severity of the suffering of the persecution, and on account of their riches and their houses and their children and their estates, they submitted to communion in appearance alone. But these two persevered and stood firm unto death, and they surrendered themselves to death, and they scorned possessions, and children, and households.89 Even these two, however, could not bear the ongoing humiliation and physical labor to which they were subjected, and eventually they also submitted to the Chalcedonian clergy, at which time “they were released and returned to their homes” and “retained their former rank.”90 Unwilling to sacrifice their material wealth, many Christians, John claims, apostatized and at least nominally joined the Chalcedonian church rather than sacrifice their possessions, family, and status.91 Fortunately for his community, he relates that “the time of the chastisement that came from God” followed closely, bringing relief to these women and everyone else.92 This story reveals a great deal about John’s concerns regarding the survival of anti-Chalcedonian Christianity, and a recognition among Chalcedonian leaders about the role of wealth and status could play in the negotiation of religious orthodoxy. Like the stories in Hist. eccl. 2 about the deployment of lepers and military personnel to demolish the homes and possessions of wealthy anti-Chalcedonian Christians, this story from Hist. eccl. 3 again explicitly accuses Chalcedonian leaders of threatening the wealth of powerful anti-Chalcedonian Christians as a means of convincing them to join in communion with Chalcedonian clergy and thus submit to the imperial power structures. The story of the two women who initially resisted but then relinquished suggests the amount of pressure that such tactics could place on the empire’s wealthy and powerful figures. The narrative also, however, implies that unity under an imperially sanctioned episcopacy was a higher priority to the authorities in John’s story than persecution for its own sake, since John tells his audience that the women’s homes and rank were both 98

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restored when they capitulated. The recurrence of such tales offers strong reason to think that John believed that the future of anti-Chalcedonian Christianity rested not only in the hands of its monks but also in the continued support of its wealthy and powerful benefactors. While nothing can compete with the vast threat and destruction of the bubonic plague to teach the uselessness of material wealth and the capricious nature of life and death, John’s Hist. eccl. 3 continued to stress the importance of God’s people being willing to abandon their material possessions in order to receive their eternal reward.

Conclusion John’s History is often mined for historical events but is more rarely studied for the ways in which John shaped his descriptions to serve his own ends. John describes a sharp Chalcedonian/anti-Chalcedonian divide; a world filled with suffering from wars, plague, earthquakes, famine, and anti-Chalcedonian persecution; and staunch perseverance among God’s true people. In this context, John’s message was that only complete and orthodox devotion to God offered any hope for eternal salvation. Jan Bremmer has pointed out that “religious persecution” was not a recognizably distinct category in late antiquity in the same way that it appears to us in the west today.93 Drawing all suffering together, placing the focus on eternal salvation rather than the physical world, and reminding his audience of God’s justice helped John of Ephesus to redefine the experiences of his audience in ways that he hoped would prevent apostasy, which in a Chalcedonian empire threatened not only the salvation of an individual, but the survival of the larger community. With their bishops in and out of prison and their monks in and out of exile, anti-Chalcedonian Christians faced a public relations challenge. In a world where people had long believed that gods favored their followers with earthly rewards, moments of earthly suffering required explanation. Like Jews facing the Temple’s destruction and early Christians facing the Roman death penalty, antiChalcedonian Christians drew on earlier role models and narratives of God’s ultimate justness to explain their situation. In this less than ideal context, John weaves a narrative in which all people suffer (justly) and God rewards in the afterlife those true followers who steadfastly persevere without apostatizing; he seemed especially intent on conveying this message to Christians of some means as imperial pressures to accept Chalcedon increased in the decades after the empress Theodora’s death and the Second Council of Constantinople (553). John crafted his Church History carefully to construct God’s people as a people who perseveres through temporary sufferings of this world in favor of spiritual rewards in the next. Ideally this suffering would come from religious persecution – the more violent, the better to make the sainthood of the sufferers more clear. Nevertheless, imprisonment and exile could substitute for martyrdom in a pinch – cold and lice for the more severe tortures of the early Christian martyrs; and if you were not able or willing to die as a martyr, even accepting the loss of property 99

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and status could help. Scholars describe a lull in imperial persecution against antiChalcedonian Christians under Justinian I and the early years of Justin II’s reign, not least because John himself refers to the persecution that began in 571 as a sharp change from Justin II’s earlier stance.94 John’s Church History raises the possibility, however, that even in more peaceful years wealthy Christians might at least think they risked their status and property if they did not visibly align themselves with Chalcedonian orthodoxy and the imperially sanctioned episcopacy. In a bid for the survival of a Christianity that rejected imperial orthodoxy, John encouraged his audience to weigh carefully the costs of religious resistance versus apostasy in a calculus that he hoped would inspire more than only the most deeply committed monks and priests and would lead even the wealthy and less firmly committed members of his audience to forfeit property, status, and perhaps even their freedom or their lives for God, eternal salvation, and the survival of anti-Chalcedonian Christianity.

Notes I would like to thank Chris de Wet for organizing the conference that encouraged me to produce this chapter, and Chris and his colleagues for hosting us so generously at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. I also thank the participants of that 2014 University of South Africa Symposium for New Testament and Early Christian Studies, the faculty research seminar on Late Antiquity at the University of Tennessee, and the Cultures of the Late Antique Mediterranean consortium between the University of Tennessee and Vanderbilt University for their feedback on earlier versions of this essay. Christine Shepardson is a guest lecturer in the Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies, University of South Africa, Pretoria. 1 In this chapter I use “anti-Chalcedonian” to refer to what some scholars call Miaphysite (or, earlier, Monophysite) Christianity. No terminology is without complications, but I prefer to highlight the individuals’ relation to the Council of Chalcedon rather than suggesting a coherent community that did not yet exist as such in this period. For related reasons, Volker Menze recommends the term “non-Chalcedonian” in his study of this period: Volker Menze, Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Menze is concerned that “antiChalcedonian” retains too much emphasis on doctrinal issues for his study, which “deals mainly with historical and not Christological issues” (Menze, Justinian, 2), an observation that supports the use of “anti-Chalcedonian” for this current chapter on John’s Church History and precisely on issues of religious orthodoxy. 2 In 1990 Susan Ashbrook Harvey noted the “uneven treatment” that John of Ephesus had received in scholarship, and she contributed greatly to his reintroduction into western scholarship with her study Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and the Lives of the Eastern Saints (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), xii. Harvey’s bibliography notes much of the early scholarship, which since the publication of her book now also includes the doctoral dissertation by Jan J. van Ginkel, “John of Ephesus: A Monophysite Historian in Sixth-Century Byzantium” (Ph.D. Dissertation; Gröningen, 1995), with its thorough bibliography. 3 For the critical edition of the Syriac text of John of Ephesus’s Lives of the Eastern Saints with an English translation, see E.W. Brooks, PO 17–19 (Paris, 1923–1925). John’s Church History had three Parts. Hist. eccl. 1, which appears to have discussed the time of Julius Caesar to the death of Theodosius II (450), is not extant. Hist. eccl.

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2 covered from the death of Theodosius II to the end of Justinian’s reign (565), and is available today primarily from its appropriation by the eighth-century author known as Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre. This author states explicitly that the third section of his own history comes from John’s earlier History, although some fragments of John of Ephesus’ Hist. eccl. 2 also survive separately (e.g., BL Add 14647 and BL Add 12154) and in other later histories. The critical edition of John of Ephesus, Hist. eccl. 2 as it appears in Pseudo-Dionysius is in Incerti auctoris Chronicon Pseudo-Dionysianum vulgo dictum II, ed. I.-B. Chabot, CSCO 104, SS 53 (Paris: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1965); a recent English translation is available in Witold Witakowski, PseudoDionysius of Tel-Mahre, Chronicle (Known also as the Chronicle of Zuqnin), Part III, Translated Texts for Historians 22 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996); a recent English translation of Parts 3 and 4 of Pseudo-Dionysius’s history is in Amir Harrak, The Chronicle of Zuqnīn, Parts III and IV, A.D. 488–775, Mediaeval Sources in Translation 36 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1999). See also Ioannis Ephesini historiae ecclesiasticae fragmenta quae e prima et secunda parte supersunt, ed. E.W. Brooks, CSCO 104, SS 53 (Paris: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1965), 402–20. Part 3 of John of Ephesus’s Church History survives in complete form in a single manuscript (BL Add 14640) from the end of the seventh century. A critical edition and Latin translation of this text can be found in Ioannis Ephesini historiae ecclesiasticae pars tertia, ed. and trans. E.W. Brooks, CSCO 105–106, SS 54–55 (Paris: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1935–1936). In 1860 Robert Payne Smith translated this Syriac into English, and that translation has been reprinted as Robert Payne Smith, The Third Part of the Ecclesiastical History of John, Bishop of Ephesus, Now First Translated from the Original Syriac, Syriac Studies Library 62 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010, reprinted from the 1860 edition). 4 John’s intended audience is not entirely clear. The evidence for a growing antiChalcedonian monastic community that immigrated to the capital in the 530s and 540s and who had increasing outreach to the city through charity work suggests that Parts 1 and 2 of his Church History could have addressed Syriac-speaking Christians in Constantinople. The fact that John wrote in Syriac, however, and that the Syriac-speaking population of Constantinople was decreasing in the 570s suggests to Van Ginkel that his primary audience for all of his texts may well have been in Mesopotamia. For Syriac-speaking anti-Chalcedonian Christians in Constantinople, see Peter Hatlie, The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, ca. 350–850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 141–9. Susan Ashbrook Harvey also discusses the role of the anti-Chalcedonian community in Constantinople under Justinian’s reign (Asceticism, 80–91). Jitse Dikstra and Geoffrey Greatrex have published two letters by Severus of Antioch that provide additional evidence for the strength of the anti-Chalcedonian community in Constantinople decades earlier in 511, when it explicitly included many wealthy and well-positioned members of society. For a translation of these letters and a study of their context, see Jitse Dijkstra and Geoffrey Greatrex, “Patriarchs and Politics in the Reign of Anastasius (with a Reedition of O.Mon.Epiph. 59),” Millenium: Yearbook on the Culture and History of the First Millenium C.E. 6 (2009): 223–64. I am grateful to Jitse Dijkstra for bringing this excellent resource to my attention. For an argument that the primary audience for John’s Church History was in Mesopotamia, see Van Ginkel, John, 93–101, esp. 97. On the decreasing anti-Chalcedonian monastic population in Constantinople in the 570s, see Hatlie, Monks, 184–5. While Susan Ashbrook Harvey does not specify the geographical location of John’s intended audience, she does argue that he wrote in Syriac rather than Greek by choice and because his audience was specifically anti-Chalcedonian (Harvey, Asceticism, 40–2). 5 Susan Ashbrook Harvey has noted John’s emphasis on suffering, and its relation to his context of famine, plague, and war. While she focused primarily on John’s Lives of the Eastern Saints, her insights provide a useful complement and foundation to this

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6

7 8

9

10

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study of his Church History. Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Physicians and Ascetics in John of Ephesus: An Expedient Alliance,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 38 (1984): 87–93; Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Asceticism in Adversity: An Early Byzantine Experience,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 6 (1980): 1–11. Harvey describes John’s Lives as, “as much a celebration of holy presence in the midst of human suffering as it is an exhortation to hearten a battered people” (“Physicians,” 88). Jan van Ginkel has also noted that John narrates events like the plague “in order to inspire readers to repent and return to a Christian way of life – under Monophysite doctrine” (91). Jan Bremmer, “Religious Violence and Its Roots: A View from Antiquity,” Asdiwal: Revue genevoise d’anthropologie et d’histoire des religions 6 (2011): 71–9, esp. 77–8 (see also Bremmer’s contribution in this volume); Jan Bremmer, “Religious Violence between Greeks, Romans, Christians and Jews,” in Violence in Ancient Christianity: Victims and Perpetrators, ed. Albert Geljon and Reimer Roukema, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 125 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 8–30, esp. 8–12. David Engels and Peter Van Nuffelen, “Religion and Competition in Antiquity: An Introduction,” in Religion and Competition in Antiquity, ed. David Engels and Peter Van Nuffelen (Brussels: Éditions Latomus, 2014), 9–44, at 12. Many scholars have challenged other scholars’ literal interpretations of the rhetorical trope of Christian violence against pagan temples, for example, by adding the evidence available from material culture. See Aude Busine, “From Stones to Myth: Temple Destruction and Civic Identity in the Late Antique Roman East,” Journal of Late Antiquity 16.2 (2013): 325–46; Jitse Dijkstra, “The Fate of the Temples in Late Antique Egypt,” in The Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism,” ed. by Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 389–436; Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan, eds., The Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism” (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Johannes Hahn, Stephen Emmel, and Ulrich Gotter, eds., From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2008), esp.1–14; Ortwin Dally, “ ‘Pflege’ und Umnutzung heidnischer Tempel in der Spätantike,” in Die spätantike Stadt und ihre Christianisierung: Symposion vom 14. bis 16. Februar 2000 in Halle/Saale, ed. Gunnar Brands and Hans-Georg Severin (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2003), 98–114; Bryan Ward-Perkins, “Re-Using the Architectural Legacy of the Past, entre idéologie et pragmatisme,” in The Idea and Ideal of the Town Between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. G.P. Brogiolo and Bryan Ward-Perkins (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 225–44; and id., “Reconfiguring Sacred Space: From Pagan Shrines to Christian Churches,” in Die spätantike Stadt und ihre Christianisierung: Symposion vom 14. bis 16. Februar 2000 in Halle/Saale, ed. Gunnar Brands and Hans-Georg Severin (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2003), 285–90. Older scholarship had a tendency to take the ancient sources largely at face value. While W.H.C. Frend’s work remains valuable in many ways, for example, he primarily used John of Ephesus in this way in his influential book The Rise of the Monophysite Movement: Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), e.g. 260, 274, 284. Philip Wood discusses the divisions among anti-Chalcedonians in this period and leaders’ efforts to create a unified community: Philip Wood, “We Have No King But Christ”: Christian Political Thought in Greater Syria on the Eve of the Arab Conquest (c.400–585) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), e.g., 175, 213. Volker Menze, furthermore, has demonstrated that although the abandonment of the Henotikon and the enforcement of the pro-Chalcedonian papal libellus under the emperor Justin I in 519 “established a clear division” between those who supported Chalcedon and those who did not, those who rejected Chalcedon were “internally not at all a homogenous group” (Menze, Justinian, 57). Jan van Ginkel provides useful insight into what we know of John’s life: Van Ginkel, John, esp. 27–37, 219–20; Jan J. van Ginkel, “Monk, Missionary, and Martyr: John

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12 13 14

15

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of Ephesus, a Syriac Orthodox Historian in Sixth Century Byzantium,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 5 (2005): 35–50. This supplements the biography found in Harvey, Asceticism, esp. 28–34. See also Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Heinzgerd Brakmann, “Johannes von Ephesus,” Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 18/Lief. 139/140 (1997): 553–64; Peter Bruns, “Kirchengeschichte als Hagiograpie? Zur theologischen Konzeption des Johannes von Ephesus,” Studia Patristica 42 (2006): 65–71. Van Ginkel, John, 46–85, esp. 48; Van Ginkel, “Monk,” 42. For a detailed study of the creation of Hist. eccl. 3, see Van Ginkel, John, 70–7; cf., Van Ginkel, “Monk,” 42. J.A.S. Evans used John’s Church History to study the eastern Mediterranean: J.A.S. Evans, “The Monophysite Persecution: The Eastern View,” The Ancient World 27 (1996): 191–6. Evans concludes, “The history of Amida in the sixth century would be enough to make one put some faith in the contemporary speculations that the world was approaching the six thousandth year after creation when it would come to an end. There were locust swarms, famine, epidemic, earthquakes, floods, two eclipses of the sun, and is if that were not enough, a sack by the Persians in January 503, where 80,000 perished, followed by two sieges by the Romans which reduced the Amidans to cannibalism. Then came the persecution” (Evans, “Monophysite,” 193–4). Jan van Ginkel has also noted, “In John’s account there were but few real martyrs during the persecutions. Most of those expelled died in exile, but not through violence from their religious opponents” (Van Ginkel, John, 174). Susan Ashbrook Harvey has contextualized the writings of John of Ephesus usefully in the long tradition of Syriac texts that interpret the “calamities” of their time in relation to an apocalyptic endtime: Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Remembering Pain: Syriac Hagiography and the Separation of the Churches,” Byzantion 58 (1988): 295–308, esp. 302. Jan van Ginkel has also commented on several of these aspects of John’s History: “In the Ecclesiastical History John intends to show that God is on their side and that they will win in the end. Christianity is struck by God for its sins but the persecutors are ‘rewarded according to their evil deeds,’ not only on Judgement [sic] Day, but even during their lives” (Van Ginkel, John, 100; cf. 116, 201). Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 145; Witakowski 128). Except where otherwise noted, all quotations attributed to John of Ephesus, Hist. eccl. 2, in this chapter come from the text preserved by Pseudo-Dionysius and follow the English translation of Witakowski, Pseudo-Dionysius, with consultation of the Syriac text in Chabot’s CSCO edition; citations are to Pseudo-Dionysisus, Chronicle 3, followed in parentheses by the page number of Chabot’s Syriac text followed by the page number of Witakowski’s translation. I  here follow other scholars in using Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 as Part 2 of John’s Church History. Because this raises questions about the level of accuracy with which Pseudo-Dionysius copied John’s History, below I compare it to Part 3 of John’s History, which survives under his own name. The comparison has persuaded me that the rhetoric of suffering is sufficiently similar between Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 and John’s Hist. eccl. 3 and Lives to make this study productive. I have found scholarship by Harriet Flower and Charles Hedrick particularly useful in thinking about the power dynamics and politics of memory. See, for example, Harriet Flower, The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Charles Hedrick, History and Silence: The Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000). Volker Menze has also worked with the writings of John of Ephesus in terms of memorialization and community construction in useful ways (Menze, Justinian, e.g., 194–246). See also Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University

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of Chicago Press, 2004); Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Norman Yoffee, Negotiating the Past in the Past: Identity, Memory, and Landscape in Archaeological Research (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2007); Ruth Van Dyke and Susan Alcock, eds., Archaeologies of Memory (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003); Michael Rowlands, “The Role of Memory in the Transmission of Culture,” World Archaeology 25 (1993): 142–51; Lynn Meskell, “The Intersections of Identity and Politics in Archaeology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 279–301; Susan Alcock, Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Landscape, Monuments, and Memories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 18 John of Ephesus portrays a society similar to that made famous by Michel Foucault’s extrapolation of the panoptikon system recommended for prison design by the eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham – that is, a society in which an individual’s every movement is open to observation, evaluation, and potential punishment. In a prison with a watchtower in a center courtyard and all rooms with full glass onto the courtyard, every inmate’s every move could potentially be seen by a guard in the tower. Although a guard could not be watching every inmate at every moment, Bentham argued that the inmates would act as if the guard were watching them all the time, because they would never know when they were being observed and they would fear punishment if they were observed behaving inappropriately. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977). 19 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 10; Witakowski 11). 20 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 10; Witakowski 11). 21 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 17; Witakowski 19). 22 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 18; Witakowski 20). 23 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 127; Witakowski 113). 24 As such, John’s History contributes to efforts that were widespread in the sixth century to codify and liturgically remember the heroes and villains of Christian orthodoxy, whether emperors, bishops, or monks. Volker Menze addresses the significant role that liturgical diptychs played, for example, in the skirmishes over the definition of orthodoxy in the first half of the sixth century (Menze, Justinian, esp. 76–86), and his book more generally explores the role that memorializing a particular narrative of history and orthodoxy played in the development of distinct Chalcedonian and “nonChalcedonian” communities. Cyril of Scythopolis’s Lives of the Monks of Palestine from the 550s likewise represents a powerful Chalcedonian counter-narrative to earlier Greek anti-Chalcedonian texts, such as those by John Rufus. 25 See, for example, Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot, 3, 4, 5, 19–20, 49–50, 53, 70–1, 79; Witakowski, 3, 4, 6, 21, 46, 49, 65, 73). 26 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 19–20; Witakowski 21). 27 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 20; Witakowski 22). 28 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 49–50; Witakowski 46). 29 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 119; Witakowski 107). While Witakowski aptly translates this phrase as “stir the minds,” I  find the translation of cuhdāne as “memories” more useful in this discussion, including because it preserves in English the echo with the same word earlier in the sentence. 30 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 8; Witakowski 10). 31 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 51; Witakowski 47). 32 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 43; Witakowski 41). 33 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 46; Witakowski 43).

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34 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 71; Witakowski 66). 35 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 114; Witakowski 103). Commenting on earthquakes in Phoenicia, Arabia, and Palestine, John also writes, “By this wrath resulting from sins many souls were buried in their houses as well as the cattle and other things” (Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 [Chabot 128; cf. 141–2; Witakowski 115, 125]). 36 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 24; Witakowski 24). 37 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 69; Witakowski 64). 38 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 20, 47–9, 72–3; Witakowski 22, 44–6, 67–8). 39 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3: Nicopolis (Chabot 3; Witakowski 3), Arsamosata (Chabot 3; Witakowski 4), Ptolemais, Tyre, and Sidon (Chabot 4; Witakowski 5), Rhodes (Chabot 5; Witakowski 6), Seleucia and Daphne (Chabot 51–52; Witakowski 47–48), Dyrrachium (Chabot 52; Witakowski 48), Corinth (Chabot 52; Witakowski 48), Anazarbos (Chabot 53; Witakowski 48), Pompeiopolis (Chabot 71; Witakowski 66), Laodicea (Chabot 75; Witakowski 69), Amida (Chabot 113; Witakowski 102), Nicomedia (Chabot 126; Witakowski 113), Botrys (Chabot 132; Witakowski 118), Cyzicus (Chabot 141; Witakowski 125), and multiple times in the cities of Phoenicia, Arabia, and Palestine (i.e., Berytus, Tripoli, Tyre, Sidon, Sarepta, Byblos, and Antarados) (Chabot 128, 133, 141; Witakowski 115, 119, 125) and in Constantinople (Chabot 126, 131, 141, 142; Witakowski 112, 117, 125, 126). 40 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3: Edessa (Chabot 44–6, 69–70, 125; Witakowski 41–3, 64–5); Berytus (Chabot 134–5; Witakowski 120–1). 41 On madness, see Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 14–15, 119; Witakowski 16, 107); on war, see Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 4–5, 20, 69; Witakowski 5, 21, 64). Susan Ashbrook Harvey discusses John’s descriptions of mass madness in Amida in some detail, including the suffering the inhabitants had suffered in the years before the illness took hold (Asceticism, 57–75). 42 Bremmer, “Religious Violence and Its Roots,” esp. 77–8; Bremmer, “Religious Violence Between Greeks, Romans, Christians and Jews,” esp. 8–12. 43 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 6–7; Witakowski 7–9). Menze provides a helpful study of the controversy surrounding the Trisagion (Menze, Justinian, 165–75). 44 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 24–7; Witakowski 25–7). 45 See, for example, Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 16–24; Witakowski 18–24). 46 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 21–4, 27–44; Witakowski 22–4, 27–41). 47 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 21–4, 27–32; Witakowski 22–4, 27–32). 48 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 32–3; Witakowski 32). 49 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 31; Witakowski 31). 50 Charles Hedrick’s study is particularly helpful in thinking about the significance of dishonoring someone’s memory after their death (Hedrick, History, esp. xi–xxvi, 89–130). 51 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 126; Witakowski 113). 52 Jan van Ginkel understands at least some of these wealthy Christians to be in Constantinople, even though Van Ginkel argues that John’s Syriac text addressed a primarily Mesopotamian audience. Van Ginkel writes, “Some members of the élite adhered to the Monophysite doctrine themselves. The influence of these Monophysite members of the imperial élite was strong enough to induce the Monophysite bishops to accept communion with the Chalcedonians in 571” (Van Ginkel, John, 120; cf. Van Ginkel, “Monk,” 42). 53 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 140; Witakowski 124–5). 54 For more information about the plague of John’s lifetime, see Lester K. Little, ed., Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); in addition to the useful essays, this book contains a substantial bibliography. Two essays from this volume are of particular relevance in relation

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to John of Ephesus: Michael G. Morony, “ ‘For Whom Does the Writer Write?’: The First Bubonic Plague Pandemic According to Syriac Sources,” 59–86; and Peter Sarris, “Bubonic Plague in Byzantium: The Evidence of Non-Literary Sources,” 119–32. 55 Philip Wood discusses the history of the martyrs of Najran, including the witness of John of Ephesus (Wood, We Have No King, 215–30). 56 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 60; Witakowski 55). 57 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 60–1; Witakowski 56). 58 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 64; Witakowski 59). 59 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 64; Witakowski 59). 60 Although the story of Ruhmi and Harith is about refusing to renounce Christianity in favor of Judaism, John still uses the story to encourage persistence in Christian orthodoxy rather than Chalcedonian heresy. 61 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 134; Witakowski 120). 62 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 134; Witakowski 120). 63 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 134–5; Witakowski 120–1). 64 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 80; Witakowski 74). 65 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 81; Witakowski 75). Michael Morony also notes that in the face of the horrors caused by the plague, John turns to “biblical lamentation texts, which he quotes profusely” (“For Whom Does the Writer Write,” 82). 66 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 105; Witakowski 95). 67 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 84; Witakowski 78). 68 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 85; Witakowski 79). 69 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 83; Witakowski 77). 70 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 93–4; Witakowski 86). 71 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 94; Witakowski 86). 72 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 94; Witakowski 86). 73 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 94; Witakowski 86). Time and again John hammers home his message that the plague is a “chastisement” from God that “because of our sins came upon us” (Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 [Chabot 92; Witakowski 84]). 74 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 103; Witakowski 93). 75 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 103; Witakowski 93). The same could be said for the last such story in John’s description of the plague, a story about two strong men who greedily collect a great deal of gold for their work burying the dead. Even the excessive wages the imperial administrators were willing to offer out of their desperation to find someone to bury the piles of putrefying bodies did not satisfy these men, who John says were “without fear” (Chabot 104; Witakowski 94). When the men died suddenly after a greedy exchange over increasing their wages, the administrator wept over them, warning, “Woe to you, covetousness of Adam” (Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 [Chabot 105; Witakowski 95]). 76 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 104; Witakowski 94). 77 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 33–4; Witakowski 32–3). 78 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 38; Witakowski 36). 79 Pseudo-Dionysius, Chronicle 3 (Chabot 39; Witakowski 38). 80 John of Ephesus, Hist. eccl. 3.2.50 (115–16; 84–5). All translations of John’s Hist. eccl. 3 are my own from the Syriac text in the CSCO edition edited by E.W. Brooks, with consultation of the CSCO Latin translation by Brooks and the English translation by Robert Payne Smith; I follow Van Ginkel in citing the book and chapter of John’s text from the Syriac edition by Brooks, followed in parentheses by the page number of the Syriac text and then the page number of the Latin translation in the corresponding CSCO volumes. 81 John of Ephesus, Hist. eccl. 3.2.5 (59–60; 42–3). Van Ginkel contextualizes John’s writings about his suffering in prison (Van Ginkel, John, 35; Van Ginkel, “Monk,” 42).

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John was first imprisoned at a hospital for a year and nine days and was then moved to an island in the Sea of Marmara for twenty-eight months until November 574 (John of Ephesus, Hist. eccl. 3.2.5–7 [59–66; 42–7]; Van Ginkel, John, 35). 82 John of Ephesus, Hist. eccl. 3.3.15 (141; 104). I rely on Van Ginkel’s dating of John’s imprisonments (Van Ginkel, John, 35); cf. Van Ginkel, “Monk,” 42–3. 83 John of Ephesus, Hist. eccl. 3.3.1 (120; 88). In this phrase, ethpek can be understood as reflexive or passive, and can carry the English sense of “turning,” “changing,” or in a religious sense “converting,” leaving it uncertain whether John of Ephesus intended his reader to understand that Justin II “turned himself” or “was converted” to the persecution. Likewise, dlā ṭaksā, a loan word from the Greek ἀταξία, primarily means “disordered” or “undisciplined” but could also have an ecclesiastical overtone, which led Payne Smith to translate the phrase as “un-canonical.” 84 Wood, We Have No King, 172. 85 John of Ephesus, Hist. eccl. 3.3.1 (120; 88). Peter Hatlie uses John’s writings to conclude that as Justin II’s reign continued he became more and more hostile toward anti-Chalcedonian monks in Constantinople, “typically through the dissolution and plundering of their monasteries and the physical beating, imprisonment and exile of their communities” (Hatlie, Monks, 185). Justin II’s hostility was particularly noticeable in contrast to the more tolerant policies under his predecessor, the emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora. See Harmut Leppin, “Power from Humility: Justinian and the Religious Authority of Monks,” in The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity, ed. Andrew Cain and Noel Lenski, 155–64 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009). Leppin has argued that numerous sources, not just John of Ephesus’s Lives, give the impression that Justinian “avoids any harassment of holy men” (Leppin, “Power,” 160). Susan Ashbrook Harvey also comments on the flourishing of the anti-Chalcedonian community in Constantinople under Justinian (Asceticism, 80–91). 86 John of Ephesus, Hist. eccl. 3.3.1 (121; 88). 87 John of Ephesus, Hist. eccl. 3.2.11 (72; 51). 88 John of Ephesus, Hist. eccl. 3.2.12 (73; 52). 89 John of Ephesus, Hist. eccl. 3.2.12 (73; 52). 90 John of Ephesus, Hist. eccl. 3.2.12 (74; 53). 91 Philip Wood refers to the challenges that John of Ephesus suggests “the defection of Miaphysite aristocrats, bishops, and clerical aids to Chalcedonian communion” posed at some points in Justin II’s reign (Wood, We Have No King, 171–2). Wood notes that while Justin II’s policies sometimes led to forced communion in the capital, John’s writings imply that in the provinces this imperial policy “may have taken the form of extortions against the Miaphysites, rather than attempts to force communion” (172). 92 John of Ephesus, Hist. eccl. 3.2.12 (74; 53). 93 Bremmer, “Religious Violence and Its Roots,” esp. 77–8; Bremmer, “Religious Violence Between Greeks, Romans, Christians and Jews,” esp. 8–12; cf., Engels and Van Nuffelen, “Religion,” 12. 94 John of Ephesus, Hist. eccl. 3.3.1 (120; 88).

Bibliography Alcock, Susan. Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Landscape, Monuments, and Memories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Bremmer, Jan. “Religious Violence Between Greeks, Romans, Christians and Jews.” Pages 8–30 in Violence in Ancient Christianity: Victims and Perpetrators. Edited by Albert

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Geljon and Reimer Roukema. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 125. Leiden: Brill, 2014. ———. “Religious Violence and Its Roots: A  View from Antiquity.” Asdiwal: Revue genevoise d’anthropologie et d’histoire des religions 6 (2011): 71–9. Bruns, Peter. “Kirchengeschichte als Hagiograpie? Zur theologischen Konzeption des Johannes von Ephesus.” Studia Patristica 42 (2006): 65–71. Busine, Aude. “From Stones to Myth: Temple Destruction and Civic Identity in the Late Antique Roman East.” Journal of Late Antiquity 16.2 (2013): 325–46. Dally, Ortwin. “ ‘Pflege’ und Umnutzung heidnischer Tempel in der Spätantike.” Pages 98–114 in Die spätantike Stadt und ihre Christianisierung: Symposion vom 14. bis 16. Februar 2000 in Halle/Saale. Edited by Gunnar Brands and Hans-Georg Severin. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2003. Dijkstra, Jitse. “The Fate of the Temples in Late Antique Egypt.” Pages 389–436 in The Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism.” Edited by Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Dijkstra, Jitse and Geoffrey Greatrex. “Patriarchs and Politics in the Reign of Anastasius (with a Reedition of O.Mon.Epiph. 59).” Millenium: Yearbook on the Culture and History of the First Millenium C.E. 6 (2009): 223–64. Engels, David and Peter Van Nuffelen. “Religion and Competition in Antiquity: An Introduction.” Pages 9–44 in Religion and Competition in Antiquity. Edited by David Engels and Peter Van Nuffelen. Brussels: Éditions Latomus, 2014. Evans, J.A.S. “The Monophysite Persecution: The Eastern View.” The Ancient World 27 (1996): 191–6. Flower, Harriet. The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Frend, W.H.C. The Rise of the Monophysite Movement: Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Hahn, Johannes, Stephen Emmel, and Ulrich Gotter, eds. From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Edited and translated by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Harrak, Amir. The Chronicle of Zuqnīn, Parts III and IV, A.D. 488–775. Mediaeval Sources in Translation 36. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1999. Harvey, Susan Ashbrook. Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and the Lives of the Eastern Saints. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990. ———. “Remembering Pain: Syriac Hagiography and the Separation of the Churches.” Byzantion 58 (1988): 295–308. ———. “Physicians and Ascetics in John of Ephesus: An Expedient Alliance.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 38 (1984): 87–93. ———. “Asceticism in Adversity: An Early Byzantine Experience.” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 6 (1980): 1–11. Harvey, Susan Ashbrook and Heinzgerd Brakmann. “Johannes von Ephesus.” Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 18/Lief. 139/140 (1997): 553–64. Hatlie, Peter. The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, ca. 350–850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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Hedrick, Charles. History and Silence: The Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000. Lavan, Luke and Michael Mulryan, eds. The Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism.” Leiden: Brill, 2011. Leppin, Harmut. “Power from Humility: Justinian and the Religious Authority of Monks.” Pages 155–64 in The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity. Edited by Andrew Cain and Noel Lenski. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. Little, Lester K., ed. Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Menze, Volker. Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Meskell, Lynn. “The Intersections of Identity and Politics in Archaeology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 279–301. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Rowlands, Michael. “The Role of Memory in the Transmission of Culture.” World Archaeology 25 (1993): 142–51. Smith, Robert Payne. The Third Part of the Ecclesiastical History of John, Bishop of Ephesus, Now First Translated from the Original Syriac. Syriac Studies Library 62. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010 (repr. 1860). Van Dyke, Ruth and Susan Alcock, eds. Archaeologies of Memory. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Van Ginkel, Jan J. “Monk, Missionary, and Martyr: John of Ephesus, a Syriac Orthodox Historian in Sixth Century Byzantium.” Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 5 (2005): 35–50. ———. “John of Ephesus: A Monophysite Historian in Sixth-Century Byzantium.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Gröningen, 1995. Ward-Perkins, Bryan. “Reconfiguring Sacred Space: From Pagan Shrines to Christian Churches.” Pages 285–90 in Die spätantike Stadt und ihre Christianisierung: Symposion vom 14. bis 16. Februar 2000 in Halle/Saale. Edited by Gunnar Brands and Hans-Georg Severin. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2003. ———. “Re-Using the Architectural Legacy of the Past, entre idéologie et pragmatism.” Pages 225–44 in The Idea and Ideal of the Town Between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Edited by G.P. Brogiolo and Bryan Ward-Perkins. Leiden: Brill, 1999. Witakowski, Witold. Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, Chronicle (Known also as the Chronicle of Zuqnin), Part III. Translated Texts for Historians 22. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996. Wood, Philip. “We Have No King But Christ”: Christian Political Thought in Greater Syria on the Eve of the Arab Conquest (c.400–585). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Yoffee, Norman. Negotiating the Past in the Past: Identity, Memory, and Landscape in Archaeological Research. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2007.

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6 EPIPHANIES AND RELIGIOUS CONFLICT The contests over the Hagiasma of Chonai Alan H. Cadwallader1 Introduction Epiphanies have increasingly captured the attention of scholars keen to explore the phenomena of religious expression and experience in the ancient world.2 Epiphanies are recognised in a variety of contexts but usually move between those geared to the foundation of a sacred site (in response to a prompting dream or as a thankoffering for divine favour) and those mounting a defence of a site, frequently in conjunction with the preservation of a city with which the sanctuary is entwined. The religious focus shows through even in the helpful collection of categorised “military epiphanies” assembled by Kendrick Pritchett, who uses the modern epiphanic mantra “Die Götter sind da” – “The gods are there present” – as the organising principle and goal of analysis.3 More recently there has been a shift in focus to explore the political dimensions that, whilst lying in the background to epiphanic accounts, provide the momentum for ensuring the remembrance of a divine visitation in text, coin, iconography, inscription, liturgy, statuary, architecture and even landscape sometimes long after the recalled event.4 Indeed the longevity of such memory can be a measure of adaptation through time to changing political circumstances, just as the formative strength launching or invigorating such memory “should be seen in the context of competition among communities.”5 This chapter explores the wider political dimensions that activated the (re-)telling of the foundation, confirmation and preservation of a healing spring through the agency and appearance of Michael the archistrategos, in “The Story of St. Michael of Chonai”. It seeks to establish how such a story-in-writing functioned to strengthen the practice and claims of a non-metropolitan ecclesial centre, especially one that had been tacitly brought to account by metropolitan conciliar prescription, in the aftermath of highly de-stabilising regime changes in the Empire. Shifts in the organisation, fortification and commitments of a central power do not occur in a vacuum with local communities left to their own devices.6 Even should local identities adopt a stance of (passive) resistance to the hegemonic incursions of elite governance on their communal life, their response is nonetheless factored

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in relation to that power.7 In most cases, regime change ushers in significant renegotiations of position and place not only in relation to the imposing authority but also in relation to perceived local competition for recognition by the central power. Claims to benefits, cultural inheritance, authenticating visions and reciprocities of relationship intensify in the immediate aftermath of regime change, particularly in a highly centralised system, and these have a marked impact on the differentiation between local entities, most especially neighbouring or regional polities with their manifold intersecting lines.8 Thus cross-sectional and trans-sectional contests require a problematisation in the interpretation of the dynamics involved in a particular period. And there is no more complex period than the third quartile of the fourth century – the period of the emperor Julian, dubbed “the Apostate”, and his Homoian successors, Jovian and Valens. A sweep of the orations and letters of the imperial orator Themistius reveals how highly sensitive were the negotiations required to secure, maintain or advance one’s own position.9 Whilst these belong to the rarefied intrigues of the central court (whether the court was stationary at Antioch or Constantinople or on the move between geopolitical centres), they are mirrored in provincial and local machinations.

Re-alignments after the death of the Emperor Julian In the immediate aftermath of Julian’s premature demise, followed shortly after by Jovian’s death (in 364 CE), the scramble for asserting one’s exemplary credentials in relation to the new central power demanded a repudiation of the extremes of his Hellenising agenda. Gregory of Nazianzus’ pun on Julian’s name10 – the “Idolian” – is a distilled signal that idolatry was the lode-stone by which renegotiations of position were to be conducted. Certainly the anti-idolatry psalms (Psalm 97, 115) were trumpeted as the response of the populace when Julian attempted to restore Hellenic temples in Antioch.11 Of course, what was meant by “idolatry” varied considerably. Themistius, whose position as imperial orator across four emperors was only interrupted by Julian’s rebuff,12 could hold to the worship of multiple gods as one of three religions of the empire.13 However, he deflected the familiar imperial concern about division and conflict threatening stability, on the one hand to Julian’s fostering of division through his policies and on the other by pointing to the patent splits in Christianity.14 He posited a neo-Platonic father-creator “either more clearly or more dimly” as the aspiration of all religions, whether known as Zeus or the Christian God, a not-completelynovel suggestion even within Judeo-Christian thought.15 For Themistius, idolatry in its negative expression (often compounded with magical interest) evoked the Julian period of division.16 For some Christians, such as Gregory, idolatry meant polytheism as contrasted with the Nicaean orthodoxy, though Gregory himself seems to have been willing to gloss over Constantius’ heterodox commitments as a better alternative than the programme that issued under Julian.17 For other

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Christians, idolatry could be the dismissive, summative designation of Arianism in its manifold permutations.18

The Synod of Laodikeia Thus, in the immediate aftermath of Julian’s reign, when a synod was called at Laodikeia in the metropolitan diocese of Phrygia Pacatiana, division and unity dominated the unfolding schedule of canons. Indeed, the canons read like a summative juridical list,19 with a set pattern of introductions for each canon: either περὶ τοῦ (canons 1 to 19) or ὅτι οὐ δεῖ (canons 20 to 59, with ὅτι δεῖ (for canons 46–48).20 The tone is legalistic, promoting order, regularity and stability. It assumes a position of authority over other churches, even if the number and provenance of bishops in attendance are nowhere coherently recorded.21 But the assumption of an ability to direct the church at large, at least in Asia, runs through the collection, notably carving itself above and against ecclesial influence that may flow from other quarters. Canon 57 for example prohibits the appointment of bishops in villages or country districts. Cities are the acceptable centre for bishops. The Nicaean formula is not relied upon as the touchstone of unity;22 indeed it nowhere occurs in the canons even though the opportunity was ripe in Canon XII for a brief statement of what “in the basis of the faith” (ἐν τε τῷ λόγῳ τῆς πίστεως) was to be.23 Just as significantly, Arianism or any of its variations is also absent. It needs to be recalled that Constantinople remained under Arian/Homoian control in this period of regime change.24 Laodikeia may have held to an Arian position even longer, given that its metropolitan is absent from the list of bishops attending the Constantinople Council in 381 – the Synod that confirmed the Nicaean position.25 The fact that the Laodikeian canons related to discipline rather than theology may have glossed over any odour of Arian sensibilities (following the lead of Gregory of Nazianzus’s treatment of Constantius),26 thus saving its decisions, its reputation and its survival. Significant in this regard is the second tenet for acceptable bishops in Canon XII, that is “and in the conduct of an upright life” (καὶ τῇ τοῦ εὐθέος βίου πολιτείᾳ). The early fifth-century church historian, Sozomen, suggested that some Asian bishops placed unity above express adherence to the homoousion formula.27 Unity may well be the integrating principle for all the canons, but the end to Canon XII points also to piety as a marketing tactic in the effort to establish credentials. The Council not only imitates the style of juridical edict in its canons but it appears to address some matters which were part of Julian’s agenda (such as priests avoiding plays, drink and the like),28 seeking to lift the credentials of Christian practice above its competitors.29 Important for this paper is Canon 35 which expressly accents the culpable idolatry that is the worship of angels. Indeed, Ulrich Huttner discerns in the canon a “cryptopaganism”, that is of pagans masquerading as Christians30 – exactly the deception of Julian.31 Given Julian’s deliberate equation of angels and gods, using the same word (ὀνομάζειν) found in the canon,32 it was relatively simple to generate distance from Julian by labelling all veneration of angels as idolatry. The canon runs: 112

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Ὅτι οὐ δεῖ Χριστιανοὺς ἐγκαταλείπειν τὴν ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ ἀπιέναι καὶ ἀγγέλους ὀνομάζειν καὶ συνάξεις ποιεῖν, ἅπερ ἀπηγόρευται. Εἴ τις οὖν εὑρεθῆ ταύτῃ τῇ κεκρυμμένῃ εἰδωλολατρίᾳ σχολάζων, ἔστω ἀνάθεμα, ὅτι ἐγκατέλιπε τὸν κύριον ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν, τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ εἰδωλολατρείᾳ προσῆλθεν. Christians shall not forsake the Church of God and turn to the worship of angels, thus having gatherings in their honour. This is forbidden. Those who devote themselves to this hidden idolatry, let them be anathema, because they have forsaken our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and gone over to idolatry.33 Colossae is not expressly mentioned, as is entirely in keeping with the juridical tone and universalising application of regulatory provisions, though the specificity of the allusion is a likely indicator of heightened antagonism.34 In barely half a century, the antagonism was being formally and unambiguously applied by Theodoret of Cyrrhus in his comment on the Epistle to the Colossians (2:18),35 a connection that has been repeated by scholiasts ever since.36 It is possible completely to isolate the issue to theological straitening but the accent in the canon on εἰδωλολατρία,“idolatry”, when this is not the judgement on the worship of angels in Col 2:18,37 suggests another determining factor, namely a separation from that which characterises the period of Julian. By defining itself against an array of heresies, against Jewish practices and against idolatry, combined with a tightening of clerical discipline, the synod was implicitly asserting its bona fide credentials as a loyal supporter of the new regime, albeit at the expense of others in the empire, including a suffragan (and therefore expendable) diocese. It helped Laodikeia that the successor Emperors, Jovian and Valens, were Homoian sympathisers, as also was the highest ecclesial officer in the eastern imperial capital, Constantinople, so there was no need to exacerbate these tensions of the post-Nicaean period. Sufficiently clear “others”, that is, heresies/heretics and Jews (generically or specifically defined), were there to be summoned to act as a negative counterpoint to their own self-presented exemplary standing.38 Colossae’s bishop is not recorded in any list of synod attendees. (Admittedly all available lists are unreliable). Given Canon 35, it is unlikely he would be listed as a subscriber anyway, and, as we shall see, Colossae appears to have held to the Nicaean settlement in this period. Perhaps Canon 40, that requires bishops to attend a synod when summonsed to teach or be taught, had specific recalcitrants in view!39

The response of Colossae to the Synod of Laodikeia If, as seems likely, a practice in a place 18 kilometres to the east, near Colossae, was the target of Canon 35, the question arises as to whether there was a response and what form it took. Clearly a non-metropolitical diocese could not mount a counter-synod. As it happened, the counter came as a populist story of an epiphany, or 113

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strictly, a series of epiphanies.40 There is the apostolic announcement of coming “favour, beneficence and wonders of the holy and glorious archistrategos Michael” (χάρις καὶ ἡ δωρεὰ καὶ τὰ θαύματα [2.17–3.1])41 though this is only tangentially related to the appearance of the healing spring (described in 3.10 as a “finding” [εὕρεσις]). What has the character of a foundation story for a sacred building follows,42 grounded in an epiphany of Michael “as if in a vision of the night” (ὡς ἐν ὁράματι τῆς νυκτός [4.2])43 that leads to healing of a young dumb girl at the spring, conversion to her father, initially an idolatrous opponent of the spring, and his benefaction of a shrine and shelter for the spring (a type of aghiasmatar?). The association of the epiphany and its consequences with a particular divine being is given an emblematic cry “God is truly of the Christians; great is your power, O archistrategos Michael” (ὁ θεὸς τῶν Χριστιανῶν ἀληθῶς μεγάλη σου ἡ δύναμις Μιχαὴλ ἀρχιστράτηγε [4.15–16]).44 Opposition, already hinted at in the foundation story, begins to build, motivated, as the story relates, either by a desire for the eradication of the spring – now tied almost synedochely with Christians and with the custodian of the spring, one Archippos – or for the restoration of the power of the gods. The first sortie combines attacks on Archippos with an effort to terminate the operations of the spring and is met by “a fiery flame launching from the water” (φλόγα πυρὸς ἐξερχομένην ἀπὸ ὕδατος [9.3]) and a restraint upon the evil-workers hands. Greater plans are detailed for the second foray, with the diversion of a nearby stream to mingle with and thereby pollute the healing spring.45 But the miasmic waters do not dare approach the hagiasma and “flee, divided in two” (ἀπέφυγεν . . . καὶ ἐχωρίσθη εἰς δύο [10.1–2]) into surrounding territory. Michael is not named in these epiphanies, though the implication is that he is the divine operative guarding the sacred site. There is no such reticence in the third epiphany however, as the second half of the story is devoted to a detailed escalation of exceedingly great odds against the spring and its custodian, only to meet the supernatural intervention of the mighty archangel, an impact that not only rescues the shrine from imminent destruction but bequeaths resultant testimonies in the landscape. Such an unfolding of epiphanies was not a new literary option, nor was it unique in early Christian writing.46 Indeed, those who recorded such epiphanies were sometimes accorded significant honours.47 The use of this form had a significant history in Asia, with a marked “spike” in the late Hellenistic and early Roman period48 – that is, at a time of increased military and political upheavals. Cities frequently found that they could gain grants and recognition of inviolability, especially by connection with a sanctuary even if at some remove, as a consequent recognition of their salvation/preservation against remarkable odds at the hands of one or more gods.49 The stories of these epiphanies frequently gained a renewed or extended life because later writers picked up the accounts, reiterating, embellishing and making them relevant for a later time.50 As Aelius Aristides waxed in his Hymn to Heracles, “Why should we speak of ancient history? For the activity of the god is still now manifest.”51 Little wonder that early Christian writers, especially when narrating a threat to a treasured Christian person or site, turned to the form that had such a revered heritage. 114

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The parallels between the epiphany of Zeus Panamaros and the story of St. Michael of Chonai One particular instance from a site approximately 235 kilometres to the southwest can provide a lens or at least some salient comparisons through which to initiate the analysis of the story of Michael of Chonai. This is the epiphany of Zeus Panamaros, at a sanctuary and sacred territory 12 kilometres from the city of Stratonikeia (IStrat 10).52 Although there is no epigraphical evidence indicating a known link between Colossae and Stratonikeia, there is a suggestion of contact with Laodikeia ad Lycum.53 In any case, the succession of narratives points to an epiphany form. This shifts the story from its traditional classification as a hagiography (compelled by its incorporation into menologia and synaxaria) to a form that has an established history prior to Christianity. It has also been classified as a Christianised aetiology of disappearing waters that tracks back to the fantasies of Herodotos,54 but this only finds a foothold in the conclusion of the final chapter, at best. The epiphany of Zeus Panamaros near Stratonikeia was recorded in an inscription authorised by the city boulê and demos.55 It details an unfolding of a series of manifestations, most of which are not expressly tied to the god until the cry “Great is Zeus Panamaros” (l.13) is uttered and the lamps of his temple are noted for the unwavering brilliance throughout the series of attacks. Nicole Belayche divides the epiphanies into atmospheric (involving a flame of light, a fog and thunder and lightning), a synergistic battle (which she calls “poliade”), where those fighting to defend the sanctuary escape with little more than flesh-wounds, and salvific which involves a massive sound burst that compounds panic throughout the enemy troops.56 The event seems to be tied to the rebellion of the Parthians led by the Roman turncoat, Labienus in 39 BCE and is characterised (as with many of these “military epiphanies”) by the defence of the sacred site (and nearby city) against overwhelming odds. The key however is not the protection of the site as such but the fact that value was attached to “remembering” the event in relation to the site, indicated by placing the inscription as part of the wall of the temple.57 Hence, elements either marginal in the text or lying in the background context provide the clue for understanding the significance of the epiphany. The revolt of Labienus marked a key moment in the south-west. The crushing of his rebellion (half a century after the successful Roman conclusion of the Mithridatic war) confirmed Rome’s position and its regional administration geo-politically organised according to the province of Asia and the allocation of conventus centred on privileged cities. Both Stratonikeia and Panamaros had negotiated their importance in the context of the old city-states of Caria. Indeed the god of Panamaros had been known as Zeus Karios. The tie of the city to the sanctuary – clued in the story by the god’s order that women and children should remain in the sanctuary rather than return to the city (l.19) – ensured that the city could benefit from the revival of renown of the sanctuary, a revival that was configured in terms of the new geopolitical reality. Hence, the sanctuary, through the diplomacy of the city, gained 115

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the reward of “inviolable status” (ἀσυλία) from Rome and recognition from a multitude of surrounding cities, which ensured annual visits, pilgrim attendance and status accrual. The landscape and its support of the god’s protection figures prominently in the story working in tandem with the punctuating polyphony of sounds – from battle chants to thunder rolls. There are clearly differences between the story of St. Michael and the epiphany of Zeus Panamaros. Cities are kept at considerable distance in the St. Michael story; there is no recognition in the story of the sanctuary being tied to any city, even though preambles in the manuscript tradition frequently named Colossae, whether alone or as the older name for Chonai. Chonai is certainly “punned” into the story with the play on “funneling” (ἐν τῇ χώνῇ . . . χωνευόμενοι [19.5, 6]). There is no indication that the story has been lifted from a prior civic edict, though the story of the foundation has all the hallmarks of earlier stories of sanctuary institutions. However, the escalating series of epiphanic protections, the transforming cry of “Great is .  .  . ”,58 the extreme disparity between the opposing forces, the involvement of landscape and atmospheric conditions in the witness to the divine intervention, the support and acclaim that flow to and from the sanctuary from multitudes of people and, most particularly, the tie of the epiphanies to a specific place clearly indicate that the story of St. Michael is drawing on a wellestablished literary form. It is possible to press the connection with a Hellenistic template even more closely. The story equivocates in its characterisation of “Greeks” (ἕλληνες). Greeks are certainly the opponents of the shrine and tagged as “idolaters” (εἰδωλοθύται [e.g. 3.9, 15; 5.3; 8.9; 9.9–10]), though later in the story the “Greeks” transmute into “ungodly/heathen” (ἀσεβεῖς [9.4; 11.12; 12.9; 13.16]). But Greeks are also clients of the shrine along with Christians, with many of them coming to faith in the Triune God evidenced in baptism.59 This synoikism, as Frank Trombley calls it,60 is found also in the description of Michael’s appearance and actions. These delineations cannot be tethered to Jewish traditions alone, as I have argued elsewhere.61 Rather, significant traits of Zeus have been incorporated into the magnificence of the archangelic being.62 The contrast, of course, is that in other hagiographies, it is frequently the battle against Zeus that is highlighted as the demonstration of the Christian triumph over idolatry.63 Rather, in the Michael of Chonai story, the battle opens with a confrontation with a perverse, morphing triad of goddesses: Artemis, Echidna and Cybele.

The association of Laodikeia with the memory of Julian in the St. Michael story This returns us to the politics of the time of the story’s development, in its transsectional and cross-sectional dimensions. In fact, there is a loose indication of the fourth century woven into the story. One finds an unfolding chronology, admittedly imprecise, that begins with the apostolic period, moves to disturbances after the apostles’ death, to the establishment of sacred buildings at the spring “many 116

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years” after its discovery, to the first custodian of the hagiasma after a lapse of 90 years, to a 70-year span of life for Archippos. Significantly, one tradition of the transmission of the story – in the Armenian synaxarion – expressly ties the events to the period of Julian.64 Even though Julian’s philosophical writings frequently speculated on the role and function of Zeus,65 he was also well known for his privileging of the “Great Mother”.66 Indeed, this could readily be molded into a scornful characterisation of the feminine dimensions of his whole reign,67 filled as it was (so the denigration ran) with those stereotypical feminine traits of sexual licence, prevarication, interest in the dark arts and serpentine deception. For example, Gregory of Nyssa’s sermon on Theodore the Recruit delivered about 380 CE, has been interpreted as a thinly veiled castigation of the Julian years.68 In it, a witty dialogue is constructed between Theodore and a pagan soldier about the way gods beget, with a marked contrast forged between the one son begotten without passion of the one father of Christian commitment and the manifold progeny of the prolifically fecund, female god.69 Julian did suggest that loyalty to his rule was evidenced in patronage of the Great Mother.70 In the St. Michael story the Julian period surfaces in a section of the sinister descriptors applied to the Devil, the ultimate architect of the attacks: ὁ .  .  . διάβολος .  .  . ὁ τῶν ἁγίων φονευτὴς καὶ τῶν θείων ἐκκλησιῶν διώκτης, ὁ τῶν ἰαμάτων ἐξολοθρευτὴς καὶ τῶν ἀσθενούντων πειρασμός, ὁ τὸν κόσμον ἀπατήσας καὶ μὴ χορτασθείς, ὁ .  .  . τὸ αἰώνιον σκότος ἐπιθυμήσας . . . The Devil .  .  . is the murderer of saints and persecutor of divine churches, the terminator of well-being and tempter of the weak. He is the one who deceived the world and refused to be sated, who . . . lusts after everlasting darkness. (10.12–11.1) This helps to explain the accent on the female gods as the archetype of idolatry – it is an instance of the characterisation of the idolatry that marked Julian’s rule. Idolatry is an essentially effeminate flaw. In the first chapter, the narrator claims: “The Greeks even esteemed her as the Great Mother . . . and sacrifice to her” (καὶ οἱ ἕλληνες εἶχον αὐτὴν ὡς θεὰν μεγάλην . . . καὶ ἔθυον εἰς αὐτήν [2.7–9]). The tie of sacrificing Greeks to a dominantly Phrygian god is a transparent indicator of Julian’s hellenising project. But by labelling idolatry as an essentially feminine weakness, the narrator is able to harvest the rich inheritance of the male gods in the effort to preserve, through incorporation and transmogrification, the links with the past. The use of epiphany bolsters the effort. But idolatry in the story also has a specific locale. Even though Ephesos and Hierapolis receive apostolic cleansing from their wicked (feminine) past to become bastions of Christian commitment, Laodikeia remains locked in its idolatrous shackles. Laodikeia is the centre for the gathering of the 5000 antagonists, 117

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significantly, especially given the use of the word συναχθέντες, drawn “from all those cities” (conveniently unnamed, 11.10). These are the ones darkened by the devil’s deceptions. These idolaters gather from elsewhere, an allusion not only to the language of synodical gathering but also, in its use of idolatry and gathering, an expropriation and inversion of the language of Canon 35 (συνάξεις ποιεῖν . . . εἰδωλολατρείᾳ προσῆλθεν). Indeed the writer deliberately mis-puns the name of Laodikeia so that λαὸς δίκαιος becomes ὁ λαὸς τῆς ἀδικίας, the “lawless mob” (11.10).71 The tension between Laodikeia and Colossae had been long-standing,72 probably going back to Laodikeia’s foundation and preferential treatment from the time of Antiochos II, that eclipsed Colossae’s eminence in Phrygia. Rome’s lifting of Laodikeia to be the assize centre in the Kibyran conventus in the late republic73 had been mirrored in its metropolitical status that officially gave it authority over surrounding subject dioceses.74 There is a hint of the defence of this eminence in Canon 12 of the Synod’s decisions. The conflict between idolatrous Laodikeia and the Nicaean orthodoxy of the story of St. Michael (even with the repeated affirmations of the archangel) not only points to another instance of a long-standing tension, but indicates Colossae’s judgement on Laodikeia’s Christian credentials. Hence any authority Laodikeia was parading in order to anathematise the healing spring devoted to St. Michael, is subverted. By using a story which, in form and subliminal content, ensured a continuity with a pagan past (with a strong connection with Zeus), the writer appealed to the “multitudes” (τὰ . . . πλήθη [8.8]) that had a long-standing connection with the site. By ensuring that there were substantial appeals to Christian orthodoxy through the use of the Trinitarian formula (4.9–10, 11–12; 8.10–11; 18.13–14) and citation of scripture (14.11–15 quoting Psalm 93:3–5; 17.13–14 citing Exodus 14:16, 21), that past was “baptised” into Christian service. And by framing the idolatrous past as a feminine aberration, the Julian factor could be caricatured in accordance with widespread, acceptable repudiation, along with incorporating the imputation that Laodikeia was still embroiled in Idolian nostalgia.

The resolution of the conflict of synodical canon and popular epiphany Both Laodikeia and Colossae/Chonai were negotiating their way in the postJulian period with different theological commitments and with different literary genres at their disposal. In the highly centralised political and ecclesial structure of the period, provincial allegiances, in this instance at least, were negotiated in local groupings in competition with each other and using each other as negative examples for building or defending their own standing.75 Whilst the surviving texts, of synodical canon and popular epiphany, have been the means – to date the only extant means76 – to explore the infra-ecclesial conflicts between these two cities generated in a period of rapid regime changes, the question arises as to the

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function of such disparate literary genres within this conflict. Were they designed to sublimate, perpetuate, justify or intensify the conflict? Ironically, both pieces of literature achieved a measure of success. Whatever their purpose in their induction into writing in inter-city conflicts, they both became harnessed in service of the interests of the wider Church. The Canons of the Synod of Laodikeia were incorporated into canonical collections possibly before the end of the fourth century77 and there they have stayed, the shadow of Laodikeian Arianism notwithstanding. Indeed one mosaic in a twelfth-century Byzantine church in Bethlehem turned one canon (8) into the main thrust of the council, now called to thwart Montanism!78 The story of St. Michael of Chonai not only went through manifold developments and re-tellings; it came into orthodox privileging in the eighth-century iconoclast crisis when the archangel’s incorporeal impact on the material landscape – still visible above a lavishly flowing spring near Honaz – became a demonstration of the validity of icons, and this notwithstanding Theodoret’s denunciation of Colossian devotion to the archangel, a fervour shared with much of Phrygia. The tensions between the local allegiances may have remained unresolved, but the great world of church and empire had found the resources activated by local conflict suitable to its own concerns, and they appropriated them accordingly, as such powers are wont to do. In the process, Canon 35 was marginalised, thereby granting Colossae/Chonai a measure of vindication, as did the lifting of Chonai into metropolitan status some time in the mid-tenth century. Michael’s epiphanies were remembered and that memory was adapted to changing circumstances, thereby fuelling renewed life into the patronage of the hagiasma.

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Appendix One I STRATONIKEIA 10 THE DECREE HONOURING ZEUS PANAMAROS 79

1–2. [During the time Artemidoros, son of Artemidoros grandson of Apollonios was stephanophore], on the 28th of Thesmophorion, [it pleased the boule and demos of the Stratonikeians, when Chairemon, son of Hecataios], grandson of Chairemon was priest, of the deme Koraios: 2–5. Whereas, [in former times the great Zeus Panamaros had, in manifest manner, delivered many great epiphanies], for the salvation of the city from ancient times, even more now has the god entered the battle and revealed himself [against the enemies, and saved the sanctuary from the threats and the circumstances threatening it]. 5–8. For when many cavalry and infantry surged [into the region, with their troops armed with weapons, ballistic support, scaling-ladders] and other implements of war, [around the middle of the night a significant proportion of them advanced on the shrine. Then the god] boomed into them with a massive flame of light, so effectively that [. . .] they were compelled to beat a hasty retreat, with much [of their firepower left incinerated. . . .] 9–18. At daybreak, when the enemies dared to move upon [the (sacred) precincts with a powerful, well-armed force, it came to pass that they were enveloped] in a fog so thick that some found themselves unwittingly fighting against the god . . . while others who had set themselves to arc against a part of the (sacred) precincts for attack, [found a great storm had arisen. Untrammeled thunder rent out] and lightning bolts flashed through the [sky]; [at once, there was a multitude] of deserters crying out for pardon and others bawling with a huge plea “ Great is Zeus Panamaros”. [But others prohibited] any comfort from themselves be given to the deserters. Finally, they all mortally wounded one another and wiped each other out becoming [blinded in their deranged state]. Some of them tried to leap out of the fog as they would avoid a torrent [and . . .] became injured as they attempted a retreat in full view from the sanctuary. [Many corpses were found littered around the sacred precincts; many] more were scattered across the surrounding high country as if they had been unhinged and [driven berserk] by the Furies. 18–22. [But we] the god [preserved us all] safe and sound and he often exhorted us through his diviners [requiring us to guard with fervor] the sacred precincts 120

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and forbidding the women and children from disbanding to the city [– this proved helpful in restoring the people] to fine mettle, free from danger. And as many had lain down their spears, those weapons were recognised as ineffectual, falling away to each side; others of us who did lunge into the fray suffered no debilitating injury; thirty [received superficial wounds] and all were saved. 22–27. But, reinforcements having appeared before the enemies, they regathered [an even greater force] at their camp which was stationed at Pisye. The order having been given, they again streamed towards the temple [. . .] and encircling the (sacred) precincts they laid down a siege. Then, a battle chant reverberated out as if help [was issuing from the city, although] nothing could be seen, and with a great baying of dogs unleashed as if they were mounting upon the attackers, all the would-be assailants against the Heraion were in one moment cast headlong down so that their standards [and their grappling-ladders were abandoned]. The (besieged) found that the lamps of the god were still alight just as they had been throughout the siege. 28–34. [In the end, all the war-mongers] were routed by the occurrence of the epiphany; they threw down their arms and again [in confusion] took off in flight [and] not finding the way [to the camp] and unable to see [a safe place to which they might escape], they shifted themselves [with difficulty by upward tracks seeking safety] in the surrounding [mountains]. Taking refuge [in a rocky] and very high outcrop, they became very agitated [at the] head of the sacred precinct and rushed against him [but] many [stumbled] in their escape [while] others fled, relinquishing their forsaken arms. 34–38. ? [. . . . ] of the pedestal/seat of white marble in the [temple? . . .] to Zeus Panamaros [. . .] the returns and the copy of the decree [. . .]

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Appendix Two SUMMARY OF THE STORY OF ST. MICHAEL OF CHONAI, THE POPULAR VERSION 80

Chapter 1. The apostle Philip joins forces with John the theologian, who is fresh from the expulsion of Artemis from Ephesos, to rid Hierapolis also of “this foul and filthy serpent”. The serpentine queen manifests in a protean blend of the female gods Artemis, Echidna and Cybele. “The Greeks even esteemed her as the Great Goddess”. Chapter 2. Having departed a cleansed Hierapolis for a teaching tour in other cities, the apostles stop over at “a place called Chairotopa”, where they announce that “the mighty taxiarch and archistrategos of the Lord’s power” is to “perform dazzling wonders”. Healing waters immediately begin to flow. Chapter 3. The hagiasma attracts both Christians and Greeks but draws the ire of idolaters in Laodikeia. One opponent, whose daughter was dumb from birth, receives a pseudo-oneiric vision of Michael. He obeys the instruction to bathe her in the waters, and learns from bystanders to appeal to the Trinity and Michael. The girl’s first words proclaim: “God is truly of the Christians; great is your power O Michael, archistrategos”. Her father makes a benefaction of a shrine and a shelter. Chapter 4. A ten-year-old Christian from Hierapolis named Archippos becomes the first custodian of the shrine, living 70 years. He rigorously pursues an “angelic asceticism” that entails abstemious food intake, sackcloth clothing, minimal bathing, disrupted sleep and constant prayer that the attractions for the “body of clay . . . a stinking mire” might not undermine “faithful orthodoxy”, the proper garment of the soul. Chapter 5. “Unbelievers and enemies of the truth” begin to mount attacks on the holy “slave of God”. They make their first foray to shut down the hagiasma only to find their hands restrained and a flame of fire springing from the water to strike their faces. They return to tormenting Archippos. Chapter 6. A second foray is directed to diverting a nearby stream against the healing spring to pollute the sacred waters. The brook refuses to approach the holy site and finds another path. Chapter 7. The Devil enters the scene, receiving a lengthy series of descriptors. He is credited as the one who plots and incites a massive destruction of the sanctuary by engineering a flood. Five thousand men, heathen “people of injustice”,

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gather at Laodikeia and bind themselves against Michael, the healing spring and for the defence of their own gods. Chapter  8. The “enemies of truth” take up positions from an “impregnable monolith” along the ridge of the mountain. They construct a temporary dam to block two rivers and cut a channel to direct the planned flood towards the “holy place”. Chapter 9. Meanwhile, Archippos perceives the machinations of the idolators and commits himself to remain at the shrine in prayer, repeating his belief in the intercessions and saving power of Michael. He lies prostrate, without food or drink, for ten days. Chapter  10. After the ten days, the heathen unlock the dam and scramble to safety on mountain crags. “But they began to feel most uneasy”. Chapter 11. Archippos remains at his post, weeping, beseeching and reciting Psalm 93. An “almighty thunderclap” announces the descent of Michael. After a fourth command to leave his post and join Michael, Archippos finally overcomes his fear, expresses his belief in the protection of God and the archistrategos over the shrine, and stands to the left of Michael. The epiphany of Michael is described but Michael avows his own position as slave before the ineffable God. Chapter  12. Michael addresses the torrents and, making a sign of the cross, halts their flow. He extends his right arm “as if controlling a staff”, like Moses. He first splits the impregnable monolith, then, with Archippos at his right, opens a chasm to funnel the waters, confirms the healing power of the site and petrifies the opponents who had contrived the assault. The site is blessed forever.

Notes 1 I wish to express my gratitude to the University of South Africa for making possible my participation in the 6th Annual UNISA Symposium for New Testament and Early Christian Studies, for which this chapter was written, and for the helpful comments made by the participants. I also express my thanks to Dr. Lara O’Sullivan of the University of Western Australia whose research in Hellenistic epiphanies initially sparked my own. Alan Cadwallader is also a guest lecturer at the Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies, University of South Africa. 2 See especially R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York: Knopf, 1989), 102–67; K. Piettre, “Le Corps des dieux dans les epiphanies divines en Grèce ancienne” (Ph.D. dissertation, École pratique des hautes études, Paris, 1996); A.K. Lau, Manifest in Flesh: The Epiphany Christology of the Pastoral Epistles (Göttingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996); V.J. Platt, Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Greco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); G. Petridou, Divine Epiphany in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). These have marked a return to and re-examination of earlier studies such as F. Pfister, “Epiphanie,” Supplement to Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft 4 (1924): 277–323; C. Picard, Éphèse et Claros (Paris: 1922), C. Mohrmann, “Epiphaneia,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 37 (1953): 644–70; E. Pax, EPIFANEIA: Ein religiongeschichtlicher Beitrag zur biblischen Theologie (Munich: Karl Zink, 1955).

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3 W.K. Pritchett, The Greek State at War, 5 vols. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979) 3:3; J.N. Bremmer, “The Greek Gods in the Twentieth Century,” in The Gods of Ancient Greece: Identities and Transformations, ed. J.N. Bremmer and A. Erskine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 1–18 at 8–9; A. Henrichs, “Göttliche Präsenz als Differenz: Dionysos als epiphanischer Gott,” in A Different God? Dionysos and Polytheism, ed. R. Schlesier (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 105–16 at 107. The summative encapsulation goes back to Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and has been repeated multiple times through to the present: Der Glaube der Hellenen, 2 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1931–1932), 1:17, 23, 42. For the list of military epiphanies with an attempt to explain the occurrence by comparison to more recent epiphanies, see G. Wheeler, “Battlefield Epiphanies in Ancient Greece: A Survey,” Digressus 4 (2004): 1–14. 4 C. Williamson, “City and Sanctuary in Hellenistic Asia Minor: Constructing Civic Identity in the Sacred Landscapes of Mylasa and Stratonikeia in Karia” (Ph.D. dissertation; Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 2012). Sanctuaries indeed can provide a lens through which to view turning points, advance and decline for local regions and cities: see P. Debord, Aspects sociaux et économiques de la vie religieuse dans l’Anatolie gréco-romaine (Leiden: Brill, 1982); A. Busine, “Oracles and Civic Identity in Roman Asia Minor,” in Cults, Creeds and Identities in the Greek City After the Classical Age, ed. R. Alston, O.M. van Nijf, and C.G. Williamson (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), 175–96. Ongoing remembrance required continual, subtle, vivifying adjustments in the account to accommodate changed political realities. See N. Belayche, “ ‘In Dieu est né. . . . ’ À Stratonicée de Carie (I Stratonikeia 10),” in Maniàeres de penser dans l’Antiquité méditerranéenne et orientale: Mélanges offerts à Francis Schmidt par ses élèves, ses collègues et ses amis, ed. C. Bartsch and M. Vârtejanu-Joubert (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 193–212, at 200. 5 A. Chaniotis, War in the Hellenistic World: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 160. 6 T. Whitmarsh, “Thinking Local,” in Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World, ed. T. Whitmarsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–17, at 3. 7 As suggested about Phrygian survival amidst a succession of empires by P. Thonemann, “Phrygia: An Anarchist History, 950 BC – AD 100,” in Roman Phrygia: Culture and Society, ed. P. Thonemann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–40. 8 See D.N. Posner, “Regime Change and Ethnic Cleavages in Africa,” Comparative Political Studies 40 (2007): 1307–9. 9 Themistius, Or. 5, 6, 14–16 (P. Heather and D. Moncur, Politics, Philosophy and Empire in the Fourth Century: Select Orations of Themistius [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001], 159–72, 180–98, 225–9, 236–54, 265–84); and see Julian, Ep. Them. (Wright 2.202–37), Libanius, Ep. 818 (102), 1430 (116) (A.F. Norman, ed., Libanius: Autobiography and Selected Letters, 2 vols, LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1992), 2.154–7, 208–13. Themistius’ panegyric for/to Julian is contested as to whether it survives in Arabic translation. See Heather and Moncur, Politics, Philosophy and Empire, xiv, 38–42; J.W. Watt, “Julian’s Letter to Themistius – and Themistius’ Response?” in Emperor and Author: The Writings of Julian the Apostate, ed. N. Baker-Brian and S. Tougher (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2012), 91–103. For an assumed convenience for the reader, I have used the edition of Julian’s writings in the LCL series (as for other well-known ancient authors) by W.C. Wright, Julian, 3 vols, LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913–1923), rather than that of J. Bidez et al., L’Empereur Julien: Oeuvres complètes, 4 vols (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1923–1964). The edition of H.-G. Nesselrath, Iuliani Augusti Opera (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015) was unavailable at the time of writing.

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10 Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 4.77; see Grégoire de Nazianze. Discours 4–5: Contre Julien, ed. J. Bernardi, SC 309 (Paris: Cerf, 1983), 198.20. 11 Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 5.19; see Sozomenus Kirchengeschichte, ed. J. Bidez and G.C. Hansen, GCS 4 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1960), 223–6; Theodoret, Hist. eccl. 3.14; in Theodoret Kirchengeschichte, ed. L. Parmentier and F. Scheidweiler (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 19542), 190–2; cf. Ephrem the Syrian, Contr. Jul. 1:17, 2.5, 3.14; trans. S. Tougher, Julian the Apostate (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) 128–31. Even though these Christian historians and poets have an investment in cultivating the Antiochene populace as bearers of Christian orthodoxy, Julian’s own tart response in the Mispogon (see especially 346B [Wright 2.444-5]) suggests there was some substance to the claim. For more on the relation of Julian and the Antiochene populace, see N. Baker-Brian, “The Politics of Virtue in Julian’s Misopogon,” in Baker-Brian and Tougher, Emperor and Author, 263–80, at 266–8. The affirmation of orthodoxy however was played out against the anathema of idolatry, complicated by the interconnection of martyr’s relics (Babylas) and disputed religious sites; see C. Shepardson, Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014), 15, 58–9, 65–79. Antioch at this stage was largely under Homoian sway in its leadership. 12 Themistius’ attempt to position himself as imperial orator for Julian appears to have been founded on a conflict of ideas over the nature of true kingship, at least as far as one can make out the circumstances from the fragments of history. Julian’s letter is extant (Ep. Them.) but Themistius’ initiation is not. There has been a suggestion that Themistius’ response to Julian’s polite refusal is extant in Arabic; see J.W. Watt, “Themistius and Julian: Their Association in Syriac and Arabic Tradition,” in The Purpose of Rhetoric in Late Antiquity, ed. A.J. Quirogo Puertas (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 161–76. 13 Syrian (=Judeo-Christian), Greek, and Egyptian; Themistius, Or. 5 (Heather-Moncur, 159–72). 14 Or. 5.70a (Heather-Moncur, 171). It was a familiar trope: see Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae 22.5.3–4 (W. Seyfarth, ed., Ammiani Marcellini: Rerum Gestarum, Libri qui supersunt, vol. 1, 2 vols [Stuttgart/Leipzig: Teubner, 1999], 256. 15 Epistle of Aristeas 16; see H. St.J. Thackeray, “The Letter of Aristeas,” in An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, ed. H.B. Swete (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), 553–4. 16 Or. 5.70b (Heather-Moncur, 171). 17 Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 4.3, 21, 39 (Bernardi 89–90, 114–16, 138–41). By contrast Athanasius, whilst Constantius still lived, called him godless, unholy and so on: Hist. Ar. 30, 34 (PG 25.725D – 728B, 731D – 734B). Philostorgius generally favoured Constantius because of his Homoian commitments but allowed his defeat by the Persians to be shafted home to his murder of relatives: Hist. eccl. 5.4; trans. P.R. Amidon, Philostorgius: Church History (Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2007), 78. 18 As Severus of Antioch tellingly admits (Ep. 5.6) see E.W. Brooks, The Sixth Book of the Select Letters of Severus, Patriarch of Antioch in the Syriac Version of Athanasius of Nisibis, 2 vols. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1902–1904), 2:316. Compare also the judgement of Peter of Callinicum; see R.Y. Ebied, A. van Roey, and L.R. Wickham, Peter of Callinicum: Anti-Tritheist Dossier, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 10 (Leuven: Peeters, 1981), 45. Similarly Ephrem the Syrian conjoined Arians with Jews: see C. Shepardson, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in FourthCentury Syria (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 1–7. 19 “[T]he so-called canons seem rather to be a statement of what the canon was, rather than the actual wording of a decree or law,” states W.A. Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Pre-Nicene and Nicene Eras (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1970), 316.

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F.J.E. Boddens Hosang holds similarly; Establishing Boundaries: Christian-Jewish Relations in Early Council Texts (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 93. The number of canons varies in the manuscripts. The 60th canon, on the books of Scripture is universally held to be an addition, but the number appears to vary between 53 and 59. The Decreta Conciliorum has 58, also found in the transcription of canons in BL Arundel Ms 393 attributable to the scribe (inadvertently?) omitting Canon 55 (regarding drinking in taverns!), though it was listed in the contents at the beginning (fol. 40a; cf. 40b). Even Gratianic manuscripts vary between 24 and 32 attendees. Most manuscripts seem to avoid mention of any number relying instead on either an assertion of the region in which it was held (Phrygia Pacatiana) or of attendance from the province of Asia or both: Ἡ ἁγία σύνοδος ἡ κατὰ λαοδικείαν τῆς Φρυγίας Kαπατιανῆς συγκροτηθεῖσα ἐκ διαφόρων ἐπαρχιῶν τῆς ἀσιανῆς. See I.B. Pitra, Iuris Ecclesiastici Graecorum Historia et Monumenta, 2 vols. (Rome: Collegius Urbanus, 1864), 2:494; W. Beveridge, Synodikon; sive, Pandectae canonum ss. apostolorum, et conciliorum ab ecclesia Graeca receptorum. . . (Oxford: Sheldon, 1672), 453. Other synods from the period do confirm Nicaean orthodoxy as part of their preambles: see the Council of Illyricum (c. 375 CE) mentioned by Theodoret, Hist. eccl. 4.8 (Parmentier – Scheidweiler, 220–1), or the Council of Serdica (343 CE); see R. MacMullen, Voting About God in Early Church Councils (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 105–7. The text of the canons (unless otherwise stated) is taken from G.D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio, 31 vols. (Florence, 1759–1798), 2:563–73. Eusebius of Nicomedia (339–341 CE), Macedonius (342–6, 351–60), Eudoxius of Antioch (360–70) Demophilos (370–80). The early Arian control of the see of Constantinople was intermittently interrupted by the three-times entry of Paul I (337–39, 341–2, 346–51). See Gregory of Nazianzus, De vita sua 652–62 (C. Jungck, Gregor von Nazianz: De Vita Sua [Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1974], 86); Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 6.9, 7.5 (Bidez-Hansen, 248–9, 306–7). See the discussion in Peter L’Huillier, The Church of the Ancient Councils: The Disciplinary Work of the First Four Ecumenical Councils (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 210–12. See S. Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus and the Vision of Rome (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 366–73. Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 6.12 (Bidez-Hansen, 251–4). This relies on Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 5.16 (Bidez-Hansen, 217–9) but the specifics are close to the matters referred to in Julian’s Frag. Ep. 289A – B, 293A, D, 302C – 304D (Wright 2.298–9, 308–11, 328–35. See Canons 24, 36, 54, 55. U. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 302. Such an allusion to the time of Julian as marking a “type” of false Christian is precisely what we find in the writings of Severus. See his Letter III to Sergius; translation by I. Torrance, The Correspondence of Severus and Sergius, Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 11 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2011), 150. It was rapidly becoming the metaphor for the topos. Contr. Gal. 290b – e: “Moses calls the angels gods” (cf. 356E). See the discussion in J.G. Cook, The Interpretation of the New Testament in Greco-Roman Paganism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 328–30. The word ὀνομάζειν in the canon has more the sense of worship than naming. This is certainly quite evident in one Latin manuscript of the conciliar canons. The Greek of the actual canon was literally translated by nominare but the canon title in the list at the beginning used colare (BL Arundel

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34 35

36

37

38

39 40

41

Ms 393, fol. 39b). There may have been an ambiguity initiated by the choice of words but the allusion to Julian or a deliberate abstruseness not only suited the council’s arguments, but, ironically, would enable the canon to be saved when the Michael story became a champion of orthodoxy in the iconoclast crises of the eighth century. An expanded text (ms. Vindobonensis) is reproduced by P.-P. Joannou, ed., Discipline générale antique (II–IXe s.), I.2, Les canons des synodes particuliers (IVe–IXe s.), Pontificia commissione per la redazione de le codice di diritto canonico orientale. Fonti. ser. 1 fasc. 9 (Rome-Grottaferrata: Tipografia Italo-Orientale “S. Nilo,” 1962), 144–5. The inclusive translation is by L. Johnson, Worship in the Early Church: An Anthology of Historical Sources, 4 vols. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009), 2:302; cf. C.-J. Héfélé, A History of the Councils of the Church, trans. W.R. Clark and H.N. Oxenham (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1876), 317. So, D.J. Mattingly, Imperialism, Power and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), xxvii. PG 82. 613–4A – B, 619–20D – 621–2A. The suggestion of Ranga Cline and John Charles Arnold that misdirected veneration is the meaning of the Laodikeian canon and of Theodoret’s comments takes no account of the impact of the emperor Julian nor the aftermath focus on idolatry. In fact, the upheaval caused by Julian barely figures at all in their analyses: see R. Cline, Ancient Angels: Conceptualizing Angeloi in the Roman Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 142–5; J.C. Arnold, The Footprints of Michael the Archangel: The Formation and Diffusion of a Saintly Cult, c. 300–c. 800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 58–61. For the more general context, see M. Mulryan, “ ‘Paganism’ in Late Antiquity: Regional Studies and Material Culture,” in The Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism,” ed. L. Lavan and M. Mulryan (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 41–86. Beveridge, Synodikon 2:196; W. Gundling, Canones Graeci Concilii Laodiceni cum versionibus Gentiani Herveti, Dionysii Exigui, Isidori Mercatoris (Noriberg: Johanne Zieger, 1684), 293–305; O. Meinardus, “St Michael’s Miracle of Khonae and Its Geographical Setting,” Ekklesia kai Theologica 1 (1980): 459–69, at 463. The range of status-reducing stigmatisation in the New Testament text includes: εἰκῇ, “vainly”, φυσιούμενος, “conceited”, οὐ κρατῶν τὴν κεφαλήν, “not holding to the head” (Col. 2:18–19). Idolatry is not applied here in Colossians but rather to πλεονεξία, “greed” in a different section (3:5). So Canons 6, 7, 8, 10, 29, 32, 34, 37, 38. See generally, A.T. Kraabel, “Synagoga Caeca: Systematic Distortion in Gentile Interpretations of Evidence for Judaism in the Early Christian Period,” in “To See Ourselves as Others See Us”: Christians, Jews, “Others” in Late Antiquity, ed. J. Neusner and E.S. Frerichs (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), 219–47, at 236–41. Compare Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 2.32 (Bidez-Hansen, 96–8) who avers that absence made one liable to the anathema. There are a number of versions of the story of St. Michael. The earliest is the anonymous version analysed here. A number of refined Byzantine versions were produced in and after the eleventh century, that of Sisinnius, Simeon Metaphrastes and “Anthony the Monk”. The style of these versions is markedly different from the earlier, vernacular one, cohering with the differences noted by C. Høgel, Symeon Metaphrastes: Rewriting and Canonization (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002), 22–3. The earlier version is populist in both style (short paratactical units, absence of complex structures and the like) and in the appeals it makes to pre-existing traditional, cultural tales, forms and motifs. For the purposes of this chapter, the edition of M. Bonnet is used, citing page and line number: Narratio de Miraculo a Michaele Archangelo Chonis Patrato (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1890). A new edition that incorporates further manuscript evidence is in

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43 44

45

preparation. An English translation may be found in A.H. Cadwallader and M. Trainor, eds., Colossae in Space and Time (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2011), 323– 30. A summary of the story is found in Appendix 2 to this article. For a detailed analysis of the source behind the Michael of Chonai narrative of the sacred spring’s foundation, see A.H. Cadwallader, “ ‘As if in a Vision of the Night. . .’: Authorising the Healing Spring of Chonai,” in Dreams, Memory and Imagination in Byzantium, ed. B. Neil and E. Anagnostou-Laoutides (Leiden: Brill, 2018), forthcoming. Some manuscripts omit the ὡς. The text and translation is disputed as scribes and translators wanted to avoid the obvious pagan associations of the acclamation of greatness. Glen Peers translates the text as “The God of the Christians, Your Power Is Truly Great, Michael Archistrategos”; Subtle Bodies: Representing Angels in Byzantium (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 146. Bouvier and Amsler agree with Peers in tying “truly” (“en vérité”) to Michael’s power but they have departed from Bonnet’s critical text and, following Nau’s Greek and Latin text (550), added “viens à mon aide” (for βοήθει μοι / adiuva me – a clear repetition from the call for God’s help two lines previously [4.13], no doubt liturgically reinforced: 402). See B. Bouvier and F. Amsler, “Le Miracle de l’Archenge Michel à Chonai: Introduction, Traduction, et Notes,” in Early Christian Voices: In Texts, Traditions and Symbols: Essays in Honor of François Bovon, ed. D.H. Warren, A.G. Brock, and D.W. Pao (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 395–407, at 402; F. Nau, “Le Miracle de Saint Michel à Colosses,” Patrologia Orientalis 4 (1908): 542–62, at 550. However, Peers’ rendering assumes that the verbless construction of Bonnet’s text (ὁ θεὸς τῶν Χριστιανῶν ἀληθῶς μεγάλη σου ἡ δύναμις Μιχαὴλ ἀρχιστράτηγε) is a single clause. This requires ὁ θεὸς to be taken as a vocative in apposition to Μιχαὴλ ἀρχιστράτηγε – clearly unacceptable – or as an abbreviation of “Here/this is the God of the Christians”. However once a copula is added here, to fill out the ellipsis, it becomes more likely that we have two balancing clauses: “God is of the Christians. . .”. The position of the adverb is as likely to end the first clause as begin the second (just as occurs 6.10, 13.9, οὕτως, and 9.11, ἀπαύστως) though it must be admitted that there is no absolute position for the adverb in the work (e.g. 6.4). Peers also asserts that the acclamation comes from the father before the healing of the child whereas, in fact, the text has the cry coming from the daughter as testimony to the success of the healing. Arnold sidesteps the centrality of the girl’s cry in this part of the narrative, shifting attention to a Nicaean formula, thereby missing the “tension” in the story: Footprints of Michael, 46–7. Given that “megatheism” – to resort to Angelos Chaniotis’ coinage – is designed to represent one god as superior to all others, there is perhaps some tension in combining the “true” god with the “great” archangel, when “great” has a long history (cf. Sophocles, Oed. 872; H. Lloyd-Jones, ed., Sophocles: Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus, LCL [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996], 412–3). The writer is however certainly trying to hold the two together. The use of the technical term ἀναβοᾶν to unleash the acclamation would suggest that there is a long-used form that is directing the writing. See A. Chaniotis, “Megatheism: The Search for the Almighty God and the Competition of the Cults,” in One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire, ed. S. Mitchell and P. van Nuffelen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 113–40, at 113, 123. A critical importance was attached to the maintenance of the sanctity of sacred and/ or healing waters in Greek sanctuaries and this seems to have flowed into Christian control of such sites. See Pausanias 1.38.1, 3.21.5, 7.22.4 (W.H.S. Jones and H.A. Ormerod, eds., Pausanias, Description of Greece, LCL [London: William Heinemann, 1926], vol. 1, 202–3, vol. 2, 134–5, vol. 3, 300–1); F. Sokolowski, Lois sacrées des cités grecques, supplément (Paris: de Boccard, 1962), §§14, 50, 81.

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46 Compare Acts 12:6–11; Acts of Paul and Thecla 22 (C. Tischendorf, ed., Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha [Leipzig: Avenarius and Mendelssohn, 1851], 50. 47 For example, civic honours were given to one Syriskos of Chersonesos (FGrH 807 Tl) for his scholarship (and oral delivery) of the succession of epiphanies of Tauric Artemis. Compare also the works of Istros on the epiphanies of Apollo and of Heracles (FGrH 334 fr 50–53) and of Phylarchos on the epiphanies of Zeus reported in the Suda Φ 828. 48 L. Robert, Études anatoliennes (Paris: de Boccard, 1937), 460–4, followed by Pritchett, Greek State at War, 11, 42. 49 Pritchett, Greek State at War, 39. 50 See for example, Dio Cassius, Hist. Rom. 48.26.4–5 (E. Cary, ed., Dio’s Roman History, LCL [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917], vol. 5, 274–5); Pausanias 4.27.1 (Jones-Ormerod, vol. 2, 416–9). 51 Or. 40.12. Translation by C.A. Behr, Aelius Aristides: The Complete Works (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 241. 52 For a translation of the inscription, see Appendix A to this chapter. 53 See A. Bresson, P. Brun, and E. Varinlioğlu, “Les inscriptions grecques et latines,” in Les Hautes Terres de Carie, ed. P. Debord and E. Varinlioğlu (Bordeaux: Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, 2001), 81–305, at 201, 212–16. 54 Hist. 7.30. Bonnet, Miraculo a Michaele Archangelo, xxviii. The equation has been recently modulated by P. Thonemann, The Maeander Valley: A Historical Geography from Antiquity to Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 81–3 who tries to tie the story to the Lycus River, largely on the basis of the traditional location of the church of St. Michael and the account in the mid-Byzantine writer Michael Attaliates 105; see I. Bekker, Michaelis Attaliotae Historia (CSHB 34; Bonn: Weber 1853), 140,14–141, 5. In so doing, he has reiterated the privileging of the church as the sacred site – a much later development in the Michael cult at Colossae/Chonai, found in the postscript to John Scylitzes’ Hist. (PG 122.415–16B – C). 55 The analysis here is indebted to the work of Nicole Belayche, “Dieu est né”; Christine Williamson, “City and Sanctuary”; Pierre Debord, Aspects sociaux et économiques; and Verity Platt, Facing the Gods. 56 Belayche, “Dieu est né,” 206. 57 Belayche, “Dieu est né,” 199–200. 58 4.15. Strictly, here the epithet is ascribed to Michael’s power: δύναμις but this is a familiar collation at ancient sanctuaries: see H.W. Pleket, “Religious History as the History of Mentality: The ‘Believer’ as Servant of the Deity in the Greek World,” in Faith, Hope and Worship: Aspects of Religious Mentality in the Ancient World, ed. H.S. Versnel (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 152–92 at 178–83. Michael is also acclaimed as “great” in the Life of Theodore of Sykeon; see C. Jolivet-Lévy, Études Cappadociennes (London: Pindar, 2012), 402. The importance attached to this descriptor can be adjudged from Hadrian’s formal addition of ὁ μέγιστος to the name “Zeus Panamaros” (IStrat 15.3–4). 59 3.13; thus, correctly Cline, Ancient Angels, passim; Arnold, Footprints of Michael, 9–48. 60 Hellenic Religion and Christianization, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 152–4. 61 A.H. Cadwallader, “St Michael of Chonai and the Tenacity of Paganism,” in Intercultural Transmission Throughout the Medieval Mediterranean: 100–1600 CE, ed. D. Kim and S. Hathaway (London: Continuum, 2013), 37–59. 62 There may be a parallel to this blending at Stratonikeia itself where there has been discovered an inscription (yet to be published) of a sanctuary of St. Michael that was graced with the privilege of “sanctuary” (ἀσυλιάσιον).

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63 See H. Delehaye, “Encomium for S Mocius by Michael the Monk,” Analecta Bollandiana 31 (1912): 176–87, at 181; “The Story of Saint Lucillian and His Friends,” Analecta Bollandiana 31 (1912): 187–94, and also in “The Martyrdom of the 40 Women and Holy Ammon the Deacon,” Analecta Bollandiana 31 (1912): 194–207. 64 G. Bayan, “Le Synaxaire arménien der ter Israel,” Patrologia Orientalis 5 (1910): 347–556, at 507. 65 See for example, Julian, Or. 7 (To the Cynic Heracleios) 220A – B, 228D – 230A, 231A – C (Wright, 2.110–3, 134–9, 140–1). 66 Julian, Or. 5 (Hymn to the Mother of the Gods) (Wright 1.442–503). 67 Julian may well have configured Cybele in a complementary relationship to Helios but this masculine-feminine dyad had no place in a project to discredit his religious teaching and practice. See J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, “Julian’s Hymn to the Mother of the Gods: The Revival and Justification of Traditional Religion,” in Baker-Brian and Tougher, Emperor and Author, 213–27, at 223–4. 68 J. Leemans, “Gregory of Nyssa: A Homily on Theodore the Recruit,” in “Let Us Die That We May Live”: Greek Homilies on Christian Martyrs from Asia Minor, Palestine and Syria (c. AD 350 – AD 450), ed. J. Leemans, W. Mayer, P. Allen, and B. Dehandschutter (London: Routledge, 2003), 82–90 at 83. 69 Leemans, “Gregory of Nyssa,” 87. 70 See, especially, Elm, Sons of Hellenism, 118–36. 71 A similar though extended pun was also directed at the pagan leaders of Laodikeia on the Europa in Macedonia: “Encomium for S Mocius by Michael the Monk,” 13.2–3, 14.21–24 (Delehaye, 185). 72 See A.H. Cadwallader, “When You Say Concord, You Mean Competition: Numismatic Witness to Colossae’s Conflict with Laodicea,” forthcoming, on the significance of Colossae’s homonoia coins. 73 T. Corsten, Die Inschriften von Laodikeia am Lykos, Inschriften Griechischer Städte aus Kleinasien 49 (Bonn: Habelt, 1997), 2. 74 The principle that the secular standing of a city should direct ecclesial status appears to have begun early (Canon 6 of Nicaea) and was developed by the Council of Constantinople (Canon 2). Canon 38 of the Council of Trullo (692 CE) put it bluntly, “let the order of things ecclesiastical follow the civil and public models”. 75 This is not to assert a simple notion of centre and centre-formation; see Mattingly, Imperialism, Power and Identity, xxii. 76 The archaeological excavations have been proceeding apace at Laodikeia, under the directorship of Prof. Celal Şimşek. Italian epigraphers are collating the newly discovered inscriptions of the last decade. The discovery of a menorah roughly cut into a column of a nymphaeum with a cross carved at the top of it is tied by Stephen Fine to the time (result) of the Council of Laodikeia: “The Menorah and the Cross: Historiographical Reflections on a Recent Discovery from Laodicea on the Lycus,” in New Perspectives on Jewish-Christian Relations: In Honor of David Berger, ed. E. Carlebach and J.J. Schacter (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 31–50 at 47–50. Şimşek ties the discovery of a major church building to the time of Constantine and posits the Council as gathered there. No artefactual link with Colossae has yet been published however. 77 See Boddens Hosang, Establishing Boundaries, 91. 78 CIG 8953: against “Montanus and the Other Heresies”. 79 This is my English translation of the reconstructed text of Pierre Roussel, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 55 (1931): 84; sections in square brackets indicate restorations. Paragraphing follows that of the French translation by Nicole Belayche, “In Dieu est Né. . .,” 209–10, a translation to which I readily acknowledge my debt. 80 The summary is based on my translation of M. Bonnet’s 1889/1890 edition of “The Story of the Archistrategos, St Michael of Chonai,” in Cadwallader and Trainor, Colossae in Space and Time, 323–30.

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Joannou, P.-P., ed. Discipline générale antique (IIe – IXe s.), I.2, Les canons des synodes particuliers (IVe – IXe s.). Pontificia commissione per la redazione de le codice di diritto canonico orientale. Fonti. ser. 1 fasc. 9. Rome – Grottaferrata: Tipografia Italo-Orientale “S. Nilo”, 1962. Johnson, L. Worship in the Early Church: An Anthology of Historical Sources. 4 vols. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009. Jolivet-Lévy, C. Études Cappadociennes. London: Pindar, 2012. Jones, W.H.S. and H.A. Ormerod, eds. Pausanias, Description of Greece. 6 vols, LCL. London: William Heinemann, 1926–33. Jungck, C. Gregor von Nazianz: De Vita Sua. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1974. Jurgens, W.A. The Faith of the Early Fathers: Pre-Nicene and Nicene Eras. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1970. Kraabel, A.T. “Synagoga Caeca: Systematic Distortion in Gentile Interpretations of Evidence for Judaism in the Early Christian Period.” Pages 219–47 in “To See Ourselves as Others See Us”: Christians, Jews, “Others” in Late Antiquity. Edited by J. Neusner and E.S. Frerichs. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985. L’Huillier, P. The Church of the Ancient Councils: The Disciplinary Work of the First Four Ecumenical Councils. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. Lau, A.K. Manifest in Flesh: The Epiphany Christology of the Pastoral Epistles. Göttingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996. Leemans, J. “Gregory of Nyssa: A Homily on Theodore the Recruit.” Pages 82–90 in “Let Us Die That We May Live”: Greek Homilies on Christian Martyrs from Asia Minor, Palestine and Syria (c. AD 350 – AD 450). Edited by J. Leemans, W. Mayer, P. Allen, and B. Dehandschutter. London: Routledge, 2003. Liebeschuetz, J.H.W.G. “Julian’s Hymn to the Mother of the Gods: The Revival and Justification of Traditional Religion.” Pages 213–27 in Emperor and Author: The Writings of Julian the Apostate. Edited by N. Baker-Brian and S. Tougher. Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2012. Lloyd-Jones, H., ed. Sophocles: Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus. LCL; Cambrige, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. MacMullen, R. Voting About God in Early Church Councils. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Mansi, G.D. Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio. 31 vols. Florence: 1759–1798. Mattingly, D.J. Imperialism, Power and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Meinardus, O. “St Michael’s Miracle of Khonae and Its Geographical Setting.” Ekklesia kai Theologica 1 (1980): 459–69. Mohrmann, C. “Epiphaneia.” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 37 (1953): 644–70. Mulryan, M. “ ‘Paganism’ in Late Antiquity: Regional Studies and Material Culture.” Pages 41–86 in The Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism.” Edited by L. Lavan and M. Mulryan. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Nau, F. “Le Miracle de Saint Michel à Colosses.” Patrologia Orientalis 4 (1908): 542–62. Nesselrath, H.-G., ed. Iuliani Augusti Opera. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. Norman, A.F., ed. Libanius: Autobiography and Selected Letters. 2 vols, LCL. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1992.

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Parmentier, L. and F. Scheidweiler, eds. Theodoret: Kirchengeschichte. 2nd ed. Berlin. Akademie Verlag, 1954. Pax, E. EPIFANEIA: Ein religiongeschichtlicher Beitrag zur biblischen Theologie. Munich: Karl Zink, 1955. Peers, G. Subtle Bodies: Representing Angels in Byzantium. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. Pérez Martín, I. Miguel Ataliates: Historia. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 2002. Petridou, G. Divine Epiphany in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pfister, F. “Epiphanie.” Supplement to Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft 4 (1924): 277–323. Picard, C. Éphèse et Claros. Paris: de Boccard, 1922. Piettre, K. “Le Corps des dieux dans les epiphanies divines en Grèce ancienne.” Ph.D. Dissertation, École pratique des hautes etudes, Paris, 1996. Pitra, I.B. Iuris Ecclesiastici Graecorum Historia et Monumenta. 2 vols. Rome: Collegius Urbanus, 1864. Platt, V.J. Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Greco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pleket, H.W. “Religious History as the History of Mentality: The ‘Believer’ as Servant of the Deity in the Greek World.” Pages 152–92 in Faith, Hope and Worship: Aspects of Religious Mentality in the Ancient World. Edited by H.S. Versnel. Leiden: Brill, 1981. Posner, D.N. “Regime Change and Ethnic Cleavages in Africa.” Comparative Political Studies 40 (2007): 1307–9. Pritchett, W.K. The Greek State at War. 5 vols. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979. Robert, L. Études anatoliennes. Paris: de Boccard, 1937. Roussel, Pierre. “Le Miracle de Zeus Panamaros.” Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 55 (1931): 70–116. Seyfarth, W., ed. Ammiani Marcellini: Rerum Gestarum, Libri qui supersunt. Stuttgart/ Leipzig: Teubner, 2 vols, 1999. Shepardson, C. Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014. ———. Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008. Sokolowski, F. Lois sacrées des cités grecques, supplement. Paris: de Boccard, 1962. Thackeray, H. St. J. “The Letter of Aristeas.” Pages 531–606 in An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek. Edited by H.B. Swete. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902. Thonemann, P. “Phrygia: An Anarchist History, 950 BC – AD 100.” Pages 1–40 in Roman Phrygia: Culture and Society. Edited by P. Thonemann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ———. The Maeander Valley: A Historical Geography from Antiquity to Byzantium. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Tischendorf, C., ed. Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha. Leipzig: Avenarius and Mendelssohn, 1851. Torrance, I. The Correspondence of Severus and Sergius. Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 11. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2011.

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Tougher, S. Julian the Apostate. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Trombley, Frank. Hellenic Religion and Christianization. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. Der Glaube der Hellenen. 2 vols; Berlin: Weidmann, 1931–1932. Watt, John W. “Themistius and Julian: Their Association in Syriac and Arabic Tradition.” Pages 161–76 in The Purpose of Rhetoric in Late Antiquity. Edited by A.J. Quirogo Puertas. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. ———. “Julian’s Letter to Themistius – and Themistius’ Response?” Pages 91–103 in Emperor and Author: The Writings of Julian the Apostate. Edited by N. Baker-Brian and S. Tougher. Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2012. Wheeler, G. “Battlefield Epiphanies in Ancient Greece: A  Survey.” Digressus 4 (2004): 1–14. Whitmarsh, T. “Thinking Local.” Pages 1–17 in Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World. Edited by T. Whitmarsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Williamson, C. “City and Sanctuary in Hellenistic Asia Minor: Constructing Civic Identity in the Sacred Landscapes of Mylasa and Stratonikeia in Karia.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 2012. Wright, W.C. Julian. 3 vols. LCL 13, 29, 157. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913–1923.

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Part III CHRISTIANIZATION

7 CONTESTED DOMAINS IN THE CONFLICTS BETWEEN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN MISSION AND DIASPORA JUDAISM ACCORDING TO THE BOOK OF ACTS Christoph Stenschke Introduction The Book of Acts contains conflicts of all sorts. Due to its purpose and focus, very few of these conflicts are at first sight “non-religious”. However, upon closer examination, Acts portrays religious conflicts of different types. Before we analyse the conflicted domains between the early Christian mission and Diaspora Judaism in Acts 9–28, several methodological issues require attention. For a number of reasons, most of them sad and disturbing, religious conflict has become a dominant theme in religious studies in the past few years.1 This quest is part of a larger interdisciplinary interest in violence.2 The present chapter is an exercise in applying recent theories on religious conflict to one aspect of some of the conflicts in Acts 9–21.3 We examine what new aspects emerge when the text is read from that perspective. We first summarise insights of the survey of the current discussion of religious conflict by Wendy Mayer in her essay “Religious Conflict: Definitions, Problems and Theoretical Approaches”,4 which serves as introduction to the volume Religious Conflict from Early Christianity to the Rise of Islam (n. 2). Concerning the range of issues involved, Mayer rightly emphasises that religious conflict encompasses not just the physical domain, that is violent acts, but also the discursive domain, that is violent, hostile/hate-filled speech. This observation leads to questions regarding the precise relationship between these two forms of violence: how should each form be addressed? To which degree is each form harmful to society? It should also be noted that the motivation for both forms of violence is often a complex matter. For example, violent religious conflicts in antiquity were rarely purely religiously motivated. Careful examination indicates that many of them owe as much, at times even more, to political considerations, local conditions and the personal motives of the chief protagonists than to purely religious motives.5 139

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Mayer emphasises the need for careful definition of the concept of religious conflict: “it is clear that what we mean by religious conflict requires careful attention, if we are to tease out the assumptions that underlie our approaches to it in our effort to seek solutions”.6 Mayer suggests that religious conflict is best described as a more complex phenomenon that engages a combination of contested domains, including power, personality, space or place, and group identity. These contested domains should not be confused with enabling factors or conditions, which . . . can be political, social, economic, cultural and psychological. When both of these aspects are taken into consideration, we should be open to the possibility that, as a religion develops over time and/or as different enabling conditions come into play, different contested domains are accorded priority. Α distinction should also be drawn between the root cause/s of the religious conflict (what is contested) and the way in which the conflict is discursively or narratively framed. That is, what a conflict is said to be about may differ significantly from what is actually being contested. We should be similarly open to the possibility that what is contested may be reframed retrospectively, just as it is also possible that what is not a conflict becomes viewed or framed as a conflict in hindsight and vice versa.7 Furthermore, Mayer also notes that competition between religions in the same environment usually turns into conflict at the point when a particular domain/s become/s contested.8 Two further issues need clarification in defining religious conflict, namely the agents involved and what precisely identifies a conflict as religious. Mayer notes that while individuals may be the chief protagonists in religious conflict, the combination of religion and conflict implies that the people involved are not individual persons, but collective individuals, that is, they are groups or communities. Thus, the agents in religious conflict are two or more groups that derive from identifiably separate religions, separate factions within the same religion (that result from splintering, i.e., sectarianism), the same faction within a religion (where splintering has not yet occurred – and may or may not, in fact, eventuate), and secular authority, the latter of which may also wield religious authority.9 These observations are important for Acts. Its protagonists in Chapters 9–28, primarily Peter, Paul, Barnabas, Silas and other travel companions of Paul, are portrayed as individuals. At the same time they “self-identify and operate as part of a larger system”,10 that is, the Christian community in Jerusalem, Antioch and elsewhere.11 All figures are firmly set in the early Christian community/communities, although this community at large is not directly involved in the conflict.

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The question of what identifies a conflict as religious obviously depends on the definition of religion and determines how broadly or narrowly the investigation is focused. Mayer argues for a definition that is not restrictive. Accordingly, conflict is religious when a conflict occurs in which religion is also involved. This avoids questions of the nature: when is a conflict religious and when is it political/ethnic, since it allows that a conflict can be both. It also avoids questions about degree, that is, whether a conflict is primarily religious or primarily political/ethnic, since under this definition all conflicts are religious in which, whether in large degree or small, religion is involved. To sum up, then, for the purposes of studying this phenomenon in as open a way as possible religious conflict can be said to occur when the following conditions are satisfied: (1) two or more collective agents are involved and the agents derive, for example, from separate religions, separate factions within the same religion, from within the same faction in the same religion, and/or secular authority; (2) a domain – e.g., ideology/morality, power, personality, space/ place, group identity – is contested, singly or in combination; (3) there are enabling conditions – e.g., political, social, economic, cultural and psychological; and (4) religion is involved (the degree to which it is involved is deemed irrelevant).12 Mayer rightly cautions that in the recent scholarly and popular discussion of religious conflict, the focus on violence as an extreme form of religious conflict often leads to failure to note the broader questions about what occurs in religious conflicts before or apart from violence.13 Such questions are these: What mechanisms are at work when conflicts originate in the first instance? How do conflicts manifest in their early stages? What about the phenomenon of splintering into sub-groups within a religion? What precise factors are operative and discernible in conflict escalation and de-escalation?14 In view of these observations, we will include these broader questions and also examine the portrayal of Acts of what occurs before or apart from violence, that is, the origin of conflict and its manifestation in the early stages. Following Mayer’s broad definition, we will also include the accounts of verbal violence/conflict. In view of these observations, our aim is not to focus purely on violence, but to examine the whole portrait of the conflict between the Christian mission and Diaspora Judaism in Acts 9–28. In short, we will apply these insights to one of the series of conflicts of Acts 9–28 to examine what fresh light they shed on these conflicts.

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A detailed and nuanced portrayal and analysis of religious conflict is not the purpose of Acts.15 Although the accounts of religious conflict contribute to it, they are “by-products” of Luke’s over all apologetic purpose. The conflict accounts in Acts 9–28 resemble those of Acts 1–8. The later conflicts build on and continue the earlier conflicts with which the readers are familiar in a different setting. Acts 1–8 narrates two rounds of inner-Jewish conflicts between some Jews and some Jewish Christians: first conflict between the religious leaders of Jerusalem and the apostles in Acts 1–5 and then conflicts in the Diaspora Jewish community of Jerusalem between Stephen and other Diaspora Jews in Acts 6f. Some contested domains are similar in both rounds, other conflicts in Acts, such as the authority to determine the mode of inclusion of Gentiles into the people of God, are different, as Gentile believers are not yet in view in Acts 1–8. The parallels in the portrayal of the conflicts caused and endured by the main protagonists of Luke-Acts contribute to the overall purpose of Acts.16 In this chapter, we will concentrate on the literary portrayal of religious conflict. We will not discuss the historical validity of this portrayal or its contribution to the reconstruction of early Christian history.17 We will return to this issue briefly when we relate our findings to the question of the so-called parting of the ways, as the process of the emergence of early Christianity as a separate religion has come to be termed in the discussion of the past three decades. Mayer rightly emphasises the usefulness of comparing literary sources with archaeological evidence.18 However, due to lack of evidence, such a comparison is hardly possible for the conflict narratives of Acts 9–28.19 A number of other issues need clarification: a. Similar to the presentation of the Christian proclamation in the missionary speeches of Acts, not all conflicts between the Christian mission and Diaspora Judaism in Acts 9–28 are narrated in equal length. The earlier conflicts, in that they are representative of later conflicts, are narrated in detail; later conflicts are only presented in summary fashion with a focus on exceptional aspects. The detailed account of the encounter in Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13:14–52) is programmatic for later episodes. b. The conflicts between the Christian mission and Diaspora Judaism are not “inter-religious” but are portrayed as intra-Jewish conflicts: Jewish-Christian missionaries (themselves with a Diaspora background) are in conflict with other Diaspora Jews. According to Mayer’s categories,20 both the missionaries and the representatives of Diaspora Judaism are within the same categories. At the beginning of their encounter they are agents of the same faction within a religion – Diaspora Judaism – where splintering has not yet occurred – and may or may not eventuate. After their encounter they are agents of two groups that belong to separate factions of the same religion that result from splintering. I use the designation “missionaries” or “Christian missionaries” as a convenient reference to Jewish believers in Jesus of Nazareth as God’s Messiah. Scholarly discourse emphasises that “Christian” is an anachronistic 142

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term for believers in Jesus in the first century. This commonplace observation is a necessary warning against reading back into the first century all that the term “Christian” came to mean in later ages. As a label for core convictions and the identity of believers in Jesus as God’s Messiah, the term is appropriate. With the plural “missionaries” we lump together Paul and his various travel companions. c. Two more terms need clarification: “Christian missionaries”: The focus of Acts is on the representatives/protagonists of the nascent Christian movement, not on the “rank and file” Christians, although many of them will have been involved and there is some evidence of this in Acts.21 There is little indication in Acts of the extent and how other Christians were involved in or were affected by these conflicts.22 “Diaspora Judaism”: The portrayal of Acts is nuanced: in some instances, the whole Jewish population of a certain place seems involved, in other instances only a sub-group, the actual opponents. To what extent this sub-group is representative of the larger group is often not clear. For the sake of brevity, we will not consistently speak of the representative figures of the Christian mission or the representatives of Diaspora Judaism who reject the Christian mission.23 It is wise not to do so as it is hardly possible to ascertain what people and behaviour is representative of the larger groups. d. According to the Lukan portrayal, the Christian message leads to a division within the Jewish Diaspora communities as it does in Jerusalem in the first few chapters of Acts.24 In Acts the primary task of the missionaries is to testify to the Jewish communities in the Diaspora that in Jesus of Nazareth God’s Messiah for Israel has indeed come. Many Jews of the Diaspora respond to the Christian proclamation and constitute the foundation and backbone of the nascent Christian communities. To these Jewish believers in Jesus, former Gentile sympathisers of Judaism (and a few Gentiles without prior affiliation with Judaism) are added. Therefore, the presentation of the encounter of the Christian mission with Diaspora Judaism is far more than a tale of conflicts. First and foremost, it is the tale of a tremendous response of Jews of the Diaspora to the Gospel, just as in the Jerusalem chapters. Our focus in this chapter in contested domains must thus not distract from this emphasis in Acts.

Contested domains in the conflicts in Acts 9–28 Competition between religions in the same environment “turns into conflict at the point when a particular domain/s become/s contested”.25 This insight also applies to competing claims by separate factions within the same religion or the same faction within a religion (see earlier). Building on Mayer’s observation that religious conflict is a complex phenomenon which involves a combination of several contested domains – that is ideology/morality, power, personality, space/place, and group identity – that in turn are enabled by a range of other conditions (political, social, economic, cultural and psychological) we will now examine the contested 143

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domains in these conflict accounts.26 We will use the sub-domains listed by Mayer, that is ideology/morality, power, personality, space/place and group identity. In the analysis these domains are separated for the sake of clarity – in the narrative they appear close to each other and inextricably linked. In some cases, material treated under one sub-domain might as well be included elsewhere. There are cross-references and an attempt is made to avoid unnecessary overlap. Ideology and morality We begin with contested ideology.27 Ideology – in this case the content of the proclamation of the missionaries – is the contested domain on the surface of the narrative. The early Christian proclamation with its claims regarding Jesus of Nazareth and his significance for Jews and Gentiles and the implications for Jews and Gentiles is contested. This is not the place for a detailed analysis of the contents of early Christian preaching according to Acts.28 The first and only detailed account of the encounter of the Christian mission with Diaspora Judaism – the events in Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13:13–52) – presents Paul’s proclamation as being in continuity with the apostolic preaching in Jerusalem in the early chapters of Acts.29 A brief summary of this contested “ideology” has to suffice: Saul/Paul proclaims Jesus in the synagogues of Damascus, saying “He is the Son of God” (9:20); “Saul confounded the Jews of Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ” (9:22). Whether and how his conversion also affected other contested domains is not clear. The strong reaction – a Jewish plot to kill Saul – indicates that these claims about Jesus are highly contested. According to Acts 13:5, the missionaries proclaim the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews on Cyprus. Nothing is said about the exact content and reception of this word by the Cypriot Jews. In the programmatic account of Acts 13,30 the missionaries claim the right to summarise and interpret the history of Israel. They present Jesus as Israel’s saviour in fulfilment of God’s promises (13:23). This is the “message of salvation” sent to the Jews.31 The Christian proclamation, the good news, consists of a summary of the events regarding Jesus and of their interpretation: “And we bring you the good news that what God promised to the fathers, he has fulfilled to us their children by raising Jesus” (13:33).32 The claim of fulfilment of promises in Jesus, the good news, is substantiated by quotations from scripture (13:33–37). The conclusions drawn from these events are straightforward: “through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you, and by him everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the Law of Moses” (13:39). The positive message of the availability and possibility of forgiveness is combined with a critical remark about the Law. As the eschatological fulfilment of divine promises, the Gospel is superior to what constitutes and defines the identity of Israel in Judea and in the Diaspora and its privileges. This proclamation is a serious matter: those who refuse to listen, designated as “scoffers”, will 144

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be astounded and perish (13:41). Those who respond to this message in faith are not referred to the Jewish Law for the ethical implications of their response, but are admonished “to continue in the grace of God” (13:43) in which they started their Christian existence. When the gospel proves to be attractive to Jews and Gentiles alike and Jewish opposition arises, Paul affirms that the word of God had to be spoken first to the Jews (13:46). In the Christian proclamation and the way in which it is presented to Jews and Gentiles, the temporal and salvation-historical priority of Israel is not contested but affirmed. The message is not withheld from Jews but proclaimed to them first. Many indeed respond.33 Other Jews thrust the offer of salvation in the Christian proclamation aside and in this way, according to Acts 13:46, judge themselves unworthy of eternal life. In the synagogue of Thessalonica, Paul reasons from the Scriptures with those present on three Sabbath days: “explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and claiming, ‘This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ’ ” (17:3). Two contested domains appear in this summary. The first domain relates to the fate of the Messiah: is the Messiah a figure who can suffer and even must suffer? As proof that it was indeed necessary for the Messiah, Paul refers to the Scriptures of Israel and to the resurrection of the Messiah from the dead. The missionaries know, interpret and teach the Scripture of Israel with authority. God affirmed the suffering Messiah in a unique way. The second domain is the identity of the Messiah: is Jesus of Nazareth the Messiah? Once it is established that the Messiah has to suffer and rise from the dead, there is no valid objection to Jesus being this Messiah. This is also the message of Apollos in Achaia: “showing by the Scriptures that the Christ was Jesus” (18:28). The Christian proclamation can be equated with “the word of God”: “When the Jews from Thessalonica learned that the word of God was proclaimed by Paul at Berea” (17:13). In Corinth Paul testifies to the Jews that the Christ was Jesus (18:5). No reasons are given for the opposition and the reviling of Paul. Its content is not indicated. Do the opponents directly challenge this claim (18:6)? For a longer period of time Paul teaches the word of God in Corinth (18:11). In Ephesus Paul is also “reasoning and persuading them about the kingdom of God” (19:8). We read in this regard: “But when some became stubborn and continued in unbelief, speaking evil of the way before the congregation, Paul withdrew from them, took the disciples with him, reasoning daily in the hall of Tyrannus” (19:8–9). The content of the public denouncement of the Christian message (“the way”), the counter-claim, is not presented. Paul speaks the word of the Lord to both Jews and Greeks (19:10). Before the Jewish leaders in Rome, Paul claims that he is a prisoner because of the hope of Israel (28:20). He testifies to the kingdom of God and seeks to convince the Jewish leaders who gather in greater numbers about Jesus from the Law of Moses and the Prophets (28:23; again the claim that Jesus is the fulfilment of Moses and the prophets). The opponents leave after Paul says: “The Holy Spirit was right in saying to your fathers through Isaiah the prophet”, quotes Isaiah 145

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6:9–10 and concludes: “Therefore let it be known to you that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles; they will listen” (28:28). To summarise, the Christian missionaries announce to their descendants in the Diaspora the fulfilment of the promises given to the fathers.34 The missionaries claim the authority of scripture, uncontested in itself, for their contested message. They interpret the history of Israel as a trajectory leading to Jesus the Christ. They present Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ and the Son of God, the necessity of the Christ to suffer and divine affirmation in this fate through the resurrection from the dead. The salvation proclaimed by the missionaries is superior to all that the Law could offer to Jews and Gentiles: “being freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the Law of Moses” (13:39). The narrator presents the missionaries as proclaiming “the word of God”. The contents of the opponents’ verbal interaction with the Christian proclamation are hardly apparent. In the portrayal of Acts, the Jewish opponents nowhere challenge the presentation of the events regarding Jesus in Jerusalem. Due to geographical and temporal distance they are not in a position or not interested to judge the reports of the events in Jerusalem some twenty years ago. As we have seen, the claim of the fulfilment of the Scriptures of Israel in Jesus and later events is a substantial part of the content of their proclamation: their message is based on Scripture (announcement of its fulfilment) and Scripture authorises their message. Summary notes such as the claim in Acts 17:3 (“he reasoned with them from the Scriptures”) and 18:28 (“showing by the Scriptures that the Christ was Jesus”) refer back to the detailed argument with Scripture in Acts 13:17–22, 33–41. For their ministry to Gentiles, the missionaries refer to the divine command in Isaiah 49:6, and appropriate it for themselves: “I have you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth” (Acts 13:47). In the portrayal of Acts, the opponents only rarely challenge this claim of agreement between the Christian proclamation and the Scriptures, the nature of these promises or interact with the missionaries’ conclusions drawn from Scripture:35 “they were filled with jealousy and began to contradict [ἀντέλεγον] what was spoken by Paul, reviling him” (13:45; reviling as an indication of lacking noble character).36 The author is not interested in presenting his arguments in summary or in detail (see 4:7; 5:28). In this way, the readers are left with the impression that the missionaries’ proclamation with recourse to Scripture cannot be challenged or refuted. In the portrayal of Acts, the opponents are either not interested or able to refute the content of the Christian proclamation.37 They resort or have to resort to other “enabling conditions” available to them. According to Acts, when the scriptures are examined by noble people (see Luke 19:12; 1 Cor 1:26; 4:10) with all eagerness, the scriptures affirm the Christian proclamation: “Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scripture daily to see if things were so” (17:11f).38 For people of different character and without eagerness (no knowledge of the scriptures or mere superficial examination) the agreement 146

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between the Christian proclamation and scripture is not evident. In this way Acts clearly characterises those who fail or refuse to understand and has no sympathy towards them. Written by a loyal supporter of the Christian proclamation, Acts is not a neutral source in this and other regards; other sources are not available. An account of the same encounters by the opponents would surely have been different.39 That they would have been able to do so is out of the question. To what extent does the charge levelled against Paul by his opponents in Corinth present a summary of the opponents’ assessment of the missionaries’ claims? We read: “This man is persuading people to worship God contrary to the law” (18:13). The opponents are not interested in a correct summary but try to formulate a charge against Paul which would make sense to Roman ears (breach of ancestral customs, see 16:21), although they do not give their case a political note as was the case for Thessalonica (17:7, “they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus”). For Gallio this accusation is “a matter of questions about words and names and your own law” (18:15) and the case is dismissed (18:15–16). This is the one instance in Acts where a Jewish attempt to draw Gentile support against the missionaries backfires. While on several occasions they can recruit dubious persons and some members of local elites for their cause (13:50; 14:19; 17:5), they fail to convince a member of the imperial elite. The Christian proclamation proves to be attractive to Jews and Gentile sympathisers alike: “the people begged that these things might be told them the next Sabbath” (13:42). Many Jews and devout converts to Judaism follow Paul and Barnabas (13:43). Almost the whole city of Pisidian Antioch gathers to hear the Christian proclamation (13:44). Acts 13:48–49 states: “And when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord. . . . The word of the Lord was spreading throughout the whole region”, and Acts 14:1 reads: “A great number of both Jews and Gentiles believed.” Some of the people listening to Paul’s proclamation in the synagogue of Thessalonica are persuaded and join Paul and Silas, “as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women” (17:4). Many Jews and not a few Greek women of high standing as well as men believe in Thessalonica (17:12). Even a ruler of a synagogue joins the Christian mission (18:8). Some of the leading Jews of Rome are convinced by Paul about Jesus both from the Law of Moses and from the Prophets (28:23–24). The Christian proclamation proves to be attractive also for Gentiles in the audiences: they can participate in God’s salvation for Israel and the people of God without having to fully convert to Judaism – with all the implications which such a step would entail.40 The salvation they receive is superior to all that the Law could offer to them (13:39: “being freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses”). That many Gentiles accept this (more) attractive message triggers the jealousy/zeal of the opponents, which is twice noted as the motivation for opposition to the missionaries (13:45; 17:5). The Christian message and its implications are contested to such an extent that its opponents employ all means available to them to resist its dissemination (this is also an issue of power, as will be discussed in the next section). In doing so, they employ 147

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dubious means (influencing Gentiles or drawing Gentile support against the Jewish-Christian missionaries) and do not refrain from resorting to violence up to the point of murder (13:45,50; 14:2, 5, 19; 17:5–9). The implications of the Christian “ideology” for group identity (faith in Jesus becomes the sole criterion for group membership) are discussed in a later section. A contested sub-domain under “ideology/morality” is the potential political implications of the Christian proclamation. While according to Acts the Christian missionaries do not address such implications directly, the opponents charge the missionaries with “turning the world upside down, . . . acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying there is another king, Jesus” (17:7–8). From the context it is clear that the charge is a false accusation fabricated to make the authorities intervene. Such charges are enabling conditions on the side of the opponents. Morality, in the sense of ethical instruction, as a contested domain between the Christian missionaries and their Jewish opponents hardly features in these conflicts.41 The scant information with regard to morality which the missionaries mention in their proclamation is closely linked to the central content of Jesus and his significance. The converts are encouraged to “continue in the grace of God” (13:43) in which they started their Christian journey. The missionaries encourage their converts “to continue in the faith, saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (14:22). Detailed ethical instruction of converts does not appear. As an argument from silence, it is noteworthy that the converts are not referred to the Law (13:39). Moreover, morality, in the sense of actual behaviour of the protagonists based on the foundational ideology, appears only rarely and is not directly contested. In relation to the ideology to which they adhere, the missionaries are described as acting in an exemplary manner and faithfully fulfilling the commission given to them by the risen Jesus, despite the suffering which this obedience implies for them.42 Despite repeated rejection, they continue to minister in synagogues (“It was necessary that the word of God be spoken first to you”; 13:46). On some occasions the missionaries emphasise the audiences’ own responsibility and announce divine rejection if the gospel is rejected (13:41, 51; 18:6; 28:25–28). Intended as a serious warning, this is not denigrating. In contrast to the missionaries, the opponents are portrayed as employing different strategies against the missionaries. They readily and regularly employ questionable and immoral means, e.g. “the unbelieving Jews stirred up Gentiles and poisoned their minds against the brothers” (14:2). These are among the enabling conditions on the side of the opponents. Their motivation to proceed in this way is indicated as jealousy/zeal (13:45; 17:5, see the discussion on these words later). Other than behaviour based on their foundational ideology, the missionaries share the morality of Diaspora Judaism and of their opponents. They attend synagogue meetings and follow proper procedure there. When invited to contribute (13:15–43) and on other occasions they instruct the people as is expected of qualified guests. Throughout the account, the missionaries are characterised as pious Jews. Paul and Barnabas bring famine relief funds to Jerusalem (11:27–30). Paul 148

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personally circumcises Timothy out of regard for the Jews (16:1–3), has his hair cut in Cenchreae because he was under a vow (18:18), hastens to be at Jerusalem, if possible, on the day of Pentecost (20:16), willingly participates in purification ceremonies in Jerusalem (21:21–26) and brings alms to his people and presents offerings (24:17). Even when they have to leave the synagogue, the missionaries stay as close as possible to it. We read in Acts 18:7: “His [Titius Justus’] house was next door to the synagogue”.) They stay in the private houses of God-fearers (of Gentiles who sympathise in various degrees with Judaism without becoming full proselytes, Lydia in Philippi, 16:13–15, and Titius Justus in Corinth43) where a certain measure of purity can be assumed. Also their Jewish opponents associate and share fellowship to a certain extent with Gentile God-fearers and other Gentiles. Therefore this association does not become a contested issue. The missionaries do not employ questionable means against their opponents. They do not stir up Gentiles against their fellow Jews as their opponents do. Rather, they withdraw and do not endanger the Jewish community in the Diaspora. They never dissociate themselves from Judaism even in situations where it might have been advantageous (cf. 16:21–22, 35–40; 19:33–34). Power In their proclamation the missionaries claim the authority to interpret the Scriptures, to proclaim their fulfilment in Jesus of Nazareth and to define and regulate access to the community/the people of God accordingly through faith in Jesus. With their message of universal salvation (in particular for Gentile sympathisers of Judaism) and redefinition of group identity, the Christian missionaries not only present a direct challenge to the contents of Diaspora Judaism (the significance of the Law, maintaining Jewish identity in a Gentile context, full conversion of Gentiles to Judaism as a prerequisite for membership in the people of God) but also a power challenge. Thus, authority and leadership of the people of God become contested domains.44 The opponents take action against the missionaries when their success becomes apparent and jealousy comes into play: “But when they saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy and began to contradict what was spoken by Paul, reviling him” (13:45). The attack is directed at the content of the message and the person of Paul. When great numbers of both Jews and Greeks believe, the unbelieving Jews stirred up the Gentiles (14:2). These activities can be understood as an effort to retain or regain influence over Jews and the Gentile sympathisers. This leads to a division of the population in Iconium (14:4). The success of the missionaries and jealousy on the side of the opponents also occurs in Acts 17:5. The contested issue here is attraction of the Gentiles and control over them. When they perceive this crucial domain to be threatened, the opponents employ all means available to them. In the portrayal of Acts, many Jews and Gentile sympathisers side with the Christian missionaries, join them, recognise them as their new and legitimate 149

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leaders and leave the synagogues with them once the missionaries are driven out by their opponents: Jewish and Gentile converts follow the missionaries before, during and after conflict: “many Jews and devout converts to Judaism followed Paul and Barnabas” (13:43). The missionaries make many disciples in Derbe and strengthen the souls of the disciples (14:20–21). Paul has his “disciples” in Lystra (14:20). Paul takes the disciples with him from the synagogue of Ephesus (19:8) and thus depletes the membership of the community. The missionaries establish Christian communities outside of the Jewish synagogues which they leave to their Jewish opponents. No attempt is made to expel the unbelieving Jews from the existing Jewish establishment. The issue of place/space will be discussed shortly. In addition, the missionaries also take responsibility and look well after the communities which they found.45 They return to their converts (14:21). Acts 15:36 reads: “Let us return and visit the brothers in every city where we proclaimed the word of the Lord, and see how they are”. The missionaries also strengthen them, as per Acts 15:41: “and he [Paul] went through Syria and Cilicia strengthening the brothers”. And they encourage them to continue in the faith and instruct them in how to handle opposition: “through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (14:22).46 The missionaries also establish leadership structures in the communities which they had founded and in this way share some responsibility with local leaders (14:23). They pray for their communities. Paul and Silas go through the cities of the first missionary journey and deliver to the Christians there the decisions that had been reached by the apostles and elders of Jerusalem (16:4). The communities of Christ-followers clearly emerge as entities of their own: “So the churches were strengthened in the faith, and they increased in numbers daily” (16:5). Paul and Silas visit Lydia and other Christians and encourage them before departing from Philippi (16:40). In addition to pastoral concerns, in this way the missionaries continue to uphold their own authority over and claim to the new community over against their opponents, either local or from other places. What the missionaries establish through their proclamation and in its aftermath – in some cases right next to the local synagogue – is meant to stay and to last. However, this not only applies to their opponents. While Acts is relatively silent in this regard, Paul’s letters indicate that he did not consider the relationship to the communities which he founded as one between equals. While he considers them to be partners in his mission and clearly expresses his expectations in this regard,47 he also leaves no doubt about his own authority over them and fiercely defends it when he perceives it to be threatened.48 This development in the synagogues of the Diaspora and beyond the synagogues in the newly founded Christian communities is a repetition of the events in Jerusalem where leadership also is a contested domain between the apostles and the religious establishment of the city.49 A few more observations are required: a. The focus on conflict should not keep us from observing that in all the synagogues or other Jewish Diaspora settings (16:13; 28:22), the missionaries are recognised as Jews and initially invited to speak (13:15–16: “Brothers, if you 150

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have any word of encouragement for the people, say it”) or given an opportunity to present their case. b. Due to the perceived attractiveness of the Christian message to many Gentile sympathisers with Judaism (the possibility of partaking in Israel’s salvation as Gentiles without the requirement to become full proselytes50), the missionaries attract and “control” the crucial group of Gentile sympathisers. As often is the case with religious minorities in potentially hostile majority societies, in the latently or overtly anti-Jewish setting of the Diaspora51 such sympathisers constitute an important, and during hard times, crucial asset for Jewish Diaspora communities. What Pervo observes regarding Acts 17:1–10 also applies to other instances: “The disappointment of the Jews is quite intelligible, for, by siphoning off a number . . . of the God-Fearers, Paul had deprived their community of important financial and political support”.52 Acts 13:50 notes that the Jews of Pisidian Antioch have contact to devout women of high social standing and know how to utilise them for purposes. When these Gentile sympathisers side with the Christian mission and leave the synagogue with their new leaders, its opponents fail to retain people with potentially wider influence in the local community and who could intervene if needed and provide some protection. In the perception of the Jewish opponents, the Christian missionaries are “fishing in the ponds” of the Jewish synagogues for Jewish and Gentile converts and offer a compromised, light version of Gentile inclusion into the people of God with potentially dangerous political implications. These aspects of contested power explain the fierceness of the conflict in some accounts.53 c. Related to issues of power and the protection of influence are the attempts of dissociation between some Jews and the Christian mission. On some occasions, leading Diaspora Jews deliberately and publicly attempt to dissociate themselves from the Christian mission and its claims: “But the unbelieving Jews stirred up the Gentiles [the Gentile sympathisers of the synagogue] and poisoned their minds against the brothers” (14:2). During the riot in Ephesus (19:21–40), the Jews of the city put forward Alexander the Jew (19:33f). Motioning with his hand, the typical gesture of an orator, he intends to make a defence to the crowd. Acts does not indicate what he wants to say to the agitated crowd. Does he want to dissociate the Jews of Ephesus from the Christian mission and its economic implications, against which the riot was directed in its early stage (19:23–27)? When the crowd recognises that he is a Jew (he must have been known as such), he does not get an opportunity to speak but is shouted down. His attempt re-triggers the popular acclamation of Artemis (“Great is the Artemis of the Ephesians”; see 19:28) which lasts for about two hours. This Jewish intervention is all the more noteworthy as it happens even when the Christian missionaries proclaim a message and have an impact (decline of income and concern for the pagan goddess) which should win Jewish approval. Pervo’s observations regarding Acts 13:44–46 151

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apply to a lesser extent also to the Ephesian episode: “Rather than take pleasure in this interest in their religion, ‘the Jews’ are infuriated and (counter-) attack”.54 The one time when some Jews in the Diaspora, that is the seven sons of Sceva, attempt to use the name of Jesus for their own purposes, the attempt backfires badly (19:13–16). Jesus himself watches over the holiness of his name and dissociates himself from those attempting to use his name without being authorised to do so. Resistance to such attempts does not come from the Christian missionaries (see Luke 9:49–50). As a consequence “the name of the Lord Jesus was extolled” (19:17) and “the word of the Lord continued to increase and prevail mightily” (19:20). On two occasions the missionaries dissociate themselves from the unbelieving Jews. In Pisidian Antioch they shake the dust off their feet (13:51). They shake out their garments and declare that they have faithfully delivered the message to the Jews who are now responsible themselves for the consequences of their rejection (18:6). d. No Jewish opposition or riposte to the power challenge is noted for Philippi. Possibly this may be linked to the observation that only Jewish women are mentioned for Philippi (16:13). Personality Due to the literary character of Acts and its purpose, the contested domain of personality is only of minor significance in the conflicts of Acts 9–28. As Acts is not interested in a detailed characterisation of its main protagonists or minor figures in the narrative, no distinctive “personality” of the opponents in various places emerges.55 They remain nameless and constitute flat characters in the narrative.56 However, what is there in terms of characterisation is devastating:57 the opponents are characterised by the fact that they are not willing to accept Jesus as God’s saviour for Israel and the Gentiles and his envoys. Their at times ruthless use of the enabling conditions available to them characterises them as people ready to employ all means to reject the Gospel, to resist the purposes of God and to defend their ideology/morality, power and space. Only one trait is addressed directly and in two instances: precisely at the moment of the first and programmatic Jewish resistance to the missionaries jealousy is mentioned as a motivation for opponents’ use of the enabling conditions on their side (13:45; this motivation for resistance occurred before in Jerusalem: 5:17; thus there is a parallel between the religious leaders in Jerusalem and the opponents of Paul’s mission). Out of ζῆλος (zeal or jealousy) the opponents stir up Gentiles and “poison their minds” against the Jewish-Christian missionaries. Later on, Jews and Gentiles unite in resistance and attempt to mistreat and stone the missionaries (14:5). Driven by this emotional response, the opponents from Antioch and Iconium even follow the missionaries to Lystra, persuade the Gentile crowds there, stone Paul and drag him out of the city (14:19). Also in 152

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Thessalonica, the opponents act out of jealousy (ζηλώσαντες; see 17:5). They recruit some wicked men from the Gentile rabble, form a mob, set the city in uproar and attack the house of Jason. This characterisation of the opponents requires more detailed discussion. Pervo writes regarding the range of meaning and its implications: The Greek word ζῆλος has a variety of meanings (“ardour”, “zeal”, “rivalry”, “envy”). .  .  . mere resentment of what another has accomplished has no relation to the pursuit of excellence. .  .  . In Acts 5:17; 13:45 (noun); 7:9; 17:5 (verb), the term accounts for the persecution of such characters as Joseph, the apostles, and Paul. Representatives of the good are persecuted because their success arouses envy. . . . “Zeal for Torah” (Acts 21:20; 22:3), which can justify murder (Num 25:11, 13 LXX; 1 Macc 2:24), is not utterly irrelevant, but it does not address the literary function of jealousy (which is not restricted to Jews) in Acts.58 Some scholars argue that in this context, ζῆλος should be understood theologically as zeal for the Law and/or Jewish identity. For example, Schnabel argues that the opposition to Christian missionaries and to their teaching is not due to jealousy regarding the greater missionary success because there was no organised missionary outreach of Jews to pagans during the Second Temple period.59 Therefore ζῆλος should be translated as zeal. In this understanding, the opponents are characterised as acting out concern for the law or ancestral traditions. At first sight this is a noble motivation as these are pivotal values in the ancient world. However, in Acts zeal and this concern characterises the opponents of Stephen (6:8–14), the pre-conversion Saul/Paul in his persecution of Christians (8:3; 9:1– 2; 22:3) and the Jewish Christians (“zealous for the law”; see 21:20) of Jerusalem who are suspicious of Paul’s loyalty to Judaism and over against whom Paul has to affirm his own Jewish identity (21:20–36). Other scholars combine the theological and psychological interpretation.60 We follow Pervo, Popkes and other interpreters who argue for a psychological interpretation and understand ζῆλος as envy with regard to the success of the Christian missionaries.61 If jealousy is the correct understanding of ζῆλος, the opponents are directly characterised negatively as acting out of ethically inferior motives. They are not of the noble character which is displayed by other Jews (17:11). Acts is clearly biased and polemical against this particular group of Jews. With this characterisation Acts shares a feature common in ancient literature.62 However, in view of the ferocity of the conflict which is amply described and the activities of the opponents against the Christian protagonists, two references to jealousy appear to be relatively mild. In the two contexts where this characterisation appears, jealousy is an understandable human reaction.63 In addition, it needs to be noted that Acts does not lump all Jews together and also narrates negative traits regarding the Christian protagonists (e.g. the sharp disagreement between Paul and Barnabas; see 15:39). 153

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The opponents are otherwise directly characterised by what is said to them by the missionaries. They should be aware lest what is said in the prophets should come about: “Look you scoffers, be astounded and perish . . . you will not believe” (13:41). Through the symbolic action of shaking out his garment (18:6) and his words (“Your blood be on your own heads”, drawing on Ezekiel 3:16–21; 33:1–9), Paul implies that the opponents are unfaithful people and now carry full responsibility for their rejection of the divine word. Marshall writes regarding the background of this action and statement: Paul’s action of shaking out his clothes may have a precedent in Neh 5:13 where Nehemiah shakes his clothes as a prophetic sign of how God will “shake out” anyone who fails to keep the promise of obedience to him. Here the sign is one of abhorrence and a threat of judgment, and it may be intended to be understood in the same way as the shaking off of the dust from one’s feet (cf. NRSV text) in 13:51. The motif of the messenger being free from guilt if the hearers do not accept the message is found in Ezek 33:1–9: their blood is on their own heads. . . . The general motif is a natural one, but it has a firm basis in LXX diction.64 Those who reject the message that the Christ was Jesus are no longer part of the people of God. The personality of the main Christian protagonists (Paul and his co-workers) largely remains hidden in the narrative.65 However, just as with the opponents, the narrative characterisation of the missionaries provides some indirect hints. Paul displays tremendous determination (before and after his calling) and comes across as a bold preacher and miracle worker.66 Despite much suffering and many setbacks, Paul presses on with his mission.67 However, this determination was not due or not only due to his personality but because he was commissioned by the risen Lord to do so and strengthened by him. Barnabas and Paul were chosen and commended by the Holy Spirit. What becomes visible of his personality must be seen together with non-human aspects. Paul faithfully fulfils this divine commission despite the different hardships and sufferings which this obedience entails for him. It is interesting to note that the one fierce argument (παροξυσμός) in Acts in which Paul is involved is not with his opponents but with his missionary partner of the first missionary journey, Joseph Barnabas, in Acts 15:39.68 In contrast to his opponents Paul is portrayed as fully self-controlled and calm. While the Christian protagonists display some personality traits which helped them to fulfil their task (courage, determination, humility, piety), according to Acts, the conflicts which arose are not due to the personality of the Christian missionaries (that is, they are not contentious or peculiar people). The very fact that Saul with his record as a zealous persecutor of Christians now proclaims Jesus as the Son of God causes astonishment in the synagogues of Damascus (9:21), not his personality as such.

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Rather the conflicts arose due to the proclamation which was entrusted to the Christian missionaries and which they faithfully delivered as instructed by Jesus and the Holy Spirit and as divinely affirmed by signs and wonders done by the missionaries (14:3). Conflicts arose when some of the primary addressees of this message, the Jews in Judea and of the Diaspora, failed to respond in faith and rejected the message and its envoys. The Jewish identity of the missionaries is nowhere disputed or denied by their opponents. It becomes an issue with their Gentile opponents as in Philippi; Acts 16:20, for instance, states: “These men are Jews, and they are disturbing our city”. They suffer, according to the text, as Jews. Place/space We start with concrete place(s).69 In the portrayal of Acts with few exceptions the Christian mission outside of Judea begins in Jewish Diaspora synagogues70 or Jewish places of prayer as outside of Philippi (16:13). It is primarily a mission to Jews in the Diaspora.71 Only the encounter between Paul and some prominent Jews of Rome takes place in some accommodation (28:16, 23: “place of lodging”) due to the personal circumstances of Paul as a Roman prisoner (28:17–28). In all these synagogues conflict arises sooner or later. However, these buildings and places in themselves and their ownership and use are not contested domains. While the missionaries make regular and generous use of them as long as it is possible (e.g. Acts 18:4: “And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath, and tried to persuade Jews and Greeks”), when conflict arises they leave the synagogues behind and move to other meeting places. Such a move is narrated in some detail in Acts 18:7–8. After a symbolic action (shaking out his garment) and solemn declaration (“Your blood be on your own heads! I am innocent”), Paul leaves the synagogue of Corinth and moves with his co-workers to the house of a Gentile a worshipper of God named Titius Justus.72 As noted earlier, his house was next door to the synagogue (18:7). This proximity surely is provocative to Paul’s opponents who remain behind in the synagogue, in particular as Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, also comes to faith together with his whole household, together with many other Corinthians (18:8; this type of proximity is not mentioned in Acts for other places).73 Blue notes: “It is no coincidence that in the account of the conversion of Crispus in Acts 18:8–9 Luke mentions that others were quick to follow. . . . According to Theissen, the fact that Crispus possessed such a high social status explains why his conversion had influence on others”.74 In leaving the synagogues behind, the Christian missionaries move to private houses75 or a public space such as the lecture hall of Tyrannus in Ephesus (19:9). In their choice of venue, the Christian missionaries are not limited by considerations of ritual purity (the presence of ritual baths or running water such as the riverside outside of Philippi; see 16:13). They do not distinguish between sacred and profane places.

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As the conflicts between the Jewish-Christian missionaries and representatives of Diaspora Judaism are to be understood as conflicts between separate factions within the same religion or the same faction within a religion (as per Mayer’s categories), it is noteworthy that the missionaries do not attempt to appropriate or “take over” synagogues by expelling their opponents or depreciate the synagogues as meeting places.76 Not in a single instance in Acts do the opponents leave the synagogue; rather they employ all means available to them to drive away the missionaries (13:50).77 Not only the synagogues are contested by the opponents but also cities: whenever possible, the opponents attempt to drive away the missionaries not only from their local synagogues but also from the entire municipality (13:50–51; 14:5– 7, 20; 17:5–9, 14–15). In some cases this was not possible despite attempts to achieve this (18:12–17).78 The enabling conditions on the side of the opponents are not sufficient. When not using Jewish venues for their initial proclamation, the missionaries use public non-contested spaces such as in Lystra (the exact location is not specified; possibly it is close to one of the city gates; see 14:13) or the market place of Athens (17:17) in order to address Gentiles. Philippi is one of the few places for which no Jewish opposition is noted (other places are Syrian Antioch and Rome). This lack of opposition may be linked to the fact that according to Acts there was no contested place/space between the Christian mission and the established Jewish community, that is a synagogue in the town, but only a place of prayer at the riverside outside the city (16:13). Possibly this lack of resistance is also due to the fact that “only” women meet there.79 Were all of them impressed by the male Christian missionaries (although Acts only notes the conversion of Lydia) or not able to pose opposition to eloquent men of some social standing (Paul and Silas both had Roman citizenship; see 16:37)?80 It is interesting to observe under this heading that with one exception the sacred spaces of Judaism in Judea (Jerusalem and the temple) are not contested domains. In the proclamation of the Christian missionaries, Judea and Jerusalem are mentioned without any further comment as the places of the ministry, rejection, death and resurrection of Jesus (13:27–31). Otherwise these places do not feature in early Christian preaching in Acts: their significance is neither affirmed nor denied. The exception is Acts 21:28–29: Jewish opponents from Asia (this is why the episode is included here) see Paul in the temple precincts in Jerusalem (21:27). They stir up the crowds, lay hands on him and call their fellow Jews for help against Paul. They accuse him of teaching everyone everywhere against the (Jewish) people and the law and this place and of bringing Gentiles into the temple precincts which Gentiles must not enter. In this way Paul defiles this holy place (21:28; v. 29 provides the reason for this false charge). His opponents present themselves as guardians of Judaism, its ordinances and the temple. In v. 30, Paul is physically removed from the temple court and the gates to the temple (to the court of men/ women?) are shut. They want to liquidate him outside of the holy precinct in order to avoid its defilement (see Luke 13:1). In the following trials, Paul points 156

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out that these Jews from Asia are not present as witnesses to testify against him as they should be in proper legal proceedings (24:17–18: “But some Jews from Asia – they ought to be here before you and to make an accusation, should they have anything against him”). While the Jews of the Diaspora stay and have settled there and the missionaries do not promote a return to the land of Israel (see 2 Chr 36:23),81 there is consensus about its theological significance. The narrative underlines the missionaries’ loyalty to Jerusalem. They return to Jerusalem with the gifts of the Antiochene church (11:27–30) and seek settlement of the disputes in Antioch in Jerusalem and accept and disseminate the verdict from the Jerusalem community (15:1–35). Paul visits Jerusalem at the end of the second and third missionary journey (18:22; 21–23). The narrative also indicates that some of the movements of the missionaries through the “space” of the narrative (the North Eastern Mediterranean world) are divinely directed: while they are prevented from preaching in Asia and Bithynia (16:6–7), they are called to Europe to minister there (16:9–10). God is in control of this space and directs the movements of the missionaries in this realm. God knows where the missionaries are, empowers them and intervenes on their behalf. Likewise, abstract space is not contested in this conflict.82 The God of Israel is Lord of the world. This conviction and confession is shared by the missionaries and their opponents. This includes the realm of the dead from which Jesus was raised. That God can do so is not a disputed domain. Whether he actually did do so on behalf of Jesus is contested (see the discussion earlier on ideology). The missionaries claim that Jesus as the Christ is the universal Lord. That universal sovereignty is a characteristic of the Messiah is not contested. However, whether Jesus of Nazareth was and is this Messiah is contested. Therefore both concrete and abstract space is not a prominent contested domain in the conflicts between the Christian missionaries and Jews of the Diaspora. A phenomenon of space observed by Jan Stenger with regard to references to philosophy by John Chrysostom is also discernible in Acts, but plays a minor role in general in Acts and in particular in the conflict narratives with which we are concerned.83 Stenger speaks of the spatiality of philosophy. John Chrysostom distinguishes two types of philosophy, namely Hellenistic philosophy and Christian wisdom. He locates the former in the city and the latter in the countryside. According to Stenger, this spatial dimension is vital to Chrysostom’s view of philosophy: he attempts to extend the rural ideal of asceticism to the city in order to create a healthy Christian community within the city.84 While no similar attempts appear in Acts, the notion itself is helpful. The Christian proclamation does not construct and use the dualism of city and countryside, but presupposes a clear spatiality of salvific events: Stephen refers in great length to the various places of God’s salvific activities on behalf of Israel (most of them outside Judea). Peter mentions Galilee, Judea and Jerusalem in Acts 10. Paul refers to Egypt, the wilderness, the land of Canaan, Jerusalem and Galilee in Acts 13:17–31. Other than these accounts, the Christian proclamation in general 157

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is not presented in detail in Acts. Therefore no other references to particular places occur. However, this spatiality is not a contested domain between the missionaries and their opponents (nothing in this regard appears in the texts; it is unlikely in a Jewish context). There is consensus that God has worked in the past outside and inside the land of Israel (salvific activities linked to physical places). That his present and future activities are linked to the land is likewise not disputed. Group identity The identity of the people of God (Jews only, including Gentile proselytes, or Jews and Gentiles as Gentiles), the authority to define this entity and the conditions of membership in the people of God (by birth or conversion or by faith in God’s Christ) are highly contested domains. Redefining the identity of the people of God as a community of believers in the Gospel is done in two ways by the Christian missionaries. According to the missionaries, Gentiles can participate in the fulfilment of the promises of God by faith in Jesus Christ and join his people as Gentiles. The Gentiles do not need to convert to Judaism first, become proselytes and keep the Law. This is because for all people, regardless of their origin, membership in God’s people is exclusively defined by a faith response to Jesus. Gentiles respond and believe in the Gospel and in this way become part of God’s people (13:48; 14:1, 23; 15:7, 11; 16:31, 34; 17:12, 34; 18:8, 27; 19:2, 4, 18; 21:20, 25; 22:19). This emphasised to an extent that “believers” becomes a prominent designation for Christians of Jewish and Gentile background.85 Trebilco observes that Luke uses believer designations “when emphasising that Christians are united, or to underline the universality of Christian faith. . . . all Christians can be called ‘believers’ ”.86 While Luke also uses believer designations on some occasions “to emphasise different types of believers within the wider Christian movement or to designate ethnicity”,87 they are also used as unifying titles: Whether people are “believers among the Jews”, “circumcised believers”, “believers from the Pharisees” or “Gentiles who have become believers”, they are all united by being “believers”. “All who believe” of 2:44; 10:43, and 13:39 are actually made up of different groups, but they are united in their “believing”. This is perhaps clearest in Acts 21:20–25. Luke notes that there are significant differences between the two groups of “believers” mentioned in this passage, but for Luke they can all be called “believers”; he uses exactly the same form of the participle from πιστεύω (the perfect) on both occasions, and simply adds a modifier to indicate of whom he is speaking. The designation “the believers” is clearly an “instrument of unity” for Luke.88 Trebilco also observes that “Luke clearly regards ‘believing’ as a distinguishing characteristic of Christians vis-à-vis the synagogue”.89 158

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Believers are instructed to continue in the grace of God, not to learn and obey the Law (13:43). As a sign of divine approval, Gentile Christians receive the Holy Spirit just as Jewish believers did and do (10:44–48; 13:52). Jervell has described this contested domain as follows: In the account of the Apostolic Council in Jerusalem (15:1–35), the Cornelius incident functions as a proof (vs. 6–7). This incident has a definite influence on deciding the question of the Gentile Christians’ freedom from the law. The problem is not the Gentiles’ sharing in salvation, but in what way they should receive salvation. This is precisely what the Cornelius story is to clarify. In v. 11 Luke expresses what Peter has learned from the Cornelius event: the Gentiles will be saved “just as they [the Jews] will”. Serving as a proof for this is the statement in v. 9 which says that God bestows the gift of the Spirit to Gentiles in the same way as to believing Jews. As a substitute for Jewish membership in the people of God, God accepts as valid the cleansing that has come upon them by faith. (v. 9b)90 The salvation of the Gentiles as such is not a new development, but that they can share in Israel’s salvation as Gentiles without first becoming proselytes, that is without circumcision and the law. Jervell emphasises that this does not mean the annulment of the privileged position or the mediating role of Israel, as becomes apparent from the speech of James with its quotation from Amos 9:11–12 in Acts 15:13–21. The speech presupposes the connection of the Gentile believers with Israel, though without the Jewish form of observance of the law and without Jewish status. The restoration of Israel leads to the addition of Gentiles. Although it is not addressed directly in Acts (as it is, for example, in Rom 2), in this way the special status, privileges and very identity of Diaspora Jews are relativised: simply to be or to become a Jew and to continue as such is no longer sufficient. Issues of group identity not only apply to Gentiles, but also to Jews. As we have seen, for the Christian missionaries, membership in the people of God depends on a faith response to the proclamation about Jesus. People have to join by faith. Those who reject the message of salvation forfeit their membership in the people of God. Already the prophets warned of perishing if God’s astonishing and unbelievable work in one’s own days (in this case: God’s salvation in Christ) is rejected: “Look, you scoffers, be astounded and perish” (13:40–41). Those who fail to believe the word of God about God’s salvation in Christ – no distinction is made between Jews and Gentiles – thrust aside the word of God and judge themselves unworthy of eternal life (13:46). By shaking the dust off their feet (13:51)91, the missionaries dissociate themselves from the unbelieving Jews in Pisidian Antioch: with this symbolic action they treat them as “unclean” Gentiles and thus challenge and deny their Jewishness. They are no longer part of the people of God.92 159

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In this conflict between separate factions within the same religion (Judaism) or the same faction within a religion (Diaspora Judaism), the missionaries claim for themselves the authority to define the identity of the people of God (the in-group and the out-group) and the conditions of gaining or forfeiting membership in this religion or faction. It is interesting to note that Acts also contains affirmations and demonstrations of the missionaries’ own Jewish identity and their respect and appreciation of it. Despite the problems that regularly emerge, they go to the synagogues and first proclaim the Gospel to the Jews. They acknowledge the authority of the community in Jerusalem (15:1–35) and regularly return to Jerusalem (18:22; 21f) and make vows which include the shaving of hair (18:18). At the beginning of the second missionary journey, Paul affirms Jewish identity by circumcising Timothy, “the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer, but his father was Greek” (16:1). This happened “because of the Jews who were in those places, for they all knew that his father was Greek” (16:3). Pervo concludes: “The act admirably serves the Lucan program of ‘Jews first’, and demonstrates Paul’s loyalty to the traditional faith”.93 The Jewish identity of the Christian missionaries or the legitimacy of their claim to it is never questioned by their opponents. Neither do the missionaries question the past or current Jewish identity of their opponents. Regarding the future, they quote from Scripture and warn the whole Jewish audience not to become scoffers, be astounded and perish (13:40). If they fail to respond in faith to the Christian proclamation they will lose what they had and have up to now. It is further interesting to note that there are no mutual charges of demonic support for the opponent’s case or association with the devil.94 This is particularly noteworthy, as this motif occurs elsewhere in Luke-Acts: Jesus is accused of casting out demons by Beelzebub, the prince of demons. He counters this charge by pointing out the flawed logic behind this claim and provides a counter-explanation and proper explanation of the success of his exorcisms (Luke 11:15–23; see also Acts 8:34: “the bond of iniquity”, and 10:38: “all who were oppressed by the devil”). According to Luke 22:3, Satan stands behind Judas’ betrayal of Jesus. We read: “Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot, who was of the number of the twelve. He went away and conferred with the chief priests”. Such a statement is not made regarding the opponents of Jesus. The agreement to act hypocritically and to lie to Peter brought Ananias and Sapphira, members of the Christian community of Jerusalem, under Satan’s influence: “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit?” (Acts 5:3). When the Jewish false prophet Bar-Jesus/Elymas in the service of a Roman proconsul seeks to turn the proconsul away from the Christian faith, he is charged with being a son of the devil, an enemy of all righteousness and full of all deceit and villainy (13:10). The setting is not a synagogue or a public square, but the residence of Sergius Paulus in Paphos (13:6–7).95 Does the position of the opponents regarding group identity become clear somewhere? According to Acts Jewish Christians from Judea demand in Syrian 160

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Antioch that Gentile Christians become Jews to participate in Israel’s salvation (15:1–5; these demands come from Jewish Christians from Judea, as per Acts 15:1; they receive support for their case from former Pharisees in Jerusalem, according to Acts 15:5). Acts reports in detail how a decision is reached by the Christian community after considerable debate. But Acts does not directly mention such counter-claims by non-Christian Jews in the Diaspora as a response to the Christian redefinition of their group identity. The opponents’ position and practice is presupposed in the occurrences of proselytes as part of Jewish diaspora communities (Acts 2:11; 6:5; 13:43). The process of becoming proselytes is the legitimate biblical way of including Gentiles into the Law-abiding people of God.96 Those who propose and practice differently (that is, by including Gentiles into the people of God) need to be challenged and expelled.97 The references to God-fearing Gentiles in Acts suggest that despite their attraction to Judaism, not all Gentiles were ready to follow this procedure and become full proselytes.

Summary and implications Our analysis of contested domains in the conflicts between the Christian missionaries and their opponents in the Diaspora has shown that beyond the content of the Christian proclamation there are several other contested areas in the portrayal of Acts. These domains are closely interrelated. This case constitutes a combination of all contested domains. The interplay between these contested domains explains the course and intensity of these conflicts. Our survey agrees with Mayer’s conclusion: The motivation for such violence, moreover, is often complex, leading to the conclusion, on the one hand, that violent “religious” conflicts in late antiquity, for instance, were rarely purely religiously motivated. On careful examination they can be shown to owe as much, if not more, to political considerations, local conditions, and the personal motives of the chief protagonists.98 While the conflicts which we examined have their origin in the contested ideology/morality of the Christian missionaries (including their commission which reflects these core convictions), other contested domains are involved early on. The identification of these five domains which are often contested in religious conflict has proven to be a helpful heuristic tool. They provide a lens which shows up issues which might otherwise be overlooked. The other factors involved in religious conflict, listed by Mayer in the quotation above, only play a minor role. At least they do not play a role to an extent that would justify the words “if not more”. • Political considerations only appear indirectly (local synagogues forfeit influence and protection through the loss of Jewish and Gentile adherents; 161

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the opponents know how to play political cards against the missionaries). Because they are part of a religious minority, neither the missionaries nor their opponents claim political influence and power in the wider community. • The portrayal in Acts of these conflicts follows a basic pattern with some variation: initial visit and proclamation in the synagogue, response of faith by Jews and Gentiles, resistance by some Jews, the missionaries withdraw from the synagogue, establish their own communities and leave the city. What is narrated in some detail for Pisidian Antioch also applies to other places. Thus, although the peculiar features of several places are mentioned, different local conditions appear in passing, but they are not prominent.99 Although there are several exceptions, the accounts in Acts are stereotypical and establish a certain pattern. • The personal motives of the protagonists remain in the background. The missionaries faithfully and selflessly fulfil their divine commission (certainly a personal motive) despite the suffering which this entails for them. Their opponents are characterised as acting out of jealousy and in an effort to preserve the fragile status of Jewish communities in the Diaspora (Acts 19:33f) and also their own influence. It is worthwhile to note what is not contested in these conflicts. Two aspects appear: although related to issues of power, according to the portrayal of Acts, financial resources do not feature as contested domain. While the missionaries accept the hospitality of their converts (Jews, e.g. 16:15, and Gentiles, e.g. 16:33– 34; 18:7), there is no indication that they claim or receive financial support from their audiences.100 The commission by the Antiochene church and Acts 18:1–3 points to the missionaries’ usual source of income.101 The two instances of impact of the mission on financial resources and income concern lost or threatened material interests of Gentiles (16:19; 19:23–27). Because the missionaries and their opponents in these conflicts belong to Diaspora Judaism, issues of ethnicity and cultural differences, often involved in religious conflicts or at their very core, are not a feature in Acts. This is different in the conflicts with Gentiles (see Acts 16:21, even there, things are not clear cut as Paul the Jew is at the same time a Roman citizen, 19:33–34).102 In the conflicts which we examined in this chapter, neither the missionaries nor their opponents question or deny each other’s shared Jewish identity.103 The missionaries demonstrate their Jewish identity and when they are rejected do not intervene against their opponents in any way. As Jews, the missionaries go to synagogues, refer to scripture and respect and affirm the priority of Israel (“first to you”; 13:46). By reviling and expelling the missionaries and other forms of active resistance, the opponents seek to challenge and alter the status of the missionaries. Rather than being treated as welcome teachers in the synagogues (the initial response to their coming), they are dishonoured and driven away.104 Even Gentile “wicked men of the rabble” are employed against them (17:5). In this process the opponents use all the means available to them.105 162

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Similar to the conflicts of the apostles with the religious leaders in Jerusalem, the conflicts in the Diaspora also involve the contested domain of leadership of the people (a category under the contested domain “power”). While this is not directly addressed as contested in Acts (in direct instruction leadership appears in Acts 20), the portrayal suggests that this is nevertheless the case. The Jewish and Gentile converts follow the missionaries who act and teach with authority and establish new communities under their leadership, at times painfully close to the synagogue (18:7). Their opponents react with jealousy and seek to maintain or regain their position of leadership by discrediting and expelling the missionaries. The portrayal is ironic: while the opponents, concerned to preserve Jewish privileges and identity, on some occasions manage to gather and lead Gentiles against their fellow Jews, the missionaries emerge as the legitimate leaders of the people of God in the Diaspora. This is due to the response of the audiences to their message, their personal persuasive integrity and, in some case, divine affirmation through signs and wonders. Reflection on issues of leadership indicates that these conflicts are not clashes between “the Christians” and “the Jews”. In addition to the fact that the missionaries themselves are Jews and behave accordingly in the portrayal of Acts (a conflict within the same religion) and all the anachronisms involved in such a juxtaposition, the conflicts arise and are carried on between the protagonists on both sides. They do not involve the recent Christian converts (the focus is clearly on Paul and his co-workers; although see 14:22) or all unbelieving Jews in all places. Many Jews come to faith, others remain neutral. The focus of Acts is not on how these larger groups related toward each other during and after the conflicts. It is instructive to return to three further observations of Mayer which we mentioned earlier in the introduction. She cautions that “as a religion develops over time and/or as different enabling conditions come into play, different contested domains are accorded priority”.106 Acts does not describe a long development over time; enabling conditions are not our focus in this chapter. Nevertheless, it is the case that different contested domains come to the forefront. Mayer argues that competition between religions in the same environment “turns into conflict at the point when a particular domain/s become/s contested”.107 In these intra-religious conflicts of Acts the initial contested domain of ideology/morality leads to competition for adherence of Jews and Gentiles in the Diaspora. Adherence/loyalty becomes a contested domain in itself. The conflict escalates and the contested domains change when through the response of many to the Christian missionaries repercussions of the status quo appear and other contested domains come into play and take centre-stage. The contested domain of ideology/morality triggers the conflict and then recedes into the background as other issues come to the foreground. However, the other contested domains remain closely linked to the original contested domain. What Mayer notes with regard to two competing religions also applies to the intra-religious competition between the Christian missionaries and their Jewish opponents: “If we consider the case of two religions competing for converts in the 163

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religious market place, two groups can be focused toward each other in conflict, while simultaneously maintaining an outward focus towards potential converts as competitive rivals”.108 Soon after initial contact, the opponents and the missionaries are focused toward each other in conflict (primarily on the side of the opponents; the missionaries’ focus is on those who respond to their proclamation, their interaction with their opponents is limited). At the same time both groups act as competitive rivals in their outward focus in regaining their former following (opponents) or in gaining more Jewish and Gentile adherents (missionaries). On several occasions we referred to the enabling conditions in these conflicts. Further study needs to provide a full survey of them and to analyse how they function and develop as the conflicts take their course. In addition, Mayer has rightly reminded scholars that the focus on conflict must not detract from the instances of conflict de-escalation and conflict resolution, which also appear in the narrative Acts 9–28.109 In addition to such instances, students of the conflicts of Acts should also take note of the references to peaceful coexistence and co-operation as well as transition and assimilation110 in order to reach a comprehensive picture, or, at least, in order to place the contested domains in these accounts in their larger context.111 James D.G. Dunn and other scholars of early Judaism and early Christianity, and their interrelationship, have referred to a number of historical, theological and social phenomena under the heading of the “The Parting(s) of the Ways”.112 The quest is based on the realisation that the separation between Jews and Christians was gradual, happened at different rates in different places, and was influenced by a variety of factors. There is disagreement as to precisely what caused the rift, and estimates vary with regard to the date. According to this discussion, in the first century the concern was to determine who was Christian and who was or was not Jewish. Later developments were characterised by a move from concern with Christian self-definition to defining and shaping the church as a distinct entity over and against nascent Rabbinic Judaism. To what extent and how Acts contributes to these quests depends on when it was written. While the author narrates events in the early years of the Christian community, he does so at a later stage. The narrative takes its readers up to early in the sixth decade of the first century. Even with an early dating of Acts, that is, soon after the events described up to Acts 28,113 the course of the development of early Christianity and its relation to early Judaism will have coloured the way in which the relationship between both groups is reflected. The later Acts is dated, the more such influence should be assumed, as the author not only refers to past events but also deals with issues current at the time. The contribution of Acts to these quests also depends on the assessment of the genre and nature of Acts: is it by and large a historically reliable, even if selective, account of the events or is it more of a theological construct?114 These two options are not necessarily mutually exclusive however as both could apply.115 A brief summary of the contribution of the conflicts between Christian missionaries and their opponents in the Diaspora to this nuanced discussion must suffice. 164

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According to the portrayal in Acts, the ways between the protagonists, that is, the Christian missionaries, themselves Jews, and their Jewish opponents, parted soon after many Jews and Gentiles join the Christian movement. After mutual distancing (although by different means, symbolic action and resort to reviling and violence), the partition of the protagonists is portrayed as definite. This was caused by the opponents’ refusal to either tolerate the Christian proclamation in their synagogues or to believe themselves the missionaries’ claims regarding Jesus. The opponents are not willing to relinquish their right of defining the identity of the people of God and claim to leadership of the Jewish communities. They are jealous of the missionaries’ success and ready to employ against them all enabling conditions available to them. For Acts, this parting of the ways was not the fault of the missionaries who are portrayed as faithfully fulfilling their commission. There is no indication that they were mistaken in doing so or could or should have acted otherwise. There is no self-criticism or reflection in hindsight that the developments could have been different. When it comes to the protagonists on both sides, the ways parted early and decisively.116 Acts does not address the relationship between the “rank and file” adherents on both sides. One may assume that the rift was not as definite for them (at least not at that stage) as it was for their leaders. Many religious and social ties will have continued. Before this literary portrayal of religious conflict is utilised in the reconstruction of the history of earliest Christianity and can be assessed critically, it is necessary to inquire how the portrayal of these conflicts in Acts relates to actual events. In current research on Acts – and biblical historiography more generally – this relation is a disputed field.117 This debate not only concerns the assessment of the historical credibility of Acts, but also the lack of other direct sources for comparison. The approach taken in my study of the portrayal of translocal links in Acts might be helpful in this regard.118 There are several implications of this examination for understanding religious conflict in early Christianity. With all its limitations, the portrayal of these conflicts in Acts indicates an awareness on the side of the author of the complexities of religious conflict. It involves more than religious content in the strict sense. While the focus is clearly on the contested domain of ideology/morality, the author’s portrayal indicates that other domains are also affected from the beginning or became affected as the contested ideology has implications beyond intellectual consent and commitment. Acts also indicates that the origins, course and results of religious conflict need to be explained for if they impinge on the purpose of the writing. Obviously the author of Acts was not a specialist on religious conflict and not interested in religious conflict per se. However, the frequency and ferocity of religious conflict accounts which appear throughout Acts is an indication that the author could not but address them and explain for them in order to achieve his explicit purpose of providing certainty to Theophilus and other readers (Luke 1:4). Luke-Acts does not attempt to paint a picture of bliss and harmony. Rather, the contrary is the case. But why did the Christian proclamation and the events to 165

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which it refers bring about so many conflicts, when it was meant to bring peace upon earth and salvation to God’s people (Luke 1:77; 2:13)? Why did so many of the people for whom this salvation was primarily intended, reject it?119 How did these frequent conflicts over this proclamation originate? Which role did the Christian protagonists, in particular Paul, play in these conflicts? Acts leaves no doubt that Paul was a contested figure among Christians, Jews and Gentiles. Does Paul’s involvement in these conflicts discredit his mission and message of access of Gentiles as Gentiles to God’s salvation for Israel? The apologetic portrayal of these conflicts in Acts, carried out with skill, emphatically underlines that Paul was not to blame for the origin in the course and result of these conflicts. He faithfully fulfilled the commission given to him by the risen Christ, despite the suffering which it involved. In doing so he did not betray his own Jewish identity and avoided anything which would harm the Jewish people, even his opponents.120 Obviously, the opponents’ perception and account of the events would have been different. Unfortunately, such accounts are not available. In addition, the portrayal of Acts would need to be brought into critical discussion with Paul’s letters and their early reception. Beyond interest in reflecting religious conflict in antiquity, this portrayal of contested domains in one early Christian source has implications for today. The religious conflicts in Acts and their critical understanding can assist the readers not only in understanding conflicts of the past but also religious conflicts of their own day and age and perhaps the very conflicts in which they might be involved themselves. An appreciation of past conflicts could help them to analyse the origins, courses and outcomes of current conflicts in view of the insights gained by understanding past conflicts, to see the analogies and the differences and to identify the contested domains in these conflicts. This applies in particular to Christians for whom Acts has become a canonical text with authority for doctrine and behaviour. The accounts of these and other conflicts in Acts can assist them in understanding the conflicts in which they are involved and provide guidance as to Christian conduct under such circumstances.121 While they may not and cannot be ready to compromise with regard to the contested domain of ideology and morality without risking the loss of the core of their faith and identity,122 a thorough appreciation of the other contested domains in religious conflicts can contribute to understanding their dynamics and to bringing about the de-escalation and solution of conflicts by re-assessing and diffusing the other contested domains where compromise does not touch coreconvictions. The portrayal of the missionaries in these conflicts in Acts offers several models and strategies for doing so, for example, in the way in which they treat their opponents or their renunciation of claiming contested space.

Notes 1 For a convenient survey of recent contributions see Wendy Mayer, “Religious Conflict: Definitions, Problems and Theoretical Approaches,” in Religious Conflict from

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Early Christianity to the Rise of Islam, ed. Wendy Mayer and Bronwen Neil, Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 121 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 1; on religion and violence in general see Mark Juergensmeyer et al., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2 For a survey see Christian Gudehus and Michaela Christ, eds., Gewalt: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2013; for the ancient world see Pieter G.R. de Villiers and Jan Willem van Henten, eds., Coping with Violence in the New Testament, Studies in Theology and Religion 16 (Leiden: Brill, 2012) and Albert C. Geljon and Riemer Roukema, eds., Violence in Ancient Christianity: Victims and Perpetrators, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 125 (Leiden: Brill, 2014). The volume of de Villiers and van Henten does not include a contribution on Luke-Acts; the introductory essays by van Henten, “Religion, Bible and Violence” (3–21) and by Jeremy Punt, “Violence in the New Testament and the Roman Empire” (23–39) raise crucial issues. Van Henten discusses various definitions (5–8) and theories of violence (8–20). Most relevant for our case would be the theories of Regina Schwartz and Mark Juergensmeyer. They observe that identity constructions often lead to the exclusion of “the Other” from the insider community and that negative stereotyping or even demonising others in the context of radically dualistic worldviews (21). Punt argues that violence in the New Testament should be seen against the violent background of the Roman Empire: “attention to imperial violence provides a hermeneutically more responsible approach to deal with violence in the New Testament” (38).     The volume of Geljon and Roukema does not contain essays on the New Testament. It starts out with Jan N. Bremmer’s essay “Religious Violence between Greeks, Romans, Christians and Jews” (8–30) and Danny Praet’s contribution “Violence against Christians and Violence by Christians in the First Three Centuries: Direct Violence, Cultural Violence and the Debate about Christian Exclusiveness” (31–55). 3 Our focus is on the conflict between Christian missionaries and representatives of Diaspora Judaism in the North Eastern Mediterranean world as described in Acts 9–28. We do not address the conflicts between the Christian mission and Gentile individuals, groups or authorities, the conflicts between the Christian community in Jerusalem and the religious and political establishment there (Acts 12; 21) or the conflicts within the Christian community over the mode of the inclusion of Gentiles into God’s salvation for Israel and the identity of the people of God as described in Acts 11:1–18; 15:1–35; 21:18–26. These different sets of conflicts are closely interrelated: the conflict between the Christian missionaries and Diaspora Judaism Gentiles plays a role (either as a cause of the conflict or in the course of the conflict as they sympathise with both sides) for the other conflicts, some of the conflicts in Jerusalem are related to the Gentile mission. This is also the case with the inner-Christian conflicts. After detailed examination of these interrelated but distinguishable series of conflicts, a comparison and an integrated analysis would be promising. 4 Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 1–19. 5 Summarised according to Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 1f. On pp. 5–14, Mayer describes “the theoretical approaches that have been brought to bear in recent decades, including discussion of a number of significant research projects with specific relevance to the time period that is the focus of this volume (the first to the ninth centuries CE)”. Mayer’s survey includes the instructive Religious Rivalries Seminar, which was conducted under the auspices of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies. The focus on conflict should not blind students to periods of peaceful cohabitation. A recent local/regional case study is Luca Arcari, ed., Beyond Conflicts: Cultural and Religious Cohabitations in Alexandria and Egypt in the 1st and the 6th Century CE, Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 103 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017). 6 Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 2.

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7 Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 3. 8 Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 4. She continues: “Where this becomes complicated is that the two categories are not necessarily exclusive. If we consider the case of two religions competing for converts in the religious market place, two groups can be focused toward each other in conflict, while simultaneously maintaining an outward focus towards potential converts as competitive rivals”. 9 See Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 4. 10 Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 4. 11 According to the portrayal of Acts, Paul was included into the Christian community of Jerusalem (9:26–30) and later in its mission efforts in Antioch (11:25–26). He was appointed by the Christians of Antioch to deliver the famine relief collection to Jerusalem (11:27–30). Paul’s full acceptance in Jerusalem is also indicated in Acts 15 and 21. For many scholars, his relationship with the Christian community of Jerusalem was less harmonious according to Paul’s letters as it is portrayed by the author of Acts; see Richard I. Pervo, The Making of Paul: Constructions of the Apostle in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), 149–85. In this understanding, there is a literary dissonance between Acts and the authentic Pauline letters, at least in terms of religious conflict. 12 Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 5. In view of our later use of this definition one would wish to either place “secular authority” in quotation marks to indicate some of the difficulties associated with this term when speaking about the ancient world or to avoid the debate by speaking of “political authority”. 13 Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 1, rightly notes that at the forefront of studies of religious conflict there is a preoccupation with its most visual, newsworthy and disruptive aspect, that is, its expression in physical violence. However, religious conflict is a much larger phenomenon than religiously motivated violence. 14 Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 19. 15 While a number of purposes have been suggested, Luke-Acts is primarily a narrative defence of the validity of the inclusion of Gentiles into God’s salvation for Israel without the need for them to become Jews; for a survey, see Robert Maddox, The Purpose of Luke-Acts, Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments 126 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982). 16 See Walter Radl, Paulus und Jesus im lukanischen Doppelwerk: Untersuchungen zu Parallelmotiven im Lukasevangelium und in der Apostelgeschichte (Bern: Lang, 1975). 17 Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 15, reminds of the “perennial issue of the bias of the surviving sources, and the historical forces that led to the transmission of some and the suppression or dwindling into obscurity of others”. 18 Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 16, writes: Driven by recent archaeological research, scholars now see events that were previously viewed as catastrophic (on the basis of literary sources) as effecting an administrative change in the eastern half of the Mediterranean world that had a relatively soft impact. Economies and trade, for the most part, continued to prosper. This change in the historical view undermines the impression of conflict and apocalypse promoted by the dominant discourse.     This also applies to the literary portrayal in Acts. Despite massive conflicts in the first half of Acts, most Jewish Christians are able to live in Jerusalem. 19 Other information in Acts has been compared with literary and non-literary sources from the ancient world; for a thorough comparison see Colin J. Hemer, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, ed. Conrad H. Gempf, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 49 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989; repr.,

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20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31

32 33 34 35

Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1990). On Gallio in Acts 18:12–17 see Rainer Metzner, Die Prominenten im Neuen Testament: Ein prosopographischer Kommentar, Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus /Studien zur Umwelt des Neuen Testaments 66 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 443–50. Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 4, cited above. For a survey see Christoph Stenschke, “Mission in the Book of Acts: Mission of the Church,” Scriptura: International Journal of Bible, Religion and Theology in Southern Africa 103 (2010): 66–78. The letters written by Paul to the communities mentioned in Acts address the status and the various challenges of those whom the Paul of Acts left behind. We have excluded Philipp’s encounter with the Samaritans or the Ethiopian Eunuch (Acts 8) as both accounts do not concern Diaspora Judaism. We have also omitted the conflict between Bar-Jesus/Elymas and the Christian missionaries of Acts 13:6–12 as he is not characterised as a representative of Diaspora Judaism. In addition, he is an individual acting on his own and on his own behalf. He is not a “collective individual”, i.e. groups or communities as described earlier by Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 4. For a detailed survey of this phenomenon and its significance, see Jacob Jervell, “The Divided People of God,” in Luke and the People of God: A New Look at Luke-Acts, ed. Jacob Jervell (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1972), 41–74. Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 4 (italics CS). Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 3 (italics CS). We divide Mayer’s category of “ideology/morality” into ideology and morality as these aspects are related, yet also quite different as the following treatment indicates. For surveys, see Ulrich Wilckens, Die Missionsreden der Apostelgeschichte: Formund traditionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen, 3rd ed., Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament 5 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1974); Martin Korn, Die Geschichte Jesu in veränderter Zeit: Studien zur bleibenden Bedeutung Jesu im lukanischen Doppelwerk, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament II.51 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993); Marion L. Soards, The Speeches of Acts: Their Content, Context and Concerns (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994); Eckhard J. Schnabel, Urchristliche Mission (Wuppertal: R. Brockhaus, 2002), 1320–57 and Christoph W. Stenschke, “The Presentation of Jesus in the Missionary Speeches of Acts and the Mission of the Church,” Verbum et Ecclesia (2014), doi. org/10.4102/ve.v35i1.803. The message is clear: Paul preached no other gospel than the apostles. This is part of the apology for Paul; the strategy is one of parallelisation; see Radl, Paulus. Richard I. Pervo, Acts: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2009), 344: “This lengthy episode may stand for all of the Pauline mission that is to follow”. This narrative “seeks to be typical and paradigmatic, edifying and normative” (p. 344). Acts 13:26. For salvation in Luke-Acts, see I. Howard Marshall, Luke: Historian and Theologian, 3rd ed. (Exeter: Paternoster, 1988) and I. Howard Marshall and David Peterson, eds., Witness to the Gospel: The Theology of Acts (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 63–166. Unless indicated otherwise, I follow the English Standard Version for the quotations from Acts. See Jervell, “Divided People.” This message was attractive to many Jews in Jerusalem. This becomes clear from the high numbers of converts in the early chapters of Acts. This is particularly noteworthy as ancient synagogues are associated with the reading and interpretation of Scripture; see Lee I  Levine, “Synagogues,” in Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism, ed. John J. Collins and Daniel C. Harlow (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 1260–71. This emphasis also appears in Luke 4:16–17; Acts

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13:14–15 and 15:21. While the scriptures are readily available, are read and expected to be interpreted in the synagogues of Acts, their interpretation is an exclusively Christian prerogative.     Sources from the second century onward give an indication how the Jewish opponents might have challenged the missionaries’ use of Scripture. Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with the Jew Trypho (written from a biased Christian perspective) gives an indication of disputed issues and the arguments which might have been used. John O’Keefe notes: “Justin, a Christian, attempts to persuade his opponent Trypho, a Jew, that the Bible predicts Christianity and that Christianity is the fulfilment of God’s promises. Trypho argues contrary positions, also citing biblical example. Both engage in ‘proof-texting’ ”, “Proof-text,” in A Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations, ed. Edward Kessler and Neil Wenborn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 355–6 and also the entry “Biblical Interpretation” by Mary C. Boys (pp. 56–7). 36 See Eckhard J. Schnabel, Acts, ZECNT (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012), 587. Schnabel notes that “The Jews of Pisidian Antioch certainly opposed Paul and Barnabas because they disagreed with their teaching”, but also observes that the social situation of the Jewish diaspora communities in the historical context of the first century must have played a role as well; see the detailed treatment in Eckhard J. Schnabel, “Jewish Opposition to Christians in Asia Minor in the First Century,” BBR 18 (2008): 233–70. The precarious social and political situation of the Jewish Diaspora communities hardly features in Acts. 37 As many other Jews found the proclamation convincing and joined the missionaries, it was probably not considered to be so ridiculous that it was not deemed to deserve any interaction. Possibly the lack of interaction was also due to insufficient scribal training and other competence on the side of the opponents. After all, Paul was a trained scribe of Pharisaic background with some persuasive power (9:1–2; 22:2–5), Barnabas, a Levite (4:36) and Silas, a Roman citizen and inhabitant of Jerusalem (15:32, 40; 16:37–38). Timothy was likewise well trained (2 Tim 1:5). Paul is presented in Acts as a gifted orator who rises to each rhetorical occasion. However, the success of the mission is never explained with recourse to such resources. 38 Interestingly, no opposition by Jews in Berea is noted. Opposition arises when Jews from Thessalonica arrive and agitate against the missionaries and stir up the crowds (17:13). People who act in this manner certainly are not of noble character. 39 To what extent such accounts would have included a detailed refutation of the content of the message is open to speculation. These methodological problems posed by documents from only one side of a larger debate are not unique to Acts, see e.g. Jan Dressler, Wortverdreher, Sonderlinge, Gottlose: Kritik an Philosophie und Rhetorik im klassischen Athen, Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 331 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 10–14. 40 See Joshua Ezra Burns, “Conversion and Proselytism,” in Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism, ed. John J. Collins and Daniel C. Harlow (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 484–6. This point would not have gone unchallenged by the opponents. In Justin Martyrs’ dialogue, Tryho challenges this claim with reference to Scripture; see O’Keefe, “Proof-Text,” 356. 41 In contrast to Luke’s Gospel, Acts offers very little in terms of Christian ethics. In addition to some descriptions of early Christian community life (e.g. 2:42–46) and accounts where the band of the apostles, Peter and Paul serve as ethical models, only Acts 20:17–35 offers detailed ethical instructions (to Christian leaders from Ephesus). This is in contrast to Pauline literature which – in accordance with its genre – extensively addresses ethical issues. 42 When recognition and divine honours are ascribed to them which they are not due to receive, the missionaries immediately intervene (14:14–18; 10:25–26).

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43 The identity of Jason in Acts 17:5–9 is not clear. The stay in the jailor’s house in Philippi is exceptional, 16:34. Only in this verse, Acts notes that the missionaries were offered food which presumably did not meet Jewish purity criteria. 44 In New Testament studies, issues of power have recently been discussed with reference to Pauline literature. The focus of this discussion is on Paul’s relationship with the churches he founded, less on the dynamics of power between Paul and non-Christian Jews and Gentiles. Some of the issues also surfaces in the discussion of Paul’s interaction with his “opponents”, as various groups of persons critical of Paul are referred to in the scholarly discussion. For a survey see Kathy Ehrensperger, Paul and the Dynamics of Power: Communication and Interaction in the Early Christ-Movement, Library of New Testament Studies 325 (London: T  & T Clark International, 2007). Ehrensperger offers an astute summary of concepts of power in contemporary theory (16–34). After a discussion of definitions of power, she discusses “ ‘Power-over’ or strategic power”, “ ‘Power-to’ or communicative power” and strategical and communicative concepts of power in critical discussion. Although a promising field, the issue of power has not been a major feature of research on Luke-Acts. Ehrensperger’s discussion would be a helpful point of departure. In this chapter our quest is for the contested domains in these conflicts. Power constitutes one of several enabling conditions in these conflicts, see Christoph Stenschke, “Conflict in Acts 1–5: ‘Religious’ and Other Factors,” Neotestamentica 50 (2016): (211–45) 231–2. 45 For a survey, see Schnabel, Urchristliche Mission, 1357–9; for the intensive teaching and admonishing of new believers in Acts, see Christoph W. Stenschke, Luke’s Portrait of Gentiles Prior to Their Coming to Faith, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament II.108 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 335–60. 46 Throughout its pages, Acts contains very little moral instructions directed to Christians. The intensive teaching ministry of Paul and his co-workers would have included this. In this way, the missionaries also claim authority over the morality/ethics of their followers. 47 See John P. Dickson, Mission-Commitment in Ancient Judaism and in the Pauline Communities: The Shape, Extent and Background of Early Christian Mission, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament II.159 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 86–308. 48 See the excellent survey in Ernest Best, Paul and His Converts (Edinburgh: T.  & T. Clark, 1988). This concern is not unique to the Paul of Acts: also Barnabas visits the converts of the first missionary journey on Cyprus after his separation from Paul (15:39). 49 See Stenschke, “Conflict in Acts 1–5.” 50 This step meant full obedience to the Law, including circumcision, with all its social and financial consequences; see Burns, “Conversion.” 51 See Gideon Bohak, “Gentile Attitudes towards Jews and Judaism,” in Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism, ed. John J. Collins and Daniel C. Harlow (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 668–70. 52 Pervo, Acts, 420. 53 The instances of physical violence which are mentioned in this context on the side of the opponents must be seen against the backdrop of the Roman Empire and its ideology of violence, as described by Punt, “Violence,” 27–9, 32–5. Punt argues that “the ambivalence and the range of agencies pertaining to the violence encountered in the New Testament can hardly be understood without more properly accounting for the dynamics of Empire (in the guise of the Roman Empire)”, 38–9. Punt claims further that the violence encountered in the New Testament “still is best explained with reference to their authors having been subalterns in an authoritarian, imperialist society, among groups whose quest for self-definition meant that identity and group-formation were constantly constructed, disputed and negotiated”, 38.

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54 Acts, 342. 55 For characterisation in Acts see John A. Darr, On Building Character: The Reader and the Rhetoric of Characterization in Luke-Acts, Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1992); John A. Darr, Herod the Fox: Audience Criticism and Lukan Characterization, Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 163 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 64–91; and Frank Dicken and Julia Snyder, eds., Characters and Characterization in LukeActs, The Library of New Testament Studies 548 (London: Bloomsbury T. & T. Clark, 2016). 56 One exception is Alexander of Ephesus in Acts 19:33. 57 The opponents are characterised by their deeds. They do not give a speech of refutation of the claims of the missionaries or a defence of their own position. Only the unconverted Jews of Thessalonica (17:6f, a brief accusation of the missionaries before the Gentile city authorities) and the Roman Jews speak briefly (28:21f; they have not heard anything regarding Paul but are interested in listening to him). This is in marked contrast to the conflicts and opponents in Jerusalem. While Gallio, Demetrius, the Ephesian town clerk, Claudius Lysias (written speech), Tertullus and Festus all speak, some of them at some length, the Jewish opponents of the Christian mission remain silent; see also Osvaldo Padilla, The Speeches of Outsiders in Acts: Poetics, Theology and Historiography, Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 144 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 58 Pervo, Acts, 141. Wiard Popkes, “ζῆλος,” Exegetisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament II, 3rd ed. (2011), 248, comes to a similar conclusion for the references in Acts. He speaks of “die besonders durch Missgunst Feindseligkeit Apg 5:17; 7:9; 13:45; 17:5, wobei auch Halsstarrigkeit, Wut und (außer 7,9) religiöse Verpflichtung mitspielen können.  .  .  . An allen Apg-Stellen .  .  . geht dem Eifer der Juden bzw. ihrer Väter auf der Gegenseite (Christen bzw. Josef) ein Gewinn an Ansehen voraus. Der Eifer stammt somit unmittelbar aus Missgunst”; die Übersetzung “leidenschaftliche Erregung” reicht nicht weit genug. Nach Ansicht des Lukas kommt generelle Uneinsichtigkeit (7:51ff; 13:45f) hinzu. [He speaks of “Hostility occasioned by ill will (Acts 5:17; 7:9; 13:34; 17:5), in which stubbornness, anger and . . . religious duty can all play a role. . . . In all occurrences in Acts . . . the rage of the Jews or their ancestors toward their opposition (Christians or Joseph) reacts to new attainments in prestige. The rage is thus derived directly from envy; the translation ‘passionate agitation’ is inadequate. According to the view of Luke a general lack of discernment is involved (7:51ff.; 13:45f.)”.] EDNT: Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament II, eds. Horst Balz, Gerhard Schneider (eds.) Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), the quotation is from p. 100., the whole entry is on pp. 100–01. 59 Schnabel, “Jewish Opposition,” 270. However, with the gain or loss of Gentile loyalty, only spiritual concerns and conversions are at stake, but also the social-political function of Gentile sympathisers and adherents. 60 For proponents see I. Howard Marshall, The Acts of the Apostles: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries 5 (Leicester: IVP; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), 229–30; James D.G. Dunn, The Acts of the Apostles, Epworth Commentaries (London: Epworth, 1996), 183 and Brian Rapske, “Opposition to the Plan of God and Persecution,” in Witness to the Gospel: The Theology of Acts, ed. I. Howard Marshall and David Peterson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), (235–56) 247; for summaries see Schnabel, “Jewish Opposition,” 240–1. Yet other scholars do not attempt to explain the Jewish opposition to the early Christian missionaries, for examples, see Judith Lieu, “Accusations of Jewish Persecution in Early Christian Sources, with Particular Reference to Justin Martyr and the Martyrdom of Polycarp,” in Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity, ed.

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61 62

63

64 65 66 67

68 69

Graham N. Stanton and Guy G. Stroumsa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 279–95 and Ernst Bammel, “Jewish Activity Against Christians in Palestine According to Acts,” in The Book of Acts in Its Palestinian Setting, ed. Richard Bauckham, The Book of Acts in Its First Century Setting 4 (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1995), 357–64 at 361; for summaries, see Schnabel, “Jewish Opposition,” 241–2). After his survey of research, Schnabel examines the political and social status of the Jewish communities in Asia Minor (pp. 243–59, the legal status of the Jews, political, social and religious factors, financial factors) and the contacts of the Jewish Diaspora communities with Jerusalem (pp. 259–62), before presenting an explanation for Jewish opposition to the Christian mission (pp. 262–9). This involves concerns for compromising Jewish identity, for the preservation of the social and political status quo and for the relationship with Jerusalem. Pervo, Acts, 342: “Jealousy, rather than critique of the Torah, generates opposition”. For surveys, see Luke T. Johnson, “The New Testament’s Anti-Jewish Slander and the Conventions of Ancient Polemic,” Journal of Biblical Literature 108 (1989): 419–41 and Oda Wischmeyer and Lorenzo Scornaienchi, eds., Polemik in der frühchristlichen Literatur: Texte und Kontexte, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 170 (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2011). See also the occurrence in Acts 7:9. Elsewhere Luke-Acts directly and graciously explains the failure of characters: the disciples disbelieve for joy (Luke 24:41); in the rejection of Jesus, the Jews of Jerusalem acted out of ignorance (Acts 3:17); Rhoda does not open the gate of Peter in her joy (12:14). I. Howard Marshall, “Acts,” in Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, ed. Craig K. Beale and Don A. Carson (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker; Nottingham: Apollos, 2007), 595. See the essays in Eve-Marie Becker and Peter Pilhofer, eds., Biographie und Persönlichkeit des Paulus, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 187 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005). For the characterisation of Paul in Acts see John C. Lentz, Luke’s Portrait of Paul, Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 77 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Pervo, Making, 149–56. See Eckhard J. Schnabel, Paul the Missionary: Realities, Strategies and Methods (Downers Grove: IVP; Nottingham: Apollos, 2008) and Scott Cunningham, “Through Many Tribulations”: The Theology of Persecution in Luke-Acts, Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 142 (Sheffiled: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 186–336. The verb παροξύνω (to provoke, rouse to anger) occurs in Acts 17:16 to describe Paul’s strong reaction to the many idols of Athens. Martin Gaenszle, “Ort,” in Wörterbuch der Religionen, ed. Christoph Auffarth et al. (Stuttgart: Kröner, 2006), 387 and the entry “Raum,” in Wörterbuch der Religionen, ed. Christoph Auffarth et al. (Stuttgart: Kröner, 2006), 424–5: “the concrete meaning for a location which is significant for a human being” (424); see also the definition of place (“Ort”): “In contrast to space, places can be perceived through the senses as concrete, singular objects. They are subject to different cultural evaluations: places are sacred or profane, pure or impure, generally accessible or forbidden” (p. 387). For a theoretical reflection on ancient place/space see Christine Shepardson, Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014), 3–10, 26–9. Shepardson notes the spatial power dynamics involved “in a person’s attendance (or refused attendance) at particular places” (26). Later she concludes: “There is power involved in rhetorically shaping places’ connotations as well as in physically controlling places of religious and civic authority” (29).

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70 Acts 13:6, 14; 14:1; 17:1–2, 10, 17; 18:4, 19; 19:8; for the significance of synagogues for Judaism see Levine, “Synagogues.” 71 See Jervell, “Divided People.” 72 With some strong divine nudging, Peter entered the house of Cornelius in Caesarea and stays there (ch. 10). Before that Peter stayed in the house of Simon the tanner in Joppa (9:43). 73 On Crispus see Bradley Blue, “Acts and the House Church,” in The Book of Acts in Its Graeco-Roman Setting, ed. David W.J. Gill and Conrad Gempf, The Book of Acts in Its First Century Setting 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 176. The other host of the Christian mission in the Diaspora mentioned by name is Lydia in Acts 16:14f. Acts does not mention a synagogue for Philippi, only a place of prayer outside of the city at the riverside. A host of Paul and his travel companions in Judea is Mnason of Cyprus (21:15). 74 Blue, “Acts,” 176. Blue continues: We submit also that given the importance of the “house” in the presentation of the spread of the Gospel and the establishment of the Christian community, the mention of a house in the context is not coincidental; rather, Crispus likely had the financial means to secure a house which would have accommodated a group of Christian believers. Again, the references to houses and households are anything but incidental. Rather, the conversion of a household/er was the natural or even necessary way of establishing the new cult in unfamiliar surroundings and the household remained the soundest basis for the meetings of Christians.

(176–7)

75 Acts 18:7. For the significance of houses in Acts and in early Christianity, see Blue, “Acts” (for Corinth see pp. 172–7), and Roger W. Gehring, Hausgemeinde und Mission: Die Bedeutung antiker Häuser und Hausgemeinden von Jesus bis Paulus, Bibelwissenschaftliche Monographien 9 (Giessen: Brunnen, 2000). 76 Shepardson’s description of John Chrysostom’s rhetorical strategy of maligning Jewish synagogues has drawn my attention to this. She writes (Controlling, 27): “Chrysostom describes . . . synagogues and other places that he defined by association with Judaism, as filled with demons and as spiritually and physically dangerous for Christians to approach, explicitly hoping to curb what he understood to be the inappropriate attendance of those in his church congregation at Jewish services and festivals”; see also 245. 77 The opponents manipulate the local landscape to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of the missionaries; see Shepardson, Controlling, 27. 78 In the Athenian episode (17:16–34), the focus is entirely on Paul’s interaction with Gentiles on the marketplace and on the Areopagus. 79 Acts 16:13. For a discussion of women at the place of prayer in Philippi, see Valerie Abrahamsen, “Women at the Place of Prayer at Philippi,” in Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/ Deuterocanonical Books, and in the New Testament, ed. C. Meyers et al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 463–4; for Lydia see Abrahamsen’s entry, “Lydia,” on 110–11. 80 Pervo, Acts, 343, notes that a familiar theme in ancient conflict is that “women were held to be liable to intellectual and other forms of seduction by holy men” (with examples in his n. 126). 81 When Paul returns to Jerusalem with a larger delegation of people at the end of the third missionary journey, a number of them are Gentile Christians. The purpose is not a return to the land of Israel, but the delivery of the collection for the Christians in Jerusalem.

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82 The picture is different for the encounters between the Christian missionaries and Gentiles and the conflicts which arise in their wake. The Ephesians affirm the sovereignty of Artemis in Ephesus. 83 Jan Stenger, “Where to find Christian Philosophy? Spatiality in John Chrysostom’s Counter to Greek Paideia,” JECS 24 (2016): 173–98. 84 Stenger, “Christian Philosophy,” 173. 85 See Paul Trebilco, Self-Designations and Group Identity in the New Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 103–11. 86 Trebilco, Self-Designations, 104. 87 At 104; see Trebilco’s survey in Self-Designations, 104. 88 Trebilco, Self-Designations, 105. 89 Trebilco, Self-Designations, 105. 90 Jervell, “Divided People,” 65–6. 91 Pervo, Acts, 344: “In accordance with the missionary instructions of Jesus (Luke 10:10–12), the pair carefully detach every vestige of hostile territory from their feet”. 92 See Henry J. Cadbury, “Note XXIV: Dust and Garments,” in Additional Notes to the Commentary, BegC I: The Acts of the Apostles 5, ed. Frederick J. Foakes Jackson and Kirsopp Lake (repr. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1966), 269–77. 93 Pervo, Acts, 388. “From Acts one would infer that Timothy was considered a gentile by local Jews, who knew that his father was such. Had a matrilineal principle been presumed, v. 3 would have said that they knew that, although his mother was Jewish, he had not been circumcised” (388). 94 See Van Henten’s summary (“Religion,” 15–17, 21) of M. Juergensmeyer’s analysis of the relationship between violence, religion and cosmic war; see M. Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). 95 For a survey, see S.E. Garrett, The Demise of the Devil: Magic and the Demonic in Luke-Acts (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1989). 96 See T.R. Schreiner, “Proselyte,” in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia III, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986), 1005–11. 97 This reaction needs to be explored further with reference to R. Schwartz’s observation that violence often leads to the exclusion of “the Other” from the insider community (summary in Van Henten, “Religion,” 11–14, 21); see Regine Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). His use of violence is not a contested domain in these conflicts but rather an enabling condition. In his essay on religious violence between Greeks, Romans, Christians and Jews (“Religious Violence”), Bremmer briefly analyses violence of pagans against Christians, of Christians against pagans and of Christians against Jews (18–28). That violence of Jews against Christians (so the portrayal of Acts in some of these encounters) is not included is probably due to the focus of the whole volume (Geljon and Roukema, Violence) on post-New Testament ancient Christianity. 98 Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 1–2 (my italics).   99 Exceptions are the Philippian place of prayer outside of the city and the detailed descriptions of the situations in Thessalonica, Corinth, Ephesus and Rome. 100 Acts 21:5–6 suggests that the Christian communities provided for some of the travelling expenses. 101 What occurs in Acts in this regard concerns conflicts initiated by Gentiles (16:19–24; 19:23–27). Acts 5:1–11 and 6:1–7 narrate inner-community conflicts. 102 For a survey, see Christoph Stenschke, “Interreligious Encounters in the Book of Acts,” in Interreligious Relations: Biblical Perspectives: Proceedings from the Second Norwegian Summer Academy of Biblical Studies (NSABS), Ansgar University College, Kristiansand, Norway, August  2015, ed. Hallvard Hagelia and Markus

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Zehnder, T  & T Clark Biblical Studies (London, Oxford, New York: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2017), 135–79. 103 This assessment depends on the understanding of the missionaries’ symbolic action in Acts 13:51: is the missionaries’ public shaking off dust from their feet an act of dissociation or of deprivation of Jewish identity (treating their opponents as Gentiles)? 104 This is an exclusion from a religious entity (membership in the Diaspora synagogue with all that such a membership entailed; exclusion means existence at the margins of society) but also from a recognised social status. The missionaries are not labelled as people who belong to a subordinate social category defined as the “other”. The missionaries are excluded as they no longer fit the norm of the group as defined by their opponents. 105 The missionaries do not resort to physical violence to defend themselves and their claims (they twice use symbolic actions). The opponents attack the missionaries (“an attempt was made by both Gentiles and Jews, with their rulers, to mistreat them and to stone them”, 14:6; see also 13:50; 14:19; 17:5, 13; 18:12–17), at times in combination with Gentiles. 106 Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 3. 107 Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 4 (my italics). 108 Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 4. 109 Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 18. 110 Mayer, “Religious Conflict,” 17. 111 It would also be interesting to compare these inner-Jewish conflicts in the setting of the Jewish Diaspora with the inner-Jewish conflicts in Jerusalem in Acts 1–8:3; see Stenschke, “Conflict.” The conflicts in the Diaspora are part of the larger portrayal of the relationship between Jesus and other Jews of his day in Luke’s Gospel and the apostles and their interaction with other Jews in the early chapters of Acts. 112 James D.G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways: Between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity, rev. ed. (London: SCM, 2006; first ed. 1991); for a current summary see Hershel Shanks, ed., Partings: How Judaism and Christianity Became Two (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2013). 113 For a survey regarding the date of Acts, see Craig S. Keener, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary: Introduction and 1:1–2:47 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2012), 383–401. 114 For discussion, see Keener, Acts I, 16–30, 90–220, 320–82, and Hemer, Book of Acts. 115 Marshall, Luke. 116 The missionaries are not long-term inhabitants of the places which they visit and where they found communities. They leave after a shorter or longer period of time. The letters of Paul indicate that the situation may have been different and indeed was different after his departure. While some of many opponents whom he mentions came from the outside, others will have been of local origin, be it from within or without the Christian community. 117 For recent surveys of the issues and debate, see Knut Backhaus and Gert Häfner, eds., Historiographie und fiktionales Erzählen: Zu Konstruktivität in Geschichtstheorie und Exegese, Biblisch-Theologische Studien 86 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2007); Jörg Frey et al., eds., Die Apostelgeschichte im Kontext antiker und frühchristlicher Historiographie, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 162 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009) and Keener, Acts I, 16–30, 90–220, 320–82. 118 See Christoph W. Stenschke, “ ‘sandten die Apostel zu ihnen Petrus und Johannes’ (Apg 8,10): Überörtliche Verbindungen der urchristlichen Gemeinden in der Darstellung der Apostelgeschichte des Lukas,” ETL 87 (2011): 449–53. The conflict accounts of Acts can be read against what is known from other sources (e.g. Josephus, the historicity of which is also debated) regarding religious conflicts within Diaspora

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119 120 121 122

Judaism or between Diaspora Jews and other groups and regarding religious competition in antiquity in general. The plausibility of the portrayal of Acts against this backdrop does not imply that the accounts are reliable. Our focus on conflict must not distract from the many positive responses of Jews and Gentiles which appear in the context of these conflicts. This is also emphasised by Jervell, “Divided People.” While he can react harshly and critically in direct contact with fellow Jews, the Lukan Paul, portrayed as a loyal Jew, avoids all accusations of his fellow Jews before Gentiles/Roman authorities. He does or says nothing which would damage his fellow Jews. See Cunningham, Tribulations. Obviously, the expression of this ideology/morality core cannot simply follow Acts as a set pattern, but needs to be adapted to different circumstances and contexts. Few Christians will encounter Diaspora Jews and their Gentile sympathisers or other people who know the Scriptures and might share some messianic expectation. However, if Christians do so, they need to be aware of the history of the immensely difficult Jewish-Christian relationships in the past two millennia and of the full reversal in numbers and power. Whether and how Jews should be evangelised (and if so, by whom and in what way) is a disputed matter. The need for such an historical awareness also applies to encounters with people of other religions or commitments.

Bibliography Abrahamsen, Valerie. “Lydia.” Pages 110–11 in Women in Scripture: A  Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and in the New Testament. Edited by Carol Meyers. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000. ———. “Women at the Place of Prayer at Philippi.” Pages 463–64 in Women in Scripture: A  Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/ Deuterocanonical Books, and in the New Testament. Edited by Carol Meyers. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Arcari, Luca, ed. Beyond Conflicts: Cultural and Religious Cohabitations in Alexandria and Egypt in the 1st and the 6th Century CE. Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 103. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017. Backhaus, Knut and Gert Häfner, eds. Historiographie und fiktionales Erzählen: Zu Konstruktivität in Geschichtstheorie und Exegese. Biblisch-Theologische Studien 86. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2007. Balz, Horst and Gerhard Schneider, eds. Exegetisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament. 3rd ed. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2011. Bammel, Ernst. “Jewish Activity Against Christians in Palestine According to Acts.” Pages 357–64 in The Book of Acts in Its Palestinian Setting. Edited by Richard Bauckham. The Book of Acts in Its First Century Setting 4. Carlisle: Paternoster, 1995. Becker, Eve-Marie and Peter Pilhofer, eds. Biographie und Persönlichkeit des Paulus. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 187. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005. Best, Ernest. Paul and His Converts. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988. Blue, Bradley. “Acts and the House Church.” Pages 119–222 in The Book of Acts in Its Graeco-Roman Setting. Edited by David W.J. Gill and Conrad Gempf. The Book of Acts in Its First Century Setting 2. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994.

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Bohak, Gideon. “Gentile Attitudes Towards Jews and Judaism.” Pages 668–701 in Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism. Edited by John J. Collins and Daniel C. Harlow. Grand Rapids, MI, Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2010. Boys, Mary C. “Biblical Interpretation.” Pages 56–57 in A Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations. Edited by Edward Kessler and Neil Wenborn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Bremmer, Jan N. “Religious Violence Between Greeks, Romans, Christians and Jews.” Pages 8–30 in Violence in Ancient Christianity: Victims and Perpetrators. Edited by Albert C. Geljon and Riemer Roukema. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 125. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Bromiley, Geoffrey W., et al., eds. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. 4 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979–1988. Burns, Joshua Ezra. “Conversion and Proselytism.” Pages 484–6 in Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism. Edited by John J. Collins and Daniel C. Harlow. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010. Cadbury, Henry J. “Note XXIV: Dust and Garments.” Pages 269–77 in Additional Notes to the Commentary BegC I.5. Repr. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1966. Cunningham, Scott. “Through Many Tribulations”: The Theology of Persecution in LukeActs. Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 142. Sheffiled: Sheffield Academic, 1997. Darr, John A. Herod the Fox: Audience Criticism and Lukan Characterization. Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 163. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998. ———. On Building Character: The Reader and the Rhetoric of Characterization in LukeActs. Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992. De Villiers Pieter G.R. and Jan Willem van Henten, eds. Coping with Violence in the New Testament. Studies in Theology and Religion 16. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Dicken, Frank and Julia Snyder, eds. Characters and Characterization in Luke-Acts. Library of New Testament Studies 548. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016. Dickson, John P. Mission-Commitment in Ancient Judaism and in the Pauline Communities: The Shape, Extent and Background of Early Christian Mission. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament II.159. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003. Dressler, Jan. Wortverdreher, Sonderlinge, Gottlose: Kritik an Philosophie und Rhetorik im klassischen Athen. Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 331. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. Dunn, James D.G. The Partings of the Ways: Between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity. London: SCM, 2006. ———. The Acts of the Apostles. Epworth Commentaries. London: Epworth, 1996. Ehrensperger, Kathy. Paul and the Dynamics of Power: Communication and Interaction in the Early Christ-Movement. Library of New Testament Studies 325. London: T & T Clark International, 2007. Frey, Jörg, Clare K. Rothschild, and Jens Schröter, eds. Die Apostelgeschichte im Kontext antiker und frühchristlicher Historiographie. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 162. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. Gaenszle, Martin. “Ort.” Page 387 in Wörterbuch der Religionen. Edited by Christoph Auffarth et al. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2006.

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———– “Raum.” Pages 424–25 in Wörterbuch der Religionen. Edited by Christoph Auffarth et al. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2006. Garrett, Susan E. The Demise of the Devil: Magic and the Demonic in Luke-Acts. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1989. Gehring, Roger W. Hausgemeinde und Mission: Die Bedeutung antiker Häuser und Hausgemeinden von Jesus bis Paulus. Bibelwissenschaftliche Monographien 9. Giessen: Brunnen, 2000. Geljon, Albert C. and Riemer Roukema, eds. Violence in Ancient Christianity: Victims and Perpetrators. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 125. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Gudehus, Christian and Michaela Christ, eds. Gewalt: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2013. Hemer, Colin J. The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History. Edited by Conrad H. Gempf. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 49. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1989. Jervell, Jacob. “The Divided People of God.” Pages 41–74, in Luke and the People of God: A New Look at Luke-Acts. Edited by Jacob Jervell. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1972. Johnson, Luke T. “The New Testament’s Anti-Jewish Slander and the Conventions of Ancient Polemic.” Journal of Biblical Literature 108 (1989): 419–41. Juergensmeyer, Mark. Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. Juergensmeyer, Mark, Margo Kitts, and Michael Jerryson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Keener, Craig S. Acts: An Exegetical Commentary: Introduction and 1:1–2:47. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2012. Korn, Martin. Die Geschichte Jesu in veränderter Zeit: Studien zur bleibenden Bedeutung Jesu im lukanischen Doppelwerk. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, II.51. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993. Lentz, John C. Luke’s Portrait of Paul. Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Levine, Lee I. “Synagogues.” Pages 1260–71 in Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism. Edited by John J. Collins and Daniel C. Harlow. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010. Lieu, Judith. “Accusations of Jewish Persecution in Early Christian Sources, with Particular Reference to Justin Martyr and the Martyrdom of Polycarp.” Pages 279–95 in Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity. Edited by Graham N. Stanton and Guy G. Stroumsa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Maddox, Robert. The Purpose of Luke-Acts. Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments 126. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982. Marshall, I. Howard. “Acts.” Pages 513–606 in Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament. Edited by Craig K. Beale and Don A. Carson. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007. ———. Luke: Historian and Theologian. 3rd ed. Exeter: Paternoster, 1988. ———. The Acts of the Apostles: An Introduction and Commentary. Tyndale New Testament Commentaries 5. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980. Marshall, I. Howard and David Peterson, eds. Witness to the Gospel: The Theology of Acts. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998. Mayer, Wendy. “Religious Conflict: Definitions, Problems and Theoretical Approaches.” Pages 1–19 in Religious Conflict from Early Christianity to the Rise of Islam. Edited

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by Wendy Mayer and Bronwen Neil. Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 121. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013. Mayer, Wendy and Bronwen Neil, eds. Religious Conflict from Early Christianity to the Rise of Islam. Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 121. Berlin: de Gruyter 2013. Metzner, Rainer. Die Prominenten im Neuen Testament: Ein prosopographischer Kommentar. Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus /Studien zur Umwelt des Neuen Testaments 66. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008. O’Keefe, John. “Proof-Text.” Pages 355–56 in A Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations. Edited by Edward Kessler and Neil Wenborn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Padilla, Osvaldo. The Speeches of Outsiders in Acts: Poetics, Theology and Historiography. Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 144. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pervo, Richard I. The Making of Paul: Constructions of the Apostle in Early Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010. ———. Acts: A Commentary. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009. Praet, Danny, “Violence Against Christians and Violence by Christians in the First Three Centuries: Direct Violence, Cultural Violence and the Debate About Christian Exclusiveness.” Pages 31–55 in Violence in Ancient Christianity: Victims and Perpetrators. Edited by Albert C. Geljon and Riemer Roukema. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 125. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Punt, Jeremy. “Violence in the New Testament and the Roman Empire.” Pages 23–39 in Coping with Violence in the New Testament. Edited by Pieter G.R. de Villiers and Jan Willem van Henten. Studies in Theology and Religion 16. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Radl, Walter. Paulus und Jesus im lukanischen Doppelwerk: Untersuchungen zu Parallelmotiven im Lukasevangelium und in der Apostelgeschichte. Bern: Lang, 1975. Rapske, Brian. “Opposition to the Plan of God and Persecution.” Pages 235–56 in Witness to the Gospel: The Theology of Acts. Edited by I. Howard Marshall and David Peterson. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998. Schnabel, Eckhard J. Acts. Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012. ———. “Jewish Opposition to Christians in Asia Minor in the First Century.” Bulletin for Biblical Research 18 (2008): 233–70. ———. Paul the Missionary: Realities, Strategies and Methods. Downers Grove: IVP; Nottingham: Apollos, 2008. ———. Urchristliche Mission. Wuppertal: Brockhaus, 2002. Schwartz, Regine. The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Shanks, Hershel, ed. Partings: How Judaism and Christianity Became Two. Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2013. Shepardson, Christine. Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014. Soards, Marion L. The Speeches of Acts: Their Content, Context and Concerns. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994. Stenger, Jan 2016. “Where to find Christian Philosophy? Spatiality in John Chrysostom’s Counter to Greek Paideia.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 24 (2016): 173–98.

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Stenschke, Christoph. “Interreligious Encounters in the Book of Acts.” Pages 135–79 in Interreligious Relations: Biblical Perspectives: Proceedings from the Second Norwegian Summer Academy of Biblical Studies (NSABS), Ansgar University College, Kristiansand, Norway, August 2015. Edited by Hallvard Hagelia and Markus Zehnder. T & T Clark Biblical Studies. London, Oxford, New York: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2017. ———. “Conflict in Acts 1–5: ‘Religious’ and Other Factors.” Neotestamentica 50 (2016): 211–45. ———. “The Presentation of Jesus in the Missionary Speeches of Acts and the Mission of the Church.” Verbum et Ecclesia (2014). doi: org/10.4102/ ve.v35i1.803. ———. “ ‘. . . sandten die Apostel zu ihnen Petrus und Johannes’ (Apg 8,10): Überörtliche Verbindungen der urchristlichen Gemeinden in der Darstellung der Apostelgeschichte des Lukas.” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 87 (2011): 433–53. ———. “Mission in the Book of Acts: Mission of the Church.” Scriptura: International Journal of Bible, Religion and Theology in Southern Africa 103 (2010): 66–78. ———. Luke’s Portrait of Gentiles Prior to Their Coming to Faith. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament II.108. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999. Trebilco, Paul. Self-Designations and Group Identity in the New Testament. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Van Henten, Jan Willem, “Religion, Bible and Violence.” Pages 3–21 in Coping with Violence in the New Testament. Edited by Pieter G.R. de Villiers and Jan Willem van Henten. Studies in Theology and Religion 16. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Wilckens, Ulrich. Die Missionsreden der Apostelgeschichte: Form- und traditionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen. 3rd ed. Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament 5. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1974. Wischmeyer, Oda and Lorenzo Scornaienchi, eds. Polemik in der frühchristlichen Literatur: Texte und Kontexte. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 170. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011.

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8 CHRISTIANISATION AND LATE ANTIQUE PATRONAGE Conflicts and everyday nuisances Maijastina Kahlos Introduction The history of late antiquity is permeated with accounts of religious struggles, temple destructions, urban disturbances, and resistance and violence between religious groups. The written sources are inclined to emphasise the dramatic and drastic instead of the regular and peaceful. The sources do not need to report repeated activities and uninterrupted life. It is this tendency that has influenced the scholarly propensity to see the religious changes (that is, the so-called Christianisation) of the Mediterranean area in conflictual terms. Christian literary sources tend to highlight the dichotomies and clashes in their triumphalist accounts of the Christian expansion. However, the day-to-day social life, filled with negotiations and compromises, was obviously more complex than the ecclesiastical writers tend to tell us. As Roger Bagnall appositely remarks, “as so often, documentation follows trouble.”1 Documentation does not usually follow peaceful life. This chapter is an attempt to break out the conflictual narrative and to seek a balance between the late antique melodramas and the not-so-exciting everyday nuisances with economic and social issues. This is not to minimise the occurrences of violent conflicts in late antiquity or to claim for only easy-going coexistence between different religious groups. Instead, I will focus on the conflict of interests in the regular routines of everyday life. I will discuss the patronage relationships in Italy and North Africa in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. I am inclined to argue that a powerful landlord could influence his clients to embrace Christianity or retain old practices. The same applies to the rivalry between “Donatists” and “Catholics” in North Africa, where local landowners were supposed to exert pressure on their tenants. I  do not aim to present an exhaustive social-historical survey on local landowners and patronage relationships in the process of Christianisation. The purpose of this chapter is to rather draw attention to how conflicts of interests, economic ties of dependence and rivalry in authority in local communities operate. This is often neglected in the discussions of Christianisation, which tend to highlight conflicts between religious groups. 182

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My discussion focuses on the rural patronage of landowners who were expected to control their tenants’ religious actions and beliefs. This idea of the landlord’s power and duty on his dependents had a long history in Roman society in which the paterfamilias, the head of the household, was held responsible for the religious sphere in the familia. Much of the religious change in late antiquity, the process that is conventionally called the Christianisation of the Mediterranean world, was conducted in line with the Roman social system, along with its hierarchy, patronage and ties of dependence. We have cases with conflicts of interest, not only between pagan landowners and bishops in the regular routines of everyday life, but also between Christian landlords and local bishops who compete for authority in doctrinal disputes and private religiosity. Late antique bishops’ complaints tell us about the continuing “paganism” in the countryside, at least in the form that these bishops imagined and understood.2 I will start by discussing the two trends in the research of late antiquity; on the one hand, the continuing emphasis on violent conflicts in historical research, and on the other hand, the prominence given to peaceful coexistence and negotiations. After these considerations, I will bring late antique patronage and other economic ties of dependence to the scene. We will look at local landowners and their peasants in the sermons and letters of fourth- to sixth-century bishops in Italy and North Africa. One notion that comes forth in the late antique bishops’ writings is the negligence of landowners. Furthermore, the conversions of the rural population were not taken as a self-evident fait accompli; bishops also problematised the sincerity and depth of the more or less coerced conversions of tenants. I will end with a focused case study based on the observations made in the first part of the chapter – a discussion on the “soft power” of the sixth-century bishop, Gregory of Rome. As Gregory’s letters indicate, the religiosity of tenants and the laxity of landowners still vexed the bishops.

From melodramas to everyday nuisances Violent conflicts were a significant part of late antique life, at least on the level of imagery in literature, preaching and polemic.3 How considerable a role that violent conflicts played in late antiquity has been an ongoing debate in recent scholarship.4 Another question is whether there was an increase in violence in late Roman society in comparison to the early imperial period. This leads us to the problem of the number, nature and representativeness of our sources, again as compared to the early Empire. We have far more reports about crises than normal patterns of life. Moreover, the question of whether there was increased participation of people in violent conflicts, especially in religiously motivated violence, is a debated topic.5 The question draws us to a bog of interpretations. In terms of local conflicts, are we able to distinguish religious impetuses from other kinds of motivation, such as political and economic ones?6 Religious justification was the way in which many Christian writers tended to explain the incidents that took place in 183

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late antique cities and the countryside. Triumphalist accounts of conflicts became a topos in church histories and hagiographies, but other factors, social and economic, were at work as well. In the research on late antiquity, there have been two trends of perceiving the relations between religious groups. On the one hand, in the previous research there was a strong tendency to emphasise violent encounters, which is very much the consequence of late antique narratives of Christian triumphalism. Many late antique Christian writers, in church histories and hagiographies, conceptualised Christianisation in terms of violent attacks and uncompromised victories over pagans.7 In Christian literary sources, the committed or rigorist writers made a lot of noise, and it is this noise that has greatly influenced the scholarly tendency to see Christianisation in conflictual terms.8 Here I understand the concept of conflict in wider terms than violent encounters between groups or individuals. Conflict is not the same as violence since it does not always include physical violence. Conflict implies that something is contested.9 We can speak about several other kinds of conflicts such as conflicts of interpretations in doctrinal disputes, conflicts of practices in everyday life or conflicts of interests in local settings. Late antiquity has been depicted as a period witnessing the “coercive turn” in the religious sphere.10 Similar to conflict, coercion implies not only physical force and violence, but also the hegemony in economic relations such as those between the landowners and the tenants.11 As Richard Gordon writes, Christian hostility in a “weak sense” usually meant indirect pressure rather than active persecution.12 Thus, coercion was not always based on using violence; instead, it could be grounded in socio-economic pressure. What late antique bishops called persuasion was often this kind of pressure. Peter Brown calls this pressure “gentle violence,” which was “brought to bear in more subtle, less melodramatic ways, more widely diffused throughout society.”13 It is this “gentle violence” that I will focus on now – even though I have a few doubts about the gentleness.

Landowners and patronage The patronage system (patrocinium) had a long history in Roman society, and the relationship between a patron and a client was one of the most significant types of dependence, dating from the Republic through the imperial period until late antiquity. Patron-client relations were often hereditary. Not only individual persons, but also the population of a certain region or city could be a client. Under the informal aegis of their patrons, clients could expect support in law cases, for instance, and protection in their trades. In return, a client’s duty was to give his support to the patron in all possible ways. There were culturally specific rules built into the Roman legal system in regard to what was appropriate behaviour or correct types action in patronage relationships.14 In late antiquity, patronage relationships did not differ essentially from the early imperial period. These ties of dependence crossed through all levels of late 184

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Roman society: clients could be humiliores and honestiores, senators, curiales, peasants or rich and poor. Aristocrats continued to exert influence as donors and leaders of their communities and their role as patrons went on within families for generations. In late Roman society, aristocrats soon found themselves in competition with bishops for prestige and power.15 The emperor was the supreme patron. On the metaphorical level, saints emerged as patrons and on the top, there was the Christian deity.16 Patronage relationships were a generally recognised part of how Roman society functioned and how the Empire was governed. What was debated were the boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate procedures. Also a matter of dispute was who the proper patrons were, especially in regions where new patrons – bishops and military commanders – appeared to compete with traditional ones, namely landowners.17 Bishops did not usually want to act against landowners. Instead, they stressed the respect for private property. It was, however, important to influence the local landowners who eventually decided whether the laws forbidding pagan practices were applied or not and whether pagan shrines were destroyed or allowed to remain open on their estates. Even powerful bishops like Ambrose of Milan had to strike a balance between different parties and forces – the imperial administration, local administration, landowners, competing ecclesiastical leaders, competing Christian groups, ascetic movements and peasants, Christians and pagans alike. Powerful patrons could also play a decisive role in local disturbances. Both bishops and local leaders such as influential curiales and landowners could mobilise their clients. This was no novelty in Roman society in which influential patrons had for centuries gathered their clients and the clients of their clients into pressure groups.18 A bishop with dependents was just one variation of the client system.19 The authority of a head of a household, paterfamilias, was based on the old Roman patria potestas over the familia, which consisted of what we today call the nuclear family (spouse and children) and the extended family of slaves, servants and other dependents, even clients. This authority extended to religious practices since the head of the household was responsible for the sacred rites. Despite widening possibilities of individual religious choices from the imperial period onwards, the authority of heads of household and patrons remained decisive. The paterfamilias was responsible for maintaining religion in Christian households as well.20 Early Christian accounts of conversions, as seen in Acts 16:13–15 for instance, stressed the conversions of whole households in which the slave-owner directed his slaves to be baptised.21 In the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity the heroine of the narrative Perpetua challenges the institution of the paterfamilias by making her own religious choice. Her father “loses face” since his authority as paterfamilias is undermined.22 Even though the historicity of the gospel and hagiographic narratives is doubtful, they reveal social expectations. Within these social parameters, it becomes more understandable that local landowners could play a decisive role in guiding rural populations to Christianity.23 185

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A landowner could give socio-economic support to some cults and withdraw his backing from other cults. This is why many bishops often addressed landowners in their sermons and letters. Christian domini were expected to guide their tenants by means of positive actions, such as by building churches on their estates. They could also pressure them by tearing down pagan shrines on their own property. Augustine of Hippo insisted that the master of a household should use all of his authority to either make his dependents Christians or encourage them to remain so. For example, in the City of God, he represents this as the ideal of landlords.24 On the macro level of the state, it was the paternal duty of emperors to take care of their subjects’ religion.25 How successful and comprehensive this “Christianisation” was, however, is another matter.26 One can also inquire as to what extent patronage could affect the religious choices. Moreover, we can ask what religious choice was in antiquity and to what extent we can speak of individual choices in late antique rural communities. This is not to underestimate or belittle the role of individual religiosity in antiquity – only to be cautious with our modern presuppositions.27

Bishops and landowners in Italy When a landowner became Christian, he was expected to stop pagan practices on his property. This does not seem to have been an inevitable outcome, however, as we can read from the complaints of church leaders. In a number of sermons, Maximus, the bishop of Turin (d. c. 420), advises the divites and potentes in his audience to wipe out the pagan impurities on their estates.28 He uses the notion of pollution: idolatry pollutes the whole community, not only those who are directly participating in idolatry, but also those who are aware of it and still keep quiet. As the performance of idolatry endangered everyone in the community – those performing the rites (exercentes), those living nearby (habitantes) and those watching (intuentes) – it was the duty of a landlord to make it stop. The landowner was believed to be polluted as well when his tenants made sacrifices.29 In another sermon, Maximus demands Christian landlords to put an end to peasants’ sacrifices, appealing to the pollution again: “As many are sanctified by the holiness of one, many are polluted by the sacrilege of one” (sicut unius sanctitate sanctificantur multi, ita unius sacrilegio plurimi polluuntur). He is particularly annoyed at Christian landlords pretending not to know what their tenants were performing on their property: “I do not know, I have not commanded [them to do so]; this is not my fault, this is none of my business” (Nescio, non iussi; causa mea non est, non me tangit).30 Maximus also asserts that a landowner who does not tolerate the performance of sacrileges on his property does not have a defiled conscience. But for the landlord who knows that sacrifices are being made to idols on his estate and still does not prohibit that, the “horrendous pollution” (pollutio . . . nefanda) touches him.31 Landlords were held responsible even if they lived far away from their estates in a city.32 186

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Other bishops to complain about the laxity of landlords were Zeno of Verona (fl. c. 360–380) and Gaudentius of Brescia (d. c. 410). Gaudentius, for example, paralleled the negligence with regards to idolatrous practices with adulteries (adulteria), obscenities (stupra) and other transgressions.33 He recurrently warned his audience from becoming involved in traditional rituals and being thus polluted by idolatry and especially by the mortifying food of demons, referring to the food dedicated to the gods in traditional rituals.34 Zeno complains that landlords pretended not to know about the fuming shrines on their estates. He mocks their fake ignorance since they knew exactly every clod of earth, stone and twig on their neighbours’ estates. Zeno implies that pleading ignorance was not far off from accepting idolatrous practices.35 When complaining about the laxity of landlords, Maximus of Turin describes them with the words coniventia, dissimulare and dissimulatio.36 The same terms are used in imperial decrees when the legislator speaks about the negligence in enforcing law or the disregard of judges.37 The words appear also in laws forbidding pagan practices and condemning heresies. For example, in C.Th. 16.10.12.4 (in 392) which forbids several pagan practices, it is declared that the law should be enforced by the judges and defensores as well as decuriones of the cities. It is stressed that the crimes reported should be punished by the judges. Then the legislator feels it necessary to warn that if some should think that these crimes should be concealed through favouritism (gratia) or overlooked through carelessness (incuria), they will be subject to judicial indignation. Furthermore, the judges are warned: “If the judges should be advised of such crimes and should defer punishment through connivance (dissimulatio), they shall be fined thirty pounds of gold.”38 Dissimulatio, gratia and incuria – connivance, favouritism and negligence – were an integral part of the administration and civic life in the late Roman Empire. This was mostly due to the low salaries of minor officials in the administration; there was a tendency to acquire additional income from all sorts of extra payments and bribes, and officials were more or less expected to rely on these.39 Many of the extant laws prohibiting pagan activities also threatened penalties against authorities who fail to put the law into practice. In 408, in a law against pagans and heretics that ordered their buildings and temples to be released for public use, the emperors proclaimed that they were compelled “by the pertinacity of the Donatists and the madness of pagans which have been enkindled by the evil sloth of the judges [mala desidia iudicum], by the connivance of the office staffs [coniventia officiorum], and by the contempt of municipal senates [ordinum contemptus]” to repeat the previously given regulations.40 Another example is a law in 409 targeting heretics, Jews, and pagans, which reminded that the laws previously issued against those groups had not diminished in force. This message was particularly meant for judges, who “shall know that the precepts thereof must be obeyed with loyal devotion.” They are then threatened with punishments, “if any of the judges through the crime of connivance [peccato coniventiae] should fail to execute the present law.”41 187

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Both bishops and imperial legislators saw Christianising peasants as the responsibility of landlords. Thus, an attempt to correct landowners was made in the imperial legislation: it was decreed that landlords were to destroy pagan shrines. In the same law, together with the pressure on landowners, bishops were given the authority to prohibit traditional ritual banquets.42 The imperial legislators noticed the landlords’ awareness of “pagan superstition” and laxity in abolishing it. A law of 392 ruled different punishments depending on whether sacrifices were performed without the knowledge of the landowner (ignorante domino) or with a person’s connivance (coniventem).43 Another law of 472 decreed the confiscation or those estates or houses in which the landlords knew (scientibus dominis) that “pagan superstition” was practiced and permitted it.44

Bishops and landowners in North Africa In North Africa as well, powerful landowners, whether they were Christian or nonChristian, could exercise significant influence on their dependents (again, whether Christian or non-Christian, “Donatist” or “Catholic”).45 According Augustine, there was a saying in Hippo about a certain aristocrat: “If this nobleman were a Christian, no one would remain pagan” (ille nobilis, si Christianus esset, nemo remaneret paganus). Augustine’s remark shows the expectations that ecclesiastical leaders put on aristocratic landowners and the leaders of the community.46 While the propaganda value of aristocratic conversions was also certainly great,47 the most significant weight was connected to the socio-economic influence of the leading landowners. As Augustine complains, local men in power positions, in towns and country, were so powerful that Christians were afraid of offending those in more powerful positions and consequently were persuaded to engage in pagan practices. All sorts of social contacts – superior, inferior or equal in the hierarchy – could draw a Christian to pagan practices.48 Augustine also mentions that the needs of everyday life – in Augustine’s words, temporalis commoditas – led people either to embrace Christianity or to retain pagan practices. The pressure of this world, pressura huius saeculi, that is, the ties of dependence, had an effect on their choices.49 In his preaching, Augustine was attentive in demanding respect for private property and calming his listeners if there was a risk that they would become too zealous and go to attack pagan shrines without proper authorisation.50 He admitted that “many pagans had those abominations on their estates” (Multi pagani habent istas abominationes in fundis suis).51 He stressed that Christian enthusiasts should wait patiently until landowners became Christians and then destroy the pagan shrines on their estates themselves.52 Similar tensions applied in the enmity between the “Donatists” and “Catholics” in North Africa, where local landowners exerted pressure on their tenants. The Council of Carthage of 411 ordered local leaders – decurions, landowners and village leaders – to close Donatist churches and hand their property over to the

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Catholics.53 A law of 412 decreed that landlords were to flog their Donatist coloni and servi, and magistrates were to collect fines. If landlords failed to convert their slaves and tenants away from Donatism, they were ordered to pay penalties.54 Augustine commended the Christian aristocrat Pammachius who had succeeded in persuading his African tenants to abandon their “furious folly of Donatists.” Pammachius had “admonished them in such a way and encouraged them with such a fervour of spirit that they with forthright devotion chose to follow” his Catholic course (tali admoneres alloquio, tanto fervore spiritus animares, ut devotione promptissima ad sequendum eligerent).55 Augustine does not mention any details here, and one can only surmise what Pammachius’ methods were in persuading his coloni to give up their Donatist inclinations and to embrace the Catholic one. In any case, (according to Augustine) the landlord’s role was decisive. In Pammachius’ case, Augustine praised the pressure brought by Catholic landowners on Donatist tenants. However, this would not work the other way around as his complaints about similar pressuring by Donatists show. In the early fifth century, the Catholic side had the imperial backing with legislation against Donatists and thus Augustine could appeal to edicts and threaten landowners if these promoted the wrong sect. In his debate with Petilianus, Augustine condemns the procedures of Crispinus, the Donatist bishop of Calama and a landlord – or technically Crispinus had purchased an emphyteutic lease of an imperial estate.56 Crispinus had immediately re-baptised eighty souls to Donatist inclination. This happened “under the sole influence of terror” (uno terroris impetu) and the people compelled to rebaptism “groaned with miserable voices” (miserabili gemitu mussitantes).57 Augustine’s rhetoric is of course composed to achieve indignation among the audience, and the reactions of tenants coerced to Donatist baptism on Crispinus’ newly purchased estate escape us.58 The contrast between Augustine’s two depictions is ostensible even though the situations with landowners remained, more or less, the same. As said, the difference was that a Donatist landowner could not coerce his tenants to his religion as this was against imperial law.59 Augustine urged landlords several times to guide their tenants to “the communion of the Catholic church”; one example is his letter to a landowner called Donatus. This landlord was to exhort all his dependents (tuosque omnes) kindly and benevolently (comiter et benigne).60 In another letter to an aristocrat called Festus, Augustine raises the problem of Donatists: “Your men [homines vestros] in the region of Hippo are still Donatists, and your letter has not made any influence on them.” So, Augustine admonishes Festus to do something about the problem and send a trusted man to consult the matter with Augustine, who will find a solution.61 Donatists should be handled with what Augustine calls “the gentlest discipline” (misericordissima disciplina).62 The methods of the “gentle discipline” varied. In his notorious letter 93, Augustine stressed the responsibility of paterfamilias, the head of the household, in correcting Donatists and bringing them “back” to the Catholic church.63 Furthermore,

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Augustine was concerned about the Donatists inciting slaves and peasants against their landlords. He portrays Donatists as militants and troublemakers, and as challenging the established hierarchical order of Roman society: One flees unity so that the peasantry may rise boldly against their lords, and the slaves also, contrary to apostolic precept. The fugitive slaves are not only alienated from their masters, but threaten their masters, and are not content with threats, but pass to the most violent attacks and robberies at their expense.64 An anonymous North African writer congratulates his addressee, a landowner or a bishop called Salvius, for having converted stubborn souls to Christianity “without any threats or terror at all” (nullis minis, nullis omnino terroribus).65 His tone reveals admiring amazement as if the non-violent and non-terrorising procedures with success were exceptional in his world of experience. It is difficult to say whether the tenants were converted from traditional pagan cults to Christianity or from Donatism to mainstream Christianity. Furthermore, it not certain if the addressee, Salvius, carried his missionary operations with the authority from imperial legislation.66 The complaints and appeals discussed earlier reflect a conflict of interests between local landowners and bishops on the regional level. It is possible that a number of landlords saw the traditional religious practices as convenient and advantageous for the maintenance of tranquillity, order and economic dependencies on their properties. Private religiosity and episcopal authority were often in tension and rivalry with one another in the countryside, not only between pagan landowners and Christian bishops, but even between Christian landlords and bishops. Local landowning elites were accustomed to keep (or at least try to keep) the religious activities of their dependents in their control.67 Sometimes landowners and bishops had shared interests, or at least that is what bishops such as Maximus of Turin and Augustine are at pains to ascertain.68 The pressures that were set on the paternal role of landowners did not mean that everything proceeded along the expectations either of landlords themselves, or bishops who wanted to influence the landlords, or imperial legislators who threatened with confiscation of property. Rural populations certainly found ways to evade menace and adapt to changed circumstances. Tenants were not passive vessels even though elite writers may have supposed so. A conflict between tenants and their bad-behaving bishop Antoninus in Fussala discussed by Augustine reveals to us how tenants had their way of negotiating and influencing their own surroundings. The Fussalans who were displeased with their bishop complained to Augustine and demanded Antoninus to be removed.69 As Leslie Dossey has shown, North African peasants were seeking actively to influence their own communities, for example, in petitioning for their own priests. Many of the conflicts in late antique Africa resulted from these ambitions of the peasantry,

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the fragmentation of the curial and senatorial elites and the competition between Catholic and Donatist elites. Peasants could play their part in the rivalry between the elites.70

Gentlest discipline and economic pressure What kind of conversion did this combination of persuasion and pressure produce on rural areas? Were conversions of tenants sincere? Another important question is what kind of conversions we modern researchers regard as sincere and what early Christian leaders considered sincere. Late antique bishops were aware of the problems connected with force and pressure. Several writers lamented about feigned conversions, including Eusebius of Caesarea, who otherwise celebrates the triumph of Christianity in the wake of Constantine’s shift to Christianity.71 Such numerous complaints tell us more about the expectations of the ecclesiastical elite than about any social facts of the converts’ mind-set. The same bishops, specifically Augustine (as we saw earlier), who advocated the “gentlest discipline” also grieved about feigned conversions. Augustine acknowledged the reality in which many pagans became Christians only for show so that their cult places would be left in peace and they could just continue with their traditional practices. Even when exulting the growing church with the metaphor of the huge haul of fishes, Augustine is worried about the mixture of the good and the bad; furthermore, the full boat is at risk of sinking. Maximus of Turin complained that some people confessed Christ only with their lips and went to the church only to be considered Christians.72 In regard to Donatist Christians, Augustine justified their coercion by eventual good consequences. One might think that “no one should be compelled to justice” but one could read the parable from the Scriptures that the head of the household said to his servants: “Compel them come in whomsoever you will find” (Luke 14:16–24).73 Here we have again the paterfamilias, the head of the household, who is expected to invite his dependents to the table of Christianity. Furthermore, Augustine offers the conversion of the Apostle Paul as an exemplum for forced conversion that turned out to be beneficial, not only to himself, but also to the Christian mission.74 In the fourth and fifth centuries, bishops were at pains persuading landowners to wipe out pagan shrines on their estates and control the religiosity of their tenants. In the sixth century, the position of the Christian churches was stronger. In many regions, bishops had a powerful role as patrons themselves both in city and country. In Gaul, for instance, Caesarius of Arles (d. 542) actively fashioned an authoritative role as an administrator, benefactor and sponsor. Nevertheless, he also had to complain about the traditional rituals practiced in the countryside and appeals to the landlords. Caesarius laments that the landlords not only are unwilling to abolish pagans’ shrines (paganorum fana), but they even rebuild cult places that have already been destroyed.75

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Gregory, bishop of Rome, also complained about the continuing pagan practices in Italy. As Robert Markus has remarked, the people whom Gregory calls “pagans” (gentiles) had either already entered the church or were expected do so. “Pagan” was a versatile term that could be used in different contexts, referring to the “gentile” within the church itself, or marking people as outsiders, not within the community of the faithful.76 Gregory writes about baptised Christians who went to church but also continued to visit the traditional cult places, taking part in “the cult of idols.”77 What these people thought themselves to be escapes us. In a letter to the local aristocrats and landowners (nobiles ac possessores) in Sardinia, Gregory complains that they let their peasants practice idolatry on their properties: they should feel guilty for the religious crimes that their dependents commit. They merely see what is happening and keep quiet.78 Furthermore, Gregory insists that Sardinian tenants should be persuaded with such a severe increase in their rents that it would force them to Christianity.79 He also disapproves of magistrates who make considerable profit by collecting fines from those who made sacrifices to idols.80 Thus, he implies that magistrates were not even interested in making an end to forbidden rituals since they were actually a source of income to them.

Conclusion The central aim of this study was to challenge the conflictual narratives of history by drawing attention away from the melodramatic events, destructions of temples and religious riots and by reminding about the everyday life issues such as conflicts of interests, economic ties of dependence and rivalry in authority. My discussion focused on the rural patronage of landowners who were regarded as responsible for their tenants’ religious actions and beliefs. This idea of the landlord’s power and duty on his dependents had a long history in Roman society in which the paterfamilias, the head of the household, controlled (or was expected to control) the sphere of religion in the familia. Thus, much of the religious change in late antiquity, the process that is usually called the Christianisation of the Mediterranean world, was conducted in the lines of the Roman social system with its hierarchy, patronage and ties of dependence. Is it possible that hierarchical paternalistic system made the religious coercion particularly conceivable and workable in late Roman society? We should, however, try to avoid reading too much into the social circumstances. The expectations of the paternal role did not mean that all happened along the wishes of the landowners, or bishops who wanted to influence the landlords. Rural populations certainly found ways to circumvent and avoid things if they chose to do so. Each case is unique in its local circumstances, with local solutions. We have cases with conflicts of interest, not only between pagan landowners and bishops in the regular routines of everyday life, but also between Christian landlords and local bishops who compete for authority in doctrinal disputes and private religiosity. 192

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Late antique bishops’ complaints tell us about the continuing “paganism” in the countryside, at least in the form that these bishops imagined and understood. The only thing we know for sure is the bishops’ views. What escapes us are the practices and beliefs of the country folk and the ways in which these people themselves saw their everyday life nuisances.

Notes 1 Roger Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 174. 2 “Paganism” here refers to the concept developed and used by ancient Christian writers to refer to their religious others. In addition to pagan beliefs and practices with reference to social reality, paganism functioned as polemical tools in Christian literature, often in the context of intra-religious disputes. Paganism was a theological phantom that functioned as a mirror in which one’s theological views and moral conduct were reflected. For further discussion, see Maijastina Kahlos, Debate and Dialogue: Christian and Pagan Cultures C. 360–430 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 18–26. 3 For the discourse on violence, see Michael Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 13–14; Thomas Sizgorich, Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 4. 4 See, for instance, Harold A. Drake, “Introduction: Gauging Violence in Late Antiquity,” in Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, ed. Harold A. Drake (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 2–3; Júlio César Magalhães de Oliveira, Potestas populi: participation populaire et action collective dans les villes de l’Afrique romaine tardive (vers 300–430 apr. J.-C.) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 17–26; Neil McLynn, “Christian Controversy and Violence in the Fourth Century,” Kodai 3 (1992): 15–44; Brent D. Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 54 on the character of sources in North Africa. 5 For example, Peter Garnsey and Caroline Humfress, The Evolution of the Late Antique World (Cambridge: Orchard Academic, 2001), 150. E.g. Garnsey & Humfress 2001, 150 suggest that in the fourth century and especially from the early fifth century onwards, “popular participation in religious competition and violence was on the increase” but how can we estimate that? Garnsey and Humfress regard mob attacks such as the killing of the Neoplatonic philosopher Hypatia in 415 as relatively rare. Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 797–8 states that there certainly were confrontations between pagans and Christians, but probably fewer than have usually been surmised. Johannes Hahn, Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt: Studien zur Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Christen, Heiden und Juden im Osten des Römischen Reiches (von Konstantin bis Theodosius I) (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2004), 292 opines, based on his analysis on fourth-century Alexandria, Antioch, Gaza and Panopolis, that religious violence was not a norm but rather an exception. 6 Hahn, Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt, 292, for instance, argues that religious conflicts were mingled with other issues such as political, social and economic problems. While religious explanations have been the dominant interpretation of many conflicts, in the case of the North African conflicts there was also a tendency to reduce the struggles between Donatists and Caecilianists (Catholics) to peasant rebellions and revolutionary social struggles; for the interpretations, see Shaw, Sacred Violence, 1–4.

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7 For example, the fate of the pagan temples in late antiquity has also been disputed in recent scholarship. Late antique hagiographies, sermons, ecclesiastical histories and other Christian literary works abound with dramatic accounts of temples being destroyed or converted into churches. In many cases, Christian authors, especially hagiographers, write in a considerably later period than the purported events. Consequently, these depictions are better understood as the ways in which writers looked back and wanted to explain the pagan past from their contemporary perspective. For example, this may be the case of the devastation of the temples in Gaza narrated in Life of Porphyry by Marcus Diaconus; see Claudia Rapp, “Mark the Deacon, Life of St. Porphyry of Gaza,” in Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology, ed. Thomas F. Head (New York: Routledge, 2001), 53–75. A less dramatic version, however, often emerges from non-literary material – archaeological evidence, papyri and inscriptions – that tell us a more nuanced story of the temples. See Jitse H.F. Dijkstra, “The Fate of Temples in Late Antique Egypt,” in The Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism,” ed. Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan, Late Antique Archaeology 7 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 389–436 for an excellent discussion on the problematic nature of the temple destructions in Egypt and the complexities of the literary sources. See also Dijkstra’s and Van Nuffelen’s contributions in this volume. 8 Sizgorich, Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity, 8–11; Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ, 6–14; Peter R.L. Brown, “Christianization and Religious Conflict,” in The Cambridge Ancient History Volume XIII: The Late Empire A.D. 337– 425, ed. Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 634. For the attraction of melodramas, see Luke Lavan, “The End of Temples: Towards a New Narrative?” in The Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism,” ed. Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan, Late Antique Archaeology 7 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), lv–lvi. 9 Wendy Mayer, “Religious Conflict: Definitions, Problems and Theoretical Approaches,” in Religious Conflict from Early Christianity to the Rise of Islam, ed. Wendy Mayer and Bronwen Neil, Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 121 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 2–4. 10 The concept of the “coercive turn,” for instance, is used by Harold A. Drake, “Church and Empire,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 450–1. 11 Noel Lenski, “Introduction: Power and Religion on the Frontier of Late Antiquity,” in The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity, ed. Andrew Cain and Noel Lenski (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 3–4 defines coercion as both physical force and the domination of relations of production and property holding. 12 Richard Gordon, “The End of Mithraism in the Northwest Provinces,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 12 (1999): 684–5; see also the discussion by Jonas Bjoernebye, “Reinterpreting the Cult of Mithras,” in Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome, ed. Michele R. Salzman, Marianne Sághy, and Rita Lizzi Testa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 210. 13 Peter R.L. Brown, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), xii; see also Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 45. 14 For the Roman patronage system, see Peter Garnsey and Greg Woolf, “Patronage of the Rural Poor in the Roman World,” in Patronage in Ancient Society, ed. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (London: Routledge, 1989), 153–67; Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, “Patronage in Roman Society: From Republic to Empire,” in Patronage in Ancient Society, ed. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (London: Routledge, 1989), 63–87; Richard P. Saller, Personal Patronage Under the Early Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge

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15

16 17

18 19

20

21

22

23

University Press, 1982); Richard P. Saller, “Status and Patronage,” in The Cambridge Ancient History XI: The High Empire, ed. Alan K. Bowman, Peter Garnsey, and Dominic Rathbone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 817–54. For Roman aristocrats as patrons, especially in Rome and Italy, see Michele R. Salzman, “Christianity and Paganism III, Italy,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity II: Constantine to C. 600, ed. Augustine Casiday and Frederick W. Norris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 212–23. For instance, Paulinus of Nola (Carm. 20.11) regarded St. Felix as his patron; in S. Pontii Meropii Paulini Nolani II: Carmina, ed. W. von Hartel, CSEL 30 (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1894), 143. Thus Salvian (Gub. 5.8) criticised disproportionate demands of landlords in Gaul; in Salvien de Marseille: Oeuvres tome II. Du gouvernement de Dieu, ed. G. Lagarrigue, SC 220, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1975, 338. Libanius (Or. 47) complained about military commanders, a new class of patrons, who came to protect peasants against the demands of landowners and challenged the old class of patrons; in Libanius. Selected Works II: Selected Orations, ed. A.F. Norman, LCL 452 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 491–535; see also Garnsey and Woolf, “Patronage of the Rural Poor”; John W.G.H. Liebeschuetz, Antioch: City and Imperial Administration in the Later Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 192–208. For professional groups, McLynn, “Christian Controversy,” 36; Rita Lizzi, “Discordia in urbe: pagani e cristiani in rivolta,” in Pagani e cristiani da Giuliano l’Apostata al sacco di Roma, ed. Franca E. Consolino (Soveria Mannelli: Messina, 1995), 140. Lizzi, “Discordia in urbe,” 116–18, 135; Peter R.L. Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 85–95. Traditional Roman patronage and that of bishops, of course, had differences, as is stressed by Claude Lepelley, “Le patronat episcopal aux IVe et Ve siècles: continuities et ruptures avec le patronat classique,” in L’évêque dans la cité du IVe au Ve siècle. Image et autorité. Actes de la table ronde de Rome (1er et 2 décembre 1995), Publications de l’École française de Rome 248 (Rome: École française de Rome, 1998), 18–21, 32–3. John North, “The Development of Religious Pluralism,” in The Jews Among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire, ed. Judith Lieu, John North, and Tessa Rajak (London: Routledge, 1992), 185 on patria potestas in household religion. For the country estates as religious communities in and of themselves, see Kim Bowes, “Christianization and the Rural Home,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 15.2 (2007): 161. Jennifer A. Glancy, “Slavery and the Rise of Christianity,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery Volume 1: The Ancient Mediterranean World, ed. Keith R. Bradley and Paul Cartledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 462. See also the extended discussion of Stenschke in this volume. For instance, Passion of Perpetua and Felicity 5.1–2, where Perpetua’s father begs her to have pity on him and change her mind, otherwise the father will be reproached by other Roman men for not being able to keep his family disciplined; see Passion de Perpétue et de Félicité, ed. J. Amat, SC 417 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1996), 118. For an analysis of the family dynamics and hierarchical reversal in the narrative, see Kate Cooper, “A Father, a Daughter and a Procurator: Authority and Resistance in the Prison Memoir of Perpetua of Carthage,” Gender and History: Gender and the City Before Modernity 23 (2012): 202. For the role of landowners in religious coercion, see Rita Lizzi, “Ambrose’s Contemporaries and the Christianization of Northern Italy,” Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990): 168; id., “L’église, les domini, les païens rustici: Quelques strategies pour la Christianisation de l’Occident (IVe – VIe siècle),” in Le problème de la christianisation du monde antique, ed. Hervé Inglebert, Sylvain Destephen, and Bruno Dumézil

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24 25 26 27

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(Paris: Picard, 2010), 103–4; Salzman, “Christianity and Paganism III,” 223; David Riggs, “Christianizing the Rural Communities of Late Roman Africa: A  Process of Coercion or Persuasion,” in Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, ed. Harold A. Drake (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 302–5; Garnsey and Humfress, Evolution of the Late Antique World, 91. Augustine, Civ. 19.16; in Aurelius Augustinus. De civitate Dei, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb, vol. 2, CCSL 48 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955), 383–4. Augustine, Ep. 185.19 states that it is the duty of rulers to issue laws against idols or destroy them; in S. Aureli Augustini Hipponiensis Episcopi: Epistulae, ed. A. Goldbacher, CSEL 57 (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1911), 17. Furthermore, it is not always clear how Christianisation was (and is) understood: Hartmut Leppin, “Christianisierungen im Römischen Reich: Überlegungen zum Begriff und zur Phasenbildung,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 16.2 (2013): 247–78. For individualisation of religious choices, see Jörg Rüpke, “Introduction: Individualization and Individuation as Concepts for Historical Research,” in The Individual in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. Jörg Rüpke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3–38. Maximus, Serm. 42.1, 106.2, 107.1, and 108; in Maximi episcopi Taurinensis: Collectionem sermonum antiquam nonnullis sermonibus extravangantibus adiectis, ed. A. Mutzenbecher, CCSL 23 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1962), 169, 417–18, 420, 423. For the complaints of pagan practices in Maximus’ sermons, see Andreas Merkt, Maximus I. von Turin: Die Verkündigung eines Bischofs der frühen Reichskirche im zeitgeschichtlichen, gesellschaftlichen und liturgischen Kontext, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 40 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 111, 139, 198. Maximus, Serm. 107.2: Immolante enim rustico inquinatur domnedius; in CCSL23.420–21. For the idea of pollution, see Maijastina Kahlos, “Polluted by Sacrifices – Christian Repugnance at Sacrificial Rituals in Late Antiquity,” in Ancient and Medieval Religion in Practice, ed. Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Ville Vuolanto (Rome: Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae, 2013), 159–71. Maximus, Serm. 106.2; in CCSL 23.417–18. Maximus, Serm. 108; in CCSL 23.423: Ceterum qui scit in agro suo idolis immolari nec prohibit, quamvis ipse longe in civitate consistat, pollutio tamen illum nefanda continget; et licet aris adsistat rusticus, ad domnedium contaminatio exsecranda regreditur. For discussion, see Kahlos, “Polluted by Sacrifices,” 159–71; Lizzi, “L’église, les domini, les païens rustici,” 100; Franz J. Dölger, “Christliche Grundbesitzer und heidnische Landarbeiter: Ein Ausschnitt aus der religiösen Auseinandersetzung des vierten und fünften Jahrhunderts,” in Antike und Christentum, ed. Franz J. Dölger, vol. 6 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1950), 307–9. Ambrose, Nabuthae 4.18 refers to landlords who often visited their estates to control the upkeep of their properties; see S. Ambrosii opera, ed. C. Schenkl, CSEL 32.2 (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1897), 476–7. Similarly to the Italian landowners, Augustine expected the landlords in his North African audience not to live on their properties; see Leslie Dossey, Peasant and Empire in Christian North Africa (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 148. Gaudentius, Tract. 13.28: An existimatis quod deum diligat tepidus ac neglegens Christianus, qui idola in possessionibus suis coli permittit, qui fanum daemonis et aram diaboli stare in contumeliam dei patitur, qui adulteria ac stupra exercere non desinit, qui aliena cotidie rapit, cotidie concupiscit, necare proximum quibuscumque modis gestiens, quo vel voluptatem vel cupiditatem suam licentius impleat, licet explere non possit? See S. Gaudentii episcopi Brixiensis tractatus, ed. A. Glück, CSEL 68 (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1936), 122. Polluted by idolatry in general: Gaudentius, Tract. 9.2, CSEL 68, 75: Unde cavendum nobis est, omni genere dilectissimi, ne aliquo rursus idolatriae violemur contagio et

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non solum repudiari, sed et damnari in perpetuum mereamur (with reference to 1 Cor. 3:17). Polluted by the food dedicated to the gods: Gaudentius, Tract. 4.13, CSEL 68, 42: Vos igitur, neophyti, qui estis ad beatae huius ac spiritalis paschae epulas invitati, videte, quomodo ab omni pollutione escarum, quas superstitio gentilis infecerit, vestras animas conservetis. Nec sufficit, ut a mortifero daemonum cibo vitam suam custodiat Christianus . . . See also Rita Lizzi, “Legislazione imperiale e reazione pagana: I limiti del conflitto,” Cristianesimo nella storia 30 (2009): 403 on Gaudentius’ complaints. Zeno, Serm. 1.25.10: Hic quaerite, Christiani, sacrificium vestrum an esse possit acceptum, qui vicinarum possessionum omnes glebulas, lapillos et surculos nostis, in praediis autem vestris fumantia undique sola fana non nostis, quae, si vera dicenda sunt, dissimulando subtiliter custoditis. Probatio longe non est; see Zenonis Veronensis tractatus, ed. B. Löfstedt, CCSL 22 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971), 75. Dölger, “Christliche Grundbesitzer,” 6:305 takes “every clod of earth, stone and twig” to mean the remains of traditional rural sacrifices. Maximus, Serm. 106.1; in CSEL 23.417: Nam cum perspicerent in regione sua gentiles homines adsueto sacrilegio quod lustrum vocant funestis circuitionibus loca universa polluere, et innocentes quosque vel absentes si non conscientia vel coniventia maculare – maculat enim coniventia eum qui, cum contradicendo prohibere potuit ne fieret, ut fieret quasi dissimulando permisit; and in Serm. 106.2; CCSL 23.417: reos nos statuimus si non operatione sceleris at tamen dissimulationis adsensu. The Latin word dissimulatio has a variety of meanings (such as, making someone or oneself to look different, covering, disguising, masking, pretence, trickery). It can be translated as dissimulation, dishonesty, duplicity and connivance. The Latin word conniventia/coniventia has the meanings of closing the eyes; thus, turning a blind eye to something, carelessness, negligence and prevarication. C.Th. 16.10.12.4 (in 392): Quod quidem ita per iudices ac defensores et curiales singularum urbium volumus custodiri, ut ilico per hos comperta in iudicium deferantur, per illos delata plectantur. Si quid autem ii tegendum gratia aut incuria praetermittendum esse crediderint, commotioni iudiciariae, subiacebunt; illi vero moniti si vindictam dissimulatione distulerint, triginta librarum auri dispendio multabuntur, officiis quoque eorum damno parili subiugandis; see Theodosiani libri XVI cum constitutionibus Sirmondianis, ed. T. Mommsen and P. Krueger (Berlin: Weidmann, 1905), 900–1. For late antique administration and extra payments, see Christopher Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 107–85. Jill Harries, Law and Empire in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 5 states that “one should not believe everything emperors or their elite imitators, said or write was true,” for example, on the corrupt behaviour of judges. Furthermore, complaints should not be interpreted as self-evident evidence of widespread misconduct of magistrates, especially judges. Harries speaks of “a culture of criticism” in which historians, rhetoricians and bishops also condemned abuses of power with similarly assertive and critical attitude. This does not mean that “there was, necessarily, more to criticise in the fourth and fifth centuries than there had been earlier.” Sirm. 12 (in 408): Compulsi igitur Donatistarum pertinacia, furore gentilium, quae quidem mala desidia iudicum, coniventia officiorum, ordinum contemptus accendit, necessarium putamus iterare quae iussimus; see Theodosiani libri XVI cum constitutionibus Sirmondianis, ed. T. Mommsen and P. Krueger (Berlin: Weidmann, 1905), 916; translated in Clyde Pharr, The Theodosian Code and Novels, and the Sirmondian Constitutions, Corpus Juris Romani 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952), 483. C.Th. 16.5.46 (January  15, 409): noverint iudices universi praeceptis earum fideli devotione parendum et inter praecipua curarum quidquid adversus eos decrevimus non ambigant exsequendum. Quod si quisquam iudicum peccato coniventiae

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exsecutionem praesentis legis omiserit, noverit amissa dignitate graviorem motum se nostrae clementiae subiturum, officium quoque suum, quod saluti propriae contempta suggestione defuerit, punitis tribus primatibus condemnatione viginti librarum auri plectendum; see Theodosiani libri XVI cum constitutionibus Sirmondianis, ed. T. Mommsen and P. Krueger (Berlin: Weidmann, 1905), 870. See also C.Th. 16.5.4 in 378: Quod sive dissimulatione iudicum seu profanorum improbitate contigerit, eadem erit ex utroque pernicies; see Theodosiani libri XVI cum constitutionibus Sirmondianis, ed. T. Mommsen and P. Krueger (Berlin: Weidmann, 1905), 856. Other examples C.Th. 16.10.4; 16.10.13; 16.10.19; see Theodosiani libri XVI cum constitutionibus Sirmondianis, ed. T. Mommsen and P. Krueger (Berlin: Weidmann, 1905), 898, 901, 902–3. For further discussion, see Maijastina Kahlos, “Dissimulatio and the Realities in the Legislation Against Religious Dissidents in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries,” in Bishops, Councils and Imperial Court in the Western Roman Empire, ed. Mar Marcos (Bari: Collana Munera, forthcoming). C.Th. 16.10.19.2–3 (in 408) = Sirm. 12 (in 408): Arae locis omnibus destruantur omniaque templa in possessionibus nostris ad usus adcommodos transferantur; domini destruere cogantur. Non liceat omnino in honorem sacrilegi ritus funestioribus locis exercere convivia vel quicquam sollemnitatis agitare. Episcopis quoque locorum haec ipsa prohibendi ecclesiasticae manus tribuimus facultatem; see Theodosiani libri XVI cum constitutionibus Sirmondianis, ed. T. Mommsen and P. Krueger (Berlin: Weidmann, 1905), 903. C.Th. 16.10.12.3 (in 392): Sin vero in templis fanisve publicis aut in aedibus agrisve alienis tale quispiam sacrificandi genus exercere temptaverit, si ignorante domino usurpata constiterit, viginti quinque libras auri multae nomine cogetur inferre, coniventem vero huic sceleri par ac sacrificantem poena retinebit; see Theodosiani libri XVI cum constitutionibus Sirmondianis, ed. T. Mommsen and P. Krueger (Berlin: Weidmann, 1905), 900. C.J. 1.11.8 (in 472): Nemo ea, quae saepius paganae superstitionis hominibus interdicta sunt, audeat pertemptare sciens, quod crimen publicum committit; see Corpus iuris civilis, ed. P. Krueger (Berlin: Weidmann, 1915, repr. Keip: Goldbach 1998), 95. I abide here to use the conventional terms. The North African Christian group called Donatists by their rivals and subsequent generations of scholars considered itself the Catholic Church. It regarded its opponents merely as traditores or Caeciliani, basing the name on the rival bishop of Carthage, Caecilianus. Augustine, Enarrat. Ps. 54.13: Plerumque dicunt homines: Nemo remaneret paganus, si ille esset christianus. Plerumque dicunt homines: Et ille si fieret christianus, quis remaneret paganus; see Augustinus. Enarrationes in Psalmos, ed. E. Dekkers and J. Fraipont, CCSL 39 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1956), 666. See also Lizzi, “L’église, les domini, les païens rustici,” 95. This was the case of the renowned philosopher and rhetorician Marius Victorinus in Rome, which the ecclesiastical leaders in Rome were ready to utilise for the fame of the Roman church (Augustine, Conf. 8.2.3; Sancti Augustini Confessionum libri XIII, ed. L. Verheijen, CCSL 27 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981), 114). On the propaganda value, see Clifford Ando, “Pagan Apologetics and Christian Intolerance in the Ages of Themistius and Augustine,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4.2 (1996): 203. Augustine, Serm. 62.5.8, in Augustinus. Sermones in Matthaeum I: Sermones LI-LXX, ed. P.-P. Verbraken and F. Dolbeau, CCSL 41Aa, Turnhout: Brepols, 2008, 302–3: ‘Sed timeo’, inquies, ’ne offendam maiorem.’ Time prorsus, ne offendas maiorem; et non offendis Deum. Qui enim times, ne offendas maiorem, vide ne forte sit maior isto, quem times offendere. Maiorem certe noli offendere. Haec tibi regula proponitur. Nonne manifestum est, eum minime offendendum, qui maior est caeteris? Discute nunc maiores tuos. Primi tibi sunt pater et mater: si recte educantes, si in Christum

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nutrientes; audiendi in omnibus, obtemperandum eis in omni iussione; contra maiorem nihil iubeant, et serviatur illis; Serm. 81.7 (PL 38, 504): Ad hoc enim tibi dicitur, ut tu, si amas mundum, blasphemes Christum. Et dicit tibi hoc amicus tuus, consiliarius tuus: ergo oculus tuus. Dicit tibi hoc minister tuus, cooperarius tuus: ergo manus tua. Dicit tibi hoc forte qui te sustentat, qui te ab humilitate terrena sublevat: ergo pes tuus. . . . Ecce temporibus christianis tantae pressurae sunt, vastatur mundus. . . . Augustine, Serm. 47.18: Nulla temporali proposita commoditate vult esse christianus, non ut maiorem amicum conciliet, non ut ad concupitam uxorem perveniat, non ut aliquam pressuram huius saeculi evadat, quamquam multi etiam sic intrantes corriguntur ingressi; see Sancti Aurelii Augustini sermons de vetere testamento I-L, ed. C. Lambot, CCSL 41 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1961), 589. Warning about earthly concerns: Augustine, Serm. Dolbeau 24.8 (= 360A); see François Dolbeau, “Nouveaux sermons de saint Augustin pour la conversion des païens et des donatistes (II),” Revue d’Etudes Augustiniennes et Patristiques 37 (1991): 41; conveniences of the present life: Augustine, Catech. rud. 16.24 (in Augustinus. De catechizandis rudibus, ed. M.P.J. van den Hout et al, CCSL 46 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1969], 148–9): vitae praesentis aliquod commodum. On Augustine’s respect for the private property and the imperial legislation, see Maijastina Kahlos, “Pacifiers and Instigators: Bishops and Interreligious Conflicts in Late Antiquity,” in The Role of the Bishop in Late Antiquity: Conflict and Compromise, ed. Andrew Fear, José Fernández Urbiña, and Mar Marcos (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 66–9; Dossey, Peasant and Empire, 179–80; Riggs, “Christianizing the Rural Communities,” 302. Augustine, Serm. 62.11.17: Cum acceperitis potestatem, hoc facite. Ubi nobis non est data potestas, non facimus: ubi data est, non praetermittimus. Multi pagani habent istas abominationes in fundis suis: numquid acsedimus et confrigimus? Prius enim agimus, ut idola in eorum corde frangamus. Quando Christiani et ipsi facti fuerint, aut invitant nos ad tam bonum opus, aut praeveniunt nos. Modo orandum est pro illis, non irascendum illis; see CCSL 41Aa, 311. Augustine, Serm. 62.12.18: Quando christianus erit cuius res est. Modo factum voluit cuius res est; see CCSL 41Aa, 313. Edictum cognitoris: Serge Lancel, ed., Actes de la conférence de Carthage en 411, vol. 3, SC 224 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1975), 974, 976. C.Th. 16.5.52; especially 16.5.52.4: Servos etiam dominorum admonitio vel colonos verberum crebrior ictus a prava religione revocabit, ni malunt ipsi ad praedicta dispendia, etiam si sunt catholici, retineri¸ see Theodosiani libri XVI cum constitutionibus Sirmondianis, ed. T. Mommsen and P. Krueger (Berlin: Weidmann, 1905), 872. For the development of peasant and slave labour force in North Africa, see N. Lenski, “Peasant and Slave in Late Antique North Africa, c. 100–600 CE,” in Late Antiquity in Contemporary Debate, ed. R. Lizzi Testa (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2017), 113–55. Augustine, Ep. 58.1 (in 401): Verumtamen iam simul, eramus, et coniuncti sub uno capite vivebamus, in cuius caritate nisi radicatus esses, non tibi tam dilecta catholica unitas foret, nec colonos tuos Afros, eo terrarum unde Donatistarum furor exortus est, hoc est in media consulari Numidia constitutos, tali admoneres alloquio, tanto fervore spiritus animares, ut devotione promptissima ad sequendum eligerent, quod te talem ac tantum virum non nisi agnita veritate sequi cogitarent, et tam longe a te locorum intervallis remoti, irent sub idem caput, atque in eius membris in aeternum tecum deputarentur, cuius praecepto tibi temporaliter serviunt; see Sancti Aurelii Augustini epistulae LVI-C, ed. Kl. D. Daur, CCSL 31A (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 7. See also Shaw, Sacred Violence, 205–6; Lenski, “Peasant and Slave,” 137. Dossey, Peasant and Empire, 179; Erika Hermanowicz, Possidius of Calama: A Study of the North African Episcopate in the Age of Augustine, Oxford Early Christian

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Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 105. Landholding by emphyteusis was the use of an imperial estate – its possession, enjoyment, mortgage and bequest to heirs. See also Lenski, “Peasant and Slave,” 130–1, 137–8. Augustine, C. litt. Petil. 2.83.184: Quid nuper, quod ipse adhuc lugeo? Nonne Crispinus vester Calamensis cum emisset possessionem et hoc emphyteuticam, non dubitavit in fundo catholicorum imperatorum, quorum legibus nec in civitatibus esse iussi estis, uno terroris impetu octoginta ferme animas miserabili gemitu mussitantes rebaptizando submergere? See Augustinus. Contra litteras Petiliani, ed. M. Petschenig, CSEL 52 (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1909), 114. As Dossey, Peasant and Empire, 147–50 shows, Augustine’s audience mainly consisted of the property-owning literate elite. Crispinus had stated that the peasants were not forced to Donatism but rather had embraced it voluntarily. This is implied in Augustine’s Ep. 66.2 (CCSL 31A, 26) in which Augustine provokes Crispinus to a public debate; see Riggs, “Christianizing the Rural Communities,” 306; Hermanowicz, Possidius of Calama, 105–6; Dossey, Peasant and Empire, 180. On Crispinus as the significant rival of Catholic bishops, especially Augustine and his ally Possidius of Calama, see Hermanowicz, Possidius of Calama, 69; Jennifer Ebbeler, Disciplining Christians: Correction and Community in Augustine’s Letters (Oxford University Press, 2012), 171–2. Augustine, Ep. 112.3 (in 409/410): Per quem te obsecro ut rescribas mihi, tuosque omnes quos in Sinitensi vel Hipponensi habes, ad catholicae Ecclesiae communionem comiter et benigne adhorteris; see Sancti Aurelii Augustini epistulae CI-CXXXIX, ed. Kl. D. Daur, CCSL 31B (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 104. Augustine, Ep. 89.8 (between 405–411): Quae cum ita sint, noverit benignitas tua homines vestros qui in regione Hipponensi sunt, adhuc esse Donatistas, nec apud eos quicquam valuisse litteras tuas. Cur autem non valuerint, non opus est scribere. Sed mitte aliquem tuorum vel domesticorum vel amicorum, cuius hoc fidei possis iniungere, qui non ad ea loca sed ad nos primitus veniat, illis omnino nescientibus, et nobiscum primitus consilio pertractato quod agendum domino adiuvante visum fuerit, agat; see CCSL 31A, 152. Augustine, Ep. 89.2; see CCSL 31A, 148. Augustine writes that Donatists thought themselves as suffering from persecution and themselves acted with violenta insania. Augustine, Ep. 93.5; see CCSL 31A, 170. For a discussion of Augustine’s argumentation in this letter, see Maijastina Kahlos, Forbearance and Compulsion: The Rhetoric of Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 2009), 112; see also Rainer Forst, Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 52–5. Especially Augustine, Ep. 108.18: Fugitur unitas, ut contra possessors suos rusticana erigatur audacia et fugitive servi contra apostolicam disciplinam non solum a dominis alienetur, verum etiam dominis comminentur nec solum comminentur, sed et violentissimis aggressionibus depraedentur; see CCSL 31B, 82; translation from William H.C. Frend, The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 73–4. On troublemakers: Augustine, Ep. 185.4.15; see CSEL 57, 13–14. Glancy, “Slavery and the Rise of Christianity,” 478 cautiously gives Donatist circumcelliones as one example of late antique people who may have challenged the institution of slavery. This is hardly the case. Donatists probably only challenged the Catholic order, not the institution of slavery as such. For a new more balanced reinterpretation of the circumcelliones movement, see Dossey, Peasant and Empire, 167–8 who sees it “as justified, meaningful, structured action,” as an effort of rural populations “to participate in the same material culture, community structures, and intellectual currents as were affecting urban society.” The religious leaders

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of circumcelliones probably did not attack the systems of slavery or debt payment but rather the traditional but illegal conventions in the North African countryside; Ibid., 173. Epistula ad Salvium (= Ps.-Sulpicius, Ep. 4): Hoc ipsum nos in tuis praeceptionibus admiramur, quod nullis minis, nullis omnino terroribus, ad cultum Dei vaesanos animos convertisti. The letter is published in Claude Lepelley, “Trois documents méconnus sur l’histoire sociale et religieuse de l’Afrique romaine tardive retrouvés parmi les spuria de Sulpice Sévère,” Antiquités africaines 25.1 (1989): 252 who dates it after 411. The letter is found in a manuscript of the works of Sulpicius Severus. The letter’s reference to the tale of Xenocrates and Polemo reminds of the similar one in Augustine’s Ep. 144 (see CSEL 44, 263–4); it is, however, impossible to say whether this is due to dependence between the letters or just a commonplace; see Ibid., 252–6; also Michele R. Salzman, “Rethinking Pagan-Christian Violence,” in Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, ed. Harold A. Drake (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 278; Shaw, Sacred Violence, 344–5; Dossey, Peasant and Empire, 155. The letter does not mention either Donatists or pagans directly. Lepelley, “Trois documents,” 254–56 suggests that the converted peasants were Donatists and after the decisions made for annihilating Donatism in the Council of Carthage in 411. Shaw, Sacred Violence, 345 remarks that other alternatives are also possible. Dossey, Peasant and Empire, 155 states that the phrase cum paucis iniusta sentire, “believing unjust things with a few,” makes more sense in the context of the schism. Bowes, “Christianization and the Rural Home,” 163–6 argues that Roman estate shrines helped to keep peasants’ religious attentions close to home and thus within the landlord’s sphere of influence. In the fourth and fifth centuries, however, landowners and ecclesiastical leaders competed for prestige and authority, and private religiosity turned to be problematic to church leaders as the cases of Priscillianism and Pelagianism show; see Ibid.; Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil, eds., Crisis Management in Late Antiquity (410–590 CE): A Survey of the Evidence from Episcopal Letters, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 121 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 115–19; Anne Kurdock, “Demetrias Ancilla Dei: Anicia Demetrias and the Problem of the Missing Patron,” in Religion, Dynasty, and Patronage in Early Christian Rome, 300–900, ed. Kate Cooper and Julia Hillner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 190–224; Brown, Eye of a Needle, 51. The imperial legislators also became increasingly concerned about private religiosity and private meeting places; Christine Shepardson, Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014), 204–13. Similarly, in the East, John Chrysostom (Hom. Act. 18.4–5; Migne PG 60.147–48) was keen to show his elite listeners that it was beneficial for landlords to make their tenants Christian and control their religiosity because it calmed them down. John Chrysostom summons landlords to build a church, get a teacher and cooperate in converting the tenants. There should be no estates without a church. He argues that having churches and priests and Christianising the tenants is profitable “for the tranquillity of the working people.” The workers will respect the priest and this will improve the security of the estate. Augustine, Ep. 20*; see Sancti Aurelii Augustini opera: Epistolae ex duobus codicibus nuper in lucem prolatae, ed. J. Divjak, CSEL 88 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1981), 94–118. For the conflict, see Serge Lancel, “L’affaire d’Antoninus de Fussala,” in Les lettres de Saint Augustin découvertes par Johannes Divjak: Communications présentées au colloque des 20 et 21 septembre 1982 (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1983), 267–85; Kim Bowes, Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 167–68. Dossey, Peasant and Empire, 152.

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71 Eusebius, V. Const. 4.54.2 complains that many people became Christians only to please the emperor; see Eusebius: Über das Leben des Kaisers Konstantins, ed. F. Winkelmann, GCS 1.1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975), 142. The church historian Sozomen (Hist. eccl. 2.5) exhibits similar complaints; see Sozomène. Histoire ecclésiastique, Livres I – II, ed. A.-J. Festugière et al, SC 306 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1983), 252. 72 Augustine, Serm. 248–52 (PL 38, 1158–79); Maximus, Serm. 41.4, 79, 71.2; in CCSL 23, 166, 327, 297. Cf. Libanius (Or. 30.26–29, in Libanii opera vol III: Orationes XXVI-L, ed. R. Foerster [Leipzig: Teubner, 1906], 101–2) who as part of defence of pagan temples argued that coercion only made peasants pretend that they had become Christians and continue to invoke their own gods but now in Christian churches. With similar statements: Procopius, Hist. arc. 11.31–32; in Procopii Caesariensis opera omnia III: Historica quae dicitur arcana (Anecdota), ed. J. Haury et al. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1963), 75. 73 Augustine, Ep. 93 to Vincentius, especially 93.5 (CCSL 31A, 170): Putas neminem debere cogi ad iustitiam, cum legas patrem familias dixisse servis: Quoscumque inveneretis cogite intrare. Augustine also writes about his own change of attitude on religious coercion. 74 Augustine, Ep. 93.5 (CCSL 31A, 170). See also Kahlos, Forbearance and Compulsion, 115; Bruno Dumézil, Les racines chrétiennes de l’Europe: Conversion et liberté dans les royaumes barbares Ve-VIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2005), 14. 75 Especially, Caesarius, Serm. 14.4 (SC 175.438) and 53.1 (SC 243.444): Sunt enim, quod peius est, infelices et miseri, qui paganorum fana non solum destruere nolunt, sed etiam quae destructa fuerant aedificare nec metuunt nec erubescunt. See also Serm. 54.5–6 (SC 243.458–64); 19.4 (SC 175.488); in Césaire d’Arles: Sermons au peuple, ed. C. Lambot, G. Morin, and M.-J. Delage, SC 175, 243, 330 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1976–1986); see William Klingshirn, “Charity and Power: Caesarius of Arles and the Ransoming of Captives in Sub-Roman Gaul,” Journal of Roman Studies 75 (1985): 183–203 on Caesarius’ patronage; and Lizzi, “L’église, les domini, les païens rustici,” 101–2, 108 on the complaints of traditional rituals. 76 E.g., Gregory the Great, Mor. 29.26.53: within the Church itself; Mor. 29.6.12–7.16: marking people as outsiders; see Gregorius Magnus: Moralia in Iob libri XXIII–XXXV, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 143B (Turnhout: Brepols, 1985), 1470–1; 1440–5; see also Robert A Markus, “Gregory the Great’s Pagans,” in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting, ed. Henry Mayr-Harting, Richard Gameson, and Henrietta Leyser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 23–6. On Gregory of Rome and paganism, see George E. Demacopoulos, Gregory the Great: Ascetic, Pastor, and First Man of Rome (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 91–3. 77 For instance, Gregory the Great, Ep. 8.1: ad idolorum cultum; see also 8.4; in Sancti Gregorii Magni Registrum epistularum libri VIII–XIV, ed. D. Norberg, CCSL 140A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1982), 513, 521. As Markus, “Gregory the Great’s Pagans,” 30 points out, in principle, Gregory was against forced baptism but in practical cases supported coercion. 78 Gregory the Great, Ep. 4.23: cognovi, pene omnes vos rusticos in vestris possessionibus idololatriae deditos habere. . . . Et tamen vos veri Dei cultores a commissis vobis lapides adorari conspicitis et tacetis? in Sancti Gregorii Magni Registrum epistularum libri I – VII, ed. D. Norberg, CCSL 140A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1982), 241. See also Markus, “Gregory the Great’s Pagans,” 30; Lizzi, “L’église, les domini, les païens rustici,” 110. 79 Gregory the Great, Ep. 4.26: Iam vero si rusticus tantae fuerit perfidiae et obstinationis inventus, ut ad Deum venire minime consentiat, tanto pensionis onere gravandus est, ut ipsa exactionis suae poena compellatur ad rectitudinem festinare; see CCSL 140,

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245. See also Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire: (A.D. 100–400) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 144 n. 18; Lizzi, “L’église, les domini, les païens rustici,” 109–10. 80 Gregory the Great, Ep. 5.38: Sed rem mihi sacrilegam nuntiavit, quia hi qui in ea idolis immolant iudici praemium persolvunt, ut hoc eis facere liceat; see CCSL 140, 312.

Bibliography Adriaen, M., ed. Gregorius Magnus: Moralia in Iob libri XXIII–XXXV. CCSL 143B. Turnhout: Brepols, 1985. Allen, Pauline and Bronwen Neil, eds. Crisis Management in Late Antiquity (410–590 CE): A Survey of the Evidence from Episcopal Letters. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 121. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Amat, J., ed. Passion de Perpétue et de Félicité. SC 417. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1996. Ando, Clifford. “Pagan Apologetics and Christian Intolerance in the Ages of Themistius and Augustine.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4.2 (1996): 171–207. Bagnall, Roger. Egypt in Late Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Bjoernebye, Jonas. “Reinterpreting the Cult of Mithras.” Pages 197–212 in Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome. Edited by Michele R. Salzman, Marianne Sághy, and Rita Lizzi Testa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Bowes, Kim. Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ———. “Christianization and the Rural Home.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 15.2 (2007): 143–70. Brown, Peter R.L. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. ———. “Christianization and Religious Conflict.” Pages 632–64 in The Cambridge Ancient History Volume XIII: The Late Empire A.D. 337–425. Edited by Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ———. Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Cameron, Alan. The Last Pagans of Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Cooper, Kate. “A  Father, a Daughter and a Procurator: Authority and Resistance in the Prison Memoir of Perpetua of Carthage.” Gender and History: Gender and the City Before Modernity 23 (2012): 195–212. Daur, Kl. D., ed. Sancti Aurelii Augustini epistulae CI-CXXXIX, CCSL 31B. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. ———. ed. Sancti Aurelii Augustini epistulae LVI-C, CCSL 31A. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Dekkers, E. and J. Fraipont, eds. Augustinus. Enarrationes in Psalmos, CCSL 39. Turnhout: Brepols, 1956. Demacopoulos, George E. Gregory the Great: Ascetic, Pastor, and First Man of Rome. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. Dijkstra, Jitse H.F. “The Fate of Temples in Late Antique Egypt.” Pages 389–436 in The Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism.” Edited by Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan. Late Antique Archaeology 7. Leiden: Brill, 2011.

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Divjak, Johannes, ed. Sancti Aurelii Augustini opera: Epistolae ex duobus codicibus nuper in lucem prolatae, CSEL 88. Vienna: Tempsky, 1981. Dolbeau, François. “Nouveaux sermons de saint Augustin pour la conversion des païens et des donatistes (II).” Revue d’Etudes Augustiniennes et Patristiques 37 (1991): 37–77. Dölger, Franz J. “Christliche Grundbesitzer und heidnische Landarbeiter: Ein Ausschnitt aus der religiösen Auseinandersetzung des vierten und fünften Jahrhunderts.” Pages 297–320 in Antike und Christentum. Edited by Franz J. Dölger, vol. 6. Münster: Aschendorff, 1950. Dombart, B. and A. Kalb, eds. Aurelius Augustinus. De civitate Dei. 2 vols. CCSL 47, 48 Turnhout: Brepols, 1955. Dossey, Leslie. Peasant and Empire in Christian North Africa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. Drake, Harold A. “Church and Empire.” Pages 446–64 in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies. Edited by Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ———. “Introduction: Gauging Violence in Late Antiquity.” Pages 1–11 in Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices. Edited by Harold A. Drake. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Dumézil, Bruno. Les racines chrétiennes de l’Europe: Conversion et liberté dans les royaumes barbares Ve-VIIIe siècle. Paris: Fayard, 2005. Ebbeler, Jennifer. Disciplining Christians: Correction and Community in Augustine’s Letters. Oxford University Press, 2012. Festugière, A.-J., et al., eds. Sozomène. Histoire ecclésiastique, Livres I–II. SC 306. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1983. Foerster, R., ed. Libanii opera vol III: Orationes XXVI-L. Leipzig: Teubner, 1906. Forst, Rainer. Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present. Translated by Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Frend, William H.C. The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952. Gaddis, Michael. There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005. Garnsey, Peter and Caroline Humfress. The Evolution of the Late Antique World. Cambridge: Orchard Academic, 2001. Garnsey, Peter and Greg Woolf. “Patronage of the Rural Poor in the Roman World.” Pages 153–67 in Patronage in Ancient Society. Edited by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill. London: Routledge, 1989. Glancy, Jennifer A. “Slavery and the Rise of Christianity.” Pages 456–81 in The Cambridge World History of Slavery Volume 1: The Ancient Mediterranean World. Edited by Keith R. Bradley and Paul Cartledge. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Goldbacher, A., ed. S. Aureli Augustini Hipponiensis Episcopi: Epistulae. CSEL 57. Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1911. ———. ed. S. Aureli Augustini Hipponiensis Episcopi: Epistulae. CSEL 44. Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1904. Gordon, Richard. “The End of Mithraism in the Northwest Provinces.” Journal of Roman Archaeology 12 (1999): 682–8. Hahn, Johannes. Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt: Studien zur Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Christen, Heiden und Juden im Osten des Römischen Reiches (von Konstantin bis Theodosius I). Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2004.

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Harries, Jill. Law and Empire in Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Haury, J., et al., eds. Procopii Caesariensis opera omnia III: Historica quae dicitur arcana (Anecdota). Leipzig: Teubner, 1963. Hermanowicz, Erika. Possidius of Calama: A  Study of the North African Episcopate in the Age of Augustine. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Kahlos, Maijastina. “Pacifiers and Instigators: Bishops and Interreligious Conflicts in Late Antiquity.” Pages 63–82 in The Role of the Bishop in Late Antiquity: Conflict and Compromise. Edited by Andrew Fear, José Fernández Urbiña, and Mar Marcos. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. ———. “Polluted by Sacrifices – Christian Repugnance at Sacrificial Rituals in Late Antiquity.” Pages 159–71 in Ancient and Medieval Religion in Practice. Edited by Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Ville Vuolanto. Rome: Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae, 2013. ———. Forbearance and Compulsion: The Rhetoric of Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Late Antiquity. London: Duckworth, 2009. ———. Debate and Dialogue: Christian and Pagan Cultures C. 360–430. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. ———. “Dissimulatio and the Realities in the Legislation Against Religious Dissidents in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries.” In Bishops, Councils and Imperial Court in the Western Roman Empire. Edited by Mar Marcos. Bari: Collana Munera, forthcoming. Kelly, Christopher. Ruling the Later Roman Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Klingshirn, William. “Charity and Power: Caesarius of Arles and the Ransoming of Captives in Sub-Roman Gaul.” Journal of Roman Studies 75 (1985): 183–203. Kurdock, Anne. “Demetrias Ancilla Dei: Anicia Demetrias and the Problem of the Missing Patron.” Pages 190–224 in Religion, Dynasty, and Patronage in Early Christian Rome, 300–900. Edited by Kate Cooper and Julia Hillner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Lagarrigue, Georges, ed. Salvien de Marseille: Oeuvres tome II. Du gouvernement de Dieu. SC 220. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1975. Lambot, C., ed. Sancti Aurelii Augustini sermons de vetere testamento I-L. CCSL 41. Turnhout: Brepols, 1961. Lambot, C., G. Morin and M.-J. Delage, eds. Césaire d’Arles: Sermons au peuple. SC 175, 243, 330. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1976–1986. Lancel, Serge. “L’affaire d’Antoninus de Fussala.” Pages 267–85 in Les lettres de Saint Augustin découvertes par Johannes Divjak: Communications présentées au colloque des 20 et 21 septembre 1982. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1983. ———. ed. Actes de la conférence de Carthage en 411, vol. 3. Sources chrétiennes 224. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1975. Lavan, Luke. “The End of Temples: Towards a New Narrative?” Pages xv–lxv in The Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism.” Edited by Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan. Late Antique Archaeology 7. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Lenski, Noel. “Peasant and Slave in Late Antique North Africa, c. 100–600 CE.” Pages 113–155, in Late Antiquity in Contemporary Debate. Edited by R. Lizzi Testa. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2017. ———. “Introduction: Power and Religion on the Frontier of Late Antiquity.” Pages 1–17 in The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity. Edited by Andrew Cain and Noel Lenski. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.

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Lepelley, Claude. “Le patronat episcopal aux IVe et Ve siècles: continuities et ruptures avec le patronat classique.” Pages 17–33 in L’évêque dans la cité du IVe au Ve siècle. Image et autorité. Actes de la table ronde de Rome (1er et 2 décembre 1995). Publications de l’École française de Rome 248. Rome: École française de Rome, 1998. ———. “Trois documents méconnus sur l’histoire sociale et religieuse de l’Afrique romaine tardive retrouvés parmi les spuria de Sulpice Sévère.” Antiquités africaines 25.1 (1989): 235–62. Leppin, Hartmut. “Christianisierungen im Römischen Reich: Überlegungen zum Begriff und zur Phasenbildung.” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 16.2 (2013): 247–78. Liebeschuetz, John W.G.H. Antioch: City and Imperial Administration in the Later Roman Empire. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972. Lizzi, Rita. “L’église, les domini, les païens rustici: Quelques strategies pour la Christianisation de l’Occident (IVe–VIe siècle).” Pages 77–113 in Le problème de la christianisation du monde antique. Edited by Hervé Inglebert, Sylvain Destephen, and Bruno Dumézil. Paris: Picard, 2010. ———. “Legislazione imperiale e reazione pagana: I limiti del conflitto.” Cristianesimo nella storia 30 (2009): 385–409. ———. “Discordia in urbe: pagani e cristiani in rivolta.” Pages 115–40 in Pagani e cristiani da Giuliano l’Apostata al sacco di Roma. Edited by Franca E. Consolino. Soveria Mannelli: Messina, 1995. ———. “Ambrose’s Contemporaries and the Christianization of Northern Italy.” Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990): 156–73. MacMullen, Ramsay. Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100–400). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984. Magalhães de Oliveira, Júlio César. Potestas populi: participation populaire et action collective dans les villes de l’Afrique romaine tardive (vers 300–430 apr. J.-C.). Turnhout: Brepols, 2012. Markus, Robert A. “Gregory the Great’s Pagans.” Pages 23–34 in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting. Edited by Henry Mayr-Harting, Richard Gameson, and Henrietta Leyser. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Mayer, Wendy. “Religious Conflict: Definitions, Problems and Theoretical Approaches.” Pages 1–19 in Religious Conflict from Early Christianity to the Rise of Islam. Edited by Wendy Mayer and Bronwen Neil. Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 121. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. McLynn, Neil. “Christian Controversy and Violence in the Fourth Century.” Kodai 3 (1992): 15–44. Merkt, Andreas. Maximus I. von Turin: Die Verkündigung eines Bischofs der frühen Reichskirche im zeitgeschichtlichen, gesellschaftlichen und liturgischen Kontext. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 40. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Migne, J.-P., ed. Patrologiae cursus completus: Series graeca. 162 vols. Paris, 1857–1886. Mommsen, T. and P. Krueger, eds. Theodosiani libri XVI cum constitutionibus sirmondianis. Berlin: Weidmann, 1905. Mutzenbecher, A., ed. Maximi episcopi Taurinensis: Collectionem sermonum antiquam nonnullis sermonibus extravangantibus adiectis. CCSL 23. Turnhout: Brepols, 1962. Norberg, D., ed. Sancti Gregorii Magni Registrum epistularum libri I–VII. CCSL 140. Turnhout: Brepols, 1982. ———. ed. Sancti Gregorii Magni Registrum epistularum libri VIII–XIV. CCSL 140A. Turnhout: Brepols, 1982.

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Norman, A.F., ed. Libanius. Selected Works II: Selected Orations. LCL 452. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. North, John. “The Development of Religious Pluralism.” Pages 174–93 in The Jews Among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire. Edited by Judith Lieu, John North, and Tessa Rajak. London: Routledge, 1992. Pharr, Clyde, trans. The Theodosian Code and Novels, and the Sirmondian Constitutions. Corpus Juris Romani 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952. Rapp, Claudia. “Mark the Deacon, Life of St. Porphyry of Gaza.” Pages 53–75 in Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology. Edited by Thomas F. Head. New York: Routledge, 2001. Riggs, David. “Christianizing the Rural Communities of Late Roman Africa: A Process of Coercion or Persuasion.” Pages 297–308 in Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices. Edited by Harold A. Drake. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Rüpke, Jörg. “Introduction: Individualization and Individuation as Concepts for Historical Research.” Pages 3–38 in The Individual in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. Edited by Jörg Rüpke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Saller, Richard P. “Status and Patronage.” Pages 817–54 in The Cambridge Ancient History XI: The High Empire. Edited by Alan K. Bowman, Peter Garnsey, and Dominic Rathbone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ———. Personal Patronage under the Early Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Salzman, Michele R. “Christianity and Paganism III, Italy.” Pages 210–30 in The Cambridge History of Christianity II: Constantine to C. 600. Edited by Augustine Casiday and Frederick W. Norris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ———. “Rethinking Pagan-Christian Violence.” Pages 265–85 in Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices. Edited by Harold A. Drake. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Shaw, Brent D. Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Shenkl, C., ed. S. Ambrosii opera. CSEL 32.2. Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1897. Shepardson, Christine. Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014. Sizgorich, Thomas. Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam. Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Van den Hout, M.P.J., et al., eds. Augustinus: De catechizandis rudibus. CCSL 46. Turnhout: Brepols, 1969. Verbraken, Pierre-Patrick and François Dolbeau, eds. Augustinus. Sermones in Matthaeum I: Sermones LI–LXX. CCSL 41Aa. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Verheijen, Lucas, ed. Sancti Augustini Confessionum libri XIII. CCSL 27. Turnhout: Brepols, 1981. Von Hartel, W., ed. S. Pontii Meropii Paulini Nolani II: Carmina. CSEL 30. Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1894. Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew. “Patronage in Roman Society: From Republic to Empire.” Pages 63–87 in Patronage in Ancient Society. Edited by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill. London: Routledge, 1989. Winkelmann, F., ed. Eusebius. Über das Leben des Kaisers Konstantins. GCS 1.1. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975.

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Part IV THREATS OF VIOLENCE

9 RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE IN LATE ANTIQUE EGYPT RECONSIDERED The cases of Alexandria, Panopolis, and Philae* Jitse H. F. Dijkstra Introduction: towards a new narrative of religious violence in late antique Egypt Among the splendid Raphael rooms in the Vatican is the Hall of Constantine, which depicts four scenes from the life of Constantine illustrating the triumph of the Church. On the ceiling in the middle of this room is the famous painting Triumph of the Cross, completed in 1585 by Tommaso Laureti. We see a statue of a “pagan” god smashed to pieces on the ground and replaced with the cross (Figure 9.1):1 This captivating image of a violent clash between “pagans” and Christians from which the new religion rapidly emerged triumphant has long characterised studies of the religious transformation from the ancient religions to Christianity in late antiquity, the period from the fourth to seventh centuries C.E.2 Inspired by the work of Peter Brown, however, since the 1980s scholars have abandoned the monolithic view of a period dominated by a stark Christian-“pagan” conflict and a rapid transition to Christianity in favour of a more intricate web of religious interactions in a world that only gradually became Christian.3 Nevertheless, the idea that religious violence was endemic in the late antique world has remained influential. Our sources are full of book burnings, temple and statue destructions, and inter- and intra-religious violence. Perhaps unsurprisingly in a world where religious violence is so on our minds, the topic has received much attention in the last ten years and is currently one of the most hotly debated issues in Late Antique Studies.4 Despite a growing awareness of the complexity of the phenomenon, all of these studies have “violence” and/or “religion” (or similar words) in their titles without defining or even discussing the terms. This is surprising since both terms are highly complex and problematic, as demonstrated in a stream of recent publications in Religious Studies analysing cases of religious violence in their modern contexts. If we concentrate on violence alone, for example, it can encompass a

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Figure 9.1 Tommaso Laureti, Triumph of the Cross (1585; Hall of Constantine, Vatican Museums, Rome). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

diversity of actions, from verbal abuse to actual physical violence. Moreover, these studies show that – despite the recent arguments proposed by Egyptologist and cultural historian, Jan Assmann, that religious violence is rooted in monotheism5 – the phenomenon exists in all places and times and even where violence is cast in religious terms, other factors (political, psychological, social, economic) are almost always involved. Consequently, religious violence needs to be analysed on a case-by-case basis and in the context of the particular local and historical circumstances in which it arises,6 a theoretical premise that has now also been applied to late antiquity.7 Such a nuanced understanding of religious violence fits in well with two recent trends within the field. First of all, scholars of Late Antique Studies are becoming increasingly critical of the (mostly Christian) literary accounts that describe violence between Christians and “pagans.”8 For example, one of the most detailed texts describing a temple destruction, the Life of Porphyry, by Mark the Deacon – while purporting to describe events in Gaza ca. 400 – has now been shown to date to the sixth century, which strongly diminishes its trustworthiness.9 The deconstruction of the literary evidence goes hand in hand with the increasing availability of large amounts of archaeological data. Until not too long ago, the picture of what happened to the temples in late antiquity was strongly influenced by a 212

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seminal study of Friedrich Deichmann who collected 89 cases of temple conversion and laid down a historical narrative in which violence against temples and their conversion into churches was a widespread phenomenon in the fourth and fifth centuries.10 The archaeological evidence that has now been collected for most parts of the Roman Empire, however, shows overwhelmingly that the destruction of temples and their reuse as churches were exceptional rather than routine events, and merely two aspects of the changing sacred landscape in late antiquity.11 I am currently working on a project that will build on these recent trends by conducting the first book-length study of religious violence in late antique Egypt.12 Thus far the idea that violence, in particular against temples and statues, was widespread in late antique Egypt has been persistent.13 To quote the much-discussed study Religion in Roman Egypt by David Frankfurter: “the gutting and conversion of traditional Egyptian temples, often still functioning, was a widespread phenomenon in Egypt during the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries.”14 My regional study of the process of religious transformation from the Ancient Egyptian religion to Christianity in the First Cataract region in southern Egypt, which exhaustively studies all sources from Philae and the two other towns in the region, Aswan and Elephantine, is a strong counter-argument against such views. It argues that the religious transformation in the whole region, including Philae, consisted of a gradual and complex process that was essentially peaceful.15 The present project extends the picture of a complex and gradual process of religious transformation, in which religious violence only occasionally occurred in specific local or regional circumstances, to Egypt as a whole. Focusing on Egypt has the advantage that a wealth and variety of sources can be taken into account not found elsewhere in the Mediterranean. In addition to literary works, there is an abundance of inscriptions and extremely well-preserved archaeological material as well as papyri, a category of evidence preserved almost exclusively in Egypt. The project aims to bridge the gap between the ideological story of the literature and the evidence from other sources, in particular the archaeology. Part of the evidence is already presented in my study of the fate of the temples in late antique Egypt, in which I  demonstrate, by confronting the literary works with the other sources available, that what happened to Egyptian temples conforms entirely to the complex picture that is now well established for the rest of the late antique world.16 By placing the incidents in a regional context of religious transformation as opposed to a context of violence, I hope to challenge the still pervasive view in current scholarship that religious violence was widespread in late antiquity. In the end, this project will not result in a dramatic picture of religious violence in late antique Egypt, such as now popularised in the Hollywood movie Agora (2009), but it will lead to an infinitely more accurate understanding of the complexity and diversity of this fascinating phenomenon. In this chapter I shall take a closer look at three iconic events that have been well documented in literature and at first sight might seem to confirm the impression that violence was widespread in late antique Egypt: the destruction of the 213

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Serapeum at Alexandria in 391/392, the anti-“pagan” crusade of Abbot Shenoute in the region of Panopolis ca. 400, and the closure of the Isis temple at Philae in 535–537. In fact, these events have often been quoted as perfectly illustrating the pervasive nature of religious violence in the late antique world. As I shall argue, when we take away the emphasis on violence and a stark Christian vs. “pagan” conflict that is so characteristic of the literary works and include the other sources available, and when we place the events in their regional contexts, a more nuanced picture arises, which shows that the representation of religious violence in the literary sources is based more on “wishful thinking” than reality.

The “destruction” of the Serapeum at Alexandria The first case that I wish to discuss, that of the Serapeum, in many ways constitutes an exception among the cases of religious violence to be discussed from elsewhere in Egypt. This is because Alexandria, with its huge, multi-ethnic population – one of the largest cities in the Roman Empire – had a long history of urban violence, a setting that is decidedly different from the Egyptian countryside, the chora, where violence was not present to the same extent. One only has to think of the tensions between the Jews and Greeks in the years 38–41, which the Emperor Claudius tried to ease in his famous letter to the Alexandrians.17 In his important study, Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt, Johannes Hahn has convincingly demonstrated that outbreaks of religious violence in late antique Alexandria should not be seen in exclusively religious terms, as many of our literary sources do, but rather as a socio-political phenomenon arising from deep-seated social tensions. For example, he sees the disturbances in the capital during the episcopate of George of Cappadocia (357–361), including an earlier plundering of the Serapeum and eventually the lynching of George himself, not so much as a Christian-“pagan” conflict but rather as a direct result of the rift caused by the imperial appointment of this controversial Arian bishop.18 The so-called destruction of the Serapeum, about thirty years later, is perhaps the best-documented case of religious violence in the late antique world. We have no fewer than four accounts by the church historians Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, and even a non-Christian account, by the sophist Eunapius, which were all written within slightly over half a century of the incident.19 Yet these accounts offer a far from consistent reconstruction of the events and contradict each other on numerous points. As we shall shortly see, not even its exact date is known. Hahn has done an admirable job in teasing out the evidence and placing the incident within its socio-political context.20 In two respects, however, I think his analysis can still be improved on. First of all, unlike previous scholarship, in particular the excellent study by Françoise Thelamon, who relied heavily on the earliest Christian account by Rufinus in 401/402,21 Hahn is highly critical of Rufinus and places great weight instead on Socrates (writing between 439 and 443).22 Whereas Hahn is right that we have to take into account the triumphal overtones in Rufinus, Socrates’ version is even 214

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more problematic in that it starts with an alleged edict by the Emperor Theodosius I  giving carte blanche to Bishop Theophilus to destroy the temples in Alexandria.23 It is only after the destruction of the Serapeum that riots break out with the “pagans.” If one looks at imperial legislation regarding temples during the fourth century as preserved in book 16 of the Codex Theodosianus, however, it is clear that such an edict could never have been promulgated. Imperial policy before 435 was not aimed at the destruction of temples and the emperor would certainly not have given powers to act against temples to a local bishop.24 On 16 June 391, an edict was indeed promulgated at Alexandria, forbidding sacrifice and the access to temples and this law has often been directly connected to the Serapeum incident.25 However, this law does not, and could not, call for the destruction of temples and should merely be taken as a terminus post quem for the Serapeum incident, which makes Socrates’ version of the events highly suspect.26 The second point is that Hahn, while giving pride of place to Socrates, adds elements from the other accounts in order to provide a coherent picture of the events.27 However, a sounder historical method would be to discuss the accounts in chronological sequence, starting with the earliest preserved account, the one by Eunapius in 399, and paying detailed attention to the interrelations between the sources. While we have to leave such a close literary analysis to another occasion, it can be said in general that the order of events as described by Rufinus seems the most plausible: an incident involving the Christian reuse of a former temple leads to riots, which soon centre on the Serapeum complex, where the violence gets out of hand and is directed against the temple, leading to the end of its cults. The involvement of the highest imperial authorities in Egypt, the governor (praefectus augustalis) Evagrius and the highest military commander (comes Aegypti) Romanus, and an imperial rescript sent in response to the riots, seem in line with how the state would respond to such a situation and, although it cannot have taken the form Rufinus gives it – that the Christians who died are to be considered martyrs and should not be avenged, and that the “cause of the trouble” should be taken away (which is clearly interpreted here as an order to destroy the Serapeum) – a more neutral imperial order to make an end to the public disorder is likely.28 Concerning the other accounts, it is clear that Socrates’ account is a condensed version of Rufinus, reversing the events (Rufinus: riots – rescript – destruction; Socrates: edict – destruction – riots). No doubt he does this in an effort to provide a clearer cause for the destruction of the Serapeum, in which he could have interpreted the edict of 391 in hindsight as providing the trigger for the incident by making imperial involvement into an outright imperial order to destroy the temples. He does add an eyewitness account from two of his teachers in Constantinople, Helladius and Ammonius, who had fled after the incident, showing the impact that the event had on the Alexandrian philosophical schools. Sozomen relies mostly on Rufinus for the chronology but replaces the rescript with Socrates’ imperial call for the destruction of all Alexandrian temples. Finally, Theodoret’s version, which starts from an Empire-wide edict to destroy temples, focuses entirely on Theophilus and embellishes Rufinus’ scene of the striking of 215

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the statue of Serapis by adding that mice came out of it, is so concocted that it is hardly useful for reconstructing the events. What we are left with after a close reading of the sources is disappointingly little: a general sense of how the events unfolded, in which the chain of events as described by Rufinus is the most likely, with the Alexandrian church under Bishop Theophilus and some Greek philosophers in opposing camps, and the imperial authorities trying to do something about the situation. Because of the literary colouring of the events, which are presented, even in Eunapius, in clear Christian“pagan” terms, precise details are forever lost to us and we can only speculate about what is the most plausible scenario. There are two sources that have the potential to shed further light on these literary accounts, however. The first of these is the archaeological evidence studied in recent years by the Oxford team under Judith McKenzie. On the basis of previous excavations and their own observations of what little is left of the foundations, it has been possible to reconstruct both the Ptolemaic- and Roman-phase temple and to refine its building history.29 The work of McKenzie and her team has also led to some clarifications regarding the fate of the Serapeum in the fourth century.30 No new structures were added to the temple precinct at this time, which argues against the account of Sozomen who states that under Arcadius (395–408) a church was built inside the temple.31 Moreover, architecturally it would have been difficult to turn the Serapis temple into a church. Remains of Christian buildings, including a church, have been found west of the temple terrain, which seems in line with Rufinus’ remark that churches were built on either side of the Serapeum, though where the other church was located remains unclear.32 The extent to which the Serapeum was destroyed will probably remain an unresolved question. In any case, in the Arab period the colonnade surrounding the temple was still intact and it seems most probable that the temple was not immediately destroyed but – having been deprived of its primary function – only gradually dismantled over time.33 The second source to be considered is the “Alexandrian World Chronicle.” This fragmentary illustrated papyrus codex is best known for its leaf (fol. VI) containing a list of consuls of 383–392 C.E. with occasional historical entries. It includes, on its back side, an entry on the destruction of the Serapeum listed under the year 392, with in the left margin a famous depiction of the victorious Bishop Theophilus on top of the Serapeum, and another illustration of the temple in the lower right corner (Figure 9.2). In his 2006 article, Hahn has argued at length that the entry proves that the incident took place in 392.34 His arguments are based on the assumption that this is the last leaf of the manuscript and that the work dates to shortly after 412, that is, fairly close to the events. As this was the last entry of the work, it formed a “grand finale,” highlighting the triumph of the Alexandrian church. Therefore the scribe could not possibly have made an error in the date, which must be 392, more specifically before April of that year when Evagrius, who as we have seen was involved in the event and is also mentioned as the governor of Egypt for this year in the papyrus, was out of office.35 216

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Figure 9.2  Moscow, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, inv. no. 310/8, verso. Source: Burgess and Dijkstra, “ ‘Alexandrian World Chronicle’ ”, Pl. 2.

A detailed study of the text undertaken with my colleague Richard Burgess, however, has revealed that this text cannot be used for dating the event, first and foremost because the papyrus dates to the second half of the sixth century, not shortly after 412, and is thus significantly removed in time from the event it is recording. Furthermore, the work would almost certainly not have ended with the 392 entry but rather continued until the time of compilation in the sixth century, as we know is the case with such chronicle texts. Finally, the other historical entries in the same text are full of mistakes, increasing the likelihood that this date, too, is incorrect. Thus, the date has been opened up again to between 16 June 391, 217

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the date of the edict of Theodosius I, and 8 April 392, the latest possible date of Evagrius being in office.36 The illustration does provide us with an interesting, sixth-century Christian perspective on the event, which already developed at an early stage, of Theophilus making a definitive end to the “pagan” cults in the city.

Shenoute of Atripe’s anti-“pagan” crusade Our second case is that of Shenoute (ca. 385–465), the main author of Coptic literature and abbot of the homonymous monastery situated on the west bank of the Nile at Panopolis (modern Akhmim), commonly referred to as the White Monastery. In his classic study of Shenoute, the German Coptologist Johannes Leipoldt made Shenoute into a religious fanatic, roaming the countryside on the lookout to destroy temples: “The Copts of his time had only one passion: this was the hatred against the ‘Greeks’, the pagans. And this hatred restlessly stirred up Shenoute and aroused in him the blazing flame to reduce one temple after the other to ashes.”37 His view has been extremely persistent, witness for example the words of David Bell, the translator of the Bohairic Life of Shenoute into English, who – paraphrasing an earlier characterization of Shenoute by Émile Amélineau – describes him as “an erupting volcano: an impressive sight, though not necessarily a pretty one.”38 Meanwhile, however, the lifelong work of Stephen Emmel on the dispersed and ruinous works of Shenoute has placed the study of his literary corpus on a new footing and an international effort led by Emmel is underway of making it systematically available to the scholarly world.39 While definitive conclusions must await further study of Shenoute’s works, Emmel has conducted a meticulous analysis of all available passages on religious violence in the Shenoutian corpus. His study shows that there is only one secure case of a temple destruction in Shenoute’s works, that of the temple of Atripe, in which idols were destroyed and the temple was set on fire. Shenoute was also, albeit rather indirectly, involved in the “destruction” of another temple, that of Pneueit, in which he defended in court at Antinoopolis some Christians who had been accused of the demolition. Shenoute is most well known, however, for his actions against the local aristocrat Gessios, whom he singles out as a “pagan.” According to his own version of the events, Shenoute stole into his house at night, robbed him of his house statues and threw them into the Nile.40 It has been assumed since Leipoldt, without any good grounds, that following its “destruction” Shenoute dismantled the temple of Atripe (Greek Athribis) and reused the blocks in his monastery, where reused materials are still visible today (Figure  9.3).41 A recent archaeological investigation of the temple of Athribis demonstrates, however, that Shenoute could not have completely dismantled the temple. This picture is confirmed by a study of the spolia reused in the Shenoute Monastery, which derive not from one but various different monuments that were probably no longer functioning by the mid-fifth century. Among the reused materials some slabs from the temple of Atripe have indeed been detected, but they only come from its roof and certainly do not provide evidence for extensive reuse of building material from this site. In fact, the temple was largely left intact and 218

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Figure 9.3  The church of the Shenoute Monastery, showing reused columns. Source: McKenzie, Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, Fig. 453.

gradually incorporated into the adjacent nunnery, also part of the monastic network of Shenoute, from the early fifth century onwards, which suggests that – as we might expect at this time – this temple, too, was no longer in use for Ancient Egyptian cults and practices.42 As with the “destruction” of the Serapeum, we should therefore be cautious in assuming wholesale destruction of temple buildings and idols out of religious frenzy. While the incidents described in Shenoute’s works no doubt go back to actual events, the image of Shenoute as an anti-“pagan” crusader does not hold and is clearly more rhetoric than reality. In this case too, more was at stake than purely religious motivations. In fact, as a recent study by Ariel Lόpez shows, the anti“pagan” measures of Shenoute can be placed in the context of his power struggle with the local elite at Panopolis on the other side of the Nile, as embodied especially in Gessios.43 That Shenoute’s actions were not always uncontroversial appears from the indignant reactions to the nightly raid on Gessios’ house, after which Shenoute had to write an open letter to the citizens of Panopolis to defend his deed.44

The closure of the temple of Isis at Philae The last case that we shall consider is that of the Isis temple at Philae. The famous temple island has often been considered as an exceptional story.45 Due to its location on the southern Egyptian frontier, Philae retained its traditional attraction to the southern peoples from the other side of the frontier, the Blemmyes and Noubades, and managed to stay open for much longer than any other major Egyptian 219

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temple. It is here that we find the last inscriptions in the Ancient Egyptian scripts hieroglyphic and demotic, dating to 394 and 452, respectively. It is interesting to observe, however, that despite these special circumstances it has been presupposed that the end of the cults at Philae also occurred in a context of religious violence – a situation that is usually more associated with the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century, the time of the Serapeum incident and Shenoute. According to this picture, the “last bastion of pagan worship” remained open until 535–537 when the Emperor Justinian himself had to intervene to close it. This picture is based on the account by the sixth-century Byzantine historian Procopius, who writes: These barbarians retained the temples on Philae right down to my day, but the Emperor Justinian decided to destroy them. Accordingly, Narses, .  .  . destroyed the temples on the emperor’s orders, held the priests under guard, and sent the statues to Byzantium.46 In an influential article published in 1967, the Patristics scholar Pierre Nautin connected this incident to the dedicatory inscriptions of a church of St. Stephen inside the temple, especially the one next to the door leading towards the main sanctuary or naos, which says: “The cross has conquered, it always conquers!” (Figure 9.4).47

Figure 9.4  I.Philae II 201. Source: photo J.H.F. Dijkstra.

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In Nautin’s view the Christian community on the island, annoyed by the continuation of the “pagan” cults until such a late date, must have felt a sense of triumph when they finally entered the holiest part of the temple, the naos. Their feelings were embodied in the inscription of the conquering cross. According to Nautin, this inscription therefore has to be taken quite literally: in a pious ceremony the bishop of Philae, Theodore, would have brought a cross inside the naos and erected it there to replace the cult image of Isis: “from then on, the whole island was for the Christians.”48 The circle is complete: we are back at the evocative image of the Triumph of the Cross with which we started this chapter. My study of the religious transformation in the region of Aswan, based on all available sources from the region, has disentangled many presuppositions that have contributed to this triumphalist image, which has made the reuse of the temple of Isis into perhaps the most famous case of a temple conversion in Egypt.49 First of all, Procopius’ account is not unproblematic. As everyone can still see today, the Isis temple is among the best-preserved temples in Egypt. It could not therefore have been “destroyed,” as Procopius says, although most scholars have recognised this and speak only of a “closure” of the temple.50 The historian also gives the impression that the southern peoples continued to worship Isis undisturbed until the sixth century, but this completely ignores the impact that Christianity must have had on the island. Philae probably had a see from as early as 330 onwards and a cathedral church, known as the East Church, was situated on the northern part of the island. This means that Christians and worshippers of Isis lived peacefully side by side for over a century. At the same time, the expansion of Christianity at Philae conforms entirely to similar developments in the rest of the region or, for that matter, in Egypt as a whole. Moreover, my analysis of the no less than thirty-five inscriptions in demotic and Greek from the last priests of Isis indicate that the Ancient Egyptian cults already show signs of contraction and isolation from the early fourth century onwards. When the last inscription was incised, significantly written in Greek in 456/457, a continuous recording by these priests from time immemorial came to an end, so that it is highly likely that cultic practice stopped soon after, if not in the same year.51 As a result, the closure that Procopius describes, some eighty years later, cannot have been more than a symbolic closure – we know that Justinian closed other temples for show – which was no doubt fuelled by the imperial propaganda machine. In this context, the dedication of the church of St Stephen need not directly have followed the temple closure, as the inscriptions that record the dedication are undated and mention Theodore, who was bishop of Philae until after 577. Probably, then, the decision to turn the temple into a church was made by the bishop, in which a new purpose had to be found for an abandoned building. Viewing the reuse of the temple in more practical terms also ties in better with the architectural reconstruction by Peter Grossman, which indicates that rather than the naos, as was assumed by Nautin, the pronaos was turned into a threeaisled church.52 We have therewith placed the reuse of the temple of Isis in a local 221

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context rather than regarding it as a triumph of Christianity over still thriving Ancient Egyptian cults.53 A second, even less reliable literary source on the end of the cults at Philae exists in the form of the Coptic Life of Aaron. The Life, which describes events taking place in the fourth and early fifth century but was written down in the sixth century, contains an entertaining story of the first bishop of Philae, Macedonius (ca. 343). Having been freshly appointed by Bishop Athanasius in Alexandria, he travels south and enters the island, which is still dominated by idol worshippers, incognito. He approaches the altar where sacrifices are made and ambiguously asks the sons of the temple priest, who happens to be away on some business, to sacrifice to “God.” As the sons are preparing the fire, he goes to the cage where the sacred falcon is kept, takes it out, cuts off its head and throws the bird into the fire: thus the old god is sacrificed to the new God. At first, Macedonius has to flee but eventually a miracle results in the conversion of the entire island to Christianity. Since we know that the falcon cult was still practiced into the fifth century and the island only became Christian gradually, this story is purely legendary. On the other hand, it does have historical value as the perspective of a later, sixth-century audience on how its community had become Christian.54

Conclusion In this chapter we have discussed three cases that have been taken as exemplary for widespread religious violence in late antique Egypt or even for the pervasive nature of religious violence in the late antique world. Each of these three cases is well documented in Christian literature, and even secular literature (Eunapius, Procopius), which describes the violence in dramatic terms as a direct consequence of Christian – “pagan” conflict, thus seemingly confirming the picture that the fourth and fifth centuries saw a struggle between the old and the new religion, leading to Christian triumph. As it now becomes more and more accepted in Late Antique Studies to discard the triumphalist overtones of our Christian sources and to view religious transformation as a gradual and complex process, in which violence only rarely erupted, these cases have been re-evaluated. It has been argued that, if we take away the emphasis on violence and take proper account of the other sources available (inscriptions, papyri, and material remains), it becomes clear that all three incidents occurred in specific local, socio-political circumstances: the Serapeum incident arose from the explosive situation in the capital, perhaps induced but not necessarily directly related to the imperial edict of June  391, the anti-“pagan” rhetoric of Shenoute needs to be seen in the context of his power struggle with the local elite and the closure of the Isis temple at Philae was probably no more than a propaganda stunt of Justinian’s that would have had a minimal effect on a local level. We have also seen that in each case, the literary sources speak of a “destruction” of temples and idols, whereas in reality the violence was something less extreme. At Philae there are no signs at all of destruction, whereas in Atripe 222

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the “destruction” by Shenoute could have consisted at most of starting a fire in an abandoned building. Finally, the Serapeum was not as thoroughly destroyed as suggested in the sources, although it is impossible to evaluate the extent to which initial damage was done. The impact of the event cannot be underestimated, however, and was soon perceived as the total triumph of the Alexandrian church. All in all, I hope that my project – by bridging the gap between the ideological discourse in the literature and the other sources, especially material remains, and by placing the incidents against a wider background of religious transformation – will put these and other events into their proper contexts. Rather than assuming widespread violence from the start, it will address the question why religious violence broke out at all and under what special circumstances. The resulting picture will not be one of a particularly violent society but it will provide clearer insights into why ancient authors used a violent discourse and what factors led to this rhetoric spilling over into reality. The powerful image of Agora can thus be discarded, but the much more complex reality behind it makes religious violence an all the more interesting phenomenon to study.

Notes * I would like to thank the audiences at the University of Kent (19 February  2014), the University of Toronto (28 February 2014), the sixth Annual UNISA Symposium for New Testament and Early Christian Studies (16 September 2014), and the exhibit “One God. Abraham’s Legacy on the Nile” at the Bode-Museum (2 July  2015) for stimulating discussions of this paper and the conveners, Luke Lavan (Canterbury), John Kloppenborg and Katherine Blouin (Toronto), Chris de Wet and Wendy Mayer (Pretoria), and Cäcilia Fluck (Berlin) for their kind invitations. I am also grateful to Jan Bremmer and Geoffrey Greatrex for comments on an earlier version of this chapter, which appeared in a much abridged form as J.H.F. Dijkstra, “Religiöse Gewalt im spätantiken Ägypten,” in Ein Gott: Abrahams Erben am Nil. Juden, Christen und Muslime in Ägypten von der Antike bis zum Mittelalter, ed. C. Fluck, G. Helmecke, and E.R. O’Connell (Petersberg: Imhof, 2015), 80–3, with its counterpart in English, “Religious Violence in Late Antique Egypt,” in Egypt: Faith After the Pharaohs, ed. C. Fluck, G. Helmecke, and E.R. O’Connell (London: British Museum Press, 2015), 78–81. This chapter was originally published as: J.H.F. Dijkstra, “Religious Violence in Late Antique Egypt Reconsidered: The Cases of Alexandria, Panopolis and Philae,” Journal of Early Christian History 5 (2015): 24–48. 1 This painting is also briefly mentioned by T. Myrup Kristensen, Making and Breaking the Gods: Christian Responses to Pagan Sculpture in Late Antiquity, Aarhus Studies in Mediterranean Antiquity 12 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2013), 16. 2 I mention here only A. Momigliano, ed., The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), for the historical context of which see P. Brown, “Back to the Future: Pagans and Christians at the Warburg Institute in 1958,” in Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire: The Breaking of a Dialogue (IVth–VIth Century A.D.), ed. P. Brown and R. Lizzi Testa, Christianity and History 9 (Zurich: Lit and Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 2011), 17–24. 3 E.g. R. MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100–400) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (London: Viking, 1986); F.R. Trombley, Hellenic Religion and Christianization c. 370–529, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1993–1994); R. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the

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Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); P. Chuvin, Chronique des derniers païens: La disparition du paganisme dans l’Empire romain, du règne de Constantin à celui de Justinien, 3rd ed. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2009); É. Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200–450 CE (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); C.P. Jones, Between Pagan and Christian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). E.g. J. Hahn, Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt: Studien zu den Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Christen, Heiden und Juden im Osten des Römischen Reiches (von Konstantin bis Theodosius II.), Klio Beihefte, Neue Folge 8 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004); M. Gaddis, “There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ”: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 39 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); H.A. Drake, ed., Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); J. Hahn, S. Emmel, and U. Gotter, eds., From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 163 (Leiden: Brill, 2008); Th. Sizgorich, Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam, Divinations (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); P. Athanassiadi, Vers la pensée unique. La montée de l’intolérance dans l’Antiquité tardive, Histoire (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2010); B. Isele, Kampf um Kirchen: Religiöse Gewalt, heiliger Raum und christliche Topographie in Alexandria und Konstantinopel (4. Jh.), Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum Ergänzungsband, Kleine Reihe 4 (Münster: Aschendorff, 2010); E.J. Watts, Riot in Alexandria: Tradition and Group Dynamics in Late Antique Pagan and Christian Communities, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 46 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010); J. Hahn, ed., Staat und religiöser Konflikt: Imperiale und lokale Verwaltung und die Gewalt gegen Heiligtümer in der Spätantike, Millennium-Studien 34 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011); B.D. Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), with the discussion of this book by M.A. Tilley, D. Frankfurter, P. Frederiksen, and B.D. Shaw in Journal of Early Christian Studies 21 (2013): 291–309 and by C. Ando, C. Conybeare, C. Grey, N. Lenski, and H.A. Drake in Journal of Late Antiquity 6 (2013): 197–263; Kristensen, Making and Breaking the Gods. J. Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), and id., The Price of Monotheism, trans. R. Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). E.g. B. Rennie and P.L. Tite, eds., Religion, Terror, and Violence: Religious Studies Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2008); W.T. Cavenaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); J.N. Bremmer, “Religious Violence and Its Roots: A View from Antiquity,” Asdiwal 6 (2011): 71–9 (reprinted in the present volume); H. Kippenberg, Violence as Worship: Religious Wars in the Age of Globalization, trans. B. McNeil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); M. Juergensmeyer, M. Kitts, and M. Jerryson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); S. Clarke, R. Powell, and J. Savulescu, eds., Religion, Intolerance, and Conflict: A Scientific and Conceptual Investigation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); S. Clarke, The Justification of Religious Violence, Blackwell Public Philosophy 15 (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014); cf. also the launching of the Journal of Religion and Violence in 2013. W. Mayer, “Religious Conflict: Definitions, Problems and Theoretical Approaches,” in Religious Conflict from Early Christianity to the Rise of Islam, ed. W. Mayer and B. Neil, Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 121 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 1–20; J.N. Bremmer, “Religious Violence Between Greeks, Romans, Christians and Jews,” in

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Violence in Early Christianity: Victims and Perpetrators, ed. A.-K. Geljon and R. Roukema, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 125 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 8–30; see also W. Mayer’s contribution in this volume. E.g. S. Emmel, U. Gotter, and J. Hahn, “ ‘From Temple to Church’: Analysing a Late Antique Phenomenon of Transformation,” in Hahn, Emmel and Gotter, From Temple to Church, 1–22; R.S. Bagnall, “Models and Evidence in the Study of Religion in Late Antique Egypt,” in Hahn, Emmel and Gotter, From Temple to Church, 25–32; L. Lavan, “The End of the Temples: Towards a New Narrative?” in The Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism,” ed. L. Lavan and M. Mulryan, Late Antique Archaeology 7 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), xv–lxv. T.D. Barnes, Early Christian Hagiography and Roman History, Tria corda 5 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 199–234; A. Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 799. F.W. Deichmann, “Frühchristliche Kirchen in antiken Heiligtümern,” Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 54 (1939): 105–36, repr. in Rom, Ravenna, Konstantinopel, Naher Osten: Gesammelte Studien zur spätantiken Architektur, Kunst und Geschichte (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1984), 56–94. E.g. B. Ward Perkins, “Reconfiguring Sacred Space: From Pagan Shrines to Christian Churches,” in Die spätantike Stadt und ihre Christianisierung, ed. G. Brands and H.-G. Severin, Spätantike – frühes Christentum – Byzanz: Kunst im ersten Jahrtausend, Reihe B, Studien und Perspektiven 11 (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2003), 285–90; R. Bayliss, Provincial Cilicia and the Archaeology of Temple Conversion, British Archaeological Reports International Series 1281 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2004); Hahn, Emmel and Gotter, From Temple to Church; Lavan and Mulryan, Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism.” The project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. As the examples mentioned thus far show, I shall clearly limit my topic to religious violence against the Ancient Egyptian religion, in particular temples, statues, and “pagans,” and not venture into intra-religious, Christian violence, which would require a separate project. For now, see e.g. Isele, Kampf um Kirchen, 113–92 on Alexandria. E.g. L. Kákosy, “Das Ende des Heidentums in Ägypten,” in Graeco-Coptica: Griechen und Kopten im byzantinischen Ägypten, ed. P. Nagel, Wissenschaftliche Beiträge der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Reihe I  29 (Halle: Martin-LutherUniversität, 1984), 61–76; E. Wipszycka, “La christianisation de l’Égypte aux IVe–VIe siècles. Aspects sociaux et ethniques,” Aegyptus 68 (1988): 117–65, repr. in Études sur le christianisme dans l’Égypte de l’Antiquité tardive, Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 52 (Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, 1996), 63–105; L. Kákosy, “Probleme der Religion im römerzeitlichen Ägypten,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II 18.5 (1995): 2894–3049; D. Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), esp. 265–84, and “ ‘Things Unbefitting Christians’: Violence and Christianization in FifthCentury Panopolis,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 8 (2000): 273–95; E. Sauer, The Archaeology of Religious Hatred in the Roman and Early Medieval World (Stroud: Tempus, 2003), esp. 89–101; D. Frankfurter, “Iconoclasm and Christianization in Late Antique Egypt: Christian Treatments of Space and Image,” in Hahn, Emmel and Gotter, From Temple to Church, 135–59. Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt, 265. J.H.F. Dijkstra, Philae and the End of Ancient Egyptian Religion: A Regional Study of Religious Transformation (298–642 CE), Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 173 (Leuven: Peeters, 2008). J.H.F. Dijkstra, “The Fate of the Temples in Late Antique Egypt,” in Lavan and Mulryan, Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism,” 389–436, a shortened and adapted

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18 19

20

21 22 23 24

25 26

version of which appeared as “Das Schicksal der Tempel in der Spätantike,” in Kult­ Orte. Mythen, Wissenschaft und Alltag in den Tempeln Ägyptens, ed. M.A. Stadler and D. von Recklinghausen (Berlin: Manetho, 2011), 201–17. Claudius’ letter to the Jews: P.Lond. VI 1912 = CPJ II 153. For the events of 38–41, see e.g. J.M.G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (323 BCE–117 CE), Hellenistic Culture and Society 33 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 48–71; E.S. Gruen, Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 54–83; P.W. van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus: The First Pogrom. Introduction, Translation and Commentary, Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2003); K. Blouin, Le conflit Judéo-Alexandrin de 38–41: L’identité juive à l’épreuve, Collection Judaïsmes (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005); A. Harker, Loyalty and Dissidence in Roman Egypt: The Case of the Acta Alexandrinorum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 9–47; S. Gambetti, The Alexandrian Riots of 38 C.E. and the Persecution of the Jews: A Historical Reconstruction, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 135 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Hahn, Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt, 66–74. Eunapius, V. Soph. 6.107–13; in Eunape de Sardes. Vies de philosophes et de sophistes, ed. R. Goulet, 2 vols., Collection des universités de France. Série grecque 508 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2014), 2:39–41; Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 11.22–23; in Eusebius Werke, ed. E. Schwartz and Th. Mommsen, vol. 2.2, GCS NF 6.2 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), 1025–30; Socrates, Hist. eccl. 5.16–17; in Sokrates Kirchengeschichte, ed. G.C. Hansen, GCS NF 1 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995), 289–91; Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 7.15.2–10; in Sozomenus Kirchengeschichte, ed. J. Bidez and G.C. Hansen, GCS NF 4 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995), 319–21; Theodoret, Hist. eccl. 5.22; in Theodoret Kirchengeschichte, ed. L. Parmentier, F. Scheidweiler, and G.C. Hansen, GCS NF 5 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998), 320–1. Hahn, Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt, 78–101, reiterated in J. Hahn, “The Conversion of the Cult Statues. The Destruction of the Serapeum 392 A.D. and the Transformation of Alexandria into the ‘Christ-Loving’ City,” in Hahn, Emmel and Gotter, From Temple to Church, 335–65. F. Thelamon, Païens et chrétiens au IVe siècle: l’apport de l’“Histoire ecclésiastique” de Rufin d’Aquilée (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1981). Hahn, Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt, 85–9, and “Conversion of the Cult Statues,” 345–8. Socrates, Hist. eccl. 5.16.1 (GCS NF 1.289). See the balanced overview of imperial policy on temples by J. Hahn, “Gesetze als Waffen? Die kaiserliche Religionspolitik und die Zerstörung von Tempel,” the concluding chapter (pp. 201–20) of the edited volume Staat und religiöser Konflikt, on which see the review by J.H.F. Dijkstra, Journal of Late Antiquity 6 (2013): 191–4. The first decree to advocate the destruction of temples is the one by Theodosius II in 435 (C.Th. 16.10.25). C.Th. 16.10.11. See e.g. T.D. Barnes, “Ammianus Marcellinus and His World,” Classical Philology 88 (1993): 61–2. As Hahn, Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt, 81–4; id., “Vetustus error extinctus est: Wann wurde das Sarapeion von Alexandria zerstört?” Historia 55 (2006): 371–4, and “Conversion of the Cult Statues,” 340–4, himself argues without, however, making a clear distinction between the improbable representation by Socrates, in which the imperial order determines the sequence of events and leads directly into the destruction of the Serapeum, and the more plausible versions of Rufinus and Sozomen. Cf. the excellent analysis by M. Errington, “Christian Accounts of the Religious Legislation of Theodosius I,” Klio 79 (1997): 423–8.

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27 Hahn, Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt, 85–92, and “Conversion of the Cult Statues,” 347–52. 28 See also Errington, “Christian Accounts,” 427–8. 29 J.S. McKenzie, “Glimpsing Alexandria from Archaeological Evidence,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 16 (2003): 50–6; J.S. McKenzie, S. Gibson, and A.T. Reyes, “Reconstructing the Serapeum in Alexandria from the Archaeological Evidence,” Journal of Roman Studies 94 (2004): 73–121; J.S. McKenzie, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, c. 300 BC to AD 700, Pelican History of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 53–6, 195–203. 30 McKenzie, Gibson, and Reyes, “Reconstructing the Serapeum,” 107–10; McKenzie, Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, 246. 31 Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 7.15.10 (GCS NF 4.321.19–20). 32 Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 11.27 (GCS NF 6.1033.16–17). 33 Dijkstra, “Fate of the Temples,” 399. 34 Hahn, “Wann wurde das Sarapeion.” 35 Evagrius is mentioned in the accounts of Eunapius, V. Soph. 6.108 (Goulet, 40.5) and Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 7.15.5 (GCS NF 4.320.16) and was succeeded by Hypatius on 9 April 392, as appears from C.Th. 11.36.1 = C.J. 1.4.6. See PLRE I s.v. Evagrius 7 (p. 286) and Hypatius 3 (p. 448). 36 R.W. Burgess and J.H.F. Dijkstra, “The ‘Alexandrian World Chronicle’, Its Consularia and the Date of the Destruction of the Serapeum (with an Appendix on the Praefecti Augustales),” Millennium 10 (2013): 39–113, esp. 96–102, and the summary by J.H.F. Dijkstra, “The ‘Alexandrian World Chronicle’: Place in the Late Antique Chronicle Traditions, Date and Historical Implications,” in Proceedings of the 27th International Congress of Papyrology, ed. T. Derda, A. Łajtar, and J. Urbanik, 3 vols., Journal of Juristic Papyrology Supplements 28 (Warsaw: Faculty of Law and Administration and Institute of Archaeology, Department of Papyrology, Warsaw University and Taubenschlag Foundation, 2016), 1:535–47. 37 J. Leipoldt, Schenute von Atripe und die Entstehung des national ägyptischen Christentums, Texte und Untersuchungen, Neue Folge 10.1 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1903), 175: “Die Kopten seiner Zeit hatten aber nur eine Leidenschaft: das war der Haß gegen die ‘Hellenen’, die Heiden. Und diesen Haß hat Schenute rastlos geschürt, hat aus ihm die lodernde Flamme erweckt, die einen Göttertempel nach dem anderen einäscherte” (my translation). 38 D.N. Bell, Besa, the Life of Shenoute, Cistercian Studies 73 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1983), 9. Cf. A.G. López, Shenoute of Atripe and the Uses of Poverty: Rural Patronage, Religious Conflict, and Monasticism in Late Antique Egypt, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 50 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 2 who cites this passage but without mentioning that Bell paraphrases É. Amélineau, Les moines égyptiens: Vie de Schnoudi, Annales du Musée Guimet. Bibliothèque de vulgarisation 1 (Paris: Leroux, 1889), 58: “Un volcan n’est jamais plus beau que lorsqu’il vomit le feu, les cendres et les laves. Le spectacle est imposant, mais il est horrible et malsain.” 39 See esp. S. Emmel, Shenoute’s Literary Corpus, 2 vols., CSCO 599, 600 (Leuven: Peeters, 2004). 40 S. Emmel, “Shenoute of Atripe and the Christian Destruction of Temples in Egypt: Rhetoric and Reality,” in Hahn, Emmel and Gotter, From Temple to Church, 161–201. See also Dijkstra, “Fate of the Temples,” 396–7, and “ ‘I Wish to Offer a Sacrifice to God Today’: The Discourse of Idol Destruction in the Coptic Life of Aaron,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies 7 (2015): 67–8. 41 Leipoldt, Schenute von Atripe, 92–3, with n. 1. This view is still found e.g. in P. Grossmann, “Tempel als Ort des Konflikts in christlicher Zeit,” in Le temple, lieu de conflit, ed. P. Borgeaud et al., Les Cahiers du Centre d’étude du Proche-Orient ancien 7 (Leuven:

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42

43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52

53 54

Peeters, 1994), 190, and Christliche Architektur in Ägypten, Handbuch der Orientalistik. Erste Abteilung, Nahe und der Mittlere Osten 62 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 171, 532. R. el-Sayed, “Schenute und die Tempel von Atripe: Zur Umnutzung des Triphisbezirks in der Spätantike,” in Honi soit qui mal y pense. Studien zum pharaonischen, griechisch-römischen und spätantiken Ägypten zu Ehren von Heinz-Josef Thissen, ed. H. Knuf, C. Leitz, and D. von Recklinghausen, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 194 (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 519–38; D. Klotz, “Triphis in the White Monastery: Reused Temple Blocks from Sohag,” Ancient Society 40 (2010): 197–213; R. el-Sayed and Y. el-Masry. Athribis I. General Site Survey 2003–2007; Archaeological & Conservation Studies; the Gate of Ptolemy IX: Architecture and Inscriptions, 2 vols. (Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2012), 1:24–9. López, Shenoute of Atripe and the Uses of Poverty, 102–26, with the review of this book by J.H.F. Dijkstra, Vigiliae Christianae 69 (2015): 97–101. For text and translation of this work, known by its incipit as Let Our Eyes, see Emmel, “Shenoute of Atripe and the Christian Destruction of Temples in Egypt,” 182–97. For a discussion of Shenoute’s raids on Gessios’ house, see the same article, pp. 166–81. E.g. R.S. Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 264. Procopius, Pers. 1.19.36–37; translation: T. Eide et al., Fontes Historiae Nubiorum. Vol. III: From the First to Sixth Century AD (Bergen: University of Bergen, Department of Greek, Latin and Egyptology, 1998), 1191 (no. 328), adapted. I.Philae II 200–204; quoted here is no. 201. P. Nautin, “La conversion du temple de Philae en église chrétienne,” Cahiers archéologiques 17 (1967): 1–43 (quote at p. 16: “désormais l’île entière était aux chrétiens”), essentially followed e.g. by J. Hahn, “Die Zerstörung der Kulte von Philae: Geschichte und Legende am ersten Nilkatarakt,” in Hahn, Emmel and Gotter, From Temple to Church, 203–42. Emmel, Gotter and Hahn, “ ‘From Temple to Church,’ ” 12: “possibly Philae represents the only completely unambiguous case of an immediate take-over in cultic use from an active pagan temple to a regular church.” E.g. Nautin, “Conversion du temple de Philae en église chrétienne,” 7; Hahn, “Zerstörung der Kulte von Philae,” 204–5. I.Philae II 199. P. Grossmann, “Die Kirche des Bischofs Theodoros im Isistempel von Philae: Versuch einer Rekonstruktion,” Rivista degli Studi Orientali 58 (1984): 107–17, “Tempel als Ort des Konflikts,” 194, and Christliche Architektur in Ägypten, 47. Pace Nautin, “Conversion du temple de Philae en église chrétienne,” 27–9, 34–43. For a full analysis, see Dijkstra, Philae and the End, with the summaries/updates in “Fate of the Temples,” 421–30, and “Philae,” Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 27 (2015): 574–91. I am currently preparing a new critical edition of this work, together with J. van der Vliet, for the announcement of which, see J.H.F. Dijkstra, “Monasticism on the Southern Egyptian Frontier in Late Antiquity: Towards a New Critical Edition of the Coptic Life of Aaron,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies 5 (2013): 31–47. For the passage of Macedonius and the holy falcon of Philae, see now Dijkstra, “ ‘I Wish to Offer a Sacrifice to God Today,’ ” which also places it in the context of other stories of idol destruction in Egyptian hagiographical literature.

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———. Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt: Studien zu den Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Christen, Heiden und Juden im Osten des Römischen Reiches (von Konstantin bis Theodosius II.). Klio Beihefte, Neue Folge 8. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004. Hahn, J., S. Emmel, and U. Gotter, eds. From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity. Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 163. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Hansen, G.C., ed. Sokrates Kirchengeschichte. GCS NF 1. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995. Harker, A. Loyalty and Dissidence in Roman Egypt: The Case of the Acta Alexandrinorum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Horst, P.W. van der. Philo’s Flaccus: The First Pogrom. Introduction, Translation and Commentary. Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series 2. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Isele, B. Kampf um Kirchen: Religiöse Gewalt, heiliger Raum und christliche Topographie in Alexandria und Konstantinopel (4. Jh.). Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum Ergänzungsband, Kleine Reihe 4. Münster: Aschendorff, 2010. Jones, C.P. Between Pagan and Christian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Juergensmeyer, M., M. Kitts and M. Jerryson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Kákosy, L. “Probleme der Religion im römerzeitlichen Ägypten.” Pages 2894–3049 in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, part II, 18.5. Edited by H. Temporini and W. Haase. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1995. ———. “Das Ende des Heidentums in Ägypten.” Pages 61–76 in Graeco-Coptica. Griechen und Kopten im byzantinischen Ägypten. Edited by P. Nagel. Wissenschaftliche Beiträge der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Reihe I  29. Halle: MartinLuther-Universität, 1984. Kippenberg, H. Violence as Worship: Religious Wars in the Age of Globalization. Translated by B. McNeil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Klotz, D. “Triphis in the White Monastery: Reused Temple Blocks from Sohag.” Ancient Society 40 (2010): 197–213. Lane Fox, R. Pagans and Christians. London: Viking, 1986. Lavan, L. “The End of the Temples: Towards a New Narrative?” Pages xv–lxv in The Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism.” Edited by L. Lavan and M. Mulryan. Late Antique Archaeology 7. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Lavan, L. and M. Mulryan, eds. The Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism.” Late Antique Archaeology 7. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Leipoldt, J. Schenute von Atripe und die Entstehung des national ägyptischen Christentums. Texte und Untersuchungen, Neue Folge 10.1. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1903. López, A.G. Shenoute of Atripe and the Uses of Poverty: Rural Patronage, Religious Conflict, and Monasticism in Late Antique Egypt. Transformation of the Classical Heritage 50. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013. MacMullen, R. Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. ———. Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100–400). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984. Mayer, W. “Religious Conflict: Definitions, Problems and Theoretical Approaches.” Pages 1–20 in Religious Conflict from Early Christianity to the Rise of Islam. Edited by W. Mayer and B. Neil. Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 121. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013.

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McKenzie, J.S. The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, c. 300 BC to AD 700. Pelican History of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. ———. “Glimpsing Alexandria from Archaeological Evidence.” Journal of Roman Archaeology 16 (2003): 35–63. McKenzie, J.S., S. Gibson, and A.T. Reyes, “Reconstructing the Serapeum in Alexandria from the Archaeological Evidence.” Journal of Roman Studies 94 (2004): 73–121. Momigliano, A., ed. The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century. Oxford: Clarendon, 1963. Nautin, P. “La conversion du temple de Philae en église chrétienne.” Cahiers Archéologiques 17 (1967): 1–43. Parmentier, L., F. Scheidweiler, and G.C. Hansen, eds. Theodoret Kirchengeschichte. GCS NF 5. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998. Rebillard, É. Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200– 450 CE. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. Rennie, B. and P.L. Tite, eds. Religion, Terror, and Violence: Religious Studies Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2008. Sauer, E. The Archaeology of Religious Hatred in the Roman and Early Medieval World. Stroud: Tempus, 2003. el-Sayed, R. “Schenute und die Tempel von Atripe. Zur Umnutzung des Triphisbezirks in der Spätantike.” Pages 519–38 in Honi soit qui mal y pense. Studien zum pharaonischen, griechisch-römischen und spätantiken Ägypten zu Ehren von Heinz-Josef Thissen. Edited by H. Knuf, C. Leitz, and D. von Recklinghausen. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 194. Leuven: Peeters, 2010. el-Sayed, R. and Y. el-Masry. Athribis I. General Site Survey 2003–2007; Archaeological & Conservation Studies; the Gate of Ptolemy IX: Architecture and Inscriptions. 2 vols. Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2012. Schwartz, E. and Th. Mommsen, eds. Eusebius Werke, vol. 2.2. GCS NF 6.2. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999. Shaw, B. Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Sizgorich, Th. Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam. Divinations. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Thelamon, F. Païens et chrétiens au IVe siècle: l’apport de l’“Histoire ecclésiastique” de Rufin d’Aquilée. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1981. Trombley, F.R. Hellenic Religion and Christianization, c. 370–529. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1993–1994. Ward Perkins, B. “Reconfiguring Sacred Space: From Pagan Shrines to Christian Churches.” Pages 285–90 in Die spätantike Stadt und ihre Christianisierung. Edited by G. Brands and H.-G. Severin. Spätantike – frühes Christentum – Byzanz: Kunst im ersten Jahrtausend. Reihe B, Studien und Perspektiven 11. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2003. Watts, E.J. Riot in Alexandria: Tradition and Group Dynamics in Late Antique Pagan and Christian Communities. Transformation of the Classical Heritage 46. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. Wipszycka, E. “La christianisation de l’Égypte aux IVe – VIe siècles. Aspects sociaux et ethniques.” Aegyptus 68 (1988): 117–65. Repr. pages 63–105 in Études sur le christianisme dans l’Égypte de l’Antiquité tardive. Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 52. Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, 1996.

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10 “A WISE MADNESS” A virtue-based model for crowd behaviour in late antiquity Peter Van Nuffelen This chapter1 contributes only indirectly to the study of religious conflict in late antiquity. It is concerned with a form of violence that is often studied under the label “religious violence,” namely riotous behaviour by crowds against buildings, symbols, and individuals of other religious groups. Instead of studying this as a separate form of violence, I seek to embed these phenomena in a wider study of crowd behaviour. The reason is that such “religious violence” assumes the same forms as violence directed against civic, imperial or economic targets. An understanding of crowd behaviour in general is thus an essential preliminary to the study of such phenomena. Besides offering a contextualisation for “religious violence,” I shall seek to analyse crowd behaviour with categories employed by late ancient authors themselves. Whereas modern sociology is commonly preferred as an explanatory framework (section 1), I argue in favour of a virtue-based model, which I briefly ground in the De officiis of Ambrose of Milan (section 2). After setting out how this model helps us to make sense of late ancient descriptions of crowd behaviour and violence (Section 3), I end by showing how such actions were profoundly meaningful, not just in the eyes of the beholders but also in their actual reality. In other words, crowd behaviour is shaped by the geographical and ceremonial contexts in which they took place, as well as by implicit assumptions about how social relations function. In this chapter, I defend a weak and a strong thesis. The weak thesis is that the model is adequate so as to help us understand the representations of riots in late ancient sources. In other words, the model shapes representations in historiography, rhetoric, letters, etc. and is thus crucial to help us grasp how crowd behaviour was perceived in late antiquity. This will draw attention to the dissonance between ancient representations and modern analyses, between, on the one hand, a focus on virtue and character and, on the other, one on interests and the state. This dissonance creates epistemological problems, as modern scholars need to find evidence for their sociological understanding of crowds in narratives that have a fundamentally different focus. They tend to solve this problem by discussing emic understandings under the label of “ideology” or “discourse” and by analysing actual behaviour through sociological models.2 234

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My strong thesis contests this disjunction and argues that the model also shaped actual behaviour and hence is also a model to help understand late ancient crowd action. If the weak thesis is uncontroversial, in contrast to the strong one, I think the former entails the latter. As this chapter will show, a representation is a normative form of perception of the world, that is, it implies value judgements about actions. It is implausible to assume that such value judgements only impacted on how actions were perceived and not on how individuals acted. Indeed, the actions of individuals are influenced and shaped by what they think and hence by their views and understandings. An ethical view never is merely a judgement on reality: it also entails guidance for future action. A  different way of framing the argument would be to say that ancient representations in historiography or rhetoric are at least plausible versions of reality: as these texts seek to persuade their readers that their accounts are truthful, their representations have to be at least realistic. Obviously, they will direct the interpretation of the reader by emphasising certain elements or omitting others, but this can only be a strategy of conviction if the course of action represented is recognised as plausible by the audience. This does not mean that modern sociology is invalid as a mode of analysis but one should be aware of the fact that it relies on very different presuppositions of why individuals act, presuppositions that are not neutral but normative in their own right.3 Indeed, we shall see that the virtue-based model relies on presuppositions about humanity and society that are different from those that modern sociology brings to the analysis. Modern sociological theory may offer gains in insight, but also distort our access to antiquity and even prejudge the conclusions. The limits of this chapter do not allow me to expand the theoretical discussion. Scholars who disagree with my strong thesis can hopefully still draw profit from the weak one.

Understanding crowd behaviour in late antiquity Religious violence in late antiquity has received much scholarly attention. This focus goes back to, first, the Reformation, when post-Constantinian violence was seen as a proof of the lapse of the Church, and, second, the Enlightenment, which in its anti-clerical variant emphasised the disruptive role of the Church in society. Such master narratives have heavily influenced scholarship, for example in its tendency to see religiously inspired violence as a new phenomenon in late antiquity and deny its existence in Classical antiquity.4 It has also led to the unreflective use of the category of “religious violence,” denoting a particular form of violence that supposedly can be studied in its own right. Scholars usually understand the term to indicate actions of violence by religious individuals and groups against other religious groups, symbols or objects. Paradigmatic acts are the destruction of temples and synagogues. The blind spot in this approach is, however, that such actions are formally hard to distinguish from other violent actions. Not only temples and cult statues were destroyed, but also palaces and imperial statues. The behaviour of crowds when attacking heretics is also hard to distinguish from how 235

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unjust governors were dealt with. “Religious violence,” then, needs to be studied within the context of general violence in late antiquity.5 This chapter proposes to do this for one specific type of violence, namely riots. Riots involve crowds, which express their disaffection by gathering, making themselves heard, and possibly committing violent acts. They are prominently reported in all types of sources from late antiquity, indicating that it was perceived to be a noteworthy phenomenon in this period. They also occur everywhere, even though scholarship has tended to privilege Rome and Constantinople.6 Historical analyses of such violent collective actions (as sociologists would call them) tend to follow explanations offered in the social sciences. Relying on older theories of collective psychology, it used to be said that crowds behave irrationally and are driven by frenzy.7 This may now seldom be used as an explanation for crowd behaviour, but the view nevertheless has some value. Ancient sources tend to represent crowds as driven by emotions. This does not mean that crowds behave fundamentally different from individuals, but that that they are more susceptible to be guided by the non-rational parts of the soul. Moreover, in contrast to some of the positions that follow, this view offers an explanation for possible violent behaviour, by suggesting that the irrational behaviour of crowds is already one step in that direction. This is not to say that this is a successful explanation, but other current models of analysis do not always seem to be able to explain why a collective action turns violent. Most explanations nowadays rely on variations of the following three models. Older scholarship sees the mob as subservient to, and directed by, elite interests. Clashes in the populace are, then, proxy fights for elite interests.8 In the case of religious violence, this model ascribes mob behaviour to the direction of the bishop. If the crowd certainly could be manipulated in some instances, such an explanation is not satisfactory, as it tends to deny the agency of the crowd and is therefore forced to discount the ancient evidence that suggests otherwise (see later). A  second model emphasises the utilitarian nature of the demands of the crowds: they make specific self-serving demands, such as a better provision of food.9 In other words, the crowd intervenes with very specific demands and is inherently conservative. This may be true, but late ancient riots do not necessarily stop when demands are fulfilled nor are crowds always acting out of selfinterest, as we shall see. A third model starts out from the idea that riots reflect the structural breakdown of society. When “the established organization ceases to afford direction and supply channels for action,” so this view holds, collective action occurs.10 The omnipresence of riots in late antiquity can, on such an understanding, be read as a sign of the inherent weakness of the state and thus a sign of the decline associated with the period. In a positive interpretation, collective action becomes a source of systemic change, a notion that is now especially popularised by Charles Tilly. In his view, collective action identifies weaknesses in, and promotes improvements of, society and state.11 Maybe this idea has heuristic value for modern Western history but its identification of the people as agents of positive change betrays too much a modern and Whig idea of “democracy” 236

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(identifying the people as the main agent of the progress of political history over and against the elites) to be a useful tool for antiquity. We do not see late ancient crowds driving, or aiming at, systemic change. Each of these models highlights important aspects but none of them provides a fully satisfactory explanation of ancient riots. What they all share, however, is a view of humanity that posits that he is driven by interests (as a member of the elite or of a crowd), seeks to obtain and influence power, and functions within social structures that are implied to be those of the state. This betrays that we are dealing with modern theories of man. As we shall presently see, the view of humanity and of social relations underpinning late ancient descriptions of riots and crowd behaviour is fundamentally different. Behaviour is judged in function of the social role the agent occupies, a role defined by the relationship between agents and the moral duties this entails. In the case of crowds, the crucial idea is that of a relationship of justice between the crowd and a leader, as theorised by Ambrose of Milan.

Crowd, leader, and justice In the middle of the second book of De officiis, Ambrose comments on the importance of justice for men in leading positions. “Justice, therefore, is a wonderful commendation for men who occupy any responsible position; injustice, on the other hand, induces people to desert them and turn against them.”12 To illustrate the point, he narrates how the people of Israel turned away from Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, when their demand for a moderation of the rule of his father was rejected by the king. Instead, following the advice of young men, he added to the weight of their yoke. Provoked by this response, the people replied: “We have no portion with David, no inheritance among the sons of Jesse. To your tents, each of you, O Israel!” – this man will be no ruler or leader to us. So, deserted and forsaken by the people, he only just managed to hold the two tribes together – and even that was achieved only on account of the merits of David.13 To turn the story into an exemplum, Ambrose has adapted the biblical account in small but significant ways.14 He has left out the presence of Jeroboam, the brother and rival of Rehoboam, at the deliberations of the people and has heightened their hardship by the use of the word servitus (slavery). The Book of Kings specifies that Rehoboam followed the advice of the young men with whom he was raised, instead of heeding the elder councillors. Ambrose leaves out this shared education with the young men and focuses the story on the more simple identification of wisdom with age: Rehoboam fails to listen to wise advice. He also renders more explicit that it is the people who decide to reject Rehoboam as their leader. 237

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In this way, the story becomes a straightforward illustration of Ambrose’s argument that a ruler cannot rule unjustly, for this will lead to a rift between him and the people. Ambrose has modelled the biblical events on those of his own age – or, at least, fourth-century sources contain representations of conflicts between emperor and people that are strikingly similar.15 He spells out the moral nature of the relationship between ruler and ruled: “It is clear, then, that fairness imparts strength to a rule (imperium) and injustice reduces it to ruins.”16 Corrupt practice (malitia) is detrimental to a state as much as it is to a family. Kindness (benignitas) is needed, and especially goodwill (benevolentia): Goodwill is of the greatest assistance here, for it makes us eager to embrace people everywhere with acts of kindness (beneficia), to capture their hearts by performing services for them (officia), and to win their allegiance by showing them favour (gratia).17 Beneficia, officia, gratia – these three words express the nature of the relationship that Ambrose envisages between ruler and ruled, indeed between individuals in general. Social relationships rest thus on a moral foundation of benevolence. In the example of Rehoboam, where the relationship is (as we would call it) political in nature, justice is the key virtue. Such a moral foundation renders social relations inherently marked by reciprocity. Although the relationship is hierarchical, the idea is not only that the ruler must be just towards his subjects, but the latter must also be just towards the former. Relations are ruptured when the moral foundation is not respected. This virtue-based account of political interaction has three features. First, the crowd and the ruler stand in a personal relation. Crucially, the crowd is represented and acts as a person. These persons possess virtues, that is, they are a certain sort of person, in this case one whose character favours justice. Second, Rehoboam occupies a social role: expectations of justice are projected onto him as a ruler. He needs to actualise this role in his concrete dealings with the people. In other words, he has to prove at each instance that he is indeed the kind of person who has justice as a character trait. Although it is not rendered explicit in the story, we may assume that the crowd also performs a social role: it is not a mere aggregation of individuals but it incarnates the role of people. Indeed, it is unlikely that in the story the whole of the people of Israel confronted Rehoboam: the gathered crowd instantiates the whole people. Such social roles come with moral expectations, which shape the occupant of that role and his relations with other individuals, but which also need to be performed and renegotiated. Third, if the relationship is primarily binary, it is embedded in a more complex social web: Ambrose mentions the presence of advisors to the king, who occupy a different social role and are in a different relationship to king and people.

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Rehoboam is, in the hands of Ambrose, an exemplum, a vignette that highlights only essential features. Even in this stylised form it reflects an understanding of social relations that contrasts with modern sociological approaches. Whereas Ambrose strictly focuses on the relationship of ruler and people and emphasises its moral dimension, modern analyses tend to see the behaviour of crowds as being determined by the nature of the society and the state in which they take place. In such a view, moral convictions are secondary to practices shaped by social interactions.18 We shall see that in late ancient descriptions of crowd behaviour structures of society and state are implicitly present but not used to explain behaviour. Attention is focused on the binary social relation. Moreover, Ambrose does not have a theory of practice that can be dissociated from a moral theory. For him a description of human action is intrinsically tied to a theory of good behaviour. By contrast, modern scholars tend to separate fact and value,19 which for historians takes the form of the separation of event and representation.

Representations of crowds After this exposition of the interpretative framework, let us turn to two examples of late antique riots to see, first, what kind of phenomenon we are dealing with and, second, how the framework just delineated works in practice. After conflicts with his clergy, monks, and the secular élite of Constantinople, John Chrysostom was deposed as bishop of that city by the Synod of the Oak in 403. Notwithstanding strong popular support in the streets, John did not dare to disobey the imperial order to leave for exile, wishing to avoid the additional accusation of sedition. In the account of the church historian Sozomen (writing ca. 445), the people got vent of this, and “rioted and insulted the emperor, the synod, Theophilus [of Alexandria], and Severian [of Gabala].”20 The latter, a sworn enemy of John, defied the crowds and preached a sermon that approved of John’s exile. If Severian had hoped to persuade the crowd of the justice of the decision, he was sorely mistaken: “the people turned mad, renewed their anger and rioted in the extreme.”21 They went to the imperial palace and requested the return of John. “Yielding to the demands of the people, the empress persuaded her husband to agree” and John was recalled.22 The people received him with chants and acclamations. Against his own wish that a council should first annul his deposition, the people put him on his see again. After a sermon in which John praised the imperial couple, the people also addressed acclamations to them. Sozomen offers us a compressed and, as a partisan of John,23 slightly apologetic version: he depicts the riot as starting from a manifest injustice and ending with redress. Other sources indicate that it were less the demands of the people than the sudden miscarriage of Eudoxia during the riots, interpreted as a sign of divine displeasure, that decided the issue, a fact that Sozomen decided to ignore.24 A year later, after the second deposition of John, the emperor resisted similar riots but this time used force to quell them.25 The 403 riots, as depicted by Sozomen, are

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an example of how a fifth-century author would see a justified, successful riot, in contrast with the less favourable outcome of 404. Indeed, another supporter of John described the state of the crowd as a “wise madness” (sophron mania).26 This oxymoron is striking: whereas mania implies a loss of control, sophron hints at the opposite. In other words, the crowd may seem to have been out of control, but it acted for the right cause. The overall structure of the episode marks a flow from insults to acclamations: the episode opens with the people insulting the emperor and Severian, and concludes with the reconciliation between people and emperor, expressed in acclamations. Insults and acclamations are two sides of the same coin, expressions of positive or negative views, addressed to a particular individual, usually a hierarchically superior one.27 Communication is not unidirectional: Severian challenges the crowd and unwittingly renews its anger, whereas John appeases it. Because the emperor had yielded fully to the demands of the supporters of John, it may seem as if it was not a hard task for the bishop to calm the people. But John was not in full control: even Sozomen admits that he was forced on his see without nullification of his deposition (which would be the pretext for his second exile a year later). John and the crowd found themselves in a situation of give and take. If the crowd responded to a manifest injustice (at least in the eyes of Sozomen), this was clearly not an undisputed fact: Severian takes up the challenge of convincing the crowd that the deposition was justified. With both Severian and John addressing the crowd, we clearly see that it was part of the bishop’s role to appease the people in such circumstances. We also see that there are two opinions about what is exactly just and that attempts at persuasion take place. Yet, the narrative clearly shows John, not Severian, to be the real bishop of the people: he succeeds in calming them and re-establishing the relationship with them. If Sozomen attributes an important role to verbal and reasoned communication, a quixotic episode of the Nika riot (532), as reported by John the Lydian, highlights other qualities. The Nika riot started with popular demands for the release of prisoners and because of the wavering of Justinian expanded into a popular revolt ending in the popular proclamation of a new emperor. One of the initial demands of the people was the sacking of the praetorian prefect John the Cappadocian. Justinian complied and appointed the patrician Phocas instead.28 John the Lydian profoundly disliked the Cappadocian for curtailing his career in the administration (or, as he himself would think of it, for overturning longestablished tradition). His praise of Phocas is therefore fulsome. John’s panegyric of the new prefect ends in a description of what happened when he left the imperial palace. Whilst Phocas was standing on his chariot, somebody from the still rioting people aimed an arrow at him, but missed. Untouched, Phocas was clearly shown to be a man of providence. When this had happened, the people started to abandon weapons and disorders, and continuously praised the all-powerful emperor, engaged

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in celebrations and dances. From the worst disorders and fears they changed to flutes and dances.29 As John the Lydian does not say anything about the Nika riot anymore, he can be taken to make the panegyrical suggestion to those of his audience with bad memories that the accession of Phocas marked the end of the riot. We notice the same transition as in Sozomen of a riotous crowd critical of the emperor to one that bursts into acclamations of the emperor. The event that triggered this transformation was, at first sight, entirely fortuitous: a thwarted assassination. Clearly, it is not just the fact that Phocas was not hurt. Had he shown fear and ordered his soldiers to violently seek out the culprit, the riot would not have died down. It was probably his keen exploitation of what could be seen as a miraculous event that triggered the change in the behaviour of the crowd. Phocas, then, performed his role as prefect with self-confidence, sending a message of firmness to the crowd, making it realise that it had overstepped boundaries. This analysis permits the following conclusions. First, Sozomen and John the Lydian suggest a similar structure to riots: they drift from insults to acclamations, from a rupture of the relationship with the leader to its re-establishment. Throughout the process, communication remains possible. This basic structure can be found in many other episodes.30 The main exception are riots in which communication absolutely breaks down, as in the Nika riot, and which often end in violent suppression. Policing measures and force, nowadays often seen as the only conceivable response to a riot, were recognised as the ultimate but not most useful way of dealing with a crowd.31 Personal intervention and persuasion, by the emperor, bishop or other officials, was evidently the more commendable response. Second, both episodes revolve around justice: actions by social superiors are challenged by the crowd. If the stories are obviously partisan and suggest which side had justice on its side, it is also clear that justice is not an objective fact but a state of affairs about which one can argue. It needs to be established and agreed upon. This does not mean, however, that the relationship is one of equals. Crowd behaviour is usually associated with lack of intelligence and wisdom, briefly: with mania. This does not imply that the crowd is always wrong: in such circumstances, the leader has to adapt and perform his role by giving in or finding a compromise. In 513, for example, John of Jerusalem upheld the Council of Chalcedon only after being demanded to do so during the procession towards the church where he was to accept the anti-Chalcedonian Severus of Antioch in communion.32 Justice had therefore to be redefined for the specific circumstances and accepted by both sides. Faced with the ubiquity of riots in our sources, it has been suggested that the people had a “right to riot.”33 If taken to mean in a modern legal-positivist sense that the people had to right to riot whatever the cause and whatever their grounds, this is mistaken. The action of the crowd had to be focused on justice and, as we have seen, justice was not always considered to be on the people’s side. In the ancient analysis, a riot is rather a regrettable yet possible outcome of

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a malfunctioning relationship between a group and a leader, that is, a relation of injustice rather than justice. Third, riots take place within the social relationship between a group and a leader, and both appear as actors in their own right. Late antique crowds can indeed be seen to actively seek to establish the direct, personal relationship that the virtue-based model requires. For example, during a riot in 580 in Constantinople, the dissatisfied people requested a processus from the prefect.34 As such public appearances were occasions when demands could be made, the crowd therefore expressed its wish to communicate. The fourth-century orator Libanius notes how governors who are unwilling to accept petitions, fear to go out into the agora, as acclamations and demands will be shouted at them.35 As in the two examples I have discussed, most accounts focus on the leader and his response to the crowd. Yet the crowd often appears as an actor too. Crowds saved prisoners from executions,36 forced bishops to be consecrated,37 killed pagans,38 defended orthodoxy,39 etc. Crowds could pursue a good cause and express just anger, but they always risked losing control. Facing a crowd could, hence, be dangerous: more than one prefect or bishop lost his life at the hands of an angry mob.40 Fourth, the individuals (bishop, prefect, etc.) to whom the people address their demands have to perform their social role. They do not simply have to exercise power, but to gain command of difficult and unexpected situations by conspicuous actions that establish that they truly are just. Such actions, in turn, reflect awareness of the expectations that come with the role: they have to show that they are “up to it.” A social role is therefore not a mere catalogue of functions and duties: it means performing these duties in accordance with the moral expectations that come with holding that position and in line with the demands of specific situations. In Aristotelian terms, it is all about the exercise of phronesis. This helps us to understand why leaders rarely avoided the crowd, even if it could be lifethreatening to confront it: avoiding the crowd implies that one is not up to one’s role. In fact, we see numerous attempts to appease the crowd in a variety of ways: by weeping;41 through the performance of humility, e.g., by the deposition of marks of office;42 by symbolic gestures; but first and foremost by persuasion.43 Fifth, the description of how leaders deal with crowds is suffused with moral valuation. Given that justice lies at the heart of the relationship, the description of actual behaviour is always measured against a standard of good behaviour. Indeed, strong leaders are depicted as succeeding in appeasing the crowd and could even have the authority to admonish it, as did Augustine by preaching a sermon on obedience after facing an unruly congregation.44 The calming of crowds was indeed expected of bishops, as expressly stated by Severus of Antioch: It is the duty of bishops like you to cut short and to restrain any unregulated movements of the mob, if they should indeed occur, and to set themselves to maintain all good order in the cities, and to keep watch over the peaceful manners and customs of those who are fed by them.45

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A similar ethos was expected of governors, as one can gather from Libanius.46 The reverse image is also amply attested: it is a feature of evil leaders to cause riots and incite the mobs. So much is stated explicitly by Leo the Great, who blames the post-Chalcedon riots in Palestine on “false monks.” These are obviously antiChalcedonians, but it is significant that he rejects their identity as monks: true monks are instruments of peace. Elsewhere Leo notes that leaders may incite the ignorant mob to riot so as to obscure their own guilt.47 We see here that the modern idea of bishops or aristocrats as the true instigators of popular riots is rooted in ancient sources,48 but depicts as standard behaviour what the sources describe as deviant behaviour.49 The negative connotation of mob violence also explains the contrasting versions we get from some events if they are attested in sources from different camps.50 The blame is shifted to the other side by claiming they instigated the violence. The shared assumption is that mob violence is something evil. Being able to deal with a crowd was, then, part of the expected behaviour of a leader. What the right course of action was had to be decided on the spot. Given the moral expectations that covered such actions, all our descriptions of riots in the ancient sources are morally charged, that is, in the narrative itself blame and praise is apportioned, even when the judgement is not explicitly expressed.51

The meaning of action The previous section has added some flesh to the bones of the model as drawn from Ambrose. In the last pages I have already made the transition from presenting the model as a tool to understand late ancient representations to suggesting that it helps to make sense of the actual behaviour of crowds in late antiquity. It helps, I argue, to understand the peculiar features of crowd behaviour as reported by the sources: in other words, we see crowds behave and episodes develop in line with the model. In this section, I  shall discuss one peculiar episode from the Chronicon Paschale to argue that there is not just meaning in the narrative but also in the action itself. I shall do so by relating the actions described by the chronicle to other actions. For the consulship of Basiliscus and Armenarichus, our year AD 465, the Pascal chronicle records the following incident in Constantinople: In the time of these consuls Menas, who was prefect of the Watch, being accused of evil deeds, was questioned in the Hippodrome by the senate, and at the command of the emperor a boy tripped him up and threw him on his face in the deep part at the Hippodrome turning-post, and the people took hold of him and began to drag him. And the officials, when they saw what had happened, withdrew in fear. And they dragged the man as far as the estate of Studius; and a certain Goth took a stone and struck him on the ear and killed him. And his corpse was dragged by the people as far as the sea.52

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As the chief “police officer,” the further unknown Menas would have had many occasions for mischief and corruption, or he may have been unloved by large swaths of the population for confusing strictness with harshness. The trial was distinctively public. The court seems to have been composed of the senate and the emperor,53 and the proceedings were conducted in the hippodrome. This setting consciously made it a popular trial: the hippodrome was in late antiquity the symbolic place for communication between emperor and subject. The hearing therefore probably had the aim of conspicuously redressing a wrong done to the population of Constantinople. Just having the trial conducted in the face of all was not enough for emperor Leo: he wanted to make Menas’ fall from power manifest by the public humiliation of the former praefectus vigilum. The act of tripping up Menas turned out to be a miscalculation: the breach of well-ordered judicial procedure seems to have been taken by the people as the sign that justice was now in their hands. Just like many unlucky officials before him Menas was dragged through the city, from the Hippodrome in the east of the city to the Palace of Studius in the west, stoned, and finally dumped in the sea. The author of the Pascal Chronicle recorded this event not because this was a noteworthy event for the history of the Roman Empire but as a vignette revealing Leo’s failures as an emperor. Indeed, Leo’s manipulation of the trial backfired. He may have hoped to receive positive acclamations from the crowd and to transform their displeasure at Menas into personal credit. Yet, the emperor misjudged the situation and thus showed a lack of skill and insight in crowd behaviour. As we have seen, it was part of a good leader to be able to deal with a crowd and to control it. Leo, by contrast, fails on all accounts: he first makes himself subservient to it by seeking to please it and then his actions spectacularly backfire. If, then, there is meaning in the representation, there is also meaning in the action. Menas was far from the only late antique official to die of being “dragged.”54 The crowd thus drew on what is usually called a repertoire, that is, a set of a stereotypical acts. Yet “repertoire” may convey too static an impression, as if the repertoire was a set of scripts proper to crowd behaviour. In fact, such acts acquire meaning not just by being repeated by crowds, but also, and more importantly by taking place against the background of the ceremonial landscape of late antiquity, and this in two ways. First, the late antique city was not a neutral landscape, but a geography invested with meaning. The late antique state had a well-developed ceremonial life, with a wide range of ceremonies that our sources usually identify with precision, such as the adventus (the arrival of the emperor or an official in a city), the processus (an official journey by the emperor in or out the city), victory celebrations, imperial anniversaries, and consular festivities, including circus games. Both the slow transformations of these celebrations by the progressive Christianisation and the transferral of their forms to ecclesiastical ceremonies, such as the festive transport of relics or the arrival of a bishop, have been documented in detail.55 Such ceremonies usually followed particular routes and took places at particular places, giving these places a particular significance in collective understanding. 244

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Second, these ceremonies provided points of reference for crowds, who often can be seen to mimic and mock official ceremonies.56 We see crowds imitating victory celebrations and parading heads on poles as armies did with dead opponents and usurpers,57 or staging an adventus ceremony for the image of long-defunct bishop.58 Evagrius Scholasticus records how a crowd under Justinian lacerated a comes Orientis with whips and paraded him through the city, as revenge for him having had some rioters whipped.59 In an extraordinary display of public discontent, the people of Constantinople stoned Maurice during a procession and in an act of satire on the emperor, they put a bald man with garlic on his head onto an ass.60 Crowds could also imitate ecclesiastical processions. In Nicomedia the local population protested against the imposition of an unwanted bishop by taking to the streets and chanting psalms, as they were wont to do, the church historian Sozomen points outs, during catastrophes.61 The action of dragging Menas from the hippodrome towards the city gates can, then, be interpreted as an inversion of an adventus ceremony, in which an official entered the city and was acclaimed by the people in a public place like the theatre or hippodrome. Menas is rejected from the city community, whereas the official during the adventus is accepted.62 The actions of the crowd thus acquired meaning by being performed against the background of a symbolically mapped landscape of the late antique city. This example may provide one way to show how the virtue-based model may have shaped crowd behaviour. Most of the public ceremonies were focused on a leader (emperor, governor, bishop) but they also had an important participation by the people. They were, then, occasions when, usually in a staged way, concord between leader and crowd was marked. If these ceremonies marked occasions when relations of justice were acted out (and thus also enacted), riotous behaviour can be seen both as challenges of particular relations and as expressions of a desire to return to a relationship of justice, a relationship that is in line with the ideal that ceremonies displayed. On this understanding, public ceremonies were not cynical displays of propaganda or merely scripted displays of consensus but enactments of ideal relationships.

Conclusions The model sketched in this paper understands crowd behaviour as taking place primarily within a binary social relationship between the crowd and a leader. It presupposes that crowds are agents and, indeed, persons, possessing character traits. Both the leader and the crowd occupy social roles which are defined by a mutual interdependence predicated on justice. These roles are not static, as there can be disagreement about the justice of particular situations and actions. Highly morally charged, social roles need to be actualised in specific circumstances. The conflicts that then arise are acted out within the relationship: the leader aims at persuasion, whilst the people communicate through acclamations, symbolic acts, or even violence. Actions, then, are shaped and judged by normative expectations. 245

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A set of expectations governs the actions of the leader, but also that of the crowd. If the behaviour of the latter is usually negatively charged (“madness”), it can, sometimes, make righteous demands on the leader (“wise”). Acephalous crowds do occur, but they are understood as unstable entities that await a return to a stable relationship with a leader. It will have transpired that the virtue-based model has a more limited focus than modern sociology. In my summary, the terms “society” and “state” are absent and they do not have an explanatory value. Crowd behaviour is described with reference to particular social relationships with leaders, and not with reference to general structures of society and state. If institutions appear, it is through its representatives (emperors, governors, bishops, etc.), who are, however, not identified as representatives of institutions but as persons. I do not claim that “state” or “society” are useless concepts for late antiquity, nor that institutions had weakened to be replaced by informal social relations. Rather, it is important to realise that the binary relationship is the primary context in which social realities are perceived in late antiquity. At best, “society” appears as a collection of morally charged social roles connected through relationships. The relationship is explicitly hierarchical: the crowd is in principle inferior, socially and morally, to its leader (that is, if he fulfils his role properly). In other words, the leader is supposed to be a better character than the crowd. Nevertheless both share the same morality: if there can be debate about what constitutes justice in a particular case, there is no hint that leaders and crowds live by two distinct moral codes.63 Both orient themselves onto a shared morality, which is, ideally, supposed to guide behaviour. As a consequence, all descriptions of crowds take place against a background of ideal right behaviour. Because the relationship is moral, it is also content-related. By this I mean that an analysis that sees crowd behaviour primarily as practices that denote acceptance or rejection of the position of the leader64 falls short by not seeing that concrete instances of justice and injustice defined the relationship. Acceptance is an epiphenomenon to justice. We can now understand why late ancient representations of crowds take the shape they have. They have more attention for the development of conflicts and their resolution than for the reasons of the conflict (be they religious, economic, or political). The focus is the binary relationship in which virtue and vice are enacted, and not possible fundamental problems in social structures. This generates obvious problems for modern analysis, which seeks to distil sequences of events from what are prescriptive descriptions and attempts to relate these to social and political structures. This dissonance between ancient and modern interests helps to understand why the modern explanations surveyed in the first section of this chapter remain unsatisfactory: whilst they have points of contacts with the model just outlined, none of them covers all its aspects. For example, late antique riots can be said to be caused by a breakdown, but it is situated on the level of the social relation, not on that of society. Selfish motifs are allowed for by the virtue-based model, but as a negatively charged possibility: the pursuance of self-interest conflicts with the moral expectations of social roles. If the model is clearly hierarchical, 246

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it highlights the agency of the crowd. It would require much more discussion to set out all implications of a view of society as made up of binary relationships and social roles, but one can see why justice in the virtue-based model does not cover institutions such as slavery, which we would call structural injustice. Is this a workable model to explain real behaviour and not just its representation? As my analysis of the Menas episode suggests, crowd behaviour was meaningful. Some of the peculiarities in recorded episodes, such as crowds seeking direct contact with a leader, imply that it did shape behaviour. Its articulation in normative texts, such as De officiis of Ambrose, suggests that it was seen as (at least) a model to direct one’s actions by. Given the fact that this is a model in which the theory of behaviour is normative (that is, it identifies what good and what bad behaviour is, not just was behaviour is), it may be important to stress that my argument that it also shaped real action does not imply that all behaved morally right. Rather, it provides the standards by which one’s action would be judged and people do deviate from moral standards. Rather, by being aware of this normative model, agents at least would anticipate the standard by which they would be measured. But, as we have seen, what was justice in a particular situation could be far from clear. This may be one reason why we see such a multiplication of episodes of crowd behaviour reported in our sources: whilst it may reflect the multiplication of hierarchical relations in late antiquity, with the Church creating a structure that ran parallel to that of society and state, we may understand it also as an increased interest in the quality of leadership.

Notes 1 Research for this study was started during a fellowship at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, the Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (2012–2013). The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n. 313153. 2 A good illustration is Richard D. Finn, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire: Christian Promotion and Practice (313–450) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), who discusses discourse and function of almsgiving separately (189–90, 218–20). The separation of the two levels is strongly defended by Egon Flaig, one of the few ancient historians to articulate his theoretical presuppositions. He sees practices as primary and values and discourse as secondary. In his view, we can study actions separate from thoughts and string practices together into meaningful series that can be studied independently from ideas about humanity or society: Egon Flaig, Den Kaiser Herausfordern: Die Usurpation im Römischen Reich (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1992), 1–20; id., Ritualisierte Politik: Zeichen, Gesten und Herrschaft im Alten Rom (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck  & Ruprecht, 2003), 163, 260. His model is inspired by that of Pierre Bourdieu, who suggested his theory worked for all periods and who is, for that reason, very popular among historians. For the limited applicability of his theories, see, however, Danilo Martuccelli, Sociologies de la modernité: L’itinéraire du XXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 140–41. 3 For the view that modern sociology also presupposes a certain view of humanity, which entails certain normative presuppositions, see Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 2007), 23–35.

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4 For further discussion, see Wendy Mayer, “Religious Conflict: Definitions, Problems and Theoretical Approaches,” in Religious Conflict from Early Christianity to the Rise of Islam, ed. W. Mayer and B. Neil (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 1–19; Jan Bremmer, “Religious Violence Between Greeks, Romans, Christians and Jews,” in Violence in Ancient Christianity: Victims and Perpetrators, ed. A.C. Geljon and R. Roukema, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 125 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 8–30; Peter Van Nuffelen, “Religious Violence in Late Antiquity,” in The Cambridge World History of Violence, vol. 1, ed. L. Fibinger, G.G. Fagan, and M. Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), forthcoming. For a discussion not limited to antiquity, see William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 5 For analyses that show the similarity in forms, see Geoffrey Greatrex, “The Nika Riot: A Reappraisal,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 117 (1997): 60–86; Troels Myrup Kristensen, Making and Breaking the Gods: Christian Responses to Pagan Sculpture in Late Antiquity (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2013). For the pervasive presence of violence in antiquity, see Wilfried Nippel, Public Order in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 47–69; Jill Harries, Law and Crime in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 108; Cam Grey, Constructing Communities in the Late Roman Countryside (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 153–4: Ari Z. Bryen, Violence in Roman Egypt: A Study in Legal Interpretation (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); JensUwe Krause, Gewalt und Kriminalität in der Spätantike (München: C.H. Beck, 2014). One should add that violence is neither a purely descriptive category (it has a negative charge in modern usage) nor a static one (what counts as violence today is not necessarily violence in antiquity). For sake of clarity I simply assume we know what violence is. 6 Hans Peter Kohns, Versorgungskrisen und Hungerrevolten im spätantiken Rom (Bonn: Habelt, 1961); Alan Cameron, Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); David R. French, “Rhetoric and the Rebellion of A.D. 387 in Antioch,” Historia 47 (1998): 468–84; Gilbert Dagron, L’hippodrome de Constantinople: Jeux, peuple et politique (Paris: Gallimard, 2011); Júlio César Magalhâes de Oliveira, Potestas populi: participation populaire et action collective dans les villes de l’Afrique romaine tardive (vers 300–430 apr. J.-C) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012); Rene Pfeilschifter, Der Kaiser und Konstantinopel: Kommunikation und Konfliktaustrag in einer spätantiken Metropole (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013). 7 See these classics: Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des foules (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1991 = 1895); Elias Canetti, Masse und Macht (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1981 = 1961). It underlies the views of Cameron, Circus Factions, 227; Ramsay MacMullen, “The Historical Role of the Masses in Late Antiquity,” in Changes in the Roman Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 250–76; Joaquín Martínez Pizarro, Writing Ravenna: The Liber Pontificalis of Andreas Agnellus (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 148. For a critique on such views, see Nicholas Purcell, “The Populace of Rome in Late Antiquity: Problems of Classification and Historical Description,” in The Transformations of Urbs Roma in Late Antiquity, ed. W.V. Harris (Portsmouth: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1999), 135–61, esp. 160. 8 Cf. Neil Smelser, Theory of Collective Behaviour (London: Routledge, 1962), 262–3. For antiquity, see Alfred N. Sherwin-White, “Violence in Roman Politics,” Journal of Roman Studies 46 (1956): 1–10; Peter A. Brunt, “The Roman Mob,” Past & Present 35 (1966): 3–27; Hans Peter Kohns, “Innerstädische Krisen in der römischen Kaiserzeit,” in Macht und Kultur im Rom der Kaiserzeit, ed. K. Rosen (Bonn: Habelt, 1994), 165–79; Rita Lizzi Testa, “Discordia in urbe: Pagani e Cristiani in rivolta,” in Pagani e Cristiani da Giuliano l’Apostata al Sacco di Roma: Atti del Convegno Internazionale

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9

10

11

12 13

14 15

16 17 18 19 20

di Studi (Rende, 12/13 Novembre 1993), ed. F.E. Consolino (Messina: Soveria Mannelli, 1995), 115–40; Thomas S. Brown, “Urban Violence in Early Medieval Italy: The Cases of Rome and Ravenna,” in Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West, ed. G. Halsall (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998), 76–89; Lellia Cracco Ruggini, “Clientele e violenze urbane a Roma tra IV e VI secolo,” in Corruzione, repressione e rivolta morale nella tarda Antichità, ed. R. Soraci (Catania: CULC, 1999), 7–52. For critique, see Neil McLynn, “Christian Controversy and Violence in the Fourth Century,” Kodai 3 (1992): 15–44; Michael Whitby, “Factions, Bishops, Violence and Urban Decline,” in Stadt in der Spätantike – Niedergang oder Wandel? ed. J. Krause and C. Witschel (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2006), 441–61. D.K. Gupta and H. Singh, “Collective Rebellious Behavior: An Expected Utility Approach of Behavioural Motivations,” Political Psychology 13 (1992): 379–406. See Zvi Yavetz, Plebs and Princeps (London: Oxford University Press, 1969); Purcell, “The Populace of Rome,” 158–9. Ralph H. Turner and Lewis M. Killian, Collective Behavior, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 30; Bert Useem, “Breakdown Theories of Collective Action,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 215–38. Ian Hernon, Riot! Civil Insurrection from Peterloo to the Present Day (London: Pluto, 2006). For antiquity, see Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 12–13; Nippel, Public Order, 47. Charles Tilly and Sidney G. Tarrow, Contentious Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007). Compare Matthew Arnold and Stefan Collini, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 181. For the absence of system-changing impulses by ancient crowds, see Paul J.J. Vanderbroeck, Popular Leadership and Collective Behavior in the Late Roman Republic (Ca. 80–50 B.C.), Dutch Monographs on Ancient History and Archaeology 3 (Amsterdam: Gieben, 1987); Christian Gizewski, Zur Normativität und Struktur der Verfassungsverhältnisse in der späteren römischen Kaiserzeit (München: C.H. Beck, 1988), 243. Ambrose, Off. 2.18.93: Egregie itaque uiros alicui praesidentes muneri commendat iustitia et contra iniquitas destituit atque impugnat; in Ivor J. Davidson, Ambrose: De Officiis, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1: 320–1. Ambrose, Off. 2.18.94 (Davidson 1: 320–321): Quo responso exasperati responderunt populi: Non est nobis portio cum Dauid neque hereditas in filiis Iesse. Reuertere unusquisque in tabernacula tua, Israel quoniam hic homo neque in principem neque in ducem erit nobis. Itaque desertus a populo ac destitutus, uix duarum tribuum propter Dauid meritum habere potuit societatem. 3 Kings 12:1–16 and 2 Chronicles 10:1–16. See, e.g., Lactantius, Mort. 26.3 and 44.7 (Alfons Städele, Laktzanz. De mortibus persecutorum. F. Chr. 43 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003, 160, 202); Historia Augusta, Pescennius Niger 2.3 (D. Magie, The Scriptores Historiae Augustae, 3 Vols, LCL [London: Heinemann, 1921–1932], 1: 432). Ambrose, Off. 2.19.95 (Davidson 1: 320–1): Claret ergo quoniam aequitas imperia confirmet et iniustitia dissoluat. Ambrose, Off. 2.19.95 (Davidson 1: 320–1): Plurimum iuuat beneuolentia quae omnes studet beneficiis amplecti, deuincere officiis, oppignerare gratia. This is strongly emphasised for antiquity, in a Bourdeuvian fashion, by Flaig, Ritualisierte Politik. See the doubts raised about this in G.E.M. Anscombe, Ethics, Religion and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981). Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 8.18.2: ὁ λαὸς ἐστασίαζε, βασιλέα τε καὶ τὴν σύνοδον καὶ μάλιστα Θεόφιλον καὶ Σευηριανὸν ἐλοιδόρουν. (Joseph Bidez and Günther C. Hansen, Sozomenus. Kirchengeschichte. GCS 4. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 373.)

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21 Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 8.18.4 (Bidez and Hansen, Sozomenus. Kirchengeschichte, 373): ἐπὶ τούτοις δὲ ἐνεμέσησε τὸ πλῆθος καὶ τὴν ὀργὴν ἀνενέου καὶ ἀσχέτως ἐστασίαζε. 22 Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 8.18.5 (Bidez and Hansen, Sozomenus. Kirchengeschichte, 373): εἴξασα δὲ ταῖς ἱκεσίαις τοῦ δήμου ἡ βασιλὶς πείθει τὸν ἄνδρα ἐπινεῦσαι. See also Pseudo-Martyrius, Epitaphius 79–82 (Martin Wallraff and Cristina Ricci, Oratio funebris in laudem Sancti Iohannis Chrysostomi: epitaffio attribuito a Martirio di Antiochia (BHG 871, CPG 6517). Quaderni della Rivista di bizantinistica 12 (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medievo, 2007), 132–6; Palladius, Dial. 9.162–208 (Anne-Marie Malingrey, Palladios. Dialogue sur la Vie de Jean Chrysostome. SC 341 (Paris: Éd. du Cerf, 1988), 194–200); Socrates of Constantinople, Hist. eccl. 6.16–17 (Günther C. Hansen, Sokrates. Kirchengeschichte. GCS 1 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995), 338–340). Compare the analysis in Pfeilschifter, Kaiser und Konstantinopel, 301–6. 23 On Sozomen, see Peter Van Nuffelen, Un héritage de paix et de piété: étude sur les histoires ecclésiastiques de Socrate et de Sozomène (Leuven: Peeters, 2004). 24 Pseudo-Martyrius, Epitaphius, 66–7 (Wallraff and Ricci, Oratio funebris in laudem Sancti Iohannis Chrysostomi, 122–4). 25 Palladius, Dial. 10.1–75 (Malingrey, 202–8); Socrates, Hist. eccl. 6.18 (Hansen, 341–3); Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 8.22 (Bidez and Hansen, Sozomenus. Kirchengeschichte, 378–9); Pseudo-Martyrius, Epitaphius 87–97. (Wallraff and Ricci, Oratio funebris in laudem Sancti Iohannis Chrysostomi, 142–52). 26 Pseudo-Martyrius, Epitaphius 110 (Wallraff and Ricci, Oratio funebris in laudem Sancti Iohannis Chrysostomi, 166). For this expression, see also Theophylact Simocatta, Hist. 1.14.8, 5.5.1, 8.8.12 (Carl de Boor, Theophylacti Simocattae Historiae [Leipzig: Teubner, 1887], 67, 196, 299). For a similar expression, see Procopius, Bell. 5.10.48 (δίκαια ὀργή) (H.B. Dewing, Procopius in seven volumes, LCL [London: Heinemann, 1914–1935], 3:106). John Chrysostom, Theod. laps. 2 (PG 47.312) uses θυμός to refer to the people in its dealing with the governor. More generally, the people are associated with lesser levels of virtue: e.g., Dialogue of Political Science 5.40 (M. Mazzuchi, Menae patricii cum Thoma referendario de politica scientia dialogus [Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1982], 23). 27 Cf. Peter Van Nuffelen, “Playing the Ritual Game in Constantinople Under the Theodosian Dynasty,” in Two Romes: From Rome to Constantinople, ed. L. Grig and G. Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 183–200, 184 with further bibliography. 28 Procopius, Bell. 1.24.18 (Dewing, Procopius in seven volumes, 1: 224). Phocas: PLRE 2 (5), 881–2. 29 John the Lydian, De magistratibus 3.76.6. (Jacques Schamp, Jean le Lydien. Des magistratures de l’état romain. Tome II: Livres II et III. Collection des Universités de France (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2006), 139–40. 30 See, e.g., Libanius, Or. 1.205–10 (Richard Foerster, Libanii opera. 12 vol. Biblioteca scriptorum graecorum et romanorum teubneriana [Leipzig: Teubner, 1903], 1: 175– 76); Augustine, Ep. 91.8 and 104 (Alois Goldbacher, S. Aureli Augustini Hipponiensis episcopi Epistulae. CSEL 57 [Vienna: Tempsly, 1911], 332–3, 582–91); Evagrius Scholasticus, Hist. eccl. 2.8 (Joseph Bidez and Leon Parmentier, The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius with the Scholia [London: Methuen, 1898], 55–9); Chronicle of Zuqnin 3, AD 524/5 (Harrak, The Chronicle of Zuqnīn, 55); John of Nikiu, Chronicle 109.15–7 (Robert H. Charles, The Chronicle of John [London: William and Norgate, 1916], 175). See also note 15 above. 31 Benjamin Kelly, “Riot Control and Imperial Ideology in the Roman Empire,” Phoenix 61 (2007): 150–76. 32 Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 56 (Eduard Schwartz, Kyrillos von Scythopolis, Texte und Untersuchungen 49:2 [Leipzig: Heinrichs, 1939], 148–52). Cf. Augustine,

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35 36

37 38 39

40

41

Serm. 279 (PL 38, 1275–1280) (with Júlio César Magalhâes de Oliveira, “Vt Maiores Pagani Non Sint! Pouvoir, iconoclasme et action populaire à Carthage au début du Ve siècle (Saint Augustin, Sermons 24, 279 et Morin 1),” Antiquité Tardive 14 (2006): 245–62); Theodore Lector, Hist. eccl. Epitome 484 (Günther C. Hansen, Theodoros Anagnostes. Kirchengeschichte, GCS 3 [Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995], 137–8); Pseudo-Zachariah, Hist. eccl. 5.4f, 7.8lm (Geoffrey Greatrex, ed., The Chronicle of Pseudo-Zachariah Rhetor, Translated Texts for Historians 55 [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011], 186, 262); Anonymus Valesianus 2.78 (John C. Rolfe, Ammianus Marcellinus, vol. 3, LCL [London: Heinemann, 1939], 556); John of Ephesus, Comm. b. orient. (PO 17.34); Michael the Syrian, Chronicle 10.20 (Jean-Baptiste Chabot, Chronique de Michel le Syrien, 3 Vols. [Paris: Leroux, 1901], 2: 353–8); Chronicon Paschale a. 498 (Ludwig A. Dindorf, Chronicon Paschale, CSHB [Bonn: Weber, 1832], 608–9. Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 114. This is related to the question about the “constitutional role” of the people in late antiquity: does the informal pressure exercised by the people represent a substitute for the absence of a formal, constitutional role? On this, see Paul Petit, Libanios et la vie municipale à Antioche au IVe siècle après J.-C (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1955), 227; Gizewski, Zur Normativität; Pfeilschifter, Kaiser und Konstantinopel; Dagron, L’hippodrome. As I indicate, I doubt this is the right question to ask. John of Ephesus, Hist. eccl. 3.31–32 (E.W. Brooks, Iohannis Ephesini Historiae ecclesiasticae pars tertia, CSCO 106. Syr. 55 [Leuven: Librairie orientaliste, 1936], 118–22). Cf. Theodore Lector, Hist. eccl. Epitome 467, 469 (Hansen, Theodoros Anagnostes, 134; Evagrius Scholasticus, Hist. eccl. 5.18 (Bidez and Parmentier, The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius with the Scholia, 55–9). Libanius, Or. 52.8 (Foerster, Libanii opera, 4: 29). John Chrysostom, Incompr. (PG 48.726); Ammianus Marcellinus 29.1.44 (John C. Rolfe, Ammianus Marcellinus. 3 Vols. LCL [London: Heinemann, 1935–1939], 3: 212); John Malalas, Chron. 18.71, 18.150 (Ioannes Thurn, Ioannis Malalae Chronographia, Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae 35 [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000], 394–401, 431. Council of Chalcedon, Session 12.31 (Acta Conciliorum oecumenicorum 2.2); Theophanes, Chron. AM 6009 (Ioannis Classen, Theophanis Chronographia, CSHB [Bonn: Weber, 1839], 230–2). John of Ephesus, Hist. eccl. 3.31–32 (Brooks, Iohannis Ephesini Historiae ecclesiasticae pars tertia, 118–22). Liberatus, Breviarium 14, 20 (Acta Conciliorum oecumenicorum 2.4, p. 123, 135). For the methodological point that crowds are actors, see Erika T. Hermanowicz, Possidius of Calama: A Study of the North African Episcopate at the Time of Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 106–7, 113–14, 135–42; Harries, Law and Crime, 108. Lactantius, Mort. 51.2 (Städele, 222); Augustine, Serm. 302.13, 16 (PL 38.1388–191), Ep. 15*.2 (CSEL 84, 84), Enarrat. Ps. 39.28 CCSL 38, 445–446, Vit. Christ. 3.3 (PL 50:387a); Socrates, Hist. eccl. 7.15 (Hansen, Theodoros Anagnostes, 360–1); Victor of Vita, Historia 2.15 (C. Halm, Victor Vitensis: Historia persecutionis africanae provinciae, Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Auctores Antiquissimi 3 [Berlin: Weidmann, 1879], 16); John Malalas, Chron. 11.4 (Thurn, Ioannis Malalae Chronographia, 204–5); Pseudo-Zachariah, Hist. eccl. 4.2; Evagrius Scholasticus, Hist. eccl. 2.8, 4.32 (Bidez and Parmentier, The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius with the Scholia, 55–9, 181–2); Chronicle of Zuqnin 3 (Harrak, The Chronicle of Zuqnīn, 125). John of Nikiu, Chronicle 120.21–27 (Charles, The Chronicle of John, 194); Michael the Syrian, Chronicle 9.22–23 (Chabot, Chronique de Michel le Syrien, 2: 196–205).

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42 Evagrius Scholasticus, Hist. eccl. 3.44 (Bidez and Parmentier, The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius with the Scholia, 146–7). 43 Libanius, Or. 1.205–10 (Foerster, Libanii opera, 173–5); Ammianus Marcellinus 19.10 (Rolfe, Ammianus Marcellinus, 1: 520–2); Historia Augusta, Life of Didius Iulianus 4.8, Life of Maximus and Balbinus 9.2–4 (Magie, The Scriptores Historiae Augustae, 1: 358, 2: 464); Life of Marcellus 34 (Analecta Bollandiana 86, 1968); Evagrius Scholasticus, Hist. eccl. 2.5, 2.8 (Bidez and Parmentier, The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius with the Scholia, 50–3, 55–9); Chronicon Paschale a. 626 (Dindorf, Chronicon Paschale, 715); The Letter of Soterichus in Jitse H.F. Dijkstra and Geoffrey Greatrex, “Patriarchs and Politics in Constantinople in the Reign of Anastasius (with a Reedition of O.Mon.Epiph. 59),” Millennium 6 (2009): 223–64, 243. The point that the people (populus rationabilis) will understand arguments is explicitly made in Conference of Carthage of 411, 1.10, 1.80–83 (Serge Lancel, Actes de la conférence de Carthage en 411. SC 194, 195, 224 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1972–1975), 2: 576–86, 3: 688–90). 44 Augustine, Sermones Dolbeau 5 (François Dolbeau, Augustin d'Hippone, Vingt-six sermons au peuple d'Afrique. Etudes Augustiniennes, Antiquité 147 (Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1996), 73–106. Theodore Lector (Hist. eccl. Epitome 467, 469 (Hansen, Theodoros Anagnostes, 134)) depicts Anastasius as a weak leader by showing how he wanted to have the prefect next to him during a public appearance: a strong emperor would have faced the people on his own. 45 Severus of Antioch, Select Letters 6.1.9 (E.W. Brooks, The Sixth Book of the Select Ltters of Severus Patriarch of Antioch. vol. 2: Translation (London: Williams and Norgate, 1904), 44–6. For evidence from the Latin early Middle Ages, see Brigitte Beaujard, “La violences et les saints dans les villes de l’Antiquité tardive,” Histoire urbaine 10 (2004): 113–21. 46 Libanius, Or. 26.10, 33.11, 41.2, 41.18 (Foerster, Libanii opera, 3: 8, 171, 296, 303–304). See also Ammianus Marcellinus 27.3.6 (Rolfe, Ammianus Marcellinus, 3: 14–16). 47 Leo the Great, Ep. 109, 124, Hom. 64–5 (PL 54, 357–64, 1014–18, 1061–8). Cf. Optatus, Contr. Parm. 1.26, 3.4 (Mireille Labrousse, Optat de Milève. Traité contre les donatistes. SC 412–413 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1995), 1: 226–30, 2: 36–46); John of Antioch, Chronicle Fr. 321 (Roberto). 48 Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 103. Scholarship on religious violence and conflict generally tends to shift blame away from “ordinary people” towards bishops. Even the more sophisticated approach of Éric Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200–450 CE (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012) results in such a conclusion. This chapter suggests matters were more complex. Equally, we should avoid thinking that crowd behaviour was always shaped by claques: in that direction, John H.W.G Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 49 Crowd manipulation was even legally outlawed: C.Th. 9.33.1 (= C.J. 9.30.1) (20/12/384) (Teodor Mommsen, Paul Meyer, and Paul Krüger, Theodosiani libri XVI cum constitutionibus Sirmondianis [Berlin: Weidmann, 1905], 486); C.J. 9.30.2 (466) (Paul Krüger, Corpus iuris civilis [Berlin: Weidmann, 1877], 851). 50 Compare Evagrius Scholasticus, Hist. eccl. 2.8 (Bidez and Parmentier, The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius with the Scholia, 55–9) and Pseudo-Zachariah, Hist. eccl. 4.1–2, 4.6 (Dijkstra and Greatrex, “Patriarchs and Politics,” 132–6, 141–4); or PseudoZachariah, Hist. eccl. 4.5 (Dijkstra and Greatrex, “Patriarchs and Politics,” 138–41) and Leo the Great, Ep. 156 and 165 (PL 54, 1127–32, 1155–73).

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51 A point well made by Richard Flower, “Tamquam Figmentum Hominis: Ammianus, Constantius II and the Portrayal of Imperial Ritual,” Classical Quarterly 65 (2015): 822–35 on the famous passage of Constantius II’s entry into Rome (Ammianus Marcellinus 16.10). The same would apply for Ammianus Marcellinus 15.7 (Rolfe, Ammianus Marcellinus, 1: 158–64), the arrest of Peter Valvomeres; cf. John Matthews, “Peter Valvomeres, Re-Arrested,” in Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble, ed. M. Whitby and P.R. Hardie (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987), 277–84 and Ammianus Marcellinus 14.7.5–6 (Rolfe, Ammianus Marcellinus, 1: 54) on Gallus. See also Libanius, Or. 56.16 (Foerster, Libanii opera, 4: 139). 52 Translation by Michael Whitby and Mary Whitby, Chronicon Paschale 284–628 AD (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989), 87. 53 Arnold H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A  Social Economic and Administrative Survey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964), 333 notes that senatorial jurisdiction was characteristic for Constantinople. For other public trials, see Ammianus Marcellinus 26.3.2 (Rolfe, Ammianus Marcellinus, 2: 580); Theodore Lector, Hist. eccl. Epitome 490 (Hansen, Theodoros Anagnostes, 139). 54 See some of the sources reported in n. 40. 55 The literature is vast. The following references allow the reader to pursue this topic: Michael MacCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Medieval West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Richard Lim, “People as Power: Games, Munificence, and Contested Topography,” in The Transformations of Urbs Roma in Late Antiquity, ed. W.V. Harris, Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 33 (Portsmouth: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1999), 265–81; Brian Croke, “Justinian’s Constantinople,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, ed. M. Maas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 60–86; Bernd Isele, Kampf um Kirchen: religiöse Gewalt, heiliger Raum und christliche Topographie in Alexandria und Konstantinopel (4. Jh.), Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum Ergänzungsband Kleine Reihe 4 (Münster: Aschendorff, 2010); Mark Humphries, “Emperors, Usurpers, and the City of Rome: Performing Power from Diocletian to Theodosius,” in Contested Monarchy: Integrating the Roman Empire in the Fourth Century AD, ed. J. Wienand (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 151–68. 56 Peter Van Nuffelen, “The Late Antique State and ‘Mirror Rituals’: Procopius of Caesarea on Riots,” in Continuity and Change: Late Antique Historiography Between Order and Disorder, ed. D. Brodka and M. Stachura, Electrum 13 (Cracow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2007), 61–72. 57 Procopius, Bell. 5.10.48 (Dewing, Procopius in seven volumes, 3: 106); John Malalas, Chron. 16.19 (Thurn, Ioannis Malalae Chronographia, 333–4); John of Nikiu, Chronicle 89.64, 107.16 (Charles, The Chronicle of John, 128, 169). Cf. Panegyrici Latini 12 (9) 18.2, cf. 4 (10) 31.5 (C.E.V. Nixon and Barbara Rodgers, In Praise of Later Roman Emperors (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 603, 623–4); Zosimus, Historia nova 2.17.1 (François Paschoud, Zosime. Histoire nouvelle. Livres I et II. Collection des Universités de France (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2003), 87; Chronicon Paschale a. 401 (Dindorf, Chronicon Paschale, 567); Evagrius Scholasticus, Hist. eccl. 3.35 (Bidez and Parmentier, The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius with the Scholia, 134–5); Procopius, Bell. 5.10.11–12, 8.28.10, 8.35.30 (Dewing, Procopius in seven volumes, 1: 94, 5: 348–50, 414); John of Nikiu, Chronicle 93.4 (Charles, The Chronicle of John, 147); Liber Pontificalis Romae 79 (Louis Duchesne, Le Liber pontificalis: texte, introduction et commentaire, vol. 1 [Paris: Norin, 1892], 346–7); John Antioch, Chronicle fr. 321 (Roberto). See McCormick, Victory, 35–78. 58 Epistula Ibae ACO 4.186–7 and 199–200. For the model, see Chronicon Paschale a. 467 (Dindorf, Chronicon Paschale, 595–7). See Symmachus, Relatio 9.4–5

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59 60

61 62

63 64

(Jean-Pierre Callu. Symmaque. Tome V: Discours – Rapports. Collection des Universités de France (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2009), 91): the populus welcomes elephants and race-horses as if for an imperial adventus. Evagrius Scholasticus, Hist. eccl. 4.32 (Bidez and Parmentier, The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius with the Scholia, 181–2). John of Antioch, Chronicle Fr. 317 (Roberto). For the parading on an ass as an official humiliation and its popular imitations, see Procopius, Bell. 3.3.9 (Dewing, Procopius in seven volumes, 2: 24); Agathias, Histories 4.11.2 (Rudolf Keydell, Agathiae Myrinaei Historiarum libri quinque. Corpus fontium historiae Byzantinae. Series Berolinensis 2 [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967], 136–7); John of Ephesus, Hist. Eccl. 3.31–32 (Brooks, The Sixth Book of the Select Ltters of Severus Patriarch of Antioch, 118–22); Michael the Syrian, Chronicle 9.24. An alternative is the camel: Evagrius Scholasticus, Hist. eccl. 2.5 (Bidez and Parmentier, The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius with the Scholia, 50–3); John Malalas, Chron. 12.30, 18.47 (Thurn, Ioannis Malalae Chronographia, 230–2, 379); Procopius, Bell. 7.32.3 (Dewing, Procopius in seven volumes, 4: 420), Anecdota 11.37 (Dewing, Procopius in seven volumes, 6:141). Sozomen, Hist. Eccl. 8.6.8 (Bidez and Hansen, Sozomenus. Kirchengeschichte, 359). Cf. Life of Daniel the Stylite 73–5, 83–5 (Hippolyte Delehaye, Les saints stylites [Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1923], 70–4, 77–81. For similar events, see Ammianus Marcellinus 22.11.3–10 (Rolfe, Ammianus Marcellinus, 2: 258–62); Historia Acephala 2.10, 5.13 (Annik Martin, Histoire “acéphale” et index syriaque des lettres festales d’Athanase d’Alexandrie, SC 317 [Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1985], 148, 166–8); Socrates, Hist. eccl. 3.2.10, 7.15 (Hansen, Theodoros Anagnostes, 194, 360–1); Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 5.7.1–3, 5.9.3–5, 5.10.11–13 (Bidez and Hansen, Sozomenus. Kirchengeschichte, 202–8); Victor of Vita, Historia 2.15 (Halm, Victor Vitensis, 16). A disjunction of moral codes is entailed by E.P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50 (1971): 76–136. Flaig, Usurpationen and Ritualisierte Politik. The notion of Akzeptanz lies at the heart of the analysis of the late antique emperor by Pfeilschifter, Kaiser und Konstantinopel.

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11 COLLABORATION AND IDENTITY IN THE AFTERMATH OF PERSECUTION Religious conflict and its legacy Elizabeth DePalma Digeser For Primo Levi, the Italian writer and holocaust survivor, every Jew liberated from the camps was a collaborator. Claiming that privileged prisoners, although a minority in the camps, “represent a potent majority among survivors,” Levi dared to consider the gray zone separating “victims from the persecutors.”1 Levi’s 1988 book, The Drowned and the Saved probed the complex relationships of the Lager system, which pitted people against one another to survive. Bernard Wasserstein’s recent book, The Ambiguity of Virtue, explored a similar set of relationships during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands by focusing on the Jewish refugee organizer, Gertrude Van Tijn, who became increasingly implicated in the deportations that led to execution. After the war when the Dutch government asked her to serve as a repatriation commissioner, the vehement backlash from the Dutch Jewish community made clear their view of her as a collaborator.2 Similar post-war tensions confronted Hannah Arendt’s exposé of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in 1961. Engaged with the problem of totalitarianism, Arendt wondered how Eichmann got Jews to act as mediators between the Nazis and their victims, to engage in the complicated relationships that Levi and Van Tijn had experienced. Arendt concluded that Germans and some Jews had abandoned the effort to pause and think. After the New Yorker published Arendt’s report, many prominent members of the Jewish community attacked what they saw as her choice to blame the victims. Despite the gray areas of lived experience, thus, many of the Jewish survivors who raged against Arendt and Van Tijn came to see themselves after the war in a clearly defined category, bound by an identity as Jewish victims.3 These examples show that some Jews identified as collaborators those Jews who pushed against this narrative of martyrdom. A long list of authors has tried – like Arendt – to explain the behavior of people like Van Tijn.4 Wasserstein, for example, carefully draws contradictions between what Van Tijn knew at different stages and how she justified her decisions later. This gray zone he terms “the ambiguity of virtue,”5 in that Van Tijn – rather than

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challenging the system and potentially sacrificing herself – repeatedly tried to find the “best” solution among a limited and horrible range of options. The late antique historian Éric Rebillard proposes a different solution. His book, Christians and their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, argues that people do not always rank their religious identity as primary: they may also feel the tug of citizenship to city and the broader polity (or the pull of family or of friends). Like Rebillard’s book, the present chapter explores social tensions during late ancient religious persecution, specifically the aftermath of the late Roman emperor Diocletian’s early fourth-century persecution of Christians (303–311). It takes the argument further, however, to suggest that the enactment of multiple identities during persecution can set the stage for charges of heresy in the aftermath. In both the ancient and the modern cases, religious persecution may act as a crucible in which multiple identities fuse to become a new identity, more religiously polarized. I employ a comparative methodology, noting parallels between the ancient and modern cases. For example, parallels between Van Tijn’s experience and Rebillard’s examples suggest that the polarizing of identity after the play of multiple identities during persecution is a compelling explanation for the so-called early fourth-century Donatist schism in Carthage, North Africa. The second part of the chapter extends this analysis to late ancient Alexandria, Egypt, setting in dialogue the condemnation of the theologian Arius with the firestorm that met Arendt’s study of Eichmann. Arendt had stated publicly that her identity as a political philosopher took precedence over any affiliation with the “Jewish People.”6 Nevertheless, those who saw her as a collaborator read her characterization of the Jewish Councils as a product of her close association with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who had joined the Nazi party. I argue that, like Arendt, Arius was trying to understand and respond to the ideologies and arguments that had undergirded the persecution – many of which had their source in the writings of the late Hellene Platonist, Porphyry of Tyre. In response, Arius’ bishop Alexander – and ultimately the Council of Nicaea in 325 – painted him not just as a “heretic” but also as a Porphyrian and hence a collaborator. Thus this chapter will use the two modern case studies, that of Van Tijn and Arendt, to raise questions about the behavior of Christians in Carthage and Alexandria, extending Rebillard’s analysis of the situation in North Africa to that of Egypt. Despite Rebillard’s argument, however, our cases suggest that, in persecution’s aftermath, multiple identities become untenable for some people to hold. As a result, they ostracize those who seem too close to the persecutors in the effort to construct a simpler identity that keeps them cleanly different from the other side. The Holocaust obviously bore few resemblances to the persecution that the emperor Diocletian launched in 303: the Germans targeted Jews for ostensibly ethnic or “racial” not overtly religious reasons, nationalism and Fascism are modern ideologies, and the efficacy of the Holocaust relied on a totalitarian network of railroads and telecommunications, not to mention modern weaponry and systems of execution. My purpose is, thus, not to superimpose the ancient events on their modern counterparts and fill in the blanks, but to see whether a better-documented 262

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situation might challenge assumptions about the past and situate late ancient examples into a pattern that might lead to some general, theoretical conclusions about persecution and intra-group conflict. The emperor Diocletian’s edict on 23 February 303 began a campaign of intergroup religious violence, depriving Christians of their citizenship and ultimately coercing religious conformity. Besides demanding the destruction of churches and that clergy hand over Scripture to be burned by the authorities – effectively forbidding “collective practice,”7 this decree stripped Christians “of official position,” status, and legal standing,8 requiring ritual sacrifice before official business.9 In the east, which saw three more edicts demanding the arrest of clergy and a general order to sacrifice,10 those Christians who survived without physical harm did so either by performing the ritual or keeping their heads down, that is, by passing as Romans. Evidence indicates that there was widespread compliance, a situation casting many Christians into Levi’s gray zone, embodying multiple identities in Rebillard’s terms. We also know that Christian identity was in flux in the decades following the edict of religious liberty issued by the emperors Constantine and Licinius in 313 CE, with persecution, martyrdom, and victimhood becoming important touchstones.11 Both in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, groups of Christians drew boundaries delineating themselves from others under their bishop’s jurisdiction with both sides claiming the mantle of true Christianity. We have long connected Diocletian’s persecution to the intra-group conflict in North Africa, commonly called the “Donatist” schism. Here a group of Christians protested the ordination of one bishop by another on the grounds that the latter had given sacred texts to the Roman authorities in accordance with the first edict of persecution. The so-called traditores, literally, “those who handed over” Scripture and so collaborated with the Roman authorities – behavior akin to Gertrude Van Tijn’s – became the spur against which the Donatist communities formed and constructed their own identity as martyrs. More controversial, however, is the link between Diocletian’s persecution and the intra-group Arian controversy. Nevertheless, my recent work on the philosophical rationale for the persecution suggests that the polemic and legislation against Arius connects him to the arguments levied against Christians by Platonist adversaries in what W.H.C. Frend has called the “Great Propaganda War” that drove the persecution forward.12 Thus I will argue that Arius’ adversaries saw him as a collaborator, in this case, playing a role similar to Hannah Arendt’s. Thus, let’s start with the case of Gertrude Van Tijn, a Dutch-naturalized German who, through her work facilitating the immigration of Dutch and then German Jews before the Nazi conquest, gradually became one of those who inadvertently mediated the identification, incarceration, and deportation of Jews to Lagers in northern Europe. It is easy to see Rebillard’s multiple identities at play and in tension: like Arendt, Van Tijn was German and not a particularly observant Jew.13 As a young woman, she lived in London and then the Netherlands, becoming a Dutch citizen with marriage, while family contacts brought her into the circle of the 263

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Christian Dutch financial establishment,14 leading to her employment with “one of the most . . . respected financiers in the Netherlands.”15 He connected her with the American Joint Distribution committee, an intermediary between German and New York financiers, who asked her to coordinate food distribution to Jewish POWs in Eastern Europe during WWI – a task for which her fluency in multiple languages and training in social work made her ideal.16 In the early ’30s she was invited to be secretary for the Committee for Jewish Refugees, a group directed by David Cohen,17 a Classics professor, who directed Holland’s Jewish Council during the Nazi occupation. In 1942,18 Van Tijn’s position with the refugee committee led to her appointment as director of “Help for the Departing,” a department of Cohen’s Jewish Council charged with equipping deportees.19 Although the Germans first asked the Jewish Council to coordinate deportations of Jews to so-called work camps, Van Tijn’s own post-war account states that “she had been fully aware of the Nazi program of mass murder” as early as 1941.20 Van Tijn wrote this account of her activities and that of the Jewish Council during the war in order to fend off criticism of her actions and those of the Council from former friends and co-workers after the war who accused her of collaborating with the Nazi apparatus in the Netherlands. Wasserstein’s account shows clearly how much Van Tijn tried to work within her various networks and identities, first legitimately to secure real refugee status for people and then to fend off deportation to the gas chambers for some while sending others in their place. For his part, Cohen stated that he acted primarily in the Dutch national interest.21 Van Tijn’s story may seem far removed from Christian Carthage in 303. Nevertheless it is important to remember that Christianity had been recognized as a legal, property-holding association since the Edict of Gallienus in 260.22 As such, its bishop and elite practitioners were embedded in a web of financial, political, and social relationships connecting them with the broader elite of Carthaginian society. For this reason, the case of the so-called Donatist church in North Africa, like Van Tijn’s, not only has the ingredients for inter-group religious violence to spawn intra-group conflict. But it also shows that, although these disagreements are articulated through religious identities, what is really in conflict – as for the Jewish Councils – is the matter of who has the authority to determine the fate of a community, its property and people, during persecution. The experience of people in northwest Africa during the persecution is fairly well documented.23 Complicating matters, however, is the fact that while a few sources dating near the conflict survive, all that do are part of a collection assembled probably before the author Optatus published them with his own antiDonatist account of the schism in the mid-fourth century.24 Nevertheless, there are examples of Christian bishops holding on to Scripture despite the demands of the Roman authorities,25 and there are accounts of bishops continuing to hold assemblies – also in defiance of the first edict.26 All the same, there are as many documents illustrating how Christian clergy and the Roman authorities reached a modus vivendi, with the authorities enforcing the law to only a minimal extent, and Christians keeping their heads down.27 Indeed, such behavior is not at all 264

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surprising, given the top-down character of the persecution and the fact that Christians had been a legal group for two generations. We should expect that people had multiple allegiances that they might deploy at different times, as Van Tijn’s case illustrates, and that the leaders of the Christian communities had relationships with people who might help them out of a tight spot. Homing in on the Donatist issue, the surviving accounts suggest that the Christian communities of Carthage and Numidia fractured because many rejected the bishop’s authority to dictate their community’s practices and manage its wealth.28 Gender and regional differences exacerbated their disapproval.29 Optatus blames a certain Lucilla for starting the split.30 “She was said to kiss the bone (os)31 of some martyr . . . before the presentation of the Eucharist.” Since the relic belonged to someone whose status as martyr “had not yet been confirmed” (presumably by the bishop),32 Caecilian, the archdeacon, “criticized her, humiliating her.” Some time later, the emperors issued the first edict of persecution.33 Mensurius, the bishop of Carthage, fearing that Roman authorities would seize church property, not just scripture, but also its gold and silver objects, put these in the hands of church elders.34 He had been summoned to the governor’s palace35 for harboring someone “arraigned as a criminal” for having written against the emperor.36 Mensurius never returned to his post.37 Maximian was the emperor ruling for Diocletian in the western provinces when he issued the edicts of persecution. He retired – with Diocletian – in 305, leaving Constantius to replace him as western Augustus. This change of power effectively ended the persecution in the west, and Maxentius made it official for Africa when he usurped power in the southwest in 306.38 Once the persecution ended, the African Christian community was in a position to replace the bishop of Carthage. The initial candidates (Botrus and Celestius) wanted to exclude Numidians from participating (Carthage was in Proconsular Africa, but the see had also administered affairs in the province of Numidia to the east).39 Optatus says that when their case failed, “the whole populace” elected Caecilian who was then ordained. But it is not clear that the Numidians participated.40 Indeed Caecilian’s most rigorous opponents came from Numidia.41 After the choice of Caecilian, the elders retained the church treasure, Lucilla withheld her support, and subsequently these parties charged that the new bishop’s ordination was improper.42 Optatus claims that “nothing could be fabricated against” Caecilian, but his opponents said that he had been ordained by a “collaborator” (traditor). By this term, Caecilian’s opponents meant that the ordaining bishop, Felix of Abthungi, had handed materials over to the Roman authorities in response to Diocletian’s first edict.43 Since Felix was later cleared,44 this charge suggests that Caecilian’s opponents did not see his as interests aligned with theirs – which they in turn identified as the true Christian community. Thus, like Van Tijn’s critics, Caecilian’s opponents aligned him together with all those who had opposed them, including the persecutors. Even if – like Van Tijn – Caecilian had not intended to collaborate, the fact remained that – as the most senior cleric in the Carthaginian church – he had somehow survived where his predecessor Mensurius had perished. 265

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Rejecting Caecilian, the elders, Lucilla and her supporters (bribed by her wealth, says Optatus) elected Maiorinus, Lucilla’s “domestic.”45 As Shaw emphasizes, however, “the main problem was not really with” Caecilian’s ordination, but rather “the ensuing battle between Caecilian and the seniores over the latter’s possession of the church’s wealth that had been left in the hands of the Elders by Mensurius before his departure.”46 “The Elders,” Shaw continues, “were more supportive of factions hostile to Caecilian than those in support of him, although they might well have had other grounds on which they did not wish to transfer the church’s wealth into his hands.”47 At a standstill, the elders appealed for resolution to the bishops of Numidia, the province to the east, inviting them to a meeting at Carthage (probably in the summer of 306).48 The Numidian bishops, meeting in Carthage, then installed Maiorinus as the bishop of Carthage in continued opposition to Caecilian.49 The conflict became broader and more complex after 310 when the usurper Maxentius restored church property appropriated by the state,50 and then Constantine, after conquering Maxentius in 312, decided to support the church at Carthage financially.51 The Numidians accused Mensurius, Caecilian, and Felix and their supporters all as traditores.52 In opposition to Caecilian, these Christians had set up a rival church over which Donatus presided as bishop, Maiorinus having died, and they asked the emperor to recognize them as the official congregation. Constantine referred the matter to Miltiades the bishop of Rome (313), then to Gallic bishops at Arles (314). All ruled in favor of Caecilian. By 314, the “Donatists” (named by the other side for the bishop pressing the claim) had rejected the validity of their opponents’ baptisms and were re-baptizing converts.53 Clearly there were more factors at play than the simple act of handing over Scripture in the struggle between the two halves – for so they were in numbers – of the African church: geography and local solidarity; the expansive power of the Carthaginian papacy; the role of patronage, money, and influence in both communities; and the recognition given to martyrs. Nevertheless, the antagonism as expressed in our sources crystallized over the charge of collaboration, traditio – especially for the party who rejected Caecilian. There is no more powerful way to say that you were one of us but joined our enemies’ side than to call someone a traitor. Although in Caecilian’s case the charge was that his people had merely given the authorities Scripture – not people as with Van Tijn – Shaw sees this act as a “primordial evil,” equal to the sin of Judas in that it involved handing over the very “Words of God Himself, to secular authorities.”54 There may have been “real ambiguities about who precisely had done what,” as in the modern example, but these questions in turn meant that the issue was constantly reinforced.55 And those hearing about such acts felt a real rage, a sense of opposition against the imagined perpetrators, and a sense of solidarity one with another.56 In this way, the charge of collaboration was identity forming.57 One more point is worth considering as we watch this community fracture into opposing camps. Specifically, the practice of re-baptism, which became a hallmark of the movement resisting Caecilian and his successors, was a long-standing 266

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African tradition aimed at reintegrating people who had lapsed back into the church.58 More customarily applied to those who had sacrificed, re-baptism was advocated in the third century by the theologian/scholar Tertullian and by the Carthaginian bishop Cyprian, despite the opposition of the bishop of Rome.59 Indeed, Cyprian in his own day – although he later bent a bit toward the Roman position – had seen Novatian – the schismatic bishop of the third century – as a veritable traitor for having invaded the “sacred space of Cornelius,” the rightful bishop.60 The appropriation of this tradition by the Donatists in the face of Roman opposition suggests, with their view of Caecilian as too much in the Roman column, a sentiment that the decisions of the bishops at Rome and at Arles would only have reinforced. In a real sense then the Donatist became an Afro-Numidian community, as their opponents, recognized by Rome and the emperor by 314, became the representatives of the imperial church. The case of Gertrude Van Tijn may not fit perfectly atop the events of the Donatist schism, but it does help us pay close attention and raise questions about the information that we do have. For example, it forces us to explore more deeply the political and economic connections – the multiple identities, if you will – of the Carthaginian versus the Numidian clergy and other African elites in the late third century – a topic that Peter Brown has recently explored for the fourth century in that region.61 Second, it helps us see how difficult it would be for anybody – especially a community leader – to have clean hands and survive a pogrom. Finally, it helps us see how – in the aftermath of persecution – a leadership who has merely survived might face the charge of collaboration from those, not so closely affiliated with the persecuting power, who want to distance themselves as far as possible from the gray zone in which all were involved. The Donatist conflict has long been the quintessential example of how persecution might lead to division in a religious community. While strictly speaking a schism and not a heresy, as our next example will consider, in both cases, groups coalesced around a narrative that “othered” their opponents overtly as collaborators. Egypt grappled with similar problems. When the bishop of Alexandria, Peter, went into hiding during the persecution – which raged harsher and much longer than in North Africa – certain clergy took advantage of the pontiff’s absence to ordain their own people, ushering in the so-called Melitian schism. If the Egyptian church has ever been considered in reaction to the persecution, this is the example that is usually discussed.62 Nevertheless, there are good reasons to ask whether some of the same dynamics operative in the modern post-war climate and in North Africa also percolated in the controversy that a priest named Arius launched when he dared to challenge the theology of his superior bishop, Alexander, the prelate of Alexandria. Scholarship on the so-called Arian heresy is vast and overwhelmingly complicated. There is an enormous literature dedicated to piecing out how exactly it began, what precisely Arius taught, why he garnered the support that he did, and why his theology and the “school” that it launched became so popular and long-lasting even after the emperor Constantine’s efforts to settle the matter at the Council of Nicaea 267

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in 325.63 If Arius’ story is situated at all within the context of imperial politics, historians usually remark that it became a cause célèbre because it came to the emperor’s attention just after his conquest of the eastern empire from Licinius and in the midst of his efforts to unify his new domain. To my knowledge, the Alexandrian conflict has never seriously been considered within the ripple effects of the Great Persecution. And yet, research on the underlying causes and controversies that contributed to the Great Persecution suggests that such a link is worth exploring. In particular, what we might call Alexandrian theology played a starring and controversial role in the “propaganda wars,” to invoke Frend’s characterization again. The implication of Alexandrian theology came through the role that the late Platonist Hellene philosopher, Porphyry of Tyre, played in the lead up to the persecution.64 In particular, Porphyry’s Against the Christians and his Philosophy from Oracles galvanized certain influential eastern elites to lobby Diocletian’s court to repress Christian practice. They were particularly effective in persuading the emperors with jurisdiction in the east, namely Diocletian and his junior colleague Galerius. Porphyry’s Against the Christians made three claims relevant to the Arian controversy. The first claim was that nothing in Christian Scripture, properly read according to its genre, justified worshipping Jesus as God in human form. Jesus, in Porphyry’s view, was a spiritual guide, not the Logos incarnate. The second claim was that the Alexandrian theologian, Origen, the towering church father of the third century, was misguided in much of his theology, led astray by inappropriately applying figural exegesis (or allegorical interpretations) to texts – such as Leviticus – which were inappropriate for this kind of technique. The third claim was that when Origen did use a proper methodology, his conclusions – though controversial within the Christian community – were patently true. For Porphyry, the most prominent example of Origen’s good sense was his rejection of bodily resurrection, despite its popularity among most Christians at the time. Finally, Porphyry’s Philosophy from Oracles, as one of its goals, used oracular sayings (of Apollo and Hecate primarily) as evidence that Jesus was not the transcendent God incarnate, but was, in fact, worth following – if not worshipping – as a spiritual guide. Porphyry too had close ties to the scholarly community of Alexandria, having studied with Origen, but also taking the great Platonist Plotinus as his spiritual guide, a man deeply imbued in Alexandrian pedagogy. Porphyry’s role in the persecution having only recently been clarified, it is not surprising that charges against Arius branding him as a Porphyrian have never been connected to the ideology driving the persecution. But in fact, his bishop, Alexander, caricatures Arius as a Porphyrian in his theology (without saying as much). Moreover, legislation that Constantine issued after the council of Nicaea condemning Arius’ views specifically links the philosopher and theologian as kindred spirits. Although Arius’ theology is not by any means Porphyrian, at least so far as we can tell from the Platonist’s surviving fragments, this linkage makes it plausible that Arius was trying – like Arendt – to understand and respond to

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the ideology that had driven persecution forward. After taking a few minutes to describe Arendt’s experience, I will then turn to the case of Arius. As the beginning of this chapter noted, Arendt attended Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in order to understand his role in the unfolding of Nazi totalitarianism.65 Having already written on The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt, who had escaped from an internment camp, concluded that totalitarianism progressed because ordinary men like Eichmann and some members of the Jewish Councils had abandoned the human effort to stop and think about what they were doing. Eichmann’s trial began in the spring of 1961. He was executed for crimes against humanity in May  1962. Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (in which, it must be said, her critiques of the Jewish Councils were a small part) appeared first in the New Yorker the following spring to be published in a separate volume shortly after. The storm that Arendt’s book raised in the community of survivors was “violent,”66 “the most bitter public dispute” about the Holocaust ever to have taken place,67 provoking divisions “that would never be entirely healed.”68 Her critics, who were as numerous as her defenders, accused her of being an arrogant intellectual looking down on ordinary Jews and Israelis.69 Both sides accused the other of misrepresenting the facts. On her attackers’ side, people took her statement that she had “never in her life ‘loved’ any people or collective,” but only individual people, her friends, to be a denial of her Jewish identity, a moral failure that set her closer to the circle of the Nazis than to her own people. What seems to have touched a nerve in the persecution’s aftermath was Arendt’s clinical willingness to take seriously and to analyze the behaviors and ideas that had enabled the Holocaust to happen, regardless of who had held them. This type of analysis pushed against the identity narrative of martyrdom, victimhood, and resistance that characterized Arendt’s detractors. As with Van Tijn, Arendt’s experience seems on the surface to have little bearing on the Great Persecution in general or Egypt in particular. Nevertheless, Arius’ connection to Alexandrian theology and the implication of this school of thought within the ideology of persecution suggest that comparing the two cases may lead to useful insights. Before exploring Alexandria’s philosophical and theological communities, however, it is important to note that the persecution in Alexandria was harsher than in Carthage, with all four edicts implemented. The crisis effectively continued until the emperor Licinius, Constantine’s eastern colleague until 324, defeated his junior eastern colleague Maximin Daia in 313. Peter, the head of the Alexandrian catechetical school, had become bishop of Alexandria in 300.70 At the outbreak of persecution in 303, he fled Egypt, returning ca. 305–306 to deal with the challenge to the episcopacy that was the Melitian schism. He paid for this return with his life. After the brief tenure of Achilleas,71 Alexander became bishop in 312. Given these events, it is clear that, like Carthage, the early fourthcentury Alexandrian see faced a crisis of episcopal authority. In addition to Peter’s absence and the Melitian schism, Alexandria was home to regional churches. The

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bishop was first among equals, with priests supervising their own congregations.72 From the time of his appointment, Alexander was thus in a “state of conflict and deep in the throes of controversy.”73 Indeed, there are hints that hostility divided Alexander and Arius, even before their doctrinal differences, with their quarrel extending to the see itself in 312.74 The see’s close connection to Origen’s theology surely complicated matters as well, given Porphyry’s repudiation of some of the theologian’s methods and his advocacy of the Christian scholar’s more controversial positions. From Dionysius’ episcopacy (247–264) forward,75 every Alexandrian bishop had been a moderate Origenist who began as head of the school.76 Even Peter, appointed bishop at the first rumblings of persecution,77 carried forward Origen’s theological legacy, distancing himself only from the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls.78 Alexander himself partly espoused an Origenist-inspired theology.79 If the persecution foregrounded controversial elements in Origen’s theology, then the reaction of Origenists outside Alexandria looks like furious back pedaling. For example, Eusebius’ and Pamphilus’ defense of Origen, written during the persecution, reveals their current view that Origen had taught a too exalted status for Christ.80 In trying to discern Arius’ connection to Alexandrian Origenism, within what Arius was teaching, we face a significant problem with the sources:81 hardly anything survives from Arius’ own point of view before the Council of Nicaea apart from a confession of faith,82 a letter,83 and two fragments.84 Christopher Beeley’s recent work on The Unity of God suggests that in many ways, Arius agreed more closely with Origen than did Alexander:85 On the other hand, Arius “maintains the unique definition of God the Father to an extent that not even a moderate Origenist would recognize.”86 It is also possible that, as in Carthage, there was a regional character to the conflict. Arius was a pastor in Alexandria’s Baucalis region,87 and after his exile, many of his closest allies were Libyan, as was he himself.88 Although countless studies have tried to parse the precise character of Arius’ teaching to understand why he provoked such a vicious reaction from Alexander and others, we can focus simply on what he was accused of and by whom. That is, our interest fortunately lies more in how Arius’ opponents characterized him than in what he taught. Very early in the controversy Alexander wrote an accusatory letter against Arius. We have long recognized that this is not an accurate portrayal, but a construction of a heresy. What is interesting for our purposes is Alexander’s caricature of Arius’ Christ. To Alexander, Arius’ Son of God more closely resembled Porphyry’s spiritual guide than Origen’s Christ. Beeley argues that only in the view of Arius’ theology that Alexander circulated is the Son considered to be a creature no different from any other human being who is mutable and capable of vice,89 except that God foresaw the Son’s virtue in advance. And only here is the tenet that the Son was created in time.90 Alexander accuses Arius of basing his views on “those passages in Scripture that speak of Jesus’ human vulnerabilities and sufferings.”91 Finally, Alexander likens Arius to the Jews and Hellenes all of whom deny Christ.92 These charges bear very little resemblance to what Arius actually taught insofar as we can tell,93 but they do hearken back to Porphyry’s 270

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critique against the Christian worship of Jesus. As Porphyry was well known to the circle of Arius’ supporters, Alexander’s critique thus relies on their ability to contextualize his remarks and see how Arius’ own connection to Origen has led him to a position, not only in defiance of his bishop’s authority, but in bed with Christianity’s arch-enemy. Arius is thus a collaborator with those whose theology helped to motivate the persecution. In this vein, a letter from Constantine “to the bishops and people” is significant. Written immediately after the Council of Nicaea had rejected Arius’ theology,94 Constantine stated that Since Arius has imitated wicked and impious persons, it is just that he should undergo the like ignominy. Wherefore as Porphyry, that enemy of piety, for having composed licentious treatises against religion, found a suitable recompense, and such as thenceforth branded him with infamy, overwhelming him with deserved reproach, his impious writings also having been destroyed; so now it seems fit both that Arius and such as hold his sentiments should be denominated Porphyrians, that they may take their appellation from those whose conduct they have imitated.95 And in addition to this, if any treatise composed by Arius should be discovered, let it be consigned to the flames, in order that not only his depraved doctrine may be suppressed, but also that no memorial of him may be by any means left.96 When this passage has attracted notice (and to be honest, it has attracted very little), historians explain the pairing of Arius and Porphyry as stemming simply from the punishment that Constantine meted out to both offenders. Nevertheless, note that the emperor equates the conduct of Arius and Porphyry. Clearly, in his view, at least, what Arius did reminded him of what Porphyry had done. Constantine puts Arius in the same company as an enemy of Christianity, whether or not the content of their doctrine is exactly the same. Moreover the emperor pairs Arius with not just any enemy, but the man whose texts in some way undergirded the ideology of the persecution. Indeed possession of either man’s writings was a capital crime.97 This reference strengthens the argument that Alexander too, in his construction of Arius, was painting him as a Porphyrian and thus as a traitor – indeed a collaborator with the other side. Most historians have assumed that Arius was not schooled in the Origenist tradition98 – although his theology even more than Alexander’s had strong Origenist underpinnings.99 Consider the situation in Alexandria as Porphyry’s writings fanned the flames of persecution: Although Platonist and Christian communities had learned and taught side by side, their theology and metaphysics became intensely politicized. Indeed there is good evidence that Hellene and Christian scholarly communities drew sharply apart.100Moreover, within the Christian community, broadly speaking, Origen’s theology – because Porphyry had applauded its controversial strengths (e.g., lack of bodily resurrection) and targeted what 271

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he saw as its flaws (e.g., figural exegesis of unworthy texts) – became extremely controversial. If Arius was trying to understand why and how Origen had erred – as Arendt had done with the Jewish councils – the sheer effort to understand how Origen’s writings had become implicated in the persecutor’s project might have been enough to prompt Alexander to call Arius’ loyalty into question, especially when the bishop’s own authority was on the line. Alternatively, if Arius was trying to imagine a Christology that stood up to Porphyry’s philosophical challenges, then this link to the culture of the persecutors, like Arendt’s relationship to Heidegger was a moral failure and denial of his Christian community in Alexander’s eyes. The efforts of Alexander and Constantine to tar Arius as a Porphyrian suggest that in some way the renegade priest had approached the enemy persecutors’ camp, violating the boundaries the bishop and emperor were now imposing around the Christian community. Setting the Arian controversy and Donatist schism in dialogue with the stories of Hannah Arendt and Gertrude Van Tijn, both of whom faced charges as collaborators from a Jewish population galvanized by the Holocaust, suggests several paths for future research. First, the modern examples prime us to ask different questions of our sources as we explore the extent to which there were similar patterns. For example, in North Africa, how might social and financial relationships during and after the persecution have exacerbated ethnic, regional, and gendered dissatisfactions with episcopal leadership? Expressed as a religious disagreement, the Donatist controversy set the purity of its martyrs against imperial patronage, but below the surface two communities with different attributes formed and competed for members. Conversely, understanding the construction of the “heretic” Arius as an incarnation of the persecutor Porphyry may allow us better to understand the role of Origen’s or the Platonist Hellene’s theology in what little remains of Arius’ teaching. Second, such patterns as do exist point us to the possibility for an overarching theory that might explain the behavior of religious groups during and after persecution. Although the study could and should be expanded to include other case studies,101 the evidence analyzed here suggests that communities whose members perform multiple identities become more polarized after persecution. For some of these communities, at least, their turn toward religious purity derives from what they see as unmitigated corruption on the part of collaborators.102

Notes 1 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage Press, 1989), 40. I  am grateful to the participants of the Sixth Annual UNISA Symposium for New Testament and Early Christian Studies and the members of the University of California, Santa Barbara Department of History’s Religion, Cultures and Societies research group for their helpful suggestions in improving this chapter. Elizabeth DePalma Digeser is also a Guest Lecturer in the Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies, University of South Africa, Pretoria. 2 Bernard Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude Van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 217–18, 225–7.

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3 Subsequently published in 1963 as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963). 4 Their solutions have ranged from traditional Jewish passivity to Dutch conformism. For instance, Raul Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985). See also Marnix Croes and Peter Tammes, Gif laten wij niet voortbestaan: Een onderzoek naar de overlevingskansen Van Joden in de Nederlandse gemeenten, 1940–1945 (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2004). 5 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 241–59. 6 Michael Ezra, “The Eichmann Polemics: Hannah Arendt and Her Critics,” Democratiya 9 (2007): 147. 7 Éric Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200–450 CE (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 58. G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, “Aspects of the Great Persecution,” Harvard Theological Review 47 (1954): 77. 8 Lactantius, Mort. 12.1–13.1; see Lactantius: De mortibus persecutorum, ed. J.L. Creed (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 18–20. 9 Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities, 58. See also Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 8.2.4; Eusebius, De martyribus Palestinae, praef. 1; see Eusèbe de Césarée: Histoire ecclésiastique, ed. G. Bardy, 4 vols., SC 55 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1952–1971); de Ste. Croix, “Aspects,” 75–6. 10 W.H.C. Frend, The Donatist Church (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 4; Optatus: Against the Donatists, trans. Mark Edwards (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), xi–xii. Tellingly, we do not hear about lapsi in Africa; Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities, 58; de Ste. Croix, “Aspects,” 89. Winrich Löhr, “Some Observations on Karl-Heinz Schwarte’s Diocletians Christengesetz,” Vigiliae Christianae 65 (2002): 75–95 refuting Karl-Heinz Schwarte, “Diocletians Christengesetz,” in E fontibus haurire: Beiträge zur römischen Geschichte und zu ihren Hilfswissenschaften, ed. Heinrich Chantraine, Rosmarie Günther, and Stefan Rebenich (Paderborn: Schoning, 1994), 203–40. 11 Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 12 W.H.C. Frend, “Prelude to the Great Persecution: The Propaganda War,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 38 (1987): 1–18. 13 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 106, 240. 14 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 10. 15 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 10. 16 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 7, 15. 17 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 21. 18 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 138. 19 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 145; 303 n. 17: Report by Gertrude Van Tijn, October 1944, Leo Baeck Institute Archives, New York AR 3477/33.3/51, 48. 20 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 251. Wasserstein, noting the absence of any earlier hint of such knowledge (252), questions her veracity, suggesting that she backdated her knowledge in order to “differentiate her position from Cohen’s.” See also Dagmar Herzog, “Nazism: Bernard Wasserstein’s Ambiguity of Virtue and More,” New York Times, June 6, 2014. 21 Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue, 21. 22 Cf. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 7.13 (Bardy, 41: 187–88). On this, most recently Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities, 58. Gallienus’ edict “amounted to a full legalization of Christianity.” 23 For what follows, see Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities, 58–9 and T.D. Barnes, Early Christian Hagiography and Roman History (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 128–38.

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24 See T.D. Barnes, “The Beginnings of Donatism,” Journal of Theological Studies 26 (1975): 13 for Optatus’ drawing “on a single dossier composed late in the reign of Constantine.” Together with Optatus’ Contra Parmenianum Donatistam in the appendix are Gesta apud Zenophilum (1), Acta purgationis Felicis (2), six letters of Constantine, a letter from the Council at Arles (314), and a warrant from the praetorian prefect giving the Donatists free transport from Trier to Africa (315); see Optat de Milève: Traité contre les donatistes, ed. Mirelle Labrousse, 2 vols., SC 412, 413 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1995–1996). According to Barnes, the authenticity of these documents “is now completely vindicated” (he cites Peter Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine [1972], 237–338). For an assessment of the sources in Eusebius, see Erica Carotenuto, “Six Constantinian Documents,” Vigiliae Christianae 56 (2002): 56–74, and for a caution against using the account of the Abitinian martyrs as anything but a product of the milieu after the 411 Council of Carthage, see Alan Dearn, “The Abitinian Martyrs and the Outbreak of the Donatist Schism,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 55 (2004): 1–18. 25 E.g., the Acts of Felix of Thibuica; cf. Claude Lepelley, Les cités de l’Afrique romaine au Bas-Empire (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1979–1981): 1:335, 2:192–3. 26 E.g., the Acts of Gallonius; cf. Lepelley, Les cités de l’Afrique romaine, 1:335–6 and 2:58–60. 27 Lepelley, Les cités de l’Afrique romaine, 1:337–43 in Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities, 59. 28 For the best, most recent overview of the intricacies of the origins and dating them, see Brent D. Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 812–19. The schism began with Caecilian’s election, this much is clear. The date of the election is controversial, with W.H.C. Frend and K. Clancy, “When Did the Donatist Schism Begin?” Journal of Theological Studies 28 (1977): 104–9 opting for a later date, identifying the “tyrant” with Maxentius; cf. Dearn, “Abitinian Martyrs,” 1, incl. n. 1. 29 Paola P. Marone, “Donne nel movimiento donatista,” Augustinianum 51 (2011): 85–99 at 89 citing Yvette Duval, Loca Sanctorum Africae: Le culte des martyrs en Afrique du IVe au VIIe siècle (Rome: Ecole Française, 1982), 2:481–82. 30 Contr. Parm., trans. Edwards, Optatus, 16. For the role of women in the schism (but sadly not an analysis of the gendered nature of the conflict), see Marone, “Donne nel movimiento donatista,” 85–99. 31 Possibly “mouth” (os); see Edwards, Optatus, n. 68, suggesting in this case that the body had not yet decomposed. 32 Is this an implicit conflict over the acceptability of martyrdom? See Kristina A. Meinking, “Anger and Adjudication: The Political Relevance of De ira dei,” Journal of Late Antiquity 6 (2013): 87: “Christian communities themselves were divided by the imperial actions taken against them, leading to conflicts over the acceptability of martyrdom and the question over the readmission to the church of those who had renounced their faith or handed over scriptures.” 33 Most recently, Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities, 58; Meinking, “Anger and Adjudication,” 86–7, citing T.D. Barnes, “Lactantius and Constantine,” Journal of Roman Studies 63 (1973): 43–4. 34 Shaw, Sacred Violence, 813, drawing on Optatus, Contr. Parm. 1.17.1. 35 The obvious meaning; see Shaw, Sacred Violence, 814. 36 The identity of the “tyrant” has been hotly contested over the years – and obviously it affects the dating of the conflict, but the emperor Maximian is the most likely choice. See Shaw, Sacred Violence, 814, drawing on Barnes, “The Beginnings of Donatism,” 18.

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37 Edwards, Optatus, xix citing Augustine, Breviculus collationis cum Donatistis 3.25 (traditio of Scripture). 38 Optatus, Contr. Parm. 18 (Edwards, Optatus, 17–18). Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities, 58; Barnes, Early Christian Hagiography, 150. These dates conflict with W.H.C. Frend, “A Note on the Great Persecution in the West,” in Papers Read at the Second Winter and Summer Meetings of the Ecclesiastical History Society (London: Nelson, 1965), 141–8 and, id., Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 502–3, but were upheld in G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, Christian Persecution, Martyrdom and Orthodoxy, ed. Michael Whitby and Joseph Streeter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 79–98 and Shaw, Sacred Violence, 593, 815. 39 Since the time of Cyprian, the provincia of the bishop of Carthage had been “unusually widespread, including the adjoining areas of Numidia and Mauretania.” Cyprian, Ep. 48.3.2; James B. Rives, Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 290. 40 See Edwards, Optatus, 17 n. 73. Their absence is confirmed by A.R. Birley, “Some Notes on the Donatist Schism,” Libyan Studies 28 (1987): 29–41. 41 Edwards, Optatus, xx citing Frend, Donatist Church, 25–49. 42 Optatus, Contr. Parm. 18–19 (Edwards, Optatus, 17–19). 43 It is not clear whether this is the same Felix; see Edwards, Optatus, 17 n. 74. 44 Appendix 2: “The Acquittal Proceedings of Felix Bishop of Abthugni.” 45 Optatus, Contr. Parm. 19 (Edwards, Optatus, 18–19). 46 Remember too that Mensurius had sheltered someone who had opposed the emperor (and the edict) and was killed, but Caecilian the deacon had survived. His survival suggests that Caecilian had some relationship with the authorities. 47 Shaw, Sacred Violence, 818. 48 The date for this appeal is contingent on the date for the conference at Cirta which Shaw (Shaw, Sacred Violence, 818) dates to May 306: some of the bishops who went to the meeting at Cirta then attended the meeting at Carthage afterward. 49 Barnes, “The Beginnings,” 19–20; Dearn, “Abitinian Martyrs,” 1. 50 Simon Corcoran, Empire of the Tetrarchs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 144–5. 51 Edwards, Optatus, xiv–xv; Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 10.6.1–5. 52 Optatus, Contr. Parm. 1.18 and Appendix 1; Augustine, Contra Cresconium Donatistam 3.30; see Augustinus: Contra Cresconium grammaticum et Donatistam, ed. M. Petschenig, CSEL 52 (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1909), 441. 53 Optatus, Appendix 4. 54 Shaw, Sacred Violence, 66. 55 Shaw, Sacred Violence, 67. 56 Shaw, Sacred Violence, 68–9. 57 Shaw, Sacred Violence, 70. 58 Karla Pollmann, “Christianity and Authority in Late Antiquity,” in Being Christian in Late Antiquity: A Festschrift for Gillian Clark, ed. Carol Harrison, Caroline Humfress, and Isabella Sandwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 163 and n. 31: “Already in AD 200, a provincial council in Carthage had denied the validity of baptism by heretics, following Tertullian’s notion of baptism.” Cf. Tertullian, De baptismo 1–9 and David E. Wilhite, Tertullian the African: An Anthropological Reading of Tertullian’s Context and Identities (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007). The councils of 255 and 256 confirmed this outcome (Pollmann, “Christianity and Authority in Late Antiquity,” 163). 59 Alan Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 7. “Stephen I  was strictly against this North African decision and in 256

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60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75

prohibited the repetition of the baptism” (Pollmann, “Christianity and Authority in Late Antiquity,” 163). Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage, 4 citing Cyprian, Ep. 75. For Cyprian’s waffling, see Pollmann, “Christianity and Authority in Late Antiquity,” 163. He would later “favour episcopal authority over church unity.” Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). Most recently, see Heather Barkman, “The Church of the Martyrs in Egypt and North Africa: A Comparison of the Meletian and Donatist Schisms,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies 6 (2014): 41–58. See, for example, a sampling of those most relevant to this study: L.W. Barnard, “The Antecedents of Arius,” Vigiliae Christianae 24 (1970): 172–88; T.D. Barnes, “The Exile and Recalls of Arius,” Journal of Theological Studies 60 (2009): 109–29; Thomas Böhm, “Die Thalia des Arius: Ein Beitrag zur frühchristlichen Hymnologie,” Vigiliae Christianae 46 (1992): 334–55; Robert M. Grant, “Religion and Politics at the Council of Nicaea,” Journal of Religion 55 (1975): 1–12; Robert C. Gregg and Dennis Groh, Early Arianism (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1981); Christopher Haas, “The Arians of Alexandria,” Vigiliae Christianae 47 (1993): 234–45; Uta Heil, “bloss nict wie die Manichäer,” Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum 9 (2005): 524–60; Winrich W.A. Löhr, “Arius Reconsidered: 1,” Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum 9 (2005): 524–60; id., “Arius Reconsidered: 2,” Zeitscrift für antikes Christentum 10 (2006): 121–57; J. Rebecca Lyman, “Arius and Arians,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 237–57; Annick Martin, “Le fil d’Arius,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 84 (1989): 297–333; id., “Les relations entre Arius et Mélitos dans la tradition Alexandrine,” Journal of Theological Studies 40 (1989): 401–13; Rowan Williams, “Arius and the Melitian Schism,” Journal of Theological Studies 37 (1986): 35–52; id., Arius: Heresy and Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001). For this aspect of Porphyry’s work, see Elizabeth D. Digeser, A Threat to Public Piety: Christians, Platonists and the Great Persecution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), especially 164–91. For the discussion here, see Ezra, “The Eichmann Polemics,” 141–65. Irving Howe, “The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle & A Critique,” Commentary 46 (4 October 1968): 29–51 in Ezra, “The Eichmann Polemics,” 142. Anson Rabinbach, “Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt Controversy,” October 108 (2004): 97–111 in Ezra, “The Eichmann Polemics,” 142. Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (London: Secker & Warburg, 1982), 269–74 in Ezra, “The Eichmann Polemics,” 142. Marie Syrkin, “Miss Arendt Surveys the Holocaust,” Jewish Frontier (May  1963): 7–14 in Ezra, “The Eichmann Polemics,” 143. On Peter, see Barnard, “The Antecedents of Arius,” 183. Christopher A. Beeley, The Unity of Christ: Continuity and Conflict in Patristic Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 106. Beeley, Unity of Christ, 108. Beeley, Unity of Christ, 107. Beeley, Unity of Christ, 107 and n. 3 p. 331; Philostorgius, Hist. eccl. 1.3 Ed. Joseph Bidez and Friedhelm Winkelmann, GCS 21 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1981), 6. See also Sara Parvis, Marcellus of Ancyra and the Lost Years of the Arian Controversy, 325–345 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 73. Beeley, Unity of Christ, 105.

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76 77 78 79

80

81 82 83 84

85

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88 89

Beeley, Unity of Christ, 105–6. Barnard, “The Antecedents of Arius,” 183. Beeley, Unity of Christ, 106. Beeley, Unity of Christ, 115–16. Exceptions were that Alexander abandoned Origen’s idea that the Son was generated by the Father’s will; he changed the language of eternity with respect to the Son’s generation (he was generated always [aei], not eternally [aidios]); and he mapped the ontology of being versus nonbeing onto this newly formed distinction between time and absolute eternity. Beeley, Unity of Christ, 54. Other charges against Origen as revealed in clues from Pamphilus’ Apology are that he divided the godhead by positing a Valentinian emission, he supported psilanthropism or adoptionism, he taught Docetism and an overstrong allegorization, he taught two Christs, he denied literal biblical history, he denied the resurrection of the dead, he denied the punishment of the wicked, he taught the pre-existence of the soul, and he taught the transmigration of souls. According to Beeley, only the teaching on the pre-existence of the soul is something that Origen actually held. For a very close reading of the sources, see Löhr, “Arius Reconsidered: 1,” 524–60 and id., “Arius Reconsidered: 2,” 121–57. Written to Alexander from Palestine ca. 321 = Urkunde 6. Beeley, Unity of Christ, 108 = Urkunde 1. Beeley, Unity of Christ, 108; cf. Athanasius, Contr. Ar. 1.5, ed. Karin Metzler and Kyriakos Savvidis, Athanasius Werke 1.1.2–3 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 306–7; Syn. 15, ed. Hans Georg Opitz, Athanasius Werke 2.1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1935–41), 42–3. Beeley, Unity of Christ, 109, 111, 332 n. 9. Cf. Urkunde 1.5; God the Father is unique within the Trinity as the source of the Son and is without source. God the Father is ontologically prior to the Son, and he avoids any suggestion that there are two sources of first principles in the Trinity. Moreover, Arius opposes the idea that the Son somehow pre-existed, but only later becomes Son. Beeley, Unity of Christ, 109–10; Urkunde 6.4; 1.2: Arius “argues against Alexander’s claim that the Son does not exist ‘eternally,’ ‘co-eternally’ or ‘co-unbegottenly’ with the Father . . . Arius takes Alexander to be asserting not temporal co-existence, but the absence of any sense of sequentiality, including causality.” Here Arius parts company with not only Alexander, but also Origen and Eusebius of Caesarea. Beeley, Unity of Christ, 111. Cf. Thalia frags. 5–6, 12, 213, 7, 11, 4, 14–15, 9, 22, 10). As Beeley emphasizes, for Arius, one of God the Father’s unique qualities is precisely his “singularity: God is supremely unique (monōtatos), yet the son does not share this quality.” Beeley, Unity of Christ, 108; Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 1.15, ed. Joseph Bidez, SC 306, 418, 495 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1983–2008), 182–91; according to Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 269–70, this was a “sparsely inhabited region, just beyond the suburb and the adjacent necropolis . . . inhabited principally by shepherds”; Beeley, Unity of Christ, 108, citing Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 272 and Lyman, “Arius and Arians,” 237–57. See also Stephen J. Davis, The Early Coptic Papacy: The Egyptian Church and Its Leadership in Late Antiquity (Cairo: American University at Cairo Press, 2004). This location may have played a role in shaping the ascetic character of Arius as pastor. Barnes, “Exile,” 127: Secundus of Ptolemaïs and others (Epiphanius, Pan. 69.1.2, 3.2, eds. Jürgen Dummer and Karl Holl, GCS 37 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1985), 152, 154; Urkunde 6 = Dokument 1.5); Beeley, Unity of Christ, 107–8. Beeley, Unity of Christ, 110.

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90 Beeley, Unity of Christ, 117; Alexander, He philarchos/Letter to Alexander of Byzantium, ed. Hans-Georg Opitz, Athanasius Werke III (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1934–), 19–29. 91 Beeley, Unity of Christ, 117; Alexander, Phil. 1.9 (Opitz, 19–29). 92 Beeley, Unity of Christ, 117; he links him with Paul of Samosata as well. Alexander, He philarchos 2, 9 (Opitz, 19–29). 93 Beeley, Unity of Christ, 109–11. 94 See Barnes, “Exile,” for a date of 325. 95 Emphasis added. 96 Socrates Scholasticus, Hist. eccl. 1.9.30; see Socrate de Constantinople: Histoire ecclésiastique, P. Maraval and R. Périchon, 4 vols., SC 477, 493, 505, 506 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2004–2007), 120–41; translation: NPNF. 97 Barnes, “Exile,” 127. 98 For the argument that Arius’ theological background was Antiochene, developed as a student of Lucian of Antioch, see Barnard, “The Antecedents of Arius,” 172. Many uphold this conviction (see e.g., Mark Edwards, “Alexander of Alexandria and the Homoousion,” Vigiliae Christianae 66 [2012]: 489) on the basis of Arius’ referring to Eusebius of Nicomedia as a fellow Lucianist, but Beeley argues that he might merely have been addressing Eusebius as someone open to his present state of martyrdom (i.e., persecution from Alexander). See also Heil, “. . . bloss nicht wie die Manichäer,” 524–60 who argues that Arius “intended to preserve the utility and transcendence of the creator and thus [in his view] the Son of God could only be a secondary mediator of creation.” 99 Beeley, Unity of Christ, 109–11. 100 Elizabeth D. Digeser, “Origen on the Limes: Rhetoric and the Polarization of Identity in the Late Third Century,” in The Rhetoric of Power in Late Antiquity: Religion and Politics in Byzantium, Europe and the Early Islamic World, ed. Robert M. Frakes, Elizabeth D. Digeser, and Justin Stephens (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 197–218. 101 Two potentially fruitful cases to bring into comparison would be the seventeenthcentury Puritan characterization of Church of England churchmen as “traitors” and the fracturing of the Chinese Christian community after the Revolution; see J. Sears McGee, An Industrious Mind: The Worlds of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 22–3 and Paul R. Spickard, “The Church in the Crucible: Chinese Protestants Since Liberation,” Fides et Historia 22 (1990): 30–42. 102 As recently proposed by Sarah Chayes, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015).

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———. “The Beginnings of Donatism.” Journal of Theological Studies 26 (1975): 13–22. ———. “Lactantius and Constantine.” Journal of Roman Studies 63 (1973): 29–46. Beeley, Christopher A. The Unity of Christ: Continuity and Conflict in Patristic Tradition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Birley, A.R. “Some Notes on the Donatist Schism.” Libyan Studies 28 (1987): 29–41. Böhm, Thomas. “Die Thalia des Arius: Ein Beitrag zur frühchristlichen Hymnologie.” Vigiliae Christianae 46 (1992): 334–55. Brent, Alan. Cyprian and Roman Carthage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Brown, Peter. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Carotenuto, Erica. “Six Constantinian Documents.” Vigiliae Christianae 36 (2002): 56–74. Castelli, Elizabeth. Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Chayes, Sarah. Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security. New York: W.W. Norton, 2015. Corcoran, Simon. Empire of the Tetrarchs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Creed, J.L., ed. and trans. Lactantius: De mortibus persecutorum. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984. Croes, Marnix and Peter Tammes. Gif laten wij niet voortbestaan: Een onderzoek naar de overlevingskansen Van Joden in de Nederlandse gemeenten, 1940–1945. Amsterdam: Aksant, 2004. Davis, Stephen J. The Early Coptic Papacy: The Egyptian Church and Its Leadership in Late Antiquity. Cairo: American University at Cairo Press, 2004. de Ste. Croix, G.E.M. Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy. Edited by Michael Whitby and Joseph Streeter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. “Aspects of the Great Persecution.” Harvard Theological Review 47 (1954): 75–113. Dearn, Alan. “The Abitinian Martyrs and the Outbreak of the Donatist Schism.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 55 (2004): 1–18. Digeser, Elizabeth D. A Threat to Public Piety: Christians, Platonists and the Great Persecution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. ———. “Origen on the Limes: Rhetoric and the Polarization of Identity in the Late Third Century.” Pages 197–218 in The Rhetoric of Power in Late Antiquity: Religion and Politics in Byzantium, Europe and the Early Islamic World. Edited by Robert M. Frakes, Elizabeth D. Digeser, and Justin Stephens. London: I. B. Tauris, 2010. Edwards, Mark. “Alexander of Alexandria and the Homoousion.” Vigiliae Christianae 66 (2012): 482–502. ———. ed. and trans. Optatus: Against the Donatists. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997. Ezra, Michael. “The Eichmann Polemics: Hannah Arendt and Her Critics.” Democratiya 9 (2007): 141–65. Frend, W.H.C. The Donatist Church. Oxford: Clarendon, 2000. ———. “Prelude to the Great Persecution: The Propaganda War.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 38 (1987): 1–18. ———. “A Note on the Great Persecution in the West.” Pages 141–8 in Papers Read at the Second Winter and Summer Meetings of the Ecclesiastical History Society. London: Nelson, 1965.

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———. Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church. Oxford: Blackwell, 1965. Frend, W.H.C. and K. Clancy. “When Did the Donatist Schism Begin?” Journal of Theological Studies 28 (1977): 104–9. Grant, Robert M. “Religion and Politics at the Council of Nicaea.” Journal of Religion 55 (1975): 1–12. Gregg, Robert C. and Dennis Groh. Early Arianism. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1981. Haas, Christopher. Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. ———. “The Arians of Alexandria.” Vigiliae Christianae 47 (1993): 234–45. Heil, Uta. “. . . bloss nicht wie die Manichäer.” Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum 9 (2005): 524–60. Herzog, Dagmar. “Nazism: Bernard Wasserstein’s Ambiguity of Virtue and More.” New York Times, June 6, 2014. Hilberg, Raul. Destruction of the European Jews. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985. Howe, Irving. A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography. London: Secker & Warburg, 1982. ———. “The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle & a Critique.” Commentary 46 (4 October 1968): 29–51. Labrousse, Mireille, ed. Optat de Milève: Traité contre les donatistes. 2 vols. SC 412, 413. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1995–1996. Lepelley, Claude. Les cités de l’Afrique romaine au Bas-Empire. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1979–1981. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Vintage Press, 1989. Löhr, Winrich W.A. “Arius Reconsidered: 2.” Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum 10 (2006): 121–57. ———. “Arius Reconsidered: 1.” Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum 9 (2005): 524–60. ———. “Some Observations on Karl-Heinz Schwarte’s Diocletians Gesetz.” Vigiliae Christianae 65 (2002): 75–95. Lyman, J. Rebecca. “Arius and Arians.” Pages 237–57 in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies. Edited by Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Marone, Paola. “Donne nel movimiento donatista.” Augustinianum 51 (2011): 85–99. Maraval, P. and R. Périchon, eds. Socrate de Constantinople: Histoire ecclésiastique. 4 vols. SC 477, 493, 505, 506. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2004–2007. Martin, Annick. “Le fil d’Arius.” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 84 (1989): 297–333. ———. “Les relations entre Arius et Mélitos dans la tradition Alexandrine.” Journal of Theological Studies 40 (1989): 401–13. McGee, J. Sears. An Industrious Mind: The Worlds of Sir Simonds D’Ewes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Meinking, Kristina. “Anger and Adjudication: The Political Relevance of De ira dei.” Journal of Late Antiquity 6 (2013): 84–107. Parvis, Sara. Marcellus of Ancyra and the Lost Years of the Arian Controversy, 325–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Petschenig, M., ed. Augustinus: Contra Cresconium grammaticum et Donatistam. CSEL 52. Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1909.

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Pollmann, Karla. “Christianity and Authority in Late Antiquity.” Pages 156–74 in Being Christian in Late Antiquity: A Festschrift for Gillian Clark. Edited by Carol Harrison, Caroline Humfress, and Isabella Sandwell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Rabinbach, Anson. “Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt Controversy.” October 108 (2004): 97–111. Rebillard, Éric. Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200– 450 CE. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. Rives, James B. Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Schwarte, Karl-Heinz. “Diocletians Christengesetz.” Pages 203–40 in E fontibus haurire: Beiträge zur römischen Geschichte und zu ihren Hilfswissenschaften. Edited by Heinrich Chantraine, Rosmarie Günther, and Stefan Rebenich. Paderborn: Schoning, 1994. Shaw, Brent. Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Spickard, Paul R. “The Church in the Crucible: Chinese Protestants Since Liberation.” Fides et Historia 22 (1990): 30–42. Syrkin, Marie. “Miss Arendt Surveys the Holocaust.” Jewish Frontier (May, 1963): 7–14. Wasserstein, Bernard. The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude Van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Wilhite, David E. Tertullian the African: An Anthropological Reading of Tertullian’s Context and Identities. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007. Williams, Rowan. Arius: Heresy and Tradition. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001. ———. “Arius and the Melitian Schism.” Journal of Theological Studies 37 (1986): 35–52.

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12 THE USEFULNESS OF VIOLENT ENDS Apocalyptic imaginaries in the reconstruction of society Gerhard van den Heever Symbolic revolutions: discourse and the reconstruction of society Unresolved tensions regarding the social compact that is the “new” South Africa – the South Africa that came into being in the period 1990 to 1996 after a nearly century-long struggle by the (mostly) black African majority against racial-imperial disenfranchisement and oppression1 – burst to the surface at the start of 2015 with the #RhodesMustFall campaign.2 The campaign started on 9 March  2015 when a student, Chumani Maxwele, threw a bucket of faeces at the statue of Cecil John Rhodes on the campus of the University of Cape Town. The protest was motivated by the experience of oppression induced by the presence of the statue, as well as the groundswell of protest against what was identified as the vestiges of institutionalized racism in the University, race-based exclusionary practices preventing full participation in higher learning by disadvantaged black students, and colonial contents of curricula that entrenched colonial oppression of Africans. Protest gatherings led to the eventual removal of the statue from the university campus. The protest soon became violent with the occupation of university buildings, the burning of colonial era artworks, and spread to other universities. Throughout South Africa in the course of 2015 there were instances of defacing and vandalism of statues of figures representing South Africa’s colonial past: most prominently the statue of Queen Victoria in Port Elizabeth, King George V at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, and that of President Paul Kruger in Pretoria. Throughout 2015 and 2016 there have been constant violent protests, destruction of university property, and clashes between protesters and police and security personnel on various campuses. Perceptions of coloniality and epistemic violence in higher education – both in terms of curricula, academic campus culture, and financial exclusions of poor black students – soon saw the #RhodesMustFall campaign broaden out to a #FeesMustFall campaign (an at times violent protest against increasing university fees and shortages in student 282

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funding), eventually to also embrace, since September 2016, a #ScienceMustFall campaign. The latter was explicitly aimed at overturning the enduring legacy of an epistemology (to wit: Western science and the canon of authors and disciplinary conventions derived from the First World) that, in the language of the protest movements, serves the ongoing economic, political, and intellectual enslavement of black South Africans.3 Hence the insistence on decolonializing higher education and the curriculum. In the public debates that ensued, connections were drawn between the “symbolic, continued, existence of names, statues and sculptures left over from the colonial and Apartheid eras of South Africa” and how these “reflect the continued exclusion of different epistemologies of thought, different races, classes and gender based oppressions.”4 The wave of rolling student protests was quickly located within a broader conversation across the nation that seeks to apply pressure on the political imagination of the present day: It is a recurring theme in interpretive reflection on the #FeesMustFall protest movement that the protest should be understood in a wider context. Commentators were quick to draw connections between protests against the varied and complex exclusions from higher education and training as avenues out of poverty, and a violent history of a hegemonic racially derived episteme. In one case the call for a curriculum that moved “beyond narrow Eurocentric confines to one which grants equal status and value to African and other epistemic traditions,” a lack characterized as “implicit, epistemic violence,” is immediately tied to the fact that this experience of alienation in the context of students’ experiences of higher education is the manifestation of wider, encompassing failure of social integration – the fall of apartheid removed the legal system of racial discrimination but not the effects of it in the economic and developmental inequalities it left in its wake.5 The Rhodes, whose name lived on in the protest campaign, is Cecil John Rhodes (1853–1902), Anglo-South African mining magnate and politician who emigrated in 1870 from Britain to the then Colony of Natal, and made his fortune first on the diamond fields of the northern Cape and subsequently on the goldfields of the then South African Republic. He eventually made a successful political career as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony 1890 to 1896 (he had to resign as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony and from the British South Africa Company, the company that had the Royal Charter to found the new colony of Rhodesia, after the failed Jameson Raid into the South African Republic). During his term as Prime Minister he promulgated the Glen Grey Act that regulated voting rights for blacks as well as establishing “purely natives territories” in the Transkei region of the eastern Cape, thus prefiguring and laying the groundwork for the later infamous legislative acts that deprived rural blacks from their ancestral land.6 283

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Of importance in the context of this chapter are the “Confession of Faith” that Rhodes wrote in Oxford during a return to Britain to further his studies at Oxford University (dated 2 June 1877, reworked later that same year in Kimberley after his return from Britain), and his first will drawn up on 19 September 1877. In the “Confession” Rhodes expressed the desirability of establishing a secret society that will operate throughout the British Empire in all sectors of influence in order to further the political and economic interests of the British Empire, to bring the “whole uncivilised world” (sic) under British rule, to recover the United States into the British Empire so as to make the “Anglo-Saxon race” but one Empire. The first clause to the 1877 will begins: To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.7 The will shows Rhodes to be a racist and an arch-imperialist, and it is in the context of what he represented that one should understand the current emerging discursive reconstruction of South African society, for the industrial capitalism that Rhodes helped found in South Africa in the late 19th century laid the groundwork for the whole social catastrophe that was apartheid-directed socially engineered South African society in the 20th century. To summarize a complex history, as I have done elsewhere, the history of apartheid as a social engineering project for the purpose of the disenfranchisement and economic exploitation of black South Africans along racial lines is not to be understood outside of the framework of the arrival, imposition, and growth of a capitalist economy in South Africa.8 The imposition of industrial capitalism after the discovery of gold and the establishment of the first mining concessions in what soon became the city of Johannesburg (1884–1886) fundamentally changed what was (and remained so until well past the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and the First World War) an agricultural, colonial-settler economy surrounding an “island of intense industrialisation” on 284

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the Witwatersrand with some pockets of industrial activity elsewhere. Gold attracted an imperial class of venture capitalists that quickly both concentrated financial power but also simultaneously expanded into an interconnected series of industries – South Africa was industrialising around mineral exports (“South Africa emerged from the British Empire as an export enclave” in the service of the Empire, so Keith Hart and Vishnu Padayachee).9 The imposition of industrial capitalism set in motion a process of fairly rapid economic transformation through expanding industrialisation, rapid urbanisation, and fundamental sociocultural transformations among the newly urbanised population. To achieve and maintain the profitability of the mining-led industrial revolution (mainly) on the Witwatersrand, a raft of legislation was needed in order to construct a “cheap labour economy.” The three main legs of this raft of legislation were political disenfranchisement of blacks, land ownership regulations, and job reservations along racial lines.10 To grossly simplify a long and complicated social history, the net effect of the economic demand for legislative social engineering was the destruction of the black agricultural peasantry, large-scale urbanisation among both poor whites and blacks with a concomitant emergence of mixedrace slums, and a long-going cultural modernising project among the black urban populations.11 Thus, apartheid was a means for excluding black South Africans both from profiting from the new modes of production and relations to economic factors, and from their simultaneously disrupted traditional cultural values. The core accusation voiced in the current protests is that the arrival of democracy did not substantially correct this alienation.12 Thus, according to self-interpretations arising from the chorus of voices in the various #FeesMustFall movements, it is the legacy of this long socially defining process that has now come to roost. Ergo, the discourse of symbolic violence of the recent student unrest as it unfolded over the past two years suggests an interlinkage between history (as in internalized, experienced history, interpreted history), symbols of the past as the sites for contestations about the interpretation of history, and social formations.13 If the unrest started with a focus on the statue of Cecil John Rhodes (and then extended to other similar symbols) as a symbol of a particular meaning-laden past, and had this symbolic meaning as its driving core (even as it fed into the follow-up rounds of protests), one may interpret the “symbolic revolution” through the concept of the instrumentality of history, or history-as-myth. The phrase “history-as-myth” in the context of the argument pursued here encapsulates Roland Barthes’s understanding of myth in “Myth Today.”14 Myth is not a simple system of ordinary or primary signification, but rather a secondary system of signification in which the sign, that is the combination of signifiersignified, itself becomes a signifier, that is, through a process of signification by 285

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means of association and connotation. “Mythology takes this sign and turns it into a signifier for a new signified, a new concept . . . Myth, then, transforms first-order meanings into second-order meanings.”15 Furthermore, this is not a neutral process of signification, but politically charged in that the political operates through mythologizing – specific power structures in society induce the particular associations and connotations that construct the myth. While myths have the capacity to disguise their own historicity and to present themselves as objective and natural (and hence become the site for the operation of ideology), it is precisely in disaggregating and fracturing social contexts that myths become dehistoricized as sites of social contestation. It is therefore that the second part of the heading to this section, “discourse and the reconstruction of society,” deliberately evokes the title of the well-known and influential 1989 monograph of Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification.16 While Lincoln offers no definition of discourse in the book, it becomes clear from the assembled examples that discourse as a statement of “so things are” arises from an ensemble of operations, viz. symbolic-mythologizing (not only as the significatory practice itself – discourse assigns meaning – but also contestations regarding institutionalized significations); ritual practices – ranges of formalized actions that establish or set assigned meanings and interpretation in place; and classifications as establishments of hierarchies of authority. Since discourse is itself the product of the ability to define how things are and to arrange hierarchies of authority, it goes almost without saying that discourse is an operation of power and force (force understood here as the ability to enforce, to induce, which exercise of the ability ranges from persuasion, to threat, to coercion, to violence).17 Hence, inducement and enforcement have as their constant counterparts, resistance, rebellion, and revolution – social discourse is the collective noun for the manifold manners and sites of interplay between both sides of the power divide.

Constructing a groundwork for comparison: destructions of religious symbols in the Spanish Civil War While Bruce Lincoln, in the essay “Revolutionary Exhumations in Spain,” highlights the millennialist subversion of conventional orders of discourse and practice during the Spanish Civil War, mainly new habits of conduct and social organization among the Left Republicans, coupled with the “symbolic revolution” expressed in destruction and profanation of churches, killing of clerics, and exhumations of mummies of deceased priests and nuns, for the purposes of making this comparison more fruitful in the context of the introductory paragraph on the various #[Enter]MustFall campaigns in South Africa, it is useful to highlight in highly summary manner some salient features of Spanish history leading up to the conflict between revolutionaries and guardians of the old order in revolutionary Spain 1936 to 1939 as a comparandum by means of which to reimagine religious violence as “symbolic revolution.”18 286

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In the course of the roughly century and a half, between 1805 and 1936, Spanish history pulled in two opposing directions:19 simultaneously deeply traditionalistmonarchist and developing a liberal tradition (in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and under influence of the French post-Revolution tradition, the Constitution of 1812 was an attempt to limit the power of the monarch and to establish a liberal state).20 In effect the military coup of July 1936 that unleashed the civil war set in motion a series of culture wars: urban culture and cosmopolitan lifestyles versus rural tradition; secular against religious; authoritarianism against liberal political cultures; centre versus periphery; traditional gender roles versus the “new woman”; even youth against age, since generational conflicts were also present.21 Since the middle of the 19th century a steady industrialization and modernizing of the economy (mainly centred on cities like Madrid, Toledo, Zaragoza, and Barcelona, as well as the agricultural region around Valencia) occurred in the midst of what was still basically an agrarian economy founded on large latifundia (from which base the landowner class exerted considerable influence on the organization of the state; the landed oligarchy occupied most important government positions), itself standing on the back of a large peasantry perpetually surviving on the edge of starvation (brought on by a tradition of monoculture which meant insufficient harvest-incomes and deepening states of indebtedness of the peasantry).22 In the period, Spain was characterized by a fairly rapid urbanization with concomitant rise in modernized urban populations, professional organizations, and labour movements, all contributing to the growing cleavage between urban and rural Spain; and a short-lived economic growth period after the First World War coming to an end in the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression. Nevertheless, the changes in social constitution of Spanish society (along with better communications and transport and the relatively freer circulation of new ideas) also brought with them increasing clamour for a political voice.23 “The drama of liberal government in nineteenth-century Spain lay especially in the fact that no other country in the world made such persistent efforts to introduce such advanced political forms amid similar conditions of social and economic underdevelopment. Such premature liberalism had seemed destined to fail.”24 These democratizing movements came into conflict with the landowning class who resisted change when the Republican Socialist government attempted anything approximating land reform – “the reforms raised opposition among Spain’s traditional elites.”25 Politically, in the course of this tumultuous and turbulent century and a half, there had been, as well, a conflict regarding the legitimate line of succession in the royal house of Bourbon (between the Alfonsine and Carlist lines), popular uprisings against the ultra-conservatism of the monarchy and the establishment of the First Republic (1873 to 1874; ending with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy); a number of military pronunciamentos and coups (a pronunciamento was a declaration by the military that the government has lost the ability to govern and this usually led to the formation of a new government);26 and the establishment of semi-dictatorial regimes under the monarchy ending in 1931 with the abdication 287

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of Alfonso XIII and the establishment of the Second Republic (1931 to 1939) under a Socialist government. Two political forces played a central role in the unfolding of the civil war: the army and the Catholic Church. While the army itself at times played protector of liberal values, the loss of the remainders of the Spanish Empire (earlier in the 19th century, Spain lost all of its South American colonies, including Mexico, to liberation movements; 1898 to 1899 saw the loss of Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam to the United States of America after the Spanish-American War), and with it the colonial markets for economic exploitation, caused deep and long-during disaffection among the military class for the political classes in mainland Spain, resulting in a call “to make Spain great again.” Thus during the political radicalization of the two decades leading up to the civil war, and under the onslaught of a Manichean dualist rhetoric of the opposition-as-enemy, the armed forces (who themselves did not initially form a unified front, ideologically or organizationally) steadily drifted Rightwards. The Catholic Church, having been deeply enmeshed with the monarchical order in Spain for centuries, regarded itself as the guardian of traditionalism – the bulwark against the “consequences of encroaching political liberalism and cultural pluralism, both of which profoundly challenged its own monopoly on truth,”27 and hence also as guardian of the landed patrician order in the rural, mainly agricultural districts. As a result, it had already begun to experience largescale rejection by the peasantry who regarded the Church as complicit in their oppression, as well as by the industrial proletariat in the urban environments. The Catholic Church’s response to this was the “apocalyptic tone” to the pastoral letter of the Cardinal Primate on 1 May 1931 which was an “incendiary royalist homily” calling on the faithful to mobilize in “spiritual and patriotic rearmament” coming close to declaring the Republic an illegitimate regime. Other bishops went further and actually described the Republic as the triumph of error and sin (the same dualist apocalyptic tone characterized discourse among the military as society radicalized).28 As the Republican government set about its programme of re-engineering Spanish society, to a large extent the Catholic Church became the central focus of the cultural wars escalating in the country. The final break between the Catholic Church and the Republican government arose from the latter’s policy of cultural modernization, laicization, and secularization – an attempt to subordinate the position and influence of the Church to that of the secular state. In this pursuit the Republicans rode a wave of anticlericalism – “As secularization increased, anticlericalism became the principal common denominator of the left. By the 1930s Spain had become a partially secularized country and thus had entered the ‘danger zone’ of cultural change in which religious conflict would become most intense.”29 Anticlericalism took the practical shape, in the Republican programme of political reforms, of restrictions posed on the public expression of Church life, particularly the right to teach. Other restrictions regarded economic activity by

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the Church, public demonstrations of religion, even the wearing of religious symbols like crucifixes by women, and in addition, the Society of Jesus was dissolved.30 While in earlier times Church property had also been targeted for vandalism or destruction, with the maelstrom leading to the war gathering apace, very early in the life of the new Republic, “Catholic churches and buildings became targets of arson and mob destruction in the famous quema de conventos [burning of the convents] of 11–12 May 1931,” which saw more than 100 buildings torched and sacked in Madrid and several cities of the south and east, destroying also priceless libraries and art. In the course of the civil war the war against the Church escalated, with numerous clerics killed, churches profaned, church rituals inverted in carnivalesque reversals, symbols destroyed (e.g., in Barcelona, Madrid, Toledo, Valencia, Almeria, Ripoll, and Vich)31 – inter alia, the exhumations of Lincoln’s description, and the most infamous of all events: the “execution” of the Sacred Heart of Jesus by Communist militiamen (Monument of the Sacred Heart on the Cerro de los Angeles, a hill a few miles south of Madrid which is regarded as the exact centre of Spain).32 In areas controlled by Republicans, especially the more radical groups like POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista = Worker’s Party of Marxist Unification) in Barcelona, a social revolution was set in motion by peasants and workers who collectivized farms, factories, and businesses of all sizes, including public services and transport. Culturally, the social revolution took the shape of new ways of address that stressed equality, even to the promotion of “free love.” Thus, in enacting millenarian antinomianism, local radicals who burnt and desecrated churches, profaned religious symbols, and exacted a kind of genocide on religious personnel, sought to overturn a dominant cultural formation that had been structured by the discourses of religion, honour, and patronage and had legitimated relations of inequality for centuries.33 It is this utopian inversion of the conventional order of things, in which “secular ideologies functioned as politico-ideological substitutes for religion,”34 that evoked the strong reaction from the range of conservative forces on the Right, in which “the wars of religion, which had never afflicted sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Spain, arrived in modern form in the 1930s with a vengeance. . . . Only as a kind of religious warfare can the intensity of the clerical–anticlerical conflict in Spain be understood.”35 The eschatological–millenarian ritual destruction and desecration of churches, shrines, statues, religious artworks, and the looting of church treasures, were seen as an assault on the public presence of Catholicism and the emotional power it still held over the population.36 As a commentator on the times, Father Antonio Montero Moreno put it: the material destruction of “the sacred” unveiled “a rage against the religious world far more significant than if the killed are men of flesh and bone.”37 As Spain descended into chaos, there were extrajudicial killings, executions, and assassinations on both sides, Republican and Nationalist; and both sides trumpeted news – real and fake – to show up the other as illegitimate and insurrectionist.

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The language hardened on both sides: following the coup in July 1936, from various constituencies on the Right came the message that Spain needed to be purged or purified. Sometimes they even spoke of the need for a blood sacrifice. These kinds of sentiments unleashed a savage repression that happened from the outset everywhere in rebel Spain, including in many areas where the military rebels were in control from the start, where there was no armed resistance, no political resistance to speak of either, no “front,” no advancing or retreating troops – in short, where there was no “war” according to a conventional definition of the term. What there was, however, was a culture war that the perpetrators carried in their heads. The coup had sanctioned its unleashing and thus opened the way to mass murder.38 On the Left the revolutionaries were equally convinced that they were carrying out a quasi-religious task: “We have rounded up all the priests and parasites. . . . We have lit our torches and applied the purifying fire to all the churches . . . and we have covered the countryside and purified it of the plague of religion,” boasted the anarchist mouthpiece Solidaridad Obrera. And a similar mysticism of cathartic annihilation could be found in the words of an FAI member to a priest, before setting the latter’s church on fire: “Can you see this lamp burning day and night in front of the tabernacle as a sign of love? Well, now, with the flame of this lamp, we’re going to set fire to the church and thus purify the world of the lies you priests have disseminated.” Priests were killed, temples were destroyed, ultimately because of the need to eradicate the enemy within, to purge society of strange, pernicious elements, and to attain a simple, popular, feasible solution to the problems posed by the war and the revolution.39 Both sides to the conflict fought the civil war on the belief that they were fighting their own Armageddon, the end-time apocalyptic conflict. On the Right, Falangist fascism was called on to “save civilization.” In fact, within the Right, in Nationalist Spain – those parts controlled by the Nationalists – the conflict was interpreted as a “re-Christianization of Spain.”40 The Nationalist side interpreted the conflict as end-time conflict through images from the book of Revelation: José M. Pemán brings the apocalyptic symbolism of Revelation to bear in his Poema de la Bestia y el Ángel (Poem of the Beast and the Angel), in which he writes: “The smoke of incense and the smoke of cannons, which rise to the feet of God, together constitute a single affirmation of our faith and, besides, of our promise to save a world and restore a civilization.”41 After the civil war had already started, the Catholic Church reacted to the revolutionary violence enacted on it by the broad variety of Leftist forces: first, the “Pastoral Instruction of the 290

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Bishops of Pamplona and Vitoria” censuring Basque Catholics’ alliance with the “enemies of the Church”; then the Pope himself, in an address to 500 Spanish refugees on 14 September  1936, showed sympathy with the Nationalist cause; followed by the Bishop of Salamanca, Enrique Pla y Deniel’s pastoral letter “Las dos ciudades” of 30 September in which he referred to the military uprising as “a Crusade against the children of Cain . . . a Crusade for religion, for the fatherland, for civilization”;42 the booklet El caso de España by the Primate of Spain (Cardinal Isidro Goma) of 23 November; and the famous “Joint Letter of the Spanish Bishops to the Bishops of the Whole World Concerning the War in Spain” of 1 July 1937, turned the Nationalist insurrection against the Republicans into a religious crusade.43 On the Republican side the conflict was cast as a fight against a fearsome apocalyptic monster: “a bloodthirsty dragon, its skin covered with the symbols of fascism and its three heads representing the three sworn enemies of the people – the rich, the military and the clergy” – the contents of a political poster published in the Catalan satirical magazine, L’Esquella de la Torratxa, 18 September 1936.44 The combination of the rich, the military, and the clergy as the triad of oppressive forces, regularly appears in propaganda posters, like the well-known poster, Los Nacionales (The Nationals) attributed to Juan Antonio Morales, and issued by the Ministerio de Propaganda, which depicts a warship with a military officer (wearing a blue Nationalist fascist sash); a wealthy bourgeois businessman with a Swastika lapel badge; a corpulent Catholic cleric; and coloured Spanish Moroccan soldiers, feared for their cruelty and fierceness, but also evoking the origins of the military insurrection – in the Spanish overseas legions of the Spanish Moroccan army; in the midst of it all a gallows symbolizing the death wrought by their hegemony and political reactionary.45 On the Republican side a millenarian mindset interpreted mass killings as achieving a tabula rasa, while on the Nationalist, rebel, side the killings were seen as “a cleansing action designed to rid the community of sources of ‘pollution’ and the dangers they supposed.”46 On both sides, people of all ages and conditions fell victim to this “cleansing” (although it has to be pointed out that, for all the destruction and bloodletting, the destruction and killings were mainly concentrated in the first six months of the civil war; thereafter, arguably, issues of survival and eventual military success took precedence). But for the Nationalist forces, the cleansing or purification concerned people who symbolized cultural change and thus non-traditionalist understandings of mores, values, and behaviour: progressive teachers, intellectuals, selfeducated workers, and “new” women. Falangist violence was targeted against the socially, culturally, and sexually different.47 In addition, in Nationalist-Falangist territories there was equally a religious crusade, this time aimed at Protestant churches. In the view of the Right, Protestantism was a plague that needed to be cleansed. Ironically, if the desecration and profanation of religious symbols and icons had as its purpose to demonstrate their mere artifact-ness and lifelessness, then these acts of desecration “seemed at the same time to reveal a basic, almost magical belief in their might and the necessity to escape from their influence at any 291

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Figure 12.1 The apocalyptic monster cornered by the Republican forces. It appeared in the satirical magazine, L’Esquella de la Torratxa, 18 September 1936, 536–537. The caption (which unfortunately runs across the fold in the page and is difficult to read) says something like: “Come on, Comrades, the beast is already cornered.” Source: http://mdc2.cbuc.cat/cdm/compoundobject/collection/esquella/id/22670/rec/2983

cost.”48 There is, again, in this the matter of the experience of the living history embedded in the symbols of a social order that fueled the sentiments of heightened aversion not only to the symbols themselves but also what they stood for – the myth of a Catholic Spain. Thus, all the actors on the stage of the Spanish Civil War were caught on either side between deconstruction and reassertion of the social order. Not to put too fine a point to it: in a context of increasing economic insecurity, an uncompleted social and economic revolution which left heightened expectations unfulfilled (even as exactly these evoked strong resistance from more conservative sectors of society), when the social fabric finally tore, it was the predominant symbolic order – the Catholic Church and all it stood for: the old oligarchic order; the entrenchment of monarchic authoritarian privileges and protections of the obtaining economic hierarchies; and its cultural and ideological hegemony over society, severely hampering social progress, democratization, and modernization – that became the focus of the ideologies operative in the Spanish Civil War on both sides. In this, I would contend, lies a powerful comparative moment to think the current symbolic revolutions with that play out in South Africa.

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Figure 12.2 Los Nacionales (The Nationals), attributed to Antonio Morales, issued by the Ministerio de Propaganda. Source: https://lts.brandeis.edu/research/archives-speccoll/spanishcivilwar/posters.html

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Christianity emerging on the border between the classical and post-classical worlds: three vignettes In the two preceding case studies, long-standing social tensions became acute in the context of sudden ruptures in the social fabric. If the symbolic revolutions discussed above are concretely situated in contexts of social disaggregation that resulted from severe reorganizations in social positionality among classes, groups, and institutionalized interests (and hence the eruptions of violence going with it – sentiments of affinity and disaffection act as the affective motor for violent behaviour), the 4th century CE as the century of the Christianization of the Roman Empire, the so-called Constantinian Revolution, was a more gradual process. Or, better put it, the evidence seems to suggest a more complex process of change that at times and in specific contexts, erupted in violence directed at religious artifacts, symbols, and institutions. I highlight these slow-moving changes in order to profile the symbolic revolutions that mark aspects of religious change in the Late Roman Empire. The big religious and cultural revolution that was the Christianization of the late Roman Empire did not arrive out of the blue, out of nothing – it was the culmination of a series of cultural shifts of long duration: a) Transitions from inspired oracular speech to book-centred religious discourses (Judaism, Christianity, Manichaeism – to name only the three most prominent, but strands of Buddhism had also made its presence felt in the late antique world – were characterized not only by the development of extensive canons of religious literature, but also by the rise of a class of expert commentators, which commentaries themselves came to constitute a library of religious resources); b) Transitions from concrete, material, imagistic instantiations of divine presence to aniconic conceptions of divinity with concomitant new ways of mediating the divine: for instance, in the rise of various permutations of Neoplatonic theurgic and religious philosophies and practices, mysticism, and so on – outside of Christianity in Late Roman Neoplatonic philosophy and theurgy, itself a kind of ascetical gymnastics; in the rise of Jewish mysticism out of the intersection of Persian-derived apocalyptic discourses and “vertical” apocalyptic-cum-visionary traditions; and within Christianity with the emergence of asceticism as training for divine vision and full-blown mysticism ranging from Origen, Evagrius Ponticus, and Gregory of Nyssa, and the 6th-century mystic (pseudo-) Dionysius the Aereopagite, who drew on these earlier writers. In this regard, the monotheism of Christianity was a manifestation of the wider drift towards monotheism in the Late Roman world;49 c) Transitions from priestly classes of religious hierarchies to hermeneutic specialists (rabbinic and Christian teacher-theologians – even as they existed alongside a broad spectrum of popular religious practitioners, holy men, healersdiviners, etc. – constituted as class the new intellectual force determining the 294

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shape of Christian discourses but also their relation to and intersection with secular authority); d) Transitions from monocultural, singular ethnic social entities, and identity formations to international, multiethnic, and geographically dispersed populations of post-ancient religious communities held together not only by shared symbols, beliefs, and practices, but also by itinerant leaders and mobile texts, incorporation into which occurred through practices of conversion as a habituated new comportment with newly emerging social and identity formations; e) And finally, transformations of the relationships between religious institutions and the hegemonic hierarchies organizing various social aggregates in the post-ancient or late antique world, that is, an emerging independence inhering in religious institutions vis-à-vis the state (the Christian church, conceived of an independent identity, exerted its social agency vis-à-vis the Roman state);50 f ) And on the other side, and for our purposes here perhaps as important, the long survival, in new shapes and forms, of Graeco-Roman religious concepts and images (some examples by way of extremely abbreviated shorthand): Horus, the son of Isis, in the image of the baby Christ cradled in the arms of the holy Mother, similarly with the young Dionysus cradled in the lap of Hermes framed by an image of Theogonia and gift-bearing Dōrophoroi in the famous Dionysus mosaic of Sepphoris – evidence of a two-way street of impact between Graeco-Roman culture and emerging Christianity?;51 the transformations of Cybele/Magna Mater and Isis into the Mother of God of Christianity;52 the identification of Graeco-Roman deities with Christian religious figures, for instance, and, for our context here significant, Sarapis as Joseph in Alexandria, or the Buddha as the Christian saint Josaphat in Johannes Damascenus’s Barlaam and Josaphat;53 Middle- and Neoplatonism, along with Stoicism, as important philosophical frameworks informing Christian theological discourses;54 the “easy coexistence” of Dionysus, the “pre-eminent pagan god of Late Antiquity” (Bowersock),55 and the Christian myth in the work of Nonnus of Panopolis, the author of simultaneously the massively encyclopedic epic, the Dionysiaca, the eminent archive of Greek and Roman mythology at the acme of Graeco-Roman culture, and the versified version of the Gospel of John, the Paraphrase of St. John.56 As a paradigmatic example in the broader context of the argument pursued here, the case of Nonnus is particularly instructive. Distinguishing “pagan” from Christian writers in Late Antiquity runs aground on the rocks of the easy comportment in both directions with enduring classical paideia, as Jitse Dijkstra puts it with regard to Nonnus: Whereas the idea that these intellectuals formed a “pagan resistance” against Christianity in this period has found widespread acceptance, it has now been firmly rejected in favour of a more complex model of 295

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coexistence and interaction. No doubt there were some intellectuals who still adhered to the traditional cults and practices, but they were few and we should not confuse the extraordinary flourish of Hellenism in late antique Egypt with “paganism.”57 As Dijkstra elaborates on the coexistence of “pagan” and Christian discourses: “[T]he religious transformation of Late Antiquity is seen as a dynamic and gradual process in which religions interacted in various, complex ways rather than that it was dominated by a stark Christian-‘pagan’ conflict.”58 Intellectuals on both sides of the divide shared in a widespread tendency towards classicizing literature. Thus Tim Whitmarsh could typify the period as one where becoming Christian did not necessarily mean rejecting other forms of religious practice. Some Christians were borderline Jews. Even after Christianity became Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD, many still clung to the old ways. . . . Polytheism and Christianity could exist side by side without any obvious friction. .  .  . A  fourth-century Roman called Firmicus Maternus wrote both an astrological work that treated the planets as traditional Roman deities and an anti-pagan tract On the Error of Profane Religions. Did he convert in the interim, as scholars tend to assume? [The same question put to the religious identity of Nonnus of Panopolis in earlier scholarship] Maybe, but maybe he simply saw no great contradiction. . . . It was, as one scholar has put it, “easy to be a Christian and something else.”59 Thus, reading the evidence from outside the triumphalist framework characterizing early Christian writers on the nature and fate of “paganism,” one is left with the unavoidable impression, now strongly asserted in Late Antique scholarship, of the interpenetration of “paganism” and Christianity.60 In spite of earlier scholarly convention of seeing a revitalized “pagan” resistance to Christianity among the Roman aristocracy, the reality was more one of relatively harmonious coexistence, in part due to class conformance on both sides (the cultural classicizing result of Graeco-Roman paideia – “pagan and Christian shared an increasingly conventionalized language of discourse .  .  . about the divine milieu”61), but also because of increasing intermarriage (the Roman aristocracy gradually Christianized).62 Translated to the religious programme of Constantine, insofar as any existed, the question is to which extent Constantine enacted a deliberate programme of Christianization (and if he really did enact legislation against “pagan” religious practices and institutions – the evidence from the Theodosian Code is ambiguous).63 Even with respect to his conversion the evidence for Constantine is not straightforward – what constituted the vision that was the basis of his conversion, and how is one to “read” his own biography of gradual Christianization?64 Nevertheless, in spite of Constantine expressing a wish for the complete cessation

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of “pagan” religious culture, he pragmatically elected to follow a “policy of contemptuous toleration”:65 Let no one use what they have received by inner conviction to the detriment of another. Rather, let everyone as far as possible apply what they have seen and understood to the benefit of their neighbor. . . . It is one thing voluntarily to undertake the contest for immortality, it is quite another to compel others to do so from fear of punishment .  .  . since I understand that some people are saying that the rites of the temples and the power of darkness have been entirely removed. I would indeed have earnestly recommended such removal to all mankind, were it not that the rebellious spirit of those wicked errors still remains obstinately fixed in the minds of some to the detriment of the common good.66 In Eusebius’s rendering of the account, Constantine only forbade governors and magistrates from offering sacrifices (the pre-eminent grounds being their use for divination or the “false arts”).67 Constantine’s further role in promoting Christianity was the ordering of an extensive church building programme (famously, he turned the holy land into a Christian theme park with his lavish building projects). His successors would be more explicit in discouraging and forbidding “pagan” religious practices: as the combined legislation by the sons of Constantine (appealing to Constantine) has it: Bloody spectacles are not suitable for civil ease and domestic quiet. Wherefore since we have proscribed gladiators, those who have been accustomed to be sentenced to such work as punishment for their crimes, you should cause to serve in the mines, so that they may be punished without shedding their blood. Constantine Augustus.68 It is necessary that the privileges which are bestowed for the cultivation of religion should be given only to followers of the Catholic faith. We desire that heretics and schismatics be not only kept from these privileges, but be subjected to various fines. Constantine Augustus.69 It is decreed that in all places and all cities the temples should be closed at once, and after a general warning, the opportunity of sinning be taken from the wicked. We decree also that we shall cease from making sacrifices. And if anyone has committed such a crime, let him be stricken with the avenging sword. And we decree that the property of the one executed shall be claimed by the city, and that rulers of the provinces be punished in the same way, if they neglect to punish such crimes. Constantine and Constans Augusti.70 Superstition shall cease; the madness of sacrifices shall be abolished. For if any man in violation of the law of the sainted emperor, Our father, and in violation of this command of Our Clemency, should dare to

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perform sacrifices, he shall suffer the infliction of a suitable punishment and the effect of an immediate sentence.71 And yet, in spite of withdrawing state support for the traditional cults, and letting cult sites slide into benign neglect, and in spite of what amounted to legislation against the continuity of classical tradition (with all that this stood for: after all, partly in the name of this classical tradition Christians were persecuted), the very laws codified in the Theodosian Code reflect a grudging awareness that traditional religion persisted and that sacrifices did continue.72 John of Ephesus, the Syrian Monophysite bishop of Ephesus, describes in his Ecclesiastical History his missionary work in the provinces of Asia, Caria, Lydia, and Phrygia, and how he found a well-organized and deeply entrenched “pagan” culture centred on the big temple of the Isodromian Mother near Tralles in Caria.73 A law of 9 April 423 CE requires “the pagans who have survived” to follow recent legislation, adding that “although we would like to believe there be no [pagans] left any longer.”74 A later law of 14 November 435 CE sets harsher conditions: We interdict all persons of a hardened pagan mind because of the accursed immolation of victims and the condemned sacrifices and the other acts forbidden by the authority of the ancient sanctiones. We order all their groves, temples, and precincts, if they remain intact even now, to be destroyed by the decree of the magistrates [of the cities] and cleansed by the erection of the revered sign of the Christian religion [the cross].75 In contrast to earlier regulations, now the traditional sacred sites had to be destroyed and exorcized by the sign of the cross. And indeed, numerous temples and sacred sites of the old traditional religions were destroyed, not only by civic authorities but also by Christian monks and local bishops emboldened by the anti-“pagan” legislation emanating from the Christian court. What makes this large-scale erasure of traditional religion from the landscape of the Later Roman Empire remarkable is that it took place in a context where Christianity was, at the time of Constantine’s conversion, a minority religion in the Empire (some calculations put it at 10% of the population). Witness a locality like Gaza in Palestine, where eight pagan temples stood against the one Christian church at the time when, under the leadership of the bishop of Gaza, Porphyrius, the temples were destroyed and burnt (in the year 402) in what can only be described as a minority incursion. This is apart from the many cases of temple conversions where “pagan” temples were reused as churches, like the famous Pantheon in Rome. Even so, a number of cult sites and temples remained open and in cultic business, like the Asklepieion in Athens, the temples at Carrhae-Harran, and the Isis temple at Philae. That it was not only a case of oversight is shown by the fact that Christian emperors could indeed also decree the reopening of “pagan” sanctuaries: in 382 CE Theodosius allowed a pagan temple to be re-opened at Edessa, although with the – by then – usual proviso that no sacrifices were carried out there. 298

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In the context of this complex history of interaction between the Late Roman state and “pagan” religious institutions, the following exemplary events can be summarily described: The removal of the Altar of Victory from the Roman Senate: With deep roots in Roman history and self-understanding, the cult of Victoria/Victory grew in importance in Rome through the Punic Wars to the end of the civil wars that ended the Republic (the famous temple to Victory erected on the Palatine Hill in 284 BCE, and the altar with statue in the Senate, begun by Julius Caesar and completed by Octavian in 29 CE). Senators swore allegiance to the state of Rome at the Altar of Victory, and each sitting of the Senate was opened by a sacrifice of incense on the Altar. Under the sons of Constantine, the Altar was to suffer removal, restoration, and eventual destruction: first removed from the Senate by Constantius II, restored to its place during the “pagan” revival under Julian, then removed again in 382 by Gratian (the latter the more enthusiastic of the anti-“pagan” Christian emperors). After Gratian’s death in battle, the leading Roman senator and urban prefect, Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, wrote a petition to the new western emperor Valentinian II to request the restoration of the Altar of Victory. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, countered Symmachus’s petition to the emperor with letters of his own (which carried the day and led to the petition denied). At stake in the literary debate was not the Altar of Victory as such, but the nature of religion, and whether traditional religious practices by its very essence involved sacrifices which are sites of ritual and moral pollution (as was argued by Ambrose). The underlying issue was Gratian’s withdrawal of state funding for traditional cults, in defense of which Symmachus argued that “[t]hus we ask for peace for the gods of our fathers, the gods of our native land. It is reasonable to believe that whatever is worshipped by each of us is ultimately one and the same. We gaze at the same stars, we share the same sky, the same universe surrounds us.” (Third Relation, 10)76 Earlier in the Relation Symmachus puts his petition squarely within the frame of tradition: “But even if the avoidance of such an omen were not sufficient, it would at least have been seemly to abstain from injuring the ornaments of the Senate House. Allow us, we beseech you, as old men to leave to posterity what we received as boys. The love of custom is great” (Third Relation, 6) (my emphasis). In addition, Symmachus refers to the visit of Constantius II to Rome in 357 CE in glowing terms as one of admiration for traditional culture: He diminished none of the privileges of the sacred virgins, he filled the priestly offices with nobles, he did not refuse the cost of the Roman ceremonies, and 299

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following the rejoicing Senate through all the streets of the eternal city, he contentedly beheld the shrines with unmoved countenance, he read the names of the gods inscribed on the pediments, he enquired about the origin of the temples, and expressed admiration for their builders. Although he himself followed another religion, he maintained its own for the empire, for everyone has his own customs, everyone his own rites. The divine Mind has distributed different guardians and different cults to different cities.77 At stake was a number of converging issues: the relationship between the emperor and the Roman Senate, at a point in history where much of the political centre of gravity had already shifted East, and in particular was focused in Constantinople; the myth-history of “pagan” cult, in particular here the Altar of Victory, as stand-in for the deep history of Roman imperial tradition; and in general, the upholding of venerated traditions in a context of fairly rapid cultural changes. The decline and destruction of the Artemision in Ephesus: As one of the famed seven wonders of the ancient world, and a temple cult that exerted religious and cultural influence beyond the province of Asia Minor, the Artemision of Ephesus was already in decline by the time Theodosius I ordered the temples closed in 391 CE. Roughly 150  years previously the Artemision suffered despoliation by the marauding Goths who sacked the city, looted the temple treasury, and burnt the temple down in 262 CE as part of a wider looting incursion into the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. The temple was rebuilt but it did not retain its previous brilliance as it was only partially rebuilt, and then with material derived from ruined parts of the building. Nevertheless, it remained in use as a cultic centre throughout the 4th century. In the meantime the Artemision featured as focus in anti-pagan invective, for instance in the second century apocryphal Acts of John, where in an episode recounting the apostle John’s visit to Ephesus, the altar of Artemis broke into many pieces, temple objects fell to the ground, and the image of the deity broke into pieces, part of the temple tumbled in killing the priest – all on the preaching of the apostle (37–47), thus prefiguring in imagined, narrated discourse the kinds of destruction wrought on pagan temples later. The account is dramatized further in the Syriac History of John, the Son of Zebedee, the Apostle and Evangelist (46) where the crowds acclaim that [w]e renounce this Artemis, in whom there is no use. . . . And the whole crowd cast cords about the image of Artemis, and pulled it down, and dragged it along, whilst bands were crying out before it and behind it: “Thou destroyer of our lives, arise, deliver thyself! Not from heaven didst thou descend; artisans made thee in a furnace.”78 While parts of the Artemision were systematically carted off to adorn imperial building projects elsewhere, and thus by the beginning of the 5th century was already in a state of high disrepair,79 it is the visit of John Chrysostom to Ephesus in 401 that is generally recounted as the moment of the final “destruction” of the 300

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temple. According to contemporary encomia, John Chrysostom was hailed as “the destroyer of demons and overthrower of the temple of Artemis,” and in the writings of the Christian poets Prudentius (Against Symmachus, 2.495)80 and Paulinus of Nola (Poem 10.95)81 John Chrysostom is exulted as the one who finally made Artemis yield to Christ (Paulinus may have played in his poem on both John the apostle, and the Christian rhetor, John Chrysostom). Chrysostom’s “overthrow” of the temple may have amounted to no more than achieving success in stopping the continued cultic veneration of the deity, but the rhetor Libanius (who, ironically was Chrysostom’s teacher), gives evidence to the widespread despoliation of churches by marauding bands of monks in his address to the emperor Theodosius to preserve ancient temples being destroyed: [The emperor has] not ordered the temples to be shut up, nor forbidden any to frequent them: nor have you driven from the temples or the altars, fire or frankincense, or other honours of incense, [yet monks run to them] bringing with them wood, and stones, and iron, and when they have not these, hands and feet. . . . the roofs are uncovered, walls are pulled down, images are carried off, and altars are overturned: the priests all the while must be silent upon pain of death. When they have destroyed one temple they run to another, and a third, and trophies are erected upon trophies: which are all contrary to law. This is the practice in cities, but especially in the countries. (Or. 30.7–8)82 The core of Libanius’s argument is not only that it is against imperial legislation to destroy temples and shrines, but also that the religious sites themselves have formed the foundation of the very empire of which Theodosius is himself the emperor. The greatness of the Empire is enshrined in these monumental religious edifices. The marauding monks saw it differently. The destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria: In 391 CE a Christian crowd under the leadership of the patriarch, Theophilus, attacked and destroyed the Serapeum in Alexandria and other pagan shrines in the city. The Serapeum was the biggest sanctuary in Alexandria and one of the most famous in antiquity. The prestige of the cult of Sarapis had to do, apart from the impressive site itself – a huge raised temenos and a richly adorned interior – also with the impressive mechanics of the cult building: a mechanical device caused tremors when one approached the statue of Sarapis (thus putting in effect the warning that touching the cult statue will set off an earthquake), hollow statues from which cult attendants blew trumpets and loudhailed commands, as well as a magnetic effect that kept a sun orb floating above the statue, in addition to the traditional Nilometer (the measure that showed the risen level of the Nile during flood) that was kept in the site as indication of Sarapis as protector of the annual Nile floods. So great was the presence of the sanctuary in the city that Eunapius could state: “For, on account of its temple of Serapis, Alexandria was a world in itself, a world consecrated by religion.”83 301

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The Christian riot was sparked off by a preceding riot by pagan Alexandrians. This was caused by the fact that a nearby public basilica that stood in disrepair was given to the patriarch for use by the growing Christian community. The basilica stood on underground rooms that had previously been discovered to have housed Mithraic groups. The Christians now paraded these cult items through the street with taunts directed at the pagan population. The pagans reacted by rioting through the city, capturing a number of Christians and keeping them hostage in the Serapeum where they blockaded themselves in. When the army intervened, the pagans appealed to the emperor, Theodosius, for justice. The imperial response elevated the Christians who died to martyrdom and provided clemency to the pagan rioters: “Litigation about the rest of the evils and roots of the discord, whatever had come forth in behalf of the defense of images, was not to be pressed. After these issues had been removed, the cause of the war would be removed” (Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 11.22).84 It is, arguably, the latter phrase that sparked off the Christian riot. When earlier Theodosius had said that the “vain superstition of the pagans” had caused the riot in the first place, the crowd took the phrase to mean that the cult images had to be removed and destroyed. What Theodosius probably meant was that the pagans images that the Christians paraded through the city had caused the riot and that this offence should be stopped. Nevertheless, the end result is that the Christians attacked the temple grounds, axed off the head of the cult statue of Sarapis, tore the statue apart and burnt the torso in the amphitheatre. “Thus all over the world the shrines of the idols were destroyed,” ended Theodoret of Cyrrhus his description of the destruction of the Serapeum.85 The Praetorian Prefect Oriens, Tatian, probably exercized a moderating influence over Theodosius in effecting a conciliatory response to the riot in Alexandria by pointing to the economic and political power of the local Hellenic elites in Egypt and elsewhere – “paganism was the hegemonic culture of Alexandria at the beginning of our period”.86 As hegemonic culture, Alexandrian paganism was an undifferentiated community, that is, pagan religious life was barely distinguishable from civic institutions.87 In this kind of situation, a pax deorum (not only as toleration for the gods of others, but also as toleration for ancient cultural traditions) is necessary for maintaining social cohesion and harmony. If it was true for the most part of its history, that a wide variety of pagan cultic communities could exist side by side, and that even Christians and Jews could share in this discourse space – the evidence of Greek philosophical schooling highly visible in Christian theologians like Origen and Clement – the break came with the imperial antipagan legislation that for the first time constructed “paganism” as a counterpart to Christianity, and made “paganism” visible as paganism. “The city’s pagans began to act in concert as they sought to preserve their status against the encroachments of the Christian community,” as Haas puts it. (In spite of this constructed bifurcation, Christian discourse and “pagan” discourse continued to mutually inflect each other: as Glen Bowersock argued with respect to the cult of Aion in Alexandria, with the iconography of Aion as the pagan counterpart of Jesus – his festival the counterpart of the Christian Epiphany, celebrating the birth from a virgin of the 302

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pagan god – as an example of Christianity impacting on pagan traditions and conceptualities.)88 If this reconstruction is plausible, then a root cause for the symbolic revolt in Alexandria can be identified in an intense identity conflict and social struggle between an educated Greek elite and a demos of disenfranchised (mostly) Christian population. This is not to reduce the conflict to a simple one of rich versus poor, educated to uneducated, but to understand the way in which a magnificent cult like this could be sustained to function: it is only by being embedded in the power relations in the city, with the rich, the civic elites and authorities, paying for the upkeep and festival outlays, that the cult could continue being a symbol for something else, namely an ordering of society that was being upended in the course of the 4th into the 5th century. The previous visits of the praetorian prefect of the East, Maternus Cynegius, a zealous promoter of the Theodosius legislation against pagan temple institutions and cultic practices (he had closed a number of temples elsewhere in the East), primed the atmosphere in Alexandria with expectation of a final showdown to come. Some of the roots in the conflict lay much earlier: indirect evidence exists for the formation of the earliest Christian groups in Alexandria in the context of Jewish baptismal movements, that is, in movements of social dissociation, or counter-cultural movements, a context that inflected the discourse production of early Christians in Alexandria for the first three centuries of their presence there.89 The regular rioting affecting the Jewish communities (leading to their eventual almost disappearance from Alexandria) was attributed to the presence of “Galileans,” that is apocalyptic-minded Christians bent on disrupting pagan cultic worship and culture. Christians were caught up, from the beginning of the Christian mission in Alexandria, in the intergroup violence that escalated after the Roman administration introduced the poll tax on non-Greeks, in which unfolding of events the Jews petitioned for full citizenship during the reign of Claudius (and thus seeking out the Roman side in opposition to the Greeks and native Egyptians) – and suffered a pogrom for it. Reversals of status combined with violence suffered against the group call into question the very compact that made possible the (even though often troubled) coexistence of disparate ethnic groups in the same geographic locality. The anomic situation in which early Christian cult groups found themselves contributed to a cosmological revolt represented by one part of these traditions that are both a reflection of what is happening “on the ground” and the discourse that continues to inspire social revolt in circumstances that are dire.90 As Henry Green puts it (in the larger context of the origins of Egyptian Gnosticism as a discourse of “cosmological revolt”): The initial gravitation by urban Jews, Greeks, and Egyptians to Christianity was a product of their anomic situation. In contrast, by the late second century, Christianity in Egypt progressively appealed to urban educated Greeks and non-Egyptians. It would require nearly another century, however, before significant numbers of rural Egyptian peasants 303

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became Christians. The spread of Christianity from social class to social class and from urban areas to rural environments is tied also to the socioeconomic development of Roman Egypt. The fragmentation of Roman ideology and economy in Egypt and the institutionalization of Christian belief systems and social organizations are highly correlated.91 The destruction of the Serapeum as an iconic event constituted for Christians a final statement of the status reversal implied by early Christian visions of the end (vide the end of the book of Revelation). The triumphalist mockery sounding through Christian accounts of temple despoliations (“Sarapis was a nest of mice,” said Theodoret; “For surely it is a grave impiety indeed, that holy places should be defiled by the stain of unhallowed impurities,” Eusebius, “Letter of Constantine to Eusebius,” Life of Constantine 3.52),92 the identification of the cult objects and deities with demons and pollution, the statement of Theodoret with respect to Marcellus of Apamea’s temple destructions: “No sooner did the multitude hear of the flight of the hostile demon than they broke out into a hymn of praise to God,”93 would resound again in a modern time and in the same world.

The Taliban and the Buddhas of Bamiyan; ISIS and the Tomb of Jonah The Taliban and the Buddhas of Bamiyan: In an act of “archaeological terrorism” the supreme leader of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Mullah Muhammed Omar, announced in early 2001 the impending destruction of the two colossal statues of Buddha in Bamiyan Province, 230 kilometres (150 miles) from the capital of Kabul.94 Mullah Omar issued a ruling, on 26 February 2001, shortly before the destruction began against un-Islamic graven images, which means all idolatrous images of humans and animals. Despite worldwide condemnation and pleas to refrain from doing so, on the grounds of the heritage value of the statues (it is a World Heritage site), and from the side of Muslim clerics elsewhere that Mullah Omar’s interpretation of Islamic law is wrong-headed and damaging to the image of Islam, on 2 March the Taliban started the destruction. When anti-aircraft and tank fire did not succeed in breaking up the Buddhas, truckloads of dynamite were brought in to complete the destruction. Kofi Annan, the then United Nations Secretary-General, met with the Taliban’s foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, in Islamabad in an attempt to save what was widely valued as prime examples of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage. The Taliban stood firm and even held that all other “moveable statues” – including more than a dozen smaller Buddha statues in the Kabul Museum – had also been destroyed.95 In a scene reminiscent of the Christian mobs destroying pagan temples, as one observer stated: when the Buddhas finally crumbled, Taliban fighters “were firing weapons into the air, they were dancing and they brought nine cows to slaughter as a sacrifice.”

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What are the Buddhas of Bamiyan? The “Buddhas” refer to two colossal statues of the Buddha (the taller one standing about 53m tall, represented the Buddha Vairocana, the “Light Shining throughout the Universe Buddha”; the lesser statue of 36m, the Buddha Sakyamuni) cut into the sandstone cliffs facing the Bamiyan valley between the two mountain ranges of the Hindu Kush and the Koh-iBaba, somewhere between the 3rd and 5th centuries CE. The original statues were impressive, as we learn from early descriptions: visible for miles, with copper masks for faces and copper-covered hands. Vairocana’s robes were painted red and Sakyamuni’s blue. These towering, transcendental images were key symbols in the rise of Mahayana Buddhist teachings, which emphasized the ability of everyone, not just monks, to achieve enlightenment.96 The site of the Buddhas in the long Kabul valley, but Afghanistan in general, was historically a place of stopover on travels along the Silk Road, connecting the various empires of India, China, Sassanian Persia, and later also the Muslim caliphates of Rashidun and then the Ummayads. It is particularly during the existence of the Kushan Empire (roughly 2nd century BCE to 3rd century CE), which spanned the current Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and stretched into northern India, that a syncretistic culture and religious environment developed in an empire that thrived commercially and culturally. Buddhists, Jains, Hindus, and Zoroastrians were present and established centres of learning. There is some evidence of Judaeo-Persians and Manichaeans, and later Nestorian Christians were also established in monasteries. The emergence of Mahayana Buddhism saw the establishment of monasteries amassing great wealth from endowments such that they were able to fund artworks and exerted a visual presence in the landscape with numerous stupas and images of Buddhist deities in the style now known as Gandharan Buddhist Art.97 In the context of the historical encounters, the Muslim conquerors of the 7th century onwards always had a difficult relationship to the Buddhists in the greater Afghanistan region. Even though they extended protection to other “religions of the Book” (and Buddhism certainly was one, and was also against idolatry), Muslims were hostile to Buddhists, calling them idol worshippers. Thus the Buddhists found themselves on the receiving end of constant repression. In more contemporary times, the caves around the Buddhas, where in centuries before Buddhist monks stayed, now refugees from the wars in Afghanistan took cover. And the area itself is contaminated by the fact that it lies at a point where some of the fighting for Kabul was fiercest in the armed conflict of various actors against the Taliban: Bamiyan was a base of the Taliban’s opposition – Northern Alliance’s “rebel” forces led by ousted Afghani President Borhanuddin Rabbani.

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How could the Taliban better humiliate the locals than to destroy their heritage? An earlier attempt to destroy the Buddhas came when the Taliban took control of Bamiyan in 1998. Then, the local Taliban governor talked the military commander out of the atrocity.98 Nevertheless, as Richard Foltz puts it, in spite of the area’s rich cultural history into which treasury a range of religious traditions contributed, after the Islamization of the Silk Road, it was a melting pot no more. And herein lies part of the answer to the violence done to the Bamiyan Buddhas: the Taliban excized the other symbolically and physically from the landscape to achieve a “pure land” remaining.99 ISIS and the Tomb of Jonah: The case of ISIS and the destruction of the tomb of Jonah is equally a tale of entwinement of religion, culture, and politics.100 The tomb of Jonah in Mosul is, according to very old tradition, the place where the prophet Jonah was buried after his preaching mission to Nineveh, as narrated in the Hebrew Bible. Present-day Mosul lies on the site of the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, and according to old legend, Jonah was buried in the city, in a site called Tell Nebi Yunus, or Hill of the Prophet Jonah. In pre-Christian literature the burial site of Jonah was identified somewhere in Palestine, but since early Christianity this was a pilgrimage site where a church was built over the purported burial place. The church was converted to a mosque after the Muslim conquest, and the present (destroyed) structure dated from the 14th century. The mosque also housed relics connected to Jonah, such as remnants of the whale that swallowed him as well as one whale tooth. The destruction of the heritage site was again met with widespread condemnation, since Jonah was, after all, a figure core to all three monotheistic book religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.101 This was, however, not the only symbolic cleansing taking place. In the month preceding, ISIS fighters destroyed a number of other Sunni holy sites in Mosul, as well as seven Shiite places of worship in the predominantly Shiite Turkmen city of Tal Afar, about 31 miles (50 kilometres) west of Mosul.102 The destruction of holy sites is not an act of arbitrary, willful violence aimed at cultural heritage in the region. It is very much embedded in and flowing from the history of the rise of ISIS in Iraq. The aim of ISIS was to re-establish an end-time caliphate in the region of Syria-Iraq with a capital in the city of Raqqa, an ancient settlement largely refounded in Hellenistic times and remaining an important city through Roman, Byzantine, and Muslim periods of control into the present day. Part of the allure of the city was its strategic role as capital of the Ummayad Caliphate at the transition from the 8th to 9th centuries into the Abbasid Caliphate. The caliphate was called out in 2014 with the installation of Abubakr al-Baghdadi as caliph. The purpose of establishing the caliphate is to create a space for the end-time clash between “Rome” (= Christianity) and Islam, as well as to provoke the final eschatological showdown.103 In the eschatological lore that animates ISIS ideologically, the city of Dabiq in northern Syria near the Turkish border will be 306

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the site of the end-time apocalyptic war. In the Shahih Muslim Hadith the unfolding of end-time events are portrayed: Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The Last Hour would not come until the Romans would land at al-A’maq or in Dabiq. An army consisting of the best (soldiers) of the people of the earth at that time will come from Medina (to counteract them). . . . And when they would come to Syria, he would come out while they would be still preparing themselves for battle drawing up the ranks. Certainly, the time of prayer shall come and then Jesus (peace be upon him) son of Mary would descend and would lead them in prayer. When the enemy of Allah would see him, it would (disappear) just as the salt dissolves itself in water and if he (Jesus) were not to confront them at all, even then it would dissolve completely, but Allah would kill them by his hand and he would show them their blood on his lance.104 These are, however, not decontextual, unanchored millennial apocalyptic imaginaries. ISIS emerged from the chaos that enveloped Iraq following the 2003 USled invasion and subsequent breakdown of any semblance of functioning polity (some ISIS leaders, like Baghdadi himself, were inmates of the American prison Camp Bucca in Iraq at the end of the military invasion). In fact, it is a declared intention of ISIS to establish a caliphate without borders, in that it refuses to acknowledge the national borders that were established in the wake of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War in 1918. It is particularly the infamous secret Sykes-Picot agreement between France and Britain (with the approval of Russia) which divided up the ex-Ottoman territories into national states regardless of internal tribal cohesions, as well as into dominions and spheres of influence – the post-1920 history of Iraq was a particularly tragic example of this, basically being turned into a giant extraction field by France and Britain. Hence the view of the Sykes-Picot legacy as example of Western imperialism, but also that the borderless ISIS (that refuses to understand itself nor function as a normal state) is intent on restoring the original idea of Umma as the community of Muslims.105 It was the traumatic experience of the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath that caused many to see the signs of the end all around them – the time for the end-time apocalypse was at hand. By deliberately hearkening back to and re-enacting Salafi theology and practice, ISIS is turning the clock back to the earliest purest period of Islam. The Salafis or Wahhabis are an austere form of Islamic faith and practice oriented around a very literal interpretation of the Qur’an.106 This is an Islamic theology that regards all innovation not accounted for in the earliest layers of tradition as idolatry, takfir, among which veneration of saints, seeking their intercession, and visiting their tombs, all of which are considered idolatry (shirk), impurities, and innovations in Islam (bid’ah). In this sense, all Muslims who do not hold to a strict practice are 307

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declared non-Muslim in the eyes of ISIS (this counts for more than 200 million Shiite Muslims, and most of the Sunni world). On a practical level, since the earliest days of Wahhabism, “archaeological terrorism” has been practiced against all religious installations and practices not allowed for in the Qur’an or earliest traditions. Upon the conquest of Medina, all the sites related to the family of the Prophet (except his own house) were razed, and in more recent times, Salafists in Saudia Arabia and elsewhere have been systematically destroying remnants of Islamic religious buildings and sites from the Ottoman era. It is a large-scale symbolic cleansing of any accruals to the faith and practice not accounted for in the Qur’an. In this manner ISIS projects a selfunderstanding of being back in the beginning years of Islam, being a small community of true believers amidst a large surrounding society of non-Muslims, in a state of takfir. The caliphate, then, is not just a political entity but also a vehicle for salvation. In this jihadist vision of ISIS, and jihadism is envisioned as a permanent state of religious obeisance, “the End of Days is a leitmotif of its propaganda.”107 The Qur’an itself is intensely interested in the events of the last days plotting out the various signs of the end-time, even if it does not offer a coherent narrative of end-time events (the Hadith literature is even more interested in the end-time): the appearance of the Dajjal (the Muslim Antichrist), the return of Jesus to fight and kill him, the appearance of the Mahdi (the Sunni Muslim messianic figure), the appearance of the beast from the Earth, the rising of the sun from the west, the appearance of Yajuj and Majuj (the biblical Gog and Magog), and the final destruction of the world – these events herald the Day of Judgement.108 In the official magazine of ISIS, Dabiq Issue 7 of 1436 A.H., the essay “The Extinction of the Grayzone” puts the point across very well. The “grey zone” is the state in which Muslims live in the world, not only in Western societies but also in majority Muslim countries.109 Here they have to conform to state laws and cultural customs, and show allegiance to their host nations and communities, hence the picture on the cover page of Muslims carrying cards reading “Je suis Charlie,” in solidarity with the French after the Charlie Hebdo murders. This grey zone is “the hideout of hypocrites.”110 This is the zone where Muslims waver between full adherence to Islam and conversion to Western religion (by implication, Christianity). Since the Prophet is understood in the Qur’an as a divider, there does not exist a real possibility for existence as Muslim in the grey zone: The destruction of the grayzone is comparable to the division resulting from the Islamic message when it was first conveyed by the Messenger (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam). As the angels said when they appeared before the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam) while he was sleeping, “Muhammad is a divider” and “Muhammad divided the people” [Sahīh al-Bukhārī].111 The terror attacks in recent years in France, London, Brussels, and Madrid, to name a few, have the purpose to put “grayzone” Muslims on the spot and force 308

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them to choose either apostasy or return to the Salafist Islam of ISIS and join the end-time struggle. Hence the title of the issue, which offers a commentary on the picture on the front cover, “From Hypocrisy to Apostasy.” In the vision of the author of the Dabiq article, immersion in Western society is to be a hypocrite or an about-to-be apostate. The capitalist West with its military and economic power, and concomitant deviant and debased lifestyle, is the embodiment of Shaytan or the Dajjal (the Antichrist). Thus, violence directed at religious institutions and persons is but an enactment of the process of the struggle of the End of Days on the way to Paradise. The Taliban in Afghanistan and ISIS in Iraq and Syria have been acting out a similar programme of purifying the land and impressing on the religious landscape a stark division between good and evil – it is an unmixing of the mixed state, to which is precisely what the programme of ISIS, announced as the “extinction of the grayzone,” amounts.112

Conclusion Four case studies traced the contours of symbolic revolts issuing in violence and destruction, the violent reordering of social spaces, across four very different contexts and periods. Shimmering below the surface is the fact that all four cases involved an apocalyptic, millennial vision of a kind. It is a typical misconception to understand apocalypticism, millennialism, and eschatology as things pertaining to the end of time – even if eschatology means the lore about the end. Millennialism and apocalypticism are imaginaries of the now, symbolic revolts in discourse and conceptuality that, at some point, can translate – and in certain contexts does translate – into physical revolts. Hence the almost overly many examples of violent millennialist movements.113 Millennialism is a strongly evaluative social discourse, embodying strong sentiments of disaffection, dissociation, and alienation. It is shaped and intensified by heightened concentration on practices of purification and dedication to divine purpose as reconstructed and reimagined by the affected group through strategies of remythologization and re-traditionalization – typical of apocalyptic imaginaries is a conceptual repristination of an earlier period of greater purity, whether this purity be ethnic, moral, or ideological. In studies of apocalypticism and millennialism114 it is the conditions of social alienation and marginalization that feed millennialist worldviews, and in which they get established and deeply rooted. It is from these conditions that the sentiment arises that “the world stinks,” a strong sense of aversion that manifests in an imagination of a catastrophic end to the world as it is, and a catastrophic process of restoration, which is labelled “catastrophic millennialism.”115 The imagination of a catastrophic end of the world as preparation for restoration is exactly a graphic explication of the negative affective relationship towards the surrounding context by those who adopt these apocalyptic visions. In comparative perspective, the introductory essay to the Oxford Handbook of Millennialism by Catherine Wessinger demonstrates the pervasive spread of such millennialist discourses 309

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across cultures and contexts, but also that the conditions giving rise to these are very much comparable circumstances with comparable outcomes. An apocalyptic worldview is essentially a violent worldview. The sentiments of disaffection projected on to the social context invite a strong emotional reaction and channelling of destructive energies towards what is seen as undesirable states of things obtaining in the world. Such a worldview is not only a social commentary on the state of things, it is also implicitly a call to arms to marshal the troops, so to speak, in an attempt to eradicate the grey zone, the area of compromises that gets erased under the pressure of societies that bifurcate under identity, ideological, and economic stresses and tensions. Purification is the “simplification” of the social aggregation.

Notes 1 The history of South Africa since the original Dutch settling of the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 is a history of conflict between various population groups, mostly understood as a racial conflict between European settler colonists and the black African indigenous population (the racial history of the population make-up of South Africa is more complex than this – it includes significant numbers of South-East Asians from the East Indies, Indians, Chinese, and the mixed-race group called the Cape Coloureds, each with its own trajectory of intersecting with the others in the making not only of the population of South Africa but also with the political history of South Africa). Resistance to colonial rule led to constant flare-ups of violent conflict through the 19th and 20th centuries, but escalated dramatically since 1960 after the Sharpeville massacre peaking in the period 1976 (the June 16 student uprising) through the mid-1980s with the repeated states of emergency. The states of conflict ended with the unbanning of the African National Congress in 1990 and the start of negotiations towards a political resolution of the crisis and the subsequent negotiated settlement that led to the inauguration of the post-Apartheid ANC government in 1994 and the adoption of the South African Constitution in 1996 with its Bill of Rights. 2 The campaign originally started as the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, but quickly evolved into the Twitter hashtag of #RhodesMustFall, which convention was quickly taken up for any other such campaign of resistance and protest, hence the inclusive moniker of #[Enter]MustFall. 3 The series of rolling protests also served to highlight the steady disaggregation of South African society. Not only has the original idea of the “Rainbow Nation,” a term coined by Archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu to indicate the arrival of a non-racial society after the fall of apartheid, been discredited. The protests also did not follow racial lines: there were black and white protesters supporting #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall, and #ScienceMustFall, locally and overseas, just as there were black students and political commentators who criticised and condemned the protest movements, or at least the form they took. The speed with which the rolling protests engulfed South Africa makes any objective overview impossible, which is why the only way to document the protest movements is via online news media and social media posts. For some commentary on the original #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements, see Amit Chauduri, “The Real Meaning of Rhodes Must Fall,” The Guardian, March 16, 2016, sec. UK news, www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/16/the-real-meaningof-rhodes-must-fall; Sam Dean, “Activist Behind Oxford University ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ Campaign Says He ‘Should Have Whipped’ White Student,” The Telegraph, September 23, 2016, www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2016/09/23/activist-behind-

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oxford-university-rhodes-must-fall-campaign-says/; Jenna Etheridge, “Permanent Removal of Uct Rhodes Statue Gets Green Light,” News24, October 31, 2016, www. news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/permanent-removal-of-uct-rhodes-statue-gets-greenlight-20161031; “ ‘The Rhodes Statue Must Fall’: UCT’s Radical Rebirth | Daily Maverick,” n.d., www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2015-03-13-the-rhodes-statue-mustfall-ucts-radical-rebirth/#; “Rhodes Must Fall,” Wikipedia, February 11, 2017, https:// en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rhodes_Must_Fall&oldid=764877321; Vashna Jagarnath, “Op-Ed: The Crisis in Our Universities Is a Symptom of a Wider Social Crisis,” Daily Maverick, October  6, 2016, www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/201610-06-op-ed-the-crisis-in-our-universities-is-a-symptom-of-a-wider-social-crisis/; Brian Watermeyer, “Making Sense of the Student Protest Movement: Saying YES to Anger, NO to Hatred,” Daily Maverick, First Thing: Opinion Piece, November 1, 2016, http://firstthing.dailymaverick.co.za/article.php?id=82412&cid=2016-10-31#. WBho9iRoBP0; Ayesha Omar, “Op-Ed: Moving Beyond the Discourse of Fees and Free Education,” Daily Maverick, October 3, 2016 www.dailymaverick.co.za/ article/2016-10-03-op-ed-moving-beyond-the – discourse-of-fees-and-free-education/#. WBu6vCRoBP0. The #ScienceMustFall movement erupted on social media with a video on the decolonialising of science recording a debate on the campus of the University of Cape Town that went viral: www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14 (at 1:14); see also the (positive) evaluation by Karin Brodie, “Yes, Mathematics Can Be Decolonised: Here’s How to Begin,” The Conversation, Africa Pilot, October 13, 2016 http://theconversation.com/yes-mathematics-can-be-decolonised-heres-howto-begin-65963. At the University of South Africa the College of Human Sciences hosted for a number of years running a Decoloniality Summer School and have now established a Curriculum Transformation Committee that will formulate a Curriculum Transformation Framework in order to oversee transformation towards transformed and decolonialised teaching, research, and community outreach, Rivonia Naidu-Hoffmeester, “CHS to Address Demand for Decolonised Education,” E-News, February  22, 2017, https://staff.unisa.ac.za/e-connect/e-news/2017/02/22/chs-toaddress-demand-for-decolonised-education. Brian Kamanzi, “ ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ – Decolonisation Symbolism – What Is Happening at UCT, South Africa?” The Postcolonialist, March 29, 2015, http:// postcolonialist.com/civil-discourse/rhodes-must-fall-decolonisation-symbolism-happeninguct-south-africa/. I provide a fuller description of the context and the protest movements in Gerhard van den Heever, “Naming the Moment. #ScienceMustFall, Power-Discourse-Knowledge, and Thinking Religion as Social Definition,” Religion  & Theology 23.3–4 (2016): 237–73. This citation is from p. 241. A fuller biographical history of Cecil John Rhodes’s life and career can be found in “Cecil John Rhodes,” South African History Online, 2011, www.sahistory.org.za/ people/cecil-john-rhodes. For the text of the “Confession” and the first clause of the will, see Robert Alan Kimball, “1877: Cecil Rhodes, ‘Confession of Faith,’ ” n.d., http://pages.uoregon.edu/ kimball/Rhodes-Confession.htm. Van den Heever, “Naming the Moment,” 243–45. Keith Hart and Vishnu Padayachee, “A History of South African Capitalism in National and Global Perspective,” Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa 81/82 (2013): 55–85, doi:10.1353/trn.2013.0004, here 55. The notorious Natives Land Act no. 27 of 1913 was merely one in a series of legislative moves, first in the Cape Colony government then later in the Union of South Africa, to regulate black African land ownership (and deprive them of it), and which later led to the establishment of segregated “group areas.” Political disenfranchisement went hand

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in hand with this. In effect, the 1913 Act (as well as the later Native Trust and Land Act, no. 18 of 1936) prohibited black Africans from buying or renting land in 93% of South Africa. As to job reservation to preserve better paying employment for skilled and unskilled white workers, this was a deliberate strategy of the Union government to make possible the profitability of the industrial sector by depressing the wage bill for unskilled black workers; the Union of South Africa, Report of the Economic and Wage Commission (Cape Town: Government Printer. U.G. 14 of 1926) is cited in Nicoli Nattrass and Jeremy Seekings, “The Economy and Poverty in the Twentieth Century,” in The Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. 2, 1885–1994, ed. Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager, and Bill Nasson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 518–72. Some overviews on the social, economic, and material transformations taking place in South Africa between the end of the 19th century and the end of the Second World War: Philip Bonner, “South African Society and Culture, 1910–1948,” 254–318; Nicoli Nattrass and Jeremy Seekings, “The Economy and Poverty in the Twentieth Century,” 518–72; Tlhalo Raditlhalo, “Modernity, Culture, and Nation,” 573–99, all in The Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. 2, 1885–1994, ed. Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager, and Bill Nasson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). For an overview of the history of capitalism in South Africa since the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1884–1886 till the present day, see Hart and Padayachee, “A History of South African Capitalism.” The foregoing derives from Van den Heever, “Naming the Moment,” 243–5. Masana Ndinga-Kanga, “Poo-Pooing the Rhodes Historical Narrative,” Mail & Guardian. Thoughtleader, Blogs – Opinion – Analysis, March 11, 2015, http://thoughtleader. co.za/masanandingakanga/2015/03/11/poo-pooing-the-rhodes-historical-narrative. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 109ff. See also the introduction to Barthes’s thought in Graham Allen, Roland Barthes, Routledge Critical Thinkers (London: Routledge, 2003), esp. 36–8 and 42–5 on mythologies and the semiology of myth. Allen, Roland Barthes, 43. Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). The original appeared in 1989. Lincoln, Discourse, 3–5. On the destruction and profanation of churches and religious symbols and artifacts, see the much more detailed description offered by Bruce Lincoln in the chapter, ‘Revolutionary Exhumations in Spain’, Lincoln, Discourse, 103–27. In general, on the Spanish Civil War, see among others, Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006); Stanley G. Payne, The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933–1936: Origins of the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Paul Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War: Reform, Reaction and Revolution in the Second Republic 1931–1936 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978); Hilari Raguer, Gunpowder and Incense: The Catholic Church and the Spanish Civil War, trans. Gerald Howson (London: Routledge, 2007). A detailed description of the tensions building up Spain is found in Payne, Collapse, 9–25, “The Republican Project.” On the swings between liberal and reactionary, Left and Right regimes, see Payne, Collapse, 3. Graham, The Spanish Civil War, 2. Graham, The Spanish Civil War, 2–3. Graham, The Spanish Civil War, 4.

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24 Payne, Collapse, 1. 25 Graham, The Spanish Civil War, 8; Beevor, Battle for Spain, 80. 26 For the various internal military conflicts during the 19th century, see Payne, Collapse, 2. 27 Graham, The Spanish Civil War, 4. 28 Graham, The Spanish Civil War, 8–9. 29 Payne, Collapse, 16. 30 As Graham, The Spanish Civil War, puts it: “But what caused most popular offence was the Republic’s interference with the Catholic culture that framed social identities and daily life: for example, the way the new authorities restricted religious processions or the ringing of church bells, or their interference with ceremonies and celebrations organized around local saints or local appellations of the Virgin Mary. This was a world of private and family devotions, but also of communal piety, where deeply felt emotions had as much to do with an allegiance to a way of life and a specific place (the immediate locality or patria chica) as with religious faith or spirituality per se. Or rather, loyalty to these things was indivisible” (10–11). More detailed descriptions of this particular aspect of the civil war, namely the anticlerical and anti-Church actions of the broad republican movement, can be found in Richard Maddox, “Revolutionary Anticlericalism and Hegemonic Processes in an Andalusian Town, August 1936,” American Ethnologist 22.1 (1995): 125–43; Clifton Amsbury, “Reflections on Anticlericalism and Power Relations in Spain,” American Ethnologist 22.3 (1995): 614– 15; Julio de la Cueva, “Religious Persecution, Anticlerical Tradition and Revolution: On Atrocities Against the Clergy During the Spanish Civil War,” Journal of Contemporary History 33.3 (1998): 355–69. 31 A more detailed list of profanations, desecrations, destructions of Church property, and killings, together with some photographs of such acts of vandalism and desecration, is found in the online blog, Mark Laskey, “No Gods, No Masters. Blasphemy and Anticlerical Violence During the Spanish Civil War,” Illuminating Shadows Dark Folkore, Strange History and Morbid Curiosities, January 14, 2014, http://illuminating-shadows.blogspot.com/2014/01/no-gods-no-masters.html. The article synthesizes a wealth of information from a number of Spanish historical publications. 32 “Shots of War: Photojournalism During the Spanish Civil War,” August 1936, https:// libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/swphotojournalism/m629-f02-19.html. 33 Maddox, “Revolutionary Anticlericalism,” 128. Describing events in Aracena, but applicable to other theatres of conflict as well. 34 Payne, Collapse, 16. 35 Payne, Collapse. 36 Laskey, “No Gods, No Masters.” 37 Antonio Montero Moreno, Historia de La Persecucion Religiosa En España 1936– 1939 (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2004), cited in Vicente SánchezBiosca, “Killing God, Executing Christ: Modern Weapons for Old Dreams,” New York University, February 26, 2013, http://roderic.uv.es/handle/10550/28757. Montero Moreno spoke of “a martyrdom of things.” 38 Graham, The Spanish Civil War, 28 (my emphasis). 39 de la Cueva, “Religious Persecution,” 367–8 (my emphasis). 40 Raguer, Gunpowder and Incense, 55. 41 Raguer, Gunpowder and Incense. The poem was published by Ediciones Jerarquıá, 1938. In a review of the work it was labelled “the greatest achievement of Spanish genius in the twentieth century up to that date,” unsurprisingly, in the Jesuit review Razón y Fe, vol. 115 (1938), 133–45, Raguer, Gunpowder and Incense, 55 n. 11. 42 Laskey, “No Gods, No Masters,” citing Daniel Sueiro and Bernardo Díaz Nosty, Historia del franquismo (Barcelona: Sarpe, 1986), 71.

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43 de la Cueva, “Religious Persecution,” 359. 44 de la Cueva, “Religious Persecution,” 359. 45 See for instance, “The Visual Front: Posters of the Spanish Civil War from the UCSD’s Southworth Collection,” https://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/visfront/nacionales.html. 46 Graham, The Spanish Civil War, 29. 47 Graham, The Spanish Civil War, 29. For instance, the famous Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca was killed because of his homosexuality. 48 de la Cueva, “Religious Persecution,” 365. 49 On Late Roman monotheism, see Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede, eds., Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 50 See for instance the overviews of these transitions in Bruce Lincoln, “Epilogue,” in Ancient Religions, ed. Sara Iles Johnston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 241–51, now republished as “Ancient and Post-Ancient Religions,” in id., Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars. Critical Explorations in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 73–82; Guy G. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 28–55; and Jörg Rüpke, “Patterns of Religious Change in the Roman Empire,” in The Changing Face of Judaism, Christianity, and Other Greco-Roman Religions in Antiquity, ed. Ian H. Henderson and Gerbern S. Oegema, Studien zu Jüdische Schriften aus hellenistisch-römischer Zeit 2 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006), 13–33. 51 Glen W. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures 18 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 52. 52 Stephen Benko, The Virgin Goddess: Studies in the Pagan and Christian Roots of Mariology, Studies in the History of Religions 59 (Leiden: Brill, 1993); Vasiliki Limberis, Divine Heiress: The Virgin Mary and the Making of Christian Constantinople (London: Routledge, 1994). 53 Sarapis as Joseph: Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 11.23, Rufinus of Aquilea, The Church History of Rufinus of Aquileia: Books 10 and 11, trans. Philip R. Amidon (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 82; see also Frank R. Trombley, Hellenic Religion and Christianization: C. 370–529. Volume 1, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 115 (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 135. In all cases following, I have made use of English translations only, most of which are available in the public domain. 54 See in general, over a long career, the work of Abraham J. Malherbe, Light from the Gentiles: Hellenistic Philosophy and Early Christianity. Collected Essays, 1959–2012, ed. Carl R. Holladay et al., 2 vols., Supplements to Novum Testamentum 150 (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Tuomas Rasimus, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, and Ismo Dunderberg, eds., Stoicism in Early Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010); Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. I. Stoicism in Classical Latin Literature, Studies in the History of Christian Thought 34 (Leiden: Brill, 1985); Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. II. Stoicism in Christian Latin Thought Through the Sixth Century, Studies in the History of Christian Thought 35 (Leiden: Brill, 1985). 55 Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, 41. 56 Robert Shorrock, The Myth of Paganism: Nonnus, Dionysus and the World of Late Antiquity, Classical Literature and Society (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2011); David Hernández de la Fuente, “Parallels Between Dionysos and Christ in Late Antiquity: Miraculous Healings in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca,” in Redefining Dionysos, ed. Alberto Bernabé et al., MythosEikonPoiesis 5 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 464–87; Domenico Accorinti, ed., Brill’s Companion to Nonnus of Panopolis, Brill’s Companions in Classical Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2016); and Konstantinos Spanoudakis, ed., Nonnus of Panopolis in Context. Poetry and Cultural Milieu in Late Antiquity with a

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57 58 59

60

61

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Section on Nonnus and the Modern World, Trends in Classics – Supplementary Volumes 25 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). Jitse H.F. Dijkstra, “The Religious Background of Nonnus,” in Accorinti, Companion, 75. Jitse H.F. Dijkstra, “The Religious Background of Nonnus,” in Accorinti, Companion, 77. Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 253. Whitmarsh cites here Mark Edwards, “The Beginnings of Christianization,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine, ed. Noel Lenski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 142; the full citation is worth noting: “It was easy to be a Christian and something else, so long as one was not a severe philosopher or a bishop. The notion that Christianity is one, perhaps the best, of many roads to God was entertained by Zosimus the alchemist of Panopolis” continuing on with a description of cultic veneration by “pagans”, Jews, and Christians at the shrine of Mamre, the site of Abraham’s vision of God. It is entirely tantalizing to imagine the language of the widespread (and numerically well-attested) cult of Theos Hypsistos (the Most High God) furnishing the language for eventual Christian creeds, as in the inscription from Oenoanda: “Born of itself, untaught, without a mother, unshakeable, not contained in a name” [α]ὐτοφυής, ἀδίδακτος, ἀμήτωρ, ἀστυφέλικτος, οὔνομα μὴ χωρῶν, πολυώνυμος, ἐν πυρὶ ναίων, τοῦτο θεός· μεικρὰ δὲ θεοῦ μερὶς ἄνγε̣λοι ἡμεῖς. (SEG 27–933). L. Robert has argued that these three lines were said by Lactantius to have been part of an oracle delivered by Apollo of Klaros, also occurring in another oracular response to the question of the nature of the god Apollo, cf. the note to the published inscription. Echoes of this language in Christian creeds: see for instance the “Clemens Trinitas” 5th/6th century from southern France, Denzinger/Hünermann #73–74. Christopher P. Jones, Between Pagan and Christian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). I follow Jones’s lead (as with other authors too) in using the term “pagan/paganism” in scare quotes. It is, of course, a term devised by Christian authors and initially never used by “pagans” for themselves. The term evokes a unity of religious identity where none existed – what went by the label of “pagan” was incredibly diverse: polytheist and monotheist; urban versus rural; mostly indicating traditional customs. Jones: “It is best therefore not to think of the distinction between pagans and Christians as a single spectrum running, like modern party-lines, from full or ‘committed’ Christians at one end and ‘committed’ pagans at the other, with ‘center-pagans’ and ‘center-Christians’ toward the middle. Who or what counts as ‘pagan’ depends very much on the outlook of the contemporary observer.  .  .  . Paganism is always a blurred and shifting category that defies neat taxonomies” (7). See also Éric Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200–450 CE (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Isabella Sandwell, Religious Identity in Late Antiquity: Greeks, Jews and Christians in Antioch (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians: In the Mediterranean World from the Second Century AD to the Conversion of Constantine (London: Viking, 1986). Frank R. Trombley, “Christianity in Asia Minor: Observations on the Epigraphy,” in The Cambridge History of Religions in the Ancient World, ed. Michele R. Salzman and Marvin A. Sweeney, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 341–68; here p. 346. Peter R.L. Brown, “Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman Aristocracy,” Journal of Roman Studies 51.1–2 (1961): 1–11; see also John Curran, Pagan City and Christian Capital: Rome in the Fourth Century, Oxford Classical Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. chapter 7, 260ff.

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63 The explicit legislation against “pagan” religion and sacrifices under Constantine’s sons and dynasty seemed mainly aimed at the aspect of augury and divination; even among “pagan” intellectuals there had been a debate on the efficacy and desirability of animal sacrifices, cf. Neil McLynn, “Pagans in a Christian Empire,” in A Companion to Late Antiquity, ed. Philip Rousseau, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 575–7. 64 Mark Lee, “Traditional Religions,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine, ed. Noel Lenski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 168–76. There are three versions of the vision of Constantine: the first recounted in the Latin Panegyrist 6.21.4; C.E.V. Nixon and Barbara Saylor Rodgers, In Praise of Later Roman Emperors. The Panegyrici Latini, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 248, relating it to a vision of the sun at a temple of Apollo in southern France; Lactantius, Mort. 44, The AnteNicene Fathers, vol. 7, Fathers of the Third and Fourth Centuries: Lactantius, Venantius, Asterius, Victorinus, Dionysius, Apostolic Teaching and Constitutions, Homily, And Liturgies, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1950), 739; Eusebius, V. Const. 2.27–31, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 2 vol. 1, Eusebius Pamphilius: Church History, Life of Constantine, Oration in Praise of Constantine, trans. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996), 1240–44. Hereafter respectively ANF 7 and NPNF 2.1. 65 David M. Gwynn, Christianity in the Later Roman Empire: A Sourcebook, Bloomsbury Sources in Ancient History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 142. 66 Eusebius, “Constantine’s Edict to the People of the Provinces Concerning the Error of Polytheism,” V. Const. 2.48ff, the citation from 2.60, NPNF 2.1, 1273. 67 “Constantine, like all emperors, was concerned about the subversive threat of magic and divination. He also demonstrated a missionary vigor in closing certain pagan sanctuaries that appeared immoral or were in other ways particularly offensive to Christians. Thus a ban on sacred prostitution led to the closure of temples at Aphaca and at Heliopolis in Phoenicia. The temple of the popular healing god Asclepius at Aegae in Cilicia was pulled down, and offensive pagan altars and statues removed from the holy site of the Oak-Tree of Mamre near Hebron, where God had appeared to Abraham,” (reference to Eusebius, V. Const. 3.51–58), Stephen Mitchell, A History of the Later Roman Empire, AD 284–641: The Transformation of the Ancient World (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 262. 68 C.Th. 15.12.1. The translation used for C.Th. throughout this study is that of Oliver J. Thatcher, ed., The Library of Original Sources, vol. 4: The Early Medieval World (Milwaukee, WI: University Research Extension Co., 1907), 69–71; online: https:// sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/codex-theod1.asp. 69 C.Th 16.5.1. 70 C.Th 16.10.4. 71 C.Th. 16.10.2 (my emphasis). 72 The literature on this is almost inexhaustible. For a survey, see Mitchell, History of the Later Roman Empire, 242ff; also Frank R. Trombley, “Paganism in the Greek World at the End of Antiquity: The Case of Rural Anatolia and Greece,” Harvard Theological Review 78.3/4 (1985): 327–52. That it was in many cases impossible to distinguish between “ordinary” cultural practices like local traditional festivals and “pagan” religion, is evident from the longevity of traditional festivals like the Brumalia and Saturnalia, the winter solstice and the spring equinox, the Lupercalia (and the scandal surrounding its celebration in Rome), New Year’s Day and the Kalends, the widely celebrated Maiuma – festivities all deplored by Christian preachers but left alone by imperial legislation. As the Theodosian Code explicitly states: “When by our salutary law we forbade the practice of sacrilegious rites, we were not giving our authority

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73 74 75 76 77

78

79 80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87 88

for the abolition of the festivals which bring the citizens together for their communal pleasure. In consequence we decree that, according to the ancient customs, these forms of entertainment should be available to the people, although without any sacrifice or illegal superstition” (C.Th. 16.10.17 = C.J. 1.11.4) (my emphasis). While animal sacrifices were banned, and no longer performed publicly, they now got transposed to the “private sphere” of cultural festivities. On the difficulty of distinguishing between “pagan religion” and culture, see Mitchell, A History of the Later Roman Empire, 247–9. Trombley, “Paganism,” 329; see also the chapter of Shepardson in this volume. The text cited from Trombley, Hellenic Religion and Christianization 1, 11. The text cited from Trombley, Hellenic Religion and Christianization 1, 11 (my emphasis). The translation is from J. Vanderspoel, “Symmachus. Relation 3,” online: http://people.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/texts/sym-amb/symrel3f.html. Symmachus, Third Relation, 8 (my emphasis). Reality was more complex: Constantius had reduced the role of the Senate in the governance of the empire because of their perceived inefficiency in providing solid support in the Western Empire for the emperor, and his promotion of “pagan” aristocrats to prefectoral positions had less to do with conciliation with “pagans” than with the realpolitik of appointing trustworthy officials, Robert Owen Edbrooke, “The Visit of Constantius II to Rome in 357 and Its Effect on the Pagan Roman Senatorial Aristocracy,” American Journal of Philology 97.1 (1976): 40–61. Translation from W. Wright, Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. Edited from Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum and Other Libraries, vol. 2 (London; Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1871), 3–60, online: www.tertullian.org/fathers/apocryphal_ acts_02_john_history.htm. The Syriac History of John originated in the 5th/6th century, so most probably recounted the destruction of the Artemision from contemporary witness retrojected back to the time of the apostle John. For introduction to the text: Wilhelm Schneemelcher, ed., New Testament Apocrypha: Writings Relating to the Apostles, Apocalypses and Related Subjects, trans. Robert McLachlan Wilson (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1992), 435–6. Clive Foss, Ephesus After Antiquity: A Late Antique, Byzantine and Turkish City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 86–7. Prudentius, vol. II, trans. H.J. Thompson, Loeb Classical Library 398 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 44. P.G. Walsh, trans., The Poems of St. Paulinus of Nola, Ancient Christian Writers 40 (New York: Paulist Press, 1974), 65. Libanius, Selected Orations, Volume II, trans. A.F. Norman, Loeb Classical Library 452 (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1977). Lives of Philosophers, 471, in Philostratus and Eunapius, Lives of the Sophists, Lives of Philosophers, Loeb Classical Library 134, trans. Wilmer C. Wright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921). Cited after Trombley, Hellenic Religion and Christianization 1, 131. Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 5.22, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 2, volume 3, Theodoret, Jerome, Gennadius, and Rufinus: Historical Writings, trans. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984), 339. A detailed description of the events leading up to the riot resulting in the destruction of the Serapeum is found in Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict, rev. ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 128–72. Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 132. Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 132. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, 22–8.

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89 See for more detailed argumentation Gerhard van den Heever, “Early Christian Discourses and Literature in North African Christianities in the Context of Hellenistic Judaism and Graeco-Roman Culture,” in The Routledge Companion to Christianity in Africa, ed. Elias Kifon Bongmba (London: Routledge, 2016), 61–78; Gerhard van den Heever, “The Spectre of a Jewish Baptist Movement. A Place for Jewish-Christianity?” Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi 34.1 (2017): 43–69. 90 This is of course not to say that all of the literary and cultural production of Alexandrian Jews stem from the situation of crisis – the backbone of their literary achievements is still the Greek translation of the scriptural tradition, what became the Septuagint; one can mention other texts too, like the romance Joseph and Aseneth, or the fragments of poems, the tragic play on the theme of the exodus by Ezekiel. The Septuagint became the heritage for Christians as well, but I am most concerned here with that literary output that came to define the various positions inherent in emerging Christianity. And these were mostly the literature of crisis. 91 Henry A. Green, The Economic and Social Origins of Gnosticism, SBL Dissertation Series 77 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1985), 113. 92 Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 5.22, NPNF 2.3, 339; Eusebius, Life of Constantine, NPNF 2.1, 1341. 93 Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 5.21, NPNF 2.3, 337. 94 The destruction of the Buddhas were widely reported. I refer here to only two fairly comprehensive online news reports: W.L. Rathje, “Why the Taliban Are Destroying Buddhas,” USA Today, March  22, 2001, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/ science/archaeology/2001-03-22-afghan-buddhas.htm; Ahmed Rashid, “After 1,700 Years, Buddhas Fall to Taliban Dynamite,” The Telegraph, March 12, 2001, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/1326063/After-1700-yearsBuddhas-fall-to-Taliban-dynamite.html. The phrase “archaeological terrorism” comes from Rathje. 95 An UN ECOMOS project is aiming at repairing some of the destroyed statues. 96 Rathje, “Taliban.” Descriptions of the Buddhas come from the travel memoirs of the 7th-century Chinese monk, Hsüan-Tsang (Xuanzang), Li Rongxi, trans., The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions (Berkeley, CA: BDK America, 2006). 97 Xinru Liu, “Regional Study: Exchanges within the Silk Roads World System,” in The Cambridge World History Volume 4: A World with States, Empires and Networks 1200 BCE – 900 CE, ed. Craig Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 462. 98 Rathje, “Taliban.” 99 Richard Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road: Premodern Patterns of Globalization, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 100 A good commentary on the destruction of the tomb can be found in Mark Movsesian, “Why Did ISIS Destroy the Tomb of Jonah?” First Things, July  28, 2014, www. firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/07/why-did-isis-destroy-the-tomb-of-jonah. I use the conventional acronym ISIS for Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, although they also go by the acronym ISIL, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or by the Arabic acronym of Daesh. 101 In the Hebrew Bible there are two Jonahs, Jonah son of Amittai from Gath-Hepher, active in the northern kingdom during the reign of Jeroboam II (c.786–746 BCE; 2 Kings 14:25); and the eponymous prophet of the Book of Jonah, who was sent to preach judgement to the people of Nineveh in Assyria. The two are certainly not the same person. In the Qur’an the applicable section is Surat Yunus, Surah 10. 102 Reports by Human Rights Watch, Dana Ford and Mohammed Tawfeeq, “Extremists Destroy Jonah’s Tomb, Officials Say,” CNN, July  25, 2014, www.cnn. com/2014/07/24/world/iraq-violence/index.html.

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103 BBC Monitoring, “Dabiq: Why Is Syrian Town so Important for IS?” BBC News, October 4, 2016, sec. Middle East, www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-30083303; James Denselow, “Syria: Dabiq and ISIL’s End of Times,” Aljazeera, October 2016, www. aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/10/syria-dabiq-isil-times-161017052013796. html; Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” The Atlantic, March  2015, www. theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/. 104 Hadith Shahih Muslim 41.9, Imam Muslim, trans. Abdul Hamid Siddiqui, Volume: The Book Pertaining to the Turmoil and Portents of the Last Hour (Kitab Al-Fitan wa Ashrat As-Sa`ah), online: www.theonlyquran.com/hadith/SahihMuslim/?volume=41&chapter=9. The whole book is devoted to detailed imaginings of how the end-time will play out, all 26 chapters of it. 105 On ISIS and Sykes-Picot: Richard Falk, “A New World Order? ISIS and the SykesPicot Backlash,” Foreign Policy Journal, December  26, 2015, www.foreignpoli cyjournal.com/2015/12/26/a-new-world-order-isis-and-the-sykes-picot-backlash/; James Miller, “Why Islamic State Militants Care So Much About Sykes-Picot,” RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, May 16, 2016, www.rferl.org/a/why-islamic-state-caresso-much-about-sykes-picot/27738467.html; Ian Bremmer, “How the Sykes-Picot Agreement Helped Make a Messed-Up Middle East,” Time, May  18, 2016, http:// time.com/4341059/sykes-picot-agreement-anniversary/. 106 Wahhabism is named after an 18th-century preacher and activist, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792). He started a reform movement in the remote, sparsely populated region of Najd, advocating a strict version of Islam. Salafism, the official Saudi version of this strict Islam, is the broader “fundamentalist” movement of which Wahhabism is an even stricter circle. 107 Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants.” 108 David Cook, “Early Islamic and Classical Sunni and Shi‘ite Apocalyptic Movements,” in The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism, ed. Catherine Wessinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 267–82. 109 For another discussion of the notion of “grey zone”, see the chapter of de Wet in this volume. 110 “Extinction of the Grayzone,” 55. 111 “Extinction of the Grayzone,” 55. 112 On the impact of millennialist and apocalyptic thinking in contemporary Islam, especially with respect to the development of jihadist movements, see Jeffrey T. Kenney, “Millennialism and Radical Islamist Movements,” in The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism, ed. Catherine Wessinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 267–82. 113 Catherine Wessinger, How the Millennium Comes Violently: From Jonestown to Heaven's Gate (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2000); Catherine Wessinger, ed., Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence: Historical Cases, Peace and Conflict Resolution Studies (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000); Eugene V. Gallagher, “Catastrophic Millennialism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism, ed. Catherine Wessinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 27–43; Peter Schäfer and Mark R. Cohen, eds., Toward the Millennium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco, Studies in the History of Religions 77 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), especially the chapter on the Branch Davidians of Waco, but most of the case studies involve some kind of injurious end. 114 The two terms actually denote the same phenomenon, so the use of both is redundant. “Millennialism” is the preferred term for sociologists, while “apocalypticism” is generally the preferred term for biblical scholars, theologians, and historians of religion. 115 Gallagher, “Catastrophic Millennialism,” 28ff. The phrase, “the world stinks,” comes from a report on how an American informant expressed his pessimism of the world.

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7/7 35 9/11 4, 9, 35 Abbasid Caliphate 306 abnormalisation 78 Abraham Bar Kaili of Amida, Chalcedonian bishop 92, 96 Abu Huraira 307 Acts of John 300 Acts, Book of 52, 139, 141 – 66 adventus 244, 245 Aelius Aristides 114 Afghanistan 304, 305, 309 Africa 5, 12, 35, 265; African tradition 267; Africans 189, 282; Christians 265, 266; elites 267; North Africa 182, 183, 188, 190, 262, 263, 264, 267, 272; North Africans 190, 196n.32; northwest Africa 264; Proconsular 265; South Africa; see South Africa African studies 12 Afro-Numidian 267; see also Numidian Against Symmachus 301 Against the Christians 268 Age of Reason 4, 12 Agora (film) 213, 223 Aion 302 Akhenaten, Pharaoh 32 al-A’maq 307 al-Baghdadi, Abubakr 306, 307 Alexander of Alexandria, bishop 262, 267, 268, 269, 270 – 72; response to Arius 270 – 72, 277n79 Alexander the Great 32 Alexander the Jew 151 Alexandria 33, 94, 214, 214 – 18, 219, 262, 269, 270, 271, 295, 301 – 4; Alexandrians 33, 214, 269, 302;

Baucalis regions 270; bishops 270; catechetical schools 269; Christians 262, 303; church 216, 223, 269; Origenism 270; paganism 302; pedagogy 268; philosophical schools 215, 269; scholarly community 268; Serapeum 301 – 4; temples 215; theological community 269; theology 268, 269 Alexandrian World Chronicle 216, 217 Alexandrians, Letter to the 214 Alfonso XIII, King of Spain 288 Allah 307 Almeria 289 Altar of Victory 299 – 300 Ambrose of Milan, bishop 185, 237, 238, 239, 243, 299; De officiis 234, 237, 247 Amélineau, E. 218 Amida 86, 87, 90, 91, 93, 96, 97 Ammonius 215 Amos, Book of 159 Ananias 160 Anastasius, emperor 90, 91, 92 Anaxagoras 33 Anazarbos 91 Ancient Egypt; cults 219, 221, 222; religion 213; scripts 220 angel 94, 308; archangel 114, 116, 118 – 19; angelic ascetism122; of death 95; worship of 112 – 13 Annan, Kofi 304 Anomeans 76 – 77 Antarados 91 anti-Chalcedonian persecution 87, 88, 90 anti-Chalcedonians 86 – 100 Antichrist, Dajjal 309 anticlericalism 288 Antinoopolis 219

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Antioch 89, 90, 91, 96, 111, 140, 156, 157, 161; church 157, 162 Antiochos II 118 anti-Semitism 11 Antoninus of Fussala, bishop 190 apartheid 283 – 85 apocalypticism 31, 32, 288, 290, 291, 303, 307, 309, 310 apologists, Christian 33 apostasy 92, 93, 98 – 100, 309 apostate; emperor Julian 111 apostates 9, 309 Arab conquest(s) 11, 86 Arab period 216 Arabia 91 Arcadius, emperor 216, 239 – 40 Archippos 114, 117, 122 – 23 Arendt, H. 261 – 3, 268 – 69, 272 Arian controversy 269 – 72 Arianism 112, 119; Arians 77, 112; bishop 214; see also Arius, theology Arius 262 – 3, 267 – 69, 269 – 72; theology 267 – 69, 269 – 72; see also Arianism Arles 266, 267 Armageddon 290 Armenarichus, consul 243 Armenian Orthodox 67 Arsamosata 91 Artemis 116, 122, 151, 300 – 1 Artemision of Ephesus 300 – 1 Asclepius of Edessa, bishop 90 Asia (Minor) 112, 114, 115, 157, 298, 300; Asian 112 Asia 32, 35 Asklepieion, Athens 48, 298 Assmann, J. 32, 212 Assyria 306 Aswan 221 Athanasius of Alexandria, bishop 222 Athens 33, 48, 156, 298 Atripe (Gk. Athribis) 218, 222 Augustine of Hippo, bishop 71, 186, 188 – 90, 191, 242 Avadh 31 Ayodhyā 31 Babri Masjid mosque 31 Baccanalia scandal 33 Bacchic societies 33 Baghdadi; see al-Baghdadi, Abubakr Bagnall, R. 182 Bamiyan 304 Bamiyan valley 305

baptism 72, 266; Donatist189; Jewish baptismal movements 303; re-baptism 116, 189, 266, 267 barbarian 72 – 74, 220 Barcelona 287, 289 Bar-Jesus/Elymas 52, 160 Barlaam and Josaphat 295 Barnabas 140, 147 – 48, 150, 153 – 54 Bar-Tal 52 Barthe, R. 285 Basiliscus, consul 243 Basque Catholics 291 Baucalis region, Alexandria 270 Beeley, C. 270 Belayche, N. 115 Bell, D. 218 Benedict XVI 32 beneficia (kindness) 238 Bentham, J. 88 Berytus 91, 94 Bethlehem 119 Bible, Hebrew 306 Biblical Studies 7 Bibliowicz, A.M. 11 bishop 89, 92, 96 – 97, 99, 112 – 13, 182 – 93, 215, 236, 240 – 46, 263 – 67, 270 – 72, 288, 298; anti-Chalcedonian 92; Arian 214; Arles 267; Gallic 266; Numidian 266; Rome 267 Bithynia 157 Blemmyes 219 Boin, D. 11 Book of Kings 237 Botrys 91 Bourbon, monarchy 287 Bourdieu, P. 10, 70 Bowersock, G. 295, 302 Boxer, Charles 30 braille 46 Bremmer, J. 3, 9, 87, 91, 99 Britain 283, 284, 307 British Empire 284, 285 British South Africa Company 283 Brown, P. 184, 211, 267 Brussels 308 Buddha 295; Buddhas of Bamiyan, destruction 304 – 6; Sakyamuni 305; Vairocana 305 Buddhism 394, 305; Buddhists 305; deities 305; Gandharan Buddhist Art 305; Mahayana 305; monasteries 305; monks 305; White Lotus movement 31 Burgess, R. 217

327

INDEX

Burke, K. 6, 10, 12 Burkean piety 6, 10, 12 Byblos 91 Byzantine Empire 86 Caecilian 265 – 67 Caesar 147 – 48 Caesarius of Arles 191 Cain 291 caliphate 305 – 8 Camp Bucca 307 Cape Colony 283 Cape Town, University of 282 Caria 115, 298 Carthage 262, 264, 265, 266, 269, 270; bishop of 267; clergy 267; church 265; papacy 266; society 264 Catholic Church: Cardinal Primate 288; in Spanish Civil War 288, 290, 292 Catholicism 289 Chalcedonians 87, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98 – 100 Charlie Hebdo murders 308 China 31, 284, 305 Chonai 116, 118, 119 Christian church, identity 295 Christianity 3 – 8, 10 – 11, 30, 33 – 34, 52 – 53, 74, 79, 86 – 100, 111, 115, 139 – 66, 182 – 93, 211 – 23, 262 – 72, 294 – 304, 306, 308; Christian identity 76, 143, 263; Christianisation 73, 115, 182 – 83, 184, 186, 188, 192, 244, 294, 296; intolerance 7; mission 31, 72, 139, 142 – 66, 191, 303; shrines 114, 116, 122 – 23, 289 Christian–pagan conflict 110 – 23, 211 – 23, 296, 299 – 304 Christians 10, 30, 31, 34, 53, 72, 74, 76, 79, 86 – 100, 111 – 14, 116, 122, 139 – 66, 185 – 92, 211 – 23, 262 – 66, 268, 296, 298, 302 – 3, 305; anti-Chalcedonians 86 – 100; Chalcedonians 87, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98 – 100; Donatists 182, 187, 188 – 90, 191; Gothic 72; Nestorian 305 Chronicles, Second Book of 157 Chronicon Paschale 243, 244 Church History 86 – 100, 298 City of God 186 Clarke, S. 3, 4, 12n2 Classics (Classical Studies) 7, 8, 32 Claudius, emperor 33, 214, 303 Clement of Alexandria, bishop 302

clergy 89, 239, 263, 264, 291; Carthagenian 267; Chalcedonian 98; Numidian 267 Codex Theodosianus 215 Cohen, David 264 colonialism 30, 282 – 84, 288 Colossae 113, 115, 116, 118, 119: bishop 113 Colossians, Epistle to 113 comes Aegypti 215 comes Orientis 245 Communist 289 competition 7, 8, 87, 110, 111, 118, 163, 185, 191 “Confession of Faith” 284 conflict: apocalyptic 290; blind and sighted 45 – 57; Christian–pagan 110 – 23, 211 – 23, 296, 299 – 304; emperor and people 234 – 47; inter-city 110 – 23; intergroup 11, 264; of interests (patronage) 182 – 93; intersect with sexuality 70 – 79; intra-Christian 6, 11, 86 – 100; intragroup 11, 261 – 72; intra-Jewish 142 – 43; Jewish-Christian 139 – 66; MuslimBuddhist 304 – 5; Muslim Jewish 306 – 8 conservatism 8, 289, 292 Constans, emperor 297 Constantine 4, 211, 266, 267, 268, 269, 271, 272, 296; conquest of Eastern Empire 268; conversion 6, 7, 8, 191, 296, 297, 298; edict 313 3, 6, 263; Hall of 211, 212; Letter to Eusebius 304; sons of 297, 299 Constantinian Revolution 294 Constantinople 72, 86, 87, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 111, 112, 113, 215, 236, 239, 242, 243, 244, 245, 300 Contantinople riot (580) 242 Constantius I, emperor 265 Constantius II, emperor 111, 112, 299 Coptic Orthodox 67 Corinth 91, 145, 147, 149, 155, Corinthians 155 Corinthians, First Epistle to 146 Cornelius, bishop 267 Councils: Carthage 188; Chalcedon 86, 93, 96, 99, 241; Constantinople 112 Nicaea 262, 267, 270, 271; Second Council of Constantinople 99 Crispinus of Calama, Donatist bishop 188 Crispus, synagogue ruler 155

328

INDEX

crowd 234 – 47; meaning 243 – 45; representation 241 – 43; social relationships 245 – 48 sociological models 234 – 37; virtue-based model 234 – 35, 237 – 39; see also riot crusade, religious 291 Cuba 288 cult: Aion 302; Christian 303; falcon 222; Hellenistic and Roman 7, 10, 299; Magna Mater 33, 75; Philae 220, 222; polytheist 8; Roman Imperial 6, 33; Sarapis 301, 303; Serapeum 215; sites 9; traditional 299; Victoria/Victory 299 culture wars 287, 288 Cybele 116, 122, 295; see also Magna Mater Cyprian of Carthage, bishop 267 Cyzicus 91 Dabiq 306 – 7 Dabiq (ISIS magazine) 308, 309 Dajjal (Muslim Antichrist) 308, 309 Damascus 144, 154 Daphne 91 Day of Judgment 308 De Angelis, Jerome, Fr. 30 decree 120 – 21, 147 – 48, 187 – 89, 263, 297 – 98 Deichmann, F. 213 delegitimisation 10, 45, 47, 50 – 57 desecration 289, 291 devil 54, 56, 117, 118, 122, 160 Diaspora 142, 144, 150, 151, 146, 161, 163, 164; Jewish community/ies 142, 143, 149, 151, 161, 162; Jews 142, 143, 151, 152, 155, 157, 159, 161; Jewish identity 159; Judaism 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 148, 149, 156, 160, 162, 164; synagogues 155 Dijkstra, J. 295, 296 Dio Chrysostom: Orationes 48 Diocletian, emperor 262 – 63, 265, 268 Diogoras 33 Dionysius of Alexandria, bishop 270 Dionysius the Aereopagite, pseudo- 294 Dionysus 295 Disability Studies 50, 55, 56, disasters: earthquake 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 99, 301; famine 86, 91, 99, 148; fires 89, 91 floods 90, 91, 301; plague 86, 87, 88, 91, 93 – 94, 97 – 99, 99; tsunami 94

disciples 145, 150; of Jesus 46, 54 divine identity 50 Diyarbakir 86 Dominicans, Spanish 31 Donatist: identity 263; schism 262, 263 – 67, 272 Donatists 182, 187, 188 – 90, 191 Donatus, landowner 189 Donatus, bishop 266 Dōrophoroi 295 Dossey, L. 190 Dunn, J.D.G. 164 Durban 282 Dyrrachium 91 Early Christian Studies 7, 8 East Church 221 Echidna 116, 122 Edessa 90, 91, 92, 298 edict 112, 116, 189, 215, 218, 222, 260, 263 – 65, 269 Edict of Gallienus 260 Egypt 32, 33, 48, 157, 213, 214, 215, 216, 219, 221, 222, 262, 267, 269, 296, 302, 303, 304; border 94; church 267; countryside or chora 214; cults 33, 219, 221, 222; Egyptians 33, 303; Gnosticism 303; peasants 303; religion 213; scripts 220; southern 213; southern frontier 219; temples 213, 220, 221 Eichmann, Adolf 261, 262, 269 El caso de España 291 Elephantine 213 elites 34, 147, 190 – 91, 237, 267, 268, 287, 302 – 3 Ellens, J.H. 56 Emmel, S. 218 emperor 185 – 86, 240 – 41, 245, 246, 272, 300; adventus 244, 245; Anastasius 90, 91, 92; Arcadius 216, 239 – 40; Claudius 33, 214, 303; Constans 297; Constantine 263, 266 – 68, 271, 297; Constantius I 265; Constantius II 111, 112, 299; Diocletian 262 – 63, 265, 268; Galerius 268; Gratian 299; Jovian 111, 113; Julian 91, 111; Justin I 89, 93, 96; Justin II 87, 93, 96, 97 – 99, 100; Justinian 96, 100, 220, 221, 222, 240, 245; Leo the Great 243, 244; Licinius 263, 268, 269; Maxentius 265 – 66; Maximian 265; Maximin Daia (Maximinus II) 269; Mogul 31; processus 242, 244;

329

INDEX

Theodosius I 215, 218, 298, 300 – 1, 301 – 3; Valen 111, 113; Valentinian 299; Vespasian 49; Yong Zhen 30 emperors, Christian 298, 299 Empo, Simon 30 End of Days 308, 309 Engels, D. 7, 9, 87 Enlightenment 3, 4, 5, 8, 50, 235 enlightenment, religious 305 Enrique Pla y Deniel of Salamanca, bishop 291 Ephesus 112, 117, 145, 150, 151, 155, 300 Ephrem bar Aphiana of Antioch, bishop 91, 96 Ephrem the Syrian 74 epiphany 110, 117, 118 – 19; Michael archistrategos 113 – 14, 116, 119, 123; Zeus Panamaros 115 – 16, 120 – 21 Epiphany, Christian festival 302 Epistle: to the Colossians 113; to the Corinthians 146; to the Galatians 74, 78; to the Romans 91 eschatological–millenarian destruction 289 eschatology 309 Ethiopic Orthodox 67 Eucharist 265 Eudoxia, empress 239 Eunapius 214, 215, 216, 222, 301 Euphrasius of Antioch, Chalcedonian bishop 90 Euphrates 32 Europe 32, 35; colonies 8 Europe-centric 8, 31 Eusebius of Caesarea, bishop 191, 270; “Letter of Constantine to Eusebius”, Life of Constantine 304 Evagrius Ponticus 294 Evagrius Scholasticus 245 Evagrius, governor of Egypt 215, 216, 218 evolutionary theory 7 exile 86, 88 – 90, 92, 96 – 97, 99, 239, 240, 270 Fascism 262, 291 FeesMustFall campaign 282 – 83, 285 Felix of Abthungi, bishop 265 – 66 feminist studies 70 Festus 189 Firmicus Maternus 396 First Cataract region 213 Foucault, M. 48, 78, 88 four Cs 7

Fox, J. 4, 9, 14n11 France 307, 308 Frankfurter, D. 213 Freedberg, D. 51 Frend, W.H.C. 263, 268 Fujian 31 Fussala 190 Galatians, Epistle to 74, 78 Galerius, emperor 68 Galves, Frances, Fr. 30 Garland, R. 49 Gaudentius of Brescia, bishop 187 Gaul 191 Gaza 212, 298 Genesis 52 Gentile 74, 142 – 53, 155 – 56, 158 – 59, 161 – 63, 165 – 66; adherents 161, 164; believers/Christians 142, 159, 161; converts to Christianity 151, 163; converts to Judaism 149, 150; “gentile” 192; inclusion 142, 151, 159, 161; proselytes of Judaism 149, 151, 158, 159, 161; sympathisers of Judaism 143, 147, 149, 151; see also god-fearers George of Cappadocia, Arian bishop 214 German 218, 261 – 64 Germany 71 Gessios 218, 219 Gibbon, E. 16n31, 32 Glen Grey Act 283 god-fearers 149, 161; see also Gentile, sympathisers of Judaism Gog and Magog 308 Goma, Cardinal Isidro, primate of Spain 291 Goodey, G.F. 49 Gordon, R. 184 Gorgias 5 Gospel of John 45 – 47, 54 – 56, 57, 295 Gospel of Luke 146, 152, 156, 160, 165, 166, 191 Gospel of Matthew 53 Goths 72, 73, 243, 300 government: 34, 70, 287; British 31; Dutch 261; Roman 34; Spanish 287 – 88 governmental responses 4, 12 governor 215, 216, 236, 242, 243 – 46, 297, 306 governor’s palace 265 gratia (favour) 238 Gratian, emperor 299

330

INDEX

grayzone 308, 309; see also grey zone Great Depression 287 Great Persecution 268, 269; see also persecution Great Propaganda War, propaganda wars 263, 268 Greek 9, 33, 72, 74, 77, 116, 117, 122, 145, 147, 149, 155, 160, 214, 216, 218, 303; ancient world 3, 49; Christians 86; language 221; mythology 295; philosopher 73, 216; philosophy 76, 302 Greek conceptions: blindness 51, 53; sight 52, 53 Green, H.A. 303 Gregory of Nazianzus, bishop 111, 112 Gregory of Nyssa, bishop 117, 294 Gregory of Rome, bishop 183, 192 grey zone 70 – 71, 72, 79, 308, 310; see also grayzone Grossman, P. 221 Guam 288 Haas, C. 302 Hadith 307, 308 Hahn, J. 214 – 15, 216 Haidt, J. 9 Haiti 288 Harith of Najran, martyr 93, 96 Hart, K. 285 Hebrew Bible 306 Heidegger, Martin 262 Helladius 215 Hellene 262, 268, 270, 271, 272 Hellenisation 111, 117 Hera 48 heresy 10, 75, 77, 267, 270 heretics 75, 78, 79, 89, 90, 113, 187, 235, 262, 272, 284, 297 heritage 114 heritage site 304, 306 Hermes 295 Herodotos 115 Hierapolis 117, 122 Hindu Kush 305 Hinduism 31, 33, 305 Hippo 189 Hippodrome 243 – 45 History of John, the Son of Zebedee, the Apostle and Evangelist 300 Holland see Netherlands Holocaust 261 – 62, 269, 272 holy site 122, 306

Homer 48 Homoian 111 – 13 homonationalism 71, 72, 74 Homousian formula 112 Horus 295 Hume, D. 16n31, 32 Huttner, U. 112 Hymn to Heracles 114 Iconium 149, 152 identity 50, 166; barbarian 72, 73; Christian 76, 143, 263; Christian church 295; community 88; conflict 303; construction 86, 262; Diaspora Jews 159; divine 50; Donatist 363; formation 10 – 11, 262, 266, 295; group 11, 140, 141, 143, 144, 148, 149, 158, 159, 160, 161; homosexual 73; Israel 144; Jewish 149, 153, 155, 160, 162, 163, 166, 269; Jewish victims 261; Messiah 145; narrative 269; people of god 158, 160, 165; polarisation79, 262; religious 10, 33, 34, 70, 74, 79, 262, 296; research 11; social 70; stresses and tensions 310; theory 10 idolatry 111 – 12, 112 – 13, 116 – 18, 186 – 87, 192, 305, 307; anti-idolatry 111; idolaters 222 Imperial Cult see Roman Imperial Cult imperialism, Western 307 inclusion 55 – 57, 71, 72 – 74, 75, 79, 142, 151, India 33, 35, 305; 1947 partition 31; epic 31; religion 31, 34 Indus 32 Ingram, B. 5, 10 intersectionality 46 intolerance: monotheist 4, 6, 32; polytheist 33 Iraq 306, 307, 309; invasion 307 Isaiah, Book of 145, 146 Isaiah, commission 52 Isis, goddess 33, 221, 295; temple 214, 219 – 22, 222, 298 ISIS 306 – 9 Islam 8, 10, 11, 304, 306, 307, 308; buildings, sites 308; clerics 304; faith and practice 307, 308; graven images 304; idolatry 307; impurities 307; innovations 307; ISIS 306 – 9; Islamic law 304; Islamisation 306; Muslims see Muslims; Salafis 307, 308; Salafism

331

INDEX

307, 309, 319n106; Shiite 306, 308; shirk 307; Sunni 306, 308; takfir 307, 308; theology 307; Umma 307; Wahhabis 307 Wahhabism 308, 319n106 Islamabad 304 Israel 143 – 47, 151, 152, 157 – 59, 161 – 62, 166, 237 – 38 Israelis 269 Jains 305 Jameson Raid 283 Jerusalem 140, 142 – 43, 144, 146, 148 – 49, 150, 152, 153, 156 – 57, 159, 160 – 61, 163, 269 Jesse 237 Jesuits 30, 31 Jesus (Christ) 30 – 31, 45 – 46, 52 – 55, 74, 79, 113, 142 – 49, 152, 154 – 60, 165, 191, 268, 270 – 71, 295, 301, 302, 307, 308; disciples 46, 54; Sacred Heart of 289; Society of 289 Jewish conceptions: blindness 53; sight 53 Jewish Council(s) 262, 264, 269, 272 Jewish identity 149, 153, 155, 160, 162, 163, 166, 269 Jewish victims, identity 261 Jews 9 – 10, 33, 54, 71 – 72, 74 – 79, 90, 99, 139 – 66, 187, 214, 261 – 64, 269 – 70, 296, 302 – 3; leaders in Rome 145; in Rome 147, 155 jihadism 308 Johannes Damascenus 295 Johannesburg 284 Johannite riot (403) 239 – 40, 241 – 43 John, apostle 300, 301 John Chrysostom 70 – 72, 72 – 74, 75 – 79, 79, 157, 239 – 40, 300 – 1 John of Ephesus, Syrian bishop 86 – 100, 298 John of Jerusalem 241 John the Cappadocian 240 John the Lydian 240 – 41 Joint Letter of the Spanish Bishops to the Bishops of the Whole World Concerning the War in Spain 291 Jonah 306; destruction of Tomb 306 – 9 Josaphat 295 Joseph 153, 295 Jovian, emperor 111, 113 Judaeo-Persians 305 Judaism 3, 8, 10, 139 – 66, 294, 306; Jews 9 – 10, 33, 54, 71 – 72, 74 – 79, 90, 99,

139 – 66, 187, 214, 261 – 64, 269 – 70, 296, 302 – 3 Judas Iscariot 160, 266 Julian, emperor 111, 111 – 12, 112 – 13, 116 – 18, 118, 299 Justin I, emperor 89, 92, 93, 96 Justin II, emperor 87, 93, 96, 97 – 98, 100, 107m91 Justinian I, emperor 96, 100, 220, 221, 222, 240, 245 Juvenal 51 Kabul 304, 305 Kabul Museum 304 Kabul valley 305 Kahlos, M. 7, 75 Kami 30 Kimberley 284 King, H. 77 King David 237 King George V 282 Koh-iBaba 305 Kok, J. 46 Kruger, Paul 282 Kushan Empire 305 KwaZulu–Natal, University of 282 L’Esquella de la Torratxa 291, 292 Labienus 115 Lakoff, G. 9 Landowners 184 – 91 Laodicea 91 Laodikeia 112 – 13, 115 – 18, 122 – 23; Arianism 119; canons 112, 118 – 19; Synod of Laodikeia 112 – 13, 113 – 18, 118 – 19 Laqueur, W. 71 Late Antique Studies 8, 10, 211, 212, 222 late antiquity 234 – 47 latifundia 287 Laureti, Tommaso 211, 212 Leipoldt, J. 218, 219 Leo the Great, emperor 243, 244 lepers 93, 96, 98 Letter to the Alexandrians 214 Levi, P. 261, 263 Leviticus 268 Libanius 242, 243, 301 liberalism 3 – 8, 287 – 88 liberation movements 288 Libyan 270 Licinius, emperor 263, 268, 269

332

INDEX

Life of Aaron 222 Life of Porphyry 212 Life of Shenoute 218 Lincoln, B. 286, 289 Lives of the Eastern Saints 86 Locke, J. 16n31 London 263, 308 Lόpez, A. 219 Lucilla 265 – 66 Luke, evangelist 53, 142, 155, 158, 159 Luke–Acts 142, 160, 165 Lydia 149, 150, 156, Lydia (Roman province) 298 Lystra 150, 152, 156 Macao 31 Maccabees 33 Macedonius of Philae, bishop 222 Macedonius, ‘heretical’ bishop 90 Madrid 287, 289 Magna Mater 33, 75, 295 Mahdi (Sunni Muslim messianic figure) 308 Maiorinus of Carthage, bishop 266 Malina, J. 46 Manichaeism 8, 10, 294; castration 75; discipline 75; dualistic rhetoric 288; Manichaeans 75, 76, 305; view of flesh/ physical body 75, 77 Mara of Amida, anti-Chalcedonian bishop 92 Marcellus of Apamea 304 Marchal, J. 70 – 71, 72 Marcionites 77 Marcos, M. 11, 17n33 Mark the Deacon 212 Markus, R. 192 martyrdom 9, 10, 86, 88, 93, 96, 99, 263; identity narrative 269; narrative of 261 martyrs: anti-Chalcedon Magian Persian 88; Christian 30, 33, 99; Dominican 31; Donatist 272; eternal reward 88; identity construction 263; manner of death 99; Harith 93, 96; of Najran 93, 96; Ruhmi 93; status and recognition 215, 265, 266, 302 Marxist social theory 7 Mary 30, 307 masculinity 70 – 72, 72 – 74, 75 – 79 Maternus Cynegius 303 Mauretiana 275n39 Maurice 245

Maxentius, emperor 265 – 66 Maximian, emperor 265 Maximin Daia (Maximinus II), emperor 269 Maximus of Turin 186 – 87, 190 – 91 Maxwele, Chumane 282 Mayer, W. 76, 139 – 41, 142, 143, 144, 156, 161, 163, 164 McKenzie, J. 216 Medina 307, 308: conquest of 308 Mediterranean 157, 213, 263; ancient and late ancient 5; Christianisation 182, 183, 192 Meletian schism 267, 269 Menas 243 – 45, 247 Mensurius of Carthage, bishop 265, 266, 275n46 Mesopotamia 86 – 87 Messiah 142, 143, 145, 157; identity of 145 Mexico 288 Michael archistrategos 110, 113 – 14, 116, 119, 123 Michael of Chonai 110, 115 – 18, 119, 122 – 23 Middle Platonism 295 millennialism 31, 286, 291 307, 309 Miltiades of Rome, bishop 266 Ministerio de Propaganda 291, 293 mission: Christian 139, 142 – 66, 191, 303; to the Goths 72; missionaries 31, 142 – 66; missionary work 190, 298; preaching 306 Mithraism, Mithraic groups 302 Mogul emperor 31 monastery 88, 92, 305: Shenoute (White) 218 Mondo, Hara 30 monks 72, 74, 86 – 90, 92, 96 – 97, 100, 239, 243, 298, 301, 305; Gothic 72 monotheism 3, 6, 9, 10, 31, 32, 34, 35 monotheist 5, 8; intolerance 4, 6, 32; religions 32 monster–terrorist–fag 71, 79 Monument of the Sacred Heart on the Cerro de los Angeles 289 Morales, Juan Antonio 291 Moreno, Fr A. M. 289 Moscow 217 Moses 32 mosque 31: Babri Masjid 31; destruction 31, 306; Tell Nebi Yunus 306; Western Europe 35

333

INDEX

Mosul 306 Mother of God 295 Muhammad, Prophet 308 multiple identities 262 Muslim 31, 33, 305, 307 – 8: bodies 71; clerics 304; conquerors 305; conquest 306; rule and rulers 31; Shiite 308; slaughter of 31; Sunni 308 Muttawakil, Wakil Ahmad 304 Najran 93, 96 naos 220, 221 Natal, colony of 283 nationalism 262 Nautin, P. 220, 221 Nazi conquest 263 Nazis 35, 71, 261, 262, 263, 264, 269 Near East 31, 35 neo-Platonic 111, 294 Neoplatonism 295 Netherlands 261, 263, 264 neuroscience 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11 neuroscientific research 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11 neuroscientific turn 3 – 5, 6, 12 New Testament Studies 8 New York 264 New Yorker 261 Neyrey, J.H. 46 Nicaean barbarians 74 Nicaean formula 112 Nicaean orthodoxy 72, 111, 118 Nicaean settlement 113 Nicomedia 91, 245 Nicopolis 91 Nietzsche, F. 32 Nika 240 – 41 Nika riot (532) 240 – 41, 241 – 43 Nile 218, 219, 301 Nilometer 301 Nineveh 306 Nonnus of Panopolis 295, 296 non-orthodox Christians 79 normalization 72 – 74, 75, 77; heteronormalisation72 – 73 North Africa 262 Northern Alliance 305 Noubades 219 Novatian, bishop 267 Numidia 265, 266, 275n39 Numidians 265, 266, 267 see also AfroNumidian Nutting, H.C. 51

officia (service) 238 Old Testament Studies 32 Omar, Muhammed, Mullah 304 On the Incomprehensible Nature of God 76 Optatus of Milevis 264, 265, 266 Origen 268, 271, 272, 294; theology 268, 271, 272 Origenism (Origenist theology) 270, 271 orthodox 89, 92, 99, 119; Christianity 34, 79; Christians 76; masculinity76 orthodoxy 10, 32, 33, 74, 77, 79, 98, 122, 242; Chalcedonian 100; Christian 86, 118; imperial 86, 100; Nicaean 72, 111, 118 orthopraxy 10, 32, 33 Ottoman Empire 307, 308 Oxford 216, 284 Oxford University 284 Padayachee, V. 285 paganism 118, 183 – 88, 19, 192 – 93, 218, 220 – 21, 296 – 300, 302; antipaganism 214, 218 – 19, 222, 296 – 300, 302; conflict with Christians 110 – 23, 211 – 23, 296, 299 – 304; cryptopaganism 112; cult 75, 186, 190, 192, 218, 220, 221, 222, 298, 299, 300, 302; cult attendants 301; cult buildings 10, 301; cult image 221, 302; cult objects 302, 304; cult places 191, 192, 298; cult statue 211, 235, 301, 302; cultic communities 302; cultic practice 303; culture 297 – 88, 303; deities 303, 304; distinction from Christianity 295 – 96, 302; killing of pagans 242; pagans 11, 33, 112, 117, 153, 183, 185, 187 – 88, 190 – 92, 211, 215, 218, 298, 302; sanctuary 110, 114, 298, 301; shrines (paganorum fana) 120, 184 – 88, 191, 300, 301, 302 temple 298, 300, 301 – 4, 316; veneration of deities 301; see also sanctuary; shrine; temple paideia 296 Pakistan 305 Palace of Studius 244 Palestine 91, 243, 298, 306 Pammachius 189 Pamphilus 270 Panamaros 115 Panopolis 214, 218 – 19

334

INDEX

panoptikon 88 Pantheon, Rome 298 Paphos 160 Paradise 309 Paraphrase of St. John 295 Parthians 115 Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) 289 Passion of Perpetua and Felicity 185 Pastoral Instruction of the Bishops of Pamplona and Vitoria 290 paterfamilias 183, 185, 189, 191 patrocinium 184 patronage 117, 119, 182 – 93, 266, 272, 289; conflicts of interest 182 – 93 Paul, apostle 52, 72, 74, 140, 143 – 57, 160, 162 – 63, 166, 191; literary corpus 71 Paul of Antioch, bishop 90 – 91 Paulinus of Nola 301 Paulson, W.R. 50 Pemán, J. 290 persecution 10, 33, 34, 52, 75, 86 – 100, 184, 261 – 72 Persia 86 Persian, apocalyptic 294 Persian, Judaeo-Persians 305 Persian, Magian 88 Pervo, Richard I. 160 Peter, apostle 140, 157, 159, 160 Peter of Alexandria, bishop 267, 269, 270 Petilianus 189 Philae 213 – 14, 219 – 22, 298 Philippi 149, 150, 152, 155, 156, Philippines 288 philosophy 73, 157; Greek 302; Hellenistic 157; Late Roman Neoplatonic 294; moral 76 Philosophy from Oracles 268 Phocas 240 – 41 Phoenicia 91 phronesis 242 Phrygia 118, 119, 298 Phrygia Pacatiana, diocese of 112 Pisidian Antioch 142, 144, 147, 151, 152, 159, 162, Platonism, Platonists 262, 263, 268, 271, 272 Plautus 51 Plotinus 268 Pluralism: cultural 288; religious 7 pogrom 33, 267, 303 polytheism 3, 4, 6, 31, 32, 33, 34, 111, 296

Pompeiopolis 90, 91 Porphyrian 262, 268, 271 Porphyrius of Gaza, bishop 298 Porphyry of Tyre 262, 268, 270 – 72 Port Elizabeth 282 postcolonial studies 70 POUM 289 Powell, R. 3, 4, 12n2 praefectus augustalis 215 praefectus vigilum 244 praetorian prefect 240 Praetorian Prefect Oriens 302, 303 Pretoria 282 Pritchett, K. 110 processus 242, 244 Procopius 220, 221, 222 profanation 291 pronaos 221 propaganda 291 prophet; biblical 94, 145, 147, 154, 159; blind 48, 52; false 160; Jonah 306; Muhammed 308 prophetic 52, 154 Protestantism 291 Prudentius 301 Psalms, Book of 111 Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre 97, 100 – 101n3, 103n16 Ptolemais 91 Puar, J. 70 – 71, 72, 74, 70, 79 Puerto Rico 288 purification 290, 291 Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts 217 Queen Victoria 282 queer studies 70 quema de conventos (burning of the convents) 289 Qur’an 307 – 8 Rabbani, Borhanuddin 305 Rabbinic Judaism 10, 164; teachertheologians 294 racism 282 radicalism: religious 70 – 72, 74 radicalization: political 288; religious 79, 86 radicals: political 289; religious 70, 79 Ram 31 Ramayana 31 Raqqa 306 Rashidun Caliphate 305

335

INDEX

Rational Choice Theory 7 Rebillard, É. 262, 263 re-Christianisation 290 Reformation 3, 235 regime change 110 – 11 Rehoboam 237 – 39 religion: Ancient Egyptian 213; of the Book 305; Chinese 34; Christianity 3 – 8, 10 – 11, 30, 33 – 34, 52 – 53, 74, 79, 86 – 100, 111, 115, 139 – 66, 182 – 93, 211 – 23, 262 – 72, 294 – 304, 306, 308; Greek and Roman 6, 7, 8, 32, 34; Indian 34; Japanese 34; Roman 32 religious conflict: identity-formation 10 – 11; intersectional nature 70 religious conflict models 6 – 10; religious marketplace 7 – 9; tolerance 6 – 7; violence 9 – 10 religious identity 10, 33, 34, 70, 74, 79, 262, 296 religious resistance 87, 100, 152, 156, 162, 182, 269, 295 – 96 religious studies 139, 211 religious transformation 222 religious violence 234 – 47; global perspectives 32 Revelation, Book of 290, 304 Rhetoric 10, 11, 87, 93, 189, 219, 222, 234 – 35, 288; delegitimising 56; disability 50; persecution 87; religious conflict 75, 79 rhetorical theory 5; rhetorical violence 5, 9, 10; suffering 86, 87; violence 86 Rhodes 91 Rhodes, Cecil John 282 – 85; RhodesMustFall campaign 282 Rhodesia 283 riot 92, 151, 192, 215, 302; Constantinople (580) 242; Johannite (403) 239 – 40, 241 – 43 Nika (532) 240 – 41, 241 – 43; see also crowd Ripoll 289 Rohrbaugh, R. 46 Roman conceptions: blindness 51, 53; sight 52, 53 Roman Empire 8, 33, 187, 213, 214, 244, 294, 298, 300, Roman Imperial Cult 6, 33 Roman: ancient world 3; (Latin) Christians 86; moral philosophy 76; mythology 295 Romans, Epistle to 91

Romanus, military commander 215 Rome 33, 115, 116, 118, 145, 147, 155, 156, 236, 267, 296, 298, 299, 306 Rose, M.L. 49 Rufinus of Aquilea 214 – 16; Historia Ecclesiastica 302 Ruhmi of Narjan 93 Russia 307 Rylaarsdam, D. 79 Sacred Heart of Jesus 289 Sacred Heart on the Cerro de los Angeles, Monument of the 289 Sahīh al-Bukhārī 308 Salvius 190 sanctuary 110, 114, 298, 301; in church architecture 220; Michael archistrategos 122, site of epiphanies 115 – 16; Zeus Panamaros 120 Sandler, S. 4, 9, 14n11 Sandwell, I. 70 Sapphira 160 Sarapis 216, 295, 301, 302, 304; cult 301, 303; statue 216, 301, 302; temple see Serapeum Sarepta 91 Sassanian Persia 305 Satan 88, 92, 160; see also devil Saudi Arabia 308 Saul, apostle see Paul Schied, J. 32, 33 schism, see Donatist, Meletian schismatics 267, 297 Scriptores Historiae Augustae 51 Scripture: burning 263; confiscation 264, 266 Second Council of Constantinople 112 Second Temple Judaism 3 Second Temple period 153 Secret Society 284 secularisation 288 secularisation theory 3, 4 Seleucia 91 Seleucids 33 self-mastery, see sōphrosynē senate 243, 244; municipal 187; Roman 299 Senate House (Roman) 299 – 300 Seneca: Epistle 33 Sepphoris 295 Serapeum, destruction 214 – 18, 219, 220, 222, 223, 301 – 4

336

INDEX

Sergius Paulus 160 servitus (slavery) 237 Severian of Gabala, bishop 239 – 40 Severus of Antioch, anti-Chalcedonian bishop 241, 242 sexual exceptionalism 71 – 72, 72 – 76, 79 Shahih Muslim Hadith 307 Sharma, S. 71 Shaw, B. 266 Shaytan 309 Shenoute Monastery 218, 219 Shenoute of Atripe, Abbot 214, 218 – 19, 220, 222 – 23 Shephardson, C. 74 shirk 307 shrine: Christian 114, 116, 122 – 23, 289; destruction 289, 301, 302; Michael archistrategos 114, 116, 122 – 23; pagan (paganorum fana) 120, 184 – 88, 188, 191, 300, 301, 302; Zeus Panamaros 120 Sidon 91 Sikh bodies 71 Silas 140, 147, 150, 156 Silk Road 305, 306 Sita, wife of Lord Ram 31 Smith, G. 77 social disaggregation 294 social identity 70 societies 310: African 12; Bacchic 33; historical (pre-industrialised) 49; hostile majority 51; late ancient 12; non-Western 5; pre-Enlightenment 3; traditional 3, 5; Western 308 Society of Jesus 289 sociology of religion 8, 11, 234 – 35 Socrates 33, 34 Socrates of Constantinople see Socrates Scholasticus Socrates Scholasticus 214, 215 Solidaridad Obrera 290 Solomon 237 Sophia, wife of Justin II 98 sophist 5: Greek theory of 5 sōphrosynē 73, 74, 75, 77, 79 South Africa 282 – 86, 292 Sozomen 112, 214, 215, 216, 226n26, 239, 240, 241, 245 Spain 287, 288, 289, 290, 291; Catholic Spain, myth of 292; Nationalist 289 – 91; nineteenth-century 287, 288; Primate of 291; Republican 286 – 89, 291 – 92 revolutionary 286; Second Republic288;

sixteenth- and seventeenth-century 289; Socialist government 288; South American colonies 288; Spanish Civil War 286 – 93; Spanish Empire 288 Spanish Civil War 286 – 93 Spanish nationalism 289, 290, 291, 293 Stark, R. 7 Stenger, J. 157 Stephen 142, 153, 157 Stephen, Church of St Stephen 220, 221 Stoicism 295 story of St. Michael of Chonai 110 Stratonikeia 115, 120 Studius 243, 244 subintroductae 74, 79 Suetonius 51 Sykes-Picot agreement 307 symbolic revolts 309 symbolic revolution 285, 286, 292, 294 Symmachus, Quintus Aurelius 299; Relation 299 synagogue, destruction 235 synods: Laodikeia 112 – 13, 113 – 18, 118 – 19; Synod of the Oak 239 Syria 150, 306, 307, 309 Syriac 86, 300 Syrian Antioch, see Antioch Syrian Orthodox 67 Taiping rebellion 32 takfir 307, 308 Tal Afar 306 Taliban 304 – 6, 309 Tatian, praetorian prefect oriens 302 Tell Nebi Yunus (Hill of the Prophet Jonah) 306 temple 48, 187, 212, 300; Alexandria 215; Artemision, Ephesus 300 – 1; Askepleion, Athens 298; Atripe (Gk. Athribis) 218 – 19; Carrhae-Harran 298; closure 214, 219 – 22, 221, 300, 316; conversion 213, 215, 221, 298; cult 300, 316; destruction99, 182, 192, 211 – 13, 214 – 16, 218 – 19, 222, 235, 290, 298, 300 – 1, 301 – 4; Edessa 298; Egyptian 213, 220, 221; Gaza 298; Hellenic Antioch 111; Hindu 31; Isis, Philae 214, 219 – 22, 222, 298; Isodromian Mother, near Tralles 298; Jerusalem 156; legislation/imperial policy 215, 297, 299 – 300; objects 300, 316; pagan 298, 300, 301 – 4, 316; Pantheon, Rome 298; Pneueit 219; priest 222;

337

INDEX

Ptolemaic phase 216; rebuilding 300; reopening 298; restoration 111; Roman phase 216; Serapeum 214 – 18, 219, 220, 222, 223, 301 – 4; statues 235; Victory, Palatine Hill 299; Zeus Panamaros, Stratonikeia 115, 121 teratogenisation 71, 75, 77, 78, 79 Tertullian 267 Thelamon, F. 214 Themistius 111, 125n12 Theodora, empress, wife of Justinian I 93, 96, 99 Theodore of Philae, bishop 221 Theodore the Recruit 117 Theodoret of Cyrrhus 113, 119, 214, 215, 302, 304 Theodosian Code 296, 298 Theodosius I, emperor 215, 218, 298, 300 – 1, 301 – 3 Theogenia 295 Theophilus 165 Theophilus of Alexandria, bishop 213 – 18, 239, 301 Tiberius, emperor 33 Tigris 32 Tilly, C. 236 Tiresias 48, 52 Tite, P. 47 Titius Justus 149, 155 Toledo 287, 289 Tolerance; polytheist 4, 6, 32, 35; religious 32 Tralles 298 Transkei region 283 Trebilco, P. 158 Tripoli 91 Triumph of the Cross 211, 212, 221 Turkey 86 Turkmen 306 Tyre 91 Tyrranus 155 Ummayad Caliphate 305, 306 United Nations Secretary-General 304 United States of America 35, 288, 307 University of Cape Town 282 University of KwaZulu–Natal 282 unorthodoxy 3 Uzbekistan 305

Valencia 287, 289 Valens, emperor 111, 113 Valentinian, emperor 299 Van der Horst, P. 33 Van Nuffelen, P. 7, 9, 87 Van Tijn, Gertrude 261 – 67, 269, 272 Vatican 211, 212 Vespasian, emperor 49 Vich 289 Victoria/Victory, goddess 299 – 300 Violence 222 – 23; inter-group 263 violent discourse 223 virgin 31, 73, 76, 97, 299, 302 – 3 virginity, Christian doctrines of 31 war 86, 87, 89, 91, 99; Afghanistan 305; apocalyptic 307; First World War 261, 284, 287, 307; Mithridatic 115; Napoleonic 287; Punic wars 299; religious wars 3, 6, 289, 290; Roman civil wars 299; Second World War 261, 264; Spanish Civil War 286 – 93; Spanish-American War 288; Thirty Years’ War 32 Wasserstein, B. 261, 264 Wessinger, C. 309 West 34, 35; concepts 31; context 71; Europe-centric 8, 31; governmental responses 4; imperialism 307; religion 308; scholarship 4, 86; societies 308; Westerners 31 White Lotus movement 31 White Monastery See Shenoute Monastery Whitmarsh, T. 296 Witwatersrand 285 Wood, P. 97 xiejiao (“harmful doctrines”) 31 Yajuj and Majuj 308 Yong Zhen, emperor 30 Zaragoza 287 Zeno of Verona, bishop 187 Zeus 48, 111, 116, 117, 118; Kairos 115; Panamaros 115, 116, 120 – 21 Zoroastrians 305

338