Abstract
The two books under review here have much to say to each other. In her preface to Ancient Christianities, Paula Fredriksen, Aurelio Professor of Scripture emerita at Boston University and Distinguished Visiting Professor emerita in the Department of Comparative Religions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, sets out to complicate a well-rehearsed story, first told by Eusebius in the fourth century, of the development of the Christian movement from Jesus to an imperially favoured Church of the later empire. Her goal?—to “introduce readers to the complexities and ambiguities, the ironies and surprises, the twists and turns” of “a different, richer, and much less linear story,” considering canonical, noncanonical and paracanonical texts, in addition to archaeological evidence within the wider Mediterranean culture in which they were embedded (p. xiii). While Fredriksen’s focus is broad, Caroline Johnson Hodge, who is Professor of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, is concerned in The God of this House: Christian Domestic Cult Before Constantine with a more specific topic—the household rituals of Christianity from the rise of the Christian movement to the early fourth century, exploring how these cult practices very often mirrored traditional domestic rituals found more generally across the Roman Empire, arguing that these were marked with such a degree of flexibility and adaptability that they may well go some way towards answering one of Paula Fredriksen’s key questions in her work: “In a world of so many peoples connected to so many gods . . . how then, over the course of four centuries, did one particular god end up the focus of late Roman imperial law and piety?” (Ancient Christianities, p. xiv).
Fredriksen’s work is divided into seven chapters: “The Idea of Israel”; “The Dilemmas of Diversity”; “Persecution and Martyrdom”; “The Future of the End”; “Christ and Empire”; “The Redemption of the Flesh”; and “Pagan and Christian.” Both newcomers to Fredriksen’s scholarship and those who are already familiar with her work will delight in her crisp and lively style of writing, and will profit enormously from her characteristically thought-provoking insights. While considering how ta ethnē should be translated into English, for instance, she avers that the pejorative term “pagan” may, in fact, more closely capture the sense of the term as used in the ancient world (rather than the more religion-neutral term “gentiles”) for, “in the first century there was no such thing as a religion-neutral ethnicity” (pp. 2–3). Fredriksen also has cautionary words to offer on the use of the term diaspora to refer to Jews living in other regions of the Mediterranean world outside of Israel. It is often misinterpreted as conveying a sense of “melancholy displacement” and involuntary exile, such as in the wake of the Babylonian conquest in 586 BCE, thus failing to account for the large numbers of Jews who voluntarily elected to live in other regions “pulled by the wider world created by Alexander the Great,” and later by Rome, centuries after the exile to Babylon and centuries before the destruction of the Jewish temple in 70CE (pp. 3–4). And while discussing the contentious Birkat-ha-minim, Fredriksen takes the time to distinguish between texts such as the Pauline writings, the gospels and the Book of Acts in which stories and judgments relating to certain Jewish groups should be regarded as “intra-Jewish arguments, not anti-Jewish ones,” and later Christian writings (p. 15). After all, disputes about the right way to be Jewish were hardly new. Only later would Christian texts display the kind of anti-Jewish sentiment that could no longer be explained away as a disagreement among insiders. Separately, in her chapter on Persecution and Martyrdom, Fredriksen reminds us that, although still found in textbooks, the age of Christian martyrdom did not draw to a close with the conversion of Constantine. This is often conveniently forgotten; indeed, “the longest and most effective period of imperial Christian persecution was only beginning, this time enacted by the Christian emperor himself, who strove to suppress ‘heresies’ and root out schism” (p. 81).
While there is much to be said about each of Fredriksen’s seven chapters, the remainder of this review will concern itself largely with the subject of Fredriksen’s chapter seven as this most closely aligns with the focus of the second book under review here (although we will also have cause to refer in part to other chapters of Fredriksen’s work more briefly where relevant). Chapter seven, “Pagan and Christian,” explores the often porous nature of so-called “pagan” and “Christian” practice, posing questions such as what makes a particular practice, or indeed artefact, “legitimate” when it is Christian, and a similar practice or artefact “illegitimate” when associated with another cult, despite the often striking similarities between the two? Or, perhaps more confusingly, how should one view either a practice or artefact that clearly exhibits a syncretic blending of “pagan” and “Christian” elements? And, in turn, how might contemporaries have viewed such things? Fredriksen will argue that “Christianity offered not an alternative to traditional Mediterranean Roman culture, but finally, an expression of it” (p. xviii).
But first Fredriksen takes issue with a line attributed to Peter in the Book of Acts (10:28) in which he remarks that it is “unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit anyone of another nation,” which she terms “nonsense” given that Jews routinely associated with pagans, “unclothed in the baths, in athletic competitions, in the gymnasium” and also “clothed in professional associations, in town councils, in the temple courtyard, and not least, in Jewish diaspora assemblies” (p. 8). Moreover, the late-fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom had reason to censure Christians for dancing with Jews on public festivals (p. 185). For Fredriksen, we shouldn’t be surprised at Jews (or, indeed at Christians later on) who lived their lives, at least partly, by “the abiding normativity of majority culture” (p. 79). We frequently encounter in our extant sources, Church Fathers, often members of the Church hierarchy, fulminating against traditional festivals with public feasting, chariot races, spectacles and gladiatorial contests, branding them pompa diaboli; nonetheless, if we look a little closer and read between the lines, we will find what Fredriksen calls the “silent majority” as they continue to lead “normal social lives, consorting and occasionally religiously cocelebrating (to their bishops’ irritation) with heretics, pagans, and Jews” (p. 170). But what sort of evidence is there for Fredriksen’s claims? In many, but not all cases, the evidence comes from the very same sources that condemn what are regarded by Christian writers and ecclesiastical authorities as deviant practice.
In his On Idolatry, Tertullian warned Christians, among other activities, against the manufacture of cult imagery (p. 185), indicating that there were some Christians who clearly didn’t allow questions of conscience to interfere with their business. He would similarly caution Christians against attending the games (On Spectacles), where demons could be found lurking. Evidently, many such warnings fell on deaf ears as John Chrysostom could be found still complaining about the very same issue in the late-fourth/early fifth century (pp. 72–73). Conciliar legislation also hints at what were regarded as ongoing issues: The Council of Elvira in the early fourth century ruled that the sacraments be denied to any baptised man who killed another by means of sorcery, while also issuing penalties for baptised upper class Christian men “who served as priests in the (still-pagan) imperial cult, made offerings to the emperor and his family and organized gladiatorial games” (p. 78). Canon 36 of the Council of Laodicea held in 363–64 forbade priests from serving as enchanters and astrologers, and from making amulets (p. 179), while Canon 42 of the Council of Carthage in 397 forbade bishops or clergy from having banquets in churches, many of which had been constructed over martyrs’ tombs (p. 193). Bishops, like priests and lay persons, varied in their levels of fastidiousness concerning what Christians could, or could not involve themselves in. In the early 360s, Bishop Pegasius of Troy made it known to the emperor Julian that he had no qualms about the performance of sacrifices at the shrines of the heroes of the Trojan War, and in 434–35, the bishop of Chalcedon dealt with an overly zealous Christian monk who wished to close down the Olympic Games by simply telling him to “go and sit in your cell and let the matter rest” (p. 186). Even after Christianity became the official religion of the Empire in the late fourth century, and funding was withdrawn from traditional Roman cults, emperors and, as we have just seen, even bishops, were content that some entertainments continue, especially when shorn of blood sacrifice.
Fredriksen begins her seventh chapter on “Pagan and Christian” by setting out her stall on the thorny term “pagan” itself: Mediterranean culture was the matrix that nourished all forms of religiousness in Roman antiquity. To call that culture “pagan” is to capitulate to the process of Christian identity formation that roars into its own in the course of the fourth century. (p. 173)
But, as ever, real life has a habit of slipping between such simplistic classifications. Citing the example of one Moschos Iudaoios who, in the third century BCE, “placed a votive inscription in the temple of the healing gods Amphiaraus and Hygeia,” Fredriksen regards this simply as an act of “commonsense piety” notwithstanding his affiliation with the God of Judea implied in his name (p. 174). Similarly, in highlighting Christian magical spells surviving from Egypt in which “amulets frame Christian elements, like the name of Jesus, with series of vowels, magical words, esoteric signs, and a customary closing formula” she comments, these were “all standard features of ‘magical’ spells, part of the technical repertoire” (p. 179). For Fredriksen, “the etiquette for dealing with divine powers . . . was . . . ecumenical” (p. 177). With a Christianity still “under construction” in Roman antiquity, she rejects the tendency to label those seemingly with a foot in both camps as either incerti or semi-pagan: “all Christian culture, high no less than low, was made up of elements from the world that everyone lived in . . . from where else could building blocks be quarried?” (p. 195). After all, she argues, this was also true for Christian theology, which depended on philosophy to proceed, and true for Christian practices “which drew on the familiar” (p. 174). But with an increasingly defined policy of institutionalised imperial Christianity, clearer lines of delineation were emerging, with attitudes such as “Legitimate ritual (‘what we do’) was sacramental; illegitimate ritual (‘what they do’) was ‘magic’” (p. 181).
Caroline Johnson Hodge’s The God of this House: Christian Domestic Cult before Constantine is the perfect companion volume to Paula Fredriksen’s Ancient Christianities as it takes up many of the questions considered by Fredriksen and sharpens their focus to examine more specifically religious practice within the household. Hodge draws on the work of Stanley Stowers, professor emeritus of Religious Studies at Brown University, who challenges historians to reconceptualise religion as a “social kind,” distinguishing between the religion of everyday social exchange (based on recent work in the area of cognitive science) and the religion of the “literate cultural producer”—specialists more concerned with ideas about the gods, orthodox belief, and moral rectitude (p. 6). The former is the primary focus of Hodge’s study. The “intuitive, shared practices of exchange with the gods” which Hodge privileges, pulsed through people’s lives in “an unbroken flow of belief and practice across all these several manifestations of piety,” to use a phrase of Ramsay MacMullen (p. 13). Applying this to the earliest centuries of the Christian Church, Hodge shows how early Christians, by adapting, and tweaking traditional rituals, developed their own household cult practices, preserving as much as they changed (p. 10).
Examining archaeological evidence from four well-preserved sites—Karanis (Egypt); Ephesos (Turkey); Pompeii (Italy); and Sepphoris (Israel)—Hodge raises important questions surrounding the blending of religious practices. Referencing the example of trash heaps found in a residential area of Sepphoris, which have yielded a variety of decorated lamp fragments—displaying, among other images, floral motifs, the head of Medusa, erotic scenes, menorahs and Torah shrines—she wonders if “this perceived ‘mixture’ of cults may signal the presence of non-Jews in Sepphoris” or whether “it may also signal the kind of blending of traditions” seen elsewhere. Citing the work of Karen Stern, Hodge refers to two votive inscriptions by Ioudaoi in an Egyptian temple of Pan, and remarks that they “illustrate how unproblematically these self-described Ioudaoi” actively participated in the devotional cult of their contemporaries (pp. 25–26).
As for Jews, so too for Christians; for instance, the Apostolic Tradition mentions “ritual blowing” (insufflation)—“Through consignation with moist breath (cum udu flatu) and catching your spittle in your hand, your body is sanctified down to your feet”— which, for Hodge, has similarities to some rituals described by Pliny in his Natural History (pp. 36–37). Similarly, Christ-followers would adopt the practice of wearing amulets containing apotropaic words or images, something that was already widespread in the ancient Mediterranean world. The similarity of practice caused headaches for some Christian leaders, Athanasius declaring that wearing an amulet “changes one from a believer to a non-believer” (p. 52); John Chrysostom criticising Christian women with “gospels hanging from their necks” (p. 43); and the sixth-century Severus of Antioch advising Christians to avoid wearing amulets altogether “as it is often impossible to tell the difference between a Christian amulet and a non-Christian one.” More strikingly, Augustine regarded resistance to amulets when one was sick (which clearly attest to their continued appeal) as “akin to martyrdom itself” (p. 54).
A similar suspicion was cast over signet rings worn for devotional purposes rather than household management (for the impressing of seals). In his Paedagogus, Clement of Alexandria conceded that if Christians insisted on wearing devotional rings, they should ensure that the image was unambiguously Christian, grudgingly deeming a dove, a fish, a lyre or an anchor acceptable (p. 45). Just as Clement of Alexandria had qualms about Christians wearing rings, Tertullian was bothered by the increasing number of Christians lighting lamps—“But now all our shops and gates shine! These days you will find more doors of gentiles without lamps and laurel-wreaths than of Christians,” and somewhat later, John Chrysostom bemoans Christians who use lamps to name their children (pp. 46–47). Furthermore, Hodge invites us to imagine “that people in a given neighbourhood would have purchased lamps from the same workshop regardless of the gods honoured in their households” (p. 46). John Chrysostom encouraged the replacement of some traditional gestures of protection and healing with more explicitly Christian ones, advocating use of the Sign of the Cross as a replacement for the practice of smearing mud on children’s foreheads to ward off the evil eye, and, tellingly, expresses his astonishment that Christians still partake of these practices (p. 53). Hodge concludes that “as scholars, perhaps under the influence of the literate producers who defined Christianity, we have been trained to see clear boundaries where they may not be so clear” (p. 12).
That said, just as in the case of Fredriksen’s bishops of Troy and Chalcedon, there was also some give-and-take with Christian intellectuals. Although he worries about the birth of babies when midwives might implore the aid of Lucina and Diana, nonetheless, in his On Idolatry, Tertullian identifies occasions (often rites of passage) in which idolatry might legitimately be dodged. Turning up at weddings and namings may not hold much danger for a Christian believer, as the person attends for one’s friends and family, not for the gods themselves. Likewise, if a sacrifice is being offered, it may be acceptable to merely witness it without participating in it in any way (p. 51). The reality of life in the ancient world meant that Christians were obliged to deal with the everyday as it was, not necessarily as they might wish it to be—and ecclesiastical legislation often recognised this. For example, while the early-fourth-century Council of Elvira warned the faithful against keeping idols in their homes, it allowed for cases in which Christians feared violence from their slaves (who may well have retained figurines of the gods within the household); in these cases, it sufficed that Christians at least kept themselves “pure” (p. 91). And then, of course, there was the question of those whose civic duty brought them into close contact with traditional cultic practice. Paula Fredriksen points out that by the mid-third century some Phrygian Christians appear in inscriptions as members of city councils: “They were thus involved to some degree with the liturgies for the city’s deities. A third century Christian in Bithynia was his town’s magistrate, underwriting the civic games” (Ancient Christianities, p. 75). Dionysius of Alexandria’s letter to his fellow bishop Fabius of Antioch (included in Eusebius’s History) concerning the Decian persecution is revealing regarding those “in public positions” who were compelled to sacrifice, and readily did so, something which Bishop Dionysius roundly condemns, musing that such people were perhaps never true Christians at all. Fredriksen asks: “But perhaps many of these Christians saw nothing wrong with sacrificing for the well-being of the empire” (p. 76). And even if they did momentarily hesitate, in practice “The nonheroic majority was prepared to admire, from a practical distance, the accomplishments of the heroic few” (Ancient Christianities, p. 171).
The blending, or at least co-existence, of religious traditions was a particular issue in the case of mixed marriages. For Tertullian, mixed marriages amounted to “an unholy mixing akin to fornication or adultery” (p. 84): how was the Christian wife to obey two masters—the Lord and her husband? In Ad Uxorem, he seems to take in his stride the idea that Christian wives might be censured by their heathen husbands for disobedience—that, after all, was the natural order of things (the lesson being, don’t marry a heathen!). Likewise regarding the dynamic between a slave and his master: the Apostolic Tradition declared that a slave should not approach for baptism unless they first secure the permission of his master (p. 89). This (Christian) concern could also extend to bodily gestures performed by slaves without their master’s leave to do so: since the bodies of slaves were considered their owner’s possession, even a simple signing of one’s body with the sign of the Cross or consumption of the eucharistic bread could constitute the making of an alternative claim on the slave’s body—and ipso facto the master’s property (pp. 91–92). In this respect, many Christians thought in much the same way as non-Christians when it came to hierarchical relationships. That said, the early-fourth-century Christian writer Lactantius, when advocating the use of the Sign of the Cross to ward off demons, regarded it as especially useful in the case of enslaved Christians who routinely were obliged to attend sacrifices (p. 53).
In 2015, Douglas Boin published his imaginatively titled Coming Out Christian in the Roman World. In his third chapter, “The New Neighbors who Moved in Next Door,” he highlights the near invisibility of Jesus’s followers in the archaeology of the most formative period of their group’s history, remarking that: . . . while some of Jesus’s followers were shouting about Rome as the whore of “Babylon,” behaving in rather unsocial ways at Roman sacrifices, others were thoughtfully—and without any hint of drama—going on about their daily lives. If we excavate their stories carefully, we can even find many of them forging common ground with their non-Christian neighbors. (Boin, Coming Out Christian in the Roman World, p. 37)
Caroline Hodge clearly agrees, arguing that “to most people who expressed an interest in the cult of Christ, the idea that their allegiance to Christ cordoned them off from their neighbors, family members, and coworkers does not seem to have made sense” (p. 49). Not only that, though; Hodge, influenced by the work of David Frankfurter, contends that “this integration of the Christ cult into traditional practices is critical to its growth and survival. These small, local acts of syncretism—offerings and prayers by mothers, shopkeepers, artisans—are themselves the ‘building blocks in the process of Christianization’” (p. 69). Paula Fredriksen echoes this view: ‘“Christianization’ proceeded precisely by syncretizing foregoing and ubiquitous patterns of life and thought with elements of its message.” Moreover, she contends that syncretism “does not reflect a mix of two discrete and different entities” nor does it suggest a “compromise or corruption of some pure and separate body of doctrine with ‘paganism’” (Ancient Christianities, p. 174).
Surveying some traditional (and long heavily critiqued) arguments for the “triumph” of Christianity in the ancient world (that it filled a religious vacuum, offering something new at a time of spiritual malaise, or that the witness of its martyrs in the face of persecution impressed would-be converts), Hodge offers another take: “The success of this new cult is owed, at least in part, to its familiarity and ability to integrate. That is to say, Christianity took hold because it became part of everyday life” (p. 125). Taking her cue from Douglas Boin’s argument that Roman religion was never a static affair, but was “characterized by pluralism, syncretism, and above all, by flexibility and constant re-invention,” Hodge argues that the same process occurs in Christianity, not at the level of the public cult, not yet in place, but “at the level of everyday contexts of households, neighborhoods, and shops” (p. 69). For most early Christians, then, Stowers’s “religion of everyday social exchange” was what mattered. As Fredriksen puts it in another place, “If the spread of Christianity had depended on the arguments of the theologians, its success really would have taken a miracle” (Ancient Christianities, p. 194). But with Constantine’s conversion and the rise of imperial Christianity, and Christianity becoming the state religion in the later part of the fourth century, Fredriksen holds that “When ecclesiastical elites summoned the rhetoric of ‘paganism’, they were not describing difference, but making it” (p. 197).
Recently I was teaching a course on early Christianity, discussing how early Christians negotiated some of the practical implications of being Christian in the largely polytheistic Graeco-Roman world. How strictly did they need to abstain from eating meat sacrificed to idols; or abstain from attending pagan festivals, or indeed, popular drama or entertainments? How were such everyday concerns to be navigated when social niceties needed to be observed, or civic duty needed to be adhered to? Of course, there was no simple answer—Christians reacted in a multiplicity of ways. After class, one of my students (from India) approached me and related how many of these issues were not just historical, but were, in fact, very familiar from his own experience of levels of Christian engagement with Hindu temples and festivals. Inviting him, and then two of his classmates who came from other regions in India, to address the class the next day about their respective experiences, it soon became clear that in all three regions a variety of approaches to the question of Christians visiting Hindu shrines and temples, participating in festivals, and consuming prasadam were to be found; and not only across regions, but among individual Christians themselves. The discussion lasted for the remainder of the class. I could not have asked for a better illustration of the variegated nature of the Christian response to the cultic life of the ancient Mediterranean world, prompting me to remark, “If the experience of three of our students in this class, coming, as they do, from three different regions of India today, is so different, why should we expect the experience of ancient Christians to have been any different; why should we think that they reacted to elements of the wider Mediterranean religious culture with simply one voice?”
Both Fredriksen’s Ancient Christianities and Caroline Hodge’s The God of this House constitute a remarkable contribution to the scholarly literature. Fredriksen’s work, in particular, is a wonderfully accessible teaching resource and I can see many of her chapters working very well as assigned readings in a classroom setting. Both books belong on all relevant bibliographies and on the bookshelves of students and professors alike. What’s more, the questions that Fredriksen and Hodge raise in their respective studies transcend the subject of religious practice in the ancient world; they endure to this day, not least in ongoing controversies surrounding Christian identity and the question of “who’s in and who’s out?”