Review: J.S. Vaillant, W. Fahy, Creating Christ. How Roman Emperors invented Christianity (2016) rev. by S. Poloczek [Journal of Higher Criticism 16.1 (2021), pp. 185-227] (original) (raw)

New Testament Christianity in the Roman World.pdf

What did it mean to be a Christian in the Roman Empire? In one of the inaugural titles of Oxford's new Essentials in Biblical Studies series, Harry O. Maier considers the multilayered social contexts that shaped the authors and audiences of the New Testament. Beginning with the cosmos and the gods, Maier presents concentric realms of influence on the new religious movement of Christ-followers. The next is that of the empire itself and the sway the cult of the emperor held over believers of a single deity. Within the empire, early Christianity developed mostly in cities, the shape of which often influenced the form of belief. The family stood as the social unit in which daily expression of belief was most clearly on view and, finally, Maier examines the role of personal and individual adherence to the religion in the shaping of the Christian experience in the Roman world. In all of these various realms, concepts of sacrifice, belief, patronage, poverty, Jewishness, integration into city life, and the social constitution of identity are explored as important facets of early Christianity as a lived religion. Maier encourages readers to think of early Christianity not simply as an abstract and disconnected set of beliefs and practices, but as made up of a host of social interactions and pluralisms. Religion thus ceases to exist as a single identity, and acts instead as a sphere in which myriad identities co-exist.

The Greek and Roman Context of Early Christianity

2012

W ithin a few decades of Jesus' death, his followers began to spread their message beyond their Jewish audience to gentiles, that is, to non-Jews, especially Greeks and Romans. The missionaries had to cope with religious world larger and more diverse than the Judaism within which the Jesus Movement had been born. It is to that wide religious context that we turn now. By Jesus lifetime, the Roman Empire had united under its control the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and much of the inland territory. Until about 175, the empire continued to expand. The migrations in the Mediterranean area that had been going on at least since the fourth century BCE intensified in the empire. The ancient migrants brought their gods with them, just as modem migrants do. In American history each flew wave of immigrants has meant new re1igions-mostly Protestants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (with small numbers of Jewish ad Catholic immigrants), large numbers of Catholics and Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and, more recently, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and others. For several centuries peoples and religions mixed on a large scale in the Roman Empire. W hen Christian missionaries approached gentiles with their message, they encountered a complex situation where their hearers already had many religious choices. The modem opinion that the Ronan Empire was somehow religiously deprived and yearned for Christianity is inaccurate. Christianity became one more choice in a religiously crowded society. Modern popular culture, especially in films, tends to portray the ancient Greeks and Romans in a lurid light orgies, gross banquets, and gladiatorial fights. Roman life was coarser and cruder than would fit most modem American or European sensibilities. The gap between rich and poor was huge, slavery was prominent, sports that shed the blood of animals and human beings were wildly popular, and a sex industry that catered to every taste flourished. But there was another side to the picture. Christianity appeared when the Greco-Roman world was in the m idst of a long-term religious revival, marked by a growing interest in otherworldly matters. It simplifies, but not too much to divide the religious development of the Greco-Roman world into three long phases. Before the fifth century BCE, the myths ("stories") about the gods and the rituals to worship them developed. In the second phase from the fifth to first centuries BEC, many intellectuals in the Greek world embraced an intense skepticism about the traditional myths and rituals. Philosophers in particular kept up withering attack on traditional beliefs and practices. In fact, it is hard to think of any modern criticism of religion that was not expressed by someone in those centuries. Without the means of mass communication, the waves of doubt and criticism probably influenced only educated elites and some urban

Christianity": a response to Roman-Jewish conflict

Katell Berthelot (ed.), Reconsidering Roman power: Roman, Greek, Jewish and Christian perceptions and reactions, Collection de l'École française de Rome 564 (Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome, 2020), , 2020

The beginning of Christianity is often associated with biblical protagonists (Jesus, Paul, the Apostles etc.) and often linked to historical events taking place around the mid-1st century. This article takes a different view, beginning with the assumption that what was later called Christianity; should not be anachronistically projected back onto the first century. Even though it built on gradual developments taking place over the course of 140 years, Christianity; was a novel concept, no older than the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt (135 CE). As most of the early Christian; writings cannot be dated with certainty, we do not know whether Jews started calling themselves Christians; prior to this time. The first texts to report such self-descriptions are Marcion’s Antitheses from around the year 144 CE and Ignatius’ Letters (middle recension) which together, and supported by growing scholarship, I take to be from after the mid second century. Before this point, Christian; texts describe the word as a deprecating exonym (Acts 26:28 attributes use of the term to a cynical Agrippa; 1 Peter 4:16 associates Christian; with suffering and shame). In what follows I hope to show why and how Marcion created Christianity; as a label for a third way between Jerusalem and Rome, an innovation which proved successful and was quickly picked up by a number of apologists; in the late years of Hadrian and the early years of Antoninus Pius

A Consensus of Suspicion: The Roman View of Christianity from Tacitus, Pliny and Seutonius

From the day of Christ's ascension and thus the creation of the Christian faith and church, persecution was felt almost immediately. The Apostles spread themselves out among the entire world and wherever they traveled, there were those who sought to oppose and silence them. Undoubtedly this persecution was felt the most by Christians living the Roman Empire, especially those who lived within the city of Rome itself.

Into All the World: Emergent Christianity in Its Jewish and Greco-Roman Context

2017

Rather than summarizing each of the chapters, this review will follow one thread, found in the second and third sections. Several of the articles mention Suetonius' reference to the expulsion of Jews by Claudius (as a result of 'disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus') and/or Tacitus' report of Nero's scapegoating of Christians after the fire of Rome. What do these tell us about the relationships between Romans, Jews, and Christians? It has to be said that there is not much discussion (Harrison being the exception) of the reliability of Suetonius and Tacitus, who are, after all, second century writers. Might, for example, Tacitus' use of the term 'Christian' be anachronistic, reflecting his own time rather than Nero's? Gore-Jones and Llewelyn take the line that 'Chrestus' is to be equated with Christ and that the turmoil during Claudius' reign 'was caused by the arrival in Rome of disciples of Jesus and their activities in the Jewish

The Roman Empire and the Struggle for Christian Orthodoxy

Scarcely half a century after the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the Apostle Paul proclaimed that Jewish law had been transcended through Christ's "free gift of grace:" 'Now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we serve not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit.*(Rom. 7:6.) Yet almost from the moment that 'the old written code' was given up, the new religion was beset with vexing questions of doctrine. By the middle of the fourth century it had developed a maze of complex arguments and distinctions every bit as subtle and far more passionately voiced than those between the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel. The religion of the Spirit seemed to become to an unsettling degree a religion of the letter, so that Edward R. Hardy could write, 'The history of (Christian) theology can be written in large part by the ex planation of a series of technical terms, the understanding, misunderstanding, and final definition of which make up the •t development of doctrine.'