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.

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