Rethinking a massacre: What really happened in Thessalonica and Milan in 390? (original) (raw)
Society of Biblical Literature - Southeast (SECSOR), 2019
This paper examines the reception history of the destruction of a synagogue in Callinicum in 388 CE and the response to its destruction by Ambrose of Milan. The primary sources for this incident are Ambrose’s letters and his earliest biography. In these sources, Ambrose boldly confronts the emperor Theodosius I and threatens to remove him from communion over his decision to force Christians in Callinicum to pay for the restoration of the synagogue they destroyed. Ambrose eventually wins over Theodosius, who agrees that there will be no punishment for the guilty Christians. Ambrose’s willingness to confront the emperor seems to be congruent with other well-known confrontations in his life with imperial authority. In fact, the Callinicum incident arguably illustrates the boldest stance Ambrose took against an emperor. However, following his death, as his popularity grew, subsequent depictions of Ambrose’s life, whether in church histories or hagiographies, omit this incident. I will begin by examining the earliest accounts of the Callinicum incident, as well as early sources of Ambrose’s life which omit it. I will argue that, while we may see continuity between Ambrose’s response to the Callinicum affair and his other confrontations with imperial authority, his strongly negative views toward Judaism, and his concern for non-Christian sacred spaces to be replaced by Christian holy sites, nevertheless, his response to Callinicum stood at odds with his emerging hagiographic image in later Christian writings. I will then survey several works from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries which do include this incident in their discussions of Ambrose, examining how their interpretations of this incident affect their portrait of Ambrose (and vice versa).