Significant of the Church’s slow spread through the Greco-Roman world is the silence of the Classical writers of the first century AD concerning it. Tacitus, Pliny and Suetonius all writing between 110-20 treat Christianity as a new phenomena which has to be explained to their readers. Of the Jews, Philo does not mention the Crucifixion in his critical analysis of the career of Pontius Pilate which he wrote not much later than 41. Josephus mentions briefly John the Baptist and the martyrdom of James in 62 but about Jesus (except in the Slavonic version) he is silent. So, the historian is thrown back on the Christian sources, on the Pauline Epistles written between 49 and 62, on Mark’s Gospel, on Luke-Acts written up slightly later, and Mathew as representing the tradition of the Church in Palestine and Syria post 70. In the Gospel of Thomas we may also have an early Aramaic tradition, though much distorted by later Gnostic editing, and he would be wise to accept one of the traditions behind John as Judean and dating back to before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. It is not very much. The Christians hoped that the bridegroom would not tarry. Only when the Parousia was delayed and Christians had lived and died in the Church was the oral tradition of Jesus’ life and teaching reduced to writing.
There is, however, one other check on the meager
information regarding the life of the primitive Church contained in Acts, namely, the Scrolls. The Dead Sea
covenanters were contemporaries of Jesus and his disciples. They too believed
themselves to be the elect of Israel, the community of the poor awaiting the
arrival of the Messianic Kingdom and from time to time their writings shed
quite unexpected light on otherwise obscure passages in the Christian Scriptures. .
. .
All this time, the real battle of Christians was with the Jews. If Paul’s
teaching succeeded in detaching the outer circle of interested Greeks from the
synagogue, they were lost. God’s promises to Abraham regarding the universal
character of the Jewish religion could not be fulfilled, and once the local
Jews had grasped the implications of Paul’s message their hostility knew no
bounds. The Apostle’s tribulations at Thessalonica, Philippi, Beroea and
Corinth stemmed from Jewish hatred. He was the man ‘who was turning the world
upside down,’ the ringleader of the heretical sect of Nazarenes,’ and if they
could persuade the Roman authorities that his teaching was also seditious, so
much the better. The treatment meted out to the master was reserved for the
apostle as well.
Down to 64 danger threatened the Christian Church from the Jews and the Jews
alone. Even accepting the apologetic bias in Luke’s Gospel and Acts, it is clear
that in the generation of the Crucifixion the Roman authorities evinced no
hostility to the new sect. Interference in what appeared to be a quarrel between
two groups of Jew over the niceties of the law was something which authorities
then would be glad to avoid; moreover, Paul was a Roman citizen and, we may
suspect, except in moments of exaltation, an interesting and not unsympathetic
personality. Hence, the officials with whom he came in contact were ready to
help him so far as they could. The impression he produced on Segius Paulus,
Proconsul of Cyprus in 46, was not isolated.
Gallio drove his accusers from his presence in Corinth, and in the long-drawn-out
crisis in Jerusalem from 58-60, the successive procurators Felix and Porcius Festus stonewalled
his enemies’ imprecations that he was worthy of death. Once arrived in Rome,
Paul was more or less left to his own devices to preach the Word, with a good
deal of success, ‘no one was preventing him.’ Even though when Paul arrived
there in 60 he found Jewish leaders ill-acquainted with Christianity except by
hearsay, though in 57 Paul could write of the Roman community as one whose
‘faith is spoken throughout the whole world.’
Such was the position when on 19 July 64 a vast conflagration devastated two
entire quarters of the city of Rome, causing considerable loss of life and rendering
thousands homeless. Suspicion fell on Nero himself who was believed to want to
rid the city of a crowded and unsightly area in order to plan it anew and also
extend his own palace. Then, to quote Tacitus’s well-known account of the
events:
Consequently, to get rid of the report,
Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class
hated for their abominations, called the Christians by the populace. Christus,
from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the
reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and
a deadly superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in
Judea, the first source of the evil, but also in the City, where all things
hideous and shameful from every part of the world meet and become popular.
Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who confessed, not so much of the
crime of arson, as of hatred of the human race. Mockery of all sorts were added
to their deaths . Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and
perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames. These served
to illuminate the night when daylight failed. Nero had opened his gardens for
the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with
the people in the dress of a charioteer or drove about in a chariot. Hence, even
for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a
feeling compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to
glut one man’s cruelty, that they were being destroyed.
As possible explanation is that Nero was able to
transfer suspicion to the Jews; they in turn pushed the blame on to the hated
rival synagogue, and this time it stuck. The idea is not an unlikely one. At
this period Jews were not popular, and the were suspected through-out the
Greco-Roman world of incendiarist leanings. The Jews, however, were partly to
blame for these suspicions. The Jewish Sibylline poems of this period foretold
thy fiery end of the Greco-Roman world. ‘God shall burn the whole earth and
consume the whole race of man. He shall burn everything up and there will
remain sooty dust. These threats were read and remembered. The earliest
commentator on the persecution, the writer of I Clement in circa 100, also implies that the Jews were to blame.
He was writing from Rome to the Church in Corinth reproaching the community for
allowing duly elected presbyters to be ousted by malcontent young men. At the
beginning of his letter he points out how envy, jealousy and fratricidal
conflict has been the bane of old Israel, and then he writes:
But, to finish with these ancient
examples, let us come to the athletes of the recent past; let us take the noble
examples of our own generation. Through jealousy and envy the greatest and most
righteous of pillars (of the Church) were persecuted and contended unto death.
Let us set before our eyes the good (i.e. heroic) Apostles: Peter, who through
unrighteous jealousy endured not one or two but many labors, and so having
borne witness proceeded to his due place in glory. Through jealousy and strife
Paul played the prize of endurance; seven times in bonds, driven into exile,
stoned, appearing as a herald in both the East and the West he won noble fame
for his faith; he taught righteousness to the whole world, and after reaching
the limits of the West bore witness before the rulers. Then he passed from the
world and went to the holy place, having shown the greatest pattern of
endurance.
Clearly he had the fate of Peter and
Paul in mind, and he places this in the context of internecine rivalries among
God’s people, ‘envy and jealousy’ not pagan persecution. In any event, the Neronian persecution has no
sequel in the provinces. 50 years after the event, members of the Roman
governing class seemed to have regarded the affair as the destruction of a
conspiracy fomented by some extremist sect among the Roman Jews, and these were
crushed in exactly the same way as the Bacchanals and other purveyors of
malevolent rites, such as the Druids had been. The stroke was directed,
however, against guilty individuals, not against the God of the Christians. A
generation later, the Roman community was once more well-established and
influential and the Christians were to enjoy another 130- years free from serious
molestation. The Neronian persecution was a single catastrophe, but not the
beginning of a consistent policy of repression.
Within two years the tactlessness of the Roman procurator in Palestine, Gessius Florus, had provoked a general revolt among the Jews there. To some contemporaries, such as Josephus, it was the greatest war of all time, and whether it deserved this title or not, it was fought out with a savagery rare even in the ancient world. Soon the Christians in Palestine were faced with a dilemma implicit in their position since the ministry of Jesus. Should they throw in their lot with the Jewish nationalists or not? James had already been struck down in 62, the victim of the same combination of conservative nationalism and mob violence that had been fatal to his Brother. Six years later came the supreme crisis,. What the anxious debates in 67-8 were we do not know, but a firm tradition describes the Christians leaving Jerusalem while there was yet time and establishing themselves in Pella, a Greek city across the Jordan. It was another momentous step. In 70 Jerusalem fell, the Essenes fighting both there and at Masada for the Lord Yahweh against the Lord Caesar to the last man. And winning the admiration of their enemies by their hopeless valor. The Christians were neutrals. They played no part in the heroic sacrifice of the Jewish nation. Their position in Palestine was damaged beyond repair. There, orthodox Judaism was to be permanently the victor. The work of James perished with him. The Christian hope now lay in Dispersion. The next fifty years would decide whether the missionary labors of Paul would bear fruit, or whether the Jews and pagans would prove too strong there also.
……………………………………………….
By the middle of the 4th Century AD
Christianity had become a great popular movement throughout the Mediterranean
lands of the Roman Empire. In this final chapter we shall be inquiring how this
movement was organized and the liturgy they served, and the part played by the
laity in the life of the Church.
Constantine’s aim had been a magnificently endowed Church served by a clergy
drawn from the necessitous ( but not too necessitous) classes, a nice balance
between wealth and poverty as befitting the ‘ministers of the supreme God.’ His
object was set out in a directive addressed to Bassus, the Praetorian Prefect
of the West in 320 or 326. Clergy should be ‘persons of slender fortunes,’ but
also people who were not held bound by compulsory municipal; services which
were the mark of the provincial classes. It was an aim impossible to fulfill,
for from the period of Diocletian (284-305) onward provincial society had
tended to become increasingly stratified into a compulsory caste system in
which the peasant, artisan, tradesman, teacher and landowner became fixed into
immoveable patterns for the benefit of the imperial administrator and tax
collector. The Church and to some extend
the central administration, provided the only practical outlets [or ‘alternatives for advancement’], and once
the Church began to acquire a privileged status, the opportunity to enter its
ministry became irresistible. From 320-6 onward successive emperors sought to
prevent decurians ( i.e. town councilors who were responsible for collecting
the quota of taxes from their area) on the one hand and land workers on the
other from finding refuge in Church office. No series of laws in the Theodosian
Code show more clearly the dilemma of the authorities when confronted by their
duty towards the State on the, one hand, and on the other towards the divine
power who safeguarded the State.
In the event, the senior clergy of the fourth and fifth centuries represented
an extraordinarily varied collection of human experience. At one end of the
scale was Ambrose of Milan, a member of an aristocratic Roman household and
protégé of Anicious Probus, the richest man in the Roman Empire. At the other
was an African bishop like Samsucius, an illiterate who had risen from the
rural population. In between came a very fair cross section of the provincial
classes. Augustine’s father had been a decurian, and so Augustine himself would
have been liable to recall to the city council of Thagaste. His friend Alypius
had also come from a slightly wealthier background, and he had managed to
migrate to the civil service before entering on Orders. Jerome’s parents were
also members of the middle classes, and so were those of Basil, and his friends
in Asia Minor. Petilian of Constantine, the Donatist leader, had been a lawyer,
Martin of Tours a soldier, and Epiphanus of Salamis the son of a Jewish farmer
in Palestine. Irenaeus of Berytus ‘the twice married, ‘ who was deposed at the
second Council of Ephesus, had been a senior imperial official and had, so to
speak, retired into Orders and become a bishop. Synesius of Cyrene, a Platonist
philosopher, found himself drafted into the same calling late in life, and
Nectarius, patriarch of Constantinople, moved from the Senate to the
patriarchate in 381. The Church of the classic age of the Father was recruiting
its ministry from a varied field which included many of the best minds of the
Empire.
The position which the Church occupied in society was an enviable one. Already
in 313 Constantine had freed orthodox clergy from obligations to municipal
levies. Though this may have been intended as relief to clerics ‘of slender
means,’ it not only put a financial premium on orthodoxy as we have seen, but
set a precedent for a long series of grants and privileges in favor of the
Church. One of the most important of these was in 321 when the Emperor
permitted the Church complete freedom of accepting bequests, and Christian freedom
to bequeath to the Church. In addition to this, it became the custom among
Christian families to leave a certain portion of their goods to the Church as a
sort of guarantee against the worse in the next world. Basil of Caesarea intimated that the Church should
receive the equivalent of a first-born’s portions. these measures enabled the
Church to amass very considerable wealth during the fourth and fifth centuries.
For Rome this was the reality behind the ‘Donation of Constantine.’ In Africa,
Augustine administered an income belonging to the Church of Hippo amounting to twenty
times as much as his father’s, that is more than 6000 gold solidi. The Church of
Ravenna had approximately double this income, while Alexandria, benefiting from
not only offerings but from an unofficial linen tax by the faithful nominally
toward the upkeep of vestments, could disperse up to 1500 lbs. in gold in
bribes and still find more in the treasury. Perhaps it is not surprising that in
circa 432 Possidias, Augustine’s biographer, commenting on the swift success of
the Vandals, lamented that ‘the Church was hated because of its lands’ and that
half a century later the Vandal King Huneric (477-84) regarded Afro-Roman nobles
and Catholic priests as more or less synonymous.
Wealth from bequests and grants apart, the Church had gained numerous
privileges under Constantine and his sons. The alleviation of an obvious
hardship in the form of an obligation to billet soldiers in 343, was followed
in 349 by the exemption of clergy and their children from all fiscal burdens in
respect of their city. Soon after, the Church was actually granted a share in
the general taxes in kind paid by provincials, and equated with state officials
for the purpose of using public posting services, which they practically wore
out. At Ariminum, though a petition for exemption from all taxation was
refused, the Church was to be exempted from all new taxes.
The end of Constantine’s reign marked the climax of the alliance in material terms
between Church and State, Under Julian most of the privileges were rescinded,
and were not renewed by Valentinian I. But sufficient were restored under
Theodosius I and his successors for the connection between the State and State
to remain close. In Africa, Augustine depended
on the great landowners like Celer and Pammachius for the success of his anti-Donatist
campaign, and indeed the Donatists were the only force in the West who remained
rootedly independent of the State. They retained to the last a theory of social
justice grounded on a theory of the Holy Spirit which justified forceful
measures against wrong and oppression. Elsewhere the Church seldom took action
against oppressors of the poor unless heresy was suspected as well as evil. As
Salvian of Marseilles pointed out, in the face of appalling misgovernment, the
clergy either said nothing or their words were no more effective than silence.
In the East, though the connection between the court and Empire was
theoretically more binding, the clergy gained a reputation for being just men, generous to the poor and
leaders of their communities Whereas the African Circumcellions [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcellions]
were beyond the pale of recognition, the monks who were often equally clamorous
in the cause of justice were respected and much heeded members of society.
The clergy, too, despite the continuous recruiting of older men from the
professions, was tending toward a career and a caste. This was partly due to
the ever-increasing complication and proliferation of services, and the need
therefore of a clergy long specialized in the minutiae of the liturgy.
To the traditional nocturnal vigil and morning ‘station’ each concluded by the
Eucharist liturgy, were now added Matins, and in St Basil’s monasteries, the
offices of Terce, Sext, Nones and Vespers, so paced out so that the religious
life became a daily round of work, rest and prayer. The pilgrim Etheria has
left a fascinating account of the Vigil and Eucharist on a Sunday in Jerusalem
circa 390: ‘But on the seventh day,’ she writes, ‘that is on the Lord’s Day, the
whole multitude assembles before cockcrow in as great numbers as the place can
hold, as at Easter, in the basilica which is near the Anastasis, but outside the
doors, where the lights were hanging for the purpose. And for fear they should
not be there at cockcrow they come beforehand and sit down there. Hymns as well
as antiphons are said, and prayers are made between the several hymns and
antiphons . . .and as he comes out all approach to his
hand.”
Such scenes were being reenacted all over the Mediterranean world. It marks a
point of transition between the ancient world and the Middle Ages. Other
tendencies recognizable in the third century continued to lead in the same
direction. As the Church expanded in wealth and numbers, offices and auxiliary
duties multiplied. Clerics in a variety of minor Orders were needed. The Bishop
of a large See was now a great officer of State, paid 720 solidi a year like a provincial governor, and expected, as Gregory
of Nazianze complained during his short tenure of the See of Constantinople
(380-1) ‘to rival the consuls, the generals, the governors, the most
illustrious commanders,’ to eat well and to dress splendidly. But the work was
incessant. He baptized, absolved, preached and excommunicated. He had a host of
pastoral duties. He was an administrator, judge, debater, defender of the Faith
against rebels and heretics, and sometimes an ambassador and imperial
counselor. Ideally the holder of such a position must be one who had already
served a long apprenticeship in the Church. In circa 390 Pope Siricius had
tried to lay down a sort of curriculum
vitae for clergy. One started as six as a lector, one then proceeded to
sub-deacon, and after not less than three years as a deacon , advanced to the
presbyterate. At the age of about forty one could expect to
be bishop. Though exceptions were many, the clerical career had become
designed to rank pari passu with the grades of the imperial civil service, just as
the bishoprics were becoming coterminous with civil boundaries. There were two
swords and it was not made easy for the layman of mature years to change to
clerical status and scale the heights of a clerical career.
Indeed, the tendency through the fourth and fifth centuries was to diminish the
number of offices which laymen could hold.
The African seniores remained,
in both Catholic and Donatist churches, the outstanding example of the
continued employment of laymen as assessors, treasurers and judicial counselors
of churches. In some churches in Africa and
Italy there were defensores ecclesiae,
lawyers who were prepared to defend their particular church’s interests in the
courts. But this was an unusual development, and soon even bailiffs on the estates formed by the papacy and other great
Sees would have to be in deacon’s orders. So far as the liturgy was concerned,
until Ambrose introduced antiphonal singing by the congregation, Church music
had been in the hands of professional chanters. The congregation was barred
from the alter precincts, and left in no doubt that the days when the Church
was where ‘two or three had gathered together’ in the name of Christ had gone
forever.
Yet, the period between Constantine (306) and Leo (461) can be reasonably be called the ‘age of the laity.’ It was not merely the enormous interest in theological affairs taken by laymen in this period- an interest which marked a corresponding lack of interest in technological and scientific matters – but the considerable contribution laymen made to the life and thought of the Church. This was the long Indian summer of the ancient world, when standards of education among the wealthy and middle classes were still high, and pessimism had not yet driven the intelligent and sensitive into the refuge of the monastery.
The Emperor, of course, was a layman, and two at
least in this period, Constantine in his later years and Theodosius II were
skilled theologians. Their existence was a guarantee against the complete
clericalization of the Church. Theodosius II ensured that some order was kept
in the bear garden of ecclesiastical politics that was a feature of the period
of Nestorius, Cyril and Dioscorus. Ibas was spared from being cut in two for
dividing the nature of Christ and Nestorius remitted to oasis-exile instead of
the mercies of Cyril’s monks. The great officials of the court were also active
theologians. The role of Count Candidian at First Ephesus or the Grand
Chamberlain Chrysaphius at the ‘Robber synod’ of Second Ephesus will be
remembered, while Augustine’s friend, Count Marcelinus, apart from steering
Catholics through the Conference of Carthage in 411, was the first to draw
Augustine’s attention to the teaching of Pelagius. He himself addressed a
number of pertinent questions to him on the subject of Grace and free will.
Further down the social scale the role of the laity was equally varied and
important. Two of the most important historians of the Church in the late
fourth and early fifth century, Socrates and Sozomen, were civil servants in
Constantinople. The father of Biblical exegesis in the West, Tyconius, was a
layman in the Dontaist Church, and the reliance which the Church place on
instructed lay theologians may be judged from the career of the grammarian
Cresconius (circa 400-10) against whose arguments Augustine had deployed four
lengthy tomes. In the Pelagian controversy, the keenest mind on the Pelagian
side was that of the lawyer Celestius. The importance, too, of the Christian
households in the lives of such men as Augustine and Basil should not be
underestimated. A revealing passage from Libanius shows the influence of
lay-women in maintain the hold of Christianity on those whose hearts would have
preferred too return to traditional paganism. ‘When men are out of doors they
listen to your plea,’ he wrote to Julian, ‘for the only right course and they
come to the alters. But when a man gets home, his wife and her tears and the
night plead otherwise and they draw him away from the alters’ – an interesting picture not without
application in our day.
Finally, the laymen contributed enormously to the missionary effort of the
Church. Christianization, both of the kingdoms of Axum (northern Ethiopia) in
the mid-fourth century and Ireland in the first half of the fifth century, was
due to the work of individuals who had originally been made captive by the
barbarians and then, having gained their master’s trust, converted them. The
Christian merchant in this period was the propagator of his Faith as the Moslem
merchant has been in more recent centuries.
The Church of the laity, however, was not destined to survive into the Middle Ages. Already by the first quarter of the fifth century the comparative optimism of the era of Theodosius had faded. ‘The fifth century is a melancholy century,’ wrote Duchesne. Increasing fear of the approaching End killed independent lay theological thought. The future lay with the cleric and the monk. In every field, military, administrative and religious, the ancient world was shading into the Middle Ages. Within a few years of Leo’s death Church and people in the West faced an exclusively barbarian world.
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