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December 7, 2014
many Christians at the time found it difficult to see why they should use four discrepant versions of the same good news.
Despite Tatian’s impeccably anti-Marcionist line, subsequent Christian censorship has not allowed Tatian’s harmonized Gospel text or indeed most of his other writings to come down to us complete.
was enthusiastic for the sort of world-denying lifestyle which in the next century crystallized into monasticism. His second-century assertion of ascetic
Tatian’s problem was that, in terms of the subsequent writing of Christian history, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.64 More definitely
Ephrem gave credit to his heretical predecessor in one very significant respect: he admitted to having borrowed rhythms and melodies from Bar-Daisan’s hymns, adding to them new and theologically correct words,
Syrian Christianity: it was a pioneer in creating a repertoire of church music, hymnody and chant.
Odes of Solomon which are likely to be second century in date.
One of them gives what may be the first reference beyond the biblical text to Mary the mother of Jesus as a virgin mother, and they pioneer a characteristic feature of Syrian Christianity, reference to the Holy Spirit as female.
His achievement prompted the writing of hymns in Greek, and the result has been that all Eastern liturgy has become far more based on poetry and hymns than the liturgy of the Western Latin Church.
hymns sung in vigorous repetitive metre, a very different sound from that of the Greek or Russian Orthodox tradition.
it is likely to represent a living tradition from the oldest known musical performance in Christian history.69
there remains a regularly used form of prayer for the Eucharist which is the most reliably ancient of any in Christianity. Today this prayer is the heart of a structure of eucharistic worship for the Church’s year and for ceremonies such as baptism and ordination which is known as the Liturgy of Addai and Mari.
Zoroastrianism, by contrast, was an ancient religion which looked with contempt on the Christian revelation and its developing doctrine of the Trinity.
Tensions developed between Greek- and Syrian-speaking Christians, and they underlined the fact that the Sassanians could easily treat both groups as an alien threat to their rule. That tension became acute after Constantine established his alliance with Christian bishops at the beginning of the fourth century. Now it was easy for successive shahs to see Christianity as a fifth column for Rome.
From the beginning of the 340s Bishop Simeon (Shem’on) of Seleucia-Ctesiphon led opposition to separate taxation for the Christian community in the Sassanian Empire, and that provoked Shah Shapur II to a massacre of the bishop and a hundred of his clergy. The Shah’s anger and fear persisted in a persecution whose atrocities outdid anything that the Romans had achieved in their third-century attacks on the Church. There was a sickening attention to prolonging individual suffering which has rarely been equalled in the history of persecuting Christians until the concentrated Japanese persecutions
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While Roman emperors had now taken the same action as Armenian monarchs in establishing Christianity as the official Church, the Sassanian shahs were persecuting Christians in their lands with increasing frequency,
303, as persecution of Christians gathered momentum in the empire, the last thing anyone would have expected was for the Church to enter an alliance with the Roman state in any way comparable with what had happened in Osrhoene or Armenia. Yet between the military campaigns of Constantine I and the end of the fourth century, the alliance became so complete that it governed the way that the Greek and Latin Christian traditions thought of themselves through to the twentieth century.
Over the century and a half from Constantine’s military victory in 312, emperors, armies, clergy, monks and excited mobs of ordinary Christians all contributed to a complex of decisions on which version of Christian doctrine was to capture the allegiance of the rulers of the world in the West and in Constantinople.
Chalcedon was to mark a new stage in this process of exclusion.
Jesus meek and mild, commanding that enemies should be loved and forgiven seventy times seven; he was a God of Battles. Constantine himself told Eusebius of Caesarea that one of the crucial experiences in his Milvian Bridge
It would hardly have been worth his while from a political point of view to court favour from Christians, for, however one calculates their numbers, they were still a decided minority in the empire, and noticeably weak in those crucial power blocs, the army and the Western aristocracy. A simple grant of toleration would have been enough to delight the battered Church.
The Emperor favoured Christians in senior positions and went as far as being baptized just before his death. There were hesitations: the designs on imperial
The site Constantine chose was an ancient city enjoying a superb strategic site at the entrance to the Black Sea and the command of trade routes east and west: Byzantion. He renamed the city after himself, as previous emperors had done in imitation of Alexander’s precedent: Constantinople.
provide a new identity for the Eastern Roman state, whose capital it remained over the next millennium, in what has commonly become known in history as the Byzantine
new Rome reflected the new situation of tolerance for all, but with Christianity more equal than others.
They included a church in which Constantine proposed to gather the bodies of all twelve Apostles to accompany his own corpse: a mark of how he now saw his role in the Christian story,
soon outclassed when Constantine’s son put up an even greater church right beside it dedicated to the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia), whose successor building was to have a special destiny in Christian history,
Christian urge to visit sacred places: the recreation of a Christian Holy Land centred on Jerusalem.
former Jerusalem was a small city with a Roman name, Aelia Capitolina,
In the middle years of Constantine’s reign its provincial tranquillity began to be interrupted, much to the delight of its ambitious bishop, Macarius, who was pressing for appropriate honour to be done to the true home of Christianity.
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It took nearly a century for pilgrimage to Jerusalem to gather momentum, partly because of the expense, but partly because not everyone was enthusiastic either for pilgrimage or for this particular destination.
That for many people was of course precisely and triumphantly what it did suggest. Scepticism was generally drowned out by the eagerness of people seeking an exceptional and guaranteed experience of holiness, healing, comfort – increasingly a self-fulfilling prophecy
The life of Judaism had once revolved around one great pilgrimage: to Jerusalem.
Interestingly, it is clear from Egeria’s description that the Church authorities made little attempt to commemorate the other events of Jesus’s life which associated him more positively with the old life of Jerusalem,
during which the site of the Temple remained a wilderness; its rehabilitation awaited those who listened to the prophet Muhammad
The crucial stage in this extraordinary cultural saga was the reign of Constantine.
Significantly, imperial Christianity came to follow the political division of the empire which had originally been established by its archenemy Diocletian,
‘diocese’. In the Western Latin Church, this has become the term for an area under the control of a bishop. The Churches of Orthodox tradition reserve it for the territories of the whole group of bishops who look to a particular metropolitan or patriarch, such as the Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, or the Bishop of Constantinople, who is now known as the Oecumenical Patriarch.
Willy-nilly, but mostly without much protest, bishops were becoming more like official magistrates, because their Church was being embraced by the power of the empire.
sun rises in the east, regardless of the Bible and its preoccupations. Second, instead of
it is in the fourth century that we first get substantial numbers of surviving Christian church buildings, it is also from this period that we first have substantial evidence about the worship for which they had been designed as theatres.
the liturgy, like the buildings in which it was celebrated, became more fixed and structured.
It was an age when clergy began to dress to reflect their special status as the servants of the King of Heaven. The copes, chasubles, mitres, maniples, fans, bells, censers of solemn ceremony throughout the Church from East to West were all borrowed from the daily observances of imperial and royal households. Anything less would have been a penny-pinching insult to God.
began and restricted to the entrance area of the church, which often developed as a separate chamber at the west end of the basilican building. And for all Christians, there
but Buddhism and Christianity have made monasticism a central force within their religious activity.
more surprising that Christianity should make monasteries part of its tradition than that monasticism should have developed in Buddhism, for Christianity affirms the positive value of physical human flesh in the incarnation of Christ, while Buddhism has at its centre nothingness and the annihilation of the self.
Christian monasticism is an implied criticism of the Church’s decision to become a large-scale and inclusive organization.
early as the end of the second century, when the austere priest Hippolytus (see p. 172) furiously attacked his bishop, Callistus, for what he regarded as laxity in imposing penances on Church members who had fallen into serious sin.29
of whether the Church of Christ was an assembly of saints, hand-picked by God for salvation, or a mixed assembly of saints and sinners. The same dilemma lay behind the schisms
The impulse to separate while remaining in communion with the mainstream Christian body is already perceptible during the third century, before the great surprise of Constantine’s ‘conversion’.
