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October 27, 2019
suspicion does linger that the story of Peter’s martyrdom there was a fiction based retrospectively on the undoubted death of Paul in the city.
The documents which do survive conspire to hide their rooting in historic contexts; this makes them a gift to biblical literalists, who care little for history.
tension between a wish to keep the gatherings of Christians exclusive and a wish to keep the new religion’s frontiers open in order to make more converts.
there are plenty of signs that Christians began by giving women a newly active role and official functions in Church life, then gradually moved to a more conventional subordination to male authority.
this was considered such an appalling anomaly by many later readers of Romans that Junia’s name was frequently changed to a male form in the recopying of manuscripts, or simply regarded without any justification as a man’s name.
There is a silence of about six crucial decades, during which so many different spirals of development would have been taking place away from the teachings of the Messiah, who had apparently left no written record.
Gnosticism represented an alternative future for the Church.
Nag Hammadi
A frequent mark of gnostic attitudes was their dualism, envisaging a cosmic struggle between matched forces of good and evil, darkness and light,
Implicit in most gnostic systems was a distrust of the Jewish account of creation.
Those capable of perceiving this harmony and hierarchy are often said to have been granted that privilege by a fate external to themselves: a predestination. It is these people – gnostics – whom Jesus Christ has come to save.
A gnostic Christianity would have bred immense diversity of belief; indeed, because of gnosticism’s general hospitality to mixtures of doctrine, Christianity might have drained into the sands of a generalized new religiosity within the Roman Empire
it sought to define, to create a uniformity of belief and practice, just as contemporary Judaism was doing at the same time in reaction to the disaster of Jerusalem’s fall.
Bishop Ignatius of Antioch provides the first known use in his letter written to the Christians of Smyrna, in the early second century, but he evidently expected his readers to be familiar with it; he certainly did not bother to explain exactly what he meant by ‘the whole’ (katholikē) Church.46
The earliest surviving complete list of books that we would recognize as the New Testament comes as late as 367 CE, laid down in a pastoral letter written by Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria.
Since Clement made so central the idea of moral progress, he wrote much about the way in which the Christian life should be lived on a day-to-day basis; he was one of the earliest Christian writers on what would now be called moral theology.
Emphatically Clement did not base justifications for marriage on romantic love, but on the necessity for procreating children: he was capable of saying ‘to have sex for any other purpose other than to produce children is to violate nature’.
his life was a constant intellectual exercise: research, presenting his faith to inquisitive non-Christians, and acting as a one-man academic task force in various theological rows throughout the eastern Mediterranean.
Origen’s importance was twofold as biblical scholar and speculative theologian, in which roles he exhibited interestingly different talents.
On First Principles, one of the first attempts at a universal summary of a single Christian tradition,
Since the first fall was universal, so all, including Satan himself, have the chance to work back towards God’s original purpose. All will be saved, since all come from God.
pagani. The word means ‘country folk’,
More likely is that the word was army slang for ‘non-combatants’:
What really offended was the opposite: Christian secretiveness and obstinate separation into their own world.
The separate nature of Christian life is symbolized in a puzzling peculiarity of their literature: with remarkable consistency, they recorded their sacred writings not in the conventional form of the scroll, like their Jewish predecessors and like everyone else in the ancient world, but in gatherings of sheets of parchment or paper in the form of our modern book (the technical Latin name is codex, and that has no Greek equivalent word, telling us something significant about its origins).
Christians also jealously guarded their ceremonies of Baptism and Eucharist from the uninitiated.
Mani to create a new synthesis of all the religions which bordered his homeland.
Then, in the mid-third century, Christian subjects of the Roman emperor found themselves persecuted for the first time on an empire-wide scale on imperial initiative.
Trajan Decius,
He attributed the empire’s troubles on the morrow of its thousandth year squarely to the anger of the old gods that their sacrifices were being neglected
Those who sacrificed were issued with certificates of proof, some of which have been preserved for us in the rubbish pits and desert sands of Egypt.43 The order was coupled with punishment, usually imprisonment but in some cases death, for those who refused.
The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Christians gave way.
from 303 a full-scale attack was launched on the Christians, beginning with clergy.
nearly half all recorded martyrdoms in the early Church period are datable to this period.
Tatian was responsible for another major enterprise,
the harmonization (Diatessaron) of the four canonical Gospels.
This highlights one of the most significant features of Syrian Christianity: it was a pioneer in creating a repertoire of church music, hymnody and chant.
When we consider the astonishing acts of ascetic self-destructiveness by western Syrian monks in the fourth century and later (see pp. 206–9), it is worth remembering that they would be acutely aware of the grotesque sufferings inflicted on countless Christians over the border in the Sassanian Empire during these grim years.
the Armenian Church remained distinctive in character. It broke with the imperial Church after the Council of Chalcedon
every church has a space reserved for the ritual killing of animals at the end of worship.
For Constantine, this God was not gentle Jesus meek and mild, commanding that enemies should be loved and forgiven seventy times seven; he was a God of Battles.
As he began showering privileges on the Christian clergy, it is unlikely that many of them considered whether the Emperor should be given a theological cross-examination before they accepted their unexpected gifts.
according to Eusebius, he regularly delivered sermons to his no doubt slightly embarrassed courtiers.5
This new Rome reflected the new situation of tolerance for all, but with Christianity more equal than others.
To live in Constantinople was to be in the middle of a perpetual pilgrimage.
Crosses had featured little in public Christian art outside written texts before the time of Constantine;
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.
All Christian monasticism is an implied criticism of the Church’s decision to become a large-scale and inclusive organization.
Indeed, that worry was translated by the Eastern Church authorities into a vague menace called ‘Messalianism’, a deviant enthusiasm for emphasizing one’s own spiritual experience in asceticism rather than valuing the Church’s sacraments
he adapted the North African Church’s well-established practice of submitting disputes to councils of bishops,
