Conventional histories of early Christianity treat the religion’s development like a tree: a trunk rooted in Jesus’ teachings, spreading out through the disciples and apostles and Church fathers in orderly succession, with occasional unhealthy branches that must be hacked off. These unhealthy branches are aberrant; they might have defects or illnesses; they cannot stay; they are deviations from the trunk. Such histories are quests for the pure origins of Christianity: What would the tree look like if it were perfect?
Paula Fredriksen’s Ancient Christianities rejects the idea of the singular trunk, looking instead to the root system. At the beginning of her book’s acknowledgements, Fredriksen notes wryly, “In the beginning there was Chadwick”—a reference to Oxford don and Anglican priest Henry Chadwick, who wrote the 1967 book The Early Church. Fredriksen’s work is thus an update to an old tradition. In contrast to Chadwick, though, Fredriksen’s narrative is not of a core Christianity at odds with contenders and pretenders. Rather, it is of adaptations and shifts in Christian beliefs and practices over five centuries as they evolve alongside natural and manmade disasters, changing political fortunes, and unstable material conditions.
Since the 1970s, early Christian studies has been enlivened by the turn to lived Christianities as sources of theology rather than corruptions of it. Scholars now know that ancient Christianities developed not due to a sequence of Great Men pitted against each other arguing out the finer points of theology and doctrine, but as social groundswells. For example, Chadwick’s Early Church reads as a series of refinements in early Christian teachings through discursive conflict. His final chapter on “Worship and Art” allows only a glimpse at what ordinary Christians might have experienced in worship. But Fredriksen takes these broader Christian practices as equally important for understanding ancient Christianities: “‘Christianization’ proceeded precisely by syncretizing foregoing and ubiquitous patterns of life and thought with elements of its message: true for high theology, which depended on philosophy to proceed; true for practices, which drew on the familiar. What else was there to draw on?”
This dialectic is on display in chapter four of Ancient Christianities, “The Future of the End.” Fredriksen examines apocalypticism and eschatology: the many answers Christians offered to what the kingdom of God is, when it would arrive, and how the world would end. Chadwick arranged The Early Church first by chronology and then by illustrious personage, espousing the Great Man theory of religious development. Fredriksen instead chooses to organize her book thematically. Focusing on eschatology for a full chapter allows her to illustrate more finely some genres of apocalyptic mulling, many that bear resonance today. Calculations of the earth’s sell-by date “had a calming effect…against agitations occasioned by circumstance,” she says. In the second-century literary world, imaginative “tours of hell” render vivid “a belated opportunity for justice.” And the fall of Rome to the Visigoths in 410 prompted Christians (including Augustine) to reread Revelation, where they found evidence both for and against an impending judgment. But all of these fascinations, Fredriksen insists, were inherited from older Jewish traditions. The chapters carry the reader from Jewish apocalyptic Messianism to Constantine’s Christianization of Rome to the splintering of confidence in empire by 500. Similarly, chapter three, “Persecution and Martyrdom,” charts the preexisting cultural currents of spectacle and religio that gave rise to local outbreaks of persecution, the discourse of martyrdom that succoured ancient churches, and the festive cult of the saints that emerged from it.
Fredriksen’s well of sources is much deeper than Chadwick’s. Since Chadwick’s Early Church, access to nontraditional sources has expanded, and new ways of reading them have developed. Readers see how this enriches the study of early Christianities in chapter two, “The Dilemmas of Diversity,” where the diverging thinkers Valentinus, Marcion, and Justin Martyr represent culminations of preexisting thought systems. In choosing her examples, Fredriksen updates Chadwick, who also highlights these thinkers. But she brings nuance to his story by treating the thinkers not as protagonists or antagonists but simply as three men who try to answer the question: “Is it possible to know God through the cosmos? How?” Instead of treating “orthodoxy” as a red thread running through the Christian tradition, constantly snarled by “heresy,” Fredriksen demonstrates in a single chapter that what orthodoxy is changes over five centuries. In her words, “The greatest enemy of orthodoxy is time,” even if its largest concern (separating good religio from bad superstitio) has longevity.
Fredriksen introduces readers not only to the noncanonical texts themselves but to second-order questions like: How are social categories (like gender) used in ancient rhetoric (like the writings that craft orthodoxy)? She models this for us: “The accuser—Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen—is gendering confusion, bad management, intellectual muddiness, and social disorder,” but this does not mean the accuser’s own community did not have women leaders. This observation would have been harder to make without the prior decades of scholarship on Christian sects and gender (acknowledged and explicated in the “Supplementary Reading” appendix).
Fredriksen’s legacy is well-established as a scholar integrating early Christian figures (Jesus, Paul, Augustine) within their layered contexts of Second Temple Judaism, Hellenistic philosophies, and Roman religio. In other words, she has always been adamant that early Christian figures and phenomena did not sprout ex nihilo but remained Jewish and Roman figures and phenomena. She continues to weave these threads in Ancient Christianities. Each chapter begins by contextualizing its theme first within Second Temple Judaism and pre-Christian Rome. In chapter one, “The Idea of Israel,” Fredriksen introduces “The Second Temple Matrix”—“a Jewish message of a Jewishly conceived end of time,” of which John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul are messengers. She goes on to trace how “the idea of Israel” is picked up, used, and redefined by Romans and early Christians through the first five centuries of the Common Era: as “killers of Christ” for some late first-century Christians, as a foil for the “new Israel” of Gentile Christianity by second- and third-century apologists, and as a template for a “Christian Rome” by the fourth century. Fredriksen is crystal clear here that no trustworthy review of early Christianity can study “historical Jews” without acknowledging both their diversity and Christian constructions of “rhetorical Jews.”
This focus on the discourses of Second Temple Judaism, and the earliest Christians as examples of it, is incisive. For an expanded treatment of Jesus’ and Paul’s theo-philosophical contexts, the interested reader should consult Fredriksen’s previous monographs on Paul and Jesus. However, I found myself looking for more exposition on the everyday Jews of the first centuries CE. Fredriksen’s work to complicate the binary between elite and popular Christianities in chapter seven (“Pagan and Christian”) made me wonder how the everyday lives of, say, Jesus and John the Baptist (uneducated residents of Judea) impacted how they internalized, processed, and then preached Second Temple Judaism’s apocalypticism. And how was Paul’s lived context different, as an educated Diasporic Jew? Of course, this might have derailed a tightly edited book.
One of Fredriksen’s through lines is the “intimate linkage, or synonymity, of religion and politics” in Roman antiquity; as she says, “‘Christianization’ and ‘Romanization’ were never discrete processes.” This story is worth telling. But using the Roman empire as the key frame for the monograph occludes the Roman hinterlands, which were also arenas of Christianization. Fredriksen does attend to Manichaeism, a Persian form of Zoroastrian Christianity which ultimately overflowed the Empire’s borders into China. She also presents the Arian Christianity of Alaric and his Goths, who invaded Rome in 410. I would have liked to see more use and analysis of the texts and archaeology that have begun to illustrate other ancient Christianities in Nubia, Aksum, and along the Silk Road.
Ancient Christianities is an excellent and readable introduction to the first five centuries of Christian traditions. Its appendices, including a glossary and an extended “Supplementary Reading” section in lieu of footnotes, are helpful guideposts for the reader who wishes to follow the breadcrumbs of major trends in the contemporary study of early Christians. Fredriksen’s clear prose does not sacrifice sophistication of thought. This will be a valuable resource for both academic experts and anyone who wishes to meet those ancient Christians for the first time.
A recent popular definition posits, “Religion is what people do.” While this omits specificity (isn’t everything what people do?), it is a helpful reminder that religion isn’t only a belief system stored in a jar in the mind, or vacuum-sealed in the soul away from the saeculum, or an individual choice. Rather, the quip reveals that the study of religion is as complex and wide-ranging as the study of any human phenomenon and, crucially, that it is entangled with all other human phenomena. We moderns forget this sometimes, but Fredriksen doesn’t. Ancient Christianities describes in rich detail a world populated by bakers, fishermen, emperors, and spirits. Fredriksen tacks between the debates of educated elites, the agendas of imperial agents, and the strategies of everyday people. And, crucially, she denies that any of these are totally separated from each other. The root system, then, is messy and tangled.
Ancient Christianities
The First Five Hundred Years
Paula Fredriksen
Princeton University Press
$29.95 | 288 pp.
