Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (57 page)

6Ibid., p. 70. This is a crucial point in Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); part of the evidence of his claim is that Constantine considered himself a chosen instrument of God for the Christianization of the Roman Empire.

'Following Drake's lead, Elizabeth DePalma Digeser (The Making of a Christian Empire: Lactantius and Rome [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000]) likewise minimizes Constantine's antipagan legislation. She finds (p. 128) only two "minor instances" of Constantine's taking "direct action against polytheists," and though she admits (pp. 131-32) that Constantine "razed" temples, she insists that there were not many. She also admits that there might have been some fairly minor prohibition of sacrifice. These details are much more damaging to her overall thesis, however, than she admits.

'Scott Bradbury, "Constantine and the Problem of Anti-pagan Legislation in the Fourth Century," Classical Philology 89, no. 2 (1994): 134.

'My conclusions here follow those of Bradbury (ibid.), and see also Scott Bradbury, "Julian's Pagan Revival and the Decline of Blood Sacrifice," Phoenix 49, no. 4 (1995).

101bid., p. 134.

"Bradbury (ibid.) quotes Paul Veyne: "Il existe beaucoup de legislations qui legisferent, non pour indiquer et imposer des conduits on des procedures, mais pour proclamer a la face du ciel quelle est la bonne conduite, on un ideal moral."

12Ibid., p. 135.

13Ibid., p. 138. The idea of an "atmosphere" comes from Peter Brown. Bradbury, "Julian's Pagan Revival," shows that Constantine's legislation did have a chilling effect. Combined with declining funding for pagan cults, his edict led to a weakening of paganism. Hanson, "Christian Attitude to Pagan Religions," pp. 913-15, 968, makes the important observation that many pagans already disapproved of animal sacrifice, and so Constantine was on relatively safe ground in prohibiting it.

14Eusebius Life 3.64-65.

"Barnes, Constantine andEusebius, p. 224.

16Ibid.

17 This summarizes James Carroll, Constantine's Sword: The Church and theJews (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), chaps. 17-20. Marcel Simon, Verus Israel.A Study of the Relations between Christians andJews in the Roman EmpireAD 135-425, trans. H. McKeating (London: Littman Library of Jewish of Jewish Civilization, 1996), p. 291, baselessly attributes to Constantine a law threatening the death penalty to converts.

"David S. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay, Routledge History of the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 424-25.

"Potter (ibid., p. 425) denies that it is possible to discern a coherent plan of persecution in Constantine's legislation regarding Jews. Jacob Neusner (Judaism and Christianity in theAge of Constantine: History, Messiah, Israel and the Initial Confrontation [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987], p. 18) agrees that the destruction of Jews during the medieval period and later is not attributable to Constantine's policies. Robert L. Wilken (John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th Century [Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 1983], p. 50) claims that Constantine's laws, though making harsh references to Jews like "feral" and "nefarious," still "remain, in the main, within Roman legal tradition."

22The evidence is taken from the Codex Theodosianus and is summarized concisely in T. G. Elliott, The Christianity of Constantine the Great (Scranton, Penn.: University of Scranton Press, 1996), pp. 112-13.

23Cf. Barnes, Constantine andEusebius, pp. 252, 392 n. 74. Barnes suggests a date of 329. If this is true, then Simon (Verus Israel, p. 126) is quite wrong to say that Constantine's legislation against Jews was "one of his first official acts" after the defeat of Maxentius. The decree is found in the Codex Theodosianus 16.8.1.1: "Si quis vero ex populo ad eorum nefariam sectum accesserit et conciliabulis eorum se applicaverit, cum ipsis poenas meritas sustinebit." Simon and Carroll claim that the decree requires the death penalty for converts, but that makes the decree more precise than it is.

20Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews, p. 51.

21lbid.

24Potter, Roman Empire at Bay, p. 425.

"John Howard Yoder, The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, ed. Michael G. Cartwright and Peter Och (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).

26This point, which comes from Yoder, is neatly summarized by Stanley Hauerwas and Chris K. Huebner, "History, Theory and Anabaptism: A Conversation on Theology after John Howard Yoder," in The Wisdom ofthe Cross: Essays in Honor of john Howard Yoder, ed. Stanley Hauerwas et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 396.

27Paula Fredricksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense ofJews and Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 2008), pp. 224-28.

281bid., p. 218.

29Ibid., p. 311.

30R. A. Markus, The End ofAncient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 51, emphasizes the role of the Genesis commentary in the "re-direction" of Augustine's thought on sexuality, the body and many other topics.

31Fredricksen, Augustine and the Jews, pp. 242-44.

32Ibid., chaps. 11-12. For an account of Christianity and Judaism that stresses the continuity, see Oskar Skarsaune, In the Shadow ofthe Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002).

33The phrase is from Neusner, Judaism and Christianity, p. 18.

34Robert L. Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 83.

35E. D. Hunt ("Constantine and Jerusalem," Journal ofEcclesiastical History 48, no. 3 [1997]: 422) denies any connection with Solomon. There is no overt association, but given the typological imagination of the fourth-century Christians, it beggars belief to think that the thought never crossed Constantine's mind.

36See Hugh Nibley, "Christian Envy of the Temple," pts. 1-2, Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s. 50, nos. 2-3 (1959), quoted by Wilken, Land Called Holy, p. 97. The church was equally a declaration of triumph over paganism. It is probably no accident that the church was dedicated on September 13, the Roman festival of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, to whom Hadrian had dedicated Aelia (Hunt, "Constantine and Jerusalem," pp. 421-22).

37Wilken, Land Called Holy, p. 96.

38lbid., p. 89, argues that Eusebius is deliberately evoking the sacred caves of classical paganism.

39Eusebius Life 3.26.

'Alison Futrell, Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997).

41Even if this is not quite sufficient reason to conclude that it had not been found, the absence of mention of the cross from the account of the Bordeaux Pilgrim confirms it. See Hunt, "Constantine and Jerusalem," p. 415.

42Eusebius Life 3.36.

43Gregory T. Armstrong, "Constantine's Churches: Symbol and Structure," Journal ofthe Society ofArchitecturalHistorians 33, no. 1 (1974): 16.

44Ibid.

45Hunt, "Constantine and Jerusalem," p. 420; Wilken, Land Called Holy, p. 94. Jas Elsner's brilliant analysis of the "sacred journey" of the Bordeaux Pilgrim reinforces this point ("The Itinerarium Burdigalense: Politics and Salvation in the Geography of Constantine's Empire," Journal ofRoman Studies 90 [2000]: 181-95).

46This is in part based on Mario Turchettti, "Religious Concord and Political Toleration in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France," Sixteenth Centuryjourna122, no. 1 (1991).

47Digeser, Making ofa Christian Empire, p. 110.

48Ibid., p. 125.

49H. A. Drake, "The Impact of Constantine on Christianity," in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine, ed. Noel Lenski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 122.

50I return, briefly, to this question at the end of the next chapter.

51For the failure of this Constantinian policy and the growing intolerance of the Christian empire through the fourth century, see H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pt. 4. Drake, mistakenly in my judgment, does not find the distinction between concord and toleration very meaningful.

'John Locke, "A Letter Concerning Toleration," is available online at .

13 To this I would only say: "Take, eat; take, drink." Lockean politics are possible only when sacramental theology has been deleted.

"Cities and kingdoms that "embraced the faith of Christ" retained "their ancient form of government"? Tell that to all the medieval kings who had to swear fealty to Jesus or the Trinity; tell that to the emperors who sought papal anointing; tell that to Alfred the Great, whose laws were expressly based on the Ten Commandments; tell that to Henry standing in the snow outside Gregory's castle at Canossa. Locke's is precisely the conception of Christianity that Yoder identified as "Constantinian." I share Yoder's abhorrence of this non- and antiecclesial brand of Christianity, but I submit that it is better described as "Lockean" than "Constantinian."

"Locke: Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1997), pp. 134-59.

56For the East, and for a somewhat later period, see K. A. Harl, "Sacrifice and Pagan Belief in Fifth- and Sixth-Century Byzantium," Past and Present 128 (1990); for North Africa, Fre- dricksen, Augustine and the Jews, p. 354. Constantius pursued a short-lived and unsuccessful program to shut down pagan temples and prevent sacrifice.

S7Fredricksen, Augustine and the Jews, pp. 357-60.

"Hermann Dorries, Constantine and Religious Liberty, trans. Roland Bainton (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960), pp. 49-51.

59J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, Continuity and Change in Roman Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 296.

'A. H. M. Jones, Constantine and the Conversion ofEurope (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), pp. 130-31.

2R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318-381 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), p. 152.

3Eusebius Life 3.10. Eusebius is more fashion reporter than historian or theologian throughout this passage.

4H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Andrew Wall ace-Hadrill, "Civilisprinceps: Between Citizen and King," Journal ofRoman Studies 72 (1982).

SEusebius Life 3.15.

6Alexander Murray, "Peter Brown and the Shadow of Constantine," Journal of Roman Studies 73 (1983): 192, poses this as one of three "consubstantial and coeternal" questions of the Constantinian shift. The others are "the problem that arises when a small church of underdogs becomes a church of the dominant majority" and what happens "when capitals are removed nearly nine hundred miles."

games Carroll, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), p. 188.

'John Howard Yoder, The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiologicaland Ecumenical, ed. Michael G. Cartwright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 245, emphasis added.

9Jacob Burckhardt, The Age of Constantine the Great, trans. Moses Hadas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 311.

1°Craig A. Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture: A PostChristendom Perspective (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006), pp. 80, 105.

"Ibid., pp. 82, 84, 96-97, 103-4.

12Burckhardt, Age of Constantine, pp. 311-15. Yoder (Royal Priesthood, p. 259) claims that Constantine formulated the conclusions of the council and that the emperor had the "decisive voice" in shaping these conclusions (Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace and Revolution, ed. Theodore J. Koontz and Andy Alexis-Baker [Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009], p. 58).

13Eusebius Life 3.17-20, from a letter written to the bishops after Nicaea.

14Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, is particularly good on this.

10J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, Continuity and Change in Roman Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 292-93.

"Drake, again, is crucial here. His fundamental methodological and substantive point is given in the plural of his title-not "Constantine and the Church" but "Constantine and the Bishops." To grasp what Constantine attempted and accomplished, accurately, we need to put faces on "the church" (see especially Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, p. 24).

17Nor, indeed, was this the first time the church had appealed to the emperor for resolution of an internal dispute. The church had appealed to Aurelian to resolve the Donatist controversy earlier (Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, pp. 117, 217-18). Like Constantine later, Aurelian had referred the question to the "bishops of Rome and Italy."

"For summaries of Constantine's involvement in the Donatist controversy, see David S. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay, AD 180-395, Routledge History of the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 402-10; Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, Pelican History of the Church 1 (New York: Penguin, 1967), pp. 121-24; W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), pp. 488-501; Geoffrey Grimshaw Willis, Saint Augustine and the Donatist Controversy (1950; reprint, Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2005), pp. 1-8; Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 54-56; Jones, Constantine and the Conversion ofEurope, pp. 91-107; Ramsay MacMullen, Constantine (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 101-8.

19Optatus Against the Donatists 1.15-21, summarized in Potter, Roman Empire at Bay, p. 403. G. E. M. De Ste. Croix ("Aspects of the `Great' Persecution," Harvard Theological Review 47 [1954]) points out that traditio was not considered a serious sin, if a sin at all, in the East and that sacrificio rarely appears in debates about martyrdom and persecution in the West. He draws the conclusion that the edict requiring sacrifice was never issued for the West.

22Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, p. 117.

20Potter, Roman Empire at Bay, pp. 404-6; Frend, Rise of Christianity, p. 489.

"Barnes, Constantine andEusebius, pp. 54-55.

23Barnes, Constantine andEusebius, p. 56.

24Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, new ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 210.