The Oxford History of the Biblical World (101 page)

During succeeding centuries, debate continued within the church concerning the proper roles for women. In some circles, women taught, prophesied, baptized, and administered the Eucharist, rousing the ire of such Christian authors as Tertullian and Epiphanius. Collections of church rules such as the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions barred women from priestly activities. Early on, however, women created a place for themselves in communities of female ascetics. The letters of the church father Jerome inform us about an ascetic circle of Roman aristocratic women of the second half of the fourth and the early fifth centuries. These include Marcella, Melania, Paula, and Paula’s daughter Eustochium. Both Melania and Paula established women’s monasteries in Palestine. Paula’s monasteries were located in Bethlehem, near the men’s monastery, which Jerome headed and which was built through Paula’s largesse.

Jerome is well known for his disparaging comments about women despite his close friendships with several female ascetics who lived as virgins or celibates. For Jerome, sexual renunciation had spared them the taint of femaleness, enabling them to acquire holiness. Mary, a second and vastly improved Eve, had brought life and had preserved her virginity; a woman could do no better than to imitate her. In a letter to Eustochium, Jerome also listed some of the practical advantages of the life of the unmarried virgin: no pregnancy, no crying baby, no jealousy, and none of the worries of managing a household. Although Jerome was especially ardent in his advocacy of female virginity, the Byzantine church would accept that the most attainable lot for the majority of women was that of the honorable wife. But contrary to paganism and rabbinic Judaism, Christianity’s highest praise was reserved for the virgin. Women such as Paula and Eustochium anticipate the powerful and pious female ascetics of medieval Europe.

Throughout the fourth century
CE
, the proponents of paganism had warned that the wellbeing of Rome was dependent on the proper maintenance of the old imperial religion. Conversely, such church leaders as Eusebius had seen in the Christianization of the ruling house the effective union between church and state. The glory and power of the latter provided evidence of the triumph of the church. These ideas would be challenged when, in 410, the Visigothic Arian king Alaric and his army sacked Rome. While pagan authors saw in this traumatic event the gods’ punishment for their neglect, Augustine (354–430), bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa, responded with his magisterial
City of God,
penned in twenty-two books between 413 and 426. For Augustine, the “universal way” of salvation was through Christ and the Catholic church, the earthly point of access to the eschatological and eternal “city of God.”

In today’s language,
City of God
is a multidisciplinary work, intertwining, as the Roman historian Averil Cameron has observed, not only theology but also political theory, history, and philosophy to argue that pagan culture and, indeed, the Roman state were fundamentally flawed. Thus for Augustine the sack of Rome did not undermine the belief that God was the agent of human history as it moved toward the final judgment and, for some, life in the Heavenly Jerusalem.

As Augustine lay near death in 430, the “barbarians” stood literally at the gates of his beloved city. Had he lived another year, he would have witnessed the partial destruction of Hippo by the Arian Vandals, who would rule North Africa for roughly the next century. In 476, well before their departure, the paradoxically named Romulus, the last Roman emperor in the west, was deposed by his master of the soldiers, a Visigoth, constituting the date often serving to mark the “Pall” of the Roman Empire. But the previous century had already provided ample evidence that, in the west at least, the empire was splitting at some of its seams. At the same time, the “barbarian” kingdoms that evolved in the fifth and sixth centuries, some of which shaped the map of medieval Europe, displayed much continuity with their Roman and Christian pasts. The Latin language, the Christian religion, and the Late Antique culture of the eastern elites were adopted and transmitted by the “barbarian” elites, resulting in a kind of “romanization.”

In the east, although Justinian and his successors understood themselves to be Romans, modern historians typically refer to them as Byzantines. Historians differ in their date for the beginning of the Byzantine era. Some date it to the reign of Justinian, others to 330 when Constantine dedicated his new capital at Constantinople, the former Byzantium. The end of the Byzantine empire is usually dated at 1453, when, under Mehmet the Conqueror, the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople.

Justinian’s lust for power and glory in both secular and sacred spheres was reflected not only in his territorial ambitions but also in his building projects. They included the rebuilding of the magnificent Hagia Sophia church in Constantinople, whose extraordinary interior prompted Byzantine clerical sources to observe that it embraced the divine cosmos, enabling worshipers through their senses to contemplate
and celebrate God. At its dedication in 537, Justinian is said to have uttered, “Solomon, I have surpassed you.”

Its enduring grandeur notwithstanding, the circumstances in which Justinian rebuilt Hagia Sophia are reminders of the hardships and tensions of urban life in the Late Antique empire. Justinian began his building project in the aftermath of the Nika riot of 532, in which the older church had been destroyed by fire. The revolt had left many thousands dead and much of Constantinople in ruins. Anger at Justinian’s officials probably fueled the riot. Indeed, exorbitant taxes, government mismanagement, occasional interruptions in the food supply, and mass poverty contributed to the unrest, which exploded at times in devastating riots in the cities of the empire. Of course, the fate of the city-dwellers was inextricably linked to the countryside. Rural unrest, whether the outcome of natural disasters or political and economic strife, exacerbated by the rural populace’s disproportionate tax burden, could affect food production and transportation with devastating consequences for civic life. Disease was also a ubiquitous specter haunting the cities. Only six years after the dedication of Hagia Sophia, as much as one-third of Constantinople’s population may have died in an epidemic of bubonic plague.

The fourth to sixth centuries
CE
witnessed the church’s adaptation to empire, as well as its increasing institutionalization and associated efforts at doctrinal clarification. Begun centuries earlier, the process of scriptural canonization, which would yield a fixed and authoritative listing of the books of the New Testament, reached a milestone in the fourth century. In a festal letter written in 367, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria listed all of the twenty-seven books of today’s New Testament. By the early fifth century, his canon had been largely accepted in both the east and the west.

The process of canonization cannot be reconstructed with certainty. In the second and third centuries many Christian writings were regarded as authoritative, but not all of them ended up in the New Testament canon or even exist today. The degree to which a text was regarded as authoritative often varied both regionally and among different factions and figures in the church. Indeed, the second century was an era in which many gospels were composed, containing traditions about and sayings of Jesus not found in the canonical Gospels. By the close of the century, the four canonical Gospels and the letters of Paul had already acquired a widespread authoritative status. But the Epistle of Barnabas, 1 Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Apocalypse of Peter are examples of texts that were widely known and viewed as authoritative by many, and yet did not achieve canonical status. Many historians hold that the process of canonization was in part a response to what key figures in the early church regarded as threats, including in the second and third centuries Gnosticism, Marcionism, and Montanism. The opinions of, and rivalries among, various sees and prominent clerical figures also played a role, both shaping and reflecting the evolving regional consensus concerning a writing. Moreover, as New Testament scholar Harry Gamble has observed, canonicity demanded that a writing be considered apostolic, catholic—of relevance to the universal church, orthodox, and in wide usage. Significantly, only in the fourth century, when the canon emerged, did the
technology of codex production make possible the manufacture as one book of a collection as large as the New Testament.

The fourth and fifth centuries witnessed also the growing power and authority of the bishop of Rome, even as, during the fifth century, Roman imperial power was in decline. To be sure, the title
pope
(Latin
papa)
had been appropriated not only by the bishop of Rome but also by the bishops of other major cities. However, from the time of the papacy of Damasus (366–84), the Roman bishops had argued increasingly forcefully and explicitly that they were, as the inheritors of the authority of the apostle Peter, the rightful leaders of the church. Strong and able fifth- and sixth-century popes such as Leo I (440–61) and Gregory the Great (590–604) contributed to the growing power, especially in the west, of the Roman papacy, an office that would facilitate greater church unity in the west and add to the growing tensions between eastern and western Christendom.

During this period there were seven church councils whose decisions on the nature of the Trinity and the nature of Christ were regarded as binding for all Christians: Nicea (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451), Constantinople II (553), Constantinople III (680–81), and Nicea II (787). The church also developed the belief that the decisions of these councils had been guided by the Holy Spirit. From a sociological perspective, this served to legitimate the majorityrule decision making of the conciliar bishops, an emerging power elite, and to better position them against others who claimed authority to act in God’s name.

The bishops are paradoxical figures. Many emerged from the upperclass urban elites who had appropriated and adapted the traditional system of
paideia,
or learning, which had also been the domain of the pagan elites. They had close ties with the state, exercised much authority in their locales, and stood at the top of a very wealthy institution that the state had endowed with great privileges. For example, by the early fifth century, church lands were exempt from most taxes. Most of the bishops were part of the empire’s privileged “handful,” supported by and generally supportive of a social, economic, and political structure oppressive to the vast majority of people, who, overwhelmingly, were dreadfully impoverished. At the same time, the bishops presented themselves as the protectors of the poor. In an era of growing civic unrest, this enabled them to accrue power vis-á-vis the imperial government and to serve as mediators between the populace and the government, at times intervening with the latter on behalf of the former. The bishops’ appropriation of the roles of civic patron and benefactor, institutions essential to the functioning of the cities, was facilitated by the privileges that the imperial government allocated to them, even as these privileges contributed to the bishops’ increasing wealth, power, and popularity among the populace.

Their frequent alliances with the monks contributed to the popularity of the bishops. In contrast to bishops, monks represented, at least in theory if not always in fact (some monks were themselves from the elite), the uneducated and simple man of the lower classes who understood and indeed embodied the fundamental truths and teachings of Christianity, and for whom the culture of the upper classes was inferior and superfluous. The bishops were able both to participate in and to benefit from the prominence and power that the monks enjoyed with the populace, while retaining the advantages of their upperclass status. The monks, in turn, were separate from
the larger society and distinct from its ruling classes. Yet simultaneously, by virtue of this separateness and distinctiveness (especially as exemplified in the widespread belief in their extraordinary holiness, reflected in their sexual renunciation, asceticism, and withdrawal from ordinary life), monks could play a significant role in influencing the outcome of events in both the clerical and the civic realms—and in making peace between local communities and the state.

Monasticism drew on a longstanding belief in many religious and philosophical traditions of the Roman world that the path to the holy rested in subduing the body, especially sexual desire, and in withdrawing from the everyday world. By the early fourth century
CE
, both male and female ascetics populated the Egyptian deserts. These monks and solitaries claimed to experience the divine outside the institutions and the locales that the bishops controlled. This threat to the hierarchy’s authority was curbed in part by the growing institutionalization of monasticism. Even in the lifetime of the earliest solitary, Anthony (ca. 270–356), about whom traditions survive, communities of monks had been established in the deserts of Egypt. The evolution of communal monasticism with its rules and orders, increasingly under the supervision of bishops and abbots, brought the monks under institutional authority. For most Christians, the veneration of those to whom extraordinary holiness was ascribed, and who might intercede with God on one’s behalf—monks, martyrs, and saints—played a greater role in their religious lives than did the doctrinal disputes that preoccupied the bishops. Yet the distinction between “popular” religion and the religion of the elites should not be overstated, for one of the strengths of the institutional church has been its capacity to organize, regularize, and thus domesticate the practices and customs of its adherents.

Although the legislation of the earliest Christian emperors did not significantly alter the rights and privileges of the empire’s Jews, the laws reflected the desire of the government to limit the spread of Judaism. The language of some of the legislation, even from the reign of Constantine, was harsh, a marked change from the neutral tone of laws promulgated by pagan Rome, and a reflection of the government’s changing perception of Jews and Judaism. For example, Constantine issued legislation that both imposed penalties on anyone who converted to Judaism and forbade Jews to disturb those who had been converted from Judaism to Christianity. Constantine also issued an edict, similar to earlier legislation, demanding that a Jew forfeit any slave whom he had purchased and circumcised. Under such conditions, the slave would receive his freedom.