It is striking that Christians were so successful. They had internal dissension; lacked relics; had no common temple; came from less educated classes and the periphery of the empire; Jews and pagans harassed, even persecuted them. Because they did not offer sacrifices, excluding them from offices and festivals, and were unable to maintain certain family traditions they appeared antisocial. Yet Christ-followers succeeded in winning over non-Jews as well. The persecutions welded Christians together, and martyrs served as role models, even to those who had manifested weakness. In areas such as sexual morality, Christians sought to demonstrate that they were superior to contemporaries of other faiths. They also formed transregional networks. The opportunity to gain prestige in Christian communities also attracted people. Various forms of authority competed with each other, especially the charismatic and spiritual authority of those who excelled in ascetic practices. That in the end monarchical bishops were to become the decisive figures in Christianity was by no means clear from the beginning. That Roman emperors would support Christianity was an unlikely development that changed Christianity significantly. But the tradition of a defiant piety that defined the beginnings was not lost, so that Christianity continued to renew itself.

The continuity of the Christian faith with classical philosophy is one of the common variables to Augustine’s three earliest dialogues. Augustine is particularly interested in the relation between faith and reason or, more precisely, the relation between Christian auctoritas and reason. This chapter contends that Augustine does not conceive of authority and reason as two diverse paths of ascent, but as distinct elements that comprise one integrated path of ascent. For Augustine, authority and reason are coordinate means of ascent to wisdom and happiness. The dialectal character of authority and reason operate in tandem to purify and enlighten the soul for the ascent to God. In the dialogues, it is the role of reason to offer an intellectus fidei, an intellectual account of the mysteries delivered by authority.

Christians oriented their lives towards the expectation of a life in the hereafter and yet had to orient themselves in this world. This resulted in very different attitudes. While some were fundamentally anti-family or, rather, against sex in general, others thought about what it meant to have a Christian marriage. While some wanted to participate in the pleasures of everyday life, others rejected this. All tried to live a humble life and do good works, especially towards the poor, orphans and widows. Penance was an institution that allowed Christians to be absolved of their sins, but it also allowed bishops to gain power, albeit in varying degrees Therefore, the question of a Christian way of life was always controversial.

This chapter investigates a liturgical mode of knowledge-creation in the sixth century. Romanos the Melodist, a late ancient hymnographer, and Leontius, a preacher in Constantinople, each attempt to build knowledge and understanding of the divine by immersing their listeners in an emotional, sensory, and dramatic liturgical world. Through narrative techniques interwoven with ritual performance, Romanos and Leontius work to shape their listeners’ emotional responses to and sensory appreciation of the divine. This chapter argues that these sixth-century writers put their listeners through a liturgical purification of the mind (senses, emotions, intellect) so that they may grow into a higher spiritual knowledge.

In this chapter, I contextualise the engagement of Christian intellectuals with the Roman empire’s medical marketplace in the second century, focusing on Justin Martyr, Tatian, and Pseudo-Justin’s On the Resurrection. I show that Justin, Tatian, and Pseudo-Justin attempted to derive authority from displays of medical and philosophical expertise regarding bodily and mental health. Justin’s limited treatment of bodily health and medicine was driven by his interests in presenting Christians as philosophers who faced death without fear, a goal that aligned him more closely with his philosophical contemporaries. Tatian and Pseudo-Justin, in contrast, launched challenges against the authority of physicians, presenting an ascetic form of regimen as a superior Christian method of achieving excellent bodily and mental health.

Very few Christians rejected the Roman Empire in principle; rather, many saw it as a prerequisite for their mission because of the peace that the Empire created. Nevertheless, conflicts arose: Few understood why Christians, who worshipped only one God, did not want to sacrifice. In the eyes of contemporaries, this could provoke the gods and endanger social peace, and was a reason for persecution in many places. Many Christians made sacrifices under pressure, but some also became martyrs who gained great prestige. Meanwhile, some Christians entered the service of the state and held public office or became soldiers. They often made compromises that strict Christians criticised. Some seemingly enjoyed the glamour of public duties. That Christians would dominate the empire was by no means a foregone conclusion even at the end of the third century, at the time of Constantine the Great.

In this study, Jeremy L. Williams interrogates the book of Acts in an effort to understand how early Christian texts provide glimpses of the legal processes by which Roman officials and militarized police criminalized, prosecuted, and incarcerated people in the first and second centuries CE. Williams investigates how individuals and groups have been, and still are, prosecuted for specious reasons – because of stories and myths written against them, perceptions of alterity that render them subhuman or nonhuman, the collision of officials, and financial incentives that foster injustices, among them. Through analysis of criminalization in Acts, he demonstrates how critical race theory, Black studies, and feminist rhetorical scholarship enable a reconstruction of ancient understandings of crime, judicial institutions, militarized police, punishment, and sociopolitical processes that criminalize. Williams’ study highlights how the criminalization of Jesus’ followers as depicted in Acts enables connections with contemporary movements. It also presents the ancient text as a critique against the shortcomings of some contemporary understandings of justice and human rights.

In their scholarship, Origen and Eusebius made revolutionary use of tabular organisation, a device little known in earlier Greek and Roman contexts. This usage is driven by a variety of ideological motives but likely enabled by physical features of their working environment. In the more specific case of his Hexapla, Origen drew on the already quasi-tabular form of bilingual texts previously used for language instruction. This has consequences for debates about the meaning of the ordering and function of the individual columns. It also suggests that the reader was to be interpellated as a (subordinate) student, whatever their actual relationship to Origen or his text was.

The wordless, often unwritable sound of the vox confusa is usually contrasted with the verbal, writeable sound of the vox articulata. The former was held to be irrational and meaningless; the latter, rational and significant. This chapter will examine the role which the vox confusa played in Augustine’s thought. It will argue that, in his later works, we encounter a wild(er) Augustine who appears to be more willing than his earlier self to recognise and exploit the vox confusa in a theological context.

The Venerable Bede’s epistemology was scholarly and experiential. His work drew on the combined riches of classical and patristic knowledge, as he encountered them at the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow. Supported by lavish patronage, he turned these resources to the teaching, preaching, and exegesis of the scriptures. His writing on pain, pleasure, poverty, and preaching suggests that every faithful Christian has experiential access to unique knowledge. They may taste future joys, enter Christ’s mind, and glimpse the divine nature through embodied practices infused by grace. Yet access to such knowledge is unequal. ‘The perfect’, with their greater understanding and virtue, are best suited for shaping societal and ecclesial life. They meditate unceasingly on holy things, without care or need and with resources beyond the reach of most. Bede’s epistemological emphases were integrated in his self-image, as teacher and monk, and his teaching elaborated an influential ‘inequality regime’.

In this study, Jeremy L. Williams interrogates the book of Acts in an effort to understand how early Christian texts provide glimpses of the legal processes by which Roman officials and militarized police criminalized, prosecuted, and incarcerated people in the first and second centuries CE. Williams investigates how individuals and groups have been, and still are, prosecuted for specious reasons – because of stories and myths written against them, perceptions of alterity that render them subhuman or nonhuman, the collision of officials, and financial incentives that foster injustices, among them. Through analysis of criminalization in Acts, he demonstrates how critical race theory, Black studies, and feminist rhetorical scholarship enable a reconstruction of ancient understandings of crime, judicial institutions, militarized police, punishment, and sociopolitical processes that criminalize. Williams’ study highlights how the criminalization of Jesus’ followers as depicted in Acts enables connections with contemporary movements. It also presents the ancient text as a critique against the shortcomings of some contemporary understandings of justice and human rights.

This chapter traces the way that questions of authorship and authenticity have shaped scholarly reception of Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373 CE). Faced with an unreliable biographical tradition, and a poetic corpus in which the boundaries between the authentic and inauthentic blurred, scholars have constructed a history, a chronology, and a notion of literary genius and consequent decline to map this corpus. I suggest that such a focus has often rested on questionable assumptions about the context of the poetry and has been pursued at the expense of other modes of organising this corpus. Within the context of this volume, I use the case of the reception of Ephrem to ask how our own histories of scholarship have shaped, and at times even determined, the patterns we see in the literature we study, and the models we build to organise the past.

This chapter examines the ideological, political, and cultural significance of law in the East Roman empire in the ‘Age of Justinian’. It argues that imperial legislation was at the forefront of the political struggles and debates that characterised the era and suggests that knowledge of the law circulated much more rapidly and widely than has often been supposed, even reaching elements of the peasantry. The evidence for the circulation and dissemination of legal knowledge, it is suggested, raises important issues concerning the possible circulation and dissemination of political and religious ideas amongst non-elite strata of East Roman society at this time, and thus may be important for how we think about the broader reception of religious and doctrinal disputes.

This chapter explores Evagrius of Pontus’ contribution to a uniquely Christian construction of the human being as knowing subject and known object. Evagrius includes distress (λύπη) among the ‘Eight Evil Thoughts’. Evagrius, following Paul, distinguishes between ‘worldly’ or ‘demonic’ λύπη and godly λύπη. This chapter probes this distinction in context of ancient passion-lists, which create affective lexica and cultural scripts for the articulation and management of emotions. In them λύπη is a deleterious emotion and an impediment to proper cognition. Evagrius emulates these lists but modifies their logic: he replaces classical with biblical exemplars, and he inserts the Pauline distinction between godly and worldly λύπη. Evagrius thus differentiates between positive and negative emotion on the basis of cause or intentional object. This results in λύπη becoming a valid dimension of human knowing, while creating a new need for a hermeneutic of λύπη and organisation of human emotion and knowledge.