Syllabus: History of European Christianity 2023-2024 PDF

Syllabus History of European Christianity Introduction Academic year 2023-2024 Course Number: u10104-B6 Course Instructor: Prof. Dr. K. Schelkens Course Load: 6 ECTS 1 ‘We won'...

Syllabus History of European Christianity Introduction Academic year 2023-2024 Course Number: u10104-B6 Course Instructor: Prof. Dr. K. Schelkens Course Load: 6 ECTS 1 ‘We won't succeed with Europe solely on the basis of legal expertise or economic know- how. If in the next ten years we haven't managed to give a soul to Europe, to give it spirituality and meaning, the game will be up.’ Jacques Delors 2  CONTENTS PART ONE: FROM ALEXANDER THE GREAT TO LATE ANTIQUITY I. Second Temple Judaism II. From Judaism to Christianity III. Christianity in Defense IV. Emperors, Controversies and Councils V. The Rise of Latin Christianity PART TWO: THE WESTERN MIDDLE AGES I. Migration and Renewal II. Merovingians and Carolingians III. The high Middle Ages IV. The late Middle Ages PART THREE: FROM LUTHER TO NAPOLEON I. A Church in Reform II. The Catholic Answer III. Eighty years of Religious Wars IV. Beyond Paternalism: The Enlightenment V. Watchmakers and Revolutionaries 3 PART FOUR: EUROPEAN CATHOLICISM AFTER THE ENLIGHTENMENT I. Europe after Napoleon II. From European Revolution Year to Vatican I III. Before the ‘Great War’ IV. The Time of the World Wars PART FIVE: THE CATHOLICS AND THE COLD WAR V. The Second Vatican Council VI. Until the Wall Came Tumbling Down LITERATURE General Handbooks and Sources Christian Antiquity The Middle Ages The Modern Period The Contemporary Period 4  PART ONE FROM ALEXANDER THE GREAT TO LATE ANTIQUITY 5  I. Second Temple Judaism (Three Centuries B.C) 1. The Early Contours of a Church The word ‘church’ has striking similarities in a number of modern languages. In French it is église, the Italians speak of chiesa and the Spanish uses iglesia. And the parallel is not only with the Roman languages. That’s how it sounds in the Welsh eglwys or the old Irish eaglais. These many variations on the same theme in most cases affect both the community of followers of Jesus of Nazareth and the buildings in which they gather. Anyone who attempts to write ‘a church history’ does not escape the first and seemingly simple question about the interpretation of the word ‘church’. The concise list of modern variants offers a good approach, because the term is clearly derived from the Greek word ekklesia. Originally, that was no Christian concept at all. It is a derivative of the verb ek-kalein, which in free terms means something like ‘calling together.’ In ancient Greece it referred to a convened popular assembly. Later, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible would use the term ekklesia as a common translation for qahal, a typology for the people of Israel. And still later, in the earliest textual traditions of Christianity, ekklesia started to refer to the first collection of disciples of Jesus. When the Christians also started to use Latin, the word was so obvious that they did not translate it again but simply latinized it to ecclesia. This hasty etymology of the term ekklesia is instructive already. In its early stages, the Christian church brought together two groups: Jews and non-Jews. The memory of this complex combination has been preserved for a long time in Christian iconography. Those who visit the fifth-century Basilica of Santa Sabina in Rome can see a mosaic above the entrance where two women are depicted. One holds a book with Hebrew letters, the other a book with Greek letters. Under the first woman is the inscription eclesia ex circumcisione (the community out of circumcision or the Jews), among others there is eclesia ex gentium (the community from the non-Jewish peoples). The two female figures point to something fundamental for those who want to understand the history of Christianity: the history of the church flows as a phase from the history of Judaism. Understandably, it goes without saying that the opening chapter of this 6 handbook places the early Christian communities within a people, a time, and a place: the Judaism of the second temple. 2. Judaism in the Period of the Second Temple a) A People with a Portable Country: The Torah To this day, the most stereotypical description of the Jews is that of ‘the people of the book.’ This typing only partially cuts the wood. It would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of ‘the people of the stories.’ The teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and his earliest followers consisted primarily of an interpretation of passed on Jewish narrative traditions, and only against the background of these stories can the early Christian narrative traditions about the Jewish teacher from Nazareth be understood. The early Christian ekklesia was ‘a form of Judaism.’ Although it is impossible to reflect here all the facets that identify Judaism from before our times, a closer look at the Jewish tradition remains fundamental. The Jewish storytelling tradition was and is a richly varied whole and contains at its core the story of how from patriarch Abram a people grew with offspring more numerous than the grains of sand, how Abra(ha)m and Sara got a son, Isaac, and how he later became father of Esau and Jacob - who became the third patriarch thanks to mother Rebecca. Partly from Jacob’s marriage with two sisters came a number of sons. The story about those sons led to Egypt, where according to tradition the people lived in slavery fifteen centuries before the Christian era. A slavery from which Moses led the people into the desert on their way to the Promised Land. Tradition still tells how the Jewish people were given rules of life along the way to their country: the ten words that have gone down in history as ten commandments and continue to play an important role in humankind’s moral and religious thinking. In the Promised Land, prophets would arise who constantly reminded the Jewish people of their rules of life and the importance of their unity. Although these stories were written at various moments, they were primarily stories that formed the collective memory of the Jewish tribes. This ‘Torah’ was a blueprint for the Jews about the way in which they had to maintain their covenant with God, and of the way in which this was shaped in relationships with people inside and outside the Jewish people. When the Jewish ancestors settled in Canaan around the thirteenth century BCE they took over traditions and rituals from the inhabitants of that country; and prophets appeared who reminded them 7 and their kings of their rules of life. The prophetic writings of figures such as Ezekiel and Jeremiah that arose before the exile of the people in Babylonia were aimed at the people as a whole or at a collection of the divided tribes. They warned of the consequences when the people turned away from their own God and the Torah. When the Babylonians destroyed the city of Jerusalem and the temple of Salomon in 586 BCE, the Jewish leaders were taken into exile and the prophetic tradition was given special authority. With the Jewish people, the Torah also moved to Babylon and the Jewish story tradition literally became a ‘portable homeland.’ When in the year 539 the Persian king Cyrus captured the Babylonian empire, the Jews began to return to Israel. b) Alexander the Great and Hellenism The period after the exile brought Judaism into a period of difficult reorientation. Not all Jews had returned from the Persian areas and the experience of exile became part of the Jewish self- understanding. Judaism in Jerusalem also changed. At the end of the sixth century BCE the construction of the second temple was started. Faithfulness to the Torah included the assignment to redefine one’s own identity. After the exile, new forms of literature arose, more individual-directed writings, prayers such as the Psalms and the poetic love song the Song of Songs, and Hebrew wisdom literature. Judaism once again underwent a transformation with the coming of Alexander the Great. The rise of Alexander and his generals, their conquest of the Mediterranean world, and the later division of his empire became a determining factor in the growing diversity of the Jewish tradition within which Christianity knew its beginnings. In a ten-year campaign, from 334 to 323, this Macedonian general defeated the Persians and Persian Egypt was taken over. One of the consequences of the Alexandrian conquests was a unified Mediterranean space in which not only Greek was imposed as a lingua franca, but where mobility and the spread of existing cultures grew more than before. The Jews also spread out to many places. Jewish communities were known in many places around the Mediterranean, creating a cross-pollination. On the one hand Jewish laws and customs were sometimes picked up by non- Jews in the areas of the synagogues. On the other hand, Jewish diaspora communities had a strongly Hellenic character over time. The synagogue was of importance as the place where the Torah was read; and not infrequently Jewish synagogues were built in Greek temple style. Under the dynasties of Ptolemy in Egypt and among the Seleucids in the vicinity of Syria and 8 Palestine, Hellenistic Jews spoke Greek, they carried Greek names; and they often knew the ancient literature of the Greeks. One of the largest and most famous diaspora communities lived in Egyptian Alexandria, under the rule of the Ptolemies. This city founded by Alexander was the cradle of the Greek- Jewish literary tradition in which the Septuagint was born. This Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, according to the letter of Aristeas, was made at the request of King Ptolemy II of Egypt by some seventy scholars, under the influence of the Alexandrian philologist school. Since many diaspora Jews were no longer that fluent in Hebrew, the need for a Greek translation of the Old Testament texts became much greater. In the first half of the third century, the translation of the first five books of Moses, the so-called Pentateuch, came about in Alexandria. In the centuries that followed, the other books were translated and the title ‘Septuagint’ gradually became the title for the Greek Old Testament. In contrast to the scholars of the Alexandrian school, the seventy did not collate manuscripts to determine the most reliable texts. They formed a commission and harmonized their translations with each other, indicating a far-reaching form of interpretation. This Septuagint would also remain the authoritative scripture for Christians until late antiquity, and the basis on which they tried to show that Jesus was the predicted Messiah. That is why groups of Jews aspired to a Greek translation that was closer to the original Hebrew than the Septuagint, despite the fact that the Septuagint was considered inspired by others. That even in ancient times every translation was a form of interpretation, is shown by the fact that the Septuagint spoke less anthropomorphically about God than the Hebrew textual traditions and so Hellenized the Jewish image of God. For example, phrases such as ‘in the eyes of the Lord’ were translated ‘before the Lord’ to emphasize God’s magnificence. Thus concepts that were too human or physical were avoided. Equally significant for the importance of the Hellenic culture was that this scripture collection counted seven more books than the Hebrew Bible. For instance, it included the short story Tobit (a booklet with ample attention to fidelity to the Torah in a non-Jewish environment) in which the golden rule - ‘what you do not want done to you do not do to another’ - was formulated. This rule was later, in the first century of our chronology, described by Jewish teachers like Jesus of Nazareth and the legendary Rabbi Hillel as the core of the law. The book Jesus Sirach was also a typical result of Alexandrian diaspora Judaism. According to the introduction to the book, Jesus Sirach, a Jewish man from Alexandria who is the prototype 9 for rabbis in later centuries, tried to summarize the biblical wisdom in his sayings. He did this in his Laus Patrum, short eulogies to the great Old Testament heroes. According to the Jewish tradition, his grandson translated the sayings into Greek so that Alexandrian Jews, who knew little or no Hebrew, could get to better know their tradition. While the Jews under the Egyptian Ptolemies worked to determine their identity in a Hellenized world, the developments in the tribal land around Jerusalem and the Syrian territories were completely different. At first here, in cities like Antioch, a Jewish-Hellenic culture developed, but in the second century, dynastic quarrels and civil wars caused political instability. In Jerusalem there was tension about the position of the high priest and under the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV - who was under financial pressure after a lost battle with the advancing Romans - the city of Jerusalem was plundered in the year 175. The Greek-Syriac Antiochus conducted an active campaign in which the Jews were forbidden to read the Torah, and they were forced to abandon sacrificial laws, dietary laws, and the circumcision practice. The moment a statue of the god Baal was placed in the second temple, a group of Jews moved to armed resistance under the leadership of the Maccabees. After the death of Simon the Maccabee, the Hasmonean dynasty took charge of the Jewish mini-state of Judea around Jerusalem, which existed autonomously and until the year 63 BCE when the Romans occupied the Jewish land. c) Jews and Romans in First Century Jerusalem Roman rule led to a turbulent period for the Jerusalem Jews. Pompey and the Roman army defiled the Jewish temple and created the Roman vassal state of Judea, over which in 37 BCE the authority was given to Herod, the first of the Herodian dynasty. Under this son of an Iduman king, new activities were started in Jerusalem. The temple square was laid out and extensive renovation work on the temple started. But attention to the temple was not the only thing. The Herodian kingdom encompassed a multitude of peoples and entered into dialogue, especially in the communities outside of Jerusalem a a broadening of the Jewish identity and a growing Jewish influence on daily life. Judaism attracted converts in several places and influenced their own customs. The Roman domination over Judea, however, caused division in the Judaism of the first century after Christ. The Jewish areas then fell under the Jewish-Roman Herodians, who actively stimulated Hellenism, particularly under Herod Antipas in the first century CE, but 10 the Roman Republic itself underwent a facial change in the millennium. After the murder of Julius Caesar, the senate lost its impact and gradually the Roman administration became centralized. This had another impact on the Jews in and around Jerusalem. In the year 6, emperor Augustus installed a direct administration over the Roman province of Judea under a procurator, who restricted the actual power of the Herodian dynasty. Under the management of Herod Antipas, the Jewish population enjoyed considerable freedom of organization, but cooperation with the Romans was not shared by all Jerusalem Jews. Judaism of this period was characterized by a multitude of fractions. First there were the Sadducees. This group, belonging to the Jewish priesthood, usually enjoyed a great deal of social status and was strongly adapted to the Hellenistic culture. They were often inclined to defend the political status quo and these Sadducees worked closely with the Roman authorities. As a result, the image of them in Jewish sources is predominantly negative. Consistent with their social position, they only cherished, to a limited extent, the idea that the Jewish people needed liberation. On a religious level they had little affinity with the belief in the resurrection from the dead. The Sadducean attention to the Jewish scriptures was limited mainly to the written Torah, the five books of Moses. Other groups shared a resurrection belief and were also much less enthusiastic about Roman influence. For example, the Pharisees sought to strengthen their own Jewish culture and identity. Central to this was a fidelity to the Jewish laws that were accompanied by lively debates about the interpretation of the law and its application in everyday life. Jesus of Nazareth and his movement were related to this group. It is not surprising that he entered into sharp discussions with the Pharisees. While the Pharisaic aversion of the Roman occupier was predominantly non-violent, the relations of other Jewish circles with the Romans deteriorated to such an extent that some groups, in imitation of the heroic Maccabees, began to resist violently. The purpose of such protestors, or zealots, was nothing less than the restoration of the autonomy of the Jewish state. They refused to pay Roman taxes and were simply averse to the pax herodiana, which was only the result of extensive mixing between Herodian and Roman interests. Zelotism was extremely critical for the Sadducees, and carried out an armed struggle against Roman civilians and soldiers. In all of this there was a liberation thought that was religious, political, and territorially charged. Although the preaching of Jesus of Nazareth emphasized nonviolence, he also attracted individuals from this group. This is evident, for example, in the fact that one of his first pupils was called ‘Simon the Zealot’, and later from the observation that a number of Jewish-Christian communities in Syria had a fervent devotion to the Maccabees until the 11 second century. In the New Testament writings, moreover, both the apostles Peter and Paul are associated with violent actions: Peter cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant and Paul was a witness to the death of Stephanus. In addition, there were splinter groups active in Jerusalem like the sicarians, who regularly took guerrilla actions against the Roman presence. In addition to these groups, some Jewish communities were aloof and some completely excluded from the urban context. An example of this is the community of the Essenes, presumably a group living in relative seclusion on the western bank of the Jordan, in Qumran. Scripture study, asceticism, and penance were central here. The way in which a preacher like John the Baptist was presented in the early Christian writings and in the Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus one sees elements that we recognize from the writings of Qumran. In the middle of the first century, tensions between Jewish groups arose among themselves. The criticism of the cooperation between the Herodians and the Romans grew under the administrative periods of emperors like Caligula and Nero. The situation derailed in the second half of the years 6o with the first Jewish war. That uprising would be suppressed by a large army under the leadership of Vespasian and later under his son Titus. Jerusalem and the Temple were largely destroyed. After this Jewish war, the zealots, the Sadducees and the Essenes disappeared from the scene. A small group of Pharisee scribes fled the war and, after the temple devastation, with great attention to the study of tradition and gatherings in the synagogues, gained importance as Jewish centers, and the prelude to rabbinic Judaism. The rabbinic tradition, however, was not the only form of Judaism that survived after the destruction of the temple. The other was the Jesus movement, which grounded its existence as well in the Old Testament storytelling traditions. 12  II. From Judaism to Christianity 1. The Historical Jesus and ‘the Separation of the Ways’ a) Non-Christian Testimonies The horizontal sketch of Judaism in the period before our Western era offers a first glimpse into the environment within which Jesus of Nazareth and his followers moved. That stage was richly varied, dominated by the rising Roman empire, Hellenism, the in itself versatile Judaism of the second temple period, and the increasing importance of the synagogues for the Jewish communities in Mediterranean cities such as Alexandria, Rome, Capernaum, Athens and Caesarea. Existing within this extremely variable background is the very first thing that can be said about the early Christian ekklesia: Christianity was a form of Judaism at the outset. For historians and exegetes this is a commonplace understanding, for non-connoisseurs it often remains an amazing thought. Even more, throughout the first century of its existence, it is difficult to separate Christianity from the various Jewish communities and to consider it in itself. Jesus of Nazareth belonged to the ‘people of the stories’ on the basis of the simple fact that his mother was a Jewish. He knew the law and identified himself with ancient prophetic traditions like those of Isaiah. The first Christians were also Jews from the various factions of Judaism before the fall of the Temple. A second fact is at least as important for those who are involved with the history of Christianity. Not only did the early Christian ekklesia speak and write about Jesus of Nazareth in their own story traditions and letter collections, there are also Jewish and Roman sources. In short, non-adherents, also confirmed the existence, preaching, and the crucifixion of the teacher from Nazareth. Despite their scarce numbers, these non-Christian sources are of great value and they contradict the ever-emerging theories that put Jesus as a fictional figure. In the Antiquitates judaicae of Flavius Josephus, a Jewish-Roman historian, there were two short passages where the Nazarene is mentioned. Moreover, John the Baptist and the apostle James were mentioned as historical characters in Josephus’ history of the Jews. The beginning of the second century offers several other sources. A Roman historian and influential consul like Cornelius Tacitus, a sharp critic of the imperial politics of Nero, told 13 in his Annales the story of the great fire that destroyed Rome in the year 64 and reported almost casually the existence of the superstitio of the chrestianos. Tacitus cited the historical figure of Jesus and took note of his death under emperor Tiberius and Stadholder Pontius Pilate. The Roman historian Suetonius stood in the same line. In his biographical writings on twelve emperors, De vita caesarum, he mentioned the figure of ‘Chrestus’ of Nazareth when he wrote about Nero. Finally, there was the poet-senator Pliny the Younger, who as a governor of Bithynia, a Roman province on the southern coast of the Black Sea in the early second century, reported an uproar about the supporters of a messianic superstition. These people came together weekly and worshiped ‘a certain Christ’ as deity. b) Different Roads? The mention of the Christian persecution immediately becomes an important issue. The simple fact that Nero did accuse the Christians and not the Jews of the city fire in Rome meant that the emperor regarded them as a separate group. The broader question that this raises is: from when can we actually speak of Christianity as a separate tradition and where did the early Christian community cease to be ‘Jewish’? Among historians, this debate about the parting of the ways is an open discussion. Recent voices like those of James G. Dunn and Peter J. Tomson have pointed to the long-standing Jewish character of Christianity. There was some discontinuity, but especially a lot of connection at the religious, social, and cultural level. This makes the habit of many ‘classic’ Church histories simply starting with the figure of Jesus of Nazareth and his followers no longer so self-evident. Recent scientific research has contributed so much evidence for the Jewish embedding, customs, beliefs and practices of the early Christian communities that the history of the Christian ekklesia can not but start with the Jewish backgrounds and Umwelt of the Jesus Movement. A portrayal of Christianity as a religious movement that was entirely independent in the first century does little justice to history. Hence, this section about Jesus and his first followers also cites a series of key dates from Jewish history before going into the peculiarity of the early Christian community and its interpretation of the Jewish and Hellenic narrative traditions. The first Jewish war, the subsequent destruction of the second temple in the year 70, and the conquest of the last Jewish stronghold in the fort of Massada three years later, are important starting points. Despite the fact that Judaism was a religio licita for the Romans, a permissible religion, Titus’ punishment expedition marked the beginning of the end of Jerusalem as the 14 center of Judaism, and the starting signal for further Jewish tensions with the Romans. Between 115 and 117 there were strong reactions in Jewish diaspora communities in Greco-Roman cities. In places like the Libyan Cyrene, Egyptian Alexandria and in the Syrian communities of Antioch and Damascus, revolts of Jewish populations were brutally suppressed. On the authority of emperor Trajan, mass slaughtering was done among the Jewish populations. A sad low point for the survival of the Jewish community under the Empire followed around CE 132, when the messianic figure Simon Bar Kochba in the Jewish homeland of Judea led an uprising that lasted three long war years and during which Hadrian sent thousands of Roman soldiers to the rebellious Jerusalem. Around 135 the uprising had been finally suppressed and from then on Jerusalem Judaism hardly represented anything. The Jews were severely punished. They were only allowed to enter the temple ruins once a year to weep over the remains. Their old beloved city was renamed the Aelia Capitolina colony: a statue of Jupiter Capitolinus rose on the temple mount. Where do we place the Christians in this history? A first observation is that the transition from Judaism to Christianity was by no means abrupt and did not happen during the life of Jesus of Nazareth himself. An exact date for the ‘emergence’ of Christianity can not be determined. It is a smooth line, and in many places the ‘separation process’ was much slower than was assumed until a few decades ago. Yet there is a relative consensus that by the end of the first century the contours of a ‘Christian church’ became visible. Nonetheless, continuity remained high and historians until the fourth century found traces of Christian and Jewish crossovers, in which Christians in the Middle East naturally visited synagogues. The famous fourth century Antiochian preacher, Johannes Chrysostom, whose name meant ‘golden mouth’, would play a decisive role in the final division of the estate with a series of harsh sermons, in which he not only attacked the ancient culture, but also fed Christian anti-Semitism by depicting Jews as a pernicious people, with innate tendencies to cruelty, and a murderousness that led them to murder of the Messiah. Until the twentieth century, this image of the Jews would live as ‘god murderers’ in Christianity, including in the Catholic liturgy of Good Friday, in which until 1959 a prayer was included for the conversion of ‘the perfidious Jews.’ This painful historical framing has an almost gruesome connotation for modern people, who lives after the Holocaust. But it has another side as well. To begin with, this perception is miles away from the reality of Jewish Christians in the first century. Moreover, the study of the preserved sermons of Chrysostom have offered proof in a negative way that Antiochian 15 Christians participated regularly in Jewish feasts well into the fourth century and that the two communities did not live as separated as suspected. Recent research has gone even further. Analysis of Christian prohibitions concerning relationships between Jews and Christians in the decrees of local councils from the fourth to the sixth century, for example that of Toledo, shows that the contacts between Jews and Christians locally well into the sixth century really rather close. When a certain practice was forbidden, it usually meant that it actually took place. From such prohibitions one can therefore conclude that, even in the first centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Christians in Spain, Anatolia, Syria, and Gaul celebrated the Sabbath and joint festivals with Jews, went to the synagogue, and that Jews and Christians intermarried. 2. The Jesus Movement: Proclamation in Diversity a) The Jewish-Christian Ekklesia in Jerusalem Since Judaism was multiform in the New Testament period, and Christianity grew within it, the early Christianity was anything but uniform. This is visible in the earliest writings of the Jesus Movement, in which some historical facts and the core of the proclamation of Jesus of Nazareth were told, in letters, in stories about the life of Jesus, and in stories about the origin of the early Christian communities. On the other hand, the New Testament testimony offers a unity and a unique view of what united early Christians: that basically boiled down to the conviction that Jesus descended from the Jewish King David, preached widely, was put to death, was raised from the dead by the God of Israel, and appeared to his followers. These kinds of fragments belong to the oral tradition of the early Christians, which is even older than the letters of the apostle Paul - the oldest Christian scriptures we have at our disposal. The first followers of Jesus of Nazareth shared short formulations, after his death, about what the Messiah meant for them. Not uncommonly hymn-like texts that could be recited. On the basis of literary criteria, it is possible to indicate where Paul used such fragments in his letters. Some criteria are, for example, demonstrate that the Greek is by no means the same as Paul’s average use of that language, and that such fragments are often strophic, suggesting that they were reiterated in the communities. A very clear example of such a pre- Pauline tradition is the memory of Pesach, the Last Supper (1 Cor 11,17-34), and the resurrection (1 Cor 3 - 5), in which the apostle indicates that he received it as a passed-on tradition. These early oral stories and testimonies found their way into the New Testament scriptures and others. A possible example of a collection of Jesus sayings is the Thomas Gospel, 16 a Coptic text found in 1945 near the Nile town of Nag Hammadi. Although there remains discussion about dating, this also shows an old form of the way in which Jesus’ teachings were passed on. In the Christian milieu, where these texts circulated, it was striking that the New Testament titles were not used for Jesus as an anointed one, as a ‘son of man’ or ‘son of God.’ Here speaking much earlier about the savior in terms of ‘light’, he was worshiped as ‘the living one’ or ‘the son of the living.’ In the earliest Christian testimonies, the specific Jewish elements are striking. They expressed the basic convictions of Jewish Christianity in Jerusalem and later far beyond Jerusalem. This is hardly surprising given their historical context. In the first instance, Christianity arose in the time before the two Jewish wars. The temple city of Jerusalem occupied a special place as the place of Jesus’ teaching, crucifixion, and resurrection. In this environment, Christianity attracted individuals from the fractions of zealots and Essenes, but developed predominantly as a Pharisaic group. With the first generation of Jerusalem Jewish Christians, the emphasis was on observing the law and the prophets, on respect for the halaka, the rules for keeping the people together. These early Jewish Christians also shared messianic liberation thought and criticism of the Roman presence. They also took to heart Jesus’ criticism of the abuses and the place of traders around the temple, in the line of prophets such as Amos and Isaiah. Crucial was the belief in his resurrection from the dead and the sense of being sent to continue the teaching of Jesus. That teaching contained hardly any elements contrary to the Torah; and for many Jews it was not an obstacle being Jewish-Christian. The earliest Christian community in Jerusalem, according to the book of Acts, was led by James, ‘the brother of the Lord:’ there they shared the Jewish fast, celebrated the Sabbath and Jewish holidays such as Passover and Pentecost, respected the circumcision laws, and the Jewish dietary laws. This Palestinian Christianity spread within the Jewish communities in Palestine and in Syrian cities, where it connected with the communities around the synagogues. In later rabbinic circles they were labeled as minim or as Ebionites, because of their striking choice for a life in poverty, in the Hebrew evjon. When the Jewish Christians were persecuted in the first Jewish war and the fall of the Jerusalem temple, the situation changed. A first consequence was that the Jerusalem community lost importance during the ‘interbellum’ between the Jewish wars of the 60s and the 130s. But Ebionite Christianity did not disappear completely. Such communities lived outside Jerusalem and had important centers in places like Antioch. Even after the second Jewish war, around the middle of the second century, Christian authors like 17 Justin the Martyr, in his dialogue with the Jewish Trypho, made clear mention of the Ebionites. In the meantime, however, it was clear that Justin defended a reading of the Old Testament that was far removed from that of the community of James and that clearly distanced the Christian church from the Jews. Christianity had changed. b) Proclamation Among the Gentiles and Evangelical Diversity In the middle of the first century, the very first generation of Christian apostles, Greek for envoys, of Jesus of Nazareth founded more than only Ebionite communities. Figures such as Peter adhered to Jewish customs but went among the diaspora Jews in the Mediterranean area and shared their openness for ‘proselytes’, converts from ‘the uncircumcised.’ In such diaspora communities, solidarity with the Jerusalem temple was remote and Jewish popular thinking was often less strictly defined. With regularity, such communities attracted non-Jewish converts and adopted their cultural traditions. This hellenistic Judaism formed the context, the ‘environment’, from which the followers of Jesus proclaimed not only among positively inclined Jews, but also among non-Jews. The result was diversity: very soon after the death of Jesus of Nazareth there were various places and forms of Christian life. Followers could be found among groups of law-abiding Jews, among diverse groups of Hellenic-oriented diaspora Jews, and among non-Jews. From these varying backgrounds it was proclaimed, from there the Jesus Movement began to grow. The result of that proclamation in various contexts was that Christianity had several dozen communities spread across Greco-Roman cities by the turn of the century. All in all, this growth emerged steadily but rather slowly in the first two centuries. Scholars estimate the number of Christians to be less than ten thousand by the year 100. Nevertheless, interesting regional developments already occurred in this century. The Aramean King Abgar, for instance, made Osroene the first Christian country. The Christians in the capital Edessa played a major role in the spread of Christianity beyond the confines of the Roman Empire, into Mesopotamia, Persia, and Armenia. While it is true that the number of Christians around 200 had grown to two hundred thousand, still these are fractions of one percent in terms of the entire population of the Roman empire, estimated at about sixty million. It was not until around the beginning of the fourth century that the presence of Christians in Roman society became really significant with about six million Christians, roughly ten percent of the population. 18  These numbers make clear that the New Testament writings we know today all originated within small communities, from the middle of the first century. Even though they were written from an ‘inner perspective’, they remain the most important historical and tangible testimony of early Christian reality. The New Testament writings themselves bear witness to the diversity of Christianity in its Jewish period. A good source for sketching the complex reality of the early Christian ekklesia lies both in the collection of Paul’s letters, and in the book of the Acts of the Apostles, which forms a literary unity with the Gospel according to Luke. In fact, Luke’s survey of the ‘apostolic deeds’ coined in the genre of a travel story orbits around the pentecostal experience as the very start of the church and his portrayal shows important characteristics of the beginning of the church. Acts tells how in the period after Jesus’ death and after the common experience of the resurrection, the apostles celebrated the Jewish Pentecost. During this traditional harvest festival, the gift of the Torah was commemorated, and Peter used Jewish tradition to reread tradition in the light of recent events. He acknowledged that the festival was a spiritual gift to the assembled followers. This charismatic experience of the assembled disciples helped to put the Old Testament prophetic promises to Israel in a new light after the death of Jesus of Nazareth. The book of Acts as a whole forms a written record of this event. It was recorded that this group of Jews proclaimed from their common story tradition of the Torah and the prophets that Jesus was the promised savior from the house of David. They added to their stories the weighty thought that had already existed in Judaism for some time, that the Christos saved both the people of the circumcision and the non-Jews. That Greek title, christos, was in fact a translation of the Hebrew masjah or messiah, which pointed to the one who had the royal commission to free the people. In this thinking, the prophetic tradition played a key role: Luke, at this point in Acts, makes Peter quote the prophet Joel, and the proclamation by the apostles Paul and Barnabas is linked to the prophecies of Isaiah. Reading from the Old Testament tradition, the combination of the shocking experiences of the Passover meal, the death of the cross and the ‘awareness’ of the resurrection, and, finally, the Pentecost event were at the core of Christian proclamation. That last experience strengthened the early Christians in their conviction that Jesus also came to save non-Jews with his death and resurrection. True to the Pentecostal experience, the proclaiming apostles and their successors adapted their stories to the local communities. In the Acts many people are enumerated, who were ‘addressed’ during the Pentecostal experience, the book 19 almost gives a catalogue of the many that the apostles addressed when it talks about the presence of Parthians, Medes, Elamites, people from Mesopotamia… That diversity is not a small detail. The three oldest gospels bear the traces of a proclamation that was accountable to their intended audiences. They share a similar structure and are therefore described as ‘synoptic’ gospels, but in addition to their parallel stories, precisely on the basis of the diverse contexts in which they are collected and written, they show differences in content, style, and language. The earliest Christian ‘Christian thought’ was in all dynamics a symphony rather than a monotonous melody. The gospel in the name of Mark, the oldest of the four gospels accepted by tradition, was probably aimed at a Roman community and was a source of inspiration for the two later collection of stories of Matthew and Luke. Where Matthew joined the Jewish Christians of Palestine and Syria, the Gospel of Luke, set up in the Greek tradition of a travel story, spoke to an audience of inclined Jews and non-Jewish Christians. The Lucan texts spoke remarkably, extensively, and positively about the proclamation of Paul and Barnabas among the non-Jews. Of importance in the period of written recording of the primal Christian stories is the fact that Matthew and Luke not only draw on stories from the texts of Mark, but that they share a second common source, the so- called Quelle - abbreviated as Q. In addition to the three synoptic gospels, the gospel according to John came into being at the end of the first century. This was, in several ways, a different story. It was strongly marked by the Hellenic culture: it used a striking Greco-Roman philosophical jargon; and unlike the synoptics with their predilection for parables and encounters, John seemed to prefer long speeches. That is why this gospel was traditionally described as rather un-Jewish, which has not been entirely correct. The Johannine Gospel, however, differed from the synoptic narrative traditions on numerous points, as did the accompanying Johnnine Letters and the book of Revelation. For instance, in the Johannine prologue the Christos was portrayed as God’s incarnate logos, a concept that rang a bell among readers who were familiar with the Hellenic philosophy. On the other hand, John more than the other evangelists connected with the traditional Jewish calendar. Thanks to the recent research on the secluded communities in Khirbet Qumran, it is clear today that this is the essence of the Essene tradition. The difference between John and the synoptics in the manner of dating cannot be attributed to the distinction between a Jewish and a Greek calendar, but to the differences in Jewish calendars. Briefly stated, considering the date of Passover, or the ‘Last Supper’, John did not follow the Pharisaic, but the Essene calendar. The striking attention of this evangelist for 20 the figure of John the Baptist fits perfectly into this story. The diversity of evangelical narrative traditions reflects an important fact: already from the first century there existed a multitude of Jesus images, both on the basis of Jewish-Christian traditions (Jesus as teacher, but also as ascetic, prophet, messiah, lawyer,...) and supplied by critical outsiders from a Jewish or Roman angle (Christ as wicked, as a political troublemaker,...). Moreover, the New Testament writings also testified to tense relations within the ekklesia. 3. The Pauline Legacy a) Apostle Among the Non-Circumcised As converts from ‘the gentiles’ increasingly arrived in Christian communities, the observance of Jewish laws became a point of debate among early Christians. In that discussion, the apostle Paul was very conscious of the need for flexibility. The proclamation that Jesus was the Christ to both Jews and non-Jewish peoples required a change in thinking about some crucial matters. From the Easter experience and the Pentecostal experience, a reinterpretation of the classical basic dimensions that characterized Judaism in the period of the second temple occurred: monotheism, the importance of the Torah and the prophets, the unique covenant of the God of Israel with the Jewish people, and finally the importance of the Temple as the center of Jewish life. Unlike the rest of the apostles, Paul did not belong to Jesus’ direct followers. This Hellenized Jew from the Pharisaic rabbinic tradition was initially an outspoken opponent of the Jesus Movement. The book of Acts paints him as a witness at the stoning of Stephen, one of the earliest Christian martyrs, who was accused by the Jews of wronging God and Moses. Paul went through a conversion. In his own words he had an experience of the risen Christ and from that moment on he devoted himself to the gospel proclamation among the non-Jews. His familiarity with both Jewish and Greco-Roman culture made him a bridge figure. In the decade after the death of Jesus, through the forties of the first century, the apostle from Tarsus undertook three major missionary trips through the Mediterranean region, to Antioch, Cyprus, through Asia Minor and to the east coast of Greece. The first letter from Clement of Rome tells how Paul, like Peter, was finally put to death by the Romans in the early sixties of the first century. In the two decades of his Christian proclamation, the apostle founded a multitude of Christian communities, with which he maintained constant correspondence. The churches that Paul wrote to were given tailor-made work in a sense. In the letter to the Asiatic Christians in 21 Galatia he advocated a certain degree of freedom about the Torah, while in the first letter to the Christians of the Greek Corinth he again told his audience to follow the Jewish law better. The great concern of Paul, who described himself as ‘the apostle of the non-Jews’, was to preserve the unity between Christians of Jewish and non-Jewish backgrounds within the Christian communities. The disagreement among the Christians of ‘his’ generation revolved mainly around the Jewish purity laws, about dietary regulations, and about circumcision. In those cases, the question was whether non-Jewish Christians were bound to the Jewish rules. Paul had his education in the strict school of the famous rabbi Gamaliel, himself a grandson of the great Hillel, and a bridge builder between the Pharisees and the Sadducees. That education made him familiar not only with messianic thinking, but also with the halaka, the Pharisees- rabbinic study of the Jewish laws. On the basis of his knowledge, Paul entered into a Jerusalem discussion with apostles such as John, James, and Peter (the apostle ‘of the circumcision’) about the legal observance of non-Jewish Christians. In the community around James, for example, the Sabbath, Jewish circumcision, and dietary laws were followed without exception; and for Peter too the table- fellowship with non-Jews was at times an obstacle (Acts 10,28). Mark, Paul, and the early Christian Didachè, the teaching of the apostles, dealt with the Jewish regulations about sabbath observance in a much smoother way. In the search for the essence of the law, people focused on Sabbath observance, circumcision, and dietary regulations. The latter theme, for example, was discussed in Antioch between Peter and Paul (Gal.2.11vv). Together with Barnabas, the latter pursued a course of his own, in such a way that Christian theologians discussed endlessly afterwards whether Jesus or Paul should be considered the actual founder of Christianity. The contrast between Paul and Jesus is a false one. The later Christian imagination often erroneously described Paul’s attitude as a liberation of the gospel from ‘the grip of Jewish law.’ This is incorrect because it actually puts Paul outside the Jewish tradition. It is also against the way he described himself and the way he was formed. And above all, it creates a gap between Jesus and Paul, while both spoke and acted in line with the Pharisaic tradition. The apostle described himself as a Jew and proclaimed clearly to non-Jews his belief that ‘the Jew Jesus’ was the Messiah. In their sometimes smooth interaction with the laws, however, Paul and Barnabas reasoned less from Palestinian temple Judaism and more from the wisdom tradition of the Greco-Roman diaspora Jews. Their argumentation included references to figures from 22 Alexandrian Judaism such as Jesus Sirach, for whom loyalty to Jewish laws was not taken in the literal sense, but was mainly related to fidelity to one’s own soul. In this way, these apostles applied the rule of thumb that Jesus released people from a rigid view of the law: not to go against the law, but because the core of the law consisted of charity or agape. Paul’s dealings with Jewish law had neither rejection nor abolition, but he did point out the danger of literal imitation. He knew that too rigid legalistic approaches could lead to discord in the early Christian ecclesia. The preservation of unity presupposed flexibility for Paul. That attention to external diversity and inner unity aptly expressed the apostle in the third chapter of his letter to the Galatians. To these Asia Minor Christians, he wrote that all Christians, inasmuch as they were baptized in the name of Jesus, had ‘taken on Christ’, and therefore were ‘no longer Jewish or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer masculine or feminine.’ Of importance was the unity in Christ, and an essential element of that unity was that people find their dignity and freedom in mutual solidarity, which was most aptly expressed by Matthew ‘love your neighbor as yourself’.’ b) Christ, the New Adam The power of attraction of the Pauline communities around the Mediterranean changed Christianity. Jewish identity seemed to combine with a focus on all of humanity. Paul substantiated this theologically by making a connection between Adam, the Old Testament first man, and Jesus the Messiah. In his ‘coupling’ of Jesus of Nazareth to Adam as the ancestor of all humankind, Paul showed both his pursuit of universalism and of a deep rootedness in the books of Moses. Creation-thinking became very important for the early Christians as well. It played a role in the universal orientation, and was important for settling the issue of dietary regulations. All food, in view of creation, was indeed created by God and therefore allowed in principle. The Jewish tradition offered, with its creation stories, an exquisite framework within which Christ’s redemptive work got its full meaning. The re-reading of the Torah brought accents that were previously less prominent in Jewish thinking. This was mainly expressed in the interpretation of the figure of Adam, who through the typology with Christ received a more prominent place than he would have received from his role in the classical Jewish tradition. Where Adam was created without sin, Paul stressed, especially in his Letter to the Christians of Rome, the importance of the Fall in the book of Genesis. Adam’s first sin was, Paul argued, 23 passed on with the growth of humankind from generation to generation, and since Adam humankind was in the grip of sin. In Jesus, God sent his own son, who took upon himself the sin of humankind with his death on the cross. This gave a Christological turn to a sacrificial theology that had already been present within Judaism. Unconsciously, the apostle planted the seeds of much later heated intellectual debates about the nature of Christ and the precise interpretation of his work of redemption. c) Early Christian Leadership The doctrinal debates in Late Antiquity, however, were not what occupied the first generations of Christians. The continuation of Jesus’ teaching was in the hands of the leading figures in the early Christian communities; they became bearers of the Jesus Movement. Also on this point, the Pauline letters, as primeval testimonies, are a rich source of insight into the multitude of tasks and functions in the ecclesia. Paul called himself an apostolos, referring to his mission and the commission he received from God. That same apostle described himself at other times as a mediator or servant (diakonos), or as an employee (sunergos). In other places it sounded again that he was an agent (oikonomos), or even a chief architect. Paul also mentioned other apostles, other associates and other deacons. The latter category, already in the New Testament and for centuries to come, also including women, such as the famous Phoebe, mentioned in Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Rom.16,1-2). The use of these Greek terms and the role of those leadership functions was not entirely structured and the early Christian communities did not know the precise delineation of offices that would be developed in later ecclesia and Christianity in later centuries. The somewhat younger New Testament writings provide an insight into the early organization of the communities in the late first century. An important witness is the passage at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 1.22-23) where the profile of the apostles from the core group of the twelve was given. These must have witnessed the life and teachings of Jesus from his baptism by John to Christ’s ascension. It is striking that in the group of immediate pupils the place of Judas was immediately filled by Matthias, after which there is nothing more to hear about an expansion of the group of the twelve. Also, the sixth chapter of the Acts tells that the apostles could no longer bear the task of leadership alone. Seven men were chosen to assist them, who in the tradition, because of the fact that they were given a form of practical, social service, were called diakonoi. In later times the successors of the apostles were described as those who held the 24 supervision or overview, the episkopoi. Both Greek concepts were used as technical terms, later in Latin and finally in our modern languages: the episkopos became episcopus and finally bishop; the diaconos became diaconus and ‘deacon’. More important than simply giving an etymological outline of these developments this establishes the fact that the early Christian communities already had a multiple leadership model in the first century, with a strikingly strong cooperation between bishops and deacons. Finally, there was a third group, the presbyteroi. About this we hear how Paul asked them to come to him and instructed them to behave as ‘shepherds of the people.’ The passage in Acts 20,17 is the subject of academic discussion, partly because the word episkopos is used here with a verb that recalls the prophetic literature of Ezekiel about God’s role as the primordial model of all shepherds. The question that arises is how the presbyteros (in Latin, presbyter, and later priest) became involved with the bishop. The letters of Ignatius, bishop of the community in Antioch in the early second century, offer a clear distinction in which the episkopos and diakonos do the daily work and the presbyteroi were a group of elders who advised them. 4. The ‘Teachings of the Apostles’ Paul and Ignatius are not the only sources where the developments of an early Christian ministry come to light. A fairly widespread non-biblical text, presumably from Syria of the second century, was the so-called ‘Teachings of the apostles’ or Didachè. This text is of great importance for understanding the complex organizational structure of the earliest communities. The final chapters of the Didachè highlight a wide variety of early offices: from apostle to prophet, teachers and bishops, and finally deacons. Even so, in the second century, the mutual relationship between these functions remained uncertain, even though the individual interpretation was already quite concrete. The Didachè reported on the (traveling and missionary) apostle that he could stay in the community for up to three days, and the teacher was expected to teach. These are not details. In order to ban freeloaders from the communities, the Didachè indicated that the believers were allowed to impose limits on their hospitality. Services had to be performed pro-deo and if not, the community could doubt the integrity and authenticity of, for example, the prophets (Did 11). In spite of the awe of the prophet as a teacher and pastor in the Sunday service, a certain sobriety, and sometimes even suspicion, was an appropriate attitude towards those who claimed religious authority. 25  All in all, the ‘prophets’ were very important for the early Christians. They too were described as traveling ministers of the gospel, but they were explicitly told that they were fulfilling their teaching task under the inspiration of the Spirit and that they could remain connected to a community for a longer period of time, just like the Jewish high priests, to prepare the meal. The early Christian ministry of the prophet, at least in the milieu of Matthew and the didachist, simultaneously gave shape to continuity and discontinuity with Judaism. This was less the case with the bishop’s office, which stood out the sharpest in Greek Christian communities formed by non-Jews. Where the didachist brought up the matter of choosing bishops, it was noticeable that the competence of a community to choose its own supervisor was highly esteemed. The people chose their own bishops. What stood out strongly in the early Christianity when it came to the choice of a bishop was his lifestyle. More than the presbyteros and the matters of the prophets and teachers, the episkopos held the final responsibility in a Christian community. Both in the Didachè and in other extra-biblical writings, like the Shepherd of Hermas, it turned out that the faithful themselves in the earliest church saw to it that ministers had to carefully observe Christian ‘codes of conduct.’ Under the criteria that set to test the motives and behavior of an office bearer, it was clear that this was not a review based on cultic cleanliness regulations. The outward observance of Jewish law was not central, but in the spirit of the Jewish decalogue guidelines were included to examine the purity of the intentions of the prophets and the ordinary members of the community. The didachist stated that when someone was ‘holy’, that person was very welcome. And holiness was then not seen as a state of life derived from rituals like baptism. It was not about cultic observance, but about an existential and moral quality. The good order of life was important. 26  III Christianity in Defense (Second and Third Centuries) In the first centuries, Christianity painstakingly developed a limited religious identity. Many factors played a role in this. The fact that local communities were structuring and that the Christians were circulating their own coherent storytelling tradition, and a whole collection of letters that also won authority, were important elements. The material itself on which the Christians spread their writings betrayed as well their changing social position. In classical antiquity two different bearers of written tradition were known: the role and the codex. The latter was small in size and paper was rare and expensive. It was reserved for the elite, of which the Christians were not part of in the first two centuries, even though in Palestine they did not belong to the lowest social segments of society. In the second century, Christians began using parchment codices, which were easy to handle in liturgical celebrations, and they made private transcriptions of texts. The technical level for this was low and not infrequently it was cut and pruned in original texts. But the use of parchment did indicate that they were more prosperous or at least that there were wealthy figures among them. Another external factor was the demise of Palestinian Judaism. Roman aggression against the Jews encouraged the independence of Christianity. Because of the Jewish wars and constant Roman intervention, Judaism became less and less diverse. In the year 68, for example, the community of the Essenes disappeared with the Roman destruction of Qumran. In the five years that followed, not only did the second temple disappear, but groups such as zealots and Sadducees were decimated. At the end of the first century, the Jewish tradition survived mainly in the rabbinic-Pharisaic form and in the Jewish-Christian congregations. This accentuated Christian self-awareness, as evidenced by letters from Ignatius of Antioch and Barnabas, who warned Christians of the danger of ‘falling back into Judaism.’ In spite of the many local examples of celebrating meals together, the division of the Jewish heritage was again imposed by outside measures, coming from the Roman imperial administration. After the destruction of the temple, the Romans had imposed on the ethnic Jews, in and around Jerusalem, the so-called fiscal judaicus. This tax was imposed on the Jews to, among other things, bear the cost of building a Jupiter temple in the city and under the reign 27 of emperor Domitian, this fiscal policy was adapted. From the year 96 onward, the Jewish tax was no longer imposed on the basis of ethnic belongings, but on the basis of religious belongings. In other words: whoever denied being a Jewish believer was exempt and whoever acknowledged religiously being a Jew was regarded as a taxpayer. This ‘fiscal choice model’ encouraged the disintegration of Jews and Christians: On the one hand, non-Jewish Christians rarely or never paid the taxauthority and were therefore no longer officially registered as Jews. On the other hand, Jewish Christians too used this option to deny their Jewish identity to the authorities, and increasingly to other Jews as well. Some decades later, during the Second Jewish War, the gap between, or rather within communities widened when Simon Bar Kochba not only urged his rebels to oppose the Romans, but also targeted the Jewish-Christian minorities in Judea and Galilee, as narrated in the Apologia of Justin the Martyr. In the aftermath of all this, some Christians of Jewish birth themselves sharpened the dividing lines. Melito was a somewhat exceptional figure. He was bishop of the Asiatic town of Sardis, traditionally a Hellenistic and multicultural city with a large Jewish community and a Jewish-Christian minority. In his handed-on writings, the complicated position becomes apparent: someone who, on the one hand, adhered to many Jewish customs, but whose thinking nonetheless took an anti-Jewish bend. The latter was most evident in Melito’s four-part work Peri Pascha, written in an exuberant Greek-rhetorical style, between 160 and 170, and entirely devoted to celebrating Easter. This work occupied itself with the Jewish Passover: it told the story of the exodus from Egypt, which was traditionally read in Jewish families on the fourteenth evening of the month Nisan. In the Jewish Haggada, this story about the misery and hardships the people had to endure was embedded in the memory of the joy of salvation by God. The second part of Melito’s story was based on this storyline and formed a Jewish-Christian haggada, while the third part of Peri Passcha made a hard judgment about the Jews, much harder than the positions that Justin took in his dialogue with the Jewish philosopher Trypho. Justinus reproached Trypho’s people for not seeing that the ecclesia of Christ succeeded ancient Israel and that the destruction of Jerusalem was a punishment from God. Melito went a step further when he suggested that the coming of Christ as a clear break with what had gone before. Here the discontinuity was emphasized and unfolded in the form of a ‘replacement thinking’. After all, Israel had murdered God and that in the center of Jerusalem. The only way for the Jews was to accept Christ as conqueror of death, as creator, savior, judge and God, for forgiveness, ransom, as Easter and king. 28  The changing attitude of Christians towards their Jewish roots was not the only element of interest at this time. The continuing spread of the Christian message in the context of the Greco-Roman cities placed Christianity headed for a series of important challenges: the communities would sporadically suffer persecution and were forced into the religious and philosophical plurality of the Hellenism of the late-ancient world to define itself as an intellectual interlocutor with the Hellenic traditions. Christianity would ‘Greekify’ in this period, and thus open the door to later doctrinal debates. This fragmentation not only led to far-reaching experiments, such as forms of Gnostic Christianity, but also to the integration of Stoic convictions that helped shape the development of a Christian order of life. The ne quid nimis-principle, i.e. ‘do everything in moderation’, was included early in rules of life. A fine example of Gnostic Christianity was a text such as the Acts of Andrew from the second century. In the synoptic gospels, the apostles Andrew and his brother Peter were called by Jesus to become ‘fishers of men’ (Matt 4: 18-20, Mc 1,16-18). In the Acta Andreae these words are placed in the mouth of the apostle Andrew, who later places the world of light opposite the darkness of material reality. According to the apostle, ignorance led to the downfall on earth and self-knowledge was the key to the restoration of the original sublimity (Acta Andreae, 6, 10-13, 15-18). The oldest written version of these Acts dates back to the second half of the second century and everything indicates that the author wanted to bring his own Hellenistic and gnostic theories about God and the human on the basis of Andreas’s life necessary by attributing them to the authority of the eponymous apostle. This type of text illustrates how the historical distance from the actual actions and words of Jesus of Nazareth pushed Christianity before new challenges. 1. Early Christian Persecutions The biggest challenge was without a doubt very basic: survival. The conversion zeal of the followers of Jesus of Nazareth could less and less remain under the radar of the Jewish authorities in Judea or of the Roman authorities. Already in the first century, early Christian communities experienced opposition in several places and the danger of being persecuted would pursue Christians up to the fourth century, with varying intensity and varying motives. The freedom of Christians against the strict observance of Jewish law, the Christian focus on the conversion of so-called ‘heathens’, and the claim that Christ was proclaimed the Jewish 29 Messiah gave rise to this. Initially it led to tensions with Jews who rejected the Jewish-Christian claims. Sporadically Jewish attacks on Christians took place, and especially the period under bar Kochba in the years 132 to 135 formed a last important moment in this respect. Much more threatening to early Christianity, however, was the Roman state apparatus. As mentioned earlier, Christians experienced opposition in the sixties of the first century, even though that word is still a soft expression. Nero’s reign ended with his suicide in the year 68, four years earlier the emperor had blamed Christians for the city fire that put large parts of Rome in ashes. Critical Roman historians such as Tacitus later contradicted him and accused him of having found an easy scapegoat. In the mean time, Christians had been tortured in Rome and, according to the horror stories, were even used as living torches in the imperial gardens. Several apostles were killed during this period: Peter was crucified with his head down, Paul was taken prisoner in Rome and later decapitated according to tradition. Much less arbitrary was the persecution of Christians at the end of the first and in the first half of the second century. While Nero went for pure political opportunism, later emperors like Trajan and Hadrian conducted a policy in which Christianity was perceived as illegal. The writings of the earlier quoted Pliny the Younger, Governor of Bithynia, make clear how the chrestiani spread under Trajan’s rule in both the cities and the countryside of Asia Minor and how their presence and their rejection of ancient traditions gave rise to anonymous accusations (denunciationes). Trajan tried and killed prominent leaders such as the successor of the apostle James, Simeon of Jerusalem and Ignatius of Antioch. Clearly identifiable Christian leaders suffered crucifixion or were given as prey to wild animals in Roman arenas. Roman citizens experienced Jewish- Christian monotheism as an insult. It was a denial of the usual polytheism of their Greco- Roman culture. The Christian claim that the Jewish-Christian God was the only truth generated annoyance and trouble. The rejection of Christianity as a ‘scandal’ was often mutual. Christians attacked Roman customs and manners: their mere attention to the Christian agapè led to a rejection of the often free-wheeling sexuality among Roman citizens, offered a cautious criticism of slavery, and a pointed comment on the minor importance of marriage for the Romans. Moreover, since Augustus the empire had cultivated an ever-increasing degree of emperor’s cult. The roots of this custom date back to ancient Egypt and the Greek ruler cults, and in particular figures like Alexander the Great, who felt chosen by his guardian gods, set the example for personal 30 worship. In the case of the Romans, the tradition also had its origins in the early Roman worship of house gods, but which was now institutionalized at the state level. On top of its quasi-religious function, the imperial cult was regularly used as an instrument to stimulate and promote the political unity of the empire. Christians in this connection seemed strangely contradictory to the Roman rulers. By virtue of their principle of giving God what belongs to God and to the emperor what the emperor deserves, they were prepared to pay taxes to the Roman authorities. But they emphatically challenged the divine status of the emperor, believing that Jesus of Nazareth was God’s only son. The latter led to sharp counter reactions. Moreover, Christians were recognizable: after all, they were monotheistic but not Jewish because they did not pay the judician tax. This made them findable and vulnerable, especially when the nomen christianum was punishable from the reign of Hadrian. For the Romans, Christianity had the formal status of a superstition throughout the second century. More even, it was a religio illicita: a forbidden religion. Yet, paradoxically, the illegal status of Christianity provided both disadvantages and benefits for its supporters, despite further persecution in the second half of the century. Especially Marcus Aurelius - praised for his contribution to the Stoic tradition - showed a profound disdain for the Christian religion. In his Mediationes, the emperor-philosopher was very aware that Christians were willing to die for their faith. This was still somewhat honorable for this Stoic, only he thought that they did not do this on the basis of reasonable considerations, but out of stubbornness. The display of the Christians who suffered the martyr’s death was for him no more than an exaggerated coup de théatre. It deserved at most contempt. He scoffed that the Christians had an illusion when they refused to face human death as the real end. They were simply unworthy rabble for Marcus. On the other hand, the testimony, in the Latin martyrium, and the fortitude of Christians who showed themselves dying for their faith gave them an aura of integrity and credibility. Regardless of how late the emperor thought about it: through Christians, the martyrdom of bishops in the second century, such as the public burning and execution of bishop Polycarp from Smyrna, was directly connected to the sacrifice of Jesus of Nazareth. The death of martyrs was a salvific sign in Christian circles and the effect was that martyrs became the subject of veneration in several Christian communities in the course of the second century. This happened in Rome and Asia Minor, but the region where a popular martyr cult grew the best was North Africa. Influential African thinkers such as Tertullian praised the blood of the martyrs, which meant for them ‘the seed for the Christian faith’ (Apologia 50, 13). This popularity made the 31 martyrs known and helped martyrdom grow into a visible criticism of established habits in the Greco-Roman world. It was one form, there were others as well... 2. Confrontation with a ‘Different’ Way of Thinking a) The Prism of the Greco-Roman Thought World Concurrent with the physical aggression against Christians in the second century, there appeared as well intellectual forms of criticism against Christians. The persecutions under Trajan made Christianity more visible. In the early second century, the famous orator Marcus Cornelius Fronto mocked Christians and accused them of impious practices, drunkenness, lack of loyalty to the state, and a general lack of civilization. This was no fait divers, because Fronto was the teacher of none other than Marcus Aurelius. The satirical writings of Lucian of Samosate followed the imperial way of thinking. They urged the Christians to make wise-up if they wished to live eternally after death. Christian believers had left the Greek gods and worshiped a crucified sophist. For Lucian of Samosate, Christians were as stupid as they were fanatical. And then there was the philosopher Celsus. At the end of the second century he raised the usual satire of the defenders of ancient traditions to the level of philosophical intellectual polemics. In his literary work ‘The True Word’ (Logos Alēthēs) Celsus studied more thoroughly than its predecessors, the Old Testament and the Christian Scriptures. Indebted to both Platonic and Stoic thought he pointed out the absurdity of the notion in the Judeo-Christian creation thought the idea of a creation out of nothing. For him it was an absurdity, because the Creator also had to create the matter that was arranged during creation. He considered this impossible. As if this were not enough, he rejected the notion that an omnipotent God would show himself off as such a highly contradictory ‘weak’ figure like Jesus of Nazareth. Contradictions of this kind were the best proof for him that Christians were on the brink of insanity. Through these kinds of attacks, these ‘insane’ people became all too aware that their faith was difficult to explain. That was immediately a reason why people in early Christian iconography had difficulty in depicting Jesus’ death on the cross. Only in medieval imagery, like the Cologne Cathedral Gero Cross, did Christ get the full traits of a suffering figure. In the earliest centuries this was not self-evident and he was mainly portrayed as a royal figure who 32 stretched out his hands in dignity. The writings of Celsus awakened the mistrust of Hellenic contemporaries. Christians were forced to intellectually counter the attacks. They did so by linking up with philosophical currents that were common in the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries. In order to be able to interpret the Christians’ indebtedness to these currents and their originality in relation to them, we summarize the most important of them. Still in Late Antiquity, Hellenism remained the overarching framework. Despite increased use of Latin, the most prominent language was still Greek. Moreover, during the first three centuries of our era, the empire knew a syncretism in which a kind of regeneration was being done. Sometimes forgotten traditions from Greek Antiquity re-emerged, while new philosophical and religious movements from the near East enjoyed great acclaim. Since the first century, mystery cults, such as the Persian Mithra cult, had been very popular and widely observed among Roman citizens. In addition to the mystery cults, in which people had to go through a number of initiation rituals to be initiated into the mysteries, ancient schools of thought experienced a renaissance. One was the Athenian Academy, where the philosophy of Plato (and Socrates as central figure in the Platonic writings) had a lasting influence. Although the Academy had lost its prestige around the millennial turn, the scholars of Alexandria had put the legacy of Platonic thinking back into the spotlight from the second century onwards. Already in Greek antiquity Plato, in his Parmenides, let the discussion partners discover that the human can only perceive and experience within the limitations of time and space. Yet that limited experience had to answer for something that was unchanging and eternal; and Plato spoke of perfect forms of being such as the one, the good, and the true. These could not be fully known as such. With regard to human capabilities, the philosopher was certainly suspicious. He did, however, share the idea that there are ideas or forms that escape any perception or experience, are outside of time and space in a separate domain. These forms or ideas are completely transcendent but therefore no less real. More even, the concrete spatial reality that we know was in a way a weakened reflection of it. On the question of how the human could conceive of the existence of these ideal forms or ideas, Plato’s reply was that the eternal human soul had ‘seen’ the ideas or forms before its existence in time and space. Consequently, the human could become aware of the transient and inadequate character of his experiential knowledge. Plato’s disciple in the Athenian Akademeia, Aristotle, had put his master’s search for certain knowledge, epistèmè, on a slightly different track. He abandoned the twofoldness of Platonic thinking that the material reality and the transcendent ideas could never be brought 33 together. Aristotle proposed a philosophy that paid attention to the individuality of tangible, concrete things. Aristotle not only wanted to adequately understand and describe the objects in reality, he also wanted an explanation for the fact that material reality is subject to change over time and that it develops. Plato’s thinking gave too few answers for Aristotle’s interest in transformative processes. For Aristotle, the essence of reality was not in sublime and unknowable forms or ideas. No, it permeated and moved the world from within. One only had to observe more accurately and develop a refined conceptual apparatus. Aristotle therefore emphasized the importance of logic and the possibility of the nous (mind, intellect) to achieve true knowledge through observations. He resorted to a method of reasoning which he called aphairesis, ‘taking away’. While the starting point in the concrete, descriptive, empirical analysis, one needed to pass through analytic stages of substraction to find abstract truth. This would eventually become important for western thought, as for Aristotle, truth was in the adequate correspondence between the linguistic expression of reality on the one hand and objective reality on the other. The flipside of it was that in the relationship between language, thought and reality, it was far less than Plato’s understanding about the inability of language to adequately express reality. In Christian tradition, both philosophical directions would play an enormous role, each influencing strands of thought about the divine, and strands of worship. In ancient times, but also among the medieval mystics and in the humanism of the Renaissance, Plato was a source of inspiration for those holding that our comprehension of the divine is always incomplete. In the Arab and Christian Middle Ages the preference would be with Aristotle, stressing the human ability to come to valid insights and conclusions, also in religious matters. In the Alexandrian environment of the first three centuries after Christ, Platonism had a lot of support, but so did other philosophical currents. In addition, Stoicism was very popular in higher Roman circles, where more and more Christians were arriving. This also went back to the ancient Greek Stoa, and especially to thinkers from the third century BCE like Zeno of Citium. In the first century CE it once again had influential representatives like the Roman statesman Lucius Annaeus Seneca. The Stoics determined the essence, the essence of the human as logos. It was a complex and broad concept, but the human life goal was to realize what this ideal logos (or reason) prescribed. With this conception of self-realization, Stoicism became, in the first instance, a theory of wisdom and virtue. In a context of unbridled pursuit of wealth and the moral promiscuity of Roman notables and the imperial court, this was not always self-evident. Because of Stoa’s stress on detachment or apatheia, for finding balance in 34 daily life and equality for all in a society in which inequality was the so common, Stoics were often sharp critics of the political system. The principle that had been touched on previously, ‘ne quid nimis’, was holy for them. Despite the anti-Christian sentiments of Stoic rulers such as Marcus Aurelius, Stgoa’s principles, like the attention to keeping things balanced and the importance of self-control found their way into the Christian virtues rather easily. That socially critical attitude was not just the property of the Stoa, it existed as well in other schools of thought, like as Epicureanism and cynicism. On the one hand the epicureans stressed the meaninglessness of everyday life; but without slipping into a flat-out hedonism, people’s aspirations for happiness and enjoyment were recognized as the human life goal. The emphasis was on the importance of aesthetics and beauty, with at the same time a stress on asceticism, from the idea of ataraxia or a stgate of tranquility. The emphasis on asceticism was found as well in the school of the so-called cynics - again, founded in Greek antiquity. This is where Antisthenes (a pupil of Socrates) and Diogenes of Sinope could find themselves, and where there was a profound contempt for civil conventions. b) The Challenge of Gnosticism Four centuries after the famous Diogenes, the man who aroused the interest of Alexander the Great, his hometown Sinope, a city along the Black Sea coast, became the birthplace of a challenging form of Christian thinking: Gnosticism. The term already makes it clear, in addition to the abovementioned traditions, a longing for gnosis or ‘knowledge’ would influence Christians in Asia Minor and beyond in shaping their basic insights. But this knowledge was nothing like the post-Enlightenment idea of rational comprehension of our times. Instead, gnosticism was a consequence of a longing for mysticism that characterized the late-ancient world. In the Roman empire that was felt by the influence of a series of ‘hermetic’ writings that were attributed to a legendary Egyptian sage named Hermes Trismesgistos. These texts contained an esoteric way of thinking that on the one hand wanted to offer explanations for the state of the cosmos and on the other hand a vision of human existence. Hermetic thinking and other forms of Gnosticism were filled with complex cosmological theories, rituals, and purity practices. All this usually had little affinity with the Jewish-Christian world of thought. Nevertheless, in the second century CE, Christian forms of gnosis arose that brought about a radical reinterpretation of the Old and New Testaments. 35  Among the groups of Christians who went down in history under the collective name ‘Gnostics’, the Greek - and often Platonic - idea was first and foremost of God as a very lofty, immutable, and infinitely good entity. God was by no means conceived of as the creator of our changeable earthly world in which evil could not be denied. In essence, it was a problem that has occupied humankind for thousands of years: how the existence of evil in the world was to be connected with the idea of God. The answer from Gnostics went in the direction of a radical discord. Under the influence of hermetic thinking and the late-ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, the Gnostics divided the biblical God into the highest and perfect divine principle on the one hand, and a lower creator of the material world on the other. Given their ethical concerns, the sublunary could only be the work of ‘a lesser god’, who was soon equated with the Old Testament God. The scriptures themselves supported this sentiment: it was inconceivable that God in Exodus was described as jealous and vindictive, while Christ in the gospel urged his disciples to be meek and gentle ‘like the heavenly Father.’ That ‘heavenly father’ could by no means be the Old Testament God of the Jews. The dualistic cosmology of the Gnostics thus ended in a strict separation between the Jewish Bible and the Christian narrative traditions, between the heavenly reality and the earthly, between the purity of the soul and human physical nature. Gnosticism was more than the playground of some thinkers on the margins. With figures like Marcion, Christian gnosis became a successful and attractive movement. This well- to-do Christian from Sinope was quickly seen as a threat by leading Asia Minor bishops like Polycarp and Papias, the bishop of Phrygia. But Marcion did not give up easily. After being rejected in his hometown, he moved to Rome, where he arrived around the year 140. After his ideas were also rejected there and he was formally excluded from the Christian community, he attracted a large crowd of followers. Soon communities of Marionite Christians arose, who were provided by him with writings. In a series of Antitheses Marcion skillfully put together the Christian narrative tradition and the dualistic Gnostic worldview. The most central contrast he launched was between the jealous and violent Old Testament creator God and the loving New Testament God who had shown himself in Jesus Christ. The God of Judaism was therefore an inferior and evil demiurge. Marcion was not alone. Christian Gnostics like Valentinus went perhaps less further in their negative portraits of the demiurge, but they nevertheless saw the human earthly body as a prison from which the soul had to be liberated. All of this had consequences for the image of Jesus of Nazareth. In Valentinian Gnosticism, Jesus was no longer a Jewish teacher. He became 36 especially a spiritual example for those seeking purity and asceticism. Christ was a model for how the human had to free him or herself from the physical in order to reach the spiritual state of perfection. Marcion was not only more influential in this, but also more radical: the rejection of the Old Testament tradition drew a sharp fault line. The Jewish image of God with its very human messiah disappeared. So the true God was a pure and immaterial being, and in accordance it was completely inconceivable that God would be revealed in an impure form as an earthly body. Although Marcion insisted on the death on the cross, he presented Christ as unearthly, as a purely spiritual entity. The Christian’s job was to pursue purity. The ultimate goal was the salvation of the soul from its imprisonment in earthly and physical existence. This form of Christian thinking could only survive if it rewrote the Christian narrative tradition itself. Marcion was aware of this; and he wrote his own version of the gospel, strongly based on the Lucan and Pauline writings, from which he, in an anti-Jewish way, filtered out any hint of earthly traits from the speaking and acting of Jesus. 3. The Apologetic Fathers Figures like Lucian, Celsus, and Marcion drew attention on several sides. Their success with the Roman citizens forced Christians to intellectual and doctrinal self-determinations. Gnosticism, for example, meant a radical reinterpretation of the Jewish and Christian narrative traditions. From the second century, the Christian church fathers were more or less systematically involved. At the same time, they faced the difficult task of justifying their religion as a young life orientation for an antique, non-Christian forum. Christians, an insignificant minority, situated in the midst of monotheistic Judaism and the overwhelming presence of Greco-Roman polytheism, brought forward the pretension that their faith was the true continuation of the faith of the Jews. They were even pretentious enough to claim that this faith fulfilled the desires of the ‘gentiles’ in a way that the latter themselves could not have fathomed. The self-awareness and the courage needed to make these pretensions come true was augmented by the increase in the number of Christian communities around the Mare nostrum, the Mediterranean. From first almost invisible communities in the Roman cities, Christianity was always looking for new communities. In addition to the traditional Christian stopping places in Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor, communities emerged in the North African cities in the second century, in Spain, and in the south of the Gallo-Roman region in cities such as Lyon 37 and Arles. Slowly but surely, the outside world discovered that these dispersed communities formed a coherent network. Gradually, Christians themselves became aware of the power of this network. In this time, there were also some Christian thinkers in the foreground who intellectually justified their position and their convictions. They adhered to the conceptual framework of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman movements and thus attempted to make their banned religion acceptable. In the writings of these defenders or ‘apologists’ the growing self- awareness of the Christians resounded. a) Irenaeus of Lyon and Justin Martyr The sharp contrasts that the Gnostics made were linked to basic intuitions that were present in the early Christian writings. Only the Gnostics elevated these to formal contradictions. Marcion’s Antitheses were the most perfect proof of this method. The Christian gnostic evoked resistance from within. One of the most striking voices was from the small Gallo-Roman town of Lugdunum, today’s Lyon. Irenaeus of Lyon, bishop at the head of a relatively small community, wrote around the year 180 a five-part Greek-language work (later known mainly under the Latin title Adversus haereses or ‘Against the heretics’) in the fourth century, which greatly influenced Christian thought in the empire. He offered a systematic refutation of Christian Gnostics such as Marcion and Valentinus and resisted the attacks of Celsus and Lucianus as well. For him God’s incarnation in Christ was the superlative step of God as creator and as legislator. Irenaeus was of the opinion that the Jewish faith in the one God by far surpassed ancient polytheism. To strongly substantiate that, he focused on the universality of Christianity. According to him, especially Paul, as ‘apostle to the gentiles’, had a hard time because he addressed people who believed in many gods. Irenaeus was highly original in his argumentation. Where the Gnostics placed God and the human against each other, Irenaeus emphasized their unity. That unity was of great importance in the Christian world of thought. Irenaeus had read Paul well and concluded that the very unity of God and the human was not in the external. It was a unity essentially, in essence. Better formulated: it belonged to the essential destiny of the Son to become human. When Irenaeus developed this idea, for the first time in Christian theology a clear attention was paid to the relational element: not only did the Son equalize himself to the human during his incarnation, he also turned the human into himself and thus to his destination. 38  In ancient times it was said above all that the human was created in God’s image. Irenaeus added something to that insight: with the incarnation of Christ the Creator’s intention was actually shown. The divine wisdom entered into the human and for Irenaeus this appreciation of the human condition, very different from the Gnostics, implied that the resurrection included a resurrection of the body - even if it concerned a glorified body. The argument of Irenaeus was built on the authority of the Roman (but originally Palestinian) theologian Justin Martyr. The latter had trained himself in the thought of the Platonists and the Stoa, and he used their philosophical jargon to translate the Christian message for Greco-Roman contemporaries. Justin was the one who started the conversation with the Jew Trypho. But he also taught Christian converts in his own Christian philosophical school in Rome, and in his Apologia he tried to explain the reasonableness of the Christian faith to pagan thinkers. He did this by making a distinction between God as Father (purely transcendent and immaterial) and the God-like Logos, who always existed, but who decided to make himself known to humankind in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Justin’s statement resolutely rejected the Gnostic way of thinking. He tried on the one hand to do justice to the Christian preservation of the Old Testament stories that were now typologically explained (Adam as typos of Christ, Eve as typos of Mary). But at the same time a great appreciation for ancient and pre-Christian thought was applied in Justin’s way of thinking. This philosopher regarded both ancient thinkers and Socrates as well as Jewish patriarchs such as Abraham as beacons of light. In Justine’s eyes they were Christians before the coming of Christ. The human thus used a Christian understanding to recognize the ‘virtues of the pagans.’ b) The North-African Response: Origen of Alexandria Rome and Lyon could then be interesting places; but in the transition to the third century, Egyptian Alexandria was undiminished as one of the great intellectual centers of the late- ancient world. Here the interest in the Athenian academy revived under the form of a refined form of Platonism. In the so-called Neo-Platonism, the duality between the world of ideas and reality was less sharply sketched than with Plato himself. This type of Platonic thinking was picked up by Alexandrine Christians, whose roots lay in the Jewish diaspora municipality of this metropolis. Among them, Origen was one of the most original and important thinkers. His influence in Late Antiquity was no less than immense. Origen was a former fellow student of the famous non-Christian Platonist Plotinus and was known in Alexandria as the person responsible for the Alexandrian catechetical school. 39  The Alexandrian legacy, however, is far greater than its function suggests. To begin with, historians only have the anti-Christian critiques of Celsus thanks to the many quotations in his work, Contra Celsum, which he has left behind. In his defense of ancient culture, Celsus found the Jewish-Christian idea of a God who had fallen abruptly into history downright ignoble. He asked Christians the critical question why the Incarnation had actually taken place so late? The historical revelation seemed to testify to a fairly arbitrary timing. Moreover, he argued entirely in the Greek way of thinking, the Christian doctrine of the incarnation gave rise to a double problem. It detracted from God’s divinity, and conversely the whole idea of ensarkôsis, the ‘incarnation’ of God, seemed to offer an absurdly important place for the human. Celsus was a keen observer and asked pertinent questions: did God then descend to find out what was going on on earth? But why? Was not God omniscient? Or did God feel undervalued and want to show off in this world with a special appearance? In that case the weak figure of Jesus of Nazareth was definitely a strange choice. The philosopher likened Christians and Jews to frogs that pry around a pond and disagree with each other about which of them are the worst sinners. It all seemed a strange waste of time. It was clear to Origen that Christians and their beliefs were set aside by Celsus as retarded peripheral figures. The most important counter-argument that he put into forward was that of a well-developed self-awareness. It was true, he admitted, that God had only revealed himself in Christ. But that unique and perhaps late incarnation brought about a great improvement in people’s way of life for those who wanted to see it. For, even though a number of Christians were unable to justify their faith reasonably and intellectually, it became apparent from their actions that Christianity had changed their lives for the better. This was evidence from ethical practice that was more common among the apologists. Yet the argument had one weakness: it only covered instances where the behavior of Christians was impeccable. Origen was too refined a thinker to appeal only to moral arguments. He wrote an extremely influential work ‘On the first principles’ of Christianity, in Greek Peri archôn. In it, the Alexandrian father explained in four detailed volumes fundamental Christian themes such as the question of God, creation, the fall, and salvation. Origen’s writings more clearly than before set the beacons for christians in relation to their ‘pagan’ cultural surroundings. He took over argumentation methods and philosophical details, but also set limits. Where previously Christians were inclined and not infrequently prepared to meet the pressure of Roman authorities or ancient thinkers that the names for God were simply coincidental (whether they be Zeus, the Invincible Sun, or Apollo), he objected. The name of God touched the very being, the ousia, of God himself and indifference on this matter was out of the question. Referring to 40 Acts 4:12, ‘no other name’, Origen insisted that it made a big difference whether one called God Zeus or that the name of Christ was pronounced. After all, the pronunciation of the Christ name made the awareness