The Triumph of Christianity

by Bart D. Ehrman

  23 “Life of St. Martin” 13.8–9. I have used the translation by Richard J. Goodrich in Sulpicius Severus: The Complete Works (New York: Newman Press, 2015).

  24 Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Random House, 1950), 22.8.

  25 Cyprian, “Letter to Demetrius,” chapter 24. Translation by Ernest Wallis, in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., Ante- Nicene Fathers, reprint ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994).

  26 Ramsay MacMullen, “What Difference Did Christianity Make?” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 35 (1986), 335.

  27 Translation by T. R. Glover, Tertullian: Apology; De Spetaculis, Loeb Classical Library 250 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931).

  28 Hoffman, Celsus, 70.

  29 Augustine, “On Catechizing the Uninstructed” 5.9; translation by Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, 263.

  30 Arthur Darby Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 9.

  31 Ramsay MacMullen, “Two Types of Conversion to Early Christianity,” Vigiliae Christianae 37 (1983), 181, 185.

  32 Herbert Musurillo, “The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas,” in The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1972), 106–31.

  33 Martyrdom of Polycarp, 11; translation by Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, Loeb Classical Library 24 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2003).

  34 Saint Justin Martyr, The Second Apology, trans. Thomas B. Falls (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1948).

  35 Saint Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, trans. Thomas B. Falls (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1948).

  36 Apology 50, translation by Gerald Rendall, modified slightly, Tertullian: Apology; De Spetaculis, Loeb Classical Library 250 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931).

  37 Octavius 27.6. Translation by C. W. Clarke, The Octavius of Minucius Felix (New York: Newman Press, 1974).

  38 Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), 11.3.

  39 See Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2014).

  40 Against Celsus 8; translation by Henry Chadwick, Origen: Contra Celsum (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1953).

  CHAPTER 6

  1 Pliny 10.96; translation by P. G. Walsh, in Pliny the Younger: Complete Letters (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  2 Translation by S. Thelwall, in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, reprint ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989).

  3 Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York: Knopf, 1987), 201.

  4 Lane Fox illustrates the point by pointing to the oracle and temple of Apollo at Claros on the coast of Ionia, where at the time we find more than three hundred pagan dedications.

  5 Adolf Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, vol. 2, trans. James Moffatt (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908), 248.

  6 As already observed. See note 1 for chapter 4.

  7 Ramsay MacMullen, The Second Church: Popular Christianity, A.D. 200– 400 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009).

  8 Ibid., 101.

  9 Ramsay MacMullen, Roman Social Relations, 50 B.C. to A.D. 284 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 63.

  10 Roger Bagnall, “Religious Conversion and Onomastic Change in Early Byzantine Egypt,” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 19 (1982), 105–124.

  11 Bagnall’s findings were disputed by other scholars making different calculations; in his reply he stressed that, even based on other calculations, “we may reasonably suppose that Christians were well more than a majority before the end of the century; but it is hard to be more precise than that” (p. 249). Roger Bagnall, “Conversion and Onomastics: A Reply,” ZPE 69 (1987), 243–50.

  12 Harnack, Expansion of Christianity, 2.324–37.

  13 Frank Trombley, “Overview: The Geographical Spread of Christianity,” in Margaret Mitchell and Frances Young, eds., The Cambridge History of Christianity: Origins to Constantine (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 2006), 302–13.

  14 Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996).

  15 Keith Hopkins, “Christian Number and Its Implications,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998), 185–226.

  16 An effort to update Harnack in light of new evidence can be found in Roderic Mullen, The Expansion of Christianity: A Gazetteer of Its First Three Centuries (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2004).

  CHAPTER 7

  1 The book was almost certainly not actually written by Jesus’s disciple Peter. On the question of authorship, see Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2012), 65–77.

  2 Translation in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5, reprint ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989).

  3 Translation by Herbert Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1972).

  4 I have taken quotations from the translation by C. W. Clarke, The Octavius of Minucius Felix (New York: Newman Press, 1974). The Introduction to the volume is an excellent guide to both the book and its author.

  5 See, for example, Stephen Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984).

  6 Andrew McGowan, “Eating People: Accusations of Cannibalism Against Christians in the Second Century,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994), 413– 42.

  7 Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2013).

  8 For translations of the early-martyrdom accounts, see Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs.

  9 See Bart D. Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 493–508; Moss, The Myth of Persecution, 94–104.

  10 My own translation. See Bart D. Ehrman, ed., The Apostolic Fathers, vol.1, Loeb Classical Library 24 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2003).

  11 Translation by Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs.

  12 Translation by Michael Grant, Tacitus: The Annals of Imperial Rome, revised reprint ed. (London: Penguin, 1996).

  13 Over the years some readers have wondered if the Christians, in fact, were guilty of setting the fire. The logic is that if they were heavily influenced by apocalyptic thought and assumed that God was soon to judge the world through a major conflagration, possibly they decided to initiate the proceeding themselves. It is an intriguing thesis, but in the end is probably not convincing. Tacitus himself thought the fire was either set by Nero or was a pure accident.

  14 Quoted in Eusebius, Church History: see Eusebius, The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine, trans. G. A. Williamson, revised and edited by Andrew Louth (London: Penguin, 1965), 10.9.

  15 The letter occupies the first part of book 5 of Eusebius’s Church History, which is our only surviving account.

  16 The best study of the incident is James B. Rives, “The Decree of Decius and the Religion of Empire,” Journal of Roman Studies 89 (1999), 135–54, on which I am dependent for many of the points I make here.

  17 Rives, “Decree of Decius.”

  18 Ibid., 53.

  19 See Moss, The Myth of Persecution, 151–53; Eusebius’s account can be found in Church History 7.10–12.

  20 For a brief history of Valerian’s persecution, see Bernard Green, Christianity in Ancient Rome: The First Three Centuries (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 161–66.

  21 See Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, The Making of a Christian Empire: Lactantius
and Rome (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), Prologue.

  22 For the course of the persecution, see Moss, The Myth of Persecution, 154– 49; Green, Christianity in Ancient Rome, 211–13; Eusebius’s account can be found in Church History 8.

  23 Quoted in R. Joseph Hoffmann, trans., Celsus: On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 118.

  24 See Arthur Droge, Homer or Moses? Early Christian Interpretations of the History of Culture (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 1989).

  CHAPTER 8

  1 In a letter he wrote to the inhabitants of the eastern provinces of the empire, as quoted in Eusebius, Life of Constantine, trans. Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1999), 2.51.

  2 The letter is cited by Eusebius in Church History: see Eusebius, The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine, trans. G. A. Williamson, revised and edited by Andrew Louth (London: Penguin, 1965), 10.5. Eusebius claims, probably wrongly, that Licinius was a Christian at the time of the conference in Milan but fell to the dark side later.

  3 Harold A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2000), 194.

  4 As emphasized especially by Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, and “Constantine and Consensus,” Church History 64 (1995), 1–15.

  5 Every decent book on Constantine discusses the Donatist controversy (see note 1 for chapter 1). For a good, brief summary see H. A. Drake, “The Impact of Constantine on Christianity,” in Noel Lenski, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 111–36.

  6 Drake, “The Impact of Constantine on Christianity,” 119.

  7 Eusebius, Life of Constantine 2.60.

  8 The letter is cited in Eusebius, Life of Constantine 1.64–72.

  9 For a fuller discussion of the council, the events leading up to it, the theological issues involved, and the eventual outcome, see my book How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2014), chapter 9.

  10 Some scholars, such as Paul Stephenson in Constantine: Unconquered Emperor, Christian Victor (London: Quercus, 2009), have expressed doubts about this. It is, however, what our few surviving sources report and is the more convincing position argued, among others, by Timothy Barnes, Constantine: Dynasty, Religion and Power in the Later Roman Empire (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 126–31.

  11 See chapter 1, pp. 32–38.

  12 A. D. Lee, “Traditional Religions,” in Lenski, ed., The Age of Constantine, 174.

  13 Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.42.

  14 This has long been the thesis in particular of Timothy Barnes. See Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1981), and Barnes, Constantine: Dynasty, Religion and Power.

  15 He did, however, take a different line with Christian heretics, legislating harshly against them, disallowing their meetings, destroying their houses of worship, and generally making their lives miserable. See his letter to the Christian groups called Novatians, Valentinians, Marcionites, Paulians, and Cataphrygians (Montanists) in Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.64–65.

  16 For different views see Barnes, Constantine: Dynasty, Religion, and Power, 108–109; Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, 465; as well as Timothy D. Barnes, “Constantine’s Prohibition of Pagan Sacrifice,” American Journal of Philology 105 (1984), 69–72; R. Malcolm Errington, “Constantine and the Pagans,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 29 (1988), 309–18; and Scott Bradbury, “Constantine and the Problem of Anti-Pagan Legislation in the Fourth Century,” Classical Philology 89 (1994), 120–39.

  17 Translation by Clyde Pharr, The Theodosian Code (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952).

  18 Translation by A. F. Norman, Libanius: Selected Works, vol. 2, Loeb Classical Library 452 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).

  19 For example, it has been argued that he originally passed such a law but then almost immediately rescinded it in a letter; or that it was a “law” only loosely defined, in that it could be found not in actual legislation but only in correspondence sent to an administrative underling. See the articles by Bradbury and Errington in note 16 for this chapter.

  20 Ramsay MacMullen, “What Difference Did Christianity Make?” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 35 (1986), 322– 43.

  21 See pp. 152–56.

  22 MacMullen, “What Difference Did Christianity Make?” 336.

  23 Ibid.

  24 There are a number of intriguing discussions. See, for example, David Woods, “On the Death of the Empress Fausta,” Greece and Rome 45 (1998), 70–86, and Barnes, Constantine: Dynasty, Religion, and Power, 144–50.

  25 Noel Lenski, “The Reign of Constantine,” in Noel Lenski, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 79.

  26 See Woods, “The Death of the Empress Fausta.”

  27 Even if he did not as a rule apply force to implement his specifically Christian views, there were exceptions: his confiscation of bronze statues and gold plate for the New Rome he constructed and the destruction of five pagan sites he viewed as particularly problematic either because they were located on sites sacred to the Christians or because they entailed sacred prostitution, a practice he could not countenance.

  CHAPTER 9

  1 These instances are cited by Clifford Ando, “Pagan Apologetics and Christian Intolerance in the Ages of Themistius and Augustine,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4 (1996), 171–207.

  2 Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 129.

  3 For a good summary of the imperial history after Constantine that I lay out here, see Robert M. Frakes, “The Dynasty of Constantine Down to 363,” in Noel Lenski, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 91–107.

  4 One very readable recent account of Julian’s life is Adrian Murdoch, The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate and the Death of the Ancient World (Stroud: Sutton, 2003). Never surpassed, however, is G. W. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1978).

  5 See pp. 76–78.

  6 Letter 26, quoted in Bowersock, Julian, 61.

  7 The best account of these policies, again, is Bowersock, Julian.

  8 Letter 60, quoted in Bowersock, Julian, 80–81.

  9 Bowersock, Julian, 84.

  10 Letter 84, quoted in Bowersock, Julian, 87.

  11 Divine Institutes 5.19–20. Translation by Mary Francis McDonald, Lactantius: The Divine Institutes (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1964).

  12 For the contrast between Lactantius and Firmicus Maternus, see Maijastina Kahlos, “The Rhetoric of Tolerance and Intolerance: From Lactantius to Firmicus Maternus” in Jörg Ulrich, Anders-Christian Jacobsen, and Maijastina Kahlos, Continuity and Discontinuity in Early Christian Apologetics (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2009), 79–96.

  13 On the Error of the Pagan Religions 29.2. Translation by Clarence A. Forbes in Firmicus Maternus: The Error of Pagan Religions (New York: Newman Press, 1970).

  14 De Vita 1293–1302. Quoted in Harold A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2000), 406.

  15 Troels Myrup Kristensen, Making and Breaking the Gods: Christian Responses to Pagan Sculpture in Late Antiquity (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2013).

  16 Ibid., 9.

  17 Ibid., 15.

  18 Ibid., 14.

  19 Prudentius 2.481–84, trans. M. Clement Eagan; quoted by Kristensen, Making and Breaking the Gods, 21.

  20 Amelia Robertson Brown, “Hellenic Heritage and Christian Challenge: Conflict over Panhellenic Sanctuaries in Late Antiquity,” in Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, H. A. Drake, ed. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 309. />
  21 Mark the Deacon, Life of Porphyry 76, quoted by Brown, “Hellenic Heritage and Christian Challenge,” 319.

  22 Among many fine discussions, see Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997), 159–72, 307–316.

  23 The first quotation is from Aphthonius, a student of Libanius. Both quotations come from the important study by Judith McKenzie, Sheila Gibson, and A. T. Reyes, “Reconstructing the Serapeum in Alexandria from the Archaeological Evidence,” Journal of Roman Studies 94 (2004), 73–121.

  24 Translation by Philip Amidon, The Church History of Rufinus of Aquileia: Books 10 and 11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  25 The events are recounted in Rufinus, Church History 11.

  26 Quoted by MacKenzie et al., “Reconstructing the Serapeum,” 166.

  27 Theodoret, Church History 5.22; quoted in Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997), 167.

  28 Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 168–69.

  29 Garth Fowden, “Bishops and Temples in the Eastern Roman Empire A.D. 320– 435,” Journal of Theological Studies 29 (1978), 77.

  30 The episode is recounted in the definitive study, Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, trans. F. Lyra (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 50. See also Michael A. B. Deakin, Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr (New York: Prometheus, 2007).

  31 In addition to Dzielsak, Hypatia, see especially Edward Watts, “The Murder of Hypatia: Acceptable or Unacceptable Violence?” in Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, H. A. Drake, ed. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 333– 42.

  32 For a discussion of this view, and a strong rejection of it, see Christoph Markschies, “The Price of Monotheism: Some New Observations on a Current Debate About Late Antiquity,” in One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire, Stephen Mitchell and Peter Van Nuffelen, eds. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chapter 6.

  33 See, for example, Harold A. Drake, “Lambs into Lions: Explaining Early Christian Intolerance,” Past and Present 153 (1996), 3–36; and “Intolerance, Religious Violence, and Political Legitimacy in Late Antiquity,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79 (2011), 193–235.