The Second-Century Apologists. Alvyn Pettersen
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litigation. For while Hadrian did hold that a Christian righty found guilty of doing anything contrary to the laws was to be punished in a way befitting the offense committed, he equally strongly maintained that anyone who levied accusations against Christians “merely for the sake of libeling them” was to suffer “heavier penalties, in accordance with his heinous guilt.”14 In the 110s and 120s, there seems to have been, therefore, an imperial self-confidence that extended, in practice, to tolerating, rather than pursuing, such critical minorities as Christians.
This decision by the second-century Greco-Roman Empire not to pursue Christians is further reflected in the fact that between c.130 and 180 Christian apologists were able to write “open letters,” formally addressed to the emperors, seeking to sway especially literate opinion that it might be more understanding of, and tolerant towards Christianity. Indeed, that Christian were not generally hunted down is further reflected in such debates as that in Rome between the Marcionite Apelles and the catholic Rhodo in AD 190. Rhodo had challenged Apelles to expound his faith, which Apelles did. There was, it therefore seems, at least in Rome at that time no general need for a Christian to hide his or her faith and religious attachment.
That said, in the second century we do find the local and occasional hunting down of Christians. Justin Martyr, for example, was denounced in 165 before the authorities in Rome by the Cynic Crescens, tried before the city prefect, Quintus Junius Rusticus, and, on refusing the demand to sacrifice, was condemned to death. This kind of pursuit of Christians, however, seems to have been local and occasional, and generally was instigated by individuals and trade associations, and not by imperial representatives.
In this generally tolerant era churches then sought to win converts, a practice generally followed neither by the synagogue nor by the cults of the empire. For the Jews mainly were racially exclusive and did not engage in proselytizing; and the cults did not see the need to convince a person of the reality of their own gods and the unreality of other people’s gods, no one being either able or willing to say that this cult was true and that not, and everyone wishing rather to establish the peaceful co-existence of all cults.
The majority of those who then converted to Christianity were converts from a paganism that allowed a mass of gods, even in one individual’s life, to an exclusive religion that believed in one God alone. Conversion to Christianity therefore required its converts to renounce all other gods and any practices associated with, or which might promote, the deities left behind. So Christians, both neophytes and those of long standing, withdrew their children from schools. For the capricious and, if understood literally, often immoral behavior of, for example, the Homeric gods featured in the curricula of local schools; and cultic observances punctuated school timetables. Tertullian described aspects of school life in north Africa in c.200. The cost of offerings to Minerva was taken from the fees of new pupils. Sacrifices frequently were offered. Prize-givings, when local dignitaries were present, were marked by cultic observances. Holidays were taken on the festivals of various gods.15 By such inclusion of the cult in a school’s life, even when such inclusion was only informal, a school modelled cultic practices. Indeed, in modelling such practices, a school provided a context in which the cult might be “caught” by its pupils, an altogether more subtle manner of “indoctrination” than any effected through teaching about a cult and its customs.
Christians further withdrew from wider society by, for example, avoiding buying meat in the markets, given the meat’s provenance generally being a temple’s sacrificial practices. This they did, even though it might have financial consequences for their town’s economy. For their loyalty to the one God trumped their loyalty to their local town’s economy.
Christians also increasingly refused to enter certain trades, even demanding that converts to Christianity who worked in any such “prohibited” trade should resign. If converts did not resign, they yet were to be very mindful that the Christian faith was to be sincerely and honestly lived daily, whatever the cost to their professional lives. So Christian converts who were painters, sculptors, and carvers were required not to undertake any commissions that might promote what to the Christian was idolatry. A soldier, who had not resigned from the army, was to commit to not killing. A gladiator was not to kill, a very costly injunction for both the gladiator and his owner. Equally, Christians were to choose not to enter the seemingly harmless trade associations or professional guilds; and those who were members of such associations and guilds, on becoming Christians, were expected to resign their membership of such. For these associations and guilds often performed various acts that had religious associations; and, insofar as such associations and guilds might act as funeral benefit societies, they frequently ensured that, on a member’s death, cultic rites and rituals were enacted. The collateral cost for Christians of either not joining or resigning from such associations and guilds therefore included, but was not limited to, Christians separating themselves from their work-colleagues’s friendship and support and a foregoing any financial and funeral help which these organizations traditionally afforded their members.
Further, Christians were not to sacrifice to the gods, even though not doing so would displease both the cult’s priest and wider society. For the cultic priest, having paid for his office as priest, would have wished to make the most of his cult, encouraging people to make sacrifices. Wider society meanwhile, especially when threatened by natural calamity or hostile peoples, wished sacrifices to be offered by every member of society, both to appease any divine anger directed against it and, by its so honoring its gods, to become again the recipients of the gods’s gift of peace. Yet, even when not threatened by natural calamity or hostile peoples, wider society wished sacrifices to be offered by as many members of society as possible. For, to varying degrees, it recognized that the very practices involved in offering sacrifices contributed to the up-building of communities. These practices included the careful allocation of the sacrificial animal, some parts being offered to the gods and other parts being given to the people. The thigh bones, sacrum and tail, for example, were burned for the gods, who, it was believed, feasted on the smoke. The entrails, once examined for signs of divine approval, were spit-roasted. The carcass was butchered, cooked, and consumed by the assembled people, either then and there, or taken elsewhere for eating later. So, the Hellenistic rite of animal sacrifice, as well as being a sharing of food with the gods, was, at one and the same time, also a sharing of food with the members of the local community, practices that resulted in the simultaneous strengthening of a community’s relationship with its gods and between its participant members.
That Christians were not willing to offer or participate in such cultic sacrifices might well then have been seen, at the very least, as evidence that Christians were careless of their non-Christian neighbors, despite the assertions that Christians loved all their neighbors as themselves. Indeed, that Christians absented themselves from the sacrificial cult and its associated practices could also be read as signaling that Christians were those who opted out of even those everyday little behaviors and religious customs that made a community’s daily living better together, and that especially enabled it “getting through” such liminal stages of its members’ lives as births, marriages, and deaths.
More gravely, not being willing to engage in the empire’s sacrificial cult might have been viewed as a sign of sedition and disloyalty to the province and the emperor. For not sacrificing amounted to undermining the empire’s leadership in seeking the pax Romana for all the empire’s peoples. What for Christian monotheism was an example of unwavering loyalty and faithfulness was for many a non-Christian a blatant example of selfish obstinacy, community disengagement, and unpatriotic intransigence.
Christian monotheism involved, however, not only the giving up of certain practices but also the taking up of others. One particular consequence of asserting belief in one God was asserting the equality of all before that one God. In second-century social order there was an absence of a clearly defined “merchant” class. Rather, there were relatively few benefactors and notables and many generally poor; and commonly the former paid for the amenities of civic life for the latter. For all that, within such a society the primary social distinction was not that between the “rich” and the “poor,” but that between the “free” and the “enslaved.” The second-century church largely mirrored that social stratification. That Clement