LITMIR.BIZ

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dais? Perhaps. The encounter between Paulinus and Edwin was one between Roman and barbarian, Christian and pagan, Latin and Germanic, literate and oral, wine and beer, oil and lard, south and north. It opened up perspectives on to distant notions and activities beyond the wildest surmises of the participants.

      Christianity traces its historic roots to the ministry of a Jewish preacher and exorcist in a backward province of the Roman empire. As an offshoot of Judaic stock, early Christianity was heir to the proselytizing zeal of its parent. Accustomed as we are to a merely self-perpetuating style of Judaism which was brought about by subsequent centuries of Christian and Islamic religious repression, it is easy to forget that the Judaism of the Hellenistic world was an evangelizing faith, and not one by any means conceived as being exclusively for adherents who were of Jewish ethnicity. The diaspora, or dispersion, of the Jewish people from their homeland had begun several centuries earlier with the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities of the eighth and sixth centuries B.C. respectively. Thereafter it trickled on, quickening to a flood of emigration after the Jewish revolt of 66–70 A.D. and the destruction of Jerusalem, and again after the rebellion of Bar-Kochba in the years 132–5. By the first century of the Christian era there were significant Jewish communities to the east of the Roman empire in Armenia, Iraq, Iran and Arabia, and throughout the Mediterranean world in Egypt, Asia Minor, Italy and Spain; communities that were thriving and growing by evangelistic effort. We shall meet some of these scattered Jewish communities of the Mediterranean in a later chapter.

      As a sect within Judaism, early Christianity followed in its parent’s geographical footsteps. It was characterized from the outset by its mobility. This rapid dissemination found its earliest chronicler in the author of the Acts of the Apostles, traditionally identified as St Luke, a masterly account focused principally upon the missionary labours of St Paul. But the impression given by Luke of an orderly and controlled diffusion – reinforced for many of us by map and mnemonic in the scripture lessons of childhood – is misleading. Our evidence is patchy. The spread of Christianity to Alexandria and beyond along the coast of north Africa to Carthage has left no narrative trace of any kind. But it is reasonably clear that Christianity spread to east and to west both quickly and anarchically, without overt strategy or leadership. In his epistle to the Romans Paul was not addressing a Christian community which he had founded, in contrast to the young churches of Ephesus, Corinth or Thessalonica. The Christian community in Rome already existed by at latest the middle years of the first century. It had just mysteriously come into being – mysteriously, that is, if one doubts (as most scholars now do) the traditions attributing its foundation to St Peter. This intimate association with Judaism continued to provide a ramifying network of communication for Christian churches throughout and beyond the long-drawn-out and messy process of the detachment of church from synagogue, of the law of Christ from the law of Moses.

      Alexandria, Carthage, Corinth, Ephesus, Rome, Thessalonica: the expansion of Christianity took place in a social setting that was predominantly urban. It was in the cities of Asia Minor and Greece that St Paul found, or founded, the Christian communities which he nurtured, lectured, scolded or bullied. It was in the cities round the Mediterranean that a church organization developed, in the cities that martyrs suffered and were commemorated, in the cities that Christians organized the charitable works for which they were renowned. The early Christian communities were composed of city-dwellers of fairly lowly social rank. It is true that when, in the course of time – and hardly at all before about the year 200 – the Christian faith began to attract adherents of higher rank and greater wealth, such persons might possess country houses in which they and their families would spend part of the year. But these country villas were, in Ramsay MacMullen’s striking phrase, like ‘pieces of cities broken off’.¹ Even in the country houses of the rich Christianity remained an urban religion.

      Such observations have long been truisms of early Christian studies. Like all truisms they need some qualification. The contrast between urban and rural may be made too clear-cut by our industrialized perceptions of that distinction. Before the era of railways, tinned food and refrigeration it was impossible for towns to be isolated from rural life. Apart from a handful of really big cities (Alexandria, Antioch and, of course, Rome) and a larger number of towns of middling size (such as Athens or Naples), most of the towns round the Mediterranean were small and closely integrated with their rural hinterland. Very many farmers would have lived in towns and walked out to their fields by day, as some still do twenty centuries later. In addition, we do have a few tiny fragments of evidence which suggest an early rural dimension to the spread of Christianity in, for example, Syria, Egypt or Asia Minor. The younger Pliny, governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor, addressed a famous letter to the Emperor Trajan in about 112 asking for guidance on the treatment of Christians, in the course of which he referred to a Christian presence in the countryside. Possibly he exaggerated; but it would be unwise to disregard his testimony altogether.

      So a degree of circumspection is needed. Nevertheless, the old truism still has validity if we introduce a geographical modification. The early evidence for rural Christianity comes exclusively from the eastern provinces of the empire (and especially from those that were close to the Mediterranean). It does not come from the western ones which are the main concern of this book, those provinces embraced by north Africa west of Carthage, Spain, Italy and the Alpine regions stretching up as far as the Danube frontier, Gaul and Britain. There were no great cities at all in the west, if we exclude Rome, and far fewer of middling rank. Towns of modest size were generally even smaller than in the east, and thinner on the ground, further apart from one another. There were enormous tracts of countryside which were to all intents and purposes untouched by Romanization. We shall see evidence in the following chapter that they were untouched by Christianity too.

      Then there is the question of cultural attitudes. The educated and articulate elite of the classical Mediterranean believed that civilization and culture were to be found exclusively in cities. Our daily use of such words as ‘urbane’, ‘polite’ and, of course, ‘civilized’ shows what a good job that elite has done in persuading posterity of its point of view. Occasionally the writers who belonged to this tiny elite deigned to celebrate country life and the happy lot of the peasantry – their rude health, sturdy virtues and innocent pleasures. Reality was different. City-dwellers, parasitic upon the surrounding country for their essential supplies, repaid this dependence in the harsh coin of disdain. Most townspeople, most of the time, looked upon the rural peasantry with mingled disgust, fear and contempt. They were dirty and smelly, unkempt, inarticulate, uncouth, misshapen by toil, living in conditions of unbelievable squalor, as brutish as the beasts they tended. These attitudes are easy to document from surviving Greek and Latin literature. The peasantry of the countryside were beyond the pale, a tribe apart, outsiders. Such attitudes underpinned the failure of the urban Christian communities to reach out and spread the gospel in the countryside. We might regard this lack of initiative as negligent. But such an accusation would probably have bewildered the urban Christians. For them the countryside simply did not exist as a zone for missionary enterprise. After all, there was nothing in the New Testament about spreading the Word to the beasts of the field.

      Unappealing as we might find this disposition of antique citydwellers, it was one which witnessed to a massive confidence in the urban order of imperial Rome. The Christian communities of the Mediterranean world had grown up in that order, if not quite of it. They took it for granted and they were right to be confident in it. From the beginning of the Christian era in the reign of Augustus for the next two centuries the Mediterranean (as opposed to the frontier) provinces of the empire had basked in almost uninterrupted peace and prosperity: the pax romana. The public buildings of the cities and the speeches which were declaimed in them alike display a bland and soothing mastery of their respective architectural and literary techniques; symptomatic of a social order which gazed upon its way of going about its business and was pleased with what it saw. Look at me, the colonnades and arches of Leptis Magna seem to say: relax; enjoy; and it’ll go on like this for ever.

      But it didn’t. In the middle years of the third century the Roman empire experienced a phase of trouble more harrowing and profound than any that had occurred since the founding of the principate by Augustus. During the half-century which followed the death of the Emperor Severus Alexander in 235 there ensued a series of short-lived and for the

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