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CHR I S T I A N P E R S E C U T I ON , M A RT Y RDOM , A ND ORTHODOXY This page intentionally left blank Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy G. E. M. DE STE. CROIX Edited by Michael Whitby and Joseph Streeter 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ßThe Estate of G.E.M. de Ste. Croix 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data De Ste. Croix, G. E. M. (Geoffrey Ernest Maurice) Christian persecution, martyrdom, and orthodoxy/G. E .M. De Ste. Crox; edited by Michael Whitby and Joseph Streeter. p. cm. ISBN-13: 978–0–19–927812–1 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–19–927812–1 (alk. paper) 1. Persecution. 2. Martyrdom–Christianity. 3. Church history–Primitive and early church, ca. 30–600. I. Whitby, Michael. II. Streeter, Joseph. III. Title. BR1604.23.D4 2006 272’.1–dc22 2006011789 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0-19-927812-1 978-0-19-927812-1 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Preface After the death of GeoVrey de Ste. Croix in February 2000, his widow Margaret passed a mass of academic papers to David Harvey and Robert Parker. Among these was a group of essays relating to Greek history which Ste. Croix had worked on during the 1960s and which were in reasonably good shape for publication; Harvey and Parker were able to bring these out under the title Athenian Democratic Origins and Other Essays (OUP 2004). The majority of the papers, however, related to religious and intellectual matters, primarily the Old Testament, Early Christianity, and Plato. For the most part these represented elements of two substantial publication projects on which Ste. Croix had embarked in the 1980s, a pair of volumes which were intended to present his radical views on a wide range of religious and related topics: Early Christian Attitudes to Women, Sex and Marriage, which would develop ideas from the lecture series he had given at Gregynog and Cornell, and Radical Conclusions, which was to be a rather more disparate collection of papers on some speciWc biblical passages or issues and on Early Christian topics. Unlike the Greek historical material most of these papers did not exist in clearly publishable forms, but comprised diVerent versions of lectures or seminar papers, drafts and redrafts, and working notes, some in typescript but much in Ste. Croix’s distinctive handwriting which became increasingly diYcult to decipher as his health declined during the 1990s. Credit for the Wrst and fundamental contribution to trans- forming this mass into what appears in the current volume belongs to David Harvey. With great patience, a clear head, and a mastery of Ste. Croix’s hand, David managed to impose some organization on the Wles and boxes of papers. The results of his eVorts were passed to Michael Whitby in summer 2002 in six substantial cardboard boxes crammed full of Ste. Croix’s characteristic lever arch Wles, folders, and notebooks. vi Preface Thereafter administrative distractions impeded progress, but dur- ing 2003 it was possible to identify, in dialogue with Hilary O’Shea of OUP, the building blocks of a potential volume on Christian matters. At an early stage it was decided that the material on Plato was too remote in subject matter and insuYciently complete to be able to be incorporated in the project. Ste. Croix had devoted much of his last decade to working on various papers on biblical topics, and to reXect his intentions a selection of these was incorporated alongside various Early Christian pieces in the Wrst formal proposal to OUP for a Ste. Croix religious volume; a pair of sympathetic and very helpful anonymous readers indicated that the biblical papers required a great deal of work and might still not have the impact that their author had intended. As a result it seemed better not to proceed with these, and to focus instead on the Early Christian writings in a volume which brought together Ste. Croix’s seminal writings on martyrdom and persecution, a couple of related early items from the 1960s which might well have been published then and which even in unpublished format had been inXuencing academic colleagues, a digest of further work on persecution which Ste. Croix presented in lecture series during the 1970s and 1980s, a substantial piece on the Council of Chalcedon which had been frequently presented at sem- inars in the 1980s and was also exerting inXuence on subsequent work, and a published item on Christian attitudes to property which could represent some of the lines of inquiry pursued by Ste. Croix in the Gregynog and Townsend lecture series.1 This at least reduced the boxes of papers under active consideration to manageable propor- tions, although the unpublished work on Heresies and Chalcedon in particular were both represented by several diVerent drafts and 1 A Greek translation of seven of Ste. Croix’s Christian writings has just been published: ˇ×ÑÉÓÔÉ`˝ÉÓÌˇÓ ˚`É ˙ ÑÙÌ˙: ˜ÉÙˆÌˇÉ; `ÉR¯Ó¯ÉÓ ˚`É ˙¨˙, ed. D. I. Kyrtatas, trans. I. Kralle (Athens, 2005). In addition to the three articles which we reprint (‘Aspects’ ¼ Ch. 1; ‘Early Christians’ ¼ Ch. 3; ‘Early Christian Attitudes’ ¼ Ch. 7) this also includes translations of three short general pieces: ‘The Religion of the Roman World’, Didaskalos, 4 (1972), 61–74; ‘Christianity’s Encounter with theRoman ImperialGovernment’, inA.Toynbee (ed.), TheCrucible ofChristianity (London, 1969), 345–51; ‘AWorm’s-Eye View of the Greeks and Romans and how they Spoke: Martyr Acts, Fables, Parables and Other Texts’, Latin Teaching, 37.4 (1984), 16– 30. The Wnal item is a seminar version of ‘Chalcedon’. We are grateful to Robert Parker for bringing this to our attention, and lending his copy for the sake of comparison. Preface vii rewritings, while the thoughts on Toleration did not extend far beyond a list of relevant references. The current volume was commissioned by OUP in autumn 2003, just when Michael Whitby’s administrative duties at Warwick in- creased substantially. A deus ex machina appeared, courtesy of the British Academy which generously allocated one of its small grants to the project. Thanks are due to all those involved, and especially to Peter Garnsey and Doug Lee, who wrote in support of the project to the BA. This money permitted the employment of a research assist- ant and, thanks to a suggestion by Robert Parker, Joseph Streeter agreed to join the project in late summer 2004. The intelligence, energy, and quality of his input soon indicated that it was appropri- ate to upgrade him from assistant to co-editor, so that the volume assumed its Wnal form. Without his collaboration it is certain that the volume would have been far longer in the gestation and quite possible that it would have remained unpublished. The editorial challenge of the Christian papers was more varied than that of the Greek papers. Three items had already appeared in print (Chapters 1, 3, and 7), and here we have restricted ourselves to minor updating. In many respects the paper on the Fourth Edict and Elvira (Chapter 2) was similar, since this had been accepted by JTS in the late 1960s, while for Voluntary Martyrs, a topic central to all Ste. Croix’s work on persecution, the challenge was to preserve the corpus of evidence while reducing unnecessary overlap with other papers in the volume. Heresy, Schism, and Persecution and Chalcedon both presented signiWcant challenges. In the former there were several ideas and issues which might have been pursued at considerable length, so that the question was to decide where to curtail discussion, especially in the absence of clear direction as to where Ste. Croix might have taken the topic. On Chalcedon there were comparable opportunities, though here it was possible to be much more conW- dent about where and how Ste. Croix wanted to develop the extant piece. Primary editorial responsibility for the material has been divided as follows, though we have both read and commented on each other’s sections: introduction to the chapters on Persecution and Martyr- dom and editorial work on Chapters 1–2, 4–5, Joseph Streeter; editorial work on Chapters 3 and 6–7, plus the introductory material

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