Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy

412 Pages·2006·4.92 MB·English

by  the late Geoffrey de Ste. Croix

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
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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
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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
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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