Political History of Early Christianity

345 Pages·2009·1.01 MB·English

by  Allen Brent

A Political History of Early Christianity
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A Political History of
Early Christianity
Allen Brent
Published by T&T Clark International
A Continuum Imprint
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Copyright © Allen Brent, 2009
Allen Brent has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identifi ed as the Author of this work.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-567-03174-7 (Hardback)
978-0-567-03175-4 (Paperback)
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire
Caroline Penrose Bammel, FBA
In piam memoriam
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Contents
Preface ix
Abbreviations xiii
Chapter 1
The Jesus of History and His Movement, and the Politics
of His Day 1
Chapter 2
The First Confrontation with Paganism under Nero and
the Markan Community 32
Chapter 3
The Political Theology of the Augustan Revolution:
Cosmic Reconstruction 78
Chapter 4
John the Seer’s Apocalyptic Response: An Attack on
Augustan Cosmic Reconstruction 129
Chapter 5
Early Christian Cosmic Reordering: St Luke, Clement and
Ignatius 166
Chapter 6
The Apologists and the Politics of the Trinity: Logos and
Cosmology 209
Chapter 7
Cyprian against Decius: Opposing Eschatologies and the
Creation of a State within the State 251
Chapter 8
Constantine, the Divine Order of the Christian Empire and
Its European Legacy 277
Bibliography 292
Index 301
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Preface
This book traces the history of early Christianity as a political movement with
serious political challenges to the Pagan Empire that pagans correctly identi-
fi ed and of which they did well to be aware. The hostility between Paganism
and Early Christianity was not the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding
but the result of a threat whether overtly or surreptitiously posed by the growth
of both the order of Christian societies and the development of the theology
that underpinned that order. Stoic and Middle and Neo Platonist assumptions
were to produce two rival cosmologies in which Pagan and Christian social
order was constructed, with imperial religion relying upon a polytheistic
ordering of the cosmos and Christianity, in one form or another, upon a Trini-
tarian one.
The methodology in terms of which my thesis proceeds can be exemplifi ed
from two proponents of the relationship between metaphysical order and poli-
tical order. The fi rst was Peter Berger who developed a sociology of knowledge
in which the metaphysical order was studied as a social construction: what
people believe about the world of nature as part of a cosmic order of things
external to society is in fact the refl ection of social order.1 Reality is socially
constructed so as to legitimate the structure of authority within society, making
patterns of authority stable and enduring, and not simply unstable and ephem-
eral, by anchoring social order in some putative order of nature beyond society.
Berger however was to emphasize that his account was essentially a study of
the role that bodies of metaphysical knowledge whether theistic or atheistic
(such as the Newtonian mechanistic model of physics) functioned in the order-
ing of social relations: he wished in no way to deny further claims to truth
that they might make. Thus a given form of society with a given set of social
relations might be necessary to explain the emergence of a particular kind
of cosmology but such social relations were not suffi cient to explain that cos-
mology and its further development.
One could, for example, write an account of the development of mathematics
in terms of economic groups pursuing their material self-interest in which their
social interaction was seen to produce various kinds of relationships between
mathematical concepts and theorems. Such an account would therefore show
1. P. Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1967), pp. 122–45.