Lecture (only) - Larry Hurtado - Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World

this is rare to have from the University of Edinburgh and morose Kotlin professor emeritus Larry Hurtado professor dr. Hurtado has taught many students he's responsible for a lot of the scholars in our world today in the area of Christendom but he's also taught many others through his writings his latest book is destroyer of the gods early Christian distinctiveness in the Roman world this is a gentleman who is extraordinary in his breadth of knowledge he's got an understanding of Christianity in the first couple of centuries that is unrivaled I believe probably an academic Christianity in the world today he has focused his attention in those early centuries for a reason for a number of reasons I'm sure but among those reasons something interesting he said to us yesterday he said that he believes Europe is already in a post-christian era and that America is rapidly becoming a post-christian world and he said if we look at the church before Constantine when the church was going through cyclical persecution and certainly it was not a Christian world we see some marvelous ways that we can face the times that are in front of us and not do it with despair but do it with hope that out of that God brought a vibrant church that changed the world and so if I'm really fascinated to hear what he's got to tell us tonight about what made Christianity distinct in its Roman era and and what it's got to say to us today so with that I'm gonna ask you to give a warm Texas welcome to Professor dr. Leary Hurtado thank you very much for that kind introduction in the plentiful cafeteria of religious options available in the first three centuries early Christianity stands out this was truly a time of religious diversity and development that included the traditional Roman and Greek Pantheon's of course as well as the deities of the various other peoples and localities encompassed in the Roman Empire among the latter were City gods such as Artemis of Ephesus deities of of such areas as Phrygia Syria and Egypt and elsewhere there were also lesser divinities of families and households and even spirit beings thought to be linked to specific sites such as bridges kitchens and even latrines there were also new and refashioned religious movements aplenty the title of a book on Roman era religion captured well the situation it was a world full of gods so on the one hand early Christianity appeared as only one option among many and only one new religious movement among others to use another metaphor early Christianity entered the traffic as a new movement on a very crowded and well-traveled Highway of religious activity on the other hand early Christianity was I contend quite distinctive in that setting even in the diverse and pluralized religious options of the time indeed for many observers then it was objectionably different and seen as even a serious threat to Roman era piety to family solidarity and to society to appreciate early Christian distinctiveness and why it generated such a negativity it is helpful to take some further account of their religious environment first in which it appeared and developed it is important to note that in the time and which early Christianity have first appeared by all indications other religious activities and interests were thriving the old notion that the pagan gods were dying off and that's the secret of Christianity is a complete fallacy there's no evidence of that whatsoever all the evidence indicates the opposite the various deities of the time were in fact doing quite well the remains of Roman era cities reflect the prominence and abundance of temples and shrines to the gods here you see a picture of course of the famous Pantheon in Rome dedicated to as its name implies all the deities in general a very ecumenical kind of temple major portions of Roman era cities were given to such structures which typically were made of expensive stone here's another Roman era temple from neem and Friends we're made of expensive stone colorfully decorated unfortunately today all the paint is washed off and so we imagine that these temples were gray granite but they were actually brilliantly brightly colored as where all the statuary and they occupied prominent and central sites in Roman cities indeed a major percentage in some cases 40 percent of the urban central urban area were given over to temples in the Roman period furthermore throughout the period in question the refurbishing of existing temples and the construction of new ones went on with impressive expense given to this outside of cities there were shrines in the countryside in various places and small villages dedicated to various deities at sites of traditional devotion to them as well as places where more recent devotees erected shrines in honor of this or that deity moreover the many temples and shrines hardly sat idle here's an example of Minerva goddess of them one of the goddess of empire here Minerva appearing as Roma goddess of the Empire here's the city goddess Artemis of Ephesus the temples and shrines hardly set idle the many what are called ex voto objects found in ancient temples and shrines attest this here you have an eye which is given to the God in the temple and thanks for curing some eye problem the person went into the temple appealed to the God please cure my eye and I promise that I'll make you a major gift the eye gets cured so the person responds by putting a token of their care in the temple and there are thousands of these things throughout temples and shrines throughout the ancient Roman world so the gods were answering prayers things were working these were physical tokens of thanks as I say to deities for answering the petitions of individuals who restored health safe delivery of a child and many other requests temples and shrines also seem to have drawn many pilgrims to them to special festivals so here you have a release of a sacrifice you have the the bowl there who is is that showing up yeah doesn't seem to be working very well but we'll see anyway you can see the bowl and the people presenting it and the musical the guy playing the two horn pipe there drew many pilgrims for special festivals and holy days associated with the deities these ceremonies often included street processions such as you see here involving choirs musicians priests and other devotees who might be specially dressed for the occasion with images of the deities taken from the temples and shrines and paraded about through the streets of the city some temples had theaters attached to them where traditional stories and rights associated with the deity were acted out and some had rooms in the temple complexes for devotees to meet for dinners in honor of the respective deities typically in that period by the way as you may know when you offered an animal sacrifice only a part of the animal was consumed and given to the God part of it was given to the priests and the main part of the animal was eaten by the devotees who cooked it up and had a nice dinner so one of the things you have to understand that for us the word sacrifice means a costly kind of thing in the ancient world sacrifice means party time you get together and you have a nice meat meal because meat was not eaten as casually as it is now almost all meat eaten in the ancient world was sacrificial meat in that Roman era religion was not only a private matter of personal petition as exemplified by the ex voto figures but also had very much a public and social character a highly salient feature feature of life in which the general population of a village or city could take part collectively in fact what we call religion was not then as it tends to be regarded by us today as the distinguisher distinguishable feature or sphere of life there's a sense in which there was no category of religion in the ancient world for us religion means something like religion economics politics and so on as separate spheres or EXOR areas of life there's no comparable word in in the Roman world because they didn't think of what we call religion is being separable it was embedded and Inter woven through all aspects of life their various gods and various forms of acknowledging them and devotion to them were woven inseparably into the fabric of individual social life in many households such as you see here there were little deities of the household and the family would gather to express its solidarity by offering devotion to those little these are little images just a few just a few inches high that would be cited in a shrine in the Roman household the meetings of professional guilds and associations typically included ritual acknowledgement of their patron deities some deities has special portfolios that were associated and with particular activities of course such as Poseidon guardian of the sea others were linked with childbirth or war or almost any other activities the welfare of cities was typically linked with their patron deity such as Artemis whom I showed to you earlier who's who was seen as the guardian of the city protecting cities from plague or from earthquake or from war or such things at the Imperial level the political system and structures rested entirely upon claims of validation by the gods indeed the goddess Roma in the image that I showed you earlier served as the divine basis for and the expression of the umpire itself it will require some adjustment for westernized people today to grasp just how thoroughly the gods and devotion to them were pervasive and virtually inseparable from the rest of life but it is important to do so in order to appreciate how early Christianity struck people of the time in addition to the worship of the traditional gods there were also various new religious movements the traditional gods also new religious movements roughly contemporary with the appearance of early Christianity and that matter deserves some brief amplification prominent among these were the so-called mystery cults in some cases their mystery cults because we don't know much about them not because they were particularly secretive and the major reason was because unlike early Christianity they didn't write anything sorry that was intended to show you how the gods feature in so there you have a mosaic of a typical dining scene and you have men and women and people serving their Isis the Isis cult is probably the most well known which many will know about through the oft read book by Lucius Apuleius the transformations of Lucius also known as the golden ass in her native Egypt Isis had been a relatively secondary importance deity but in the Roman period she quickly acquired a considerably higher status and indeed function for many as an as a sort of goddess of the whole Empire and had an empire-wide following the cult seems to have been particularly but not exclusively popular among women temples and attendant priests of the cult appeared in various cities including Rome itself and Lucius and we mentioned earlier portrays vividly the elaborate rituals and colorful public processions devoted to her another well-known mystery cult was Mithras another oriental deity in this case deriving from ancient Persia one of the striking things about the cult is that Mithras was a deity favored by people who had been opponents of Rome but was adopted and a adapted and in that form became particularly favored it appears among the Roman army this is a myth Ross here shown slaying the bull and it has various other iconographic features that are kind of standard iconographic features of the myth Ross cult here you have a picture of an actual myth rayon which is the space in which the Mithras cult met tended to be underground or at least fashioned to look like it was underground in the myth rayon such as you see here the meeting place constructed to resemble a cave fitted out with elaborate and at least to us cryptic symbols his devotees met to enact rituals that we know little about today but we do know two things we know that the devotees were exclusively males and that they seem to have been largely drawn from the ranks of the Roman army roughly corresponding to today's noncommissioned officers yet another new religious group of the time that also derived from the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire and likewise connected to Roman armies is the god Jupiter dolak eNOS drawing upon inscriptional evidence in a recent study and a caller offered an intriguing analysis of the geographical spread of the cult and of the social class of its devotees who seemed in this case to have been drawn again from the Army but in this case from the officer corps of the Roman army the deity was obviously a variant form of the Roman god Jupiter adapted and blended with a local deity in ancient delicate in ancient Dalek a on the border of the Syrian desert caller wrote quote in the century or so between roughly 125 and 230 AD worship of the North Syrian storm god Jupiter dildo quino's raced through the populations on the northern frontiers of the Roman Empire and the cult trends transmitted westward through networks of Roman army officers obviously as with myth rammed with as with Mithra ISM the cult of Jupiter Dola canis was also only a male's cult now it is interesting that these various these three mystery cults all comprised adaptations of local deities from eastern parts of the empire for successful translocon and empire wide appropriation in that rough sense one can draw comparison with the early Christian movement it likewise sprang from an Eastern location Roman Judea in this case and comprised initially a remarkable and innovative variant in the ancient Jewish tradition the God of the ancient Jews but went on to success as a distinguishable trans ethnic and trans local movement one obvious difference to a note immediately however is in the long term outcome of these various new religious movements in the case of all of the so-called mystery cults they enjoyed various levels of take up for a while though scarcely longer than a couple of centuries or so indeed of all of the new and I've only shown you a few but of all of the many new religious movements of the Roman era only Christianity continued to grow and succeed and survives today and is one of and is the one movement as they say that remains a living and vibrant world religion of course that success included what is often referred to as the triumph of Christianity against efforts to destroy at eventuated in its adoption by Constantine as the imperial religion it was not Constantine however who made early Christianity a success it would be more accurate to say that it was the prior success of Christianity despite opposition that made it attractive to Constantine he was no fool but there were other distinguishing features of early Christianity as well in the first three centuries and in the remaining parts of this lecture I want to highlight several that I discussed at greater length in the new book destroyer of the Gods mentioned earlier my emphasis on that on the early Christian distinctiveness is not particularly apologetic and a particularly apologetic project of trying to big up Christianity I simply have two aims first for the sake of historical knowledge I simply want to make the point that early Christianity was in the context in which it first appeared genuinely distinctive unusual even bizarre in the eyes of contemporaries I intend this is something of a balancing emphasis to some other scholarly work of recent decades that has tended rightly to posit similarities between early Christianity and its historical context my object is to deny any such similarities for early Christianity was surely a historical phenomenon of the Roman era and so we should expect that it reflected some characteristics of that time but these similarities should not be pressed to the neglect of the very real distinctiveness of early Christianity in that same Roman setting I urge that an adequate and balanced picture must include a recognition of the features that comprise that distinctiveness as well my second point though it plays a much smaller role in the book and in this lecture is that the features that made early Christianity distinctive in that Roman era have subsequently become for us cultural commonplaces at least in those cultures where Christianity has had strong influence and that is what I meant in the opening sentence of the book in which I refer to it as addressing our cultural amnesia so let's consider some of these distinctive features of early Christianity first early Christian impiety let's begin with what many in the Roman era considered to be Christian godlessness to understand this charge we have to take account of what piety involved in the Roman era in the Roman period generally all gods in principle were real and valid and they deserved worship therefore even those philosophically minded individuals who debated the nature of the gods whether they cared about humans and the world and even whether the gods really existed nevertheless continued to participate and to encourage generally the worship of the gods and even it would seem typically refused and and they never tried to discourage the worship of them or to discourage others and participating in them similarly what modern scholars refer to sometimes as ancient pagan monotheism curious term was really a body of philosophical discourse that had little effect on the actual practice of religion in the Roman world to repeat the point for emphasis in the Roman world all gods deserve worship but you didn't have to work through a checklist to ensure that you ticked them all off didn't you didn't have to be afraid that you emitted anybody but in principle if the opportunity presented itself you were expected to participate worship of any God they were all equally valid it was generally sufficient to worship the gods of your own family your own city and your own people on the other hand if for example you visited another city or land and were invited to take part in the worship of the deities there you could do so freely without fearing that your own gods would be offended except for the Jewish God also if you if you if you were commanded by city authorities or whoever to join in the worship of the deity such as Roma as a sign of imperial loyalty there was no problem in complying but to refuse to worship the gods when the occasion arose was to act in an unfriendly and even impious manner this was especially acute when it came to the deities linked to your own family your own City your own nation for the worship of these gods was an important way perhaps the important way in which you signaled your participation in and your loyalty to those social groups likewise acknowledging the gods identified with the Roman Empire signaled your loyalty and solidarity with it even those adherents of the various new voluntary religious movements of the time the so called mystery cults that I mentioned earlier although they became devotees of Isis or Mithras or whoever also continued to participate in the worship of their traditional gods you simply added on Isis not in place of any perdition at traditional gods so becoming a devotee of Isis or Mithras for example was as I say more of an addition to your religious repertoire not a replacement for your previous responsibilities and here is where early Christianity differed alone among the various new religious movements of the Roman era so far as we know early Christianity alone expected adherents to abstain from the worship of all deities other than the one they called the truth and living God and his son to cite wording from 1 Thessalonians chapter 1 in the discourse reflected in many early Christian texts all other gods were referred to as idols a term that typically designated something as an allusion or phantom in effect the gods are treated and referred to by Christians as phonemes that didn't mean a denial of their existence please note indeed early Christians sometimes emphasized that the pagan gods were real beings but demonic beings utterly unworthy of worship for example consider Paul's exhortation in 1 Corinthians 10 quote to flee from the worship of idols and in the same context his further characterization of the pagan gods as demons the early Christian Concern wasn't particularly to deny the existence of the pagan gods but to deny them as worthy of worship in academic terms this was cultic exclusivity that went against the grain of roman era religious practice and belief indeed because in the minds of people of that time the reality of the Gods is demonstrated by worshipping them not by signing a statement of faith but by engaging in worship so to deny them worship is effectively to deny their existence almost and so because the Christians refused to engage in the worship of the Gods their refusal to do so could even amount to atheism a charge that in fact is hurled against early Christians they're accused of being atheists so I say to people today you say I'm an atheist I say I'm a better one I probably don't believe in more gods than you don't believe in you're gonna be a good Christian you learn have to learn how to be a good atheist given the linkage of deities to family city and people early Christian refusal to worship these deities also came over to the wider public as deeply antisocial so another charge hurled against Christians is that they were called haters of mankind to psych Tacitus expression from the animals in short the early Christian stance against worship of the gods was profoundly objectionable to many and generated tensions for Christians and their various family and social associations and I repeat it was a unique stance among Roman era new religious movements to be sure however this early Christian Celtic exclusivity simply echoed the stance advocated previously in Roman era Judaism the matrix out of which the Jesus Movement first appeared but in the eyes of the pagans of the time notice please the Jewish obstinacy about the gods was simply one particularly annoying feature of Jewish ethnicity again religion is associated with people with nation Jewish refusal to worship the gods was understood as a feature of their ethnicity they didn't like it they thought it was weird they thought it was annoying but it featured in their logic but in the eyes as they say in the eyes of pagans of the time Jewish obstinacy about the gods was simply a feature of their ethnicity every nation had its own ways and in the eyes of Roman pagans the Jews even more so but as the Jesus movement began to recruit more and more non-jews aka Gentiles and began to be seen as a distinguishable religious movement their refusal to worship the gods generated a distinctive hostility Jews might be allowed their obstinacy but pagan adherents of early Christianity had no such ancestral or ethnic right and so their refusal to worship the gods was deemed a much greater offense a serious social deviance indeed a potential danger deposit to established religious practice and social cohesion this brings me to the next distinctive feature of early Christianity adherence to early Christianity we're expected to take on what we might call in our language a new religious identity for most of us today the notion of a religious identity distinguishable from our ethnic identity is axiomatic so as I point out in the book if you in Britain or in the United States you have a periodic census and one of the questions will be what is your ethnicity and you can put down Hispanic black Caribbean white anglo-saxon whatever and then there would typically be another question which you're asked to register your religious affiliation and you can put down you know Hindu Christian Protestant whatever in a recent British census I think about fifty thousand people put down Jedi seriously to most of us today the notion of a religious identity distinguishable from our ethnic identity is utterly unproblematic and deep seems natural illustrative of this as I say you have this sort of double question on a on it on a census but this actually shows us again how far we are from the cultural situation of the Roman era and I contend also how much our conceptions have been shaped by the influence of Christianity indeed I contend that in early Christianity we see the first emergence of what we would recognize as a religious identity distinguishable from one's family or ethnic identity now the phrase religious identity is ours of course but I submit this the substance of what we mean by that expression first appeared in early Christianity I mean by that a religious identity distinguishable from your ethnicity recall my earlier point that for the most part gods were tied to your family your city and your people essentially your gods were conferred with your birth certificate and so your religious identity in our terms was tied to the social groups by which you were identified this ethnic linkage of the gods is particularly evident in the process of becoming a Jewish convert or proselyte in the Roman era a Gentiles who underwent full proselyte conversion are described as renouncing idolatry but also renown their family and their nation and joining the Jewish nation so when you change your religion fully you change your nation as well and a proselyte fits that logic for proselytes as I say religious conversion also involved a change in ethnic identity the two inseparable by contrast pagan converts to early Christianity were expected to remain members of their families and to remain what they were ethnically such as Greek or Egyptian or Syrian or whatever but they were to disassociate themselves from all the gods of their families their nations and their cities and to devote themselves solely to the one God and to his son proclaimed in the Christian gospel I propose that in this we see the effective disassociation of ethnicity and religious identity and that Rhiannon and a religious identity as a distinctive feature of early Christianity in the Roman world and again something that has now become for us a cultural common place we likely presume that any religion has its scriptures its sacred texts that have a special place in as a basis for teaching and also likely a place in corporate worship but yet again that assumption is shaped heavily by the influence of Christianity for example another distinctive feature of early Christianity was what I refer to as its bookishness now I don't mean that early Christianity consisted simply in the use of books or that it was some kind of scribal cult that set around copying and nothing else early Christianity wasn't a scribal sec such as seems to be reflected in the famous Dead Sea scroll community at Qumran but if we weigh up the effective indications of the major place of reading composition copying and dissemination and interpretation of texts in early Christianity its bookishness I think is clear moreover if we compare early Christianity with the many other religious options in the Roman era the religious investment in text is remarkable indeed with a possible exception again of its Jewish matrix early Christianity is distinctive in this manner from its Jewish origins of course early Christian circles inherited the practice of reading scriptures in the context of corporate worship gatherings as in the synagogue so in early Christian ecclesia settings initially therefore the texts designated and treated as scriptures in these circles of the Jesus Movement were those that came to form the completed Jewish canon eventually that or the so-called Christian Old Testament so for example the exhortation in 1 Timothy 4:13 to quote give attention to the public reading must mean the reading of scripture text in corporate worship as is reflected in many modern translations and I think agreed typically in commentaries but we should note that the reading of scripture texts as a component in corporate worship marked off Jewish and Christian practice in the ancient Roman world that's not a feature of religious groups and gatherings outside of either Jewish or early Christian circles moreover we should also take account of the impressive production of new texts in early Christianity some of which acquired also a status as Scripture by common scholarly judgment the earliest extant Christian writings are the several undisputed letters of the Apostle Paul which are typically dated as composed somewhere between roughly 50 to 65 ad now Paul wrote these letters with the expectation that they should be read out to the various individual churches gathered together as a congregation the various churches to which they were sent as well from an early point Paul's letters were circulated than beyond their original recipients which may well have involved making copies of them as seems to be reflected for example in Colossians 4:16 indeed where he talks about exchange the letter from colossi and laud Asiya so on indeed the earliest reference to Christian texts as scriptures is in 2nd Peter 3:15 and 16 where Paul's letters are so designated and there the author is arguing with a bunch of Blockheads which means people who disagreed with him and and he he refers to them as twisting the letters of Paul as they do the other scriptures so pulse letters seem to be linked in with scriptures interesting isn't it he considers their interpretation of Paul's letters though that is his interpretation of Paul's letters and their interpretation of Paul's letters are in conflict but they both agree that Paul's letters are Scripture so the the view of Paul's letters and scriptures not confined to one kind of Christianity but seems to have been shared by various groups that couldn't agree with each other otherwise moreover we should as I say take account of the production of new texts Paul's letters the earliest ones to achieve the status of Scripture it is further interesting that the passage refers to a collection of Paul's letters another interesting activity as they do you know they twist all of Paul's letters you refers to all of it so he thinks he knows all the false letters so he has a letter collection of some sort is it four is it seven is at thirteen we don't know but whatever it is he thinks he has a complete collection by the time of second Peter somewhere 70 to 120 AD by the mid 2nd century AD the four familiar New Testament Gospels likewise appears to have been read in corporate worship in at least some Christian circles perhaps most this seems to me to be reflected in Justin martyrs off site off cited references to the liturgical reading of what he calls the memoirs of the Apostles in the first apology and two Gospels plural interesting you notes Gospels plural written both might he says both by apostles and by those who followed them so you seem to have a plural Gospels by apostles and a plurality of Gospels by those who followed them of course Matthew Mark Luke and John would serve nicely indeed by the early third century the majority of the writings that make up the New Testament were being copied and read as Scripture in various Christian circles but we know also that there were many other early Christian texts composed in the first three centuries for example the author of the Gospel of Luke in the opening words refers to many previous accounts quote of the events that have been fulfilled among us which he says I've insulted no longer extant perhaps beyond as most of us assume the Gospel of Mark the 27 texts that make up the New Testament all of them composed at various points between roughly 50 and 120 AD further illustrate something of the textual productivity of early Christian circles and if we track further down through the mid 3rd century or so we know of at least 200 texts composed by Christians these include various other Gospels theological tractates defenses of Christianity commentaries on biblical books hymn collections and texts of other literary genres some of these texts survive only partially or in citations or simply in references to them and it is likely that there were still other texts that are now totally unknown to us in short early Christianity was impressively prolific in the composition of texts I would say exceptionally so among all religious groups of the period in addition there were also a remarkable amount of effort and resources put into the copying and distribution of texts in early Christian circles this process began early note Paul's referee calls epistle is addressed to the churches of Galatia likely indicating churches in several Galatian cities so either multiple copies had to be sent by paul or else he intended that his letter be sent to one church and then copied and sent on to subsequent churches in the circle likewise the prophet john sent the book of revelation as an epistle addressed to 7 named churches in the Roman province of Asia and so it would have had to be copied or sent around in the same way so some arrangement had to be made to ensure that each of the seven churches had a copy recall also that reference in second Peter 3 to all of Paul's letters suggesting some kind of collection of them which mean they had to be copied in order to be collected and these epistles circulating amongst Christians who differed as I said over how to interpret them in his letter to the Philippians the second century teacher Polycarp expresses his intention to send with it quote the letters of Ignatius of Antioch that were sent to us by him together with any others that we have in our possession this Ignatius wrote to several churches along his captive Trek to Rome for martyrdom in the early 2nd century so it appears that these letters that he sent to the individual churches were interned copied and then gathered together into a collection of in Ignatius letters which Polycarp had at his hand and which he could then copy and sent to the Philippian church in another early Christian text the Shepherd of hermas another 2nd century text the Roman Christian author Hermus claims that he made a copy of a small book that he saw in a vision which was to be read out to the church in Rome he then relates another vision in which he is directed to make two copies of this book one copy was for clement a figure in the roman church who was then to make copies and send copies of the book out to other churches in various cities the other copy he made two copies one for clement to copy and the other copy was made for a woman named drop-d a woman leader in the church and yes there were women leaders in the early church so if you want to replicate the early church you got to have women in leadership or you're a defective Church this was made for grotty a woman leader in the Roman Church who was to employ it quote to instruct the widows and orphans in the church to judge by extant Christian manuscripts by the way the Shepherd of hermas enjoyed wide circulation and popularity it is the third most frequently attested Christian texts in extant manuscripts from the first three centuries you have John Matthew and the Shepherd of hermas those are the three top ones got one copy of Mark to appreciate what was involved in the distribution of Christian text translocate we must remember that there was no public postal system and so all written communications letters or texts had to be conveyed by direct special arrangements this meant either payments for example to Overland traders or ship captains for conveying the text or sending them by the a trusted courier either way the circulation of text required the outlay of financial resources and if a Christian courier was engaged this involved an obvious personal commitment of time and effort in this light quote quoting one of my teachers from earlier years the extensive and lively interactions between various Christian groups in various parts of the Roman world that included the wide circulation of text is truly impressive for example we have actual cop manuscript copies of Irenaeus Bishop of Lyon in ancient France we have actual copies of Irenaeus against heresies written somewhere around 170 180 ad and works by Melito of Sardis at about the same time found in the Egyptian provincial town of Oxyrhynchus 120 miles south of Alexandria and these copies paleographic Lee dated to within perhaps a decade of thereafter their composition as well as various copies of New Testament writings Old Testament texts and still other writings the early Christian bookishness is exhibited also in two distinguishing physical and vegan and visual features of Christian books the first feature is the book form early Christians clearly adopted the Codex as their preferred book form especially for their scriptural text in a time when the book roll the scroll was overwhelmingly preferred in the wider culture I think I have some pictures here here you have a pie chart the blue is now this is this is copies extant copies of manuscripts from the second century and the blue is the the percentage of book rolls so you see it the book rolls comprise at least 75% of the total material from the second century the the percentage of Codex is the green and that amounts to about 5% of the extant manuscripts in the in the green there the the rest of it is sheets and fragments that is we can't tell if you confine yourself to just the material that can be find as either roles or codex's codex's amount roles amount to about 95 percent and and codex is about 5% of the total of extant manuscripts from the second century of all kinds early Christians preferred the codex however for their book form especially for the text that they regarded as Scripture indeed in the 2nd and 3rd centuries as I've shown here the book roll reigned supreme especially for literary texts whereas the codex had a much more limited use especially for so-called sub literary texts such as astronomical tables list of medical recipes and other workaday items indicative of this here you have an example of a book roll by the way to show us how to put together you take consecutive sheets of leather or papyrus and as you can see the hope you can see the seams running down where they're joined together you lay it out and then you put these tall narrow columns and you can make the scroll as large as you need it here's a famous st. Mark's Isaiah scroll at mate on leather you have a replica of it in the library which you can examine later tonight if you want here you have an example of a codex being used a pagan relief and this is a tax accounting where people are coming by to pay their taxes and so the tax bills are being recorded in a codex so you see what I mean by sort of sub literary uses of the codex it was not considered appropriate mainly for literary text here's a famous scene in which you have this famous couple from Herculaneum and it's very interesting you know they are quite you'll notice quite quite eager to show you that they are literate so the man is holding a roll and the woman is holding a little wax set of wax tablets sort of the predecessor of the codex to wax tablets that are held together with the thong and she has a stylus looking very pensively it's interesting isn't it both the man and the woman are literate and can both read and write and and by the way we think that they were sort of a couple who operated a bakery so they weren't high-class people they were sort of mercantile class people and yet both of them can read but they're quite important to say you I want you to know that I can read right so I got this is something prepared for two for remembering them by after their death by the way can you also see the gendering of literacy here the man is holding a rolled-up roll which is for literary purposes philosophical tractates things like that the woman has a workaday item on which she in which he writes shopping lists tasks for the servants things like that so literature is the man's is is seen as them as the male enclave and the woman is literate but her job is to be functionally literate in other ways and and so it's interesting for early Christians to have adopted the Codex is very interesting when in one sense it's actually associated more with sub literary or even feminine things and the early Christians prefer the Codex as their for their most highly prized text it's what I would call a bit of a countercultural move indicative of this among all manuscripts of literary text as I've shown going back a bit to the second century in the Louvin database of ancient books oops such as you see here and this is where I take it from if you buy the Louvin le you ve enliven database of ancient books a fascinating site you can go there and search for all of their manuscripts individually and it will prepare these pie charts for you and graphic Kraft charts for you century by century all sorts of things here you see about 5% of the total for the second century are codex's and among third century manuscripts about 15% of the total are codex's but among Christian literary manuscripts of the same period at least 75% are codexes and if we confine our attention to those writings that Christians treated as Scripture that is Old Testament writings on those that became part of the New Testament about 95 percent of Christian copies from the 2nd and 3rd century are codexes Christians of the time cannot have been ignorant that they were differing in this here you see how a codex is put together you take fun on the left you have folded sheets of writing material you fold them and then you stitch them down in the middle and you have a simple codex of 5 10 15 20 50 even even 100 pages or more and then the other on the right you see you take groups of three or four or five folded sheets stitch them together and then stack them on top of one another and stitch them together and you have a book made up of various what we call choirs and of course this is the way we construct proper books to this day Christians cannot have been ignorant that they were differing in their preference from the wider culture their preference for the Codex must I think have been deliberate moreover that preference is clear in our earliest evidence of Christian books and so likely must have been must have commenced by the early 2nd century and perhaps even earlier scholars have proposed various reasons for this preference some urging some supposedly practical advantage but all such notions seem to me counterintuitive are we to presume that among all the peoples of that time only Christians perceive the supposedly obvious superiority of the Codex I revere my Christian ancestors but that somehow seems a bit counterintuitive everybody else was stupid about the issue and only Christians bright enough to see the obvious superiority of the Codex it's obvious only because we are used to a leaf book and a roll is unfamiliar to us but for people who are familiar with the role as the ancients were they thought it was obviously superior for literary text the respected I'm not alone in that opinion for what it's worth the respected papper ologist william johnson has rightly referred to the claims that christians preferred the codex for this or that supposed practical advantage as in his word all red herrings instead whatever may have been the original impetus it seems much more cogent that early Christians preferred the Codex as a deliberately distinctive move setting their books apart particularly their scripture books in physical form this commitment to the Codex then required Christians to experiment with various ways of constructing them because people didn't tend to use the codex for literary text so if you're going to use it for such an ambitious purpose you're actually taking a fairly instrument and making it serve a much grander purpose it's like taking a Volkswagen Beetle and trying to make a stretch limo out of it or a heavy goods vehicle out of it it required Christians to experiment with various means of constructing codices adequate for such large bodies of text such as a 4-fold Gospels or the pauline letter collections indeed to judge by the extant manuscripts of the late 2nd and 3rd century and here's by the way a page of one of these codex's so-called P 75 which is remnants of the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of John commonly dated to the early 3rd century one leaf of it in need to judge by the extant manuscripts of the late 2nd and 3rd centuries Christians appear to have been at the leading edge of such experimentation finally settling on the use of multiple gatherings they say sort of taking 3 4 5 sheets which form a gathering or stitching it together and making the codex of multiple gatherings or choirs ultimately settling on that but they used actually at least three different methods of codex construction which time prevents me from talking about this moment but if you want to buy a book I would perhaps to say more about it this of course this is of course what became the standard method as a set of constructing books acquire still used in our modern leaf book the other key physical or visual feature of early Christian books are the copyist devices referred to by scholars today as the nomina sacra latin term which means basically sacred names these are unique abbreviated forms of key terms here you have the four greek words down the left side the Greek words for Jesus Christ God and Lord and then off to the right you have typical abbreviated or nomina sacra forms it involved using a comprar compacted form typically first letter last letter of the word with this puzzling hist horizontal stroke written over the abbreviation unique abbreviated forms of key words and early Christian discourse with this distinctive horizontal stroke written over the abbreviation the word most commonly given this treatment are the ones displayed here and they're probably the earliest word so treated the Greek words for God they us lord kurios Christ Christos and the name Jesus you Seuss that key terms designating God and Jesus are both given the same treatment is an interesting expression of what I refer to as the dyadic shape of early Christian devotional belief and practice Jesus included with God in a comparable manner but my point here is that in the eyes of most scholars who have considered the matter it's not universally agreed but in scholarship nothing is but most of the scholars who have considered the matter the gnomon Oh sacré collectively represent expressions of early Christian piety and in particular visual expressions of early Christian piety early Christianity appropriated the Codex as its preferred book form and developed it but it appears that the nomina soccer comprised an early Christian innovation a distinctive Christian copyist practice that among other things marked Christian texts visually certainly among pepper ologists if they find the mere fragment of a text that they cannot identify but if it's got nomina sacra forms on it unquestionably they treat it as whatever we don't know what it is well whatever it is it's a Christian text it's got an ominous sacra here's by the way an example of another a papyrus a copy of the Gospel of John from the 3rd century p66 and what you have here I've circled nomina sacra forms up at the top I how is your reading this up the top I think that's Yoda Sigma the abbreviation for Jesus and down in the red one in the lower right hand corner as well is you Seuss and then the purple one there purple signal is around an abbreviated form of kurios and then down below that the yellow one is an abbreviated form of the word pneuma to you the word for spirit works referring to the Holy Spirit there finally early Christianity was marked by a distinctive emphasis on proper behavior we may think today that religion consists of a lot of do's and don'ts and some people say I don't like religion cause it's all about do's and don'ts that's another modern notion inappropriate in the Roman world for the worship of the gods primarily involves sacrifice and associated Celtic activities and had only a limited impact on your daily life your ethics if you wanted to consider how to live your life you turn to philosophy in the Roman world not religion but again reflecting its Jewish origins early Christianity typically promoted a particular way of life with strong behavioral requirements in the book I Ellis trait this in several matters one of these is the Roman practice of exposing or discarding unwanted infants after birth this was legal and appears to have been practiced widely without serious qualms or hesitation as illustrated by an oft noted letter from a certain Hilarion to his wife Alice written in about 1 BC after greeting his wife and other relatives Hilarion asked her to quote take care of the little one their child apparently and promises to send money as soon as he is paid Alice is expecting it appears another child and Hilarion then instructs her if it is a boy let it be if it is a girl cast it out but then after what will seem this callous order he expresses his unaltered affection for her how can I forget you he writes I beg you then not to be anxious now Hilarion was obviously not a monster he was capable of human feelings that's my point it wasn't monsters who threw away their kids in the Roman world it was everyday nice caring related people the practice of discarding infants was so widespread and accepted but by people that people capable of tender feelings felt little reluctance about it along with Judaism however early Christianity utterly rejected the practice as well early Christianity rejected another widespread practice pederasty sex with small children and by the way we have indications of sex with children as young as two and three years of age this practice too is common even cultivated especially amongst the cultured classes most often this abuse involved a course slave children both male and female the early Christian condemnation of the practice by the way is exhibited distinctively in what appears to be the distinctive Christian terms used to designate it instead of the Greek words pet or Ostia which means child love or boy love or pederasty Oh to love or have sex with boys or children and the person does it as a pet or a Stace a boy lover or child lover instead of these terms early Christians invented the term pedo Thoreau a penta photo which means to abuse or corrupt children and paid off for us instead of pederasty they referred to the person did this as a pedophile translated roughly one who sexually abuses children more generally early Christianity forbade sexual relations outside of marriage of course adultery sex with a married woman was prohibited by everybody was against the law frowned upon in the wider culture but in addition Christian teaching condemned practices commonly accepted in the Roman world including particularly sex with prostitutes or courtesans and those who were typically slaves often provided for sexual pleasures at banquets for males in doing so early Christianity essentially laid upon male adherence the same sort of standards of sexual behavior widely expected in the join the common culture of virtuous wives the Christian distinctive was to erase the double standard requiring males to practice the same chastity as everybody expected proper women to men and married women to practice for early Christianity what was good for the goose was good for the gander also time prevents me from taking this discussion further here one final observation however there are some similarities often noted between early Christian behavioral requirements and the teachings of some Roman era philosophical figures such as Missoni Rufus true if we only consider the content of the teachings but the off cited stoic philosophers in fact had little effect on the morals and behavior of any beyond the small circle of their dedicated students so we're like becoming a graduate student yes spent two or three years to learn how to bend your mind to live that way early Christianity however laid these strict same strict behavior requirements upon all of its adherents and from the point of baptism onward in the matter of behavioral teaching when early when early Christianity is assessed again it seems to me it is a very distinctive social project early Christianity so to speak in the words of those great philosophers of the 60s and 70s the Doobie Brothers early Christianity took it to the street the differences between early Christianity and its Roman era setting are such that they're respected ancient historian Edwin judge a friend and a great guy in Macquarie University in Sydney Australia insisted to me firmly in writing that it is misleading to refer to early Christianity as a religion when I sent him some early chapters he wrote back you must not call early Christianity our religion it doesn't fit any of the criteria of religion in the Roman world for judge it would it would be more accurate to say the early Christianity was a philosophy now I take his point in at least its first forms early Christianity had no temples no shrines no altars no sacrifices no images or priesthood those are the basic requirements of religion in the wrong world Christianity no no I would prefer myself our to say that early Christianity was a distinctive kind of religion a distinctive kind of religious movement but whatever your choice of words it was distinctive in the eyes of critics it was superstition unacceptable religion bizarre even repellent and sufficiently dangerous to justify strenuous efforts occasionally to falsify it and eventually attempts to destroy it by state pogrom but early Christianity survived and to be sure also adapted and evolved for better or for worse more to the point here a number of features that made early Christianity distinctive in the Roman Empire I repeat have become for us cultural commonplace early Christianity helped to destroy one world and created another

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Keywords: Lecture - Larry Hurtado - Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World, Lecture (only) - Larry Hurtado - Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World, fleetwd1, the Lanier Theological Library, Larry Hurtado, Lanier Library Lecture Series, Mark Lanier, Lecture (only), Lecture

Id: c-prVu7B9PE

Length: 58min 51sec (3531 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 16 2016