II THE RISE OF FREELANCE RELIGIOUS EXPERTS IN THE EARLY EMPIRE

Before turning our attention to the evidence for Roman actions against Christians some definitions are in order. First and foremost, by ‘freelance expert’ I intend to capture any self-authorized purveyor of specialized religious skills, teachings, and related services who drew upon such abilities in pursuit of status, prestige, and even more transparent forms of profit. Unlike a civic priest, whose religious authority was granted on account of factors like social status and institutional affiliation, freelance experts operated outside existing institutions and had to earn their recognition and legitimacy, often through demonstrations of skill or learning.Footnote ¹⁰ While these criteria also encompass many specialists in philosophy, medicine, law, and rhetoric, the focus of the following discussion is experts in religion, that is, ones who directly enlisted gods and similar beings (daimones, divine pneuma, spirits of the dead, etc.) in their practices.Footnote ¹¹ I also include within this category astrologers, who typically held divine understandings of celestial bodies and their relevance to human affairs.

Of course, the boundaries between these putative areas or disciplines were often porous, and all the more so since many experts employed a range of skills that span multiple categories of practice; indeed, there seem to have been clear competitive advantages to wielding more than one form of expertise.Footnote ¹² While distinctions in the content of specialized offerings are not unimportant, they are secondary to some of the deeper field dynamics that all freelance experts negotiated: the challenges of constructing one's own authority and legitimacy, competition, the problematic connotations of interest, and opportunities for niche forms of prestige (e.g. writing and intellectual demonstrations, the production and interpretation of esoteric writings). I thus find it productive to theorize all specialized offerings as products of a common class of religious activity, one that necessarily cuts across categories like magic, astrology, mystery cults, philosophy, Judaism, and Christianity.

Recent scholarly interest in particular kinds of religious experts has yielded rich studies of their impact on the changing religious landscape of the Roman Empire.Footnote ¹³ Altogether the evidence for their activities suggests that from the early decades of the imperial period they grew increasingly influential, more diverse with respect to the skills or methods in which they claimed expertise, and more assorted in the ethnic coding of their wisdom and practices.Footnote ¹⁴ In keeping with other effects of imperial expansion — new networks of trade and travel, improved mobility, and increasingly heterogeneous urban populations, among other factors — it is unsurprising that many participants in this class of activity were foreigners who capitalized on interest in offerings perceived to be novel or exotic among Roman audiences.Footnote ¹⁵

The same period witnessed an escalation in both the frequency and severity of efforts intended to counteract specialist influence, particularly throughout the first century c.e.Footnote ¹⁶ Although experts in religious knowledge and services appear often, maybe even most often, in our sources for these punishments, equivalent actions were taken against comparable and similarly self-authorized actors, especially philosophers. The measures themselves might take the form of an expulsion, a proscription of certain practices, or the confiscation of certain objects or materials. They might issue from an individual magistrate, the senate, or the emperor. Some targeted specific kinds of experts, but the same or similar measures might also encompass their followers or clientele, as well as certain practices or artifacts with which they were commonly associated.Footnote ¹⁷

In an article on expulsions of astrologers, Pauline Ripat argues persuasively against reading these legislative incidents as plain indicators of Roman attitudes toward entire disciplines or undifferentiated groups. Among other reasons, Ripat notes that individual measures often applied to more than one type of specialist (e.g. magi and astrologers) and likely targeted select populations of actors within larger categories of expertise (i.e. certain kinds of astrologers, but not, say, Thrasyllus or Balbillus, who would have been spared on account of their pedigrees or the status of their patrons).Footnote ¹⁸ Moreover, while some experts might be exempt from suspicions that attended the wider class, others were not only vulnerable but even solicited stricture to their own benefit.Footnote ¹⁹ Even in cases where the language of a piece of legislation is more exact, given the robustness of many specialized offerings there is reason to suspect that its scope was broader in intent than the wording would suggest; since many experts had the capacity to innovate exponentially through new combinations of skills, intellectual influences, and ethnic frames of reference, they and their offerings evaded neat classification.Footnote ²⁰ As Ripat aptly remarks of their protean nature, for Roman magistrates and others tasked with enforcing legislation, getting a handle on the specialist phenomenon must have been ‘equivalent to an attempt to scoop water from a bucket with a slotted spoon’.Footnote ²¹ This raises the possibility that concerns about freelance expertise might be inferred in certain cases where they are not stated explicitly, namely, in episodes that involve practices, social formations, and instrumentum deeply resonant of specialist activities.

By way of illustration, Tacitus recounts an incident during the reign of Tiberius in which four thousand freed practitioners of ea superstitio, here certain Egyptian and Judean forms of religion, were expelled from Rome.Footnote ²² Suetonius reports that the emperor abolished externas caeremonias, among which were Egyptian and Judaic ritus, and adds that mathematici were expelled at the same time, although he pardoned any who promised to desist from the art.Footnote ²³ In the same version of the story, Tiberius then compelled people gripped by ea superstitione to publicly destroy religious garments and instrumentum, the latter of which might include anything from vessels or images to writings. Josephus, too, recounts what seems to be the same incident, but in his version Tiberius was prompted to act after learning of deceptions perpetrated by the priests of a temple to Isis, who facilitated the seduction of one aristocratic woman, and by a disreputable Judean and his accomplices, who posed as experts in Mosaic wisdom in order to steal from another.Footnote ²⁴

The differing accounts of this episode reveal important points of overlap between freelance and/or exotic experts (Egyptian priests, Judean teachers, astrologers), groups or institutions that they might establish (private temples, schools of instruction, regular clienteles), and religious services in which they typically claimed expertise (divination, wisdom instruction or textual interpretation, initiation into divine mysteries). Although the relationship between some of these details and concerns about freelance expertise is circumstantial, comparable circumstances arise in other accounts of Roman religious legislation. When Livy chronicles the Bacchanalia controversy, which he initially traces to an itinerant Greek sacrificer and seer (sacrificulus et vates), he concludes with a consular speech in which the audience is reminded of how often the magistrates have acted to forbid the introduction of foreign sacra, to exclude sacrificers and seers from the Forum, the Circus, and the city, to seek out and burn prophetic books, and to abolish every manner of sacrificing except for the one performed according to Roman custom.Footnote ²⁵ While many scholars have noted parallels between the harsh suppression of Bacchic cult and Roman prosecutions of Christians, here too, each item of the suite of religious legislation can be linked, either directly or indirectly, with specialist activity.Footnote ²⁶ Although Livy does not reiterate the culpability of figures akin to the graecus for each of the efforts he lists, it may be more revealing that he does not need to; the account in its entirety impresses upon readers that itinerant experts were obvious epicentres for such concerns.

Livy is hardly exaggerating the frequency with which Roman authorities attempted to get a handle on the expanding influence of freelance experts by proscribing certain forms of foreign religion, by expelling certain kinds of specialists, and by confiscating prophetic texts. Such measures grew increasingly common and severe over the course of his lifetime, with expulsions alone occurring with greatest concentration from 33 b.c.e. to 93 c.e.Footnote ²⁷ On separate occasions, Augustus excluded private forms of Egyptian religion from the city's pomerium, limited the subjects about which manteis could prophesy, confiscated writings attributed to the Sibyl and other writers of little repute, and made illegal the private possession of such prophecies.Footnote ²⁸ Under Tiberius, between 16 and 19 c.e. alone, there are at least seven separate references to measures aimed at suppressing the activities of magi, goētes, venenarii, malefici, haruspices, mathematici, Chaldaei, harioli, diviners of all varieties, and certain practitioners of Egyptian and Judean religion, as well as the circulation of pseudepigraphic oracula sibyllina and other kinds of fatidici libri. Footnote ²⁹ The fervour of his efforts was not lost on later historians, who note that Tiberius executed an unprecedented number of venenarii and malefici. Ulpian claims further that nearly every emperor after him renewed legislation against mathematici, Chaldaei, harioli, and all others engaged in similar pursuits.Footnote ³⁰

Not unlike the later Christian evidence, a number of sources for these measures provide insight into the range of concerns that motivated Roman officials to examine and punish certain figures and kinds of social activity. At the extreme end of the spectrum, freelance experts could pose a tremendous and very measurable threat to Roman governance. Astrologers and other diviners attracted negative attention on occasion by casting imperial horoscopes for contenders to the throne, or by prognosticating about the affairs of powerful people.Footnote ³¹ At the other end, however, specialists might be perceived as urban clutter, especially since many are said to have competed for clients in public areas. As a case in point, Marcus Agrippa expelled goētes and astrologers from Rome in 33 b.c.e. under the aegis of a city improvement initiative that also encompassed public works, sewer cleaning, and the provision of hygiene services.Footnote ³² The latter example serves as an important reminder that actions taken against freelance experts were not always a matter of seditious activity.Footnote ³³ Instead, the more general concern about them seems foremost a regulatory matter: they were at once commonplace and popular but difficult to isolate and contain.

Whatever problems religious experts might be seen to pose, the frequency of measures issued against them throughout the first century of the Empire points to a growing frustration about how to effectively manage their activities. Judging from the periodic reissue of earlier legislation, the challenge was only exacerbated by the apparent ineffectiveness of these efforts, even as the punishments they carried were steadily augmented.Footnote ³⁴ Adding to the challenge, punishments might also have the unintended consequence of enhancing the reputations of their recipients.Footnote ³⁵ Much as exile had become the mark of the true philosopher, attempts to suppress the influence of freelance experts could heighten their perceived authority, authenticity and efficacy.Footnote ³⁶ As Ripat notes, if fame was one's aspiration, then outright defiance of laws that proscribed certain activities made that fame easier to achieve.Footnote ³⁷

The threads binding these assorted legislative incidents are at least twofold. First, they targeted similarly self-authorized purveyors of specialized offerings, or else any artifacts and social formations that specialists might produce. Second, the same strategies were used consistently to suppress various permutations of this class of activity, whether Egyptian and Judaic rites, astrologers and other diviners, or privately held prophetic writings that were likely composed or interpreted by specialists.

Whereas these incidents have been viewed as symptomatic of Roman attitudes toward entire groups, communities, cults, or categories of practice, many seem to have originated from concerns about specialists and the innovative forms of religion that they were known to purvey.Footnote ³⁸ I suspect that the former conclusions have much to do with the recipients posited for these measures: categories, ethnic or religious communities, or systems, even when the sources cite individual practitioners as the perceived culprits. Some scholars do foreground experts as the intended targets, and also acknowledge parallels between the shared lots of specialists who were proscribed or expelled concomitantly. However, many of these comparisons tend to stop short of parsing the larger categories (magic, astrology, Judaism, Christianity) into which varieties of experts are sorted.Footnote ³⁹ The result is that the common denominator of freelance expertise underlying many of the incidents in question is difficult to discern and we are left with a mistaken impression of essential difference between participants in a common field of religious activity.

The relationship that I am proposing between the recipients of these punishments does not depend on the content of their religious programmes, on the exact services they offered, or on the ethnic idioms couching their practices. Rather, I am suggesting that from an administrative perspective freelance experts shared a number of characteristics stemming from the common field dynamics that they negotiated. These differences may seem slight but, as I hope to demonstrate, they have important implications for how we reconstruct the status of foreign religious phenomena in Rome in order to situate Christians within this landscape.

III PAUL'S PUNISHMENTS IN THE CONTEXT OF FREELANCE EXPERTISE

In the preceding section I proposed that legislative actions undertaken to get a handle on the burgeoning influence of freelance experts formed an unofficial pattern that escalated in frequency and severity through the first century of the Empire. It is roughly within this window, the so-called first phase of Christian persecution spanning the reigns of Nero to Decius, that we first encounter references to Christians, some of which appear in texts that chronicle similar penalties imposed upon non-Christian specialists and groups. Paired with the vivid trial proceedings that frame many martyr accounts, these sources have been of interest primarily to scholars wishing to reconstruct Roman motives for singling Christians out and punishing them.Footnote ⁴⁰ While the numerous studies of the topic have shed much light on matters like the legal foundation of charges against Christians, they have been admittedly less successful in formulating a plausible historical explanation for why Christians attracted such attention in the first place.Footnote ⁴¹

A recent publication by James Rives provides a succinct and highly accessible overview of the relevant scholarship, on account of which I will simply recapitulate his assessment that many of the solutions proposed have proven untenable either because they stake too much on particular charges, or because they posit pre-existent criminal laws for which we have no evidence.Footnote ⁴² None, moreover, has been able to account for the claim made by multiple early Christian writers that the primary charge brought against Christians was that of simply being Christian. The impasse is understandable: our sources are vague about the legal basis of prosecutions, the events seem to have been sporadic and ad hoc, and the explanations that Christians themselves provide are consciously rhetorical and rich in drama. G. E. M. de Ste Croix's theory of how trials of Christians unfolded — namely, as cognitiones extra ordinem that permitted the presiding official significant latitude to evaluate pending charges and to assign punishments — productively obviated the quest for their legal foundation. But, his dissenters object, if Roman actions against Christians were largely the product of individual initiative and discretion, how do we account for the overarching consistency in how they were treated? Rives' answer is apt: ‘On the one hand, the pattern may well have been less consistent than it appears; most of the extant evidence comes from the Christian side, where the concern was to commemorate martyrs rather than document the variety of official responses to charges of Christianity … On the other hand, the tendency of Roman officials to follow precedent or seek advice from the emperor whenever possible would easily account for such consistency as did exist.’Footnote ⁴³

And yet, from Rives' conservative answer another question arises: whence did such a precedent form? He rightly praises a growing tendency among scholars to emphasize the reactive nature of Roman responses to Christians, but even his measured remarks seem to presume or require a prior frame of reference into which those in power might first slot Christians before determining the appropriate course of action for dealing with them. On this matter, the preceding discussion furnishes a fresh set of possibilities. That is, the seemingly intractable problem of why Romans took action against Christians might be enriched by situating these incidents amidst earlier efforts to regulate or suppress specialists in novel, often foreign or ethnically coded, forms of religion. Rather than examining the prosecution of Christians as yet another instance of Roman anxieties about new or foreign religious groups, we might instead consider the possibility that concerns about Christian experts and followers stemmed from their perceived relationship to a class of religious activity with a problematic regulatory history.

Although they rarely enter into discussions of martyrdom, the undisputed Pauline epistles furnish the richest, if least utilized, evidence for the circumstances underlying Christian punishment. Rather, Paul's repeated references to having endured imprisonment, expulsions, and beatings have been subordinated to the more historically dubious narrative of Acts of the Apostles.Footnote ⁴⁴ The oversight has obscured an important link between measures enacted against freelance experts and the incidents at the root of martyrdom, since the sort of punishments that Paul describes exhibit remarkable continuity with the incidents examined above.

Elsewhere I have argued that indications of Paul's participation in the field of freelance expertise are woven throughout his epistles.Footnote ⁴⁵ Like other religious specialists of his time, he offers a comprehensive religious programme that is authorized by revelation and the receipt of divine mysteries, and whose contents are elaborated by prophecies, innovative retellings of Judean myth, and philosophy. Indeed, paralleling a strategy that Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston have posited of Orphic bricoleurs, who drew on and creatively combined elements from Greek myth, Paul's myth-making is tailored to initiation into the mysteries of Christ through baptism, during which initiates received God's own pneuma in order to be spared from a human condition and eschatology of his own design.Footnote ⁴⁶ Spatial limitations, however, narrow our focus to his description of occasions whereupon he received now familiar forms of public stricture: imprisonment, expulsion, and corporal punishment. His statements not only correlate with the legislative tactics examined above, but also corroborate the postulated dynamics that accompanied them.

The first point of overlap involves the rhetorical effect of having endured punishments. An examination of his assorted appeals suggests that Paul proffers suffering both as proof of his pure motives for spreading his gospel and to distinguish himself from religious experts who falsely claim authority about Christ. These aims are evident in 2 Corinthians 11, where he asks of would-be rivals: ‘Are they ministers of Christ? [I am] a better one: with far greater labours, far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often near death. Five times I have received from the Judeans the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning.’ Likewise, Paul alleges to live in a constant state of danger from his own people (Judeans), from Gentiles, in cities, and from ‘false brothers’ (ψευδαδέλϕοι).Footnote ⁴⁷ Here and elsewhere, Paul invokes hardships that he has endured as an apostle in defence of own legitimacy, over and against that of others engaging in similar activities whose teachings and practices nevertheless differ from his own. John Fitzgerald has highlighted notable continuities between Paul's hardship catalogues (peristaseis) and those of first-century philosophers like Epictetus and Seneca, who invoke equally adverse circumstances. According to Epictetus, the sage ‘suffers no harm even though he is soundly flogged, or imprisoned, or beheaded, but bears all of this with personal profit’.Footnote ⁴⁸ As to the intended effect of enumerating hardships, Fitzgerald argues that adversity occasions the exhibition of virtue because it tests and reveals the recipient's true character. Endurance of hardship is thus a mark of virtue, and also of one's authenticity, sincerity, and disinterest.Footnote ⁴⁹

Beyond basic similarities in how Paul and certain philosophers used peristasis catalogues, there is also overlap in the nature of the hardships themselves: corporal punishments, imprisonment, exile, and even the threat of death. More than once Paul mentions running afoul of local magistrates, for instance, when he recalls how the governor of Damascus attempted to seize him, and elsewhere, when he claims to have been driven out of Judea.Footnote ⁵⁰ In these examples, and, for that matter, in comparable ones from Musonius Rufus and Epictetus, the precise forms and circumstances of alleged hardships match Roman tactics for dealing with freelance experts on other occasions.Footnote ⁵¹ This is fitting, since earlier I proposed that many philosophers occupied one subset of the wider class of activity that also contained religious experts. The same explanation also accounts for why Paul shares many characteristics with philosophers, even if he enlisted philosophical doctrines, discourses, and techniques of self-mastery in the context of religious activities, in my sense.Footnote ⁵²

So too, does Paul seem aware of the generative potential of punishment, especially in his letter to the Philippians, which he writes during a period of incarceration (possibly even at Rome). Here he reports that imprisonment has actually furthered his agenda since the entire imperial guard knows that he suffers for Christ. His notoriety has also spawned imitators who proclaim Christ from envy, rivalry, and selfish ambition.Footnote ⁵³ About the latter, Paul is unconcerned since it matters not whether one's motives are false or true so long as Christ is proclaimed in every way. As I noted earlier, restrictive legislation and expulsions often carried the dual advantages of confirming the sincerity and truth of one's teachings, and of burnishing the reputations of the persons penalized. As in the case of an astrologer mentioned by Juvenal, whose services are all the more desired for his visible proof of incarceration, a handcuff on his wrist, Paul's general embrace of suffering — his own, that of Jesus, that of the assembly in Jerusalem, and even that of his audiences — seems to have heightened the intrigue surrounding his religious offerings.Footnote ⁵⁴

The observation that Paul's particular hardships match punishments enforced for other varieties of freelance experts gains strength from additional considerations. For instance, the collection that Paul solicits for certain poor people (πτωχοί) among the holy ones living in Jerusalem has parallels with economic practices that were strongly, and problematically, associated with freelance expertise. Several comparanda arise within the window of this study. Cicero insists that no one may have a collection (stipem) except the followers of the Idaean Mother, and they only on the permitted days. Elsewhere he writes that the Romans have ‘abolished collections, except the one for the Idaean Mother, because collections fill the city with superstitiones and deplete households'.Footnote ⁵⁵ Valerius Maximus relates an anecdote in which a proscribed aedile escaped Rome undetected after donning the Isiac habit and travelling through the city streets under the pretence of taking a collection, while Juvenal laments the wastefulness of wives who, left to their own devices, are all too eager to squander their husbands' earnings on alms for the roving priests of foreign gods.Footnote ⁵⁶

These examples suggest both that collections undertaken on behalf of gods, or in exchange for religious expertise, were included in the broader set of practices circumscribed by Roman magistrates, and also that Paul's basic economic practices are consistent with those of other experts, even if the justifications for collections were idiosyncratic. For an even closer analogy we might recall Josephus' story of the reprobate Judean and his three accomplices who professed expertise in the wisdom of the laws of Moses in order to steal from an aristocratic woman interested in Judaica by getting her to send donations to the Jerusalem Temple.Footnote ⁵⁷ One wonders whether our differing impressions of the two Jerusalem collections, that one is charity, the other extortion, are merely a matter of perspective: Paul's self-representation versus Josephus' normative judgement of itinerant experts in Judean religion. Notably, when Paul denounces a fictive Judean teacher of Gentiles, he uses the same stock charges that Josephus levies against the Judean deceivers at Rome: theft, improper relations with married women, despoiling temples, and sullying God's reputation among non-Judeans through his actions.Footnote ⁵⁸

Another consideration involves Paul's instructions to his groups to abstain from suspicious activity of the sort for which Roman authorities penalized freelance experts and their participants on other occasions. First Thessalonians and Romans both contain lengthy asides in which the apostle urges people not to reject human authority, to remain subject to governing authorities, to live quietly and mind their own affairs, to continue working, and even to pay their taxes. Being privy to the wider context of Roman efforts to legislate against these actors reframes how we understand some of Paul's instructions for those in Christ.Footnote ⁵⁹ Insofar as expulsions and proscriptions were issued in response to perceived complicity in socially disruptive behaviour, Paul's affirmations of civic responsibilities seem to guard against obvious consequences of participating in a class of religious activity that drew such attention.

Again, Paul's admissions of imprisonment, punishment and expulsion are only one of several qualities that justify treating him as a participant in that class. Nevertheless, the epistles are largely absent from discussions of early evidence for the persecution of Christians, which begin from independent witnesses like Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny and Trajan, and to a certain extent material from Acts. Yet the Pauline epistles furnish a link between later Roman punishments of Christians and the earlier pattern of legal measures exacted against a more variegated cast of specialists. Reframed in this way, Paul's letters become a rare form of evidence not only for the general phenomenon of freelance expertise, but also for how one such expert might strategically reconcile punishments with his particular set of religious claims.

IV EVIDENCE OF OTHER EARLY ACTIONS AGAINST CHRISTIANS

With the Pauline evidence to demonstrate continuity between Roman responses to freelance experts generally speaking and to Christian experts specifically, it remains to be shown how other early sources for the punishment of Christians square with the pattern of legislation that I have outlined. Outside the New Testament, Christians first appear in Tacitus' account of the Great Fire of 64 c.e., written sometime in the first quarter of the second century. According to Tacitus, a display of civic religious responses to the disaster could not dispel suspicion that Nero was behind it.Footnote ⁶⁰ To counter the rumour he blamed Christians, a category of people who were already associated with immoral activities. Tacitus explains that this pernicious superstitio had been checked momentarily when its instigator and namesake was sentenced by Pontius Pilate. It soon broke out again, not only in Judea but also in Rome, where all shameful things in the world converge and are celebrated.Footnote ⁶¹ Several Christians were arrested, investigated, and convicted on account of their disclosures, less for the crime of arson than for hatred of humankind. Some were covered with animal skins and torn to death by dogs, others set ablaze as torches.Footnote ⁶²

As many scholars have pointed out, Tacitus' use of the term Christian is somewhat anachronistic for the Neronian period, a consideration that does not preclude the possibility that they were implicated in Nero's response to the fire since Paul attests to some degree of familiarity at Rome with teachings and practices involving Christ around that time.Footnote ⁶³ If we are to believe his statements about imprisonment and other punishments suffered on account of his gospel, then we also know of at least one mid-first-century authority on Christ who was penalized for his activities.Footnote ⁶⁴ In other words, regardless of whether Tacitus dramatizes the plight of the Christians at Nero's expense, or whether the story is a later Christian interpolation, it would not be implausible for apostles and followers of Christ to crop up in that scenario for their affinity with a wider class of religious actors regularly called into question for such reasons.

Suetonius is terser in his account, saying only that Nero severely punished many abuses during his reign, including the activities of Christians, a class of people prone to a new and nefarious superstitio. Footnote ⁶⁵ As part of the same sweep Nero curtailed conspicuous consumption, revoked the customary immunity of charioteers, who had earned a reputation for cheating and robbing, and banished actors and their partisans. Suetonius offers no commentary on how Christians were punished, nor does he explicitly connect any of these measures to the Great Fire. Although they are the only recipients who are linked with religious activity, the fact that Christians were co-implicated with belligerent charioteers and actors belies a more general concern about the propensity of these groups for public disturbance.

Aside from certain hyperbolic details, which if original are à propos of the despot who issued them, these punishments, too, accord with measures undertaken by Roman authorities on other occasions to manage the activities of freelance experts. As he glosses the identity of Christians for his readers, Tacitus captures a dynamic we have now observed severally: a Roman magistrate attempts to quell a form of religious activity by punishing its instigator, with the unintended result that it redounds and spreads, requiring renewed and even harsher suppressive measures. Pliny experiences this frustrating predicament firsthand. After interrogating people accused of being Christians once, twice, and then a third time with the threat of capital punishment, it is with options exhausted that he orders the execution of those unwilling to recant.Footnote ⁶⁶ Extreme though his actions may seem, they are consistent with the opportunities extended to practitioners of problematic religious practices on other occasions, for instance, in Suetonius' recollection of astrologers who escaped expulsion by promising to give up their craft.Footnote ⁶⁷

Although Pliny's letter to Trajan does not dwell on the culpability of specialists, it is important to keep in mind that at the time he wrote, some fifty years after Paul, Christian forms of religion might have evolved from entrepreneurial offerings to a kind of religious activity that more closely resembled voluntary associations.Footnote ⁶⁸ Nevertheless, Pliny's handling of Christians aligns in key areas with earlier legislation against specialists, particularly with respect to the kinds of social dynamics undergirding those episodes. Casting Christian practices as a contagion to be checked and cured, he cites the desertion of temples, an intermission in regular religious observances, and a flagging market for sacrificial animals as the impetus for his investigation.Footnote ⁶⁹ Although he makes special note of the defiant attitude (contumacia) of the accused, it would appear that his interest in Christians stems from their alleged impact on local social practices and institutions.

If we return to some of the non-Christian examples discussed above, further connections between Pliny's letter and the specialist phenomenon might be inferred. Consider, for instance, the rôle of informants, solicited and compensated by the Roman officials, who identified Bacchic worshippers that they might then be arrested, questioned, and punished.Footnote ⁷⁰ Pliny reports that accusations against Christians had multiplied, as is usually the case, merely because the matter was being scrutinized.Footnote ⁷¹ He questions the value of a publicly published libellus of undisclosed authorship, which Trajan deems inadmissible, echoing Nerva, who outlawed such informing on Judaic practices.Footnote ⁷² Paul also mentions the slanderous charges of informants when he mentions certain ‘false brothers’ brought in to spy on a private meeting of the apostles in Jerusalem.Footnote ⁷³

Like Paul himself, specialists might bridge multiple categories of expertise, with the result that the precise actors affected by an edict might only be clarified in practice by the testimony of aggrieved observers with a vested interest in informing on suspicious activity. Furthermore, enforcement was not always a feasible task and seems to have depended, at least in part, on the voluntary participation of the public. Speaking to the latter challenge, Suetonius notes that Vitellius grew hostile to astrologers after issuing an edict that banned them from the city, to which they responded by posting a placard assuring that he would no longer be alive on the specified date.Footnote ⁷⁴ What these examples suggest is that the actual specialists incriminated in a piece of legislation were not always self-evident, and might only come to light through accusation or self-incrimination.

While scholars often concede that Roman officials rarely took action against Christians on their own initiative, too little attention has been paid to clues of competition among rival experts and existing institutions that pervade Christian writings and could shed light on why, and by whom, Christians were brought to the attention of governing authorities.Footnote ⁷⁵ Such indications recur throughout the narrative of Acts, for instance, when Paul is dragged before local magistrates after he exorcises the prophetic daimōn from a female belly-talker (ἐγγαστρίμυθος) who had earned a great deal of money for her masters by foretelling the future. His accusers charge that he has thrown Philippi into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for Romans to accept or practise.Footnote ⁷⁶ Likewise, in Ephesus Paul has an altercation with a silversmith who fears that his business of casting sacred images of Artemis will decline because he teaches that gods made by human hands are not really gods.Footnote ⁷⁷

On the subject of Acts, it is worth noting that its author locates the apostles in the phenomenon of freelance expertise and even illustrates the consequences of engaging in this class of activity as they are regularly expelled from the cities they visit, examined by city officials, and imprisoned or otherwise punished. In Acts 18:2, Priscilla and Aquila are even introduced as exiles from Italy, who came to Corinth after Claudius had ordered all Judeans to leave Rome. At the same time, however, the author is careful to show that unlike other specialists with cameos in his story — Theudas, Bar-Jesus or Elymas, Simon Magus, Judean exorcists, Athenian philosophers, and practitioners of magical arts, who spontaneously burn their books upon learning about Christ — the apostles are legitimate purveyors of true teachings and real divine power; their ability to prevail in the face of opposition is precisely what distinguishes them from those other figures.

That competion was rife among freelance rivals is well attested by non-Christian and Christian sources alike, but it is often overlooked how many first- and second-century Christian writings cast non-Christian experts as opponents second only to ‘heretics’ and Judaizers. In addition to the cast of specialists in Acts, the Didache urges readers neither to practise divination, magic or sorcery, nor to use incantations or astrology or rites of purification, nor even to wish to see or hear these things.Footnote ⁷⁸ Justin denounces Simon Magus and Menander as false authorities on Christ, who used beguiling ‘magical’ arts to attract a great following at Rome in the time of Claudius.Footnote ⁷⁹ He also argues that an emperor who is persuaded by those who conjure the dead (νεκρομαντεῖαι), magoi and their assistants (πάρεδροι), dream-senders (ὀνειροπομποί), and philosophers should also be willing to entertain Christian beliefs.Footnote ⁸⁰ Justin admits that certain philosophers have, at times, deservedly received punishment without compromising more esteemed philosophers or the schools with which the culprits claimed affiliation.Footnote ⁸¹ Hence he proposes criteria for discerning ‘true’ Christians from those who might pose as such but who actually deserve the punishments being inflicted indiscriminately on anyone by that name.Footnote ⁸²

Adjusted for perspective, Christian sources can also be triangulated with the polemical accounts of writers who decry the toxic effects of freelance expertise. For instance, the episode motivating Justin's Second Apology, the arrest of a Christian named Ptolemy at the instigation of a man whose wife divorced him after receiving instruction in Christian teachings, bears an unmistakable similarity to Josephus' account of Egyptian and Judean religious experts who were similarly punished.Footnote ⁸³ After a period of imprisonment Ptolemy appeared before Rome's urban prefect and was executed, along with two additional men who questioned the sentence because Ptolemy had not been convicted of any crime, but was killed only for being a Christian.

Justin's narrative may differ in perspective from that of a writer like Josephus but it shares a number of structural affinities with accounts that we have seen: a specialist in novel religious practices or teachings influences a woman, whose husband reports him to a Roman authority on charges of adultery or theft. Although one might assume that the prefect of Justin's story, if reliable, punished Christians on account of their religious beliefs, I find it more plausible that he took ‘Christians’ to be akin to magi, Chaldaei, mathematici, Iudaei, diviners, initiators, and so on. I would even venture to suggest that the famous complaint of Christians garnering suspicion and being punished ‘for the name alone’ is less poignant when one considers that the fate of any other type of expert seems to have hung in the balance of being identified as a participant in a form of activity that was presently under investigation. In other words, a practitioner of astrology might fall under suspicion and incur penalty merely by virtue of having been labelled an ‘astrologer’.

From the other side of the looking-glass, then, early Christian writings offer further insight into the tactics and dynamics we have seen already with respect to Roman efforts to regulate the activities of freelance experts. In a rather striking admission, Tertullian admits that even though Christians pose no problem to Roman authorities, there are certain people who may truly complain of suffering losses on account of the religion of Christians: venenarii, magi, haruspices, harioli, mathematici. ‘To be unprofitable to such as these’, he qualifies, ‘is in itself profitable’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Inasmuch as all varieties of freelance experts rivalled one another for clients interested in novel or exotic wisdom traditions, rarified teachings, divinatory methods, and other religious practices, Tertullian's statement provides a tantalizing glimpse of Christian participation within a specific and more variegated class of specialists. And, in keeping with the evidence that we have considered above, it would be wholly unsurprising if such rivalries account for some of the negative attention that Christians seem to have drawn, at least in the first and second centuries. This is not to suggest that they were deserving of punishment, but to reiterate that from a Roman perspective they fell into a class of activity that had repeatedly provoked such responses. Likewise, most specialists were vulnerable to the sort of concerns that Christians, rightly or wrongly, might be seen to pose.Footnote ⁸⁵ In raising such alarms, Christians mirrored a then familiar precedent set by numerous freelance experts over the course of the preceding century.

V BEYOND CULTS AND COMMUNITIES

It has become something of a commonplace that with few exceptions the Romans usually allowed foreign peoples to cultivate their gods in a customary manner. Although they might occasionally take issue with certain cults or rites, it was only in the case of Christians that they saw fit to suppress an entire religion. To quote Rives again, ‘Roman authorities might forbid certain rituals such as human sacrifice or prohibit the activities of particular religious functionaries such as the Druids, but they otherwise allowed people to worship their traditional deities more or less as they pleased … The Roman repression of Christianity thus appears to constitute an anomaly in what we might call Roman religious policy, and scholars have long attempted to account for it.’Footnote ⁸⁶ On the contrary, I would suggest that many of the exceptions scholars have in mind when they note the Romans' general tolerance for foreign religion involved freelance experts and their followers, and that actions against Christians are best understood in this light.

Rather than view such occasions as revocations of permission to maintain native forms of religion for one reason or another, or as evidence of inconsistent attitudes toward particular disciplines, we might instead consider that such legislation had a more limited target, one that transects different ethnic populations and categories but was specific to none. In other words, what are perceived as minor inconsistencies in Roman attitudes toward the religion of Egyptians, Judeans, and Persians, or categories of practice such as philosophy and astrology, may have been a matter of freelance experts acting in those different capacities. Against this backdrop, Christians would not have been analogous to foreign populations with their traditional gods and observances, but to a more specific set of entrepreneurial religious actors. That is, theirs was a form of religion — really, many forms of religion — among other offerings propagated by freelance experts. Thus situated, Roman efforts to repress Christians are not anomalous but par for the course.

The prominent rôle of specialists in our Christian sources (not to mention in the composition of many of those sources) has been largely neglected owing, I suspect, to notions of sui generis ‘communities of believers’ that dominate explanations of the origins and spread of Christianity. As Stanley Stowers has noted, such narratives lack accounts of how Christian groups developed in terms of ordinary social processes because they proceed from the assumption, reinforced by later Christian myths of origin, that these communities both formed organically and were highly coherent in thought and practice.Footnote ⁸⁷ While a writer like Paul certainly laboured to produce circles of followers dedicated to his teachings and enlisted copious identity rhetoric in the service of this ambition, his ideal (and apparently unrealized) ‘community’ vision is simply that, an ideal, which he pursued through a number of tactics internal to his audiences. It is productive to study these tactics as evidence of how a freelance expert interested in forming groups might actually evoke and sustain them, but our task as scholars should be to translate such efforts and their resulting social formations into broader analytic terms.

Nevertheless, the scholarly habit of referring to Pauline and other early Christian forms of religion as ‘communities’ ultimately makes them incomparable with other first-century groups. Continuities between the wider specialist phenomenon and Christian forms of religion are more apparent, however, when the types of social formations imagined for early Christians are redescribed in terms that are consistent with the regular followings that formed around individuals who fit the mould of traditional experts with similar group-making interests.Footnote ⁸⁸ As we learn from sources like the Pauline epistles and the Didache, such groups might then continue to be served by other freelance experts, whether the latter were affiliated with an original founder or departed from his or her teachings and practices.

As I suggested earlier, the problems that attend treating Christians as an undifferentiated religious community, or a network of communities, are not entirely absent from other studies of Roman religious regulation. Many explanations for the legislative actions considered in the first part of this article also posit a single type of social formation (i.e. cults or communities) as their intended recipients, even when the sources point to individual experts who were not necessarily linked with a larger entity.Footnote ⁸⁹ As in the case of Christian punishments, the circumstances underlying these episodes are dismissed in favour of more symbolic explanations (e.g. concerns about Rome's religious purity or Roman identity). To be sure, there is ample fodder for these interpretations in the discourses that surround regulatory incidents. Many ancient authors who record them lament the contamination of foreign superstitio or otherwise pathologize the parties involved.Footnote ⁹⁰ However, the discursive justifications for these events are not plain indicators of what warranted them.Footnote ⁹¹ Although the commentaries of Roman authors undoubtedly capture certain sentiments about self-authorized expertise, it is less clear to what extent, if any, the magistrates who issued legislation were influenced by such opinions.

In this article I have argued that the selective fashion in which regulatory measures have been studied makes it difficult to see that many of the occasions on which Roman magistrates issued religious legislation involved freelance experts rather than aggregate entities. The approach that I have proposed seeks more specific impetus for these events while also adding a layer of complexity to studies that posit structural or symbolic factors as the Romans' primary motivation for taking action against particular religious experts and forms of religion. I have also theorized a relationship between the recipients of these measures that does not depend on their exact claims, methods, or affiliations — in other words, whether they were experts in Judean wisdom, authorities on Christ, or diviners of planetary movements — but on their participation in a common field of religious activity within the Empire's motley religious landscape.Footnote ⁹² Acknowledging the different kinds of religiosity comprising our existing scholarly categories allows for greater explanatory power than attributing legislative incidents to general, fluctuating anxieties about foreign peoples and their superstitiones, and may help to resolve apparent contradictions in the status of phenomena that were variously protected and restricted at Rome.Footnote ⁹³

The possibility that the plight of Christians is continuous with measures directed against assorted freelance experts invites, in turn, another conclusion, that it was from this particular class of religious activity that the earliest authorities on Christ arose, and within it that Christian forms of religion, in their full range of diversity, took shape. With Christians located within a wider class of activity, we are better positioned to investigate whether, and if so why, they became notable recipients of measures commonly employed to manage it. Lucian, for example, attributes their disregard for authority to the fact that ‘the poor wretches have convinced themselves … that they are going to be immortal and live for all time, in consequence of which they despise death and even willingly give themselves into custody, most of them’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Although we must exercise caution both in weighing Lucian's comment, and in assuming that such expectations were uniquely Christian, we might ask how afterlife-oriented forms of religion might embolden participants to court punishment, even death.Footnote ⁹⁵ Or, in view of the favourable stakes that punishments might entail, we might consider how these stakes would have risen as rival specialists actively solicited them.Footnote ⁹⁶

To bring the discussion full circle, as an example of how some freelance experts reconciled punishments with their proprietary religious claims and expectations, early Christian writings constitute a rare and invaluable body of evidence.Footnote ⁹⁷ For all of their drama and subjectivity, these texts are no less valuable as witnesses to the impact of Roman regulatory measures upon the broader class of activity from which they are excerpted. In the absence of comparable accounts from other recipients of this legislation, however, it is important to recognize the extent to which the perspectives of one set of affected actors skew our impression of its aim and scope.