Second-century Christianity, if such a thing exists even in multiple forms, is a concept that has been so repeatedly dissected and problematised that it is difficult to speak of it at all without a seemingly gratuitous use of inverted commas: ‘orthodoxy’, ‘heresy’, ‘gnostic’, ‘Christian’ and ‘apocryphal’ are all designations the meanings of which have been thoroughly contested. It was thus with considerable courage that the editors of the present volume sought to gather together a cohort of scholars at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge, in order to confer with one another on the essential themes of Christianity in a period in which every possible hair has been split and every historical commonplace has been tortuously called into question.
Several animating questions underwrite the project, the first of which is the context within which Christianity is understood. In ‘Empires, diasporas and the emergence of religions’ (25–38), G. Woolf carefully and deliberately argues that the emergence of Christianity should be placed in the context of immigration-promoting empires in which emergent religious groups were shaped in particular ways in urban centres and diaspora contexts. In a similar vein, L. Nasrallah (‘Lot oracles and fate’, 214–32) and T. Morgan (‘Belief and practice in Graeco-Roman religiosity’, 200–13) offer substantive discussions of the literary and material evidence for divination and Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride, to show that the doctrine/praxis binary that has informed so much study of the interaction of Christian and pagan religiosity is deeply flawed.
A second cluster of essays interrogate the ideologically charged questions of continuity and discontinuity in the early Church. J. Carleton Paget's ‘The second century from the perspective of the New Testament’ (91–105) deconstructs the seemingly accidental and arbitrary fissure between the Jesus movement of the first century and the ‘early Church’ of the second. W. Löhr's riveting ‘Modelling second-century Christian theology’ (151–68) parses the ways in which Christians did and did not self-identify as philosophers, and how they redefined heresy by the turn of the fourth century.
Building upon recent North American scholarship in this area, two erudite essays further interrogate the invention of Christian ethnicity. E. Gruen asks ‘Christians as “third race”: is ethnicity at issue?’ (235–49) and O. Skarasuane tracks ‘Ethnic discourse in early Christianity’ (250–64). Here both authors use the invention of Christian difference and individual identity in the Epistle to Diognetus, Clement of Alexandria, the Proclamation of Peter, Justin Martyr and Tertullian. Noting the lack of ethnic discourse (in a modern sense) in Tertullian, they complicate the picture adduced from Clement's very idiosyncratic use of the term. They also gesture to an idea, more greatly drawn out in W. Horbury's contribution, ‘Church and synagogue vis-à-vis Roman rule in the second century’ (71–88), about the way that the experience of persecution informed Christian self-definition. Horbury uses a broad collection of evidence to show that while Christians and Jews both experienced legislative pressure in the second century, they could be distinguished from one another by outsiders. He concludes that ‘at the beginning of the century, there was probably no Roman aim to destroy Judaism and Christianity jointly, as Sulpicius Severus might suggest’ (87).
Both Gruen and Skarasuane's essays invite us to think more about texts and the manner in which close readings of texts construct authority. The same question is taken up by J. Verheyden, whose ‘“Authoritative texts” and how to handle them’ (188–99) examines the manner in which debates about the authority of various texts are a means of facilitating the construction of Christian identity. The issue of the authorising texts is brought into sharp relief by the inclusion of R. Flemming's essay ‘Galen and the Christians’ (171–87). Here she both discusses the ways in which Galen constructs authority and provides a helpful analysis of Galen's discussion of Christians and their place in the intellectual movements of the second century.
In an essay focused on translation culture among diaspora Jews, T. Rajak (‘The Mediterranean Jewish diaspora in the second century’, 39–56) draws attention to the distinctive character of Jewish communities outside of the motherland and sensitively tackles the difficult question of the relationship between Jewish communities and their Graeco-Roman neighbours. P. Alexander's ‘The Rabbis and their rivals in the second century CE’ (57–70) tracks the period of ‘disruption, confusion, transition and reconstruction’ (69) of the long second century for the history of Judaism by following the passage of the ‘hurricane of zealotry’ (70), the ambitions of the rabbinic movement and the ways in which both Christians and Jews ‘fought for the heart and soul of Israel’ (70).
As is surely expected in a volume like this, two essays tackle the methodological quagmire that is the category of ‘Gnosticism’ in the early Church. Both K. King (‘“The Gnostic myth”’, 122–36) and M. Edwards (‘The Gnostic myth’, 137–50) agree that no such religious entity existed in the early Church. Eloquently drawing upon her earlier work in this area, King resists the siren song of genealogies and totalising narratives and insists instead on ‘great complexity’, while Edwards looks to the points of continuity between so-called ‘proto-orthodox’ writers and so-called ‘Gnostic’ ones in a manner that cuts across crass definitional distinctions.
Two essays engage the subject of pagan critique of Christians. J. North (‘Pagan attitudes’, 265–80) scrutinises the intersection between Christians and pagans through the lens of Lucian's Peregrinus, finding surprisingly more evidence for positive, sympathetic attitudes towards Christians than has previously been recognised. T. Whitmarsh's contribution, ‘“Away with the atheists!”’ (281–93), looks at both the charges of atheism levied against Christians by their second-century pagan peers, and the ways that Christians adapted this trope to turn ‘the tables on their accusers’ (292).
A concluding essay on ‘Modelling the second century as the age of the laboratory’ (294–308) by J. Lieu offers a nuanced and insightful analysis of the ‘laboratory’ model for second-century Christianity that was introduced and popularised by Löhr and Markschies. In the context of refining this model she provides a helpful history of the scholarship of modelling the second century.
To their credit, Paget and Lieu have not attempted to ‘provide a new and settled account of the second Christian century’, but rather to initiate questions about how to map and explore this critical period of history. The result is a collection of essays that draws together cutting-edge scholarly work in Theology, Classics, Judaic Studies and Religious Studies, while simultaneously managing to situate the readers, regardless of background, in recent debates about the nature of this period. If there is an omission in the volume, it is the absence of an essay on the matters of persecution and martyrdom. But this should not deter the reader; this is an astonishingly useful and thought-provoking collection that breathes new life into the study of the second century.
