18a - Christianity, a.d. 70–192

Summary

It would be difficult, and almost disingenuous, to undertake a history of ‘the church’ within this period as though it were one developing entity. It is generally admitted that the structure of the churches differed widely from place to place, and that what was plausible speculation in one city might be heresy in another. Yet this is equally true of other topics which are frequently approached with a presumption of uniformity: we cannot infer, because we have a series of rescripts from emperors, that each would have been familiar with, or obedient to, the policy of the last; nor when so much argument persists as to the ‘causes of persecution’, can we assume that this phenomenon or its causes were the same in every city. This chapter will attempt to give due weight to the diversity of regions, and will not aspire to a universal narrative. If, as is so often the case in the study of antiquity, we do not know how to characterize those ‘happenings’ of which we have some evidence, we can hardly expect to ascertain ‘why’ they happened, and perhaps not even ‘when’.

Syrian region (outside Antioch)

The book of Revelation and the three synoptic gospels all allude to the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, which, involving as it did the dissolution of the temple, could be seen as a divine anathema against Judaism. The Christians of the city fled to Pella (Eus.Hist. Eccl. iii.5.2), and fromthis point history can say little of them. Eusebius gives a continuous list of bishops after James (Hist. Eccl. iii.11 etc.), but since the latter was not in fact a bishop, but the chairman of the presbyters, this information carries little weight.