18b - Third-century Christianity

Summary

Third-century Christianity has to be read against its polytheistic context. Not only that. If we are to appreciate what it may have been like to be a Christian in this century, we also need to have some idea how idiosyncratic it may have been in fact to belong to the Christian following (the social setting) as well as how influential was the Roman state in the lives of individual Christians (the political setting). To map these two co-ordinates may help us to see third-century Christians from our vantage point – insofar as we are able to reconstruct those settings. It goes without saying, however, that this reconstruction need not necessarily be the same as how third-century Christians themselves perceived their own place in their social world and how they construed their relations with the Roman state: the rhetoric of self-identification and self-representation need not coincide with our description. The first section, accordingly, attempts to trace quickly the geographical coverage of Christianity in the third century, whilst the second section deals with what we know of Christians' relations with the Roman state – the persecutions which formed a backdrop to the mental lives of many Christians even if physically they may have been little affected by them. But the possibility of persecution was not the obsessively dominant feature in their lives as many have construed it to be: the third section surveys the literary and intellectual life of third-century Christianity.

GEOGRAPHICAL COVERAGE

Until the Great Persecution and its aftermath in the early fourth century brings to light invaluable evidence for the geographical spread of Christianity (and impressionistic anecdotes, in places, illustrating the depth of that spread), we are forced to be content, for much of the preceding century, with extremely fitful testimony.