25 - Religious Violence in Late Antiquity

Summary

This chapter starts by locating the common association of religious violence with Christianity and late antiquity in a Protestant polemic which was further developed by the Enlightenment. New approaches have started to question this master narrative, however, by highlighting the limited number of temple destructions and other paradigmatic acts of religious violence, contextualising religious violence within the prominent role played by violence in the later Roman Empire, and dissociating violent language from violent acts. Moral principles and specific understandings of religion and history produce a Christian discourse that makes violence highly visible because the church is associated with peace and society with violence. Two well-known case studies illustrate the point. First, the destruction of the Serapeion in Alexandria (391 CE) allows us to notice how the historian Rufinus constructs a narrative playing on Christian understandings of martyrdom and pagan, sacrificial violence. Second, the letter of Severus of Minorca on the conversion of the Jews (418 CE) is not an aggressive tract to promote widespread conversion of the Jews, but a defensive document that tries to free Severus from accusations of having stirred up violence.