Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years (Princeton U. Pr., 2024) is Paula Fredriksen’s latest contribution to our enhanced appreciation of the ancient Mediterranean world in which Christianity arose and took root.
Scholars get reviewed by fellow scholars. So this is not a review, but just an appreciation. Ever since her Augustine and the Jews (Yale U. Pr., 2008), I have admired and been enlightened by her capacity to bring the ancient, late-Roman world to life like none other (except the inestimable Peter Brown).
The plural title – Ancient Christianities – is key to her approach. There is a received history of Christianity which recounts the Church’s growth from the perspective of the winning side, from th perspective of doctrinal orthodoxy and inherited practices. In fact, however, the losers in that history – the heretics and schismatics – did not necessarily all start out that way. They were part of early Christianity’s « large cast of characters » who competed with one another for popular (and eventually imperial) acceptance, all part of what Fredriksen calls « the complexities and ambiguities, the ironies and surprises, the twists and turns of this richer story. » Indeed, I think one appreciates the accomplishment of Nicaean and imperial orthodoxy that much more as one wades through the challenges presented by the opposition and the varying appeals which opposing ideas had.
From Second Temple Judaism through the triumph of imperial Chalcedonian orthodoxy, Fredriksen navigates the beliefs and practices of the range of ancient Christians. Not just the writings and sermons of Church Fathers get attention, however, but also the varied beliefs and behaviors of those we might call ordinary Christians, what today we might call popular religion. We experience the intersection of Christian faith and civic practices (public games, theatrical spectacles, etc.), celebrations of saints’ days rooted in ancient Roman familial festivals, complete with « dancing and singing as well as eating and drinking, » along with other inherited popular practices and unauthorized ritual behavior (e.g., amulets), which shed new light on what may have been the actual, if unofficial, boundaries of Christian behavior and practices.
It has often been noted that elite Christian culture, in its adoption of Greek philosophy and Roman institutions somewhat syncretized itself with the existing dominant culture, in ways which advanced the Christian religion while preserving important aspects of that pre-Christian culture. One of the beauties of Fredriksen’s book is showing how something analogous was going on at the popular level. She writes « all Christian culture, high no less than low, was made up of elements from the world that everyone lived in. What was the option? From where else could building blocks be quarried? There was no view from nowhere, above and outside of the world one lived in … ‘Paganism’ – not an -ism, but simply majority Mediterranean culture – framed the whole. »
All this is very insightful about early Christianity, but it is also helpfully relevant to our present predicament, in which popular « spirituality » seems increasingly entwined with otherwise perhaps problematic aspects of contemporary culture. Both at the level of high theology and that of popular piety, the fact is we live in this combination of somewhat secularized, somewhat disenchanted, somewhat re-enchanted modern world, with which Christian faith must engage and by which it is inevitably influenced.
