Early Christianity and the Discourse of Empire in the First Three Centuries CE

Abstract

Did the setting of the Roman Empire make a difference to the way that early Christian texts defined or, more precisely, invented the religion of Christianity? If so, are traces of this difference perceptible in the writings of early Christians? The scholarship assembled here, generally speaking, answers both questions affirmatively: the context of empire affected the way that early Christians talked about themselves, others, and the world they inhabited. The study of the self‐definition of early Christians, this research contends, cannot be undertaken without recognizing the distinctive kinds of knowledge (of Self and Other) engendered by the ascendancy of the Roman Empire. The work is separated out under three rubrics: spectacle, borderlines, and mimicry. These categories reflect patterns that have emerged in the study of early Christian texts as they contributed to, appropriated, refracted, and resisted the discourse of empire in the first three centuries of the Common Era.

Christian Origins and Religious Studies

“…Far prior to a time when Christianity had anything akin to “powerful, authoritative institutions,” we find authors asserting orders of knowledge and creating totalizing “systems of categorization” that re-read world-history as Christian history, interpolating the Christian gaze as timeless and universal. We can debate whether this stance reflects the epistemological hubris of apocalyptic eschatology, or the strategically anti-imperial appropriation of Roman imperial strategies of ordering knowledge, or the reversal or denial of the no-less-imperializing ethnographical gaze (Frilingos, 2010; Horsley, 2010; Reinhartz, 2002). Whatever the precise reasons, it remains that early Christians like Justin, Ireneaus, Tertullian, Eusebius, and Epiphanius contributed to the creation of totalizing discourses of heresiology, chronography, and world-history that asserted Christianity as universal, long before such imperializing moves were backed by Christian imperial power.…”