How the early Christians fought cosmic sages, vegetarians and each other

Ancient Christianities, Paula Fredriksen’s study of the religion’s first 500 years, features saints, sects and ‘intolerant zeal’

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The unfortunate Bishop Priscillian of Ávila in Spain was accused of sorcery, praying while naked and fasting on Sundays. In AD 385 he was tried at an imperial court and had his head cut off: the first bishop to be executed by a Christian state. Poor old Priscillian makes several appearances in Paula Fredriksen’s survey of the first five centuries of Christian belief in the Mediterranean West. She adopts a thematic approach that “avoids the impression of linear development”. In her extended essay of seven chapters, each 20 pages or so long, she makes an aerial reconnaissance of the whole period for themes such as diversity of belief, Jewish apocalyptic eschatology, persecution, amulets or treatment of the flesh. 
These are subjects she has long studied and feels to throw light on varieties of Christianity. So Ancient Christianities can seem like being in a holding pattern near Heathrow. Round comes Windsor Castle again, or Priscillian executed for the wrong kind of diversity, then executed again for the wrong kind of fleshliness and, once more for luck, for the wrong kind of magic. It’s not that Fredriksen is short of material. Ancient Christianities is a miracle of compression. “Pelagianism was largely invented by Augustine,” we are told briskly, with only a thumbnail sketch of Pelagius who “foregrounded the importance of the freedom of the will” (perhaps an error as egregious as fasting on a Sunday). But did Augustine invent Pelagianism or discover it?
Fredriksen ought to know. It’s more than 40 years since she published an edition and translation of two short works by Augustine on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, which confronted ideas of Pelagius on how Christians are saved or justified. The arguments smouldered like peat below the surface and burst into hot flame at the time of the Reformation. Fredriksen is determined to present “the complexities and ambiguities, the ironies and surprises, the twists and turns” to demonstrate that Christianity was plural, as Christianities. I’m not sure that this succeeds. It’s as if, writing of the Thames, one threw in details of swallow holes and oxbows, weirs and backwaters. But the river remains.
There is certainly no point complaining about figures who do not appear. The Iberian poet Prudentius, for example, would nicely illustrate a point about a fashion in Christian sensibility for recounting violent martyrdoms. But his inclusion would burst the book’s 200-page waistcoat. By contrast, Augustine makes an appearance every couple of pages, yet is welcome because he seems in a way so very modern. His autobiographical Confessions convey an astonishing self-awareness. His seems a recognisable face in the utterly strange last centuries of antiquity. The assumptions we share about what is obviously true, about human psychology and the way the world wags, differ from those shared then. Slavery, total war, bloody laws, arbitrary medication, demonology, the behaviour of the stars and the public placating of deities were taken for granted. It isn’t the Christians that seem weird, but the whole world where Christianity was born.
Augustine had spent a decade in the late fourth century attached to the sect of the Manichees. Thanks to his “informed antagonism”, Fredriksen notes, we can reconstruct its teachings. Manichaeism, she says, was “a genuinely new form of Christianity” with a “genuinely different metaphysics”. It was certainly pretty whacky: its founder Mani, drawing on elements of Zoroastrianism, had preached cosmic warfare between good and evil, light and matter. Among his followers, the Elect led a celibate, vegetarian life; Augustine belonged to the less constrained Hearers. At the initiative of Zoroastran clergy, Mani had been executed in Persia, in 276. Opposing Manichaeism exemplified what Edward Gibbon, as quoted by Fredriksen, called the “intolerant zeal” of early Christians. But I don’t know what tolerance early Christians could be expected to exercise. Were they meant to invite Manichees round for coffee and send them Christmas cards? 
Fredriksen is keen to argue that orthodoxy, which preferred to call itself “Christianity”, was a victors’ ideology. She deploys the term “proto-orthodox” to mean the people from the past who were retrospectively accorded orthodoxy once the fighting stopped. I think she leaves out an element perhaps extraneous to her academic pursuit. Unlike, say, Stoic philosophy, a system of ethics to which a few today remain sympathetic without getting too hot under the collar, Christianity still has billions of adherents, clever and stupid, who would like to say that their beliefs are true and essentially identical to those taught by Jesus Christ. 
How can this possibly be, when in Fredriksen’s analysis “orthodoxy has a shelf life”? She means that teachings happily accepted in one century are later attacked as unorthodox. But this is to ignore the effects of development (in John Henry Newman’s sense) or refinement of terminology. So Justin Martyr (100-65) wrote of God the Father in first place, the Son in second place and the Holy Spirit in third place. If confronted with the later controversy of Arianism, which made the Son inferior to the Father, he would no doubt have avoided the phrase “in the second place”. Justin was recognised as a saint and remained one, but that did not entail accepting every formulation of his as infallible. Once the state became a confessional entity in the fourth century, Fredriksen concludes, orthodoxy meant “One god, one church, one empire, one emperor”. In practice, it never became that simple.
Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years is published by Princeton UP at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
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