Paula Fredriksen, Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024)
This work’s purpose is to relate the story of ancient Christianity from the first to the fifth century AD, focusing on its development from a form of Second Temple Judaism in ancient Palestine to the creation of an imperial Church in the Western Roman Empire. Fredriksen’s goal is to introduce “the complexities and ambiguities, the ironies and surprises, the twists and turns” of this movement by examining materials outside the New Testament such as Second Temple Jewish, pagan, and non-canonical Christian works (xiii). In the process, she seeks to describe how Israel’s God went from being one god among many whom the inhabitants of the Roman Empire worshiped to the empire’s sole deity (xiv). Fredriksen’s work is divided into seven chapters, a conclusion, and back matter.
In chapter 1 (“The Idea of Israel,” 1–29), Fredriksen reconstructs the early Christian message in ancient Palestine and its development and alteration as Christianity spread in the larger Greco-Roman world. In the process, she focuses on the idea of “Israel” in it. Fredriksen tracks how the movement began as the eschatological renewal of Israel, including Jews and Gentiles, and morphed into an imperial Church dominated by Gentiles who “claimed the title ‘Israel’ for itself.”
Chapter 2 (“The Dilemmas of Diversity,” 30–59) explores the various groups and theologies that were a part of the first five hundred years of the Christian movement. Hence, Fredriksen’s preferred term of Christianities versus Christianity. She proposes that the earliest days of the movement witnessed theological diversity but that as it expanded and grew such diversity was condemned as heresy.
In chapter 3 (“Martyrdom and Persecution,” 60–89), Fredriksen reconstructs the reasons for the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire, their failure to maintain pagan ancestral cultic customs and thus threaten the relationship between heaven and earth in Greek and Roman cities.
Chapter 4 (“The Future of the End,” 90–112) investigates the eschatological diversity of early Christianity with an eye to millenarian movements and the trend as the movement went on from emphasizing the imminence of Jesus’s Second Coming to focusing on one’s place in the afterlife, heaven or hell.
In chapter 5 (“Christ and Empire,” 113–43), Fredriksen surveys the political, social, and intellectual belief systems of the Roman Empire and how they contributed to controversies among early Christians about the nature of Jesus Christ and his relationship to God.
Chapter 6 (“The Redemption of the Flesh,” 144–71) focuses on how the delay of Jesus’s Second Coming, along with philosophical beliefs of the soul, contributed to the development of novel Christian teachings on sex, asceticism, and poverty among believers.
In chapter 7 (“Pagan and Christian,” 172–97), which is somewhat of a catchall chapter, Fredriksen explores the use of the term “pagan” among early Christians, the practice of magic and the veneration of relics among them, and the formation of the primacy of the Roman Church in the Christian West.
Her conclusion (“Conclusion,” 198–205) offers a summary of the work emphasizing, once again, the diversity of the Christian movement.
Fredriksen ends her book with various back matter: an acknowledgement (“Acknowledgements,” 207–9), a timeline of the first five hundred years of the Christian movement (“Timeline,” 211–17), a glossary (“Glossary,” 219–22), a list of supplemental readings (“Supplemental Readings,” 223–43), and indices (“Source Index,” 245–54; “Names and Place Index,” 255–59; “Subject Index,” 260–63).
This strengths of Ancient Christianities are its breadth, the various themes of the history of the early Church in the Greco-Roman world that Fredriksen covers, and her encyclopedic knowledge of Jewish, (Greek and Latin) Christian, and pagan sources. Moreover, this book is pure Fredriksen with its prose being clear, concise, on-point, and witty. For example, she refers to St. Paul’s understanding of the Messiah living in believers as the latter living “in a spiritually radioactive zone” (7).
There are, however, two limitations of this work. The first is in her choice of how to construct Ancient Christianities. Because of her desire to stress the diversity of beliefs among early Christians and not to give an impression of an arc of linear development, Fredriksen opts to focus on themes in the first five hundred years of the Church (xiv). While I understand this desire, especially given the philosophical and ideological framework through which she approaches early Christian history, it has taken away from the book’s coherence. For example, the last chapter seems to be a catchall for themes in the first five hundred years of Christianity in the West that she desires to address: the use of the term pagan, magical arts, the veneration of relics, and the primacy of Rome in the Christian West.
The second limitation of Fredriksen’s work is its narrow attention to Christianity in the Greek and Latin speaking portions of the Roman Empire. Rome was not the center of the Christian movement, even in the fifth century AD. For example, Robert Louis Wilken (The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013]) has recently composed a magisterial work surveying the first one thousand years of Christian history, which highlights the lack of centralized governance in the Church in the form of the Roman Papacy and demonstrates how within the first five hundred years of its existence Christianity spread to non-Greek and Latin speaking peoples in Armenia, Persia, Ethiopia, Central Asia, and even India. What is more, Christians living in these areas quickly composed Christian works in their native tongues and in the case of Armenia (as well as with the Slavs later in the first millennium AD), Christians wrote down for the first time a language that had heretofore only been spoken.
For these reasons, I cannot recommend Ancient Christianities to you for purchase. Instead, if you are looking for a history of early Christianity, then I encourage you to read Wilken’s well-balanced work, which you can buy on Amazon or directly from Yale University Press.
I appreciate Princeton University Press for this gratis copy, which (as you can see) in no way influenced my review.