Early Christian Hagiography and Roman History (review)

Barnes is concerned to delineate the contours of an early Christian hagiography that has a core of ‘authentic historical material.’ The corollary to this claim is a narrative of the development of a ‘fictitious hagiography’ after the great persecution of 303–313 C.E. This is to some degree a contrarian pair of claims, but Barnes undertakes it with a measure of skill and erudition that makes his case worth reading whether one is ultimately convinced or not. Regarding the ‘authentic historical material,’ Barnes’s methodological commitment is to excavate such materials through a rigorous engagement of, rather than flight from, the standards of Roman history with his particular skills in prosopography and chronology.

Early Christian Hagiography and Roman History – proceeding from lectures at the University of Jena in 2008 – is more than a linear argument that authentic martyr texts preceded fictitious hagiography. To the reader’s profit and delight, Barnes’s attention and focus vary from the large-scale overview of five centuries down to specific arguments about particular texts, persons, and historical events. At the large scale, Barnes is at his most provocative but at the small scale at his most valuable.

The book is packed with well-argued nuggets of research. Barnes’s argument on the date of Ignatius of Antioch should force a reckoning in a large body of scholarship on the first quarter of the second century. His treatment of a riot in Carthage instigated by Christians deserves a solid place in the scholarly imagination of Christianity’s growth.

As later chapters of the book make plain, the endeavour of Christian hagiography became less and less connected to authentic historical materials of martyrdom as state persecution itself receded into the past (it is worth noting that Barnes never falls into an easy narrative of ubiquitous persecution; he maintains a healthy and informed scepticism throughout). Jerome’s life of Paul and Sulpicius’s life of Martin of Tours are the parade examples of the fictitious historiography of the fourth century and beyond. According to Barnes, there was a significant degree of self-consciousness about these fictions.

The difficulty that the argument faces is not the fictionality of later hagiography but the claim of the widespread relevance of court records to early accounts. This leads to (or perhaps proceeds from) treating the book of Acts with little critical disposition, to treating 1 Peter as orthonymous rather than pseudonymous, and to a preponderance of out-of-date scholarship on early Christianity even though Barnes’s dialogue partners in classics and late antique Christianity are very up to date. Moreover, the entire corpus of the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles is virtually ignored. These difficulties make the value of the earlier chapters uneven and the larger argument less comprehensive. They do not, however, remove the very substantial value of the work, and the insight that fictionalized history took became, at least to some degree, a self-conscious stance among later authors. The skills and insights that Barnes brings from classics will benefit anyone interested in early Christian narrative.