Christian and Pagan in the Roman Empire

1. Apology

1 A P O L O G Y Introduction Very few documents from early Christianity reveal more vividly than Tertullian’s Apology the perspectives from which Christians might look upon the pagan world that surrounded them, and the presuppositions they brought to the justification of their own role in society. Indeed, the modern reader is forced into the hurly-burly of the Roman world by the very form of the Apology, for this “apology” for Christianity takes shape around the fictive image of a forensic trial. The image of the trial is consistently maintained with such lively force that the reader is captivated by the vivid thrust and parry of argument , and one easily imagines oneself as an attendant in a court of law in the last years of the last decade of the second century a.d. The image of the trial furnished a literary rationale for listing the charges against Christians that pagans might make in a variety of circumstances: whether they were intent on having Christians brought before the governor to be put on trial for their faith, whether they were indulging in dinner-table gossip among their pagan friends, or whether they were personally confronting Christians in what might well have been an honest and friendly attempt to understand Christian faith. Novel forms of religious behavior invite from outsiders conceptions that are 1 sometimes wildly imaginative, even malicious. Tertullian would have us believe that in their gossip pagans of the second century turned the Christian Eucharist into a cannibalistic feast and the Christian love-feast into a sex orgy. It is possible that such rumors as were reported by the Christian Tertullian were exaggerated —both in the literary art of Tertullian and in the popular Christian mind; but they undoubtedly reflect a fertile seedbed of suspicion among pagans from which substantive charges against Christians could grow. Indeed, Tertullian reports two charges that were indeed substantive: first, that Christians did not worship the gods of the state, and, second, that Christians neither offered incense to the genius of the emperor nor participated in pagan celebrations in honor of state and empire. In ancient Rome the view was pervasive that the prosperity of the Roman state—a prosperity that had brought Rome dominion over the entire world—was the result of Roman devotion to the gods; to refuse to worship these gods was to threaten the security of the entire community, which was, in effect, to betray the commonwealth. Similarly, to refuse to participate in the community’s celebrative occasions suggested a malicious intent to undermine the state, or, at the least, signaled an unwillingness to play one’s legitimate role as a loyal and supportive citizen. Such concerns were intensified by a further complaint that Christians, by withdrawing their support from pagan religion , undermined a major sector of the Roman economy, thus becoming a financial liability to the state. The image of the trial also served a symbolic function, for in the Greco-Roman world the trial had offered a context in which to practice the sophisticated skills society had developed for discerning truth; as the obverse of this, the trial could also stand as a symbol of the justice based on truth so confidently discovered by such skills. Thus, in the Apology Tertullian was able, by placing his exposition of Christianity within the framework of an imagined trial, to parade all the skills commonly used to bring a judgment in an actual court case. Thus he was able to invite pagans to affirm a Christianity whose truth had been established by the finest techniques of rational demonstration known in antiquity, where finely tuned arguments from probability and conjecture and appeals to the first-hand evidence of 2 t e r t u l l i a n witnesses and testimony were the accepted grounds of evidence . Because concern for the discovery of truth lay at the heart of the image of the trial, in adopting this image Tertullian found an appropriate arena in which to present the knowledge of the truth as the central issue between paganism and Christianity. On the one hand, he could affirm the capacity of pagans as pagans to glimpse the truth—if only in part; because they could do so, he could legitimately proceed to sketch for them the outline of Christian truth. On the other hand, he was compelled to explain why pagans had missed the truth in...