Captive Women and Heretical Monks: Reassessing Christianization on the East Roman Frontiers

May/June 2007 Historically Speaking 21 Captive Women and Heretical Monks: Reassessing Christianization on the East Roman Frontiers Andrea Sterk ^^ espite asurgeof interestinworldhistoryin ^B the past two decades, the premodern his- ^^ tory of Christianity has continued to be written and taught primarily as a Western European phenomenon. Many scholars pay lip service to the movement's origins in the ancient Near East but in their research and teaching quickly move to the western Roman Empire and to the development of ideas and institutions that came to fruition in Western Europe . Relegated to the periphery of historical scholarship , the linguistically and theologically diverse communities comprising Eastern Christendom were spread throughout a vast territory that far surpassed late Roman and early medieval Europe in both size and population. The Christianization of this area has yet to receive much attention outside of narrower confessional and regional studies. While a wide range of interdisciplinary and theoretical approaches has led to significant advances in understanding conversion as a social and cultural phenomenon , the subject of Christian mission has received no comparable attention from historians of late antiquity or Byzantium. To be sure, for the earlier centuries of the common era we are better served. From the pioneering study of the 1 9th-century German scholar Adolf von Harnack, TheMission andExpansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries (1 902), to the work of sociologist of religion Rodney Stark, TheRise of Christianity (1 997), both conversion and the spread of the Christian movement in the/>r«-Constantinian age have continued to inspire fresh scholarly enterprise and debate.1 Yet the subject of Christian mission has been largely ignored amid the spate of recent studies on conversion. Indeed, several scholars have argued that neitherJews nor Christians were especially concerned about proselytism in the pre-Constantinian centuries and thatonce Christianitybecame the officialreligion of the state, the very idea of mission lostits meaning.3 Debate about the missionary nature of the early church only rarely touches on the post-Constantinian period, for it is largely assumed that mission was simply part of the political program of the newly Christian Roman Empire, especially in the East or what became Byzantium. In either period it is often claimed that there was very little theological reflection on the task of the church or individual Christians to convert others. As several fine studies of Western Christianization have indicated, we are far from a developed "theology" of mission.1 A close reading of late ancient conversion accounts challenges both long held assumptions and newer theories about mission or Christianization in the later Roman Empire. In particular, examining the function of captive women and heretical monks in these narratives may illuminate the relation between Armenian cross, near Ani. Archdeacon Dowling, The Armenian Church (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge , 1910), 104. empire and religion as well the nature of Christian mission in this pivotal age. Captive women played an important role in the Christianization of the Caucasus in late antiquity. Situated between the Black and Caspian Seas and straddling trade routes to the east, Greater Armenia was poised between the Roman and Iranian Empires. Writingunder the pseudonym Agathangelos, literally "Good Messenger," the 5th-century Armenian churchman attributed the conversion of this region primarily to Gregory the Illuminator, a Christian in the service of the pagan King Trdat III. Closely connectedwith Gregory's missionarywork, however,was the role of the female captive Rhipsime. A beautiful and pious Christian virgin, Rhipsime had fled Rome due to unwanted attention from the pagan Roman emperor Diocletian and arrived in Armenia only to fall prey to the wiles of King Trdat. While praying in a chamber in which she had been imprisoned, the king "seized her in order to work his lustful desires." They wrestled for seven hours until the kingwas ultimately "vanquished and worsted by a single girl through the will and power of Christ."4 For Rhipsime 's resistance the king had her tortured and killed alongwith thirty-six other virgins who had accompanied her. But then Trdatwent into deep mourning for the beautiful virgin, and after setting out for the hunt a few days later, he was stricken with madness and turned into a pig. It was then...