This may be the first book ever written on the ‘triumph of Christianity’ to mention the emperor Theodosius only twice, on page 6 and on the last page. It will not be the last book on that ‘triumph,’ but it would not be a bad thing if it were.
Eric Rebillard is known and admired, especially for his Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity (2012), which is a sort of prequel to this volume. ‘Redescription’ in the title here represents a methodologically serious and conscientious effort to grapple with a cliché and connect it with historical reality. The narrative of ‘triumph’ is achingly familiar: from the upper room to the gospel writers to Origen to Constantine (and Eusebius) and on through a melodramatic fourth century to the moment of Theodosian authoritarianism. I shouldn’t even need to hum a few bars to let readers catch the tune.
The received narrative has been taking a beating for some decades now, perhaps most notably in Ramsay MacMullen’s Christianizing the Roman Empire (1984), but it remains resilient. Recent work from venturesome scholars like Markus Vinzent and Maia Kotrosits has worked on dismantling the edifice. In particular, Vinzent’s Resetting the Origins of Christianity (2023) has shown the way our received understanding of earliest Christianity has been projected backwards from the self-absorbed work of historians, most notably Eusebius. Rebillard now takes up the work of close methodological analysis to give a new shape to the conversation. The overwhelming majority of names in his index are those of modern scholars, adduced with great learning and fairness.
His book is not—and this is a good thing—a narrative to compete with the familiar story, but a series of analyses of critical elements, centerpieced on a case study where he draws on some of the very best recent work done at a microhistorical level. He takes the first bull by the horns in reviewing the history of estimates of Christian numbers. How many Christians were there? His account of the most notable and notorious of those efforts, from Gibbon to Stark and beyond, is meticulous and in the end radically skeptical. Every set of numbers turns out to be a constructed narrative based on a presumed outcome. So, too, he reviews the history of accounts of Christian mission work, which turn out to be consistently grounded in the philo-Christian assumption that preaching and teaching were the privileged way in which Christian practice and discourse spread. Again, not so. An exploration back to Nock on the parallel accounts of ‘conversion’ has similar effects.
With those preliminaries out of the way, Rebillard takes up once again the question of the word ‘religion’ and its functional utility. His discussion here is more abstract and conceptual than his other early chapters and perhaps arguably more derivative of the work of those like Wilfred Cantwell Smith and J.Z. Smith who have worked this territory before. The demonstration is important, however, in that it clears the field for genuine reconception of ways to speak of the historical phenomena in question.
He next takes up as his case study the example of Roman Phrygia, where the recent work of Stephen Mitchell, Robert Parker, and Peter Thonemann has taken the analysis of evidence down literally to ground level. Rebillard refracts their work into a clear and striking account of epigraphic evidence that in the hands of the three has shown a strikingly ambiguous world characterized by intermingled practices and inscriptional evidence that cannot be at all convincingly forced to demonstrate any conscious encounter between ‘paganism’ and ‘Christianity’. Christ is there, to be sure, and so are lots of other gods—not many of them famous—but when the analysis comes down to the individual inscription it is very, very often impossible to pigeonhole the view represented. Crosses are everywhere, references to the god who will guard this grave are entirely ambiguous in their provenance, and diachronic study yields no narrative of progress or development. There were gods in Phrygia and Christ was, more or less, one of them, much of a muchness with them in every way we can see. Rebillard’s analysis goes even further beyond the skepticism and caution already shown by the earlier eminences working here and we may anticipate that debate will follow to ask whether Rebillard goes too far. I think not.
He concludes by framing the results of this concise study to identify three features of the ‘triumph’ that may reasonably be thought to have survived the contemporary work he reviews and his own contribution. First, there is triumph in the political success of the literate cultural producers of Christian allegiance; second, the differentiation and declaration of the particular ‘ontological reality’ traveling under a Christian brand among all the other practices of communities that lived among ‘metahumans’ (Marshall Sahlins’s word for ‘gods’ brought out to good effect by Rebillard); and third, the visibility of its signs and practices in the ‘basic mode of religion’ in Roman society.
Fair enough and carefully said. I surmise Rebillard would say that he abstains from entering the narratological swamp into which the evidence for the Christian past has sunk over the years, but that is very much the swamp that needs draining in his wake. Assuming that there was such a thing as ‘Christianity’ and that the word when used of Marcion and Melania the Younger has not only equivalent force but a prescriptive right to integrate both figures and many more in a single linear account rooted in that Christian identity is proving to be a practice well past its sell-by date. Much work on the history of the history of Christianity (not a typo) remains to be done.
But Rebillard has earned his conclusions and his last sentence should be the last sentence here: “I therefore claim that we should drop ‘triumph’ as a framework for writing a general history of the origins of Christianity.