In this short book, Caroline Johnson Hodge explores an important aspect of early Christian culture: the ways in which individuals who recognised Christ as God performed their faith in their homes and at cemeteries—contexts where behaviour was not closely regulated or observed by clerics. The text incorporates and complements previous studies by Johnson Hodge, whose research over the past decade has shed light on various aspects of the domestic life of Christians during the first three centuries CE. Through a careful analysis of textual and material sources, Johnson Hodge reveals a variety of simple gestures that harnessed the power attributed to Christ and symbols associated with his cult—such as the cross and the names of divine beings—to address practical concerns such as protection and healing. Johnson
Johnson Hodge demonstrates that the gestures, actions, and objects involved in this process were the same ones that the Romans had traditionally used in relation to other divine powers.
This realisation has important implications for how we understand the appeal of the faith during this period, which has often been related to its intransigence—symbolised by the martyrs—and difference from existing practices, rather than to the movement’s willingness to adapt and emulate inherited patterns. In addition, the continuation of polytheistic forms of interaction with the divine and of performance of the faith challenges us to reconsider how we understand and define ‘being Christian’ in the Roman world. Thus, like other scholars, Johnson Hodge emphasises the need to abandon the notion of ‘Christianity’ as a category with clear-cut margins.[1]
The introduction outlines the book’s focus and main thesis and summarises Stanley Stowers’ categorisation of religiosity into different modes, which Johnson Hodge uses to set domestic cult apart from other forms. Stowers distinguishes between daily-life practices performed individually—of the kind on which Johnson Hodge focuses here—and individual intellectual practices such as reading or interpretation. According to Stowers, these two ‘modes’ produce each a further form of religiosity, characterised by the institutionalisation of their specific way of interacting with the divine under the authority of specialised personnel (i.e., intellectuals and clerics).[2]
A concise first chapter provides an overview of household cult practices, using contexts in Egypt, Turkey, Italy, and Israel as case studies. The discussed data reproduces well the cultural dynamic of the empire in the first centuries CE, when local habits and practices endured in the various provinces, yet a degree of coherence had also been achieved. Domestic shrines where the head of the household brought small sacrifices for the welfare of the family, short prayers uttered at the start of recurrent daily activities such as eating, and gestures of piety towards the images of the gods found in both private and public spaces kept individuals across the empire in regular contact with the divine as they went about their days.
Chapter Two reviews written sources from the first three centuries CE to reveal that Christians continued to engage in similar practices but referencing Christian powers. The content of prayers, advice by literate leaders such as Tertullian, and extant objects are marshalled by Johnson Hodge to reconstruct how Christians performed their faith at home: making the sign of the cross or blowing on various areas of the house for protection, or consuming Eucharistic bread before meals. The chapter also discusses several practices involving the bodies of believers, such as signing the body with the cross and wearing amulets containing references to Christian powers or rings bearing Christian symbols, all of which continue Roman strategies.
Chapter Three further explores the issue of protective amulets, incorporating the perspectives of Christian intellectuals who discussed the practice, such as Tertullian or Clement of Alexandria. Johnson Hodge uses a selection of gems with Christian imagery to explore the blurred boundaries between Christianity and magic when it came to personal protection. Adopting David Frankfurter’s flexible notion of syncretism, Johnson Hodge invites us to reimagine the Christianity of that time as encompassing various forms that recognised Christ as a god alongside other powerful beings.[3]
In Chapter Four, Johnson Hodge considers how wives and enslaved people—key, albeit poorly documented, members of Roman households—would have contributed to bringing Christianity into the home through their gestures. To this end, she pieces together glimpses of information from Christian authors and integrates them within the known power dynamics of the Roman domus; thus in contexts where enslaved persons were under the close scrutiny of the pater familias, rather than living on their own. Given the overall scarcity of details on the domestic religious gestures of Roman enslaved persons, Johnson Hodge also turns to modern theories of agency proposed by Judith Butler, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, and Vincent Brown, as well as to dynamics observed in modern Brazil to propose a set of gestures and behaviours pertaining to a household cult.[4]
The final chapter of the book is less innovative than the previous ones. Johnson Hodge shows that Christian private celebrations of the dead, and later of the “special dead” (i.e., martyrs), evolved from Roman traditions that involved commemoration at the tomb in designated periods of the year and the sharing of memories, meals, and drinking both with the deceased and among household members; a set of practices that is attested, with small differences, across the empire’s diverse regions. Johnson Hodge thus reiterates insights previously presented by Hippolyte Delehaye, Éric Rebillard, and others on Christians continuing in a first phase traditional customs with regards to the dead and, in a second phase, adapting them to the faith’s tenets by integrating liturgical acts and minimising merriment.[5] An ‘extension’ of the Roman household cult that was performed at the burial site, the annual commemoration of the dead by adepts of Christ thus followed the pattern seen in previous chapters: the gestures and actions were maintained, but the referenced powers were replaced with Christian ones. With information on this phenomenon abounding for several provinces, Johnson Hodge uses select instances from North Africa, Dalmatia, and Rome to illustrate how martyr tombs became focal points for local Christian communities, rather than for individual Christians. The process by which clergy members assumed control of the ad hoc celebrations over the fourth century CE, discussed at the end of the chapter, offers a model for how representatives of the Church eventually regulated such grassroots practices, a process which has been the subject of previous studies.
By recognising Christians as Romans rather than as a separate group, Johnson Hodge considers how their adoption of Christ as a god influenced the gestures that they typically performed to involve the divine in every aspect of daily life, both inside and outside the home. Johnson Hodge’s analysis corroborates David Frankfurter’s findings for the subsequent period in Roman Egypt, where integrating Christ’s power into inherited ritual practices enabled the faith to spread and flourish.[6] This study also complements another recently published title in the same series, which focuses on how John Chrysostom—one of the fourth century’s most prolific preachers—struggled to regulate the performance of the Christian faith at home.[7]
Curiously, despite focusing on lived religion, Johnson Hodge’s analysis does not engage with Jörg Rüpke’s work on the subject and the wave of scholarship it catalysed.[8] This reflects more of a divide between scholarship produced in the US and Europe than a shortcoming of the book published in the Inventing Christianity series at Penn State, since the latter ultimately provides an excellent analysis of the phenomenon it sets out to explore.
The text is written in an accessible manner suitable for both specialists and a wider audience, and the book itself is carefully produced. In hardback, with an appealing cover design and high-quality paper, the book also features a general index. There are almost no typos, and the only shortcoming is the quality of some of the black-and-white drawings, which would have been worth remaking given the overall relevance of the study.
Johnson Hodge’s study draws attention to an important gap in our understanding of Christian ritual behaviour, and fills it. In this respect, the book establishes a distinct place for itself in research on the spread and performance of Christianity during the first three centuries CE, and it should become essential reading for anyone studying the evolution of the faith during this period.
Notes
[1] E.g., Éric Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200-450 CE. Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press, 2012.
[2] Stanley Stowers, Christian Beginnings: A Study in Ancient Mediterranean Religion. Edinburgh studies in religion in antiquity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024.
[3] David Frankfurter, Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity. Martin Classical Lectures. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.
[4] Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993; Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” American Historical Review (2009): 1231–49; Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Exploring the Intersections of Race, Gender, Status, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies,” in Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies, eds. Laura Nasrallah and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009, pp. 1–23.
[5] Hippolyte Delehaye, Les origines du culte des martyrs. Subsidia Hagiographica 20. Bruxelles: Société des Bollandistes, 1933; Éric Rebillard, The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.
[6] Frankfurter, Christianizing Egypt.
[7] Blake Leyerle, Christians at Home: John Chrysostom and Domestic Rituals in Fourth-Century Antioch. Inventing Christianity. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024.
[8] E.g., Jörg Rüpke, On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016; Valentino Gasparini, Maik Patzelt, Rubina Raja, Anna-Katharina Rieger, Jörg Rüpke, Emiliano Urciuoli, eds., Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World: Approaching Religious Transformations from Archaeology, History and Classics, Berlin-Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2020, to name two representative studies produced by these scholars.