Teaching the history of early Christianity to undergraduates is at once a thrill and a hard row to hoe. Students invariably arrive interested in the subject and some of them quite invested, but taking on five or six centuries in a single course can be a challenge. That is true for any topic, but especially so for this one: the most expedient way through this mass of material might be to offer a single story, an account of progress toward a goal, but that would not reflect the fullness of the current scholarly conversation about early Christianity. Students new to the field have first to understand the concept of historical contingency—at every point in antiquity, things could have gone otherwise—and its corollary, namely, that the importance of a given writer or event to the later tradition does not reliably indicate its importance to antiquity. Cognizant of these challenges, Paula Fredriksen has provided teachers with an outstanding tool for classroom use. At once an introduction of the basic events, ideas, and prosopography necessary for survey courses, Ancient Christianities renders for newcomers a field that grows broader and unrulier with each passing decade. At the same time, it offers an elegant, accessible demonstration of the field’s current historical methods.
A few years ago, Fredriksen spoke about the book’s design at the North American Patristics Society’s annual meeting.[1] Rather than follow a single narrative of development of the tradition, she explained, she chose to organize the book around key themes in early Christianity; the resulting chapters are each a complete study in their topic. Chapter One, “The Idea of Israel,” treats the tradition’s origins in and emerging relationship to Judaism; Chapter Two, “The Dilemmas of Diversity,” the process by which variance in thought and practice came to be understood as “heresy”; Chapter Three, “Persecution and Martyrdom,” the interactions between Christians and the Roman state, the memory of which lives on in martyrdom accounts and martyrs’ feasts; Chapter Four, “The Future of the End,” Christian accounts of time and the ultimate end of the world; Chapter Five, “Christ and Empire,” the emergence of theology as an agonistic project supported by imperial attention and resources; Chapter Six, “The Redemption of the Flesh,” Christian approaches to the possibilities (and liabilities) of the body; and Chapter Seven, “Pagan and Christian,” the inauguration of a consciously Christian identity, accompanied by the idea that there was a “pagan” culture that Christians-as-such left behind. A glossary, several maps, and a robust list of additional readings make the book even more useful.
A veteran in the field and a subtle reader of ancient texts, Fredriksen accomplishes an extraordinary balance in Ancient Christianities. On the one hand, readers are led through the most complex historiographical issues in the study of the tradition. That there were in fact multiple ancient Christianities; that Paul and other early followers of Jesus were not “Christian”; that martyrdom literature tells us more about the ritual and imaginative life of Christians after the start of the fourth century than about events before it; these and other deliberations are presented judiciously, and only when the reader has enough of a base of information to begin to dabble in their complexities. On the other, Fredriksen adopts an authoritative voice in Ancient Christianities that, even with the vagaries of the past in view, is imperative for an introductory book. Too much doubt, too closely attended, might be a mirror of where historians in the field are today, but that doubt can have a deleterious effect on knowledge absorption and retention for novices. As a result, introductory texts often revert to a basic, though outdated narrative, making the wager to tell a story to undergraduates that they will understand, rather than representing how scholars of the field actually talk with each other. Fredriksen manages to do both, giving readers a substantial grounding in the basics alongside a real taste of the epistemological nuances involved in reconstructing the past.
The elegant design, easy prose, and sparse footnoting in this book can obscure, for the uninitiated, its richly evidenced nature. As an example of what I mean, consider a paragraph on page 74. The topic under discussion is whether Christianity was a secretive, illegal religion before the reign of the emperor Constantine. Fredriksen opens the paragraph simply, writing, “Christianity—or Christianities—were not underground movements.” What follows in the body of that paragraph are six individual sentences, each detailing proof of the claim, each one matchable by a knowledgeable reader to an existing ancient source. For the next paragraph, Fredriksen starts, “We also find further evidence of social integration well before the accession of Constantine.” There nine sentences follow, each referencing a building, a person, a text, or an inscription that stands as evidence of the claim. The pattern holds throughout the book, and in this way, Fredriksen has created a twofold resource: a persuasive narrative for new readers, and a kind of collection of lesson plans for teachers. A scholar of early Christianity could read practically any paragraph in the book, take each paragraph’s topic sentence as a lecture topic, then collate the ancient sources gestured to in the body sentences for students to read and examine in support of the point.
Fredriksen’s treatment of the range of early Christianity in the book inclines toward her areas of expertise. Thus, Paul and Augustine appear frequently in the discussion of topics; sources from the first several centuries are more frequently called upon as evidence than those from later centuries (and the book does not treat much material later than the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE); most of the texts brought into evidence survive in Greek and Latin, with fewer Syriac and Coptic sources used. I say this not as a detraction from the book—choices have to be made!—but as a description, because it affects how the book will be used. A teacher expert in the first few centuries of the tradition might not learn as much from the book as I did, but a survey course that leans to the early centuries will be mildly better served by it than one that leans later. The teacher who wants to focus on later materials or to reach outside the classical languages might need to build out additional resources for her students. And yet, I should say: I am currently overhauling my own rather-late-leaning undergraduate survey of early Christian history in order to have Ancient Christianities be the required text the next time I teach it. A student in the most recent iteration of the course, which had no required secondary reading and relied solely on primary sources, asked for a supplemental reading to help him make sense of it all. I recommended Ancient Christianities, and his response tells it even better than I can: “reading Fredriksen is like having the cheat code for this class.”
At the very end of Ancient Christianities, Paula Fredriksen reveals something of the book’s start. “In the beginning,” she writes, “there was Chadwick.” The paperback that anchored half a century of early Christianity survey courses, Henry Chadwick’s The Early Church captured the events and ideas salient in the mid-twentieth-century scholarly discourse about early Christianity—concisely, authoritatively, and affordably. It was what you directed students to read when you needed to give them an introduction to hold on to while they learned all the specificities, the twists and turns of early Christian history, in your lectures and class discussions. Fredriksen’s nod to Chadwick signals her respect for the durability of his little book, but it also implies that Ancient Christianities is come to replace Chadwick. It should.
Notes
[1] Paula Fredriksen, “The Subject Vanishes: Jews, Heretics, and Martyrs after the Linguistic Turn,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 32, no. 2 (2022): 151-169. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/earl.2024.a929876.