Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion: Two Thousand Years of Christian Missions in the Middle East

CONFLICT, CONQUEST, AND CONVERSION

Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion

TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Eleanor H. Tejirian and

Reeva Spector Simon

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS      NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Copyright © 2012 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-51109-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tejirian, Eleanor Harvey, 1938–

Conflict, conquest, and conversion : two thousand years of Christian missions in the Middle East / Eleanor H. Tejirian and Reeva Spector Simon.

    p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-13864-2 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-51109-4 (ebook)

 1. Missions—Middle East—History. I. Simon, Reeva S. II. Title.

BV3160.T45 2012

266.00956—dc23

2012017416

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

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References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1.   The Spread of Christianity: The First Thousand Years

2.   The Latin West in the Middle East: Pilgrimage, Crusade, and Mission

3.   Disintegration, Revival, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation: 1450–1800

4.   The Great Awakening of the Protestants and the Anglicans

5.   Missionaries and European Diplomatic Competition

6.   The Imperialist Moment: From the Congress of Berlin to World War I

7.   Achievements and Consequences: Intended and Unintended

8.   World War I: Nationalism, Independence, and the Fate of the Missionary Enterprise

9.   Setting the Agenda: From Conversion to Witness and Back

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank the Middle East Institute at Columbia University for its financial and moral support of the project since its inception. The interlibrary loan services at Yeshiva and Columbia Universities made access to a large variety of sources that would have been difficult to obtain otherwise. Particular thanks are also due to the Rockefeller Foundation, whose invitation to Bellagio provided validation of the project at a critical juncture. We are grateful to all the scholars who participated in the conferences and panels of the project; their work pointed us in directions we might not otherwise have considered. They include Fatma Al-Sayegh, Lisa Anderson, Peter Awn, Andrea Bartoli, Dale L. Bishop, Richard Bulliet, Randi DeGuilhem, Mehmet Ali Dogan, Eleanor Doumato, Ellen Fleischmann, Carolyn Goffman, Yvonne Haddad, Linda Herrera, Eileen Kane, Ruth Kark, Samir Khalaf, Hans-Lukas Kieser, Ann Lesch, Ussama Makdisi, Bruce Masters, Eden Naby, Inger-Marie Okkenhaug, Jean-Marc Oppenheim, Andrew Porter, Thomas Ricks, Aron Rodrigue, Paul Sedra, Heather Sharkey, Marcella Simoni, Elizabeth Thompson, Devrim Umit, John Voll, Steve Weaver, Robert Woodberry, and Michael Zirinsky. We appreciate the research by Eitan Kastner and thank the copy-editor, Annie Barva, and the editors and staff of Columbia University Press, especially Wendy Lochner and Christine Mortlock.

Credit for the entire project should also be given to Benson and Eleanor Harvey, whose tales of missionary life in the Philippines from 1926 to 1945 sparked their daughter’s curiosity about the meaning and complexities of the missionary experience. Finally and most important, we are grateful to our husbands, Sheldon Simon and Edward Tejirian, who have been extremely patient throughout the project and will surely be glad to see the finished product.

INTRODUCTION

This history of Christian missions in the Middle East is an outgrowth of a project called Altruism and Imperialism, begun at the Middle East Institute of Columbia University in 1998. At the time, the idea that missionary activity was relevant to the history and politics of the Middle East was just beginning to become acceptable. Few courses were offered that covered the missionary enterprise, even in religion departments and seminaries, except at evangelical institutions, despite the fact that major universities house important mission archival collections.

In fact, until quite recently, in the story of the Middle East in modern times missionaries have been marginalized, and in the story of the missionaries the Middle East has been marginalized. This is odd because it was the Middle East—the land of the Bible—that was most privileged by the missionaries themselves, in particular the Protestants, whose enthusiasm became the catalyst for missionary revival in the nineteenth century. Yet there is little in the literature of either the Middle East or missions that examines the entire landscape of Western missionaries—Roman Catholic as well as Protestant, European as well as American, their impact on the region, and the effect of their activity on other aspects of Western involvement in the Middle East.

We began the project with panels at the meetings of the Middle East Studies Association conventions in 1998 and 1999 and participation in a workshop held at the Watson Institute of International Affairs at Brown University in 1999. The subject of missionary activity in the Middle East soon elicited broader interest. The Rockefeller Foundation invited us to hold an international conference at its center in Bellagio, Italy, in August 2000, and Columbia University’s Middle East Institute published in 2002 an edited selection of the papers presented at the Bellagio conference as Altruism and Imperialism: Western Cultural and Religious Missions in the Middle East. Another workshop, focusing on the period following World War II and on the relationship between religious missions and faith-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), a subject that had animated all of our work, was held at Columbia in December 2005.

In the decade since the publication of Altruism and Imperialism, interest in the subject has grown, with an ever-increasing number of dissertations produced and more conference panels organized. In the United States, the focus has been primarily on Protestant missionary efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹ Scholars in a number of disciplines have begun to use missionary sources to investigate such issues as the status of women,² the impact of Western education and technology on the people of the Middle East,³ and even the relationship between religion and international politics.⁴ Israeli scholars have published on missionary work in the Holy Land.⁵ With the resurgence of interest in imperial history, British scholars have been particularly active in reanalyzing the complex relationships among commerce, trade, mission, and imperial control.⁶ Although European scholars from countries that are primarily Roman Catholic or Orthodox have incorporated material on Roman Catholic missions and even Russian missions, they, too, tend to write from national perspectives.⁷ As a consequence, despite this burgeoning interest in the general topic, it became increasingly clear to us that research in these areas had been targeted to specific groups and topics related to the subject with little sense of the overall historical and religious context of the missionary enterprise in the Middle East, one that dates from the earliest days of Christianity. Furthermore, by focusing on Protestant missions, American studies have neglected the long history of Roman Catholic efforts in the region and the relationship between the Eastern and Western branches of Christianity, just as Europeans have neglected American missions.

The purpose of this book, then, is to provide a benchmark narrative that tells the story of Christian missions to the Middle East from the beginning of Christianity to the present. It is an effort to fill the gap in the story of the Middle East by examining the missionary phenomenon in the region in the context of political events. By contextualizing this phenomenon, we hope to provide a frame of reference for a systematic study of the interaction between proselytization and conversion with political change that focuses on the modern period but looks both backward to the Muslim conquests and the Crusades and forward to the cultural and religious evangelism of today, taking into account the domestic roots of the missionary enterprise as well as its international outreach. We are concerned in particular with the interaction between politics and religion as well as with missionaries’ political and social impact on the region. As explicit proselytizing and the work of faith-based NGOs have increased in the region along with Western military and political influence, we need to understand earlier efforts and their effects both on the Middle East and on the countries from which these organizations have come.

The concept of missionary activity has been central in theological terms and in practice to both Christianity and Islam from the earliest days of their existence. Christianity expanded through the Roman Empire, eventually becoming the Roman Empire. Islam developed within the context of the breakup of the Roman and Persian empires and spread by military conquest. Both religions began in the Middle East, expanding outward from there, and, as a result, their holiest places are there. Both are founded on the holy books of Judaism, and the three together constitute the Abrahamic religions. However, their closeness both religiously and geographically has produced more conflict than mutual understanding.

Our story starts with the Great Commission of Jesus to his disciples, which established the universality of his message, and the journeys of St. Paul, the most important of the earliest Christian missionaries. It was these disciples who spread the Christian Gospel throughout the Roman Empire and beyond, focusing first on the Jewish communities, but with Paul’s universalization of the Christian message moving outward across the Roman world. With the legalization of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century, the new religion became increasingly institutionalized and absorbed into the political fabric of the empire. As Rome and then Byzantium weakened, however, coinciding with the weakening of the Persian Empire, space in the Middle East opened sufficiently to allow military conquest by the Arabian tribes under the banner of a new religion, Islam. Over a period of three hundred years, from the seventh century through the tenth century, much of the population from Spain and North Africa to Persia and beyond gradually became Muslim, shrinking the area dominated by Christianity to western Europe and the ever-smaller Byzantine Empire.

Thus, this is a story of shifting momentum. From the crucifixion of Jesus, traditionally dated to 33 CE, until the rise of Islam in the mid–seventh century, Christianity expanded steadily throughout the Mediterranean and contiguous areas, as far north as the British Isles, east to Persia and India, and south to Ethiopia. With the rise of Islam, however, missionary momentum shifted dramatically. Western Christianity was all but moribund following the Germanic invasions, and Eastern Christianity was forced by the Muslim challenge into what was at best a holding pattern. Islam made major inroads into the Christian communities of the eastern Mediterranean, Spain, and North Africa. In the eleventh century, however, the tide began again to turn as Western Christianity expanded north and eastward, the reconquest of Spain proceeded, and, with the Crusades, Europe began a process of increasing its influence on the Middle East. This process was arrested by the rise of Turkish power, culminating in the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and for the next three hundred years the boundary between Christianity and Islam was essentially the boundary between the Ottoman Empire and Europe. Both Christian and Muslim missionary activity in the region diminished until the eighteenth century, though religious interchange continued, particularly as the Roman Catholic Church maintained its contacts with Christians in the Ottoman Empire.

The Crusades, preached in France by Pope Urban II in 1095, mark the first attempt by the Roman Church to retake the Holy Land, Jerusalem, and the Middle East, although the Crusaders were interested primarily in conquest rather than in conversion. This first foray, lasting two hundred years, was ultimately a failure, and Islam consolidated its hold on the region, expanding it with the rise of the Ottoman Empire. As the Ottomans spread their control over the eastern Mediterranean and pressed Europe on its eastern borders, western Europe began to explore the world to the west. Spain and Portugal in particular extended their reach to the Americas, taking with them Roman Catholic missionaries. As western Europe increased its political and military power, projecting it throughout the world and carrying Christianity with it, the Church of Rome fragmented under the challenge of Protestantism. By the end of the eighteenth century, Islamic political power, represented primarily by the Ottoman and Persian empires, had weakened, and the West, including Western Christianity both Catholic, which had never left the region, and Protestant, was moving in to replace it.

Most of this book covers the period of Western hegemony in the Middle East and the rise of nationalism that coincided with the so-called Great Awakenings. These Protestant revival movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries began in America and spread to Britain and the rest of Protestant Europe, inspiring the sending of missionaries throughout the globe. In the Middle East, Protestants first focused on the Holy Land and on conversion of Jews. At the same time, Roman Catholic and Orthodox powers had their religious protégés whom they could use to leverage their imperial relations with the Ottomans, Egyptians, and Persians. For most of the nineteenth century, commerce, religion, and imperial strategy dominated the Europeans’ policy in the Middle East and Central Asia in what was known as the Eastern Question—or what to do with the Ottoman Empire as it declined—and in the Anglo–Russian competition in Central Asia known as the Great Game. For Russia, Germany, and even secular France, missionaries were used as instruments of imperial policy. The British generally dissociated missionary work from state policy, but they were able to parlay their support for the Ottoman Empire against Russian incursions in the Middle East into the establishment of an Anglican presence in Jerusalem and to gain official status for Protestants in the Ottoman Empire.

At the same time, initial American Protestant attempts at missionary work in the Middle East were discouraging. With the British already established in the Holy Land and in Egypt, American Protestants began to work in Lebanon and Anatolia, where they focused on education and medicine. Their missions saw Eastern Christians as targets if not for conversion, then at least for modernization. Unlike the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox, whose missionaries were directed from Europe through orders resident in the region, American Protestants often went to work in the Middle East as individuals or families and may or may not have been associated with missionary organizations in the United States. By the end of the nineteenth century, as Protestant evangelical organizations transformed and proliferated, their diversity was mirrored in the Protestant organizations in the Middle East.

The decade preceding World War I was the high point of Western missionary work in the Middle East. Roman Catholic missions proliferated in the Middle East and North Africa, and the Russians bolstered Greek Orthodox institutions in the wake of the Protestant challenge. Among evangelical Protestants, religious fervor generated by revival meetings on both sides of the Atlantic, concern for Christian victims of war in Greece, Bulgaria, and Lebanon, and Muslim uprisings in India and the Sudan sparked renewed interest in converting Muslims. Meetings in Britain and organizations such as the Student Volunteer Movement motivated youth to mission. This euphoria occurred at a time when the focus of the Protestant mission in mainline churches was shifting from conversion to support of indigenous churches, education, and humanitarian assistance.

The consequence of this change is what scholars look to when they wish to assess the impact of the missionary enterprise on the peoples of the region. The establishment of schools and colleges, the institution of Western curricula with their space for intellectual challenge and questioning, and interest in biblical and pre-Islamic archaeology at a time of burgeoning nationalisms throughout the region lead many to see a correlation between the missionaries’ work and the development of local nationalist movements.

World War I destroyed the Protestant missionary enterprise, just as this enterprise had developed under the patronage of the European powers in the nineteenth century. Although the Middle East was never subject to Western imperial control to the same extent as India and Africa, the missionaries nevertheless benefited from European protections and were clearly part of the cultural encounter between East and West that characterized the period. With the rise of nationalisms in the former Ottoman and Persian empires during the interwar period, the resulting conflicts with the Western powers that had been granted mandatory authority in the former Ottoman Empire by the League of Nations affected missionary activity.

The ideological and theological developments within the missionary movement itself, brought about by the changing circumstances both in the Middle East and in the West, have caused a shift from an emphasis on conversion to one of cooperation with existing churches and the indigenization of the missionary churches. This shift has resulted in the strengthening of the Eastern Christian churches even as their members emigrated the region in greater numbers, leaving the Middle East a more thoroughly Muslim world than at any time in its history. For the mainline Protestant churches, missionary zeal has increasingly been channeled into affiliated, faith-based NGOs, and the evangelical mission has been taken up by other evangelical and Pentecostal Christian groups. It is the latter who continue the work of the Great Commission.

ONE

The Spread of Christianity

The First Thousand Years

As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. Immediately they left their nets and followed him. (Matthew 4:18–19 RSV)

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age. (Matthew 28:16–20 RSV)

The first story recounts Jesus’s recruitment of the first missionaries, the twelve disciples who followed him during his lifetime. Peter and Simon were followed by two more brothers, James and John (the sons of thunder), and then by Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew, James (the Less), Thaddeus (called Jude), Simon the Zealot, and finally Judas, later accused of betraying Jesus to the Romans. The stories of the travels of the first eleven, though perhaps apocryphal in many cases, give us a clear idea of the lands to which the Christian message was thought to have been carried in the first century, the apostolic period. The second story, referred to as the Great Commission, is the touchstone for the evangelical foreign missions of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

Peter preached first in Jerusalem and then in Rome, where he was martyred in 67 CE. His brother Andrew is reputed to have gone to Thrace, Constantinople, and Macedonia and was martyred in Patros in Greece. There is also a tradition that he traveled to Georgia in the Caucasus and preached to the Scythians near the Caspian Sea. By tradition, James was martyred in Jerusalem in 44; his brother John remained in Jerusalem until just prior to the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66–70, when he went to Ephesus. He is reputed to have remained in exile on the island of Patmos until his death in 100, writing several of the books included in the New Testament canon: the Gospel According to John; the letters designated First, Second, and Third John; and the final book, Revelation. Philip is thought to have gone from Galilee to Galatia in present-day Turkey and was martyred at Hieropolis at the age of eighty-seven. Bartholomew also went to Hieropolis, then variously to India and Armenia, where he is thought to have been martyred at Derbend, on the west coast of the Caspian Sea, in 68. It was Thomas who went to Babylon and may have established the first Christian church there. From there he is thought to have gone on to Persia, India, and even as far as China. He was martyred in India. Matthew, the author of the Gospel, is also thought to have traveled to Persia and may have been martyred there or alternatively in Egypt. Mark, regarded as the founder of the Coptic Church, is said to have proselytized in North Africa.¹ There are few traditions concerning James the Less, though he may have been the first bishop of the Syrian Church. Jude is also thought to have evangelized the region of Armenia in Anatolia, around Edessa (modern Urfa), which emerged as a major center of early Christianity. However, there is also a tradition that he worked in northern Persia as well, where he may have been martyred and buried near Tabriz.

The focus of these traditions on the eastern Roman world and the realms even farther east beyond Roman control is striking evidence of the dispersion of Jewish communities throughout the Roman and Persian empires, which were the disciples’ first targets. Only Peter, who with Paul went to Rome, and the last disciple, Simon (the Zealot), are thought to have gone west. Tradition indicates that he went to Egypt, Mauritania, and even Britain, though even he is thought to have gone also to Persia.

Peter clearly emerged as the leader of the disciples from the beginning, and the enumeration of the countries in whose native languages his message was heard in Jerusalem provides further evidence of the scope of the earliest missionary enterprise: And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language, Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God? (Acts 2:8–11 RSV).

From the beginning, the primary target of the disciples’ mission was fellow Jews, scattered throughout the Roman Empire, for Jesus regarded himself as the fulfillment of the prophecy of a Jewish messiah. Whether and how the message should be extended also to non-Jews was a major source of contention within the nascent church in the first century.

Omitted from this list of the twelve disciples are two major figures of the early expansion of what came to be called Christianity. One is James, the brother of Jesus, who obviously knew Jesus but was not one of his small band of followers. The other is Paul, originally called Saul. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus is one of the seminal stories of the New Testament.

At midday … I saw on the way a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining round me and those who journeyed with me. And when we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me … Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? And I said, Who are you, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. But rise and stand upon your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and bear witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, delivering you from the people and from the Gentiles—to whom I send you to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me. (Acts of the Apostles 26:13–18 RSV)

Paul was probably born in Tarsus in Cilicia, a cosmopolitan city founded by the Persians in the fourth century BCE and conquered by Rome in the second century. His family appears to have been tent makers and Roman citizens, though Jews. His daily language would have been Greek, though he would also have known Aramaic. When he went to Jerusalem in 28 to study to be a Pharisee, he took the name Saul. This was his first conversion—from Diaspora Judaism, which owed much to Greek thought, to Pharisaic Judaism as practiced in the Temple in Jerusalem.² After spending four years in Jerusalem, he was sent to Damascus to counter the increasing influence of the Jesus cult there, at which point he had the vision described earlier.

As we think about missionary practice in early Christianity, it is important to understand that Paul’s conversion did not come about as a result of missionary preaching, but from what he felt was a personal experience with Jesus. Unlike later conversions that resulted from his preaching and that of the apostles, he himself was not the object of missionary preaching. He did not begin to preach immediately but instead spent three years in Arabia (probably Nabatea) and then returned home to Tarsus. Thus, he does not appear to have regarded the charge on the road to Damascus as an immediate demand that he go out to convert the Gentiles. However, that charge does seem to have implied that he could endeavor to convert Gentiles directly to Christianity without first converting them to Judaism.

Paul undertook his first missionary journey in 42 CE, ten years after his conversion, and from then until his execution in Rome in 64 he crisscrossed the Roman Empire from Jerusalem to Asia Minor to Greece, establishing churches in many centers as reflected in the letters contained in the New Testament. He went first to Cyprus and then to Antioch on the Orontes, far from Jerusalem. However, by 46 sufficient controversy had arisen within the small Christian communities over the requirements for salvation that Paul found it necessary to return to Jerusalem to meet with Peter and James, the brother of Jesus, who had assumed leadership of the Jerusalem community. At this meeting, spheres of influence in proselytization were established: Peter, Barnabas, and those like them would direct their attention to Jews and God-fearers [pagans who accepted the Jewish God] in the synagogues of Israel and lands contiguous with Israel. Paul could make his way outside that large region (into Asia Minor, for example) with what he calls the apostolate of foreskin—that is, for Gentiles.³

Thus, Paul left Jerusalem for Philippi in Greece and then went on to Thessalonika, Athens, and Corinth, where he remained until 52. During this period, he began to write the letters that were eventually included in the New Testament and that represent the earliest written Christian literature.

In 52, Paul returned again to Jerusalem to try to achieve agreement with James on issues of conversion. James continued to insist that acceptance of the Jewish Torah was required for baptism, a position that Paul opposed. Peter, working in Antioch, accepted James’s position, and in 53 Paul left Antioch for Ephesus, where he remained for three years, becoming an apostle for the faith of the Gentiles in the Diaspora.⁴ In 57, Paul paid a final visit to James in Jerusalem, and when they were unable to reach agreement, Paul was thrown out of the Temple, beaten, and arrested by the Romans. As a Roman citizen, he asked to be taken to Rome for judgment, where he continued to preach. He no longer depended on synagogues for preaching, and he felt no dependence on Jerusalem. In 64, Nero, blaming the Christians for the great fire in Rome, launched persecutions during which Paul was beheaded, and Peter, who had also come to Rome, was crucified (upside down, according to tradition). Paul had already cut his ties with Judaism.

Although Paul himself had not been converted by a human agent, his method of conversion of others was preaching, frequently in synagogues or the homes of believers. Several aspects of his life and preaching resonate in the Protestant missionary enterprise of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. First, Paul’s own conversion experience led him to regard it as being born again, represented by the ceremony of baptism. Second, James and Paul found it necessary to divide the territory of their proselytizing to prevent confusion and conflict, as Protestants would do in the nineteenth century. Third, repeatedly in his career Paul fell back on his family’s trade of tent making as a way of earning a living while continuing his preaching. The concept of tent makers—that is, missionaries who adopt another working identity to enable them to continue to proselytize—has become very important in evangelism since the late twentieth century.

After Paul, however, there appears to be no formal missionary mechanism within the Christian Church. We find no names of active missionaries until the age of Constantine in the fourth century, despite the fact that Christianity was emerging as the fastest-growing religion in the Mediterranean region. As hope for the imminent End of Time and the Second Coming of Jesus declined, and as a church hierarchy developed, the initial force that drove the first missions receded. Local versions of Christianity, each with its own language and theological variation, developed throughout the empire. Once imperial patronage was established, however, Constantine and his successors would address this heterogeneity in the councils of the early Catholic Church.⁵

To understand Paul’s mission, it is necessary to understand the environment in which he operated. The Middle East, together with the rest of the empire, was a world of intellectual and religious ferment—soul searching, interest in mystery cults and other alternative religions,⁶ as well as apocalyptic zeal, intense mysticism, and incipient violence.⁷ With the establishment of the Roman Empire under Augustus (27 BCE–14 CE) and the subsequent institution of the cult of the emperor during the first century, religiopolitical loyalties had become more complicated. For pagans, the priests and the sacrifices to the Roman emperor, whose impact on daily life was as divine as their gods, meant the addition of more festivals to the calendar and the opportunity to construct monuments and to fund tributes. Imperial religion deified emperors, who outlawed the Eastern religions that many nevertheless continued to practice. For monotheists, refusal to participate in emperor worship meant disloyalty to the state. To the Romans, it also smacked of atheism.

Judaism was one of the religions from the East that proved attractive to many Romans in this period. Paul’s travels took him to areas of the Jewish Diaspora where Jews were one among any number of spiritual and intellectual communities spreading the good word about their particular belief systems during the early Roman Empire. It is only in the first century that we read of a general interest in Judaism’s beliefs and practices. Before then, we rarely hear about actual converts to Judaism. By the second century, however, we hear of Christians who are attracted to full-fledged Judaism, in particular women, who did not need to be circumcised.⁸ Rabbinic sources provide no evidence of an official doctrine or methodology related to proselytizing. It seems that individuals brought others into the faith, and conversion was personal and spontaneous.⁹ Roman authors write of Jews being expelled from the city of Rome because so many people from the Roman upper class were attracted to Judaism that it became somewhat of a fad to follow Jewish customs. Sympathizers who abstained from eating pork, did not work on the Sabbath, and even underwent circumcision were derided. Interested Gentiles did not deny paganism totally but rather venerated the God of the Jews and selected those Jewish rites they wished to observe. More of these God-fearers were to be found in areas outside of Judea, especially in Asia Minor among Jews in the communities of the Jewish Diaspora. Early Christianity at its inception was a movement within Judaism directed to Jews.¹⁰

This intellectual ferment existed in a Roman Empire fraught with internal dissension and the almost constant rebellion along its frontiers from Britain to Judea, the Caucasus, and the eastern marches. Tyrannical rulers found in the adherents to Christianity who brooked no compromise in their monotheism convenient scapegoats for imperial instability. Nero’s condemnation of Christians for setting the fire that destroyed much of the city of Rome in 64 came at a time when the emperor faced senatorial plots against his rule and had to call in troops to suppress the rebellion in Judea that would outlast his reign.

Persecutions of Christians occurred again during the reign of Domitian who faced rebellions along the Rhine and assassination. Attacks on Christians during the second century after adherence to Christianity became illegal were sporadic and were often the result of local mob violence rather than imperial decree.

After the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70, however, the split between Christianity and Judaism grew. Christians, who believed that the Messiah had come, did not participate in the Jewish rebellion against Rome (66–70), which was both political and eschatological. Despondent at the loss of Jerusalem, most Jews rejected Christian overtures and continued to await the arrival of the Messiah.

The fact that Christians were not persecuted after the Jewish rebellion under Hadrian is evidence that the Roman authorities differentiated between Jews and Christians and that the split between Christianity and Judaism had become irrevocable. The Bar Kokhba revolt in 132–135, as this rebellion is known, with its messianic overtones led to Rome’s decision to sever the ties between Jews and their homeland by renaming it Syria–Palastina. Jerusalem became a pagan cult center called Aelia Capitolina, and Jews were forbidden to enter the city except on the anniversary of the Temple’s destruction (the ninth of the Jewish month of Av), when they were permitted to sit at the last remnant of the Jewish Temple, the Western Wall (also known as the Wailing Wall) and mourn. Events of the second century also marked the dispersion of the Jews throughout the world from Central Asia to Spain, where they became one minority among many in the empires where they lived.

Economic and political instability continued as the Roman Empire’s traditional mechanisms for political control eroded. The emperors, with few troops under their direct command, relied on client peoples living on the periphery for defense of the imperial heartland, but that reliance began to break down toward the end of the second century. Despite the lengthy and stable tenures of both Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, drawn-out wars of rebellion by the tribes along the Rhine and Danube river borders and losses in the east against the Parthians severely taxed Rome’s prestige and precarious economy. The spread of Christianity across the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries was paralleled by the expansion of the empire itself. Nevertheless, in Rome the old gods still ruled, reinforced by the cult of the divinity of the emperor himself. Both Jews and Christians suffered persecution, torture, and death.

By 200, the Roman Empire had reached its greatest extent, stretching from Britain to North Africa to the Caucasus to the borders of Persia. Fifty years later, however, the empire was in crisis. Civil war over imperial succession led to short reigns by military commanders, whose border origins seemingly provided them with experience at combating the increasing tribal invasions by consortia of Goths, Franks, and Visigoths from the Ukraine to Spain who settled within the borders of the empire. Such stop-gap economic revitalization measures as imperial citizenship (212), however, led more often than not to tax evasion and did not impede the decline of trade and monetary devaluation that accompanied the road to imperial bankruptcy. Urban decline, decentralization of imperial rule, economic stagnation more in the agriculturally based West than