17-CHAPTER 17. THE CHURCH FROM 120 TO 170 A.D.

CHAPTER 16. THE CHURCH FROM 120 - 170 A.D.

WE have seen that, before the end of the first century, there was, as a rule, an individual episkopos in each community, who tended, in fact, to be permanent, but who possessed no official rank except as a presbyteros. It may be argued that the account we have given of his position is inconsistent and self-contradictory. We acknowledge that this is so; but this does not prove it to be untrue. The office was in process of rapid growth, and no account of it can be true which makes it logical and self-consistent in character. It had vast potentiality, for the whole future of the Church was latent in it; yet, in its outward appearance and its relation to the past, it was humble, and the episkopos was merely a presbyter in special circumstances. [If the view we have taken is correct, the question whether anepiskoposexercised any teaching or religious duties shows a misapprehension of the situation. Theepiskoposmay do anything that a presbyter may do, for he is a presbyter. He may be a prophet and speak with inspiration, for inspiration may come to all.] His actual influence depended on his personal character. The order of prophets still existed; but, to take an example, what influence was any prophet likely to have in Smyrna except with Polycarp’s approval? But if the idea had been possible in Smyrna that Polycarp’s action was guided to the faintest degree by thought of self, his influence would never have existed. His personal influence, however, was undoubtedly increased by the important administrative duties which he performed as episkopos; and, in all probability, his position in Smyrna did much to impress on the mind of his contemporaries in general, and of Ignatius in particular, a new conception of the episcopal office. Yet, even after his death, the letter to the church at Philomelion, written, as we must understand, by the episkopos who succeeded him, is couched in the old style. The writer is merely the impersonal mouth-piece of the community at Smyrna. An important step was made when the Christian communities began to accommodate themselves to Roman law by enrolling themselves as Benefit Clubs. That this step had been taken by the third century is certain in a considerable number of cases, and may safely be assumed as general. [Le Blant,Actes, pp. 282, 288; De Rossi, Roma Sotterr., ii., p. 82; and my papers inExpositor, December 1888, February 1889. Hatch,Bampton Lectures, p. 152, collects the facts well, but states them without sufficient legal precision. The right of forming associations, provided these were not in themselves illegal, belonged theoretically to all except soldiers; but practically almost all associations were illegal. The exception in the case of poor persons, chiefly for purposes of burial, came to be important under Hadrian,Digest, 47, 22;C. I. L., xiv., 2112. The technical name iscollegia tenuiorum, orfuneraticia, p. 359n.]As to the time when the custom began no evidence remains; but I see no reason why it should not have begun as early as Hadrian’s reign, simultaneously with the outburst of Apologetic literature and the general rapprochement between the Church and the Empire, A.D. 130-40. [In 1882 (Journal of Hellenic Studies, p. 347), unaware of the bearings of the case, I tried to prove that a benefaction to the poor, mentioned in the fourth-century legend of Avircius Marcellus as taking place in Hieropolis of Phrygia, and beginning as early as the second century, was historical.] The general development of such collegia over the Empire was quite in accordance with Hadrian’s broad views and his superiority to the narrow Roman idea.

Christian communities, registered as collegia tenuiorum, held property. The collegium had to be registered in the name of some individual, who acted as its head and representative, and who held the property that belonged to it. We can hardly doubt that the episkopos was the representative of the collegium, for he already acted as representative of the community in its relation to others. About 259 Gallienus granted to the bishops the right to recover the cemeteries, which had been seized in the recent persecutions, and which had therefore been registered in the name of the bishops a considerable time previously. This being the case, the community would be unable to recover such property by ordinary legal process from the bishop, if he were deposed or changed; for it could not appear before a court except through its bishop. [For example, in A.D. 270, when Paul of Samosata, Bishop of Antioch, was deposed, he retained the church building and property until the whole church appealed to Aurelian against him ( Eusebius,H. E., vii., 30).]Permanence in the discharge of episcopal duties was usual long before 130; but the new character of the bishop must have greatly strengthened his official character. If the impression I have as to the numbers and power of the Christians in Asia Minor is correct, the property of the communities must have been considerable. Doubts were sure to arise as to boundaries and other points; and in such cases the community must either submit to external claims, or appear by its bishop before a tribunal. The bishop thus became the regulator of the property of the community. Similarly in modern Turkey, a religious community can have a legal position only as represented by an individual head; but, if it thus legalises itself, the head has ex officio a seat on the district council. [In this way the pastor of a small Armenian community in Cæsareia of Cappadocia is a member of the Mejliss of that important city, and has at least once, by his solitary resistance, prevented an arbitrary act of the Pasha. My authority is Dr. Farnsworth, whose mission is not connected in any way with this Protestant community.]

Such associations were commonly for sepulchral purposes, and cemeteries were the most widely spread form of property. Bequests of such property are well known. [One of the most curious is published by me inRevue des Études Grecques, 1889, p. 24, where we must read in A (as Mommsen writes) πη(χέων) δέκα ἐπὶ σέκα, and in B δικε[λ]λα[τὰ] δύο and ἀ[γωγὸ]ν Ἠρυ[κ]τόν.] With Hadrian a new period begins in the Church. Not merely did Apology arise, as an immediate consequence of his wiser policy. The Church as a body responded to his action, and a marked distinction in its policy and its utterances appears to have taken place about 130. The uncompromising spirit of Ignatius did not long survive him. [From this point of view we must date theShepherdof Hermas before the era of the charge--i.e., before c. 130. In every aspect that I can appreciate, it belongs to the age 100-120, and is earlier even than Ignatius’ letters. 2 Peter seems to belong to the same period as Hermas: I cannot,e.g., imagine1 Peter 3:1-2, being written at an early period.] That amount of concession to the State, which was implied in pleading before the Imperial tribunal or the bar of public opinion, probably became universal soon after his time. But there was much disagreement as to the extent to which concession should go; and the disagreement increased as time went on. It is quite impossible, owing to the dearth of works of the period, to say when the disagreement began to be apparent; but it is a striking feature of Christian documents (except the purely Apologetic) in the period that follows A.D. 150. In the Letter of the Smyrnæans about the death of Polycarp in 155, it is strongly marked, and evidently is a question that has existed for some time, but on which peaceable discussion is still possible. The Acta of Carpus, a document of uncertain date, but probably very little later, shows a similar state of the discussion, in which it takes the opposite side. In the former document, as Keim has rightly observed, there is a strong though veiled protest against voluntarily offering oneself for martyrdom. The Christian should wait till he is arrested, and should consider the safety of his coreligionists. Keim [Aus dem Urchristenthum, p. 119. In his reply to Keim Lightfoot seems to me not to show his usual historical insight when he inclines to dispute the fact, i., p. 619.]rightly urges that such a protest is not in keeping with the earlier tone of the Church; but he wrongly adduces it as an argument that the document is a late forgery. In this protest we catch the new tone that grew up after Hadrian’s time. Hence marked blame is cast on the Phrygian, Quintus, who voluntarily gave himself up; and the drawing of a triumphant moral is implied in the way in which his subsequent weakness is described. On the other hand, Polycarp’s withdrawal from the city is described as arising, not from cowardice, but from the belief that it was the right course; and the intention to paint Polycarp’s action as a law to others is proved by the straining after analogies, some rather far-fetched, between his death and that of Christ (p. 374; Lft., Ign., i., p. 610). In Acta Carpi, especially in the concluding episode of Agathonike, the opposite principle--viz., that the Christian ought to proclaim openly his religion, and even to rush upon martyrdom [This episode, as Harnack well shows, wants the striking individualism shown in the characters of Carpos and Papylos, and the incidents seem even coloured in imitation of the tale of Thekla.
Where he preaches most, the writer is more remote from bare narrative of facts (p. 399).]--is insisted on. This document shows the same type of feeling, though not so developed, as appears in Acta Perpetuœ, in which Professor Rendel Harris has rightly recognised the controversial character. But, though in Acta Carpi the tone is more developed than in the Smyrnæan letter, it is still peacable, and free from the rancour that characterised the bitter controversy of the years after 170. [The chief point in which I differ from Dr. Harnack’s admirable edition ofActa Carpiis his inference, founded on a comparison between the later and the earlierActa, that it is impossible to recover from lateActa, by such subjective criticism as M. Le Blant has used, any real historical facts. The inference I would draw is different. In the lateActa Carpithere is not a single point that would be quoted as indicative of real foundation, and there is not a trace of local colour; yet we now find that this miserable legend is only a distortion of fact. This case seems to lend strength to the argument of those who take any points of finer character in these late legends as survivals of real history on which the legends are founded.] In that period Catholic prisoners would have no intercourse with Montanists, and in Acta Perpetuœ the Montanist Saturus in a vision saw the bishop of his church shut out from heaven. Acta Carpi is still far from that extreme. The bishops were the chief agents in carrying out the policy of conciliation towards the State, which the Catholic Church, as a whole, resolved on, but which a strong party in it considered to be a secularisation of religion, and an unworthy compromise. [In this critical period our present concern is merely to understand what did take place, and not to apportion praise or blame to the contending parties.]While the Church, guided by the bishops, acted on a skilful and well-considered plan, the party which held that accommodation with the State was compromise with the World maintained that this plan was worldly wisdom, and that the Church should have recourse always to Divine guidance, as accorded in new revelations to seers, and prophets, and martyrs. At first both parties continued within the limits of brotherhood and one common Church, and both equally clung to the idea of unity and solidarity of all Christians. Both episkopoi and prophets therefore characterised the organisation with which each party started; but naturally, as bishops guided the one and prophets the other, each, in the progress of disagreement, acquired a growing dislike for the organisation which the other insisted on. The Church in Asia Minor seems to have held that Christians should live in society as far as possible, should act as members of the municipal senates, and serve as soldiers. [Numerous examples, especially of senators, occur in the Christian inscriptions of the third century. See my papers inExpositor, 1888-9, andJournal of Hellenic Studies, 1883. When Tertullian says that Pliny degraded some Bithynian Christians from their rank, he is referring to senators degraded as Dorymedon was at Synnada (see Le Blant,Actes, p. 122); but his remark is not justified by Pliny, and is a judgment grounded on the facts of his own time.]But in Acta Carpi it is clear that the official information (elogium) supplied to the proconsul specified Papylos as a senator; yet, when the question was put to Papylos, he would not admit the fact, but replied, "I am a citizen." Apparently he had been called on to serve, but considered the duty an unworthy one. He held, with Tertullian and Origen, that Christians ought not to hold office, nor serve in the army, as in both cases it was impossible to avoid countenancing heathen rites. But the ordinary Christians, the tradesmen and shopkeepers and skilled artisans, who had to face the practical difficulties of life, while Tertullian taught and thought and wrote, could not act on this principle; [Examples of soldiers, stirred by religious feeling to refuse service, or to participate in heathen rites, occur inActa Maximiliani, Acta Marcelli(Aug. 27), Tertulliande Cor. Mil., i. The refusal to perform the ordinary duties of society was termed by the State indolence (see above, p. 274, and Le Blant,Actes, p. 312).]and the Church, as a whole, justified them, and held that they ought not to force their religion on the notice of others, and might even employ legal forms to give a show of legality to their position, and help inactive or well-disposed officials to keep their eyes shut. The object of using legal forms and fictions was not concealment, as that was impossible and unnecessary, when they were so powerful as the Church was in Asia Minor during the second century. [At an earlier time concealment was an object; and perhaps a trace of this remains in the legend of Avircius Marcellus. At the source of a stream among the mountains between Synnada and Hieropolis was a place called Gonyklisia--i.e., where the early rite of γονάτων κλίσις was held. This remote place was clearly a secret meeting-place; and after the meetings had ceased, and the archaic term was no longer understood, a foolish legend grew up to explain the name, seeExpositor, 1889, p. 262.]It was to give themselves a legal footing, and allow all who had no active animosity to keep up the fiction about them. Thus, even while Christianity was held a capital offence, communities obtained a legal position as Benefit Societies. The party which rejected all these compromises with the State gradually took form as Montanism. Montanism was in many respects the conservative principle. It remained truer to the old forms. It maintained the order of prophets
in its old dignity: it did not admit the growing dignity of the bishops. It claimed that it preserved the character and the views of the early Church. But it was unconscious that in human society conservatism is an impossibility. The life of the Church lay in the idea of unity and intercommunication; the Catholic Church was truer to this essential idea, and, in order to maintain it, was ready to sacrifice some of the older forms. Montanism was blind to the real character of this idea, and went back to the early thought of a local centre for the unified Church, for which it was as zealous as the Catholics. It made a New Jerusalem, and localised it in two little villages of the Phrygian highlands, Pepouza and Tymion. [Harnack, almost alone among modern writers, and in confessed opposition to the views of the later Montanists, considers that the earlier Montanists held the new Phrygian Jerusalem to be the proper home of all Christians, who were to leave their own houses, and to settle there. This appears to me to misconceive the Montanist idea, which was conservative.] In opposition to this idea of a local centre, the Catholic Church maintained in theory that its centre had no locality, and that primacy in the Church lay in the most perfect realisation of the Christian idea; but in practice one cannot doubt that the thought of Rome as the centre in fact, though not in principle, was conceived or at least strengthened in opposition to the Montanist Jerusalem. Hence, when Avircius Marcellus, the Catholic champion in Phrygia at this period, was approaching death, and wished to leave behind him in his epitaph before the eyes of men a testimony brief, clear, emphatic, of the truth for which he had during his life contended, he described in it his visit to Rome and his intercourse with the Church there, and his visit to Syria with all its cities; but the only Syrian city which he named was not Jerusalem, but Nisibis.

Conservative as Montanism desired to be, it could not preserve the reality of the form that it prized by mere conservatism. A living and vigorous organism must develop, and Montanism was no exception to this rule. It made a Phrygian mountain glen the centre of the Church; and, as a necessary consequence, the marked character of the country and the people impressed itself more and more on their religion. It is a trite subject, on which I need not dwell, how many traces of the old enthusiastic religion of Phrygia are to be found in Montanism. While, therefore, the unity and brotherhood of Christians was the central principle of Montanism, as of Catholicism, it was in the nature of things inevitable that the former should in Asia Minor become the Church-according-to-the-Phrygians. There was no outside influence to counteract the natural tendency of the Phrygians to Phrygianise their beliefs; for outside influence was mainly Catholic, and Montanism disliked the episcopal channel through which intercommunication was maintained. Thus it happened that an influential position was accorded to women in Phrygian Montanism. This arose, not from any essential principle of Montanist doctrine, but from the tone of Asian society. Hence it was not a characteristic of Montanism generally; and no one can be more opposed to it as a feature of Church government than the Montanist Tertullian. That visions were granted to women he admitted, but beyond this he would not go; and it is clear that the Phrygian Montanist prophetesses, Prisca and Maximilla, must have gone far further. The subject would soon carry us far beyond our limits. We must not, however, pass from it without referring to the one great figure on the Catholic side produced by the Phrygian Church during this period, Avircius Marcellus, born about A.D. 120-130. We are fortunate in possessing two accounts of his life and action; one written by himself, in his seventy-second year, the other a legendary biography, composed, probably, about A.D. 400. In the former he appears as an upholder of what he believed to be the truth, in a controversy that took place within a powerful and world-wide church; in the latter he is the missionary who converted a heathen land. From the latter alone it would be impossible to discover the real character and position of Avircius Marcellus; and yet the original document, combined with the information given by Eusebius, shows how most of the legendary adventures originated. It would be most instructive in regard to the nature of these late Acta in general, and also in regard to the difference between the tone of the Church in the second century and A.D. 400, to study in detail the legendary biography. But such a study would be premature until a MS. of the Acta in the National Library in Paris is published. [No. 1540. Rev. H Thurston,S. J., has kindly sent me some highly interesting passages from it.]An important MS., now in Jerusalem, is said by Professor Rendel Harris to be on the eve of publication by M. Papadopoulos Kerameus. For the present I need only refer to what I have written on the subject in Expositor, 1889; further reflection and study have confirmed me in the opinions there expressed. In particular, the name Avircius Marcellus still seems to me to imply Western origin. If the name occurred in a pagan inscription, no one would have a moment’s hesitation in accepting it as belonging to an Italian settler in Asia Minor, one of the numerous Roman traders who swarmed in the great cities of the provinces, and who played in ancient times a part similar to that played by British commerce in spreading national influence at the present day. I feel obliged to interpret the names of Christians on the same principles as those of pagans, and to recognise Avircius Marcellus as a Roman citizen (the prœnomen being, as often, omitted) belonging to a Western family settled in Asia Minor. [Aburcus at Falerii, DeeckeFalisker, p. 214; Avircius in Rome,C.I.L., vi., 12923-5; Avercius in Gaul, xii., 1052; it spread to Cappadocia as Abourgios Basil,Ep., 33. Ignatius Theophorus is not Roman: he belonged to a Syrian family, strongly affected by Western civilisation, which had discarded native names and used the double nomenclature, Italian and Greek. The unusual name Ignatius has some historical explanation.] The Catholic champion’s fame naturalised the name Avircius in Phrygia in its Greek forms, ’Aουίρκιος, ’Aβίρκιος, ’Aβέρκιος. Examples of its use occur as late as the tenth century, when it was borne by an official mentioned in the treatise of Constantine Porphyrogenitus de Adm. Imp., 50. It is found in Phrygian inscriptions of the fourth century [They mark the period when Avircius was remembered as the old Christian hero, and the legend was growing in Catholic circles.] (see Expositor, 1889, p. 395, and Lightfoot, Ignatius, i., p. 501). One of these, shown in the accompanying illustration, deserves more notice; it is the epitaph on the gravestone that marked the tomb of Abirkios, son of Porphyrios, a deacon at Prymnessos. His name is a sufficient proof that he belonged to the Catholic Church, and therefore that there was a Catholic Church at Prymnessos, in the anti-Catholic part of Phrygia. [An inscription of Sinethandos or Laodiceia Combusta, probably of the end of the fourth, or early fifth, century, mentions the Church of the Novatians there. The phrase τͩ+̑ν Νατω+̑ν has been misunderstood in theCorpus, No. 9,268, and treated as a single word even by M. Waddington, No. 1,699. The article τͩ+̑ν has been doubled by error of the engraver.] The sculpture on the gravestone is interesting, as giving one of the earliest known representations of the Saviour, who, as in other early sculptures, is represented as a youthful figure. In all probability a Montanist would have regarded the representation of the Saviour as idolatrous; but the Iconodoulic tendency was already beginning in the Orthodox Church. He stands, facing, but with the head turned to the right, with the thumb and two fingers of the right hand extended. The attitude is that of admonition and instruction. The figure has the squat proportions that mark the declining art of the late third and the fourth century. The features are those of the conventional male youth of later art, insipid but retaining the Greek type and character. The artist was used to represent the face in profile, and therefore put the head in that position, though the body is differently placed. The heads of Abirkios, and his wife, Theuprepia, are shown on a larger scale, one on each side of the central figure. That of Abirkios is of the conventional, expressionless type; but in the face of Theuprepia there appear individuality and beauty, which are lost in the reproduction It is the portrait of a matron, plump, with a slight tendency to double chin; the features are graceful, dignified, and noble, and wear the placid and contented expression which indicates comfortable circumstances and a happy life. I can hardly imagine this face to be the work of a fourth-century artist. The official title deacon, on the other hand, points to the period when the Christian religion was recognised and legal after the triumph of Constantine. The Catholic principle seems to have been to avoid the public use of official terms before the Church was explicitly legalised. It is, however, not impossible that we have here an instance of the title being used even earlier--e.g., in the early years of Diocletian’s reign, when he was favourably inclined towards the Christians. [The form διάλων for διάλονος occurs in a pagan inscription giving a list of the officials of a temple at Metropolis in Ionia, and therefore not later than the end of the third century:Mous. Smyrn., iii., p. 93.] The use of memorion to indicate an ordinary grave also, perhaps, points to a third rather than a fourth century date. It was afterwards appropriated to the holy grave and shrine of a martyr or saint.

We notice that, as in almost all Asian epitaphs, the wife precedes the children. The regular order in Greek literature was to mention the children before the wife.

NOTE. A document, published too late for Lightfoot to use, gives a clue to the proper form of the inscriptions about Philip the Asiarch, published in his Ignat., i., p. 629 f.: the words perhaps are [κατὰ τὰ βοφλη+̑ς, δόγματα α+̕ναγνωσθέν]τ[α] λαὶ έπικυρ[ωθέν]τα ύπὸ τος θειοτάτυ αύτολράτορος ́Αντωνείνου, λ.τ.λ; or possibly [λατὰ λ ὰπὸ τη+̑ς βουλη+̑ς ͨηφις]τ[α], λαὶ DZ0πιλυρ[ωθέν]τα, λ.τ.μ Bull. Carr. Hell., 1887, p. 299.