L7 Imperial sponsorship and the Bible


With the Edict of Milan in 313, Emperor Constantine made Christianity a legal religion within the Roman Empire and over the years Christianity displaced Greco-Roman polytheism as the empire’s official religion. The consequences for Christianity and Judaism were profound. The Bible as the sacred text of the Christian empire gained the status of sacred object. Constantine managed the ecumenical Council of Nicea in 325 and financed the publication of four magnificent codices of the Bible in Greek.


  1. The fourth century marks a decisive turning point in religious history and in the story of the Bible.

    1. Before then Christianity was persecuted and powerless. Greco-Roman polytheism was the official religion and received imperial patronage. Jews and Christians competed as rivals with Judaism having more official recognition.

    2. After the 4th C, Christianity was the privileged and powerful religion of the Roman Empire. It took over the place of the imperial client with property and power. Judaism was marginalized and regarded as a threat to ecclesial and political order. The “orthodox” form received support while “heretical” forms found refuge beyond imperial reach.

  2. Constantine the great (274-337) was the key figure in this change.

    1. In his victory over his rival Maxentius, Constantine claimed the victory was owed to Christ and thus he aligned with the Christian group. Eusebius (historian) records Constantine’s conversion as sincere and the Greek Orthodox Church regard Constantine as a Saint.

    2. Like other emperors Constantine wanted the imperial religion to secure unity within the empire. He used his influence to settle the Donatist dispute (siding with Augustine). He called the Council of Nicea in 325 to settle the Arian dispute.

    3. Constantine moved his capital to Byzantium and renamed it Constantinople in 330. The Eastern Empire remained Greek in language and culture. The Patriarch of Constantinople worked in harmony with the emperor for a millennium. Western regions would become Latin in language and culture headed by the bishop of Rome (pope).

  3. The full integration of the Christian religion into imperial society affected the Bible as well.

    1. The Church councils and canonical declarations of the council of Carthage (397) or the Paschal Letter of Athanasius (367) had the backing of the emperor.

    2. Constantine used his imperial scribes to help produce the codices that included the entire “Christian Bible” (LXX + NT) as a book.

    3. As an imperial publication, the Bible was the official religious literature of the state.

  4. The new status of the Christian Bible had consequences for interpretations within Judaism and Christianity.

    1. Within Christianity, the Bible as book abetted other forms of liturgical and ideological customs. As a book with covers that could be closed and even locked the Bible was an object of veneration. The book with Old Testament and New Testaments together, the suppersessionist form of interpretation was used to replace God’s story in Judaism with Christianity.

    2. The Jewish Bible did not enjoy official approval and became the Word of God for the children of Abraham. Read by those in the Diaspora as religious text rather than a text that legitimized the People of the Land. Jewish interpreters read Scripture not as a divine history but as a divine command that placed freeing obligations upon God’s people.


Questions:


  1. To what extent should the “triumph” of Christian religion under Constantine be considered a positive thing to Christians?

  2. How would the Christian Bible be read differently as the Scripture of a persecuted minority and as the religious literature of the world’s rulers?


Donatist controversy: During the reign of Diocletian from 284 until his abdication in 305, he posted an edict that all churches were to be destroyed, all Bibles and liturgical books surrendered, sacred vessels confiscated and all meetings for worship forbidden. A few months later he ordered arrest of the clergy but the prisons were full so he granted amnesty on condition of sacrifice. In 304 all citizens of his portion of the empire (East) were required to sacrifice on pain of death. In the western regions Caesar Constantius (father of Constantine) ruled and while he destroyed some churches, no one was executed. When his father died, Constantine asked for aid by the Christian God through his half-sister Anastasia a Christian and when he won the battle and rose to power in 306, and later in 313 at the Edict of Milan declared religious freedom for all and Christianity as the official religion of the Empire. The worst legacy of the persecution was schism. In the East sacrifice was regarded as apostasy, not the surrender of sacred books or objects. In the West some of the bishops did surrender books and other sacred objects waiting for the furor to die out. This led to the Donatist schism – separation on the basis of who was faithful and who was not and therefore worthy to serve Christ. When Augustine became bishop of Hippo, the schism in Africa was 85 years old. Augustine tried by several counsels to bring reconciliation and only managed to declare the Donatist heterodox at a council in Carthage in 411. The schism completely dominated African church life for a century until both Donatist and Catholic were swept away by Islam.


Arianism was the view that Jesus was less than the Father, of like substance but not of the same substance (homoousios = same vv homoiousios = like but unequal). The debate continued from the Council of Nicea until the formulation of the Trinity and Christology dogmas. Augustine’s book, On the Trinity, asserted the “three hypostases” 3 persons of one unity. This formula prevailed as the Constantinople council of 381 which revised the Creed as we have it in the Nicene Creed.