Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place in Caesar's Empire, by Douglas Ryan Boin
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Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place in Caesar's Empire, by Douglas Ryan Boin
Free Ebook Online Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place in Caesar's Empire, by Douglas Ryan Boin
The supposed collapse of Roman civilization is still lamented more than 1,500 years later―and intertwined with this idea is the notion that a fledgling religion, Christianity, went from a persecuted fringe movement to an irresistible force that toppled the empire. The "intolerant zeal" of Christians, wrote Edward Gibbon, swept Rome's old gods away, and with them the structures that sustained Roman society.
Not so, argues Douglas Boin. Such tales are simply untrue to history, and ignore the most important fact of all: life in Rome never came to a dramatic stop. Instead, as Boin shows, a small minority movement rose to transform society―politically, religiously, and culturally―but it was a gradual process, one that happened in fits and starts over centuries. Drawing upon a decade of recent studies in history and archaeology, and on his own research, Boin opens up a wholly new window onto a period we thought we knew. His work is the first to describe how Christians navigated the complex world of social identity in terms of "passing" and "coming out." Many Christians lived in a dynamic middle ground. Their quiet success, as much as the clamor of martyrdom, was a powerful agent for change. With this insightful approach to the story of Christians in the Roman world, Douglas Boin rewrites, and rediscovers, the fascinating early history of a world faith.
Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place in Caesar's Empire, by Douglas Ryan Boin- Amazon Sales Rank: #626971 in Books
- Brand: Boin, Douglas
- Published on: 2015-03-03
- Released on: 2015-03-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x .80" w x 6.54" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
Review "A genuinely thought-provoking and imaginative book." -- Peter Thonemann, The Wall Street Journal"[Douglas] Boin is a gifted writer with the rare ability to bring ancient history before modern eyes." -- Greg Carey, The Christian Century"An unusual and sometimes alternative, cultural history of late antiquity for those with an affinity for classical civilization." -- Library Journal "Boin is an entertaining guide, leading the reader through complex texts, materials, and events with a panoptic gaze, an engaging pace, and humor--like Morgan Freeman narrating March of the Christians." -- John David Penniman, Marginalia (Los Angeles Review of Books) "A very thorough and detailed picture of what it was like for a Christian living in the early Roman Empire...Very well written." -- Lisa Covington, Manhattan Book Review
"Boin offers a highly original approach to the social and religious anxieties that seized Jesus' followers in the years after his death. The result is not just another new study of early Christianity. Coming Out Christian in the Roman World takes the history of the Roman empire into a wholly new direction." ―Reza Aslan, author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
"In this well written and engaging book about late antiquity, Boin provides us with a thought provoking new take on the origins of Christianity with explanatory power for how we think about ourselves today. Anyone who wonders or worries about religious freedom in the modern world should read Coming out Christian." ―Candida Moss, author of The Myth of Persecution
"The author provides some thought-provoking points and successfully begins a dialogue with conventional wisdom on this subject." ―Kirkus
"An unusual and sometimes alternative, cultural history of late antiquity for those with an affinity for classical civilization." ―Library Journal
"Boin has produced a genuinely thought-provoking and imaginative book." ―Wall Street Journal
"Boin is an entertaining guide, leading the reader through complex texts, materials, and events with a panoptic gaze, an engaging pace, and humor--like Morgan Freeman narrating March of the Christians." ―John David Penniman, Bucknell University, Marginalia
"Boin is a gifted writer with the rare ability to bring ancient history before modern eyes." ―The Christian Century
"One of the excellent points he makes concerns how most early Christians were 'the quieter ones,' who went along with many of the civic/religious ceremonies, and may well have converted more pagans to their faith than the argumentative martyrs. Other topics include the wide variety of Christianities in those early years, Judaism, the cults of Mithras and Isis, and, most of all, just how complex religious life on the ground really was during late antiquity." ―The Historical Novel Society
About the Author
Douglas Boin is an expert on the religious history of the Roman Empire. He is currently assistant professor of ancient and late antique Mediterranean history at Saint Louis University and he has worked extensively as an archaeologist in Rome, studying the site of the synagogue at Ostia Antica. From 2010 to 2013, he taught in the department of classics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. This is his first trade book. He lives in St. Louis.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful. Juggling a Christian identity with a Roman identity By Graham Boin's topic is how early Christians chose to integrate into the broader Roman world. Some early Church leaders emphasized an absolute rejection of normal Roman civil society, especially of anything to do with traditional sacrifices. Boin argues that in practice many early Christians appear to have drawn a softer line, being willing to juggle a private Christian identity with a more conventional public identity. This may have meant either concealing or perhaps simply downplaying their Christian identity in public. Many early Christians may have seen no real conflict in a willingness to publicly fit in to broader Roman society, including participating in traditional local ceremonies (including eating sacrificed animal meat). Boin provides example of soldiers or even bishops who juggled the two roles.As Christianity moved to the forefront and Church leaders acquired real influence over Emperors, the Church became openly intolerant of other sects and eventually actively suppressed them. Boin argues that this was to a significant degree driven by conflicts within the Christian community, with vocal factions trying to demonstrate that they were more authentically Christian by first rejecting Christians with "Pagan" or "Jewish" leanings, and then by rejecting any Christians who were willing to tolerate Paganism in others.Boin has a slightly meandering style, but he writes well and he uses many concrete examples to support his central argument: that the adoption of Christianity within the Roman empire was not always an "all or nothing" confrontation, but often progressed as a quiet co-existence, often happening below the radar of the authorities.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful. Somewhere over the Rainbow By Roderick Blyth In the thirteenth book of his Annals, Cornelius Tacitus refers to a lady called Pomponia Graecina. Pomponia, he says, was accused of a ‘foreign superstition’ and was 'handed over' to her husband, Aulus Plautius, (known otherwise to history as the first governor of Roman Britain). Tacitus writes that Plautius conducted an ‘old-style investigation’ into his wife’s ‘character and honour’ and pronounced her innocent. The historian adds that Pomponia’s ‘long life was passed in a state of grief and mourning’ - a fact which he attributes to the vindictive elimination of her daughter, Julia, by the Empress Messalina, but the passage, with its reference to ‘foreign superstition’ and to Pomponia’s secluded way of life life has long been associated with the suspicion that Pomponia was an early Christian - a view which is said to be supported by a third century Christian inscription celebrating the ‘gens Pomponia’ (See Cornelius Tacitus, ‘Annales xiii, 32; ‘Documents of the Christian Church’, ed.Bettenson & Mander, Ed.4 Oxford University Press (2011).This anecdote, and the uncertainties as to its interpretation, is good example of the difficulty faced by those trying to asses contemporary responses to early Christianity. Serious inquirers will find the literary, archaeological and sociological sources painstakingly analysed in Peter Lempe’s book on ‘Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries from Paul to Valentinus', Continuum, (2003). wWat we have in Douglas Boin’s curiously entitled book are 149 pages of what amounts to a filtration of a very small part of the evidence through the sieve of the contemporary orthodoxies.Fair warning of this is given on the back cover, which is endorsed with recommendations by Reza Aslan (the author of a sensationalist book called ‘Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth’) and by Candida Moss, the author of ‘The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom’ . Ms.Moss receives gracious thanks from Mr. Boin in his Acknowledgements. The book is dedicated to the author’s sister, Katie; to her wife, Anne; and to Mr. Boin’s partner, Gardiner; and the epigraph from John Lewis Gaddis, declares that ‘Science, history and art’ share a common dependence on ‘metaphor, the recognition of patterns’ and ‘on the realisation that something is ‘like something else’ Elsewhere, Mr Boin quotes Mr Gaddis to the effect that ‘good historians take the past on its own terms first, and only then impose their own'. Mr.Boin admits frankly that this is his preferred method, and the book he has written bears out the fact.Mr Boin’s argument is that the literary record on which earlier generations relied gave them a deceptive picture of the facts. Writers in the conservative tradition, such as Tacitus himself, had a glacial disdain for the vulgar and ‘anti-social’ superstitions entertained by those who were either themselves foreign or traitors to their class and culture. Christian apologists, on the other hand, tended to be unrepresentative extremists of the opposite tendency. Mr Boin invites us to focus instead on the people to whom he refers in one chapter heading as‘The Quieter Ones’, and, in another, ‘The Neighbours who moved in Next Door’. He suggests that there really wasn't much to differentiate the average Christian from the average Graeco-Roman’ and that Christian refusal to reach an accommodation with the Graeco-Roman world was the exception rather than the rule.'This is an arguable idea: we all know, for example, that, even today, Christian culture is fractured and divided, both in its attitudes and in its practice. Mr. Boin rightly points out that as early as the days of St.Paul, there were significant divisions within single communities as to what was permissible - not least in defining of the relationship between Christians and 'the World'. We know, too. that many of today’s Christians do not, in fact, conform doctrinally with the orthodox positions maintained their clergy: that there are many younger Catholics who hold, for example, that gender orientation is mechanically determined; that sexual self-expression is primarily an issue of choice; that chemically induced contraception is, or should be uncontroversial; that priestly celibacy goes, almost by definition in hand with pederasty; and that the hierarchical structures of the Church are out of date and undemocratic and should, of that reason alone, be changed. They have imbibed from the popular culture that surrounds them a set of assumptions that they barely know how to question. But even Mr.Boin’s more sophisticated version of this thinking unreflectingly mirrors the prevailing polyculturalism of western democratic societies, especially America, and so it is not surprising that Boin should see same principles as characterising the Greaco-Roman empire of the Ancient Mediterranean.The fact that there is little archaeological evidence to support persecution, serves oddly, to persuade Mr Boin of his case. The close proximity of synagogue and ecclesia in a Syrian frontier town or may not suggest peaceful co-existence, but a graffito untypically preserved in a prosperous city at the heart of Empire and showing a crucified donkey with the caption 'Alexander worships his God' is a striking counter-statement - and is endorsed by the weight of the literary evidence.Mr Boin suggests, on the one hand, that the anathemas of Christian writers could only have been provoked by a widespread failure to conform with their prescriptions, whilst, on the other, evidence drawn from the hellenisation of a significant number of Jews and latin domestication of eastern mystery cults offers, for Boin, a natural analogy for the acculturation of early Christians to a system which he thinks most of admired and whose privileges he holds them to have been eager to share. Outbreaks of inter-community violence were, he suggests, untypical, and often provoked by social and financial pressures which had little to do with differences of faith save in so far as non-conformism could be given a political spin.Mr Boin goes s far as to say that ‘there is not one shred of evidence to suggest that Christians were ever systematically persecuted for their beliefs until the second half of the third century'. Tertullian, he says, may have 'felt' persecuted, 'but there is no legal evidence to confirm any early Christian ‘persecution’ until AD 253-60, a generation or more after Tertullian died’. (p.23). The words ‘systematic’, ‘persecution’ and the phrases ‘for their beliefs’ and ‘legal evidence’ need to be more carefully defined and weighed: they appear to exclude, for example the Neronian persecution (which Boin attributes to that Emperor’s ‘regrettable’ xenophobia), and the martyrdoms of, say, Saints Perpetua and Felicity (which Mr. Boin attributes to ‘refusal to participate’ in 'rituals for the well-being of Rome’).What this kind of language tends to obscure is the fact that the famous exchange between Pliny and Trajan, or the letter of Hadrian to Minucius Fundanus (Bettenson op.cit.loc.cit, p.7 - which Mr Boin does not quote) rests firstly, on the assumption that people felt that reporting Christians to the authorities would result in punitive action; secondly, that the authorities did not simply regard Christians as contemptible, but also as explicitly ‘criminal’; and thirdly, that the refusal of Christians to participate in popular rituals was indeed, unpopular with the mass of people and was regarded as ‘lese-majesté; by the authorities - and as such, a ‘criminal’ offence, whatever the legalities. Pliny says that when a Christian is bought before him his procedure is 'to ask them if they are Christians. If they admit it, I repeat the question, a second and a third time, threatening capital punishment; if they persist I sentence them to death'. Pliny makes it clear that what is at stake here is not so much the fact of being Christian ('whatever crime it may be to which they have confessed'), but 'pertinacity and obstinacy' in refusing to deny the fact'. In other words, what Pliny was doing was putting Christians to death for refusing to deny Christ - a pretty good definition of persecution on any reasonable interpretation,, and by no means the limited phenomenon that Mr.Boin suggests: numbers of Christians in the Empire in the second century may have been a tiny fraction of the whole, but on Pliny's evidence, this was not the case in its Anatolian heartlands. for he comments expressly that Christianity is wide spread, and he claims that as a result of his 'measures' - 'the temples, which have been almost deserted, are beginning to be frequented once more; that the sacred rites , which have been neglected, are being renewed, and that sacrificial victims are for sale everywhere, whereas, till recently, a buyer was rarely to be found' ( see Bettenson, op.cit., lc.cit, pp.3-5).The contemporary account of the martyrdoms of Perpetua and Felicity give a telling demonstration of Pliny's principles in action. Perpetua came from an important provincial family, but the Roman governor who tried her had no patience whatsoever with her attitude, and was quite clear as to where his duty lay; similarly, the fact that these two martyrs were put to death in an arena before a crowd of thousands baying for their blood does much to make one hesitant about subscribing to Mr.Boin’s jaunty optimism when he writes of a christian soldier martyr that ‘his Christian army buddies’ (who had conformed to pagan ritual) 'must have looked at him with bewilderment, bemusement and maybe even fear’: Who knows? Perhaps they did, but they may also have looked at him shame, embarrassment, and may be even the irritation which we all feel when we see other people publicly maintaining principles which we find it safer not to avow. The fact is despite the scholarship attested to by 35 pages of footnotes referring to the most up to date academic discussions about Christianity in antiquity, Mr.Boin’s dismissive attitude to primary sources blinds him to the facts that conscientious analysis might have yielded. That this dereliction of scholarship is conditioned by prejudice is evident from the general tone of Mr.Boin's approach. Referring to the Fathers, he repeatedly refers to them as 'fulminating', 'thundering' and 'shouting', but he himself has no time for the quieter pastoral of the 'shepherd of Hermas', the 'Didache', or Minucius Felix in all of whom are found a startling new, popular voice not hitherto heard in the mainstream of Graeco-Roman culture.Mr.Boin, who says that he has ‘for a long time felt uncomfortable around early Christians’ titles his Preface with the now celebrated remark by Pope Francis; “Who am I to Judge?’ and concludes his Afterword with reflections on the epiphany of Pope Francis in March 2012: “Some people saw in the crimson-clad men gathered about him, the blood of all the martyrs of early Christian history'. [Did they?] Others just saw red'. [Really?] What do I see now when I look back at 400 years of Jesus’ followers in Rome? I don’t just see the red of the martyrs. I see a group waving many colours’. [A rainbow coalition] In doing so he, and his book, conform with the orthodoxies of the day, and yet it is precisely these that work against a proper understanding of the very different world with which Mr..Boin purports to deal.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. As if you were there... By Karen Garst Boin states his goal as talking about people with nuance and complexity. He has done just that. Instead of using broad-brush strokes, he paints the picture of the first four centuries of Christians in Rome with the fine pen acquired by examining the details of people’s daily lives using art, inscriptions, letters, literature, and archeological finds. To this, he juxtaposes the comments of the bishops of this budding religion who were often opposed to what ordinary people were doing. The reader feels as if she is there – deciding on whether to “come out” as a Christian or to continue to attend the civic festivals of Rome often deciding to do both – tell her friends, but go to the celebrations. Boin is able to take his academic knowledge and write a fascinating story that is very accessible.
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