Faith, Work, and Economics
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 59, No. 2 - Spring 2017
Managing Editor: W. Madison Grace II
Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place in Caesar’s Empire. By Douglas Boin. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. 206 pages. Hardback, $28.00.
Douglas Boin is an assistant professor of ancient and late antique history at Saint Louis University. As a classical historian, Boin reconstructs the past not only with literary evidence but also with material artifacts. Accordingly, his volume contains eight pages of colored photographs of relevant archeological and artistic evidence. An appendix discusses pertinent Latin and Greek texts as well as selected archaeological sources (153–59). Substantive endnotes (161–96) and an index (197– 206) nicely round out the volume. Minor errors within the work include “solider” for “soldier” (48), “Over next fourteen years” (95), and “Sixty millions Romans” (142).
Early Christianity is often portrayed as “inflexible” (2) and as “obstinately different” (1) in clear-cut contradistinction to its cultural context. In this traditional paradigm, the Roman “pagans” and “Christians” formed “two cultures incapable of mixing, like oil and water” (3). Boin’s engaging study exchanges the sharp lines of this “us vs. them” depiction for the blurred boundaries of an impressionist montage. Although the title of the book borrows from the contemporary “coming out” metaphor, the focus of the work does not hinge on this illustrative yet connotation-laden metaphor. The central theme of cultural negotiation vs. cultural resistance makes a thought-provoking study of identity formation. Boin’s brushstrokes paint a Christianity more involved in conversation than confrontation. Rather than engaging in a “cultural clash” (3), the early believers went about “conversing with their neighbors and tearing down walls” (74).
Boin emphasizes that “what people believe—and what people are taught to believe—can and does inform the way they engage the world” (149). He posits an empathetic reading of “insider” beliefs in a manner that dissects and scrutinizes without criticizing (12). “The internal dynamics of a group are always much messier than they seem from the outside” (48). As a narrative focused upon historical details (4), the book seeks to draw from the “subtle stories” of “quieter” co-existence (4, 14). This bottom-up reading of the evidence focuses on “so many overlooked men and women who fought battles for acceptance every day in Rome” (57).
How does Boin seek to shift our understanding of early Christianity? First, he emphasizes the early Christian skill and art of cultural negotiation. The early Christians lived “hyphenated lives” (5, 66) inhabiting the “middle ground” (22), and they became “skilled jugglers” (30) and experts at “building bridges” (33). “Many of these men and women juggled their identities in highly creative ways” (5).
Second, the early Christians were not persecuted “everywhere and always throughout the Roman Empire” (18), as is often assumed. Of course, this comes as no surprise to historians who have spoken of life-threatening persecution as only local and sporadic. But Boin goes further—although the early Christians may have “felt” persecuted (23, 29), he believes the evidence for any systematic persecution is negligible.
Third, Boin maintains that pre-Constantinian Christians did not overtake the empire through a rapid growth that accompanied mass evangelism (6). Moreover, there was no religious “vacuum” of pagan dissatisfaction waiting to be filled by Christianity. According to Boin, “the majority” of pagans “were doing just fine” with the status quo (cf. 90).
Fourth, the “Constantinian turn” was not a “radical break with centuries of tradition” (98), since “the continuing debate over what it meant to be Roman and Christian would continue” (35). Rather than ending the debate, the Constantinian shift elevated it to a whole new level. “The long-running debate over what it meant to be a follower of Jesus had morphed into an empire-wide debate about the nature of being Roman” (128).
Among New Testament documents, the Gospel of John already discussed being in the world but not of it (17:14–15). Was such a two-pronged approach inherently contradictory? According to Boin, “Jesus’s followers were tied up in social contradictions from the earliest age” (18). Yet the Apostle Paul’s advice steered a middle course (1 Cor 5:9–13; 8–10)—even though many Corinthians lamentably capitulated to culture.
On page 46, Boin quotes the Epistle to Diognetus 5.1–2: “People who call themselves ‘Christians’ aren’t any different from anyone else, either in where they come from or the language they speak or in their way of life. They don’t separate themselves by living in their own cities; they don’t talk some strange language; and they don’t have an overly distinct way of life.” Yet Boin’s overall work seems to lack a sustained focus similar to the subsequent sentiments in Diognetus 5.4–12: “They dwell in their own countries, but only as sojourners; they bear their share in all things as citizens, and they endure all hardships as strangers. Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland is foreign. . . . They find themselves in the flesh, and yet they live not after the flesh. Their existence is on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. . . . They love all men, and they are persecuted by all. They are ignored, and yet they are condemned” (Lightfoot translation).
Granted, idealistic texts such as the Epistle of Diognetus were immersed in rhetorical overstatement (“they are persecuted by all”). Boin privileges a mirror-reading realism (what various churchgoers were actually doing) over a moral idealism (what they were being told to do by their church leaders). One wonders if Boin’s emphatic reversal loses the early Christian theme of “pilgrim” living in a complex and fallen world. His early Christians are a conversational and conceding lot of master negotiators, readily participating in the vast bulk of their socio-cultural milieu. Boin’s “when in Rome do as the Romans do” interpretation of the evidence, while an opportune corrective to simplistic portrayals of early Christian distinctiveness, seems to tilt to the point of teetering in the other direction. Surely sundry early Christians heeded the intractable calls of the Tertullians and Novatians of their world.
