Martyrs and after

Bowersock contrasts the stance of Christians and Jews toward the Greco-Roman world: “it was precisely the Christians’ vigorous participation in the civic life and intellectual traditions of the Graeco-Roman world that grounded their martyrdoms in the life of the great cities. The Jews, by contrast, had conspicuously chosen a different path by remaining altogether separate in their conduct of life, except, of course, on those public occasions when the Christian martyrs united them with the polytheists in giving expression to a community hostility. But we find no Jewish rabbis teaching the people of Smyrna or Pergamum or Carthage, as Polycarp, Papylus, and Cyprian did.”

This is crucially important: The martyr church was not a separatist organization that kept its distance from contact with pagans. If it were separate as Judaism was, it would not have been the martyr church. Before Constantine, at the very moment when the clash between church and world is at its most intense, it is intense precisely because the church lays claim to the world. It’s not that the church began outside and moved in in the early fourth century. It was on the inside of the Greco-Roman world from the beginning. The clash between martyr and provincial governor is fundamentally the same clash as that between Ambrose and Theodosius.