Abstract
Fair adjudication, Rome claimed, was one of the key benefits its empire offered provincial populations. Early Christians (second and third centuries A.D.), with their insistent narrative of state-sponsored persecution, were perhaps uniquely implicated in this claim. The Roman courtroom (in representation as much as reality) was therefore the archetypal site in which the Christian relationship to the Roman state was negotiated. Elite early Christian authors, through their engagement, contestation, and internalisation of Roman judicial ideology and practice sought to stabilise their identities within their imperial context, asserting the congruence of their ‘Christian’ and ‘Roman’ identities.Early Christian authors sought to neutralise the dislocating tension between ‘Christian’ and ‘Roman’ caused by persecution (real and imagined) through specific, limited criticisms of Roman justice. They adopted and appropriated existing critical narratives of Roman justice in order to combat the implication of persecution – that Christians should be ejected from imperial society – and modified these criticisms in order to suggest that persecution in fact proved their Roman-ness. Finally, Christian authors were themselves affected by, and internalised, Roman judicial ideology, mobilising aspects of it for purely ‘internal’ purposes. The ways in which Roman adjudication was experienced and written about had a direct influence on early Christian expression, and even on the development of doctrine.
Christians were not alone in this period, but were rather a community (or communities) among many dealing with unstable identities under the Roman principate. They were not primarily interested in ‘resisting’ Rome, or in creating a distinct world for themselves. Rather, the evidence in this dissertation repeatedly shows elite Christian authors creating for themselves a place within empire, as Christians and Romans.
| Date of Award | 1 Mar 2022 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | James Corke-Webster (Supervisor) & Dominic Rathbone (Supervisor) |