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A compelling history of radical transformation in the fourth-century--when Christianity decimated the practices of traditional pagan religion in the Roman Empire.

Watts traces their experiences of living through the fourth century s dramatic religious and political changes, when heated confrontations saw the Christian establishment legislate against pagan practices as mobs attacked pagan holy sites and temples. Notice that they didn t abandon the larger church structures, but rather set up smaller groups outside the bigger institutional structures, to support each other in discipleship.

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The Final Pagan Generation

The Final Pagan Generation shows how the generation of Romans born in the 310s adapted to their changing religious and political environments. The included chapter introduces the religious landscape of the Roman world of the early fourth century and sets the stage for their story.

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A long-unpublished statue base for the emperor Constantius II was rediscovered at Oinoanda in 2010. It contains information that Oinoanda was a neokoros city, that is, having a special status in the imperial cult. The article attempts to trace the significance of neokoria and of images in the imperial cult in the fourth century AD, an era of rapid religious change when the Christianity of the emperors and many ordinary people co-existed with deep and widespread pagan traditions that flowed throughout Roman society.

The Idea of Rome in Late Antiquity

The aim of this research is to approach and analyse the manifestation and evolution of the idea of Rome as an expression of Roman patriotism and as an (urban) archetype of utopia in late Roman thought in a period extending from AD 357 to 417. Within this period of about a human lifetime, the concept of Rome and Romanitas was reshaped and used for various ideological causes. This research is unfolding through a selection of sources that represent the patterns and diversity of this ideological process. The theme of Rome as a personified and anthropomorphic figure and as an epitomized notion ‘applied’ on the urban landscape of the city would become part of the identity of the Romans of Rome highlighting a sense of cultural uniqueness in comparison to the inhabitants of other cities. Towards the end of the chronological limits set in this thesis various versions of Romanitas would emerge indicating new physical and spiritual potentials.

(111) ABSTRACT: The subject touches on both ancient and modern history. Discusssion can most conveniently separate the two, beginning with the practice in question, ancestor worship, emphasizing its grand proportions while leaving detail to notes and Appendix. The proportions themselves, however, present a striking contrast to the modern treatment, better called neglect, that the cultural phenomenon has received. This contrast invites explanation.

This is a chapter in the forthcoming volume, Reconceiving Religious Conflict. New Views from the Formative Centuries of Christianity Edited by Wendy Mayer, Chris L. De Wet. © 2017 – Routledge. This essay focuses on a particular perspective on religious violence, namely those cases in which religious symbols are destroyed through acts of violence. The argument pursued in this essay is that these acts of ‘symbolic violence’ should be understood as a kind of purity discourse. The interpretive framework from which this phenomenon is interpreted derives from an understanding of the social function of millennialist discourse on purity as the ‘unmixing’ of the blend of light and darkness, moral and immoral, good and bad in proto-apocalyptic traditions. It is a discourse that erects stark dualities that are interpreted in moral categories but serve a highly socio-political rhetoric. The effective history and longevity of this kind of rhetoric of religious symbolic violence is illuminated starkly in four case studies: the destruction of colonial era symbols in South Africa in the #RhodesMustFall campaign; the Spanish Civil War; the removal of the Altar of Victory in Rome, the despolation of the Ephesian Artemision, and the destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria; and the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan and the tomb of Jonah, in the way in which ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) portrays their own programme as one of the ‘eradication of the grey zone.’

This thesis addresses an intriguing question concerning the death of emperor Julian, known throughout history as “the Apostate.” Although Julian ruled for less than two years, his reign and death were the center of debate for centuries. Ancient writers composed different death narratives for the last “pagan” emperor, elaborating upon certain details in the narratives and adding portions, probably fictionalized, of the story where they thought necessary. It is my view that these different death narratives were used as literary loci to discuss the growing power of the church and the relations between church and state. Analysis of these narratives, written by Gregory Nazianzus, Libanius, Ammianus Marcellinus, and the ecclesiastical historians of the fifth century (Socrates of Constantinople, Sozomen of Gaza, and Theodoret of Cyrrhus) allows the historians a more nuanced view of the religious and political history of late antiquity, specifically concerning Christianization in the empire and relations between bishop and emperor, church and state. This thesis will argue that the narratives of Julian’s death, written in the fourth and fifth centuries, were colored by these two political and religious concerns of the period.

Construction of Christian identity in Egypt proceeded in pace with construction of the Egyptian pagan “Other” between the second and sixth centuries. Apologies, martyrdoms, apocalypses, histories, sermons, hagiographies, and magical texts provide several different vantage points from which to view the Christian construction of the Egyptian pagan “Other”: as the agent of anti-Christian violence, as an intellectual rival, as an object of anti-pagan violence, as an obstacle to salvation, and—perhaps most dangerously—as but another participant in a shared religious experience. The recent work of social scientists on identity, deviance, violence, social/cultural memory, and religiosity provides insight into the strategies by which construction of the “Other” was part of a larger project of fashioning a “proper” Christian religious domain. Egyptian religious developments should be contextualized within the overall Greco-Roman milieu. However, a focus on Egypt is justified insofar as Egypt held so much interest for the ruling Roman elite and Egyptian patriarchs stood at the forefront of Empire-wide polemical debates. Yet Egypt also deserves attention in light of its valence as a place of “difference”: its religious practices were often admired for their antiquity, its part-animal deities inspired disgust even among pagans, it was thought to be associated with esoteric religious practices and magic, and tales of the Exodus cast Egypt as the embodiment of incorrect religion and arch-sin. Ultimately, the notion of “Egypt” was distorted by Greco-Roman pagan and Christian rivalry (and inner-Christian rivalry), as each side sought alternatively to identify with and to distance itself from Egypt. This negotiation in and of itself served as a confirmation of identity.

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What’s interesting about this is that even though daily religious realities for most Romans were not very different than they had ever been, this hid from most people the massive changes that were actually taking place. This seems contemporary to me. Liberals may well see Trump as a Julian the Apostate figure, trying to roll back the progressive Sexual Revolution. And there are certainly conservatives who regard Trump that way, and love that about him. But the cultural changes that have overtaken America, and that are continuing to do so, are fundamental, and aren’t going to be undone by government policy.

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