The Body of Christ. This simple and elegant metaphor first used in the mid-first century by Paul the Apostle (1 Cor 12:12–27, Rom 12:5) offered innumerable opportunities for Christian writers over the next two millennia to think about the dynamic between the visible and the invisible – the Christian collective on earth, the risen Christ, and the triune God. The metaphor’s potency lay in its ability to frame the Christian community on earth as an extension of the divine, something that could transcend any individual member, even the sum of all members, because it participated in an inseparable union with the divine. The salvation enabled by the incarnation of God the Word applied to all members of the Body of Christ precisely because it was the body of Christ that was crucified, died, and raised from the dead. The Christian community bridged the visible and invisible, the material and immaterial, the earthly and heavenly, the human and divine, the past, present, and future. For early Christians, such an idealized view proved easy to wax poetic about precisely because it was impossible to achieve in reality. The image of what ecclesiastical, liturgical, theological, practical, and experiential unity should look like rarely corresponded to what it actually looked like. In the lived reality of late antique laypeople, clergy members, and monastics, the Body of Christ was something that needed to be created, governed, adapted, and policed on an alarmingly regular basis by Christians spread across disparate geographical locales and time periods.

The anthology of texts in this volume provides a view (an admittedly blurry one) of the multidimensionality of early Christian discourse on community. Readers will find here a plurality of voices representing diverse views on many aspects of what it meant to join, belong to, remain within, and manage early Christian communities. Unsurprisingly, here as in other anthologies of early Christian texts, ecclesiological idealizations feature prominently, and yet such theologies of the “true church” represent but a mode of conceptualizing community. The texts translated here reveal the expansive contours of early Christian visions of their community by addressing conversion, governance (legal and ecclesiastical), leadership (clerical and monastic), visible and invisible membership (the living and the dead), and enforcement of communal boundaries (by clergy members, monks, and laypeople) vis-à-vis “heretics,” pagans, Jews, lukewarm Christians, lax clergy members, and worldly culture broadly conceived. Collected here are fresh English translations of texts originally by Christian authors who hailed from regions as diverse as the British Isles, the Egyptian desert, the Italian Alps, and the Cappadocian valleys during the period historians refer to as late antiquity (ca. 100–700 CE). These centuries witnessed the emergence of Christianity within the Roman Empire and the ensuing, if slow-moving and uneven, religious, social, cultural, and governmental transformations and reconfigurations.

In making determinations about which texts to include and exclude, anthologies like The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings tacitly construct narratives that challenge the conceptualizations of previous generations and encourage readers to broadly regard the volumes’ subjects and themes (here, community in early Christianity) in a new light. The foil for this volume is an old-fashioned story, popular in both scholarly and popular imaginations, that explains the changes through which Christianity, the Roman Empire, and the Mediterranean world went by hitting several familiar notes: Christianity’s move from being a persecuted religion to the official religion of the Roman Empire; the decline of self-identifying pagans; the increase in self-identifying Christians; the triumph of orthodoxy over many heresies; the rise of the Roman papacy; and the emergence of a unified Christian church that would determine the shape of medieval Europe and Byzantium. The thrust of that story could be framed in different ways, frequently dependent on the confessional identity of the storyteller. On the one hand, Catholic historians might tell the story of Christianity in late antiquity as one of flourishing achievement, a tale in which the church’s theology, clerical authority, and culture triumphantly ascended; on the other hand, Protestant historians might tell it as one of theological and moral degradation, a tale in which the church corrupted its doctrines, ethics, and sense of community by “Judaization” or “paganization.” Either way, grand narratives like this stand atop a series of assumptions that scholars in recent decades have scrutinized and challenged. Historians now acknowledge, for example, that the very notion of a singular, authentic, or even original Christian church is a theological projection rather than a reflection of lived reality for late antique women and men. Simply consider Augustine’s North Africa, where Donatists, Caecilianists, adherents to the New Prophecy, Marcionites, Arian Vandals, and even Manichaeans all claimed to be the singular and authoritative “true church” over and against the “schismatic” or “heretical” others in the early fifth century. When historians identify Caecilianist Christianity as “the church,” they not only side with Augustine but also subtly affect the way that scholars and students regard Augustine’s competitors: they might well be “Christian,” but only partially so, and definitely not authentically so, since they exist outside the “church.” Even the uncritical use of certain terms and phrases signals a biased participation in ancient and late ancient disputes. “Apostolic,” “catholic,” “orthodox,” “heretical,” “Jewish,” “pagan” – these are terms that originated within polemical debates among early Christians.

All of this leaves us with another story to tell, one that tracks the Christian invention of communal unity, leadership, and cultural categories in the context of rhetorical and sometimes physical conflicts rather than the emergence of “the church” or even the “rise of Christianity.” It is no doubt a more complicated story, but one that offers a far more panoramic view of all the late antique religious activity and discourse that we might classify as Christian. Consider what we learn from this volume’s translation of John Chrysostom’s First Oration against the Jews, a text notorious for its anti-Jewish extremism in which the Antiochene priest lambastes members of his Christian congregation who visited Jewish synagogues and celebrated Jewish festivals. Chrysostom’s view of Christianity as something that ought to be undefiled by cultural or religious overlap with Judaism dominates this text, and yet his shrill invective cannot muffle the so-called Judaizers’ alternate view of Christianity as something that can, in fact, incorporate Jewish worship and festivals. Similarly, in the two sermons of his translated in this volume, Caesarius of Arles rebukes wealthy Christian landowners in the Gallic countryside who maintained temples dedicated to traditional gods on their estates. While we might be tempted to see these sermons as showing how Caesarius reined in his congregation, another perspective would reveal the competing views embedded in this text vis-à-vis the boundaries of Christian community. The organizing perspective of this anthology ultimately refuses the writers of these texts – bishops, priests, monastics – the interpretive authority to determine what is true and authentically Christian, an authority perhaps granted by previous grand narratives. In other words, Caesarius and Chrysostom are no more or less Christian than the folks that they rebuke. In this way, readers will find an incredibly rich assortment of theologies, Christologies, practices, performances, liturgies, organizations, authorities, ecclesiologies, and communities. While complexity and diversity, even chaos and contradiction, result from expanding our view of what late antique Christianity was – a set of beliefs? Practices? A communal identity? An affect? A lifestyle? – the upshot is that historians free the past from any obligation to the future.

Yet the texts translated in this volume do not grant readers an unobstructed view into the messy reality of lived experience among late ancient Christians, for each one bears the agenda and bias(es) of the author(s) who wrote it. Overwhelmingly, those authors were male clergy members (bishops and priests), ascetics (abbots and monastics), governmental officials (emperors and imperial functionaries), and charismatic leaders – all of them writers who had a vested interest in dictating the way things ought to be, the way things ought to happen, the way Christians ought to act. This is evident in the fiery and urgent prescriptions of Chrysostom and Caesarius just as much as it is in less overtly polemical texts like the selection from Gregory of Nazianzus’ Oration 18, where the author reveals important and idiosyncratic details of his father’s conversion to pro-Nicene Christianity from the Hypsistarian cult while using hagiographical conventions to link his own position and authority to that of his father. Moreover, many of these writers conformed the content of their writings to the conventions, expectations, and rhetorical designs of distinctive literary genres in order to persuade readers of a specific point, or to construct for them a certain understanding of events, or to instill within them a certain affect, or to gin up within them a propensity toward or aversion from certain behaviors. And so, rather than providing access to the past “as it was,” these texts show readers the range of conceptual, strategic, and rhetorical possibilities available to leaders in their construction and governance of early Christian communities.

The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings, volume 5: Community, is organized into four parts, each of which highlights one part of early Christian thinking on what community is. The first section showcases four texts that pertain to the theme of conversion, or entering the community. Two are autobiographical (Augustine’s Confessions and Patrick’s Confession), and two narrate the experience of others (Gregory of Nazianzus’ Oration 18 and Augustine’s Sermon 279), but none is uncomplicated. Augustine frames his frank introspection – the very quality that would endear this classic to generations of later readers – within the context of other conversion stories, and Gregory of Nazianzus’ narrative emphasizes the crucial role that his mother, Nonna, played on his father’s journey to becoming an orthodox bishop. Augustine’s sermon, on the other hand, dwells on Paul the Apostle’s conversion story as told in the Acts of the Apostles before offering an extemporaneous defense of the newly converted Faustinus, while Patrick tells how his own abduction played a role in his eventual formation of the Christian community in Hibernia (modern Ireland). For all four of these post-Constantinian texts, converting to Christianity cannot be understood merely as an assertion of beliefs, but rather includes a full reorientation of private psychological dispositions and public careers, social roles, and relationships.

The texts featured in this volume’s second part pertain to the theme of community governance. From the instructions of the second-century Didache to the specific regulations featured in the conciliar canons, Christians in late antiquity spilled much ink regarding rules and counsels that would contribute to creating a uniform community, at least at the local level. Of course, the legislation compiled in the fifth-century Theodosian Code shows how local imperial pronouncements uttered at one time could, at a later time, find a wider application as part of a more comprehensive legal code. On the whole, Christians in this period, despite all efforts to the contrary, rarely achieved any real or lasting unanimity regarding which creedal statements to assert, which theologies to hold up as orthodox, which practices of asceticism, liturgy, or simply piety to embrace, or which disciplinary rules to follow. Perhaps some of this owes to the diverse backgrounds and interests of those men who occupied episcopal positions. The third-century Cyprian of Carthage may have seen the episcopal college as the key to ecclesiological unity, but Gregory of Nazianzus’ later portraits of bishops – a negative one in Poem 2.1.12 and a positive in Oration 43.1 – remind us that Cyprian’s vision was more idealistic than realistic. The texts of the late fourth-century Ambrose of Milan show the degree to which episcopal leadership was related to civic and even imperial politics. Ambrose’s influence permitted him to dictate the acceptable course of action for Theodosius (a Roman emperor!) in the case of the Callinicum riots, and to discover the relics of previously unknown martyrs (read: to invent new saints), whose physical proximity would impart a new aura of sanctity onto his own episcopal authority. And yet, a bishop’s authority could be generated more quietly, outside the rough-and-tumble of politics. The dossier of texts related to the monastic community established on the island of Lerina (modern Lérins) shows how a deliberate and self-governing community of ascetics could empower individuals to occupy nearby episcopal positions, whereas Shenoute of Atripe’s Discourses show how a powerful archimandrite could take up the mantle of spiritual leadership over his monastic community of women and men as well as local clergy in the neighboring town. These texts collectively show how the governance of Christian lives, conduct, beliefs, and community proved to be a persistent challenge that posed new and unforeseen questions and problems for leaders everywhere.

The third part of this anthology turns to Christian thought on the internal contours of the Christian community. How ought sin among the members of the Body of Christ be negotiated and managed? What brings Christians together into a moral or spiritual unity? Which human beings qualified for inclusion, and on what basis would some be excluded? North African writers were particularly fixated on these questions throughout the third, fourth, and fifth centuries. The two translations of Tertullian’s writings show that attitudes toward communal boundaries could intensify over time, especially with regard to sin, repentance, and regaining membership in the Body of Christ. Cyprian of Carthage, a moderate intellectual successor to Tertullian, navigated competing groups of laxist and rigorist Christians over the question of whether and how to readmit into the community those Christians who had lapsed during times of persecution, and in doing so developed an ecclesiology built around episcopal unity. On the other hand, Augustine’s Sermons, crafted and delivered amidst his persistent conflicts with the Donatist community, base his vision of the oneness of the church on sacramental unity: what makes the Christian community the Body of Christ is its full participation in the Eucharistic liturgy. Of course, ecclesiological theorization extended well beyond the provincial confines of North Africa. Pseudo-Dionysius’ Ecclesiastical Hierarchy situates members of the church – clergy, monastics, lay Christians, catechumens, and even those possessed by demons – within a sequence of ranks, whereby the clergy contemplate the angels and pass down the benefits of that contemplation through ecclesiastical rites to the laity.

Whereas the third part of this book considered how early Christians defined their community’s internal relations, the fourth part turns to how Christians defined their community in relation to the “religious other” and, therefore, to the ways that these writers defined the communal boundaries between Christianity and non-Christianity. Students and scholars ought to tread lightly here, for in defining the limits of “true Christianity” these writers frequently use a particularly intense breed of polemic capable of obscuring the lived reality of most laypeople. In other words, the sectarian boundaries that seemed so obvious to late antique Christian leaders were likely not so obvious to most ordinary Christians. Commodian’s poetic mockery of pagan gods and Tertullian’s insistence that Christians refuse to attend Roman theater performances and games were, after all, literary efforts designed to persuade Christians to adhere to their view, not literary descriptions of how Christians actually behaved. It is unsurprising that such sectarianism could easily morph into incitements to physical violence. Maximus of Turin’s Sermons work to mobilize his congregation into violently confronting pagans and John Chrysostom’s sermon against the Judaizers ultimately authorizes zealous members of his congregation to use coercive violence to bring the Judaizers to quit their Judaizing ways. Even a hagiographical text like Callinicus’ Life of Hypatius can idealize what a saint’s performance of violence should look like. Not all Christians, though, approved of violence in this period, which is why Socrates Scholasticus’ narration of the assassination of Hypatia, the famous Neoplatonist philosopher, is so important. His is a voice bemoaning the tragedy of violence, as he pins the blame for her death on Cyril of Alexandria, one of the Christian leaders who so eagerly constructed these sectarian boundaries. Nevertheless, even in the early sixth century, the boundaries between Christian and not-Christian remained frustratingly blurry to clergy members like Caesarius of Arles, whose sermons implore wealthy landowners in rural Gaul to quit providing tenant farmers with pagan shrines at which to worship.

As a whole, this anthology may be seen as a hodgepodge of writings produced by Christians in late antiquity pertaining to the theme of community. While some of the writings translated here touch on themes and concerns that attracted the attention of Christians everywhere in this period (martyrdom, communal discipline, ecclesiology, ritual uniformity, and governance, to name a few), others resist any universalization and remain bound to the context in which they were produced. Their historical value rests in the access they provide modern readers to parochial moments, issues, tensions, and disputes. To take in the diversity of early Christian writers means perusing the well-known and the obscure, the global and the local. Indeed, many of the texts translated in this volume are classics, cherished by both past and present readers for their stylistic eloquence, theological acuity, psychological insight, or historical import. Others are obscure texts given fresh translations and, in some cases, their first appearance in English. With each translation comes a contextualizing introduction, designed to provide readers with some basic historical context for the author and text.