On “Christianity in the Second Century” edited by James Carleton Paget and Judith Lieu ***

I had high hopes for this book, but I was quite disappointed. My reasons for avoiding it for as long as I did had to do with this being an edited collection. I don’t generally care for reading edited collections of essays on a subject. This volume is an example of why. Individual essays in such volumes, of course, can be useful, but the essays as a whole rarely add up to the sum of their parts. There’s no throughline. Rather, it’s like reading a journal--a bunch of randomly tossed-together articles on a broad subject. I had hoped to learn more about second-century Christianity; instead, I learned a few interesting things, but much of the collection was taken up with arguing esoteric points that in the end don’t really make a big difference to reality.

Case in point: Several articles were about the concept of the “third race” in Christianity in the second century. The takeaway seemed to be that people in the second century didn’t think about race and ethnicity the way that we do in our contemporary world. Well, yeah, obviously. Christianity, as a third race, is really just a way of saying there were pagans, Jews, and Christians--that is, a third group of people. I never thought that such writers actually thought of such peoples ethnically; it seemed a really long exercise to review so much literature to state the obvious. I guess some scholars might care about this, but these were esoteric points that didn’t really reveal anything terribly new or intriguing.

There were lots of arguments about gnosticism and how it is really a meaningless term, which I’ve read about in more detail elsewhere.

This isn’t to say that there weren’t some interesting points here and there. There were several essays that touched on Lucian’s Peregrinus and his portrayal of Christians in it, which showed that I really need to spend more time with this work. Tim Whitmarsh made the intriguing, though not wholly convincing, argument that the only people making the accusation that Christians were atheists were Christians themselves, setting up strawmen arguments about their persecution as such. Certainly, outside Lucian’s satire, Christians were the only ones to preserve this accusation in their defenses against it, but I think to convince me, Whitmarsh would have had to look also at the same accusations against Epicureans. I tend to believe the accusations were real. That said, I agree with Whitmore’s main point--that Christians used such accusations eventually to redefine what constituted an atheist: namely, someone who did not accept the one true god. But Whitmore’s essay points to the general esotericness of the collection, the need to try to say interesting things that in the end don’t amount to much.