Animals, Gods And Humans

Ingvild Saelid Gilhus explores the transition from traditional Greek and Roman religion to Christianity in the Roman Empire and the effect of this change on the concept of animals, illustrating the main factors in the creation of a Christian conception of animals. One of the underlying assumptions of the book is that changes in the way animal motifs are used and the way human-animal relations are conceptualized serve as indicators of more general cultural shifts. Gilhus attests that in late antiquity, animals were used as symbols in a general redefinition of cultural values and assumptions.

Animals are beings with which we may have social relations. We feel sympathy and affection for them, but we also exploit them for our own benefit, for company, sport or nourishment. They are persons and things, friends and food. We communicate with animals, but we also kill, cook and eat them. Animals are similar to us as well as different from us, which encourages us to imagine ourselves as them to conceptualize our own being and to use them as symbols to make sense of our world.

Our thinking about animals is not simple, any more than our feelings for them are straightforward. There is a conflict between our friendliness for some animals and our fear of others, also between our economic interest in them and a natural empathy for living beings when we have the imagination to think of ourselves in their place. By arousing contradictory thoughts and a multitude of emotions, animals become natural symbols and such stuff as myths are made of.

The relationship between animals and humans is a relationship between one species and a tremendous variety of others. Even if we feel that there is an unbridgeable gap between our species and all others, this gap is viewed differently  with regard to different species, which contributes to making the relationship between humans and animals extremely complex (Midgley 1988). How kinship and otherness, closeness and distance between humans and animals are experienced and expressed varies in different types of discourse, and different cultural interpretations may be made of the same animal.

In religions, animals appear as the third party in the interaction between gods and human beings, often as mediators. In this trinity, animals and humans share a flesh-and-blood reality, while gods are creatures of human imagination and tradition. This does not necessarily mean that gods are seen as less real than humans and animals – usually they are thought of as more real. Rituals function above all to establish and confirm the reality of the gods. Killing animals in honour of them and offering them part of the meat from the sacrifice was one way in which their reality was established.

At some points in history, major changes occur in the religious meaning and functions of animals. This was so in India nearly three thousand years ago, when the sacrificing of animals was replaced by bloodless offerings, eating meat was deemed less pure than a vegetarian diet, and doing no injury to any living being became a universal ethical command in Brahmanical lawbooks (Jacobsen 1994). In England, attitudes to the natural world changed in the early modern period. Animals were viewed with increasing sympathy, and even writers in the Christian tradition no longer saw animals as made solely for human sustenance (Thomas 1984: 166). In late antiquity, a major change appeared, when the main religious institution, the animal sacrifice, was replaced by Christian rituals, which no longer included any offering of animal flesh. At the same time, Christians continued to employ a sacrificial terminology. They regarded the death of Christ as fulfilling the sacrificial rites of the Old Testament and used the sacrificial lamb as a symbol for Christ (Snyder 1991: 14–15). With Christianity, the human body became the key symbol in a religion that focused on the death and resurrection of Christ, and the ultimate hope of believers was their own bodily resurrection.

This change from a sacrificial cult, where the animal body had been a key symbol, to the Christian cult, where the human body became the new key symbol, is one of the dramatic changes in the history of religions. What this change implied for the way human beings, through symbols, myths and rituals, imagined their relationship with the rest of the living world has been remarkably little investigated.

Few have found it strange that the bloodless cults of Christianity replaced the sacrificial cults of the Roman Empire. The reason why the worship of gods by means of animal sacrifices gave way to the cult of Christ has not been discussed very much. This curious lack of research may be due to a combination of assumptions based on evolutionism and implicit Christian beliefs.

That the religious significance of animals was discussed for so long in the context of cultural evolutionism has associated the problem with an outdated way of thinking. The religious significance of animals is still mainly associated with earlier stages of cultural development, even if the evolutionistic paradigm on which these ideas were originally based has been rejected. Therefore, one reason why few have seriously asked why the bloodless cults of Christianity replaced the sacrificial cults of the Roman Empire is simply that this problem was regarded as solved. The solution was enlightenment and civilization. The slaughter of sacrificial victims is more primitive than bloodless cults, the worship of gods in animal form is a less advanced type of religion than the worship of gods in human forms, and polytheism is more primitive than monotheism. Seen from this perspective, Christianity stands for cultural progress. In the case of animal sacrifice, furthermore, there has been a tendency to give universal answers to phenomena that in reality are extremely varied and perhaps have only a superficial resemblance (Bloch 1992).

In the present study, we are dealing with a limited period in human history, the first to the fourth century CE, and a limited geographical area, the Mediterranean. Animal sacrifice did not originate in this period; on the contrary, it was brought to an end – at least in its traditional form. After it had been banned, people managed very well without killing their animals in a sacrificial and religious setting. The end of sacrifice did not mean that people stopped killing animals or that they declined to eat meat, only that they no longer did these things in religious settings. One difference between the earlier and later periods was that the butchering of animals, which had been a religious activity, was now secularized. However, the end of animal sacrifice did not mean the end of sacrificial ideology, which was continued in Christianity.

The transition from paganism to Christianity offers us an opportunity to look at the much debated question of the origin of sacrifice in a different way and ask other questions instead. We will not ask why people started to sacrifice animals (about which, when all is said and done, we can know very little) but rather why they stopped doing so. Why did the bloodless Christian cults replace animal sacrifice? We are better equipped to suggest reasons why sacrifice came to an end in late antiquity than to give a reason for its origin in prehistory.

If it is strange that the sacrificial cult came to an end, it is likewise strange that the change from a sacrificial non-Christian cult to a Christian cult was not accompanied by essential changes in diet, for instance by a turn to vegetarianism similar to the one we witness in India in the last millennium BCE – even more strange since the question of purity of food was an issue among the different religious factions and sects in the empire.

Representatives of various religious elites, for instance the Stoic Seneca (1–65 CE), the Neopythagorean Apollonius of Tyana (c. 40–120 CE) and the Neoplatonist Porphyry (234–305 CE), abstained from eating flesh. Why was the sacrifice of animals discontinued apparently with no other dietary consequences for mainstream Christianity than that meat was desacralized? Sacrifice is only one element in Graeco-Roman human–animal relations.

As animal sacrifice lost its significance, the religious and moral value of animals was reduced in general. The lowering of the status of animals is reflected in philosophical debates between Aristotelians, Epicureans, Platonists, Neopythagoreans and Stoics in which the Stoic position gradually became dominant. According to the Stoics, logos is the categorical boundary marker between humans and animals, animals are aloga – creatures without reason. The degradation of animals is also to be seen when animal worship was used as an example of barbarism and regarded as a primitive form of religion. The growing importance of the arena with its massacres of animals could also reflect a devaluation of animals.

Two complementary religious processes that concerned the relationship between animals and humans were at work in the Graeco-Roman world. One was a sacralization of the human form, seen in several of the new cults, among them Christianity. The other was a desacralization of animals, a process that can be observed when the traditional sacrificial cult came to an end. The desacralization of animals is also to be seen in the criticism of people who were suspected of animal worship. It is as if animals and humans had been placed on two scales, and the scales had started to move apart. The humans were given greater religious value, the animals less. But even if the process of sacralization of humans and desacralization of animals was not Christian in origin, Christianity developed these processes further. They were given a final form and incorporated into the continuous cultural work of building a new Christian identity.

The present study owes much to several branches of cultural research. One includes the classic studies of animals in religions. In the heyday of evolutionism, totemism and the religion of hunters and gatherers were the main contexts for the discussion of the religious function of animals (Willis 1994: 1–24). This discussion focused on totemism as a social system, but it sometimes also stressed the nutritional value of the animals involved in this system.

However, the debate about totemism took a new course in 1962, when Claude Lévi-Strauss said that natural species are chosen, not because they are “good to eat” but because they are “good to think” (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 127–8). From that point on, totemism has mainly been regarded as a system of symbols where animals appear as “chiffres” and as illustrations of human thought processes. However, it must be pointed out that the structuralist turn initiated by Lévi-Strauss, although it offered a fruitful new perspective, also implied a reduction in the broader significance of animals. One point was that economic factors in the relations between animals and humans were downplayed; another was that emotional factors were overlooked. Animals are not only good to think, they are also good to “feel”, and they give emotional value and impetus to anything they are linked with. That at least is one of the reasons why they are so effectively used as symbols and metaphors.

Like totemism, sacrifice has been treated in recent research as a system of signs and as an institution that links and divides elements in the social fabric (Detienne and Vernant 1989). Animal sacrifice has further been linked with economic factors and, above all, the distribution of power (Gordon 1990; Jay 1993; Stowers 1995).

Research on animals in antiquity is the second branch of research that has been of value to this study. This is a wide field that includes ancient debates on the status of animals as well as veterinary medicine; studies of animals in art as well as the analysis of ancient physiognomics; and studies of animals in the Roman arena as well as ecological treatises. Three books have been a special inspiration to the present study. These are J.M.C. Toynbee’s survey of the Roman use of animals, Animals in Roman Life and Art; Urs Dierauer, Tier und Mensch im Denken der Antike. Studien zur Tierpsychologie, Anthropologie und Ethik and Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate. Toynbee’s book takes its point of departure from the study of Roman art, while the books by Dierauer and Sorabji are based on close readings of Greek and Latin texts and investigations of the ancient debate on the status and value of animals.

The flourishing field of research on religion/Christianity in late antiquity has been vital for the present study. This research is characterized by a willingness to see Christianity and paganism synoptically, which implies taking Christianity out of Church history and into the wider ancient world of which it was part.3 It also implies looking at the different branches of Christianity without automatically applying an orthodoxy/heterodoxy perspective. Some of these more recent studies are characterized by a certain subversive perspective: the texts are not only to be read with the elite that produced them but also against it (Burrus 2000).

Antiquity and late modernity have in common an increased interest in the status and value of animals. Contemporary studies of the cultural and moral value of animals is the fourth branch of research from which this study has profited. The modern debate has focused on ethical issues surrounding the treatment of animals by humans. Peter Singer argues for a radical change in the treatment of animals and bases his arguments on the principle of equality and the idea that we should minimize suffering. Singer compares “speciesism” to racism and equates human and animal suffering (Singer 1975, cf. also Regan 1983). A more moderate stand on “speciesism” is taken by Mary Midgley in her Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1995), where she persuasively attempts to set humans within their animal context. These authors are alike in their call for respect for non-human animals, their claim that suffering of sentient beings matters and their extension of the principle of equality across species barriers.

Complementary to these “pro-animal” authors are Mary Douglas’ criticalperspective and searching questions about why compassion towards animals has become an issue in late modernity. She points out that it is simplistic to stop at identifying some people as being more compassionate towards animals than others. One must ask what sort of ideology and social structure generally produces such attitudes in the first place. How we think about the relations between animals is based on our own relationships (Douglas 1990, 2001). Concepts of animals reflect human concerns, and animal categories are moulded on principles of how humans interact with each other, which means that human social categories are extended to the animal world. According to Douglas, “animal categories come up in the same pattern of relations as those of humans because the said humans understand the animal kinds to be acting according to the same principles as themselves” (Douglas 1990: 33). And, she asks, “how could we think about how animals relate to one another except on the basis of our own relationships?” (ibid.).

Douglas is certainly right in pointing to a fundamental connection between how humans think of themselves and the ways they think of animals. But it must be added that the animal world does not consist of non-intentional objects on which human relations can be projected as on a blank slate. Animals have their specific ways of behavior and own interests to pursue that contribute to determining how they are conceived of. Animals also interact with humans, at least some animals do, and their societies are not only parallels to human ones but extensions of them as well. All the same, a cultural analysis of animal categories must include the references of these categories to the world of humans.

Steve Baker, who has written about late modern depictions of animals, has attempted to show the meanings that animal metaphors give to humans; at the same time, he is attentive to the views of animals that are conveyed by means of these metaphors (Baker 2001). The idea that animal representations, which may be literary or social constructions, reveal something about the way living animals are perceived and treated is not uncontroversial. Baker recalls that when he spoke at a conference in Oxford in the mid-1980s, called “Animal Images of Sex, Race, and Class”, and at the end of the paper suggested “that animal representations may indirectly reveal something about how a culture regards and thus treats living animals, the suggestion was considered, to be frank, bizarre” (cf. ibid.: xvii). At a conference fifteen years later, “many speakers took for granted that the ‘real’ and the representational can no longer be regarded as conveniently distinct realms” (ibid.).

Baker makes several interesting points. I will especially mention his warning against drawing a sharp distinction between representations and reality – the representational, symbolic and rhetorical use of animals deserves, according to him, as much conceptual weight as any idea about “real” animals (ibid., 10). In The Treason of Images, the famous picture by René Magritte of a pipe accompanied by the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, the difference between an object and its representation is visualized. A picture of a lion is not a lion, but a picture of a lion may help us to recognize a lion when we see one. The challenge is to understand when and to what extent representations of animals make comments on animals, and what they say about them.

In relation to animals and cultural expressions of contempt in relation to animals, Baker points out that “it may be that the practice somehow accounts for the rhetoric; it may be that the rhetoric sustains and substantiates and consolidates the practice, leading us to continue to hold animals in contempt; I contend only that they run in parallel, and that it is rash to assume that the parallel is without significance” (ibid.: 90). In this cautious observation, there lies an appeal not to see the different contexts where animals appear totally in separation from each other but to see them and the conception of animals that they generate as somehow connected.

Finally, I will mention Baker’s point that we have a tendency to deny animals. Animals in fairytales and cartoons are read as humans. They are not animals in any meaningful way, only a medium for messages that concern humans (ibid.: 136–8). In other words, their animality is denied. Something similar may be at work in Christian antiquity, when texts about animals are explained as if they did not concern animals.

One challenge is to track the relations between a society’s metaphorical systems based on animals and that society’s treatment of them. I do not mean that animal metaphors are related to a society’s evaluations and practices towards animals as a one-to-one relationship, and not in each and every case. But as an overall “mechanism” I will suggest that metaphors are dependent on how animals are evaluated, and further that the evaluation of them is interconnected with practices towards them. When, for instance, Achilles is spoken of as a lion, the metaphor will say something not only about the object it is used to describe (Achilles) but also about its original referent (the lion).

Furthermore, it is important to stress that a representation of an animal does not mirror the actual animal; nor is it a “true” description of that animal but reflects popular conceptions of it. Mary Midgley has pointed out that “Actual wolves, then, are not much like the folk-figure of the wolf, and the same is true for apes and other creatures. But it is the folk-figure that has been popular with philosophers” (Midgley 1995: 27). Midgley has also poignantly revealed how the folk figure of the wolf has influenced the actual treatment of wolves.

However, there is a danger in confusing representations of real animals with animal symbols and metaphors. This problem is not new but was realized in antiquity. In his refutation of the Ophites, a gnostic sect, Epiphanius, archbishop of Salamis on Cyprus, struggles with a saying in Matthew: “Be ye wise as the serpents and harmless as the dove” (Matthew 10:16; Panarion I, 37.1–9). It is well known that serpents have a problematic standing in Christian religion, but neither do doves escape Epiphanius’ criticism, as he says that in many ways doves are not admirable. They are incontinent and ceaselessly promiscuous, lecherous and devoted to the pleasures of the moment, and weak and small besides. But because of the harmlessness, patience and forbearance of doves – and even more, because the Holy Spirit has appeared in the form of a dove – the divine Word could have us imitate the will of the Holy Ghost and the harmlessness of the harmless dove, and be wise in good but innocent in evil.(Panarion I, 37.8–9)

The dove is here depicted in anthropomorphic language as a disgusting animal, which clearly makes the bird unsuitable as a Christian ideal. In Epiphanius’ enumeration, the bird’s bad qualities far outdo its good ones. Epiphanius contrasts one positive folk figure of the dove with what he takes to be real doves and shows that the connection between “real” doves and symbolic ones is slight and selective indeed. The common properties of a dove and the Holy Spirit do not cover the totality of the dove but consist of only a few characteristics.

The selection of animals that are used as metaphors is governed by certain interests in the first place. It is also true that different characteristics of an animal are used in different contexts – an animal may be mapped in several ways, as Epiphanius (who does not especially like allegorical readings) shows in his characteristics of ordinary doves in relation to the dove that is used as a symbol for the Holy Spirit. When Christ is described as a lion, his wrath, manliness and rulership appear in the context of his saving power, while in relation to Satan the lion describes his wrath and rulership in the context of evil. Different animals can be used as metaphors for the same entity: Christ is both a lion and a lamb, and Satan is described as a wild boar, a serpent, or a lion. Some animals tend, to a higher degree than others, to have a fixed range of metaphorical meanings in Christian discourse, for instance the lamb and the dove.

Thinking about animals, experiencing them and interacting with them is done in certain cultural contexts. A context may be mental as well as physical. The point is that an animal – be it a real one or a metaphorical one – is never a transparent object and accordingly can never be grasped in isolation; animals are always woven into specific contexts. There are pagan contexts for animal concepts, such as arenas, sacrifices and philosophical debates; Jewish contexts, such as the Genesis account of creation and the dietary laws based on purity and impurity; and Christian contexts, for instance, martyrdom, asceticism and the Christian interpretations of paganism and heresies – contexts in which animals appear as symbols and metaphors. One aim is to show how animals were contextualized during the Roman Empire, what meanings they were given and what changes Christianity made.

In the Graeco-Roman world, animals were described in an anthropomorphic language and often in moralizing ways. Similarities and differences were always emphasized in this language: animals were similar to humans but at the same time radically different from them. How, in what ways, and by what means the interplay between similarities and differences between animals and humans was construed varied with context and purpose. Such variations are closely connected to the fact that when texts mention animals they are often referring to humans in a sort of code. However, this code is only comprehensible if the evaluation of animals that it is dependent upon is known and shared. When texts are talking about humans by means of animals, what is the specific issue? On what conditions are animals present? What do these texts say about animals?

The theme of this book is the transition from traditional Greek and Roman religion to Christianity in the Roman Empire and the effect of this transition on the conception of animals. The changes in the religious evaluation of animals, the effects of these changes and the cultural processes that these involved will be investigated. The disappearance of animal sacrifice is the most visible sign of more general changes in the relationship between animals and humans. However, the use of animals in symbols, myths and rituals and the value they were given also changed profoundly in these centuries. One of the underlying assumptions of the book is that changes in the way animal motifs are used and the way human–animal relations are conceptualized serve as indicators of more general cultural shifts. In late antiquity, animals were used as symbols in a general redefinition of cultural values and assumptions. Cultural issues were focused through them. We will trace the changes in the religious significance of animals in the centuries when Christianity grew from a minority sect to a world religion and look into the significance of these changes, to understand not only the conception of animals but also its functions in the development of a new Christian identity.

The present study of animals and religious changes in the first to fourth centuries CE is intended as a contribution to research on religion in late antiquity. I will investigate changes in the concept of animals during the transitionfrom a non-Christian to a Christian culture. The aim is to see how people in the Graeco-Roman world imagined, interpreted and dramatized animals and how they related to them. Key texts consulted range from philosophical treatises to novels and poems on metamorphoses; from biographies of holy persons such as Apollonius of Tyana and Antony, the Christian desert ascetic, to natural history; from the New Testament via gnostic texts to the Church fathers; from pagan and Christian criticism of animal sacrifice to the acts of the martyrs.

The texts consulted will be treated as equally valuable. They reflect parallel or interlocking discourses on animals that all have an equal right to be heard. One of the project’s aims has been to bring these various texts together and confront them with each other. A second has been to present the dominant themes and developments in people’s conception of animals without losing their complexity. Both the pagan and the Christian conception of animals remained rich and multilayered through the centuries. Furthermore, it has been an ambition to give an outline of the main factors in the creation of a Christian conception of animals.

The book is intended as a macro-investigation based on selected texts, aiming at an understanding of the dominant religious and cultural processes relating to animals in the first to fourth century CE and at creating an overall picture. The selection of texts has been made on the basis of which texts were estimated to be most helpful. Geographical differences and variations due to social strata will be commented upon only to some degree.5 As for the relationship between non-Christian religions and Christianity, Christianity will be viewed as both a continuation of general religious developments in these centuries and a religious innovation in itself.

In the first part of the book, the concept of animals will be described in relation to public institutions, thought, imagination and religion. Chapter 1 is a broad survey of the various contexts in which living animals appeared in the cultural and religious landscape of the early Roman Empire. Three of these are singled out as being especially significant. These are sacrifice, divination and the arena. In Chapters 2–4, the role and function of animals in philosophy and literature will be discussed. Considering how much time was spent, how much cultural work was done to keep up the categorical boundaries between humans and animals, a number of interesting questions arise: when, in what way, in which media and for what purposes were these boundaries overstepped, as they most certainly were.

The theme of Chapter 5 is the religious value of animals. While animals and humans share a flesh-and-blood reality, gods and animals have in common the fact that they are not human. They also have it in common that humans relate to them and define themselves in relation to them. Furthermore, both gods and animals are usually described as if they were human, with human attributes and consciousness. The mysteries of Mithras, Cybele and Attis, Isis and Osiris are examples of cults in which animals appeared. Alexander of Abonouteichos had his sacred serpent, and in the temples of Asclepius serpents and dogs were present. Animals appeared in magic, and in several other systems of expertise such as divination and astrology. How and in what ways were animals associated with the divine world in antiquity?

In Chapters 6 and 7, animal sacrifice as the old religious key symbol will be analysed and compared with the appearance of the human body as the new Christian key symbol. In the change from a pagan to a Christian culture, a great symbolic burden was lifted from sacrificial animals and laid upon Christian bodies. What does this shift of key symbols imply? Why did it come about?

The second part of the book will be a more systematic investigation of how animals appear in Christian texts. Its point of departure is the New Testament. From these biblical texts we will proceed to the discourse that took place on martyrs and then on ascetics. Next to the animal sacrifice, the arena was the most significant context in which animals appeared in the empire. In the arenas, Rome played out its superiority and might. Rome had conquered the world and continued symbolically to conquer it in the spectacular hunting of wild animals in the arenas. In Chapter 9, we will look into the acts of the martyrs and the Christian narratives about the arena and see what meaning animals were given in relation to Christian martyrs.

In addition to their discourse on martyrs, ascetic discourse was one of the main Christian contexts for talk about animals. In Chapter 10, this subject will be investigated through Egyptian sources – the Nag Hammadi texts and the Life of Antony. In Chapter 11, the use of animals to characterize other beings will be discussed, while in Chapter 12, we will proceed from bestial humans to humanlike animals. Here the anomalies within the neat Christian hierarchical system, the lack of winged humans and the presence of speaking animals will be scrutinized.

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Perfect Martyr: The Stoning of Stephen and the Construction of Christian Identity

Recent studies have examined martyrdom as a means of constructing Christian identity, but until now none has focused on Stephen, the first Christian martyr. For the author of Luke-Acts, the stoning of Stephen-- even more than the death of Jesus-- underscores the perfidy of non-believing Jews, the extravagant mercy of Christians, and the inevitable rift that will develop between these two social groups. Stephen's dying prayer that his persecutors be forgiven-the prayer for which he is hailed in Christian tradition as the "perfect martyr" plays a crucial role in drawing an unprecedented distinction between Jewish and early Christian identities.

Shelly Matthews deftly situates Stephen's story within the emerging discourse of early Christian martyrdom. Though Stephen is widely acknowledged to be an actual historical figure, Matthews points to his name, his manner of death, and to other signs that his martyrdom was ideally suited to the rhetorical purposes of Acts and its author, Luke: to uphold Roman views of security and respectability, to show non-believing Jews to disadvantage, and to convey that Christianity was an exceptionally merciful religion. By drawing parallels between Acts and stories of the martyrdom of James, the brother of Jesus, Matthews challenges the coherent canonical narrative of Acts and questions common assumptions about the historicity of Stephen's martyrdom. She also offers a radical new reading of Stephen's last prayer, showing the complex and sometimes violent effects of its modern interpretations. 

Perfect Martyr illuminates the Stephen story as never before, offering a deeply nuanced picture of violence, solidarity, and resistance among Jews and early Christians, a key to understanding the early development of a non-Jewish Christian identity, and an innovative reframing of one of the most significant stories in the Bible. 

The Jerusalem section of Acts is closed by the story of the stoning of Stephen, the first Jesus believer to be killed by those who resist his testimony. The story connects the death of Jesus in the Third Gospel to the conversion of the Paul in Acts, for Stephen’s death is closely modeled on the death of Jesus and closely linked to the conversion of Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles. As with many martyrdom tales, the precise reason for Stephen’s rejection and death is not clearly stated. Stephen is charged with speaking against the law and the temple, the central institutions of the Jewish people. But Stephen’s defense speech reveals his reverence for the law; the precise nature of Stephen’s temple criticism is diffi cult to discern; and, in any case, the narrator marks those who make the temple/torah accusation as false witnesses. The angry reaction of the crowd to Stephen’s defense speech is prompted not by proof that Stephen is against the law and the temple but by Stephen’s counteraccusation that his audience is implicated in prophet persecution and law breaking. The stoning takes place after Stephen has shared his vision of the Son of Man.

While the grounds for the martyr’s death are not obvious, the identity of the persecutors is. They are Jews living in Jerusalem, who come from the far reaches of the earth. Saul/Paul is also implicated as one who receives the coats of those stoning Stephen, his pre-conversion presence at the stoning standing as a sign of the violence of his former life, when he persecuted the church to the utmost. That the death comes by stoning makes clear that the Ioudaioi who murder Stephen are despicable rabble-rousers since, from a Roman imperial view, stoning is the crime of the barbarous. The vile persecutors serve as a perfect foil to the innocent and generous martyr who, fi lled with the Holy Spirit, prays an extravagant prayer of mercy upon them.

The death not only marks the close of the Jerusalem section of Acts but also paves the way for the mission into Judea, Samaria, and unto the ends of the earth. At the death, a severe persecution breaks out against the church in Jerusalem, causing all but the apostles to scatter, with some traveling as far as Antioch, the place where the disciples were fi rst called Christians. Martyrdom is not an event but a discourse. Throughout the course of Roman imperial rule of the ancient Mediterranean, hundreds and thousands of subjects were killed in state-sanctioned violence. 1 Nearly all of these subjects met their deaths without the consolation of being named and memorialized in any historical record. While all these deaths are events that “happened,” language is required, specifi cally a narrative told by those empathetic to the victim and the victim’s plight, to create a martyr. As Daniel Boyarin puts it, “For the ‘Romans,’ it didn’t matter much whether the lions were eating a robber or a bishop, and it probably didn’t make much of a difference to the lions, either, but the robber’s friends and the bishop’s friends told different stories about those leonine meals. It is in these stories that martyrdom, as opposed to execution, or dinner, can be found.”

As a discourse that attempts to wrest meaning out of violence through inverting categories of strength and weakness, victory and loss, and life and death, martyrdom narratives can subvert hegemonic powers, providing a language of, and hence a means for, resistance to those facing similar violent circumstances. Recent scholarship has also shown the discourse of martyrdom to do other kinds of complicated work as well in constructing the subjectivity of those who circulate the martyrs’ stories. Reciting martyrdom tales can be a form of culture making, a means of nation building, and a process through which ethnoracial identity is constructed. Paradoxically, the anti-judgment, anti-authority alignment of Christian martyrdom discourse can work in the service of generating new sites of authority.  In the first centuries of Judeo-Christian history, martyrdom tales work toward creating the very categories “Jew” and “Christian.” The primary focus of these studies has been on texts that might be considered full-blown martyrologies, such as those found in 2 and 4 Maccabees, in rabbinic literature, and in Christian martyrdom literature from the mid-second through the fourth centuries. This book contributes to the current conversation on martyrdom, memory, and identity by bringing the story of the stoning of Stephen in Acts into this conversation.

To be sure, Stephen is not a martyr according to recent typologies of martyrdom proposed by Jan Willem van Henten or Daniel Boyarin. While later Christian tradition gives to Stephen a privileged place—in some versions, the fi rst space—in the company of Christian martyrs, one might say that his death is fi rst narrated before the elements that will constitute Jewish and Christian martyr acts of Late Antiquity have coalesced (or, following van Henten’s typology, before Christian death narratives have more completely conformed to the framework established in the Jewish martyrdom narratives of Maccabees and Daniel). The trial proceedings are not formal enough, the ultimatum is not directly given so that the persecuted might directly resist or affi rm, and erotic elements so common in later martyr texts are absent. A visionary element is present in Stephen’s cry, “‘Look’ . . . I see . . . the Son of Man” (Acts 7.56) but is not developed. Stephen is not persecuted in a “pagan” court but rather by his own people. Therefore, in some renderings, his death might fall more precisely under the taxonomy of the persecuted prophet or the noble death rather than the Christian martyr. Yet, I want to suggest that the story of Stephen occupies an important place on the path toward Christian martyrologies proper and hence is too compelling to overlook for those who recognize the identity work that such texts do.

Dating Acts

As a supporting plank in my argument that the Stephen story should be considered for its relevance to the developing second-century discourse on martyrdom, I note recent reappraisals of the dating of the canonical Acts. While this text has long been dated by common consensus to the 80s or 90s of the common era, a surge of scholarship has now converged in arguing that it isbetter understood as a product of the early second century. There is nothing in the reception history of Acts that precludes a dating to the second century rather than the fi rst, as the fi rst sustained and irrefutable witness to Acts is Irenaeus, ca. 180 CE . Recent and compelling reintroductions of the argument that Acts knows portions of Josephus’s Antiquities, as well as several Pauline Epistles, set a terminus a quo for the narrative at 100 CE . Within this possible range of dates, I assume a date in the second or third decade of the second century as most probable. As many have come to recognize, the political, social, and ecclesial issues of concern in Acts, and the rhetoric employed to address them, fit more squarely within debates of the third generation of the Jesus movement, rather than the fi rst or second. In terms of its depiction of persecutory Jews, its defense of Christians in Romanized terms, and its understanding of proof from prophecy, Acts is a document that lies close to the thought world of Justin Martyr. Its appropriation of Jewish symbols and Scriptures, its clear statement that the ministry of Paul is authorized by the Jerusalem apostles, and its solution to questions of divine judgment and mercy, and violence and peace, place the text within debates that might be considered “marcionite” in flavor.

Thus, Acts may be considered as a document near contemporary with 4 Maccabees (ca. 100 CE ) and the Letters of Ignatius (ca. 110 CE ); as a close relative of the Apocryphal Acts of Paul, both in terms of genre and dating; and not so distant from the Martyrdom of Polycarp (ca. 150 CE ), the text that is often recognized as the earliest Christian martyrdom narrative. Without making arguments for textual dependency among all these texts in which martyrdom fi gures, I note the usefulness of considering them as products of the same thought world, possibly the same geographic region, written under similar social circumstances. Viewing Acts as an early second-century text not only prompts reassessment of its relationship to these texts but also raises questions about what the canonical Acts does and does not say about the fate of revered fi gures of the fi rst generation of Jesus believers. If Acts is located in the second century, its silence concerning the fate of its own hero Paul—to say nothing of its silence concerning the deaths of James, the brother of Jesus, and of Peter—is especially curious. Some sixty years after their deaths, it is diffi cult to explain this silence as owing to paucity of source material. Because Acts contributes to the shaping of second-century discourse of martyrdom, the silence concerning the deaths of these early Christian leaders, Peter, Paul, and James, as well as the prominence of Stephen’s death require explanation.

Stephen in Acts’ Construction of Categories

As is now commonly recognized, identities do not emerge whole and contained at fi xed points in time but rather are constructed over time through social and linguistic processes. This construction requires the imposition and continual maintenance of boundaries among social groups whose identities would otherwise remain in fl ux. The work of Daniel Boyarin especially has enabled scholars to understand the development of identities from the time of the Jewish Jesus movement to the time in which Christianity came to be spoken of as a religion that was not-Judaism, not as the birth of a religion at a fi xed point in time but rather as a massive unwieldy construction project. This construction involved constant negotiation across a number of sites where struggles played out over the precise architectural nature of the edifi ce and required the concurrent construction—over the same centuries, with related elements of contest and struggle—of Judaism as something Christianity was not.

Adopting the model and terminology employed by Boyarin, one might say that the author of Acts is an early border agent working to fi x barriers and hence to construct two unifi ed and distinct social/religious entities called Judaism and Christianity (or better, working to fi x barriers between his version of Christianity, with Judaism on the one side and heresy on the other). But he is an early player, laying bricks in his particular region of the ancient Mediterranean for the “borderline” between Judaism and Christianity that will not be firmly and broadly erected for some centuries.

While Acts lays foundation stones for the edifice of a version of Christianity that is not-Judaism—a version so like that of many of our Protestant Christianities that is naturalized and nearly unquestionable—it should also be noted that its author is not in full possession of the categories that later constructors of Christianity as a religion distinct from Judaism will eventually possess. That is, Acts does not own the fully stocked semantic toolbox available to later constructors of Christianity as a religion distinct from Judaism, one that would enable him to confidently name fellow believers as “Christians/not Jews.”

Boyarin, along with scholars including Jan Willem van Henten, and Judith Lieu have come to recognize that martyrdom narratives are key sites for identity construction among Jews and Christians. Readers of these narratives of men and women who choose to die rather than compromise their identities are instructed in what makes one Christian, what makes one Jewish. It is my contention that Acts’ story of the martyrdom of Stephen participates in both a peculiar and a pernicious construction of Christian and Jewish identities. It is peculiar because it stands at odds with numerous martyrdom traditions concerning the earliest believers of Jesus. It is most obviously pernicious because of its anti-Judaism. 19 An analysis of both its peculiarity and its anti-Jewish edge occupies a large portion of subsequent chapters. To introduce the problem here, I identify a number of overlapping themes by which the Acts narrative, in general, and the Stephen story, in particular, tell a story of Christian origins that is problematically framed and ethically troubling.

The Swift, Linear, and Violent Break

In the past several decades, scholars of ancient Jewish–Christian relations have compiled a number of arguments demonstrating that, the angry rhetoric of the Adversus Judaeos literature notwithstanding, Jews and Christians in the ancient world did not always live in enmity. To name a few, Wayne Meeks and Robert Wilken have read John Chrysostom against the grain to fi nd Christians in Antioch keeping kosher, meeting with Jews in the synagogue, and fi xing their Easter celebrations according to Passover; E. Leigh Gibson argues that Jews in Smyrna invited Christians into their synagogues at the time of Pionius (ca. 140 CE ), noting that shelter there might have been extended as “an alternative to the grim choice between martyrdom and execution”;  Daniel Boyarin argues that rabbinic literature hints at Rabbi Eliezer’s pleasure concerning the teaching of Jesus; and Annette Yoshiko Reed speaks of the irenic tone of the fourth- and fifth-century redactions of the Pseudo-Clementines, in which the Jewish Christians acknowledge both the Torah and Jesus as distinct but legitimate paths to salvation. These recent studies highlighting porous boundaries, common alliances, and occasional irenic relations cut deeply against the grain of the Acts narrative.

Both the chain of succession established in Acts—from Jesus, to Stephen, to Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles—and the geographic progression of “the Way”—from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria and unto the ends of the earth— have served to support linear models of Christian origins by which Christianity emerges and diverges from Judaism quickly and decisively. To be sure, Acts’ view of Jews and Jewish symbols contains complications of its own, which will be subject to considerable analysis below. Here, I note in brief that, in spite of the narrative’s repeated loops back to Jerusalem, where Paul’s mission to the Gentiles receives the blessing of Jewish Jesus believers (15.1–29) and where myriads of such believers are said to reside (21.20), Paul’s fi nal speech to the Jews in Rome suggests a decisive break between Jews and Gentile followers of the “Way” within the lifetime of Paul himself (28.25–28).

The break is not only swift but also contingent on violence for, as I will demonstrate in greater detail in another chapter, the parting is ignited by Stephen’s death at the hands of the riotous mob of Jews. Eusebius reinscribes Acts’ narrative by which originary martyrdom is linked to the creation of two distinct social groups by noting that Stephen’s death ignites the “fi rst and great” persecution of one distinct social group, the Jerusalem ekklēsia , by another, “the Jews” ( Hist. eccl . 2.1.8). 24 While recent scholars of early Jewish–Christian relations, adopting images used also by the rabbis and the church fathers before them, have invoked a story of gestation and birthing to speak of the origins of and contests between Judaism and Christianity—the rivalry of Jacob and Esau begun in the womb of their mother—Acts tells a more deadly story: the parting is ignited by bloodshed. Thus, in J. B. Lightfoot’s nineteenth-century study of Acts, the significance of the parting is not captured by imagery of an actual birth but rather by sacramental language fusing the imagery of birth and death. “The Church of the Gentiles,” he notes, “was baptized in the blood of Stephen.”

Polarized, Uncomplicated Identities

As exemplified in the violent murder of Stephen and its connection to the persecuting- Saul-turned-persecuted-Paul, Acts constructs Jewish and Christian identity along a simple binary: to be a non-believing Jew is to be an agent of violence; to be a Christian is to suffer. 26 The extreme polarity between these two subject positions is heightened by Stephen’s dying forgiveness prayer for his persecutors. This extravagant prayer of mercy uttered by the dying victim on behalf of the villainous Jews marks the martyr as bound by a new and superior ethic. In Acts’ construction, this distinctively merciful response is the inverse of the merciless deeds of the Ioudaioi ; the peaceful Christian and the violent Ioudaioi are constructed in tandem.

Owing to the reinscription of the violent Jew–violated Christian binary in modern scholarship, the assertion that the first killers of “Christians” were “Jews” is one of the fundaments of the master narrative of Christian origins, standing largely uninterrogated into the twenty-first century. The influence of the lurking violent Jew, so distinctive to Acts’ account of Christian beginnings, helps to explain the numerous modern histories of early Christianity in which scenarios of widespread Jewish violence against Christians seem otherwise gratuitous. One thinks of the understanding of the Jew as the fons persecution is articulated in the influential works of Adolf von Harnack and W. H. C. Frend. 27 This sentiment has been echoed recently by H. W. Tajra, who, in spite of not being able to cite any specific textual evidence in support, imagines that the execution of the Apostle Paul in the Roman capital owes chiefly to influential Jews in the Roman synagogue who desire his death and who manipulate

Roman officials to sate that desire.

The reflexive reliance on this binary is problematic on a number of grounds. For one, it erroneously reduces the multiplicity of first-century Jewish experience under empire—a complex of alliances, negotiations, and antipathies—to a simple tale of conflict between two opposing sides. A related problem in depicting first-century “Jews” and “Christians” in this polarized way is that it forecloses the possibility of imagining that belief or disbelief in Christ was only one of many identity markers among first-century Jews. In the following pages, I will suggest that a better historical narrative than the one offered by Acts would evoke some of that multiplicity, imagining, for instance, situations in which Jesus believers and other Jews formed alliances, marshaled resistance, and/or faced common suffering from imperial overlords. Such an alternative narrative might also make space for imagining that a particular Jew’s assent to messianic claims for Jesus need not have been a singular identity marker, adversely affecting every interaction with other, non-believing, Jews.

The Masking of Imperial Violence

In contrast to legendary accounts of the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul, where Roman officials assume the central villainous roles, the death of Stephen takes place outside of any Roman interest or agency. In large measure, Romans are bracketed from the violence animating the entire book of Acts. Tellingly, in Acts’ version of Paul’s trials and imprisonments, the Romans serve to rescue Paul, not to inflict harm upon him. The message that “Romans do no harm” occludes the role of this ancient imperial power in the violence enacted upon colonized peoples of the Mediterranean, including Judeans. Another way to name this problem is to note that Acts makes claims of agency in Stephen’s death that have long been made about Jesus’ death—the Jews alone are the agents of death. While post-Holocaust scholarship on Gospel passion narratives has underscored Roman agency, whether through Pontius Pilate or the grinding wheels of the “Roman imperial system” as the first cause of Jesus’ death, the Acts narrative has not been subject to the same scrutiny.

Further Authorizations and Reinscriptions

I have already made some reference to the manner by which anti-Jewish rhetoric in Acts is reiterated by subsequent interpreters. Because of the highly charged significance of the “Hellenists” in modern constructions of Christian origins, I conclude this section by considering at greater length how the anti-Judaism of the Stephen pericope is authorized and reinscribed in the racially inflected discourse of the nineteenth century concerning Hellenists and Hebrews.

The great conundrum at the heart of nineteenth-century supersessionist Christian self-understanding is the inescapable fact that the earliest Christians were Jews. Susannah Heschel has demonstrated with acuity the anti- Jewish racism and anxiety infusing many premodern and modern Christian attempts to grapple with that conundrum, especially as it pertains to Jesus’ Jewish identity. 30 An explanation is needed for how the Savior of the West is born into an inferior racial group. As Heschel notes, attempted solutions to the problem of Jesus’ Jewishness range from arguments that Jesus, born of “the virgin womb of the God of Judaism,” comes into the world detached from and unscathed by the “Pharisaic Judaism” of his day, to arguments that Jesus was racially Aryan.

Nineteenth-century scholarship on Acts attempts another way out of the conundrum, through a particular racial/religious coding of the Stephen narrative. A key interpretive move of this reading is the superimposing of nineteenth-century constructions of the (Western) Christian and the (Eastern) Jew onto the terms Hellenist (Hellēnistēs) and Hebrew (Hebraios) that appear in the Stephen narrative (Acts 6.1). To be sure, the author of Acts himself is also attempting to work his way out of a Jewish/Christian conundrum, and these early modern interpreters are responding to markers in Acts suggesting both that believing Gentiles have replaced non-believing Jews as the rightful heirs to the promises of Israel and that Stephen plays a pivotal role in that replacement. However, by racially inflecting the categories Hellenist and Hebrew, and by imposing them even upon Jesus believers who are Jews , modern interpreters have inscribed the distinctions and boundaries between Jews and Christians more starkly than the author of Acts himself. That is, in the Acts narrative, there is an interstitial category and an interim period in which one can be coded positively both as aJew and as Jesus believer. In contrast, nineteenth-century interpreters of Acts, through coding Jewish Jesus believers as either Hebrews or Hellenists, the former trapped in Judaism and the latter liberated into Christianity, collapse the interstitial space.

I summarize the contours of this nineteenth-century reading here, with primary focus on the foundational work of F. C. Baur on Acts. This is not to deny that Baur had at least as many detractors as disciples in the nineteenth century, particularly among those who resisted his reading of Acts as a compromise document hammered out between Gentile and Jewish factions of Christianity. Yet, as a number of recent monographs have demonstrated, Baur’s foundational work, heavily influenced by Hegel’s racially inflected notions of the gradual self-revelation of Spirit in human history, sets the parameters for the debate on Stephen’s significance and holds enduring influence.

Stephen is first introduced in Acts among a group of seven appointed to serving tables as a means of solving the dissension that has broken out within the church between factions named Hellenists and Hebrews (6.1–6). The narrative does not specify what makes (Jewish)Hellenists distinct from (Jewish) Hebrews, nor does it explicitly identify Stephen himself as a Hellenist. 33 Yet, because Stephen bears a Greek name, because he argues in a synagogue with members of the Greek-speaking Diaspora, and—most crucially—because he speaks with wisdom and the Spirit against the temple and the law, he is coded as a Hellenist. Likewise, though the narrative does not explicitly indicate that the apostles are “Hebrews,” majority nineteenth-century Acts scholarship assumes that the Twelve are representative of the “Hebrew” outlook, one that is Jerusalem located, temple focused, law abiding, and Aramaic speaking. Since the question of Gentile believers is not introduced in Acts until the Gospel spreads from Jerusalem into Samaria and beyond (Acts 8.1ff.), it is clear that both the “Hellenists” and the “Hebrews” in Acts 6.1–6 are Jesus-believing Jews. But nineteenth-century commentary generally elides this fact, reading Hellenist as Christian and Hebrew as Jew.

Stephen’s position as Hellenist makes possible a bridge between (the Hebrew) Jesus and (the Hellene) Paul, thus enabling Christianity’s escape from the shackles of fleshy Judaism into the Spirit of freedom. In Baur’s schema, Stephen receives the higher consciousness first possessed by Jesus and then confronts Paul with it, making possible Paul’s conversion from Jew to Christian, a conversion of a full 180 degrees: in Stephen, whom [Paul] had persecuted he had been confronted with the idea which to a Jew was most of all intolerable, which set aside the Jewish particularism, and substituted for it a universalism, in which Jew and Gentile stood with equal privileges side by side, he could now in the revulsion of his consciousness adopt without any further mediation the exact opposite of all that he had hitherto clung to with a true Jew’s feelings and instincts .

Though Baur wavers over the question of whether Stephen or a later hand is responsible for the speech as recorded in Acts 7.2–53, he nevertheless finds it a fitting reflection of Stephen’s higher religious consciousness. Stephen’s speech lays bare “the grossness of the people’s perversity, ingratitude and disobedience, with that overwhelming bias towards materialism which the people had always manifested” 35 and levels a scathing critique against temple worship, which signifies the coarse materiality and inflexibility of Judaism. The temple stands as a place in which “the external, visible, and tangible machinery of worship assumed an overwhelming preponderance, and ceased to be a living and flexible expression of that invisible Ideal.”

Against the Hellenist Stephen and his championing of the Spirit of freedom stand not just the hostile and non-believing Jews but even the apostles themselves. The Twelve, as “Hebrews,” prove as moribund as the rest of their race. Stephen stands alone, “[waging] this fresh and so momentous battle against the enemy; and while he considers the Temple worship, with all its outward forms, as a thing already antiquated and in ruins, the Apostles always remain immovably true to their old adherence to the Temple .” Through attributing to the Jerusalem apostles themselves this state of lethargic imprisonment to the flesh, Baur moves significantly beyond the schema of Acts in his denigration of the Hebrew/Jew, for however much Acts privileges Paul above the Twelve, these Jerusalem apostles yet hold authorizing roles in the Acts narrative. Baur elides this authorizing function, so that Christian Spirit transfers from Jesus directly to Stephen to Paul, avoiding the taint of the Hebrew apostles altogether.

Another way in which nineteenth-century readings inscribe the Jew–Christian divide even more starkly than the Acts narrative itself concerns the question of the “severe persecution” arising against the Jerusalem church at Stephen’s death (8.1). As already noted, key to Acts’ own construction of the two distinct social groups, Jews and Christians, is the sculpting of the former as persecutors and the latter as persecuted. To be a nonbelieving Jew is to inflict violence upon Christians; to be a Christian is to be subject to Jewish violence.

This distinction already inscribed in Acts between the murdering Jew and the victimized Christian, coupled with the tendency to read “Hebrews” in Acts as Jews and “Hellenists” as Christians, results in a widespread exegetical consensus that the severe persecution following Stephen’s death affected only the Hellenist wing of the church and not the Hebrew. The thin thread of text on which this very large scenario unfolds is one phrase in 8.1: “That day [of Stephen’s death] a severe persecution began against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout the countryside” (emphasis added).

That is, the clause in which it is reported that the apostles remain in Jerusalem, while the rest of the church scatters, is taken to mean that no part of the “Hebraistic” church was persecuted in the fi rst place. 39 In Acts’ construction of the persecutor–persecuted binary, a Jew may fall within the category of the persecuted so long as that Jew believes in Jesus as the apostles obviously do (cf. the persecution of Apostles in 5.17–40, 12.1–5). But the widespread acceptance of the “Hellenist-only” persecution scenario in modern biblical criticism suggests among scholars a strong inclination to withhold from the Hebrews the privilege of being counted among the persecuted—that is to say from the authentically Christian—subjects.

To summarize up to this point, the Acts narrative, in general, and the Stephen story, in particular, participate in an anti-Jewish construction of Christian origins. Owing to the wide-ranging influence of the Acts narrative, this anti-Judaism has been reauthorized and reinscribed in much modern biblical scholarship. One aim of this book, therefore, is to draw attention to the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the narrative and its continuing effects. A further aim is to decenter this narrative of Jewish violence, free from Roman involvement, by considering alternate models for writing the history of violent encounters among Jews and Christians under empire. But this is a difficult task—indeed, in the end it might be considered a quixotic undertaking—owing to the tenacious hold of the Acts narrative on collective Christian consciousness. It is to the question of this collective Christian consciousness that I now turn.

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