Late Antiquity

This was originally published in my Substack, available here.

I sometimes call myself a scholar of “Late Antiquity.” But what does that mean?

There is nothing obvious or natural about how we name historical eras. Such names are both loaded and contingent. When we call an age “the Renaissance” or “the Enlightenment,” we signal a value judgement (good!) that goes beyond a specific and dry date range. The Renaissance, for example, applies to only a small geographical region and denotes a set of aesthetic and cultural characteristics that would probably have been invisible even to most people living in that place and time.

The use of the term “Late Antiquity” took off in the 1980s:

Why? And what is it supposed to designate?

Prior to then, most Roman historians denoted their periods by reference to Rome’s political configurations.  Rome’s “golden age,” in this narrative, occurred in the period of the Republic, around 509 BCE – 27 BCE.  The Republic was hardly a politically stable period, but it saw the evolution of a quasi-democratic political arrangement and flowering of Latin culture and literature.  Rome began to assemble its empire through conquest, extracting wealth that would flow back to Rome.  By the “Late Republican” period, though, cracks were beginning to develop in the political system.  Julius Caesar attempted to seize more power for himself at the expense of the Senate, resulting in his assassination in 44 BCE.  The genie was out of the bottle, though, and soon after his adopted son, Octavian, seized and consolidated power.  Octavian – soon to be known as Augustus – had a long and successful rule and ushered in the period of the “Early Roman Empire,” or “Principate”.  By the mid third-century, the period of decline had begun.  Economic instability, increasing reliance on mercenaries, and ossified bureaucracies marked the beginning of the “Late Roman Empire”.  Spiritually, Romans entered, as E. R. Dodds called it, an “age of anxiety,” which set the scene for the spread of Christianity.  Almost a century later, the Empire would begin to split into a Western Empire, based in Rome, and an Eastern Empire, based in Constantinople.  Some scholars thus use the term “Byzantine” to describe the Eastern Empire from the early fourth century.  The Western Empire comes to an end with the successive sacks of Rome in 410 CE and 455 CE.  In the West, this was seen as the end of antiquity and the beginning of the Medieval period .  Meanwhile, the Islamic invasions began to eat away at Byzantium beginning in the seventh century.  Constantinople would finally fall in 1453.

The problem with this narrative, some scholars (especially Peter Brown) argued, is that it was focused on a narrative of breaks and declines. The history, they argued, could be told instead as one of continuity and flourishing. Instead of focusing on a (contested) narrative of the move from democracy to autocracy, from religious pluralism to superstition and persecution, we can turn our gaze on how classical culture continued in Christian garb. This was a different way of telling the story, and one that required a new terminology.

“Late Antiquity,” though, also found increasing favor among historians of Christianity. Traditionally, Christians had a counter-narrative to that of the Roman historians, one based on triumphalism. Beginning in the early fourth century, the world began to rapidly turn to Christianity. An early Church historian, Sozomen, writing around 440 CE, captures this tone, describing how Christianity spread in the West:

The church having been in this manner spread throughout the whole Roman world, religion was introduced even among the barbarians themselves. The tribes on both sides of the Rhine were Christianized, as likewise the Celts and the Gauls who dwelt upon the most distant shores of the ocean; the Goths, too, and such tribes as were contiguous to them, who formerly dwelt on either of the high shores of the Danube, had long shared in the Christian faith, and had changed into a gentler and more rational observance. Almost all the barbarians had professed to hold the Christian doctrine in honor, from the time of the wars between the Romans and foreign tribes, under the government of Gallienus and the emperors who succeeded him. For when an unspeakable multitude of mixed nations passed over from Thrace into Asia and overran it, and when other barbarians from the various regions did the same things to the adjacent Romans, many priests of Christ who had been taken captive, dwelt among these tribes; and during their residence among them, healed the sick, and cleansed those who were possessed of demons, by the name of Christ only, and by calling on the Son of God; moreover they led a blameless life, and excited envy by their virtues. The barbarians, amazed at the conduct and wonderful works of these men, thought that it would be prudent on their part, and pleasing to the Deity, if they should imitate those whom they saw were better; and, like them, would render homage to God. When teachers as to what should be done, had been proposed to them, the people were taught and baptized, and subsequently were gathered into churches. (Ecclesiastical History 2.6)

Most modern scholars regard accounts like this skeptically.  Christian historians, they recognize, are more concerned with constructing a theologically meaningful and useful story than they are with staying true to their sources (although they did indeed often convey important and correct historical details).  At the same time, though, these scholars saw themselves as scholars of “patristics” or the “Church Fathers,” following the terms used by ecclesiastical sources themselves.  These scholars, who were working in newly established departments of “religion” and “religious studies” (sometimes renamed from “theology”) in secular universities and who sought a new approach to Christian history that was less burdened by theological narratives, were attracted Late Antiquity.  No longer fusty scholars of patristics, they repackaged themselves, more ecumenically, as scholars of Late Antiquity.

But how ecumenical is the field of Late Antiquity?  Neither Roman nor Christian histories had much of a place for the Jews.  Ancient Roman historians sometimes mentioned Jews, often within the context of their revolts against Rome.  Ancient Christian historians gave to “Jews” an important, foundational part of their theological story.  They were the original recipients of God’s covenant but squandered that opportunity through rebelliousness.  God consequentially rejected them and instead shifted the covenant to the followers of Christ.  Once their theological function was completed, though, real Jews became increasingly irrelevant to the Christian story.  The bishop Augustine, writing in North Africa in the early fifth century CE, finally developed an approach to real Jews that remained important in the Roman Catholic Church for centuries.  Jews played important roles as guardians of the original, sacred covenant (now called the Old Testament) and as future witnesses to their own errors.  They were to be tolerated in Christian lands, albeit in a degraded state.  Augustine did seem aware that there was a rabbinic tradition that was just beginning to spread, and that Jewish life remained vibrant, having already moved far from its biblical roots.  This was of little interest to him, though.  Jews were to be seen as stuck in unchanging antiquity.

Modern scholars of Christianity, of course, abandoned this theological and pernicious understanding of Jews.  This did not mean, though, that Jews were any more relevant to their own narratives.  The main action was taking place between Romans (“pagans”) and Christians; if present at all, Jews were at the margins.  The new scholarly discourse of Late Antiquity shifted this tendency only slightly.  Many more recent histories gesture toward the existence of Jews and the potential relevance of their sources (especially rabbinic literature), but still fail to integrate them into the main narrative.  Late Antiquity is, perhaps, less ecumenical than it appears.

Jewish historiography, with its own chronological framework, followed a different path.  Judea was constituted as a Roman province in 6 CE, following the misadministration of the area by Herod’s sons.  Most (but not all) Judeans were followers of the God of Israel, known also by the unpronounceable tetragrammaton, YHVH.  YHVH’s house – and the only authorized place to make sacrifices to YHVH – was the Temple in Jerusalem, a grand complex.  According to our primary historical source for this period, the ancient Judean historian Josephus, the Roman procurators grew increasingly bad and cruel.  Whether or not he is correct in this assessment, it is at least clear that Roman misadministration exacerbated unrest and existing fissures among the Judean elite.  In 66 CE these elite led a rebellion that seems to have caught the Romans off-guard.  Once the Romans regrouped, however, the rebels had little chance.  They retreated to the Jerusalem Temple where they held out until 70 CE, when the Romans finally overcame them, setting fire to the Temple.

The destruction of the Temple meant different things to different historians.  To the ancient Christian historians, it was a theological sign of God’s rejection of the Jews.  Josephus also saw it as a divine punishment for sins, albeit not a sign of rejection.  Modern academic Jewish historians sometimes frame it as a watershed moment in Jewish history.  The destruction of the Second Temple ended an era in Jewish history (the Second Temple period, ca. 540 BCE – 70 CE) and transformed Judaism from a sacrificial religion to one based on study of the Torah.  With the sacrificial system in ruins, a new kind of spiritual authority, the rabbis, quickly rose.

The ancient rabbis, though, did not quite see history that way.  Rabbinic texts begin to emerge in Roman Palestine (the new name of the province) in the early third century CE, although they are based on earlier sources.  These early texts barely reflect on the meaning of the Temple’s destruction.  Rabbinic texts that date to fourth to sixth centuries, from Palestine as well as Persia (which, somehow, gave sudden rise to a very robust rabbinic network), give differing evaluations of the Temple’s destruction.  One thread largely follows Josephus; God caused the Temple’s destruction as a response to Jewish sins.  The rabbis, though, have many, often competing and contradictory voices.  Many rabbinic stories marginalize the Temple as relatively unimportant.  The rabbis and their importance in leading Torah study, these stories claim, go well back into the Second Temple period.  The destruction of the Temple may have been tragic, but the rabbis assured continuity.

For modern historians of early Jewish history, the Second Temple period is followed by the Rabbinic period, which lasts until the Islamic conquest of the Near East around 620 CE.  Although they left a voluminous literature, especially the Palestinian and the Babylonian Talmuds, the rabbis remain surprisingly obscure.  They were educated and largely from families of means; this is the only way that they could have acquired an education and devoted themselves to abstruse conversations.  As the Rabbinic period progressed, the socio-economic position of the rabbis becomes blurrier to modern historians.  Most historians today would agree that the rabbis had far less power and influence than they self-reported, although there are a range of scholarly views on exactly how much they did have.

Rabbinic literature both before and after 313 CE barely acknowledge the existence of Christians.  This relative absence continues to puzzle modern scholars.  Was Christianity, even in Byzantium, such a surface phenomenon that the rabbis hardly noticed it?  Or did they ignore it out of more passive-aggressive tendencies or denial?  In any case, Christianity played no theological role for the rabbis.  Christians who were ethnically Jewish remained Jewish in their eyes, and those who were not born Jewish were simply not Jewish.  If the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple was of little historical consequence to the rabbis, surely the advent of Christianity was of even less, especially to those rabbis who lived in Sassanian Persia, where the state religion was Zoroastrianism.

While the faith-based approach to early Christianity was transformed in the secular university first into patristics, the academic study of rabbinic literature became rabbinics.  Academic scholars of rabbinics, even from the foundation of the academic study of Judaism in the nineteenth century, put the study of rabbinic literature in the broader context of Roman and Christian history.  Despite the theological irrelevance of Christianity for Jews, Christians – and particularly their persecution of Jews – played an important social role in scholarly histories about Jews in antiquity, particularly in those written in the shadow of the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel.

So, it seemed natural for scholars of “rabbinics” in secular universities to embrace a new identity as scholars of Jews and Judaism in Late Antiquity.  Such scholars were routinely trained not only in the Hebrew and Aramaic literature of the rabbis, but also in Greek and Latin.  They already saw what they were doing as part of a wider cultural fabric. The moniker “Late Antiquity” now put them in the same playing field as scholars of Roman history and Christianity.

The integration of Late Antiquity – and more specifically the integration of Jews into the historical narratives of Late Antiquity – is still a work in progress.  Basic questions remain unresolved.  We do not really know how many Jews there were (or even the size of the general population); their economic condition; their access to power; or the networks of the Jewish intellectuals.  We know that there was for a time a “patriarch” recognized in the West by Roman authorities and an “exilarch” recognized in the East by Persian authorities, but we have no clear sense of what they did.  There are subtle signs that the rabbis knew some Roman law and Christian stories, but we do not know how they gained this knowledge and in what form.  Maybe, in other words, Jews are marginal in most of the narratives of Late Antiquity because they were truly marginal in Late Antiquity.  Maybe, though, that marginality is more of a function of historiographical tradition.

My own conception of Late Antiquity emerges from my background as a historian of Jews and Judaism.  It thus covers the years 70 CE – 620 CE, with special attention to the third through sixth centuries (the rabbinic period).  There has been much scholarly discussion, due to its relevance to the question of Christian origins, about whether there was a “common Judaism” when the Jerusalem Temple stood.  Less attention has been paid to the time after the Temple’s destruction.  Chronology, though, is only one component of Late Antiquity.  Late Antiquity also gestures toward a shared culture.  Jews are part of this fabric, neither central nor marginal.  The evidence that they left can thus be seen as reflecting this wider culture, not as the parochial writings of an isolated community.