Salience, Multiple Affiliation, and Christ Belief in the Lycus Valley
Salience, Multiple Affiliation, and Christ Belief in the Lycus Valley: A Conversation with Ulrich Huttner's
Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley Harry O. Maier It would not be an overstatement to suggest that Ulrich Huttner's Early
Christianity in the Lycus Valley is a watershed in the study of Christ religion in Phrygian Asia Minor.1 The book is a monument of gathered and sifted evidence, analysis of primary literary data and material culture, and bibliographical resources. It is a meticulous, state-of-the-art work that no future research on the development of Christianity in central Asia Minor will be able to ignore. Dedicated studies to Pauline literature, Phrygian religious movements, and differing moments in the unfolding of Christianity in the first four centuries can easily suffer from the peril of microhistorical study, namely, a precise focus that ignores a wider swath of evidence and thus fails to see the forest for the trees. But a clear strength of Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley is that it takes a long and wide view of the topic under consideration. Long, because it seeks to chart out the topography of an emerging Christian tradition from the first through to the fifth century, and wide, because it seeks to analyze it with the help of known data that includes epigraphical and archaeological data as we know it from each of the decades and centuries under consideration. In doing so it aims to fulfill a chief objective of the Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity series and its subseries, Early Christianity in Asia Minor, in which the monograph finds its place, namely, as the volume's frontispiece indicates, to "focus on the rise and expansion of Christianity in a specific geographic region of Asia Minor up to the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451."
1. Ulrich Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, trans. David Green, AJEC
85, Early Christianity in Asia Minor 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
Harry O. Maier What lies behind the series in general is the goal of revisiting Adolf von Harnack's Mission and Expansion of Early Christianity, with a view to bringing to bear on the topic new data that has emerged for our understanding of the emergence of Christianity in the ancient world.2 Early
Christianity in the Lycus Valley is the first volume to appear in the subseries, and at the time of press another one was anticipated on Lycaonian
Christianity.3 Huttner has set the bar very high. He extends far beyond Harnack's discussion of Christianity in the Lycus Valley, if only because
Harnack dedicated barely a paragraph to the topic, constrained as he was by the available evidence at the time.4 Further, Harnack ended his analysis with the Council of Nicaea; the Early Christianity in Asia Minor series has
Chalcedon as its terminus. Nevertheless, in its overall orientation, the hermeneutical focus of the book remains that of Harnack, namely, to explain how Christianity expanded in the Lycus Valley and what factors contributed to its growth. In that sense, Huttner's, like Harnack's, is a teleologically driven account. Unlike, Harnack, however, Huttner does not describe the expansion of Christianity as a tragic decline of the Christian gospel as represented by the church but a movement toward institutionalization and centralization of the Christian message. We might speak then not so much of a narrative that betrays the acute Hellenization of the Christian message and thus a fall from gospel to philosophy (Harnack), so much as the steady growth of Christianity in the Lycus Valley until it became recognized by the state as a legitimate and finally official religion. At the same time, Huttner is interested in how Christian community (Gemeinschaft) was embedded in a larger society (Gesellschaft) and how lines between the two were often blurred as so-called Christians moved back and forth between so-called pagan society as well between other groups.5
My interest in what follows is largely hermeneutical and historiographical in orientation. To put it simply, what do we mean when we
2. Adolf von Harnack, Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten, 4th ed. (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1924). The two-volume English translation (most recently reissued in 1972) is of the enlarged and second edition of 1908, The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, trans. James Moffatt
(London: Williams & Norgate, 1908). The first German edition was published in 1902.
3. Editor note: The volume has appeared since the time of the composition of Maier's response.
4. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 1–2.
5. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 5–7, 388–93.
Salience, Multiple Affiliation, and Christ Belief in the Lycus Valley
speak of Christianity in the Lycus Valley, and what tools should we use to measure it? I aim to describe how Huttner answers those questions, and then I will furnish my own response to them. Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley presents, I will argue, a too static way of answering them. My proposal will be to champion a more dynamic response. To begin with, I will survey Huttner's historiographical methods and the way he builds and develops conclusions about data based on his survey of a wide array of data. My own perspective in what follows is guided, like Huttner's, in the social geographical study of space, and, after some other observations, this is where I will present a different kind of spatial approach to the kind that Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley presents.
Spatiality furnishes the center point of discussion because the series and subseries where Huttner's study is lodged arises out of the Excellence Cluster Topoi, a German federal and state funded programme that started in 2005 and concluded in 2017. Huttner's monograph arises from cooperation with a team at the Humboldt University of Berlin under the oversight of Cilliers Breytenbach. The subtitle of the project is "The Formation and Transformation of Space and Knowledge in Ancient Civilizations." The description of the project repays attention for its sophistication in presenting a spatial approach to a host of cultural phenomena that extend far beyond the study of emergent Christianity.6
The website reveals a well-formulated and ambitious research prospectus divided into four overarching foci listed from A to D: (A) Spatial and Environment and Conceptual Design; (B) Constructing Historical Space;
(C) Perception and Representation; and (D) Theory and Science. Each theme is further subdivided into four to six categories, with a host of dedicated teams leading projects in each subgroup. This is a rich complement comprised of a variety of aspects of the study of space ranging from the biological cognitive to the historical symbolic. Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley is the fruit the second of the four foci, namely, "Constructing
Historical Space," specifically "Research Group B-4": "Space—Identity— Locality: The Construction of Knowledge Related Identity Spaces." The website represents the theoretical orientation of the research group. The prospectus warrants quotation at some length because it will steer the comments that follow:
6. "Excellence Cluster Topoi: The Formation and Transformation of Space and Knowledge in Ancient Civilization," www.topoi.org.
Harry O. Maier Our conceptions of space, knowledge and cultural players, as well as of their interaction, have changed dramatically in recent decades; in the course of the already ancient processes of globalization and universalization, what role is played by distinctions that emerge as a result of contrary tendencies such as regionalization, particularization and/or "localization"? And what connections to possible concepts of identity shared by the bearers of these bodies of knowledge do such distinctions indicate? These issues are explored through the analysis of diverse, interdependent bodies of knowledge and their respective media (e.g. literary and religious texts, paintings, inscriptions, archaeological artifacts, rituals and performances), which on the one hand are connected with space to varying degrees, and yet on the other hand are also concretely situated in space. Space, knowledge and identity are understood here as interdependent social constructs; consequently, factual or fictional selfassignations play just as important a role as the hotly disputed topics of remembrance and collective memory.… The research group focuses on knowledge-based spaces of identity, whose founders, designers and addressees create, modify and materialize spatial arrangements and knowledge, and are thus essential for the production of relational space and bodies of knowledge. This becomes clear, e.g. in placeand spaceoriented narratives, through spatially referenced material culture, in the form of discourses on memory, and in the course of cultural transformation within the scope of spatial mobility and cultural contact situations.7
The goals of the project express well what is the promise of spatial study in the investigation of Christian origins even as they point to a neglected area in the existing state of affairs. In other words, the spatial turn is yet to be undertaken in the disciplines of New Testament and early Christian studies despite the fact that it has long been made in ancient Near Eastern,
Old Testament / Hebrew Bible, and classical studies.8 Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley offers an avenue into this more spatially oriented study.
From the quotation just cited two statements deserve further exploration to address the hermeneutical and historiographical analysis this essay intends: "Space, knowledge and identity are understood here as interdependent social constructs; consequently, factual or fictional self-assignations play just as important a role as the hotly disputed topics of remembrance
7. "Space—Identity—Locality: The Construction of Knowledge Related Identity Spaces. Research Group B-4," http://www.topoi.org/group/b-4/.
8. For a general overview, Eric C. Stewart, "New Testament Space/Spatiality," BTB
42 (2012): 139–50.
Salience, Multiple Affiliation, and Christ Belief in the Lycus Valley
and collective memory." "The research group focuses on knowledgebased spaces of identity, whose founders, designers and addressees create, modify and materialize spatial arrangements and knowledge, and are thus essential for the production of relational space and bodies of knowledge."
In other words, space is a social product as much as it is a material phenomenon. Spatial study involves the ways in which people in engagement with one another produce relational spaces around them, and how physical space creates types of social relations. These include the ways in which the practitioners of space view the actors around them and the histories of the spaces to which they belong. Historians are also entailed in this production, of course, since the way they describe ancient actors and their spaces results in a constructed past made more or less persuasive depending on their perspective and analysis and presentation of data. Historians are, even as are their sources, entangled in the complexities of the material under investigation.9
With all of this orientation behind us, then, there are two things the aforementioned quotation furnishes as a point for critique of Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley. The first is early Christianity and the second is the Lycus Valley. Both phrases reveal critical hermeneutical decisions and reflect an orientation rather closer to that of the historical positivism of Harnack than I think it should be over a century after his work.
It will hardly come as a surprise that in the second half of the second decade of the twentieth-first century a North American biblical scholar should challenge usage of the phrase "early Christianity" as a concept whose content, from a historical point of view, is self-evident. The pendulum has swung very far in the direction of contesting straightforward designations like this. The presence of the phrase in the title of the monograph is an easy target, but my intention is to do more than invoke a reigning fashion in the historical study of an emergent religious movement we today call
Christianity. My interests are rather more precise and pointedly hermeneutical. As Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley unfolds, there appears to be two Christianities in a hermeneutical tug-of-war with one another. On the one hand, as already indicated, one of the chief interests of the book is to describe the process by which a collection of believers became a self9. For a hermeneutical engagement with entangled historiography within the framework of "histoire croissée," a phrase coined by its authors, see M. Werner and B.
Zimmerman, "Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,"
History and Theory 45 (2006): 30–50.
Harry O. Maier defined institution—a Gemeinschaft with a particular standpoint within a Gesellschaft. I will query that linear model directly. First, I want to remark how insightful I think it is that Huttner names the concluding chapter of his book: "Communitization and the Search for a Standpoint." He remarks,
"Two aspects of [the everyday world of the average Christian] can be illuminated through the diverse facets of the source material: community formation and the search for a defining position, a standpoint."10 As the conclusions unfold, he notes how standpoints were not always shared, a point amply attested by the canons of the fourth century synod of Laodicea (ca. 363–364 CE). They represent a highly diverse set of beliefs and practices among Christ believers at a time when an imperially sponsored cult close to the capital was seeking to eliminate diversity in favor of a sanctioned unity. Among other things, the decrees condemn the worship of angels, attendance by Christ believers at synagogues, observation of the Jewish Sabbath rather than Sunday as the Lord's Day, women holding clerical titles and perhaps presiding at eucharistic celebration, the observation of Easter on the wrong date, and so on. So it is that Huttner writes,
"When we address the question of who determined the boundaries and assigned the Christians their proper place, we see the dependence of the churches on the authorities."11 I pause here to ask of this quotation: What does "their proper place" mean? Is this a native category or one brought in from the outside? The issue becomes more pronounced when on the next page he writes, "The Lycus Valley presents us with an interesting constellation precisely because ideas and practices of Christians outside the churches emerged and left sufficient traces of, especially in the context of pagan cults, to allow comparisons."12 These include offices, prophecies, penitential inscriptions, prophets, and cultic singing in so-called pagan cults. This he argues resulted in what he describes as the emergence of "divided identities."13 "On account of their common tradition, the many
Jews of the Lycus Valley were much closer to the Christian than the pagans: however often the Christian spokesmen urged distance, it was a long time before Jews and Christians went their separate ways."14 I whole-heartedly agree with this assessment of things on the ground and how it must have
10. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 385.
11. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 389.
12. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 390, emphasis added.
13. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 391.
14. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 391.
Salience, Multiple Affiliation, and Christ Belief in the Lycus Valley
collided with clear demarcations dividing Christ followers from Jews and adherents of Greco-Roman religion that certain leaders wanted. Yet, as the book proceeds, Huttner appears unconsciously to have taken on the point of view that such leaders advanced against those with divided loyalties.
The long arch of the book's discussion of evidence from the first through to the fifth century includes a host of normative statements such as the ones that follow, cited in a more fulsome manner in order to make explicit the counter-argument being advanced in what follows. The red thread that runs through Huttner's patient distilling and description of evidence relevant to the emergence of Christ belief in the Lycus Valley is comprised of statements such as these: The author of the Colossians was opposing "a competing concept, primarily of Jewish origin, circulating in the guise of a philosophy, reduced to crude angel worship, pointless self-mortification, and pedantic observation of rules," three adjectives that the Colossian polemicist nowhere deploys.15 "The lukewarmness of the Laodiceans [in Rev 3:16–17] finds expression in unthinking self-righteousness."16 Philip's daughters [Acts 21:9] offered prophecies that "appear not to have overstepped the boundary of what was generally accepted by the Christian churches: their inspiration was obviously not accompanied by irritating phenomena, such as symptoms of ecstasy"; they were free from "the loss of control of [Montanist] pseudo-prophets, whose appearances regularly culminated in frenzy."17 It is difficult to know when exactly but "the hierarchalization of the clergy was moving forward and the monarchic episcopate was becoming standard in western Asia Minor, as Ignatius attests for a series of churches."18 "With his treatise Πρὸς Ἰουδαἰους, Apollinaris takes his place in a process of emancipation that was soon to reach the Latin West with Tertullian's Adversus Iudaeos."19 The light is diffuse that "blurs the lines between Christians and Jews on the fringes of cultic communities at the time of Apollinarius."20 "Apollinarius had every reason to speak out against the suspect ecstatics [i.e., Montanists]."21 An anonymous anti-Montanist author "contrasts the ecstatic prattling of Montanus
15. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 131, emphasis added.
16. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 158.
17. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 199.
18. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 214.
19. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 246.
20. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 247.
21. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 261.
Harry O. Maier with the messages of true prophets actually transported by the Spirit."22
"The inscriptions therefore do not constitute an independent witness that might help us describe the influence of the Montanists on the Christian church of Hierapolis in greater detail."23 In the fourth century "members of the mainstream church thus occasionally found spiritual fulfillment at the cultic sites of sectarians."24 The canons of Laodicea show that "this was not the first time that conflict with heretics flared up in the Lycus
Valley."25 "Though the pagans might be classed together [by the Synod of Laodicea] with Jews and heretics, the danger that they presented and the potential for conflict with them was smaller: they had little in common, and hence there were only a few bridges that might tempt Christians to cross over to them."26 "The dubious activities of the Montanists and their prophetesses along with the integration of women into the clergy within that heresy, which likewise sought to appeal to local traditions, may have led the bishops assembled at Laodicea to eliminate the Presbytides [i.e., female clergy officiants]."27 Flavian deposed "the scheming Dioscorus,"
"increasing institutionalization beginning in the [second] century offered the churches of the Lycus Valley a basis for participating in the structures of the universal church."28
Huttner can hardly be faulted for quoting his sources, but not all— indeed few—of his evaluative descriptions can be found there, however much one may assume many of the champions of what would emerge as a mainstream of Christ belief from the second century onward might have agreed. Tertullian, for example, had far more strident things to say about those opposed to what he conceived as a predetermined set of beliefs handed down from Christ to the apostles than anything found in Early
Christianity in the Lycus Valley. And it is possible that Huttner's original German text that was subsequently translated and then published in English used the first rather than second subjunctive, namely, the grammatical construction one uses in German to recount the point of view of one's quoted source to distinguish a reporter's own perspective from 22. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 261.
23. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 265.
24. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 299.
25. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 299.
26. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 305.
27. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 312.
28. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 318, 329.
Salience, Multiple Affiliation, and Christ Belief in the Lycus Valley
the one cited. That grammatical possibility notwithstanding, the overall impression nevertheless stands: Huttner is telling us a story about Lycus
Valley Christianity that came to espouse a Christian orthodoxy and the developments of that Christianity are ultimately measured in the light of it. How otherwise can one explain such evaluative phrases one finds in this long list of citations? When we read that some believers had not overstepped the boundaries of what was generally accepted Christian teaching in the second century, a number of assumptions are being made that should be challenged. What was accepted Christian teaching in the second century? What was Christianity in the second century for that matter? The search for a standpoint seems, despite Huttner's statement of its inchoate nature, to have already been present. The hermeneutical basis of that position is implied by the assertion of a normative acceptable Christianity. The description of the search for a standpoint is hardly aided by the use of adjectives and concepts such as "unthinking self-righteousness," "dubious activities," "pseudo-prophet," "emancipation from Jews," "scheming," "ecstatic prattling," and "universal church." Again, it is, of course, the case that some representatives of what would ultimately emerge as a state-endorsed Christianity and who represented themselves as the spokespersons of the universal church would wholeheartedly have endorsed such evaluative commentary. It is hard to imagine the followers of Montanus and Marcion not deploying the same invective against those opposed to them, yet nowhere do we find adjectives used by opponents of an emergent mainstream set of beliefs and practices to describe the normative form of Christ belief that represents, in Huttner's scheme, the Christianity of Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley. This is because, at least if one is to take seriously the adjectives deployed to describe them, they either simply were not Christians or they promoted retrograde versions of right belief.
It is worth pausing to take up by way of illustration a more detailed reading of the emergence of a monepiscopate and finally monarchical episcopate in Asia Minor. It is a commonplace to see Ignatius invoked as evidence of an advanced level of institutionalized Christ belief and organization in Asia Minor because the bishop from Antioch can single out a single individual as a bishop of a church in each of the cities to which he addresses his respective letters. Consistent with this line of argumentation, Huttner writes of Ignatius of Antioch already evidencing the institutionalization of the Asia Minor church by his ability to name a monarchical bishop separate from the rest of the so-called clergy. But to
Harry O. Maier speak of deacons, presbyters and bishops as clergy is already problematic, since Ignatius himself is starting to construct the category by calling offside any eucharistic celebration not conducted by a bishop or someone he (the bishop) designates (Ignatius, Smyrn. 8.1, 2; 9.1; Ignatius, Magn.
4.1; Ignatius, Tral. 2.2; 3.1; Ignatius, Phld. 8.2). And it is not the case that Ignatius treats these as discrete orders; indeed, he portrays them as a collective, and their legitimate leadership is assigned by their being treated as such (for example, Ignatius, Eph. 4.1–2; Ignatius, Magn. 2.1; 7.1; 13.1–2;
Ignatius, Trall. 3.1; 7.1–2; Ignatius, Phld. inscrip.; 4.1; 7.1; 10.1; Ignatius,
Smyrn. 12.2; Ignatius, Pol. 6.1).
Further, it is not so straightforward that Ignatius is evidence of an achieved institutionalization; he is in a battle with Christ followers who seem to enjoy integration within certain Asia Minor churches, and it is arguable that they were surprised to hear themselves singled out as followers inimical to the Christian witness (Ignatius, Eph. 7.1; Ignatius, Magn.
3.2; 4.1; Ignatius, Phld. 7.2). In Ignatius, Phld. 7.1–2, Ignatius records the suspicion of his opponents that he was able to detect their presence in an assembly he personally addressed.29 He defends himself against an accusation that someone tipped him off by appealing to a divine gift of spiritual discernment. It is a curious passage a full discussion of which lies outside the confines of the topic taken up here. It is sufficient to indicate the very real possibility that some in the assembly at Philadelphia found no reason
29. Εἰ γὰρ καὶ κατὰ σάρκα μέ τινες ἠθέλησαν πλανῆσαι, ἀλλὰ τὸ πνεῦμα οὐ πλανᾶται, ἀπὸ θεοῦ ὄν· οἶδεν γὰρ πόθεν ἔρχεται καὶ ποῦ ὑπάγει, καὶ τὰ κρυπτὰ ἐλέγχει. ἐκραύγασα μεταξὺ ὤν, ἐλάλουν μεγάλῃ φωνῇ, θεοῦ φωνῇ· Τῷ ἐπισκόπῳ προσέχετε καὶ τῷ πρεσβυτερίῳ καὶ διακόνοις. οἱ ὑποπτεύσαντές με ὡς προειδότα τὸν μερισμόν τινων λέγειν ταῦτα. μάρτυς δέ μοι ἐν ᾧ δέδεμαι, ὅτι ἀπὸ σαρκὸς ἀνθρωπίνης οὐκ ἔγνων. τὸ δὲ πνεῦμα ἐκήρυσσεν, λέγον τάδε· Χωρὶς τοῦ ἐπισκόπου μηδὲν ποιεῖτε· τὴν σάρκα ὑμῶν ὡς ναὸν θεοῦ τηρεῖτε· τὴν ἕνωσιν ἀγαπᾶτε· τοὺς μερισμοὺς φεύγετε· μιμηταὶ γίνεσθε Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, ὡς καὶ αὐτὸς τοῦ πατρὸς αὐτοῦ. "For even though certain people wanted to deceive me, humanly speaking, nevertheless the Spirit is not deceived, because it is from God; for it knows from where it comes and where it is going, and exposes the hidden things.
I called out when I was with you; I was speaking with a loud voice, God's voice: 'Pay attention to the bishop, the council of presbyters, and the deacons.' To be sure, there were those who suspected that I said these things because I knew in advance about the division caused by certain people. But the one for whose sake I am in chains is my witness that I did not learn this from any human being. No, the Spirit itself was preaching, saying these words: 'Do nothing without the bishop. Guard your bodies as the temple of God. Love unity. Flee from divisions. Become imitators of Jesus Christ, just as he is of his Father'" (trans. Holmes).
Salience, Multiple Affiliation, and Christ Belief in the Lycus Valley
for marking internal boundaries of belief before Ignatius came through Asia Minor and tried to draw them. To put it differently, there is no reason to suppose that they would have had any reason not to be present. It is, in other words, Ignatius marking distinctions that were not definitive in the way Ignatius thought they should be before he travelled through the area.
The fact that he can name people as bishops is not proof of a monarchical or even monepiscopate, only that he has found someone to represent his own interests. The letter of Polycarp to the Philippians in which Polycarp treats himself as a copresbyter and not a bishop of Smyrna is, I think, testimony to a more general state of affairs (Polycarp, Phil. inscrip.).30 It is thus that I find Huttner's notion of a search for a standpoint the most credible way of treating the evidence which honors the data without asking it to conform to categories some Christ believers were bringing to the world around them for often polemical reasons. But I query his own standpoint vis-à-vis the evidence. One of the goals of the Excellence Cluster Topoi project is "to conduct a—likewise thoroughly (self) critical—inquiry into the contribution made by our own research practices to the constituting of contemporary identities."31 In other words, the ways we are entangled with our sources are as critical to take note of as it is to recognize the fraught nature of traditional taxonomic constructions of boundaries in the analysis of ancient Christianity.
This leads to a second observation that focuses on the issue of linear developments. As the epigraphic evidence of some Jews living in the Lycus
Valley suggests and Huttner himself concludes from it, we are dealing in the religious world of Jews and Christ followers with complex patterns of affiliation. He points, for example, to some funerary data that shows Lucius
Nonios Glykon, probably a Jew, setting forth instructions for the dispersion of funds to his association of fellow weavers at the feast of Kalends and the festival of Passover to set a wreath on his grave and likewise to an association of purple-dyers to do the same on the feast of unleavened bread.32
The conclusion to be drawn from this is that Glykon has no trouble seeing 30. Πολύκαρπος καὶ οἱ σὺν αὐτῷ πρεσβύτεροι τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ τοῦ θεοῦ τῇ παροικούσῃ
Φιλίππους· ἔλεος ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη παρὰ θεοῦ παντοκράτορος καὶ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τοῦ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν πληθυνθείη. "Polycarp and the presbyters with him, to the church of God that sojourns at Philippi: may mercy and peace from God Almighty and Jesus Christ our Savior be yours in abundance" (trans. Holmes).
31."Space—Identity—Locality," www.topoi.org/group/b-4/.
32. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 251.
Harry O. Maier himself as occupying two social groups that from a strict ideological point of view should have been kept separate. We can see this reflected as well in the canons of the Synod of Laodicea that forbid Christians from keeping
Jewish Sabbath, attending synagogue, angel worship, and so on. This is but the extension of what we discover already in the canon, in the Letter to the Colossians where the author exhorts Christ followers of the Lycus Valley to avoid new moons and Sabbaths, ascetical disciplines, and the worship of angels (Col 2:16–19). Huttner describes this as "a competing concept," which is true, but it is too easy from there to reify such beliefs into the fault lines of competing communities and make one Christian and the other not. We may say that if there was a search for a standpoint, there was competition that involved several standpoints. Like Ignatius with respect to the so-called docetists, could it not rather be that our author is making a line rather than describing one? Surely Colossians itself attests to a complex affiliation of one view with other ones, the former given a rhetorical seal of approval by associating it with Paul's name.
Eric Rebillard offers a promising avenue into a discussion of the social complexity of multiple affiliation.33 In his work on identity and Christianity in North Africa he contests the picture presented by Tertullian of the call to more fervent discipleship through refusing to go to the games, meeting with Jews, opposing pagans, and so on. Drawing on the ethnographical studies of Rogers Brubaker, he uses the term groupism to describe "the tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogeneous and externally bounded groups as basic constituents of social life, chief protagonists of social conflicts, and fundamental units of social analysis."34 In place of groupism, again following Brubaker, he asks that we focus instead on "the processes through which categories are used by individuals to make sense of their social world." In favor of groupism, he uses the term groupness to describe how identity as a process refers to "a type of contingent event."35 Groupness, he argues, depends on shifting points of salience. Salience refers to how identities are marked and acted upon in differing situations: "The 'salience' of an identity is its probability of being active in a situation, and 'activation' refers to the conditions
33. Éric Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity: North
Africa, 200–450 CE (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
34. Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities, 2, quoting Rogers Brubaker,
"Ethnicity without Groups," Archives européennes de sociologie 43.2 (2002): 163–69.
35. Rebilliard, Christians and Their Many Identities, 2.
Salience, Multiple Affiliation, and Christ Belief in the Lycus Valley
in which an identity is actively engaged, as opposed to being latent and inactive."36 Salience is what determines how one can be in one group at one time and another group at another time while the two groups promote values and practices that taken as a whole are from a groupism perspective antagonistic to one another. If we apply these insights concerning groupism to the Lycus Valley, we arrive at a picture different from Huttner's and one that contests the linearity of the model of the so-called rise and expansion of Christianity.
Rather than a linear model, we should imagine a model of overlapping circles and a series of rhetorical moves to create groupism from shifting events of groupness. Such moves often occasioned a rhetorical attempt to advance one point of salience over another. For some Christ followers, there is no conflict between angel and Christ worship, because what counts as salience and group identification belongs somewhere else than cosmic devotion to a singular deity. This does not mean that angel worship was crude, self-mortification pointless, and observation of rules pedantic: instead it means that such practices were events of affiliation, an affiliation Colossians seeks, through a rhetorical performance of the Pauline voice, to end through the assertion of groupism. The search then is not so much for a standpoint, but there is rather a conflict of competing standpoints, with the result that ideological considerations come into play that include the uses of rhetoric to malign a rejected position and set of practices. Nor can we speak straightforwardly of Gemeinschaft embedded in Gesellschaft since either category reifies shifting, colliding, and recombinant social allegiances. Ultimately in the Lycus Valley the state endorsed one set of positions and not the other, but even then salience changed as debates over so-called Arianism and then the proAlexandrian christology of Eutyches made their way through the Lycus
Valley. Even so, people continued to do their own thing—if the canons of Laodicea are anything to go by—in practices that could not be confined to one circle or another. We will then not speak, like Harnack, of a rise and expansion of Christianity but rather of the creation of circles and their delimitation and strategies for control. Nor will we speak in a simple way of Christianity; rather, we will refer to strategies such as those undertaken by figures such Ignatius, Apollinarius, or the formulators of the canons of Laodicea to create something normative out of diverse practices and 36. Rebilliard, Christians and Their Many Identities, 3.
Harry O. Maier commitments. The question is then not a battle for Christianity per se but over what counts as salience and the rhetorical means of affirming groupism in the face of an inchoate groupness.
The second challenge to Huttner's formulation of the evidence is his study's use of the phrase Lycus Valley. Again, there are two valleys, as it were, that emerge in Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley. There are the geographical empirical boundaries of the valley, and then there are the social networks that form a web of relations both by those within and outside it. To focus too strictly on the valley as a limit for the consideration of data becomes problematic in some cases. For example, in his treatment of the message to the Laodiceans in Rev 3:15–22, Huttner invites us to consider the valuable material evidence of a thriving textile industry at the city. He then takes up each of the phrases of the admonitions and exhortations of the message (3:17–18) and shows how they can find an analogue in Laodicean material culture: eye salve, gold, white clothing, wealth. However, the message to the Laodiceans is one of seven messages, and one must ask how valid it is to seek to interpret the message without reference to the other six messages. It is true that none of the other cities addressed are in the Lycus Valley, but it is arguable that the messages are to be taken as a rhetorically constructed whole so that those Christ followers living in the Lycus Valley receive the references to the other cities as well. The difference this makes is, again, that we discover a contest over salience. It falls outside the confines of this essay to discuss in detail the scholarship that argues that John's messages reveal a contest over the kinds of economic practices and involvement Christ followers should have in imperial Asia Minor.37 Arguably some—perhaps like believers in Corinth (1 Cor 8:10)—were inviting a much more relaxed attitude and did not limit them from meeting with colleagues in temple dining rooms where sacrificed food was consumed; John stridently opposes this. We cannot see this if we take up the message to the Laodiceans alone. The broader view allows us again to witness a battle over salience and the limits of affiliation. While some in Laodicea practice a groupness with 37. For example, Paul B. Duff, Who Rides the Beast? Prophetic Rivalry and the Rhetoric of Crisis in the Churches of the Apocalypse (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001), and Leonard L. Thompson, The Book of Revelation: Apocalypse and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), furnish two studies that take up competing interpretations among Christ believers regarding believers' participation in the Roman imperial economy.
Salience, Multiple Affiliation, and Christ Belief in the Lycus Valley
more porous boundaries, John under the rhetorical form of an apocalypse seeks a much more defined set of markers.
This then brings me to my third and final point, that of social geography and the social construction of space and identity. There is, of course, a physical Lycus Valley, and then there is an imagined and practiced one.
Edward Soja, developing the categories of Henri Lefebvre outlined in his The Production of Space, distinguishes between first, second, and thirdspace.38 Applying these concepts to the topic discussed here: firstspace is the topography and material geography and geology of the Lycus Valley as a set of earth coordinates; secondspace is the human design of firstspace for particular activities (the creation of cities, roads, trade routes, housing blocks, temples, and so on); thirdspace designates the idiosyncratic ways in which the inhabitants of the Lycus Valley lived first and secondspace. It is at the third level that the Excellence Cluster Topoi project is for me the most exciting: namely, we may describe thirdspace as the ways in which inhabitants of the valley used religious imagination and ideological strategies to live and delimit the living of space. The Lycus Valley under this aspect is an imaginary world with protagonists and antagonists, mythic narratives, socially constructed memory, and a set of rhetorically charged incentives to live space in one way rather than another. Here polemic and apologetic find their place as what people do when they meet are taken up in overarching narratives and places are populated with heroes and villains. It is this imaginary world where we can legitimately use a host of adjectives to describe differing accounts of Christian practices. But we do so knowing that we are engaging in the creation of a kind of noumenal or imagined Lycus Valley. Perhaps that particular chapter has yet to be written about the Lycus Valley—the imaginary valley made up of destructive and constructive religious forces and their chief characters with their corresponding virtues and vices. It is this imagined Paul who addresses this imagined set of Christ followers in the Lycus Valley in a letter alleging to come from him. It is a world where the Colossians Christ followers are part of a grand narrative that like the imperial gospel is growing and taking the world by storm (Col 1:6) in which angel worshipers only reveal that they have fallen prey to a villainous philosophy (2:8).
38. Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
Harry O. Maier Such an imagined valley is central to the establishment of competing standpoints and overlapping circles I have discussed. Groupness springs forth from imaginary fields of belonging. Salience appears and disappears as some practices and beliefs become the focus of one imaginary or another. These do not continue statically but rather are made and remade in different kinds of encounters. On such an account religion in the Lycus
Valley is a dynamic lived phenomenon, even as its intersections with the poleis of the region unfold in differing constellations of actors with shifting interests and objectives. Historians by virtue of hindsight have the capacity to furnish a kind of freeze frame perspective on one moment or another, a particular set of actors, and on material spaces and identities. In doing so they also inhabit their own spatial imaginaries, sometimes consciously and often unconsciously.
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Salience, Multiple Affiliation, and Christ Belief in the Lycus Valley
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Part 3 Thematic Essays on the Lycus Valley