Religious Violence in Late Antiquity

Current Approaches, Trends and Issues*

Wendy Mayer

Abstract

One of the few points on which the multitude of debates that have occurred across the disciplines in recent years
agree is that, whether addressing the late ancient past or the global present, the phenomenon we label religious
violence is far from simple. The paper outlines some of the current debates and trends with regard to the world
of Late Antiquity and introduces a variety of challenges posed by them. A key question these pose is not just
whether there is a causal relationship between religion and violence, but whether in trying to unpack religious
violence as a perceived phenomenon we are asking the wrong question about, among other things, the
relationship between narratives of violence (which in Late Antiquity were prolific) and actual violent action.

Introduction

Late Antiquity, it has long been assumed, is the historical period in which we first observe the
widespread rise of religious intolerance.1 Hand in hand with this view goes the premise that
there is a direct causal relationship between religious intolerance and religious violence. That
is, intolerance leads to conflict; conflict leads to violence.2 Late Antiquity, in which
Constantine’s conversion to Christianity is viewed as a watershed moment,3 is thus the period
to which scholars look to observe religious violence and its origins.4 In the past decade and a
half there has been a move to unpack these entrenched ideas, with a growing number of
scholars concluding that these assumed relationships—between the rise of Christianity and
religious intolerance, and between religious intolerance and religious violence—are neither
inevitable nor simple.5 My own recent research into the cognitive and neurological
underpinnings of the phenomenon even goes so far as to conclude that, in both what we label
religious intolerance and religious violence, causally religion is neither a distinctive factor nor
essential.6 But that is to get ahead of our discussion. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on

*
The research that informs this chapter is supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery
Project grant, ‘Memories of Utopia: Destroying the Past to Create the Future (300–650 CE)’ (DP170104595), in
collaboration with Bronwen Neil (Macquarie University), Pauline Allen (Australian Catholic University), and
Chris de Wet (University of South Africa).
1
See the tracing of this approach in W. Mayer, ‘Re-Theorising Religious Conflict’, in W. Mayer and C. de Wet
(eds), Reconceiving Religious Conflict: New Views from the Formative Centuries of Christianity (London, 2018)
3–29 at 6–7.
2
This is discussed in brief in Mayer, ‘Re-Theorizing Religious Conflict’, 9.
3
On this point, see W. Mayer, ‘Religious Conflict: Definitions, Problems and Theoretical Approaches’, in W.
Mayer and B. Neil (eds), Religious Conflict from Early Christianity to the Rise of Islam (Berlin, 2013) 1–20 at 8,
12–14.
4
The seminal work of J. Hahn, Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt. Studien zu den Auseinandersetzungen zwischen
Christen, Heiden und Juden im Osten des Römischen Reiches (von Konstantin bis Theodosius II.) (Berlin,
2004), M. Gaddis, ‘There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ’: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman
Empire (Berkeley, 2005), and T. Sizgorich, Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in
Christianity and Islam (Philadelphia, 2009) sits within this space. The study by P. Athanassiadi, Vers la pensée
unique: la montée de l’intolérance dans l’Antiquité tardive (Paris, 2010) has pushed the chronological origins
back into the late third century.
5
See e.g. the articles in A. Geljon and R. Roukema (eds), Violence in Ancient Christianity: Victims and
Perpetrators (Leiden, 2014) and chs 3–12 in Mayer and De Wet, Reconceiving Religious Conflict, 45–325.
6
W. Mayer, ‘Australia’s Moral Compass and Societal Wellbeing’, in D. Costache, D. Cronshaw and R. Harrison
(eds), Wellbeing, Personal Wholeness and the Social Fabric: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Cambridge, 2017)
110–31, and ‘Fundamentalism as a Response to Perceived Threat: Teasing out Some Cognitive Mechanisms at
Work’, in A. Papanikolaou and G. Demacopoulos (eds), Fundamentalisim or Tradition? Christianity after

1
how research has addressed the question of religious violence with specific reference to the
world of Late Antiquity, to trace current trajectories in that research and to engage with the
question of how best to approach it.
One proposition that scholars do all agree on is that there is in the literature of Late
Antiquity, particularly within Christian circles, a large amount of violence. On the surface,
that violence often appears to be distinctive and presents itself as religious in the sense that it
is between adherents of a religion/religions, about religion or motivated by religion. Whether
it is pagans persecuting and killing Christians,7 Christians beating up and killing other
Christians,8 Christians destroying or mutilating synagogues, temples and statues,9 accounts of
divine vengeance,10 or the memory of martyrs killed for their beliefs,11 the surviving texts of
Late Antiquity give a strong impression of a violent turn. The rise at this period of Christian
asceticism, the successor to martyrdom,12 adds further weight to that impression. At the heart
of that turn, the texts tell us, lies religion per se, but, more specifically, Christianity. Where in
the past scholars had largely accepted that this narrated violence reflects historical reality,
there are now large questions around how to interpret the violence that the texts portray. What
relationship does it bear to historical reality? What is its purpose? What impact did it have on
its audience? Further, if we are now asking ‘was the violence real?’, then we also need to ask
‘was it really religious?’.
To date, two trends are emerging in scholarship in response to these questions. One is
to seek a clearer definition of religious violence and, as an essential part of that process, to
unpack the assumptions behind what drives us to investigate religious violence per se. This
avenue of investigation introduces large questions about the validity, for the period of Late
Antiquity, both of the questions we pose in relation to the phenomenon we seek to analyse
and of our approaches. In essence, what scholars who pursue this approach are asking is
whether the phenomenon as well as the questions posed are emic or not, and whether the

Secularism (New York, forthcoming). Same point in the paper of Kippenberg, this volume, pp. 000, 000,
followed by Bendlin, p. 000.
7
Claims of persecution persisted well beyond the Decian persecution. See e.g. the chapters in É. Fournier and
W. Mayer (eds), Heirs of Roman Persecution: Studies on a Christian and Para-Christian Discourse in Late
Antiquity (London, forthcoming).
8
Famously, the violent actions of ‘circumcellions’, ‘Donatists’ and their opponents in North Africa, see B.D.
Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge, 2011),
with the paper of Van Nuffelen, this volume, pp. 000–00.
9
E.g. the destruction of the synagogue at Callinicum in 388 and of the Serapeum at Alexandria in 391/92 CE. For
a recent discussion of the former see C.M. Chin, ‘“Built from the Plunder of Christians”: Words, Places, and
Competing Powers in Milan and Callinicum’, in N.P. DesRosiers and L.C. Vuong (eds), Religious Competition
in the Greco-Roman World (Atlanta, 2016) 63–75. For a discussion of the sources concerning the latter see
J.H.F. Dijkstra, ‘Religious Violence in Late Antique Egypt Reconsidered: The Cases of Alexandria, Panopolis
and Philae’, Journal of Early Christian History 6 (2015) 24–48 at 31–36 (repr. in Mayer and De Wet,
Reconceiving Religious Conflict, 211–33 at 214–18) and his paper in this volume.
10
E.g. the destruction of the temple of Apollo at Daphne in 362 CE as reported by John Chrysostom, De sancta
Babyla (SC 362, p. 308). M. Marcos, ‘Religious Violence and Hagiography in Late Antiquity’, Numen 62 (2015)
169–96, supplies a range of examples.
11
The second half of the fourth century is the period in which martyr homilies and hagiographies become
prolific, rituals associated with the cult of the martyrs become embedded in liturgical cycles and we see the
development of hagiotourism. See S. Efthymiadis with V. Déroche, ‘Greek Hagiography in Late Antiquity
(Fourth–Seventh Centuries)’, in S. Efthymiadis (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine
Hagiography 1 (Farnham, 2011) 35–94.
12
See e.g. the varied accounts of self-mortifying ascetic behaviour in the Historia Lausiaca, Historia
monachorum, and Apophthegmata patrum, and the discussion in A. Crislip, Thorns in the Flesh: Illness and
Sanctity in Late Ancient Christianity (Philadelphia, 2013), as well as the papers of Vecoli and De Wet, this
volume. On accounts of attempted killing of children as an ascetic act see C.T. Schroeder, ‘Child Sacrifice in
Egyptian Monastic Culture: From Familial Renunciation to Jephthah’s Lost Daughter’, JECS 20 (2012) 269–
302.

2
emic/etic distinction really matters. The other trend concerns a call to be more
methodologically particular in respect to bringing together material and textual evidence,
where this is possible, exploring evidence on a case-by-case basis and situating reported
religious violence carefully in its local context.13 The latter is more concerned with the
relationship between rhetoric and reality (reported and actual violence); the former with
whether we are barking up the right or wrong tree—or should be sniffing out something
altogether different. As we will argue, both are important and, as several articles in this book
show, point us in some interesting directions.14

Religious Violence as a Category

One could, with some validity, conclude that until the shocking events of 9/11 for scholars in
Western countries the topic of religious violence was not at the centre of their radar.15 Until
then attention in this area had largely been confined to concerns about the nature of Jewish-
Christian relations. For the second half of the twentieth century European scholars,
particularly in Germany, struggled to make sense of the horrors of the Holocaust where, even
though Jews were the majority victims, the violence was for the most part categorised as
political (nationalist) and racial (antisemitic) rather than motivated by religion. One of the
driving questions implicit in that struggle, nonetheless, has been what part the teachings of
Christianity played in those events and thus to what degree it has engendered anti-Jewish
violence throughout history and can be held responsible. This question has impacted the
analysis of religious violence in Late Antiquity in that, in addition to endless discussion about
the parting of the ways between the two religions, it has given rise to the anti-Judaism versus
antisemitism debate.16 This particular framing of the question—is Christianity responsible for
anti-Jewish violence? If it targets the race, yes; if it targets the religion, no—has significantly
shaped how scholars interpret relations between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and
assess the production and purpose of Christian anti-Jewish polemic.17 The assumption behind
the claims of some scholars that Christian polemic of this period is anti-Jewish not antisemitic
is that antisemitism, in that it by definition targets the Jewish people as a race, leads to
physical violence, whereas anti-Jewish discourse, while it could be said to be discursively

13
See Dijkstra, ‘Religious Violence in Late Antique Egypt’, 26–30 (repr. in Mayer and De Wet, Reconceiving
Religious Conflict, 211–13), where this approach is outlined.
14
See e.g. the papers of Van Nuffelen and De Wet, this volume.
15
See also the General Introduction and the paper of Bremmer, this volume, p. 000 and 000.
16
The distinction (anti-Judaism condemns the Jewish religion; antisemitism, the Jewish people) goes back to M.
Simon, Verus Israel. Étude sur les relations entre chrétiens et juifs dans l’Empire romain (135–425) (Paris,
1948). For the further development of this approach see G.G. Stroumsa, ‘From Anti-Judaism to Antisemitism in
Early Christianity?’, in O. Limor and G.G. Stroumsa (eds), Contra Iudaeos: Ancient and Medieval Polemics
between Christians and Jews (Tübingen, 1995) 1–26.
17
The scholarship informed by this approach is vast. For examples with specific relevance to Late Antiquity see
J.G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes Toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (Oxford,
1985); L.H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World. Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to
Justinian (Princeton, 1993); J. Hahn, ‘Die jüdische Gemeinde im spätantiken Antiochia: Leben im
Spannungsfeld von sozialer Einbindung, religiösem Wettbewerb und gewaltsamem Konflikt’, in R. Jütte and
A.P. Kustermann (eds), Jüdische Gemeinden und Organisationsformen von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart
(Vienna, 1996) 57–89; C. Fonrobert, ‘Jewish Christians, Judaizers, and Anti-Judaism’, in V. Burrus (ed.), Late
Ancient Christianity: A People’s History of Christianity (Minneapolis, 2005) 234–54; E. Soler, ‘Les violences
chrétiennes contre les synagogues dans l’Empire romain, pendant le conflit entre Théodose et l’usurpateur
Maxime (386–388 apr. J.C.)’, Semitica et Classica 4 (2011) 89–98; S. Morlet, ‘L’antijudaïsme chrétien au IVe
siècle. À propos de quelques idées reçues’, in M.-F. Baslez (ed.), Chrétiens persécuteurs. Destructions,
exclusions, violences religieuses au IVe siècle (Paris, 2014) 163–88.

3
violent, only targets the religion and is therefore more benign.18 In essence the premise on
which this distinction is in turn based is that treating anti-Jewish Christian discourse as
targeting the religion is emic (and therefore a valid analytical framework for the period),
whereas viewing it as targeting the Jewish race is etic and invalid, since at that point in time
the concept did not yet exist.19 This is one example where distinctly modern questions and
events have been projected back onto Late Antiquity, creating a problematic binary that needs
to be brought to the surface and deconstructed.
This realisation urges caution in regard to the latest wave of research on religious
violence in Late Antiquity, driven by the events of 9/11 and concerns in Europe and North
America over the rise of violent religious radicals. The sudden interest in militant devotion,
dying for God, the role of martyrs, violence enacted by religious groups and other related
phenomena, is driven as much by a desire to make sense of current events as a sense that it is
in Late Antiquity (with the rise of Christianity and rise of Islam) that we observe the first
florescence of very similar waves of violence.20 There are large questions here about whether
the Late Antique world is directly comparable to the present—scholars focused on culture and
society would argue that it is not—just as there are significant questions about the validity of
the perception that religious violence is a phenomenon that first emerges—due to the unique
blending of organised religion and imperial authority (‘Church and state’)—in Late
Antiquity.21 Again, here modern and postmodern assumptions about religion, about Church
and state, about secularism and rationalism as social goods and religion as unscientific and
superstitious all need to be foregrounded and unpacked, if we are to be sure that we are not

18
The analysis of John Chrysostom’s Adversus Judaeos homilies by R. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews:
Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century (Berkeley, 1983), which counters the more pessimistic approach
of R. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York, 1974), has been
profoundly influential in this regard. Wilken argues that the rhetoric of blame (psogos) was in fact normative and
its content thus familiar and ignored.
19
That this distinction is in fact a case of special pleading from a neuro-cognitive perspective and irrelevant to
the question of the impact of the discourse on its audience—and thus its agency in giving rise to violent action—
is argued in W. Mayer, ‘Preaching Hatred? John Chrysostom, Neuroscience, and the Jews’, in C.L. de Wet and
W. Mayer (eds), Revisioning John Chrysostom: New Approaches, New Perspectives (Leiden, 2019) 58-136.
20
We could also say that it is driven by Western government demands in recent years that research in the
Humanities demonstrates contemporary relevance. Religious violence is one area where scholars of Late
Antiquity can legitimately claim that study of the past has the potential to help explain the present, with some
subsequent success in research funding. The following projects are samples: ‘Multiculturalismo, convivencia
religiosa y conflicto en la Antigüedad tardía (ss. III–VII)’, 2007–2009, outlined by M. Marcos and J. Fernández
Ubiña, ‘Multiculturalismo, convivencia religiosa y conflicto en la Antigüedad Tardía’, in M.V. Escribano Paño
(ed.), La investigación sobre la Antigüedad Tardía en España: estado de los estudios y nuevas perspectivas
(Málaga, 2009) 187–96; ‘Intolerância religiosa e conflito cultural no Império Romano: a propósito de judeus,
pagãos e hereges’, 2007–2009 (one of a series of nationally- and university-funded projects in Brazil, led by G.
Ventura da Silva); ‘Conflicto y convivencia en el cristianismo primitivo: retórica religiosa y debates
escatológicos’, 2009 (funded by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Spain, in collaboration
with Harvard University Department of Classics, and Divinity School); ‘“I Wish to Offer a Sacrifice to God
Today”: Religious Violence in Late Antique Egypt’, 2015–2021 (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada, led by J.H.F. Dijkstra); and our own project, ‘Memories of Utopia: Destroying the
Past to Create the Future (300–650 CE)’, 2017–2019 (funded by the Australian Research Council). This is the tip
of the iceberg. Gathering data on the actual number of proposals related to the topics of religious conflict and
violence submitted to government and university funding agencies around the world since 9/11 would, one
suspects, be instructive.
21
For the argument that such violence is not unique to Late Antiquity nor to monotheism but can be observed
much earlier within Greek and Roman polytheist society see J.N. Bremmer, ‘Religious Violence and Its Roots:
A View from Antiquity’, Asdiwal 6 (2011) 71–79 at 73–77 (repr. in Mayer and De Wet, Reconceiving Religious
Conflict, 30–42 at 32–34), and ‘Religious Violence between Greeks, Romans, Christians and Jews’, in A. Geljon
and R. Roukema (eds), Violence in Ancient Christianity: Victims and Perpetrators (Leiden, 2014) 8–30 at 12–
18. See also the General Introduction, and the papers of Raschle and Bendlin, this volume, pp. 000, 000–00 and
000–00.

4
asking questions of the Late Antique past that are invalid. Already there is significant
discussion around the language of religious tolerance and intolerance as terms etic to Late
Antiquity,22 as well as deconstruction of the influential premise that polytheist religion is
inherently tolerant, monotheisms intolerant (because they are exclusivist and coercive).23 Of
value for the longe durée is the work of Jan Bremmer in tracing modern premises about
religion that rightly or wrongly inform current approaches.24
The argument that the concepts ‘antisemitism’ and ‘religious tolerance/intolerance’
are modern constructs that bear no relevance to Late Antiquity is mirrored by a recent
development that approaches the question of religion and violence in the pre-modern world
not by interrogating categories or concepts related to violence but by directly challenging the
category ‘religion’. This has implications for the exploration of religious violence in Late
Antiquity in that we cannot, these studies imply, speak of religious violence in Late Antiquity,
if Late Antiquity had no concept of religion. That is, whereas religious violence does exist in
the present, violence of any kind that occurred in Late Antiquity must be attributed to other
causal factors. In deconstructing religion as a category Brent Nongbri has led the way,
recently followed by Daniel Boyarin and Carlin Barton.25 The counter to this argument is
exemplified in some of the papers in the present volume,26 to the effect that, just because in
the ancient to late ancient world there was no concept of religion in the modern post-
Reformation sense, this does not mean that the inhabitants of the world of Late Antiquity did
not have a sense of the religious that accords with the definitions put forward by cognitive
scientists of religion.27 Human beings, this field of research argues, are naturally religious,28

22
See, among others, M. Kahlos, Forbearance and Compulsion: The Rhetoric of Religious Tolerance and
Intolerance in Late Antiquity (London, 2009), and most recently, P. van Nuffelen, Penser la tolérance durant
l’Antiquité tardive (Paris, 2018).
23
Some of the foundational studies in this area are: J. Losehand, ‘“The Religious Harmony in the Ancient
World”: Vom Mythos religiöser Toleranz in der Antike’, GFA 12 (2009) 99–132; T. Canella, ‘Tolleranza e
intolleranza religiosa nel mondo tardo antico: questioni di metodo’, VetChr 47 (2010) 249–66; C. Markschies.
‘The Price of Monotheism: Some New Observations on a Current Debate about Late Antiquity’, in S. Mitchell
and P. van Nuffelen (eds), One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2010) 100–11.
These studies strive to counter the influence of Jan Assmann in this respect, particularly the thesis developed
across his monographs Moses der Ägypter. Entzifferung einer Gedächtnisspur (Munich, 1998), Die Mosaische
Unterscheidung oder der Preis des Monotheismus (Munich, 2003), and Monotheismus und die Sprache der
Gewalt (Vienna, 2006)—namely, that religious conflict and violence are unique to and a natural consequence of
monotheism. See also the General Introduction, and the papers of Kippenberg Bremmer and Bendlin, this
volume, pp. 000–00, 000–00, 000–00 and 000–00.
24
Among numerous articles and chapters see, in addition to his paper in this volume, J.N. Bremmer, The Rise of
Christianity through the Eyes of Gibbon, Harnack and Rodney Stark (Groningen, 2010), ‘Religious Violence
and Its Roots’, and ‘Religious Violence between Greeks, Romans, Christians and Jews’,.
25
See B. Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, 2013); C. Barton and D.
Boyarin, Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities (New York, 2016). The paper
of Mason, this volume, follows this path and provides helpful discussion of this position. Cf. also the paper of
Rives, this volume, p. 000 (n. 000).
26
See esp. the paper of Bendlin, this volume, p. 000.
27
See R. McKay and H. Whitehouse, ‘Religion and Morality’, Psychological Bulletin 141 (2015) 447–73, who
describe the foundational psychological systems that inform religion as: hyperactive agency detection (HAD),
theory of mind (ToM), teleofunctional explanation, the ‘ritual stance’ and kinship detection. As they explain (p.
454): ‘Research in the “cognitive science of religion” has not sought to demonstrate the universality of any
particular religious representations, such as various notions of ancestors, punitive deities, creator beings, or
sacrifices, blessings, and rites of passage. Rather, the aim has been to show that the great variety of culturally
distributed dogmas and practices that have been collectively labelled “religion” are shaped and constrained by a
finite but disparate set of evolved cognitive predispositions—what we might call “religious foundations”. These
foundations comprise a set of evolved domain-specific systems, together with the intuitions and predispositions
that those systems instill (...) Barring pathology (...) such tendencies emerge in all human beings without the
need for deliberate instruction or training, even if their expression in development may be “tuned” by cultural
environments’. For a recent application of aspects of the CSR framework to ancient religion see J. Rüpke,

5
suggesting that arguments about whether religion in Late Antiquity is embedded and thus
exists but is subsumed under other categories—for example, politics, society, culture29—or
there is no religion in the ontological sense at all are, once again, asking the wrong questions.
The intersection between analyses of ritual magic in Late Antiquity and the argument of
scholars like Esther Eidinow that a subset of a category like ‘magic’ can in Antiquity validly
be considered a form of religious violence,30 along with work that explores freelance
‘religious’ experts,31 and views of Late Antiquity as characterised by competition between
teachers of a variety of ways of life and modes of knowing all of which touch on the human
soul, concepts of creation and the divine32 point to an emic sensibility in Late Antiquity that
embraces a messy spectrum of practices and beliefs. Many of the modes of knowing and
praxeis along that spectrum—magic, astrology, physiognomy, philosophy, oratory, cults,
medicine—have aspects that can be described as having religious foundations in a cognitive-
science-of-religion sense but are excluded by a constrained modern definition of religion.33
An emic approach suggests that all of these should be embraced within research in Late
Antiquity into the phenomenon of religious violence. The question then becomes whether
there are concomitant implications for broadening the study of the phenomenon in
contemporary postmodernity.
Operating within this model of competing discourses of knowledge as emic to Late
Antiquity has been an approach which seeks to avoid reading the narrated violence in the
texts of Late Antiquity at face value by exploring religion through the lens not of conflict but
of competition.34 This approach has its own problems, in that in order for something to
compete in an assumed marketplace, it has to be something the seller can clearly define and
market. This brings us back to the problem either of a narrow modern definition of religion or,
if one accepts the emic view, something that is so ill-defined that it could not have readily
‘Religious Agency, Identity, and Communication: Reflections on History and Theory of Religion’, Religion 45
(2015) 1–23.
28
Although see A.C.T. Smith, Thinking about Religion: Extending the Cognitive Science of Religion (London,
2014) 10: ‘I think that human minds are susceptible to religious content, but no more so than other culturally
prolific activities that also engage emotion, memory, belonging and belief (...) While I acknowledge some
convergence pressures upon cultural activities, they lead towards more generic tendencies such as the ability to
hold belief sets, rather than a predisposition to hold religious beliefs. Religious cognition is not a unique domain,
but a generic domain incorporating social relationships between agents. Although some evidence suggests that
religious content will be attractive to human minds, it is not inevitable. In fact, religion is not sustained by
natural cognitive mechanisms alone; the structure of cultural reinforcement remains essential’.
29
For the concept of religion in the ancient world as embedded see e.g. M. Beard, J. North, and S. Price, The
Religions of Rome 1 (Cambridge, 1998) 43, and the paper of Bremmer, this volume, p. 000. Cf. J. Rüpke, Die
Religion der Römer: Eine Einführung (Munich, 2001) 13. See also Nongbri’s criticism of this approach in B.
Nongbri, ‘Dislodging “Embedded” Religion: A Brief Note on a Scholarly Trope’, Numen 55 (2008) 440–60.
30
E.g. J.E. Sanzo, ‘Magic and Communal Boundaries: The Problems with Amulets in Chrysostom, Adv. Iud. 8,
and Augustine, In Io. tra. 7’, Henoch 39 (2017) 227–46; T. de Bruyn, Making Amulets Christian: Artefacts,
Scribes, and Contexts (Oxford, 2017); E. Eidinow, Oracles, Curses, and Risk, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2013) 13–16,
with her paper, this volume, p. 000.
31
E.g. H. Wendt, At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in the Roman Empire (Oxford, 2016),
and the paper of Raschle, this volume, pp. 000–00
32
Neoplatonic and theurgic philosophy both fall into this category. On the competition between modes of
knowing see e.g. T. Barton, Power and Knowledge: Astrology, Physiognomics and Medicine under the Roman
Empire (Ann Arbor, 1994); S.P. Mattern, Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing (Baltimore, 2008); K. Eshleman,
The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire. Sophists, Philosophers, and Christians (Cambridge,
2012); S.B Levin, Plato’s Rivalry with Medicine: A Struggle and Its Dissolution (Oxford, 2014).
33
The distinction drawn between cult and religion when discussing religion in the ancient to late ancient world is
itself a product of the modern definition of religion.
34
This is explicitly stated in the introduction to their volume by N.P. DesRosiers and L.C. Vuong, ‘Introduction:
Conflict, Cooperation, and Competition in Antiquity’, in DesRosiers and Vuong, Religious Competition, 1–7 at
1–2. The case is similarly argued by the editors in ‘Religion and Competition in Antiquity, An Introduction’, in
D. Engels and P. van Nuffelen (eds), Religion and Competition in Antiquity (Brussels, 2014) 9–44.

6
been marketed as a product. By definition, in order to sell something, it has to be easily
circumscribed and reified. As a way of getting around this, the argument here is that it is the
purveyor who draws artificial distinctions between his or her own product and that of another,
and that the circumscription of one’s own product or that of a competitor’s is itself a product
of the competition.35 In this respect, the religious competition approach offers one solution to
unpacking the relationship between rhetoric and reality when it comes to the impression that
the texts of Late Antiquity convey of a world rife with examples of religious violence. That
the rhetoric of violence is a product of the competition comes to the fore in this explanatory
model, minimising interest in the question of whether the reported violence bears any
relationship to historical reality. However, adopting religious competition as a lens is not
without a number of further problems.36 Here again, it is important for scholars who take this
approach to maintain awareness of its origins and so be conscious of its implicit assumptions.
A survey of studies in this vein published over the past decade reveals its debt to a project put
forward by New Testament scholars that had as a particular focus the first two centuries CE.37
Its primary focus was the struggle of Christianity for success in an urban plurireligious
society, not the period during which Christianity achieved success or when it dominated the
market. This should throw up a warning flag in that the scholars engaged in the project were
operating largely within the paradigm of polytheistic religious tolerance.38 Elements of the
four Cs approach that they coined to facilitate their analysis of how religions interrelated—
coexistence, cooperation, competition and conflict—rapidly became normative within the
literature. Their reliance on the theories of John North is in itself not problematic, in that these
scholars pursued carefully contextualised focused case studies of the kind advocated by Jitse
Dijkstra.39 It does, however, counsel caution when transferring the language and approach to
the period of Late Antiquity and requires that ideas like ‘embedded’ religion or polytheist
tolerance that might be associated with the concept of religious competition be carefully
interrogated. Another level of concern is added when we acknowledge that questions
surround whether the market model which undergirds the concept of religious competition is
itself valid.40
It remains to mention one final way in which experiences like 9/11, Islamic-inspired
terrorist acts around the world and the rise of Islamic State in Syria have driven these kinds of
approaches to religious violence in Late Antiquity, and that is a not unnatural but rarely
voiced presumption that there is something special about religious violence. It is this premise
that has led to the overwhelming focus in this branch of scholarship on determining the
precise nature of the causal relationship between religion and violence, and to the resultant

35
This is an issue engaged with in my article, ‘A Son of Hellenism: Viewing John Chrysostom’s Anti-
intellectualism Through the Lens of Antiochene Paideia’, in S.-P. Bergjan and S. Elm (eds), Antioch II. The
Many Faces of Antioch: Intellectual Exchange and Religious Diversity in Antioch, CE 350–450 (Tübingen, 2018)
369-390.
36
On the assumption implicit in religious competition of consumer choice and rational cost-benefit analysis and
the problems that attach to this see Mayer, ‘Re-Theorizing Religious Conflict’, 7–9.
37
On this project of the Religious Rivalries Seminar of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies see Mayer,
‘Religious Conflict’, 8–10. The first book appeared in 2000.
38
They built their project on the theories of the scholar of Roman religion John North. See the discussion at
Mayer, ‘Religious Conflict’, 9 (n. 32). The association between religious competition and the tolerance paradigm
is problematised by S.J. Larson, ‘The Trouble with Religious Tolerance in Roman Antiquity’, in J.D.
Rosenblum, L.C. Vuong and N.P. DesRosiers (eds), Religious Competition in the Third Century CE: Jews,
Christians, and the Greco-Roman World (Göttingen, 2014) 50–59.
39
See n. 13 above.
40
Viewing religion through the lens of economic capital, albeit with some self-critique, persists in E. Urciuoli,
‘Enforcing Priesthood: The Struggle for the Monopolisation of Religious Goods and the Construction of the
Christian Religious Field’, in R.L. Gordon, J. Rüpke and J. Petridou (eds), Beyond Priesthood: Religious
Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Imperial Era (Berlin, 2017) 317–40.

7
interrogation of religion. Violence as a category has been significantly less well theorised,
particularly in relation to Late Antiquity. It is well-known, for instance, that violence had long
been a part of life in the Graeco-Roman world at both the political and domestic levels,41 yet
far less attention has been paid to how this normative violence might have extended to and
even permeated religious contexts.42 Decoupling religion and violence in the causal sense at
the theoretical level is, I would argue, as important as broadening our understanding of what
in the Late Antique world constituted religion or fell within the domain of the religious,43 if
we are to progress in our exploration and understanding of religious violence.44

Rhetoric and Reality

If it is the case that scholars have been less successful at decoupling religion and violence and
still largely operate within a paradigm of a direct causal relationship, the other major trend in
the exploration of religious violence in Late Antiquity has made progress in the decoupling of
the rhetoric of religious violence from the historical reality. The way in this regard has been
led by projects like ‘Vom Tempel zur Kirche. Zerstörung und Erneuerung lokaler
Kulttopographie in der Spätantike’, a subproject of a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-
funded project that ran from 2000–2003.45 The date of this project indicates that it was
inspired by a larger trend naturally emerging in the study of Late Antiquity independently of
9/11—to approach the claims of Christian texts with a hermeneutic of suspicion. In regard to
claims of temple destruction, the substantially improved archaeological record supplied an
important means of testing the historical validity of these claims and, where required, of
offering a corrective.46 This approach has since been extended to assessment of the abuse,

41
On the cruelty of the judicial system in Late Antiquity see J. Harries, Law and Empire in Late Antiquity
(Cambridge, 1999); J. Hillner, Prison, Punishment and Penance in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2015). On
violence regularly inflicted on slaves in the domestic sphere see C.L. de Wet, Preaching Bondage: John
Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity (Oakland, 2015) 170–219. This continues
practices normative in Greece and Rome: P. Hunt, ‘Violence against Slaves in Classical Greece’, and N. Lenski,
‘Violence and the Roman Slave’, in W. Riess and G.G. Fagan (eds), The Topography of Violence in the Greco-
Roman World (Ann Arbor, 2016) 136–61, 275–98.
42
This question is posed to a small extent in Mayer, ‘Preaching Hatred?’.
43
In broadening out this understanding recent discussions among classicists deconstructing the category polis- or
civic religion and focusing in on individual or personal religion may be helpful. See e.g. J. Kindt, Rethinking
Greek Religion (Cambridge, 2012), and ‘Personal Religion: A Productive Category for the Study of Ancient
Greek Religion?’, JHS 135 (2015) 35–50; J. Rüpke, ‘Lived Ancient Religion: Questioning “Cults” and “Polis
Religion”’, Mythos NS 5 (2011) 191–203, and ‘Ein neuer Religionsbegriff für die Analyse antiker Religion unter
der Perspektive von Weltbeziehungen’, Keryx 4 (2016) 21–36.
44
See also the General Introduction, and the papers of Kippenberg, Bremmer and Bendlin, pp. 000, 000, 000 and
000.
45
See the brief outline of the project in S. Emmel, U. Gotter and J. Hahn, ‘“From Temple to Church”: Analysing
a Late Antique Phenomenon of Transformation’, in J. Hahn S. Emmel and U. Gotter (eds), From Temple to
Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity (Leiden, 2008) 1–22 at 4.
46
On this point and on the long-standing influence of Friedrich Deichmann’s narrative of widespread violence
against temples and their conversion into churches in the fourth and fifth centuries see Dijkstra, ‘Religious
Violence in Late Antique Egypt’, 28–29 (repr. in Mayer and De Wet, Reconceiving Religious Conflict, 212–13),
and the General Introduction, p. 000. For examples of publications in this area see, in addition to Dijkstra,
‘Religious Violence’, e.g. R. Bayliss, Provincial Cilicia and the Archaeology of Temple Conversion (Oxford,
2004); Hahn, Emmel and Gotter, From Temple to Church; L. Lavan and M. Mulryan (eds), The Archaeology of
Late Antique ‘Paganism’ (Leiden, 2011); J. Hahn (ed.), Spätantiker Staat und religiöser Konflikt: Imperiale und
lokale Verwaltung und die Gewalt gegen Heiligtümer (Berlin, 2011); K.S. Freyberger, ‘Zur Nachnutzung
heidnischer Heiligtümer aus Nord- und Südsyrien in spätantiker Zeit’, in H.-G. Nesselrath et al. (eds), Für
Religionsfreiheit, Recht und Toleranz: Libanios’ Rede für den Erhalt der heidnischen Tempel (Tübingen, 2011)
179–226.

8
destruction and mutilation of pagan statues.47 The lack of material evidence for comparative
purposes has not hindered the revision of rhetorical claims of destructive violence in the case
of hagiographical literature where, on the one hand, we have cases like the Life of Porphyry,
on the other, cases like the Egyptian Antioch cycle. In the first instance a reliable redating of
the text has required that claims of destruction in the fourth century of the Marneion at Gaza
that had been taken at face value be read in light of the religious and political agenda of a later
period.48 In the second, the Antioch cycle of martyr homilies from Egypt, which purports to
record the lives of saints martyred at Antioch under the Emperor Diocletian, has been shown
to be a product of sectarian anti-Chalcedonian concerns of the seventh to eighth centuries.49 In
both cases it is unlikely that the events described have historical validity. Mar Marcos views
the fourth to sixth centuries as a period in which the insertion into saints’ lives of iconoclastic
events (the destruction of temples and idols) peaked and then waned as the transformation of
the Late Antique world into one that was perceived to be Christian was completed.50 Such
approaches sit side-by-side with analyses that acknowledge that some violence may have
occurred, but that the origin of the violence is not religious. In addition to Steve Mason’s
analysis in this volume of two massacres reported by Josephus, the recent claim by Hans
Teitler that, in the few cases of Christian deaths under Julian that can be verified, these can be
attributed to a legitimate ruling of treason is indicative.51 Emerging from the results of these
kinds of studies is a Late Antiquity in which religious violence was more local and sporadic
than the narrated violence suggests, in addition to being misattributed or over-reported.52
Since the result of interrogating the extent to which narrated violence reports historical
reality tends to be reductionist,53 one response has been to ignore the historical reality
altogether to focus solely on the rhetoric. The kinds of questions asked of the texts in this
approach concern the purpose of the narrated violence, resulting in an emphasis on discerning
authorial intention. The assumption here is that the narrated violence is intended to produce in
the hearers a particular way of viewing themselves in relation to other religious groups in the
world around them. Broadly speaking, the way these texts are approached is thus from the
perspective of identity production.54 A large number of studies of texts that were produced in

47
E.g. T.M. Kristensen, Making and Breaking the Gods: Christian Responses to Pagan Sculpture in Late
Antiquity (Aarhus, 2013); R.M. Jensen, ‘Spitting on Statues and Shaving Hercules’ Beard: The Conflict over
Images (and Idols) in Early Christianity’, in B. Neil and K. Simic (eds), Memories of Utopia: The Revision of
Histories and Landscapes in Late Antiquity (London, forthcoming).
48
See now A. Lampadaridi, La conversion de Gaza au christianisme. La Vie de S. Porphyre (Brussels, 2016),
and the paper of Bremmer, this volume, pp. 000–00.
49
See A. Papaconstantinou, ‘Historiography, Hagiography, and the Making of the Coptic “Church of the
Martyrs” in Early Islamic Egypt’, DOP 60 (2006) 65–86.
50
Marcos, ‘Religious Violence’. See also B. Caseau, ‘Christianisation et violence religieuse: le débat
historiographique’, in Baslez, Chrétiens persécuteurs, 11–36.
51
See H.C. Teitler, ‘Ammianus, Libanius, Chrysostomus, and the Martyrs of Antioch’, VChr 67 (2013) 263–88,
and The Last Pagan Emperor: Julian the Apostate and the War against Christianity (New York, 2017), who
concludes that not a single allegation that the Emperor Julian executed Christians on the basis of their religion is
true, despite accounts of up to five different martyrdoms in a variety of sources.
52
See also the General Introduction, p. 000.
53
So e.g. Marcos, ‘Religious Violence’, 190. For a criticism of the eirenic view of the Late Antique world to
which this reductionism can give rise see D. Frankfurter, ‘“Religious Violence”: A Phenomenology’, Ancient
Jew Review (24 February 2016), available online at
http://www.ancientjewreview.com/articles/2016/2/24/religious-violence-a-phenomenology.
54
For an example of this approach see C. Shepardson, ‘Give It Up for God: Wealth, Suffering, and the Rhetoric
of Religious Persecution in John of Ephesus’s Church History’, in Mayer and De Wet, Reconceiving Religious
Conflict, 86–109, and her paper in this volume. See also the paper by Digeser in this volume, and her article
‘Continuity and Change: The “Great” Persecution’, in É. Fournier and W. Mayer (eds), Heirs of Roman
Persecution: Studies on a Christian and Para-Christian Discourse in Late Antiquity (London, forthcoming), in
which she successively demonstrates how Lactantius’ production and promotion of a narrative of a militant

9
Late Antiquity that have a focus on aspects of religious violence—however the latter might be
defined—fall into this category.
There is a third path, however, which is just starting to emerge. The pursuit here is not
to view rhetoric as a record of violence (past action), but to explore to what extent the rhetoric
of violence produces violence (future action).55 This moves the scholar away from the often
impossible task of determining to what extent the reported memory is real or false or
manipulated or flawed. In this approach the rhetoric of violence becomes a thing in itself,
separate from the author’s intention, and focus rests on the agency of the rhetoric. This is the
intent of Marcos’ study of reported iconoclasm in hagiography. She concludes that the stories
functioned as exemplars that subtly encouraged the use of violence in the conversion
process.56 Michael Gaddis had earlier concluded that stories of martyrdom and resistance
provided a rationalisation and justification ‘for zealous action enacting the anger of God
against enemies of the faith’.57 Despite their confidence, this causal relationship—violent
rhetoric producing violent action—proves difficult to demonstrate. From modern examples
we suspect this is the case, but proving it for the distant past is problematic.58 Given the kinds
of evidence at our disposal, it is usually simpler to prove the opposite—that narrated violence
does or, more often, does not reflect actual historical violence. My own engagement with
research in the areas of experimental moral psychology, cognition and neuroscience suggests
that explanatory models from those disciplines have the potential to move us one step closer
to determining the actual impact of narrated violence.59 Those results will always be limited,
however, in that we cannot go back into the past and test the impact of narrated violence on
individuals or groups via interviews, surveys and media footage. The conclusions drawn as a
result of this kind of approach can only ever be and will always remain speculative.

Making Sense of Religious Violence

If we turn to the questions posed at the beginning of this paper, we can see that in the context
of Late Antiquity there has been considerable discussion to date concerning the nature and
definition of religious violence and whether we can say that, as a category, it existed.
Emerging from these debates are a number of key issues which scholarship needs to address
as theorisation and investigation in this area progresses. One is whether, for the purposes of
exploring and understanding the phenomenon, religion existed or not as a distinct category in
Late Antiquity matters. A second is whether religious violence is distinctive as a phenomenon
and can be separated from all other forms of violence. A third is what does or does not belong
under the category ‘religious violence’, to which a related issue is determining when
something is religious violence and when it is another category of violence or just violence.
Asking what makes the violence religious will help us to further refine our understanding. A

Christian emperor, on the one hand, and of Christians as persecuted minority, on the other, has been so
successful that it has been influential up until the present day.
55
E.g. W. Mayer, ‘Purity and the Rewriting of Memory: Revisiting Julian’s Disgust for the Christian Worship of
Corpses and Its Consequences’, in Neil and Simic, Memories of Utopia, forthcoming.
56
Marcos, ‘Religious Violence’, 190–91.
57
Gaddis, ‘There is No Crime’, x. Although, one suspects that in his view the justification for violence occurred
after rather than before the fact. That is, the rhetoric of violence validates violence that is already occurring. See
especially his conclusion (pp. 323–41), where, it is to be noted, the role the rhetoric of violence played is linked
to identity production. This is different from viewing the rhetoric as actively producing violence.
58
Frankfurter, ‘“Religious Violence”’, refers to observable patterns, but these can be, and have been, variously
interpreted. This is the case, for example, with legislation concerning violence against Jews. See e.g. S. Doležal,
‘Possible Legal Impact of the Homilies Against the Jews by Joannes Chrysostomos’, GLP 23 (2010) 15–29 and
the opposite opinion of Morlet, ‘Antijudaïsme chrétien au IVe siècle’, esp. p. 188.
59
See Mayer, ‘Preaching Hatred?’, where the relationship between rhetoric, cognition and action is set out in
detail.

10
fourth is related to both branches of scholarship. Greater consciousness needs to be exercised
when moving between exploration of religious violence as a real phenomenon (a thing that
actually happened) and religious violence as a rhetorical and/or ideological construct. The line
between the two is still frequently blurred in scholarship on the topic. Exploration of the
subtleties of the relationship between the two, on the other hand, is a space in which some of
the most fruitful research is likely to be produced in the future. A fifth issue is the need for
greater self-awareness about what we are trying to describe, explore or recover and about the
assumptions that drive this activity. Whether it is suppositions about different kinds of
religion being eirenic or violent (tolerance/intolerance; polytheism/monotheism) or about
religion being optional (the religious marketplace/competition) even as we argue that it was
‘embedded’ (and thus automatic?), there continue to be a number of problematic, unvoiced
assumptions that infuse one thesis or another.
These issues will continue to plague investigation into the future. We need to continue
to be diligent about bringing these assumptions into the light and deconstructing them.
Making sense of religious violence is nonetheless a worthwhile endeavour. As with
everything to do with the world of Late Antiquity the more we read through our texts, the
more we bring together material and textual evidence, the more insights we gain and the more
we discover both about the Late Antique past and about ourselves as scholars. In this
endeavour both avenues of approach—to interrogate categories and definitions and to theorise
at the higher level; and to explore evidence on a case-by-case basis, situating reported
religious violence carefully in its local context—are essential. It is in the interaction between
these two scholarly approaches—the one providing explanatory models and theories, the other
testing them and showing up their strengths and weaknesses—that progress in making sense
of religious violence with specific reference to the world of Late Antiquity in the future lies.

11