Download PDF by Jeremy M. Schott: Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late

In Christianity, Empire, and the Making of faith in past due Antiquity, Jeremy M. Schott examines the ways that conflicts among Christian and pagan intellectuals over non secular, ethnic, and cultural identification contributed to the transformation of Roman imperial rhetoric and beliefs within the early fourth century C.E. in this turbulent interval, which begun with Diocletian's persecution of the Christians and ended with Constantine's assumption of sole rule and the consolidation of a brand new Christian empire, Christian apologists and anti-Christian polemicists introduced a few literary salvos in a conflict for the minds and souls of the empire.

Schott specializes in the works of the Platonist thinker and anti- Christian polemicist Porphyry of Tyre and his Christian respondents: the Latin rhetorician Lactantius, Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, and the emperor Constantine. past scholarship has tended to relate the Christianization of the empire by way of a brand new religion's penetration and conquest of classical tradition and society. the current paintings, by contrast, seeks to droop the static, essentializing conceptualizations of non secular id that lie in the back of many reviews of social and political switch in past due antiquity on the way to examine the strategies during which Christian and pagan identities have been built. Drawing at the insights of postcolonial discourse research, Schott argues that the construction of Christian id and, in flip, the development of a Christian imperial discourse have been in detail and inseparably associated with the wider politics of Roman imperialism.