By the late fifth century, Armenian writers had developed a local historiography including the idea of righteous kingship linked to and assisted by the new institution of the Christian episcopacy.This essay considers the Letter of Macarius and the royal establishment of Christianity from the perspective of several early Armenian historians.

Chapter 4 concludes the analysis of Julian’s reckoning with Constantine’s propaganda. It focuses on Julian’s strategy to disavow the public persona of the first emperor who had promoted the association between Christian sovereignty and ideals of philosophical leadership. The first section considers the efforts of Constantine’s propaganda to use the events of his (Constantine’s) life to prove that Roman history was guided by Christian providence. The engagement with autobiography in Julian’s final writings appears in this light as the culmination of his response to Christianity’s claims of intellectual dominance over Greco-Roman culture. The second section reconstructs Julian’s joint attempts to project his life as the token of his superior understanding of providential history (Against Heraclius) and to mobilise past Roman history as a source of counter-exempla disproving Constantine’s claims (The Caesars). In the process, Julian repurposed a fundamental element of Constantine’s propaganda – imperial iconography – to his advantage (Caesars; Misopogon).

During the Principate, the negotiation of the ruler’s intellectual authority emerged as a key strategy of political self-legitimisation. In the early fourth century, the definition of early Christian thinking as the perfect system of knowledge, which had been developed through dialogue and rivalry with the post-Hellenistic philosophical schools, encouraged the emperor Constantine to mobilise his allegiance to Christianity for competitive self-assertion: he upheld his conversion as an intellectual achievement with no imperial precedent. Modern reluctance to take ancient definitions of Christianity as philosophy at face value has obscured the force of this propagandistic argument. Yet its recovery is essential to understanding Julian’s philosophical response to the positioning of early Christianity as an authoritative system of knowledge and appreciating the strategies of self-legitimisation pursued by fourth-century bishops in conversation with the (Christian) philosopher-ruler. As the question of who holds authoritative knowledge was antagonised by religious disputes, the fourth-century socio-political and ideological transition was channelled into a ‘politics of interpretation’ in which leaders (imperial and episcopal) negotiated their status as intelligent decoders of providential signs scattered throughout literature, history, and the cosmos.

Chapter 3 addresses the writings Julian composed during his sole rule (361–63) following Constantius’ sudden death. I suggest here that Julian’s mature output was grounded in the intuition that the challenge to Christian power had to be channelled into an attack on its identity as a superior interpretive system. The first section draws on a reading of key texts by Constantine and his supporters to contextualise Constantius’ intellectual self-image in the legacy of his father’s cultural policy. Constantine legitimised his subversive status as Christian emperor by projecting himself as the sublime exegete of divine providence. The second section illustrates the strategies Julian devised to deny the validity of Christianity’s hermeneutical claims, which he envisaged as prepared by Greek philosophical achievements and as being therefore derivative and unauthoritative. Julian’s critique was articulated through an attack on Christian exegesis (Against the Galileans) and on what Julian perceived as Christianity’s exploitative relationship with paideia (the School Ban). At the same time, Julian attempted to competitively rethink Greek allegoresis by renouncing the status of Homer as divine, enigmatic text and by composing hymns and writings constructing Greek religion as a ‘cult of culture’.

The cautious conversion of the kings of Ḥimyar to monotheism in the fourth century CE was influenced by the beliefs of a local Jewish community. This chapter clarifies the relationship between South Arabian Jews and Jewish sympathizers and offers an interpretative framework for the monotheism of fourth- and fifth-century Ḥimyar, which contextualizes the choice of South Arabia’s elites to become Jewish sympathizers. The process of conversion to monotheism also shares features with the first stage of Christianity in Aksūm and the Graeco-Roman world, as well as the henotheism of pre-Islamic North Arabia. It argues that the Ḥimyarite kings’ cautious conversion follows a broad Late Antique trend which aimed to ease the transition for their subjects and/or to assume a neutral position towards the developments of the surrounding empires. In the brand-new kingdom of Ḥimyar, the cult of a single, institutionalized and translocal deity provided a strong mechanism for establishing identities that were reshaped in a wider syncretistic framework through a sociopolitical exploitation of cults characteristic of the broader late antique world.

The second chapter narrates the history of North Arabia between the late third and fifth centuries. In around 224, the Arsacid dynasty in Iran was defeated by the Sasanians, who immediately embarked on a war against Rome. The renewed animosity between the two superpowers of Late Antiquity had repercussions in the Near East, causing the fall of valuable buffer states such as Palmyra and Hatra and the employment of Arabian allies in areas such as North Ḥijāz, where the Romans could no longer easily exercise direct control. These Arabian allied confederacies did not have fixed geographical boundaries and were also often unstable in their alliances. After shedding light on the sociopolitical situation of North Arabia, the chapter focuses on the impact of Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, which had the result of creating a cultural network. It argues that Christianity had an instrumental role for the North Arabian urban elites and a more limited role among the poorer classes, especially the rural ones.

As seen from the two previous chapters, Eusebius of Caesarea is the one author who had produced the master narrative of the beginnings of Christainity. In his 10 books of the history of the church, he chronologically developed a world history, in which Christianity is and always has been the ultimate goal of God’s creation. Already before time, God had conceived the Logos and through the Logos created this world which, despite the fall, was to come to its restauration and final perfection through the guidance of the Logos, his incarnation, presence on earth and him being alive in his community, called the Church, finally recognized by the first Christian Emperor Constantine.

The question of whether a supreme authority can perform resistance – a notion presupposing confrontation with a force that is equal, if not superior – is here addressed through the case study of Emperor Julian’s opposition to Christianity. During the year and a half of his rule, Julian engaged in attempts to control the religious life of the Roman Empire, seeking to reverse the religious agenda pursued by his Christian predecessors Constantine and Constantius II. His writings, however, do not voice a top-down approach to religious confrontation, but rather deploy forms of expression that are traditionally associated with subaltern dissidents, such as humour and figured speech. Julian’s literary choices point to his self-perception – and self-narrative – as grappling with forces that were greater than his contingent position of authority. In particular, the positioning of his response to Christianity in the field of philosophy (Against the Galileans) betrays his alertness to contemporary narratives of Christianity as the system of knowledge that had displaced the philosophical schools of Greece and Rome. To this claim, Julian reacted with a defence of Greek philosophy and religion against what he perceived as Christianity’s aggressive and power-endorsed intrusion in the spheres of theology, philosophy, and interpretation of history.

This focus on the senators and the clergy is important because, in my view, too much of the discussion of Rome in late antiquity has focused on either the catastrophic impact of barbarian invasions or the baleful influence of weak emperors and strident generals. Although I am not the first to recognize the vital role played by senatorial aristocrats nor to show the limited influence of the bishops in Rome, new information about the city in late antiquity, new scholarly work on its history, and a new appreciation of the role of the bishops of the city require a new perspective on the very old topic of the “Fall of Rome.”

Thou shall not return a refugee to persecution. Nation-states declared they had learned that critical lesson from the tragedy of the Holocaust by enacting international refugee conventions and protocols. Today, as refugees seek safety, they find fortress-like liberal democracies building walls of steel interlaced with legal strategies that undermine the international protections forged from the fires of the Holocaust. Consequently, refugees drown in the Mediterranean, die in the Mexico-United States desert, become detained in overcrowded refugee camps and unofficial street shelters, or become victims of criminal gangs. Nation-states have all too often abdicated their responsibility to refugees. This chapter explores this interlocking struggle between Christian hospitality toward the outsider and Christian refusal to offer that hospitality in support of national security. Christian beliefs that encourage submission to governing authorities and prioritize the nation undermine international law to the detriment of not just refugees but also citizens and the world community.

A key figure in the Arian dispute leading up to and following the Council of Nicaea, Eusebius of Caesarea (bishop c. 313-39) was not only implicated as a central player in the broader theological developments of the early fourth century but was also one of the most significant formulators of ancient literary representations of the council itself. His writings contain an eye-witness account of the council; a broader narrative of Constantine’s interactions with Christian bishops; letters of Constantine addressing issues of theological or practical debate; his own letters to his home congregation at Caesarea and to other bishops involved in the controversy; and his theological polemic against Marcellus of Ancyra, the promoter of a more radical anti-Arian position. These texts simultaneously assist and complicate modern attempts to construct the precise nature and dynamics of the controversy, the council, and its aftermath. They also provide a fascinating angle by which to discern important features of Eusebius’s fertile authorial work: he stands as a careful and creative formulator of a powerful historiographic, theological, and political vision that would make a signal impact upon later competing accounts of the Council of Nicaea.

The introduction to this volume begins with a reflection on the impact of Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code, especially for its presentation of the Council of Nicaea as a conspiratorial moment in the history of Christianity. It then offers a sweeping examination of how various contemporary Christian traditions and denominations have received the Council of Nicaea and its creed and how they understand historical figures such as Arius and Constantine. As we near the 1,700-year anniversary of the first “ecumenical” council, the chapters in this volume will revisit old debates and discussions, ask new questions, and offer different perspectives on the people, context, and consequences related to the Council of Nicaea.

This chapter discusses the evidence for the existence of creeds before Nicaea and the purpose for which they might have been employed. The rival accounts of the origin of the Nicene formula are compared, together with the variants in the wording and the different accounts of its origin. The biblical texts that lie behind each verse of the creed are examined, and Beatrice’s argument for a pagan origin of the term homoousios is weighed against other theories. The anathemas require particular study, since the anathema on the term ktiston (“created”) is not preserved in all sources, but is crucial to the argumentation of Athanasius, who claims that it has the authority of Eusebius. The chapter then asks how the Nicene Creed was regarded after the end of the council, and whether subsequent creedal formulations were meant to reinforce or supersede it, and how it attained the form that is now regularly employed in churches.

The Council of Nicaea was a landmark event, yet uncertainty surrounds almost every aspect of the council and its proceedings. No Acts survive, the signatory lists are incomplete, and the organization of the council’s meetings and the identities and motivations of those who participated remain controversial. Rather than propose another hypothetical reconstruction, the aim of this chapter is to reconsider the different interpretations made possible by our limited evidence and the particular questions that have divided scholarly opinion. Who attended the council? Who took the leading roles in the council’s deliberations? And who proposed and supported the crucial decisions, such as the inclusion of the contested term homoousios into the Nicene Creed? Not only are such questions essential to understanding the council and its legacy, but our search for answers offers the opportunity to look beyond the emperor Constantine and the most famous episcopal protagonists, and consider the significance of Nicaea for some of the less prominent figures who contributed to the drama. While their voices are difficult to hear, these more humble individuals had their own parts to play and shared the contemporary awe at a spectacle that symbolized the changing status of Christianity within the fourth-century Roman empire.