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The Old Testament in Byzantium (review)

The second half of the book moves away from the single theme of alienation to offer a reading of the intellectual and political transformations that followed from the conversion of the later Roman Empire and the internalization of Christian values by Roman society. Chapter 4 suggests that bishops and other Christian leaders of the Christian Church attempted to replace classical utopias with the actualized charitable institutions of the Church, an aim that was inhibited by their need to act in harmony with, and indeed to reinforce, the authoritarian and hierarchized structures of the Roman Empire. Chapter 5, a thought-provoking study of imperialism and Christianity, charts the transformation of Christianity from initial marginality to become a force that reinforced and transformed Roman imperial power. By detaching itself from Judaism, Christianity avoided the destructive consequences of direct political opposition to Rome and was unthreatened by the decadence of Greek institutions through offering an explicit alternative to Hellenic culture. Thus by the end of the later empire, Christian orthodoxy could claim to occupy the cultural and religious territory of both Greeks and Jews, as it provided reinforcement to Roman political power. Chapter 6 explores the paradox that the extreme punishments inflicted on Christian martyrs, which were central to the self-definition of the faith, but nevertheless were adopted as models for their own understanding of proper punishment both in the context of divine and secular justice. Chapter 7, loosely attached to the rest of the book, examines the question of the psychological importance to individuals of reading scripture.