See Justin Martyr through the lens of “a pagan astronomical device.”

Just a few months ago, the Washington Post ran an astonishing opinion column, written by one of its own, Patricia E. Bauer, a former Post bureau chief. Patricia has a grown daughter with Down syndrome, and she writes about the rudeness she has had to endure through the years. People ask her whether she had undergone prenatal testing. The unspoken assumption is that, if she had, her daughter Margaret would never have been born. One Ivy League ethicist said in her presence that mothers whose unborn children test positive for Down syndrome have a “moral obligation” to terminate the pregnancy.

We’ve come a long way, baby. And we’ve ended up back where we started before the rise of Christianity. In the Church’s infancy, the age of the Fathers, abortion and infanticide were commonplace events, requiring little deliberation. Archeology has yielded us a rare glimpse at the inner life of ordinary people in this time. We have a letter from a pagan businessman in which he wrote home to his pregnant wife, amid the usual endearments: “If you are delivered of a child [before I come home], if it is a boy, keep it, if a girl discard it.”

Indeed, most pagan cultures considered it a duty to place “defective” newborns on the dunghills at the edge of town, where birds of prey could pick them apart. Most families interpreted the word “defective” broadly, to include female children as well as those with disabilities or disfigurement. Plato and Aristotle commended the practice, and the Roman historian Tacitus said it was “sinister and revolting” for Jews to forbid infanticide.

Yet these practices created a crisis for pagans. Abortion and infanticide led to low fertility rates, high maternal mortality, a shortage of marriageable women, and an absence of familial care for the elderly. Over generations, the dwindling native population of Rome grew increasingly dependent on foreign mercenaries to fill the ranks of the army, and immigrants to do the servile jobs that no Roman citizen wanted to do. That makes for an unstable infrastructure. Various emperors tried to legislate fertility, but the law isn’t much of an aphrodisiac. And abortion kills a couple’s love every bit as much as it kills their baby. Besides, people had grown accustomed to an unmoored, leisurely life, drifting from pleasure to pleasure, without the encumbrance of children.

We face a similar crisis today. Christianity’s critics say they want to promote a tolerant, welcoming, inclusive society. What they usually mean is a society that gives free rein to every vice, every cruel lust, and every sin. But a growing number of people are dissatisfied with the societal consequences of those sins. What’s a culture to do?

We Christians have answers. Around 155 A.D., St. Justin Martyr wrote to the emperor: “We have been taught that it is wicked to expose even newly born children . . . For we would then be murderers.” In the same century, Athenagoras said: “Women who use drugs to bring on an abortion commit murder.” These testimonies appear late in the game, a half-century after the earliest recorded Christian condemnation of abortion.

We, too, are living rather late in the game, but not too late to speak up and speak plainly. No society can grow if it snuffs out life in the seed or in the bud. No society can be inclusive if it refuses to welcome the most vulnerable persons. It was Christians who created the first truly tolerant, welcoming, and all-inclusive society — with a remarkable social-welfare system. They did this because they, unlike their rulers, not only tolerated the poor and weak, nor merely loved them with a human affection. They saw the least of the human family as the image of God, as Christ who must be welcomed, as angels requiring hospitality.

I’ve quoted the Didascalia Apostolorum here before, but that’s OK. We need to memorize this line as if it were the first catechism lesson: “Widows and orphans are to be revered like the altar.”

From such reverence for life came true social security, true stability and prosperity. From such reverence came many beloved and loving children like Margaret.

Some poets peer into Chapman’s Homer and get inspired. I peered into my co-author Chris Bailey’s copy of The Da Vinci Code, saw his marginal notes, and howled with laughter. An example:

DAN BROWN WROTE: “More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament…”
CHRIS BAILEY WROTE: “Thank you for submitting ‘The Gospel of Thomas.’ Unfortunately, it does not meet our current needs…”

Visit Chris’s blog to read more of his musings on the Holy Grail and, yes, The Da Vinci Code. Unlike Dan Brown, Chris gives you real history. And, unlike Brown’s novel, many of Chris’s observations are intentionally funny.

I so enjoyed writing The Grail Code with this guy. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it.

In the western calendar, today is the optional memorial of Sts. Nereus and Achilleus, martyrs (c. 100 A.D.); and the optional memorial of St. Pancras, martyr (c. 304).

Remember them today. They’ll intercede for you and help you through difficulties. Martyrs are good about that sort of thing.

Hat tip: Jeff Ziegler of the Ziegler A List.

Do you teach? Homeschool? Would you be interested in adding Latin to your lineup — or as an extracurricular activity?

About a year ago, while browsing at the local Barnes and Noble, my kids and I discovered the coolest program. A goup of students from a local Catholic school were putting on a Roman pageant — lots of comedy, singing, etc., and much of it in Latin. And their teacher raffled off some real ancient objects. On the other side of the store, the group had arranged for a “traveling ancient-coin museum” to visit. Its curator made the trip from the far reaches of the midwest.

I found out that the sponsoring Catholic school did not actually offer Latin classes. All they do is sponsor a Latin club. But the club’s moderator is a true zealot named Zee, who knows how to keep kids spellbound.

Zee Poerio is not alone in her work. In fact, she’s very active in several national organizations that welcome members from public, private or home schools.

If you teach you might be interested in checking out Excellence Through Classics, which sponsors and administers the National Mythology Exam. (Zee is vice-chair.) Homeschoolers, too, can take the exam.

Zee is also director of Ancient Coins for Education, which is the program that most fascinated my kids.

She’s also a member of the Education and Youth Programs Task Force of the Ancient Coin Collectors Guild

Membership in the American Classical League gets you a discount on books from the organization’s Teacher Materials Resource Center.

Granted, these groups are dealing almost exclusively with classical antiquity, not Christian antiquity. But none of them, to my knowledge, forbids its members to substitute the writings of the Fathers for the best of Cicero. Others may ask, with Tertullian, what has Athens (or Rome) to do with Jerusalem? But that question was best answered by other Fathers, like St. Basil the Great, in his “Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature.”

How do you say that in French? Kevin at Biblicalia broke the news:

…in celebration of publishing their 500th volume in the Sources Chrétiennes series, all volumes are on sale at 50% off through the end of May. So, if you’ve got any Patristic writers for which you want an original language text with a French translation, chances are they’re in the series and now’s your chance to save big.

There’s some fascinating activity at GrailCode.com, where my co-author Chris Bailey has summoned old Nennius forth from his ancient grave and from neglected library shelves. In Nennius we encounter an early Christian re-telling of the Celtic tales, which later bards would weave into the romances of the Holy Grail. Don’t miss Chris’s fascinating discussion, and don’t forget to order our book, The Grail Code — which (if I do say so myself) is one of the more entertaining ways to counter the Grail-related fabrications of The Da Vinci Code.

People are often shocked when they go to the early Christians hoping to find a solution to problems that have preoccupied Christians since the Reformation. They often find the Fathers relatively unconcerned. A case in point is the debate about what it means to be “saved,” and correspondingly what it means to be justified and sanctified. The post-Reformation tendency, especially among Protestants, is to section these terms off and consider them as discrete events, points on a timeline. The Fathers, however, preferred to speak of salvation as an irreducibly integrated process, which they called “divinization” — or “deification,” or “theosis.”

Those are daring terms, but they are biblical in essence, as is the idea that we share in divinity by our incorporation into Christ. The Apostle Peter said, after all, that Christians are “partakers of the divine nature.”

Whenever people asked me about this doctrine of the Fathers, I usually pointed them to two excellent modern explanations: Scott Hahn’s book First Comes Love and chapter 2 of Cardinal Christoph Schonborn’s book From Death to Life. These are excellent resources — thorough and winsome — but I always wished for something that was handier for evangelism, along the lines of those tracts I often find at the laundromat or supermarket (“Are YOU Saved?”). After all, why should the whole truth — why should our divinization — prove resistant to modern media?

Yesterday I discovered just such a handy booklet: Theosis: Partaking of the Divine Nature, by Mark Shuttleworth, an Orthodox layman. The 20-page booklet is, like the teachings of the Fathers themselves, saturated with the testimony of the Good Book.

“I said, ‘You are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High’ (Ps 82:6)… What on earth does it mean — “you are gods”? Doesn’t our faith teach that there is only one God, in three Persons? How can human beings be gods? … Theosis is the understanding that human beings can have real union with God, and so become like God to such a degree that we participate in the divine nature.”

Shuttleworth gives several pages over to New Testament quotations explaining the meaning and implications of our deification. He then summons the early Fathers to the witness stand: Origen, Athanasius, Basil, Cyril of Alexandria and others. C.S. Lewis even makes a cameo appearance.

This is a very useful little book, great to buy in bulk and stack in the back of the church. And it’s an invaluable tool for modern apologists.

The very first question I received when I launched this blog was from a group of tenacious Catholics living in the Mormon heartland of Utah. My correspondent said that Mormons were increasingly trying to invoke the Fathers’ doctrine of theosis as a sort of anticipation of the Mormon belief that the faithful will be made gods to rule over their own planets in the afterlife. These Utah Catholics, though, diligently applied themselves to studying and discussing the patristic doctrine, and formulating a deeply Christian, patristic response to their nearby neighbors.

The author of Theosis, Mark Shuttleworth, has put this ancient doctrine to the biblical test; he has put it into words that engage the mind; but, a man of extraordinary talent, he has also done something more with the doctrine. He has put it to beautiful music. Shuttleworth has translated these biblical and patristic notions into music in the contemporary praise idiom. His CD travels with me wherever I go. I especially love his setting for the ancient Trisagion and his own composition “My Lord, I Love You.” The disk is not yet available on the Web, but you can buy it directly from the artist. Just send a check for $15 ($12 for the CD; $3 for shipping and handling) to Mark Shuttleworth, 2962 Voelkel Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15216.

Then settle in for some truly divinizing listening.

This is from Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, in God’s Human Face: The Christ Icon:

“Theodore the Studite was convinced that iconoclasm ultimately is based on a rejection of the humility of God.”

What a stud … ite.

Hat tip: Scott Hahn, who sent it in response to this post.

Yesterday I joined Greg and Lisa Popcak on the “Heart, Mind and Strength” radio show, to talk about breastfeeding imagery in the Church Fathers. You can pick up the podcast here.

Rod Bennett‘s at it again. Searching out the ultimate creative sources of Tolkien, Lewis, and J.K. Rowling, he follows the influences, Livingstone-like, till he reaches … the Fathers of the Church.

A visitor named Simon tells me that I should post my “top ten books on early Christianity…No, make that twenty!” Well, I could call him on a technicality because he never said “Simon says.” But I won’t, because I can’t resist his temptation. So I publish this list, with all the usual disclaimers: I do not, of course, endorse everything every author says in every one of these books; nor do I necessarily root for their favorite football teams. I, after all, am a Pittsburgher. Not all of these books are, strictly speaking, books on the Fathers. But these are the books whose scholarship on the Fathers has (in the words of my pre-teen kids) rocked my world.

1. The Spirit of Early Christian Thought by Robert Louis Wilken.

2. The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries by Rodney Stark.

3. The Church of the Fathers by John Henry Newman.

4. The Spirituality of the New Testament and the Fathers by Louis Bouyer.

5. The Celebration of the Eucharist by Enrico Mazza.

6. In Procession Before the World: Martyrdom as Public Liturgy in Early Christianity by Robin Darling Young.

7. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600), vol. 1 in The Christian Tradition by Jaroslav Pelikan.

8. Face to Face: Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity by Robin Margaret Jensen.

9. The Christians as the Romans Saw Them by Robert Louis Wilken.

10. Mary and the Fathers of the Church: The Blessed Virgin Mary in Patristic Thought by Luigi Gambero.

11. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine by John Henry Newman.

12. Easter in the Early Church: An Anthology of Jewish and Early Christian Texts by Raniero Cantalamessa.

13. Patrology (four volumes) by Johannes Quasten.

14. Fathers of the Church by Hubertus Drobner.

15. Early Christian Doctrines by J.N.D. Kelly.

16. The Theology of Jewish Christianity by Jean Danielou.

17. In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity by Oskar Skarsaune.

18. Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition by Robert Murray.

19. Letter and Spirit: From Written Text to Living Word in the Liturgy by Scott Hahn.

20. Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words by Rod Bennett.

Several house-churches have survived from the time before Constantine. They began as homes, but were gradually given over to church use till they became full-time worship spaces. But the oldest known structure that seems to have been built as a church is the ruin at the Red Sea port of Aqaba in Jordan (known in antiquity as Aila). Pottery from the building’s foundations date the church to the late third or early fourth century. A bishop of Aila attended the Council of Nicaea in 325, suggesting that the place was already a bustling Christian center. When the site was excavated in the late 1990s, a churchyard cemetery was unearthed as well.

The Church at Aqaba is important for several reasons.

A few earlier churches are known, but these were originally built for other purposes, such as a house at Dura Europos in Syria that was converted into a church. Usually dated to ca. 230-240, it apparently went out of use when the city was captured by the Persians in 256. Mud-brick churches similar to the one at Aila are known from Egypt, but they are slightly later. Other early Christian churches, like that of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, originally erected ca. 325, have been in continuous use and rebuilt over the centuries, making their original architecture difficult to discern. The church at Aila was used for less than a century. Its latest coins date to 337-361, suggesting the church was a victim of an earthquake that, according to historical sources, devastated the region. The building was then abandoned and quickly filled with wind-blown sand, preserving its walls up to 15 feet in height.

See the church and the rest of the story at Archaeology magazine.

An obscure rabbi from a backwater of the Roman Empire, Jesus of Nazareth was hardly a “superstar” by today’s standards.

His fame was, for the most part, a local phenomenon. The world and its cultures took little notice of His coming and going. And so it remained for nearly a century.

Jesus’ claims to authority — and even divinity — surely would have seemed absurd to the average Roman citizen. A carpenter had come to save the world. He was God, yet He was publicly executed in a most humiliating way. And after a century, the world seemed no more saved then before.

To the most cultured, and to the movers and shakers of the Roman Empire, Jesus didn’t matter. He hardly merited a joke or a second glance. But that was just as it should be.

Back in 1994 Pope John Paul II pondered the pagan historians of antiquity as he prepared the Church for the millennium we now call home.

“This ‘becoming one of us’ on the part of the Son of God took place in the greatest humility,” he wrote in Tertio Millennio Adveniente (“As the Third Millennium draws near”). “So it is no wonder that secular historians, caught up by more stirring events and by famous personages, first made only passing, albeit significant, references to Him.”

Just what “passing” did they take, and why is it “significant”? Pope John Paul dedicated a paragraph to those rare testimonies in his long meditation on the incarnation of Christ.

The first he takes up is by Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian of the Roman Court, who wrote his “Antiquities of the Jews” about 60-65 years after Christ’s death. Josephus’ only undisputed reference to Jesus appears as he describes the severity of the Sadducees in judging offenders against the law.
The example he offers is that of the apostle James, “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ.” Yet Josephus is concerned here not with Jesus but with James, who was “delivered to be stoned.”

In a footnote, the Pope mentions another passage that appears in some manuscripts of “Antiquities of the Jews,” but is missing from others.
scholars who believe the passage is authentic claim that it had bee purged by copyists during times when Christians were persecuted. Those who believe it is false claim it was plugged in by pious copyists of later centuries. The Pope, in his footnote, acknowledges the dispute.

The passage comes as Josephus is relating the reign of Pontius Pilate as procurator of Judea. After a description of how Pilate rather violently put down rebellions, the text reads: “Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works – a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jew and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal man amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and 10,000 other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.”

The problem some scholars raise (and even some Church Fathers raised) is that if Josephus could make a statement of faith such as “He was the Christ,” such a faith should pervade the rest of his history – especially his reading of the prophets and patriarchs, and at the very least his reading of the death of St. James. But it doesn’t.

In recent centuries, some unbelieving scholars have used the paucity of references to Jesus in Josephus’ writings to argue against the Nazarene’s very existence. Yet they perhaps forget that Josephus elsewhere proclaims his own master, the Emperor Vespasian, to be the Messiah, and so the historian would probably be reluctant to give notice to the most promising “competition.”

In any event, a handful of Romans recorded their brief notice of Jesus and His followers as the years wore on.

Pope John Paul also mentioned the historian Tacitus, writing between A.D. 115 and 120 on the burning of Rome, which the emperor Nero had blamed on the Christians. Tacitus recorded that the founder of this sect (“hated for their abominations”) was one “Christus,” who “suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate.”

Christ also appears, by name only, in the “Lives of the Caesars,” by the historian Suetonius, writing around A.D. 121.

Another brief but more telling remark comes in the testimony of Pliny the Younger, writing in A.D. 111-113 when he was Roman governor of Bithynia, on the Black Sea. Reporting his routine interrogations and torture to the emperor Trajan, Pliny spoke of the Christian sect as something harmless. They gather once a week, he wrote, “on a designated day, before dawn, to sing in alternating choirs a hymn to Christ as to a God.”

The pagan Pliny’s report, then, is among the earliest records of orthodox Christology – relating the early Church’s belief of the divinity in Christ. (Dan Brown, call your office.)

Perhaps the Pope could have mentioned more in Tertio Millennio Adveniente. For instance, Celsus, an anti-Christian polemicist of around A.D. 180, never for a moment doubted that Jesus had lived. Rather, he directed his attacks at the divinity of Christ and the veracity of His miracles.

The mother of all early pagan records, perhaps, was by the neoplatonist Porphyry, who wrote 15 volumes against Christ – again, never denying that He had lived, but taking aim rather at the Church’s idea of Who and what Jesus was.

Porphyry’s nastiness was so offensive to Christians, however, that they fairly thoroughly wiped it out, once they were running the empire. Today, Porphyry is known only from what the Church Fathers said in response to him.

It is one of the ironies of history that all those contemporaries who made such passing reference to Christ should themselves become passing references in today’s record of that pivotal moment in human history.

In Tertio Millennio Adveniente, Pope John Paul, after giving a paragraph to Josephus, Suetonius, Tacitus and Pliny, swept on to 54 paragraphs about Jesus of Nazareth whose birth the world marked in the year 2000.

Indeed, today the world marks all its years from the birthday of that obscure carpenter of so many years ago.

If Christians can draw a lesson for themselves, maybe it is that they should expect little from today’s media and opinion-makers – who may be tomorrow’s footnotes.

But the truth about history endures in the Lord of History. Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever.

Underwater divers can actually go parish-hopping in the now-submerged ancient town of Aperiae.

A second church has been found beneath the waters of the partially submerged settlement of Aperlae on the southern coast of Turkey, adding credence to the idea that the city was a popular pit-stop for Christian pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land from the fourth to seventh century A.D.

This latest discovery has brought the total number of churches identified at Aperlae to five, an unusually high number, considering the population of the settlement most likely never exceeded 1,000 people.

“During the first several centuries of the Christian era, churches were a sign of regional importance, much like domed sports stadiums are today,” said Robert Hohlfelder, an underwater archaeologist and history professor at the University of Colorado, who, along with Lindley Vann of the University of Maryland, has led surveys of the site since 1996. “It looks like this city invested considerable capital in these prestige symbols. Another reason for so many churches is that Aperlae may have been a way station for pilgrims traveling to and from the Holy Land.”

The location of the two submerged churches, which were originally built on the shores of the city and later fell victim to earthquake-related shoreline subsidence, emphasized the religious importance of water and gave seafarers a place to pray for safe journeys, says Hohlfelder.

See an above-water shot at Archaeology magazine.