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The Place of Miracles in the Conversion of the Ancient World to Christianity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

W. H. C. Frend
W. H. C. Frend*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Extract

In C.435 Sozomen, the fifth-century lawyer and continuator of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History, describes how probably near the end of Constantine’s reign his grandfather and his family were converted to Christianity. He attributes this to the work of the Palestinian monk, Hilarion. He writes of Alaphion, a friend of the family at that time living in Bethelia near Gaza, a pagan stronghold:

Alaphion it appears was possessed of a devil; and neither the pagans nor the Jews could by any enchantments deliver him from this affliction, but Hilarion, by simply calling on the name of Christ expelled the demon and Alaphion and his whole family immediately embraced the faith.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 41: Signs, Wonders, Miracles Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church , 2005 , pp. 11 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2005

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References

1 Sozomen, Historia Ecclesiastica, v. 15. 14–17: Sozomenus Kirchengeschichte, ed. Bidez, Joseph and Christian Hansen, Günther, GCS 50 (Berlin, 1960), 216 Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., ii.7.1–12. Also, the case of the advocate Aquilinus, ibid., ii.3.

3 Ibid., ii.6 and ii.5 (pagan surrenders).

4 Cited from E. A. Westermarck, Ritual and Belief in Morocco, 2 vols (London, 1926), 1: 414; re. fear of the Evil Eye in Syria, see Peter Brown, ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies 51 (1971), 80–101, repr. in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (London, 1982), 103–52, 114.

5 Personal observation, summer 1938. I also saw ‘evil eyes’ painted on the sides of barrows used for selling ice-creams, as well as the Carthaginian ‘hand of Fatima’. The laurel was also regarded as a charm against the Evil Eye, see Westermarck, Ritual, 1: 108.

6 Contra Celsum, i.68, transl. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge, 1953), 62–3.

7 Ibid., iii.26 (trans. Chadwick, 144).

8 Ibid., iii.27.

9 Ibid., iii.24 (trans. Chadwick, 142).

10 See Remus, Harold, Pagan-Christian Conflict over Miracle in the Second Century (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 97–103 Google Scholar. Aristides appears also to criticize severely as being shameless, willful and neglectful of the common weal, either Christians, or Cynics (p. 101). Cf. also E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine (Cambridge, 1965), 40–2, where he describes the terrifying anxiety dreams and megalomaniac fantasies that afflicted Aristides during his stay at Asclepius’ shrine.

11 Described, illustrated and discussed in full by Jérôme Carcopino, Aspects mystiques de la Rome païenne (Paris, 1942), 208–42.

12 Origen, Contra Celsum, i.38 (trans. Chadwick, 37).

13 Ibid., i.62 (trans. Chadwick, 56).

14 Ibid., i.68 (trans. Chadwick, 63).

15 Ibid., ii.31 (trans. Chadwick, 93).

16 Ibid., ii.28 (trans. Chadwick, 91).

17 Ibid., ii.79 (trans. Chadwick, 127).

18 Arnobius, Adversus nationes libri VII 1. 63–5, ed. August us Reifferscheid, CSEL 4 (Vienna, 1875), 43–6 Google Scholar.

19 See examples illustrated in Angelo di Berardino, Encyclopedia of the Early Church, trans. Adrian Walford, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1991), 2: fig. 152 (Healing of the issue of blood, Milan); fig. 139 (Healing of the Blind Man, Clermont); fig. 259 (Raising of Lazarus, Rome).

20 Origen, Contra Celsum, i.62.

21 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, iii.37.3.

22 Ibid., iii.26, transl. Lake, Kirsopp, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1980), 1: 261 Google Scholar.

23 The Acts of John, 42, in The Apocryphal New Testament, ed. and transl. M. K. James (Oxford, 1926), 228–70, 236–8.

24 See Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (AD 100–400) (New Haven, CT, and London, 1984), 26. For John’s cures, see p. 236: ‘John by the power of God healed all the diseases’.

25 See W. H. C. Frend, The Archaeology of Early Christianity: a History (London, 1996), 139, giving references to excavations on the temple site by the Austro-Hungarian team before the First World War, with special reference to those by Rupert Heberdey.

26 Incidents cited from Brown, ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man’, 120–4. Miracles were ‘the proof of power’.

27 Theodoret, Historia religiosa, 26 (PG 82, 1476A); cited from Macmullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire, 1–2.

28 Sozomen, Historia Ecclesiastica, i. 18.

29 See MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire, 62.

30 Ibid., Curse by the Syrian monk Aphraates.

31 Ambrose, Ep. 22; Augustine, Confessions, ix.7.16, trans. William Watts, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols (London and New York, 1912), 2: 32–3; cf. De civitate Dei, xxii.8.8.

32 Augustine, De vera religione, 25.47 (PL 34, 142) and Sermo 99.3 (PL 38, 540) (c.400): ‘Modo caro caeca non aperit oculos miraculo Domini’.

33 For a discussion and description of the sites identified with the cult of Stephen, see Yvette Duval, Loca sanctorum Africae: le culte des martyrs en Afrique du IVe au VIIe siècle, Collection de l’Ecole française de Rome 58, 2 vols (Rome, 1982), 2: 624–32.

34 Recorded by Augustine in sections of his De civitate Dei, e.g. xxii.8.

35 Origen, Contra Celsum, i.43 and 46.

36 Jerome, Chronicon 313F (ad ann. 327), in Die Chronik der Hieronymus, in Eusebius Werke vol. 7, ed. Rudolf Helm, GCS 24 and 34, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1913 and 1926) repr. as one volume (Berlin, 1956), 152. Wrongly dated by Jerome to A.D. 327.

37 For Paul’s downplaying of the apparently miraculous among the Christians of Corinth, 1 Cor. 1, 18–25 (manifestations of human wisdom) cited by Origen, Contra Celsum, iii.47–48. For Origen’s own view that miracles were secondary to Christian understanding of Christ ‘weaving together human and divine nature’, see ibid., iii.28. High character was expected of Christian leaders: ibid., iii.28 and 30 (qualities of the leaders of Churches compared with those of city councilors), and miracles secondary.

38 Described by Gregory himself in his Letter of Thanks to Origen: Remerciement à Origene, ed. Henri Crouzel, SC 148 (Paris, 1969), cc. 13–15, 159–73.

39 Contra Celsum, i.68 and ii.50 (moral reformation).

40 Justin Martyr, 1 Apol. 14 and Dialogue with Trypho, 30.3 and 35.7.

41 Tertullian, Apologia, 38.1 and 39.1.

42 Lucian, The Passing of Peregrinus, 11.13, trans. A. M. Harmon, Loeb Classical Library, 8 vols (London and Cambridge, MA, 1913–67), 5 (1936): 12–15.

43 Tertullian, Apologia, 39.7; for this writer, Christians were ‘brethren’ (ibid., 39.10).

44 Julian, Ep. 49; see also Sozomen, Historia Ecclesiastica, 5.16, 5–15.

45 Tertullian, Apologia, 50.13.

46 Justin Martyr, ii. Apol. 12.

47 Tertullian, Apologia, 50.1.5.

48 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, v.1.60 (trans. Lake, 1: 434–5).

49 ‘Acta Pionii’, ed. H. Musurillo, in Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford, 1972), 136–67. The best discussion of these Acta is by Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (Harmondsworth, 1986), 460–92.

50 Lactantius, Divine Institutes, v.23, ed. Pierre Monat, SC 204 (Paris, 1973), 254.

51 Ibid.

52 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, vii.9.4–5 (events of 311–12).