In the second century, when Christianity was diverse and, as a good essay in this collection demonstrates, all sorts of religious experts could be encountered in a city of the broad Roman empire, what counted as a Christian school? A first reaction: we do not have much evidence, but the place to start would be the references to teachers, teaching, students, and place of learning in Justin Martyr, his student Tatian, and Marcion. Three of the studies in this collection address this directly. The volume as a whole, however, does not frame the issues in a satisfactorily critical fashion, and there are weak and unrelated papers here. (The volume's title promises a narrower focus: the capital city itself. For an excellent account of “Christianity” in this period, with ample disagreement about the periodization, degree of unity, and appropriate scholarly approaches, see James Carleton Paget and Judith Lieu, Christianity in the Second Century: Themes and Developments [Cambridge University Press, 2017]).
The positive first: the volume as a whole reconsiders the evidence for schools in Christian contexts and schooling in Christianity. Robin Jensen's chapter nicely illustrates the change in depictions of Jesus, noted by Zanker, from miracle worker to teacher in the fourth century, and connects this to the broader phenomenon of images of intellectuals in private homes. In her final three sentences, Jensen suggests that the iconography was following, a little late, the apologists’ concern with Jesus as the teacher of true philosophy. Heidi Wendt considers Christians as intellectuals in second-century Rome. She understands Christian intellectuals not as the coming into maturity of Christianity—i.e., Christians now theorizing their religion—but as one manifestation of the ferment of intellectual and religious experimentation in the imperial period. Both the gospels and heretical writings are then efforts to promote the authors as authorities on Christ, with considerable polemic. The emphasis on competition within a culture seeking religious expertise is most welcome. Winfrich Löhr here offers a useful overview on Marcion, including testimonia to and scholarly judgments about Marcion's writings, with discussion of the recent efforts (Vinzent) to present Marcion's Gospel as the stimulus to the composition or (Klinghardt) reediting with addition of Luke of the canonical gospels. He teases out the polemical background in calling Marcion a nautēs which should put to rest any simple conclusions about his identity and social status. In sum, this chapter is a fine state of the question piece, but as to schools and schooling the reader is told that Marcion had probably set up a school in Rome.
A bold, almost manifesto-like chapter by Fernando Rivas Rebaque, “Justin Martyr as an Organic Christian Intellectual in Rome,” treats the apologists as an innovation within Christianity and uses the distinction from Gramsci of organic intellectuals—i.e., those critical of and not supportive of the institutions and ideologies of their upbringing. The author is arguing with Gramsci that certain intellectuals are class traitors. Maybe so. But aren't all converts traitors to the prior regime/system? Isn't the Epicurean an organic intellectual as he forges his own community against politically involved, kin-respecting, more ordinary Romans, and, if he has students or a school or a patron, is he then inorganic? I don't think Gramsci helps us much in understanding the complexity of expressions of belonging to the in and out group, the self-defintions of the newly arrived at true wisdom, and the old patterns from which the convert distances himself. Nonetheless, this is a lively chapter and admirable as an effort to see the apologists as a socially motivated, productive moment in Christianity.
Several chapters review evidence (usefully) but offer (appropriately) slim conclusions. The first chapter “Jewish Teachers in Rome?” ends appropriately with a question mark. There is a good deal of “may have been,” “set of possibilities,” “neither can we be sure,” “we know nothing about,” and in good measure because evidence for Jewish schools comes from Alexandria not Rome, loss of Hellenistic Jewish literature, and so on. The chapter is useful as a review of scholarship, but it never emerges from a certain fencing with aporiae. Alas, the second chapter title ends with a question mark: Einar Thomassen's “Were there Valentinian schools?” and the chapter itself with “In the absence of any solid evidence for organized teaching activities. . .” Christoph Markschies's chapter, “Esoteric Knowledge in Platonism and in Christian Gnosis,” was a lecture given for a different conference (on esoteric knowledge), with the addition of “a few footnotes,” as the first note says. This begins as a review of a 1994 book and at the end calls for more investigation to see if the esoteric lies behind the exoteric Valentianian texts.
Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui's “Tatian Theodidaktos on Mimetic Knowledge” is a close investigation of the term thauma in Tatian, who had called his teacher Justin thaumasiotatos and attacked the theater as producer of false thauma. Tatian's idea of learning as mimesis of God through scripture necessarily leaves us with few human details about schools and schooling. Last comes a chapter with plenty of (welcome) historical detail. The editor, Professor Snyder, investigates what the epithet in Theodotus the Cobbler, a Christian teacher, might have meant. From the shoemaker in Plato to the places in Rome where the cobbler lived, the reader is taken on a rich tour of possible cultural meanings. Too bad so few of the contributors have not followed the editor's lead.
