(upbeat folk music fades) (upbeat folk music) (upbeat folk music fades) - How are you doing?

I'm very glad to be with you again.

You remember, last time, we were discussing the Roman army as a force in ancient civilization, a moving force which helped transmit the ideas, the concepts, the religions, in the early centuries of the empire and thus the early centuries of Christianity.

The legions, as you remember, were stationed here along the Limes, the line in Germany, along your Roman wall in Britain, all along the Danube River, the Ripa Gothica, the Gothic Bank, on the fringes of your desert here on the Sahara, and out here along the fringes of the desert in Syria and Palestine, and always watching the active Persian military frontier in the east.

Thus, the soldiers, the Roman legions, the great legionary encampments, were active areas for transmission of ideas.

And it's during this particular period of the Early Principate, as we call it, when the emperor referred to himself as First Citizen, Princeps, that your Christian Church is to develop.

Now it has been said and said very truly that after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, probably in 30 AD, possibly before that, certainly not on the Year 1.

After the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the Christian Church goes into a long, dark tunnel and comes out in your third century after Christ, with a bishop, with a perfected and sophisticated organization, with a perfected and sophisticated hierarchical structure, a hierarchy of offices based primarily on your Roman structure of offices and your Roman Imperial organization.

Just exactly how Christianity should have evolved or does evolve as a sacramental hierarchical religion, from non-sacramental, non-hierarchical Judaism is very difficult to say, indeed.

We don't really know where the borrowings come in, where the stress merely of the passing of the centuries of human experience is to discipline this organization.

We do know that as organization rises with the reorganization of the empire itself.

I should like to talk about that very briefly.

From 235 AD until the end of your third century, the 280s, there were more than six dozen pretenders for the Roman Imperial Throne.

This is a period of anarchy, of civil war, of pressures from inside as well as outside with the new Gothic folk and German folk evolving as nations, as peoples, with a recognized military potential along the northern frontier, with a constant pressure of a civilized empire, the Sasanian Persians, pushing west out of modern Iran, out of Ancient Persia, with your nomads from the Arabian desert and your great nomadic peoples out of the Northern Sahara raiding along the periphery of the empire wherever that empire touched on the desert.

It is this world in which Christianity too is to evolve and in which this reorganized empire is to evolve.

It doesn't really come into being until the reign of Diocletian, the Emperor Diocletian, the tough Illyrian soldier.

He came from what is today modern Yugoslavia.

At the end of your third century after Christ, Diocletian realized that he could not govern an empire that stretched all the way from the Persian frontier to the wall of Britain, and from the North Sahara to your Danube and Rhine.

It could not be governed by one man from the no-longer strategic city of Rome.

It must be governed, in his opinion, by a series of fragmented empires, of separated empires, under leaders responsible for those areas for their defense and their administration.

And so Diocletian organized the empire, or reorganized the empire into four main sections.

The prefectures, the four prefectures of Gaul, which included what is today modern France and part of Belgium, running along the Rhine River, Spain, and the British Isles, or rather Britain, since Ireland never came under Roman control.

The Prefecture of Italy, which included here the territories of Raetia and Noricum, that would be modern Switzerland and Western Austria, the Italian Peninsula, Corsica, Sardinia, and of course parts of North Africa, the Prefecture of Illyricum, which included the area here of Eastern Austria, Hungary, modern Hungary, Yugoslavia, the Danube Frontier and Greece, the Balkan Peninsula, in other words, and the prefecture of your east, which watched the frontiers of the east, the Black Sea area against your Persians and against your nomads out of the Arabian desert.

Four prefectures.

The Prefecture of Gaul had its capital at Treveri.

That's the modern city of Trier.

Sometimes your junior emperor ruled instead at the city in the north of Eboracum.

That's the modern York.

How the Saxons got York out of Eboracum I could not tell you.

This is obviously a linguistic development of a later time.

The Prefecture of Italy was not ruled from Rome, as you might think, but ruled from the modern city of Milan, the ancient city of Mediolanum, watching your alpine passes to the north.

Your Prefecture of Illuricum was ruled from a city called Sirmium up here on your Save River, which watched the Ripa Gothica, the Gothic Bank of your Danube.

And your Prefecture of the East was ruled from Nicomedia.

Nicomedia is right here, right across your Propontis, your Bosporus, from the ancient city of Byzantium, which is of course to become the capital of Constantine the Great in the next century and be renamed Constantinople, the city of Constantine.

Four capitals, four prefectures ruled by four emperors, two senior emperors, the Augusti, and two junior emperors called the Caesars.

Now, this is rather a naive solution for a very difficult problem.

Diocletian's idea, his concept was that when the two senior emperors reached a certain age where they no longer could be effective, they would retire and be succeeded by their two Caesars, who in turn would select, this is co-option, not election, they would select or co-opt two junior emperors, two new Caesars to replace, of course, their own regimes.

Naturally, it didn't work.

When Diocletian retired, which he did, the empire fell apart in the 30 years of civil war and more Caesars and Augusti, and really you want to worry about, all striving to take over central rule.

It ended up again with one-man rule under Constantine.

But this was the theory.

And this four-prefecture empire was divided and turned into sections called, in Greek, the diocese or dioceses, 13 sections ruled by vicars, Vicarius.

We see that title reoccurring in the Christian Church.

The great provinces, which are shown here on your map, were divided and turned into 120 smaller provinces, each one under a provincial governor.

And below that, the basic unit of government was the city-state, the city, the Civitas, ruled in turn by your city senate, your curia.

The curia was responsible to your provincial governor, who in turn was responsible to your diocesan vicar, who in turn was responsible again to a junior or a senior emperor.

And the senior Emperor Diocletian himself sat at Nicomedia east of the Bosporus there, and presumably ruled the empire through his hierarchy of subordinates.

Each diocese had its military leadership.

And you see beginning here the evolvement of some of your later medieval titles: your Commander of the Horse and Commander of the Foot, your Dux equitum, Cavalry Commander, and Dux peditum, Infantry Commander.

Your great military districts came under the command of, for example, the Magister Militum per Orientem, the Commander-in-Chief for the Eastern Military District, who under the emperor watched the whole Military District of the East or your Magister Militum of the Gothic Bank, who watched the Gothic Bank against the inroads of the Gothic peoples pushing down from the north.

You have to remember, this is an empire under siege.

This is an empire always watching its frontiers where the soldier of Rome, the swords of the Roman army, permitted the Roman Empire to live in comparative peace except for the all-too-ubiquitous civil wars behind that frontier.

Of course, we must not make the error that some people have made in thinking that during this time, the empire itself, its civil service, its army organization fell apart, because it didn't.

Your Roman civil service probably is one of the best the world ever evolved.

And undoubtedly, your provinces continued to be run with a certain degree of skill and dedication.

Your frontier areas undoubtedly still had a good sound administration through most of the time.

Your army again held its organization and usually watched the frontiers and kept guard on the frontiers with no great difficulty until the end of your fourth century after Christ when Barbarian pressure really started pushing across into the empire proper.

Most of your Barbarian peoples, your outsiders coming in who settle in the empire were recruited into the army, and progressively the Roman army during this time becomes barbarized: your Germans, your Goths, your Sarmatians, your Berbers in the Sahara, your Arabs all become part of this Imperial Army, all members of the Imperial Military Forces.

So you find an increasingly barbarized empire and an increasingly watched empire as the pressures start building up along your frontiers.

Now, the Christian Church evolved the same organization.

Early, we don't exactly know when, certainly by the end of the second century after Christ, you find a Christian hierarchy, a bishop.

It means overseer, episcopus, probably taken from the title of the great overseers of the Imperial farms, the latifundia, which provided grain for an always-hungry empire.

Your presbyter, your elder, from which we get our word priest, your helper or server, diakonos, your deacon, your acolyte, again, your aid or helper, your exorcist to exercise away the evil spirits, your doorkeeper.

And senior to these in the early and primitive church, of course, the apostles while they still lived, and prophets, prophets who still spoke with voices and prophesied.

Finally, the church had to discipline your prophetic group.

They no longer were a title or part of your church organization, because after the church discovered that the Second Coming was not going to come, that the Christian Church had to be part, become part of your general life of an empire, then the office of prophet drops away and Christianity starts equating to life within the Roman empire.

We know all too little about these early years.

Almost all of our Christian writers come in your second or third centuries after Christ.

There's almost nothing out of the early period that we can put our hands on, really.

There are fragments, some of them fascinating fragments.

We don't know what happened, for example, at Whitsuntide.

But something obviously did happen at Whitsuntide when the 12 apostles, the 12 humble men of a small dispartite Jewish sect, as it started out in Jerusalem, according to Christian legend, divided the world among them and went out to Christianize the world.

There are fragments only.

We have, for example, in a still extant Act of Thomas or Acts of Thomas, which the church later repudiated as part of our New Testament, it's a Gnostic act or Gnostic, part of the Gnostic Gospels; The Gnostics were philosophers attempting to become a religion or to form a religion from their philosophy, but a bane to the Early Christian Church.

And the Acts of Thomas record that the apostles met in Jerusalem.

And Judas Thomas, Saint Thomas, Thomas the Doubter drew by a lot the realm of India and went east to Christianize India.

Origen, Saint Origen, in the second century, the head of the catechetical school at Alexandria, the first great Christian school, or university, if you like, preserves the legend that Thomas went to Parthia, which is of course Persia.

Now, according to your Acts of Thomas, Thomas went down to a royal city, probably Andropolis, went down the Nile, crossed the desert over to your Red Sea and took ship from Andropolis on the Red Sea, following your monsoon winds across the Indian Ocean to India, where he landed sometime around 50 AD in the Punjab.

Now, this is the legend.

There he stayed at the city of Taxila in the realm of a prince named Gondophares, Gudnaphar or Gondophernes, and his neighboring princedom held by a brother named Gad.

Now, legend leaves us there, and we pick up of course with history.

There was a king, there really was a king named Gondophernes or Gudnaphar in the kingdom or principality of Taxila in the Punjab.

It was a Parthian dynasty, a Persian dynasty, and his brother or a neighboring kingdom was ruled by a prince named Gudea, which comes close to your Gad of the Acts of Thomas.

We know that the kingdom of Taxila, around 52 AD, we know this historically, was destroyed by some very unpleasant nomad peoples out of Central Asia called the Kushans, Tatar Iranians of some sort, who destroyed that Parthian kingdom in the Punjab in Northwest India.

And we know again that your present-day Church of the Mar Thoma, the Church of Thomas, the ancient native Christian Church of India that predates all the missionary efforts of our own 18th, 19th, and 20th century, claims foundation by Thomas and claims foundation in 52 AD, which fits right in with the known facts that Taxila was destroyed by the Kushans, and Thomas very well might have fled to South India to found his church, the Mar Thoma, the Church of Thomas, which is so ancient it is part of the Indian culture pattern.

It has nothing at all, no relation whatsoever with your churches and the missionaries.

These legends are part of this dark period in Christianity, which is so fascinating and so interesting and so much part of your historians' projection into your Christian past.

And so by your second century AD, the end of the second century, in the beginning of the third, Christianity had modeled its organization.

It had come into being as a sacramental church with a recognized service and sacraments.

The great dioceses, the dioceses within the church and within the government ruled by exarchs within the church itself, ruled by exarchs or possibly your archbishops.

Your provinces were ruled by primates or metropolitans, and your cities, your city-states by bishops.

And by the end of your third century AD, your great church cities were beginning to evolve.

Rome in the West, the only one in the West, the Archbishop of Rome.

Antioch here in the East, Alexandria, naturally, here in Egypt, Antioch here in Syria, ancient capitals of ancient empires.

Jerusalem, very naturally indeed, here in Southern Palestine, though for a hundred years after the Dispersion in the 70 AD when Titus and Vespasian, the church in Jerusalem dies out and has moved to Caesarea on the coast and comes back to Jerusalem, which may be why Jerusalem never remains an important, truly important archbishopric within the church itself.

And later on, of course, Constantinople, after it became the Imperial City of Rome, the great metropolitan archbishops, what later is known as the Pentarchy, the five great archbishoprics.

And yet Christianity was not the simple religion of the Sermon on the Mount, a combination of sophisticated Greek philosophy, a combination possibly of customs, ideas drawn from other religions.

After all, the worship of Isis in Egypt had a vested clergy and a communion service with sacramental wine.

It had a liturgy and a ritual.

It had hymns.

Whether Christianity borrowed from these religions such as Mithraism or the Isis religion or the worship of Cybele, the Magna Mater is very difficult to say.

It could have been the tremendous longing at this time that people had in a completely disturbed era for a religion of salvation, and thus you had parallel development.

The people naturally turned to sacramental religions, religions which promised salvation, that promised a hope of another world since the present world was very unpleasant, indeed, in which they lived.

Certainly you had a baptism in other religions.

And you had a baptism in Christianity, though it usually was adult baptism in early Christendom.

You were baptized just before you died.

It was a final act, though initiates could be baptized, adult initiates, the laying on of hands of your bishops, particularly of the Great Churches which claimed apostolic foundation.

Now, remember that Alexandria and Egypt traditionally was founded by Mark.

It probably was.

The first gospel is Mark.

Mark about 65 AD; we think the first gospel was produced about 65 AD.

The church in Antioch definitely and historically was founded by Peter.

The church in Rome by tradition was founded by Peter and Paul.

The church in Jerusalem, of course, or the Ancient City of the Jews, by James, James the Just, possibly the brother of our Lord, this of course is a matter of dispute and study still, was the first bishop of your church in Jerusalem.

Later on, Constantinople claims, probably erroneously, foundation by Saint Andrew.

All of these are part of your Christian story, and these great apostolic centers of Rome and Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and eventually in your fourth century, Constantinople become the Pentarchy, the five great archbishoprics of the church, which are to dominate church policy and church history from this time on.

It is during this period then that your concept of apostolic succession, of the bishops laying their hands upon the bishops who lay their hands, upon the bishops who lay their hands takes place.

And it's during this third century particularly when your terrible persecutions are to cement Christendom itself, the Christian Church.

Now, there'd always been persecutions.

From the very beginning of the Christian Church, there were persecutions, but they came to a terrible culmination.

In the reign of the Emperor Decius in your 249-250 period, when Decius tried to make everyone within the empire, remember, he was killed in his Gothic campaign, everyone in the empire had to swear allegiance to the emperor and the empire by making sacrifice to the gods of the empire.

It's under Decius that your great persecutions take place.

It is under his success of Valerian who was captured by the Persians in the Eastern Persian campaign.

It's under Valerian's son, Gallienus, that the persecutions continue and then finally stop.

And it's during this time that your Christian writers, later on, people like Lactantius wrote his "De Mortibus Persecutorum" concerning the dead of the persecutions, (indistinct) memorialized the great period in which the blood of the martyrs became the seed of the church.

That simple men and women die with such transcendent courage, such magnificent courage that they are to bring in converts not only from the humble where the church began, but from the aristocracy as well.

And it's from this period we shall move into next time and talk about the first Christian emperor, Constantine the Great.

Thank you very much.

(upbeat folk music) (upbeat folk fades) (upbeat folk music) (upbeat folk fades)