The Hellenic moment in ancient Christianity (1)

In a recent comment I cited a book which describes how Western Christianity absorbed a great deal of Germanic pagan culture following the collapse of the Roman Empire, and how what we now think of as traditional Christianity took on a Germanic martial tinge as a result. In that post I referred to the Christianity of the Empire as "primitive" Christianity, as distinguished from the later Germanized kind. Actually, this is much too simplistic, as is shown in Peter Brown's well-known and valuable (also, readable and not very long) work, The World of Late Antiquity (1971).

While Brown does not set out an explicit scheme, he seems to divide the history of Christianity in the Roman Empire into three phases, only the first of which can rightfully be called "primitive". This was Christianity in its first two centuries, until about 300 A.D. . . . . CONTINUE