A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

of Paul. In the Greek world, in the first century AD, Paul’s letters and theology
had laid the foundations for a Christianity that took root outside Judaism. Later
he became less influential. In the second century he had been championed by
Marcion (see p.43), but Marcion had been declared a heretic. The Church father
Tertullian went so far as to call Paul ‘the apostle of the heretics’. 2 Paul suffered
further by becoming associated with Gnosticism, a movement rejected by the
mainstream Church in the third century, and with the despised Manicheans, who
placed him second to Mani as a religious leader. As a result, many theologians
wrote their works without any reference to Paul, and those that have survived
often concern his personality rather than his letters. He is, for instance, presented
as the companion to one Thecla, whom he converted, but to whom some
accounts give greater prominence than they do to Paul. At the beginning of the
fourth century, when Constantine built the first great churches of Rome, that
erected in honour of St Peter was one of the largest, while the supposed place of
Paul’s martyrdom on the road to Ostia was marked by no more than a small
shrine.
It is only in the final decades of the fourth century that Paul became of interest
in the west. In the 380s, a massive basilica was built around his shrine, financed
by many Christian grandees, including Theodosius himself. In the first depiction
of Christ in Majesty, in the church of San Pudenziana in Rome (390), Peter is
accorded the place of honour at Christ’s right hand, but Paul comes next,
immediately on Christ’s left. This is a dramatic and unexpected elevation.
The roots of this change can be traced to the 360s, when one Marius
Victorinus produced the first Latin commentary on Paul. Little is known of
Victorinus, who appears to have been African by birth and a teacher of rhetoric
in Rome. Jerome writes that ‘in extreme old age, yielding himself to faith in
Christ, he wrote some very obscure books against Arius in a dialectical
style,which can only be understood by the learned, as well as commentaries on
the apostle Paul’. 3 However difficult Victorinus is to read - and one modern
commentator confesses to finding him ‘totally incomprehensible’ 4 - he reflects a
new interest in Paul. Five more Latin authors, including Jerome and Augustine,
would produce Pauline commentaries by 410. Paul’s most popular text was the
Letter to the Romans, which comes to predominate over his other writings to
such an extent that it has been called ‘one of the most influential documents of
western history’. 5 Some fifty commentaries on Romans had been written in the
Latin-speaking west by 1300, although many of these were derived from earlier