Conflicting criminal jurisdictions in the New Testament and the early Church

Book section : Chapter

The early Christians engaged Jewish and Roman criminal jurisdictions as two distinct instantiations of a legal Other, sometimes set in deliberate contrast, and in addition to emerging internal processes of Christian jurisdiction. Pre-Constantinian Christianity never simply abdicated or ‘outsourced’ criminal justice to Rome. Before long, Christians began to co-opt and critique Roman criminal jurisprudence in the context of persecution, increasingly in a context of public discourse about philosophy and about ethics. There was also an important quietist strain of resistance that deliberately withdrew from such engagement. But by the third century, the patent legal injustice of persecution emboldened legally trained writers like Tertullian and Lactantius publicly to assert Christians’ superior citizenship and Romanitas while castigating Rome’s corruption of its own legal principles and best practice on matters including due process, precedent, and torture-induced confessions. All the while, the potential for a Constantinian settlement was latent in affirmations of the Roman state’s God-given role as the restrainer of evil.

Authors: Bockmuehl, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Reviewed (other)
• Publisher: Routledge
• Host title: Christianity and Criminal Law: An Introduction
• Chapter number: 3
• Place of publication: New York
• Publication date: 2020-05-28
• Edition: 1st
• DOI: 10.4324/9781003015260-4
• EISBN: 9781003015260
• ISBN: 9780367858254
• Language: English
• Subtype: Chapter