Book Notice: Christianity in Roman Africa

Book Notice: Christianity in Roman Africa April 28, 2015

J. Patout Burns & Robin M. Jensen

Christianity in Roman Africa: The Development of Its Practices and Beliefs
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014.
Available at Amazon.com

This is a detailed and documented history of the Christian church in North Africa. Its a great amalgam of literary and archaeological evidence about the Donatist controversy, Decian and Diocletian persecutions, and church order and practice. There’s great stuff on baptism, eucharist, burial practices, martyrologies, and clerical offices. It is the fruit of the CHROMA (Christianity in Roman Africa) project. It’s very pictorial and definitely well resourced.

Many highlights, one was the description of the difference between the Greek and Latin church: “Whereas those Greeks focused their concern with salvation on the nature of the Godhead and its manifestation in Christ, these Latins worried about the adequacy of human organizations and ministers to mediate the divine life. The Greeks studied the interaction of the divine and human in the Savior; the Latins attempted to discern the standards which would guarantee the divine operation in the rituals of the church” (pp. xlvi-xlvii). And I enjoyed the sections on the practice of eucharist and ordination in the early church according to Cyprian, Augustine, and Tertullian, a whole lot of things I hadn’t heard before.

My only quip is that there wasn’t much on the church before 180 AD. They tend to ignore the significance of manuscripts for what they tell us about Christianity in Egypt. There’s nothing on the Nag Hammadi codices as far as I can tell, nor the Epistle of Barnabas, or the story/legend of St. Mark coming to Alexandria, or even the Egyptian Gnostic Basilides.

Otherwise a great volume and a necessary resource for anyone serious about the history of Christianity in North Africa.


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