Romans themselves spoke and wrote Latin, and they imposed
their tongue as the language of public business in the western
empire; but in the provinces of the eastern Mediterranean the
language of civic politics and administration was Greek. There
were also various local languages, such as Egyptian, Aramaic, and
Palmyrene in the east, Punic in north Africa, and Celtic in Gaul
and Britain. These linguistic variations matched broader cultural
divergences, which were reflected, for example, by different
religious traditions (in terms of gods, rituals, temple design, and
so forth). Economic life too operated differently in different
provinces – and different systems could exist side by side within
single provinces. Social structures were also diverse. A propor-
tion of the empire’s population lived in cities, but many others
lived in villages or in isolated farmsteads. In some parts of the
Roman world, such as in the mountains of Rough Cilicia in south-
ern Asia Minor or along the desert fringes of north Africa, tribal
societies endured throughout the empire’s existence. Some regions
also boasted curious social customs, such as brother–sister mar-
riage in Egypt. Social divisions between rich and poor, elites and
peasants, will have fostered differences in education, lifestyles,
and life-expectancy within individual communities.
To what extent did this mosaic of cultural, social, and
economic diversity have an impact on early Christianity? One
influence was already traced in the last chapter, where we saw
that Christian communities developed at different rates of growth
and at different times in different places. Yet it was a character-
istic of early church writers to stress the essential unity of the
Christian movement. Some time around AD250, bishop Cyprian
of Carthage wrote a work tellingly entitled De Catholicae
Ecclesiae Unitate– this is usually rendered in modern versions
as something like On the Unity of the Catholic Church, in which
the term ‘catholic’ means that the church was universal. In this
work, Cyprian stressed how the church throughout the world was
a community united in faith, practice, and organization under
the leadership of its bishops:
ORTHODOXY AND ORGANIZATION IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY1
2
3
4
5
61
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
1711
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
147 Folio