ABSTRACT
To help understand the religious transformation of the Roman world, Gerald Bonner once made use of a distinction between two classes of persons: those ‘well disposed towards the Christian faith and to the Church, who could even adhere to them quite firmly, but who nevertheless still clung to the old faiths to a greater or lesser degree’; and ‘sincere converts who, while accepting Christianity for better or worse, continued to retain some of their old customs and habits of thought’.1 The distinction, he thought, is often not easy to apply; the hallmark of the latter group was their readiness to accept baptism or martyrdom, indicating the readiness of a person ‘to commit himself to Christ, even if he did not fully comprehend the Christian faith and its implications’. Many churchmen around AD 400 would have concurred. Martyrdom or baptism were, indeed, the decisive marks of a Christian; but now that the age of the persecutions was a distant memory, and martyrdom, or willingness to undergo it, no longer a test of Christian commitment, baptism seemed, to many, a net of too coarse a mesh to catch the ‘authentic Christians’ among those who were Christian in name, but not in reality. Bonner rightly saw a clue here to the the process of ‘Christianisation’ of the Roman world: for the dividing line between ‘pagan’ and ‘Christian’, always liable to shift, was especially unstable at the end of the fourth century and early in the fifth.
