ABSTRACT
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. However, by the third century, the patent legal injustice of persecution emboldened legally trained writers such as Tertullian and Lactantius publicly toassert 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 the affirmation of the Roman State’s God-given role as the restrainer of evil.
