The Early Christian Church. Volume I, The First Christian Century; Volume II, The SecondChristian Century by Philip CarringtyonReview by: Kenneth Scott LatouretteThe American Historical Review, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Apr., 1958), pp. 642-643Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1848888 .

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642 Reviews of Books good in human terms? Some, such as the physicist Democritus, were supporters of democracy and praised concord and equality.

All these things are explored by Havelock, but his main concern is, neverthe- less, with Plato and Aristotle, who were both reporters and critics of their prede- cessors. He believes that they replaced the doctrine of free development of human institutions by a teleological idealism, which was used to support their notion of a closed, static, caste society, narrow in outlook and primitive in economics, sup- ported by a rigidly authoritarian system of education, the values of which were located in heaven and discovered by dialectic. This concept was imposed on posterity in spite of the (supposed) end of the Greek city at Alexander's conquests and the introduction of a (supposed) brotherhood of man, which the Romans later (supposedly) made the basis of their empire. This baneful influence on political and moral thought has survived to mislead the modern world.

If we could take all of this at Havelock's own evaluation, we should have to credit him with a notable achievement. He has displayed extreme ingenuity, not least in his analysis of Aristotle, which separates out everything "liberal" as non- Aristotelian. But I am not convinced that things were this simple and schematic. Ancient man was complex. He was also religious. The "liberals" fell back on a natural right as dogmatic as Plato's ideas. Aristotle's concept of education was as liberal, if more thoughtful, than that of modern educators. Plato and Aristotle were both concerned with natural development of institutions, and their intel- lectualism, a high achievement of the Greek polis, was as much and as little a "natural" phenomenon as the commercial and social life that Havelock regards as the foundations of the amity and peaceableness that looms so large in his own thinking.

Yale University C. BRADFORD WELLES

THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCH. Volume I, THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY; Volume II, THE SECOND CHRISTIAN CENTURY. By Philip Carrington. (New York: Cambridge University Press. I957. PP. Xx, 519; Xiii, 518. $I7.50 the set.)

THE Anglican archbishop of Quebec has here giv en us an important study of the Christian church in its first two centuries, with a condensed account of the third century. The narrative is based almost entirely on the contemporary docu- mentary records, in general taken up in what the author believes to be the chronological sequence of their composition. The book is not written primarily for the specialist. Footnote references to the literature are almost entirely lacking, and the appended bibliographies make no pretense of being exhaustive. Yet the author obviously has a wide familiarity with the pertinent scholarship and has had the advantage of extensive consultations with experts. He has at- tempted to sketch the cultural and especially the political setting. The result is

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Carrington: Early Christaan Church 643

two solid but readable volumes with the superb mechanical workmanship to be expected of the Cambridge University Press. The text is enriched with excellent illustrations, most of them of scenes and persons which are coincident with the narrative.

The author is by no means oblivious of the controversial issues on which he has ventured an opinion, but he does not hesitate to express his judgment. For example, he has a high regard for the Acts of the Apostles as history and claims for Luke the authorship of the "we" sections of that book. He believes that the Fourth Gospel was by John the son of Zebedee, although he suggests that that apostle may not have composed the entire Gospel but may have left material that was worked over by others. He holds that the First Epistle of Peter was written or dictated by him whose name it bears and that the Epistle to the Ephesians was by Paul. In contrast to some specialists, he views the greetings in the final chapter of the Epistle to the Romans as a messa-,e to Christians in Rome, not as detached from some other letter. Hie comes out against the theory of Paul's Ephesian cap- tivity and is of the opinion that the Babylon in Revelation refers to Jerusa!em and not Rome. He is convinced that early Christianity was not, as many have declared, a proletarian movement, spreading solely among slaves and depressed foreign groups, because its literature shows that its intellectual and literary stand- ards were of the highest, even if not of the classical schools, and the evidence of its cemeteries proves that it was in touch with the noble families. He thinks it probable that Paul was released from his initial imprisonmnent in Rome and went to Spain and then to Asia and that the Pastoral Epistles are from these years. He is thoroughly skeptical of the interpretation of the Ignatian epistle to the Romans that claims it proves the author recognized the Church in Rome as having taught other churches. iHe is not convinced that the famous passage in Irenaeus (Ad. Haer. III, 3, I) is correctly translated "it is necessary for every church to agree" with the Church in Rome.

The author offers us some very interesting conjectures. For example, he states as a fact that Luke spent the two years of Paul's imprisonment in Caesarea in lit- erary labors, especially in gathering the material incorporated in his Gospel and Acts.

Perhaps it is asking for too much, but we miss in these volumes an adequate account of Gnosticism. We are given hints of it, but only incidentally and only as viewed by its Catholic critics. It probably loomed much larger among the move- ments that gave a place to Jesus than could be gathered from these volumes. So, too, with the oth er nmovements regarded by the Catholic Church as heresies. The wide sweep and variety of the movements indebted to Jesus are portrayed only from the angle of the Catlholic Chu.rch of the earlv centries.

Yale University KENNETH SCOTT LATOURETTr

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