Church History 79:1 (March 2010), 1 –39.

# American Society of Church History, 2010

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990989

Mission from Below: Captive Women and

Conversion on the East Roman Frontiers
ANDREA STERK

So the servants took Rhipsime by force, now lifting her, now dragging her . . .
But when they had shut her in the chamber she began to beseech the Lord.
—Agathangelos, History of the Armenians

It is said that during this reign the Iberians, a large and warlike barbarian
nation, confessed Christ . . . A Christian woman, who had been taken
captive, induced them to renounce the religion of their fathers.
—Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History

And after his death the people of Yemen received the knowledge of God . . .
by means of a holy woman named Theognosta. Now she was a Christian
virgin who had been carried off captive from a convent on the borders of
the Roman empire.
—John of Nikiu, Chronicle

T
HEsignificance of captives in the history of empire has come to the fore
in several recent books and articles. Linda Colley starts her intriguing
study of this theme with the stories of two famous, if legendary,
British captives—Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver—explaining how each
represents a different conception of empire: the former a shipwrecked ex-
slave turned conqueror and colonizer; the latter an overseas adventurer who
is captured, humiliated, and terrorized but ultimately transformed by the
values of his captors into a critic of his own society.1 Far from the heroes of
Defoe and Swift, female captives featured in conversion accounts on the east
Roman frontiers represent another response to captivity in a very different
imperial world—that of the Roman and Iranian empires of late antiquity.

For detailed comments and much encouragement in the completion of this two-part article, which
will be continued in the subsequent volume, I would like to express my gratitude to Frederick W.
Norris. Thanks are also due to the anonymous readers at Church History for their suggestions.
Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the financial and intellectual support of the Center of
Theological Inquiry, Princeton, New Jersey, where an original draft of the article was written
while I was a member-in-residence in 2007– 2008.
1
Linda Colley, Captives (New York: Pantheon, 2002).

Andrea Sterk is Associate Professor of History at the University of Florida.

1
2 CHURCH HISTORY

These protagonists neither came to dominate the kingdoms in which they were
held nor assimilated the culture of their captors but maintained their identity,
their customs, and their religion in captivity. Indeed, these captives went
further still, actually transforming the peoples and governments under which
they were held from their very positions of subordination.
Though stories of captive women missionaries have a romantic ring, it is well
known that hostages, slaves, and prisoners of war were crucial to the spread of
cultures and exchange of ideas across the borders of the ancient world. In fact a
more thorough examination of the role of captives in transmitting religious ideas
and practices in late antiquity is long overdue.2 Bearing witness to one aspect of
this broader phenomenon, a remarkable group of historical texts attribute the
conversion of whole nations on the east Roman frontiers to the influence of
captive women. My focus in this essay will not be the status or treatment of
these female captives, much less the history of slavery, but rather their portrayal
as evangelists and what these descriptions suggest about notions and practices of
mission in the Christian east. To set the stage for our consideration of these
peculiar missionaries, we will begin with a review of scholarship on the
interrelated themes of mission, conversion, and Christianization in late antiquity,3
especially in relation to the historiography of east Roman or Byzantine mission.

I. MISSION, CONVERSION, CHRISTIANIZATION:

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL TRENDS
The history of conversion in late antiquity, like the study of the era as a whole,
has undergone considerable revision in the past generation of scholarship. In
his classic treatment of the subject, A. D. Nock defined conversion as “the
reorientation of the soul of an individual, his deliberate turning away from
indifference or from an earlier form of piety to another.”4 Far from Nock’s
dramatic turning point, a newer wave of essays has examined conversion as

2
A good starting point is Samuel N. C. Lieu, “Captives, Refugees and Exiles: A Study of Cross-
Frontier Civilian Movements and Contacts between Rome and Persia from Valerian to Jovian,” in
The Defense of the Roman and Byzantine East, Part 2, ed. Philip Freeman and David Kennedy,
475– 505 (Oxford: British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, 1986).
3
For a helpful discussion of the connection as well as the distinction between these terms, see Ian
Wood, The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400– 1050 (Harlow:
Longman, 2001), 3 –5. I will be using this terminology in a similar manner: “conversion”
primarily for the spiritual change of an individual, though I will sometimes refer to the
“conversion” of a nation or land; “mission” primarily for the evangelization of pagans; and
“Christianization” for what is generally deemed a longer process involving the transformation of
communities or whole lands that may already be superficially Christian. The term
“evangelization” will be used interchangeably with “mission” and may be more helpful since the
latter “implies a plan” (Wood, 4) that is not always evident in the relevant accounts.
4
A. D. Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion form Alexander the Great to
Augustine of Hippo (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933), 7.
MISSION FROM BELOW 3
social process.5 Scholars have interpreted the phenomenon as “a sequence of
action and response . . . at times stretched out over years,” as a spectrum, or
at the least, as both “moment and process.”6 Archeologists have contributed
to these reassessments by pointing to deeper, longer-term consequences of
conversion in transformed landscapes and new aspects of material culture
that illuminate the social and political dimensions of religious change.7
The subject of Christian mission in late antiquity has received considerably
less attention than the related theme of conversion. To be sure, for the earlier
centuries of Christian expansion we are better served. From the pioneering
work of Adolf von Harnack’s Die Mission und Ausbreitung des
Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten (1902), to Ramsey
MacMullen’s Christianizing the Roman Empire (1984), to the best-selling
study of sociologist of religion Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity
(1996), the spread of the Christian movement in the pre-Constantinian
era has continued to inspire fresh scholarly enterprise and debate.8 While
some continue to affirm an “intensive sense of mission” that characterized
the early church,9 a growing number of scholars have argued that neither

5
This approach is perhaps best exemplified in the edited volume, Anthony Grafton and Kenneth Mills,
eds., Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Seeing and Believing (Rochester, N.Y.:
University of Rochester Press, 2003). See also Raymond Van Dam, Becoming Christian: The
Conversion of Roman Cappadocia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
Lamenting the many deferential studies that ignore the disruptive impact of the new religion on a
traditional society, Van Dam sets out to examine the practical, immediate aspects of conversion while
essentially ignoring “doctrines, asceticism, monasticism, and spirituality” (3–4).
6
Karl F. Morrison, Conversion and Text: The Cases of Augustine of Hippo, Herman-Judah, and
Constantine Tsatsos (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), viii –x. See also Paula
Fredriksen, “Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions, and the
Retrospective Self,” Journal of Theological Studies 37 (1986): 3– 34; and James Muldoon, ed.,
Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
1997), 1– 2, for the editor’s description of a “conversion spectrum.” Terminology of moment
and process has also been used with reference to Gregory Nazianzen’s idea of conversion. See
Susanna Elm, “Inscriptions and Conversions: Gregory of Nazianzus on Baptism (Or. 38– 40),”
in Conversion, ed. Mills and Grafton, 1–35.
7
See the introductory comments on conversion in Florin Curta, ed., East Central and Eastern
Europe in the Early Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 18–19.
8
Adolf von Harnack, The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries,
vol. 1, Theological Translation Library, trans. James Moffatt (New York: Putnam, 1908);
Ramsey MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100–400) (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1984); Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders
History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). See also the special volume of
essays responding to Stark’s book, Journal of Early Christian Studies 6, no. 2 (1998); and the
recent reassessments in William V. Harris, ed., The Spread of Christianity in the First Four
Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
9
Glenn Hinson, The Evangelization of the Roman Empire (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press,
1981), 10. Hinson emphasizes major institutional forms of the church as the pivotal factors in
Christian expansion and suggests that his study is “predicated on the assumption, now widely
accepted in ecumenical circles, that the church is mission” (2). See also Michael Green,
Evangelism in the Early Church, rev. ed. (1977; repr., Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004).
4 CHURCH HISTORY

Jews nor Christians were especially concerned about proselytism in the pre-
Constantinian centuries and that once Christianity became the state religion
the very idea of mission loses its meaning.10 Indeed, common to most
treatments of early Christian mission is relative inattention to developments
beyond the fourth century. This neglect is curious since, as W. H. C. Frend
observed in 1970, once Christianity had assumed the character of the official
religion of the empire, “the missionary situation changed completely.” He
concluded his own brief overview of Christian missions from 180– 700 with
the observation that “no detailed survey of the conversion of the Greco-
Roman world in the fourth and subsequent centuries has yet been attempted.”11
Since this offhanded challenge to new research in the field, the
Christianization of the late ancient and early medieval West has been the
subject of several excellent studies.12 The subject of eastern mission has
been less studied, although the tide is beginning to change,13 and literature

The one-volume survey by Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions (New York: Penguin,
1964), also stresses the inherently missionary nature of the church (especially 13– 25) and “the
continuance of the Pauline pattern” in the post-apostolic period (30– 31).
10
In particular, Martin Goodman, Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History
of the Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); see especially his comments on 18– 19 and
106– 7. John Curran, “The Conversion of Rome Revisited,” in Ethnicity and Culture in Late
Antiquity, ed. Stephen Mitchell and Geoffrey Greatrex, 1– 14 (London: Duckworth, 2000)
describes it as a commonplace in recent scholarship that Christianity was not notably missionary
in the first two and a half centuries. Focusing on the first two centuries, Shelly Matthews, First
Converts: Rich Pagan Women and the Rhetoric of Mission in Early Judaism and Christianity
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001) challenges this “new consensus” and the
“minimal definition of what constitutes missionary activity” (3).
11
W. H. C. Frend, “The Missions of the Early Church, 180–700 AD,” in Derek Baker, ed.,
Miscellenea historiae ecclesiasticae 3: Colloque de Cambridge, 24– 28 septembre 1968
(Louvain, 1970), 3 –23.
12
James C. Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical
Approach to Religious Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Peter Brown,
The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200 –1000, 2nd ed. (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2003); Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Wood, Missionary Life.
13
Although there has been no major English monograph devoted to eastern mission or Christianization
equivalent to studies on the West (see note 12), several recent articles have examined the subject either in
specific regional contexts or from a comparative angle. Especially relevant to this article are Cornelia
Horn, “St. Nino and the Christianization of Pagan Georgia,” Medieval Encounters 4, no. 3 (1998):
243–64; Horn, “The Lives and Literary Roles of Children in Advancing Conversion to Christianity:
Hagiography from the Caucasus in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” Church History 76, no. 2
(2007): 262–97; and Christopher Haas, “Mountain Constantines: The Christianization of Aksum and
Iberia,” Journal of Late Antiquity 1, no. 1 (2008): 101–26. Also indicative of rising interest in eastern
Christianization is an essay by Sergey A. Ivanov, “Religious Missions,” in the new Cambridge
History of the Byzantine Empire, c.500–1492 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 305–
32, covering the middle Byzantine period. Oddly, there is no comparable treatment of mission in
volume 2 of the Cambridge History of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
which covers the period from Constantine to c.600.
MISSION FROM BELOW 5
on regional or national Christianity has grown tremendously in recent years
providing a surer foundation for broader comparative studies. Debate about
the missionary nature of the early church only rarely touches on the post-
Constantinian period in the east for it is largely assumed that mission was
simply part of the political program of the newly Christian Roman Empire
and what became Byzantium. Even missiologists devote little attention to the
east acknowledging the problematic nature of the Eusebian legacy: an
empire in which monotheism and monarchy were inextricably intertwined.14
Jonathan Shepard encapsulated the dominant perspective that has shaped
historical scholarship on Byzantine missions for the past fifty years:

The Byzantine emperor, as successor to Constantine the Great, was acclaimed

as ‘equal of the apostles’ in court acclamations and rhetoric. An emperor, not a
patriarch or any other sort of churchman, had been chosen by God to bring
about the conversion of the inhabitants of the Roman world, and
proclaiming one’s willingness to spread the Word was a useful political prop.15

Though Shepard is describing a later period of Byzantine history, similar

emphasis on imperial motives and initiative in Christianization has
influenced studies of the fourth to the sixth century as well. In a recent
monograph, Russian medievalist Sergey Ivanov added a more provocative
twist to standard representations of Byzantine mission. Arguing that mission
was coterminous with the borders of empire, Ivanov attempts to document
the Byzantines’ unconcern with evangelizing “barbarians” unless those

14
On the relation between monotheism and world empire in late antiquity, including insights on
the implications for Christian mission, see Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth:
Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1993), especially chap. 5, “The First Byzantine Commonwealth: Interactions of political and
cultural universalism,” 100–37. For missiologists’ treatment of eastern missions, see the
comments of David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission
(Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1991), 205, who has noted the tendency of most western missiologists
to ignore or belittle the significance of eastern missions. His chapter, “The Missionary Paradigm
of the Eastern Church,” 190– 213, is exceptional in its attempt to discern distinctive theological
features of an Orthodox or eastern approach to mission. See also James Stamoolis, Eastern
Orthodox Mission Theology Today (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1986).
15
Jonathan Shepard, “Spreading the Word: Byzantine Missions,” in The Oxford History of
Byzantium, ed. Cyril Mango (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 230. Two pages later,
however, Shepard explains that, in fact, “Emperors do not seem to have sponsored major
missionary undertakings in any quarter between the seventh and early ninth centuries.”
Similarly, writing over forty years ago, Byzantine historian Hans-Georg Beck presented the
common understanding of Byzantine missions: “Jede Ausbreitung des Reiches ist potentiell eine
Ausbreitung des Christentums und jede Ausweitung des christlichen Raumes potentiell ein
Zuwachs zum römischen Reich.” H. G. Beck, “Christliche Mission und politische Propaganda
im byzantinischen Reich,” in La conversione al Cristianesimo nell’Europa dell’alto medioevo,
vol. 14, Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo (Spoleto: Centro
italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 1967), 654.
6 CHURCH HISTORY

outsiders had come to settle on Roman territory.16 Not only was Byzantium’s
Christianizing activity of a “passive character,” he argues, but the Byzantines
viewed the call to spread Christianity among the barbarians with loathing,
even as a blasphemy or sin.17
Underlying these studies are at least two assumptions, seemingly well
supported by the evidence, which I would like to revisit and revise in a
limited manner in the present essay. The first is the notion that there was
very little theological reflection on the task of mission in the Christian
Roman Empire. As recent studies of western Christianization have indicated,
we are certainly far from a developed “theology” of mission in these
centuries. Accordingly, “Christianization,” most often linked with political
power and religious coercion, has been the domain of historians of the post-
Constantinian empire, while “conversion” remains largely the realm of
patristic theologians, scholars of ancient religion, and historians of the early
church.18 A second, related assumption is that Christian mission after
Constantine was almost exclusively a “top-down” affair, sponsored by
emperors and directed primarily toward ruling elites. Indeed, the Oxford
Dictionary of Byzantium affirms that “characteristically, Byzantine
missionary activity worked ‘from the top down’ by focusing on the rulers
and leaders of society who then arranged the conversion of their people en
masse.”19 Although he covers a fairly broad swath of missionaries, Ivanov’s

16
S. A. Ivanov, Vizantiiskoe missionerstvo: Mozhno li sdelat’ iz “varvara” khristianina?
[Byzantine Missionary Activity: Is It Possible to Make a Christian out of a “Barbarian”?]
(Moscow: Iazyki Slavianskoi Kul̀tury, 2003). On a smaller scale, Ivanov’s argument was
articulated by E. A. Thompson in “Christianity and the Northern Barbarians,” in The Conflict
between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, ed. Arnaldo Momigliano, 56– 78
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1963). For a more nuanced treatment of the spread and organization of
Christianity among the barbarians, both east and west, see Ralph W. Mathisen, “Barbarian
Bishops and the Churches ‘in barbaricis gentibus’ during Late Antiquity,” Speculum 72, no. 3
(1997): 664–97.
17
Ivanov, Vizantiiskoe missionerstvo, 59. In a recent essay he put it this way: “Even the last words
of Jesus “Go teach all nations,” which in later centuries became the slogan of mission, were
interpreted by the Byzantines in all possible ways except the missionary one.” Sergey A. Ivanov,
“Casting Circe’s Pearls before Swine: The Byzantine View of Mission,” in Mélanges Gilbert
Dagron, Travaux et Mémoires 14 (Paris, 2002), 298. Despite judgments of this sort in both the
article and his much fuller monograph, Ivanov states that he is interested in mission as a
“cultural pheonomenon” and therefore does not intend to consider “the theological aspect” of
missionary activity. Vizantiiskoe missionerstvo, 12.
18
Peter Brown, “Conversion and Christianization in Late Antiquity: The Case of Augustine,” in
The Past Before Us. The Challenge of Historiographies of Late Antiquity, ed. Carole Straw and
Richard Lim, 103– 17 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2004). Though Brown uses Augustine as a
case study in this essay, the conceptual questions he explores in the first half of his essay are
very close to those I am pursuing here for the east.
19
Timothy E. Gregory and Ihor Ševčenko, “Missions,” in Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium 2nd
ed., ed. Alexander P. Kahzdan, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1380– 81 (hereafter
cited as ODB). The authors add that “missionaries also worked consistently among the people
after the ‘official’ conversion” (my emphasis), but missionary initiative is clearly from above.
MISSION FROM BELOW 7
main focus is imperially-sponsored mission, and missionaries “from below” are
deemed “accidental” or “unintentional” evangelists.20 A broader conception of
what constitutes mission and missionaries might lead to different or more
nuanced conclusions.
As the reaction against Nock’s “psychological maximalism” is beginning to
subside for the first few centuries, the study of mission and conversion in the
post-Constantinian era deserves renewed attention as well.21 Based on
histories composed from the fifth to seventh centuries, we will consider here
three interrelated accounts of conversion from lands on the borders of the
East Roman Empire: Armenia, Georgia, and Yemen. I hope to show that
accounts of female evangelistic activity suggest more missionary initiative
on the part of eastern Christians and more theological reflection on this
process than is generally acknowledged in treatments of Byzantine mission.
Moreover, by analyzing narratives of unofficial mission I will attempt to
assess both the ideal and the reality of mission “from below.” Though but
one phase in a longer process of Christianization that spanned several
centuries, it is an aspect of Christian expansion that has received far less
attention than it merits.22 While traditional histories of Christianity have
focused on doctrines and institutions, some recent scholars have approached
the Christian movement as “a people’s history,” sensitive to the ways in
which it has “effectively subverted elite privilege and imperial authority,
even in the post-Constantinian period.”23 Building on and drawing
inspiration from such approaches, this study will examine the contribution of

20
Ivanov, Vizantiiskoe missionerstvo, chapter 2, especially 31– 34.
21
Seth Schwartz, “Roman Historians and the Rise of Christianity: The School of Edward
Gibbon,” in Spread of Christianity, ed. Harris, 151. By “psychological maximalism” Schwartz
refers to A. D. Nock’s understanding of conversion as a dramatic spiritual, intellectual, and
emotional turning, a psychological moment as opposed to a process of transformation. Schwartz
also speaks of almost all Gibbon-derived scholarship, including that of Ramsey MacMullen, as
characterized by “psychological minimalism” in interpreting accounts of mission and
conversion, that is, the tendency to reduce mission and conversion to a relatively simple process
explicable in terms of group motivation or other sociological factors. He suggests that this
approach too is beginning to run its course. In the same volume, see also H. A. Drake, “Models
of Christian Expansion,” 1 –13.
22
Haas, “Mountain Constantines,” 125–26, concludes his essay with a model of Christianization
that includes nine “distinct phases” and “took at least two centuries to complete.” Though one might
quibble with the precise wording or order of these phases (and his own title emphasizes conversion
from above), Haas also recognizes the importance of gradual Christianization from below in both
Axum and Iberia.
23
Virginia Burrus and Rebecca Lyman, “Shifting the Focus of History,” in A People’s History of
Christianity, vol. 2, Late Ancient Christianity, ed. Virginia Burrus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 22.
At the same time the authors acknowledge the ways in which “Christian communities embraced
imperial patronage and affirmed class privilege while generating their own class distinctions
along a variety of gradients.” Besides this introduction to the volume, the essays in part 1,
“Hierarchy and Subversion,” are especially relevant to themes considered in this article.
8 CHURCH HISTORY

female captives to the conversion of lands on the east Roman frontiers. Such
analysis should help to illumine the relation between empire and religion as
well the nature of Christian mission in this pivotal age.

II. THREE NARRATIVES OF CONVERSION

Situated between the Black and Caspian Seas and straddling trade routes to the
east, Greater Armenia in late antiquity was poised between the Roman and
Iranian Empires. The Christianization of this region owes much to both
Syrian and Greek Christian traditions, but the earliest account of the
conversion of Armenia is attributed to a churchman who wrote under the
pseudonym “Agathangelos.” His History of the Armenians focuses on
the missionary role of Gregory the Illuminator, a Christian in the service of
the pagan king Trdat (Tiridates) III.24 According to this account, a long
confrontation began when Gregory refused to worship the Armenian
goddess, Anahit, described by King Trdat as “this great lady . . . the glory of
our race and our savior.”25 For spurning the deity and confessing his
Christian faith, the king subjected Gregory to cruel torture and threw him
into a deep snake-filled pit to die. Some thirteen years later the king was
possessed by demons, went mad, turned into a pig, and began pasturing in
the grassland and wallowing naked in the plain outside the city. A series of
dreams revealed that Gregory (assumed long dead) was the only hope for the
king’s restoration. Rescued from his pit, Gregory preached the gospel to the
king and his court, whereupon King Trdat shed his pig-like skin, tusks, and
snout, was restored to vigor, and was soon baptized in the Euphrates River
along with his nobles. After overthrowing the pagan shrines throughout the
land, Gregory was sent to Caesarea in Cappadocia to be consecrated bishop,
and Armenia, just beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire, became the first
state to adopt Christianity as its official religion.26

24
For the Armenian text and English translation, see Agathangelos: History of the Armenians,
ed. and trans. Robert W. Thomson (Albany: State University of New York, 1976). On the
identity of Agathangelos, see Thomson’s introduction, xxiv– xxvi.
25
Agathangelos, History, §48.
26
Though the date of this conversion was long held to be c.301, scholarly consensus now places
these events c.314. See Werner Siebt, ed., Die Christianiserung des Kaukasus: The Christianizaion
of Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia, Albania), Referate des Internationalen Symposions (Wien, 9– 12
Dezember 1999) (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2002),
especially Siebt’s essay, “Die historische Hintergrund und die Chronologie der Christianisierung
Armeniens bzw. Der Taufe König Trdats (ca. 315),” 125–33. On the historical circumstances
surrounding Trdat and Gregory the Illuminator, see Marie-Louise Chaumont, Recherches sur
l’histoire de’Arménie de l’avènement des Sassanides à la conversion du royaume (Paris:
Librairie orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1969), 131– 46, and A. E. Redgate, The Armenians
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 113–39.
MISSION FROM BELOW 9
Closely connected with Gregory’s missionary work in Armenia is the role of
the captive woman Rhipsime, a beautiful and pious Christian virgin who enters
the scene while Gregory is languishing in the pit.27 Having received unwanted
attention from the Roman emperor Diocletian, Rhipsime, along with her abbess
Gaiane and their entire convent of nuns, had fled Rome to Armenia only to fall
prey to the wiles of King Trdat. They hid temporarily in “vat-stores” in the
vineyards at the edge of the capital city, Valarshapat, but the king’s spies
soon discovered the virgins’ hiding place and were sent to retrieve Rhipsime.
Amidst loud prayers recounting the history of salvation from Abraham to the
cross, the virgin was forcibly dragged to the king’s palace and imprisoned in
the royal chamber in preparation for her wedding to the Armenian king.28 As
she prayed, King Trdat entered the chamber and “seized her in order to work
his lustful desires. But she, strengthened by the Holy Spirit, struggled like a
beast and fought like a man.” They wrestled for seven hours until the king,
though renowned for his strength, was overcome—“vanquished and worsted
by a single girl through the will and power of Christ.”29 Rhipsime
temporarily escaped to relate to her companions what had happened and
pronounce a final scripture-filled prayer exalting God’s victory and
providence. For her resistance to the king, however, Trdat’s nobles had
Rhipsime recaptured, tortured, and killed along with thirty-six other virgins
who had accompanied her in her flight to Armenia. King Trdat went into
deep mourning for the beautiful virgin, and after he set out for the hunt a
short while later, madness befell him as a “punishment from the Lord.”
Central to Gregory’s long sermon calling for the king’s conversion is the
faith, witness, and supernatural power of Rhipsime.30 He claims that God
had sent Rhipsime and the other martyrs for the Armenians’ salvation, and

27
On Rhipsime’s centrality for the conversion of both Armenia and Georgia, see Michel van
Esbroeck, “Die Stellung der Märtyrerin Rhipsime in der Geschichte der Bekehrung des
Kaukasus,” in Christianisierung des Kaukasus, ed. Siebt, 171– 79. The origin of the name
Rhipsime is unknown, although Agathangelos, §175, suggests it derives from the Greek íptv,
“to throw.” One scholar suggests that the verb may have the meaning “imprison,” thus implying
that Rhipsime was a captive. Thomson, however, discounts this “folk-etymology.” Thomson,
Agathangelos: History, 472 n. 2.
28
For the virgins’ flight to Armenia and discovery by Trdat’s nobles see Agathangelos, History,
§§149– 161. On the “vat-stores” in which they hid see Agathangelos, History, §150, and the editor’s
comment on 469, §150, n. 2.
29
Agathangelos, History, §§180– 82.
30
For example, Agathangelos, History, §§233, 237–39. These references to Rhipsime and the
martyrs’ testimony form part of Gregory’s preliminary exhortations to the king and his court.
The sermon continues in what has been described as an “elaborate catechism” that is longer than
the rest of the History combined and became known as the “teaching” of St. Gregory. This text
went through various recensions before reaching its final form in the early seventh century and
has been published separately as The Teaching of Saint Gregory, rev. ed. trans., comm., and
intro. Robert W. Thomson (New Rochelle, N.Y.: St. Nersess Armenian Seminary, 2001). Here
too the role of Rhipsime and the martyrs is emphasized.
10 CHURCH HISTORY

he eventually had their bodies enshrined in the first chapels built in the newly
Christian land.31
Linked with this narrative of Armenia’s conversion is the story of the
Christianization of neighboring Georgia, known in antiquity as Iberia.32 The
earliest account appears not in the Georgian Chronicles, the compilation of
which began no earlier than the seventh century, but rather in the work of
Rufinus, the Latin monk and ecclesiastical historian who wrote from
Bethlehem just after 400 and who is the main source for the earliest Greek
versions of the conversion. The account follows his narrative of the roughly
contemporaneous Christianization of Axum (modern Ethiopia), which is also
attributed to the efforts of captives, specifically two Christian Roman boys
who were spared when “barbarians” attacked their ship on the Red Sea
coast.33 The pivotal missionary figure in Georgia was a female captive who
amazed the “barbarians” with her ascetic piety and devotion to Christ. When
her prayers effected the restoration of a hopelessly sick child, the queen of
Iberia, who suffered from a grave physical illness, summoned the woman.
Though she “declined to go, lest she appear to pretend to more than was
proper to her sex,” the queen is brought to the captive’s hovel where the
woman’s prayer immediately restores her to health and vigor.34 The captive
attributes the healing to Christ and entreats the queen to acknowledge him.
Grateful for his wife’s restoration, the king sends the captive gifts as
payment, but the woman returns them and urges him instead to recognize the
true God whom she has declared. On the hunt a short while later, the king is
suddenly engulfed in impenetrable darkness and despairs for his life. He
calls upon the captive’s god, who instantly rescues him from his plight. On
his safe return to the city the king summons the captive, who teaches him

31
Agathangelos, History, §§759– 60. For an analysis of the architecture and later history of the
chapels built in honor of the virgin martyrs, see A. Khatchatrian, L’architecture arménienne du
IVe siècle au VIeEsiècle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), especially 32– 33, 37, on the martyrium of
Rhipsime which was rebuilt twice by the early seventh century and was said to be the site of
many healings. See also Khatchatrian’s Appendix, 103– 8, for a collection of all the passages in
Agathangelos that have to do with architecture.
32
For general background on Georgia in late antiquity, see Cyril Toumanoff, Studies in Christian
Caucasian History (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1963), and David Braund,
Georgia in Antiquity: A History of Colchis and Transcaucasian Iberia, 550 BC–AD 562
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). On Georgia’s conversion see Françoise Thelamon, Paı̈ens et
chrétiens au IVe siècle. L’apport de ‘l’Histoire ecclésiastique’ de Rufin d’Aquilée (Paris: Études
augustiniennes, 1981), especially 85– 122, and several essays in Seibt, ed., Christianisierung des
Kaukasus.
33
Rufinus, Historiae ecclesiasticae 10.9– 10, in Eduard Schwartz and Theodore Mommsen, eds.,
Eusebius Werke. GCS 2, n.f. 6,2 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), 971– 73, (hereafter cited as HE);
English translation in Philip R. Amidon, SJ, trans., The Church History of Rufinus of Aquileia,
Books 10 and 11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 18–20. The account of Iberia’s
conversion follows in HE 10.11: Schwartz and Mommsen, 973– 76; Amidon, 20–23.
34
Rufinus, HE, 10.11: Schwartz and Mommsen, 974, lines 19– 20; Amidon, 21.
MISSION FROM BELOW 11
about Christ. He then gathers his subjects, recounts what happened, and exhorts
the Iberians to worship him. After the captive woman performs another miracle
enabling the placement of a hitherto immovable column in the construction of a
church, the whole nation is said to have acknowledged the true God. At the
woman’s advice, an embassy is sent to Emperor Constantine requesting
priests to instruct the Iberians in their new faith.
A similar account of a captive woman missionary is set on the southern tip of
the Arabian Peninsula in the early fifth century. The author of this brief narrative is
the seventh-century anti-Chalcedonian leader and monastic administrator, John,
bishop of Nikiu, a fortified island in the Nile delta of Egypt. John ignores the
traditions of the apostle Bartholomew and the missionary Theophilus, a captive
converted in Constantinople and sent out by Emperor Constantius,35 and
focuses instead on a holy woman named Theognosta. He describes her as
a Christian virgin who had been carried off captive from a convent on the
borders of the Roman Empire and had been conducted to the king of
Yemen and presented to him as a gift. And this Christian woman became
very rich through the grace of God and wrought many healings. And she
brought over the king of India to the faith, and he became a Christian
through her agency as well as all the people of India.36
Eventually the king and his subjects requested that the “Godloving emperor
Honorius” appoint them a bishop, which he did with great joy. This “holy
bishop,” Theonius, instructed and strengthened the people of Yemen in their
new faith, yet their eventual baptism, or “second birth,” is attributed to “the
prayers of the holy virgin Theognosta.”37

III. MISSION FROM BELOW: INVERTING IMPERIAL PARADIGMS

The prominent place of women in accounts of national conversions is certainly
not unique to the east Roman frontiers in late antiquity. Especially pertinent to
mission is the reputed role of early medieval queens in the conversion of their
pagan husbands and hence their entire realms. The Burgundian princess
Clothilde, wife of King Clovis of the Franks, and Queen Bertha, wife of
Anglo-Saxon King Ethelbert, provide the most famous examples of this

35
For the mission of the one-time hostage Theophilus “the Indian,” sent out by the pro-Arian
emperor Constantius II (337– 361), see Philostorgius, HE III.4; English translation in Philip
Amidon, SJ, trans., Philostorgius, Church History, Writings from the Greco-Roman World 23
(Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), 40–41.
36
The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, trans. R. H. Charles (London: Williams & Norgate,
1916), chapter 77.106. For the Ethiopic text and French translation, see Chronique de Jean,
Évêque de Nikiou, trans. H. Zotenberg (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1883).
37
Ibid.
12 CHURCH HISTORY

process.38 In the east the pious empress Helena, mother of Constantine the
Great, advanced the spread of the Christian faith, and she and her son are
honored together as the prototypical Christian rulers; similarly in the Arabic
Christian tradition Queen Mavia has been hailed as the “first Christian Arab
queen.”39 Such examples lend support to the “top-down” definition of
mission that appears in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium.40 However,
although rulers have a function in each of the national conversions recounted
above, it is female captives and not ruling women who are central to
narratives of evangelization.
To be sure, accounts of captive women were also a topos in earlier Greco-
Roman literature in antiquity, and variations on this theme, often involving
religious choice, appeared throughout the Middle Ages.41 Among patristic
exegetes, the motif was developed in interpretations of Deuteronomy
21:10 – 13 on the treatment of a non-Israelite woman taken captive in war.
Building on Origen’s interpretation of this passage, Jerome used the image
of the female captive to represent non-Christian literature and learning as
both potentially dangerous and alluring. Like the captive woman, however,
foreign pagan wisdom can be purified and “made a captive and servant to
Israel,” that is, to the Christian reader.42 Similarly the rabbis of late antiquity
adapted the topos of the sexually alluring captive woman to some of their
own purposes, as “a kind of myth or foundational story that helped them
explain to themselves their place in the pagan world.”43 Yet in such

38
Descriptions of the actual role that Christian queens played have been softened in more recent
literature, and the motif of “conversion by marriage” has been questioned. See, for example, Dorsey
Armstrong, “Holy Queens as Agents of Christianization in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History:
A Reconsideration” Medieval Encounters 4, no. 3 (1998): 228–41. As Armstrong summarizes,
“In Bede, queens do not convert peoples—kings and bishop do” (239).
39
On the portrayal of Helena in hagiographic literature, see Lynda L. Coon, Sacred Fictions:
Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1997), 95– 103. On Mavia, see J. Spencer Trimingham, “Mawiyya: The First Christian
Arab Queen” in The Near East School of Theology Theological Review, vol. 1, no. 1 (Beirut,
1978), 3–10, and on her Christianity, Irfan Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth
Century (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1989), 188– 90 passim.
40
Gregory and Ševčenko, “Missions,” in ODB 2:1380–81.
41
See, for example, F. M. Warren, “The Enamored Muslim Princess in Orderic Vital and French
Epic,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 29, no. 3 (1914): 241–358, where the
medieval use of the topos is traced from roots in Seneca and the Greek Sophists through
medieval Islamic literature like the Arabians Nights. In medieval European accounts, however,
the captive women protagonists end up abandoning their religion (Islam) rather than converting
others to Christianity.
42
“Is it surprising that I too, admiring the fairness of her form and the grace of her eloquence,
desire to make that secular wisdom which is my captive and my handmaid, a matron of the true
Israel?” Jerome, Letter 70.2; cf. Letter 21.13. For an illuminating discussion of the use of this
captive women motif by Origen and Jerome, see Catherine M. Chin, Grammar and Christianity
in the Late Roman World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 75, 82– 85.
43
David Stern, “The Captive Woman: Hellenization, Greco-Roman Erotic Narrative, and
Rabbinic Literature,” Poetics Today 19, no. 1, Special Issue: Hellenism and Hebraism
MISSION FROM BELOW 13
examples of early Christian exegesis or rabbinic midrashim, captive women
protagonists appear more often as tempters or seducers who need to be
converted themselves than as missionaries converting others. None of these
exegetical motifs explain the peculiar apostolic role of captive women
evangelists or the distinctive theological assumptions that underlay accounts
of their missionary activity on the east Roman frontiers.
Closer examination of the late ancient conversion accounts presented here,
however, challenges, or at least significantly qualifies, reigning paradigms of
mission and adds nuance to standard presentations of empire and religion in
Byzantium. The narrative of Agathangelos, the “received tradition” of
Armenia’s conversion, presents intriguing ambiguities regarding political and
cultural orientation, religious allegiance, and missionary identity.
Agathangelos wrote or redacted his account during the second half of the
fifth century, most probably around 460.44 Since 387 Armenia had been
divided between the Roman emperor, Theodosius I, and the Iranian shah,
Shapur I, but the territory of Greater Armenia came under Iranian suzerainty.
In 427 the Arsacid monarchy came to an end, and amid the feuding of
various noble families, the patriarch emerged as the symbol of Armenian
unity and resistance to increased Sassanian control, which included attempts
to enforce Zoroastrianism. After an Armenian revolt in 450– 451 in which
the moral authority of the patriarch undergirded the resistance movement,
Sassanian religious oppression subsided. In this setting Agathangelos
composed his History exalting the missionary work of Gregory, Armenia’s
first bishop.45 Parthian by birth, yet raised in Cappadocian Caesarea and thus
connected with Rome, Gregory served as a model patriarch for Armenians
on both sides of the Roman – Sassanian border.
Agathangelos’s narrative of Armenia’s conversion has definite political
overtones, and the author clearly had diplomatic relations in view. Unlike
later Armenian historians, Agathangelos reveals a distinctly Greek cultural
orientation and pro-Roman political tendencies. Though the work was
written in Armenian, the author of the History introduces himself in the
prologue as “one Agathangelos,” literally “messenger of good news” in

Reconsidered: The Poetics of Cultural Influence and Exchange I (Spring, 1998), 91–127; here 99.
For the rabbis, too, the exegesis of Deuteronomy 21 is prominent. See especially 113– 18 for Stern’s
comparison of Jerome’s allegorical interpretation of the passage with those of the rabbis. He
suggests that in different ways all use the captive women as an allegory of cultural influence.
44
Thomson, introduction to Agathangelos: History, lxxxix–xl, and Nina G. Garsoı̈an, The Epic
Histories Attributed to Pawstos Buzand (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 11,
concur on a date of c.460 for Agathangelos’s History.
45
See Thomson, introduction to Agathangelos: History, especially xc–xciii, regarding the
author’s context and motives.
14 CHURCH HISTORY

Greek, “from the great city of Rome, trained in the arts of the ancients,
proficient in Latin and Greek,” and commissioned by the king to compose a
historical narrative of the Armenian people.46 After Armenia’s conversion,
he describes a journey of King Trdat, Bishop Gregory, and a vast embassy of
magnates, courtiers, and troops to visit the recently converted emperor,
Constantine, in Rome. The encounter serves to seal the lifelong friendship of
the two lands.47 This episode is absent from other Armenian histories that
concentrate on the Pahlavian background of the ecclesiastical hierarchy—all
descendants of Gregory’s noble family of Parthian Iranian origin—and
maintain a definite distance from the structures of east Roman political and
ecclesiastical power, though Constantinople maintains its allure for culture
and learning.48
Despite pro-Roman leanings, however, Agathangelos’s History was not
primarily a political text, and diplomatic factors remain in the background.
Much more prominent in his narrative are hagiographic motifs. Scholars
have long recognized the novelistic character of the work, mediated through
acquaintance with apocryphal literature which gained popularity in Armenia
in the fourth and fifth centuries.49 Robert Thomson, eminent scholar of
Armenian Christianity and translator of Agathangelos, places much of the
History in the realm of hagiography and traces its indebtedness to
hagiographical sources, particularly the Lives of the Edessene martyrs.
Indeed, the work bears all the marks of an “epic passion,” showing
familiarity with standard scriptural and patristic models of both Greek and
Syrian provenance.50 For example, the structure of Agathangelos’s narrative

46
Agathangelos, History, §§12–13. See Thomson, introduction, xxiv– xxvi, for further
discussion of “Agathangelos,” who comes to be known as the author of the History in the later
fifth century.
47
For the whole journey, Agathangelos, History, §§873–81; an alliance between the two rulers is
mentioned in §877. On this alleged journey to Rome see Marie-Louise Chaumont, “Une visite du
roi d’Arménie Tiridate III à l’empereur Constantin a Rome?” in L’Arménie et Byzance. Histoire et
Culture (Paris: Sorbonne, 1996), 55–66; and Robert H. Hewsen, “In Search of Tiridates the Great,”
Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 2 (1985–1986), especially 22–23.
48
The accounts of Koriun, Faustos Buzand, and Moses of Khoren are discussed and compared to
Agathangelos’s narrative on this issue in Robert W. Thomson, “Mission, Conversion and
Christianization: The Armenian Example,” Harvard Ukranian Studies 12/13 (1988/1989), 34– 35.
49
Jean-Pierre Mahé, “Die Bekehrung Transkaukasiens: Eine Historiographie mit doppeltem
Boden,” in Christianisierung des Kaukasus, ed. Siebt, 108–9, points to the more than
coincidental similarities between Agathangelos’s history and Greco-Roman novels like
Apuleius’s Golden Ass. Mahé also refers also to another of his articles, inaccessible to me, in
which he compares the details of Agathangelos’s account with ancient novels: “Agathange et la
destruction des sanctuaires paı̈ens,” École Pratique des Hautes Études (Sciences historiques et
philologiques), Livret 10 (1994– 1995), 32– 35. See also P. Peeters, “St. Grégoire l’Illuminateur
dans le calendrier lapidaire de Naples,” Analecta Bollandiana 60 (1942): 102–3, where he
speaks of the “Roman de Ste. Hripsime.”
50
On Agathangelos’s history as hagiography and its dependence on hagiographical topoi and
themes, see Thomson, introduction to Agathangelos: History, xliv, xlv, lxxxv; on the parallels
MISSION FROM BELOW 15
parallels the Thaddeus-Abgar account in Syrian literature.51 Likewise
Rhipsime’s struggle with the king to protect her virtue recalls another virgin,
St. Thecla, whose resistance to the amorous advances of a noble suitor
resulted in her being thrown to wild beasts. Indeed, the Acts of Thecla in
both Greek and Syriac translations were extremely popular in fifth-century
Armenia, and the figure of Thecla would soon be assimilated by Armenian
authors.52 If the imitatio Thecla inspired diverse forms of piety as her cult
spread throughout Asia Minor and Egypt, one can well imagine the potential
influence of her role as evangelist and protomartyr in representations of
Rhipsime in Armenia.53
In light of both the political context and the hagiographical precedents, we do
well to consider what role the captive woman Rhipsime and the other martyred
virgins played in Agathangelos’s History. To be sure, Rhipsime was not a
typical “missionary.” She neither was sent out by the Roman church nor
formed part of a diplomatic embassy but rather arrived in Armenia as a
refugee from persecution in the Roman Empire. She did not present the
gospel to the king or his people in any official ecclesiastical capacity but
remained largely sequestered in captivity, passing much of her time in prayer
and fasting. Far from suggesting any diplomatic role, Agathangelos emphasizes
Rhipsime’s captivity, weakness, and humility; yet these characteristics are
transformed by the Spirit of God into vehicles of strength and ultimately
salvation for the Armenian people. Rhipsime and her companions functioned
as true martyrs, that is, “witnesses” to the faith (recalling the original

between Agathangelos and the Books of Maccabees, lxxxii–lxxxiv. Both Thomson, xlv, and Mahé,
“Die Bekehrung Transkaukasiens,” 109, refer to Gregory’s life as recounted by Agathangelos as an
“epic passion” as defined by Hippolyte Delehaye, Les Passion des martyres et les genres littéraires,
2nd ed., Subsidia hagiographica 136 (Brussels, 1966), 171, 222– 23.
51
For parallels and discussion of Syrian influence see Thomson, “Syrian Christianity and the
Conversion of Armenia,” in Christianisiering des Kaukasus, ed. Siebt, 159–69. In addition to
the Syriac Teaching of Addai, the Greek church history of Eusebius, which was well known in
Armenia in Syriac translation, also recounts this narrative of Abgar’s conversion by the Apostle
Thaddeus. (Eusebius HE 1.13) Thomson emphasizes the importance of Eusebius for Armenia
and the formative role of the Thaddeus-Abgar account for the story of Gregory and Trdat.
52
See Catherine Burris and Lucas van Rompay, “Some Further Notes on Thecla in Syriac
Christianity,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 6, no. 2 (July 2003), [10].
53
For the influence of Thecla’s cult in Asia Minor, see Ruth Albrecht, Das Leben der heiligen
Makrina auf dem Hintergrund der Thekla-Traditionen: Studien zu den Ursprungen des
weiblichen Mönchtums im 4. Jahrhundert in Kleinasien (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1986). Although she focuses on the model of Thecla in the spread of female monasticism, see
246–77 on the genre of Apostolic Acts in general and the Acts of Thecla in particular; 267– 71
on Thecla’s “missionarisch-apostolische Tätigkeit.” Stephen J. Davis, The Cult of St. Thecla: A
Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), traces the
spread and indigenization of Thecla’s cult in Egypt. Similar work remains to be done for Syria
and Armenia. A critical edition of the Armenian text of the Acts of Thecla is forthcoming by
Valentina Calzolari Bouvier for Corpus Christianorum– Series Apocryphorum.
16 CHURCH HISTORY

connotation of the word), as Agathangelos affirms at several points in his

account. Through their martyrdom they “bore witness” to God and “made
their death a faithful and firm seal of the truth of their faith.” Moreover,
“because they died for God they can turn the death of many into life.”54 The
martyrdom of these captive virgins has rendered them apostles to the
Armenian nation alongside St. Gregory.55
While on the surface the women seem to have performed no public teaching
or preaching function akin to Gregory’s long sermon before the king and his
nobles following the martyrdom, the prayers of Rhipsime and the other
virgins were largely a concatenation of scriptural quotations announcing
God’s victory over foreign idols and proclaiming the message of salvation in
Christ. Moreover, these prayers were always uttered aloud, and often before
crowds.56 Agathangelos also notes that “some of the noble servants of the
court ran to tell the king all their words, because there were there secretaries
who wrote down all that was said, and they read it before the king.”57 The
word for secretaries in this passage, nshanagirk‘, is the same term used for
the “scribes” who are said to have recorded and brought before the king the
words of Gregory’s lengthy biblical and evangelistic prayers, pronounced
over the course of seven days while suspended upside down from one foot.58
These passages raise intriguing questions about the evangelistic function of
public prayers as well the language in which the Christian captives
pronounced their message to their captors. There is very little commentary
on the biblical and liturgical texts that form the subject of the virgins’
intercessions. Nonetheless, an emphasis on the loud and public utterance of
these prayers, written down by royal secretaries and read before the king just
like those of Gregory, suggests that for Agathangelos the women, too, served
as preachers of the gospel to the Armenian people.59

54
Agathangelos, History, §237. He also speaks of the ongoing power of their intercessions. See
also §239 where he speaks of “their testimony”; he calls the Armenian nobles to be reconciled to
God “through them” repeating that they died “to be come witnesses to the Godhead” (§238).
55
This theme of the witness and apostolic mission of the virgin martyrs is especially emphasized
in The Teaching of Saint Gregory. See especially Teaching, §§514–18, 541–42, and 544.
56
See for example, Agathangelos, History, §§168– 69, where the “loud voice” with which
Rhipsime prayed is repeated along with the posture of her prayer, for she “stretched out her
arms in the form of a cross.” See also §174 for the loud prayers of all the virgins while
encircled by a throng of royal servants.
57
Agathangelos, History, §176.
58
Agathangelos, History, §§75–98 for Gregory’s prayers during his second torture; §99 for the
phrase atenakal dpirk‘n nshanagrats‘n, which Thomson translates, “scribes of the tribunal.”
59
Commenting on the alleged scribes recording Gregory’s words in prayer, Thomson,
Agathangelos: History, 465, §99 n. 1 suggests that this reference to scribes writing down the
prayers of Gregory and Rhipsime (cf. §176) “is to be taken no more seriously than
Agathangelos’ own claim to have been an eyewitness.” He notes that there are “close parallels”
in the Martyrdom of Shmona and Guria, §39, and the Martyrdom of Habib, §39. In his
introduction, xliv, Thomson affirms that the claim that scribes or secretaries accurately recorded
MISSION FROM BELOW 17
Another indication of the theological reflection underlying this account is the
virgins’ connection with vineyards and winepresses at several junctures in the
text. When Rhipsime and her companions arrived in Armenia they took refuge
outside the capital in certain “vat-stores,” a term for the buildings that housed
winepresses.60 One martyr was killed on this very spot; and after the
martyrdom, one of the first four chapels built by Gregory was placed on the site
of the winepresses that had temporarily housed the female refugees,61 soon to
be martyred in preparation for Armenia’s conversion. Patristic exegetes, both
Greek and Syriac, used the vineyard and the winepress as symbols of the
church, and the winepress was interpreted with reference to both the passion
and the ascension of Christ.62 The coincidence of symbolism in these accounts
seems less fortuitous than intentional, linking the suffering of these captive
missionary-martyrs with the very foundations of the church in Armenia.
Narratives of Iberia’s conversion reveal similar political and cultural
ambiguities. Archeological evidence demonstrates the presence of Christians in
Georgia already in the second or third century, but the earliest written
descriptions of the nation’s conversion appear in the fifth-century church
histories of Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret.63 All three Greek
historians follow the outline of Rufinus, but they modify details in keeping with

all that was said is a characteristic of hagiography with which Agathangelos was well acquainted.
The broader question of authorial intention will be discussed in further depth in a subsequent article,
but multiple references to the use of scribes to record the words of Christian prayers in similar
situations of persecution certainly warrant further consideration.
60
Robert W. Thomson, “Architectural Symbolism in Classic Armenian Literature,” in Studies in
Armenian Literature and Christianity (Ashgate: Variorum, 1994), IX.114; for this first reference to
the “vat-stores,” Agathangelos, History, §150.
61
Agathangelos, History, §§201, 224, 737, 759.
62
See Robert Murray, “The Vineyard, the Grape, and the Tree of Life,” chap. 3 in Symbols of
Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition (New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 95–
130. The association of the winepress with the passion and ascension of Christ is especially
prevalent in patristic exegesis of Isaiah 63:1–3. On the architectural symbolism in
Agathangelos’s History, see Khatchatrian, Architecture Arménienne, 73–86, and specifically on
the spiritual symbolism of the martyrs’ chapels, Thomson, “Architectural Symbolism in
Classical Armenian Literature,” in Studies IX, 106– 8, and on the vat-store and the winepress, 114.
63
Rufinus, HE 10.11. The three fifth-century Greek descriptions of Iberia’s conversion occur in
Socrates, HE 1.20; Sozomen, HE 2.7; and Theodoret, HE 1.24. Citations are from the Sources
chrétiennes editions of these texts: Socrate de Constantinople. Histoire Ecclésiastique, Livre I,
trans. Pierre Périchon and Pierre Maraval, SC 477 (Paris: Éditions du cerf, 2004); Sozomène.
Histoire ecclésiastique, livres I– II, ed. J. Bidez, trans. André-Jean Festugière, SC 306 (Paris:
Éditions du cerf, 1983); Theodoret de Cyr. Histoire Ecclésiastique, ed. L. Parmentier, G. C.
Hansen, J. Bouffartigue, Annick Martin, and Pierre Canivet, SC 501 (Paris: Éditions du cerf,
2006). For English translations of Socrates and Sozomen, see respectively A. C. Zenos and
Chester D. Hartranft, trans., Ecclesiastical History, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids,
Mich.: Eerdmans, 1957). For Theodoret, see Blomfield Jackson, trans., The Ecclesiastical
History of Theodoret, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989).
Unless otherwise noted, English translations are my own.
18 CHURCH HISTORY

slightly different perspectives on the connection between empire and religion,

Christianization and Romanization.64 Rufinus himself claims to have heard the
account from a Georgian king and one time comes domesticorum, Bacurius,
with whom he became acquainted in Palestine and whose religious character
and trustworthiness he emphasizes: “Bacurius, a man outstanding in faith, piety,
and strength of mind and body.”65 While Sozomen and Theodoret mention
neither Bacurius nor Rufinus as the source of their information about Iberia’s
conversion, Socrates adds details to Rufinus’s description of his source. He was
an Iberian prince (basilísko6) who had served as commander of soldiers in
Palestine, Socrates explains, and he later led the war against Maximus the
Tyrant assisting Emperor Theodosius.66 This same Bacurius is also known to us
from other Latin, Greek, and Armenian sources for his military and diplomatic
role.67 Despite slight discrepancies in these accounts, there is little reason to
doubt his identity or relationship with Rufinus, although the precise period of
his rule in Iberia is difficult to determine.68
If Bacurius’s dates are uncertain, the identities of those involved in the
conversion of his homeland are even more obscure. The names of the

64
A detailed comparison of the four historians’ narratives is central to the second part of this
article, “‘Representing’ Mission from Below: Historians as Interpreters and Agents of
Christianization,” Church History 80, no. 2 (forthcoming). On Rufinus, whose account of the
conversion of Iberia is foundational and whose work as a translator and historian has begun to
be reevaluated in recent decades, see Mark Humphries, “Rufinus’s Eusebius: Translation,
Continuation, and Edition in the Latin Ecclesiastical History,” Journal of Early Christian
Studies 16, no. 2 (2008), 143– 64.
65
Bacurius, vir fide, pietate, virtute et animi et corporis insignis. Rufinus, HE 11.33: Schwartz
and Mommsen, 1038, line 17; Amidon, 88. Similarly here in 10.11 Rufinus affirms that his
“chief concern was for religion and truth,” Amidon, 23.
66
Socrates, HE 1.20.
67
For the identity and background of Bacurius, whom we encounter in the writings of Libanius,
Ammianus Marcellinus, and Zosimus, among others, see Braund, Georgia in Antiqutiy, 246– 48;
and David Woods, “Subarmachius, Bacurius, and the Schola Scutariorum Sagittariorum,”
Classical Philology 91, no. 4 (1996): 365– 71. In the Syriac Life of Peter the Iberian Bacurius
appears as the grandfather of the saint and is described as “the first Christian king who ruled
that country, having led that whole nation to the fear of God.” See Vita Petri Iberi, §§6– 7 in the
new edition and translation of Cornelia B. Horn and Robert R. Phenix, Jr., John Rufus: The
Lives of Peter the Iberian, Theodosius of Jerusalem, and the Monk Romanus (Atlanta: Society
of Biblical Literature, 2008), pp. 7–8; also §11, p. 13. The editors also note the possibility that
John Rufus has confused Bacurius with King Mirian (xxiv). Other views on Bacurius and his
role in the conversion of the Georgians to Christianity are briefly discussed in Cornelia B. Horn,
Asceticism and Christological Controversy in Fifth-Century Palestine: The Career of Peter the
Iberian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 51, 58–59, and 115–17. See, too, the older
but thorough discussion of the problem in P. Peeters, “Les débuts du christianisme en Géorgie
d’après les sources hagiographiques,” AB 50 (1932), 5–58; here 30–38.
68
Moses Khorenatsi, History of the Armenians, trans. Robert W. Thomson (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1978), 3.34, 322, relates that Mashtots, after having invented an
alphabet for the Armenians, went to the Georgians and was favored by the Iberian king,
Bacurius. On this basis Thelamon surmises that Bacurius reigned in Iberia in the early fifth
century, that is, at the very time Rufinus was writing. See Thelamon, Paı̈ens et chrétiens, 93 – 96.
MISSION FROM BELOW 19
Iberian royal couple are absent from all four of the earliest accounts, but
evidence from other sources strongly suggests the reign of King
Meribanes (Mirian III, according to local tradition), a contemporary of
Constantius II rather than his more orthodox father. While the Roman
Emperor Constantine comes into the picture toward the end of all four
narratives, we must bear in mind Rufinus’s penchant, followed by the
other orthodox church historians, for attributing everything good to the
reign of the Nicene Emperor Constantine rather than his pro-Arian
successor.69 Ammianus Marcellinus specifically notes Constantius’s
diplomatic efforts to maintain the loyalty of “Arsaces and Meribanes,
kings of Armenia and Hiberia respectively . . . since it was feared that they
could gravely injure the interests of Rome if at this critical moment they
went over to the Persian.”70 Moreover, Constantius is known to have
sponsored missionary efforts as part of his imperial strategy in sensitive
areas on the frontiers.71
The principal agent in the Christianization of Georgia, however, is no Roman
emperor or Iberian king but an anonymous captive woman. Although she
became known in later Georgian tradition as St. Nino, she remains unnamed
in all the fifth-century accounts.72 None of the narratives even specify that
this female captive is a Roman. Indeed, this would have been unlikely since
Iberia was in this period a kind of Roman protectorate, though apparently
without abandoning connections with the Sassanians.73 While kings on the

69
On the deliberate chronological imprecision of Rufinus and the other pro-Nicene church
historians, especially with respect to the reign of Constantius II and his “zelo missionario
filoariano,” see Lellia Cracco Ruggini, “Universalità e campanilismo, centro e periferia, città e
deserto nelle Storie ecclesiastiche,” in La storiografica ecclesiastica nella tarda antichità. Atti
del Convegno tenuto in Erice (December 3–8, 1978) (Messina: Centro di studi umanistici,
1980), 159–94; here 178–80. See also Amidon’s introduction, xvii, for his harsh criticism of
Rufinus on this point.
70
Ammianus Marcellinus, 21.6.8 in Walter Hamilton, trans., Ammianus Marcellinus: The Later
Roman Empire, A.D. 354– 378 (New York: Penguin, 1986), 215.
71
W. H. C. Frend, “The Church in the Reign of Constantius II (337–361): Mission –
Monasticism – Worship,” in L’Église et l’empire au IVe siècle, ed. Albrecht Dihle (Geneva:
Fondation Hardt, 1989), 73–111, especially 75–85.
72
Several scholars have suggested that the name Nino has its origins with the Latin word “nonna”
(meaning nun or ascetic), the Greek n nna, or the Armenian nounè. On diverse interpretations of the
origins of Nino’s name, see Eva Maria Synek, Heilige Frauen der frühen Christenheit. Zu den
Frauenbildern in hagiographischen Texten des christlichen Ostens (Würzburg: Augustinus-
Verlag, 1994), 135–38; also Jost Gippert, “St. Nino’s Legend: Vestiges of Its Various Sources,”
Gelatis Ak’ademiis Moambe 3 (1997): 2 –4 at http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/personal/jg/pdf/
jg1997je.pdf (accessed November 30, 2009); English translation of original in Enatmecnierebis
sak’itxebi 1– 2 (2006), 104–22. Gippert points to evidence suggesting that Nino originally came
from Cappadocia to the Jewish community in Mcxeta and that her mother tongue was Syriac.
Horn, “St. Nino and Christianization,” 250, also suggests that she may have been “a native of
Cappadocia.” Both authors, however, focus on the later legends of St. Nino rather than the fifth-
century church histories.
20 CHURCH HISTORY

eastern frontiers had long maintained relations with both empires, the terms of
the Treaty of Nisibis in 298 put Iberia more squarely within the Roman sphere
of influence. Iberian kings received their symbols of office from Rome, and
Iberia remained an ally of Rome through most of the fourth century. In this
context the presence of a Roman captive in Iberia would be hard to explain.
Moreover, while the woman is repeatedly referred to as a “captive” (Latin:
captiva; Greek: aixmálvto6) or even a “prisoner of war” (doryálvto6) in
Theodoret, there seem to be no limitations on her activities. Rather she is
characterized by fasts, prayer, vigils, chastity, and scorn for riches—that is,
by the virtues of monastic life with which Rufinus himself was so well
acquainted. Following Rufinus, Socrates speaks of her “holy and chaste life”
adding that “she practiced much moderation and serious fasting, and she
devoted herself to earnest prayer.”74 Sozomen explains that “she did not
slacken her accustomed way of life among the foreigners. It was important
to her to fast and night and day to pray and to praise God.”75 Theodoret is
even more explicit in connecting the captive’s ascetic practices with her
apostolic ministry: “She continued instant in prayer, allowing herself no
softer bed than a sack spread upon the ground, and accounted fasting her
highest luxury. This austerity was rewarded by gifts similar to those of the
Apostles.”76 Although she is remiss to leave her hovel on account of her
modesty, there is no indication that the woman is literally imprisoned.
Indeed, she seems to represent a “captiva Christi,” paralleling the Apostle
Paul’s self-description as a “slave” or “prisoner of Christ” rather than the
captive of any empire or kingdom.77

73
On the complex relations between Iberia, Rome, and the Sassanians in this period, see Braund,
Georgia in Antiquity, 238–67 and Beate Dignas and Engelbert Winter, Rome and Persia in Late
Antiquity: Neighbours and Rivals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), especially 128–
29, 188–92. Despite the absence of details about the woman’s identity, scholars continue to refer to
her as a Roman captive. For example, Haas, “Mountain Constantines,” 106–9, describes her as a
“captive Roman woman,” “a young captive,” and “a slave girl, a Roman captive . . . [who]
impressed her Iberian owners,” although neither Rufinus nor the other fifth-century church
historians says anything explicit about her nationality, her youth, or her alleged Iberian slaveholders.
74
Socrates, HE 1.20.2.
75
Sozomen, HE 2.7.1.
76
Theodoret, HE 1.24.1: Jackson, Ecclesiastical History, 3:418. In the secondary literature on
St. Nino, Fairy von Lilienfeld makes the clearest connection between the captive’s ascetic and
apostolic calling. Pointing out that that the captive woman bears no similarity to a prisoner of
war, she proposes translating Rufinus’s “captiva” with a Georgian term that she renders in
German, “Fremdland wandernde (d.i. die altmonastische j1nit1ía übende) asketische lebende
Frau.” See Fairy von Lilienfeld, “Amt und geistliche Vollmacht der heiligen Nino, ‘Apostel und
Evangelist’ von Ostgeorgien, nach den ältesten georgischen Quellen,” in Horizonte der
Christenheit. Festschrift für Friedrich Heyer zu seinem 85. Geburtstag, Oikonomia 34, ed.
Michael Kohlbacher and Markus Lesinski (Erlangen, 1994), 224– 49; here 226, n. 10.
77
See Thelamon, Paı̈ens et chrétiens, 101, though by the end of this chapter she seems to have
forgotten this point, emphasizing instead the political implications of the conversion.
MISSION FROM BELOW 21
Descriptions of the captive woman in these texts have given rise to diverse
interpretations of her identity and function. In her penetrating study of pagans
and Christians in Rufinus’s church history, Françoise Thelamon analyzed at
some length what she believes to be the underlying Georgian source of such
a concept. Although the term is anachronistic for this period, in ancient
Georgian paganism, the kadag, or shaman, was a man or woman who was
possessed by a divinity, served as a healer, and was associated with the
foundation of pagan religious cults and rituals. The ancient Georgian
equivalent of the kadag was designated by the term daç’erili, the very meaning
of which, Thelamon suggests, denotes captivity. Hence, Rufinus’s account of
Iberia’s conversion through the mediation of a captive woman represents his
attempt to translate a Georgian foundation myth related by Bacurius into
language that made sense to him and would be acceptable to his Latin
Christian audience.78 While Thelamon’s theory is intriguing, Philip Amidon
has noted that it would be difficult to prove or disprove her hypothesis, and
others have raised questions about the application of data drawn from
modern Georgian shamanistic practices to the late ancient pagan setting.
Both Cornelia Horn and Eva Synek pose the simpler explanation, with
which I concur, that the Christian captive was following instructions about
healing the sick derived from the New Testament.79
Other studies of Christian origins in Iberia lend support to this less exotic and
more biblically-based interpretation of the captive woman’s actions and identity.
Several scholars have argued for the Jewish character of early Christianity in
Georgia well before the influence of Hellenistic Christianity came to dominate
through the conversion of the Iberian royal family. Analysis of archeological
data, particularly burial practices and inscriptions, suggests that a sizeable
community of Jews settled in Kartli from the end of the first through the
second century A.D. and that some of these Jews had already embraced
Christianity, particularly in Urbnisi and the capital city of Mtskheta.80

78
Hence, he would have edited out the idea of the woman’s possession, which from the Christian
perspective could only be demonic. For an analysis of the whole account, see Thelamon, Paı̈ens et
chrétiens, 86–122; on the underlying motif of the kadag in Rufinus’s account, 107 –10. On the role
of the kadag (shaman) in ancient Georgian paganism, see G. Charachidzé, Le système religieux de
la Géorgie paı̈enne (Paris: Maspero, 1968), 115– 95, on which Thelamon bases her analysis of
Rufinus’s account. See also Synek, Heiligen Frauen, 80–132.
79
For the most serious challenges to Thelamon’s theory, see Balbina Bäbler, “Die Blick über die
Reichsgrenzen: Sokrates und die Bekehrung Georgiens,” in Die Welt des Sokrates von
Konstantinopel, ed. Balbina Bäbler and Heinz Günther Nesselrath (Munich: Saur, 2001),
159–81. For alternative explanations, see Horn, “St. Nino and Christianization,” 253; and
Synek, Heiligen Frauen, 85. Among the passages cited are James 5:14 –15, John 14:12–13, and
Acts 3:6. See also the comments of Amidon, The Church History of Rufinus, 47–48 n. 21.
80
Tamila Mgaloblishvili and Iulon Gagoshidze, “The Jewish Diaspora and Early Christianity in
Georgia,” in Ancient Christianity in the Caucasus, ed. Tamila Mgaloblishvili (London: Routledge,
1998), 39–48.
22 CHURCH HISTORY

Moreover, later Georgian and Armenian texts explicitly link the female captive
with Jerusalem and the Jewish community.81 Whether or not Rufinus knew of
the earlier Judeo-Christian background to Iberia’s conversion or however much
he may have understood the shamanistic function of the kadag or daç’erili in
ancient Georgian paganism, neither he nor his Greek counterparts reveal any
knowledge of such influences. Like Rufinus, these early Byzantine historians
use biblical motifs to describe the woman’s way of life and miraculous deeds.
Moreover, they present their female protagonist as a humble captive and
ascetic, accentuating the weakness of her position. She was a woman of low
estate with no apparent connection to a Christian or Jewish community in
Iberia, and she certainly held no imperial or high social position. Indeed, her
point of contact and initial influence in the Georgian community was not with
the king and queen but through the healing of another woman’s child.82
As with the account of Armenia’s conversion, apostolic and hagiographic
topoi are rife. For example, the evangelistic role of the captive parallels that
of the apostle Thaddeus in the conversion of King Abgar of Edessa that
Rufinus had just translated from Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History. Here too,
the king’s healing is effected through the prayers of a wandering preacher
and evangelist.83 What set the female captive apart from such apostolic
figures, however, was her sex. In every other way the woman exemplified
the traits that Rufinus attributed to apostles of his own day, primarily bishops
and monks: they speak in the name of God and are orthodox in faith, they
perform the same miracles as the apostles (signa apostolica), and they are
involved in evangelization. Yet neither the anonymous female captive nor
any other woman appears among those he deems “apostles and prophets of
our time.”84 Moreover, it is not the captive woman but the Iberian king who,

81
Besides Mgaloblishvili and Gagoshidze, “The Jewish Diaspora,” in Ancient Christianity in the
Caucasus, see in the same volume, Ernst Bammel, “Die Ausbreitung des Christentums in
Georgien,” 18–23, and Michel van Esbroeck, “La place de Jerusalem dans la ‘Conversion de la
Georgie,’” 59–74. See also Jean Pierre Mahé, “Bekehrung Transkaukasiens: Eine
Historiographie mit doppeltem Boden,” in Christianisierung des Kaukasus, ed. Siebt, 107–24;
Dan D. Y. Shapira, “‘Tabernacle of Vine’: Some (Judaizing?) Features of the Old Georgian Vita
of St. Nino,” Scrinium: Revue de patrologie, d’hagiographie critique et d’histoire ecclésiastique
2 (2006): 273 –306; and Haas, “Mountain Constantines,” 110–12.
82
For more on this theme see Horn, “Lives and Literary Roles of Children,” especially 272– 73.
83
Eusebius, HE 1.13.
84
Rufinus reserves the designation “apostles and prophets of our times” for certain orthodox
bishops and monks, despite the difference in their status and function. For an analysis of those
he places in this category in his church history, see Françoise Thelamon, “‘Apôtres et prophètes
de notre temps:’ Les évéques et les moines présentés comme apôtres et prophètes contemporains
dans l’Histoire ecclèsiastique de Rufin,” Antichità altoadriatiche 39 (1992): 171– 94. Although
the captive evangelist of Iberia fits these characteristics, Rufinus does not include and Thelamon
does not discuss any women among his “apostles.”
MISSION FROM BELOW 23
“before even being initiated into sacred things, became the apostle of his
nation,” or in Socrates’ rendition, “a preacher of Christ.”85
Although fifth-century historians attempted to make the captive woman conform
to contemporary gender roles—humility and reserve before the queen, instructing
the king in the faith only “as far as it was lawful for a woman to disclose such
things,”86 and advising that the emperor be asked to send priests—they did not
try to hide her major function as an evangelist and preacher of the faith to the
Iberians. In this capacity she bears resemblance to St. Thecla, whose possible
influence we have already noted with regard to Armenia. The Acts of Thecla
were well known throughout the late antique world by the fifth century and very
likely a model for accounts of women missionaries. They present an ascetic
female evangelist who inspired men as well as women not only to acts of piety
and asceticism but also to apostolic activity.87 Like Thecla as well as Rhipsime,
the female Iberian captive is clearly an ascetic, resembling the parthenos theou
of ascetic literature, and her ascetic virtues are the basis of her apostolic gifts.88
Yet while Rhipsime allegedly came from a convent in the Roman Empire, the
captive ascetic apostle of Iberia remains anonymous in our fifth-century sources,
unconnected with any monastery or political realm.
None of the fifth-century accounts of Georgia’s conversion suggests imperial
initiative in sending a mission, diplomatic or religious, until after the people
had converted, and only then at the captive’s advice. As for Emperor

85
nondum initiatus in sacris fit suae gentis apostolus. Rufinus, HE 10.11, Schwartz and Mommsen, 975,
line 20; Amidon, 22. Cf. Socrates, HE 1.20.12:
86
Rufinus, HE 10.11: Schwartz and Mommsen, 975, lines 16– 17; Amidon, 22. Sozomen, HE
2.7.8, includes a similar caveat while Socrates omits any mention of the captive’s teaching function.
87
See Albrecht, Das Leben der heiligen Makrina auf dem Hintergrund der Thekla-traditionen,
267–71, for an analysis of Thecla’s role as a missionary and apostle. Albrecht mentions Nino
(as she became known in medieval Georgian texts) at several points as a type of the wandering
apostle, teacher, preacher, and evangelist in the model of Thecla (25, 223– 25). While Davis,
The Cult of St. Thecla, traces the influence of the Acts of Thecla on traditions of women’s piety,
he does not explore the question of its influence on eastern missionary activity. Examining the
later Life and Miracles, itself a “literary paraphrase” of the Acts, Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, The
Life and Miracles of Thekla: A Literary Study (Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies,
2006), is suggestive in this regard. Showing how different aspects of the Thecla legend were
appropriated by late antique authors, Johnson includes an analysis of a group of “miracles
leading to conversion” (153– 60), the goal of which was to bring praise to Thecla “for
converting people to Christianity” (153).
88
Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret all introduce the captive woman with a description
of her ascetic practices, though only Theodoret (HE 1.24.1) explicitly links her asceticism with her
apostolic gifts. On the parthenoi theou, literally “virgins of God,” which had already developed into
a distinct order by the later fourth century, see Susanna Elm, “Virgins of God”: The Making of
Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), especially 54–55, 59, 139–40. Elm,
however, does not discuss the connection between asceticism and apostolicity. On this
connection, especially in the context of third-century Syria, see Daniel Caner, Wandering,
Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 50– 82. See also Albrecht, Das Leben der
heiligen Makrina, 305– 7, on the prophetic and apostolic model of the female parthenos.
24 CHURCH HISTORY

Constantine’s response, Rufinus claims that he “was made far happier” by the
news of Iberia’s conversion “than if he had annexed to the Roman Empire
unknown peoples and kingdoms.”89 Thelamon has suggested that this
statement reflects the contemporary view that the conversion of a barbarian
nation was equivalent to a new conquest.90 In the account itself, however,
quite the opposite is affirmed. Constantine does not respond to Iberia’s
conversion in terms of an annexation or as an extension of Roman influence
but rejoices in the news of the spread of the Christian faith. Though
Constantine does send priests to “complete God’s work begun among them,”
Rufinus downplays the imperial connection. To be sure, both Socrates and
Sozomen add the information that alliances were sought, suggesting that
acceptance of Christianity implied a particular political relationship with the
Roman Empire. However, Sozomen concludes not simply with a summary
statement regarding the Iberians’ Christianization but with more precise
vocabulary concerning what had occurred: “Thus did the Iberians receive the
knowledge of Christ, and until this day they worship him carefully.”91 Here
as elsewhere in his church history, Sozomen minimizes the role of the
emperor in the process of Christianization.92 Although Theodoret also
affirms that the captive woman convinced the Iberian king to send an
embassy to Constantine requesting a “teacher of religion,” he does not
explicitly discuss the political implications of Iberia’s conversion. Rather he
concludes by describing the emperor’s solicitousness for the spread of the
faith and the well-being of Christians both on and beyond the frontiers of the

89
Rufinus, HE 10.11, Schwartz and Mommsen, 976, lines 16– 18; Amidon, 23.
90
Thelamon, Paı̈ens et chrétiens, 106; also, 122, where she concludes that “Pour Rufin, comme
pour ses contemporains, la christianisation impliquait la romanisation.” Thelamon also cites
Thomson, “Christianity and the Northern Barbarians,” 75– 78, in this regard as Thomson uses
Georgia, among other barbarian nations, to argue that the religious history of the barbarian
peoples cannot be separated from their political relations with the Roman Empire. For a slightly
different interpretation of Rufinus’s account of Iberia, see Alain Chauvot, Opinions romains face
aux barbares au IVe siècle ap. J.-C. (Paris: De Boccard, 1998), 456–58.
91
. Sozomen 2.7.12: Hartranft,
Ecclesiastical History, 264. This and other descriptions of mission and conversion in Sozomen
contrast with the approach of Socrates. This contrast will be developed in greater detail in Sterk,
“‘Representing’ Mission from Below,” (forthcoming).
92
Sozomen’s more nuanced approach to the different stages of Christianization brings into
question common comparisons of the two historians. See, for example, David Rohrbacher, The
Historians of Late Antiquity (London: Routledge, 2002), 234–35, who equates Sozomen with
Socrates in his connection of Christianization with imperial politics. Though she does not focus
on Christianization, Theresa Urbaincyzk presents a more nuanced comparison of the two
historians. See T. Urbainczyck, “Observations on the Differences between the Church Histories
of Socrates and Sozomen,” Historia 46 (1997): 355–73; also Urbainczyck, “Vice and Advice in
Socrates and Sozomen,” in The Propaganda of Power: The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity,
ed. M. Whitby (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 299– 319, where she notes that Sozomen’s narratives tend
to “give the emperor a less important role” (308).
MISSION FROM BELOW 25
empire.93 Judging from our Greek historians as well as Rufinus, then, political
alliance consistently followed rather than preceded religious conversion.
Medieval Georgian and Armenian narratives identify Rufinus’s anonymous
captive as St. Nino, a companion of Rhipsime who fled Rome with the other
virgins, thwarting the emperor’s plan to take Rhipsime as his wife. Most of
the virgins were martyred, but St. Nino escaped and was commissioned in a
vision to preach the gospel to the pagans of Georgia. Passages of scripture
reassured her that her gender posed no obstacle to this missionary call.94
Based on these later accounts, especially The Conversion of Kartli, Fairy
von Lilienfeld has detailed the apostolic characteristics and activities that
clearly placed St. Nino in the category of a wandering apostle and
evangelist.95 Oddly enough, however, Georgian sources themselves were
silent about their female apostle until at least the seventh century, even
though Latin and Greek church historians related the same basic information
about her role in the conversion of the Iberian royal family more than two
centuries earlier.96 We must bear in mind, however, that St. Nino had several
strikes against her in the context of late ancient Iberia: she was a foreigner,
she was a captive, and she was a woman. Any one of these aspects of her
identity would have rendered her inferior in the eyes of the nobility, and all
three together would have likely proved embarrassing for the apostle or
enlightener of Georgia.97 Moreover, as a foreigner she would have likely
faced linguistic limitations in attempting to translate the Christian message to

93
Theodoret, HE 1.24.10– 13. Indeed, he concludes the account of Iberia’s conversion with a
comment about the emperor’s solicitude for the Christians in Persia. His next chapter (25), taken
from Eusebius’s Vita Constantini 4:9– 13, is the text of the letter from Constantine to Shapur II
concerning the persecution of Christians in his realm.
94
The full texts of these Georgian and Armenian accounts of the conversion of Georgia have been
placed on the same page in English translation in Robert W. Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian
History: The Medieval Armenian Adaptation of the Georgian Chronicles: The Original
Georgian Texts and the Armenian Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 84– 152; for the
commissioning and reassurances of St. Nino, 93– 96. Not surprisingly, the later Armenian
version also emphasizes Armenia’s political and ecclesiastical pretensions over Georgia.
95
Von Lilienfeld, “Amt und geistliche Vollmacht,” especially 238– 49. She notes, however, that
unlike the medieval Georgian sources, Rufinus failed to honor the captive woman with the title of
“apostle,” reserving that title instead for King Mirian and relating that “the men believed because
of the king, the women because of the queen” (237). For the content and complicated textual history
of the Conversion of Kartli, see 227 –36.
96
On the medieval Georgian tradition of St. Nino and the centuries of silence about her apostolic
role, see also Synek, “Die heilige Nino,” in Heiligen Frauen der frühen Christenheit, 80–138; and
Horn, “St. Nino and Christianization,” especially 258–61. On medieval Georgian historiography
see Stephen H. Rapp, Jr., Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography: Early Texts and
Eurasian Contexts, CSCO 601, Subsidia 113 (Louvain: Peeters, 2003).
97
Eva M. Synek, “The Life of St. Nino: Georgia’s Conversion to its Female Apostle,” in
Christianizing Peoples and Converting Individuals, ed. Guyda Armstrong and Ian N. Wood
(Turnhout, Belgium: Breposls, 2000). Synek also points out that for some time the nobly born
Gregory the Illuminator had served as “an honorable substitute for the slave woman” while the
Armenian and Georgian churches were in concord (7– 8). After the division over Christology,
26 CHURCH HISTORY

another culture. Consequently, when medieval Iberian writers began to reshape

the story of their nation’s Christianization, they tried to conceal or compensate
for Nino’s low social status. No longer a captive, they suggested instead that
she was the niece of the patriarch of Jerusalem, who gave official
ecclesiastical confirmation to her missionary vocation in Georgia. Several
authors added to their accounts of Nino’s dream-vision commissioning clear
scriptural sanction for female apostleship, and they tried to counterbalance
the scandal of female leadership by placing Nino in the context of a broader
list of formidable women in positions of authority and influence.98 Our fifth-
century Greek historians are much less precise about the identity of the
anonymous captive woman, but they are no less affirmative of her central
role as a missionary, even an apostle, to barbarian peoples on the borders of
their empire.
The seventh-century anti-Chalcedonian chronicler, John of Nikiu, similarly
affirms the apostolic agency of a captive woman beyond the Roman frontiers
in South Arabia. The narrative of Yemen’s conversion through the medium
of the holy virgin Theognosta contains several puzzling features. John of
Nikiu’s Chronicle is believed to have been originally composed in Greek but
has come down to us through only two extant Ethiopic manuscripts, which
are translations from Arabic. None of the three Greek chroniclers on whom
John heavily depended includes this account of the Christianization of
Yemen.99 Another odd element in John’s account is the king’s request for a

however, the notion of a common apostle was abandoned, and St. Rhipsime, once deemed
Gregory’s co-apostle to Armenia, is now transformed into the godchild and disciple of St. Nino.
98
Not least of these was St. Mary Magdalene, who was used in Georgian hagiography to exalt the
role of their unconventional female apostle. Synek, “Life of Nino,” 12– 13. The Conversion of
Kartli also includes Georgian Jewish women, noble female converts of St. Nino; Empress
Helena; Nino’s mother, who served in ecclesiastical office in Jerusalem; and Nino’s teacher in
Jerusalem who is described as the “best contemporary theologian” (10). Recent studies suggest
that Georgia’s rediscovery and rehabilitation of its female apostle corresponded with a general
improvement in the social status of women in medieval Georgia and reached a high point during
Georgia’s “golden age” under the rule of a woman, Queen Tamar (1184– 1213). See von
Lilienfeld, “Amt und geistliche Vollmacht,” 247– 48; Horn, “St. Nino and Christianization,”
261; and Synek, “Life of Nino” 11–12.
99
John of Nikiu’s main sources for the Chronicle were John Malalas, John of Antioch, and an
unknown author of the Chronicon paschale. For an English translation of Malalas, see Elizabeth
Jeffreys, Michael Jeffreys, Roger Scott, et al., The Chronicle of John Malalas: A Translation,
Byzantina Australiensia 4 (Melbourne: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1986).
For a recent edition of John of Antioch, see Umberto Roberto, Ioannis Antiocheni Fragmenta ex
Historia chronica. Introduzione, edizione critica e traduzione. Texte und Untersuchungen zur
Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, 154 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005); for the
Chronicon paschale, Michael Whitby and Mary Whitby, Chronicon Paschale 284–628 A.D.
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989). On John of Nikiu’s sources, see Zotenberg,
“Mémoire sur la chronique Byzantine de Jean de Nikiou,” Journal Asiatique ser. 7, 10 (1877),
451– 517; 12 (1878), 245–347; 13 (1879), 291– 386. A. N. Stratos, Byzantium in the Seventh
MISSION FROM BELOW 27
bishop from Emperor Honorius, who from 395 had come to rule the western
half of the Roman Empire while his brother Arcadius ruled the east. Yemen
had no significant diplomatic relations with the west, and it was situated
ecclesiastically and politically between the Axumite kingdom of Ethiopia
and the east Roman emperor in Constantinople. In fact Axum had already
launched missionary work in southern Arabia, most often referred to as India
in this period.100 In light of the struggle for independence from both nearby
Axum and Byzantium, however, it is not surprising that the king might try to
circumvent authorities closer to home.101 From John of Nikiu’s anti-
Chalcedonian perspective, the connection with Honorius and the church in
the western empire may also have seemed more judicious from an
ecclesiastical point of view, even if the events he describes took place well
before the Council of Chalcedon had fractured the unity of the eastern
Christian world.102 Either way, John’s narrative of Yemen’s conversion
implies the underlying importance of diplomacy in the Christianization
process—whether oriented toward or away from the Byzantine ecclesiastical
capital. Yet it is certainly not the focus of his brief account of the land’s
conversion.
An account of St. Theognosta in the later Copto-Arabic Synaxarion,
containing biographies of saints and martyrs for each day of the year, first
compiled in the ninth century based on earlier texts, also connects the
captive woman with the western Roman emperor, Honorius.103 In this

Century, vol. 2, trans. Marc Ogilvie-Grant (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1972), 219–20, gives a
brief, largely unfavorable assessment of John’s Chronicle, but much work remains to be done on
both the text and its author.
100
On Axumite missionary efforts in southwest Arabia, see J. Spencer Trimingham, Christianity
Among the Arabs in Pre-Islamic Times (London: Longman, 1979), 287–93, though Trimingham
does not mention this brief account in John of Nikiu’s Chronicle. On the problem of “India” in
late antiquity, see Philip Mayerson, “A Confusion of Indias: Asian India and African India in the
Byzantine Sources,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 113, no. 2 ( April– June 1993):
169–74.
101
Such a maneuver recalls the later attempts of the Bulgar khan Boris to seek ecclesiastical
advice from the pope in Rome rather than the patriarch in Constantinople and the Moravian
ruler Rastislav seeking missionaries from Byzantium rather than Rome despite the Frankish
priests already at work in his territory. On the political context of these decisions, see Francis
Dvornik, Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
1970), 100–103.
102
John’s bitterness toward imperial Chalcedonian Christianity, enforced by the emperors in
Constantinople, is evident throughout the Chronicle. Indeed, he sees the Muslim invasions as
God’s punishment for the empire’s apostasy in accepting and enforcing Chalcedon: “When they
rejected the orthodox faith, which is our faith, in like manner were they rejected from the
imperial throne. And there has followed the undoing of all Christians that are in the world.”
John of Nikiu, Chronicle, 120.56.
103
Text in Le Synaxaire arabe jacobite (rédaction copte), ed. and trans. Rene Basset (Paris:
Firmin-Didot, 1905) PO 1:277–79. On the Synaxarion see also “Synaxarion, Copto-Arabic,” in
28 CHURCH HISTORY

version, envoys of the king of India have just delivered gifts to Emperors
Honorius and Arcadius when they come upon the virgin Theognosta, seize
her, and take her back to their country; but when the need for priests arises
later in the narrative, it is Emperor Honorius alone to whom appeal is made.
In this account we also see more clearly the significance of the saint’s name
“Theognosta” (she who has known God), for the woman is reading a book
when she is taken captive and placed in charge of the king’s wives and
attendants.
This variant more closely resembles late Roman accounts of the conversion
of Iberia. Indeed, Theognosta is known to the Copts as the saint who introduced
Christianity to Georgia, though the Synaxarion, like John of Nikiu, mentions
only India. Here the king himself falls sick and is immediately restored when
the captive woman makes the sign of the cross over him. The Coptic
redactor has the king’s crisis occur while he is waging war rather than on the
hunt, likely replacing symbolism that would have been highly significant for
the Caucasian lands in their Sassanian setting but had little meaning for the
desert contexts of Arabia and Egypt.104 Upon his return from war, the king
bows at the saint’s feet requesting baptism for himself and his people, but
Theognosta explains that it is not her place to baptize. After a priest sent by
Honorius administers this sacrament, the former captive “builds a convent
for herself and for the many virgins who desired the monastic life.”105 The
captive woman’s connection with monastic life is explicit in this later
account of Theognosta’s apostolic activity while such an association is only
implied in the Latin and Greek narratives of Iberia’s conversion.
The secondary nature of political factors in all these accounts adds nuance to
reigning paradigms of Christianization. The emperor’s role in converting the
Roman world has shaped scholarship on Byzantine missions for the past fifty
years, and no one would seriously question the interconnection of mission
with imperial political ambitions. Indeed, each of the narratives examined
here gives a role to the Roman emperor; yet none features imperially
sponsored missionaries as the principal evangelists. Imperial initiative is

The Coptic Encylopedia, vol. 7, ed. Aziz S. Atiya (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 2171–73. This
text is based on three fragmentary and conflicting Coptic texts discussed by Michel van
Esbroeck, “Theognosta, Saint” in Coptic Encylopedia, 7:2243–44. Van Esbroeck speculates that
in John’s account Iberia, through the medium of Ethiopic, has been transformed into the Yemen
or India.
104
Braund, Georgia in Antiquity, 253–54, emphasizes the importance of hunting for the
Sassanian context of Georgia just as Nina Garsoı̈an, “The Iranian Substratum of the
‘Agathangelos’ Cycle,” in Armenia between Byzantium and the Sassanians (London: Variorum,
1985), 12:151– 89, discusses its significance for the similar context of Armenia.
105
Coptic Synaxarion (Hinsdale, Ill.: St. Mark and St. Bishoy Coptic Orthodox Church, 1987),
4:26.
MISSION FROM BELOW 29
generally minimized in these accounts, coming only as a response to requests
for priests and only after the local rulers and the people have already turned
toward the Christian God, that is, after they have converted. Of course such
petitions to the emperor could be used to legitimize imperial intervention on
the basis of more noble spiritual goals. However, even the pleas for aid are
initiated in the first place not by the royal converts but rather by the captive
women missionaries who have effectively evangelized the nation despite
their confession of inadequacy as females to instruct the people or administer
the sacraments.
Whether martyr, thaumaturge, or teacher of the faith, each captive woman
served in an apostolic or evangelistic capacity despite the general reluctance
of our historians to ascribe the title “apostle” to their female protagonists.106
Even the stereotypical hagiographic and missionary topoi employed could
not obscure the provocative role these women played as agents of the
conversion of whole nations. Thus, although diplomatic elements are present
in each account and a shared Christian religion almost inevitably presumed a
political orientation toward Rome or Constantinople, these narratives also
reflect theological ideals of mission and conversion in late antiquity. It is not
the aggressive imperial or political dimension of the missionary process that
our historians emphasize, but the lowliness of the slave, the miraculous
spiritual strength of the virgin, and the evangelical zeal and prayer of the
humble captive turned missionary. We see here mission from below
preceding and complementing more typical reports of conversion from above.

IV. CAPTIVE WOMEN EVANGELISTS: RHETORIC AND REALITY

These accounts of captive evangelists do not stand alone in the history of
eastern Christian mission. The Christianization of the Goths, Ethiopia, and
pre-Islamic Arabia feature similar involvement of captives, both male and
female, in converting kingdoms to the Christian faith.107 Such narratives
present a very different picture of Christianization from that which has
typified scholarly treatments of eastern missions. Because of the legendary or

106
Von Lilienfeld, “Amt und geistliche Vollmacht,” 237– 38, 248, points out that in contrast to
later Georgian sources, Rufinus resists referring to the woman as an “apostle” while freely
assigning this title to the king. Agathangelos and Sozomen, however, put more emphasis on the
apostolic role of their female protagonists, and Theodoret, HE 1.24.1, specifically attributes
“apostlic gifts” to the captive woman.
107
Sozomen, HE 2.6.2; Rufinus, HE 10.9; al-Tabari, Geschichte der Perser und Araber zur Zeit
der Sasaniden: Aus der arabischen Chronik des Tabari übersetzt, trans. T. Nöldeke (Leiden, 1879),
177–82. The Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre also makes a vague claim that a woman
slave converted the Himyarites c.305, noted in F. Nau, “Analyses des parties inédites de la
chronique attribuée de Denys de Tellmahré,” Revue de l’Orient chrétien 2 (1897), 49. On
Theophilus’s mission to southern Arabia, see Philostorgius, HE 3.4–5.
30 CHURCH HISTORY

romantic quality of this topos, historians have tended to neglect such accounts;
and to be sure, on one level they do not take us very far in unraveling the
historical details of these nations’ conversions. Nor are we able to balance
our narrative sources with the kind of quantitative evidence that has been
used to challenge assumptions about women’s active roles in the conversion
of the western Roman aristocracy.108 While the intricately interwoven
threads of text and event may never be unraveled in our episodes of female
captive missionaries, the inclusion of such miraculous or semi-legendary
accounts in chronicles and histories introduces another layer of discourse in
the study of Christianization and the history of religion and empire in late
antiquity. In concluding, then, I would like to offer some reflections on the
genre of these conversion narratives, the rhetoric of female evangelists, and
the evidence of real women and captives as forces of Christian expansion on
the east Roman frontiers.
Given the relative paucity of historical records of Byzantine missions from
the eighth to the tenth century, Ihor Ševčenko has pointed to the import of
“imaginary reports,” that is, hagiographic novels and “hybrid mission
reports,” which present actual events in a miraculous setting.109 Similarly,
late antique conversion narratives may represent a mixed genre or a
“blending of genres,” which, as Scott Fitzgerald Johnson recently argued,
characterized late antique literature as a whole.110 Apocryphal and
hagiographic elements combined with narrative history to make the genre of
ecclesiastical history more flexible or “elastic” than has sometimes been
assumed. Embedded in historical narratives, specifically in the newly
evolving genre of church history, these accounts of mission and conversion

108
See Michele Renee Salzman, “Aristocratic Women,” chap. 5 in The Making of a Christian
Aristocracy: Social and Religious Change in the Western Roman Empire (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2002), 138 –77. Salzman’s conclusions should temper any confident
assertions about women’s Christianizing influence in what was in both east and west a
predominantly patriarchal world.
109
Ihor Ševčenko, “Religious Missions Seen from Byzantium,” Harvard Ukranian Studies
12–13, Proceedings of the International Congress Commemorating the Millennium of
Christianity in Rus’-Ukraine (1988/1989), 20– 27. While we are relatively well-informed of
missions “on the higher governmental and ecclesiastical levels,” Ševčenko notes that we know
very little about “the nuts and bolts of these enterprises” (18– 19), for example, questions of
language and missionary methods.
110
“The blending of genres and experimentation with form can be read as definitive of late
antique literature,” Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, “Reviving the Memory of the Apostles:
Apocryphal Tradition and Travel Literature in Late Antiquity,” in Revival and Resurgence in
Christian History, ed. Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), 23
n. 92. Johnson has also developed this argument about late antique “literary hybridity” in an
article and the introduction to his edited volume, Greek Literature in Late Antiquity: Dynamism,
Didacticism, Classicism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), and in Johnson, “Apocrypha and the
Literary Past in Late Antiquity,” in From Rome to Constantinople: Studies in Honour of Averil
Cameron, ed. Hagit Amirav and Bas ter Haar Romeny (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 47– 66.
MISSION FROM BELOW 31
stood alongside Lives and Apocryphal Acts as “stories that people liked to
hear.”111 Shaped by the revival of apostolic history that particularly marked
the fourth and fifth centuries, they were stories invested with meaning,
stories that might inspire imitation.112 Yet because they formed part of
historical narratives, they were intended to be taken as trustworthy and true.
An emphasis on simple, unadorned style, eyewitness reports, and hence
“intrinsic truth-value” that marked the storytelling of late antique
hagiographers characterized the conversion narratives included in these
histories as well.113 Indeed, although Rufinus has been criticized for his
emphasis on the miraculous and for chronological errors, he describes his
own work in translating and thereby passing on Eusebius’s church history as
an example of “apostolic tradition;” and each of the other fifth-century
historians make similar claims about the trustworthiness of their accounts.114
Moreover, even hybrid reports or semi-legendary accounts of captive women
evangelists may illumine our understanding of mission in late antiquity. At
the least they suggest what the authors and their contemporaries expected the

111
Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian
Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 93. Chapter 3, 89–119, entitled
“Stories People Want,” discusses the significance of early Christian apocryphal writings for the
diffusion of Christianity in late antiquity.
112
Johnson, “Reviving the Memory of the Apostles,” 3– 4, describes a “revival of interest in
apostolic traditions” that stimulated patristic writers to address the subject of Christian history.
Moreover, “this awareness of the value of the history of the apostles . . . offers an early example
of reaching back into the historical past of the Christian Church for inspiration in the present.”
Both here and in “Apocrypha and the Literary Past,” 64, Johnson examines the diverse forms in
which the revival of apostolic history was expressed and emphasizes the influence of apocryphal
texts on diverse new Christian genres (for example, Lives, homilies, dialogue poems, travel
literature). He says nothing, however, about the impact of this revival on the writing of church
history.
113
See Claudia Rapp, “Storytelling as Spiritual Communication in Early Greek Hagiography:
The Use of Diegesis,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6, no. 3 (1998): 431– 48. Rapp argues
that this type of storytelling “finds preferred application in hagiographical writing” (437) and
especially in collections of such writings like the Historia monachorum and Theodoret’s
Historia religiosa (433).
114
Rufinus, HE, Preface, in Schwartz and Mommsen, 951–52: Amidon, 4. On modern scholars’
negative evaluation of Rufinus’s work, see Humphries, “Rufinus’s Eusebius,” especially 146 –51.
Humphries is one of several historians who have reassessed Rufinus’s historical work in a more
positive light. See also Torben Christensen, Rufinus of Aquileia and the Historia ecclesiastica,
Lib. VIII– IX, of Eusebius, Historisk-filosofiske Meddelelser 58 (Copenhagen: Munksgaard,
1989), especially his conclusion, 333– 36; Françoise Thelamon, Paı̈ens et chrétiens; and more
recently, Thelamon, “Écrire l’histoire de l’Église: d’Eusèbe de Césarée à Rufin d’Aquilée,” in
L’Histoire de l’Église des premiers siècles, ed. Bernard Pouderon and Yves-Marie Duval,
Théologie historique 114 (Paris: Beauchesne, 2001), 207– 35, where she makes the following
comparison between Eusebius and Rufinus: “Nos deux historiens en effet n’entend pas faire une
histoire purement documentaire—même s’ils ont le souci qu’elle soit véridique et bien
documentée—, mais ils veulent construire un récit qui fait apparaı̂tre le vrai sens de l’histoire de
l’Église” (209). On the aims and approaches of the other historians’ conversion narratives,
especially as revealed in their prologues, see Sterk, “‘Representing’ Mission From Below,”
(forthcoming).
32 CHURCH HISTORY

process of mission and conversion to be like: some of the goals, the methods,
and the potential missionaries.
Unfortunately the motif of the female captive who converts others tells us
frustratingly little about the actual activities of Christian women, whether the
powerful or the lowly, as missionaries on the east Roman frontiers. As in
texts concerning earlier Christian and Jewish women, the divide between
rhetorical construction and historical reality remains problematic.115 Like
Josephus’s portrayal of Gentile women converts to Judaism as over and
against Hasmoean, Herodian, and biblical women, or Luke’s juxtaposition of
the respectable noblewoman Lydia to the demon-possessed slave girl
proclaiming her message publicly on the streets, the portrayal of women may
well be part of an author’s apologetic or propagandistic strategy.116 It may
be used to convey particular ideals of Christianization as much as real
evangelistic activity. The representation of female captives as evangelists in
our accounts of mission underscores the power of the powerless, God’s
choice of the weak and the despised of the world as ambassadors
(1 Corinthians 1:28).117 This message is sometimes explicit, as in the victory
of the girl Rhipsime over the mighty King Trdat, or in Gaiane’s words of
encouragement regarding God’s grace to the humble and strength to young
David in overcoming the giant.118 At times it is implicit in the story as a

115
The past generation has seen an outpouring of scholarly literature and diverse hermeneutic
approaches devoted to the analysis of both misogyny and feminism in patristic writings about
women. For a discussion of some of the dominant trends from the 1970s to the 1990s, see
Lynda Coon’s introduction to Sacred Fictions. The emphasis of Coon’s own study, she explains,
“is not on the historical lives of the subject saints but on the theological and didactic agendas of
their authors” (xv). Kate Cooper, among others, has rightly cautioned about the rhetorical use of
women by late antique male authors, even suggesting that the challenge posed by Christianity in
such texts is “not really about women.” See Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized
Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 55. While
Cooper is referring here to the highly rhetorical Life of Thecla, like others, I take issue with her
overly neat distinction between rhetoric and reality in male-authored texts about women.
116
On the representation of missionary women in Josephus and Luke– Acts, see Shelly
Matthews, First Converts; also the review of Matthews by Kim Haines-Eitzen in Church History
72, no. 3 (2002). For a more skeptical reading of these same texts, with a focus on women
converts rather than missionaries, see Judith M. Lieu, “The ‘Attraction of Women’ in/to Early
Judaism and Christianity,” JSNT 72 (1998): 5 –22, which Matthews does not discuss.
117
Though neither focuses on women evangelists per se, two essays in A People’s History of
Christianity, vol. 2, note the same emphasis in patristic literature. Elizabeth A. Clark,
“Asceticism, Class, and Gender,” 28, cites a number of biblical and patristic passages that show
how Christianity “complicated the usual status markers of Roman society” based on its “central
theological confession: if God had lowered himself to become human, then humble abasement
received divine sanction.” Similarly, on the representation of apostolic power in the Apocryphal
Acts, Judith Perkins, “Fictional Narratives and Social Critique,” 58, remarks: “The narratives
convey a message that the seeming powerlessness of those who have been traditionally
discounted on the basis of their lack of wealth, good looks, or status, may be an illusion.”
118
See Agathangelos, History, §§186–87, where he cites or alludes to Phil. 2:8, Luke 1:52, and
1 Kings 17:40. See also his description of the monk Albianos, §§845– 46, one of several pagan
MISSION FROM BELOW 33
whole. Although each narrative recounts the conversion of a king or royal
couple, we should not forget that the principal instruments of conversion
were foreign female captives. Indeed, the evangelization of Iberia began with
a humble female ascetic whose faith and devotion to Christ first attracted the
interest not of monarchs but of other “weak women.”119 Such accounts of
captive women missionaries communicate a consistent if subtle message. It
is not only the emperor or his bishops who are invested by God with an
apostolic mission to convert the ethnē, but the lowly, too, may embody and
proclaim the good news of salvation.
Although we lack systematic treatises on evangelism and mission in this
period, the study of Christianization must be attuned to theological as much
as socio-political ideals implicit in such accounts. As the mighty God could
take on lowly human form for the salvation of the world—the paradoxical
claim of orthodox Christianity—so the lowly of the world—women and
captives—could be exalted and might themselves become agents of
transformation. While churchmen might have demurred at the practical
application of such socially provocative principles, they were not adverse to
using women to “think with.”120 In this light, both the actual roles of captive
women and the use of such paradigms in late antique narratives of
conversion deserve renewed attention, for descriptions of their ministry
reveal not only contemporary views about women but also assumptions
about mission, conversion, and the very nature of the gospel.
Despite apocryphal elements in these semi-hagiographic narratives of
mission,121 various other sources provide supporting evidence of the

priests’ children whom Gregory appointed as bishop “to increase the preaching of the gospel.” With
his pupils he frequently retreated to deserted mountains where they devoted themselves to severe
mortifications “because they looked to the consolation of the apostolic sayings: ‘When I am
weak for Christ, then I am strong’” (2 Cor. 12:10).
119
“Her very perseverance made the common women [mulierculis] wonder if she were deriving
some benefit from such great devotion.” Rufinus, HE 10.11: Schwartz and Mommsen, 974, lines
5–6; Amidon, 21. Although Amidon translates mulierculae as “common women,” it might
equally be rendered “weak” or “foolish women.” Thelamon, Paı̈ens et chrétiens, 87, translates
mulierculis with “faibles femmes.” It was also these women who witnessed the captive’s first
healing miracle and spread the word about this marvel so that the news soon reached the queen.
Anne Jensen, God’s Self-Confident Daughters: Early Christianity and the Liberation of Women
(Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 77, has commented that this passage
from Rufinus suggests that “the Christianization of Iberia began from below, not from above, as
indicated by the official report.”
120
Building on the oft-quoted statement of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Elizabeth A. Clark discusses a
similar approach to the representation of pre-Nicene women in “Thinking with Women: The Uses
of the Appeal to ‘Woman’ in Pre-Nicene Christian Propaganda Literature,” in Spread of
Christianity, ed. Harris, 43–51.
121
I use the term “apocryphal” here in two senses: first, as it is commonly used in English to mean
fictitious or of questionable authenticity, but also “in the sense of belonging to the imaginary worlds
34 CHURCH HISTORY

prominent role that women played in complex and multi-layered processes of

Christianization. Well known are the complaints of Celsus that the weakest and
lowest members of society—slaves, stupid women, and little children—are
both the targets and the agents of Christian proselytism.122 While pagan
critics of Christianity frequently maligned the new religion for attracting and
corrupting women, the details Celsus supplies of women and children
drawing others to certain “private houses” or shops where they persuade
them concerning “the right way to live” and how to “make their home
happy” underscores the centrality of household life in the expansion of early
Christianity.123 Similarly, Cornelia Horn’s recent analysis of the function of
children in hagiography from the Caucasus presents substantial evidence for
the centrality of the family rather than the individual or the ruler in decisions
about religious adherence.124 She presents a convincing case for the role of
the weakest members of society—women and children—in the conversion of
their households, perhaps even legitimizing on the popular level the ruler’s
decision to convert. Although Horn focuses on later Georgian and Armenian
hagiography, these long-standing Caucasian traditions are reflected in the
earlier narratives of Iberia’s conversion recounted by Rufinus and the fifth-
century Greek historians.
While I have noted material evidence of Jewish or Judeao-Christian roots of
Christianity in Iberia, for the ministries of women, we must also reemphasize
the formative influence of Syrian Christianity in all the frontier regions
mentioned in our narratives.125 Both the Acts of Thomas and Pseudo-

of Christian Acta.” On usage of this term, see also the comments of Johnson, “Reviving the
Memory of the Apostles,” 13.
122
For example, “they want and are able to convince only the foolish, dishonorable and stupid,
and only slaves, women and little children.” Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. Henry Chadwick
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 3:44. Cf. 3:50 and 3:55.
123
Origen, Contra Celsum, 3:50. For further discussion of this passage and related texts see
Carolyn Osiek and Margaret Y. MacDonald, “Women as Agents of Expansion,” chap. 10 in
A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 220–
43. While recognizing the rhetorical use of such pagan critique of Christianity in the first few
centuries, Osiek and MacDonald have analyzed similar passages in the context of earlier
Christian texts and the broader Greco-Roman social setting. They take a mediating position
between Cooper’s extreme pessimism about the “topos of womanly influence” and sociologist
Rodney Stark’s bold claims about women’s numeric preponderance and significant influence on
church growth (“The Role of Women in Christian Growth,” chap. 5 in Rise of Christianity).
They argue that “household life” was the unifying factor in the diverse roles women played
contributing to the spread of Christianity.
124
Horn, “The Lives and Literary Roles of Children.”
125
Though a survey, Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, vol. 1, Beginnings
to 1500, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1998), especially part 1, sections 1– 3, pays special
attention to the role of Syrian Christianity in mission beyond the borders of the East Roman
Empire. For a more specific study of Syrian influence in Armenia, see Robert W. Thomson,
MISSION FROM BELOW 35
Clement’s Letters to Virgins promoted a paradigm of apostolic wandering that
was clearly practiced in Syria already in the third century and continued to
inspire fourth-and fifth-century Christians to a life of rigorous asceticism
combined with missionary endeavors.126 The influence of such apostolic
models is all the more pertinent in light of the important roles that women
played in the Syrian Christian tradition. From the circulation of the tales that
eventually formed the Acts of Thomas,127 the gifts of women, whether noble
or lowly, and the themes of virginity, martyrdom, and critique of the social
order, were prominent in Syriac hagiographical literature. But women’s
active participation in ascetic pursuits, service within the Christian
community, and ministry to the sick and poor were not mere literary
tropes.128 Indeed, beginning in the third century, Syriac legal as well as
patristic sources attest to women’s public offices as well as personal
involvement in apostolic ministries.129

“Syriac Christianity and the Conversion of Armenia,” in Christianisierung des Kaukasus, ed. Seibt,
159–69. For Arabia, Irfan Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century (Washington,
D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1989), especially part 2 on Arabic and Syriac sources. George Hatke’s
forthcoming Princeton dissertation, “Africans in Arabia Felix: Aksumite Relations with South
Arabia, 300– 600,” argues forcefully for the primary role of Syrian rather than Axumite
Christianity in the Christianization of South Arabia. However, none of these studies devotes
significant attention to the role of women in accounts of mission and conversion.
126
On the content, provenance, and influence of these writings, see Caner, Wandering, Begging
Monks, 50– 82. For the wandering Syrian ascetics, Caner explains, “following Christ meant active
engagement, as Christ’s representatives, with the ‘world’ they had renounced” (56). Caner
emphasizes the missionary zeal of the followers of Mani, who were similarly inspired by these
writings and whom he considers at least partly responsible for the spread of the Christian
message along the roads and to “the far-flung villages and towns of third-century Syria and
Mesopotamia” (77). Unfortunately, he says little more about the missionary impact of more
“orthodox” Syrian ascetics and apostolic wanderers; neither does he discuss the involvement of
women in such apostolic ministries except to note that the Letters to Virgins “discuss
ministrations provided only by other ‘brothers’” (66 n. 77). However, the fact that they address
“virgins of either sex” (Letter I, Chapter 1) and refer to female virgins and communities of
virgins, if only to warn against mixing with them (Letter II, Chapters 1, 2 and 4), suggests that
ascetic life and at least some forms of apostolic ministry were practiced by women as well as
men. For an English translation, see Two Epistles Concerning Virginity, trans. B. P. Patten
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1978), 51– 66.
127
For a recent reassessment of the provenance and dating of the Acts of Thomas, see Susan E.
Myers, “Revisiting Preliminary Issues in the Acts of Thomas,” Apocrypha 17 (2006), 95– 112.
Based on her analysis of the major themes of the work, Myers dates the redaction of the whole
work to the mid- to late third century in Nisibis.
128
Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks, 56, 80– 81, links the apostolic ascetic tradition of the Acts
of Thomas and the Letters to Virgins to the ministries of the Syrian Bnay and Bnat Qyama, an older
institution which became increasingly organized and formalized in the fourth century.
129
Amidst the growing body of secondary literature on women and their roles in Syrian
Christianity, see especially Susan Harvey, “Women in the Syrian Tradition,” in Woman in Prism
and Focus. Her Profile in Major World Religions and Christian Traditions, ed. Prasanna
Vazheeparampil (Rome: Mar Thomas Yogam, 1996), 69– 80; also Eva Maria Synek and Susan
Ashbrook Harvey, “Syrian-Christian Women,” in Women in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia,
36 CHURCH HISTORY

If the evidence of specific female evangelists is scant, the role of captives in

Christian expansion is hard to contest. Latin and Greek sources attest both to
the conversion of barbarian soldiers in the Roman army and to the role of
Roman prisoners in converting their captors.130 Indeed, Sozomen suggests it
was a fairly regular occurrence in barbarian lands.131 Due to almost constant
warfare, captives and prisoners of war were an ever-present reality in the
Roman – Sassanian border area. The function of hostages as a cultural force
may have been relatively minimal since they were generally exchanged as
temporary guarantees of a truce in the process of formal peace
negotiations;132 but the involuntary transfer of whole civilian populations
was a constant feature of life on the east Roman frontier in late antiquity.
These cross-frontier civilian movements in the form of captives, refugees,
deportees, and exiles provided long-term occasions for cultural assimilation
and exchange, which often involved religion.133 Under Shapur I (241– 272)
many of the Roman captives taken from Syria and Cappadocia and deported
to Mesopotamia and Iran were Christians. Armenian, Syriac, and Arabic
sources attest to the spread and flourishing of Christianity under the shah’s
generally tolerant rule.134 Among the deportees were women, some of whom
were destined for the shah’s harem. A favorite concubine of Bahram II
(276 – 293), for example, was the female captive Candida, a Roman Christian
whose faithfulness to her religion under pressure to convert to

Katherina M. Wilson and Nadia Margolis, 2:871–77 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004),
which includes a bibliography of relevant primary as well as secondary sources. It is noteworthy
also that these accounts of captive women and conversion all take place in or beyond the eastern
empire, where the role of women in both pagan and Christian religion tended to have greater
scope. See, for example, L. Cracco Ruggini, “La donna e il sacro, tra paganesimo e
cristianesimo,” Atti del II convegno nazionale di studi su la donna nel mondo antico (Torino,
1988), 243 –75.
130
For example, according to the fifth-century testimony of Prosper of Aquitaine, “quidam
ecclesiae filii ab hostibus capti dominos suos Christi Euangelio manciparunt.” De vocatione
omnium gentium ii, 33, in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, ed. Jacques-Paul
Migne, 51:717. For comments on this passage and related references, see the broader discussion
of E. A. Thompson, “Christianity and the Northern Barbarians,” 56– 58.
131
Sozomen, HE 2.6. In particular he emphasizes the role of “many priests” among the
Roman captives who healed the sick and impressed the barbarians by their virtuous way of life.
This passage immediately precedes his account of the conversion of Iberia.
132
See A. D. Lee, “The Role of Hostages in Roman Diplomacy with Sasanian Persia,” Historia
40, no. 3 (1991): 366– 74. See also John F. Matthews, “Hostages, Philosophers, Pilgrims, and the
Diffusion of Ideas in the Late Roman Mediterranean and Near East,” in Tradition and Innovation in
Late Antiquity, ed. F. M. Clover and R. S. Humphreys (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1989), though Matthews’s treatment of hostages in the late Roman period is very brief.
133
S. N. C. Lieu’s excellent article, “Captives, Refugees and Exiles” (see note 2), is among the
few treatments of the subject that considers the interchange of religious ideas resulting from civilian
movements across the Roman-Persian frontier.
134
For references and further discussion see Lieu, “Captives, Refugees and Exiles,” 476 –86.
MISSION FROM BELOW 37
Zoroastrianism resulted in a gruesome martyrdom.135 Indeed, the young
woman’s beauty, the king’s attraction to her, and the goriness of her torture
and death are reminiscent of the story of Rhipsime.
In the fourth century Ammianus Marcellinus describes the horrendous sieges
of Roman cities under Shapur II (339 – 379). He details the failed negotiations
of bishops, the massacre of citizens that followed a successful siege, the
pillaging and destruction of the city, and the captivity and deportation of
whole populations.136 Despite Shapur II’s reputation for persecution and
cruelty, however, hagiographical sources recount the continued expansion of
Christianity through individual captives and whole captive communities
resettled in new Sassanian foundations. While military personnel were often
slaughtered following a Persian siege, Roman clergy and bishops were
allowed to accompany the deported prisoners on their long, arduous journey
into the Iranian heartland, and they often played important leadership roles
both during and after the resettlement. Christian prisoners spread their faith
among non-Christian Roman captives, made converts at the highest levels of
the Persian court, and even wielded influence beyond the Sassanian frontiers.137
Nor should we assume that evangelistic activity was limited to Roman
prisoners of war. It has been suggested, for example, that conflicts between
Armenia and Georgia, exacerbated by Roman–Persian disputes, may provide
a clue to the identity of Iberia’s anonymous Christian captive. Generally
assumed to be a Roman, she was quite possibly carried off to Iberia from
Armenia amidst the wartime turmoil on the borders.138 Thus, while multiple
narratives of captive women missionaries suggest a topos that was adopted
and modified to accommodate different cultural settings as the stories spread
among Christian communities on the eastern frontiers, the seeming romantic
quality of such accounts must not obscure the reality of captives and slaves as
major transmitters of cultural and religious ideas in late antiquity. Indeed, the
“constant circulation of specialists or populations” and “exchanges of women

135
The Syriac account, likely composed in the early fifth century, is edited with an English
translation in Brock, “A Martyr at the Sasanid Court under Vahran II: Candida,” AB 96, no. 2
(1978), 167– 81. Lieu, “Captives, Refugees and Exiles,” 483–84, following Brock, suggests that
Candida’s parents were captives who had been deported and settled in one of the new Sassanian
foundations where they raised the girl as a Christian.
136
See especially Ammianus Marcellinus, 19.1– 9 and 20.6 and 7 for the sieges of the cities of
Amida, Singara, and Bezabde involving massacres, pillaging, and the deportation of captives.
137
See Lieu, “Captives, Refugees, and Exiles,” especially 484–87 and 495–99, for the fate of
deported Roman captives and examples of their Christianizing influence. Lieu draws primarily
from accounts in the anonymous Arabic Chronicle of Seert, also known as the Nestorian
Chronicle, ed. and trans. Addai Scher, PO 4 (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1908), and the Acta Martyrum
et Sanctorum, 7 vols., ed. P. Bedjan (Paris, 1890–97).
138
See Bäbler, “Die Blick über die Reichsgrenzen,” 163– 64.
38 CHURCH HISTORY

and goods and knowledge” were fundamental to the creation of cultural

“empires” that encompassed much more than a single center and periphery.139
Narratives of captive women evangelists provide evidence that imperial
ideals and ambitions are far from sufficient to account for missionary
expansion on the eastern frontiers. These accounts demand closer attention
to the direct agents alongside the subjects of conversion and consideration of
religious motivations alongside political and social factors that have often
completely overshadowed them. Examining the motives and methods of
missionaries themselves, whether officially commissioned or self-initiated,
helps to expose the multi-layered stages in which the process of
Christianization occurred. Such analysis suggests that “bottom-up”
evangelism often preceded and prepared the way for the “top-down”
conversion that was subsequently imposed by rulers and emphasized by
most historians, both Byzantine and modern.140 Alongside imperial and
cultural dimensions of the missionary process, the identities and practices of
evangelists as well as the theological perspectives of their chroniclers form
an integral part of our narratives of captive women.141
Finally, using female captives as a lens through which to view the later
Roman Empire, we discover shifting attitudes toward barbarians, just as the
captives in Linda Colley’s book, with which we began, reveal the changing
British outlook on the Islamic world as the empire’s power grew vis-à-vis
the Muslims. But the change in perspective is quite different. While Britain’s
perspective shifted from awe and apprehension to condescension and disdain
for the Muslim “other,”142 late Roman accounts of captive women evangelists
reflect a transition from fear to potential conversion of barbarians.143 Hailed

139
Greg Woolf, “World-Systems Analysis and the Roman Empire,” Journal of Roman
Archaeology 3 (1990): 55. Woolf emphasizes the importance for pre-modern historians of
“symbolic systems,” a category of world-system “in which supra-regional dominance is
achieved” and “in which symbolic or religious power has subordinated political and economic
interests to its own” (54). See also Peter Brown’s discussion of this exchange of “symbolic
goods” which, he suggests, “lay behind ‘the age of the missionaries’ in early medieval Europe.
Brown, Rise of Western Christendom, 16.
140
Horn, “Lives and Literary Roles of Children,” 275, suggests that an emphasis on “bottom-up”
conversion through the family in early medieval Georgian hagiography may have been used during
a period of Islamic domination as part of a polemic against the conversion of families to Islam,
“which was more of a ‘top-down’ affair.” For a recent multi-layered paradigm of the
Christianization process, see Haas, “Mountain Constantines,” especially 125– 26.
141
The shaping of these texts, the perspectives and goals of the historians who composed them,
and their further influence in the process of Christianization forms the subject of the second part of
this article, “‘Representing’ Mission from Below,” (forthcoming).
142
See in particular her analysis of The Female Captive, a mid-eighteenth century
autobiographical narrative. Colley, Captives, 125–31.
143
It became increasingly meaningless to speak of barbarians as over against Romans since this
status was so readily susceptible to change, as indicated by a sixth-century Latin inscription from
Lyons: “germine barbarico nati, sed fonte renati.” See Geoffrey Greatrex, “Roman Identity in the
Sixth Century,” in Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity, ed. Mitchell and Greatrex, 277– 78;
MISSION FROM BELOW 39
as a model of history from below, Colley’s book incorporates a laudable
collection of first-hand accounts of men and women of all classes. By
contrast, our late antique narratives are the work of established churchmen
and scholars, and the history is therefore told from above even when
describing the work of mission from below. Like saints’ Lives of this period,
however, such conversion accounts appealed to readers and hearers of all
educational levels and presented ideals and patterns for Christians to
emulate; indeed, the frequent repetition of such popular narratives made
them all the more powerful as models of behavior.144 In this light, accounts
of captive women missionaries may tell us more about both popular
conceptions and concrete realities of evangelization than has normally been
recognized in presentations of Christianization as a tool of late Roman and
Byzantine imperialism.

also Michael Maas, “‘Delivered from their Ancient Customs’: Christianity and the Question of
Cultural Change in Early Byzantine Ethnography,” in Conversion, ed. Mills and Grafton,
152–88. The accounts of our fifth-century historians suggest that this change in viewing
barbarians and the ethnē was already evident at least a century earlier. Regarding the church
fathers’ perspectives on barbarians from the late fourth to early fifth centuries, see Chauvot,
Opinions romaines faces aux barbares, 429– 59. Ivanov, Vizantiiskoe missionerstvo, 62– 72,
argues that perspectives changed dramatically with the conversion of the Roman Empire. A kind
of primitive pre-Constantinian Christian “internationalism” disappeared, and John Chrysostom’s
preservation of such an ideal is an anomaly among the fathers.
144
See Cameron, Rhetoric of Empire, 145 –51, on the significance of the increased role of women
in Christian hagiography from the fourth century onward. As an example Cameron refers to the
church fathers’ use of the “heavily charged” life of Thecla as a model of asceticism for the
imitation of their readers (147).