John Cadoux’s The Early Christian Attitude to War: A Contribution to the History of Christian Ethics (first published in 1919) is a classic in its area, which contains rich source material of great value for anyone interested in the topic. As Roland Bainton puts it, the “various contentions are not to be dismissed simply because they support the views of those who propose them.
Hunter, soldiers and early Christianity are “a field where ideological bias seems so often to affect one’s interpretation of the evidence.” 4 However, these studies are not worthless. The present situation of scholarly discussion makes me treat earlier studies with caution. 3 Such a viewpoint surely makes soldiers a less attractive theme for the more historically oriented scholar. More precisely, this motivation springs from the needs of modern Christian ethics, in which soldiers, wars and armies represent nothing but a problem. Nearly all scholars focusing on soldiers in early Christianity basically consider them in a modern sense, not a historical one. This is the way in which scholars usually discuss the military. Why are soldiers passed over? The answer flickers brightly through Meeks’ comment that soldiers are a problem, especially a moral one. Raymond Hobbs is right when he says: “Many studies of the Roman-Hellenistic social world of the New Testament offer a strange silence on things military.” 2 A quarter of a century later, Meeks’ book has been critically revisited in After the First Urban Christians (2009), but a gap remains unfilled. Meeks has to say about Christian soldiers in his groundbreaking study First Urban Christians (1983), which mapped the social world of the Pauline churches (for example, pointing out that Philippi was a Roman colony consisting of veterans). So far as our sources permit us to judge, this kind of career has little or no relevance for the first generations of Christians, although later on Christians in the army would constitute a problem both for the empire and for the church’s leaders.
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