A State of Mixture: Christians, Zoroastrians, and Iranian Political Culture in Late Antiquity (Volume 56)

by Richard E. Payne

Christian communities flourished during late antiquity in a Zoroastrian political system, known as the Iranian Empire, that integrated culturally and geographically disparate territories from Arabia to Afghanistan into its institutions and networks. Whereas previous studies have regarded Christians as marginal, insular, and often persecuted participants in this empire, Richard Payne demonstrates their integration into elite networks, adoption of Iranian political practices and imaginaries, and participation in imperial institutions.

 The rise of Christianity in Iran depended on the Zoroastrian theory and practice of hierarchical, differentiated inclusion, according to which Christians, Jews, and others occupied legitimate places in Iranian political culture in positions subordinate to the imperial religion. Christians, for their part, positioned themselves in a political culture not of their own making, with recourse to their own ideological and institutional resources, ranging from the writing of saints’ lives to the judicial arbitration of bishops. In placing the social history of East Syrian Christians at the center of the Iranian imperial story, A State of Mixture helps explain the endurance of a culturally diverse empire across four centuries.
 

Genres: History, Iran, Middle East, Church History

320 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2015

Reviews

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

The emphasis here is on re-examining sources, primarily may stories, to challenge the assumption that Christianity was widely suppressed under Zoroastrian Iran. The argument started shaky, I thought, with a theological extrapolation of Zoroastrian precepts (the idea of the current era as a mixture of good/evil means that Zoroastrian elites were tolerant of mixed faith communities, which is a little thin to me in the absence of any evidence) and moves to much stronger ground as the author demonstrates the exceptionalism of persecution stories, and also looks at the ways that elites used the formation of Bishoprics to keep the Christian population managed, and paying tax.
I had expected this book to focus on Zoroastrian structures, but the emphasis was definitely on the Church of the East, and the dynamic of a church needed to quickly establish itself in the aftermath of a huge schism, and an empire needing to manage diversity of religion, could have been more explored, which is usually what I say when the existing analysis really engages me.
In the end, I really enjoyed this as a contribution to my understanding of Christianity: again, one of the most engaging parts looks at how zoroastrian (and pre-zoroastrian) traditions shaped Christian imagery and beliefs, but perhaps less as a contribution to my understanding of Iranian history.