HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

18 MICHAEL I. ALLENone, emphasized the goal and the quality of its trajectory when hewrote to the Philippians (3:20): “Yet our citizenship 3 is in heaven,whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ”. Theuniversal history of the Christian dispensation was a matter of commonorigin and desired end, of self-definition, and also of intuitedand perscribed strategies for the present.Classical Antiquity had known its own universal histories, cut tothe contours and needs of its leading cultures. 4 Christians did notignore these writings and their facts, but focused of necessity on thedynamic of their own community, the paradox of its continued existencein the absence of Jesus’s return, and the mystery of its increase,even in the teeth of persecution. From very early, there was needto address the spectre of the messianic promise and, also, to shapeand root a viable communal identity within a sometimes hostile socialcontext. The body of scripture inherited from the Jews and the emergentcanon of holy texts connected with Jesus provided the basis forunderstanding and attempted explanation. Believers, confirmed byJesus’s own use of allegory and typology, took for granted the unityand coherence of Scripture, subject to the use of the right exegeticalmethods. Biblical utterance in its diverse aggregate and presumedunity of intent amounted to a single universal history and also invitedvarious acts of interpretive reconciliation.Jesus’s promise to return and the goad of alternate, competingwisdoms set the actual backdrop for the first Christian translationsof biblical historical data into the lineaments of a distinct universalhistory. St. John’s Apocalypse (ca. A.D. 95) had first raised againstRome the force of biblical allegory (Rome as the harlot Babylon)and pointed to the persecutor Nero under the figure “six hundredthreescore and six”. 5 Attention to analogous historical data, suggestedin the Old Testament and its Christian supplements, gave believerstools to stir or still eschatological fears. As vigorous churches emergedin cultivated urban centres, Christian apologists used biblical chronology3Or “way of life” for the Latin conversatio, as found before and in Jerome’s LatinVulgate (ca. A.D. 400); from St. Paul’s Greek, pol¤teuma, ‘(practice of ) citizenship’.All biblical references follow the Vulgate and its numbering.4E.g., Diodorus Siculus, Bibliothêke (ca. 50 B.C.), and Justin’s Epitome (3rd cent. A.D.)of the Philippic Histories of Pompeius Trogus (1st cent. B.C.).5Cf. Rev. 17–18; Rev. 13:18, the key example of Hellenistic gematria, or mysticalnumber science, in Christian scripture.