introduction

Although Christianity would seem by its very nature to be a missionary religion, both the sense of what ‘mission’ means and the specific motivations of missionaries have varied as each generation reads afresh the Gospels’ injunctions. Early Christians were keen to stress the ‘international’ character of their religion and the primordial equality of all peoples, yet a different conceptual system was embedded in the very language in which the early Christian apologists wrote. St Paul already uses the term barbarian, with its implicit contrast between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Early Christians also appropriated the discourse of the Roman world, which was similarly permeated with the spirit of empire. If the empire was ‘the world’, then those beyond the imperial borders were automatically assigned to an ‘other’ world, not inhabited by real people. Primitive Christianity opposed this kind of logic. St Christopher, for example, was – according to his Life – ‘from the race of dog-heads, from the land of cannibals’; but this did not prevent him becoming a Christian martyr. Does this imply that natural savagery could be eradicated? An answer can be found in another legend – the ‘Tale of St Christomeus’ – one of the apocryphal stories of the wanderings of the apostles Andrew and Bartholomew. The legend tells how a certain cannibal was visited by an angel, who breathed grace into him and ordered him to assist the apostles. When the inhabitants of ‘the city of the Parthians’ incited wild beasts against the preachers in the circus, Christomeus asked God to give him back his former nature: ‘and God heeded his prayer and returned his heart and mind to their former savagery’.