I. Introduction
Ecclesiastical histories occupy a peculiar position within contemporary scholarship. For example, these histories have played a significant role in how late ancient scholars organize and piece together the formative years of the Christian movement. Too often, these same scholars bypass how reliant early writers were on rhetoric of scandal to shape their narratives. Scandal was a discursive tactic deployed in the ancient world. By paying attention to how scandals are constructed, it is possible to see how these formulas were used as shorthand to mark the historical boundaries of Christian orthodoxy.
Modern theories of political scandal, such as the model proposed by Wioletta Dziuda and William Howell, investigate the strategic logic behind the timing, credibility, and political utility of scandal.Footnote 1 In their model, scandal is not simply the public revelation of misbehavior, but a product of partisan incentives, informational asymmetries, and reputational trade-offs. Scandals emerge when the cost–benefit analysis favors exposure – authentic or fabricated – and are shaped by variables such as polarization, collaboration stakes, and the public’s prior beliefs.
Ancient historians of Christianity, of course, operated within a very different cultural and narrative framework. Modern scandal theory, however, clarifies the strategic conditions under which scandal becomes politically useful. Late ancient Christian historians participate in a similar logic, but instead of responding to unfolding events, they craft retrospective scandals that manufacture clarity, assign culpability, and secure Christian truth through narrative design. The late ancient authors do not primarily ask when or whether to reveal a scandal in real time. Rather, they retrospectively construct scandals within historiographical accounts as part of a broader theological and ecclesiastical argument. In these cases, scandal is less a reaction to truth and more a mode of narrativized truth claims.
Recent focus on ancient conspiracies is helpful for understanding the distinction of ancient versus modern scandals. Victoria Emma Pagán, for example, has focused on what she identified as a rhetorical strategy of containment in the framing of non-Christian Roman conspiracies. Historians such as Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, and Josephus used the strategy of containment to assuage fears or insist it could not happen again if one recognized the signs. It is a way to control those elements left to the imagination. In essence, this strategy refers to how the historian frames the conspiracy as exceptional – something that has a beginning, is discovered or revealed, dealt with, and then contained. For instance, the conspiratorial acts leading up to Julius Caesar’s assassination might at first appear hidden and dangerous. By revealing these details, the historian contains the narrative so that future threats are kept at bay. Christian scandals also operate in a similar fashion. Christian scandals are also carefully assembled stories reimagined and moralized, to become controllable and usable.
The careful placement of a scandal in the ecclesiastical histories also functions within a grander narrative of providence, which often sets the ecclesiastical historians apart from non-Christian historians. These stories draw the reader into a longer narrative concerning divine activity and the production of Christian truth – at least how the author imagines it.Footnote 2 Christian scandal more specifically reinforces norms, which explains why these stories work so well and sometimes pass as historical fact even in contemporary scholarship.
Stated another way, sometimes the retelling of the absurdity of human behavior, sexuality, or violent acts reinforce what stands as historical evidence. And yet, these scandals do not stand on their own merit but are carefully and intentionally positioned to produce historical truth claims. Here, we explore the familiar, that is, the formulaic elements that make up an ancient Christian scandal, to disrupt contemporary assumptions and reveal hidden investments. The art of the scandal is how it covers what is often hidden in plain sight.
The parameters of scandal rest on three elements. First, the launch of a scandal is tethered to a set of characters and/or themes arranged by the ecclesiastical historian. These are teachings, practices, or nefarious characters known to the intended audience. Next, the literary set up of the plot or conspiracy follows familiar patterns. The narrative often contains theological tropes and cultural standards that are either reinforced or violated to amplify the shock or confirm the biases of the storyteller. Finally, a scandal would not be a scandal without the element of discovery and consequences. The reveal rests in those moments of judgment when the scandal comes to light either in the author’s imagination or in the collection of material that articulates what inevitably happened to bad characters. This is a key component especially in Christian histories where a line of divine judgment is ultimately at stake and must be preserved.
This article argues that scandal in late ancient Christian historiography is not an incidental episode or moral lapse but a narrative technology that arranges deviant bodies, contested practices, and moments of exposure to produce claims about Christian truth. Ecclesiastical historians use scandal to retroactively stabilize doctrine, police boundaries, and render divine judgment legible within their accounts of the past. By tracing how controversies over altered bodies and the misuse of divine power are repeatedly redeployed, I show that these writers do not merely report inherited scandals; they canonize scandal itself as a method of history-making. Modern scholarship has mined these texts for historical data without recognizing how the very form of scandal structures what counts as evidence, authority, and orthodoxy. This study foregrounds that missed insight and reveals scandal as a formative way Christians shaped the late ancient historical imagination. With these elements in place, we turn to the controversies that anchor late ancient scandal narratives.Footnote 3
These elements of a scandal surface at key moments in ecclesial histories to help reinforce cultural and religious norms. For example, the concern over Christian circumcision is a persistent controversy. Male bodily alteration (also including castration) becomes central to how more than a few Christian scandals are formed. The association and disassociation with the practice, the bodies they mark (or have marked), and then accusations of continued participation in the practice make a claim about trustworthy and untrustworthy bodies.Footnote 4
It was not only debates of what to do and not do with the male body that became an issue but also what to do with intangible power as well. The Holy Spirit and its wielding by the wrong sort of men became an equally charged. At times, the two narrative points overlap. But where did these scandals begin? For late ancient historians, scripture was the starting point, but these same ecclesiastical authors would also rely on the reception history filtered through prominent heresiologists to build on and shape their divine, and eventual, canonized history of Christian authenticity.
II. Acts as a Source of Controversy
While the Christian canon was an invention of the late antique moment, many of the texts that made it into the New Testament were in wide circulation in various forms prior to the discussions of order and rule that took place at the council of Nicaea in 325 CE. The Acts of the Apostles, for example, contains a set of stories that become widely popular in the imaginings of heresiologists and the ecclesiastical historians of the fourth and fifth centuries.
Acts also serves as a historical touch point for modern scholars as well. Biblical scholars, for instance, take their cues from late ancient writers who relied on Acts to reinforce and confirm their version of events. Even scholars of second Temple Judaism and the subsequent diasporic authors – those writing after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and ultimate expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem in 110 CE – organize their histories in conversation with (or in opposition to) this source material. It is a symbiotic relationship that set the stage for how contemporary scholars think about beginnings and origins of the Christian movement and its long, complicated history with the Judaism(s) of the pre-Constantinian world.Footnote 5
Here, we examine Acts, not for historical truth, but as a narrative source upon which late ancient authors relied to construct their arguments. In addition to the concern over circumcision and how eunuchs participate in this movement, the text contained other smaller tantalizing stories, which shaped Christian visions of insider/outsider status. While the pericope within Acts is relatively short, Simon’s legacy and spatial politics, much like the problem of circumcision and the role of eunuchs in Christian history, continues to evolve within later reconstructions of this earlier movement.
The reception of these controversies functions as both a theological and cultural boundary in late antiquity and allows the late ancient authors to shape a history that attempts to mark boundaries with bodily alteration and gender-bending actors.Footnote 6 Drawing from Acts 15, for example, later Christian authors interpret circumcision as a symbol of doctrinal error or cultural otherness. Acts likewise offers the figure of the Ethiopian eunuch, whose altered body is momentarily recast as a site of inclusion, yet whose later reception underscores how anxieties over castration and ambiguous masculinity continued to shape Christian debates over belonging. Similarly, the reception of Simon Magus, whose foreignness, profit-seeking, and sexual impropriety (at least in his reception history), are invoked to damn Christian rivals.
Eusebius of Caesarea, the first official ecclesiastical historian established the tone for how later writers would model their ecclesiastical histories. At the start of his work, Eusebius notes the connection to Judaism to first establish a familial link and legitimacy, but very quickly moved to difference. In Book 1, for example, Eusebius traces the legacy circumcision through the Hebrews. Following the lead of Paul, he relies on the strategic interpretation that righteousness through faith and not practice is the rule of the day. In a notable shift, he then identifies the Hebrews as “those of the circumcision” to identify and class a group of people separate from those who follow Christ – even placing them in a separate category from Peter (who was by all accounts was circumcised).
Eusebius remarks that there was a tradition that permitted a Jew to also believe in Christ. He states, “a certain Jew by the name of Justus succeeded to the episcopal throne in Jerusalem. He was one of the many thousands of circumcision who at that time believe in Christ” (Eusebius, HE, 3.35.1).Footnote 7 And while this may sound strange and maybe even appear to gesture toward an acceptance of the practice, it is only ever a temporal one for Eusebius. By 4.5.4, he notes that the “bishops of circumcision ceased at this time” ending with Justus as the last bishop of Jerusalem. Circumcision is cast as a practice that must be overcome for Christianity to emerge as distinct and transformative. Andrew Jacobs has traced how the earliest dialogues began to undertake the herculean task of debating Jewishness through the symbol of circumcision.Footnote 8 Ultimately, the practice was used to differentiate what was Christian and what was not.
As is clear in heresiological literature, the late fourth and early fifth century was a moment when Christians defined themselves over and against others both in and outside the movement with significant consequences, which included violent ones. The issue surrounding markers of identity such as circumcision highlight an inter-Christian debate, which carry over into the ecclesiastical histories. The debates over orthodoxy turned to these earlier writings and “historical” facts to ground their arguments in Christian authenticity and built on a troubling logic for determining who carries the truth.
In the late ancient world, circumcision and the proof texts found in the evolving Christian canons did not solve the issue (after all, Jesus was circumcised), but provided the elements to an enduring problem. The characters involved, including Paul and later non-Jewish men, embodied the gospel – quite literally. Jacobs has convincingly shown the investments in strategies of argument that look back and impart earlier heroes and their charged body parts (or lack thereof) to argue who is a true Christian. The heresiologist Epiphanius’s, for example, imagined a debate with so-called Ebionites – that is, those individuals who said they were Christian but still practiced circumcision along with other “Jewish” practices – to distance orthodox Christians from heretics.Footnote 9 Circumcision was not the only way to alter the male body. Christian eunuchs also raised similar concerns especially at the turn of fourth century.
In Acts 8:26–40, Philip encounters an Ethiopian eunuch on a desert road after being directed there by divine intervention, a setting that already signals that something marginal and unexpected is about to happen. The eunuch, an elite court official returning from Jerusalem, is reading Isaiah but cannot interpret it, creating the opening for Philip to step in as an authorized interpreter who reframes the text through the story of Jesus’ suffering. What follows is a strikingly compressed conversion narrative: instruction, recognition, and baptism occur almost immediately, without institutional mediation or delay.
The eunuch’s body, which is marked by castration and thus excluded under certain scriptural regimes, nevertheless becomes the site of inclusion rather than obstacle, underscoring how Acts uses this figure to stage the expansion of the Christian message beyond ethnic, geographic, and embodied norms. Philip is then abruptly removed from the scene, while the eunuch continues “on his way rejoicing,” leaving the text with an unresolved image of Christian belonging.
The ambiguous legacy of eunuchs and outsider status is further complicated when Eusebius decides to preserve and attempt to explain away a scandalous tradition concerning Origen of Alexandria, who famously castrated himself out of ascetic zeal and a commitment to teach the gospel even to women. There are a few reasons why Origen remained an ambivalent figure within Christian memory, but here we only focus on his legacy as a eunuch bishop.Footnote 10 In Eusebius’s narrative, the scandal is explained away as youthful indiscretion and motivated by Christian piety. For Eusebius, like circumcision, the act of self-castration is neither a requirement for Christian perfection or a matter of disqualification of belonging. It does, however, require explanation.
Not all ecclesiastical historians agree on how to negotiate the legacies of these controversial bodily practices. Although Eusebius set the early framework for thinking about Jewish law as historically bounded, it is Sozomen who later develops this line of argument through explicit discussions of circumcision. When Sozomen turns to Jewish practices, for instance, he frames them as ethnic markers rather than as theological problems. His treatment of circumcision appears in the context of explaining the customs of various groups: “All of this lineage, drawing such descent, are circumcised like the Hebrews, abstain from swine’s flesh, and preserve many other customs practiced among them” (Sozomen, EH, 6.38.10–15).Footnote 11 Here, circumcision is simply evidence of cultural continuity. It is one feature among many that indicate the group’s origins.
Sozomen’s perspective also reflects an inherited Eusebian move situating Jewish law within a broad arc of divine pedagogy without condemning it outright. He remarks, “For Moses, having come much later in time, prescribed this law only to the Hebrews” (Sozomen, EH, 6.38.12). The effect is to contain the practice historically and ethnically rather than to stigmatize it. Even when he notes earlier that Paul “abolished circumcision and established faith in Christ” (Sozomen, EH, 5.22), the emphasis is on theological development rather than polemical attack. In Sozomen’s hands, circumcision serves less as a marker of deficiency than as a sign of distinct communal identity.
Sozomen affirms the covenantal and ethnic specificity of circumcision. Rather than universalizing or moralizing the practice, he frames it as a historical practice meant for a specific group. This distances the Christian identity from Jewish practice not through theological critique but by historicizing and contextualizing Judaism as part of a now-past religious order. An order that should not be a part of his own historical moment. A boundary is still marked, but the controversy serves a slightly different purpose. Eunuchs, however, are a different story.
In Sozomen’s ecclesiastical history, eunuchs are not simply ambiguous figures – they actively shape theological competition. In a charged section of his narrative, Sozomen notes how Euzoïus, the so-called Arian bishop of Antioch, tries to install Probatius, a eunuch who shares his theology, which is symptomatic of the larger debates concerning orthodoxy and Christian authenticity in Antioch. Eventually, even the emperor must intervene to prevent further corruption. According to Sozomen, eunuchs are at the heart of Antioch’s troubles and their alliance with a heretical party proves the case. This entanglement of eunuch bodies, court politics, and theological maneuvering shows how Sozomen’s world is never just about ambiguously sexed bodies or power. It is about orthodoxy itself hanging in the balance. The controversy of castration then signals to Sozomen’s readers that altered bodies signal larger problems.
Sozomen’s contemporary, Socrates, while not concerned with circumcision, does address the issue of eunuchs. His construction of Christian identity is made through doctrinal, moral, and disciplinary boundaries in the midst of fourth- and fifth-century intra-Christian conflicts in and around Constantinople. His broader historiographical posture shares with Sozomen a desire to delimit who counts as “authentically” Christian especially in relation to the issue of castration. For Socrates bodily alteration signals failed clerical discipline, which is a transgression that destabilizes episcopal authority and undermines the legitimacy of those who support them. It helps Socrates distinguish between acceptable Christian discipline and suspect embodied excess.
In both instances of Christian memory, the logic remains the same: if a Christian was discovered to have participated in the practice of bodily alteration – or surrounded themselves with those who do – we have the markings of a Christian scandal. The evolving controversy of circumcision and disdain of the castrated was not simply remembered within the ecclesiastical histories, but methodically deployed. Ecclesiastical authors participate in a shared tradition by retrofitting old controversies into a canonical scandal-machine. In other words, they draw Christian boundaries with surgical precision.
III. Missing Pieces
Unlike the major overlapping concerns linked to Christians practicing or utilizing the logic of circumcision in the ecclesiastical histories, the role of Simon Magus only surfaces in Sozomen’s account, but his presence demonstrates how scandals can also be driven by recognizable characters. In this way, scandal operates genealogically: figures like Simon Magus are not simply remembered as isolated offenders but function as typological ancestors, providing a narrative lineage through which later deviations, bodies, and abuses of power can be recognized, named, and condemned.
At an early point in Acts, even before the famed Jerusalem council where circumcision was debated and very near when Philip encounters the Ethiopian eunuch, we come across the story of Simon Magus. In Acts 8:9–24, Simon is the first recorded man to abuse divine power specifically given to the earliest followers of Jesus. Not only was his hubris condemned, but also the reality that someone like Simon, an outsider, could wield divine power was quite shocking to an ancient audience. A few details stand out in this peculiar story. The author of Acts notes that some Samaritans had been baptized by both the apostles Peter and John, who were sent to impart the Holy Spirit to the new followers in that territory. Simon’s attempt to purchase the Holy Spirit is meant to stand in contrast to Peter’s role as the guardian of divine grace, reinforcing the dichotomy of true versus false leaders.
Simon’s placement in Sozomen’s history is therefore not insignificant. In the very first book of his ecclesiastical history, Sozomen invokes the story from Acts: “In the first part of the history, it is said that a certain man named Simon from Samaria… who witnessed what took place in Samaria during Peter’s visitation…” (Sozomen, EH, 1.2.2.) His brief mention reflects Sozomen’s strategy of referencing a familiar nefarious figure without much elaboration to signal a larger and longer narrative. Sozomen also carefully notes where Simon is from. By placing Simon in Samaria and linking him with Peter’s apostolic mission, Sozomen perpetuates the association between territorial impurity, spiritual usurpation, and the emergence of heresy: By explicitly naming Samaria as Simon’s origin, Sozomen activates a deep reservoir of cultural and theological ambivalence about place and those tied to it.
It is worth stressing that Samaria was perceived as a liminal territory – neither fully Jewish nor fully Gentile – and its people were often portrayed as heretical or morally suspect. For example, Samaria was a territory linked to the Northern Kingdom of Israel that was the first kingdom to fall during the Assyrian conquest (740–722 BCE). The history of Samaria and the Samaritans was, in short, a complicated one. According to the Jewish scriptures, Samaritans are a people linked with intermarriage, sacrilege, and, ultimately, early defeat because of their sinful behavior – at least from the perspective of second Temple Jewish texts. Notably, the Samarian temple, on Mount Gerizim, stood in opposition to the Jerusalem temple. In the Pentateuch and Jerusalem centered texts, Samaria was a at best a competitor and at worst a group of people that would be cast, at least in Christian categorization, as a heretical group. That is, they are almost but not quite Jews. Samaritans in turn argued for authenticity and stood as the true representative group as people of the covenant or keepers of the covenant.Footnote 12
In this space of not-quite Jew, Jewish territory, the memory of Simon holds an odd position in both spatial politics and preconceived cultural norms about the Samaritan people. The people of this territory continued to hold a peripheral position in both Jewish and Christian memory and narrative development. Not unlike the gentiles, Samaritans were outsiders and could easily be used to exaggerate a conversion story or fill in the role as predictable villain and villainous activity. Simon clearly occupied the later position, and, as Kimberly Stratton has stressed, it was a queer one as his legacy as a magician developed.Footnote 13
His power is also described as magic and not divine favor. This distinction, according to Stratton, is what links him to a longer history of gendering and demonizing practices with the broader Greco-Roman discourse.Footnote 14 Irenaeus of Lyon, for example, cast him as a suspicious character because, in addition to magic, his improper relationship with women deems him a suspicious character.Footnote 15 Sexual slander is particularly effective.Footnote 16
Sozomen’s allusion to this legacy and link to Peter’s visit underscores apostolic authority and divine legitimacy at the very start of his ecclesiastical history. Though Simon is not directly rebuked in this account, the reader is meant to recall the Acts 8 confrontation as a set up for other stories of conflict in the following historical account, which include financial corruption, sexual deviance, and a genealogical link to corrupt leadership. It is unsurprising then that Sozomen immediately launches into the series of doctrinal errors that were introduced in the lead up and aftermath of Nicene council.
Simon, then, is an anchor point to introduce heretical beginnings and those spaces, people, and teachings that reveal heresy. Sozomen’s brief invocation of Simon Magus therefore operates through three phases: his Samaritan origin triggers recognition; his association with Peter offers narrative contrast; and the implied rebuke recalls divine judgment.
Even in its abbreviated form, the reference to a controversial figure serves as a historiographical boundary marker. He is a type and a reminder of heresy, usury, and the dangers of spiritual deceit. In short, Sozomen relies on the cultural memory of Simon rather than developing a full narrative to clear effect. Those who share his story are proof of a shared scandalous history. In this section of Sozomen’s text, Simon Magus serves as a narrative prologue followed by real drama that unfolds once the abuse is replicated in the Arian heresy and other heretical influences on the Church.
IV. Putting the Pieces Back Together
So far, we have traced the way Christian controversies begin to shape the markings of scandal in the ecclesiastical histories of the fourth and fifth centuries. In this final section, we see how a Christian scandal builds on these earlier controversies and then deploy a scandal. Theodoret of Cyrrhus adopts a similar set up to Sozomen in his later fifth century ecclesiastical history, but shifts from typecasting to detailed sexual invective, particularly in his account of a scandalous bishop in Antioch.
Theodoret wrote his Ecclesiastical History while still actively involved in the Antiochene community where he was born in 393 CE.Footnote 17 In the fallout of Nicaea, many episcopal lines were disrupted.Footnote 18 Antioch’s troubles began with the removal of Eustathius soon after the conclusion of the Nicene council. The competition among different Christian factions over what version of Christianity would take shape in Antioch was intense and the details were convoluted. As Christine Shepardson has painstakingly recounted, frequent imperial interventions and external factional alliances added to the city’s identity crisis for nearly half a century.Footnote 19
At odds were various theological positions concerning Nicene terminology and the ongoing efforts of outsiders to meddle in Antiochene affairs. Theodoret’s social network, as Adam Schor has emphasized, played a significant role in the portrayal of the drama and which line of succession he would ultimately favor.Footnote 20 As these alliances continued to disrupt the city and caused further confusion (it was not always clear what theological position was actually held at any given moment), Theodoret, along with his pro-Nicene network, attempted to disentangle the orthodox from the heretics through various rhetorical techniques including sexual invective and abuse of power.Footnote 21
Theodoret, for example, made full use of sexual stereotypes to distinguish the orthodox from the heretic.Footnote 22 His assessment of a character like Simon Magus and those who acted like him, are especially revealing. Averil Cameron has noted that Theodoret sees heresies connected via doctrinal controversies rather than genealogical succession. It is unsurprising then we see the logic of heresiology at work in Theodoret’s ecclesiastical work even if the controversy of Simon Magus is explicitly found in his more overtly heresiological text the Compendium. Footnote 23 The outcome of that line of reasoning, however, is clearly at play in his description of a number of scandals in his ecclesiastical history where he was especially keen to trace a heretical line of leaders in Antioch. The bishop Leontius was one example that ties together both the problem of male anatomy (or lack-there-of) and abuse of power that revives Simon’s legacy in a Christian scandal.
Antioch’s unstable religious landscape heightens the force of Theodoret’s portrayal of Leontius. The city functioned as a contested space in ways that resemble Samaria, with long-standing Jewish communities, Christians who were accused of behaving like Jews (as John Chrysostom’s sermons repeatedly complain), and a crowded field of Christian factions competing for authority in the aftermath of Nicaea.Footnote 24 All of these threads created a setting where questions of belonging, and authenticity were never straightforward. In such an environment, Theodoret cannot simply dismiss Leontius as a heretic. Instead, he draws on familiar material already circulating in Christian memory, including concerns about altered male bodies, inappropriate domestic arrangements, and echoes of Simonian deceit. By weaving these elements together, Theodoret presents Leontius as a figure who threatens to collapse the fragile boundaries between Christians, Jews, Judaizers, and heterodox rivals. The complicated religious history of Antioch therefore requires a more elaborate narrative, one that uses the language of scandal to secure Theodoret’s vision of what counts as genuine Christian leadership and where it clearly does not.
Theodoret’s distinct disdain of Leontius, the bishop of Antioch from 344 to 357 CE, who in the lead up to the Antiochene crisis that appeared to peak between 350 and 380 CE, can be cited as the tipping point of that controversy. In his description of a traceable line of heretical bishops, this notorious bishop stands out because of his reputation as a eunuch and his improper cohabitation with a woman named Eustolia.
In Antioch…Leontius assumed the leadership [as bishop of Antioch] which he accepted contrary to the decisions of Nicaea: indeed, he was a eunuch who had self-amputated. The admirable Athanasius also explains the cause of the mutilation: “Leontius was accused of cohabiting with a young woman named Eustolia. He mutilated himself because of her, in order to spend his life with her in complete tranquility. The act did not clear him of suspicion, but it was an additional reason to depose him since he was a priest.” (EH, 2.24.1-2).
The missing male anatomy and sexual impropriety are here deployed. The mutilation of male genitals is particularly egregious.Footnote 25 Not fully man nor categorically woman, Leontius is a charlatan bishop. Theodoret appears to have built on Eusebius’s earlier struggles to reconcile the practice of self-castration especially with Christian episcopacy when referencing the famed theologian Origen of Alexandria. This scandal, which would and could not be explained away by Eusebius (despite his best efforts), appeared to be a point worth remembering.Footnote 26 Theodoret follows Eusebius in treating bodily mutilation as a site of theological unease and boundary marking, though he sharpens this association. Like Socrates, practices that alter the male body are outright heretical.
In a much shorter account preserved by Socrates, Leontius’ mutilation is treated as a moral and ecclesial liability. When narrating the Antiochene schism, Socrates notes this earlier scandal: “He [Leontius] removed his own genital organs” so that he might cohabitate with her without reproach (Socrates, EH, 2.24).Footnote 27 The act, Socrates remarks, did not resolve the concern; indeed, “the suspicion was not washed away, and the incident remained a blemish on his clerical character” (EH, 2.24).
Theodoret further built on this legacy and distrust. He then uses the logic of mutilation coupled with sexual impropriety and misuse of Christian authority to condemn a seemingly successful bishop. Using the same logic as Irenaeus in his description of Simon Magus, Leontius stands a condemned heretic. To put it succinctly, a cohabitating-eunuch bishop is proof of his heresy. In deploying the scandal of Leontius’s mutilation and domestic arrangement, Theodoret invokes all three elements of the scandal formula: a shocking bodily deviation, narrative construction of moral deviance, and public exposure that justifies ecclesiastical condemnation. In Socrates, Leontius’ mutilation illustrates the danger of bodily excess within the clergy; in Theodoret, it becomes a vivid symbol of theological corruption. The bishop’s scandal thus functions not only as a moral tale but also as a historiographical warning.
Similarly, the altering of male episcopal anatomy, sexual deviance, and abuse of power served as a useful framing for when Christian leaders, especially successful ones, were re-membered in Theodoret’s historical narrative. Leontius is one among many deviant Antiochene bishops. The gender-bending Christian leaders and those who associated with the wrong sorts of women built upon a sexual deviant Simonian legacy reborn in a character like the bishop Leontius. The suspect Christian leader thus becomes a disciplinary archetype, marking the boundary between orthodoxy and heresy in narrative form.
What unites these deployments across ecclesiastical histories is not just their content but their form. Scandal, as I have shown, is not simply in the history – it is the history. By organizing narrative around scandal’s recognizable formula such as the logic of Christian controversy and signs of religious deviance Theodoret secures orthodoxy through affective memory. Scandal thus becomes canon: a reusable historiographical method embedded in Christian identity-making.
V. Conclusion
The case studies above reveal how scandal organizes Christian historical writing in ways that are both structural and strategic. By examining how controversies tied to bodies, practices, and spiritual power are repeatedly reworked, we see that scandal becomes a preferred mechanism for turning contested material into usable history.
The recurring debates over circumcision reveal how authors such as Eusebius and Sozomen mobilize inherited scriptural disputes to articulate new boundaries of belonging. In their hands, what began as an internal disagreement becomes a retrospective proof of Christian distinctiveness, a way of marking the limits of continuity with Judaism and of judging the authenticity of rival Christian identities. Eunuch bodies, both the Ethiopian court official of Acts and later figures like Origen or Probatius, further expose the instability of these boundaries. Their reception in the works of Socrates and Theodoret demonstrates how bodily ambiguity invited theological anxiety, prompting historians to turn potentially inclusive narratives into occasions for defining what kinds of bodies and behaviors could anchor Christian authority.
The misuse of divine power, remembered through the figure of Simon Magus, likewise becomes a durable template for identifying spiritual imposture. Sozomen’s deployment of Simon as a shorthand for corruption, and Theodoret’s portrayal of Leontius as a living embodiment of Simonian deviance, show how scandal could be refitted to new crises. These authors use scandal not merely to denounce individuals but to impose order on periods of doctrinal confusion, especially in places like Antioch where competing claims to legitimacy threatened to fracture communal identity.
Taken together, these cases demonstrate that late ancient historians did more than report controversies: they shaped the very terms through which Christian history could be imagined. Scandal provided a flexible narrative architecture: a way to sort bodies and beliefs, elevate preferred lineages, and render divine judgment legible within human events. Recognizing scandal as a historiographical method exposes how these histories construct rather than simply preserve the past. Attending to this narrative logic allows us to see not only the boundaries these authors draw, but also the techniques by which those boundaries are produced, justified, and remembered.
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