Christians as Levites: Rethinking Early Christian Attitudes toward War and Bloodshed via Origen, Tertullian, and Augustine

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I thank Simeon Burke, Julia Snyder, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Introduction

Much scholarly ink has been spilled in recent decades on the best way to understand attitudes toward war and bloodshed during the first three centuries of the Christian tradition. While scholars tend to agree that many of the early church fathers wrote against Christian participation in the Roman army, and that no extant Christian writings prior to Constantine explicitly affirm Christian participation in bloodshed,¹ there has been considerable dispute as to the reasons why such writers would have opposed participation in military service.² Some have argued that the dominant view among such authors was that Christians should not engage in bloodshed at all—and hence participating in the organized bloodshed involved in military battles would be ipso facto illegitimate for Christians.³ Others, however, have pointed to Christian writers during this period, notably Origen and Tertullian, who wrote in praise of the Roman Empire, and who seem to have affirmed the military force needed for upholding the empire’s stability. In light of this apparent condoning of military bloodshed, such scholars have argued that much Christian opposition to military service was due to concerns about idolatrous religious practices in army life, rather than to any principled or pacifist opposition to bloodshed.⁴

In this essay, I argue that analyzing early Christian writers in light of the biblical portrayal of the normative differences between Levites and the other tribes of Israel can point to a third position that can contribute to overcoming this scholarly dispute. To this end, I first put forth an account of the ways in which, in the biblical text, the Levites are enjoined to refrain from the military bloodshed in which the other Israelite tribes participate. The Levites’ special calling entails that they must avoid bloodshed in order to uphold the purity necessary for their task of ministering before God in the tabernacle. Yet, this nonengagement in bloodshed does not entail a condemnation of the military violence of other tribes; indeed, because God is the ultimate source of military success or defeat, the Levites are portrayed as directly contributing to Israel’s military victories precisely by tending to God’s...