The present dissertation examines the relationship between Christian institutions and the distinctive social practices of the Iranian world in the sixth and seventh centuries. Previous studies have represented late antique Iranian society as a mosaic of religious communities, in which distinctive hierarchies of religious professionals and systems of religious law tessellated diverse populations into discrete groups. The dissertation contends that the institutions of Christian community did not insulate Christians from Iranian society but rather provided novel means of negotiating their position in the broader society of the empire.

The argument emerges from four case studies of hagiographical and legal texts, our principal types of surviving evidence, which derived from the respective roles of Christian clerics as organizers of saints’ cults and judicial mediators. The peculiar religious landscape, social structure, political culture, and geography of the late antique Iranian empire imposed challenges on the elites and sub-elites of the empire, challenges Christian religious professionals often sought to meet. Hagiographical and legal texts addressed themes of urgent concern to the elites of Eranšahr : the relationship between religious ritual and the prosperity of a land, the demarcation of boundaries between cities and between city and hinterland, the construction, maintenance, and communication of claims to noble status, and the intergenerational transfer of wealth in a patrilineal society with a high incidence of male death. By expressing loyalty to a land, legitimating the dominance of a city and its nobles, and adapting legal institutions for the maintenance of familial wealth within the paternal line, hagiographers and bishops facilitated the engagement of Christians in practices common to the elites of Sasanian and post-Sasanian society. They sought to instantiate Christian communities that overlapped with communities regional, civic, and aristocratic.

At the same time, Christian religious professionals strove to assert and to articulate the primacy of religious affiliations, a project that inspired some—notably the catholicos Mar Aba—strategically to define Christian identity through the rejection of an Iranian social practice, incest, wholly incompatible with Christianity. The Christian encounter with Iranian society was thus marked by convergence and divergence, consensus and dissensus. However disparate their approaches, the texts discussed in the following chapters are united by their attempts to grapple with the constraints Iranian society imposed on Christianity and to construct religious communities whose institutional moorings remained frail.