A love of antiquity—that spills into long-held hobbies like playing Dungeons & Dragons—along with an enthusiasm for Latin, and the ability to envision real-world applications of his research, all come together to fuel Peter Fraser-Morris’s doctoral work. Fraser-Morris, a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies in the Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity program, is currently writing his dissertation on Early Christian Apologetic literature—a topic that first sparked his interest during his Master of Divinity program at Duke Divinity School.
When he first entered graduate school at Duke, Fraser-Morris loved it all—theology, ethics, languages—but what truly fascinated him enough to continue his study at the doctoral level at UVA were his Christian history in antiquity courses. It was through a directed readings course that he discovered the “niche, but lively” scholarly debate around Christian Apologetics, specifically addressing ideas about genre and application. He explained: “I was not interested in doing apologetics to actually defend my faith and beliefs, but [ideas like] dialogue, conflict, how we articulate who ‘the other’ is, all of that is extremely interesting and important to me, and apologetics is doing that.”
Two early Christian writers in particular, Lactantius and Eusebius, serve as the focus of Fraser-Morris’s dissertation, in which he is arguing that in the works of these two writers we see the first instances of Christian authors overtly and obviously theorizing about Christian apologetics. Of course, in order to make that argument, Fraser-Morris must contribute to the scholarly debates on what precisely is meant by “apologetics.” He traced out the history and shifting meanings of the genre in our conversation. The meanings range from popular, contemporary Christian usage in which authors set out to prove the truth of Christianity, to a classic apology in which someone writes a defensive response to an accusation, all while attempting to discredit the accuser, to a very strict interpretation of Eusebius’s use, whereby letters arguing for Christianity’s legitimacy and legality are written to Roman officials. In Fraser-Morris’s words, he says that “there is some sense of a capacious notion of early Christians writing about why our religion is best and true; they don’t have a particular word for it, but they do conceptualize it and find it worthwhile to theorize about it, write about it, and put it to use in particular ways. We see that [happening] explicitly with Lactantius and Eusebius.”
The connection between politics and apologetics also runs throughout the entire history of the genre, from its use in antiquity to current and contemporary manifestations of the term. For Lactantius and Eusebius, as Fraser-Morris detailed to me, it was no coincidence that their sustained projects of apologetics—and specifically accounts of the interaction between Christianity and the empire—appeared during the rise of Constantine. “They were trying to do important social and political work,” Fraser-Morris stated, and then outlined some of what these early Christian writers argued. One element they had to take on was the pagan, Hellenic cultural superiority, and they accomplished this by arguing that Christians were the true ancients; polytheism, they argued, was the veneration of human leaders taken to an extreme, wherein they became deified, and the true connection to a single source of divinity was lost in this process. Christianity’s benefit, these early writers argued, was in restoring that connection and returning people to their original, ancient relationship to the divine.
Fraser-Morris is seeing this political connection to apologetics all over the place. He noted that when popular Christian apologist, Ravi Zacharias, died in May 2020, that many prominent Republicans expressed condolences and revealed their deep appreciation for Zacharias’s work. Zacharias was not particularly political in his approach to Christian apologetics, and to this Fraser-Morris stated that “even when it’s muted, there’s this political edge to apologetics.”
Outside of his doctoral research, Fraser-Morris also works as a hospital chaplain in an interfaith chaplaincy department and is soon to be ordained in the Episcopal Church. This ministry work means that the question of negotiating difference is at the front of his mind, as on a daily basis he is asked to provide support to people of all kinds of faith backgrounds. His academic research into Early Christian Apologetics helps with this, as writers living in a pluralistic society, the authors of his study were constantly navigating religious and cultural differences. Fraser-Morris summed up the goal of his work and the benefit of academic research, in stating that “the best scholarship helps us think about the world we are inhabiting.”