The Ways of the Worldviews (Part 12): Christian Persecution in the Roman Empire

Now we come to the final topic regarding early Christianity in the Roman Empire: persecution. Two things must be said up front: first, despite what some might think (I mean, it’s what I thought growing up), Christians were not continually persecuted for 300 years until the rise of Constantine the Great. That being said, persecution of Christians was fairly constant at some level, throughout various places of the Roman Empire. Most persecutions took place at the local level. This is not to downplay the severity of Christian persecutions, but to set the record straight: there wasn’t a continual, 300 year-long orchestrated campaign by the Roman state against Christians. The most famous persecutions took place under the reigns of Nero (54-68 AD), Domitian (81-96 AD), Trajan (98-117 AD), Marcus Aurelius (161-180 AD), Semptimius Severus (193-211 AD), Decius (249-251 AD), and Diocletian (284-305 AD).

Everyone knows that Christians were often persecuted, but the question must be asked, “Why were Christians persecuted in the first place?” Sure, from the Roman point of view, Christianity was an odd offshoot of the already odd and hostile religion of Judaism. And sure, from the Roman point of view (and the pagan rumor mill), Christians practiced incest (they called each other “brother” and “sister”), cannibalism (i.e. a misunderstanding of communion), engaged in wild, drunken orgies (what Christians called “love feasts”), and were atheists (they didn’t have idols). But such behavior would have just made the Christians out to be weird—so why the intense persecution?

Ah, Persecution…Let’s Take It Back to Jerusalem! Jesus Quotes Daniel at His Trial…
Well, it should be pointed out that the first group to persecute Christians was not the Roman Empire—it was the Jewish religious authorities in Jerusalem. Yes, Jesus himself was crucified on a Roman cross, but the very reason he was even brought before Pilate in the first place was because the Sanhedrin viewed him as a threat to their own power. They knew they didn’t have the authority to put Jesus to death, but they knew if they accused him of being a threat to Caesar, then Pilate would carry their wishes out.

Indeed, Jesus had amassed a following who hailed him as the Jewish Messiah, had come to Jerusalem, and had then proceeded to condemn, not Rome, but (shockingly) both the Temple and the priesthood! He even prophesied that it was because of the corruption among the priesthood that the Temple would be destroyed by Rome. And then, after the Sanhedrin had him arrested and interrogated by the high priest that night, when the high priest asked Jesus, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” Jesus replied by quoting Daniel 7:14: “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.”

This scene from “The Passion of the Christ” depicts the trial. For the actual exchange to which I’m referring, just skip to minute 13.

What does that mean? Well, Jesus was not predicting his second coming at that point. It certainly would be quite odd, when asked that question at his trial, for Jesus to say, “Yeah! And over 2,000 years from now, I’ll be back to reign as king of the world!”

Rather, what Jesus was doing was alluding to Daniel’s vision in Daniel 7, in which a “little horn” of a beast from the sea is persecuting God’s people, only to eventually be destroyed by one like “the Son of Man,” who ascends to heaven, is given authority by God, and who then destroys the “little horn.”

Now, you and I might have to do a little digging to understand what Daniel 7 is about, but every Jew at that time already knew exactly what this vision was about. It was about the tyrannical Selucid king Antiochus Epiphanes of the 2nd century BC, and how God would eventually destroy evil rulers like him when the Messiah comes. The shock of Jesus’ words, therefore, was that not only was he claiming he was the Son of Man, God’s anointed Messiah, but that the high priest and the Sanhedrin (the Jewish priestly authority!) was actually the “little horn!”

Jesus was basically saying, “Yes I’m the Messiah, and you’re the equivalent of Antiochus Epiphanes!” For those who don’t know their Jewish history well enough to appreciate the scandal of such an accusation, imagine if Jesus’s life and ministry happened today, and if the Knesset (the Israeli legislature) arrested Jesus and put him on trial, and Jesus accused the prime minister and the entire Knesset of being the equivalent of Hitler and the Nazis. Given such an inflammatory charge, it isn’t hard to understand why the Sanhedrin wanted Jesus killed.

Early Christian Martyrs up to the Temple’s Destruction in 70 AD
Yet, the crucifixion of Jesus hadn’t ended the movement. It sprang up within days, and continued to grow. So what does a threatened authority do in such cases, other than to crush such movements even more fiercely? We all know that Paul was commissioned by the Sanhedrin to crush the Christian movement, only to become a Christian himself. There was the stoning of Stephen in 35 AD; James the son of Zebedee was killed by Herod Agrippa in 44 AD; Peter was initially arrested soon after James was killed, only to miraculously escape; Paul was arrested during his last visit to Jerusalem in 56 AD. Then, within the span of about six years, three of the most significant leaders in the early Church all were killed: James, the brother of Jesus, and the head of the Jerusalem church, was arrested, convicted, and stoned to death by the high priest Ananus and the Sanhedrin in 62 AD; Paul was beheaded by Nero in Rome somewhere between 64-67 AD; and Peter was crucified upside down in Rome around the same time.

jewish-warWith the Jewish War of 66-70 AD and the subsequent destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by Rome (just as Jesus had prophesied), the divorce between Jews and Christians became complete. After all, as Rome was approaching Jerusalem, the Christians in Jerusalem remembered Jesus words of Mark 13/Matthew 24/Luke 21, that when they saw Jerusalem surrounded by armies they were to flee the city—and they did just that. From the Jewish perspective, the Christians were traitors to Israel. From the Christians’ perspective, they were the true people of God, and the Jews had become God’s enemies. Therefore, the reason for Jewish animosity toward Christians is fairly easy to understand.

But Why Did Rome Persecute Christians?
Yet the question remains, why did Rome persecute Christians? To put the reason in simple terms: Romans viewed Christians as unpatriotic to Rome. The Christians’ value system and ethics flew in the face of Roman society (as we have already seen in previous posts). Not only that, but they were considerably “anti-social,” because they refused to have anything to do with the pagan temples. We must remember, pagan temples were not just “places of worship,” for pagans; they were essentially community centers. Everything in Roman society revolved around the pagan temple system. And so when Christians refused to participate in any activity associated with the pagan temples, they were refusing to participate in the Roman way of life, and therefore were seen as not really being good Roman citizens.

It would kind of be like if someone wouldn’t stand up for the national anthem because he was concerned with the plight of oppressed and neglected minorities. (I emphasize kind of…just an analogy to point out how easy it is to see someone as unpatriotic and unleash hatred on that person).

When it gets right down to it, though, the fundamental reason why Christians were persecuted was that they refused to worship the emperor as a god. That made the Christians out to be, not just unpatriotic, but absolutely treasonous to the Roman Empire. We must remember that in ancient Rome there was no “separation between church and state,” or more properly, there was no distinction between “religion” and “patriotism/loyalty to the state.” It simply did not matter how much Christians like Justin Martyr tried to argue that Christians were loyal to the empire, that they paid their taxes to the empire, and that they even prayed for the emperor. The fact that they refused to offer incense to the emperor and to hail him as a god, marked Christians out as entirely suspect, and potentially dangerous. Therefore, whenever a crisis affected Rome, or whenever an emperor called for patriotism and unity, that usually meant it was time for another round of persecutions for the Christians.

Where I Disagree with Francis Schaeffer
Francis Schaeffer, in his book How Should We Then Live, claimed that the real reason Christians were persecuted was that they claimed a “moral absolute” by which they could confront even the emperor, and they held to a moral foundation that was far superior and stronger than the pagan morality of their day. Although that is generally true, Schaeffer misunderstands a few vital points.

The hallmark of the early Christians was not simply that they came out, preaching “absolute moral truth.” Yes, their moral values and lived-out ethics radically flew in the face of their surrounding pagan neighbors. There is no doubt about that. But to reduce the impact of the early Church before Constantine to simply saying they preached “absolute truth” is to dangerously flirt with reducing the core of Christianity to nothing more than a “definite moralism.”

What got Christians in trouble was not simply their ethics or their claims to absolute truth. Their ethics (we can call it “the ethics of the Kingdom of God”) simply stemmed from a radically different worldview that itself was born out of the historical realities of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Simply put, what got Christians persecuted was not that they said things like child prostitution, slavery, or abortion was wrong (although they certainly did say those things were wrong). What got Christians in trouble was that they claimed allegiance to another kingdom, to another king, and they claimed that kingdom and king was currently reigning. They claimed it was a kingdom that was not of this world.

In essence, Christians were saying that the kingdom of Caesar wasn’t even in the same league as the kingdom of Christ. From the Christian perspective, such a statement wasn’t a threat to Caesar at all, any more than saying, “Michael Jordan is a better basketball player than a high school sophomore JV player” is a “threat” to that sophomore. But from the Roman perspective, especially that of an all-powerful emperor who wouldn’t appreciate being equated with a high school sophomore on the JV, such a statement was taken as a threat.

Persecutions and Political Power
Those in positions of political power, especially megalomaniacs, will often do anything they can to crush any perceived threats (real or imaginary) to their power. Therefore, the Christians had to be dealt with as traitors and threats to the empire. The fact that they didn’t cower at the feet of Caesar when threatened, the fact that so many of them gave not so much of a shrug to threats of torture, the fact that they had the boldness (or audacity, if you’re Caesar) to not openly defy the emperor by not hailing him as a god, but to act as if they were, in fact, his equal—well, such people had to be positively terrifying to the Roman world, much less Caesar.

martyrdom-of-polycarp
Martyrdom of Polycarp

That is perhaps the reason why the persecutions of Christians were so particularly ghastly and inhumane: they were doused with tar and set on fire to be used a human torches in Nero’s gardens; they were thrown to beasts and ripped apart in the Coliseum as a form of entertainment; they were beheaded, crucified—the creatively horrid ways the Romans thought up torture could go on.

Yet the early Christian martyrs would not deny Christ, even in the face of such inhumane torture. And why? Because they were convinced that the resurrection of Jesus opened up a whole new understanding of God, human beings, and the world itself, and they proceeded to live out the implications of the resurrection. They lived, if you will, resurrected lives within a pagan world where death, disease, inequality, and despair reigned. And the rulers and authorities of that world, who trafficked and benefited from those things couldn’t stand to have their power threatened by people who were truly better than them.

A Look Ahead: The Byzantine Age (313-1054 AD)
With this post, I mark the end of what would have been my chapter on the Greco-Roman Age. In the next few posts, I will cover what I call The Byzantine Age (roughly 313-1054 AD). I do not use the term “Middle Ages” or “Medieval Times,” because these titles were essentially made up by later Enlightenment thinkers who tried to portray this period as a time of intellectual darkness in an attempt to slander the Church. Therefore, I have chosen to call the period of 313-1054 AD (from the rise of Constantine to the Great Schism) as The Byzantine Age. For it was during this time that Christianity thrived under the blessing of the Christian Byzantine rulers.

3 Comments

  1. I really hope you have the chance to expand this series into a book like you originally wanted someday. It’s been very useful and enlightening to me, and I’m really enjoying it.

    1. Perhaps one day. This stuff isn’t particularly my area of academic expertise–these posts reflect me trying to articulate what I’ve learned on my own. Thanks for the comment though!

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