38. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 31.
39. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 5, 11.
40. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 23.
41. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 39 (emphasis added).
42. Paul Veyne observes that “the originality of Christianity lies not in its so-called monotheism, but in the gigantic nature of its god, the creator of both heaven and earth: it is a gigantism that is alien to the pagan gods.” The Christian god was a “metaphysical god.” Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 20.
43. O’Donnell, Pagans, 67. See also Wilken, The Christians, 91 (“God, in the Greek view, dwelt in a region above the earth, but he did not stand outside of the world, the kosmos. Earth and heaven are part of the same cosmos, which has existed eternally. The world is not the creation of a transcendent God”).
44. See the discussion above, in chap. 2.
45. See, e.g., Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948), I, q. 2, arts. 2–3.
46. See A. C. Lloyd, “Aristotle’s Principle of Individuation,” Mind 79 (October 1970): 519.
47. See Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1987), 95–97.
48. See Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 50 (“As polytheists, the Greeks accepted many gods, and the gods which they met abroad were usually worshipped and understood as their own gods in yet another local form”).
49. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, [1776] 1995), 1:459–60.
50. Cf. E. L. Mascall, The Christian Universe (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966), 53 (“It has become customary in some circles to ridicule the use of images in religion, but it is difficult to see how we can avoid them”).
51. Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955), 88, 90.
52. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 40–41.
53. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 9.
54. See above, 93.
55. Fox, The Classical World, 50.
56. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 91.
57. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 42.
58. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 43.
59. See Everett Ferguson, Church History, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 98; Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought: From Its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism, ed. Carl E. Braaten (New York: Touchstone, 1967), 34–35.
60. James 1:27; 4:4. See also, e.g., John 15:16–19; Gal. 1:4; 1 John 5:19.
61. E.g., 1 John 2:15–17 (KJV): “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.”
62. Athanasius, Life of Antony 2.7.
63. See Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 136–38; Colin Gunton, “The Doctrine of Creation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 141, 147–48; Tillich, History of Christian Thought, 41–43.
64. Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians, trans. B. P. Pratten (Pickerington, OH: Beloved, 2016), 18.
65. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, ed. and trans. Albert Cook Outler, rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 2002), 10.9, p. 176.
66. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty,” Poetry Foundation, accessed July 1, 2017, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44399.
67. E.g., Matt. 19:16; Rom. 2:7; 1 Tim. 6:12; Titus 1:2; 1 John 1:2; Jude 21.
68. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. and ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19.4, p. 918.
69. See, e.g., “The First Apology of Justin Martyr,” in The First and Second Apologies of Justin Martyr, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Cumming, GA: St. Polycarp, 2016), chap. 8, p. 23.
70. See, e.g., Fox, The Classical World, 48.
71. Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion, 186–87.
72. Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion, 188.
73. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice, 9.
74. But see Fox, Pagans and Christians, 102–67 (describing ways in which pagans did expect to see and encounter the gods).
75. 1 Cor. 2:9.
76. Augustine, Confessions 1–3. Hereafter, references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text; the page references are to the Outler edition.
77. This is a paraphrase; the actual quotation is “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”
78. Heb. 13:14.
79. Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 67.
80. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 101 (describing the “vast gulf between Christian standards and contemporary sexual practice”). See also Kathy L. Gaca, The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity (London: University of California Press, 2003), 293 (“Paul’s unconditional imperative to flee fornication was radically new to the Greeks and other Gentiles, and its aim was to supplant religious sexual existence as they lived it, or, in the case of the philosophers, as they conceived it should be lived”).
81. Both points are developed in Gaca, The Making of Fornication. Gaca nonetheless emphasizes the discontinuities between Christian and non-Christian understandings of sex. Even when Christians were influenced by Stoic or Pythagorean ideas, these ideas were radically transformed in the Christian understanding.
82. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 8, 18.
83. Sarah Ruden, Paul among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (New York: Random House, 2010), 15.
84. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 155–56.
85. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 186–88.
86. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 8.
87. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 21.
88. The theme is developed at length in Brown, The Body and Society.
89. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 99 (“Similarly, early Christian literature—with one exception—offers none of the vicious attacks on passivity . . . , because the precise synthesis of machismo and sexual moralism was wholly absent from Christian discourse”). See also Ruden, Paul among the People, 66–67.
90. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 87.
91. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 8.
92. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 87.
93. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 93.
94. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 87–92. See also Gaca, The Making of Fornication, 144 (“Christian bodies, [Paul] states, are the temple of the holy spirit and fornication is a sin ‘against the body’ [1 Cor. 6:18–19], not unlike the desecration of a temple”).
95. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 91.
96. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 92.
97. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 67.
98. Brown, The Body and Society, 18.
99. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 94. This point is developed at length in Gaca, The Making of Fornication, 119–46.
100. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 94.
101. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 85.
102. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 18.
103. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 1.
104. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 12.
105. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 14–15.
106. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 1. In a similar vein, see Gaca, The Making of Fornication, 304–5.
107. But see Gaca, The Making of Fornication, 293 (“The antifornication social order that Paul aspired to form cou
ld never peacefully coexist with the religious sexual heritage of any Gentile gods”).
108. Jan Assmann explains that “all the great [pagan] deities are gods of their respective cities.” And “the cult is nothing other than the tribute owed the gods as civic overlords.” Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 41.
109. Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion, 20.
110. Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion, 16.
111. Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion, 20.
112. See Wilken, Spirit of Early Christian Thought, 102–3.
113. Heb. 11:9–10 NIV.
114. Heb. 11:13–16 NIV.
115. Heb. 13:14 NIV.
116. See, e.g., Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989). See also George Weigel, Soul of the World: Notes on the Future of Public Catholicism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 32–36.
117. “Epistle to Diognetus,” in Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation, trans. James A. Kleist, SJ (New York: Newman Press, 1948), 135, 139.
118. Augustine, City of God. See, e.g., 14.28, p. 632: “Two cities, then, have been created by two loves: that is, the earthly by the love of self extending even to contempt of God, and the heavenly by love of God extending to contempt of self. The one, therefore, glories in itself, the other in the Lord: the one seeks glory from men, the other finds its highest glory in God.”
119. See, e.g., Augustine, City of God 19.17, pp. 945–47; 19.26, pp. 961–62.
120. See H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 45–82.
121. See generally Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).
CHAPTER 6
The Logic of Pagan Persecution
We began this book by noticing a question posed in the early second century by the provincial governor Pliny and again some decades later by the Christian lawyer and apologist Tertullian: Why did the Roman authorities persecute, prosecute, and often execute people just for being Christian? Pliny, the governor, found the Christians to be irritatingly inflexible and superstitious, but his investigations uncovered no criminal conduct on their part. And yet he sentenced to death anyone brought before him who confessed to being a Christian, without proof of any other crime. And his emperor, Trajan, approved this policy. For his part, Tertullian, the apologist, insisted that Christians were exemplary citizens who obeyed the laws, took care of themselves and their needy, and prayed without ceasing for the welfare of the empire and the emperor. And yet, he protested to the Roman authorities, “[you] rend us with your iron claws, hang us up on crosses, wrap us in flames, take our heads from us with the sword, let loose the wild beasts upon us.”1
Why? Why would the Romans, much admired (by modern historians, at least, if not by early Christians like Tertullian) for their religious and cultural tolerance,2 imprison, enslave, torture, and kill people just for being Christian? Pliny wasn’t sure; he inquired of Trajan but got no answer. Tertullian was convinced that there was no adequate justification—hence his vehement protest to the “rulers of the Roman world.”
Having raised but deferred this question in the first chapter, we are now in a position to consider an answer. Extrapolating and synthesizing, we will be able to see how it might have seemed both to pagans like Pliny and to Christians like Tertullian that peaceful and mutually respectful coexistence should have been possible, if only the other side would be less unreasonable. It seemed that way, though, because each side misunderstood and misjudged the other. Both pagans and Christians in effect held out terms of mutual accommodation that seemed fair and reasonable to them, but that for discernible reasons were not—and could not be—accepted by the other side. The failure to achieve mutually acceptable terms of coexistence meant that so long as the pagans were in power, Christians were naturally treated with suspicion and were often persecuted.
In this chapter we will consider the terms of peaceful coexistence that Christians offered to pagans, and the alternative terms that pagans offered to Christians. And we will see why neither party could embrace the other party’s terms without sacrificing or betraying its own beliefs and commitments. Hence the Roman persecution of Christians. Hence the centuries-long struggle between paganism and Christianity. (Hence also, at some removes, the contemporary culture wars—but that is for later chapters.)
The Fact of (Episodic) Persecution
Although the fact that Christians were persecuted will hardly seem a shocking observation, opposing misconceptions make it useful to note at the outset, first, that persecution did in fact occur—contrary to a recent, much-noticed book, it was not a “myth” that was “invented” by Christians3—but, second, that such persecution was episodic, not constant.
The earliest persecutions of Christians are recorded in the New Testament. Thus, Jesus warned his followers that “men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.”4 The Gospels go on to explain how Jesus himself was crucified, at the instigation of Jewish authorities but with the consent and assistance of the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate.5 The Acts of the Apostles records additional public and private persecution carried out under the oversight if not the direction of Roman authorities: the stoning of Stephen, the execution of James, the imprisonment of Peter, the sundry prosecutions and extralegal sanctions inflicted on Paul and his evangelizing associates.6
Paul himself elaborated on these afflictions in various epistles addressing persecutions suffered by different Christian communities. In these letters, Paul attempted to strengthen those communities in the faith so that they would be able to endure such punishments.7 The strange, often inscrutable book of Revelation, or the Apocalypse, attributed to the apostle John, has been interpreted by scholars as an allegorical response to severe ongoing persecution.8
Later Christian traditions confidently recollected that the church’s principal early leaders, Peter and Paul, were executed in Rome, probably during the reign of Nero.9 Somewhat hazier traditions, later gathered and provocatively presented to the English-speaking world in Foxe’s influential Book of Martyrs, recount the gruesome executions of many or most of the other leading original disciples. In addition to Simon Peter, two other Simons—the brother of Jude, and the Zealot—were crucified.10 Mark, the Evangelist, “was beaten down with staves, then crucified; and after . . . beheaded.”11 Matthew, another Evangelist, was run through with a spear. Philip was “crucified and stoned to death.”12 And so forth. So at least related John Foxe.
In later decades, the official persecution of Christians was episodic but, when it occurred, horrific. Christians would be sent into the Colosseum, or the arenas in other cities, to be devoured by wild animals. Or they might be sentenced to labor under the appalling conditions of the imperial mines. Christian women were consigned to work in brothels.13 Some Christians were roasted alive in the “iron chair.”14 Under Nero, the Roman historian Tacitus reported, Christians were “dressed in wild animals’ skins,” to be “torn to pieces by dogs” or “made into torches to be ignited after dark as substitutes for daylight.”15
The fourth-century church historian Eusebius recorded numerous instances of such persecution, carefully and even tediously listing his sources—sometimes “tradition,” sometimes letters or writings of earlier periods.16
Most of the postapostolic martyrs have passed into comparative anonymity; the city of Rome contains dozens of churches named after (and sometimes claiming relics of) ancient martyrs whom hardly anyone today has heard of. But a few—Ignatius, Polycarp, Perpetua, Justin, Origen, Cyprian—achieved legendary status.
Historians both ancient and modern have agreed that the persecution of Christians was sporadic, at least at the imperial level.17 Eusebius chronicled in sometimes lurid terms the persecutions Christians had endured, but he also made it clear that not all the emperors engag
ed in persecution.18 Before the so-called Great Persecution of the early fourth century that he himself lived through, Eusebius related, the Christian religion “was accorded honor and freedom by all men, Greeks and non-Greeks alike. Rulers granted our people favors and even permitted them to govern provinces, while freeing them from the agonizing issue of [pagan] sacrifice. In the imperial palaces, emperors allowed members of their own households—wives, children, and servants—to practice the faith openly. . . . All governors honored the church leaders, mass meetings gathered in every city, and congregations worshiped in new, spacious churches.”19
Eusebius’s contemporary, the Christian scholar Lactantius, wrote in a similar vein. In a book devoted to describing the horrors endured by Christians and the gruesome deaths suffered by some of their persecutors, Lactantius was also explicit that “while many well-deserving princes guided the helm of the Roman empire, the Church suffered no violent assaults from her enemies.”20
To be sure, most governmental business occurred at the provincial or local levels, and a dearth of evidence makes it difficult to determine the extent of persecution by local authorities—or by mobs acting without official mandate but sometimes with official acquiescence.21 The provincial governor Pliny was a loquacious sort of official who wrote often to the emperor Trajan, and whose correspondence was preserved; we accordingly know much more about what he did as governor than about the doings of almost any other similar Roman official.22 One thing we know is that Pliny was executing people merely for being Christians, not because of any idiosyncratic anti-Christian animus but rather because he assumed that this was what a governor was supposed to do. Were other provincial officials acting similarly on the same assumption? It would be surprising if some were not.23
Thus, a few years after Pliny, in a protest to the Roman Senate, Justin Martyr described executions imposed on people merely for being Christian by a Roman prefect named Urbicus.24 Justin added that similar measures “are likewise being everywhere unreasonably done by the governors.”25 It seems unlikely that Justin would have complained to the senators about official executions occurring in their own city if there had been no factual basis for the complaint.
Pagans and Christians in the City Page 19