The persecution was carried out under the authority of the regional governor. But at one point in the proceedings he communicated with the emperor concerning how to proceed and received instructions back: “Caesar [i.e., Marcus Aurelius] had issued a command that they should be tortured to death, but any who still denied Christ should be released.” Some clearly did so, but for obvious reasons the account focuses on the torments of the valiant faithful rather than on the failings of the apostates.
We have no reliable reports of another emperor’s involvement in persecution for another eighty years. By that time Christianity had started to explode in numbers, and emperors started to express concern.
Decius (Ruled 249–51 CE)
The first emperor to issue empire-wide legislation that affected the Christian movement was Decius in 249 CE, shortly after he assumed power. It came in the form of a universal decree requiring everyone in the empire to perform a sacrifice to the gods, taste the sacrificial meat, and swear they had always done so, all in the presence of an official who was to sign a document scholars call a libellus certifying it had happened. The only people exempt were the Jews.16
We know of this extraordinary measure from several sources: three Christian contemporaries who spoke of persecutions that erupted when followers of Christ refused to comply, and a group of the actual libelli, forty-five altogether, discovered by archaeologists.
Traditionally it was thought that Decius enacted the decree specifically to institute an empire-wide persecution of the Christians. Recent historians have persuasively argued this was not the case.17 Instead, the decree was almost certainly designed to show a commitment to the gods throughout the entire empire in a time of imperial crisis. The middle half of the third century was a notorious period of real upheaval, with economic crises, barbarian invasions, and imperial assassinations, one after the other. The proper worship of the gods was called for as never before.
For modern minds it is interesting how Decius did so. It was not by dictating a certain range of religious beliefs; it was not by insisting on a national day of prayer; and it was not even by naming specific Roman deities who were to be worshiped. It was instead by requiring everyone to perform the cultic act of sacrifice. For Decius and pagans like him, this was the central feature of true religion. It did not matter which of the gods was honored through the sacrifice. The empire had to participate.
It is possible that Decius issued this edict precisely because he knew of the growing numbers of Christians and he wanted to force their hands. James Rives argues, however, that he may not have had only Christians in mind. There were other “foreign” cults that deemphasized sacrifice or neglected it altogether. Decius may have detected an alarming trend and sought to put an end to it.
His edict carried enormous implications. For Roman history prior to 249 CE, religious activities had always been local affairs. Worship was conducted by the individual, in the family, or as part of a local community. At most it was a matter of the province. That was true even of the Roman imperial cult: emperors may have been worshiped throughout the empire, but the specific practices were not controlled by a centralized authority. They were devised and carried out following local customs.
With Decius’s edict an official type of religion appeared for the entire empire, a sanctioned and even mandatory cultic act required in every place. This had profound effects on Christian-Empire relations. As Rives puts it: “It is thus not surprising that before Decius’ decree on universal sacrifice, there had been no centrally organized persecutions of Christians: it was only when a ‘religion of the Empire’ had been defined and its boundaries set that there could be a systematic persecution of people who transgressed those boundaries.”18
As one might imagine, there were certainly ways for Christians—especially those who were wealthy—to get around the requirements of the decree. They could take flight and keep on the move under the radar; they could bribe officials; they could purchase fake libelli. But we know from later Christian accounts that even though the reign of Decius was brief—he was killed in battle in 251 CE—serious consequences attended those who refused to sacrifice: exile, confiscation of property, torture, and death. It is impossible, however, to know the extent of the persecutions.
Valerian (Ruled 253–60 CE)
Two years after Decius, Valerian assumed the mantle of office. He was the first emperor to issue decrees specifically directed against the Christians and thus the first to sponsor an empire-wide persecution.19 The initial decree appeared in 257 CE, requiring church leaders to participate in pagan rituals and banning Christians from meeting en masse in cemeteries. More significant was a rescript the next year ordering the execution of all Christian bishops, presbyters, and deacons in the city of Rome itself. Christians at the rank of senator and equestrian were to be deprived of their status and worldly goods. If they refused to recant their faith, they too were to be executed. Matrons of senatorial rank were to have their property confiscated and be exiled. Members of the imperial household were also to have their goods confiscated and they were to be conscripted to work on imperial estates. This was an aggressive and very serious policy.
During the persecution, the Roman bishop Sixtus and four of his deacons were executed at the Catacombs of Saint Callixtus. Days later the deacon Laurence was executed. The cult revering Saint Laurence was to become a major feature of Roman Christian worship. Also during the persecution came one of the quickest judicial trials on record, set forth in a book called the Acts of Fructuosus. A bishop was brought up on charges, and his trial before the magistrate required four words: “Episcopus es?” “Sum.” “Fuisti.” Literally: “Are you a bishop?” “I am.” “You were.”20
With Valerian’s decrees, imperial powers took on the business of stamping out the growing Christian religion. However, the emperor himself was captured by the Persians during his attempt to defend the eastern borders in 260 CE; he was the first Roman emperor ever taken captive by the enemy. His son Gallienus assumed the highest office and did nothing to rescue his humiliated father. He did, however, rescind the persecution of Christians. As a result, the church enjoyed a forty-three year peace as it grew by leaps and bounds at the end of the third century. But after that the worst of times arrived with the Great Persecution under the emperor Diocletian.
Diocletian (Ruled 284–305 CE)
Diocletian was one of the truly great emperors of Roman history. He has nonetheless suffered a sullied reputation because of events that transpired near the end of his reign. Diocletian was highly religious and saw in the rise of Christian “atheism” a threat to the empire. He may have been spurred into action by the vitriolic polemic of the neo-Platonic philosopher Porphyry, whose book Against the Christians was seen by later Christian intellectuals to be the best-informed and most serious assault on the faith ever issued from a pagan pen. Diocletian knew Porphyry and had heard him lecture in Nicomedia, where he kept his official residence.21 On the administrative level, it is often thought that the real driving forces behind the persecution were Diocletian’s virulently anti-Christian junior Caesar Galerius and Galerius’s later replacement, Maximin Daia. But it was Diocletian who ordered it. This was a state-sponsored attempt to wipe out the Christian church, a persecution that dwarfed anything the empire had ever seen. It was to last on and off for a decade.
Diocletian issued a first edict on February 24, 303.22 All Christian meetings were declared illegal; Christian places of worship were to be destroyed; Christian Scriptures were to be confiscated; Christians of high social status were to lose their rank; Christian freedmen in the imperial service were to be re-enslaved.
It was one thing, however, for Roman officials, even emperors, to issue an edict and another thing to enforce it. No imperial police force existed to carry out the requirements of Diocletian’s decree. Enforcement was a regional or even municipal affair. Apart from a few church building destructions, the decree had little effect in the western part of the empire, and enforcement in t
he East was spotty. Still, those could be very hot spots indeed.
Months later the imperial palace in Nicomedia caught fire. Twice. Christians were accused and a second decree appeared in the summer of 303 ordering the arrest of all Christian clergy. November of that year saw a third decree, indicating that the imprisoned clergy would be set free only if they sacrificed to the gods.
Some months later, in spring 304, the fourth, final, and most severe decree was issued. It required everyone in the empire to gather in public spaces and participate in sacrifices. Some Christians escaped the requirement by bribing authorities; others apostatized; others refused and faced punishment in the form of imprisonment, torture, and death.
In the western part of the empire, only the first decree appears to have been propagated, and enforcement of even that one was brought to a complete halt with the accessions of Constantine and Maxentius in 306 CE. In the East the persecution continued sporadically, first under Galerius and then, especially, under Maximin Daia, up until the so-called Edict of Milan was issued in 313 CE by the victorious Constantine and his co-emperor Licinius. Still, it was long remembered by Christians as a horrific period of suffering, when the forces of evil strove to overthrow the true worship of God and destroy those who practiced it. We simply do not know how many Christians suffered imprisonment or died at the hands of the authorities: possibly hundreds of people, although almost certainly not many thousands. We do know that, in the end, the Christians came out on top. Constantine converted, and with one brief exception all the emperors to follow were Christian. There would never again be an official Roman persecution of the Christians.
Throughout these early centuries of on-again, off-again opposition, Christians were not always bullied, beaten, tortured, and executed. Most of the time, in most places, they were simply left in peace. Many Christians went from cradle to grave without facing any public ridicule, opposition, or persecution. We do not hear much about these Christians for an obvious reason: peace and quiet rarely make it into the history books.
It also bears noting that when Christians were attacked, either verbally or physically, they did not always accept it passively “like lambs led to the slaughter.” They often fought back, if not with swords then at least with words. There is a long and distinguished history of Christian intellectuals defending the claims of their faith and attacking the religious practices of their pagan opponents. Some of these literary works still survive, in a corpus produced by the Christians apologists.
THE CHRISTIAN APOLOGISTS
The Greek term apologia does not mean “I’m sorry.” It means a defense. When used of a literary genre, it refers to a reasoned defense of one’s personal, philosophical, or religious views. The Apology of Socrates was Plato’s account of the legal defense that Socrates made at his trial in Athens. The speech itself is one of the great classics of ancient literature. They executed him anyway.
Later generations often look back at such unsuccessful defenses and judge them to be irrefutable. That has proved to be the case with many of the Christian apologies. When transposed into a modern Christian context, they seem to be filled with such commonsensical and persuasive arguments that it is a wonder the pagans did not simply agree en masse.
The Christian apologies of the second and third centuries, however, were not meant for or read by outsiders. They were insider literature, written by Christians for other Christians in order to provide moral support and intellectual reasons for the faith. It is true that in almost all instances these apologies are actually addressed to pagans, normally to the emperors themselves. But it defies all sense to think they were actually hand-delivered to the ultimate ruler or that he would take the time to plow through their sometimes convoluted argumentation. Emperors, as you might imagine, were rather busy people.
Some scholars have thought that the apologies were published as “open letters” to the emperors such as you might find today in a daily newspaper. That is possible, of course, but it seems more likely that they were simply placed in circulation within the church communities themselves, just as the writings of modern Christian apologists are almost always read by Christians who want to be armed in their assault on the views of nonbelievers and in the defense of their own, rather than by nonbelievers, who, as a rule, are not all that interested in the intellectual justifications popular among the insiders.
So far as we can tell, early Christians almost always thought they should be able to defend themselves against charges leveled against them, and they were sometimes instructed to do so. Already in the New Testament we have the injunction of 1 Peter: “Always be ready to make a defense [Greek: apologia] to everyone who asks for a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15). No doubt, in the early decades, Christians spoke among themselves about why they believed, why their beliefs were superior to those of the pagan and Jewish worlds in which they otherwise found themselves, and how they could defend themselves verbally when under attack from those on the outside. It is not until the middle of the second century, however, that we begin to get actual written defenses of the faith, produced over the next two hundred years (and a bit beyond) by the very small cadre of intellectuals who had joined the ranks of the faithful.
Their writings were circulated, read, mastered, and utilized, and some of them have come down to us today from such authors as Justin Martyr in Rome, Athenagoras in Athens, Tertullian in Carthage, Minucius Felix in North Africa, and Origen in Alexandria, Egypt. Some of the apologists (Tertullian, Origen) are familiar names because of their other extensive surviving writings; others (Justin, Minucius Felix) are known only from their apologetic works. One of our very earliest apologies, the Letter to Diognetus, is never mentioned in any other ancient source. It is named after its recipient, since its author did not identify himself and we have no clue who he was.
Together these apologists provide us with an entire arsenal of arguments used both in the defense of the Christian faith and in the assault on the views of pagans and, to a much lesser extent, Jews. Among other things, the apologists addressed the very strange legal position of the Christians during their court proceedings. As we have seen, Christians were put on trial not for having committed a crime but for committing one in the present, by being Christian. That seemed nonsensical to the apologists, for two reasons. One is that a name is not a crime. Crimes are acts committed against others, such as murder, theft, adultery, and treason. By identifying themselves as Christian, the members of this religious group had not done anything but name themselves. That should be no crime. Even more, the legal proceedings made no sense because Christians were not being asked to confess a crime they had committed—the normal procedure in a criminal court of law—but to deny who they were. They were to forswear their Christian faith and take an oath to the pagan gods. And they were being tortured to do so. The judicial action, therefore, was designed not to uncover a criminal act but to force them to stop committing one. As Tertullian put the irony: “In the case of others denying, you apply the torture to make them confess; Christians alone you torture to make them deny” (Apology 2).
Needless to say, such pleas based on logical inconsistencies fell on deaf ears. As did all the other arguments of the apologists, however sensible they may seem to modern readers. As one might expect, most of their defenses addressed the suspicions raised and allegations leveled against Christians that we have already seen: atheism, sexual immorality, infanticide, and cannibalism.
CHRISTIAN ATHEISM
In defending themselves against charges that they were “without gods,” the apologists acknowledged they did not worship the pagan divinities. But they certainly worshiped the one creator God over all, the ultimate divine being. And not just him alone: they also worshiped the Son of God and the Spirit of God. Moreover, they acknowledged there were other divine beings in the world—angels, archangels, and so on—who, since they were not at the pinnacle of divinity, did not deserve the adoration due to the one true God but who were recognized for their g
reatness. And so Christians obviously were not atheists.
Moreover, every nation, every city, every family, had its own gods. The major deities of Britain, Spain, Gaul, Italy, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt all differed from one another. Romans did not intervene to force people in Spain or Egypt to worship gods other than the ones they chose. Why should they force the Christians? Suppose the Christian views were wrong, that their god was not the ultimate divine being alone worthy of worship. That would make Christians mistaken and possibly even foolish, but it would not make them criminal. Persecution on these grounds was senseless.
In response to the pagan view that the gods resented not being worshiped and could bring disaster on a people, or an entire empire, that ignored them, Christians pointed out that the gods were always being neglected. Since there were so many gods in so many places, anytime pagans worshiped one god they were neglecting to worship hundreds of others. Were these hundreds upset about that? Did they bring disasters on the empire every time someone chose to worship a different god? If not, why would they do so when the Christians chose to worship their god?
Moreover, what evidence was there that gods brought drought, floods, earthquakes, famine, epidemics, or any other calamities because they were not worshiped by the Christians? If that were true, why did such catastrophes occur with equal frequency before the reign of the emperor Tiberius, when Christianity first appeared? Moreover, when such calamities struck in the present, they did not affect just the allegedly guilty parties, the Christian culprits alone. If the gods wanted to punish Christians for their refusal to worship, why would disasters strike pagans as well?
The Triumph of Christianity Page 23