Christianity
Persecution of Christians II
Abstract
Persecution did not cease in the age of Constantine. Christians promptly began to persecute their fellow Christians.Robin Lane Fox
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Saturday, April 08, 2000
Apocalypticism
The apocalypticism of Christians in the first two centuries is proved by too many citations. The Shepherd of Hermas is a good example, popular in the second century though possibly based on an Essene original. The church had an order of ”prophets” in the first two centuries, before they suppressed it. It again hints at the Essene origins of Christianity because the Essenes considered themselves to have been prophets in the tradition of the great scriptural prophets, but instructed in the pesharim of their Righteous Teacher.
The prophets of the early church, like the Essenes, spent their time preaching of the coming End of the World. Since they regarded the world as ”wicked” and believed that only the Christians would be saved, they sounded to Romans as if they exulted in disaster. Even if Christians did not set the fires that burnt down Rome under Nero, they will have seen it as a ”sign” of the coming End, and therefore gloried in it.
Roman magistrates will have been aware that preaching of this sort in a superstitious age made people nervous. Today, large corporations are sensitive about rumour, false or true, that might bring the stock price crashing. The Romans had similar fears regarding morale. Celsus accused Christians of ”inventing terrors”, and he complained of Christians who ”roam like tramps” through cities prophesying that they will end up in ”everlasting fire… mixing up their mighty threats with half crazy and absolutely senseless words, that every fool applies to suit his own purpose”.
Christian apologists tell us that these people were imposters trying to get credibility on the back of the church, forgetting that the church had no credibility with the bulk of the population and with Roman magistrates because it was being persecuted by them! It is typical that Christians will have their cake and eat it. They were simultaneously hated but so admired that they generated imposters. These people were not imposters but were ”prophets” who stuck to the original Christian purpose of warning people to prepare for the coming End, long after it had proved that it was not coming. They then became an embarrassment to the church and were banned. The church could not ban imposters, but could ban the source of the problem, one of its own orders called ”prophets”. Modern Protestant churches reinvented them.
In a Phrygian inscription, an Epicurean described Christianity not as ”life in death” but as ”death in life”. Ignatius reiterates this, saying: ”The job of the Christian is to be always preparing to die”. Another critic said that ”the crucified repels all gladness”. Their perpetual message was that the Pagan world and its inhabitants would be burnt up in everlasting flame and only the Christian Elect would survive into the kingdom of God. Pagans naturally thought this philosophy was insulting to them. Poets like Virgil tried to turn people away from superstitious fear of fate and the ”roar of greedy hell”, but Christianity stoked up the fires.
Secrecy
From the Essenes, the Christians claimed hidden knowledge and often insisted on meeting in secret. A young acolyte, Tarsicius, was stopped and searched by a patrol of soldiers and refused to show them what he was carrying. He was said to have been carrying the sacrament for some confessors, but for his refusal to cooperate with the police, he was martyred. The treatment of anyone refusing to cooperate with police on a stop and search operation today would also be severe, if stopping short of death.
Babylas of Antioch was allegedly martyred for refusing to admit the authorities into the secret meetings of his congregation in the time of Decius. People asked: ”Why do they conceal whatever they worship?” Minucius Felix has his Pagan spokesman saying that ”anything that is secret is suspected of being abominable”, Christians being accused of getting up to abominable things in their secret meetings. The accusations of lewd and immoral behaviour are too widespread to dismiss, but are falsehoods, Christians say, perpetrated by their enemies, the Jews, or attributed to the misunderstanding of Christian acts of piety such as the ”kiss of peace” instituted by Paul. And what are we to conclude when a prominent spokesman for the church, Clement of Alexandria, complained that some Christians ”do nothing but make the church resound with their kisses”.
Christians were also accused of cannibalism, Christians say because people misunderstood the words of Jesus in prescribing the Eucharist, instituted by St Paul and read in conjunction with John:
The Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread: And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me. After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me. For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come.1 Cor 11:23-26
Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.Jn 6:53-55
Pophyry could say long ago what many non-Christians think today, though Christians do not seem to have delicacy or sensitivity enough to notice:
The sound of the words grate inevitably on the soul and makes it rebel against a loathsome saying.
And that, even though ”it were meant to be taken in a mystical or allegorical sense”.
Other religions had their own mysteries but escaped persecution, the point being that their initiations, ceremonies and revelations of hidden things were all openly advertised on fixed days and places and were open to anyone who had joined, including many government officials and noble families. They were secret, in other words, only in the sense that the Judaeao-Christian God’s name is secret—nobody was allowed to speak it. Romans did not forbid these meetings in which secret things were revealed, they forbade secret meetings! These religions were ”licita” and their observers did not meet clandestinely but openly. Christianity was not ”licita” and Christians met clandestinely.
Tertullian in De Praescript, thought the Taurobolium was a travesty of the cross. A great Taurobolium had been held in Lyons in 160 AD according to a record found there in 1704 AD. The Taurobolium was associated with Cybele, the Great Mother of the Gods, was supervised by magistrates and was attended by a large crowd. In a solemn ceremony, the bull was slaughtered on a platform and its blood allowed to drip on to those who passed below to be purified. The purification lasted twenty years before another similar purification was needed, and anyone who died within twenty years of experiencing this sacrament could expect eternal life and could have inscribed on their tombs ”renatus in æternum”.
Unpatriotic and anti-Social
Yet another reason for Pagan anger was the Christian ”enthusiasm” for desecrating and destroying things and places held sacred by Pagans. In 179 AD, Symphorion of Autun boldly said to an examining judge:
By your leave, I would gladly smash that image of a devil with a mallet.
Nominally the church disapproved of enthusiasm taken this far but, either its disapproval was a front, or it had little control over its flocks. Leo of Patara tore down the lanterns and candles burning before the temple of the Goddess Fortuna and trampled them underfoot, calling out:
If you think the gods have any power let them defend themselves.
This worthy sentiment is one that later Christians, Moslems and others happily ignore when they go on the rampage to defend their gods! Leo, who was an old man, was arrested but his judge was inclined to treat him with mercy because of his age and urged him to recant his vandalism by saying, ”Great are the Gods”, to earn a release with a caution. But Leo answered, ”Yes, great in destroying the souls of those who believe in them”, and so he went to his martyrdom around the time of Valerian
A Christian deacon in Antioch, in 303 AD, took it on himself to stop a Pagan procession. He was not martyred but lost his tongue, according to Eusebius. Theodore the Tiro was taken before the magistrates for refusing to sacrifice and told the court:
I know nothing of your gods. They do not exist. You are wrong to call seducing imposters of devils by the names of gods. My god is Christ, the only begotten son of God.
The dedication of Theodore impressed the judge who viewed the youth’s plea with some sympathy and bailed him for a cooling off period to ”reconsider his insanity”. Theodore took the reprieve as the chance to go out and burn to ashes the temple of the Great Mother, the town’s goddess, and her statue. Christians and humanists alike consider the torching of a church as an unspeakable crime, yet Christians relate the acts of these martyrs in joyous reverence. The magistrate ordered that Theodore suffer the same fate, and thus he entered the lists of martyrs.
Origen quoted Celsus as saying, ”The language of sedition is only used by those who separate and stand aloof from the society of their fellows”, implying that Christians both used the language of sedition and stood aloof. Notice also that Celsus describes the Christians as being separated, the very word used of the Essenes and the meaning of the word ”nazirite”. Minucius Felix also has his Pagan spokesman saying Christians are ”people who separate themselves and break away from the rest of mankind”.
Pagan life in every respect revolved around Pagan ceremony, just as Christian ritual dominated the whole of life for many centuries. Public meetings began with appeals to the appropriate deities, birth, marriage and death had appropriate ceremonies, and travel by land or sea and the home were each guarded by suitable gods. How this differs from Christian mumbo-jumbo, except that it offers more variety, is anybody’s guess, but Christian apologists maintain that Christians did something noble in bringing it all down.
Workman admits that Christian converts carried with them into their new life the faults and habits of their old one. Many, especially fundamentalists, will not even admit this, but those that do think the stalwart Christians were able to overcome their old prejudices and Christianity was little affected. Common sense says it is nonsense. A small number of the first Christians tried to stick to Jewish Essenian principles and were called ”Puritans”. Most converts, however, will have thought they were taking up a new god not a new lifestyle, and will have fitted their new Christian practices into their old lifestyle. Even the purest Puritan could not avoid social conventions and when they insisted on flouting them, they invited Pagan criticism. So old fashioned Essenism began to hybridize with Paganism to give birth to the Catholic Church.
The progress of the church can be seen in the names on Christian graves. Obviously converts had Pagan names, but the remarkable thing is that biblical names did not become fashionable until well after the adoption of Christianity by Constantine. Some martyrs changed their Pagan names before going to their deaths but preferred to chose Old Testament names rather than New Testament ones. Mary did not become popular until the end of the fourth century.
Nor did Christians feel so strongly about their principles by the time of Constantine that they wanted to alter the Mithraic names of the days of the week. This is proof that Romans at the time of Constantine saw Jesus as a sun god, and Christianity as an allegory of the sun, so that Constantine did not so much as promote Christianity as top religion but put control of the official syncretistic solar religion into the hands of the Christian hierarchy.
The beginning of Dark Age disdain of education can be seen at the beginning of Christianity. Pagans called Christians ignoramuses, ”idiotai”. The reason is that fanatical Christians were so concerned at wicked Paganism influencing them and their children that they refused to allow Christian children to study Greek or Latin. Greek and Latin literature was Pagan literature, full of mythical allusions. Celsus commented on the refusal of Christians to read Pagan literature. Before long Christians had such poor Greek and Latin that it showed on the inscriptions on their gravestones.
This disdain for basic education got so bad that by the time of Pope Gregory, the Pope could berate his bishop in Vienne, Desiderius, for teaching grammar. This story alone should be sufficient to explain that the Dark Ages had little to do with barbarian conquests and everything to do with Christian dogma and ignorance.
Biased Christian history tries to pretend that Christians invented charity, ignoring that Christianity’s predecessors, the Essenes, had charitable objectives, that many Roman collegia provided benefits like the later friendly societies, and that the Stoic emperors passed charitable legislation. If Christians want to make unwarranted claims about their social improvements, they also want to deny that Christianity was an open confidence trick. Thus Peregrinus, the Christian fraudster described by Lucian, is universally rejected by Christians. Lucian, incidentally, also tells us that Christians communicted by secret signs.
Christian aloofness meant they had problems deciding whether to garland and illuminate their houses on the emperor’s official birthday, as was the Pagan custom. Should they accept invitations to the weddings, birthdays and funerals of Pagan neighbours? Should they seek or accept treatment in hospitals that were dedicated to the god of healing, Æsculapius? Should they seek redress in Pagan courts? Should they refuse the honour of public office, which required presiding over Pagan ceremonies and festivities. Minucius Felix, Tertullian and Tatian say that Christians did initially refuse public office but, by the time of the Christian triumph, Christians were prominant in the bureaucracy and were happy to hold offices as high as the Senate and governorships in the colonies.
Magic
Romans also feared Christians because they thought they practiced magic. For modern Christians to make the questionable claim that Christianity has nothing to do with magic is not to answer the fact that the Romans thought they did. Historians must beware above all of mental anachronism. The old fears of nature that the Latins had was disappearing with the growth of the status and size of the Roman empire. In their place came religions from the east that supposed the widespread existence of supernatural horrors—mystical and spiritual monsters. Christianity was among the worst of these, and still is.
Even worse, for the Romans was the fact that some people—witches, warlocks and sorcerers—had power over these supernatural monsters, through magic, and could make them commit whatever mischief they wanted. Roman religion had originally been ancestor worship, and at this time spiritualism became popular. Christians entered the scene speaking of miracles and driving out demons, feats that they claimed they could do. St Augustine of Hippo claimed he had witnessed 72 miracles in only two years including five cases of resurrection. Sulpicius Severus tells of how the Devil appeared to St Martin, and how the saint himself raised three people from the dead. St Antony was reported as having the power to make demons appear before him and cower in terror at his feet.
In the second century, the Acts of the Apostles was in circulation with its story of how the well known magician, Simon Magus, wanted to buy the magical secrets of the apostles. So, a Christian holy book was claiming that Christianity had stronger magic than the famous gnostic, Simon. If Pagans hated the Christians as sorcerers, it is only because of their own swanking about their magical abilities. Tertullian bragged that a Christian could expose the demon in anyone possessed. As early as Justin (in his Dialogues), the power of the name of Jesus, and the equal power of the cross, were being touted as effective ways of opposing evil spirits and casting out devils, the self-same charms still recommended—tongue in cheek, one hopes—by makers of horror films, such as the Hammer Dracula series. Not much progress in 2000 years of Christianity there.
In short, Christians claimed to be magicians. They incriminated themselves in the popular mind because no one believed demons could be controlled by someone not in league with them, a fact guarded against in the gospels when Jesus is himself accused of being Satan. Nero had the Jewish messianists that had raised the fire in Rome burnt alive or thrown to mad dogs, both punishments prescribed for magicians, presumably because they believed they were inducing the end of the world by their incendiarism.
Dionysius of Alexandria, quoted by Eusebius, places Valerian’s dislike (about 260 AD) of Christians on to the ”Chief of the Egyptian Magi”. What is meant by this strange title? ”Egypt” might have been a code word for the headquarters of the Essenes and, if ”magi” suggested an order of priests influenced by the Persian religion, it could also apply to the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The title would therefore have applied to Jesus himself. The ”Chief of the Egyptian Magi” had given Romans a hard time in capturing Jerusalem and helping to stimulate the Jewish War. That would have been good enough reason for Valerian to dislike the Christians, and he might have had the information from the archives.
Persecuted as a New Religion
Such notable scholars as T Mommsen, E G Hardy, E le Blant and W M Ramsey at the end of the nineteenth century proved beyond doubt that Christians were not persecuted for their religion but because they broke the law of Rome.
Police surveyance of Christianity was not because it was a new religion. Rome was remarkably tolerant of religious differences at this time. Rome had bestowed the ”freedom of the city on the gods of mankind”, as Gibbon put it. Christians will claim that their religion was treated badly because of its morality—especially its sexual prudery—at a time when morals were lax. Yet though the rites of some of the mysteries were bizarre to us, such as the self-castration of the Galli of Cybele, the evidence of widespread licentiousness is not there—the orgiastic nature of Pagan religion is mainly Christian fiction, invented to denigrate the religions it sought to displace, and eventually did by brute force. The dominant Philosophy of life at the time was Stoicism, an utterly moral and self-sacrificing outlook that is still remembered today in the adjective ”stoical” meaning possessing great self-control, and staying rational when all others lose their heads.
By the time that Christianity was invented, most educated Greeks and Romans believed in a supreme god as the monarch of a heavenly kingdom in which other gods were His subjects. That is the theory of the Jewish scriptures that were written in their present form only in the second century BC, when this idea had been accepted. Christians could therefore have accepted the Pagan gods as the lesser gods of the Jewish scriptures that Christians purloined for their own purposes.
The cult of Æsculapius, introduced into Rome in 290 BC was perfectly proper. Æsculapius was called the Philanthropotatas, the ”Friend of Humanity” and the ”Healer” and ”God the Saviour”. His many inscriptions testify to his popularity. Because Æsculapius had titles that Christians wanted to purloin for the use of their own god, they were unusually intolerant of this Pagan god. The god was so like Jesus in image that even Eusebius mistook a statue of Æsculapius at Paneas (Caesarea Philippi) as a statue of Jesus. A Roman statue of Æsculapius was built into the wall of a Wiltshire church, presumably because someone took it to be Jesus, though an expert from nearby Oxford University declares it to be a local God because it is wearing Roman robes not Greek ones as Æsculapius always did (unless, in Britain, sculpteurs of religious images became less conventional at the end of the Roman period).
The oft spoken church story of the martyrdom of the four stonemasons, about 300 AD, reveals the antagonism of Pagan for Christian, in the view of Christians, but also shows the reverse. The four were supposedly better at their trade than their Pagan rivals, supposedly the source of their jealousy, but although the four had sculpted such Pagan images as the sun without a qualm, they refused to sculpt Æsculapius, presumably because they were jealous that this Pagan god had the same titles and perfomed the same worthy deeds as their own ”saviour”. Diocletian had them drowned for striking.
It is disputable that cults like that of Isis were licentious by this time even if they had once been, and moral deficiencies like this ”sin” of ”licentiousness” are introductions to morals by the prudish religion of Christianity that took, as the proper way to behave before God, the self-deprivation of desert monks who saw themselves as a holy army in the waiting.
Roman authorities were always ready to favour dominant religions in the colonies. Yehouah was favoured in Judaea to such an extent that a violation by a gentile, or even by a Roman soldier in peace time, meant death. But the favour extended to a god in its homeland was not necessarily extended elsewhere. If a Jew violated the temple of Diana, it was the worshippers of Diana who were favoured. Thus Jews causing riots in Rome in anticipation of the end of the world and the coming messiah could not expect to be treated kindly. And who else expected the end of the world at this time?
Any new worship required the approval of the emperor and the Senate, and no emperor, until the origins of Christianity had been forgotten in favour of the myth, could allow a religion to be worshipped that glorified a rebel against the state.
And the practitioners of these so-called monotheistic religions did not want to have their only god lined up with the idols of the heathen. The Christians would not register as a religion alongside the others, and the emperor would not have accepted them, if they had. Originally the Romans regarded all religions other than the native ancestor worship of Rome as superstitions. That is how Christianity is described by the first historians to notice it.
Christianity was not the only religion treated with suspicion and persecution at this time. So were the Druids. Their long established central organization in the Druid priesthood, and their annual convocation on the holy hill of Chartres, seemed far too dangerous for emperors like Tiberius and Claudius, who claimed that human beings were being burned in wicker baskets so that they could clamp down savagely on the religion. Whether this was true or propaganda is a moot point, but Christians obviously thought it a good idea and took it up themselves, albeit foregoing the basket in favour of a wooden stake, and practiced it for almost another 2000 years.
So each god had its rights within its own domain, but its worshippers had to recognize the rights of others. Christians argue that a universal religion would necessarily clash with local gods, but that too is a lie unless it is the worshippers of the universal god who refuse to recognise the lesser gods. That is what Christianity did, but other universal religions such as the worship of Isis and the worship of Mithras, both of which were empire wide and either of which could have been our Catholic religion today, if not stamped out by the intolerance of Christianity, were tolerant of other gods and goddesses, each other and even Christianity.
Christians chose not to be tolerant about other peoples’ beliefs and today they rage if anyone criticises Christianity. Christianity is intolerant. It began being intolerant, and despite its present cloak of enlightenment, it still is. There is only one god, the Christian god, so you had better worship it. The Moslems have exactly the same attitude. You can see today what happens when people with beliefs like this get power. They insist on ”saving” others, who do not worship their god, by obliging them to do so on pain of death. If you do not want to be saved, then die.
Christians have projected on to Roman magistrates their own intolerant ideas, even though the evidence otherwise is that Romans were relatively indifferent to anyone’s religious beliefs. What Romans found a few centuries later was that their magistrates and police were absolutely correct. Christians did indeed want to overthrow the traditions of Roman society and culture. They were indeed anarchists. What is virtuous in themselves is a crime in others.
Roman toleration was no more natural than it is in our society. We have to struggle in our society to propagate tolerance, that differences are not a quarrel, but that is hard when the dominant morality is intolerant of any other. The Roman reception to other religions was not automatically tolerant. When the cult of Isis was first introduced, temples to the goddess were burnt down. In the Republic, Romans were forbidden to participate in foreign cults. Neverthless, by the first century, foreign cults were widespread and popular, and the custom of the people was to respect other peoples’ gods.
Christianity benefitted from a surge in social awareness among the lower classes—the desire to help each other and be rewarded with eternal life. Most of the cults that spread in the empire around the time of the crucifixion had these elements in them. The formation of brotherhoods, the emancipation of women, the growth of charities and the dole, the building of hospitals and orphanages, the growth of education and the building of libraries, the emancipation of slaves, all were movements of the time that promised a more liberal future. Progress was made under the Republican emperors, the Antonines, and ultimately Christianity emerged as the main beneficiary. Then, having benefitted from this sea change, Christianity stopped it and turned the tide.
The refusal of Christians to acknowledge the ”natural gods” with their own, and their further refusal to sacrifice to the emperor as a patriotic act confirmed to the authorities their suspicions that Christians were subversive or even anarchistic because they were both threatening to weaken the religous basis of society and its political cohesion through loyalty to the emperor. It was sacrilege—the “crimen laesae Romanae religionis”.
The Greek, ”atheoi”, means ”those without gods”, and was applied to Christians because they categorized the Roman gods as the demons of Satan ensconsed in wood and stone that had induced paople to worship them ”that they might obtain their favourite food of flesh, fumes and blood”, according to Tertullian, plainly confirming himself as not being a monotheist or one of those in the long line of Christian liars—believing or pretending to believe in demons as lesser gods. There are gods besides God, and even though they are little and inferior, they are clever enough to fool human beings into worshipping them.
More honest Christians attributed worship of idols to worshipping the memory of ancient kings, elevated by their deeds on earth to godhood. It never occurred to them, nor does it today, that these theories might apply to their own god. If they are of a supernatural bent, how can they be sure that a devil has not fooled them into believing a crucified criminal is god? Or how can they be sure that their god is not just a man, they believe to be a remarkable one, elevated to the status of a god?
The prevalent idea of the time was that the world was full of demons, monotheism or no monotheism, and the Christians added to it by claiming all the natural gods were demons. The hosts of god, angels led by Michael, would have to come to earth to defeat the hosts of demons. This was the Essene belief that transmuted into the Christian one by the substitution of Jesus returning for the angel Michael. Christians believed this so fervantly that Christian mobs attacked and burnt down Pagan temples. Minucius Felix has his Pagan spokesman, Caecilius, declaring:
They despise the temples as dead houses, they scorn the gods, they mock sacred things.
No honest Christian historian or theologian can deny it, but they will find ways of justifying behaviour that they would condemn if it happened today to Christian churches. Some theologians, more eager to be seen as properly monotheistic, will deny the existence of demons, angels and Satan. If there is only one god, there cannot be other gods, even if they are minnows by comparison. Yet they did not stand up in pulpits and on their TV channels to tell their flocks that demons and angels are a heresy against the One God. They know that demons and angels are popular among the superstitious and ignorant masses that attend their churches, and they do not have the will to correct such polytheistic ideas in case their flocks start attending some other sect of ”Christianity” that does accept heretical entities, and they lose their income.
Christians refused to show loyalty to Rome, a major reason why they were shunned and sometimes persecuted. It is an attitude that stems from the Essenes, the secret but militant party of Judaism. Clergymen tell us that their gentile founders in the Roman empire upheld the law of the land except where it clashed with the superior law of God, and cite Paul and Justin as proof. Even if that is true, is the clergyman telling us we can pick and choose which laws we want to obey? You can bet your life they are not. “There’s a law for you’ns, and there’s a law for we’ns, and ’tain’t the same law!” In Christian mythology, Christians would rather be eaten by lions rather than lift even a finger in their own defence. Yet, Christians in the USA will insist on their “right” to carry a lethal weapon, even though killing is a mortal sin of God, expressed in one of his most prominent commandments. “Hypocrites!” was the word their own god used.
Christians came to see persecution as modern day criminals see jail—as a badge of honour. The stories told of the uncomplaining submission of the earlier Christian martyrs are only bettered by those of the Cathar heretics and some of the witches, and they echo the phlegmatic endurance of the Essenes under torture by the Romans in the Jewish war. The original inclination towards feeling justification in persecution came from the Essenes, who thought of themselves as a persecuted species through their attempt to be perfect, as the scrolls prove. Subsequent persecutions in Judaea, when Jesus was crucified and then in the empire as a subversive organization, strengthened their self-righteous feeling that they must be doing right in the wicked world because the world hated them so much.
The favourite stories of Christian martyrs were of young virgins like Blandina of Lyon and Perpetua and her child.
Pain and death were not to be feared, but actually to be hoped for, and matyrdom washed away more sins than a lifetime of prayer.W Woods, A History of the Devil
The ones who still carry on in the same way today are the Moslem martyrs—the human bombers.
Exaggeration or Lies?
The main periods of persecution were around the middle of the third century and the start of the fourth when Christianity had grown immensely and was seen by administrators as a serious threat to the health of the empire—as it proved. Jerome claimed 5000 Christians were being murdered every day, almost 2 million a year, enough to wipe out the whole empire inside fifty years. Even so, some later tales were even more exaggerated—the medieval Church claimed the martyrdom of thousands of virgins and soldiers simultaneously! Eusebius, not normally shy about “exaggerating”, more modestly claimed 100 a day in Thebais, but Gibbon points out that his information was second hand. In Palestine, where Eusebius had direct information, he finds a total of 92.
In earlier times, Tacitus spoke of “multitudes” being martyred in Rome after the fire, but they were messianic Jews rather than Christians. Curiously, the written records of the Roman Church have all been “lost!” Pliny, in his investigation in Bythinia, uses a vague expression taken to mean about fifty for the number of victims. The reports passed on by Christians based on Pliny multiplied it to 500, then, later still, to 50,000! Ever since it has been habitual for Christians to use a liberal multiplying factor to exaggerate the numbers persecuted.
Yet, in his reply to Pliny, the emperor Trajan[†]Trajan not Hadrian. Erroneously, I had written Hadrian. L F Brancaccio kindly corrected me with a Latin citation., instructed that there was no need for Christians to be hunted down like criminals, if there was no explicit accusation against anyone—anonymous accusations were not admissable. If Christianity was a crime at this time, then Trajan made it a much worse offence for anyone to bring a false accusation against them. Even the fanatical Tertullian concedes that a magistrate called Pudens, tore up a charge sheet against a Christian when he discovered the accuser was not in attendance. Any uncovered Christian only had to undertake the traditional rites of the state to be exonerated.
Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, incidentally, had an odd idea of who the Christians were—or was it not odd, but instead throws some light on Christian origins? He wrote according to Phlegon, a freedman of Hadrian, quoted in a later source, that in Egypt:
The Christians and the worshippers of Serapis are the same. Those devoted to Serapis call themselves the bishops of Christ.
A colossal bust of the God Serapis is or was kept in the Vatican. Serapis was a universal God created out of Osiris and Apis, as a consort for Isis, allegedly by Ptolemy, though one wonders whether the Persians had founded the universalism on which Ptolemy built. The qualities of Pluto, Aesclepius and Jupiter were added in and at the time of Hadrian, Serapis worship was widely popular across the empire.
Antoninus Pius who succeeded Hadrian in 138 AD declared he would rather “save the life of one citizen than slay a thousand foes”, not the material of a persecutor, one might think. Christians insist he did, though some Christian commentators have to admit that it was “sporadic and localized mob action” rather than concerted imperial persecution. In short, it was not persecution! The truth is that the mob violence was often the response of Pagans to Christian intolerance and pious vandalism.
Hadrian had declared mob action as illegal and the liberal emperors that succeeded him will have adopted the same law. Yet Christians also accuse Marcus Aurelius, the living epitome of the philosopher-king, of persecuting their forebears. If, indeed, their claim is true, one would imagine that Christian “historians” would pause to consider why an enlightened ruler should want to persecute a supposedly peaceful sect. Since Marcus Aurelius can hardly be considered a Nero, he cannot have done it out of perversion or personal enmity. The only answer is that they were not seen by Roman rulers, even philosophical ones, as being innocent. They must have been breaking the law—like their founder—and creating unrest. No Christian will consider the possibility, but even the noblest of men could not tolerate his peace being deliberately disturbed by a fanatical sect intent on promoting the End of the World.
The Persecution of Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic emperor who brought in laws relieving the burdens on slaves, children and orphans. It is a wonder Christians do not claim him as one of their own. The reason they do not is that they can say that even the most enlightened of Pagans still did the work of the Devil in persecuting God’s innocents. They add justification in the assertion that, though generally a well-intentioned and moral man, he was practically a bad emperor. So, the Christian differs from no others in placing practical success above morality? There is nothing surprising in it. It has always been true and explains why today, Christians of all denominations will defend the indefensible actions of transnational corporations in destroying the world in the interest of wealth, when their god was a believer in the virtue of poverty.
Stoicism for Marcus Aurelius, as it was for the freed slave, Epictetus, who was its greatest protagonist, was the submission of the person to “God”, where God was not a disembodied superbeing but the law of the universe—the cosmos or what the Persians called Arta. At death, the personality did not survive but merged with the cosmos whence it had come in its immense vortex of cyclical change. Death is oblivion—a dreamless sleep—a far more comforting idea than the thought of an eternal life, which, however reassuring it might seem to those scared of death, can only mean that everyone in heaven must be insane within a few millennia. Anything like a real eternal life could only be a curse and indeed it was the curse of the legendary Jew who refused to assist Jesus.
The most popular headstone in Christian cemetaries says, “Rest in Peace”. The only real peace is oblivion, so most Christians must believe in it despite the mythology about eternal life. Yet Christian apologists tell us that such a believe is an absence of hope. So, how many Christians hope to die despite the balmy place they expect to finish in. People who are not overcome by depression through misfortune instinctively know that this is the life we have and want to hold on to it, despite the promises of fraudulent priests. To believe in hope in death rather than hope in life is necrophilia. Worse!—it is irresponsible, yet Christians preach it and denigrate noble emperors like Marcus Aurelius for having a more honest and practical outlook.
Perhaps it is no wonder that he persecuted the Christians. The danger of the liberal condoning its opposite, fascism, is that it is a game of political Russian roulette. Everything is fine as long as liberals remain in government, but, once a fascist governments gets into power, your brains are against the wall. Pagans allowed that to happen with Christianity, but throughout the periods of so-called persecutions some of the authorities from time to time saw the danger and tried to stop it.
Perhaps Marcus Aurelius was one of them. He had a great sense of duty and doubtless saw it as his duty to try to leave the world strong, not subject to those who despised it. Christians call this despair, though any Christian that does the same gets canonized because they do it “in hope!” Marcus Aurelius was motivated by his desire to live “in the image of God” and to see “the City of God”, but by these he meant living harmoniously with Nature. The cosmos was the harmony of Nature that people and societies should aim to emulate. Marcus Aurelius apparently saw the Christians as opposing all the best traditions of Rome—of chosing the “right thing” that he saw properly defined by the Stoic world view.
Persecutions are reported in Rome, where Justin Martyr was among the victims, Gaul and North Africa, but even though these cases seem historically sound, they scarcely add up to the Christian myth. The honest scholar has to consider that, if these cases did signify an imperial policy of persecution of Christians, it consisted mainly of some exemplary punishments of local ringleaders interspersed with occasional more severe instances. The alleged slaughter in the amphitheatre of Lyons, in Gaul, seems the most severe incident. Otherwise the evidence of a widespread official persecution of Christians under Marcus Aurelius is described, even by Christian commentators as “fragmentary and incomplete”.
Workman points out, for example, that the cruelty of the persecution in some places was probably not even known by Marcus Aurelius, who ruled an empire more than half the size of the USA and a lot less compact. Local governors had immense powers and since their objective was to keep the peace, they could hardly be disciplined by emperors by doing so harshly, as long as they were successful. Marcus Aurelius seems to have instituted no new policy but merely continued those of his predecessors of requiring the Christians to obey the law of the Roman state, though he might have applied the extant penal code more vigorously than Trajan or Hadrian.
Christian Boasters
Commodus succeeded Marcus Aurelius. He is universally considered a worthless emperor. Yet, Eusebius, the Church’s early historian, tells us that he did not persecute the Christians, unlike his noble predecessors. He released some of the Christians sentenced to hard labour in the Sardinian mines, including Callistus, the freedman who would become Pope. Note that, contrary to Christian mythology, Christians were not habitually fed to the lions or boiled in oil like John the Divine. (Though perhaps the authorities had tried but the lions had become like pussies and the oil had become like warm milk!)
Again, it seems curious that Christian historians never seem to consider that, in this period, Christians thrived when emperors were slack but were persecuted by vigorous emperors. Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot would smell a rat, but Christian scholars never do. They are trained to defend Christian mythology not to question it. Those who have sought an explanation, outside of the childish or the supernatural, praise Commodus’s mistress, Marcia, supposed to have been a Christian or a fellow-traveller—showing that Christian women were not all spotless virgins!
Commodus was the opposite of Marcus Aurelius, being indifferent to “order” and unperturbed by public disturbance. Furthermore, and most interestingly, Commodus was more interested in the religion of Mithras than in the “right things” of old Rome. The point is that 150 years later, the two religions, Mithraism and Christianity, were amalgamated, so the attitude of Commodus and his mistress might suggest that even at this early date the two might have been seen as similar. It seems that Commodus favoured the eastern solar religions, of which Christianity was one. In the next 30 to 40 years, Christianity became so fashionable in Rome that whole families converted.
Despite this upsurge in popularity—and in the most influential classes—Christians want to believe that persecutions were continuous through to the time of Constantine, when—miraculously—it triumphed. The real point about the third century was that a succession of Pagan emperors saw that Christianity had virtually taken over the running of the state with its influence on the bureaucracy and its blatantly parallel organization to the secular organizational structure of the state. To responsible emperors, it cried out of the danger of a coup d’etat. The second century emperors had suspected that Christianity sought to undermine the state: the third century emperors saw that it already had.
Irenaeus brags of the “many nations among the barbarians who believe”, and Tertullian, apparently referring to Ireland, speaks of “places inaccessible to Rome” that have yielded to Christ. He also brags of Christian success within the empire:
We have filled all the places you frequent—cities, villages, markets, the camp itself, town councils, the palace, the senate, the forum. All we have left you is your temples… Nearly all the citizens of nearly all of your cities are Christians.
Tertullian was writing at the beginning of the third century, a hundred years before Constantine, yet Christianity had effectively triumphed already.
Christian historians see no contradiction in the bragging of third century Church spokesmen like Tertullian and Origen that Christianity “came,saw and conquered”, echoing Caesar, while claiming they contended with the most cruel, vigorous and continuous persecution. Unless Christianity was the triumph of Roman Sado-Masochists, both claims cannot have been true.
The truth is that these Church authorities helped create the myth of incessant persecution, but, when their propaganda purpose is ignored, their real message is that Christianity was barely persecuted, and when it was it was as a subversive organization. That it eventually subverted the empire should be proof enough, but note in the quotation above that Tertullian wrote not as a citizen but as an outsider. Christians did not see themselves as part of the Roman state and culture. If this is not subversive then what is?
What do Christians have to say about Tertullian’s boasts?—other examples exist. It was “rhetoric!” What they mean but cannot say is that it is lies. Christians do not tell lies, they tell “rhetoric”. They cannot admit it is true without making the myth of continuous, savage persecution into a lie.
Tertullian can only have been telling the truth, at least in the influence that Christianity exerted, even if his suggestion of the number of people practising Christianity was exaggerated. An angler can boast about the size of the fish he caught because the proof is back in the river or eaten. Tertullian was boasting about the state of the world that his readers lived in. How then could he have made false claims? Only a fool or a drunk could falsely boast about what can immediately be verified. Tertullian cannot have made such a boast if Christianity was insignificant. He would have been locked up as a madman.
Doubtless that is how the Christians were seen, but such empty words cannot have been persuasive to anyone. Even if we concede that Tertullian was speaking only of urbanized areas, where his presumably literate audience lived and not the countryside, where most people were still Pagan, the contradiction stands—states are administered from urban centres not from country estates. The cruel forces of the state, which consisted of many Christian officials, were supposedly persecuting a majority or influential minority of the population, their co-religionists. The acknowledged official persecutions always began with the court, normally dominated by Christians, being itself purged. There could hardly have been any effective persecutions the rest of the time when the court was predominantly Christian.
From Commodus to the middle of the third century, Tertullian’s boasts were verified increasingly. Finally, the emperor Decius was to declare he would rather “see a rival emperor in the field than another Pope in Rome”. The power of the church seemed to Decius more dangerous than a rival emperor! The Church was a state within the state. J W C Wand DD writes (A history of the Early Church):
The Christian society had become the terror of the state, an empire within the Empire.
Could any state, ancient or modern, tolerate such a situation? The outcome was the only real official persecutions that ever happened to Christianity. For a half century or so, sporadically, the emperors sought to curtail the power of the Church. They failed and Christianity took over with the decrees of Constantine. The empire decayed rapidly and only a hundred and fifty years later, the Roman empire was dead!
The Severi
By the end of the second century, a Syrian dynasty, the Severi came to power. The Severi were less attached than the Antonines to the traditional religion of the empire, more open to the influence of oriental religions, and particularly to uniting the religions of the empire under the the sun god—the god of many names. The Severan dynasty, notably the dynasty’s Syrian princesses, promoted Christianization. The Syrians were, of course, the Phœnicians, Canaanites, who had been a part of the Persian satrapy of Abarnahara, and so had been Jews! The Phœnician or Syrian Jews were among the earliest converts to Christianity, a version of Judaism that emphasised Mithras in the form of Christ, rather than Yehouah of the Jerusalem temple.
Septimius Severus was lenient to Christians, although he is supposed to have martyred Pope Victor, an acknowledged lie, according to Duchesne in his Lives of the Popes. Severus’s sympathies seem to have been toward Christianity, appointing a Christian tutor for his son Caracalla and being treated himself by a Christian slave when he was ill. Tertullian confirms that Christians supported Severus.
Despite this, Severus felt let down when he found Christians in the military were taking advantage of him. They refused to accept normal discipline and Severus felt obliged to make an example of them, and he took measures in the east, notably in Alexandria. The Church reports that “inexhaustible wells of martyrs were burnt, impaled and beheaded”. Fifteen can be named! Elsewhere 15 more can be named including the oft-quoted story of Perpetua and her infant child, and Irenaeus of Lyons. Irenaeus was not martyred. His myth was likely invented by Gregory of Tours.
Perpetua refuses pleas from her father and the judge, the procurator Hilarion, to spare her child of being orphaned by merely offering a sacrifice “to the prosperity of the emperors”. In her supposed diaries, she was condemned to the beasts and returned to prison “in great joy”. If this is true, the woman was insane or a poor dupe of the Church.
Tertullian was a contemporary of Severus, and we have seen what he thought of the Roman state and its Pagan traditions. He heaps contempt on them and defies his enemies to do their worst. Not surprisingly, some did!
Severus was succeeded by his sons who were worthless, and so regarded by contempories and historians alike—except Christians. Christianity thrived again under these weak emperors. Then followed Elagabalus, a Syrian who was related to Severus by marriage, one of several foreign emperors less devoted to Roman tradition. He promoted his own version of a solar religion, devotion to a black cone known as Al Gebel, the mount, whence his name. The Greeks called him Heliogabalus because of his association with the sun. His aim was to unite the solar religions of the empire, including Christianity, the aim that was eventually realized under Constantine.
Origen was in great demand. In the reign of Caracalla in 215 AD, the governor of Arabia asked permission from the bishop of Alexandria and the prefect of Egypt for Origen to give a course of lectures. Hippolytus dedicated a treatise on the resurrection to the Empress Julia Mamaea, mother of Alexander Severus, and, at the time of the Parthian wars in 232 AD, she summoned Origen to Antioch to enlighten her when she was travelling through. Origen corresponded with the Emperor Philip the Arab and his wife, Otacilia Severa, and Bardesanes, another Christian writer, dedicated a treatise on destiny to either Caracalla or Elagabalus. Christianity had become fashionable in high society.
Alexander had a statue of Jesus in his private chapel, together with several other deities, and awarded a legal judgement over a desirable plot of land, disputed between Christians and a company of victuallers, to the Christians. Thus Christians were not habitually persecuted by Roman officialdom before Constantine, and furthermore they were able to operate so openly that they could make use of the Pagan courts at the time—hardly consistent with persecution. This was the very time when the Roman jurist, Ulpian wrote his treatise on the Office of Proconsul in which he collected together the legislation relevant to the penal code as it applied to Christianity.
In 228 AD, the Christian writer, Sextus Julius Africanus, was given the responsibility of instituting the Pantheon library. He came from Aelia Capitolina, the ancient Jerusalem but no longer a Jewish city, and was a friend of Bardesanes. He had been tutor to the son of Abgar IX of Armenia, the first Christian King of history. To put the establishment of such an important project as the Pantheon library into Christian hands shows that the Christians were already accepted into society. Christians were rising to positions of power in the ruling classes.
Alexander Severus was emperor for thirteen years until he and his mother were murdered. The new dynasty of emperors were Europeans, and were generally welcomed after the Syrians. They were the Thracian Maximinus, the Pannonian Decius, the Dalmatian Diocletian and the Dacian Galerius, men proud of the qualities of strength and valour necessary for the threats being faced, and proud of the Etruscan and then Roman tradition of doing what is right.
Maximin the Thracian, the first northern barbarian to have the honour of being emperor, could not speak Latin. He was a terrible emperor who persecuted Christians but, then, he persecuted everyone else as well. He is known as a persecutor of Christians because he found the court he inherited from Alexander Severus dominated by them. They were in control and he decided to purge them out. Despite the supposed severity of Maximin’s persecution and the diligent collection of the cases by Pope Fabian, few names of martyrs have come to us. He only reigned for three years and, under Philip the Arabian, Christians again had free rein. The rumour grew out of this that Philip was a Christian. He might have been but there is no direct contemporary evidence. By the time of Decius, eleven years later, the court was again so dominated by Christians that Decius had to repeat the purge of Maximin.
The Persecution of Decius
The external threats to the empire were serious and Decius was a soldier, with traditional Roman values, who realised that the power of Christianity was a central threat to national security. In the north the Franks and Goths were on the borders and in the east, Rome’s ancient rivals, the Persians, favoured in Christian sacred writings (Revelation), were menacing. Christian commentators label Decius as a fool for alienating a substantial and influential part of the Roman population by undertaking an unjust and pointless persecution against them. They deliberately ignore, in the interest of Christian mythology, the fact that the Christians were perceived by Decius and his advisors as a fifth column, especially of the Persians, but also of any force that seemed likely to threaten civilization. Dr C Bigg in The Church’s Task under the Roman Empire, puts the main reason for the persecution of Decius as “the fear that Christians would foment disloyalty at the moment of extreme danger from external enemies”.
Christians were still apocalyptic and saw the end of Rome as the herald of the coming of Christ. Christians still had no allegiance to the Roman state and used their influence to avoid their state duties, particularly military service. The later martyrdom of Maximilian of Theveste was because he refused to serve in the military, not because he was a Christian. Caracalla had extended Roman citizenship to all freedmen in the empire, placing the burden of duty upon them, but many saw espousing Christianity as a way of avoiding it. So, paradoxically, Caracalla’s act stimulated Christian growth.
Like the emperors of the previous century, Decius thought that the Roman religion was broad enough to encompass all loyal people and thus to unite the empire. He allied himself with the Senate which still regarded itself as the upholder of traditional Roman standards, and appointed Valerian into the post of Censor.
To the officers in charge of the sacrifice of Alexander’s Isle, from Aurelius Diogenes, the son of Sabatus, of the village of Alexander’s Isle, aged about 72, with a scar on his right eyebrow. I have always sacrificed to the gods, and now, in your presence, according to the law, I have sacrificed and made a libation and tasted the sacrifices. Please confirm this. Fare thee well.
It was dated and signed by the villager and the witness. Many Christians would not sacrifice but were happy to obtain a certificate from the leniency of the magistrates (who legally had no authority to do this) by bribery or by connexions—an interesting note of early Christian morality.
Note also that this man declares himself always to have been a Pagan. Decius undoubtedly aimed to test Christian loyalty but he also wanted to unite the citizens, so all had to undergo the loyalty test, even recognized Pagans.
In 250 AD, Decius issued an edict that all citizens should sacrifice to the gods and the spirit of the emperor on a prescribed day each year, though simply throwing incense on the altar was accepted in tough cases. Its purpose was twofold: to unite the people behind the state and its traditional values, and to expose those whose loyalties were elsewhere, namely the Christians—the measure was largely directed at the Christian state within a state. Decius knew that the loyalty of Christians was to the Church not to the Roman state and he determined to expose it. The major figures of the Church hierarchy were picked out to sacrifice according to Roman duty and, now, law. Not only were they to sacrifice but they were required to taste the offering, a clever addition that Decius thought would expose those who might sacrifice insincerely while praying for forgiveness. The Christian abhorence of food committed to idols would expose them as traitors.
Decius thought that this would be sufficient and issued no order that recalcitrants should be executed. His aim was to weaken the pseudo-state of the church by targetting its bishops. Christianity was no longer Essene. It was 200 years after its foundation and had lost its original Essene idealism. Many Christians had converted out of expediency, convenience and fashion, and had no strong commitment. Standards were lax. The Church was a career choice for ambitious men, and crooks, pimps and prostitutes had joined to get the cover of the dissident Christian movement. Such people do not take decisions like this expecting to be martyred. Decius knew this and expected that the average Christian would have a change of heart as soon as the bishops began to yield, or submit to the punishment of the state.
He was partly correct. Many Christians undertook to sacrifice and receive their “libelli”, official certificates that certified them as dutiful citizens, including many bishops. They were called “lapsi”, those who had lapsed but were admitted back into the “sacred mysteries” if they obtained a “labellus pacis” a note from a condemned martyr that he would plead for their forgiveness in heaven. At the end of the persecution, the church was flooded with these notes. The church takes this to be evidence of the number of martyrs!
The Spanish bishops of Legio-Asturica (León-Astorga) and Emerita (Merida), Basilides and Martial, apostatized. Because such apostates could no longer retain their episcopal rank, the Christians in these towns had proceeded to elect others to fill the vacant Sees. Martial appealed to Pope Cornelius (253-255) and was reinstated, but S Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, ruled that the reinstated bishop was not entitled to the obedience of the laity and clergy.
The Decian persecution was the first real persecution of Christians but even this scarcely impinged on lower class Christians, who either received their certificates or were treated leniently by the magistrates. It was the wealthy and influential Christians who suffered the loss of their possessions and perhaps their lives.
The first victim seems to have been Pope Fabian on 20 January, 250 AD. For about a year and a half, the Papacy was vacant. The lists of those who sacrificed shows that women were still a high proportion of the Christian ranks. Those who refused to sacrifice were often imprisoned, and some of them died therein, thus getting the accolade of martyr. Many were more sensible, but our upbringing teaches us to disdain them as dishonourable to God when, in fact, they were the sane ones. If, today, we refused to stand for the national anthem when the punishment was death, we should be fools not to stand. There is no honour in going to a foolish death. If it was a question of principle because the government was fascist, then we would stand and work underground to bring about a change in government. Sane Christians took this line, probably the majority, but it is not the stuff of myth.
If an idol is, as Christians tell us, a mere block of wood or stone, then it is hard for the rational mind to understand what was so bad about offering a sacrifice to it, especially given no option. Christians could revere the void they saw as the true God knowing their action was an empty gesture. It is certain most modern Christians would think this way and avoid imprisonment and death, arguing that their God would not want them to die needlessly! Yet they pretend it is nobler to offer up a human life than burn a barleycorn to a statue.
The elderly Origen was said to have been tortured on the rack but released by a sympathetic magistrate. He died a few years later in his 70s. Such acts of clemency by official judges was not uncommon, showing that Romans were not as brutalized as Christians make out, and that the response to the persecution varied from locality to locality or courtroom to courtroom. Allowing people to escape was also a ploy used. Decius was killed fighting in Gaul in 251 AD, so his persecution lasted about 18 months.
The following year a plague spread over the empire and the new emperor, Gallus, saw it as caused by the anger of the gods that the persecution had lapsed. He ordered universal sacrifice to them to assuage their anger. Gallus banished leading figures in the Church, like Pope Cornelius and Pope Lucius, who were later described as martyrs, though there is no evidence that they were unless death in exile counted. They most likely died of the plague rather than any human mistreatment. The plague continued to ravish the provinces for 15 years—in Alexandria, half the population died.
The Persecution of Valerian
When Valerian, the Censor, was made emperor in August 253 AD, the empire was attacked by barbarians from the north east, drought and famine took hold, the economy collapsed, and tornados and tidal waves added to the chaos that the new emperor had to handle. He was too busy to persecute Christians and even seemed to favour them, despite, or perhaps because of, his role as Censor. Christians again began to dominate the court until again the emperor felt he was being used as a puppet.
Christians blame his change of heart on to Valerian of Macrianus, the head of the Magi of Egypt, an influential man at the court. Christians like to have an external reason, but in any event Valerian had reason to distrust the Christians just as previous emperors had. The requirement to sacrifice was imposed once more and refusal was punished by banishment. The Popes of Rome seem not to have been troubled by it. In north Africa, Cyprian was banished. Some were sent to the mines and, it seems, some lesser known figures were martyred, though anonymous martyrs were often invented to make up the numbers.
Valerian evidently thought his first edict was a failure—presumably too soft—and, in 258, he issued a more severe one, condemning professional Christians to death without the option of recantation. Senior laymen were allowed to recant but suffered the same fate if they refused. Noble female Christians were banished and Christians members of the court were enslaved. These were indeed harsh measures, but what had induced Valerian to impose them? Aubé explains in his book on the Church and the State in the Second Half of the Third Century that Valerian had come to see Christians as traitors. They still had ideas about the end of the world and the coming of Christ and they welcomed the invading barbarians as the hosts of heaven helping to bring about their objective. Modern Christians, whose hopes of parousia have dissipated into never-never land and whose outlook on Christian history is totally tendentious, will not credit this, but, in the time of Valerian, they seriously believed in the end of the world and cheered barbarian victories and economic disaster as symptomatic of it.
So, Valerian believed he had impeccable reasons of state security for taking drastic measures against the Christians to weaken the quislings within the empire. Senior Christians did indeed suffer torture and death under Valerian, though many of the tortures were those invented by the Christians themselves much later and projected backwards in time, perhaps to justify their own inhumanity in the inquisition and the witch hunts. Despite the reality of the persecution, Christians have as usual grossly exaggerated the numbers, and added cases when suitably edifying ones could not be found in history.
The only martyrs in the whole of Spain were Bishop Fructuosus of Tarragona, said to have been well loved even by Pagans, and two deacons of this city, Eulogius and Augurius. Yet, from the account of the martyrdom of Fructuosus, which is thought authentic, the Christians were already a strong minority in Tarragona, a city where the imperial cult had been deeply rooted.
The end of Valerian will be considered by Christians as the punishment of God. He was captured by Shapur, the Persian, and made to walk about tied to the stirrup of the Persian king burdened with heavy chains but dressed in his imperial purple. His son, Gallienus, made no attempt to secure his father’s freedom, and the old man died after six years living thus. He was skinned, his skinned dyed red and stuffed with straw, and he was hung in a Persian temple.
Gallienus was the ruler of an empire already falling apart. Usurpers set up court in every province and Gallienus did nothing except issue an edict of toleration. Christianity became a “religio licita” sixty years before its ultimate triumph.
The Church claims more persecution by Aurelian but it has little basis in fact. Some alleged cases are probably misplaced from the period of Valerian.
The Persecution of Diocletian
The final persecution was that of Diocletian, a reforming emperor, who again seemed to favour Christianity initially, and whose wife and daughter certainly favoured Christianity. His court officials including his chamberlain were also Christians. Eusebius at this time says that vast numbers were flocking to the congregations of Christ and “spacious churches” were being erected. Such a building programme does not reflect a policy of persecution.
Diocletian’s capital in Nicomedeia in Anatolia, looked out on to a hill topped by the Christian basilica, the most conspicuous building in the city. In fifty years of supposed intense and continuous persecution, Christian masons seem never to have been out of work. But in 303 AD, Diocletian had a change of heart like that of Valerian. He repealed the edict of toleration and imposed severe laws. Nevertheless, he did not order judicial murder but seemed to think that destroying churches and writings would be sufficient. Those who refused to sacrifice lost their civil rights or were actually enslaved.
The response was an uprising. Several risings occurred in Christian centers. Two fires were set in the royal palace, apparently the work of Christians though ever since the Christians have said were provocations. Diocletian thought otherwise, made his wife and daughter sacrifice and executed some senior Christian officials whose negligence implicated them in the arson. Diocletian sought to impose order with a stronger edict—the clergy were to be imprisoned.
In Britain, the governor was Constantius, whose wife, Helena, was a Christian. Despite the legend of St Alban, under the protection of the sympathetic governor, no Christians were martyred here. Others did not fare so well, but the implementation by the magistrates was patchy as ever. When scriptures were to be burnt, some magistrates would accept old discarded copies as sufficient. In strongly Christian Spain, the names of only fifty martyrs during this persecution have come to us, eighteen being ther martyrs of Saragossa, among whom was the deacon Vincent.
Diocletian’s health failed in 304 and he retired from public duty in 305 AD. Galerius continued the persecution but substituted mutilation for death, and sent suspects to work in the mines. Eusebius reports seeing 97 men, women and children being sent to the mines having had an eye gouged out and had a foot branded with a red-hot iron. In 311, Galerius also retired with venereal disease. The longest persecution had ended after eight years, only two of which had been particularly savage. Fifteen years later, Christians ruled the empire.
Julian the Apostate was the last emperor seriously to try to control Christianity. He insisted on calling the Christians “Galileans”, to remind the people that they originated from bandits opposed to the Romano-Greek culture, but his short reign failed to make a dent, and the world was blinded and crippled for over a millennium.
Respect for the Dead
An interesting comparison between the persecution of Christians by Pagans and the persecution of Pagans and heretics by Christians is that Pagan Romans rarely interfered with proper burial, and the tombs of the martyrs that exist until today, if genuine, attest to it. The mobs sometimes did interfere with burial, as at Lyons, but official desecration of corpses was rare. Valerian did refuse to allow Christians to keep their own cemetaries, but he did not infere with burial.
In contrast, in the Middle Ages, Christians disposed of the bodies of heretics or Pagans with savage fanaticism. Even Hypatia’s body was appallingly treated but such treatment in the Middle Ages was commonplace. Many were burnt alive and the ashes scattered into rivers, as were those of Hus. Similarly, Wycliff’s body was exhumed and its remains cast into the river Swift.
Bernard Gin, the inquisitor, saw it as his duty to God to dig up 67 bodies of heretics inadequately dealt with, burn their bones and scatter their ashes. The record of Christianity over centuries is shocking in almost every way, but Christians ignore it. If Satan had temporarily taken over the Christian religion, how are Christians sure today that he has given it back?
The difference between the Pagan treatment of burial and the Christian treatment of it is that Pagans considered the dead body as sacred. Even the bodies of executed criminals were returned to their relatives and friends. Thus Pilate turned over the body of Jesus to Joseph of Arimathea, according to the gospel story, even though the significant exception allowed to the rule was that of the crime of Majestas. In the persecutions of Christians, the supposed crime was always also Majestas, but nevertheless Romans still respected the sacredness of the dead body in most instances. The basis of the sanctity of the dead was the old Roman religion of ancestor worship.
This gives the lie to yet another Christian myth—that of the catacombs. Supposdly these were secret caverns where passive and trembling Christians hid from persecutions, held their Eucharistic meals and buried the martyrs. The practice of catacomb burial however was started by Jews not Christians in Rome. The common practice is another link between the first Christians and the Essenes. In short, the first Christians were Jews, Essenes, who followed the practice of Roman Jews of burying their dead in artificial caves. When the gentile Church separated from Judaism, the Christians were left with the catacomb habit.
The caves were dug out by servants of the Church later called sextons. It is impossible, therefore, that the Roman authorities did not know about the Christian catacombs. Legal responsibility for tombs and burials belonged with the Pontiffs, a title later granted to Christian Popes. Pontiffs supervised the digging and repair of tombs, even the Christian ones. All the catacombs were excavated outside the walls of the city in accordance with Roman (and Jewish) law. So, although Christianity was supposedly an illegal organization in Christian mythology, its tombs were dug according to the prescriptions of Roman officials and according to Roman legal practice.
The Christians took advantage of the Roman taboo against defiling tombs to hold secret meetings. Tertullian spoke of “secret meeting places” and in the persecutions Christians met in the catacombs for secret worship, but this subterfuge depended on the respect the Romans officials had for the sanctity of tombs. Even in the third century when Decius, Valerian and Diocletian persecuted Christians as subversives, some of the martyred bishops were buried in the catacombs.
