Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated:Saturday, 19 October 2002

Growth of Christianity

Christianity was a mystery religion requiring initiation for centuries. It was not until 692 AD that every believer was ordered to be admitted to Christian worship. Moreover, parts of the Christian communion were held in secret. Traces of this survive in the custom of the Greek Orthodox Church of celebrating divine worship behind a curtain which is only removed for the elevation of the Host, “since at that moment the worshippers prostrate themselves and are not supposed to see the holy sacrament”.

Hippolytus and Origen, among others, show that admission into the Christian church was not free to everyone as modern Christians always claim. The Essenes had had a novitiate of two or three years, and the Church’s Orders of Discipline had the same. Initiation was by baptism, deferred until the converts were fully instructed. Anyone interested could immediately be considered as a Christian but had to remain as a novice for the two or three year period that they were being instructed. Unbaptised people were excluded from the inner mystery of the Eucharist but there was a special doctrine of “baptism of blood” to cover those unfortunate enough to be martyred before they had become proper members.

The Christian novice was called a catechumen, and was taught the details of the faith while being watched for misconduct by the teachers. They attended Church as catechumens not as Christians and received a different communion from the baptised Christians. Exactly like the Essenes, they could not eat with baptised Christians at “the Lord’s table”, and they received only the “bread of exorcism”. In the period of receiving instruction, if catechumens were reported as having sinned, their instruction was suspended, they were designated “hearers”, and their baptism was postponed. The last few weeks before they were due for baptism, were taken up with a series of exorcisms, confessions and fasting. The early Church in Rome had a large rank of clergy called exorcists. Only after all this were they baptised. This long novitiate and succession of rituals gave the catechumens the impression that they were joining something important with a profound mystery at its core. However, the whole procedure could be cut to a token for favoured candidates like S Ambrose.

S Basil tells how the Fathers of the Church…

…were well instructed to preserve the veneration of the mysteries in silence. For how could it be proper publicly to proclaim in writing the doctrine of those things which no unbaptized person may so much as look upon?

And, S Augustine explained why secrecy was essential:

1. the mysteries of Christianity were incomprehensible to human intellect, and should not be derided by the uninitiated
2. this secrecy produced greater veneration for the rites
3. the “holy curiosity” of those to be initiated into the experience of Christianity should be increased so that they might attain to a perfect knowledge of the faith.

The celebrant must be prepared by expectation, one of the techniques of brainwashing.

The earliest Christian Church accepted the Essene notions of communism. “The first would be last and the last first” in spirit, but the wealth aspect of it, seen in the common holding of goods in Acts of the Apostles, never seems to have entered the gentile Church of the Roman empire. As in Mithraism, rich and poor were equal in the brotherhood of the church meetings but not otherwise. Worldly rank was ignored in the churches but not wealth, and the result was that superiority passed from worldly rank to spiritual rank, quite contrary to the saying above. Displays of perfection and piety immediately became the characteristics of the holier-than-thou Christian familar to us all ever since. In only the third century, Origen had to rebuke families for their snobbery towards new Christians who had undergone the three year Christian novitiate as catechumens before baptism. Origen even admitted that these snobbish Christians were worse when they had or once had a church dignatory like a bishop in the family.

Christians write almost exclusively about their successes. Nothing is found about those who preferred the older religions of Paganism or Judaism, and turned back to them. Nevertheless we know of the Christians examined by Pliny (c 112 AD) who had lapsed up to twenty years before, Peregrinus who became a Cynic philosopher, Ammonius who had taught Origen, Aquila who had been baptized but returned to Judaism and pointed out the Christian alterations in the Septuagint, and the apostate emperor Julianus who rejected Christianity for Platonism.

Where did the attraction lie in Judaism’s off-shoot, Christianity? Robin Lane Fox (Pagans and Christians) explains how oracular fakes flourished in the first and second centuries AD:

Almost nobody had a convincing test to distinguish an old text from a fake. The point was not lost on contemporary Christian authors.

Christian authors gutted the Pagan oracular books and saved the better opieces as Christian proof texts.

To judge from the tales, Christian leaders were given apparent telepathic powers, prevision and faith-healiug, just as the incarnate Christian god had. They recounted visions, dreams and mystical experiences. Miracle stories formed an essential ingredient in early Christianity, as in other religions of the time. The reaction of simple people to an unusual event was to believe in awe rather than to be skeptical, like sophisticated people. The same remains true to this day despite the unprecedented success of skeptical inquiry.

Yet some of the earliest Christian documents such as the Epistles of John tell us that even in those days many people did not believe that Jesus had come in the flesh—he was an apparition or a ghost. And there were those who doubted the divinity of Jesus. Heretics who denied it were persecuted by the Christians into extinction and, after the Christian triumph, all Pagan religions were also rigorously driven into oblivion.

Christianity was unpopular and eventually was made unlawful for a variety of sound reasons but mainly because because its belief in the end of the world was seen by Roman rulers as destructive of the morale and pride that had built and maintained the Roman world. Central to this was loyalty to the emperor, regarded as a god, just as European sovereigns effectively were under the divine right of kings, and just as the American flag is, to modern American schoolchildren (and no Christian sect seems to object to this idolatry![†]No Christian sect. Andy Redding corrects me, the Jehovah’s Witnesses do. ). To Romans, Christianity was subversive.

The order of prophets was highly regarded by the earliest Christians, doubtless because the original Essenes had considered themselves to have been prophets. Just as the Essenes supported travelling Essenes in their homes, the first Christians were expected to support a prophet that came to live among them. Church services were tumultuous when the prophets got going. They sounded not only fanatical but deranged. The most powerful propaganda of all—that they were willing to die for their beliefs—sounds no less deluded.

There is little doubt that many gentile Christians sought a martyr’s death just as Islamic human bombers do today. As Colin Cross puts it: “Some actually welcomed martyrdom as the direct route to heaven”. The Church was to declare courting persecution a heresy, but plainly that is what many actually did. The end of the world would occur when Jesus returned on a cloud, so they were willing to die now, confident that they would be resurrected into God’s kingdom. Christians believed that their deaths would swell the ranks of God’s saints and soldiers waiting for them to participate in the return of their God to purify the world and begin the new “kingdom”. In this they did not differ from the Essenes who started out the Christian faith.

Loyalty and Citizenship

Origen (Against Celsus) says the church had a different conception of citizenship from that of the worshippers of demons. They called themselves “foreigners” and “strangers” in Roman society, and were morally superior to the rulers of the Roman towns. The apocalyptic books they read, like the Revelation of John, were full of rebellion against the existing civic order. And, as self professed slaves of the coming Christ, they refused worship of the emperor, as showing the state in the service of Satan. Belief in God’s kingdom was incompatible with the cult of the emperor, they had decided, even though the cult made only one demand and that was loyalty to the state. That they refused to show. In return the state accused them of treason, of being the enemies of civilization. Yet the Christians agreed the emperor, after God, was the first in this world. Tertullian (Apology) says the Emperor is “second only to God, before and above all gods”. The world, they believed, was wicked, ruled by demons led by their chief Satan. The emperor stood above the demons that had been the Pagan gods, so by recognizing him as above the Pagan gods the Christians merely identified him with Satan, as Revelation makes clear. The imperial government would soon be ended. It was a passing historical phenomenon that would be swept away by God’s supernatural kingdom that, for Christians, has always been coming soon. Christians were misfits in society. They were a “third race”, and accused of atheism, the equivalent of blasphemy to extremist Christians and Moslems today. The Jews already affronted Romans with their separatism, surliness and associations with Parthia, the Roman enemy in the east. They were the “second race”.

Romans considered the Christians as just as barmy as modern Christians regard the Moslem martyrs, and that is why the word martyr came to its modern use. In Latin, it means a witness, and all Christian believers claimed to be witnesses to Christ, through their belief. In the occasional persecutions that happened under the emperors who saw the danger of this cult to the civilization of Rome, some of those who witnessed to Christ in the courts of law ended up being put to death. So on these occasions to be a witness meant to die, and that is why the word has its present meaning. Since they considered the world to be wicked, they regarded being a witness, and thence a martyr, to be part of a cosmic battle against evil. Jesus had died as champion and leader of God against Satan. In some curious way, by dying, the hostile powers of Satan had been routed! His death on cross had been the first martyrdom, and each new one, each execution, each death in Christ, becomes a solemn victory over the forces of Satan! How does this insane reasoning differ from the way the Moslem martyrs think? It does not. Only the name of the cult does. Christians were soldiers in the cosmic battle. Non-Christians were therefore called “civilians” or “pagani”, from which the word Pagan comes.

Suffering and dying together, eulogized by Ignatius in some of his letters to churches and in his letter to Polycarp, is the “fellowship of the cross” promoted by all believers in Christ still, except that then they meant it—they were willing and even eager to die like Christ for the Christian cause, or what they took it to be. They were certain that the world was against them and the Christian faith was sure to bring persecution and martyrdom to them. Celsus was cynical about the gullible believers in a way that is frowned on today, when the most idiotic beliefs have to be respected when they constitute a religion:

If Christ had been thrown down a cliff or pushed into a pit, or strangled with a rope… then they would speak of a cliff of life, or a pit of resurrection, or a rope of immortality.

Persecution of Christians

Decades before Constantine imposed Christianity, the Christians were so badly abused that they were among the richest people in the Roman cities. A Roman governor of Egypt is said to have told the Christian bishop, Phileas, in the Diocletian persecution of 303 AD:

If you were one of the rustics who have given themselves up out of need, I would not spare you. But since you have acquired such a surplus of property that you can nourish and care not just for yourself, but the city too, please spare yourself for this reason, and give a sacrifice to the gods.

Even in the mid-third century AD, Christian families were openly and with no evident fear of retribution, putting up public inscriptions to dead Christians for Christians! Anyone could stop and read them and immediately know of the faith of these people and their families.

In a dispute between the Roman Church and Paul, the Monarchian bishop of Antioch (260-272 AD), Paul was excommunicated—after synods in 264 and 268 in which his heresy was exposed by his priest, Malchion—but chose to sit in the church building and refused to give it up. The leaders of the Church at Rome appealed to the emperor Aurelian, who found in favour of the Church. Paul, supported by Zenobia, queen of Palmyra, hung on for several years, but was expelled by the secular authority when Aurelian defeated Zenobia. That was in 272 AD, sixty years before Constantine. Where is the persecution? The civil authority supported the Church. The truth is that Christians were officially persecuted only sporadically, and mainly out of fear that they were subversive.

Any harassment of Christians from Trajan to 250 AD was not official persecution effected from above by imperial orders, but came from the distaste for Christians among ordinary people. Robin Lane Fox, in Pagans and Christians, tells us that, before 250 AD, only three cases of concerted action against Christians deserve consideration from historians:

1. New edicts, probably of a local governor, in Asia in the 170s, reported by Melito, a Christian.
2. A decree of the Senate in the 180s.
3. An order against Church leaders by the emperor Maximin in the 230s, alleged by the Christian historian, Eusebius.

Atheism was a basic concern of Romans, and superstitious people accused Christians of it. The issue was not what they believed but was a question of honour and tradition. Romans were more fearful than the educated Greeks had been of the wrath of the gods. Christians could think whatever they liked, but they chose to dishonour the gods and brought harm on to everyone. “No rain because of the Christians”, became a proverb.

Fathers and fiancés particularly would complain in anger when their daughter or betrothed declared they were Christians and would not marry. The overriding concern of the magistrates and governors was to keep the peace. Local governors had to handle the consequences of public victimization of Christians in such circumstances. For the magistrates, the source of the complaints, and the riots that they led to, was the peculiar sect of Christians, and the courts doubtless acted to suppress them as a troublesome minority, allowing the Church to claim the persecutions were official all along.

In about 52 AD, according to the Christian bible, Gallio, the governor or Achaia, dismissed Jewish complaints against Christians as an internal religious dispute of no concern to the civil authority. Sixty years later, Pliny sought advice on how to treat Christians. Now they were of concern to the civil authority. For the extension of Christian persecution from the indifference of Gallio to the persecution of Domitian, we are dependent on Christian sources like Eusebius, and it is a foolish historian, or a fellow Christian, who does not take them with a large pinch of the salt of skepticism. Until 180 AD, no governor in north Africa sentenced a Christian to death. In about 245 AD, Origen (C Cels 3:8), the respected father of the Church who only missed canonization because of his enthusiasm for chastity, said candidly that Christian martyrs were “few” and “easily numbered”.

Trajan had insisted that the Christians could only be tried before accusers, but the Church accounts of the trials of martyrs rarely mention them. The Church had its vested interest of making the whole business seem unjust, but there is no reason to doubt that some magistrates will have disregarded the matter of accusers on the grounds that the disturbances were public order offences unquestionably involving Christians.

Not until the year 257 AD were Christian meeting places and services targetted.

Even during official persecution, Roman magistrates seemed to lean over backwards to offer Christians a way out, but the Christians often enraged them by copying their god in refusing to speak, or being evasive when they did—refusing to give details like their name and place of residence when questioned, merely saying they were Christians of the Universal (Catholic) Church. They would often gaze like the classical gods unblinkingly, with eyes lifted skywards. Pagans regarded staring as impudent, as parents of well-mannered children still do.

Lane Fox lists the following features as typical of Christian persecutions:

• The concern of the magistrate to find a compromise.
• The effect of one martyrdom on other “volunteers”.
• The ability of imprisoned Christians to record events.
• The enthusiasm for the “rash itch of destruction”.
• The idea of the martyrs being “warriors”.
• The moderate views and the evasions of the majority of Christians.
• The frequency in martyrdom of well to do girls.

Christians would agree to pray for the emperor’s salvation, but not swear an oath to him. Yet, for the governors that was the simple, essentially non-religious solution. It was nothing more than assuring the emperor their loyalty. On the same criterion, applied today, no American would salute the Stars and Stripes. Praying would have to suffice for the Christian not to fall into idolatry. There will be no US Christian who will refuse to honour the flag on these grounds, and yet they hypocritically praise the Roman Christians who did the precisely equivalent thing. Roman governors usually gave Christian martyrs every chance to return to Roman mores. They refused.

This was the pattern of interrogation. Invited by the magistrates to eat sacrificed animal flesh as a token of their loyalty, they would refuse:

Well, then, burn a little incense. No? Oh, come on! Just sacrifice to the emperor. [Again a token, implying that no one intelligent thought the emperor was a god!] No? Well, why not merely swear for the welfare of the emperor—just a simple little oath? Still, no? Um! I know, sacrifice to the air. We all have to pay attention to the air. No? You pay no attention to the air, merely Him that made it? So, tell me, who did make the air? What? You are not free to say?

The latter part of this reconstruction was actually recorded in Smyrna in March 250 AD.

The death that is coming to me is more pleasant than the life that you would give.

So said Colluthus to a magistrate who had tried to get the Christian volunteer for martyrdom to reconsider by pointing out how pleasant the weather was.

Christians had to argue against accusations of cannibalism, child murder and sexual license. They were accusations cited by others because the Christians used them themselves against heretical sects. The argument simply was that the Christians themselves said that these heretics did these awful things, and must have done them when they were still Christians. Some Christians therefore did them, and the only question was the extent to which the practices went among Christians. Christians still make the same accusations against their enemies, and they are still believed—the Germans of the First World War, and the communists. No one now believes that Christians ever did these things, though they started saying it.

Christians celebrated their faith in eternal life by choosing to be surrounded by dead Christians that they presumed were sure of resurrection. In Rome, despite the vaunted persecutions, the Christians had been allowed to form burial clubs, and the faithful made labyrinthine underground cemeteries, the catacombs—long burial galleries in the soft sandstone outside the city, following the practices of their Jewish founders.

They met here, possibly at first for reasons of security but, since it went on for two centuries, and cannot have remained secret, mainly through choice. Some catacombs had chapels attached. Mithraists met in caves called grottos and it might suggest a link with Mithraism, or a desire to emulate it. Scratched on the walls were Christian symbols such as the fish.

In the odd times of persecution, the catacombs became places of refuge, considered safe because Romans had a profound respect for the dead. Secret galleries were added and concealed entrances in the sides of the stone quarries outside. In 258 AD, Valerian realised that the Christian Church was a rival authority to the secular state, ordered all bishops to be arrested, and, knowing what the catacombs were being used for, forbade it. A story is that two Christians were walled up in a concealed entrance by two guards who had spotted them, though the implication was that the entrance must have led nowhere for this to have been the fate of two martyrs. In the catacomb of Callistus, Pope Sixtus II was said to have been caught celebrating mass and executed on the spot with four deacons.

On the other hand, despite Christian mythology, persecution of Christians by the Romans only became serious in the third and fourth centuries, curiously enough on the eve of the Christian triumph. Many martyrs were Jewish martyrs—messianic Jews, some of whom might have been Christians. Christian martyrs like Maximilianus of Theveste were not executed because the Roman state particularly objected to Christians but because they refused to do military service or carry out military duties. Whether you were a Christian or not, the penalty was death!

Between 260 and 303 AD persecution virtually ceased and the Christians entered upon a period of calm and prosperity. Converts flowed in, churches were built and theologians disputed on the nature of the Trinity. People speculated on the urgent expectation of the return of Jesus but the idea of the millennium had arisen and some did not expect it until the year 1,000 AD. Others still thought it might be “soon”—every time the barbarians attacked.

By 300 AD, the Christians were over a quarter of the population in some parts of the Empire. Their main strength was in the East, where in some places they were a majority, in southern Italy, and in urban centres. More thinly they stretched across France and into Britain. Three British bishops attended a council in 314 AD. Few were in the countryside, but some spilt out of the Empire to the east, to Persia and even to India. By this time, some legions of the army were mainly Christian.

Converts, already cynical, delayed baptism until they were on their death-beds, because baptism was thought of as a washing clean of the slate of sin, so that all their sins would be washed away or forgiven, and they would go straight to heaven. At the other extreme, the more enthusiastic Christians devoted their lives to prayer and asceticism as monks living in groups or as hermits living alone.

One, Simeon Stylites, lived on a pillar built for him in the Egyptian desert. As time passed he had the pillar made taller and the last 13 years of his life he lived on one 60 feet high and did not come down at all. Christians would go out to get his blessing or just to gape at him. The platform on the pillar was too small for him ever to lie down and he prayed for hours on end a gaunt figure with outstretched arms silhouetted againet the sky.

Then fell the final persecution. A new Emperor, Diocletian, was determined to restore Roman ways in their old purity and he saw Christianity as a corruption. On 23 February 303 AD, the edict of a persecution was posted in Nicomedia, starting the “Great Persecution”, an event that Christians have hugely exaggerated. There were few executions, but Christians who refused to get a certificate from the magistrates that they had honoured the old gods were mutilated and sent to slavery in the mines. Some of the certificates are still extant. The mark of the new martyrs was to have their right eyes gouged out with a sword and their leg tendons cut. Many of the new generation, even bishops, found such hardship unendurable and apostasy became a serious problem. The first known British martyr, Alban, supposedly died in this persecution.

In the east, Maximin was more vigorous than the others. Even so, the local magistrates were the ones who applied the law, and they remained mainly lenient. When bishops were obliged to yield up their holy scriptures, some magistrates were known to accept any old books. Some allowed Pagans to sacrifice on behalf of Christians. Some accepted bribes by Christians. Some punished bishops all right, but by reducing them to camel keepers and stable lads.

On the other hand, some Christians continued to provoke the authorities into martyring them, and some have gone down in history therefore as genuine martyrs, but most Christians were sensible enough, even bishops and clergy, and saved their lives by lapsing. They expected to be able to be admitted again to the Church when the persecution ceased, and after a period of penance of not more than four years.

Lactantius, a Christian writer of the beginning of the fourth century, thought the persecution of Diocletian presaged the end of the world. History was moving in a well prophesied way. In his book, the Divine Institutes, he writes that the end of the world “scares the mind, but I will say none the less, happen it will”. Eusebius too, who wrote over 30 volumes of Christian history and apologetic while the supposed persecutions were raging—and his friend Pamphilius was a victim—was not much troubled himself, but also was certain that the persecutions heralded the imminent end of the world and the epiphany of Christ. Both were wrong. What ended was the world of classical Paganism. In its place came no world of incorruptibility, but its exact opposite—the utterly corrupt millennium of Christendom.

Martyrdom

The persecutions were neither systematic nor continuous, but converts to Christianity knew the potential risk. The start of the Christian myth of persecution was 64 AD when Nero punished “Christiani”—not necessarily Christians, but messianists—and continued intermittently for the next 250 years. Following in the Essene tradition, these “Christiani” would not break under torture, and were highlighted by the Church in its later martyrologies. Nero smeared “Christiani” with pitch and burnt them as torches to illuminate a feast at the Vatican. In about 64 AD, Paul was supposedly beheaded, showing he was a Roman nobleman, and Peter was supposedly crucified, showing he was considered a felon.

The typical martyrdom in Christian myth was to be torn to death by animals in an arena, as an entertainment for the general public. The general public, who were used to deaths in the arena and preferred their gladiators to die with fortitude, might have been impressed by the Christian acceptance of death but it is doubtful. They preferred people to die nobly, as they saw it, fighting, not passively accepting their fate. In later centuries, though, the stories of the fortitude of the martyrs did impress new generations of Christians who had been told it proved the power of their God. The stories were that they raised their voices in a hymn as they faced the lions, and that arena attendants found smiles on the faces of the Christian corpses.

The cult of martyrology reached what today would be regarded as morbidity. Christians loved retelling the grisliest details of precisely how the martyrs suffered. Laurence was grilled on a gridiron, Sebastian was pierced with arrows, Bishop Polycarp was roasted alive, a punishment that the Christians liked so much they were to use it often on their own enemies. The churches sent circular letters to one another bragging about their martyrs. Among such letters surviving is one about the martyrdom of Polycarp in 167 AD. He was tied to a stake in the arena and faggots were piled around him and set alight.

When the flame began to blaze to a very great height, behold a wonderful miracle appeared to us who had the happiness to see it, and who were reserved by heaven to report to others what happaned. For the flame, making a kind of arch like the sail of a ship filled with wind, encompassed, as in a circle, the body of the holy martyr, who stood in the midst of it, not as if his flesh were burned. but as bread that is baked, or as gold or silver glowing in the furnace. Moreover, so sweet a smell came from it as if frankincense, or some rich spices, had been smoking there.

At length, when those wicked men saw that his body could not be consumed by fire, they commanded the executioner to go near him and stick his dagger in him, which being accordingly done, there came forth so great a quantity of blood, as even extinguished the fire, and raised admiration in all people, to consider what a difference there was between the infidels and the elect, one of which this great martyr, Polycarp, certainly was, being in our times a truly apostolic and prophetical teacher, and bishop of the catholic church which is at Smyrna.

Yet even sources that are almost contempory with the trials of Christian martyrs are now known not to be trustworthy. Bishop Phileas was tried in Egypt about 305 AD. Four versions are known, two almost contemporary and in Greek, recently discovered, and two Latin versions, known for some time. A Latin and a Greek version are closely similar, but what is interesting is that the two Greek versions closest to the event differ considerably, though they still have much in common. None of them can be considered reliable accounts, and one of them was obviously expanded as a Christian apology.

Texts like these betray the fact that Christian martyrs, like modern Moslem ones, chose to do it, and provoked it. The texts even say they are for the “training” of martyrs, a disgusting concept whatever the age or religion. Like the Moslem martyrs, the Christian ones were told they were free of any sin or blemish incurred since baptism, and so went post-haste to heaven. Even S Ignatius spoke of his lust for death, and his wish to be ground into the pure bread of Christ by the teeth of beasts. The cynically evil Church father, Tertullian, wrote:

Your blood is the key to paradise.

Tertullian also relates a story about a group of Christian who begged the governor of Asia to put them to death. He refused and invited them all to hang themselves, or to jump off a cliff, if they were so eager to die. Six Christians begged also to be thrown to the beasts in Caesarea in 305 AD, Eusebius writes. The governor refused but instead decapitated them.

Among Cyprian’s correspondence are letters from Christians who can hardly wait to “quit men to stand among angels”, and “become the colleague of Christ in suffering”. Voluntary martyrs are always quickly exploited by those who avoid the pleasure of it, then and today. Yet despite all this Christian propaganda about martyrs, it ought not be surprising that Christianity grew fastest once it was legalized by Constantine and there was no longer any need for them.

Are there any Christians alive who will admit that these Christians are no better than the Moslems doing the same today? After 11 September 2001, we know how far the idea of “glorious martyrdom” can go, but we ought to know too that martyrs actually desire it, so killing them suits them. The Moslems have had the idea of dying for their faith from the earlier patriarchal religions, Judaism and Christianity, so Christian martyrdom is in the same line of evolution as modern day human bombs. If Christians can understand why Christians did it, they need to understand why Moslems are doing it still, and explain it to western leaders.

The veneration of “glorious martyrdom” in this tradition began with the Jews rebelling under the Maccabees in the second century BC. In the Jewish works concerning these rebellions, the death of a martyr was seen as an atonement for the sins of the nation. It is easy then to see how the martyrdom of Jesus, a noble leader of a rebellious Jewish faction, should have been seen by his followers as an atonement for Israel—especially as they saw themselves as the only true Israel—and thence for the whole of Christendom, and mankind when the concept spread into the wide world.

A significant difference that arose in gentile Christianity from its Jewish origins was the obsession Christians had by the fourth century for the bits of the bodies of dead martyrs and saints. The Christians treasured bits of the bodies of martyrs and celebrated the Eucharist over them, reciting their names as part of the ritual. The practice still continues. Christian leaders in the fourth century were digging up the graves of dead martyrs to break the bodies into pieces for distribution to all. No Pagan or Jews ever thought of violating the graves of the dead in this way. In Zoroastrianism and Judaism, corpses were unclean.

A curious consequence of knowing that martyrdom removed all your sins and sent you straight to heaven was that you might as well make the most of it before the beasts eat you or whatever other fate awaited. Christians who confessed, often boasted of it, drank heavily and indulged in promiscuous sex. Martyrs were friends of God, and had influence in the balmy place. They put in a good word for those who had lapsed, and if a pretty virgin came to comfort you, she need not worry that the comforting went further than usual. Her sin was effaced by the martyr’s approval. Christian women queued up to take comfort to the martyrs in gaol waiting death.

None less than bishop Cyprian is testimony to this. Since the Roman magistrates were often loath to act, they often gave the confessors a second chance, whereupon the man ran off into hiding, having had a life of Reilly for a few weeks. In the persecution of Decius, large numbers of martyrs were made up. Even Eusebius in the fourth century was admitting that some of the accounts were pure fiction. It seems now that few were not.

There were no genuine martyrs from 260 to 300 AD. The ones we have are all Christian fictions. When they begin again, they are soldiers. Though they are Christians, that is not the charge against them. It is that they are refusing their duties, a serious matter in view of the threats from the north and the east. Dereliction of duty is still criminal in wartime. It was then too, even for Christians.

In the time of Diocletian occurred the martyrdom of S Sebastian. He was supposed to have been an officer in the Imperial Guard and was executed by archers. Since that did not finish him, he was despatched with cudgels and thrown into a sewer. Pollaiuolo’s painting shows that Sebastian was hung on a tree (crucified) and shot at by six archers who encircled him. The two larger figures had hand bows and the four smaller ones had crossbows. The victim is raised up so that he is effectively in the sky and the whole scene is set in a wan landscape. It suggests the legend is from a picture representing the sun in Sagittarius dying at the midwinter solstice.

Another Roman soldier to die the death of a martyr, in the reign of Diocletian, and become a famous saint was S George. He might have been stationed in Palestine or in Africa but he tore down Diocletian’s edicts anouncing the suppression of the Christians and was arrested tortured and beheaded in the myth. This too, though is too full of symbology to be convincing. Once again it is suggestive of the Christian belief in a cosmic battle waiting to begin when the Christian god “returned”. George was a faithful soldier of Christ. The maiden he was said to have saved was the Christian Church and the dragon was Satan, meaning the Roman empire or emperor, as in Revelation. In the original Essene belief, the maiden was the land and people of Judaea, personified as the Daughter of Zion or the betrothed of God—the true Israel, a title taken by the Christians. The Essenes saw the Roman empire or emperor also as Satan or as a dragon. The Essenes themselves were the original soldiers of Christ patiently awaiting their call from God to participate in the holy war against the occupying Roman power. In the age of chivalry, crusaders like Richard Lionheart depicted George as the epitome of the chivalrous knight fighting the infidel.

Heresy

Though Christians had allegedly been persecuted under Nero (64 AD), Marcus Aurelius (166 and 177 AD), Decius (250 and 251 AD) and Diocletian (303 AD), now that they were in a position of power under their trinity of gods they persecuted other faiths mercilessly until there was a counter attack by Julian the Apostate (361 to 363 AD). But Christianity was on the rise and in 391 AD the Emperor Theodosius banned all non-Christian cults. Apart from a brief revival of the ”heathen” cults under Eugenius (392-394) the Christian victory was complete.

Christianity now introduced heresy into the world. Despite their advocacy of brotherly love and supposed fortitude in facing persecution together, Christians were split by violent controversies over doctrine. As the Christians put it, “truth” counted for more than unity—“truth” being whatever their particular sect believed. Polycarp, encountering an old friend, now a heretic, in the street, stuck his fingers in his ears and said, “I recognise the first-born of Satan”. Among epithets applied by the great Athanasius of Alexandria to the Arian heretics were “maniacs”, “cuttlefish”, “wolves”, “atheists”, and “eels”.

Many of the early heresies were traditions from the first days rejected by the church. One second century heretic, Basilides, claimed that he was following teaching left by the apostle Matthias. The most successful of the first heretics was Marcion, the man Polycarp cut in the street. He was a warm-hearted shipowner who donated a substantial sum of money to the Church of Rome, declaring then that Jesus had existed only as a spirit and that the God of the Jews was a separate and inferior being to the supreme God of the Christians. He repudiated the Old Testament. He will have known the history of the foundation of the Jews by the Persians, coming as he did from Pontus in Asia Minor, a centre of Persian religion. He started his own Marcionite church, complete with bishops, and in places his following was larger than that of the orthodox. Marcionites and orthodox were martyred side by side.

Gnosticism laid claim to a store of secret knowledge. The founder is often seen as the Samaritan, Simon Magus, but, if so it seems likely that Gnosticism goes back to the same roots as the New Testament, where Simon actually makes an appearance. The root idea was that the world was alien to the real being of man and that truth could be found in various “emanations” from God (like the Persian Amesha Spentas). Jesus was one such “emanation”. This seems plainly enough to be Persian, and since the Essene form of Judaism was still strongly Persian, and that the Essenes saw their saviour Messiah as the archangel Michael (the Amesha Spenta, Mithras), there are plenty of grounds for seeing common causation in the Essene sect.

No Gnostic martyrs seem to have been recorded, but this might be a case of the Church selecting what to remember in history. Modern scholars are fond of saying things like, “Gnosticism influenced such heretics as Marcion and affected mainstream Christianity”, supposing that Gnosticism was an outside influence rather than a different branch on the same tree as what became mainstream Christianity when the rivals died out or were destroyed.

There had been disagreement about whether Jesus was a man or a God, but by 260 AD, the Gnostics had been defeated and lesser matters were attracting the attention of Christian bigots. As early as 270 AD, Christians were not allowed to read Pagan books, but had to restrict their reading to scripture—the growing seedling Dark Age.

The precise nature of the Son now became a big issue. Different Christians took up different positions on the issue and it remained the main talking point for several centuries. Manichaeism also arose at this time, and became such a serious rival to Christianity that it was banned as soon as possible after the Christian establishment. Its leaders were condemned to death, so it did not take the Christians long to start killing their enemies, once they knew they could.

The Persian teacher Mani founded the rival system in the middle of the third century. The important Christian saint, Augustine, began as a hearer of Mani before converting to Christianity. Mani said he had twice had a vision of an angel who had given him a new revelation to supersede that of Jesus, who had been only a phantom. The universe was divided into darkness and light, the darkness having got the upper hand, as in the Dead Sea scrolls. Mani himself was “the ambassador of light” and eventually there would be a conflagration in which the light would win. Persian influences are here again transparent.

The Manicheans, who by the fourth century had become a powerful force in the Empire, had two classes of member—the “elect” who were supposed to live perfect and celibate lives and so be “redeemers” of mankind, and the secular members who had to be just ordinarily pious. An “elect” was forbidden to kill so if he wanted to eat a chicken he had to get a secular to kill one for him. Christian Emperors eventually suppressed the group by persecuting them to extinction—proving incidentally that it could be done, and could have been done to Christianity had any of the Christian persecutions been as serious as the Christians novelists write. But for a moment it looked capable of becoming a world religion and won converts from Christianity.

Apart from the heresies, Christianity faced rivalry from the philosophical codes, like Stoicism and Epicureanism, fashionable in the Roman aristocracy, and from entirely separate religions. The latter included the old civic cults of Rome and other Pagan centres and newer, more spiritual movements which swept across the Empire. Most came from the east or from Egypt. One of the most successful was Mithraism. At the end of the third century it was a serious rival to Christianity but, apart from anything else it suffered the weakness of being a male religion, with no place for women.

Monks

Christian monks despised sleep, and early monasteries kept up a nightly vigil of prayer and fasting to effect “sleeplessness”. This accords very well with what is known of the Essene desert ascetics who also had a regime of continuous nightly prayer, and prayed to the sun at dawn. Before his martyrdom, Polycarp was found outside Smyrna where he had been praying night and day. He begged the soldiers sent to arrest him for another hour to pray. He prayed another two hours, “facing east”. Tertullian (Apol 16:9-11) claims that Christians were misunderstood because of their practice of praying to the rising sun at dawn. They were not worshipping the sun, he maintained.

Antony and Pachomius were supposedly the first Christian monks in the early 300s, according to conventional Christian history. Yet there are so many strands of Christianity that lead back to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and therefore to the Essenes of Qumran, that it is hardly possible not to regard the Qumran sectarians as the model of the Christian monks. If they were, though, what were they doing for over 200 years? It seems possible that the desert hermitages of the Essene survivors of the sectarians were too isolated to disturb the mainstream, and probably they did not regard themselves as Christians but as Essenes, Ebionites, Gnostics and so on until, the Christians began to emerge as dominant in the west. So, it was that the long monkish tradition of the Egyptian deserts harboured the monkish lifestyle of the Essenes for the missing 200 years until it belatedly merged once more with its now evolved child.

Essenes aspired to be angels, trying to be perfect beings, as a brdgehead between heaven and earth. Since sleep was a biblical euphemism for death, they will have imagined they were becoming like angels in minimizing personal sleep and appearing as a group to be active continuosly. The same applies to fasting and the metaphor of “spiritual food”. the consequence of this, as H Grigoire showed is that monks were seen as near perfect, lived “in the state of angels”, and were even addressed as “your angel”.

There are hints of relationships between the Manichees and the Christians. Augustine was a Manichaean before he became Christian. The link is that both were Persian inspired religions. The Romans, whose chief enemy Persia was, might have thought they implied disloyalty, although Mithraism did not seem to suffer in the same accusation. The central difference was that Mithraism was much older, and had successfully established itself as reliable.

Manichaeans were mistaken for Christians so the two beliefs must have seemed similar to Pagan Romans. The governor of Africa had investigated Manichaeism about 300 AD and wanted to know whether he should treat them as Christians. The emperor replied they were worse, considered as poisonous intruders from the Persian enemy! It seems possible that the Christians were considered in a similar way, if not so extremely. In 260 AD, the Persians had captured the emperor, Valerian, and persecution of the Christians was halted. In 300, the Persians were heavily defeated, and a persecution was instigated.

Mani’s father served a Jewish Christian baptist sect as a “house master” and the Manichaeans retained the title. The same term was used in the communities of the early Christian monks (monachoi). The word “monachoi” means “solitary ones” in Greek, but is also similar to Manichee, and since the Essenes in particular, among the Jews in general, were fond of puns the desert hermits might have felt an affinity for the Manichees. Essenes were a lustrating sect, and both Christianity and the Manichees, being baptizing sects having common roots, must have strengthened the feeling of affinity. If the Christian solitaries were holy men who sought to be perfect, and live in the ranks of the angels, they sound like Essenes.

Constantine himself says that the oracle of Apollo at Didyma had announced from a vast cave in 302 AD that his ability to give oracles was inhibited by “the Just on earth”. This was taken to mean the Christians. It cannot be coincidental that “the Just” was a title apparently used by the Essenes.

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