Christianity
Persecution of Christians I
Abstract
The Christians were bad citizens, refusing public employment and avoiding service in the army. And while they claimed toleration for their own creed, they had no toleration for others. Every god but their own, they openly called a devil, and so long as religion was maintained by the state, and the empire was administered with religious forms, direct insults to gods could not be readily permitted. Their organization was secret, and their allegiance ambiguous, since they refused to take the customary oaths…Prof J A Froude, Short Studies: Origen and Celsus
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Saturday, April 08, 2000
Persecution in the Early Church
The earliest church was eschatological—the end of the world was expected, when the dead saints would rise and enter God’s kingdom. Some Christians, sincerely believing this, cavalierly defied authority to die as martyrs. It still happens today, and we think the people that burn themselves and their children to death, provoke the authorities to do it for them, or otherwise commit mass suicide are deranged or sadly misled. Why should we think otherwise of those that did the same 2000 years ago, but now appear in books of martyrs?
Even so, the number of martyrs seems to have been exaggerated later because, for most of them there is no evidence even in the form of contemporary popular tradition. Persecution is part of the Christian legend. Origen, in the mid-third century AD, said that the Christian martyrs were “few” and “easily numbered”. Traditions that arose hundreds, or a thousand years later, can only be attributed to the ingenuity of the bishops in creating places of pilgrimage (which meant money!).
The average Christian was not much affected by the persecutions according to H B Workman (Persecution in the Early Church). It was Christian “extremists” that attracted the attention of angry Pagans. “Earthly institutions should not be judged by their averages, but by the ideals of their leaders”, Workman adds. Persecution of Christians only became significant, curiously enough, in the third and fourth centuries, on the eve of the Christian triumph.
The source of the legends of Christian persecution and martyrdom is that the earliest followers of Jesus wanted to “imitate in all things the master of martyrdom”, as Irenaeaus put it. No one was a true disciple or saint unless they had suffered martyrdom for the “name”. For later Chroniclers, that meant they had to be imaginative when they knew that a prominent church figure had died of disease or old age. When they did not die as martyrs, they were granted the honour anyway. Not a single apostle escaped martyrdom, though many first lived to old age even in their myths. Only ten of the Popes who preceded Sylvester—Pope (314-335 AD) at the time of Constantine—were not martyrs. Whether by design in their real lives or through the inventive minds of biographers, the saints lived and died in imitation of Christ.
The church also used the ploy of mortalizing some old gods and goddesses as martyrs. In the city of Merida and throughout the whole of Lusitania, the goddess Ataecina was popular among Pagans. In the same region, Eulalia, a young girl of twelve supposed to have been martyred at Merida, was held in high veneration among early Christians. Curiously, the same petitions are addressed to Ataecina and Eulalia, and their titles are similar. The honour paid to the martyr, Eulalia, was a likely acknowledgement of the cult to Ataecina, the favours which adorers of the martyr received, being transferred to them from God through the intercession of Eulalia rather than directly from the goddess Ataecina, as they did formerly.
Christians have always had to maintain that Jesus was treated, by Jews and Romans according to their respective legal systems, to the cruellest injustice. It is simply untrue. The Jews had nothing but a formal role in the matter. The Sanhedrin was allowed by the occupiers, the Romans, to administer the civil law locally, and so would have had a role in capturing and charging Jesus and the Nazarenes. But, if Jesus was suspected of flagrant acts of rebellion, they had no authority to try him and release him themselves. Quite the opposite. Had they tried to play down Jesus’s crimes, they would themselves have been guilty of treason against the emperor.
All of the three charges against Jesus specified in Luke were “crimen laesae majestatis”. The Roman jurist, Ulpian, includes, within its compass, conspiracy, assisting Romes’s enemies, assuming the role of king, or any crime against the security of the Roman state and people. So, in Roman law Jesus was plainly guilty, and Jewish law did not matter—Jesus’s crimes were of no concern to the Jews.
Roman law overruled Jewish law in vital matters of state security, and it is a fact recognized in John’s gospel that even Pilate had no choice but to condemn the rebel, or he too would have been complicit in the crime of treason—laesae majestatis. Jesus was therefore not persecuted by the Jews, who had no say in the matter, or by the Romans who were merely administering the law—a law that Jesus and his followers had broken.
It was normal practice to send a summary report of trials like Jesus’s to Rome. Indeed, these reports were the basis of many of the “Acts of the Martyrs”. Justin, Tertullian and Eusebius all thought that such a report must have been filed and existed in the archives. They had no access to the archives themselves and so their belief was an assumption, but one that proves that eveyone knew that such reports were required and therefore that this one should exist. At some time after the Christians took control in the empire, it went missing!
The Sadducean temple thugs, apparently led by Saul, were employed in Palestine to lay waste to the Jerusalem Church, to arrest men and women, to cast them into jail, and even to kill them, a privilege the Romans would not normally have permitted—though, according to the New Testament, Saul merely watched the coats of Stephen’s killers! The Sanhedrin, a tolerant and civilised body in spite of the New Testament picture, is unlikely to have acted cruelly as Saul did, unless there was a good reason for doing so. Furthermore, it had no power over the Temple guards, who were effectively agents of the Romans, controlled by the priests. The Romans plainly saw the community of Nazarenes as revolutionaries, and so will have insisted, after they had removed the leader of the band by crucifixion, on the Jewish authorities rooting out the rest of his followers to maintain order in the land. They had no choice.
What of Paul? Christian scholars accept that the Sanhedrin had no authority in Galilee yet the same Sanhedrin in Acts of the Apostles had authority over a more distant place, an Arab town, Damascus, in a Roman province, Syria. The Jerusalem Sanhedrin had no authority over any civil authority other than Judaea and any temporal authority it had over synagogues anywhere else was exactly that, and did not extend to punishments or kidnapping.
The common factor between Galilaeans, meaning men from Galilee, and Galilaeans, meaning men that did not recognize any authority but God’s and therefore rejected Roman rule, was that Galilee was a Jewish state not subject to the Sanhedrin. So from the time of Judas of Gamala, rebels who refused to accept the Romans and their puppets in Judaea were called Galilaeans. Since Galilee literally means a region, implying provincial, it also denotes them as barjonim, outlaws—men that live on the outside, in the provinces. Since the Essenes also did not accept the authorities in Jerusalem, whether Jewish or Roman, the two ideologies overlapped considerably on these important matters.
Why do we know so little about the fate of the apostles—except that, naturally, they were martyred? Jesus must have had senior lieutenants among his disciples, but where are they? Were they historical? Their martyrdom might simply cover their absence from history. Were there twelve or was this Mark’s invention? Did they abandon Jesus to join other leaders, or revert to Essenism? Christians say they spread the gospel into distant countries, but why is there no independent evidence of this? Their lives exist only in unverifiable and contradictory Christian traditions. When traditions conflict, how do we know which is true?
Matthew visited half the known world, according to different traditions, and he escaped death by miracles scores of times. It must be true because both Heracleon and Clement of Alexandria say he died a natural death! Bartholomew was skinned and crucified in India but was also martyred in Armenia. India simply meant the east in those days so included Armenia, Christian preachers tell us.
The apostle John was tortured and boiled in oil but escaped by the finger of God. The Church of San Giovanni was built on the very spot in Rome where it happened, so it must also have been true… unless the local bishop thought the tale was a good way of promoting his church. Christian bishops boast of the undemonstrative nature of biblical miracles, but they have left out all the absurd ones. They appear instead in the traditions about the apostles. Another tradition about John is that he died as a young man with his brother rebelling again against king Agrippa. But perhaps he just died in Ephesus of old age.
Evidence that John and James, the sons of Zebedee, were both killed in about 44 AD in the reign of Herod Agrippa, first came from a ninth century statement by one George the Sinner, but was remarkably confirmed in a fragment of a work by Philip of Sidé (430 AD) called Christian History, in which he relates:
Papias, in his second book, says that John the Divine and James, his brother, were slain by the Jews.
Having read this scholars then noted what Jesus had to say to the two brothers in Mark 10:39:
Ye shall indeed drink of the cup that I drink of; and with the baptism that I am baptized withal shall ye be baptized.
Mark, writing about the time of the Jewish War, knew the fates of Jesus and the two brothers, so could depict Jesus as making this veiled prophecy about the three of them sharing the same fate of dying for their cause, the freedom of Judah as the kingdom of God—or treason to the Romans. Philip of Sidé’s quotation is also interesting because it names John as “the Divine”, even though he died at such an early date. Conventionally, John’s famous work, The Revelation, was not written until the time of Domitian, at the end of the first century, over fifty years after John died, if this tradition is true. If John is associated with Revelation, though he died so early, then Revelation must also be an early work.
Why then does the death of John not appear in Acts 12:2? It is probably because a tradition had arisen in some church that its gospel had been written by this John, when it was actually written by another. It suited the Christians, however, to accept that this gospel was written by an apostle, even though he could not have. It was easier for them to change a sentence in Acts than to deny the tradition that had arisen that John had lived long enough to write the last of the gospels. The acceptance of the early death of John meant his gospel and epistles would have to be accepted as pseudepigraphs. There is also a Christian tradition that John’s gospel is associated with a John the Elder, so it is not at all unlikely that the book is pseudepigraphic, either John the Elder, the real author, or an editor, making out that the book was written by John the Apostle.
One tradition says Paul was tried in Rome and executed, but another says he was released and went to Spain to do more missionary work. Which do we accept? The earliest evidence of the martyrdom of Peter and Paul is Clement’s epistle to the Corinthians, 30 to 40 years later. But, the pastoral epistles imply Nero acquited Paul in Rome around 62 AD proving, Christians believe, that Christianity was, at that time, considered as “licita”. But Paul was undoubtedly a Roman agent-provocateur and was probably not even put on trial, which is why nothing more is said about him in Acts, once he gets to Rome. He was pensioned off with a medallion for meritorious service in creating division and uncertainty in the ranks of the Jewish enemy at a delicate time.
Christians argue that, if Paul had gone on to Spain, then the Spanish would have claimed him instead of St James, but the argument depends on Paul openly continuing his former life as a missionary. The rumour that he went to Spain might be a memory that he retired there, and so would not have continued proselytising, and indeed would have been keen to appear as an ordinary citizen to finish his years in peaceful obscurity. He had been an agent-provocateur—a soldier-spy commissioned to mingle among dissident Jews to report on their activities and to disrupt them to the best of his ability. No Christian can deny that there were many such spies and informers in the Roman empire—most emperors were totally neurotic about security. Paul shows every evidence of having been one.
Persecution in Rome
An indifference to ethnicity, and inclination to universality, was the tendency of Roman culture before the arrival of Christianity, as Cicero, Sallust, Caesar, Livy, Virgil and the Emperor Claudius all confirm in their writings. Foreign customs were readily integrated into the traditions of the Roman world, as long as they were not harmful.
Diodorus Siculus, in Bibliotheca Historica, in the mid-first century BC, saw human affairs as growing together. History had become the history of “all the world as if it were a single city”. Rome was the universal city, based on the Hellenic tradition, the highest achievements of the past—signified by its foundation by Aeneas. Diodorus saw rational thought in history, the Logos (Word) “by which the Greeks are superior to the barbarians and the cultured to the uncultured”.
This trend to universality was what Paul and the early Christian missionaries were making use of. Christians will insist they were singularly Christian, when they were the means of Christian infiltration.
Christian writers tried to urge that Christians were not against the interests of Rome, but the belief in the coming apocalypse was too strong—and had too many benefits for some. Obedience to the Roman state was an obligation of conscience before God in the epistles. Clement of Rome urged Christians to be as disciplined as Roman soldiers. Tertullian said Caesar is more truly Caesar to the Christians because his authority derives from the Christian God. Few were to take any notice of this. Why should they when the world would soon end? None of it impressed the believers beguiled as they are still by their expectation of the second coming and the end of the world, and that was Paul’s message. Every barbarian success was seen as a step towards it. That is what the old order did not like. And they proved to be right!
The earliest persecution of the Christians in the empire was really the harassment of Jews considered as dissidents and potential rebels because of the tensions and ultimate war in Judaea. The Christians pretend that Judaea was a distant country of which the Romans knew little and cared less. No honest scholar will accept this. The Jews were large minorities in the important towns in the empire, and Judaea was a country on a sensitive frontier, smouldering in suppressed hatred for their occupiers.
Little consideration has been given to the affiliations of expatriot Jews, the unquestioned consensus being that they were Pharisees, or inclined toward them, when the truth is more likely to be that they favoured the Essenes, whose manuals set forth practical rules for being Jewish while dealing commercially with gentiles. Essenes were messianic Jews and that means they were “christian” Jews, even before the followers of Jesus made messianic claims for him—christos is Greek for messiah. Similarly, the Latin for Christians is “Christiani”, which can equally mean “messianists”.
This is why classic writers could write of “christians” and people provoked by “Chrestus” at times when it is hardly possible that any significant numbers of the Christian followers of Jesus could have been in Rome. Doubtless a few Christians were among the many “christians” (messianic Jews) in Rome and might, indeed, have been responsible for provoking to riot the ones who did not accept that Jesus was the messiah. The “christians” spoken of, nevertheless meant messianic Jews, in general.
Persecution under Nero
The fire in Rome was blamed by Nero on to the Christians but these will have mainly been “christians”—messianic Jews. Half a century later, Tacitus calls them Christians but tells us that they “hated the human race!” Christians today want us to think that the first Christians were innocent maidens and sages who waited pacifically for their saviour to arrive to save them from the wicked world. Presumably they hated the world because it was so wicked, but it is hard to see why Tacitus would have known that they hated the world unless their acts showed it. In short, if they were peaceful innocents waiting passively for the end, why should anyone have thoguht they hated the world?
Either these Christians were not so harmless and passive or they were not the Christians that modern Christians say they are. Or both! Most will have been messianic Jews, increasingly excited about the prospects of a messiah coming or returning. A few will have been Hellenized Christians equally excited about the prospects of their messiah returning. Neither set is likely to have sat around passively but will have been on the streets at every snippet of news that arrived. These will have been the ones who started the fire in Rome, seen by them as a helping hand to the heavenly hosts coming to cleanse the world—by fire of course.
Messianists of whatever persuasion might have been expressing their conviction—from Persian Religion—that the world would end in fire. Some of them admitted helping to set the blaze, but no one today questions the Christian assertion that the confessions were obtained through torture, and so were false. It seems quite likely that fanatical messianists would have given God a helping hand. Christians throughout the Middle Ages did the same thing often, insisting that they must ignite the flames that would forever consume for an eternity in hell whoever the bishops did not like.
Why should we be persuaded that in this instance the Christians were innocent of what they later were to do often? Throughout history, Christians above all others have shown a clear inclination to apocalyptic madness, and the multiplicity of instances in tha last few decades alone proves that nothing differs today. Recently, mass murders and suicides have occurred among the members of an apocalyptic Christian sect in Uganda. Christians will try to say it is untypical, but the opposite is the truth—it is the very root of Christianity.
The theory is simple enough, determine what will cause God to bring about the Judgement Day and do it. The Roman “christians” apparently did by setting the capital alight. Jesus himself had sought to do the same thing by returning Jerusalem to the bosom of the Jewish God. God did not respond and Jesus felt forsaken. Tacitus makes it clear that the “christians” who confessed then named names and many more were brought into the same condemnation, though not so much because they had made use of flaming brands but because they hated the “human race”—they also thought the world wicked and would soon end. The expression used by Tacitus here was almost a legal term used by Romans to mean… Romans, the rulers of the visible world. In Luke 2:1, we read:
There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.
The fire was on 19 July 64 AD. Tacitus says the “superstition” broke out again not only in Judaea but in Rome, showing that messianic riots were occurring in both places, symptoms of the growing tensions that led to the war. Tacitus is really, implying that his understanding of “christianity” tied in with the movement of Zealotism in Judaea. The points of contact between early Christianity and the Zealots are simply too recurrent for them to be coincidence.
The hatred to which Tacitus refers could only mean to a Roman that these people were traitorous anarchists intent on undermining public order. That is why Jesus had been crucified, and the historian shows that a few decades later, his followers in Rome were seen in exactly the same light. Christians will have us believe that it was all an extended plot by the world against innocent Christians, or, if not a plot, a misunderstanding. They want us to believe that Roman officials would pick unnecessary fights with innocent people or, in a quite uncharacteristic lack of thoroughness, would misunderstand their intentions, and then waste a lot of time and public money persecuting them for no good reason. It is much easier to believe that they had their reasons and they were not to be sneered at.
They had found Christians, from their founder on, to be dangerous anarchists ready to do anything to bring about the end of the world, as they thought. Thus, the Romans had good reason to think that “christians” hated the Roman state and wanted to end it. If we are to believe the letters of Paul, it is hard to think that his Christians would ever be mistaken for anarchists. He instructs his converts to obey the law, not to strike while waiting for the End and so on. As a Roman, Paul could not have recommended any such actions, so these “christians” cannot have been Paul’s followers even if they were Hellenized Jews. Once again, then, we are obliged to conclude that the people mentioned by Tacitus were messianists, among whom were probably Jewish Christians ready to follow Jesus’s example and give signals to God that they were ready for His Judgement.
Perhaps, Hellenized Christians were involved by association or by names being named, but the bulk were not the Christians that the church would have us believe they were—the law abiding followers of the Great Apostle who went on to become the Christians of today!
So, Christian followers of Jesus might well have been among the “christian” Jews who were cruelly punished by Nero for their incendiary activities. Christians later claimed them all as their own and started the myth of the Roman persecutions.
J B Lightfoot saw evidence, notably in the lists of Popes, for two autonomous churches in Rome not just one. The original church could not have been set up by Paul or Peter. If Peter did arrive in Rome after Paul, then he had been sent there by the Jerusalem Church to counter Paul’s heresies. He might have found it necessary to found an orthodox church to counter the heretical one of the Hellenizers. Thus one church took a Pauline line and the other took a Petrine line. One, was Hellenized and abrogated tiresome Jewish laws, while the other remained true to the Jerusalem Church and Judaism, and considered the law as essential.
If persecution of messianic Jews continued under Vespasian and Titus, it would hardly have been surprising, since both had been Roman generals in the Jewish War, with its messianic overtones. They will certainly have seen messianists as anarchists ready to overthrow the state. Domitian was the next emperor and a younger son of Vespasian. He was seventeen when his father was fighting in Judaea, and so he too will not have been favourable to messianists. He has a bad reputation because of his alleged persecutions of Christians, but he was a prudent emperor, in general.
If, by this time, the Pauline Christians, who presumably had been trying to distinguish themselves from militant messianic Jews, had been caught up in Domitian’s surveyance of subversive groups, perhaps they had a right to feel aggrieved. Not long afterwards, Pliny was writing to Trajan asking how he should deal with the Christians he found all over Bythinia singing hymns to Christ as a god, so he had doubts about the degree of subveriveness of this group. Trajan’s response was mild.
Christians say that after the fire they were persecuted for “the name”—just being called Christians. Justin Martyr (1 Apol 24) argues that though the Christians only said things familiar to the Greeks, they were hated because of the name of Christ. So, the name of Christ must have carried some connotation that the Romans thought was undesirable or even threatening. It was that Christ was a Jewish rebel who had been executed as such.
Plainly “the name” was thought by the Roman authorities to signify a subversive group. They were thought to be Jewish messianists, and were therefore justly suspected as terrorists. The Romans saw them just as Americans, especially under the neurosis of Joseph McCarthy, saw communists—a threat to stability, a conspiracy to overthrow society—and persecuted them too as subversives. If subversion means seeking any sort of social change, then doubtless American communists were subversives, but most were loyal Americans. It was taken for granted that a communist was a Russian spy, and doubtless some were, but most were not.
Most Americans will think it a self-inflicted wound if admitted communists were hounded by the state. Most of these Americans will be committed Christians who will believe that their buddies in the first century were hard done by. They would not believe a communist who had no desire to emulate the Soviet sphere of the world in anything other than planning the economy. Neither did the Roman authorities believe the Christians who said they were not supporters of Jewish independence. So just as communism became a word of abuse in the twentieth century, in the first century, Christian—the name—became a word of suspicion and abuse to Romans.
The far-sighted Jesus, of course, prophesied this (Mt 10:22) if you believe that Matthew was not just writing into his gospel what he knew to be already true. Matthew’s gospel was written about this time, toward the end of the first century.
Distinguishing Jews and Christians
Julius Caesar had given Judaism the status of a “religio licita” and conferred on Jews certain privileges. In the earlier part of the century, Christians enjoyed the favours given to all Jews as members of a religio licita. But as Jews caused trouble in Judaea and then in the empire at large, they fell in the esteem of the gentiles. They were not popular among the Roman mob because they were reputed to be so aloof that they would not even give anyone directions, if asked. They sound more like the Jews of the Scrolls who could have no commerce with a gentile without the permission of their overseer.
It probably was not sensible to annoy the Roman mob, which was inured to bloodshed through the “games” and jeered at foreign dignatories being physically sick at the cruelty and bloodshed in the arena. Romans thought of the Greeks as “cissies” but their reaction and that of other foreign visitors show that not all Pagan people were insensitive to cruelty as Christians have always made out.
Claudius found it necessary to expel Jews from Rome, but it is doubtful that many actually were expelled. Dio Cassius says that only Jewish assemblies were banned. Either way, they retained their privileges. They did not have to sacrifice to the emperor but had to show him respect. Philo says they had inscriptions in honour of the emperors carved in their synagogues in Alexandria.
We tend to get a distorted view of Judaism in the first century from the bible. Jews were the “second race”, after the Romans. They were about seven percent of the population—four or five million people. Norman Cantor calls this an astounding demographic fact—it is too! It proves they were not a racial group but a religious one—the Juddin of the Persians. The greatest numbers, about ninety percent, were in Syria, Egypt and Asia Minor, “the eastern Mediterranean in the Greek-speaking culturally Hellenistic part of the Roman Empire”, but while Cantor is right about this it is also true that these were the areas ruled by the Persians before the Greeks. No one can claim the Greeks invented Judaism, but the claim is legitimate for the Persian kings.
Philo says there were about a million in Egypt of a population of seven million, and two of the five suburbs of Alexandria, with a population of about 500,000, were Jewish before Claudius restricted them to one only. The Jews of Alexandria were partly self-governing through a council of elders (gerousia).
Jews, as they are today, were merchants and bankers and so were found in the towns and cities not in the countryside. The first Christians were the same. Though they were unpopular with the general population, Judaism attracted certain nobles, particularly women, who were interested in the austerity of the religion and the long history it seemed to have in the Greek version of the Old Testament.
Though Jerusalem was important to Jews, for many, it was a sentimental attachment. Already, for most Jews in the dispersion, Judaism was a non-sacrificial, non-sacerdotal religion, just as it is today. When the temple was closed in 70 AD and destroyed in 135 AD, the Jews of the empire were relatively unaffected because the temple was no longer central to their religious practices.
If most Jews ever saw Jerusalem it was perhaps only once in their life and many probably never did, but were content to make a donation to the temple and pay the temple tax. Quite possibly, the majority of Jews were not fond of the temple anyway, because they were of the Essene persuasion, considering the Sadducees as corrupt, and paying the two drachmas only once in a lifetime. After the war, the two drachmas were paid as a tribute into the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus at Rome, allowing Minucius Felix to say that the Jews were in “bondage to the gods of Rome”. Essenes also preferred to offer God a prayer and the sweet savour of incense rather than sacrifice, and for that reason diapproved of the Jerusalem temple and Pagan sacrifice too.
The main effect of the Jewish War was the scattering of the Jerusalem Church, so that it lost influence over the Jewish Christian Churches of the West. The result was that the Hellenized churches of the empire became dominant, and asserted their independence of Judaism. Not only the Jews but Christianity as a Jewish sect fell in the esteem of anyone who bothered to think about it as a result of the war. Such Romans, for long, saw the differences between Christians and non-Christian Jews as a family quarrel. Only after the war when gentile Christians protested loud enough for others to hear that they were not Jews, did the authorities begin to notice that all Christians were not Jews.
The key to this period is the date when the Christians began to be seen as a separate sect from the Jews by Roman and Greek observers. The Jewish Christians of the Jerusalem Church were later known to Christians as the “Ebionites”. They honoured Jesus as a great man but did not elevate him to a god. The Hellenized Christian Jews saw Jesus as a supernatural figure because of his “resurrection” and followed the Greek tradition of elevating great men to the realm of the gods. It seems the Ebionites were not impressed enough by the “resurrection” to see anything divine in it. This suggests that the Ebionites either knew that Jesus had not been “resurrected” or that they required confirmation of it, confirmation that never came—the “return”.
Essenes understood their arcane theories but the Hellenized followers of Jesus did not. Both might have been happy to wait for forty years to see whether the hosts of heaven arrived, but when they did not the reponse was different in each case. The Jerusalem Church went back to the scriptures to try to figure out why they had prophesied wrongly. The Hellenized Jews, now joined by gentiles simply continued to postpone the “return”, until we have the situation today—the “return” will always be “soon”, but it never actually comes at all.
The Essenes and Hellenized Christians in the wider empire will have been at loggerheads with each other from the start, and the Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s epistles tell part of this story. But the Hellenistic Christians were also converting gentile “Godfearers”. Initially westerners will not have been able to distinguish Hellenized Jews from orthodox Essenes, and will have seen the differences as quibbling, if they were interested enough to notice. But at some stage the differences must have become evident to most. When was it? The first step must have been the Jewish War. Jewish and Hellenized Christians will both have thought that the war signalled the “return”. But whereas Jews will have seen Rome as Satan, gentile Christians were more likely to have seen the Jews as Satan.
Now the truth is that in these dissident times, orthodox Jews will have done what we see in the gospels depicted as what they did to Jesus. They pointed out to Romans that Christians were followers of a Jewish rebel and so were not to be trusted. Christians sought not to be tarred by the brush of Judaism, which was causing trouble with the Romans, while Jews tarred them with the brush of being the explicit followers of a Jewish troublemaker.
This was the very period when the gentile bishops started to re-write the history of Jesus. Jews sought to discredit Christians by telling stories they knew of the career of Jesus the rebel. The bishops had to say to members of their flock coming to them with these tales, “Ho, Ho, Theophilus, how gullible you are to listen to what the Jews say. This is what really happened”. Thus the first gospel was written in the sixties of the first century. So it was that Jesus did not, “as the Jews alleged”, kill and scatter 2000 Roman soldiers, described as swine, defending Jerusalem. No, he sent 2000 demons out of a man into swine that then killed themselves by running over a cliff!
Whenever the official attitude to Judaism changed is when the attitude to Christianity changed. Christians blame it on to Nero’s wife Poppaea, who dallied with Judaism, according to Josephus. The real key to the differentiation of Jews and Christians was the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. After the war, Jews were obliged to register and pay a tax of two drachmas a head to the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, in Rome. This bureaucratic move ensured that the authorities knew where all Jews were but it also meant they had to begin to see a difference between gentile Christians and Jews. Gentiles did not have to register, and men could prove they were not Jews because they had stopped being circumcised. So, we can deduce that the two sects began to be distinguished in the administrative mind after the war when these requirements were placed upon Jews. It might have taken another twenty years to the time of Domitian’s poll tax before the general public began to notice the difference.
When Paul got to Rome about 60 AD, everyone spoke against his new “heresy”, but did Paul mean his own sub-cult or James’s sub-cult of Judaism. Pharisaic Jews might have disliked the Essenes, as the gospels might show, and the Essenes disliked the Hellenized faction. The registration that was introduced will have forced the Hellenizers to decide whether to register as Jews or not. The Hellenizers never felt comfortably Jewish, and by this time there must have been significant numbers of gentile converts to their churches, so rather than continuing to endure being considered Jewish and potential traitors, they will have decided not to register. The Jewish Christians of the Jerusalem Church will have registered because they still felt Jewish. Gentile Christianity thus became a new religion but it was not “licita” and the authorities must have thought its members were dangerous oddballs.
Gibbon thought the Neronic persecutions, which only covered the capital and spread no further in the empire, were not of Christians but of Jews, probably Zealots. Suetonius says it was Jews instigated by “Chresto”. Both amount to people like the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls, thought by most scholars to have been the Essenes—messianic Jews ready to fight a holy war when the signs were auspicious. E G Hardy, as early as 1894, realized that two parties of the church were probably incriminating each other, and Tacitus spoke of the “information” they yielded up. These were the Jewish and Hellenized parties.
Some scholars think the Jerusalem Church had already split into “Nazarenes” and “Ebionites” even in the lifetime of James the Just. They say Peter, Paul and John were Nazarenes who followed the proper teachings of Christ, but the Ebionites were Judaizers who failed to notice the reforms Jesus had made and tried to forestall Paul. Later the three apostles supposedly fell out with the Nazarenes too, because they also wanted to remain Jewish, or unilaterally decided to go into the countries of the gentiles to tell them the good news, and eventually to form the gentile church. This new church then declared the Jewish Nazarenes and Ebionites to be heretical. This calumny is possible in Christianity because the gentile church claimed it was guided by the Holy Ghost, while the Jewish branches plainly were not. The Holy Ghost laid down plans on God’s behalf of how the church would evolve and sure enough it did evolve on those lines. Understand?
In truth, the Nazarenes and the Ebionites were the followers of the very church that Jesus himself was a loyal member of—the Essene Church, or a lay branch of it. If the Nazarenes ever differed from the Ebionites, it was probably only like the differences between village Essenes and monastic Essenes, the Nazarenes holding their beliefs while leading everyday lives whereas the Ebionites were more ascetic. But the Acts of the Apostles tells us that the Nazarenes suffered schism and evidently divided into a Hellenizing faction and a Judaizing faction. The Hellenizers were the party of Paul and later evolved into the gentile church. The Hebrew faction, to use the terminology of Acts, remained loyal to the Jerusalem Church (the Ebionites). For all the disdain of the Christians for the Ebionites, they happily call James the Just their own, though there can be little doubt that he was the head of the Jerusalem Church and this was the Ebionite Church.
In the Jewish War, the Church was dispersed, and whatever of it managed to regroup, was again dispersed in 135 when Jerusalem was rebuilt by Hadrian as a gentile city, Aelia Capitolina, forbidden to Jews on pain of death. The image of a pig was placed over the Bethlehem Gate and the Roman Tenth “Fretensis” Legion, whose standard was a boar, was stationed in the Upper City. It is possible that this Tenth Legion was the Gadarene Demoniac that Jesus “cured”, and that was the reason why it was stationed permanently in Jerusalem. The distinction between Christians (the gentile church) and the Jerusalem Church was clear and absolute by now because the gentiles set up a bishopric at Jerusalem.
Eusebius informs us that subsequent leaders of the Jerusalem Church, after James the Just, the “brother” of Jesus, were also relatives, and were sought out by Vespasian and his son, Domitian, to eliminate the line of David. Are we to believe Eusebius or Jesus himself? In Mark, Jesus denied that he was a descendant of David! Admittedly, Christians will not give up the idea that Jesus was a son of David, despite his denial in Mark, but he cannot have had blood relatives who were of the line of David, if we are to accept his own word that he was not. Eusebius was therefore telling tall stories to the greater glory of God. He was a pious liar. He wanted to show that Jesus had a family when his bothers were members of a brotherhood, and that having rejected him, they finished up in abject poverty as a punishment of God. Despite his disdain for these poor men, Eusebius still claims Symeon as a Christian martyr in the reign of Hadrian.
The story is taken further, into the reign of Decius when the governor questioned a kinsman of Christ, a poor gardener, and naturally a Christian. The governor had taken pity on the poor man and tried to make it easy for him to do the duty required of him. “I don’t say ’sacrifice’ or anything like that. It will be enough to take a pinch of incense, a drop of wine, and an olive branch, and say, ’Most sovereign Zeus, save this multitude.’”
Christians certainly publicly derided the Jews. Hippolytus tells the story of how Callistus, later the Pope, sought to avoid his creditors by seeking banishment and so publicly derided Jews entering and leaving a synagogue in Rome. It worked! He was banished to Sardinia.
By the time of the revolution of Bar Kosiba, Christians were hated so much by Jews that they were treated as the Roman enemy and not as a Jewish sect. Jewish Christians doubtless were still accepted as Jews, but the word “Christian” had by this time become to mean to Jew and gentile alike, the Hellenized branch of the Nazarenes that evolved into gentile Christianity. But Bar Kosiba claimed to be the messiah, so Jewish Christians might have refused to recognize him in this role while supporting his revolutionary aims.
The Legality of Societies
Caesar and Augustus enacted restrictive laws about when and how societies, including relgious societies, could meet. Under the Republic societies had had more freedom but even then certain restrictions had been enacted. The rites of Bacchus for example, according to a Senatorial decree of 184 BC, could be celebrated on license only provided that not more than two men and three women met together. This law was a result of the Bacchanalian scandals of 188 BC described by Livy. So, Romans were not averse to regulating religions, if necessary, but they passed no laws to control Christianity.
The police required all societies to register and had powers to suppress unregistered clubs. From as early as 48 BC, under the Lex Julia, unregistered clubs could be prosecuted by the police for treason, the assumption being that secret meetings could only be to hatch conspiracies. Ulpian says the punishment for a “collegium illicitum” was the same as that for an armed riot—both were considered as laesae majestatis and were punishable by death.
Despite this the police took a liberal line on unregistered clubs, usually on the grounds that, though illicita, they met openly and for innocent purposes. Just as today, to court public approbation, a politician will institute a clamp down, so it was then, and occasionally on a wave of indignation a club would be dissolved. Even then, unless the magistrates thought the club was a threat to state security, the funds of the suppressed club were not confiscated but were shared among the members. The state would show it meant business in upholding its laws but was not malicious or intent on using the law to fill the treasury. This was no longer the case under Christian emperors. Justinian raised funds to build churches by declaring wealthy citizens as criminals and confiscating their property.
The emperors’ fear of meetings is shown even by a liberal emperor like Trajan, who refused to allow the citizens of Nicomedia in Asia Minor to form a fire brigade after the city had experienced a damaging fire. Trajan was mild in reply to Pliny’s letter about the Christians but he would not allow the citizens of Amisus to meet for subscription suppers. Trades unions were also forbidden (though widely tolerated) until the time of Alexander Severus. The restrictions were so repressive, even if not uniformly upheld, that ordinary people felt there was little they could do as communities that was not illegal, and many felt bored and disaffected. The practical disobedience of ordinary citizens and the burden on the police eventually forced concessions but they took hundreds of years to squeeze out of the authorities, and were not codified properly until Justinian famously did it (though he was not noted for sticking to his own codes of law).
Many of these clubs were fraternities expressing the brotherhood of man, a concept growing in popularity partly as a result of legal restriction on meeting. The proletariat had grown with the empire but felt politically helpless, whence the growth of popularity of combinations like trades guilds and unions. Clubs for military veterans, traders, merchants and artisans of every conceivable type, even mule drivers in the alps, and the religious colleges of Cybele, Isis and Serapis, and clubs for late drinkers and late sleepers abounded, even though the licenses for such collegia were themselves restrictive. Thus meetings might be restricted to once every month, or a club would not be allowed to have any permanent head or organization. These restrictions often defeated their own purpose because people refused to register rather than be so restricted, so the burden on the police again increased.
Among all these clubs, legal and illegal, the Christians met for their “love feasts” but evidently chose not to register. Had the love feasts been held under other auspices, the police would have turned a blind eye, but for the Christians they were often not so inclined and suppressed their meetings—but not as unregistered clubs but as political agitators!
Round about 200 AD, some Christians registered as burial clubs, a format that the Mithraists had used for a long time. The authorities were still not inclined to believe their innocent cover and still continued to investigate them. For Roman authorities the family and the state were the only legal combinations. By registering, other combinations could be granted legality but only under legal conditions. Organisations thus licensed effectively had to become buttresses of the state establishment. This is what the church eventually became, organising itself in parallel with the Roman state as its buttress. According to Paul’s epistles, if they are to be taken as genuine, this is what he had always instructed his converts to do—obey the law. And, if all this is true, the state must have had independent reasons for believing the Christians as subversive.
Police and Magistrates
Since Christianity was not “licita”, Christians were not allowed to meet in groups and so were under police surveyance as conspirators. Those meeting illegally and clandestinely were considered enemies of the state, thought to be meeting in secret because they were plotting to overthrow society. This was the Christian legacy from its origins among those who were to become famous as Zealots in the Jewish War. Gentile Christians might have protested their innocence, but with their background, the magistrates were not likely to have believed them.
Any of those brought before the magistrates would be tried in secret, for the same reasons that spy trials, or trials involving state security, are today held in camera—so as not to reveal state secrets. The names of their agents like Paul might be revealed, with potentially tragic consequences.
Suspects could be tortured and, if found guilty and low-bred could be punished by being forced to fight wild beasts in the arena, as Christians say actually happened. If they were high-bred Romans, then they were beheaded. These penalties were those of the crime of sacrilege, which sounds religious but at this time meant the same as treason—laesae majestatis—because it implied denigration of the civic gods and the emperor himself.
Often Roman judges were less sympathetic to high-born Romans, who they felt should have had a clear idea of their duty, than they were to low-born citizens, whose poor unbringing excused them their ignorance. When the magistrate would offer the low-bred an easy way to recant and escape a cruel death, a noble would be sent to the sword of the executioner with little chance of repentance. Speratus and the Scillitan martyrs refused to worship Caesar though they said they were willing to honour him, but were beheaded anyway, about 180 AD.
However, the diligence of magistrates varied considerably over time and place, so actual harassment and trial of Christians was uneven, and generally rare. Christians were under constant police observation, but in most instances the police took no action, suggesting—as apologists claim—that mostly Christian activities were innocent, but also that few of them actually went to feed the lions.
The reason was that the police, just as they do today, preferred to know what suspect groups were doing and where they were, rather than dispersing them and forcing them underground where they were much harder to track down. Once again, too, Christians must admit, that on this basis, the ones who actually did feed the lions probably were Jewish Zealots that the Romans would have counted as christiani—messianists.
The great Roman writers on jurisprudence, Ulpian, Paulus and Modestus, all say nothing about Christianity itself being a crime. Though Ulpian is supposed to have covered it, curiously, this part of his works is “missing”. But Christianity was dealt with by Ulpian in his book on the duties of the proconsul, confirming that it was handled by magistrates under existing laws, and not under some new or special law applied to Christianity.
From the Christian viewpoint today, the charge of anarchism for their first gentile forebears looks outrageous and modern Christians will declare it mistaken, as a matter of faith. They are incapable of accepting evidence and of imagining the real situation 2000 years ago, nor how the Roman authorities felt about a sect built on the crucifixion of a rebel leader, or, indeed, the fact that their god was crucified as a rebel leader. They say he was innocent, but for the Romans he was guilty. If they once used their intelligence, they would see that the charges against Christians were reasonable and even justified because Jesus was found guilty and punished as a terrorist.
Law is not upheld by being sorry for criminals but by having an efficient police who will do their job well. The modern Christian might be sure the social gatherings of their predecessors were innocent, but the real point is whether the authorities thought they were. They did not, and the Christian claim that Roman police and magistrates were childishly, pointlessly and cruelly vindictive against harmless people will simply not do. Christians allege that Roman authorities had time and effort to waste keeping known innocents harassed merely for the fun of it. The truth is they had reason to think that Christians were or might be seditious, and one good reason was that their founder was a seditionist hung for treason.
Besides the suspicion of sedition, there were several other reasons for antagonism between Pagan and Christian.
Emperor Worship
The two important patriotic commitments were military service and the duty to observe the state religion. If anything, from the viewpoint of national morale, the latter was the more important because Romans felt that for even a single person to neglect a god could have dire consequences on everyone when the god showed its anger. The Romans blamed misfortune on to the wrath of their gods just as the God of the Jewish scriptures vented his anger on to the Chosen People in general by seeing them conquered or deported. For Romans, it could not possibly help if sections of society like the Christians openly flouted the customs and ceremonies of the state by deisparaging their gods and inviting disaster.
Maecenus is supposed to have advised Augustus, according to Dio Cassius:
Visit strange divinities at once with hatred and chastisement, for, from this cause, conspiracies and combinations and plots are formed which are by no means expedient for a monarchy.
So Augustus began the deification of the emperor to stand beside the other gods as a patriotic commitment and to forestall the growth of “strange divinities”. Everyone had to show this commitment except Jews who pleaded monotheism and were permitted instead to pray for the welfare of the emperor in their own places of worship.
Christians explain that the Roman magistrates did not appreciate what Christians like to call “enthusiasm”, but which is better called gullibility. Roman magistrates knew this and tried sometimes to offer a helping hand to worthy cases among those found conspiring among the Christians.
On record is the case of an old soldier refusing to sacrifice to the emperor and so charged with treason. The magistrate was sympathetic to the veteran and wanted to suggest to him ways of escaping his fate under the law. “Why be such a fool”, the magistrate said, “respecting a crucified criminal as more than a living emperor”. The old man replied, “Because he died for my sins so that I will live forever”. “Well, just sacrifice to the emperor and you will live now”, persisted the magistrate. “Only by chosing death will I live forever”, answered the veteran. “Oh, very well”, retorted the exasperated magistrate. “Live forever, then”. Christians say the mnagistrate was intolerant of the old man’s “enthusiasm”, when the magistrate simply got fed up with his obstinate stupidity.
Romans were not fools themselves. Probably no one, certainly among the administrative and noble classes, thought their emperors were gods, though they might flatter the more insane ones that they were. Most emperors themselves saw emperor worship as a form of loyalty and patriotism intended to bind the people to the state. The formal sacrifice was an annual duty, nothing more. Christians who refused to do it were therefore seen by the authorities as determinedly anti-Roman in attitude.
The emperors’ policy of setting up a universal religion of emperor worship to cement the empire into a patriotic whole was the same idea that Cyrus the Persian had six hundred years before. In three hundred more years it bore fruit in the Catholic Christian Church of Rome. It took a thousand years for the seed planted by Cyrus to reach maturity. Christians jeered as a sophism at the elder Pliny’s dictum that the essence of godliness was for a mortal to help another mortal, a dictum that they now have virtually taken as their own.
Christians claim that the difference between the apotheosis of emperors and the failed rebel is that the former were successful whereas the latter renounced success and apparently died a failure. Everyone wants to elevate heroes to Olympus but that Christians could see godliness in a failure apparently proves something. The first Christians were encouraged to follow in the image of Christ by being a nuisance and then getting martyred when the authorities got tired of playing games. It is easy to see why Roman magistrates were incredulous, and it ought not be hard to see that most people today would feel the same if it were not from the incessant Christian propaganda we get from birth to death.
A sacrifice to the emperor was preferred by Trajan (98-117 AD), required informally by Marcus Aurelius (161-180 AD) and required legally only in the time of Decius (249-251 AD). In short, failure to sacrifice to the emperor was not a crime until about 250 AD. Before then, the magistrates were concerned with the lack of patriotism and dealt with it under appropriate legislation rather than as a formal crime in itself. On the day dedicated to the festival of Caesar’s name, people would have been required to register and those who did not would have attracted the attention of the magistrates and the mob. Both came to dislike Christians for their disrespect to the gods and the country. Just to be a Christian—the name—would by then have been sufficient.
Tertullian could write with unrecognized irony that Christians love, revere, and honour the emperor, and pray “for his safety and that of the whole Roman empire, that it may endure—and endure it will—as long as the world itself”. But in Christian eschatology, “the end was nigh”. When the Christian saviour came on his clouds with the heavenly hosts, the Satanic empire of Rome would end in it being consigned to a lake of boiling sulphur. In those days it was to be even “sooner” than it is today, so Tertullian was plainly writing tongue in cheek.
Regarding military service, which also necessitated Pagan acts of worship, the extremist Tertullian recommended desertion, doubtless hoping to add to the roll of martyrs. Origen also argued that Christians should not serve because all Christians were priests and priests were exempt from military service. Origen said that Christians would fight their battles by prayer. Note that the idea of an order of priests assumed by Origen was the very belief that the Essenes had about themselves.
Just as the Essenes regarded themselves as a holy army, the Christians claimed to be the army of Christ—Christ being their captain or “imperator” to whom they were bound by “sacraments” meaning oaths of loyalty and binding rituals (like baptism) such as soldiers had to undergo! Maximilian of Theveste about 295 AD, is the famous case of the Christian refusing to serve in the Roman army because the Christian could only be a soldier of God. Since Jesus was executed for leading a revolution against the prefect of Judaea, Christians ought to listen to the implications of this admission.
They were “soldiers” in a “holy war” that would bring in the “kingdom” of God “with violence”. And they were calling themselves an army at the time when they were being accused of sedition by their “persecutors” in Rome. All of this derives from their Essene foundations and is explained in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Modern Christians tell us it was all an extended metaphor of the war against evil, and the cruel Romans deliberately misunderstood. Yet, the Essenes personified Rome as Satan, and the Apocalypse of John does precisely the same.
Undermining the Family
Christians were criticized for being against the family. They recommended celibacy rather than marriage and, when marriage was inevitable, it was to be within the Christian community and not to be with a Pagan (1 Cor 7:32-39). The exclusiveness of Christianity in marriage came straight from Persian religion via Judaism, and created extremely bad feeling, even though the church never succeeded in strictly enforcing it. Pagans charged Christians with “tampering with domestic relations:”
But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer, or as a busybody in other men’s matters.1 Peter 4:15
The charge could be sustained entirely by reference to the published sayings of the Christians’ own god:
For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.Mt 10:35-37
Christians dealt with Pagan families in this cavalier way yet let some modern ruthless sect like the Moonies undermine the cohesion of Christian families and they are bleating that Satan is at work. Much more, even than modern Christians, Romans looked upon the family as the building block of social stability and personal morality and were tremendously upset by these Jewish and pseudo-Jewish missionaries coming into towns and causing trouble.
In the Acts of Paul and Thecla, a non-canonical but early Christian work, Thecla is discouraged by Paul from pursuing as sinful the marriage arranged for her by her parents. She attached herself to the apostle, bribed a jailer to get to him when he was arrested for his activities and then fled after him like a twentieth century groupie. No modern father or fiance would have been happy with someone inducing a beloved daughter or fiancee from rejecting everything like this, let alone a Roman family. Christians will dismiss the story as a meaningless romance and not historical, but even if it was just a romance, it was one that was enthusiastically taken to by second century Christians. They plainly approved of it.
Worse than this, some Christians, following their god’s instructions, refused to acknowledge parentage:
Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.Mt 23:9
Statements exist from such people as Lucian of Antioch, quizzed by the magistrates about their parentage:
I am a Christian and our only parents are the saints.
Christians also interefered with the right of the head of a Roman household to accept a new baby into the family or to reject it and leave it exposed to the cold to die. This is one of the instances when our modern ideas of the sanctity of life might interfere with our judgement of this issue. In parts of the modern world where contraceptives are not available or expensive the normal method of contraception is exactly the one used by Romans. This right safeguarded the rest of the family from abject poverty by spreading its income too thinly among an excess of children, a factor the church did not take into account and nor does the Catholic Church still. The real reason for the churches’ insistence on untrammelled progenesis is to ensure a mass of ignorant people who will believe the superstitions of the church and will support its priesthood with their donations.
Christianity also disapproved of mixed marriages. Tertullian called the Pagan husbands of Christian women, “slaves of the Devil”, because they objected to their wives going “round from street to street, to other men’s cottages, especially those of the poor” or “even to exchange a kiss with one of the brethren”. What were these supposedly respectable Christian housewives up to? It does not seem surprising that Roman husbands were puzzled or suspicious—especially as the Christian “love feasts” had themselves a bad reputation. Even Christian commentators feel it necessary to dispute with Tertullian that all Pagan hubands were brutes, or that all Christian wives were so indifferent to their husbands or so indiscreet as to behave like this. But Tertullian was a great Churtch authority on these matters, and it is hardly surprising that Romans were annoyed.
Furthermore, the Christian bishops discouraged Christians from being buried with their Pagan relatives. Christians were to be together after death, as they were meant to be in life, and so Pagan husbands and their Christian wives were buried separately, sons were buried in separate ground from their Pagan mothers, and daughters away from their Pagan fathers.
In 220 AD, the Pope Callistus announced that noble born Christian women could marry according to Christian rights a low-born Christian man. In Roman law, this was illegal and Christians were therefore conspiring to break the law. The church had found its first congregations in the upper class women of Rome who had been “godfearers” or even Jewish proselytes, and the poor oppressed classes of workers, the slaves and poor freedmen, who identified with the crucified god and his message of the eschaton.
Tertullian admitted about the same time that “a rich unmarried man in the house of God is hard to find”. Popes like Callistus who did not want mixed marriages, with the attendant risk of losing a convert, decided instead to persuade wealthy women to marry beneath their station. Romans were strongly against people marrying outside of their class and the Christian emperor, Justinian, three hundred years later had to deliberately change the law to allow himself to marry the prostitute, Theodora.
Ambiguity about Property
The Christians in Acts held their property in common as did the Essenes and Therapeutae, their predecessors. The village Essenes, whose practices were probably followed by the Essenes and early Christians of the dispersion, did not share their property but ran a welfare fund for the benefit of the poor, the sick and the old. So, the Essenes and Christians that were not communists were socialists. Workman says that “the early church was saturated with Ebionite conceptions”. The gospels idealize poverty as do some of the early Christian works like the “Shepherd of Hermas”. Curiously, though, it did not last long, despite the reminders they had in their holy books.
The characteristic of Christianity in the early period is the way wealthy women were attracted and admitted to the church without them having to renounce a penny, but merely to drop suitable gifts into the platter. Inasmuch as Christians propagated poverty as an ideal, even though they mostly ignored it in practice, they would have alienated the Roman authorities as anarchists. So, Christians had an ambiguous attitude to property that Romans, addicted to self indulgence, found distasteful. In particular, the Essenes had opposed slavery, believing that all virtuous men were free. Since the Roman empire depended on slavery for its economic existence, and certainly the privileges of the Roman mob were upheld by slavery, those Christians that expressed antagonism to slavery were disliked.
The Essene attitude to holding slaves, transferred to their successors, the Christians, was surely a strong reason why the movement was attractive to slaves. Yet, if the first Christians took a stance against slavery in the empire, it soon disappeared, and the truth probably is that they never took any political position against it. Their rich female converts could never have managed without their female slaves to do everything for them.
Slavery was thought to be natural by gentile Christians as much as Pagans, and Ignatius told slaves not to hope to be set free at the expense of all others in society. Slaves were in bondage because they had not been virtuous. In an early church work, the Epistle of Barnabas, slaves were told, “Thou shalt work with thy hands as a ransom for thy sins”.
Since Christians were expecting the end of the world and the final judgement, the slaves would be freed of their bonds in the kingdom of God—the usual pie in the sky! By repenting and leading exemplary lives as slaves until the End Time, they would be first in the kingdom of God, though they had been punished in life. Meanwhile gentile Christians decided that holding slaves was acceptable to a god who had declared:
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Mk 12:31
If they thought about it at all, they excused it on economic grounds—without slaves, the empire would collapse—yet they had no such economic qualms against impoverishing families by making them have uneconomic children. It was an early example of Christians doing just as they liked, irrepsective of the supposed teachings of their god. They have always been sticklers for pointless principle, like being celibate, but never for any principled ones, like decrying slavery. If they were chary about breaking the law in this respect, it is surprising, because they happily broke other Roman laws, but even then they could have refused to have slaves themselves, as a matter of principle, just as they refused to worship Caesar. They did not. Some Christians provided in their wills for their slaves to be freed, but then so did other Romans. Slavery existed in Christian America until 1865!
They claim some justification in that freed female slaves had no way to earn a living other than prostitution, a “libertina” being a freed female slave, and also a prostitute, but the Popes were having trouble finding Christian wives for poor Christian husbands. They would have solved that problem, at least, and left the wealthy women to persuade wealthy prospective husbands to join the church.
So, gentile Christians accepted as a matter of fact that some people were slaves, and they were not willing to say or do anything about it. It was the Stoics who voiced concern that human beings should be treated as property. Stoic leaders came from the Orient where Zoroastrianism had a greater or lesser influence: Babylon, Cilicia, Phygia, Rhodes and Phoenician towns. While owning slaves, Christians claimed they treated them as brothers. Modern Christians point to the absence in the Roman catacombs of any inscription using the word, “slave”. Slaves were undoubtedly attracted to Christianity and some former slaves like Pope Callistus achieved high office. But unfreed slaves were not allowed to hold office. They had to be freed first. Christians consider this uncharacteristically democratic for the time, but the greatest of Stoic writers, Epictetus, was himself once a slave.
Still, the admission of slaves into the local Christian groups, served to confirm to the authorities that Christianity was subversive.
