The conflict between Christianity and the Roman authorities: Growth of the church

Initially, the Roman authorities had viewed the Christians as Jews, but after a while they realized that they formed a separate group that was not entitled to the privileges of the Jewish nation, and was a group with a diffuse character that by its rejection of the religion and much of the prevailing morals of the empire constituted a danger to the Roman order. That, in any case, was the conclusion reached in Rome when in 64 AD the Christians of the city were accused of having started the great fire in which a large part of Rome had been destroyed. On the orders of Nero, Christians had been arrested, interrogated, and convicted of what the historian Tacitus called “hatred of humanity.” Probably, that should be understood as a reference to the Christians’ rejection of pagan society and their triumphant prediction—maybe repeated while Rome was burning—that this world would end in flames to be replaced by a new one in which only those saved by Christ would live. A “large number” of Christians in Rome, again according to Tacitus, was then crucified, burned at the stake, or thrown to wild beasts. Since Nero’s massacre, Christians in the view of the Roman authorities were people who rightly deserved the death penalty as long as they embraced the convictions that could apparently inspire them to horrible crimes. Rather soon, however, it was discovered that in fact they did not commit the crimes they were accused of. Nevertheless, being a Christian remained a capital offense, for the simple reason that the Christians’ “anti-social” and “atheist” behavior in itself threatened the well-being of society; brought before a magistrate who ordered him to sacrifice, a Christian’s refusal to do so, moreover, challenged the authority of Rome and fully justified the death sentence. If, however, a Christian in such circumstances did offer sacrifice, he thereby proved that he was no longer a Christian or not a “real” Christian, consequently of no danger to society or the state, and was therefore acquitted. Whether or not a Christian was willing to sacrifice was thus the sole criterion used to condemn or to acquit an accused Christian. This was the basis for the direction that the emperor Trajan (ca. 112 AD) gave to his governors. It was of no importance if the accused had never committed a crime, but neither was it important if he or she had been a Christian for a long time: as soon as the accused offered sacrifice, he or she was acquitted, but the death sentence was inescapable if he or she refused the magistrate’s order to sacrifice. The government, though, should according to Trajan not actively search for Christians but only act when someone brought in a formal accusation and appeared in person with the accused before the magistrate (as was the normal procedure in many other criminal cases). If the accused then proved to be innocent by offering sacrifice, he or she had to be acquitted but the accuser punished for “calumny.” If only Trajan’s direction had been invariably followed, presumably only a very few Christians would have been convicted and executed. But the idea that the Christians as “atheists” were a danger to the community was widespread, and that sometimes caused spontaneous outbursts of hatred toward them in the larger cities, especially in times of a great pagan festival or after some calamity had struck. The Roman governor, in his wish to maintain order, often reacted by arresting Christians as the source of all unrest, sometimes even searching for them, and placating the public with the spectacle of their death, often on the occasion of games in the amphitheater. Another element usually played a role here

As well: the wish on the part of some Christians to die as martyrs. Most Christians were convinced that those who died as Christians had to “sleep” in their graves until the day after the Lord returned, when all the dead would be resurrected; only the martyrs did not have to wait so long, because their souls had gone straight to heaven at the moment of their death (and would return with Christ on Earth in the future, to be reconnected with a new body). In heaven, the martyr could intercede with God Himself for the faithful on Earth, which was the reason why the latter started venerating the martyr-saints. Moreover, in early Christianity the ritual of baptism was taken very seriously, for in principle one who was baptized could count on being saved—unless some grave sin was committed after baptism, for instance, the sin of offering sacrifice to an “idol.” In such cases, no forgiveness was possible, and eternal hell fire would be the inevitable outcome. Only dying as a martyr could wash away such a deadly sin, making as it were, the martyr’s blood a second baptism. That must have been a reason for some Christians to provoke the authorities and actively to seek martyrdom, while others might simply have been driven by the wish to be assured of salvation in the afterlife. Other Christians again, saw in these events the signs that the time could no longer be far off that Christ himself would return.

Still, the scope of the persecutions should not be exaggerated. Until the middle of the 3rd century they were always local and never lasted more than a few days. In fact, we know only of a handful of persecutions in a few cities, the largest number of victims being 48. Most Christians in the first three centuries AD never experienced a persecution and heard about it only from hearsay. These persecutions by no means hampered the further spread of the church. The Christian expansion over the empire went from east to west, and for a long time the center of gravity of the religion would remain in the Greek-speaking east. The diffusion into the countryside in Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor started in the 3rd century, in the west a century later. Socially, the church in the 2nd and 3rd centuries reached the upper classes, although among senators she would long remain a tiny minority. This implied that the church numbered a growing number of educated members, foremost in the Greek-speaking east. As a result, there appeared Christian writings and a Christian theology was created. This was mainly the work of the so-called Apologists, Christian writers who in their treatises or “open letters” tried to defend their faith against the objections of pagan society and the anti-Christian laws of the emperors. In doing so, they assured their readers of Christians’ loyalty to the empire and the emperor, who in their view had received his authority from God. They also tried to reconcile the Christian faith with the main tenets of Greek and Roman philosophy, especially Platonism and Stoicism, and presented Christianity as in fact the most perfect “philosophy,” since, among other things, it was also the most ancient, going back to Adam, the patriarchs and the Israelites, whose position of “chosen people” had been taken over by the Christians, “the true Israel.” All good things in ancient philosophy, in this view, were plagiarized from the scriptures of Moses and the prophets. Not many pagans can have been convinced by all that, but it was clear that the church began to abandon her initial total rejection of the world; instead, she started to look forward to the time that the empire might become Christian itself. At the same time, the Jews were more than ever rejected by Christians, because they had refused to listen to the message of Christ and his apostles and because “they” had been the murderers of Christ. Their favored place with God had now been assumed by the church. Consequently,

The books of the Hebrew Bible, in which according to the Christians the coming of Christ, his death, and resurrection were frequently foretold, were appropriated by the Christians as their so-called Old Testament. They were placed besides the books of the so-called New Testament, in which four gospels (describing Jesus’ actions and teachings), letters under the names of Paul and a few other apostles, a history of the early spread of Christianity (the so-called Acts of the Apostles), and the Apocalypse of John (a revelation about future catastrophes and the end of time) were combined. All these writings, brought together since roughly the 3rd century AD, formed the Christian Bible.

In the first two centuries, Christianity was far from homogeneous; instead, there existed a bewildering multiplicity of sects and subgroups. There were some sects that appealed to direct inspiration by the Holy Spirit and therefore rejected or at least questioned the authority of the traditional scriptures and the established leaders of the Christian communities. Other groups moved along the edges of Christianity, stressing not so much faith but an inner “knowledge” (Greek: gnosis, hence “Gnostics”), which brought them close to philosophical speculation about the nature of the soul and of the universe. For these Gnostics, salvation was not brought about by the redeeming work of Christ and in particular by his death on the cross, but by the inner knowledge that some men and women possessed, knowledge about the origin of the souls and human destiny. In this, they resembled somewhat those pagan intellectuals who believed in an origin of the soul in a special realm of light among the stars. The Gnostic view, however, was dualistic, positing a realm of pure spirit beyond the evil and material world. For many of them, Christ’s mission had been an esoteric one: to reveal that “knowledge” to those of humankind who would understand, for the vast majority would remain ignorant, doomed to perish with this world of evil. Such ideas were hardly Christian, and the church did her utmost to combat them—eventually with success, for in the 4th century most of the Gnostic groups would disappear. In their opposition to the gnostics, the more “orthodox” Christians had been forced to formulate the core of their own beliefs more clearly and succinctly and at the same time to strengthen the authority of the bishops, their community leaders.

The organization of the Christian communities took shape in the same first three centuries. In essence, each Christian community was autonomous and had a clergy of several ranks, the most important and ubiquitous being those of the “elders” or priests and the deacons. Everywhere, there was one leader at the top of the clerical hierarchy: the bishop (from Greek episkopos or “overseer”), who enjoyed an absolute authority in spiritual matters but also supervised the material assets of the community. He had the power to excommunicate the unforgivable sinner from the community. The church as a whole was a kind of confederation of bishoprics, for in the 3rd century there was not yet one overall authority, although the bishop of Rome was honored by the others as the most respectable of all, the successor of the apostles Peter and Paul and the leader of the largest and richest community. How many Christians there were in the 3rd century, we do not know, but their numbers certainly varied from one region to another, being on average much higher in the east than in the west. Estimates for the empire as a whole in the year 300 mostly vary from 5% to 10%. The 3rd century was a period of crises for the empire, caused among other things by the invasions of foreign enemies. In that situation, the emperors,

Who also stressed their own divine nature, more than before appealed to the gods for help and protection. That brought them into conflict with the church.

In 249, the emperor Decius issued an edict ordering all the inhabitants of the empire to offer sacrifice to the traditional gods. It was like a religious mobilization in which the combined piety of all citizens would propitiate the gods. Christians who refused to participate were automatically suspected of being hostile to the well-being of the empire. This entailed the first empire-wide persecution of Christians on the orders of the imperial government. The number of martyrs is unknown, but in the tradition of the Church the emperor Decius would figure as one of her bitterest enemies. Probably, there were a couple of hundred victims all over the empire, since many Christians fled, or had others sacrifice in their place, or bought special certificates stating, falsely, that they had sacrificed, or indeed complied. What to do with the latter two categories would become a vexed question in the church for some years to come. In 251, the persecution stopped when Decius was killed in battle against the Goths, but in 257 another emperor, Valerian, launched another empire-wide persecution. He put pressure on the clergy, forcing them to sacrifice and thus to prove their loyalty and solidarity, in the expectation that the rest of the Christians would follow the examples of their leaders. But again, most clergy went into hiding or fled, and the number of martyrs was probably not very high. In 260, the emperor was taken prisoner by the Persians. His son distanced himself from his father’s policies and immediately ended the persecution, even restoring confiscated property to the church. That meant that the Roman state recognized the church as a legal organization, and thus the period of persecutions ended, or so it seemed.

In the years following 260, the numbers of Christians must have grown considerably, and Christianity now also spread to the countryside of provinces in the east. Perhaps it was this development that worried some influential pagans. In around 300, the emperor Diocletian, a man who was convinced that only the cults of the traditional gods could guarantee the survival of the empire and who had presented himself and his colleague-emperors of the tetrarchy as the close companions and earthly representatives of Jupiter and Hercules, outlawed in an edict the new sect of the Manichaeans as a threat to the Roman order. Similar reasoning probably inspired him a little later to take measures against the Christians. In four edicts in the years 303 and 304, he attacked first the clergy, then all the Christians, by ordering them to sacrifice, apparently expecting to force many Christians to renounce their faith and push the rest back to the margins of society. That started the so-called Great Persecution, which would last a few years. Diocletian’s colleague-emperors in the west, however, cooperated only half-heartedly, and the persecution was soon limited to Egypt and the eastern provinces. There, especially in Egypt, probably hundreds of Christians, if not more, died as martyrs. But the numbers of Christians in the east had by then grown already so large that these martyrdoms rather enhanced the prestige of the church. When Diocletian resigned in 305, the persecution in the east was still going on, albeit at a reduced level. His successor there, Galerius, continued half-heartedly with the anti-Christian policy, whereas in the west in 306 Christians everywhere regained their freedom of worship. At last in 311, on this deathbed, Galerius issued the edict of toleration that declared Christianity a legal religion. The Christians were ordered to pray to their god for the well-being of the state and of the emperor—but that they had always been wont to do. In the eastern provinces,

Persecution would be resumed for a while in 312, but in 313 it finally stopped. An epoch ended, and about the same time a new one began with the conversion to Christianity of the first emperor.