Christians in the Roman Empire The persecution of religious minorities

As soon as we have Christian writings, we have evocations of Christian suffering. Paul’s version of‘‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’’ - imprisonments, beatings, Jewish juridical lashing, Roman beating with rods, a stoning (2 Cor 11:23-7) - coheres well with the picture presented later in Acts: early Christian apostles (who were themselves Jews) often met with hostility and energetic rejection both in synagogues and in the larger urban context of their mission. In the Gospel of Mark (written sometime after 70 CE), Jesus ‘‘prophesies’’ that his followers will experience similar harsh receptions: ‘‘They will deliver you up to councils; and you will be beaten in synagogues, and you will stand before governors and kings for my sake’’ (Mk 13:9; Mark’s reference to ‘‘beating in synagogues’’ attests to his envisioning a predominantly Jewish movement: synagogues had no jurisdiction over gentiles). Such measures can be viewed as improvised and ad hoc attempts on the part of urban communities, both Jewish and gentile, to contain and control the potential disruptiveness of the early Christian mission.

By the turn of the first century, however, we already find a startling change: evidence of coercion, now directed specifically against gentile Christians, and exercised by government agents, civic and imperial. Throughout the second century and into the third, this pattern sporadically continues, rising to a crescendo with antiChristian persecutions under Diocletian in 303. After 312, with the progressive Christianization of the government - and ‘‘governmentalization’’ of the church - religious persecutions continue, for much the same reasons as during their pagan phase. In its post-Constantinian Christian phase, however, religious coercion targeted a more diverse population. Gentile Christians (now identified as ‘‘heretics’’) continue to be harassed, but pagan public worship, and pagan worshipers, also joined the roll (MacMullen 1997). Whether under pagan or, later, Christian persecutors, however, Jews and the practice of Judaism for the most part remained free from government harassment, and continued to be protected by imperial law (Fredriksen and Irshai 2004).

How can we account for the origin and development of such persecution, given the practical and principled religious pluralism long native to Mediterranean culture? We should orient ourselves by thinking of‘‘religion’’ in the terms that mattered to these ancient people: ethnicity and antiquity; standing obligations to one’s own people’s gods; the importance of public cult acts, showing - and being seen to show - respect; the importance for public security of maintaining the pax deorum, the concordat between heaven and earth that guaranteed the well-being of city and empire.

The problem, then, in the view of majority culture, was not that gentile Christians were ‘‘Christians.’’ The problem was that, whatever religious practices these people chose to assume, they were still, nonetheless, ‘‘gentiles.’’ That is, the Christians were still members of their own genos or natio, with the standing obligations to the gods of their genos, who were the gods of the majority. From roughly the end of the first century until 250 ce, these Christians could be the object of local resentments and anxieties precisely because they were not honoring the gods upon whom their city’s prosperity depended. As Tertullian famously complained, ‘‘if the Tiber overflows to the walls, if the Nile does not rise to the fields; if the sky does not move or the earth does; if there is famine or plague, the cry goes up at once, ‘The Christians to the

Lion!’ ’’ (Apol. 40.2). Jewish Christians were not so persecuted, because as Jews their exemption from public cult was ancient, traditional, and protected by long legal precedent. Ancestral obligation was what mattered.

Popular fear of this strange new group fed also on rumor, which attributed terrible anti-social crimes to Christians - infanticide, cannibalism, incestuous intercourse - all accusations that the different Christian sects also made against each other, and that medieval Christianity would ultimately fix upon the Jews. Such stories eventually lost their force: courts discounted and disproved them (e. g. Pliny Ep. 10.95-6 [112 ce]). Once a Christian was in court, before the governor, the matter turned upon showing respect both for authority and for the mos Romanorum. Would the accused defer to the governor’s request? Would he honor the emperor’s image? Would she eat meat offered to the gods? Some Christians complied; others refused. And as canons 2, 3, and 4 of the Council of Elvira (303 ce) make clear, not all gentile Christians saw the problem: this church council had to legislate against Christians who nonetheless continued to serve as flamines, that is, as priests of the imperial cult. The stalwart might end their days in the arena, robed as characters from classical mythology, sacrificed in spectacles recalling the stories of the same gods whom these Christians had refused more conventionally to honor (Coleman 1990; Potter 1993).

This first phase of anti-Christian persecution was random, sporadic, and local. The contributing role of social factors seems clear, though the actual legal grounds for persecution remain foggy. Evidence of significant freedom of movement - Christians freely visiting and supporting those arrested in jail, or Christians in custody (in the case of Ignatius of Antioch) visiting churches despite having been arrested - implies what the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan clearly states: simply being a Christian did not suffice to have action brought. The admiring many, who recorded and preserved acts of the martyrs, surely outnumbered the heroic (and perhaps voluntary) few.

With the emperor Decius, in the mid-third century, both the issues and the evidence become clearer. In response to the decades of turmoil that had gripped the empire, Decius mandated that all citizens participate in public cult. The protocols most especially emphasized blood sacrifices and honoring the emperor (Rives 1999). (Jews - and thus Jewish Christians - were once again exempt: Euseb. Eccl. Hist. 6.12.1.) The emperor did not forbid the practice of Christianity. Rather, he ordered that gentile Christians, whatever their peculiar practices, also observe those rites that ensured the gods’ goodwill. His goal was not religious uniformity but the preservation of the commonwealth.

More Christians were caught in this imperial net than in the earlier, local, uncoordinated efforts. The chief consequence of Decius’ initiative and of the other occasional imperial efforts that followed was an internal crisis of authority within the church over the question of those who had lapsed - an indirect measure, perhaps, of the relative proportion of Christian resistance to accommodation. Churches of various orientations continued, nonetheless, to settle into Roman society: on the eve of the ‘‘great persecution’’ of 303, a large basilica stood just across the way from Diocletian’s own palace.

The persecution of its own citizens is to a society what an auto-immune disease is to an individual: it wastes resources, squanders solidarity, and ultimately leaves the whole much weakened. Within Mediterranean culture in particular, religious persecution was an anomaly. Yet from the mid-third century on, the Roman government, whether pagan or Christian, pursued such policies. The imperial church, once the object of persecution, shifted roles with equanimity. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), directing the persecution of Donatist Christians in North Africa, even made a reasoned theological defense of coercion as a sort of muscular pastoral care. Despite its changed role - indeed, perhaps because of it - the church nevertheless clung to the idea that the true church was the church of the martyrs (though by its own definition, those contemporaries currently subject to coercion were, ipso facto, ‘‘false’’ Christians).

Religious persecution was the expression of insecurity, and a socially enacted form of theodicy: if bad things happened, it must be that the good gods (or God) were rightly angry. In their imperial phase, these persecutions were wed to a sense of declining political fortune. Christian emperors sought to preserve the pax dei just as purposefully as their pagan predecessors had sought to preserve the pax deorum. Christian emperors persecuted those whom they deemed to be dangerous outsiders - or false insiders - for the same reasons that pagan ones had: the hope of averting heaven’s wrath, and of soliciting divine goodwill (Liebeschuetz 1979: 277-308, esp. 297). Thus in 430, calling for the Third Ecumenical Council, the Christian emperor Theodosius II expressed his hope that ‘‘the condition of the church might honor God and contribute to the safety of the Empire’ (Acts of the Ecumenical Councils I.1.1, 114). One year later, the same emperor wrote in his constitution against pagans, Samaritans, and Jews: ‘‘Why has the spring lost its accustomed charm? Why has the summer, barren of its harvest, deprived the laboring farmer?... Why all these things, unless nature has transgressed the decree of its own law to avenge such impiety?'' (NTh. 3.; cf. Tert. Apol. 40.2, quoted above, for the pagan enunciation of exactly the same sensibility).