Loading...Why were early Christians persecuted? How extensively? Were they early on seen as a threat to the state?
In my previous two posts I discussed the relationship of Jews and Christians — and how Christians became anti-Jewish — in the early church. It occurred to me it would be good to talk about two other groups Christians had problems with early on, one from outside their ranks with persecutors (unofficial and official) and one with in their own ranks with “false believers” (heretics).
This post will be a snapshot look at persecution in the early centuries.
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We hear a lot about Roman persecution of Christians, presumably because we in the West tend to look at things from a Christian perspective. What about the other way around, though? Is it true that once Christianity became the official religion of the Empire, pagans were persecuted just as viciously?
Yup, it wasn’t good once Theodosius I came into power. I discuss it, with some details, in my book Triumph of Christianity.
There is also the book by Candida Moss that you highly recommended and I read. I concur with your evaluation. I can’t remember the title nor find the book, but it’s excellent.
PS: Moss’s book is The Myth of Persecution.
Columbus set sail for his first trip 3 days after Jews were driven from Spain but he purposely took on board a Jewish person because it was known fact that when they arrived in China the emperor would speak Hebrew.
I laughed hard when I first heard this but then thought this probably was because Hebrew was seen as an ancient language.
I found your analogy comparing the cross to something like an electric chair very illuminating. It reminded me of a thought I once had when I was younger. Before becoming a Christian, I was a Buddhist, and when I saw Christians wearing crosses, I sometimes wondered what it would feel like if the symbol were something like an electric chair or a hangman’s noose instead.
Since Christians make up only about 1% of the population in Japan, the historical and symbolic meaning of the cross is not always easily understood here.
That’s a really good point. I used to try to convey to my students that it is almost impossible for us to recapture, imaginatively, the associations the cross would have had for Romans (and the peoples ruled by them) in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE. The cross was an instrument of torture and execution, reserved for lower-class criminals and social outcasts (a Roman patrician might be executed, but he wouldn’t be crucified). For a group of people to start proudly using it as a symbol of salvation was as mind-boggling and incomprehensible –and frankly, as repellent and disgusting — as we would find it if a group of people started proudly wearing images of guillotines, electric chairs, and so on. And even there, we’d be missing the strong association with torture. Crucifixion was deliberately designed to kill slowly and extremely painfully (“excruciating” actually means, more or less, “like being crucified”). I think the first reaction to seeing someone wearing that symbol proudly, as an indication of a religion promising salvation, would have been to think that person was obviously mentally deranged, and to avoid them.
I remember in a biopic about the (considered then) raunchy comedian Lenny Bruce, in it on stage he made some joke that if Christ lived today, Catholic schoolgirls would have to wear electric chair necklaces.
I also remember a sophomoric joke going around in my youth:
Q. Why was Jesus crucified instead of being stoned?
A. So we can do this [make the sign of the cross] rather than this [knock your own head four or five times with your knuckles].
Excuse my irreverence.
I have a question about the epistemological limits of historical inquiry—one that I have long wondered about without finding a clear answer. My understanding is that historians work with surviving evidence and attempt to reconstruct what most probably happened. Because historical method generally operates with methodological naturalism, events such as miracles—for example, the resurrection—appear either extremely improbable or methodologically excluded within historical analysis, at least methodologically speaking.
If this is the case, theology (or faith) seems to operate on a different explanatory level, allowing for the possibility that events beyond currently known natural laws may occur. This raises a question for me: if historical method assumes methodological naturalism in advance, how can it fairly evaluate historical claims whose very content is supernatural without narrowing the range of possible conclusions beforehand?
Related to this, I wonder whether historical reasoning itself—because it relies heavily on probability and patterns derived from repeated experience—may face limits when addressing singular events in the past. If historians must explain events only in terms of natural causes, how could they ever conclude that a genuinely supernatural event occurred, even if it did?
Yes, if a historian automatically rules out claims of supernatural intervention, claiming they CAN NOT happen, then that means they cannot/will not agree that they ever have. My approach is different from that. It is that even if you grant that supernatural interventions can happen, you have no way of showing historically that they have. Other explanations are almost invariably “more probable.” If you have five people claim they saw Joe Jones walk across his swimming pool one afternoon, which would be more probable: that he played a trick on them, that they mistook what they saw, that they made it up, that they were drunk out of their gourd, that…. Or that it happened. If you’d say that the testimony of five people is more powerful an explanatoin than the laws of physics, I’d say you’re not seriously doing history. The other optioins happen millions of times every day; the other one has never happened in documented history. So which is more likely? It’s not that it COULD NOT have happened, in this line of reasoning. It is that even if it DID, it cannot be decided as the historically more plausible explanation.
And so, yes, there are limits to what history can show. The big mistake people make is thinking that the past is history. The past is everything that has ever happened. History is the reconstruction of what probably happened. Ain’t the same!
Thank you for this very clear explanation. Your distinction between the past and history was quite eye-opening for me. As someone who is not a historian, I had not fully appreciated why historians focus on what is most probable rather than what is merely possible.
Yes, sure, and similarly Christians were not persecuted in Communist countries either, after all it was not illegal, it was not a crime in itself and it wasn’t openly systematic… Their only sin was that they did not want to worship fake “gods” (i.e., ideologies), again… Interestingly, some minorities are apparently persecuted nowadays based on much more dubious statistics… The best part: “being a Christian was not exactly a crime… And so it was a crime to continue being Christian.” Nice contradiction, since the choice of being a Christian was a crime after all, as long as it persisted, wasn’t it? Or weren’t the Jews of medieval Spain persecuted, after all they were only expected to convert?
Communists did not persecute Christians? I’m not sure what you mean? And no, it’s not a contradiction to say remaining a Christian was illegal and punishable but formerly having been one was not.
before or around Y2k, a Christian missionary from the South [USA] was expelled from China ex HK for evangelizing in Anhui province. I doubt his translator went to prison.
Shanghai state church had home meetings & “underground” activities, everything was known by the State aka BIG BROTHER.
Christmas 1986, apostle @ Maranatha Christian fellowship witnessed trucks of Christians with a bull horn calling for converts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maranatha_Campus_Ministries
20132, christianity in China was replaced by Capitalism by a former sf chinatown senior pastor gone missionary. https://cpccsf.org/about/history/
I have my history.
It’s interesting that Christianity’s “closed” nature triggered some agitation against them, but one would think the same would have happened to the various “mystery religions” that also kept secrets of their own. Even so, in a lot of places and times, those thrived (or so I’ve been told).
Is there any difference in how Christians were treated versus the mystery religions? Or does something like this explain the Romans’ oppression of the Dionysian cult? Just asking out loud.
None of the religions that were suppressed for their religoius practices per se, UNLESS those practices were seen as harmful to society or individuals in it (either directly or indirectly — e.g., by spreading harmful immorality)
The difference involves the distinction between polytheism and monotheism. Adherents of mystery cults did not, usually, claim that their god was the ONLY god. Being initiated into a mystery religion did not mean that one ceased to offer the appropriate worship to all the other gods.
When the Roman emperors started claiming to be gods, then the political element entered in. If Christians had been willing to offer sacrifice to the divinity of the emperor, no-one would have cared that they also worshipped a god they called Christ. In polytheism, there’s always room for another god. But the Christians’ refusal to sacrifice to the emperor was so counter-intuitive and downright weird that the most plausible explanation, to many Romans, was that Christians were actually engaged in political sedition. Why else would they refuse to do something so innocent and simple as offering incense to the divine emperor? In a nutshell, Christians weren’t suspect because they worshipped Christ; they were suspect because they would NOT acknowledge the Emperor’s divine status.
Furthermore, Christians vigorously converted others to their viewpoint, so “clearly” they were plotting against the state. The Jews, in contrast, did not try to convert others, so they weren’t considered dangerous.
I listened to a “Data over Dogma” podcast on the topic of the idea in Christian apologetics circles that “no one would die for a lie.” The podcast guys (Dan and Dan) talked about the descriptions found in non-canonical sources (Gospel of _____; writings of Eusebius; etc.) of the horrific deaths endured by the disciples. They even mentioned Papias as a source of some of these stories including some of the info you shared in your March 5 blog (the “bloating” of Judas). Suggestion: a blog post from you on this topic. It would fit well with your post the other day on the beginnings of Christian persecution. Thanks.
Yes, I’ve written on it for the blog before. We only have much later accounts that are clearly not historical. (Even for Peter and Paul) (If people think the martyrdom accounts in these narratives really happnened as described, do they think the stories about talking lions who get baptized, obedient bed bugs, and smoked tuna raised from the dead really happened?)
I’m working on a proposal that the DSS/Masada “Angelic Liturgy”-(aka-SoSS) was used among early Christians, and Nero’s persecution as supporting evidence: Tacitus claims persecution for “hatred of the human race.” This reflects Roman discomfort with Christian eschatology- the present world stood under judgment and will be overturned by Christ. Nero’s punishments are inversions of Christian claims.
Crucifixion becomes more than execution; it’s public testing of a crucified Messiah’s promise of vindication. Likewise, the spectacle of Christians dressed in animal skins/torn apart evokes a parody of transformation imagery found in Genesis and later developed in early Christian thought, where mortality is “clothed” with something more enduring.
Most striking is Tacitus’s account of Christians burned as living torches in Nero’s gardens. This resonates with the luminous world of “Angel Liturgy” where God is enthroned on a chariot at the center of a radiant heavenly sanctuary, surrounded by ordered ranks of shining beings whose praise fills the space with light. Participation in this liturgy is transformative, drawing the worshipper into the divine realm. Nero’s spectacle turns human bodies into sources of light through destruction rather than glorification. Even Nero’s role as charioteer evokes the imagery of divine kingship associated with the chariot-throne.
“Because the earliest Christians were Jewish… If the case of the pre-Christian Paul is representative of why the earliest persecutions took place, it was precisely because of the Christian claim that a crucified man was the messiah.”
Paul also taught a meal ritual that violated Jewish dietary restrictions. He taught in synagogues. Encouragement of open apostasy in actual behavior might have been a bigger conservative Jewish motivator against Paul than a difference of opinion.
The traditional Jewish view of resurrection was that it was a reward for strict Torah observance, especially to the point of martyrdom. Paul taught that Jesus taught Jewish dietary apostasy to his disciples but the mode of transmission of this information Paul allegedly received from Jesus is not secure. The disciples did not confirm this information.
The subject of the Neronian Persecution has been much changed by an article in the Journal of Roman Studies for 2015 by Brent Shaw claiming that we should have serious doubts about whether it took place. The question has massive implications for the whole idea of imperial persecution, and also about the relationship between Christians and Jews – if Nero clearly had no difficulty in the early 60s in telling the two apart then that has implications for how they spoke to and of each other.
There is a very interesting case made by James Corke-Webster in the same Journal 10 years later, 2025, about the legal basis of the persecutions, on lines quite like yours I think, though he goes on to suggest that people then as now exploited the legal system for all sorts of purposes and that it is possible that some events should be regarded as persecution of Christians by Christians under the pagan legal system
Bart,
Why could Jews claim an exemption from not worshiping pagan gods? How does having a very ancient religion let them do that?.
They were granted an exemption because Romans realized this had been their (for them) odd custom/tradition/practice for many centuries, and since it was an ancestral tradition, it may have been bizarre but it wasn’t problematic — especially since Jews petitioned their God for the sake of the emperor.