When did Christianity first become “illegal” in the Roman world?

In my previous post I described the Christian persecutions in its early decades, including those under Nero in Rome in 64 CE and Papias in Bythinia in 112 CE.   It would be useful to continue the tale, to see just what the known persecutions were about.  This is worthwhile information for anyone interested at all in how Christianity started out and was received in the Roman world.

There was no “official” persecution (pursued or permitted by a Roman emperor) for another half century.  I’ll pick up the story from there, based what I say in my book The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster).  This will take two posts, focusing on the emperors’ roles in each case.  Part of the point will be that persecution rarely happened, at least at an emperor’s bidding, and Christianity was not declared in all effects illegal until the early fourth century – just a decade before the first emperor actually converted (Constantine, in 312 CE).

 

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Marcus Aurelius (Ruled 161-80 CE)

We would not know of Marcus Aurelius’s involvement in a persecution of Christians were it not for one brief reference to him in a Christian source later quoted by the fourth-century church historian Eusebius.  Even there the emperor is not called by name.  The source is one of the most gripping accounts of Christian martyrdom on record, the Letter of Lyons and Viennes, usually dated to 177 CE.   This is an actual letter – assuming its authenticity — written by Christians of these two cities of Gaul, now modern France, to describe their escalated tensions with the pagan population, eventuating in horrific torments imposed on them in an attempt to force them to recant their faith.  The heroes of the narrative never do so, after days of brutal treatment.^[1]

The zeal of the pagans leaps off the pages of the account.  These, again, were not irreligious people who wanted to torture others for sheer sadistic pleasure.  On the contrary, “they imagined in this way they would avenge their gods,” by forcing the Christians to worship pagan cult statues.  And so: “They subjected them to every horror and inflicted every punishment in turn, attempting again and again to make them swear.”  In most cases, if the account is to be believed, it was to no avail.   The Christians, we are told, were “reminded by the brief chastisement of the eternal punishment of hell.”  Better to suffer for a horrible week than for all eternity.

The persecution was carried out under the authority of the regional governor.  But at one point in the proceedings he communicated with the emperor concerning how to proceed and received instructions back: “Caesar [i.e., Marcus Aurelius] had issued a command that they should be tortured to death, but any who still denied Christ should be released.”   Some clearly did so, but for obvious reasons, the account focuses on the torments of the valiant faithful rather than on the failings of the apostates.

We have no reliable reports of another emperor’s involvement in persecution for another eighty years.  By that time, Christianity had started to explode in numbers and emperors started to express concern.

 

Decius (Ruled 249-51 CE).

The first emperor to issue empire-wide legislation that affected the Christian movement was Decius in 249 CE, shortly after he assumed power.  It came in the form of a universal decree requiring everyone in the Empire to perform a sacrifice to the gods, taste the sacrificial meat, and swear they had always done so, all in the presence of an official who was to sign a document scholars call a “libellus” certifying it had happened.  The only people exempt were the Jews.^[2]

We know of this extraordinary measure from several sources: three Christian contemporaries who spoke of persecutions that erupted when followers of Christ refused to comply and a group of the actual libelli, forty-five altogether, discovered by archaeologists.

Traditionally it was thought that Decius enacted the decree specifically to institute an empire-wide persecution of the Christians.  Recent historians have persuasively argued this was not the case.^[3]  Instead, the decree was almost certainly designed to show a commitment to the gods throughout the entire empire, in a time of imperial crisis.  The middle half of the third century was a notorious period of real upheaval, with economic crises, barbarian invasions, and imperial assassinations, one after the other.  The proper worship of the gods was called for as never before.

For modern minds it is interesting how Decius did so.  It was not by dictating a certain range of religious beliefs; it was not by insisting on a national day of prayer; and it was not even by naming specific Roman deities who were to be worshiped.  It was instead by requiring everyone to perform the cultic act of sacrifice.  For Decius and pagans like him, this was the central feature of true religion.  It did not matter which of the gods was honored through the sacrifice.  The empire had to participate.

It is possible that Decius issued this edict precisely because he knew of the growing numbers of Christians and he wanted to force their hands.  Rives argues, though, that he may not have had only Christians in mind.  There were other “foreign” cults that de-emphasized, or neglected, sacrifice altogether.  Decius may have detected an alarming trend and sought to still it.

His edict carried enormous implications.   For Roman history prior to 249 CE, religious activities had always been local affairs.  Worship was conducted by the individual, in the family, or as part of a local community.  At most it was a matter of the province.  That was true even of the Roman imperial cult:  emperors may have been worshiped throughout the empire, but the specific practices were not controlled by a centralized authority.  They were devised and carried out following local customs.

With Decius’s edict an official type of religion appeared for the entire empire, a sanctioned and even mandatory cultic act, required in every place.  This had profound effects on Christian-Empire relations.  As Rives puts it: “It is thus not surprising that before Decius’ decree on universal sacrifice, there had been no centrally organized persecutions of Christians: it was only when a ‘religion of the Empire’ had been defined and its boundaries set that there could be a systematic persecution of people who transgressed those boundaries.”^[4]

As one might imagine, there were certainly ways for Christians – especially those who were wealthy – to get around the requirements of the decree.  They could take flight and keep on the move under the radar; they could bribe officials; they could purchase fake libelli.   But we know from later Christian accounts that even though the reign of Decius was brief – he was killed in battle in 251 CE — serious consequences attended those who refused to sacrifice: exile, confiscations of property, torture, and death.  It is impossible to know, however, the extent of the persecutions.

 

[1]The letter occupies the first part of book 5 of Eusebius’s Church History, which is our only surviving account.

[2] The best study of the incident is James B. Rives, “The Decree of Decius and the Religion of Empire,” Journal of Roman Studies 89 (1999) 135-54, on which I am dependent for many of the points I make here.

[3] Rives, “Decree of Decius.”

[4] Rives, “Decree of Decius,” p. 53.