Early Christian Persecution

[Music] you it is sometime between 155 and 160 AD and we are in the city of Samara which is in the modern-day city of Izmir Turkey and here we have Polycarp then Polycarp was an important bishop in his day at this point he is in his late 80s around the age of 86 and Polycarp recording the legend had been discipled by the Apostle John himself and had lived for years as both a priest and then later as a bishop in the modern day state of Turkey Polycarp had been a fighter for orthodoxy he had at one point confronted the heretic Marcion in the city of Rome and called him the firstborn of Satan and he had also waged war intellectually speaking against a number of the Gnostics in around the regions of his city and tradition has it that he converted quite a number of them correcting them of the theological errors that they believed to be associated with the Christian faith at this point though Polycarp is ready to be executed the Roman officials of the area had had enough of Polycarp and they decided that Christianity was just simply too strange and that it was making too many inroads into the Roman world and so Polycarp was ready to be executed and Polycarp had an enormous amount of calm during the process his friends had pleaded with him to leave to flee knowing that the Roman governors probably would not chase after him or go looking for and why to see if they could find this 86 year old man but Polycarp remained in his home and so when the soldiers discovered where he lived and they came and knocked Polycarp opened the door and he said to simply God's will be done and he invited the soldiers in and at least according to the story that was written down after the fact he even gave them refreshments as they awaited to take him off to be put on trial publicly and so Polycarp has led to a local arena and there he is publicly questioned and he banters back and forth with the person that is inquiring about his faith at one point he is accused of being an atheist a strange thing for a Christian to be accused of but in the Roman world when you do not believe in the pantheon of the gods to only believe in this Lord Christ to them sounded like atheism and Polycarp sort of coyly points to the crowd and said no these are the atheists and after time Polycarp eventually realizes that the back and forth between he and his accuser was simply not going to solve anything and so eventually he says why do you delay come do what you will and so the soldier sees Polycarp and they are going to nail him hands and feet to the stake before they begin to burn it but Polycarp pleads that they not do this and asked instead that they just allow him to stand and he says that the Lord will give him strength to endure the fire and in the end he is burned to death this story of Polycarp would later be written down and actually serve as one of the earliest documents that we have of the earliest Christian persecutions by the Romans and so in this lecture we're going to look at the persecution of the Christian Church in the earliest centuries of the church up until the 3rd century crisis in a later lecture we'll look at the third century crisis and take a look at some of the harsher persecutions that occurred there but in this lecture we're going to look at the earliest centuries of the church how did they engage with the Roman world and then how did the Roman world respond with persecution and the first thing we have to say is that persecution of Christians is often misunderstood there are popular misconceptions about how Christians are persecuted and about the ways in which the Roman world and the Roman government treated Christians as a whole often particularly in textbooks or in popular books on the subject the first entries of the church are treated as if the Christians were subject to ethnic cleansing or to something as heinous as the Nazi treatment of the Jews in world war ii in fact with some definites we want to stress that that is not the case now there is some pretty heinous persecution and we're going to talk about those moments but we have to understand that in general overall given the breadth and the depth of the Roman government and the amount of land that it covers and looking at the church as a whole for several centuries by and large as we'll see persecutions were sporadic and they were local in fact at times only a handful would be persecuted not thousands when thousands of Christians we don't see Rome attempting to wipe Christians from the face of the earth at least on in these centuries when we get to the third century crisis and up into Diocletian in the early fourth century we do see something close to that it gets significantly worse by that period of time but from the earliest days from the time of the Apostles up until the early 200s Christianity is sporadically persecuted and it is by and large ignored though it is on the books oppressed and illegal and the division between these two periods of persecution really kind of falls almost fully into the division that we talk about between the early characterization of the Roman Empire and it's later manifestation before its fall in the fifth century historians divide the type of government that is in place in Rome between two major categories first of all we had the Principate and the Principate begins from about 31 BC that's the time of Julius Caesar down until about 284 in during this time the Principate is called that because despite the fact that the Roman Emperor was very much in charge and despite the fact that he was an emperor he was the autocrat nevertheless from Augustus Octavius on the Emperor was the princeps that is to say he was first among equals he was not a full autocrat in the sense that we sometimes believe it the emperor was expected to mingle amongst the senatorial classes as an equal he was not expected to treat them as somehow beneath him very often the Emperor had to abide by certain stipulations that the Senate would impose or he would have to get their approval or their backing with their support by and large and so this is the Principate and during times of the Principate in general the emperor while again very much in charge is still beholding to the senate and very often the emperor is more focused on that anything else he's more focused on global politics on what is going on throughout the empire or he's very much involved with local politics in the city of Rome itself so very often during the Principate the emperor in the Senate as a whole are not casting much of an eye on Christians in the East in an Asia Minor Christianity is very much a minority religion and as we'll see in just a minute Christians do not rebel they don't turn to violence when they are persecuted or when they feel marginalized in society and so really the Christians gave no reason for the Romans to come after them and by and large then during the Principate they did not look to the Christians as much of an opposition they didn't see them as seditious they knew that Christians did not like to take up arms and therefore during the Principate you do not have a lot of widespread persecution now that changes with the coming of the dominate and the dominate lasts from roughly 284 to 476 and what is striking about the dominate is it begins as a pagan entity and then with the coming of Constantine in the early 300s the dominate becomes Christian as well in the dominate is called that because it is at this time from 284 on that increasingly the Emperor does not have to abide by or engage with the senatorial classes and more importantly the Emperor began to be referred to as the Dominus as Lord he was now fully in command he he took on an almost ancient near-eastern or a Persian style of Ora or of authority amongst his peoples the senatorial classes no longer would be his equals he would not mingle with them he would engage in all kinds of ceremonies to stoke up his own sense of authority and therefore it is during the dominate during those periods of times before Constantine comes to the throne that we see the worst persecutions that is because during the dominate the Emperor's in most cases come from the Army and the Army is a bastion of traditional paganism and therefore these rock-ribbed stiff spined military soldiers who come to the throne do not lightly on any denial of the role of the gods in traditional paganism and therefore it is under the dominate that we see the worst in the most systemic and widespread persecutions now before we get into the history of it a little comment on the sources one of the things that historians are somewhat troubled by is the fact that we don't have a lot of first-hand accounts of martyrdom in the first several centuries by far the most important text that we use to determine the stories of martyrdom during these centuries comes from Eusebius and Eusebius is not living during the times of persecution first and foremost now he was living during the Diocletian era which was a period of persecution but when Eusebius sits down to write his history of the church he is describing the first several centuries of the church from the vantage point of Constantine's rise to the throne in other words what Eusebius is describing in his book is the ways in which Christians suffered before the rise of Constantine to the throne now according to Eusebius Constantine coming to the throne was essentially a miracle it was impossible to believe that suddenly they had a Christian Emperor and so therefore when he's telling the history of the Christian Church he's not doing so in a vacuum he's not doing so also during the persecutions themselves rather he's trying to codify and describe in whatever detail he can with whatever sources he can the ways in which Christians suffered from the beginning of the Apostolic age all the way down until the beginning of the fourth century with Constantine and some historians have been cynical about this and they've said well you see beus is just plying up the evidence and we don't have to go there this is the only source we have and this is written by somebody who's living in an age of triumph nevertheless Eusebius historians will say in general is attempting to write the history as it happened at least according to the sources and so therefore we can look at Eusebius as a trustworthy source that we have to be careful with it in general now if we want to talk about Christianity in the Roman world in the first several centuries we have to look at Christianity and relationship to Judaism because Romans generally see Christians as at least somewhat connected to the Jewish faith which of course is only natural because the Christian faith is connected to the Jewish faith however there is again a misconception here there are a lot of people who believe that the Romans had trouble distinguishing between Jews and Christians in the early centuries of the church in fact the Romans were quite good at telling the difference between these two at least in general if only by the fact that the Jews quite often would point out certain Christians in their midst and would say these are not us but the relationship between Judaism and Rome goes back until time before the birth of Christ and we already looked at this a bit in our lecture on the Greek world where we talked about the Maccabee and revolt in general the Alexandrian period and the subsequent years of the Saluki dynasties as well as the other dynasties gave rise to what we call the Jewish Diaspora and the Jewish Diaspora is a period of time in which Judaism spreads it moves in it spreads throughout most of the urban populations of the known world and one of the things that's often overlooked is just how many Jews there were in the Roman in the Greek worlds by one count by the time of the birth of Christ the Jewish population numbered about eight to ten percent of the Roman population that is a pretty staggering amount if you just consider the sheer numbers of people involved to consider that 8 to 10 percent in general are Jewish you're talking about a really substantial presence not only that but the Jews were incredibly intellectual take the city of Alexandria for example the city that itself was founded by Alexander and Alexander this time had roughly a million people maybe a bit less but Alexandria had as much as a third of its population is Jewish and they were incredibly intellectual it was in Alexandria predominantly where the study of the Septuagint arose where real deep study of the Scriptures took place and above all it was in Alexander were Philo one of the most important Jewish intellectuals in history lived and wrote now despite the fact that the Jewish population was widespread it had a bit of a tense relationship with Rome on the one hand Rome actually had a great deal of respect for Judaism at least according to their own categories they kept Judaism at arm's length in some ways but they could not underestimate the fact that Jewish faith was really ancient and for the Romans to be ancient was to be better was to be good they did not understand monotheism they thought it was a bit crazy and they also didn't understand the sacrificial system and some of the regulations that the Jews went through but unless they had some respect for the Jews still despite that respect Rome not only had trouble dealing with the local population in Israel and particularly in Jerusalem but at times it bungled the situation entirely Jerusalem itself was a real mess in some ways and at one point Pompey himself has to take over the city and restore order and what happens is as Pompey is the one who puts the half Jewish Herod on the throne of Jerusalem an interim they tried a mixture of autonomy and Roman control that just simply was not bound to work of course the Gospels give us this picture you have the Sanhedrin law court which runs Jerusalem and is in charge of any number of things but yet there was always a proconsul over the city and in the time of Christ that is Pontius Pilate and Pontius Pilate is actually a bit of a bozo he has somehow landed one of the worst jobs in the Roman army and even by the Gospel accounts he simply does not know what he's doing he on the one hand tries to make the Jews happy and yet on the other hand openly says that he doesn't really know what to do with this Jesus and he's kind of pushed and prodded into doing what the Jews want him to do which is to execute Jesus but that is only the tip of the iceberg of the problem you see the problem is is that the Romans are consistently under the assumption that the Jews are moving their way that the Jews are becoming more syncretistic that they're becoming more philosophical that they're seemingly backward ways of serving one God and following the rituals that had been there from the Old Testament we're beginning to wane and repeatedly when the Jews will not come their way the Romans resort to as antiochus the fourth did centuries before they will resort to attempting to force the Jews to come their way and so for example there are a number of attempts by Roman leaders either locally or at the wider level that attempt to push Jerusalem in this way Caligula for example the Emperor attempted to put a statue of himself in the Holy of Holies not the best idea and then at another time the procurator guess he is Flores actually raided the temple Treasury for himself and took the money and as a result the entirety of Jerusalem goes into an uproar and what he does is he simply flees he leaves the city why put this down just kind of let it Peter itself out and in fact by doing so he allows the fires to be stoked even further and so from 66 to 73 ad we have the first Jewish war and this highlights something that needs to be pointed out right now and that is that repeatedly in this period of time and back to the period of the Maccabees and even further back into the Old Testament there is nothing in the Jewish religion that is pacifistic at least not in general when pushed far enough the Jewish people's will take up arms to defend itself and to try to kick out the armies by a show of violence and what's interesting is is the Romans actually respect the choose for that there are examples of the Romans actually speaking well of the Jews for their attempt to fight for what they believed for their attempt to fight for their deities and even though the Romans will put them down and put them down with authority nevertheless because the Jews attempt to fight for what they believe in that is the Roman lingua franca that is what the Romans believe ought to be done in this case that in and of itself is one of the major differences between the Judaism of the 1st and 2nd centuries ad and that of Christianity in its early centuries when the Romans find Christians they know two things one they refer to Christians as new which again belies the fact that Romans somehow couldn't distinguish between Jews and Christians Romans always refer to Christians as that new group that new sect that superstud Co that superstitious cult they never refer to Jews that way and so when they see Christians they know the difference the other thing that Romans find is that Christians are pacifists they do not take up arms they are not rebellious there were not attempts by the Christians to rise up and to overthrow the Roman establishment and believe it or not that struck Romans as the strangest thing that ever seen for Roman to be pacifist to take the suffering upon oneself as the early Christians did was simply insane if you were God as strong they believed if you served a deity who was actually more powerful than the Roman deities then it ought to be proved and your deity ought to step in and defend you at least in some ways but in particular to be pacifist and to be a new faith at least seemingly a new faith is to be strange to the Romans and so as we move from the first century into the second century the major element of persecution that will occur for the Christians is that as they are separated in the Roman mind from the Jews what will happen is Romans will start to attack the Christians in a way that they have never attacked the Jews they will single the Christians out in a unique way and therefore it is the Christians who suffer in a different way than the Jews did before them the Jews were occasionally forced or attempted to be forced to synchronize to become more Roman to become pluralistic and they always resisted that the Christians however become illegal they become scapegoated frequently whenever calamity befalls Rome it is the Christians who are to blame Rome never treated the Jews that way but for the Christians in the first interest they will okay now as we turn to look at the actual persecutions in the early church we're going to see the in the early years in the early decades of the church the Christians were wrapped up with the Jewish context in general now as we've already said the Jews and the Christians were distinguishable by the Romans that doesn't mean that the Romans were unconcerned with the ways that Jews and Christians interacted and one of the first things that we see is that in AD 49 the Emperor Claudius actually expels the Jews in Rome due to a controversy over someone named crustose now the word crest in this case comes from a secondary source Suetonius tells us about this controversy and the majority of historians have come to the conclusion that what is happening here is that SOI toniest is simply misspelling the word for Chris toots which is Christ now there is some debate on this there are historians who do not like this conclusion but nonetheless it does seem to be the case that what is happening is is that the Jews in Rome are disputing about the nature of Christ about who Christ is was he the Messiah and that that dispute got to such a pitch that it forced the Emperor Claudius just simply to expel the Jews entirely from Rome now this opinion is the majority view by historians because in another place SOI toniest uses the same spelling when he is explicitly referring to Christian there's other evidence as well in the book of Acts chapter 18 verse 2 we find that Paul first comes into contact with Aquila and Priscilla to have his right-hand people during his ministry and this chapter tells us that Paul comes into contact with them because the Jews had been expelled from realm now it doesn't make much sense to say that here are some Christians who have been expelled from Rome because of this fight and they have arrived to help Paul in his ministry in another location and that therefore the debate in Rome was somehow irrelevant to Christianity it seems almost certainly the case given the evidence that what has happened in Rome is there was a debate that there were fights that it probably turned violent which caused Claudius to kick both Jews and Christians out in AD 49 within 15 years though the situation is more grave when Nero comes to the throne Nero in particular is violently oppressive of Christians we know by Elise tradition that the Apostle Paul was killed sometime around 66 or 67 ad in the city of Rome it is also according to tradition that Peter was crucified some say upside-down that Peter asked to be crucified upside down some say in the city of Rome but we don't have any evidence one way or the other more importantly though is the fire of Rome in AD 64 in AD 64 the city of Rome went ablaze in a significant portion of it burned down now the reason for this is of course in certain parts of Rome a lot of it is wood houses but also you have to remember that in an ancient world before you had wide streets capable of having multiple cars passed down the road very often streets would be built very close together and so from a fire hazard standpoint if a fire erupts in one part of the city it very quickly can spread throughout now even the secondary sources the pagan sources tell us that Nero was to blame for the firing of Rome or at least he was implicated now Nero denied this and what happened is that Nero is believed to have wanted to rebuild his palatial estates and down near the Colosseum region of the city and so therefore he had a section of it set fire to in order that he could then justify taking over this region now there's one myth about this and then there's an actual historical fact to it the myth about this or at least the the literary tradition that comes from it is that a lot of people say that Nero fiddled while Rome burned now Nero didn't have a fiddle that is a significantly later invention one story does say that he's sang of the fall of ilium the story that is accounted during the Iliad of Homer but whatever the case the more important situation is that Nero in order to deflect the blame that he had set fire to Rome according to the secondary sources actually turns the blame on to the Christians and let me read you a quote from Tacitus one of the secondary sources from this period Tacitus tells us that consequently to get rid of the report Nero fastened the gilt and inflicted the most exquisite torture on a class hated for their abominations called Christians by the populace Christa's from whom the name had its origins suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurator's Pontius Pilate and a most mischievous superstition now you can see in this that Tacitus is no lover of Christianity he actually refers Christianity as a super stud CEO as one of these religions that is ecstatic that attempts to control the deities in this case Christ or God he doesn't really seem to know much about the Christian faith but he does say that they are a class hated for their abominations he goes on to say however that when Nero puts the blame of the fire onto the Christians that eventually the anger by which Nero attacks the Christians and the tortures that he comes up with we're so screwing that eventually Tacitus tells us this abomination this the superstitious Christianity becomes pitied by the populace now he doesn't mean that people were going to convert for a Roman to pity something is not a good thing it is not something that they are attracted to but nonetheless they are pitying these poor souls who are being destroyed by the anger of Nero Tacitus tells us when Nero invented all kinds of tortures one of the ones that is well known is that during a party in order to provide light for his guests he had the Christians wrapped in some kind of oil cloth and then he set them afire so that their bodies once they were dead and this oil cloth would serve as a lamp for the party and there were a number of others as well and again I won't go into them because they are quite gruesome and that's Nero now again we have to stress the Neronian persecutions were intense but they were short-lived and they were localized they happened mostly in and around the city of Rome they did not happen throughout the empire the next stage of persecution in the early church that's pretty well known is the persecution under the Emperor Trajan and what happens is this one of the procurator's of a region in this case his name is plenty of the younger plenty is out in a region out into the east and he writes a letter back to Trajan and he says that he is shocked at how many in his location have become Christian and he says he is surprised because there are so many and he asked Trajan how should we handle this situation certainly we don't want people converting to Christianity and what happens is this Trajan decides to apply the policy that they had applied to all other super stat co faiths or cults throughout the empire Trajan in other words points to the way the Druids were handled in the Celtic regions of Gaul or the way that the excesses in the worship of Bacchus and that cult had been treated it Trajan says you know plenty don't go and see Christians out but in fact if two or more people in person come and accuse someone of being a Christian then you are to put them on trial and you are not just to put them on trial and ask them lots of questions about if they're Christians but you were to set up a sacrifice to one of the gods and if they offer a pinch of incense and if they taste the sacrificial meats the steaks that had been burned and cooked on the altar then we can be assured that they're not Christians and they are to go free however Trajan says if they refuse to do this or if they openly acknowledge that they are Christians than they are to be put to death now many see in this a certain generosity on the part of Trajan he's saying don't seek them out don't do heinous torture don't listen to hearsay don't if a note is slipped under your door saying my neighbor is a Christian why don't you kill them you're not to believe that you have to have someone not just one person in fact but two people come in person and make the accusation in public so that it is known and you can't just take their word for it you have to put the person on trial now again many see this as a kind of benevolence a kind of holding off of the pogroms or of the mob rule of certain actions against Christians I tend to see it the other way around though what's worse the tyranny and the hot-blooded anger of one man no matter how vicious no matter how evil the Neronian persecutions were is it worse to kill a few in a gruesome way or to apply a law that always says governors and regional procurator's throughout the Roman Empire must kill Christians if these standards are met that to me is more cold-blooded that to me is more systemic it can then be applied more uniformly on the Roman world now thankfully it was not applied uniformly that these local governors didn't always follow the rules or maybe in some cases they didn't know all the rules read it to Christians but for me for an emperor to say here's the rules on how to cold-bloodedly kill Christians here are the legal ramifications it's not enough to say don't chase them it's it but to say if they don't do these things and by the way here's a litmus test they must figure out these sacrifices and you must have them do these things and therefore you know they're a Christian and then you can kill them well again that that's more cold-blooded in the end the persecutions of Christians really follow these two patterns on the one hand the Neronian persecutions the real hot blooded passionate persecutions would endure at certain periods of time sometimes a plague would come to Rome or a certain calamitous event and Rome would get concerned and worried and suddenly in a region or in a city or in some cases in a larger region persecution of Christians would explode and for a short period of time a number of Christians would be executed that's the one hand that the more hot-blooded kind on the other hand though from the point of trajan all the way down until the time of Constantine in the 4th century Christianity is now officially on the books as an illegal religion it's illicit it is unable to meet public preaching will be immediately met by the death penalty and it's going to be both suppressed and oppressed that is to say it's going to be restricted and then if it pops its head up if Christians are found or if they do things if they proselytize these kinds of things then they are going to be suppressed they're going to be killed but in particular the pastors and the leaders of the church will come under persecution and will be executed and so for a period of about 200 years from the time of the Apostles until the third century crisis which we'll look at in a later lecture persecutions were sporadic but they were at times hot-blooded and very intense these persecutions were again not ethnic cleansing they were not systemic one can hardly say that the Roman governors ever really cared all that much for Christians except when they were forced to care when Christianity was spreading or if certain Christians were more overt in their faith maybe with preaching or proselytizing by Lords the Romans wanted to ignore the Christians and scare enough of them so that if they ever attempted to open their mouth and express their faith that they would be held back from doing so and so in the end the early centuries were a time of persecution for the Christians but even in the cases where the persecution didn't lead to thousands upon thousands of deaths nevertheless the Christian faith was a persecuted hated illegal religion for centuries after the time of the Apostles in fact according to the traditions of the death of the Apostles which again are only traditions but still of the Twelve Apostles that are recorded in the book of Acts one of course having replaced Judas all but one is said to have died a violent death at the hands of the Roman government and like the Apostles not a few of the earliest Christians paid the ultimate price for following their Lord [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Ryan Reeves

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Keywords: Christian persecution, Christian (Adherents), Nero (Roman Emperor), Trajan (Roman Emperor), Polycarp (Saint), Persecution (Quotation Subject), Early Christianity (Literature Subject), Religion (TV Genre), Roman Catholic Church (Organization Founder), Roman Empire (Country), Religion in Ancient Rome, Church Fathers, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (College/University), Ryan M. Reeves, Anti-Christian Policies In The Roman Empire, Christianity (Religion)

Id: hJR0A9phBc8

Length: 33min 5sec (1985 seconds)

Published: Tue May 27 2014