The Roman Persecutions

Rome tolerated a great many gods, but it expected everyone to honor the state's gods and, increasingly, the divine spirit of the emperor. This was less a matter of private belief than of public loyalty: the "peace of the gods" was thought to protect the empire, and a citizen who refused the customary sacrifices seemed to endanger everyone. Because Christians would worship only the one God, they were branded atheists and traitors, and when war, famine, or plague came, they made easy scapegoats.

Rumor supplied the rest. The Christian language of eating Christ's body and drinking his blood was twisted into charges of cannibalism; the "love feast" shared among people who called each other brother and sister bred whispers of incest. In many trials a Christian was condemned not for any crime but simply for confessing the Name — refusing to curse Christ and offer incense to the emperor was itself enough.

It is a common misconception that Christians were hunted without pause for three hundred years. In fact, for most of that time persecution was local and intermittent. The first state action came under Nero in the year 64, when he blamed Christians for the great fire of Rome and put many to death — but this was confined to the capital. For the next century and a half, whether a Christian was in danger depended largely on the local governor or the mood of a crowd. When the governor Pliny wrote to the emperor Trajan around the year 112 asking how to handle Christians, Trajan replied that they were not to be sought out. Famous martyrs of this era — St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Polycarp of Smyrna, the martyrs of Lyons in 177 — died in scattered local outbreaks, not an empire-wide campaign.

That changed in the third century. In 250 the emperor Decius ordered every inhabitant of the empire to sacrifice to the gods and obtain a certificate proving they had done so — the first genuinely universal persecution. Many Christians stood firm and died; many others complied out of fear, and the problem of these "lapsed" believers, and how to receive them back, troubled the Church for years afterward. Valerian renewed the assault in 257 and 258, targeting the clergy and seizing church property, until his capture and death in war brought it to a halt.

The fiercest storm came last. In 303 Diocletian launched what later Christians called the Great Persecution: churches were demolished, copies of the Scriptures burned, clergy imprisoned, and — especially in the eastern provinces — countless Christians tortured and killed. It outlasted Diocletian's own abdication, dragging on until 311, when a dying and defeated Galerius issued an edict grudgingly granting Christians the right to exist. Two years later, in 313, the emperors Constantine and Licinius agreed to the settlement remembered as the Edict of Milan, granting freedom of worship to Christians and all others and restoring their confiscated property. The persecutions were over.

The Church did not remember its dead with bitterness but with honor. The Greek word for a martyr, martys, means simply "witness": the martyrs bore witness to Christ with their blood, and their courage — sung in the feasts of the martyrs and marked in the catacombs where the faithful gathered at their tombs — did not empty the churches but filled them. As Tertullian observed in the very midst of the persecutions, the attempt to destroy the faith only sowed it more widely.