Christian trouble

The problems with understanding the conflicts between the ancient Romans and the troublesome Christians are the exact opposite. The victory of Christianity, which in the fourth century CE became the ‘official’ religion of the Roman Empire, ensured that there is an enormous amount of surviving evidence, argument and self-justification from Christian Roman writers and almost nothing from their traditional, ‘pagan’ Roman opponents outlining their objections to the new religion. The letters between Pliny and Trajan amount to one of the most loquacious non-Christian discussions of the new religion to survive. The Christian texts of the third, fourth and fifth centuries CE are some of the most extreme examples ever of the rewriting of history to fit the agenda of the winners. They construct a triumphalist history of Christianity as victorious both against its pagan rivals, despite cruel persecution by the Roman state, and against all the internal variants (‘heresies’, as later Christians defined them), which challenged what came to be Christian orthodoxy.

The truth is that for two centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus sometime in the early 30s CE, Christianity is hard to pin down. It started as a radical Jewish sect, but how and when it became clearly separated from Judaism is impossible to say. It is not even certain when ‘Christians’ started regularly to use that name for themselves; it may originally have been a nickname applied by outsiders. They were for many years small in number. The best estimate is that by 200 CE there were around 200,000 Christians in the Roman Empire, of between 50 and 60 million people, though they may have been more visible than that figure suggests, as they were overwhelmingly concentrated in towns; the word ‘pagan’ was their term for anyone who was not a Christian or a Jew, and it implied anything from ‘outsider’ to ‘rustic’. And they held a whole variety of views and beliefs about the nature of god and of Jesus and about the basic tenets of Christian faith that were gradually, and with great difficulty, pared down to the range of Christian orthodoxies (still not a single one) that we know today. Was Jesus married with children? What exactly happened at the crucifixion? Did he die or not?, many wondered, not unreasonably.

From time to time in the first two centuries CE, Roman authorities punished the Christians. There was at this period no general or systematic persecution; there was no sign of that until the mid third century CE. In practice, most of the early generations of Christians lived un-troubled by the intervention of the state. Yet they were occasionally scapegoated, as when Nero decided to shift the blame for the great fire of Rome in 64 CE on to them. They were plausible candidates perhaps, as some Christians were prophesying that the world would shortly end in flames. The letters between Pliny and Trajan suggest that there was some Roman legislation that, whether explicitly or implicitly, outlawed the religion, though we know no more than that. Pliny’s uncertainty and puzzlement are reflected on some other occasions when Romans chose to punish Christians in different parts of the empire, from Gaul to Africa.

One particularly revealing moment is described, in the account of her own trial, by a Christian woman who was sent to be killed by wild beasts in the amphitheatre in Roman Carthage in 203 CE. Vibia Perpetua, a newly converted Christian, was aged about twenty-two, married and with a young baby, when she was arrested and brought before the procurator of the province, who was acting in place of the governor who had recently died. Her memoir is the most lengthy, personal and intimate account by a woman of her own experiences to have survived from the whole of the ancient world, dwelling on her anxieties about her child and the dreams that she experienced in prison before she was sent to the beasts. Even in this account the frustration of her interrogator comes across, and his keenness to get her to recant. ‘Have pity on the white hairs of your father, have pity on your tiny baby,’ he urged her. ‘Just make a sacrifice for the well-being of the emperor.’ ‘I will not do so,’ she replied. ‘Are you a Christian?’ he asked, now putting the formal question. When she said she was – ‘Christiana sum’ – she was sentenced to death. The procurator was obviously baffled, and so it seems was the crowd who watched her die in the amphitheatre. Roman blood sports obeyed a rather strict set of rules. It was animals and criminals and the slave underclass who met their deaths, not young mothers. In fact ‘the crowd shuddered at the sight’, when they saw that Perpetua’s fellow martyr Felicitas had breasts dripping milk. So why on earth were the Romans doing this?

Whatever the letter of the law or the precise circumstances of any individual trial, there was an irreconcilable clash between traditional Roman values and Christianity. Roman religion was not only polytheistic but treated foreign gods much as it treated foreign peoples: by incorporation. As far back as the takeover of Veii in the early fourth century BCE, Rome had regularly welcomed the gods of the conquered. There were from time to time controversies and anxieties about this; the priests of the Egyptian goddess Isis found themselves expelled from the city of Rome on more than one occasion. But the basic rule was that as the Roman Empire expanded, so did its pantheon of deities. Christianity was, in theory, an exclusive monotheism, which rejected the gods who for centuries had guaranteed the success of Rome. In practice, for every Perpetua who went bravely, or in Roman eyes stubbornly, to her death, there were probably hundreds of ordinary Christians who chose to sacrifice to the traditional gods, cross their fingers and ask for forgiveness later. But on paper there could be no accommodation.

The same was true, in a sense, of Judaism. But to a remarkable and in some ways unexpected degree, the Jews managed to operate within Roman culture. For the Romans, Christianity was far worse. First, it had no ancestral home. In their ordered religious geography, Romans expected deities to be from somewhere: Isis from Egypt, Mithras from Persia, the Jewish god from Judaea. The Christian god was rootless, claimed to be universal and sought more adherents. All kinds of mystical moments of enlightenment might attract new worshippers to (say) the religion of Isis. But Christianity was defined entirely by a process of spiritual conversion that was utterly new. What is more, some Christians were preaching values that threatened to overturn some of the most fundamental Greco-Roman assumptions about the nature of the world and of the people within it: that poverty, for example, was good; or that the body was to be tamed or rejected rather than cared for. All these factors help to explain the worries, confusion and hostility of Pliny and others like him.

At the same time, the success of Christianity was rooted in the Roman Empire, in its territorial extent, in the mobility that it promoted, in its towns and its cultural mix. From Pliny’s Bithynia to Perpetua’s Carthage, Christianity spread from its small-scale origins in Judaea largely because of the channels of communication across the Mediterranean world that the Roman Empire had opened up and because of the movement through those channels of people, goods, books and ideas. The irony is that the only religion that the Romans ever attempted to eradicate was the one whose success their empire made possible and which grew up entirely within the Roman world.