Bring wild beasts, bring crosses, bring fire, bring tortures. I know that as soon as I die, I come forth from the body. I rest in Christ. Therefore let us struggle, let us wrestle, let us groan.
—Origen1
The great majority of the early martyrs were Christians of a type which the Church would later classify as heretic.
—Paul Johnson2
Christianity is a religion of immense power and beauty. During its two-thousand-year history, it has been the frame upon which Western civilization has draped many of its most splendid vestments. It has provided laws to the lawless, succor to the sick, solace to the despairing, nourishment to the soul, answers to the perplexed, alms to the poor, protection to the dispossessed, and order to the confused. The message contained within its sacred text persuaded many followers to disavow their baser impulses. Christian rituals have suffused the prosaic with solemnity and the sacred with glory. Its art, music, and architecture have engendered throat-tightening awe. The story of the arisen god in springtime has invited multitudes to touch the hem of two of the most basic human longings: surcease of anxiety and everlasting life.
During periods in the West when civility and civilization were trampled under and left mud-caked by the hooves of warring armies, Christianity kept alive the principles of faith, hope, and charity. When learning and literacy were all but extinguished, Christianity attended the lamps with steadfastness. Yet, it was during the rise of Christianity that an aberration previously absent from human society began to manifest—group suicide.
Early in the second century, for the first time in the historical record of any culture anywhere, ordinary people willingly relinquished their lives en masse out of loyalty to cherished convictions about abstract concepts. The word martyr slipped into the stream of language. Martyr is the Greek word for witness. In the second century, mass martyrdom became common.
In previous ages, mothers sacrificed their lives on rare occasions so that their children might live. On occasion, warriors sometimes chose death to protect their comrades. In defense of home and hearth whole tribes, armies, and even cities willingly went to their deaths now and then. Once in a blue moon a love-sick youth might become so stricken that suicide seemed the only way to achieve relief. But these were the acts of isolated individuals. Child, comrade, lover, home, and hearth were specific things for which to die. There is no evidence from the study of preliterate tribes or archaeological digs that any early peoples chose martyrdom for the sake of philosophical or theological principles. The only exceptions to this important canon of self-preservation were the Jews and Greeks, the two alphabet cultures. They consistently defended their ideals to the death. The Greeks united against the invading Persian despot, Xerxes, to preserve their freedom, and the Jews under the Maccabees fought to the death for the right to practice their religion. In both instances the Jews and Greeks were also defending home and hearth. Until the Christian martyrs, there does not occur anywhere in the recorded history of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Greece, India, or China a single instance in which a substantial segment of the population accepted torture and death rather than forswear their belief in an ethereal concept. The instinct for survival, present in every living creature, is supreme. What unique circumstances, we might ask, enabled many early Christians to override the circuit breakers of this most fundamental hard-wiring?
Within a few years after Jesus’ death the Jews did the unthinkable. They revolted against the Romans. As quixotic as this insurrection appeared to contemporary observers, it turned out to be the Empire’s Vietnam. Roman generals grossly underestimated the tenacity of the Jewish urban guerrillas who revolted on three separate occasions (A.D. 66, 113, and 132).* The setbacks experienced by the Roman military machine in Judea shattered the idea of Roman invincibility. Once they were compelled to reinforce their legions there, the Romans never again expanded the borders of their realm.3 As the populace became more rebellious within, the barbarians at the Empire’s outer fringes became bolder. Imperceptibly, the pugnacious offensive posture that had characterized Roman rule shifted uneasily to a defensive one. Aware of their vulnerability, they became more tyrannous.
But the three revolts against Rome instigated by right-wing Jewish zealots brought death, destruction and exile to the Jews who had resided in Judea. The ferocity with which Jews fought these wars combined with the previous internecine conflicts of the Jewish Hasmonean families can also be classified as a kind of cultural madness. The Jews had enjoyed a fairly privileged position within the Roman Empire. By revolting, they very nearly destroyed themselves in what can be viewed as a sort of national suicide.
Against this background, the fledgling Christians began to organize into a movement that would reshape the world. The core of their beliefs repudiated pagan values, all things Roman, and authority in general. At first, sophisticated Romans viewed the new sect as an aberration. The Roman historian Suetonius called the Christians “depraved”4 and Tacitus characterized Christianity as a “deadly superstition.”5 Emperor Marcus Aurelius despised them as morbid and misguided exhibitionists.6 To Romans, the Christians were atheistic pacifists who refused to acknowledge Roman deities or to serve in the military, and who disrespected the emperor.
From the Jews, the Christians inherited the idea that living in truth was the supreme aspiration of life and they made this the fundamental tenet of their faith. They set up charitable institutions to help the poor and ministered to the sick and unfortunate. Their piety appealed to the better natures of many in the Empire disaffected with the State religion.
As had happened during the high point of Classical Greece, Rome’s Golden Age of letters and rationality coincided with an outbreak of madness. During the years of the Roman Republic, madness rarely appeared in either rulers or populace. But with the advent of the Empire in the first century B.C., it became increasingly manifest. The emperor Caligula tried to have his horse declared a deity. The emperor Nero killed his mother, then ordered her abdomen slit open because he wanted to inspect the womb that had carried him. The emperor Hadrian insisted that his dead boy-lover, Antinoos, be declared a god. But these isolated episodes were only preludes to one of the most extraordinary instances of mass madness.
Emboldened by the rebellious Judeans, early Christians refused to acknowledge the divine authority of Roman gods. The Romans, for their part, were acutely aware of the political price they had already paid for not insisting upon complete compliance by the Jews. The stage was set. Although the dispute was ostensibly about the divinity of Christ versus the genius of Jupiter, the shadowy figure behind this confrontation was the cannibal embodiment of Dionysus. As Roman legal proceedings droned on in hushed tones in a thousand courts, his maenads picked up their thrysus wands and began their deadly, circling dance.
After having been proscribed by the Hebrews, renounced by the Greeks, and outlawed by the Romans, human sacrifice made a dramatic reappearance. The flesh-eating, blood-drinking component of the Dionysian myth had been, for the most part, imaginary. In their rites, the Greeks pretended to be predatory animals who rent the flesh from a live human. In practice, they disguised themselves in lion and leopard skins and substituted a ritual animal in the human effigy’s place.
But what had been fantastical in Greece became preternaturally real in the Roman coliseum. Christians were literally torn apart and eaten by lions and leopards in a carnival atmosphere before festive crowds. In the new popular religion, God had sacrificed his own Son, and the Son had willingly suffered and died to ameliorate the human condition. Emulating Christ’s sacrifice, Christians participated willingly in this carnage.
Ignatius, writing from aboard the prison ship taking him to Rome for his martyrdom, pleaded with his friends not to interfere.
I am writing to all the churches, and I give injunction to everyone, that I am dying willingly for God’s sake, if you do not prevent it. I plead with you not to do an “unreasonable kindness” to me. Allow me to be eaten by the beasts, through whom I can attain to God. I am God’s wheat, and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts, so that I may become pure bread of Christ… Do me this favor… Let there come upon me fire, and the cross, and struggle with wild beasts, cutting and tearing apart, racking of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body… may I but attain to Jesus Christ.7
In A.D. 190, the Roman proconsul Antonius proceeded to Asia Minor under instructions from the emperor to eradicate Christianity. He set up a tribunal to try suspected Christians and let it be known that if they were willing to pay homage to the emperor’s divinity, they could go free; if not, they faced torture and death. To Antonius’s astonishment, hundreds of Christians voluntarily crowded before him begging for martyrdom. Most of them he dismissed with the words, “Miserable creatures! If you wish to die, are there not ropes and precipices?”8 This was not an isolated event. Antonius’s experience was replicated throughout the conservative Roman Empire. Court records preserved from a Roman province in North Africa tell one such story. The proconsul Saturninus worked to save the lives of nine men and three women accused of being Christian.
If you return to your senses, you can obtain a pardon from our lord the emperor… We too are a religious people, and our religion is a simple one: We swear by the genius of our lord the emperor and offer prayers for his health—as you ought to do too.
Meeting their determined resistance, Saturninus asked, “You wish no time for reconsideration?” Speratus, one of the accused, replied, “In so just a matter, there is no need for consideration.” In spite of this, the proconsul ordered a thirty-day reprieve, urging the Christians to think it over, but thirty days later, Saturninus was forced to give the order:
Whereas Speratus, Narzalus, Cittinus, Donata, Vestia, Secunda, and the others have confessed that they have been living in accordance with the rites of the Christians, and whereas, though they have been given the opportunity to return to the Roman usage, they have persevered in their obstinacy, they are hereby condemned to be executed by the sword.
Speratus exclaimed, “We thank God!” Narzalus added, “Today we are martyrs in heaven. Thanks be to God!”9
The Church’s early leaders, observing that human sacrifice paradoxically increased their numbers instead of diminishing them, encouraged potential martyrs to give up their lives for the cause. Convinced that the “blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church,” Tertullian mocked the Roman authorities’ persecutions and taunted them to be more repressive.
Historians who chronicle the Roman Empire must tell two parallel stories. First, there is the panoramic sweep of the rise and fall of a mighty legal, civic, artistic, engineering, and military institution. Despite its excesses, Pax Romana provided a stability never before experienced in Western civilization. For a large segment of the Western world’s population, prosperity, hygiene, and civic order were the fruits of Roman pacification.
Then there is the remarkable rise of Christianity that began when Rome was at the height of its power. This improbable movement overcame the regime’s native religions and outlived Rome’s expiring corpus. Edward Gibbon described the period circumscribing the birth and death of Jesus:
If a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation name that which elapsed from the accession of Nerva to the death of Aurelius. Their united reigns are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.10
Examining the rise and decline of Rome and the explosive emergence of a new religion reveals several striking coincidences.
Roman culture passed through several distinct stages. Law and democracy were the hallmarks of the Republic, which marked the first four hundred years of Roman history. Rome produced only minor art during this expansive period. The Empire, the next four hundred years, witnessed an artistic renaissance. And while the Empire’s ethical standards declined, Rome expressed itself creatively through the works of Cicero, Livy, Ovid, Virgil, Terence, and many others.
The success of these writers was due in no small part to the elegant simplicity of the Latin alphabet and the stability of Pax Romana. Under Rome’s rule many people learned how to read and write. Papyrus from Egypt, tutors from Greece, and knowledge from every corner poured into the center. By the time of Christ, book publishing had hit highs never before experienced.11 The great Library of Alexandria contained 532, 000 works in the first century; although the largest library, it was by no means the only one. Wealthy Romans collected books with a passion, and armies of slave scribes were kept busy copying them. According to Seneca, “Private libraries had become as common as baths in the houses of the rich.”12 The first romantic novels and adventure stories in prose appeared.13
Among the five principal factors Gibbon listed as responsible for the rise of Christianity, one was the presence of a large, alphabet-literate population. Christianity was the first alphabet-based religion to spread in a population that was already largely alphabet-literate. The ground had been prepared. All that was needed was a sacred book to be the seed, and Paul and the Gospel writers he influenced planted it. The religion gained converts at the moment in history when many previously illiterate people were learning how to communicate in a new culture-transforming medium.
The sudden appearance of a new religion that encouraged one to give up one’s life for one’s belief occurred at the acme of pragmatic, sensible Rome’s literary, philosophical, engineering, and legal triumphs. It is an extraordinary synchronicity that the meteoric ascent of a religion whose premise was anti-intellectual and anti-rational should occur during the period when Rome approached the zenith of its written accomplishments. A similar parallelism had occurred four hundred years earlier during the Golden Age of Greece. The burst of rationalism epitomized by the logical arguments of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle was accompanied by the ecstatic worship of Dionysus. Both cultures, Greek and Roman, experienced a sudden pulse propelling them toward left-brain values. The engine behind this pullulation was alphabet literacy. This imbalance unhinged culture. In compensation, these cultures exhibited behavior that can only be characterized as mad. Christianity was not a mad religion, but the awful sacrifices some Christians were willing to make for it in those early years could be considered mad.* Reason and madness, yoked unwillingly to each other, must advance together like partners in a three-legged sack race.
The role of the alphabet in changing a culture’s religious beliefs is best illustrated by events that occurred in Egypt. Many historians have puzzled over the rapid and enthusiastic conversion of Egyptians to Christianity in the second century.14 Egypt was, after all, an immensely ancient culture whose principal characteristic was resistance to change. Despite having been conquered by diverse foreigners throughout its three-thousand-year history, Egyptians retained their fealty to Osiris, Isis, Amon, Maat, and Anubis. Contrary to expectations, the people who conquered them more often than not adopted the Egyptians’ gods and attendant myths, and Egypt thus influenced every major civilization in the area. Osiris became Dionysus, Attis, and Adonis; Maat transformed into Athena and Minerva; and Isis was the model for Demeter and Cybele. Then, in the late second century A.D., the Egyptian people abruptly deserted their ancient gods and replaced them with a new religion emanating from a foreign land—and not from just any foreign land, but from Judea.
At that time, Jews were a prominent minority in’ Egypt. In Alexandria, they comprised one-fifth of the population.15 The Jews’ spare, imageless religion was the complete opposite of its Egyptian counterpart. There is historical evidence that the Egyptians resented them. Egyptians were familiar with the Jewish Passover, which annually celebrated the killing of Egyptian sons, the defeat and death of a pharaoh, and the Egyptian people’s humiliation because of the Jewish deity. This celebration posed a serious impediment for any proselytizer of a religion whose central character was Jewish. Why then did the Egyptians abandon the rich bureaucracy of their own religion, attack their own priests, despoil their own temples, and embrace with a fervor unmatched anywhere else in the ancient world a new creed revolving about the story of a crucified Jewish prophet?
Alfred North Whitehead’s contention that innovations nearly wreck the societies within which they occur applies to all forms of writing. In the second century B.C., the alphabet was in use by every Mediterranean people except the hidebound Egyptians, who stubbornly refused to accept it. Instead, they refined their hieratic script into a sort of shorthand called demotic, based on the syllabary rather than on the alphabetic principle. Fighting a valiant rearguard action against that cultural wrecking ball, the alphabet, they merged elements of demotic with alphabetic principles to form Coptic, an Egyptian original. Almost overnight, the cumbersome hieroglyphics and hieratic script disappeared and Coptic replaced demotic. Was it merely coincidence that at the very moment Egypt was contending with an alphabetic writing system, the country should be swept by a new religion emanating from the Jews, the oldest alphabet culture? I submit that it is doubtful that Christianity could have ever gained a footing in Egypt if the Gospels had been written in hieroglyphics. And there are no traces of hieratic or demotic Gospels—only Coptic ones. Coptic is so intertwined with Christianity that today the term “Coptic” has two specific meanings: one refers to the Egyptian alphabet, the other to Egyptian Christians.
In Egypt, where women had enjoyed the greatest equality, Clement of Alexandria vowed to destroy their rights. The Christian cleric held in his hand a spurious gospel written in the new Coptic alphabet in which he claimed that Jesus had warned, “I have come to destroy the works of the female.”16 Clement’s paraphrase was surely an adulteration inspired by a Coptic misogynist.
After Christianity became Rome’s state religion, Church fathers ordered the destruction of images. Zealous believers ran amok in the streets, sledge hammers and knives in hand, attacking the painstakingly crafted statuary and paintings that represented two millennia of classical culture. They destroyed works of Praxiteles, Pheidias, and Lysippus. Impassioned Christians were probably responsible for knocking the nose off the Sphinx and the arms off the Venus de Milo.*17 Those engaged in marble smashing and image slashing made no distinction between religious statues and the likenesses of prominent Romans. Why did the Church fathers order the landscape cleared not only of images of pagan deities but of all images of anything? For the same reason that Moses declared images subversive: in order for a left-brained written message to dominate, images, perceived by the right brain, must be effaced.
Women’s rights were also attacked, even though women had comprised a majority of early Christians. In the beginning, alongside men, women had conducted all important ceremonies and frequently led congregations in prayer. They nurtured the new Church, bequeathed their fortunes to it, proselytized for it, and even, not uncommonly, gave their lives for it. Since this new Church was based on feminine principles, it should have followed that women would continue to play a central role in it, and they did—until the spoken word of Jesus was transcribed. Once Jesus’ oral message was codified in ink, women found themselves reduced to second-class status.
As the New Testament grew in stature, women’s rights were curtailed and imagery was eliminated. In 380 the temple of Isis at Philoe was closed. In 391, the temple of Artemis at Ephesus was sacked. In 390, a mob under the direction of the patriarch Theophilus attacked and burned the library in Alexandria because it contained pagan classics. In 425, Theodosius II closed all the synagogues in Palestine. In 529, Justinian ordered the Academy of Athens disbanded. Christianity, a religion originally based on loving tolerance, had become tyrannically intolerant.
In the spring of 415, an episode occurred that epitomized the portentous change in women’s fortunes. Hypatia was a renowned woman mathematician and the head of the Neoplatonist school of philosophy in the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria. As such, she was the leading advocate of the Orphic creed.18 Her modesty, beauty, and eloquence attracted a large number of pupils of both sexes, and she exemplified wisdom, learning and science. Cyril, Alexandria’s Christian patriarch, resented her position and influence. One day as she was passing through the streets, he had a group of Nitrian monks ambush her and drag her from her carriage. They took her to a church, where she was stripped and spread-eagled. The monks tortured her to death by scraping her flesh from her bones with oyster shells, and then tore her corpse apart. This torture and mutilation echoed the frenzy of the mythical maenads rendering their male victims. With the steep ascension of a patriarchal paradigm based on an alphabetic text, both the maenads and their sacrificial victim had changed gender.
*Josephus, a chronicler of these wars, estimates that Romans killed one and one-half million Jews. Even if this is an exaggeration, it speaks to the sheer savagery of the conflict.
*If children today decided to sacrifice their lives for a new religion, parents would declare that behavior mad.
*Books on the subject instructed pious worshipers that knocking off the nose or the ear of the statue could destroy the powers of an idol. This probably accounts for the fact that noses are missing from so many ancient statues.