The Logic of Pagan Persecution
We began this book by noticing a question posed in the early second century by the provincial governor Pliny and again some decades later by the Christian lawyer and apologist Tertullian: Why did the Roman authorities persecute, prosecute, and often execute people just for being Christian? Pliny, the governor, found the Christians to be irritatingly inflexible and superstitious, but his investigations uncovered no criminal conduct on their part. And yet he sentenced to death anyone brought before him who confessed to being a Christian, without proof of any other crime. And his emperor, Trajan, approved this policy. For his part, Tertullian, the apologist, insisted that Christians were exemplary citizens who obeyed the laws, took care of themselves and their needy, and prayed without ceasing for the welfare of the empire and the emperor. And yet, he protested to the Roman authorities, “[you] rend us with your iron claws, hang us up on crosses, wrap us in flames, take our heads from us with the sword, let loose the wild beasts upon us.”1
Why? Why would the Romans, much admired (by modern historians, at least, if not by early Christians like Tertullian) for their religious and cultural tolerance,2 imprison, enslave, torture, and kill people just for being Christian? Pliny wasn’t sure; he inquired of Trajan but got no answer. Tertullian was convinced that there was no adequate justification—hence his vehement protest to the “rulers of the Roman world.”
Having raised but deferred this question in the first chapter, we are now in a position to consider an answer. Extrapolating and synthesizing, we will be able to see how it might have seemed both to pagans like Pliny and to Christians like Tertullian that peaceful and mutually respectful coexistence should have been possible, if only the other side would be less unreasonable. It seemed that way, though, because each side misunderstood and misjudged the other. Both pagans and Christians in effect held out terms of mutual accommodation that seemed fair and reasonable to them, but that for discernible reasons were not—and could not be—accepted by the other side. The failure to achieve mutually acceptable terms of coexistence meant that so long as the pagans were in power, Christians were naturally treated with suspicion and were often persecuted.
In this chapter we will consider the terms of peaceful coexistence that Christians offered to pagans, and the alternative terms that pagans offered to Christians. And we will see why neither party could embrace the other party’s terms without sacrificing or betraying its own beliefs and commitments. Hence the Roman persecution of Christians. Hence the centuries-long struggle between paganism and Christianity. (Hence also, at some removes, the contemporary culture wars—but that is for later chapters.)
The Fact of (Episodic) Persecution
Although the fact that Christians were persecuted will hardly seem a shocking observation, opposing misconceptions make it useful to note at the outset, first, that persecution did in fact occur—contrary to a recent, much-noticed book, it was not a “myth” that was “invented” by Christians3—but, second, that such persecution was episodic, not constant.
The earliest persecutions of Christians are recorded in the New Testament. Thus, Jesus warned his followers that “men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.”4 The Gospels go on to explain how Jesus himself was crucified, at the instigation of Jewish authorities but with the consent and assistance of the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate.5 The Acts of the Apostles records additional public and private persecution carried out under the oversight if not the direction of Roman authorities: the stoning of Stephen, the execution of James, the imprisonment of Peter, the sundry prosecutions and extralegal sanctions inflicted on Paul and his evangelizing associates.6
Paul himself elaborated on these afflictions in various epistles addressing persecutions suffered by different Christian communities. In these letters, Paul attempted to strengthen those communities in the faith so that they would be able to endure such punishments.7 The strange, often inscrutable book of Revelation, or the Apocalypse, attributed to the apostle John, has been interpreted by scholars as an allegorical response to severe ongoing persecution.8
Later Christian traditions confidently recollected that the church’s principal early leaders, Peter and Paul, were executed in Rome, probably during the reign of Nero.9 Somewhat hazier traditions, later gathered and provocatively presented to the English-speaking world in Foxe’s influential Book of Martyrs, recount the gruesome executions of many or most of the other leading original disciples. In addition to Simon Peter, two other Simons—the brother of Jude, and the Zealot—were crucified.10 Mark, the Evangelist, “was beaten down with staves, then crucified; and after . . . beheaded.”11 Matthew, another Evangelist, was run through with a spear. Philip was “crucified and stoned to death.”12 And so forth. So at least related John Foxe.
In later decades, the official persecution of Christians was episodic but, when it occurred, horrific. Christians would be sent into the Colosseum, or the arenas in other cities, to be devoured by wild animals. Or they might be sentenced to labor under the appalling conditions of the imperial mines. Christian women were consigned to work in brothels.13 Some Christians were roasted alive in the “iron chair.”14 Under Nero, the Roman historian Tacitus reported, Christians were “dressed in wild animals’ skins,” to be “torn to pieces by dogs” or “made into torches to be ignited after dark as substitutes for daylight.”15
The fourth-century church historian Eusebius recorded numerous instances of such persecution, carefully and even tediously listing his sources—sometimes “tradition,” sometimes letters or writings of earlier periods.16
Most of the postapostolic martyrs have passed into comparative anonymity; the city of Rome contains dozens of churches named after (and sometimes claiming relics of) ancient martyrs whom hardly anyone today has heard of. But a few—Ignatius, Polycarp, Perpetua, Justin, Origen, Cyprian—achieved legendary status.
Historians both ancient and modern have agreed that the persecution of Christians was sporadic, at least at the imperial level.17 Eusebius chronicled in sometimes lurid terms the persecutions Christians had endured, but he also made it clear that not all the emperors engaged in persecution.18 Before the so-called Great Persecution of the early fourth century that he himself lived through, Eusebius related, the Christian religion “was accorded honor and freedom by all men, Greeks and non-Greeks alike. Rulers granted our people favors and even permitted them to govern provinces, while freeing them from the agonizing issue of [pagan] sacrifice. In the imperial palaces, emperors allowed members of their own households—wives, children, and servants—to practice the faith openly. . . . All governors honored the church leaders, mass meetings gathered in every city, and congregations worshiped in new, spacious churches.”19
Eusebius’s contemporary, the Christian scholar Lactantius, wrote in a similar vein. In a book devoted to describing the horrors endured by Christians and the gruesome deaths suffered by some of their persecutors, Lactantius was also explicit that “while many well-deserving princes guided the helm of the Roman empire, the Church suffered no violent assaults from her enemies.”20
To be sure, most governmental business occurred at the provincial or local levels, and a dearth of evidence makes it difficult to determine the extent of persecution by local authorities—or by mobs acting without official mandate but sometimes with official acquiescence.21 The provincial governor Pliny was a loquacious sort of official who wrote often to the emperor Trajan, and whose correspondence was preserved; we accordingly know much more about what he did as governor than about the doings of almost any other similar Roman official.22 One thing we know is that Pliny was executing people merely for being Christians, not because of any idiosyncratic anti-Christian animus but rather because he assumed that this was what a governor was supposed to do. Were other provincial officials acting similarly on the same assumption? It would be surprising if some were not.23
Thus, a few years after Pliny, in a protest to the Roman Senate, Justin Martyr described executions imposed on people merely for being Christian by a Roman prefect named Urbicus.24 Justin added that similar measures “are likewise being everywhere unreasonably done by the governors.”25 It seems unlikely that Justin would have complained to the senators about official executions occurring in their own city if there had been no factual basis for the complaint.
Still, the lack of solid evidence makes it difficult to quantify how many Christians may have been punished or executed. Estimates of the number of Christians killed under Nero alone range from a few hundred to just under a thousand.26 Guesses as to the total number of Christians martyred under Roman rule vary radically from under ten thousand to almost one hundred thousand.27 Not surprisingly, Christian apologists (like John Foxe) have often offered inflated accounts; historians hostile to Christianity have inclined to more depreciating estimates. Edward Gibbon, with his contempt for the Christians and his admiration bordering on adulation for the Romans, treated the stories of Christian martyrs as “an undigested mass of fiction and error”;28 the Enlightenment historian wrote a long chapter drawing every possible inference that might serve to reduce the extent and severity of the persecutions.
Gibbon was explicit about his interpretive assumptions. The Romans were possessed of “the universal toleration of Polytheism”;29 their officials “were actuated, not by the furious zeal of bigots, but by the temperate policy of legislators.”30 Such a civilized people would not have been inclined to persecute: it just wasn’t in their character. (Gibbon, of course, had not lived to witness the atrocities carried out under the Third Reich in the land of Goethe, Kant, and Bach.) The Christians, conversely, were credulous and superstitious, so their own reports should be discounted.31 If Christians reported intolerance by the Romans (who we know, or at least Gibbon knew, were not intolerant), the Christians were probably misrepresenting the facts; indeed, they were probably just projecting onto their adversaries the “implacable and unrelenting zeal which filled their own breasts.”32 Gibbon did not deny that some Christians had been executed by the Romans, but he thought the number was probably much smaller than Christians themselves supposed.
Whatever the body count may have been, though, it seems clear enough that over the first three centuries of the religion’s existence, thousands of Christians, including a significant number of church leaders, were tortured, imprisoned, or killed for the offense of being Christian. Which once again raises the question: Why?
Christianity and Civic Allegiance
As we saw in the previous chapter, pagan religiosity served to secure the subjects’ support for a city deemed to be consecrated by its association with the gods. Christians had an entirely different conception: they regarded themselves as pilgrims in the world, or as “resident aliens” whose higher loyalty was not to the earthly city but rather to their heavenly abode. Despite these differences in pagan and Christian conceptions of the relation of the individual to the city, it would not necessarily follow that the conceptions were incompatible in practice. And indeed, both Christians and pagans could and sometimes did propose that peaceful coexistence should be possible on fair and mutually acceptable terms. In proposing this, however, both sides failed fully to grasp and credit the other side’s commitments.
Let us begin by considering the Christian position. Although Christians believed that their ultimate commitment was to a divine sovereign and a heavenly city, they insisted that they could still be loyal subjects of the earthly city. They could say this in complete good faith, because in fact their own Scriptures commanded as much. Albeit in cryptic fashion, perhaps, Jesus had enjoined his followers to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”33 The apostle Paul had reached a similar though seemingly even more categorical conclusion through a remarkable or at least inventive (albeit contestable) piece of logic: he had deduced the obligation to respect earthly rulers from the very fact of divine sovereignty: “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. . . . Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.”34
In the spirit of these teachings, Tertullian insisted, as we saw in chapter 1, that “without ceasing, for all our emperors we [Christians] offer prayer. We pray for life prolonged; for security to the empire; for protection to the imperial house; for brave armies, a faithful senate, a virtuous people, the world at rest, whatever, as man or Caesar, an emperor would wish.”35 In a similar vein, Athenagoras the Athenian maintained to the emperor Marcus Aurelius that “[we Christians] are of all men most piously and righteously disposed toward the Deity and towards your government.”36 Justin Martyr protested to the emperor Antoninus Pius that “everywhere we [Christians], more readily than all men, endeavour to pay to those appointed by you the taxes both ordinary and extraordinary, as we have been taught by Him.”37
Tertullian, Athenagoras, and Justin were in effect proposing terms for peaceful coexistence. Normally, Tertullian argued, addressing the “rulers of the Roman Empire,”38 you let people believe as they are so inclined, however nonsensical their beliefs may seem to you,39 so long as the believers pay allegiance to the government and do not behave subversively. All we Christians are asking for is to be treated under that benign policy. We obey the laws, take care of our own, and support and pray for the emperor and the empire. Why isn’t this enough?
Had he been preternaturally prescient, Tertullian might have tried to phrase his proposal in Rawlsian terms. Given religious and cultural diversity (which the Roman Empire had in abundance), a just political community should be grounded in an “overlapping consensus” among citizens whose “comprehensive doctrines” are significantly divergent.40 The pagan and Christian worldviews or “comprehensive doctrines” were obviously very different, but they converged in prescribing allegiance to earthly rulers and obedience to the laws adopted by those rulers. That convergence supplied the “overlapping consensus”—not at that time a “liberal” consensus, to be sure, but one supportive of imperial authority—on which a just, mutually respectful political community should be maintained.
So, could Romans accept these terms of coexistence? Sometimes they could and did, at least as a practical matter.41 Robert Wilken observes that “in most areas of the Roman Empire Christians lived quietly and peaceably among their neighbors, conducting their affairs without disturbance.”42 As we have seen, Eusebius made the same point: during much of their existence Christians were “accorded honor and freedom by all men, Greeks and non-Greeks alike.”43 But such coexistence was more a matter of pragmatic accommodation than of agreement on principles. Then, as now, people could often manage to live together precisely by not fully appreciating and forthrightly declaring their own basic beliefs, and thus by overlooking or ignoring the fundamental incompatibilities of theirs and their neighbors’ outlooks.44 In sum, pagans might often put up with Christians, but they could not truly and understandingly embrace the Christian terms of political cooperation.
We noticed briefly in the previous chapter a recent book that argues that as they got to know Christians better, pagans were able to accept Christians as fellow subjects of the empire.45 In reality, the truth is closer to the opposite. So long as Christianity remained a remote and little-understood sect, Roman authorities might have little practical reason to suspect or repress it. After all, they were used to putting up with all manner of exotic cults. But as the doctrines and commitments of the new faith were more clearly and forcefully presented, the incompatibility of Christianity with the pagan religiosity on which Rome was founded could become more conspicuous.
We can consider the reasons for this incompatibility under four general headings: allegiance, subversion, desecration, and liberty.
Ineffective Allegiance
Christians like Tertullian may have been perfectly sincere in professing their support for the empire and the emperor. But the Romans were concerned not merely with internal or subjective sincerity; they had also developed a formal and empirically verifiable way for subjects to manifest their allegiance. More specifically, subjects were expected to make formal, visible sacrifices to the gods and to the divine emperors. Pliny’s method of testing accused Christians drew on this practice; to exonerate themselves, indicted persons were required to make sacrificial offerings to the gods.46
The exact patterns in which sacrifices were offered seem to have varied from region to region and city to city. Following the triumph of Augustus, cults to the divine emperors proliferated; some were regional, some municipal, some even more localized.47 But in one form or another, as Steven Friessen explains, “imperial cults in Asia permeated Roman imperial society, leaving nothing untouched. So it is almost impossible to separate imperial cults from public religion, from entertainment, from commerce, from governance, from household worship, and so on.”48 Bruce Winter observes that “participation in these cultic activities in the Greek East and the Latin West in the first century provided the opportunity for everyone to express publicly undivided loyalty to those who brought them the divine blessing of pax romana.”49 But “opportunity” is not quite the right word, because the expression of loyalty was not optional. “All citizens were required to express loyalty to emperors who . . . were addressed with same titles that the Christians used of Jesus.”50
For Christians, this requirement presented a serious theological and practical problem. They of course did not believe in the gods—or rather, they believed the “gods” were in reality demons51—nor did they believe that the emperors were divine. Could they nonetheless perform the ritual sacrifices, on the assumption that no real harm was done in pretending to sacrifice to ostensible deities that were not in fact real, or at least not really deities? Some Christians drew this convenient conclusion.52 But others regarded such performances as a betrayal of the faith and a forbidden performance of idolatrous worship.53
An early Christian document of uncertain authorship seeks to describe how this process worked in the case of Justin Martyr and several companions.54 The men were brought before a Roman prefect named Rusticus and asked whether they were Christians. They answered that they were. After some follow-up examination, Rusticus then proposed that the men sacrifice to the gods.55 Justin declined, observing that “no right-thinking person falls away from piety to impiety.”56 His companions did likewise. Rusticus then pronounced sentence: “Let those who have refused to sacrifice to the gods and to yield to the command of the emperor be scourged, and led away to suffer the punishment of decapitation, according to the laws.”57 And the sentence was duly carried out. Records of the trial and execution in the next century of the influential African bishop Cyprian reveal a very similar procedure.58
In the early decades, Christians sometimes managed to be excused from the sacrificial rites by claiming an exemption that the Jews had received based on the assumption that sacrifices performed in the temple in Jerusalem could substitute for the standard sacrifices normally required of Roman subjects.59 The earliest Christians were Jews, after all, and it is likely that some early Christian leaders—the ones with whom Paul carried on a famous and fierce contention—insisted that even converted Greeks and Romans should be required to adopt Jewish customs and practices, such as circumcision, precisely so that Christians could continue to claim this Jewish exemption, thereby avoiding the requirement of sacrificing to the emperors and the other gods.60 But as the divide between Christians and Jews became more conspicuous,61 Christians forfeited their claim to the Jewish exemption, and thereby faced the daunting dilemma: to sacrifice (and thereby betray the faith) or not to sacrifice (and thereby face severe legal sanctions, including execution).
Sometimes the dilemma arose in connection with commercial activity. Bruce Winter explains that “as a prerequisite to engaging in any commercial transaction [Christians] had to give specific divine honours to the Caesars. Without doing so they would not have been able to secure provisions for their daily needs, as all goods could only be bought or sold through the authorized markets in a first-century city.”62 Subjects had to be certified for economic activity: “Then, and only then, could they sell or purchase essential commodities.”
But sanctions for noncompliance were not limited to exclusion from the marketplace; they could include exile or “summary execution.”63 Nor was it only commercial activity that placed Christians in this precarious situation. Gibbon observed that “the innumerable deities and rites of polytheism were closely interwoven with every circumstance of business or pleasure, of public and of private life; and it seemed impossible to escape the observance of them, without, at times, renouncing the commerce of mankind, and all the offices and amusements of society.” With characteristic sarcasm, Gibbon went on to observe that “the Christian, who with pious horror avoided the abomination of the circus or the theatre, found himself encompassed with infernal snares in every convivial entertainment, as often as his friends invoking the hospitable deities, poured out libations to each other’s happiness.”64
Some Christians submitted to the relentless pressure and complied with the requirements—by performing the pagan sacrifices. But others refused. To the Romans, this refusal signified a failure of allegiance; persecution and punishment predictably followed.
Subversion
But Christians did not merely fall short in their demonstration of allegiance; intentionally or not, they actively and affirmatively subverted the foundations of Roman authority.65 That is because the doctrines that Christians preached to the world fundamentally contradicted and thus undermined the basis of civic allegiance and obligation in the Roman political system. “By embracing the faith of the Gospel,” Gibbon explained, “the Christians . . . dissolved the sacred ties of custom and education, violated the religious institutions of their country, and presumptuously despised whatever their fathers believed as true, or had reverenced as sacred.”66
Pragmatic authorities, to be sure, might overlook these contradictions. They might be content to leave Christians undisturbed, so that the city could benefit from their industry and their taxes, so long as the Christians were content to leave the subversive implications of their faith implicit—in other words, so long as they were willing to practice their faith in secret or in silence. This was more or less Trajan’s advice to Pliny, as we have seen: if Christians are brought before the ruler and affirmatively accused, they “must be punished”;67 but don’t go around actively seeking them out. Cambridge historian Keith Hopkins remarks that “the very small size of Christianity helps explain why the Roman state paid so little attention to suppressing it effectively.”68
Unfortunately, Christians often were not content to remain inconspicuous. They had been commanded by their Founder, after all, to go forth and preach the gospel to every creature.69 And although the early dramatic evangelizing efforts of the apostle Paul and associates were not replicated in the immediately ensuing generations, many Christians still no doubt felt impelled to share the “good news”—the news that was surpassingly good, that is, in their perspective but that was openly destructive of pagan practices and commitments.70 Gibbon relates an incident in which a centurion named Marcellus, during a public festival, suddenly threw down his arms and accouterments, renounced war and pagan idolatry, and declared that he would obey only Jesus. The man was promptly condemned and beheaded, and Gibbon placidly remarks that “it could scarcely be expected that any government should suffer” such conduct.71
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs recounts a story taken from Jerome that (whether or not historically accurate) illustrates the problem. According to the story, Andrew, the apostle and the brother of Peter, was evangelizing in Achaia, and the governor, Aegeas, became concerned that the apostle’s work was undermining the civic religion. A confrontation ensued, in which Andrew
did plainly affirm that the princes of the Romans did not understand the truth and that the Son of God, coming from heaven into the world for man’s sake, hath taught and declared how those idols, whom they so honored as gods, were not only not gods, but also most cruel devils; enemies to mankind, teaching the people nothing else but that wherewith God is offended, and, being offended, turneth away and regardeth them not; and so by the wicked service of the devil, they do fall headlong into all wickedness, and, after their departing, nothing remaineth unto them, but their evil deeds.72
Is it surprising that Aegeas took umbrage and ordered Andrew crucified?
A decisive vindication of pagan suspicions was ultimately provided in Augustine’s epic work, The City of God. By the time Augustine’s book was written, in the early fifth century, the empire had become officially Christian. But pagans were still plentiful, and the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410 prompted critics to argue that the city’s tragic plight was a consequence of abandoning the traditional gods. Augustine responded with a no-holds-barred attack on paganism. The pagan gods were demons.73 They had never deserved credit for Roman political or military successes, but rather had worked only to insinuate wickedness into the Roman character.74 In fact, the Roman state had never really been a true commonwealth at all in the fullest sense, because, as Cicero himself had asserted, a “true commonwealth” depends on justice, and the false pantheon of iniquitous demons had never been capable of supporting a just regime.75 As Augustine’s treatise proceeded, pointed criticisms evolved into savage mockery.76
In this ferocious condemnation of pagan religion, and of the state’s reliance on such religion, Augustine was arguably just articulating content that had been implicit or less elaborately explicit in Christian thinking all along. In fact, very similar if somewhat less extensive indictments of paganism had been made by earlier Christian thinkers, including Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Tertullian, Origen, and Lactantius. And when articulated, those indictments were boldly and emphatically subversive with respect to the pagan foundations of the pre-Christian Roman state.77
Even a modern, thoroughly secular observer can presumably appreciate the Roman concern with Christians like Andrew who went about undermining the pagan assumptions on which the Roman state was founded, however implausible those assumptions may seem today. Even a broad-minded and pragmatic Roman official who personally doubted the gods—the kind of official described or at least hypothesized by Gibbon, in other words78—might well have objected to this kind of subversiveness.
But, of course, many Romans would not have looked at the matter in this merely pragmatic way. Many honestly believed in the gods, either in a literal sense or in the more philosophical sense elaborated by the Stoic character Balbus in Cicero’s dialogue. If you were a Roman of this mind, you would have believed that the gods were real, and that they were willing and able to guide the state so long as they were properly honored and propitiated. Conversely, if the gods were insulted or offended, they might visit ruin on the community (as they so often had done in the pagan classics of Homer and Virgil).
From this perspective, again, Christianity would inevitably appear as a profoundly subversive force—not merely because its doctrines contradicted the religious premises on which the state was founded but, even more importantly, because Christians defied and insulted the gods. The very existence of Christianity, with its perverse and sacrilegious doctrines—sacrilegious relative to pagan piety, that is—was a kind of desecration, or “desacralization.” In sum, Christianity did not merely undermine people’s belief in the gods; even more importantly, it interfered with the actual relation between the people and their rulers and their gods. It disrupted the pax deorum—the peace of the gods.79
The Roman concern with Christian desecration is evident in the fact that persecution of Christians typically picked up during difficult times. Gibbon observed that “if the empire had been afflicted by any recent calamity, by a plague, a famine, or an unsuccessful war; if the Tiber had, or if the Nile had not, risen beyond its banks; if the earth had shaken, or if the temperate order of the season had been interrupted, the superstitious Pagans were convinced that the crimes and the impiety of the Christians . . . had at length provoked the Divine Justice.”80
Here Gibbon’s Enlightenment contempt for anything “superstitious,” normally directed against the Christians, is applied to the pagans. But in fact, the pagan attribution of calamities to Christianity was not merely irrational scapegoating; under the premises of pagan piety, at least, the attribution was logical enough. Indeed, it was not only pagan premises that supported this logic. In the Bible, a transgression by a single individual can sometimes bring down God’s wrath on the entire community of Israel.81
Under this logic of desecration, the “Great Persecution” under the emperor Diocletian was initially provoked—or so contemporaries related—when frustrated augurs blamed their failures on Christians who had made the sign of the cross. In fury, Diocletian directed his wrath against all Christians in the immediate vicinity,82 and what became the most savage of all persecutions was unleashed.
Liberty (and Dignity)
The considerations discussed thus far—the Christians’ refusal to register their allegiance by performing required sacrifices, Christianity’s contradiction of and thus subversion of the beliefs on which the Roman state rested, Christianity’s effective desecration of the relation between the Romans and their gods—seem more than sufficient to explain why Romans could not accept coexistence on the terms offered by Christian apologists like Tertullian. In addition, though, there was another, more amorphous but also in one sense even more fundamental consideration that helps to complete the picture—and that illuminates as well the ongoing tension between Christianity and the kind of immanent religiosity reflected in Roman paganism. That consideration can be explained by reference to a value that in modern times might be articulated in terms of liberty—of religious, intellectual, and moral liberty—or perhaps also of “dignity.”
As noted in chapter 5, modern scholars have sometimes tried to explain the difference between Christianity and paganism by asserting that Christianity was and paganism was not concerned with truth, or that Christianity was and paganism was not concerned with morality.83 Our survey suggested that hard-and-fast distinctions in these terms are overdrawn. Nonetheless, Christianity did manifest a commitment to formulating theological truths in precise creeds and doctrines, and to identifying and proscribing theological falsehoods or heresies, that was wholly foreign to a pagan mentality. As Robin Lane Fox remarks, “There was . . . no pagan concept of heresy.”84 Similarly, Christians exhibited an intense, perhaps puritanical concern for morality—sexual morality, for example—that was alien to pagan sensibilities.85
These Christian commitments followed from the belief in a transcendent deity who stood outside the contingencies of this-worldly time and space, and who prescribed the “straight and narrow path” to “eternal life.”86 In the Christian view, all of human life transpired “under the aspect of eternity”—and thus under and subject to a transcendent standard. We might say that all of human life was subject to judgment.
For devout Christians, this fact of a transcendent standard or judgment was not an infringement of liberty. On the contrary. “You shall know the truth,” Jesus had taught, “and the truth shall make you free.”87 Augustine concurred: it was the gospel that brought “true liberty.”88 “[A] good man is free,” he explained, “even if he is a slave, whereas the bad man is a slave even if he reigns: a slave, not to one man, but, what is worse, to as many masters as he has vices.”89 By contrast, the mere absence of moral restrictions would amount to “a vagrant liberty.”90
Moreover, it was the belief in a transcendent standard that in time would permit Christians to pronounce a practice—infanticide, gladiatorial combat, eventually slavery—to be unjust and immoral even if it had been widely practiced and accepted by all known human cultures. “Man is the measure of all things,” Protagoras had declared.91 On that premise, if a practice (like slavery or infanticide) was widely accepted by human beings, what other evaluative criterion was there to appeal to? But Christianity emphatically rejected the Protagorean premise. Not man but rather God was ultimately the measure of all things,92 and hence even a universally accepted practice—like slavery—might be deeply wrong.
In a different and thoroughly understandable sense, though, the assertion of a perpetual, all-encompassing divine standard of truth and morality could be viewed—and resented—as an oppressive limitation on a man’s liberty to think and to worship and, within legal limits, to live as he pleased. (The masculine gender remains apt here.) Within a pagan framework, a man was free to choose what to believe, which deities to worship, and, within broad limits, how to conduct himself sexually. In Christianity, conversely, this kind of freedom was denied. Or rather, the freedom might formally persist, but some exercises of the freedom would be approved while others would be condemned as incorrect, even damnable. It was as if a stern Big Brother was watching with a censorious eye your every deed, your every word, your every wayward or lustful thought. Keith Hopkins remarks on the pagans’ adverse reaction to “early Christians’ magnification of guilt.”93
Even if the Christians’ censorious views were not implemented in law (and of course, they could hardly be legally enforced while Christians remained a powerless minority), so that liberty was not restricted through legal sanctions, the condemnation of pagan views and practices might nonetheless be resented as an offense against what in modern terms might be described as the pagans’ “dignity.” The possibility is displayed in a third-century dialogue called the Octavius written by the Christian apologist Minucius Felix. The dialogue purports to relate a conversation between two of Minucius’s friends—one (Octavius) a committed Christian and the other (Caecilius) a pagan. As the three are walking to enjoy the baths at Ostia, just outside Rome, they pass an image of the god Serapis, and Caecilius follows the pagan custom of pressing a kiss with his hand to the image’s lips.94 Octavius immediately reproves Minucius, in Caecilius’s hearing, for allowing his friend “in broad daylight . . . to give himself up to stones.”95 Caecilius is predictably resentful, protesting that “Octavius’ speech has bitterly vexed and worried me,”96 and he goes on to argue that the Christians’ god “runs about everywhere, and is everywhere present: they make him out to be troublesome, restless, even shamelessly inquisitive, since he is present at everything that is done, wanders in and out of all places.”97
In the dialogue, the breach between Octavius and Caecilius is healed, almost miraculously, when Octavius, in a long speech, convinces the pagan of the truth of Christianity. Caecilius thanks the Christian for this service, and the friends depart “glad and cheerful.”98 For social interactions not culminating in such an improbably happy conclusion, though, it is understandable that Christian censoriousness might be resented as an irksome or even intolerable curtailment of liberty, or (as advocates today would likely put the point)99 as an offense against the “dignity” of the censured pagans. Gibbon observes that “the Pagans were incensed at the rashness of a recent and obscure sect, which presumed to accuse their countrymen of error, and to devote their ancestors to eternal misery.”100 And there is at least a hint of this kind of objection in Pliny’s criticism of Christians as given to “unshakeable obstinacy,” and in his assertion that they were on that basis worthy of chastisement even though he had not found them guilty of any actual crime.101
During Christianity’s first three centuries, of course, Romans were entirely free to ignore or reject Christianity, and hence to reject the constraints on pagan liberty that Christianity entailed;102 and that is precisely what the vast majority of Romans did. Even so, resentment of the seemingly unreasonable restrictions that Christianity sought to impose—unreasonable from a pagan perspective—and of the Christians’ perceived censorious and dogmatic attitudes, likely reinforced the reasons why Roman pagans were suspicious of Christianity and unwilling to embrace peaceful coexistence on the terms proposed by Christians such as Tertullian.
Paganism’s (Unacceptable) Terms of Coexistence
Although pagans could not accept the terms of the Christian proposal for coexistence, they could and did make a counteroffer. In effect, pagans proposed their own terms for peaceful coexistence. And these terms would have seemed entirely fair—from a pagan perspective, anyway. So the Christians’ obstinate dismissal of the eminently reasonable pagan proposal would have provided further justification for repression of Christianity.
In essence, the possibility held out by paganism was that Christians and Christianity might be accepted on the same terms under which a vast variety of other cults and rituals were embraced within the broad canopy of paganism. For the most part, Romans had managed to accommodate a wide range of cults and deities on terms of reciprocity: I will respect your preferred deity if you will respect mine. Why couldn’t Christianity be accepted on the same basis?103 After all, the family of “the gods” could be extended almost without limits. It could include not only the original Roman deities but also the entire Greek pantheon, as well as deities imported from Egypt and Syria and elsewhere. It could surely have been augmented to include the god of the Christians on these same embracingly ecumenical terms. Or so it might have seemed, from a pagan perspective.
Thus, according to the church historian Eusebius (who took the report from Tertullian), the emperor Tiberius had heard of Jesus and had sua sponte proposed to add him to the pantheon of deities; the senators declined to approve the emperor’s proposal only on the ground that they were insufficiently informed regarding the new religion.104 The accuracy of this report may well be doubted;105 even so, the story describes a development that, under proper circumstances and with proper solicitation, might have been possible. Later, the empress Mammaea sought out the learned Christian philosopher and apologist Origen to converse about theological matters. And her ecumenical son, the emperor Alexander Severus, placed a statue of Jesus in his private chapel (alongside statues of Abraham, Orpheus, and Apollonius); there was even a rumor that Alexander intended to erect a temple to Jesus. Another rumor had it that the emperor Philip the Arab had actually converted to Christianity.106 The erudite pagan philosopher Porphyry, though one of Christianity’s most vehement critics, wrote a treatise that included Jesus among human sages who had been elevated to divinity after his death.107
Other Roman authorities would likely have been willing to extend the same terms of acceptance if Christians had been agreeable.108 And in fact, some Christians were agreeable; as noted, some performed the small sacrificial gestures to the gods and otherwise mingled congenially with their pagan neighbors.109 One modern historian who enthusiastically approves of such conciliatory conduct suggests that Christians who were willing to accept these terms seem to have gotten along well enough in the Roman world.110
We saw earlier that the Christian proposal for coexistence might be articulated in a Rawlsian vocabulary: though Christian and pagan “comprehensive doctrines” differed radically, both positions converged in prescribing obedience to earthly rulers, and that convergence might provide the “overlapping consensus” on which a just political community could be constructed. But the pagan proposal for coexistence might equally or even more persuasively be cast in Rawlsian terms. In effect, the pagan approach attempted to ground community not in claims of truth, or of Truth, but rather in what we could call “reasonableness”—of reasonableness understood in terms of sociability and willingness to accept others’ practices and commitments on terms of reciprocity and mutual respect.111
In this spirit of “reasonableness,” the Roman demands of allegiance would have seemed inoffensive and easy to comply with. All that was required, really, was a simple and innocuous gesture. “If [the Christians] consented to cast a few grains of incense upon the altar,” Gibbon explained, “they were dismissed from the tribunal in safety and with applause.”112 “Why can’t you compromise?” Keith Hopkins has an educated pagan press on a Christian friend. “It surely wouldn’t be too dreadful if someone told you Christians to take an oath ‘by an emperor,’ or pour a simple libation ‘to the emperor’s health.’ Could you just participate in our public festivals, for the sake of form . . . ?”113
And yet the more fervent Christians were unwilling to make this seemingly innocent gesture, or to enter into this “reasonable” and fair arrangement for cooperation. On the contrary, they refused the sort of respectful reciprocity by which most other cults had been assimilated into the Roman religious system. Christians insisted, rather, that their God was the one true God, and that the various Roman deities were false gods, or demons. From a distance, it is easy to see why from the pagan perspective the Christian stance would have seemed arrogant, unsociable, and unreasonable. “The Christians were seen as religious fanatics,” Robert Wilken explains, “self-righteous outsiders, arrogant innovators, who taught that only their beliefs were true.”114
And yet it is understandable as well why devout Christians (like the Jews before them)115 did not and could not view the matter in these terms—why they could only view the ostensible reciprocity of the Roman arrangement as a sham. The Christian faith taught, after all, that Jesus was the one true God. So any pagan offer to accept Jesus as one god among many was not really an invitation of inclusion; it was instead a proposal that the Christians renounce their faith and become polytheistic pagans instead. A Christ understood as one god among many would no longer be the Christ that Christians believed in and worshiped. As Lactantius explained, “If the honour paid to Him is shared by others, He altogether ceases to be worshipped since His religion requires us to believe that He is the one and only God.”116 So the general Roman policy, understood by Romans as “We’ll accept you and your god if you’ll accept ours,” inevitably sounded to the Christians like disingenuous or at least ignorant double-talk: “We’ll accept your religion if you will effectively renounce it and accept our pagan religion instead.”117
A modern (imperfect) analogy may help. Proponents of including creationism in the school curriculum sometimes use the language of inclusion and reciprocity. “You evolutionists and we creationists have different theories about how life came about,” they suggest, “so let’s just teach both theories—on equal terms.”118 From one point of view, this can seem like an eminently reasonable, broadly tolerant proposal. But for many scientists and educators, the proposal reflects a spurious reciprocity, because the “theories” are not comparable: one theory is scientifically supported and the other is not. So the “equal time” proposal is analogous to a shady trader’s offer: “I’ll accept your (legally valid) money if you’ll accept my (counterfeit) currency.” Treating evolution and creationism as competing “theories” would amount to a travesty and indeed a betrayal of science. That, in any case, is how evolutionists often see the matter.
Christians in the Roman Empire were in an analogous position—even if pagans applying their own religious perspective could not understand the fact, and thus perceived the Christians as inflexible, dogmatic, and undeserving of accommodation. Athenagoras tried to explain the Christian perspective to the emperor Marcus Aurelius as one philosopher speaking with another.119 To conceive of divinity in terms of a host of finite and changeable deities who often behave in ways that would be shameful even for humans is obviously unacceptable. Isn’t it? Conversely, even pagan philosophers and poets have acknowledged that, ultimately, God must ultimately be one. Why then, Athenagoras pleaded, should Christians be punished for declining to worship the finite deities and instead confining their worship to the one, true, infinite God?
Repeatedly flattering the emperor’s philosophical acumen, Athenagoras was hopeful that Marcus would see the justice in this position. His hope was not rewarded.
Augustine later explained the ultimate conflict in lucid terms. Both Christians and pagans, he said, “make common use of those things which are necessary to this mortal life.” The heavenly city, or the community of Christians, “must of necessity make use of this [earthly] peace also,” and “for as long as it does so, it does not hesitate to obey the laws of the earthly city.” And hence “a harmony is preserved.” The problem arises when pagans insist on the worship of multiple gods. “But the Heavenly City knows only one God who is to be worshipped. . . . Because of this difference, it has not been possible for the Heavenly City to have laws of religion in common with the earthly city. It has been necessary to dissent from the earthly city in this regard, and to become a burden to those who think differently. Thus, she has had to bear the brunt of the anger and hatred and persecutions of her adversaries.”120
How Tolerant Were the Romans Really?
We noted earlier the judgment of many modern historians that Roman authorities were admirably tolerant, particularly in matters of religion.121 Indeed, even the Christians could acknowledge the broad range of religious cults that flourished, and were freely allowed to flourish, under Roman rule. “Among every nation and people [subject to Roman rule], men offer whatever sacrifices and celebrate whatever mysteries they please,” Athenagoras acknowledged to the emperor. “The Egyptians reckon among their gods even cats, and crocodiles, and serpents, and asps, and dogs. And to all these both you and the laws give permission so to act, deeming . . . that it is necessary for each man to worship the gods he prefers.”122
And yet, as we have also seen (and as Athenagoras bitterly complained), Romans also engaged, episodically, in the savage persecution of Christians—even though Christians professed allegiance to and even prayed for the emperors and for the most part behaved peaceably and responsibly. To be sure, the Roman policy of persecution was not gratuitously vindictive or malicious; it was, as we have seen, entirely rational (on pagan premises at least). Even so, does the Roman practice call for a revision of the familiar judgment of the Roman Empire as religiously tolerant?
The question itself is elusive, and probably misconceived. A first observation, though, is that the Romans themselves would not have explained or defended their own practices in terms of toleration. For them, tolerance was not an ideal, or an established virtue. As J. A. North observes: “If there was tolerance it was not tolerance born of principle. So far as we know, there was no fixed belief that a state or individual ought to tolerate different forms of religion; that is the idea of far later periods of history. The truth seems to be that the Romans tolerated what seemed to them harmless and drew the line whenever there seemed to be a threat of possible harm; only, they saw no great harm in many of the cults of their contemporary world.”123
Indeed, toleration did not come to be viewed as a positive value or virtue until relatively recently. Prior to a modern “transvaluation of values,” tolerance of error or wrongdoing would be viewed mostly as an indication of weakness, lack of integrity, or lack of courage. Thus, Ethan Shagan explains that “before the 1640s, the state’s prerogative to punish religious deviance was almost unanimously praised as moderate, while broad claims for religious toleration were almost unanimously condemned as extremist.”124
And indeed, in other contexts, that earlier logic is readily understandable even today. A school principal who acquiesces in bullying, or a manager who puts up with sexual epithets, jokes, and innuendos in the workplace, will not gain sympathy by invoking the value of “toleration.” On the contrary, for such evils the contemporary attitude confidently and righteously prescribes “zero tolerance.”
Still, granting that “religious toleration” is our value, not theirs, can we nonetheless describe the pagan world as religiously tolerant? Yes and no—but probably more no than yes. Roman paganism surely did manage to encompass and accommodate a vast diversity of deities and cults. But then again, it accommodated religions that were willing to accept its terms. Indeed, the Roman approach might more accurately be described as one not of tolerance but of a combination of indifference and assimilation—policies today not typically associated with toleration.
Thus, for the most part, as J. A. North notes, Roman authorities simply didn’t care which deities people worshiped, or how. Jan Assmann observes generally that “it . . . makes no sense to talk of ‘tolerance’ with regard to the polytheisms of pagan antiquity, since here the criterion of incompatibility is missing; as far as other peoples’ religion is concerned, there is nothing that would need to be ‘tolerated.’ ”125 Moreover, the Romans did not so much tolerate diverse or foreign deities as annex them into the Roman system. In this vein, Rodney Stark suggests that rather than speaking of a collection of different religions, it is more cogent to think of Roman paganism as constituting a religious “system.”126 The cults devoted to the different gods and goddesses were parts of a single expansive religion, much in the way that different Catholics today might feel special attachments to a multitude of different saints while still belonging to the same capacious faith.
To say this, though, is not to criticize the Romans for accommodating diverse cults only on Roman terms. What else could they do? What else could anyone do? Accept and accommodate strange religions on the basis of terms and assumptions they did not hold?
In the end, it thus seems misconceived to evaluate Roman paganism in terms of toleration, either for praise or for blame. What we can say is that pagan religion had resources for including or accommodating a variety of deities and cults, but there were limits to what could be accommodated. In troubled times, at least, Christianity fell outside those limits. For pragmatic reasons it might sometimes be put up with, so to speak, but it could not really be respected or tolerated. In a similar way, Christianity had its own, different resources for permitting or accommodating various beliefs and religiosities, but again there were limits (as would become apparent after Christianity became the preferred religion of the empire). In the long run, Christian dualism—or its commitment to two cities, each with its proper jurisdiction—would evolve into acceptance of a “separation of church and state” that has functioned to permit a vast diversity of faiths and antifaiths to coexist more or less peacefully. But it would take centuries for that kind of separation to develop. And whether it can survive the erosion or rejection of its Christian foundations remains uncertain.127
When we set aside unilluminating labels like “tolerance,” what seems clear is that although in the early centuries paganism and Christianity sometimes operated side by side as a matter of practical convenience or necessity, they did not manage to work out mutually acceptable terms of peaceful coexistence. Their experience stands as a testament to the difficulty of “just getting along”—a difficulty that persists today (as we will discuss in later chapters).
1. Tertullian, “Apology,” in Selected Works (Pickering, OH: Beloved, 2014), 55.
2. See above, 3–4.
3. Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (New York: HarperCollins, 2013).
4. Matt. 5:11 KJV.
5. Matt. 27.
6. Acts 7:57–60; 12:1–3; 14:4–6, 19; 16:19–24; 17:5–9; 21:30–32.
7. 2 Cor. 1:1–10; Phil. 2:17–18; 2 Thess. 1:1–10; 2 Tim. 3:10–14.
8. See, e.g., Steven J. Friessen, Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John: Reading Revelation in the Ruins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
9. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (London: Penguin, 2009), 134, 161; P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Chronicle of the Popes: The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Papacy over 2000 Years (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 12–16.
10. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 1981), 6.
11. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 7.
12. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 9.
13. Adrian Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 98–99.
14. Eusebius, The Church History, trans. Paul L. Maier (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 1999), 175.
15. Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. Michael Grant (London: Penguin, 1959), 365.
16. In an introduction to Eusebius, The Church History, Paul Maier observes: “His sources, which Eusebius often quotes, paraphrases, or condenses . . . , need not be listed here, since he is always scrupulous about crediting the fonts of his information. His debt to Josephus, Hegesippus, Justin, Irenaeus, Dionysus of Alexandria, and others is open and acknowledged. He may have borrowed too heavily for modern tastes, but much of his material owes its very survival to its felicitous incorporation in Eusebius’s record. He found much of his material in the vast library at his own Caesarea, founded by Origen and tended by Pamphilus, and that at Jerusalem established by Bishop Alexander, which accounts for the Greek and East emphasis in his pages” (16).
17. E.g., Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 24; Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph of Christianity (New York: Penguin, 1999), 109–10.
18. Eusebius, The Church History, 107, 120–22, 146–55, 289–315.
19. Eusebius, The Church History, 289.
20. Lactantius, On the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, Addressed to Donatus, ed. Alexander Roberts et al. (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2015), chap. 3, p. 8.
21. See W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 181 (noting that while due-process protections might discourage official indictments, “there was no protection, however, against mob violence backed by all sections of opinion”). See also 294.
22. Wilken, The Christians, 2–15.
23. But see Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 120 (“By no means all Roman governors were executing Christians. One governor dismissed a case because he thought the accusation vexatious; another told a crowd of overenthusiastic would-be martyrs that if they wanted to die they should hang themselves or jump over a cliff”).
24. “The Second Apology of Justin Martyr,” in The First and Second Apologies of Justin Martyr, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Cumming, GA: St. Polycarp, 2016), chap. 2, pp. 122–23.
25. “Second Apology of Justin Martyr,” chap. 1, p. 121.
26. Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 138.
27. “Body Count of the Roman Empire,” last updated March 2011, http://necrometrics.com/romestat.htm.
28. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, [1776] 1995), 1:515. More recent, but in a similar vein, is the work of Candida Moss. Moss’s eye-catching claim that persecution is a “myth” that was “invented” by the early Christians is deeply misleading, not only with respect to the historical facts but also with respect to the content of Moss’s own presentation. Thus, while arguing that Christian martyr stories are historically unreliable, she adds that this fact “does not mean . . . that there were not martyrs at all or that Christians never died. It is clear that some people were cruelly tortured and brutally executed for reasons that strike us as profoundly unjust.” Moss, The Myth of Persecution, 124–25. Her deflationary treatment of the persecutions depends largely on a series of baffling distinctions that serve to narrow what counts as “persecution” almost to the vanishing point. Thus, Moss distinguishes between “persecution” and “prosecution” (14, 159), and she excludes from the category of “persecution” punishments inflicted under general laws against subversion (as opposed to laws or edicts specifically targeting Christians) as well as punishments inflicted not from “blind hatred” but rather for what authorities believed to be legitimate reasons. See, e.g., 164 (“Just because Christians were prosecuted or executed, even unjustly, does not necessarily mean that they were persecuted. Persecution implies that a certain group is being unfairly targeted for attack and condemnation, usually because of blind hatred”).
29. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:514.
30. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:524.
31. E.g., Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:526, 576–77.
32. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:539.
33. Matt. 22:21.
34. Rom. 13:1, 5–7 NIV. To be sure, not all Christians embraced this logic. Steven Friessen argues that the Apocalypse of John conveys a different message—that “Roman imperial authority was demonic.” Friessen, Imperial Cults, 202.
35. Tertullian, “Apology,” 54–55.
36. Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians, trans. B. P. Pratten (Pickerington, OH: Beloved, 2016), 5.
37. “First Apology of Justin Martyr,” in First and Second Apologies, chap. 17, p. 38.
38. Tertullian, “Apology,” 1.
39. Tertullian argued that even if Christian doctrines struck Romans as absurd, they “are just (in that case) like many other things on which you inflict no penalties—foolish and fabulous things, I mean, which, as quite innocuous, are never charged as crimes or punished.” Tertullian, “Apology,” 80–81.
40. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 133–72.
41. Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 111 (observing that Roman authorities’ policy toward Christianity “fluctuated, if we can trust our sources, from cruel oppression to legal protection to benign neglect”).
42. Wilken, The Christians, 16.
43. Eusebius, The Church History, 259.
44. Cf. Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 133: “Inside people’s minds the most contrary beliefs might coexist, at some moment suddenly to be recognized as mutually intolerable. In that same fashion, Christians and pagans lived together for generations in the cities of the Empire, in peace disturbed rarely by spasms of frightful violence, both before and after 312.”
45. See Douglas Boin, Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place for Themselves in Caesar’s Empire (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015).
46. See above, 1–2.
47. See Friessen, Imperial Cults, 25–131. See also 75: “Imperial cults permeated community life. Various temples and small shrines for the imperial family were found in towns and cities, and imperial cults were part of worship at many temples of other deities as well. Municipal imperial cults were part of many institutions besides temples, such as the agora, the bouleuterion [or assembly house], the gymnasium, and the baths. Festivals normally involved processions beyond the sites of the sacrifices themselves, so all public spaces were involved in such activities at different intervals. Imperial cults were an aspect of urban life encountered often and in diverse forms.”
48. Friessen, Imperial Cults, 203.
49. Bruce W. Winter, Divine Honours for the Caesars: The First Christians’ Responses (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 59.
50. Winter, Divine Honours, 277 (emphasis added).
51. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:459–60.
52. Winter, Divine Honours, 196, 222; Boin, Coming Out Christian, 30.
53. Winter, Divine Honours, 222–25.
54. “Martyrdom of the Holy Martyrs Justin, Chariton, Charites, Paeon, and Liberianus, Who Suffered at Rome,” trans. M. Dods, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, 10 vols. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), vol. 1, http://www.clerus.org/clerus/dati/2001–02/19–999999/Tmarty.html.
55. “Martyrdom of the Holy Martyrs,” 4.
56. “Martyrdom of the Holy Martyrs,” 4.
57. “Martyrdom of the Holy Martyrs,” 5.
58. See Robert Louis Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 72–74.
59. Winter, Divine Honours, 117, 243.
60. Winter, Divine Honours, 192–95.
61. Just when and how this divide occurred presents a complicated historical question. See generally James D. G. Dunn, Neither Jew Nor Greek: A Contested Identity, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015).
62. Winter, Divine Honours, 286.
63. Winter, Divine Honours, 286.
64. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:460–61.
65. Cf. Wilken, The Christians, 125 (“It was, however, not simply that Christians subverted the cities by refusing to participate in civic life, but that they undermined the foundations of the societies in which they lived”).
66. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:518.
67. See above, 3.
68. Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 82.
69. Matt. 28:19–20.
70. Cf. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:451–52 (“It became the most sacred duty of a new convert to diffuse among his friends and relations the inestimable blessing which he had received, and to warn them against a refusal that would be severely punished as a criminal disobedience to the will of a benevolent but all-powerful Deity”).
71. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:562.
72. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 7–8.
73. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. and ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7.33, p. 307 (asserting that pagan gods are “demons: demons who, in the guise of spirits of the dead, or under the appearance of creatures of this world, desire to be thought gods”).
74. Augustine, City of God, bks. 2, 4.
75. Augustine, City of God 2.21, pp. 76–80. However, under a less ambitious definition, Augustine conceded that Rome had been a commonwealth (19.21, pp. 950–51; 19.24, pp. 960–61).
76. Augustine, City of God, bks. 4, 6, 7. In one passage, for example, Augustine ridicules the pagan assignment of a variety of deities to assist in the consummation of a marriage—Jugatinus to help with the wedding; Domiducus to lead the bride home; Domitius to install her in the house; Manturna to ensure that she stays with her husband; Virginensis, Subigus, Prema, Pertunda, Venus, and Priapus to assist with different phases of the consummating intercourse. “Why fill the bedchamber with a swarm of deities when even the wedding attendants have departed?” Augustine asks mockingly: “If, at any rate, the man, labouring at his task, needed to be helped by the gods, might not some one god or goddess have been sufficient? Would not Venus alone have been equal to the task? . . . Why, when a newly married couple believe that so many gods of both sexes are present and viewing the proceedings, are they not so overcome with modesty that he is less aroused, and she made even more reluctant?” (4.9, p. 258).
77. See also Wilken, The Christians, 124–25 (explaining Celsus’s criticism that Christians “undermined the foundations of the societies in which they lived”).
78. See above, 86.
79. See Moss, The Myth of Persecution, 175.
80. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:537.
81. See, e.g., Josh. 7.
82. See Lactantius, On the Manner, chap. 10. See also Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 45.
83. See above, 108.
84. Fox, Pagans and Christians, 31.
85. See above, 108.
86. See above, 118–21.
87. John 8:32.
88. Augustine, City of God 2.29, p. 92.
89. Augustine, City of God 4.4, p. 147. See also 14.11, p. 605: “The choice of the will, then, is truly free only when it is not the slave of vices and sins. God gave to the will such freedom, and, now that it has been lost through its own fault, it cannot be restored save by Him Who could bestow it. Hence, the Truth says, ‘If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.’ ”
90. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, ed. and trans. Albert Cook Outler, rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 2002), 3.5, p. 34.
91. Plato, Theatetus, trans. Harold North Fowler (London: W. Heinemann, 1921).
92. Cf. Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 55 (“Only in the context of a religion in which god appears as both lawgiver and judge does the thought first become thinkable that man’s judgment and god’s can diverge significantly”).
93. Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 88.
94. Minucius Felix, “Octavius,” in Ante-Nicene Church Fathers, Fathers of the Third Century, trans. Philip Schaff (London: Aeterna Press, 2014), vol. 8, chap. 2, p. 3.
95. Minucius Felix, “Octavius,” chap. 3, pp. 3–4.
96. Minucius Felix, “Octavius,” chap. 4, pp. 4–5.
97. Minucius Felix, “Octavius,” chap. 10, p. 12.
98. Minucius Felix, “Octavius,” chaps. 40–41, pp. 48–49.
99. For discussions of the increasing significance on the idea of “dignity” in contemporary law and advocacy, see Mark L. Movsesian, “Of Human Dignities,” Notre Dame Law Review 91 (2016): 1517; Jeremy Waldron, “Dignity, Rights, and Responsibilities,” Arizona State Law Journal 43 (2012): 1107; James Q. Whitman, “The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty,” Yale Law Journal 113 (2004): 1191.
100. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:560.
101. See above, 2.
102. See Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 82–83.
103. To be sure, as noted already, subjects were expected to make a small gesture of respect to the divine emperor and to “the gods.” But, seriously, how much of a burden was this? How hard was it to recite a short, pro forma loyalty oath, or to sprinkle a splash of wine or flick a pinch of incense on an altar? Wilken, The Christians, 25–27.
104. Eusebius, The Church History, 59–60.
105. See, e.g., Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:550.
106. These episodes are recounted in Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:553–54.
107. See Wilken, The Christians, 148–53.
108. It is true that Pliny required accused Christians not only to worship the Roman gods but also to “revile the name of Christ.” See above, 2. Other Roman rulers may have done the same. But the latter requirement quite likely was imposed on the (correct) assumption that Christians insisted on viewing their God as the exclusive deity. Had Christians been willing to treat Christ as one god among many, the Roman response would likely have been different.
109. See Boin, Coming Out Christian, 29–31. See also Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:549 (“In every persecution there were great numbers of unworthy Christians who publicly disowned or renounced the faith that they had professed”).
110. See generally Boin, Coming Out Christian.
111. For a discussion of this tendency in contemporary political thought, see Jody S. Kraus, “Political Liberalism and Truth,” Legal Theory 5 (1999): 45.
112. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:537–38. See also Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 548 (noting that “they were not being asked to do much, only to offer the gods a pinch of incense, but if they refused they should be killed”).
113. Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 210.
114. See Wilken, The Christians, 63. See also Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:536–37 (“The Christians alone abhorred the gods of mankind, and by their absence and melancholy on these solemn festivals, seemed to insult or to lament the public felicity”).
115. See Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 19 (“For the Jews, Yahweh could not be translated into ‘Assur’ ‘Amun’ or ‘Zeus.’ This was something the ‘pagans’ never understood”).
116. Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, ed. Alexander Roberts et al. (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2015), 1.19, p. 46.
117. Cf. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 94 (observing that “Christ and Iaveh were drawn into polytheism on the latter’s terms, simply as new members in an old assembly”).
118. For a description of this “balanced treatment” position, see Edward J. Larson, Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory (New York: Random House, 2004), 257–59.
119. See generally Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians.
120. Augustine, City of God 19.17, pp. 945–46.
121. See above, 4.
122. Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians, 5.
123. J. A. North, Roman Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 63.
124. Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion, and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 288. See generally Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).
125. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 18. See also H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 453 (“If pagans did not preach compulsion, that was only because there was nothing to compel—the belief system shared by all peoples of their empire was polytheistic, with local variations only in the names of particular deities and the specifics of particular practices”).
126. Stark, The Triumph of Christianity, 10.
127. See below, chaps. 10 and 11. See also Steven D. Smith, The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Steven D. Smith, “Discourse in the Dusk: The Twilight of Religious Freedom” (review essay), Harvard Law Review 122 (2009): 1869.