Except for the manner of the Christians’ deaths, which he thought excessively cruel, he showed no sympathy for the Christians. 115, included an account of the incident in his Annales (XV, 44). Many Christians (perhaps including Peter) were seized, tortured, and done to death in the arena. Suspicion immediately fell on Emperor Nero: was this a madcap way of clearing part of the city to make room for new, magnificent streets and buildings in his honor? Nero, however, managed to deflect blame first, apparently, on the Jews, who had a reputation for large-scale arson but also had friends at court and then onto the Christians. On July 19 that year a great fire engulfed much of Rome only four of the fourteen quarters of the city escaped damage. The persecutors and their motives changed in A.D. Indeed, the writer of Luke-Acts appears to go out of his way to reassure the Roman authorizes of the loyalty and general value of the Christians and the hostility of the Jews toward them. The New Testament writings tell of fratricidal strife between Jews and Christians, the latter challenging the Jews by claiming to be “the New Israel.” In the early chapters of Acts, Stephen (7:57) and James, the brother of John the disciple (12:2), became victims of the Jerusalem mob and of King Herod Agrippa, respectively. Persecution did not begin with the Roman authorities. Reasons for the persecution emerge from the record of Christianity’s first three centuries. The name alone was a sufficient death warrant. Countless local gods and goddesses, worshiped by the ordinary inhabitants of the Greco-Roman world, were often provided with a classical equivalent name and worshiped as “Roman” deities.ĭespite this toleration, by the early second century the Roman governor of Bithynia (on the Black Sea) had no hesitation in sending to immediate execution those who had been denounced as being Christians. In the provinces, the great territorial gods-such as Saturn in North Africa and Jehovah among the Jews-were accepted as “legal religion” on the grounds that their rites, even if barbarous, were sanctified by ancient tradition. How was it that the church underwent such sacrifices? The Roman religion was not intolerant Rome had accepted into its pantheon deities from the Italian tribes and from Asia Minor. As the writer of 1 Peter expressed it, “If you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name.” (4:16). The Jewish legacy portrayed, in writings such as the Fourth Book of the Maccabees, the glorious nature of death rather than renunciation of Israel even without this, Christianity would inevitably have held the martyr’s death in high esteem. Christ had died on the cross, so there was no higher honor than to imitate that death through accepting martyrdom (witness by one’s blood).
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