But the Christians passed into the bright light of history in 64 C.E., when a fire of suspicious origin raged through the imperial capital and Nero cast about for someone to blame for starting it. The emperor himself was suspected of the deed, accused of fiddling while Rome burned, and he tried to deflect the accusations by casting suspicions on another culprit: the tiny, obscure and powerless community of Christians that had only recently appeared in Rome. Until Nero called attention to them, in fact, the only violence that touched the Christians in Rome were the occasional fisticuffs with the Jews, a settling of old theological scores by two communities that both claimed to worship the same god.
Now Nero singled out the Christians and decreed that they should be punished. According to secular historians, however, the punishment had nothing to do with their strange new faith. Nero was familiar with the fabulous array of exotic rites and rituals that were on display in Rome—his own wife was reputed to be one of the “God-fearers” who attended services at the local synagogues—and he was probably untroubled by the religious practices of a sect as small and obscure as the Christians. Rather, the pagan emperor condemned the Christians as common criminals, guilty of the crime of arson, and he sentenced a few of them to the standard penalty for arson in Roman law, death.
Some of the Christians were crucified, a form of capital punishment that was commonly used throughout the empire. Others were bound in the skins of wild animals and sent into the gladiatorial arenas, where the crowds watched as they were attacked by packs of hungry dogs. A few were put to more exotic forms of torture and death in the gardens of Nero’s imperial palace—they were sheathed in leather, painted with pitch, hung from crosses, and set afire, thus serving as human torches to illuminate a garden party hosted by the emperor. But their deaths started a very different kind of fire—Christian tradition sees them as the first casualties in a holy war against paganism, the first Christian men and women to suffer martyrdom in the cause of the Only True God.
The Peace of the Gods
Once Nero chose to blame the Christians for the burning of Rome, they became the object of ever closer scrutiny by the imperial authorities. What troubled the pagan magistrates was not their theology or their religious practices—far stranger rites, as we have seen, were tolerated and even embraced by pagan Rome—but their stubborn refusal to participate in the rituals of worship that were regarded as the civic obligation of every loyal citizen of the Roman empire. As the pagans saw it, the
Pax Romana
depended on the
Pax Deorum
, and the “peace of the gods” depended on paying the proper respect to the old gods and goddesses. By shunning the imperial cult, the Christians were calling their own patriotism in question, and the pagan authorities regarded Christianity as a security risk.
After all, the pagans reasoned, the rituals did not require much of an effort—a few grains of incense cast on the altar fire or a few words of prayer uttered before the image of the deified emperor were sufficient to discharge one’s civic duty. As long as the gesture was made, as long as respect was paid to the old gods, one was perfectly free to worship the deity of one’s own choosing. Since the Christians insisted that they were
not
Jews, they did not enjoy the dispensation that had been granted to the Jewish community, and so they were expected to do their part to preserve the
Pax Deorum
like every other Roman citizen. More than a few Christians, in fact, did what was expected of them in public and then retreated to the home churches where they prayed privately and discreetly to the Only True God.
But the old rigorism that is written so deeply into the Bible stirred the true believers in Christianity as it had once stirred the Maccabees and the Zealots. They regarded a few grains of incense or a mumbled prayer offered to the pagan gods not as a gesture of civic virtue but as an act of apostasy and betrayal. The most zealous among them saw it as their solemn duty to make a public display of their faith even if it meant arrest, torture and death—significantly, the original meaning of the Greek word “martyr” is “witness.” A few of the Soldiers of Christ actively sought martyrdom by charging into the shrines and temples of the pagan gods, smashing the statuary and overturning the altars, as they were instructed to do by their own scriptures: “You shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, for the Lord is a jealous God.”
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The offense that the Christians committed against Roman law and tradition was not called or punished as heresy—the whole vocabulary of true belief was alien to paganism. Rather, the Christians were suspected of subversion and treason, and they were accused of acts against public order and civic virtue. A Christian could escape arrest and punishment by turning over his Bible and offering a sacrifice to the gods, thus demonstrating his loyalty and good citizenship. Still, the most pious pagans were outraged by the theological rationale of Christianity, and they roused themselves to a certain rigorism of their own in defense of the
Pax Deorum
. Like true believers in monotheism, the persecutors of the Christians coined a new word to describe those who denied the very existence of the old gods and goddesses—the Christians were condemned as “atheists.”
The Shameless Darkness
Christian “atheism” excited rumor and speculation among the pagans, who were baffled by what Christians believed and curious about what Christians did. The atrocity propaganda that was directed against Christianity was all the more plausible because monotheism itself was such a strange idea in the pagan world. After all, if a man or woman was capable of publicly denying the thousand-year-old traditions that had established and preserved the culture of Hellenism and the Roman empire, what else might he or she do in secret?
The mystery was only deepened by the fact that Christian rituals were, by legal and practical necessity, conducted in private. The Christian church was not recognized as a corporate body by Roman law and thus could not own property, and so Christians were forced to use private residences as their gathering places. Later, when Christians found themselves at risk of arrest and imprisonment for the practice of their faith, they were even more secretive—Christian services took place only in hidden rooms and only during hours of darkness. And so, ironically, the pagans suspected the Christians of the same acts of sexual excess and bloody human sacrifice that so obsessed the biblical prophets.
“[T]hey make love together before they know one another,” goes one especially agitated pagan tract, “for there is a certain amount of lust mixed up with their religion, and they promiscuously call themselves brothers and sisters.” Their rituals of worship were said to include “reverencing” the genitals of their priests, and a jackass “is most improperly consecrated to I cannot imagine what kind of worship.” After feasting and drinking, “[p]eople of every age and sex . . . couple in abominable lust in the shameless darkness.” At the most horrific moment in the initiation ceremonies, a sacrifice is offered in a “suitably corrupt and vicious way” to Jesus of Nazareth, “a man punished for his crimes by the supreme penalty”:
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A baby is smothered with flour and . . . offered to one to be initiated, who kills it with blows on the floury outer surface. They lap the blood up thirstily and eagerly share out the limbs.
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Demonizing one’s theological adversaries begins in the Bible, as we have seen, but it can be found in paganism, too. Such slanders are what provoked the official campaign against Christianity, and they were later used to justify even the worst atrocities against the Christians. The gruesome garden party that took place in Nero’s palace, where Christians were burned alive as human torches, is recalled as the first persecution of Christianity by pagan Rome. And Christian tradition counts a total of ten persecutions, ending only with the so-called Great Persecution conducted by the emperor Diocletian (245-316) in the opening years of the fourth century.
Combs and Seashells
Roman justice was notoriously cruel, and accused criminals were routinely tortured, sometimes to extract a confession, sometimes as a form of punishment and sometimes just to satisfy the impulse to inflict pain that is, sadly, one of the characteristics of the human species. A man might be scourged with whips, his bones shattered with rods, his eyes gouged out with hooks. He might be flayed until he was literally skinned alive, or his skin might be scraped off with iron combs or the sharp edges of seashells. Many of the implements of torture that figure so prominently in the practices of the Holy Office of the Inquisition were first invented and perfected in pagan Rome.
Indeed, the principal method of capital punishment under Roman law, crucifixion, was essentially a kind of torture that was specially and ingeniously designed to make a public display of the whole process. Once nailed or tied to the cross, the victim was allowed to hang for days. If he appeared too comfortable, he might be poked or slashed with a spear, but if he appeared likely to die too soon, his executioners would refresh him with a beverage in order to prolong his suffering. At the end, the weight of his own body would make it impossible for the victim to breathe, and he would die slowly of asphyxiation. For the crucified, death was a welcome relief.
Criminals who were spared the death penalty and survived the torture sessions might be put to work in mines or galley ships. They might be confined in prison or exiled to some especially unwelcoming backwater of the Roman empire. They might be branded on the forehead, outfitted with an iron collar or draped with heavy chains. Their goods might be confiscated and—under some circumstances—turned over to the informers who carried the accusations to the imperial authorities in the first place. And the conduct that put an ancient Roman at risk of punishment included not only petty theft and other minor crimes but such private moral lapses as adultery and seduction.
A Christian might suffer any or all of these afflictions if he or she defied the imperial order to make an offering to the gods or refused to surrender a cherished copy of the Bible. But the tortures that were inflicted on the Christian martyrs were even more sadistic—or so we are asked to believe by pious Christian sources. The atrocities that are preserved in the Book of Maccabees, where the tradition of martyrdom begins, are far exceeded in sheer gruesomeness by the hagiographers who describe the ordeal of the Christian martyrs for the edification and inspiration of their fellow believers.
The Christians and the Lions
A Christian martyr, we are told, might be made to seat himself on an iron chair or stretch out on an iron bed that had been heated until it glowed red, thus roasting to death for the amusement of the pagan executioners. Molten lead might be poured down the throat or funneled into another and even more sensitive bodily orifice. A victim, male or female, might be sawn in half, or tied up in a bag and thrown to the bulls, or slowly carved up into tiny morsels that would be tossed to a caged beast. One old bishop was smeared with honey, suspended in a cage and exposed to a swarm of wasps that slowly stung him to death.
Other accounts of martyrdom as preserved in Christian tradition are faintly pornographic—virgins were dragged to temples of Venus and offered the choice of either sacrificing to the goddess of love or submitting to forcible rape on her altar. The ordeals of Christians who were, quite literally, thrown to lions are rendered with heart-tugging but heroic details—when a highborn Roman matron called Perpetua and her slave-girl, Felicitas, were sent into the arena to be ravaged by wild beasts, for example, the crowd could plainly see that “one was a delicate girl, the other fresh from childbirth with her breasts still dripping with milk.”
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And the pagan spectators who crowded into the coliseums and circuses of ancient Rome are said to have been as bloodthirsty as the beasts and the gladiators: “Well-washed, well-washed” was the sarcastic cry that went up in the arena when Christian blood began to flow, a phrase that was customarily used as a friendly greeting in the public baths.
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The pagans, we are asked to believe, were provoked into such outrages by the courage and conviction of the willing Christian martyrs. Ordinary torture was not enough to satisfy their blood-lust—the Romans set their practical skills and their sadistic imagination to the task of devising new and ever more terrible ways of tormenting and murdering their enemies, and all because they were so addled and demon-ridden that they failed to recognize the self-evident truth of the Christian faith in the Only True God. But it is also true that the Christians had learned the propaganda value of martyrdom from the Jewish zealots who were the authors of the Book of Maccabees—if the human imagination is capable of devising ever more sadistic tortures, the human heart is stirred to ever greater passion by the example of such atrocities. Significantly, the most ardent of the new converts to Christianity submitted to baptism during the hottest periods of persecution.
“Horrid and Disgustful Pictures”
Whether the gruesome accounts of Christian martyrdom are works of history or works of propaganda, however, is still an open question. Writing in the late eighteenth century, Edward Gibbon was already suggesting that the most bloodcurdling examples of torture originated in the imaginations of monks who sat safely in their cells and entertained themselves by inventing “extravagant and indecent fictions.”
34
Few of the details that decorate ancient Christian writings can be confirmed in the pagan histories that have survived, and secular historians ever since Gibbon have taken a skeptical view of the martyrologies.