Huon

I agree

Rusting Car Bumper

I posed this question about the deification of Emperors and the persecution of Christians to Thomas Noble Professor of History and Conway Director of the Medieval Institute at Notre Dame. This is his response.

DC

Diogenes the Cynic

We know that Jews refused to worship the Emperor and were ready to be destroyed for it. We don't actually know that it was true that early Christians, in any large numbers, were willing to die for their faith. There is no credible documentation that Christians were especially persecuted in the 1st century, and certainly no evidence for the martyrdom of any direct followers.
It's difficult in the 1st century because there's no good evidence that it happened at all, at least not in any significant numbers.
Really? Who says that? I'm not familiar with that theory. It certainly isn't part of any mainstream scholarship.
The huge gaping hole in this argument is that there is not a shred of credible evidence that any disciples ever claimed to have seen a resurrected Christ, that they refused to recant their claims or that they were martyred.
And Christians haven't?
The Koran says nothing of the sort.
Ever heard of the crusades? The Inquisition? How about Eric Rudolph?
You're taking a detour into irrelevant witnessing here. The point is that people of all religions have been willing to die for their beliefs. There was a time when Christians burned people at the stake for refusing to recant their beliefs. It means nothing. It proves nothing.

Joseph Smith, the founder of the LDS Church was lynched for his beliefs and refused to recant them to save his own life. By your own logic, that must prove that the Angel Moroni really dictated the Book of Mormon to him.
This is called the No True Scotsman fallacy. You're defining the term "Christian" in a selective and self-serving way so as to automatically exclude- by a post hoc definition- any Christian who contradicts your argument.

sorompio

Most of the "persecution" Christians suffered under the Roman Empire was arguably just a myth. If memory doesn't fail me, Edward Gibbon wrote than throughout a 300 year period, Christian victims of persecution were somewhat less than two thousand persons. :worried:

Joan of Bark

Every minority group likes to cry "persecution" (even atheists) because it engenders sympathy. Yet as soon as the persecuted minority becomes the majority (or gains sufficient power), that group becomes the persecutor.

The same rule applies to the concept of tolerance. It is almost always the minority who promote the concept of tolerance, but once that minority comes to power ...

Christian and Muslim martyrs don't impress me much for a simple reason ... they gain the ultimate reward for their sacrifice. They give up life on an imperfect Earth for a perfect life in heaven; not much of a sacrifice, unless you believe in purgatory. Yes, I will acknowledge they are and were sincere in their beliefs; that is undeniable. But then the Ku Klux Klan are sincere; the nazis were sincere; the Crusaders were sincere. Sincerity does not equal truth.

lpetrich

Also, as to how they were executed, were they all fed to lions? That seems like confusion with Daniel in the lions' den; lions were likely not very common beasts. I recall that Felicitas and Perpetua were sentenced to being gored by a heifer in an arena, but I don't know much about most others. The accounts of them state that they were executed for refusing to worship the Empire's official gods, which is in character with the rest of the Romans' persecution of Xianity.

Also, some early Xians would evade worship of the official gods by conveniently doing some traveling during religious festivals. I recall something about Tertullian getting indignant that too many Xians were unwilling to put their lives on the line for their religion.

Jews also refused to worship the official gods, but they pointed to their long tradition; the early Xians did not have such a long tradition.

RED DAVE

From sorompio:
Welcome sorompio.

Can anyone confirm or deny Gibbon's figures? Some numbers, even educated guesses that would put us in the right ballpark, would be helpful. My feeling is that Gibbon is roughly correct. 2000 or so over a period of 400 plus years is hardly major persecution. During the Holocaust, the Germans, a nation of professed xtians, were killing, on the average 4000 Jews per day.

RED DAVE

Huon

From New Advent, Catholic Encyclopedia, dated 1911.

The Church has suffered many kinds of persecution. The growth and the continued existence of Christianity have been hindered by cultured paganism and by savage heathenism. And in more recent times agnosticism has harassed the Church in the various states of America and Europe. But most deplorable of all persecutions have been those that Catholicism has suffered from other Christians. With regard to these it has to be considered that the Church herself has appealed to force, and that, not only in her own defence, but also, so it is objected, in unprovoked attack. Thus by means of the Inquisition (q. v.) or religious wars she was herself the aggressor in many instances during the Middle Ages and in the time of the Reformation. And even if the answer be urged that she was only defending her own existence, the retort seems fairly plausible that pagan and heathen powers were only acting in their own defence when they prohibited the spread of Christianity. The Church would therefore seem to be strangely inconsistent, for while she claims toleration and liberty for herself she has been and still remains intolerant of all other religions.

In answer to this objection, we may admit the fact and yet deny the conclusion. The Church claims to carry a message or rather a command from God and to be God’s only messenger. In point of fact it is only within recent years, when toleration is supposed to have become a dogma, that the other "champions of Revelation" have abandoned their similar claims. That they should abandon their right to command allegiance is a natural consequence of Protestantism; whereas it is the Church's claim to be the accredited and infallible ambassador of God which justifies her apparent inconsistency. Such intolerance, however, is not the same as persecution, by which we understand the unlawful exercise of coercion. Every corporation lawfully constituted has the right to coerce its subjects within due limits. And though the Church exercises that right for the most part by spiritual sanctions, she has never relinquished the right to use other means. Before examining this latter right to physical coercion, there must be introduced the important distinction between pagans and Christians. Regularly, force has not been employed against pagan or Jew: "For what have I to do to judge them that are without?" (I Cor., v, 12); see JEWS AND JUDAISM: Judaism and Church Legislation.

Instances of compulsory conversions such as have occurred at different periods of the Church's history must be ascribed to the misplaced zeal of autocratic individuals. But the Church does claim the right to coerce her own subjects. Here again, however, a distinction must be made. The non-Catholic Christians of our day are, strictly speaking, her subjects; but in her legislation she treats them as if they were not her subjects. The "Ne temere", e.g., of Pius X (1907), recognizes the marriages of Protestants as valid, though not contracted according to Catholic conditions: and the laws of abstinence are not considered to be binding on Protestants. So, with regard to her right to use coercion, the Church only exercises her authority over those whom she considers personally and formally apostates. A modern Protestant is not in the same category with the Albigenses or Wyclifites. These were held to be personally responsible for their apostasy; and the Church enforced her authority over them: It is true that in many cases the heretics were rebels against the State also; but the Church's claim to exercise coercion is not confined to such cases of social disorder. And what is more, her purpose was not only to protect the faith of the orthodox, but also to punish the apostates. Formal apostasy was then looked upon as treason against God — a much more heinous crime than treason against a civil ruler, which, until recent times, was punished with great severity. (See APOSTASY; HERESY.) It was a poisoning of the life of the soul in others (St. Thomas Aquinas, II-II, Q. xi, articles 3, 4.)

There can be no doubt, therefore, that the Church claimed the right to use physical coercion against formal apostates. Not, of course, that she would exercise her authority in the same way to-day, even if there were a Catholic State in which other Christians were personally and formally apostates. She adapts her discipline to the times and circumstances in order that it may fulfil its salutary purpose. Her own children are not punished by fines, imprisonment, or other temporal punishments, but by spiritual pains and penalties, and heretics are treated as she treated pagans: "Fides suadenda est, non imponenda" (Faith is a matter of persuasion, not of compulsion) — a sentiment that roes back to St. Basil ("Revue de l'Orient Chrétien", 2nd series, XIV, 1909, 38) and to St. Ambrose, in the fourth century, the latter applying it even to the treatment of formal apostates. It must also be remembered that when she did use her right to exercise physical coercion over formal apostates, that right was then universally admitted. Churchmen had naturally the ideas of their time as to why and how penalties should be inflicted. Withal, the Roman Inquisition (q. v.) was very different from that of Spain, and the popes did not approve the harsh proceedings of the latter. Moreover, such ideas of physical coercion in matters spiritual were not peculiar to Catholics (see TOLERATION). The Reformers were not less, but, If anything, more, intolerant (see INQUISITION). If the intolerance of Churchmen is blamable, then that of the Reformers is doubly so. From their own standpoint, it was unjustifiable. First, they were in revolt against the established authority of the Church, and secondly they could hardly use force to compel the unwilling to conform to their own principle of private judgment. With this clear demarcation of the Reformer's private judgment from the Catholic's authority, it hardly serves our purpose to estimate the relative violence of Catholic and Protestant Governments during the times of the Reformation. And yet it is well to remember that the methods of the maligned Inquisition in Spain and Italy were far less destructive of life than the religious wars of France and Germany. What is, however, more to our purpose is to notice the outspoken intolerance of the Protestant leaders; for it gave an additional right to the Church to appeal to force. She was punishing her defaulting subjects and at the same time defending herself against their attacks.

Such compulsion, therefore, as is used by legitimate authority cannot be called persecution, nor can its victims be called martyrs. It is not enough that those who are condemned to death should be suffering for their religious opinions. A martyr is a witness to the truth; whereas those who suffered the extreme penalty of the Church were at the most the witnesses to their own sincerity, and therefore unhappily no more than pseudo-martyrs. We need not dwell upon the second objection which pretends that a pagan government might be justified in harassing Christian missionaries in so far as it considered Christianity to be subversive of established authority. The Christian revelation is the supernatural message of the Creator to His creatures, to which there can be no lawful resistance. Its missionaries have the right and the duty to preach it everywhere. They who die in the propagation or maintenance of the Gospel are God’s witnesses to the truth, suffering persecution for His sake.

<end quote from Catholic Encyclopedia (dated 1911)>

I would laugh, if it were not a question of (eternal) life and (immediate) death (at stake). As i was never a christian, i am not an apostate. Ouf !

Huon

Tiberius (14-37)

He drove away some astrologers (not all), persecuted the fidels of Isis, fought against the druids in Gaul, who were probably nationalists as well,, and sent to Sardinia 4000 emancipated (!) Jews, who were suspected of proselytism.

Johnny Skeptic

To be sure, there were Christian martyrs, but likely nothing anything near the numbers claimed by many Christians.

Some Christians attempt to build a case for a sizeable early Christian Church by referring to Tacitus’s mention that Nero persecuted “a vast multitude of Christians.� The notion has been widely discredited. Consider the following:

The Britannica 2002 Deluxe Edition says that Nero “became infamous for his personal debaucheries and extravagances and, on doubtful evidence, for his burning of Rome and persecutions of Christians.�

The Microsoft Encarta 2000 Encyclopedia says "In July 64, two-thirds of Rome burned while Nero was at Antium. In ancient times he was charged with being the incendiary, but most modern scholars doubt the truth of that accusation. According to some accounts (now considered spurious), he laid the blame on the Christians (few at that time) and persecuted them." Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2002. © 1993-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

In ‘The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark says the following:

“Second, persecutions rarely occurred, and only a tiny number of Christians ever were martyred – only “hundreds, not thousands� according to W.H.C. Frend (1965:413). Indeed, commenting on Tacitus’s claim that Nero had murdered “an immense multitude� of Christians, Marta Sordi wrote that “a few hundred victims would justify the use of this term, given the horror of what happened� (1986:31). The truth is that the Roman government seems to have cared very little about the “Christian menace.� There was surprisingly little effort to persecute Christians, and when a wave of persecution did occur, usually only bishops and other prominent figures were singled out. Thus for rank-and-file Christians the threat of persecution was so slight as to have counted for little among the potential sacrifices imposed on them.�

Christians claim that most of the disciples died for their beliefs, but no external sources corroborate the claim.

Following are excerpts from two articles written by Joseph McCabe that can be found in their entirety at the Secular Web:

"According to the Catholic writers, and even the official liturgy of their Church, the Roman community of the first three centuries was so decked and perfumed with saints and martyrs that it must have had a divine spirit in it. Now the far greater part, the overwhelmingly greater part, of the Acts of the Martyrs and Lives of the Saints on which this claim is based are impudent forgeries, perpetrated by Roman Christians from the fourth to the eighth century in order to give a divine halo to the very humble, and very human, history of their Church.

"This is not merely a contention of 'heretics and unbelievers.' It is not even a new discovery. The legends of the martyrs are so gross that Catholic historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries frequently denounced them. Cardinal Baronius and Father Pagi repeatedly rejected them. Pope Benedict XIV, of the eighteenth century, a scholar who by some mischance was made a Pope, was so ashamed of the extent to which these forgeries permeate the official ritual of his Church that he entered upon a great reform; but the cardinals and monks obstructed his work, and the literature of the Church still teems with legends from these tainted sources. In fact, many of these forgeries were already notorious in the year 494, when Pope Gelasius timidly and haltingly condemned them.

"These forgeries are so gross that one needs very little historical knowledge in order to detect them. Large numbers of Roman martyrs are, like the Pope Callistus whom I have mentioned, put in the reign of the friendly Emperor Alexander Severus, who certainly persecuted none. One of these Roman forgers, of the sixth and seventh century, is bold enough to claim five thousand martyrs for Rome alone under the gentle Alexander Severus! Other large numbers of Roman martyrs are put in the reign of the Emperor Maximin; and Dr. Garres has shown that there were hardly any put to death in the whole Empire, least of all at Rome, under Maximin. The semi-official catalogue of the Popes makes saints and martyrs of no less than thirteen of the Popes of the third century, when there were scarcely more than three or four.

"No one questions that the Roman Church had a certain number of martyrs in the days of the genuine persecutions, but nine-tenths of the pretty stories which are popular in Catholic literature ... the stories of St. Agnes and St. Cecilia, of St. Lucia and St. Catherine, of St. Lawrence and St. George and St. Sebastian, and so on are pious romances. Even when the martyrdom may be genuine, the Catholic story of it is generally a late and unbridled fiction.

"A short account of the havoc which modern scholars have made of the Acts of the Martyrs is given by a Catholic professor, Albert Ehrhard, of the Vienna University, and will cause any inquiring Catholic to shudder. Dr. Ehrhard mentions a French work, L'Amphithtre Flavien, by Father Delehaye, a Jesuit, and calls it 'an important contribution to the criticism of the Roman acts of the martyrs.' It is a 'criticism' of such a nature that it dissolves into fiction all the touching pictures (down to Mr. G. B. Shaw's Androcles and the Lion) of the 'martyrs of the Coliseum.' It proves that no Christians were ever martyred in the Amphitheatre (Coliseum). The English translation of Father Delehaye's ‘Legends of the Saints’ (1907) gives an appalling account of these Roman forgeries. Another scholar has, Professor Ehrhard admits (p. 555), shown that 'a whole class' of these saints and martyrs are actually pagan myths which have been converted into Christian martyrs. The whole literature which this Catholic professor surveys is one mighty massacre of saints and martyrs, very few surviving the ordeal. These fictions are often leniently called 'pious fancies' and 'works of edification.' Modern charity covers too many ancient sins. These things were intended to deceive; they have deceived countless millions for fourteen centuries, and in the hands of priests they deceive millions today.

"The early Roman Church was a poor little sect, like any other. It had some noble-spirited martyrs during the three or four short persecutions (in two hundred and fifty years) which affected it; but it had a far larger number who either sacrificed to the gods or bought a false certificate that they had done so. It had many men and women of strict life, and still more of lax life. Its first thirty Popes were obscure men of no distinction in the Church, of no learning, who just managed to hold together their ten or twenty thousand followers until the golden days of Constantine began.

"Even the most orthodox reader will recognize the force of the modern criticism of martyr-legends when so retrograde a work as the 'Catholic Encyclopedia' is compelled to admit it. Usually its writers deny the most certain facts of science or history with an ease that must command the envy of a politician."

Elaine Pagels:

"For nearly 2,000 years, Christian tradition has preserved and revered orthodox writings that denounce the Gnostics, while suppressing and virtually destroying the Gnostic writings themselves. Now, for the first time, certain texts discovered at Nag Hammadi reveal the other side of the coin: how Gnostics denounced the orthodox. The 'Second Treatise of the Great Seth' polemicizes against orthodox Christianity, contrasting it with the 'true church' of the Gnostics. Speaking for those he calls the sons of light, the author says: '...we were hated and persecuted, not only by those who are ignorant (pagans), but also by those think they are advancing the name of Christ, since they were unknowingly empty, not knowing who they are, like dumb animals.'"

Larry Taylor:

"How does this apply to the story of Jesus? Simply that all of the early critics are dead. Skeptical opinions were banned. Christian opinions, other than those of the establishment, were banned. Books were destroyed, and later, heretics were burned."

Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2002:

"By the 3rd century Gnosticism began to succumb to orthodox Christian opposition and persecution. Partly in reaction to the Gnostic heresy, the church strengthened its organization by centralizing authority in the office of bishop, which made its effort to suppress the poorly organized Gnostics more effective."

In his book titled ‘The Religious Quests of the Graeco-Roman World,’ Christian author S. Angus, Ph.D., D.Lit., D.D., says the following:

“No one could have dreamed that the Christians, who had themselves suffered so much from persecution and protested so vehemently against the injustice and futility of persecution, would so quickly have turned persecutors and surpassed their Pagan predecessors in fanatical savagery and efficiency, utterly oblivious of the Beatitude of the Divine Master (Matt. V. 10, 44, 45). It became ominous for subsequent history that the first General Council of the Church was signalized by bitter excommunications and banishments. Christians, having acquired the art of disposing of hostile criticism by searching out and burning the objectionable books of their Pagan adversaries, learned to apply the same method to the works of such groups of Christians as were not in power or in favour for the time; when this method proved unsatisfactory, they found it expedient to burn their bodies. The chained skeleton found in the Mithraic chapel at Sarrebourg testified to the drastic means employed by Christians in making the truth conquer otherwise than by the methods and exemplified by the Founder. The stripping and torture to death with oyster-shells in a Christian church and the subsequent mangling of limb from limb of Hypatia, the noblest representative of Neo-Platonism of her day, by the violent Nitrian monks and servitors of a Christian bishop, and probably with his connivance, were symptomatic and prophetic of the intolerance and fanaticism which Christianity was to direct throughout the centuries upon its disobedient members and troublesome minorities until the day – yet to dawn – when a purer, more convincing because more spiritual, Christianity gains ‘the consent of happier generation, the applause of less superstitious ages.’�

The largest colonial empire in history by far under a single religion was conquered by Christian nations by means of persecution, murder and theft of property. The victors often warred among themselves for the spoils of victory. Few Christians would favor the United States embarking upon colonial conquests at this time, but if every Christian who is alive today had been transported at birth back to 1650 A.D., when colonial conquests were widely accepted by Christians, and had been raised by
Christian parents who favored colonization, there should be no doubt whatsoever that the majority of them would have favored colonial conquests.

I debated the issue of Christian martyrs with Christians at the Theology Web for some time, and I eventually retired all if them.

Regarding Paul's persecution of Christians, there are not any good reasons at all for anyone to assume that Paul would only have persecuted Christians if there were a lot of them.