schilling.klaus

It's irrelevant what the majority or even all scholars think, Polydore Hochart knew the fakeness of the Tacitan stuff already over 100 years ago, and those who still believe in its authenticity are fooled beyond help.

Klaus Schilling

Civil1z@tion

One reason I heard that explains why the Romans were particularly harsh on the Chirstians and not other cults (with the notable exception of the cult of Baccus) is that the Romans viewed Christians as "atheists." Their reasoning was since they refused to worship their gods as well as their own, that made them "atheists" cause their god had to be imaginary if it couldn't be included in the Roman pantheon (which every god which allowed you to worship Roman gods as well could).

CreamFilledGiraffe

So what Polydore Hochart thought is relevant because ... he agrees with Klaus? He's god? The sun shines out of his ass?

mountainman

See The Tacitus Reference (Annals 15:44) and ROSS on BRACCIOLINI

The other references are likewise suss.


Best wishes,


Pete Brown

Didymus

You're projecting Christian-style intolerance into ancient Roman minds.

You've got it partly right: Romans had a problem with Christians because Christians refused to worship Roman gods. As to what sort of god the Christians did worship, or whether the Christian god was real or imaginary, the Romans could not have cared less. The Romans were only concerned with the way Christians behaved, and how that behavior affected the community and the state.

In ancient Rome, worship was not a private matter. The Romans believed that the gods, including local and highly specialized gods, protected the community. They made rain fall, crops grow, protected travelers from thieves, prevented floods, thwarted pestilence, and so on, almost infinitum. But the gods provided this protection only in response to the appropriate rituals, sacrifices and incantations. If a community (or landowner, or ship's crew) failed to carry out the traditional rituals in a punctilious manner, divine protection would be absent, and the whole enterprise/community would be at risk.

Any community member who didn't do his propitiary duty toward the gods was regarded as seditious. From the Roman point of view, by failing to carry out essential rituals, Christians put the entire community in jeopardy.

Nonetheless, the Romans were generally inclined to live and let live, and severe persecution seems to have been surprisingly rare.

As to the accounts of Roman persecution of Christians, they seem quite mild in comparison with the extensive Christian persecutions of pagans and destruction of pagan books and other artifacts after Constantine.

Ddms

Roger Pearse

The crime of which Christians were found guilty was the nomen, not the behaviour of the Christians. Non licet esse vos! -- you aren't allowed to exist! was the jeer, recorded in Tertullian's Apologeticum. See the Acts of the martyrs of Scilli, the Martyrdom of Polycarp and again Tertullian for this.

I was glad to see this note, with its appreciation that Roman paganism was not like modern Christianity. It was indeed a lot about ritual; even rather like magic, sometimes. But... the Romans of this period were a pretty irreligious lot themselves.

So it must be questionable whether this is a serious motive, or an excuse (when proferred, which it doesn't seem to be all that often). Modern politically correct persecutors of the Christians (I belong to a group that has just been on the receiving end, so this is not theory) usually invent some kind of excuse for their actions. Those who act out of hate usually want to demonise their intended victims in order to 'justify' their actions to others. We know that Jews got this treatment in some periods, but the real basis was hatred of outsiders.

However Tertullian does record one such episode when the governor was an old-fashioned pagan, and probably was acting out of Pietas.

Although Christians lived perpetually at the risk of blackmail and extortion -- indeed Tertullian records this -- and any governor could initiate a 'crackdown'. Few of us would wish to live like this.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Amaleq13

:rolling:

You're only kidding yourself, amigo.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

Fortuna

I'm not so sure about that. IN the Pliny Trajan correspondence, Pliny expresses his reasons for concern about the Christians in his provence of Bythnia..............

So, it would seems that Piny was concerned because the traditional temples began to become deserted and that the "established religious rites" were not being performed.

But Pliny remarks that with just a mild application of punishment, things came back to normal and the Christian menace ceased for the time being.



So, it would seem that Pliny was able to more or less eliminate the practice from Bythnia. Pliny showed soem concern here ;

Next Pliny tells us that while some were very obstinate, that they (the people, Christians, ex-Christians) seemed for the most part to be open to repentence.

So, some confessed and others did not. Those who did he interrogated a second and third time (appparently giving them every chance to recant).

Those who persisted to the end were exacuted. But, as I read this, I get the sense that only a few were executed. I get that sense from the paragraph that follows and by his last paragraph ;


This last paragraph says that Pliny did successfully check the Christian problem in Bythnia ;


The sense that I get from this is that, while there was a small group of die-hard Christians who refused to recant and got themselves executed, the large majority just recanted, went back to the traditional forms of worship and left Christianity behind, sort of like a passing fad.


Also, I might point out that some sort of persecution must have been going on just prior to the Nicean Council. I think this must be so because so many of the statement that came out from Nicea seeed to be concerned with it ;

Acording to the Catholic encyclopedia, canons 10-14 seem to have something to do with that persecution and talk about those Christians who probably recanted during that persecution ;


I'm getting the sense that recanting, or denying that one had been a Christians during times of persecution was much much more common and much more frequent than those who chose martyrdom.

andrewcriddle

As relations between the Christian-supporting Constantine (Western Emperor) and the non-Christian Licinius (Eastern Emperor) worsened, Licinius (maybe understandably) saw the Christians under his rule as probably disloyal and took measures against them.

Licinius' hostility to Christianity meant bishops had to keep a low profile and prevented formal measures by the bishops to deal with the problem of Arius and his views.

Constantine eventually defeated Licinius (who was later killed). Bishops could now meet together freely to discuss problems and the Council of Nicea took place.

Andrew Criddle

Clivedurdle

There is a serious unacknowledged problem in this discussion of orders of magnitude, of looking through the wrong end of telescopes.

We have acknowledged a few hundred martyrs max over several centuries compared with a milleniums treatment of one quarter of the Roman population and a specific hit of 11,000 in one go!!