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Two

The Empire and the Church

“Two ways there are, one of life and one of death, but there is a great difference between the two ways.” ¹

The Didache

The philosophy teacher was perplexed. He had mastered ancient Greek thought, but this new teaching threatened to turn the philosophical world upside down. How was he to interpret this new way of life? It gave purpose and meaning to his life in a way the Greeks had never done. His contact with the God-man Jesus, in the sacraments and teachings of the Catholic Church, led him to understand that the only authentic source of philosophical truth was Christ. He believed it was his duty to share that truth with others. As a young man, he had left his native Palestine to study philosophy in Ephesus. After his conversion at the age of thirty-eight, he settled in Rome, where he opened a school of Christian philosophy and allowed students to attend free of charge — because the truth of Christ was so important, it had to be made accessible to all. The philosopher poured his life into studying the Scripture, where he saw how the life of Jesus fulfilled the ancient Old Testament prophecies. He studied history and was the first to understand that there is a twofold dimension to history: sacred and secular, with Christ at the center.² He utilized his intellectual talents to combat early heresies, and when the Roman Empire turned its violent attention to the nascent Church, he wrote to defend and explain the Faith to the emperor and pagan society. When persecution came under the reign of Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–180), the philosopher’s ardent love for Christ drove him to give his life in martyrdom. He is forever known as Saint Justin Martyr (100–165).

What was the Roman Empire?

In his study of the impact of the Catholic faith on Europe, the historian Hilaire Belloc asked two important questions: “What was the Roman Empire?” and “What was the Church in the Roman Empire?” Answering these questions helps us understand the history of the early Church.

In the centuries before Christ, the city of Rome was a republic governed by elected magistrates, advised by the Senate. This form of government was designed to prevent one person or group from gaining supreme power. The Roman Republic began to change during the life of the outstanding general Julius Caesar, whose conquests (especially of Gaul) increased the power, prestige, and wealth of Rome. After Caesar’s murder in 41 B.C., three men, Marc Antony (one of Caesar’s generals), Octavian (Caesar’s nephew and adopted son), and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus (a close ally of Caesar), stepped into the political void caused by Caesar’s death and established a dictatorship known as the Second Triumvirate. Eventually, infighting and civil war ensued among the three, which ended when Octavian exiled Lepidus and defeated Marc Antony at the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C. Octavian was acknowledged as imperator (emperor) by the army and given the title “Augustus” by the Senate years later. Although Octavian kept the outward governmental framework of the Republic, he was a military dictator; thus the Roman Empire was born. The Empire reached its height of power, influence, and expanse in the mid-second century, when it encompassed all of Europe west of the Rhine and south of the Danube Rivers, including most of Britain, as well as North Africa, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine. The Empire was organized into forty provinces with a total population of sixty million people, most of whom lived an agrarian lifestyle (only 15 percent of the Empire lived in cities).³ Above all, the Empire united a vast, diverse civilization in a “common mode of life,” consisting of shared language, culture, and commerce, which all citizens embraced and preserved.⁴ The Roman army was the foundation of the Empire. It was deployed in garrisons in cities that were connected by a well-maintained and extensive road network, allowing the free flow of resources and ideas.⁵ It was into this political organization that the Church grew, and that growth raised the ire of the Empire, with violent results.

The Burning of Rome

The night of July 18, A.D. 64, began 250 years of government-sanctioned persecution against the Catholic Church. On that night, a great fire flared up in the city of Rome. The fire raged for days, ultimately destroying several districts of the city and causing serious property damage as well as loss of life. When it subsided, the angry populace demanded answers about the fire’s origin. Rumors circulated that the emperor was to blame for the fire, as it was known he wanted to remake the city according to his own design and even rename it after himself (“Neropolis”).⁶ In an effort to deflect criticism, the emperor fabricated a scapegoat. He blamed the fire on a small sect in the city that refused to honor the pagan gods: the Christians.

Nero became emperor of Rome in A.D. 54 at the young age of seventeen. The history of the Roman emperors illustrates that many men who came to the throne before the age of thirty-five went insane.⁷ Nero certainly fits that description — the man was a psychopath. He was known to practice all forms of vice and was a cruel, “neurotic hedonist” who poisoned his brother, ordered the murder of his mother, and kicked his pregnant wife, Poppaea, to death because she scolded him for coming home late from the races one night.⁸ Nero was a man “of about average height, his body was pockmarked and smelly, while he had light yellow hair, good but not handsome features, blue, rather weak eyes, too thick a neck, a big belly, and spindly legs” and was “ridiculously fussy about his person and his clothes, having his hair done in rows of curls.”⁹

Nero blamed the Christians for the great fire and initiated the first of many persecutions against the early Church. He outlawed the Christian faith, ordering the arrest and imprisonment of Christians in Rome.¹⁰ Those arrested who refused to abandon the Faith were horribly tortured and killed. Tacitus, a Roman senator and historian, described the horrors suffered by Christians under Nero: “[they] were covered with wild beasts’ skins and torn to death by dogs; or they were fastened on crosses, and, when daylight failed, were burned to serve as lamps by night.”¹¹ Although Nero tried to use the Christians as a scapegoat for the fire, his punishments served to bring about “a sentiment of pity [among the Roman people], due to the impression that they [Christians] were being sacrificed not for the welfare of the state but to the ferocity of a single man.”¹²

Tradition holds that during Nero’s persecution the twin pillars of the early Church, Saints Peter and Paul, were martyred in Rome. Peter demanded to be crucified upside down, and Paul, as a Roman citizen, was executed by beheading. Before their martyrdom, Peter and Paul had worked to strengthen the Christian community in the imperial capital and mentored elders to lead the flock after their deaths. As a result, the bishop of Rome, Linus (67–76), became the successor to Saint Peter and the universal pastor of the Christian community.

The Jewish Revolt

A few years after Nero’s persecution of Christians in Rome, a devastating event occurred in the Holy Land that would forever shape the history and worship of the Jewish people, and also influence the early Church.

Gessius Florus, the Roman Procurator of Judea, was a wicked man. He disliked the Jewish people and wanted to goad them into rebellion against Rome. Florus provoked the people by commandeering money from the Temple treasury in the name of the emperor. The people, incensed, rioted in the streets of Jerusalem. Florus demanded that the Jews hand over the leaders of the demonstrations. When the people refused, he ordered Roman troops to restore order. The army killed thousands of Jews in Jerusalem, even crucifying Roman citizens, which was against imperial law. This was the tipping point for the Jews, and more men joined the rebellion. The rebels quickly overwhelmed the small Roman garrison in Jerusalem. Word reached the Roman legate in Syria that the situation in Judea was out of control, so he ordered the Twelfth Legion, augmented by mercenaries and auxiliary troops, to quell the Jewish rebellion. On the march to Judea, Jewish rebels at the pass of Beth-Horon ambushed and slaughtered the legion.¹³ News of the massacre of the Roman legion spread throughout Judea, encouraging more people to join the rebellion, which now became a full-scale war.

Rome never allowed those who defeated a legion to remain unpunished. When word of the Twelfth’s defeat reached the capitol, Nero ordered General Titus Flavius Vespasian to Judea. Vespasian was “a no-nonsense sort of man, tough, shrewd, and efficient, with a caustic wit, a soldier’s soldier who always led from the front and had been wounded several times.”¹⁴ Vespasian was a confident and experienced combat commander, a veteran of thirty battles fought in Germania and Britain against some of Rome’s fiercest foes. He took command of several legions and ordered his son, Titus, to lead the Fifteenth Legion from Egypt to Judea. Nearly sixty thousand Roman troops were dispatched to Judea to put down the Jewish revolt. Vespasian embarked on a systematic campaign, initially refusing to attack the main rebel stronghold of Jerusalem and focusing instead on controlling the surrounding areas and strategic towns on the approach to the great city.

The main source of information for the Great Jewish Revolt is from the writings of Josephus (A.D. 37–100), a Levite and a Jewish nobleman (a descendant of the famous Maccabee kings on his mother’s side), whose many books include The Wars of the Jews.¹⁵ Josephus had lived in Rome in the years before the Jewish rebellion, so he was intimately aware of the power of the Empire. He returned to his homeland and tried in vain to convince his countrymen that war against Rome was futile. But Josephus believed it was his duty to defend his nation, so he joined the rebellion and took command of the city of Jotapata (also known as Yodfat), which the Romans besieged for forty-seven days. Eventually, Roman soldiers broke into the city and killed most of the city’s population. Josephus survived and was taken prisoner. He soon gained favor with Vespasian for his knowledge, respect for Rome, and clever mind. The Romans used Josephus to convince other Jewish towns to surrender, so most Jews saw him as a traitor. At the end of the war, Josephus settled in Rome, became an imperial citizen, and took as his own the imperial family name, Flavius, in honor of their patronage.

The Holy City Destroyed

After three years of fighting, Vespasian’s systematic campaign in Judea came to its culmination with the siege of Jerusalem. The situation in the city at the arrival of the Roman legions was desperate. Zealots inside the city had unleashed ferocious class warfare, breaking into rival factions so that the Jews in the city were fighting not only the Romans, but also each other. As Vespasian’s army prepared for siege, word reached the general that Nero had committed suicide, triggering a year of civil war among rival claimants to the throne. Vespasian left the Judean campaign and placed his son Titus in command of the siege. Eventually, Vespasian emerged victorious from the civil war and became emperor in the summer of A.D. 69. Titus embarked on the biggest siege to date in Roman history. He placed the Tenth Legion, “Caesar’s Own,” on the lower slopes of the Mount of Olives. The soldiers used wood from the Garden of Gethsemane to build siege engines.

Conditions in the city went from desperate to horrific. A large number of people had come to the city for the Passover feast when the Romans began the siege. As months passed, starvation reigned. People ate leather and hay, and even sifted through cow dung looking for scraps of food — for “what had once revolted them now became their normal diet.”¹⁶ There was even a ghastly account of a mother, delirious from hunger, who ate her infant child.¹⁷ The death toll climbed until the Jewish soldiers were forced to walk over corpses to sally forth from the city. After six months of siege, the Romans prepared their final assault. Titus personally led the way and ordered that the Temple was not to be destroyed. Unfortunately, those orders were not obeyed, and the Roman troops rampaged through the city. The destruction of the Temple, which had been only recently completed in A.D. 64, was a watershed moment in the life of the children of Israel, although it was not the first time the Temple had been destroyed. In fact, the Babylonians destroyed the first Temple on August 10, 587 B.C. The second Temple was destroyed 657 years later on the same day. The loss of the Temple fundamentally changed the practice of Judaism from a worship that required animal sacrifice to an observance of the Law as the defining characteristic of Jewish faith. Titus triumphantly marched back to Rome in A.D. 71 and carried with him the great menorah from the Temple.¹⁸

Although Jerusalem had fallen to the Roman legions, a group of Jews led by Eleazar ben Ya’ir took refuge in the isolated rock plateau fortress of Masada for three years. The Romans, under the command of Lucius Flavius Silva, built an impressive 400-foot ramp in order to enter the fortress. Knowing the final Roman assault was near, Eleazar ordered his troops to commit suicide with their families to avoid capture. When the Romans broke into Masada in the morning, a ghastly sight greeted them.

After years of continued clashes, another Jewish revolt commenced in A.D. 132 under the leadership of Simon bar Kokhba. Once more, the Romans violently put down the rebellion, this time leveling the entire city of Jerusalem. It was replaced by a new city, founded by Emperor Hadrian, and renamed Aelia Capitolina.

Over one million Jews died in the Great Jewish Revolt, and tens of thousands were sold into slavery. Christian inhabitants of Jerusalem, remembering Jesus’ prophetic words, fled to the countryside before the siege and were not deeply impacted by the war. The destruction of the Temple and the subsequent change in Judaism helped solidify the distinction between Jews and Christians. Originally viewed as a Jewish phenomenon, the Christian faith became a permanent separate entity as a result of the Jewish war with Rome.

The Didache

The early Church produced an interesting document known as the Didache, or The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.¹⁹ The Didache outlines the choice each person faces — the way of life and the way of death. The way of life involves living out the Ten Commandments, whereas the way of death involves living by the sins of pride, lust, lying, stealing, murder, adultery, sodomy, and abortion. From the earliest days of the Faith, as the Didache illuminates, Christian living was focused on morality, on living in accordance with the example of Christ and the teachings of the Church. The Didache also provides information on the worship and sacramental life of the early Church. The document exhorts Christians to pray every day — especially the Lord’s Prayer, which should be recited three times a day. The Sacrament of Baptism and its application is mentioned in the Didache. The candidate was required to fast before reception of the sacrament and was baptized in the Trinitarian formula with water. Prayers for the celebration of the Eucharist on the Lord’s Day are found in the Didache, along with the admonition that only those who are baptized can receive the Lord’s body and blood. Finally, the document also testifies to the practice of the early Church that only worthy, morally upright men should be appointed as bishops and deacons in the Church.

The Faith Spreads

The Faith spread rapidly within the Roman Empire for several reasons. The Empire itself provided a universal organized structure for the rapid spread of ideas. Although many groups of people lived within the confines of the Empire, each with their own culture and language, all shared the common tongue, Greek, which was the language for business, education, and everyday life (at this time, Latin was the official state language and used primarily for political purposes). Moreover, the initial decades of the Church were times of peace in the Empire, which afforded people the time to ask important life questions and seek answers. The Roman Empire was overall a religious society. Romans understood that there was a connection between religious faith and morality, and between conduct in life and one’s fate in the afterlife. Religion had a political dimension as well; participation in the state cults was viewed as a civic duty. All forms of religious cults existed in the Empire, from nature-worship to emperor-worship. The mystery religions that originated in Egypt and Persia were also popular and contained rites of initiation, sacred food, sacrifices, and a hierarchical structure, elements found also in the Faith, which assisted in conversions. Within the Roman religious environment, several groups were predisposed to accept the Gospel, such as the “proto-Christians,” known to Jews as “God-fearers.” These proto-Christians were Gentiles (Roman pagans) who, as a result of contact with Judaism, came to adore the one true God. They read the Old Testament and tried to live in accordance with the Ten Commandments.²⁰ Additionally, Hellenized Jews had been part of the Jewish Diaspora and were considered half-pagan by Palestine Jews. Hellenized Jews took Greek names, spoke Latin and Greek, and dressed like the pagans. The several large communities of Hellenized Jews throughout the Empire provided rich evangelization opportunities for the missionaries of the early Church.

Pagans were attracted to the Faith by the witness of the early Christians, especially the martyrs. Romans were also astounded by how the Christians treated the poor with a dignity unknown to the pagan world.²¹ Christian charity toward pagans was a deeply effective form of evangelization. Pagans understood Christians caring for Christians, but when believers also cared for pagans during plagues and other times of need, the pagans were intrigued. Indeed, “the practical application of charity was probably the most potent single cause of Christian success.”²² Ultimately, what allowed the Faith to spread rapidly in its first few decades was the fact that the Gospel was inclusive — it was meant for everyone. Roman society was very class-oriented, and religious cults were organized similarly. In contrast, the Catholic Church accepted everyone regardless of race, class status, education, or profession. That openness was unique and intriguing to people in the first-century Roman Empire.

More Persecution

Vespasian, the Roman general who had quashed the Great Jewish Revolt, reigned as emperor for a decade (A.D. 69–79). Upon his death, his son Titus, commanding general of the Roman forces that had taken Jerusalem, succeeded to the imperial purple. Titus became the first Roman emperor to succeed his biological father, in what became known as the Flavian dynasty. Titus’s brief reign lasted only two years, but during those two years the Flavian amphitheater (also known as the Colosseum) in Rome was completed and Mount Vesuvius erupted. After Titus died of fever, his younger brother Domitian became emperor. Domitian struggled with his mental health while emperor and was an “unpredictable and treacherous, [and] a truly horrible man who delighted in cruelty.”²³ He was the first Roman emperor to deify himself with the title “Lord and God” during his reign.²⁴ Domitian was paranoid; he spent his last days in a specially constructed hall of polished surfaces that acted as mirrors so he could see anyone trying to sneak up on him. He also delighted in the sadistic task of catching flies and spearing them with a special needle. Domitian initiated a limited persecution of the Church by striking down members of the imperial family who had become Christians. It was during his fifteen-year reign that the beloved Saint John the Evangelist was exiled to the island of Patmos. Eventually, imperial officials grew angry at the whims of the mentally ill Domitian. He was assassinated in 96, and was succeeded by his adviser Nerva.

The Epistle of Saint Clement of Rome

Before the turn of the century, a man in Rome named Clement, who had known Peter and Paul, was selected to become the fourth bishop of the city.²⁵ Clement was aware that his position was unique in the Church. It required diligent oversight of the other Christian communities scattered throughout the Empire, which is why he was greatly troubled by reports from the Christian community in Corinth (initially established by Saint Paul). Word had reached Rome that the Corinthians were openly rebelling against their priests. This uprising threatened not only to tear apart the Church in Corinth, but also to affect the Church’s evangelization mission, so Clement resolved to act quickly. He sent a firm and fatherly reprimand to the Corinthians that became known as the Epistle of Saint Clement of Rome. Clement focused his letter on the theme of order. Order, according to Clement, is the expression of the will of God and is good, whereas disorder is the expression of the will of the devil and is bad. The Corinthians were giving in to the temptations of the Evil One by their rebellion, which was weakening the unity of the Church and causing scandal among the pagans. Clement wrote, “Disgraceful, beloved, indeed, exceedingly disgraceful and unworthy of your training in Christ, is the report that the well-established and ancient Church of the Corinthians is … in revolt against the presbyters. And this report has reached not only us but also people that differ from us in religion.”²⁶

Clement’s letter illustrates three fundamental Catholic doctrines. First, it affirms the apostolic teaching that the clergy derive their authority from God and not from the people. In other words, “the Church’s structure was sacramental not political.”²⁷ Second, Clement reminds the Corinthians that the Church’s organization is apostolic. The apostles handed on their authority through ordination to other men in the communities they established. This is known as apostolic succession. Finally, Clement’s letter is the “first exercise of the Roman primacy after Saint Peter’s death” and proves the early Church believed in papal primacy and universal jurisdiction.²⁸ Clement may have been writing on an internal matter of a particular church, but his letter clearly indicates he knew he had the authority to command the Corinthians to stop their rebellion. He wrote, “If some shall disobey the words which have been spoken by him [Christ] through us [Clement], let them know they will involve themselves in no small transgression and danger.”²⁹ Saint John the Beloved was still alive at the time of the Corinthian uprising, but it was Clement, the bishop of Rome, rather than the living apostle, who wrote the admonition. The Corinthians acknowledged Clement’s epistle as authoritative; they ended their rebellion and restored the ousted priests upon receipt of the letter, which was still being read in the city a century later.³⁰

What was the Church in the Roman Empire?

With the closing of the first century, we can clearly answer Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc’s question, “What was the Church in the Roman Empire?” Belloc first assessed what the Church was not. The Church was not an opinion, a fashion, a philosophy, or a theory; instead, she was a “clearly delineated body corporate based on numerous exact doctrines, extremely jealous of its unity and of its precise definitions, and filled, as was no other body of men at that time, with passionate conviction.”³¹ The Church was a distinct and unique organism within the Roman Empire. She was organized in a hierarchical structure centered on bishops, the chief of whom was the bishop of Rome. Most cults in the Empire were local and attached to specific places; however, the Church’s structure, doctrine, and worship were not dependent on geography but were the same throughout the Empire. At the end of the first century, there were fewer than 10,000 Christians, comprising only 0.0017 percent of the total imperial population of 60 million. By the end of the second century, the Church had grown to 200,000 members, though still less than 1 percent of the Roman population. At the time of the first Empire-wide persecution, initiated in 250 by the Emperor Decius (r. 249–251), there were more than one million Christians (2 percent of the imperial population). By the beginning of the fourth century, the Church was home to six million people, or 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empire.³² The Church came into conflict with Roman society because her teachings and lifestyle were in opposition to societal norms. Roman society “believed man to be sufficient to himself and all belief to be mere opinions.” Conversely, the Church “proposed statement instead of hypothesis, affirmed concrete historical facts instead of suggesting myths, and treated its ritual of ‘mysteries’ as realities instead of [merely] symbols.”³³

Pagan Attacks on the Church

The growing Catholic population became a concern for certain pagan authors who were dumbfounded that people would join what they saw as such a nonsensical religion. They attacked the Church in order to dissuade Romans from joining this new religion. The three main critics of the Church and her teaching, who wrote various books, pamphlets, and tracts against her, were Celsus (second century), Porphyry (234–305), and Julian the Apostate (r. 361–363).³⁴

Celsus, a second-century philosopher, wrote the first major pagan attack against the Catholic Church. Most of what we know about Celsus and his anti-Catholic work True Doctrine (c. A.D. 170) comes from the writings of the Catholic apologist Origen (185–254), who wrote a work known as Contra Celsum that refuted Celsus’s criticisms of the Church. Celsus utilized popular critiques as well as intellectual arguments in his attack on the Church. He viewed Jesus as a low-grade magician who duped people into believing he could actually perform miracles.³⁵ Celsus considered Christians a revolutionary fad, a threat to the ancient culture and traditions of Rome. Romans believed that religion and the nation were linked — one could not exist without the other — therefore, an extraterritorial group like the Catholic Church was an odd, seditious, and potentially threatening institution. Celsus also believed the newness of the Faith made it untrustworthy. The only acceptable and authentic religions, in the eyes of Celsus, were those whose teachings had been passed down from multiple generations. “Greco-Roman society revered the past. The older something was, the better it was thought to be … [because] those who lived very long ago, were thought to have been closer to the gods.”³⁶

Celsus extended his theological criticisms of the Church to foundational doctrinal teachings, such as the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and Jesus’ divinity. Celsus questioned the timing of the Incarnation, asking: “Is it only now after such a long age that God has remembered to judge the human race? Did he not care before?” He found the Incarnation unreasonable: “The assertion that some God or son of God has come down to earth as judge of mankind is most shameful, and no lengthy argument is required to refute it. What is the purpose of such a descent on the part of God? Was it in order to learn what was going on among men? Does he now know everything?”³⁷ Celsus considered the resurrection of Jesus an unnatural and therefore suspect event. Celsus did not dispute the claim that a man could be God or that men should worship him, but he doubted Jesus’ divinity because the Savior ate normal human food and spoke in a normal human voice. According to Celsus, “A divine figure would have had an enormously loud speaking voice!”³⁸ He opined that it would have been better for the Christians to worship Jonah or Daniel from the Old Testament, men who had accomplished astounding feats, rather than Jesus. Finally, Celsus attacked the Faith because he saw it as nothing more than an apostate group from Judaism. Celsus viewed Christian repudiation of circumcision and Jewish dietary laws as proof that the movement was illegitimate and that no self-respecting Roman should join it.³⁹

Porphyry (234–305) was born in Tyre (modern-day Lebanon) on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and was a Neoplatonic philosopher. He wrote a scathing critique of the Catholic Church titled Against the Christians, which was refuted by a long list of Christian apologists and intellectuals, including Eusebius of Caesarea, Saint Jerome, and Saint Augustine. Porphyry’s anti-Catholic work is known only from these Christian writers because Emperors Constantine and Theodosius II ordered copies of his work to be burned in the fourth and fifth centuries.⁴⁰ Porphyry attacked the Scriptures with literary and historical criticism, arguing that they did not provide a reliable historical account of Jesus. Porphyry believed such central Christian doctrines as the Incarnation and the Resurrection were fabrications. He was stupefied that Christians would believe Jesus was an incarnate god:

Even supposing that some Greeks were stupid enough to think that gods dwell in statues, this would be a purer conception than to accept that the divine had descended into the womb of the Virgin Mary, that he had become an embryo, that after his birth he had been wrapped in swaddling clothes, stained with blood, bile and worse. … Why, when he was taken before the high priest and governor, did not the Christ say anything worthy of a divine man …? He allowed himself to be struck, spat upon on the face, crowned with thorns. … Even if he had to suffer by order of God, he should have accepted the punishment but should not have endured his passion without some bold speech, some vigorous and wise word addressed to Pilate his judge, instead of allowing himself to be insulted like one of the rabble off the streets.⁴¹

The Church endured general criticisms from a host of pagan authors in addition to Celsus and Porphyry, which included the charges that Christians were atheists, ignorant and poor people, bad citizens, cannibals, and sexual deviants. These pagan critics believed Christians were atheists because they did not participate in the traditional and imperial polytheistic religious cults. This angered the Romans, since they thought the Christian lack of faith in the gods could bring divine wrath and vengeance on the Empire. Pagan critics attempted to dissuade members of the upper class from joining the Church by arguing — falsely — that only members of the socially inferior class (women, children, slaves, the poor) were attracted to the Christian faith. Imperial Roman society and its religious cults were highly class-stratified. The Church, teaching that all believers were equal regardless of social standing, threatened the established social order. Additionally, pagan authors charged Christians with a lack of patriotism because they refused to worship the emperor, which was considered blasphemy and treason, and were allegedly not interested in political affairs or the welfare of the Empire. In reality, Christians were very much concerned with state affairs and, despite the persecutions, prayed for the prosperity of the Empire and the well-being of the emperor.

Early Christians believed in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist — that they were eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ. Pagans, misunderstanding, applied the charge of cannibalism to the Eucharist. Roman society tolerated many vices, but cannibalism was something not even immoral Rome abided. One of the earliest Christian apologists, Marcus Minucius Felix (c. 200), was a lawyer who wrote a dialogue between a Christian and a pagan, addressing the primary attacks of Roman pagans on the Church. The pagan labeled Christians as sexual deviants, baby-killers, and cannibals:

The story about the initiation of new recruits is as detestable as it is well known. An infant, covered with flour, in order to deceive the unwary, is placed before the one who is to be initiated into the mysteries. Deceived by this floury mass, which makes him believe that his blows are harmless, the neophyte kills the infant. They avidly lick up the blood of the infant and argue over how to share its limbs. By this victim they are pledged together, and it is because of their complicity in this crime that they keep mutual silence! Everyone knows about their banquets, and these are talked of everywhere. On festivals they assemble for a feast with all their children, their sisters, their mothers, people of both sexes and every age. After eating their fill, when the excitement of the feast is at its height and their drunken ardor has inflamed incestuous passions, they provoke a dog which has been tied to a lampstand to leap, throwing it a piece of meat beyond the length of the cord which holds it. The light which could have betrayed them having thus been extinguished, they then embrace one another, quite at random. If this does not happen in fact, it does so in their minds, since that is their desire.⁴²

Despite these libelous attacks, by the third century, the Christian apologist Tertullian could boast “we are but of yesterday and we have filled all you have — cities, islands, forts, towns, assembly halls, even military camps, tribes, town councils, the palace, senate and forum. We have left you nothing but the temples.”⁴³

The Time of Major Persecutions

From the first to the fourth centuries, there were twelve major imperial Roman persecutions of the Catholic Church. Many of these were confined to Rome and the surrounding areas or particular provinces, but some were Empire-wide. At times, Christians were ignored by the state, although Nero’s law against the Church remained on the books. At other times, Christians were violently persecuted because they were an identifiable minority; or because they were suspected of nefarious activity (they necessarily maintained a certain secrecy due to their illegal status); or because Romans considered them antisocial, since they tended to live close together while rejecting elements of Roman society, such as the public baths, and spectacles like the gladiatorial games. Saint Justin commented, “The world suffers nothing from Christians but hates them because they reject its pleasures.”⁴⁴ Frequently, imperial politics and affairs of state determined whether Christians were persecuted or left in peace. Christians were easy scapegoats, blamed for various regional and national events. Tertullian mocked the Roman tendency to scapegoat Christians when he wrote: “If the Tiber rises too high or the Nile too low, the cry is ‘the Christians to the lion.’ All of them to a single lion?”⁴⁵

The Persecution of Trajan

Early in the second century, Emperor Trajan sent a man known as Pliny (called “the Younger” to distinguish him from his well-known uncle, Pliny the Elder, who had died in the blast of Mount Vesuvius in 79) to be the imperial legate in the province of Bithynia (modern-day Turkey). Pliny the Younger was instructed to conduct a financial audit, examine local governments, stop political disorder, and investigate the military situation. Soon after his arrival in the region, a group of butchers filed a complaint against Christians. The butchers were angry because the new sect was gaining converts, which impacted their business; pagan converts to the Faith refused to buy their sacrificial meat for use in the pagan temples. Pliny knew that Christians were an illegal sect, but wondered whether he needed to initiate a new persecution. He wrote a letter to Trajan, requesting instruction. The emperor responded with a benign neglect policy, telling Pliny to not actively pursue Christians if they were quiet and not public in the manifestation of their faith. But if the Christians caused trouble, Pliny was to arrest them.⁴⁶ Trajan’s sensible policy, designed to limit the unnecessary involvement of the state in private affairs, was discarded several years later when a large earthquake rocked the city of Antioch in Bithynia. Aftershocks from the earthquake continued for days, causing the city to suffer terrible destruction and many deaths. Trajan had been visiting the city and was injured when the natural disaster struck. The people were angry. They believed the pagan gods had allowed the earthquake because the city housed a significant number of Christians.⁴⁷ Trajan acquiesced to the blood lust of the people and ordered a persecution of Christians in the city. He arrested the long-standing and well-known bishop of the city, Ignatius. The elderly bishop, who had direct apostolic ties as a disciple of Saint John the Evangelist, had overseen the Antiochene Christian community for three decades. Trajan wanted to make an example of Ignatius, so he commanded the bishop be taken to Rome under armed guard and executed in the Flavian amphitheater. That decision proved providential for the history of the Church, since during his long journey to the capital Ignatius wrote letters to six Christian communities (the Ephesians, Magnesians, Trallians, Romans, Philadelphians, and Smyrnaeans), and to one fellow bishop, Saint Polycarp.

These letters not only provide detail into the life of the early Church, but also illustrate Ignatius’s deep love of Christ and the Church. His letters verify early Christian belief in the central doctrines of the Faith, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Divinity of Christ, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and the hierarchical structure of the Church (unified by the primacy of the bishop of Rome).⁴⁸ Ignatius uses special language in his letter to the Romans, referring to the Roman Church as “worthy of God, worthy of honor, worthy of being called blessed, worthy of praise, worthy of success, worthy of veneration.”⁴⁹ Ignatius was concerned that influential members of the Church in Rome might try to intervene on his behalf and prevent his martyrdom. He had embraced his cross and desired to fulfill the Lord’s plan for the end of this earthy life, writing, “God’s wheat I am, and by the teeth of wild beasts I am to be ground that I may prove Christ’s pure bread.”⁵⁰ Ignatius also exhorted his fellow Christians to remain obedient to their bishops and priests. He gave the Church her name — the Catholic Church — when he wrote to the Smyrnaeans, “Where the bishop appears, there let the people be, just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”⁵¹ Ignatius’s letter to the Philadelphians contains one of the earliest references to the belief in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. The Sacred Liturgy was the center of Christian life in the early Church, and Ignatius exhorted his brothers and sisters to “take care, then, to partake of one Eucharist, for, one is the Flesh of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and one the cup to unite us with His Blood.”⁵² This man of deep faith and love for the Church arrived in Rome and was martyred by lions in the Colosseum in the year 116.⁵³

Early Heresies

The early Church dealt not only with external Roman persecution, but also with internal persecution in the form of false teachings, known as heresies. One of the earliest falsehoods that sought to reshape the Church’s fundamental teachings was Gnosticism (from the Greek gnosis, which means “knowledge”). Gnostics held to a negative view of the material world and believed it was the creation of an evil god, whereas spiritual things were positive and the work of a benevolent god. The dualist construct of the Gnostics presented the history of the world as a battle between the God of Goodness and Light and the God of Evil and Darkness. They believed that human souls were good (because they were spiritual) but imprisoned in evil, material human bodies.

Gnosticism was an ancient belief that predated the Faith and proved resilient because it assimilated teachings of various religions in order to accumulate adherents. It attempted to present Jesus as a spiritual being who only appeared human (thus denying the Incarnation) and who came to earth to provide the way to free the spirit from the evils of the material world. Those who joined the group were promised this secret knowledge of Jesus. Gnostics did not practice baptism and did not hold to the centrality of the Eucharist, since a good spiritual god would never imprison his presence in an evil material object. Their rejection of the material world led to the renunciation of marriage and the sexual act between man and woman — that union, in their eyes, might result in a good soul’s imprisonment in an evil body in the form of an infant. Additionally, their view of material things led to the bizarre belief that the highest form of worship was suicide, which freed the good soul from the bad body.⁵⁴

The early Christian bishop Irenaeus (140–202), born in Smyrna, was a disciple of Saint Polycarp, who in turn had been a disciple of Saint John the Evangelist. Irenaeus was the bishop of Lyons in the imperial province of Gaul (modern-day France). He was an exceptional scholar, educated at Rome in philosophy and literature. He oriented his writing on the tasks of defending “true doctrine from the attacks of heretics” and explaining “the truth of the faith clearly.”⁵⁵ In Against Heresies, his elaborate five-part survey of Gnosticism, he accurately identified the core teaching of the heresy: the origin of evil.⁵⁶ Gnosticism sought to explain why evil exists in the world by attributing evil to material things. Irenaeus refuted this tenet by illustrating that the origin of evil is the wrong use of free will. Evil exists because men and women, given free will by a loving Creator, choose to perform evil actions — there is nothing inherently evil about material things.

Irenaeus also included a list of the Roman pontiffs, beginning with Saint Peter and ending with the reigning pope at the time of his writing, Eleutherius (r. 175–189). Interestingly, only four of the thirteen popes listed were born in the city of Rome, which illustrates the universality of the Church at this early stage. Irenaeus also presented the features of a true Church, in order to help Christians and new converts discern which communities were orthodox and which were heretical. He stressed that an authentic Christian community was one that preached a consistent message throughout the world and was founded upon apostolic succession — certainty of truth in doctrinal matters rests with churches that can trace apostolic origins. Irenaeus stressed that Christian teaching must be public — not secret like the Gnostics preached — guided by the Holy Spirit, and completely united:

The Church, though dispersed throughout the world … having received [this faith from the apostles] … as if occupying but one house, carefully preserves it. She also believes these points [of doctrine] just as if she had but one soul and one and the same heart, and she proclaims them and teaches them and hands them down with perfect harmony as if she possessed only one mouth.⁵⁷

Most importantly, Irenaeus highlighted the primacy of the Church in Rome, which is “the greatest and most important and best known of all, founded and organized by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul. For with this Church [Rome], because of her more powerful preeminence all churches must agree.”⁵⁸ Irenaeus’s Against Heresies clearly illustrates that the early Christians believed the test of orthodoxy was unity with the Church in Rome and her bishop, the pope.

Marcion the Heretic

Marcion, a wealthy shipowner from Constantinople and the son of the bishop of Sinope (in modern-day Turkey), came to Rome in the year 135. He had semi-Gnostic tendencies, believing the material world was evil. These tendencies led him into heresy when he denied the humanity of Jesus, believing Christ’s human body was an optical illusion. Marcion is best known for his false interpretation of Scripture. He preached a dichotomy of the Old and New Testaments, arguing that the God portrayed in the Old Testament was a stern, wrathful judge, whereas the God of the New Testament was a loving father. The difference could only be explained by recognizing they were two different gods, a belief that still finds adherence in the modern world. He tried to convince the Roman Church that his interpretation was correct, but when his heresy was rejected in the summer of 144, he established his own church. Marcion’s church imitated the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church with Marcion, of course, as the head. Marcionites practiced a rigorous moral life and reserved baptism for celibates, eunuchs, and dedicated widows.

Saint Polycarp (D. 155)

Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna (modern-day Turkey), was a disciple of Saint John the Evangelist, the recipient of one of Saint Ignatius of Antioch’s letters, and one of the most respected members of the Church. He had spent some time in Constantinople, where he met Marcion. Toward the middle of the second century, Polycarp was an elderly man near ninety when, shortly before his death, he made a journey to Rome to discuss an important matter with the pope.

While in Rome, Polycarp saw Marcion walking down the street, but made no move to acknowledge him. Marcion, offended, maneuvered to cross paths with the saintly bishop. When he was near Polycarp, Marcion called out, “Don’t you recognize me?” Polycarp responded, “I do indeed: I recognize the firstborn of Satan!”⁵⁹ Polycarp, who preached strenuously against heresy, had no time for the egotistical founder of a heresy itself.

Soon after Polycarp returned home from his consultation with the pope, a persecution of Christians began in Smyrna. At a festival held in honor of Emperor Antoninus Pius (r. 138–161), anti-Christian outbursts erupted from a mob. Christians were arrested and martyred by being thrown to wild beasts in the arena; however, the mob’s bloodlust was not slaked. They demanded the life of the aged and venerable Polycarp. The bishop was sentenced to die by burning at the stake, but when all the preparations had been made and the fire lit, it miraculously failed to touch him. He was cut down from the stake and killed by the executioner’s dagger.⁶⁰

Montanism

The late second century was witness to another heresy that greatly affected the Church. Montanus was a recent convert to the Faith who, along with two women, Maximilla and Prisca, who had left their husbands to follow him, began to utter prophecies and claim direct revelations from the Holy Spirit. Montanus argued that private revelations held equal authority to Scripture and the teaching of the Church. Montanus’s followers practiced a strict asceticism with severe penitential disciplines, including extreme fasting. Montanus believed sins committed after baptism could not be forgiven. This rigorist position produced a conflict in the Church between those favoring mercy toward Christians who gave in during the persecutions (known as lapsi), and rigorists who believed the lapsi could not reenter communion. Montanus also called his followers to renounce material goods, marriage, and the marital act, and to seek out martyrdom. Ultimately, Montanus’s insistence on equal authority of private revelation and Scripture helped to “reinforce the conviction that revelation had come to an end with the apostolic age, and so to foster the creation of a closed canon of the New Testament.”⁶¹

Although a variety of heresies challenged the unity of the Church and posed significant problems, they also provided opportunities for the Church to affirm her teaching in definitive terms. The result was a benefit to the faithful, who clearly knew what to believe in order to remain in communion with the apostolic faith.

The Antipope Who Became a Saint

Not much is known about the life of Hippolytus, an early Christian theologian and scholar, but his writings provide details about the liturgical customs of the Roman Church and the heresies afflicting the Church in the late second and early third centuries. In his Apostolic Tradition, Hippolytus describes the rite of baptism used by the early Church in Rome. His book also provides details concerning the structure of the liturgy, which involved a prayer of thanksgiving, the invocation of the Holy Spirit on the offering, the recitation of Jesus’ words of consecration for the Eucharist, as well as a memorial acclamation. Hippolytus exhorted the faithful to show reverence to the Eucharist and to receive it worthily, not dropping the host or spilling the Precious Blood.

Many of the heresies in the early Church dealt with Jesus’ relationship to the Father. The Church wrestled with discerning the correct terminology to apply to the truth the apostles had passed down: that Jesus is true God and true man. In many cases, it was difficult to determine whether a teaching or theological opinion was truly heretical. The heresy of Modalism blurred the distinctions between Father and Son in the Trinity, to the point where it posited they were actually one person who appeared in different modes.⁶²

Hippolytus wanted Pope Zephyrinus (r. 198–217) to strongly rebuke and condemn the Modalists, and grew upset when the pontiff failed to do so. After Zephyrinus died, the clergy and people of Rome elected the former slave Callistus I (r. 217–222) to succeed him. Hippolytus soon disagreed with the new pope (and his successors) on the issue of absolution and readmittance of Christians who had committed serious sins. Hippolytus was a “rigorist” and believed that those who had greatly sinned should not be absolved or readmitted to communion, despite their genuine contrition and repentance. Callistus, remembering the actions of Christ, embraced a policy of mercy. Hippolytus was so angry at Callistus’s election and decisions that he gathered a group of followers, who elected him pope, and claimed Callistus was unworthy of the office due to his embattled past.⁶³ Hippolytus opened the door to the concept of the “antipope,” a concept that would rear its ugly head throughout Church history. Ultimately, Hippolytus’s schism would last for nineteen years and through three pontificates.⁶⁴

Maximinus Thrax, a career soldier, was proclaimed emperor by the legions in Germania in 235. Shortly afterward, he turned his attention to the Church, and began a persecution targeting the clergy. Callistus’s successor, Pontian (r. 230–235), and the antipope Hippolytus, were arrested and sent to the mines on the island of Sardinia. Amid the suffering and hardship of the mines, Hippolytus renounced his schism and papal claim. He was then reconciled to the Church by Pontian. Both men ultimately succumbed to the harsh conditions, and when their remains were transported back to Rome for burial, they were both honored as martyrs and saints of the Church. Saint Hippolytus is the first antipope, and the only antipope ever canonized.

The Apologists

The criticism of Roman pagan authors against the Church and her teaching produced one positive effect: it gave rise to the apologists. Apologists were educated Christians who wrote an apologia, a defense of the Faith from the attacks of pagan authors. These early Christian apologists tried to make the teachings of the Church understandable and accessible to the Greco-Roman mind. They worked to refute the false claims of authors like Celsus and Porphyry and convince the emperors to pursue policies of tolerance. They did not write for catechetical purposes nor to present a systematic exposition of all Christian teachings. Rather, they emphasized the existence of one God, the nature of God, the immortality of the soul, and the Christian ideal of holy living.

One of the first apologists was Justin (100–165), a learned philosopher born in Palestine. Justin converted to the Faith at the age of thirty-eight and moved to Rome. There, he opened a school to teach Christian philosophy, free of charge. Justin did not repudiate the Greek philosophy he had previously taught, but now “claimed with power and clarity that he had found in the Christian faith ‘the only sure and profitable philosophy.’”⁶⁵ Justin studied Scripture and believed that Christ was the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies. He posited that the Old Testament and Greek philosophy could be used together like “two paths that lead to Christ, to the Logos.”⁶⁶ Justin was the first intellectual to see history as twofold — sacred and secular, with Christ at the center of all human history.⁶⁷ He also produced works defending the apostolic faith against heresies, though he is best known for his apologetic work written to Emperor Antonius Pius. In his First Apology, Justin responds to the false charges leveled against Christians by pagan authors and explains the Christian understanding of the Eucharist:

And this food is called among us the Eucharist, of which no one is allowed to partake but the man who believes that the things which we teach are true, and who has been washed with the washing that is for the remission of sins, and unto regeneration, and who is so living as Christ has enjoined. For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ, our Savior, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.⁶⁸

Justin’s deep faith and love of Christ were tested during the reign of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–180), when he was arrested and martyred during a persecution of the Church. He is known as Saint Justin Martyr.

Another early apologist was Tertullian of Carthage (163–230), the son of a Roman army centurion. Tertullian, like Justin, converted to the Faith in his thirties. A few years later, Tertullian was ordained a priest. His writings discussed the proper behavior of Christians in a pagan world, defending the Faith from pagan attacks and heresies, and covered various theological topics. Tertullian was the first Christian writer to use the terms “Trinity” and “person” to explain the relationship in the Godhead, writing that God is “one substance consisting of three persons.”⁶⁹ Tertullian reveled in the apparent paradoxes inherent in the Church’s teachings, such as the fact that God is one yet three, that Christ is man yet God, and that the eternal God could suffer and die. In the mind of Tertullian, these “absurdities” were what made the Faith believable.⁷⁰ Unlike other apologists, Tertullian had no use for pagan philosophy and did not believe the Faith needed to be reconciled to it, writing, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”⁷¹ A focus on philosophy, he believed, led to heresies.

In his apologetic works, Tertullian focused on educating the Roman populace about Christians, illustrating that they were no different from any other Romans, apart from their religious beliefs. Christians were not a secret organization bent on the destruction of the Empire but rather “a body knit together by the sense of one belief, united in discipline, bound together by a common hope. We pray, too, for the emperors. … We live with you, eat the same food, wear the same clothing, have the same way of life as you. We live in the same world as you. We sail with you, we serve as soldiers with you, and till the ground and engage in trade.”⁷² Tertullian informed his pagan readers that persecutions would not eradicate the Christians: “your cruelty serves no purpose. On the contrary, for our community, it is an invitation. We multiply every time one of us is mowed down. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of Christians.”⁷³ Unfortunately, Tertullian agreed with the Montanist assessment that the Church was too lax in her enforcement of penitential discipline, and joined the heretical group in the year 211. While a Montanist, he even repudiated teachings he had held during his orthodox days, including whether or not Christians could serve in the military. Ultimately, even the Montanists were too lax for Tertullian, so he left them and founded his own group. Although he was an astute defender of the Faith in his early Christian life, Tertullian provides an example to all Christians, especially theologians, about the need for humility and adherence to the Church’s teachings.

The apologist Origen (185–254) had personally experienced the persecutions. His father, a catechist, had been arrested and martyred under the Emperor Septimius Severus (r. 193–211) when Origen was a young man. Much of what we know about Origen is because the “Father of Church History,” Eusebius of Caesarea, discussed the apologist and his works at length in the book Ecclesiastical History. Origen was born in the great city of Alexandria in Egypt and, like his father, was a catechist. Origen became head of a famous catechetical school in Alexandria, and was a prolific writer. Saint Jerome later remarked, “Who could ever read all that Origen wrote?”⁷⁴ Origen wrote apologies defending the Faith against pagan attacks, along with theological treatises. He was a systematic theologian, constructing a vast synthesis of the Faith in order to display the harmony of Christian teaching. Ultimately, theology, for Origen, was the handmaid of Scripture and was utilized in order to explain and understand the sacred word. Origen was the first Christian scholar to write commentaries on the books of the Old Testament. He believed it was vital for Christians to have accurate translations of the Jewish texts, so he created a work known as the Hexapla that contained six parallel columns: four Greek versions of the Old Testament alongside two Hebrew translations. Scholars could use the work to see in one glance how a certain passage was translated among the various texts. Origen believed that the unity of the Old and New Testaments was found in Christ, and that the prime purpose of Scripture was to convey spiritual truth. The scholar, he thought, must approach interpretation of Scripture prayerfully in order to understand accurately the truths God wishes to convey in the sacred pages.

Although Origen was a gifted scholar, he, like Tertullian, chose a path that led him into conflict with the Church. Origen’s troubles involved disobedience to Demetrius, the bishop of Alexandria, whom he “thought a worldly, power-hungry prelate consumed with pride in his own self-importance, enjoying the honor of presiding over a wealthy community in a great city.”⁷⁵ Origen decided to escape the situation and travel, making his way to Rome and then to the east, where (although a layman) he was allowed to preach. In Palestine, he was ordained to the priesthood without Demetrius’s permission, which greatly angered the bishop. Upon return to Egypt, Origen quickly realized that the situation with his bishop was untenable. He left and returned to Caesarea in Palestine, where he was welcomed. While living in the Holy Land, Origen composed his famous apologetic work Contra Celsum (“Against Celsus,” countering the pagan Roman author discussed earlier). In the mid-third century, Origen was caught up in the general persecution of Decius and was arrested, imprisoned, and horribly tortured. Origen was an influential and important early Christian scholar and apologist. He suffered for the Faith heroically and died in 254 from the effects of his imprisonment and torture.⁷⁶

The First Empire-Wide Persecution

The mid-third century witnessed the short reign of Decius as Roman emperor. Decius (r. 249–251) was a strong and inflexible man with little administrative experience. He desired unity in the Empire and disliked the presence of the Christians, who refused to worship the state gods. So, he issued an edict in January 250 that required every citizen in the Empire to make a public sacrifice before the idols of the pagan gods. All those who sacrificed received a certificate, known as the libellus, documenting their adherence to Decius’s edict. Failure to comply resulted in arrest, torture, and execution. This edict produced the first extensive Empire-wide persecution of the Church. Previously, persecution of Christians had been confined to particular cities or provinces but was not applied uniformly throughout the Empire. Decius, in an attempt to solidify support for his reign and to reassure the public of the security of the Empire, believed the edict would root out unpatriotic elements in Roman society.

The edict produced mass confusion, chaos, and fear in the Church. Pope Saint Fabian (r. 236–250) refused to sacrifice and was martyred. However, other Christians, including bishops, offered the sacrifice in order to save their lives. Wealthy Christians offered bribes to others to sacrifice in their names, or had their slaves sacrifice, thinking that by not personally sacrificing, they could avoid moral culpability. Most Christians resisted the edict. Those who had given in caused scandal and a challenge to the Church when the persecution ended and they requested readmittance. The persecution stopped at the death of Decius, who, while campaigning in the Balkans against the barbarian Goths, disappeared in a swamp — his body was never recovered. Later Christian authors highlighted the fact that Decius was the first Roman emperor to be killed by a foreign enemy and indicated this fate was the result of his persecution of the Church.

Valerian Persecutes the Church

A few years after the death of the tyrant Decius, a man from a noble senatorial family ascended the throne as emperor. Valerian (r. 253–260) was friendly to Christians at first, but when political and military problems plagued the Empire he, like previous emperors, utilized the Church as a scapegoat. Various barbarian tribes, including the Franks, were on the move along the northern border and had made incursions across the Rhine River. The Persians had launched an invasion in the east, conquering and destroying territory (including the city of Antioch). Valerian distracted the populace from the politico-military situation by issuing an edict ordering the execution of all Christian bishops, priests, and deacons in 257. The saintly bishop of Rome, Sixtus II (r. 257–258), was executed by a group of soldiers while meeting with his flock in a Roman cemetery along the Appian Way. A Roman deacon, Lawrence, was ordered to gather the wealth of the Church and bring it to the Roman authorities several days later. At the appointed time, Lawrence arrived with a group of poor people, indicating the Church’s riches lay not in material goods but in the corporal works of mercy undertaken for the benefit of others. The authorities were not amused at Lawrence’s behavior. They ordered his execution: burning alive on a gridiron. Tradition attests that Lawrence, in the midst of the excruciating experience, joked with his executioners, asking them to turn him over since he was done on that side.

A few years later, Valerian and the legions were defeated by the Persians at the Battle of Edessa. Valerian was captured by the Persian king Shapur I (r. 240–270) and subjected to humiliating treatment throughout five years of captivity, including being used as a footstool by Shapur when mounting his horse. When Valerian died in captivity, Shapur ordered the flaying and stuffing of his corpse for a war trophy. Once more, a Roman emperor who had sought the destruction of the Church suffered an ignoble end.

Diocletian’s Division and Great Persecution

The Roman Empire experienced a profound political crisis of instability in the third century. Over twenty emperors were murdered, and a new emperor, on average, put on the purple every three years. For over two hundred years (31 B.C.–A.D. 180), there had been only sixteen emperors, but in the ninety years encompassing most of the third century, there were twenty-eight! The man who became emperor in the year 284 was acutely aware of this volatile situation and the need for greater political security in the Empire. Diocles was thirty-eight when he was proclaimed emperor, upon which he changed his name to Diocletian. As the son of slaves (his father rose to be a freedman), he was familiar with the necessity of hard work and sacrifice. Diocletian joined the army, becoming known as an exceptional administrator who loved the imperial traditions of Rome and who earnestly desired to return the Empire to its former strength and glory. Diocletian lived in ways unlike those of previous emperors; he was not known to drink alcohol and was devoted to his family, refusing to take mistresses (a rare occurrence among the Roman nobility). He was fiscally frugal and ran the imperial court like his army headquarters, establishing a multilayered bureaucracy with strict ceremonies and rituals. Very few people were granted audiences, and those who did were required to prostrate themselves before him.⁷⁷

Diocletian made a decision in the late third century that had a lasting impact on the Empire, the Church, and the world. Realizing that the Roman Empire was too large and cumbersome to be governed by one man, he divided the Empire in two. The western half encompassed what became Europe and parts of North Africa. The eastern half of the Empire contained Greece, Asia Minor, the Holy Land, and Egypt. He also established smaller regional jurisdictions in each half of the Empire, named “dioceses” after himself.⁷⁸ There were twelve dioceses in all, each ruled by a vicar. Diocletian’s reorganization increased the imperial bureaucracy to over thirty thousand officials — as one contemporary wrote, “more numerous than flies on sheep in springtime.”⁷⁹ As part of the reorganization of the Empire, Diocletian also created the tetrarchy, a political structure designed to provide a smooth transition of power upon the death of the emperor and prevent the recurrent civil wars. The tetrarchy was a system based on four rulers, two emperors (augusti), one for each half of the Empire, and two caesars, who acted as deputies to the augusti. When an emperor died, his caesar would automatically become emperor and would then appoint a new caesar.

Diocletian chose to rule the eastern half of the Empire and appointed Galerius as his caesar. In the west, Diocletian’s friend Maximian was named augustus, with Constantius as his caesar. In order to further strengthen the tetrarchy and prevent civil war, Diocletian bolstered the political bond between the men through marriage. Constantius married Maximian’s daughter Fausta, and Galerius married Diocletian’s daughter Valeria. Additionally, each caesar was adopted by his augusti. Diocletian chose to make his imperial home in the city of Nicomedia and only visited the capital city of Rome once, during the celebration of his twentieth anniversary as emperor. Galerius, his caesar, resided in Sirmium (modern-day Serbia). In the west, Maximian made his residence in Milan, whereas Constantius lived in Trier (modern-day Germany). Rome, the ancient capital, was discarded as an imperial residence but retained influence due to its large population and the presence of the Senate.

Diocletian was tolerant of Christians for the first nineteen years of his reign, and there is speculation that members of his immediate family may have been Christian. Everything changed, however, when Galerius, known by one later Christian writer as “the Beast,” persuaded Diocletian to initiate what became known as the Great Persecution because of a military readiness problem in the eastern legions. Some Christians in the east refused military service, which was causing a manpower shortfall in the army. Christians who had joined the army refused to sacrifice to the pagan gods before battle (per army custom and tradition), which affected unit morale and cohesiveness. Galerius believed the issue in the army was a crisis, so he asked Diocletian to deal with the Church once and for all.

Diocletian issued the first edict of persecution on February 23, 303, ordering the closing of all known Christian churches and buildings. He demanded that all copies of the Scriptures be handed over to Roman authorities for destruction. Further edicts ordered first the imprisonment of the clergy, and then torture and execution of bishops, priests, and deacons. A final edict was passed that mimicked Decius’s general order in the previous century, requiring all Romans to sacrifice to the pagan gods. Persecution of the Church was widespread in the eastern half of the Empire, especially in North Africa (Egypt), where more than two hundred bishops were martyred. It was more sporadic in the west since the western emperor, Constantius, did not vigorously enforce the edicts.⁸⁰

We have historical knowledge of the Great Persecution from three main sources: the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea and Lactantius (c. 250–c. 330), and the Acts of the Martyrs. Eusebius was an eyewitness to the persecutions in Palestine and Egypt. He wrote of the violence in his works Ecclesiastical History and The Martyrs of Palestine. Lactantius was a North African teacher of rhetoric who became the tutor to Constantine’s son Crispus. He wrote about the Great Persecution in his De mortibus persecutorum, positing the belief that emperors who persecuted the Church ended their lives in a violent and horrible fashion as punishment from God. The Acts of the Martyrs was a compilation of stories about the martyrs. Verbal transcripts of exchanges between arrested Christians and Roman officials, eyewitness accounts, and even imaginary narratives were utilized in crafting these works. These sources allowed later Christians to understand the ferocity unleashed by the Roman Empire on the Church in the early fourth century.

Christians who suffered through the Great Persecution were divided into groups, depending on how they responded during the crisis. Some refused to give in to the edicts requiring submission to the pagan gods and, as a result, were killed for the Faith. Known as martyrs (“witnesses”), these brave Christians suffered horrible deaths by fire, wild beasts, beheading, and other manners of painful death. Not every Christian arrested during the persecutions died, but many, known as the confessors, were imprisoned and suffered the tortures of racking, beating, scourging, or having their fingernails ripped out. Christian women were frequently sent to brothels. Men were oftentimes sent to the mines, where the tendon of their left foot was cauterized to prevent escape. Those who toiled in the mines also had their right eye ripped out, and the wound burned with a hot iron. Sometimes they suffered the horror of castration. Despite their harsh treatment, Christians in the mines (who were ministered to by clandestine aid from their brethren) continued to preach the Gospel and brought fellow prisoners to Christ. Unfortunately, under extreme stress, some Christians gave in to the dictates of the persecution edicts and apostatized. They were known as traditores (“traitors”) from the Latin tradere, “to hand over.” There were different classes of traditore — those who handed over copies of the sacred Scripture, those who handed over the sacred vessels used in the celebration of Mass, and those who revealed the names of Christians who had such items in their possession. The extensive destruction of copies of the Scriptures during the Great Persecution was remembered for centuries. Finally, some Christians, known as the lapsi, gave in during the persecutions and, after they ended, desired readmittance. The subsequent discussion of how to handle their request for return to communion dominated the early life of the Church, in essence centering on whether the Church was a “society of saints or a school for sinners.”⁸¹

The question of how to handle the lapsi was an issue after the first general persecution under Emperor Decius in the mid-third century. Pope Saint Cornelius (r. 251–253) believed it was his pastoral duty to restore to communion those who fell during the persecution. He thought their participation in the Eucharist, after a suitable period of penance, would strengthen them in the event of future attacks. Saint Cyprian (200–258), bishop of Carthage, also believed the Church should follow the road of mercy for the lapsi. During the Decian persecution, Cyprian had fled his see and was criticized for abandoning his flock. After the persecution ended, Cyprian focused on restoring unity in his diocese by urging mercy and patience, especially for the lapsi. He gathered fellow bishops in North Africa in a local council to discuss the lapsi. They decided that those who had received the libellus but did not personally sacrifice could be readmitted to communion after a period of penance. Those who had sacrificed were required to undertake a prolonged period of penance and could be reconciled on their deathbeds.⁸² When the persecution under Valerian began, Cyprian refused to leave Carthage and became the first African bishop martyred during the persecution. Both Cornelius and Cyprian imitated the Lord’s mercy in their dealings with the lapsi, and their example set the policy for the Church in later persecutions. Their emphasis on unity and mercy — as opposed to the rigorists, who wanted permanent expulsion of the lapsi — helped the Church settle this critical question. As a result, the Church honors their sanctity by a shared feast day (September 16) on the liturgical calendar.

The Great Persecution of Diocletian witnessed the martyrdoms of saints such as Agnes, a young virgin; Sebastian, a centurion; and Lucy, a young woman betrayed to the authorities by her betrothed. The killing was especially terrible in North Africa, where Eusebius recorded the extermination of entire towns populated by Christians. Indeed, he records that “so many were killed on a single day that the axe, blunted and worn out by the slaughter, was broken in pieces, while the exhausted executioners had to be periodically relieved.”⁸³ The torments and methods of execution were horrific, as Eusebius describes in his Ecclesiastical History:

Immense numbers of men, women, and children, despising this transient life, faced death in all its forms for the sake of our Savior’s teaching. Some were scraped, racked, mercilessly flogged, subjected to countless other torments too terrible to describe in endless variety, and finally given to the flames; some were submerged in the sea; others cheerfully stretched out their necks to the headman’s axe; some died under torture; others were starved to death; others again were crucified, some as criminals usually are, some with still greater cruelty nailed the other way up, head down, and kept alive till they starved to death on the very cross.⁸⁴

The Great Persecution ended because Diocletian wanted to retire to his cabbage farm in Dalmatia. He abdicated in 305, becoming the first emperor to voluntarily give up power. His caesar, Galerius, succeeded him in accordance with the dictates of the tetrarchy. Galerius reigned for a few years, until he died from the effects of venereal disease. Before he died, Galerius issued an edict of toleration of Christians, in the hopes that their prayers might assuage God to spare him during his illness (since prayers for his recovery to the pagan gods had had no effect on his health).⁸⁵ This act of desperation provided for the freedom of worship and conscience for Christians in the Roman Empire, but did not yet provide the Church with legal rights to exist as a corporate body.

Surveying the death and destruction wrought on the family of God by the Roman persecutions leads to the question, “Why?” Why did God allow this massacre to take place? Why, in the very infancy of the Church, when she was seemingly at her most vulnerable, did the Lord allow such ferocious violence against his Mystical Body? Tertullian provides the answer: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of Christians.”⁸⁶ The experience of the persecution laid the foundation for the eventual conversion of the Empire. The Church would grow from a hunted sect to an official state religion in just over three hundred years. The conversion of the Roman Empire, one of the most monumental events in the history of the world, was made possible by the witness of those early Christians who stood firm in the midst of persecution, motivated by their love of Christ and his Church.

1. xsThe Didache. Translated from the Greek text by Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1884, accessed September 18, 2018, http://reluctant-messenger.com/didache.htm.

2. See Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, revised edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 78.

3. For total population of the Empire, see Adrian Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 41. For percentage of the population who lived in cities, see Peter S. Wells, Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), 72.

4. See Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith (Rockford, IL: TAN Books and Publishers, Inc., 1992 [1920]), 22.

5. See Brennan Pursell, History in His Hands: A Christian Narrative of the West (New York: Crossroad, 2011), 81.

6. See Tim Gray and Jeff Cavins, Walking with God: A Journey through the Bible (West Chester, PA: Ascension Press, 2010), 287.

7. Examples include Domitian (age 30), Commodus (age 19), and Elagabalus (age 17). It is interesting to note that the United States Constitution (Article II, Section 1.5) stipulates that only those who have reached the age of thirty-five can assume the office of President. I am convinced the Founding Fathers were well aware of Roman history when they stipulated that particular age requirement.

8. Desmond Seward, Jerusalem’s Traitor: Josephus, Masada and the Fall of Judea (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009), 34 & 36.

9. Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, VI, Nero, li., quoted in Seward, Jerusalem’s Traitor, 37.

10. Nero’s law against the Faith would remain Roman law until the early fourth century. Nero’s persecution was limited to Rome; it was not Empire-wide.

11. Tacitus, Annals, XV, 44, quoted in Jean Comby, How to Read Church History: From the Beginnings to the Fifteenth Century, vol. 1 (New York: Crossroads, 2001), 38.

12. Ibid.

13. This was the same location where Joshua in the Old Testament commanded the sun to stand still so the Israelites could defeat the Amorites (see Jos 10:10).

14. Seward, Jerusalem’s Traitor, 78.

15. His other famous works are The Antiquities of the Jews (a history of the Jewish people from the creation accounts in Genesis to his own time) and The Life of Flavius Josephus (an autobiography).

16. Seward, Jerusalem’s Traitor, 200.

17. Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, Book 6, Chapter 3.4, trans. William Whiston, A.M. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2006), 737.

18. Genseric the Vandal took the menorah to Carthage in A.D. 455 when he sacked Rome. It was recovered by the Byzantine general Belisarius in 533 and sent back to Jerusalem by Emperor Justinian. Unfortunately, the menorah vanished after the Islamic invasion in the seventh century.

19. There is no known author of the Didache. It was discovered in a monastery in Constantinople in 1883. An excellent website with multiple translations of the Didache is http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/.

20. See Rod Bennett, The Apostasy that Wasn’t: The Extraordinary Story of the Unbreakable Early Church (El Cajon, CA: Catholic Answers Press, 2015), 52.

21. See Robert Louis Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 156–158.

22. Chadwick, The Early Church, 56.

23. Seward, Jerusalem’s Traitor, 264.

24. Previous emperors were deified after their deaths, never while alive.

25. Historians debate the dating of Clement’s Epistle. The original letter was lost sometime during the Middle Ages and the most recent copy is from the seventeenth century. The traditional view holds to a date of A.D. 96 because Eusebius of Caesarea indicated that Clement wrote the letter toward the end of Emperor Domitian’s reign. An alternative date of A.D. 70 was proposed by Msgr. Thomas J. Herron, who was the English language secretary in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in his book Clement and the Early Church of Rome: On the Dating of Clement’s First Epistle to the Corinthians. Msgr. Herron argues that since the letter favorably mentions Jewish temple practices, which seems odd if the Temple was destroyed, the letter must have been written before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in A.D. 70. Additionally, Msgr. Herron points out that the Epistle relies heavily on quotations from the Old Testament but not the Gospels, which is a curious omission if written in the year 96. Msgr. Herron deduces that Clement does not quote from the Gospels because his letter was written before them.

26. Saint Clement of Rome, The Epistle to the Corinthians, 47, trans. James A. Kleist, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1946), 38.

27. Benedict XVI, Wednesday General Audience on Saint Clement, Bishop of Rome, March 7, 2007, in Church Fathers: From Clement of Rome to Augustine (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 10.

28. Ibid., 8.

29. Saint Clement of Rome, The Epistle to the Corinthians, 59.

30. The epistle was revered throughout the early Church to the point where some considered it canonical, although it was not ultimately included in the canon of Scripture.

31. Belloc, Europe and the Faith, 35.

32. Data on the numbers of Christians is found in Robert Louis Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (New Have, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 65–66.

33. Belloc, Europe and the Faith, 38. This is also a sentiment embraced by the modern world.

34. Julian’s attack on the Church and her teaching is discussed in Chapter Three.

35. Roman society was tolerant of various practices, but magic was not one of them. The practice of magic was a criminal offense, and calling someone a magician was a grave insult. See Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, Second Edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 99. Additionally, the Roman legal system inflicted capital punishment on those convicted of practicing magic. The penalties included exposure to wild beasts, slitting the throat, or being burned alive. See the Sentential of Julius Paullus, 5, 23, 17, quoted in Gary Michuta, Hostile Witnesses: How the Historic Enemies of the Church Prove Christianity (El Cajon, CA: Catholic Answers Press, 2016), 64.

36. Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 122.

37. Contra Celsum, Chapter 4 in Comby, 32.

38. See Henry Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society: From Galilee to Gregory the Great (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 113.

39. Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 116.

40. For the imperial book burning see Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 126, and Michuta, Hostile Witnesses, 125.

41. Comby, 33.

42. Octavius 9,6, quoted in Comby, 30.

43. Tertullian, Apologia, 37.

44. Justin Martyr, Epistle to Diogentes, 6, quoted in Diane Moczar, Ten Dates Every Catholic Should Know: The Divine Surprises and Chastisements that Shaped the Church and Changed the World (Manchester: NH, 2005), 4.

45. Chadwick, The Early Church, 29.

46. Trajan’s policy is the first “don’t ask/don’t tell” policy in history.

47. Antioch had been the home of Saint Peter for a time and was the place where the followers of Jesus first received the name “Christians.” See Acts 11:26.

48. Ignatius’s letters so thoroughly prove that the early Church was the Catholic Church that the sixteenth-century Protestant revolutionary John Calvin tried to discredit them by writing “[there is] nothing more nauseating, than the absurdities which have been published under the name of Ignatius [of Antioch].” John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, i. 13.29, accessed April 27, 2017, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes/.

49. Margherita Guarducci, The Primacy of the Church of Rome: Documents, Reflections, Proofs, trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 27–28.

50. Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Romans, 4, trans. James A. Kleist, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1946), 82.

51. Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans, 8. Catholic is derived from the Greek term for “universal.” Many mistakenly believe the Church’s name is the Roman Catholic Church. That term is a Protestant one developed in the nineteenth century by Anglican (Church of England) theologians studying ecclesiology who posited the Church was one tree with several branches (their teaching is known as the “branch theory”), which they identified as Anglo-Catholic (Church of England and Episcopalians in the United States), Orthodox, and Roman Catholic, or those united with the pope. The term “Roman Catholic” from this theory became the standard English language term for the Church in the twentieth century, but it is not a Catholic term and is never used officially by the Church.

52. Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Philadelphians, 4.

53. Saint Ignatius’a death is usually cited as A.D. 107, but Warren Carroll supports, convincingly, a later date of 116. See Warren H. Carroll, The Founding of Christendom: A History of Christendom, vol. 1 (Front Royal, VA: Christendom College Press, 1985), 480.

54. The eradication of heresy is a difficult task, as the history of the Church illustrates. Heresies that are refuted and condemned in one century arise and return with a vengeance in later centuries, making heresy akin to the carnival/arcade game Whack-a-Mole. The Church addresses the false teaching definitely and “whacks” it down, but it reappears later in a mutated form. Gnosticism is a prime example, as it is refuted in the second century but returns in the form of Manichaeism in the fourth century, and then as Albigensianism (or Catharism) in the thirteenth century, and even makes an appearance in the twentieth century with the Heaven’s Gate cult.

55. Benedict XVI, Wednesday General Audience on Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, March 28, 2007, in Church Fathers: From Clement of Rome to Augustine (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 22.

56. The original title was An Exposition and Refutation of What is Falsely Called Knowledge.

57. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, I, 10, 1–2.

58. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III, 3.2; translation in Guarducci, The Primacy of the Church of Rome, 19.

59. Carroll, The Founding of Christendom, 460.

60. Ibid., 461.

61. Chadwick, The Early Church, 53.

62. The heresy was also known as Monarichianism, Patripassianism, or Sabellianism (for Sabellius, the main proponent of the heresy in Rome in the early third century). A Modalist, for example, believed that God the Father appeared in the mode of God the Son on earth.

63. It was believed that as a slave Callistus had embezzled his master’s money.

64. The pontificates of Saint Callistus I (r. 217–222), Saint Urban I (r. 222–230), and Saint Pontian (r. 230–235).

65. Justin, Dialogue 8, 1, quoted in Benedict XVI, Wednesday General Audience on Saint Justin, Philosopher and Martyr, March 21, 2007, in Church Fathers: From Clement of Rome to Augustine (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 19.

66. Ibid.

67. Chadwick, Early Church, 78.

68. Justin Martyr, First Apology, Chapter 66, accessed September 18, 2018, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0126.htm.

69. Tertullian, Against Praxeas, 2. He was also the first Church Father to write in Latin rather than Greek.

70. See Mike Aquilina, The Fathers of the Church: An Introduction to the First Christian Teachers, Expanded Edition (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2006), 92.

71. Ibid.

72. Tertullian, Apology 37, 39, 42.

73. Ibid., 50:13.

74. Chadwick, The Early Church, 109.

75. Ibid.

76. There is much debate about Origen’s alleged self-mutilation. Eusebius of Caesarea records a story that Origen, taking the Lord’s explication of chastity in Matthew 19:12 literally, castrated himself in order to ensure chastity while catechizing women. Other accounts indicate Origen did not castrate himself, but that he took drugs to maintain celibacy.

77. See Adrian Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 158.

78. The Church adopted the imperial structure and retained the name for administrative regions when the Empire collapsed in the West in the late fifth century.

79. Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell, 164.

80. Wilken, The First Thousand Years, 76.

81. Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, 692.

82. Wilken, The First Thousand Years, 70–71.

83. Eusebius, The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine, trans. G. A. Williamson (New York: Penguin, 1965), Book VIII, 9, p. 265.

84. Ibid., VIII, 8.

85. Michael Grant, Constantine the Great: The Man and His Times (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), 137.

86. Tertullian, Apology 37, 39, 42.