By Bart D. Ehrman, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Christian persecution became a serious, concentrated, empire wide affair in the 3rd and 4th centuries. For many, it’s hard to understand why Roman populace would be opposed to Christians. After all, Romans were polytheists who were highly tolerant of religious difference. Virtually, every other religion was tolerated. Then why not the Christians?
Pagan View
There are intriguing indications of how pagans viewed Christians in the 2nd and early 3rd centuries. Christians were widely thought to be dangerous to the well-being of society and were accused of wild and licentious activities that threatened the moral fabric of society.
One of the most graphic explanations of the charge comes to us in a Christian apology by a north African Christian author, named, Minucius Felix. The apology is called the Octavius.
It’s set up as a dialogue between a fictitious pagan named Caecilius who attacks the Christians for all sorts of things, and the Christian hero of the work, Octavius, who responds. At one point, the pagan Caecilius describes the widely known charges against what Christians were doing in their secret worship services, engaging in wild and random sex, killing babies, and then eating them.
Modern readers may find it incredible that anyone could take such charges seriously. But they must have done so, otherwise, we would not have such a consistent allusion to them. Still, how could anyone credit them?
Scurrilous Charges
Some scholars have maintained that it’s because of the nature of the Christians actual worship services. They were in secret and at night. They involve brothers and sisters kissing each other, isn’t that incest? And claiming to be eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the son of God, infanticide and cannibalism.
Others suggest that it’s actually simpler than that. It was common in the ancient world to charge your enemies with grotesque violations of social norms, and nothing could be more heinous than sexual orgies, ritual murder, and eating babies. These scurrilous charges, in this view, were simply standard rhetoric. The evidence comes from the fact that we have similar charges leveled by pagans against Jews and by Christians against Christian heretics.
The Apologists’ Defense
The apologists, of course, mounted a vigorous defense against these charges. They argued that Christians were the most moral people on the planet, far more moral than the pagans. In the Christian view, pagan morality could be judged by the pagan gods. The myths were filled with gods committing adultery, having sex with family members, killing those whom they did not like, lying and so on.
Christians, on the other hand, had a particularly strict morality. Adultery? Christians were not allowed even to look on another with lust. Murder? They weren’t allowed even to hate one another. And unlike pagans, Christians forbade infanticide, the exposure of unwanted babies and they flat out condemned abortion. Lying? Christians weren’t willing to speak of falsehood, even on pain of death and so on and on. The apologists insisted that Christians were more moral than anyone else, so the charges were completely false.
This article comes directly from content in the video series The Triumph of Christianity. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Showing the Positive Side
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In addition to defending themselves, the Christian apologists made numerous arguments to show the positive side, that their faith was true and should be accepted. They pointed out that there were ancient prophecies predicting the coming of Jesus, prophecies found in the Hebrew Bible about Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem to a virgin, about Jesus as a healer, about Jesus is the one who would die for the sins of the world and be raised from the dead.
They debated that these prophecies were made centuries earlier and have come true, which shows that Christianity is true. Christians did amazing miracles that proved that God was behind them. Jesus himself, of course, had done one miracle after another, so did his Apostles after him and the miracles continue on in the present day, that shows that God is behind this faith.
Moreover, the faith itself was spreading like wildfire throughout the empire said the apologists. That shows that God is behind it. There is divine power behind the Christian message.
So Who Was the Audience?
When it comes to the outcome of these Christian apologies, we have no evidence that any of these writings of the apologists convinced any pagans. In fact, we have no solid evidence that these apologies were even read at all by pagan opponents. Most of them were addressed to the emperor’s themselves with a plea to put an end to the local persecutions that were happening here and there.
Amusingly enough, the actual audiences of these books were fellow Christians. They circulated in the churches, not to convince Christians, but to provide them with ammunition to use in their debates with non-Christians who suspected them of atheism and immoral practices. There’s virtually no way emperors spent their time reading such long defenses of an outlandish religious cult.
Although emperors paid scant attention to the Christianity in the 2nd century and into the early 3rd, but all along, Christianity kept growing a little bit at a time. Paganism, on the other hand, as a result was shrinking and shrinking till eventually, emperors had to take notice in a very big way.
Common Questions about the Roman Perception of Christianity
There are intriguing indications of how pagans viewed Christians in the 2nd and early 3rd centuries. Christians were widely thought to be dangerous to the well-being of society and were accused of wild and licentious activities that threatened the moral fabric of society.
The Christian apologists debated that the prophecies about Jesus were made centuries earlier and have come true, which shows that Christianity is true.
When it comes to the outcome of these Christian apologies, we have no evidence that any of these writings of the apologists convinced any pagans. In fact, we have no solid evidence that these apologies were even read at all by pagan opponents.
