The second, related reason was that, after a period of relative indifference, Christianity began to attract hostile and fantastically inflated rumors about the numbers, conduct, and beliefs of its devotees, and the dangers they might pose to an orderly society. They were becoming a more visible sect, which—thanks to its slowly growing popularity among the common folk of the Roman Empire in the third century C.E.—was attracting the kind of hatred that success breeds. Christians had arrived only recently, boasted one of them, Tertullian, “and we have filled everything of yours—cities, islands, forts, towns … palace, Senate, Forum. We have left you only the temples.” This was an extreme exaggeration. But nearly everything that was said about Christianity in its earliest years was an exaggeration, and nothing more so than the popular notions among pagans of what Christians actually believed and hoped for.
Given the success of Christianity in the coming years, given that this embryonic cult would soon become an all-dominating and world-embracing religion that drove the pagan gods from their sanctuaries and niches, one might have expected a surge of opposition to it right from the start; actually, there was little. If no threat was presumed, Romans tended to be quite tolerant of minority religions, even when the “minority” was large. The Emperor Augustus, for instance, knew that a large tract of Rome beyond the Tiber was owned and inhabited by Jews. Most of these Jews were Roman freedmen, who had been brought to the city as prisoners-of-war and then manumitted by their owners. They did not worship the Roman gods, or perform obeisances at Roman shrines. But because they caused no trouble either in doctrine or in action, Augustus saw that no pressure was put on their synagogues; no Jew was prevented from meeting with his or her brethren for the exposition of the Law—“On the contrary, he showed such reverence for our traditions that he and almost all his family enriched our Temple with expensive dedications. He gave orders for regular sacrifices of holocausts to be made daily in perpetuity at his own expense, as an offering to the Most High God. These sacrifices continue to this day, and will continue always, as a proof of his truly imperial character.”1
Christians, few but growing in number, led little-noticed lives in the forest of sects and cults that the decay of “official” Roman religion produced; as a religion, Christianity seemed hardly worth contesting. To most Romans who thought at all about the matter it would have seemed of little consequence, and the idea that the civilized world would before long date its events from the lifetime of a carpenter’s son from Galilee would have seemed merely ludicrous.
There is a passing reference in Suetonius’s account of Claudius to disturbances caused by Jews in Rome “at the instigation of Chrestus,” but it is not at all clear if Chrestus was the same person as Christ. No pagan writer even bothered to attack the ideas of the Christians until 178 C.E. (He was a Neoplatonist named Celsus, and his writings are lost; we only know that he wrote them because a Christian apologist, the Church father Origen, attacked him for them.)
Unrestrained calumnies were let fly against the Christians, “a rabble of unholy conspirators,” given to sharing “barbarous foods … for the sake of sacrilege,” according to the converted Christian writer Minucius Felix. The result of the mere presence, let alone the growth, of Christianity (according to those Romans who disapproved of it) had been general moral decay in the Empire and, everywhere, “a kind of religion of lust.” Christians were accused of every sort of perversion and impropriety, including ritually murdering children and eating their flesh—a fantasy which must have arisen from Christ’s Eucharistic instructions to his disciples, to eat his body (the bread) and drink his blood (the wine), and to “do this in memory of me.” This form of banqueting was “notorious; everywhere, all talk of it.” The Christians wanted to bring the end of the earth, moon, and stars with fire, and be “reborn after death from the cinders and the ashes.” In sum, the apocalyptic nonsense that anti-Semitism would soon be spouting against Jews was being marshaled by some Romans to incite and justify the persecution of Christians.
Whence such virulence? A reasonable person might have had his reservations about Christian behavior and found reasons to disagree with, even dislike it. But the idea that Christianity wanted to bring about the destruction of the world must seem exotic, or at least a tad far-fetched, to those who think of it as a benign and gentle religion. Others destroy; Christians temper, comfort, and forgive. But it could very well not have seemed so to a Roman in the first century C.E., when confronted by the rhetoric not only of the sect’s faithful, but of its founder, the aggressive Galilean Jesus Christ.
Early Christians were not milky-mild or forgiving at all. We know this because we know what they believed, which was what Christ had told them to believe. At the back of all Christian minds lay his injunction to intolerant militancy: “I come not to bring peace, but a sword.” The New Testament’s record of early Christian belief is contained in the Acts and the Epistles. They are saturated with apocalyptic rhetoric; some of it, no doubt, garbled and touched up—the New Testament was put together a long time after Christ’s death—but without reasonable doubt a fair epitome of what Christ, and the early Christians, believed and said. And (no less important) of what the Romans thought they were saying.
The principal content of these beliefs was that the world was coming to an end. Saint Peter had no doubt about this. “The end of all things is at hand,” he announced. “The time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God.” This would happen at any moment, because these were “the last days”—a phrase which would be used and reused in Christian eschatology for the next two thousand years. Saint Paul was of a similar view, eagerly awaiting the day “when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: who shall be punished with everlasting destruction.…”
Jesus’ own words on these terrible events to come are recorded in the Gospel of Matthew:
For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows.… Ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake.… I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.
Christians did not believe that such prophecies, promises, and threats were in any way metaphorical. They were truthful in essence, and soon would be in fact as welclass="underline" not in the distant future, but imminently, within this generation. Rome was doomed to be destroyed in a few years, a few decades at the most. The New Testament had not been written yet, but such beliefs were preached, described, made part of the essential public lore of the new religion and its adherents. To them, it made perfect sense, because it was Revealed Truth. But it also made sense to the Roman authorities, sense of a different kind. It meant that the Galileans wanted this promised destruction—as no doubt many of them, being fanatics, did. The radical who dreams of bringing a whole society crashing down on the heads of its inhabitants, who fantasizes about the fiery end of the social order, would become a familiar figure—hero to some, nightmare to others—throughout the twentieth century: the anarchist with the bomb, the Falangist general crying, “Viva la muerte,” the Arab teenager blowing himself and a Jewish school bus to a bloody, smoking pulp for the sake of “martyrdom.” There seems to be little room for doubt that a civilized, law-loving Roman might have believed what the Jesus freaks said about the future of history and their mission within it, and concluded that the best thing to do with this hostile though marginal sect was to wipe it out before it spread any further. Of course, the end of the world did not come—a relief to sensible people, though no doubt a disappointment to some loonies. But to threaten it, which was what Rome thought Christians were doing, was—how to put it?—a deeply antisocial act. It made the thought that Christians were motivated by “hatred of the human race” seem quite plausible.