128 - The Great Persecution

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 128, The Great Persecution. As we've seen over the course of the past few episodes, the first 15 years of Diocletian's reign represented a sea change for the Roman Empire. Some of the reforms he initiated were embraced as long overdue, while others were fought tooth and nail every step of the way, for example, the uprisings in Egypt triggered by the crackdown on tax evaders. Some of his reforms did not outlast his reign, while others became the entrenched status quo for a thousand years or more, while others, like the price edict, never even got off the ground. But all in all, there is no question that Diocletian had taken an empire that was adrift and placed it back on solid ground. And impressively, he had done all this with a minimum of ill-advised screw-ups. That is, Diocletian sometimes pursued policies that were disruptive, and sometimes he pursued policies that wound up producing no tangible benefits, but he almost never pursued policies that were both at the same time. I think it's fair to say that this week, we will see him pursue a policy that was both in spades. And ironically, for all that Diocletian did right, it was this thing he did wrong that wound up changing the world more than anything else.

The trouble started in 299 AD, not long after Galerius returned to Antioch in triumph, having just defeated the Sassanids. Diocletian and Galerius were together in the imperial residence, and decided to have some divinations taken to find out what the future looked like from a metaphysical point of view. But every time the priest reached in to inspect the entrails of a sacrificial animal, he announced that something had gone wrong. Something was preventing him from getting a proper reading. After enduring attempt after attempt, it was finally brought to Diocletian's attention that certain members of the household staff were Christian, and that they had been seen making the sign of the cross to ward off evil demons, aka the gods Diocletian was trying to contact. In other words, these Christians were intentionally sabotaging the emperor's divinations. Diocletian was furious, and immediately ordered all members of his household to make a sacrifice to the gods, and if they refused, they were to be fired. Then, egged on by Galerius and a few other staunchly anti-Christian advisors, he extended his order to the army. Every officer and soldier in the legions was to make a sacrifice.

Diocletian was at heart a deeply conservative man, who was trying to restore the glory of the Roman Empire. His desire to connect imperial authority to Jupiter and the other Olympian gods was, for him, not necessarily just cynical propaganda. He very much wanted to get Rome back on the side of the gods who had made the empire great, and he spent lavishly on temples and sacrifices and memorials throughout the provinces to help make that happen. Now, following the reasoning of Decius, Diocletian began to suspect that the continued existence of the antisocial, impious, and sacrilegious Christians was doing serious damage to the relationship between Rome and her gods. So he began to suspect that it was time for them to go. But he was also at heart a deeply pragmatic man, and wide-scale religious purges can rarely be filed under P for pragmatic. So with his religious conservatism coming into conflict with his political pragmatism, Diocletian turned to his advisors for, well, advice. With Galerius taking the lead, they came back to him with the nearly unanimous conclusion that in this case, his religious instincts must take precedence. Christianity needed to be stamped out once and for all.

We have, up until this point, only dealt with the Christians in passing, usually as they intersected with imperial affairs, like when Nero blamed them for the Great Fire, or when Pliny asked Trajan what to do about them. But since Christianity is about to become one of the core defining elements of the Roman Empire, I think I should probably take this moment to give a brief thumbnail sketch of the first 300 years of the Church so we can get a feel for what it is exactly Diocletian is about to try to stamp out, and what it is exactly that in just a few years will become the most powerful non-imperial institution in the Empire.

Now by way of disclaimer, I'd like to say that I am not a Church historian, and am not going to delve deeply into the myriad little controversies about, say, who wrote what Gospels, when, why, and how. I just want to give a general overview of how Christianity developed, where it developed, and what it developed into over the course of its first three centuries. I am afraid that at times my vocabulary will be imprecise, but I hope that no one will find too much to argue with in the broad strokes.

So as I'm sure you are no doubt aware, it is said that around 30 AD, a Jewish holy man from Nazareth named Jesus was put to death by Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. Over the course of his brief career as a preacher, three years being the longest estimate I've seen, Jesus had won over a small band of adherents known as the Disciples, and had earned fame throughout Galilee for his non-traditional interpretations of Jewish scripture and his potential for miracle working. He eventually ran afoul of the Jewish religious authorities, and when he arrived in Jerusalem for Passover, the exact year is unknown, he was arrested by Roman authorities either on sacrilegious or revolutionary grounds. He was found guilty of whatever crime he was charged with, and crucified a few days later, which most people no doubt figured was the end of the ministry of Jesus.

But the Disciples of Jesus were not ready to abandon their leader's message. They continued to meet and worship as he had instructed them to do, and continued to convert their fellow Jews to their way of life. The early church was focused on Jesus' role as the prophesied Jewish Messiah, and that per his teachings, he would soon return from the dead to oversee an apocalypse that would pave the way for the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth. The early Christians expected this second coming at any moment, and lived their lives accordingly. But as the years passed, and Jesus did not return, the imminency of the second coming was emphasized less, and other, more immediate concerns began to demand the attention of the Christian leadership.

The first major concern for the growing church was the question of the Gentiles, that is, non-Israelites. Initially, Christianity was an exclusively Jewish sect. Every Christian was a practicing Jew, they just happened to believe in a few extra things that were not believed by mainstream Judaism. But as the first generation of disciples went out into the wider Greco-Roman world, they often found willing non-Jewish adherents. So are they allowed to be Christian, or what? Some Christian leaders said yes, and others said no. As you probably already know though, the drive to allow for Gentile conversion was driven by St. Paul, and his point of view eventually won out. Traditionally, the first Gentile Christian was a centurion named Cornelius, who was baptized by St. Peter himself, though that is one of those myriad little controversies that I am not going to wade into.

The question of whether Christianity should retain its strictly Jewish character was answered early in the negative, but that question was merely the opening salvo in a long-running Christian debate about the nature of their religion. That is, whether the Church ought to be composed of a select few who were pure in their faith and utterly devoted in life, or whether it should make a play at becoming the universal religion of the world, which would inevitably involve clearing away most of the barriers to entry into the Church. At the very beginning, it was understood that you had to be circumcised in order to be a true Christian, but that barrier was quickly dropped to allow for Gentile adherence. What other barriers should be dropped? What barriers could not be dropped? Though that initial question was resolved, the tension between big-tent and small-tent Christians would never go away, and every generation some new controversy would flare up that pitted purists against expansionists.

The second century saw the passing away of the original disciples and gospel writers, and the rise of an independent Christianity, with its own hierarchy of command, separate from all other religions in the empire. Up until the Great Jewish Revolt, Jerusalem had naturally acted as the de facto capital of Christianity, since it was, after all, a Jewish sect. But after Jerusalem fell in 70 AD, the Church began to separate itself permanently from Judaism, culminating most visibly in the Christian refusal to join in the Third Jewish War of the 130s AD. The Romans themselves by that point had already determined the two religions were separate, and a tax edict issued by Nerva explicitly denies to Christians the special exemptions enjoyed by the Jews. See, the Romans liked people to get on board with the Roman way of doing things, and the Jews had always given them trouble on that front. But the Romans were also deeply impressed with the sheer ancientness of Judaism, and so more or less let the Jews conform to Roman rule in their own way. But the Christians were recognized as a newfangled thing, owed no such deference. Jesus' church, which had once been just a little sect of Judaism, was now, for better or for worse, its own independent thing.

The other major consequence of the sack of Jerusalem is that the Christian movement also became far more decentralized. With Jerusalem out of the picture, the local leadership of each of the Christian centers now took command of their parishes and ran them as they saw fit. Ironically, though, just as the church as a whole was becoming less centralized, the chain of command at the local level was becoming more centralized. Over the years, the Christians developed a system whereby each city had its own chain of authority, with deacons at the lowest rung doing the daily work of tending to the sick and poor, the next run of presbyters, who would become today's priests, acting as a sort of governing council, and at the top the bishop, who was the supreme religious authority in his district, which usually meant that he issued clarifications on the differences between a true and a false teaching. Usually the bishops of the largest cities, Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria, came to exert an extra bit of authority over their surrounding territories, and the bishop of Rome in particular claimed a higher authority even than that, both because he sat in the capital of the empire and because his seat had been founded by St. Peter himself. But if you'd like to enjoy an entertaining conniption fit, just ask the bishop of Alexandria what he thinks about the primacy of Peter.

Since the main role of the bishop was to establish the difference between what was a true and what was a false teaching, we must ask the question then, what happened when the bishops disagreed with each other? And that, my friends, is the $10,000 question of early Christian history. The church was not some sort of hive mind, and the various bishops disagreed with each other frequently, passionately, and sometimes violently about almost everything under the sun. And these were serious disagreements. This was not, I think what that guy over there is teaching is true, and you think what that guy over there is teaching is false. It was rather, I think what I am teaching is true, and I think that what you are teaching is false. Discussions and counter-excommunications began to proliferate, and sometimes succession to a major bishopric began to look like succession to the imperial throne, with supporters of the new bishop purging supporters of the old bishop, stripping them of their priesthoods and kicking them out of the church, only to have the whole drama play out in reverse a few years later. It is truly a wonder that Christianity managed to maintain any sort of cohesion at all during this period.

But enough of the bishops had enough of an interest in preventing a major schism that they would meet in councils, summits really, and hash out their differences, force each other to compromise, and try to put these controversies to rest. But just as one issue was put to bed, another would pop up, threatening a split all over again. And we haven't even gotten to the really big controversies of the 3rd and 4th centuries yet.

The 3rd century was as tumultuous for the Christians as it was for everyone else. Though Christianity had always been an outlaw religion, and had found itself the victim of periodic local persecutions, in Rome under Nero, in Gaul during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, and so on, imperial policy rarely took notice of them. Trajan's advice to Pliny that he ought to ignore the Christians unless they did something really wrong seemed to be standard operating procedure. But as the empire fell into chaos, the Christians for the first time felt the sting of coordinated imperial attack. Maximinus Thrax ordered the first major attack on Christianity, though he limited the scope of his persecutions to the bishops. Fifteen years later, attempting to get Rome back on the right side of the gods, Decius broadened the scope of persecution to include all Christians, which not only resulted in confiscations and executions across the empire, but also a major split within the church between leaders who advocated compliance and those, particularly in North Africa, who advocated resistance. The latter would eventually be shouted down and declared heretical when the Decian persecutions was over. But this episode foreshadowed the later, larger fight with the Donatists, who advocated similar resistance to Diocletian's persecutions, or more accurately, resistance to those who acquiesced to them.

But just as it seemed like things were going from bad to worse for the Christians, the empire was falling apart, and the emperors were now specifically targeting them for harassment, Christianity suddenly enjoyed an unprecedented run of growth and acceptance. Gallienus canceled the Decian persecution on the grounds that it was unnecessary and unjust, and the Illyrian emperors had way more important things on their minds. So from 260 until about 300, the stigma attached to Christianity was muted. So much so that the religion that had once been derided as a religion of women and slaves now counted amongst its number wealthy and influential men. Christians were now joined by their masters, wives were now joined by their husbands, common soldiers by their officers, the poor by the rich. Churches ceased to be little hovels hidden away deep in the maze of an inner city, and were now being built right out in the open. By 300 AD, in fact, a church sat on a hill in Nicomedia overlooking the imperial palace. Christians were still in the minority by a substantial margin across the empire, but they were estimated by this point to account for about 10% of the population, which was nothing to sneeze at.

Over the course of the past three centuries, the little sect of heretical Jews led by a messianic holy man from Nazareth had grown to be the largest monotheistic religion in the empire and a social force with real teeth. Which is, perhaps, what troubled Diocletian's advisors the most. Of all the myriad differences between Christians and pagans, perhaps no single difference loomed larger in the minds of imperial authorities than just how structured Christianity was. Yes, the church functioned politically more as a loose oligarchy of bishops than as some unified autocracy. But still, no pagan cult could come close to matching the empire-wide network of institutionalized authority that Christianity boasted. It was nothing less than a parallel command structure to the state. And if you listened to Christian rhetoric for any length of time, you would find that most of them believed that their command structure actually superseded the state's, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's notwithstanding. The fact that roughly 10% of the population was now Christian and adhered to that command structure scared the hell out of many in the government. Plus, that 90-10 split is a bit misleading, because Christianity was still clustered in the cities at this point, so their minority share seemed that much larger to government officials living in those same cities. Filled with genuine fears of organized revolution, there was also the fact that the church was beginning to raise funds in unprecedented sums as wealthy patrons began to render unto God whatever they weren't rendering unto Caesar.

So when we ask the question, why were Diocletian's advisors so keen on taking the Christians out, the answer essentially boils down to protection of the status quo. They were amongst the greatest beneficiaries of it, and the Christians were amongst the greatest threats to it. So this is all mostly a case of entrenched power making a pre-emptive strike against a potential rival.

But following the initial purge of the imperial household and the army, tempers cooled some. The purge of the army was in fact unevenly enforced at best. And it wasn't until the winter of 302-303 that things really got rolling again. Not that Diocletian hadn't been gearing up for the fight in the meantime. In 301 he had visited Egypt, and encountered problems with the Manichaeans, a religion similar to Christianity, both in substance and organization, which had become a hotbed for resistance to imperial authority. Diocletian was additionally troubled by the Manichaeans because their religion originated in Persia, and members still had close ties to their brethren in the east, meaning that they looked to Diocletian a lot like a Sassanid-aligned fifth column. So the Manichaeans were ruthlessly suppressed, executions, exiles, confiscations, and destruction of scripture. In effect, a dry run for the great persecution of Christians that was coming down the chute.

Diocletian and Galerius were in Nicomedia over the winter of 302-303 when things finally got going. The emperors had attempted to get a pronouncement on something or other from an oracle of Apollo, but the oracle instead announced that the quote impious on earth were preventing him from connecting with the gods. Diocletian huddled with his council to determine what this meant, and they were of one mind. It meant that the gods were angry at Rome for tolerating the Christians.

I should mention at this point that it is widely believed that by now Galerius was taking more of a lead in imperial policy, and as a fierce anti-Christian, that he was actually the driving force behind all of this. At its most all-encompassing, the blame Galerius for everything theory contends that the junior emperor arranged for the botched divination and the non-responsive oracle in order to push Diocletian into a hardline stance. He will also be blamed for the fires that will break out following the publication of the first anti-Christian edict, which we'll get to in a second. However, though Galerius proved himself to be a sadist when it came to the Christians, it is really hard to say in the run-up to the persecution what events he pre-arranged and what events he simply took advantage of.

On February 23rd, 303 AD, almost exactly 1,708 years ago, Diocletian finally let the hardliners off the leash. He ordered the church of Nicomedia, the one that could be seen from his imperial palace, razed to the ground. All of the scripture housed there was burned, and all of its valuables were carted off. The next day, imperial authorities posted an edict, not only ordering every citizen in the empire to make a proper pagan sacrifice, but further ordering that every church in the empire was to be destroyed, all Christian scripture was to be burned, and known Christians be henceforth forbidden from assembling in one place.

The public outcry was immediate, and the first victim of the persecution was a Christian man who literally tore the posted edict down off the wall. Within a week, fires began breaking out in the imperial palace, according to some sources these were little Reichstag fires set by Galerius, and Diocletian's opinion hardened further. Now the Christian threat was not just theoretical, they were disobeying imperial orders and engaging in nothing less than treason. In the aftermath of this initial uprising, Christians were rounded up and tortured for information about their brethren, and Galerius seems to have had a particular penchant for burning victims alive once he was done extracting information from them. Then, when the first edict was determined to be insufficiently oppressive, a further law was passed in the summer of 303, ordering that church officials, all those deacons and presbyters and bishops, be rounded up and jailed. This of course caused the prisons to overflow, and regular criminals had to be released to allow for the influx of Christians.

It was around this time that the backlash began. Hardline anti-Christians, for the most part, only lived in the uppermost rungs of the imperial government. Down on the lower levels, soldiers and guards and wardens had a hard time fathoming why they were being made to suffer under the crushing weight of thousands of harmless old men who had broken no real laws. In many cases, these men just outright lied to their superiors, telling them sacrifices had been dutifully made just so they could clear out the holding cells. This dynamic played out all over the empire, as the rigor with which the persecution was pursued became defined by local officials, who, more often than not, wanted no part of jailing and killing Christians.

In the West especially, the Great Persecution never really gained traction. Constantius in particular seems to have set the tone for his territories, and after a few perfunctory photo-ops, he essentially let the whole matter drop, which of course made him something of a hero within the Church, allowing his son to easily play the part of Christian champion down the road. In the East though, under the watchful eye of Galerius, Christians in Syria and Egypt and Asia Minor were rounded up, tortured, and, more often than not, burned alive.

The backlash in the Eastern provinces then did not take the form of intentionally blind state officials, but instead ordinary citizens who were horrified at what the government was doing. The victims were their family, their friends, and their neighbors, and even if they were none of these things, the Christians were by this time widely viewed as a harmless cult comprised of law-abiding, tax-paying citizens, whose most visible public activity was, what, tending to the poor and the sick? On top of that, there was a whole growing community of Romans, like for example the Emperor Aurelian, who had drifted over to monotheism, even if it was a particularly pagan brand of it. They often identified the god of the Christians with their own god, and even if the Christians did not necessarily reciprocate, monotheists who watched fellow monotheists dragged off in chains were incensed. Across the East, citizens hid Christians, lied to protect Christians, helped Christians escape to the West, and in every way tried to thwart the imperial agents.

The persecution's initial burst of energy lasted into 304, and would continue on the books until 311, but it would eventually be dropped by Galerius just prior to his death, after he finally came to understand that the whole operation had done far more to undermine imperial authority than bolster it. What happened between 304 and 311 to change Galerius' mind, you ask? How about the rise of Constantine the Great, whose career was in part fueled by citizens, Christian or otherwise, who viewed the persecution as an unthinkable crime against humanity?

And that is why it appears Diocletian made a huge mistake in aligning himself with the hardliners. The persecution disrupted the peace he had spent the last twenty years establishing. It undermined the legitimacy of the Tetrarchy, paving the way for Constantine to eventually blow it up. And in return for all that, the persecution had produced for Diocletian no tangible benefits. It was a bad policy and a bloody policy, and stands as a giant stain on Diocletian's otherwise sterling record.

Next week, we will get into the only upside for Diocletian, namely that in 305 he would wash his hands of the whole thing, and in an unprecedented move, announce that he planned to voluntarily abdicate the throne so he could retire to his villa and, I'm dead serious about this, raise cabbages.