Outlines of Ecclesiastical History

by B. H. Roberts

SECTION I.

In Part I, our narrative was confined mainly to those propitious circumstances which made for the successful introduction of the gospel and the founding of the church of Christ. In Part II, we are to deal with those adverse events which led finally to the subversion of the Christian religion. We commence with the

1. Persecution of the Christians by the Jews.—The Messiah forewarned his disciples that they would be persecuted by the world, pointed out the reasons for it, and comforted them by reminding them that the world had hated him before it hated them; that the servant was not greater than his lord; and for that matter all the prophets which were before them had been persecuted by the generations in which they lived, and that, for the reason that they were not of the world, therefore the world hated and destroyed them.^[[1]]

2. Two special reasons may be assigned for the persecution of the saints by the Jews. 1. They looked upon Christianity as a rival religion to Judaism, a thing of itself sufficient to engender bitterness, jealousy, persecution. 2. If Christianity should live and obtain a respectable standing, the Jews of that generation must ever be looked upon as not only putting an innocent man to death, but as rejecting and slaying the Son of God. To crush this rival religion and escape the odium which the successful establishment of it would inevitably fix upon them, were the incentives which prompted that first general persecution which arose against the church in Jerusalem, and that commenced in the very first year after Messiah's ascension.

3. The extent of the persecution or the time of its continuance may not be determined; but that it was murderous may be learned from the fact that Stephen was slain,^[[2]] as was also James, the son of Zebedee,^[[3]] and James, the Just, brother of the Lord.^[[4]] The Apostle Peter was imprisoned and would doubtless have shared the fate of the other martyrs, but that he was delivered by an angel.^[[5]]

4. Nor was this persecution confined alone to Jerusalem; on the contrary the hate-blinded high priests and elders of the Jews in Palestine conferred with the Jews throughout the Roman provinces, and everywhere incited them to hatred of the Christians, exhorting them to have no connection with, and to do all in their power to destroy the "superstition," as the Christian religion was then called. Nor were they content with what they themselves could do, but they exhausted their ingenuity in efforts to incite the Romans against them. To accomplish this they charged that the Christians had treasonable designs against the Roman government, as "appeared by their acknowledging as their king one Jesus, a malefactor whom Pilate had most justly put to death."^[[6]]

5. The Jews themselves, however, were in no great favor with the Romans since their impatience of Roman restraint led them to be constantly on the eve of rebellion and sedition, and frequently to break out into deeds of violence against the Roman authority. This lack of favor rendered the power of the Jews unequal to their malice against the church of Christ.

6. The imperious nation, too, whose forefathers had rejected the prophets and at the last had crucified the Son of God with every circumstance of cruelty, crying out in the streets of their holy city, "crucify him, and let his blood be upon us and on our children,"^[[7]] were about to meet the calamities which their wickedness called down upon them. The Roman emperor Vespasian [Ves-pa-zhe-an], tired of their repeated seditions, at last sent an army under Titus to subjugate them. The Jews made a stubborn resistance and a terrible war followed. Jerusalem, crowded with people who had come into the city from the surrounding country to attend the Passover, was besieged for six months, during which time more than a million of her wretched inhabitants perished of famine. The city was finally taken, the walls thereof thrown down and the temple so completely destroyed that not one stone was left upon another. Thousands of Jews were cut to pieces and nearly a hundred thousand of those taken captive were sent into slavery.^[[8]] All the calamities predicted by the Messiah^[[9]] befell the city and people. Jerusalem from that time until now has been trodden down of the Gentiles; and will be until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.

7. According to Eusebius, the Christians escaped these calamities which befell the Jews; for the whole body of the church at Jerusalem, having been commanded by divine revelation, given to men of approved piety, removed from Jerusalem before the war and dwelt at Pella, beyond Jordan, where they were secure from the calamities of those times.^[[10]]

8. Persecution by the Romans.—It is more difficult to understand why the Romans should persecute the Christians than it is to see why the Jews did it. The Romans were polytheists, and affected the fullest religious liberty. The author of the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" claims that this period of Roman history was the golden age of religious liberty. And such was the multitude of deities collected in Rome from various nations, and such the variety of worship to be seen in the great capital of the empire, that Gibbon has said: