THE
EARLY CHRISTIANS IN ROME

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Dreamland in History

The White Robe of Churches

The Church of England: A History for the People (in Four Volumes)

Cloister Life in the Days of Cœur-de-Lion

Christianity and Paganism

The Golden Age of the Church

PAINTING IN THE CATACOMBS, CENTURY II OR III. THE GOOD SHEPHERD IN THE CENTRE. ON THE LEFT DANIEL IN THE DEN OF LIONS. ON THE RIGHT THE THREE CHILDREN IN THE FURNACE.

THE
EARLY CHRISTIANS
IN ROME

BY THE VERY REV.

H. D. M. SPENCE-JONES

M.A., D.D.

DEAN OF GLOUCESTER

PROFESSOR OF ANCIENT HISTORY IN THE ROYAL ACADEMY

WITH A FRONTISPIECE IN COLOUR AND
TWELVE OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS

SECOND EDITION

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

TO

EDGAR SUMNER GIBSON, D.D.

LORD BISHOP OF GLOUCESTER

A GREAT SCHOLAR AND A WARM FRIEND

PREFACE

Of the five Books which make up this work, the First Book relates generally the history of the fortunes of the Church in Rome in the first days.

The foundation stories of the Roman congregations were laid largely by the Apostles Peter and Paul—Peter, so with one accord say the earliest contemporary writers,[1] being the first apostle who preached in Rome. Paul, who taught many years later in the Capital, was also reckoned as a founder of the Roman Church; for his teaching, especially his Christology, supplemented and explained in detail the teaching of S. Peter and the early founders.

The First Book relates how, after the great fire of Rome in the days of Nero, the Christians came into prominence, but apparently were looked on for a considerable period as a sect of dissenting Jews.

From A.D. 64 and onwards they were evidently regarded as enemies of the State, and were perpetually harassed and persecuted. No real period of “quietness” was again enjoyed by them until the famous edict of Constantine the Great, A.D. 313, had been issued. Although, through the favour of the reigning Emperor, a temporary suspension of the stern law of the State, sometimes lasting for several years, left the Christian sect for a time, comparatively speaking, at peace.

The Persecutions, which began in the days of Nero, with varying severity continued all through the reigns of the Flavians (Vespasian, Titus, Domitian).

Nerva, who succeeded Domitian, only reigned two years, and was followed by the great Trajan: still the persecution of the sect continued. This we learn from Pliny’s letter to Trajan, circa A.D. 111–113. Hadrian, who followed Trajan, virtually pursued the same policy.

In the latter years of Hadrian, from A.D. 134–5, the result of the great Jewish rebellion definitely and for ever separated, in the eyes of the government, the Christian from the Jew. Henceforth the Jew generally pursued his quiet way, and found new ideals, new hopes. The State feared the Jew no longer.

Not so the Christian. Rome saw clearly now that a new and influential sect had arisen in their midst; a sect absolutely opposed to the old Roman sacred traditions and worship, a sect, too, that evidently possessed some mighty secret power which enabled the Christians fearlessly to defy the magistracy of the Empire. This partly accounts for the greater severity of the persecution under the Antonine Emperors.

The policy of the Antonines (Pius and Marcus), which endeavoured to restore and to give fresh life to the old Roman traditions and worship, which they looked upon as indissolubly bound up with the greatness and power of Rome, was absolutely hostile to the spirit of Christian thought and teaching.

The First Book brings the history down to A.D. 180, the date of the death of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.

The “Inner Life” of the Christian congregations is now dwelt on, and forms the subject-matter of Books II., III., IV.

The subject-matter of the Second Book is the everyday life of the Christian in the first, second, and third centuries, during which period the religion of Jesus of Nazareth was in the eyes of the Roman government an unlawful cult, and its adherents were ever liable to the severest punishment, such as confiscation of their goods, rigorous imprisonment, torture, and even death.

After dwelling on the question of the numbers of Christians in very early times, their public assemblies or meetings together are described with considerable detail in Book II. The importance of these “meetings” in early Christian life is dwelt upon. What took place at these gatherings is commented upon at considerable length. The position occupied by the slave at these “meetings,” and in Christian society generally, is examined briefly.

Some of the various difficulties which Christians in the age of persecution had to face, and the way by which these difficulties were combated, are described.

Instruction as to the way of meeting the difficulty of life for a Christian living in pagan Rome, was given by two different schools of thought. A sketch is given of (1) “Rigourists,” and (2) of the “gentler and more practical” schools which strove to accommodate the Christian life with the life of the ordinary Roman citizen.

The important part played by the “Rigourist” or ascetic school in the ultimate conversion of the Roman World to Christianity is examined.

Finally, some of the inducements are indicated which persuaded the Christian of the first three centuries to endure with brave patience the hard and dangerous life which was ever the earthly lot of the followers of Jesus.

The Third Book treats especially of the hard and painful nature of the “life” which, from A.D. 64, was the lot of the Christian in the Roman Empire. For the members of the community ever lived under the dark shadow of persecution. The severity of the persecution varied from time to time, but the dark shadow lay on them, and constantly brooded over all their works and days. We possess no direct detailed history of this state of things, but all the early contemporary writings of Christians, a good many of which, whole or in fragments, have come down to us, are literally honeycombed with notices bearing on this perpetual apprehension; and indeed so real, so constant was the danger, and so grave were the consequences to Christianity of any flinching in the hour of trial, that among the congregations of the first days, numerous schools existed for the purpose of training men and women to endure the sufferings of martyrdom.

The number of martyrs in these early years has been probably understated. Pagan contemporary writers of the highest authority, casually, but still definitely, allude to the great numbers of victims, while the tone of early Christian writings (already referred to) is deeply coloured with the pathetic memories of these blood-stained days.

Besides the references even of eminent pagan authorities and the perpetual allusions in early Christian writings to the great numbers of Martyrs and Confessors, a somewhat novel testimony to the vast number of martyrs is quoted here at some length from the history of the Catacombs, where the numbers of these Confessors are again and again dwelt on in the “handbooks” to the Roman subterranean cemeteries, compiled in the fifth and following centuries as “guides” for the crowds of pilgrims from foreign lands visiting Rome. These “Pilgrim Guides,” several of which have in later years come to light, have been recently made the subject of careful study.

The Fourth Book is devoted exclusively to the story of the Roman Catacombs. In the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, the vast subterranean City of the Dead, known as the Roman Catacombs, has been in parts patiently excavated, and carefully studied by eminent scholars. This study, which is still being actively pursued, has thrown much light upon the “life” lived among the early generations of Christians. The inscriptions and epitaphs graved and painted, the various symbols carved upon the countless tombs in the Catacombs, have told us very much of the relations between the rich and the poor. They have disclosed to us something of the secret of the intense faith of these early believers on the “Name,” and have shown us what was the sure and certain hope which inspired their wonderful endurance of pain and agony, and their marvellous courage in the hour of trial.

All this and much more the inscriptions on the thousand thousand graves, the dim fading pictures, the rough carvings, speak of in a language none can mistake. It is, indeed, a voice from the dead, bearing its strange, weird testimony which none can gainsay or doubt.

The work of excavation and the patient study of these Catacombs are yet slowly proceeding, but from what has been already discovered we have learned much of the “Inner Life” of this early Christian folk.

The history of these wonderful Catacombs, this subterranean city of the dead beneath the suburbs of ancient Rome, is told at some length and with considerable detail in the Fourth Book.

The Fifth Book may be considered as a supplement to the work, which in the first four Books has dwelt on (1) the very early history, and (2) on the “Inner Life” of the Christian Church in the first three centuries, especially in Rome.

Christianity sprang from the heart of the Chosen People, the Jews. The Divine Founder in His earthly life was pleased to be a Son of the Chosen People, and His disciples, who laid the early stories of the Faith, were all Jews, as were the earliest converts to the religion of Jesus.

The history of the Jews—their past and present condition—is indissolubly bound up with the records of Christianity. It constitutes the most important confirmation which we possess of the truth of early Christian history. It is the weightiest of all evidential arguments here, and it cannot be refuted or disproved.

The general account of the Chosen People before the coming of Messiah is well known, and the historical accuracy of the Old Testament records is generally admitted. But the memories of the fortunes of the Jewish race after A.D. 70, when the Temple and City were destroyed, and when the heart of Judaism, as it were, ceased to beat, are comparatively little known.

The Fifth Book tells something of that eventful history. It sketches first, very briefly, the last fatal wars of the Jews. Then it tells how directly after the Temple was burnt a remarkable group of Rabbis arose, who, undismayed by what seemed the hopeless ruin of their race, at once proceeded to the reconstruction of Judaism upon totally new foundation stories.

These strange and wonderful scholars gathered together a mass of memories, traditions, and precepts which from the days of Moses had gradually been grouped round the sacred Torah,—the Law of the Lord,—and which had formed the subject-matter of the teaching of the Rabbinic schools of the Holy Law during the five centuries which had elapsed since the Return from the Captivity.

All these memories—traditions—comments, the great scholar Rabbis and their disciples arranged, codified, amplified. This work went on for some three hundred years or more; their labours resulted in the production of the Talmud.

The great object of this marvellous book, or rather collection of books, the Talmud, was the glorification of Israel; but no longer as a separate, a distinct nation, but what was far greater, as a separate People, a People specially beloved of God, for whom a glorious destiny was reserved in a remote future, a destiny which only belonged to the Jews.

In the several sections of this Fifth Book the Talmud is described:—the materials out of which it was composed, the method of the composition, the marvellous power which it exercised upon the sad Remnant of the Jewish people, how it bound them, exiles though they were in many lands, and kept them together,—all this is told at some length.

The ten or twelve millions of Jews, scattered through many hostile nations, living in the world of to-day, more powerful, more influential by far than they were in the golden age of David and Solomon, linked together by a bond which has never snapped, are indeed an ever-present evidence of the truth of the story of the early Christians dwelt on in the first four Books of this work.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“Assured the trial, fiery, fierce, but fleet,

Would, from his little heap of ashes, lend

Wings to that conflagration of the world

Which Christ awaits ere He makes all things new:

So should the frail become the perfect, rapt

From glory of pain to glory of joy.”

Browning, The Ring and the Book, x. 1797

BOOK I
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY IN ROME

PART I

INTRODUCTORY
THE JEWISH COLONY IN ROME

At the beginning of the first century of the Christian era the Jewish colony in Rome had attained large dimensions. As early as B.C. 162 we hear of agreements—we can scarcely call them treaties—concluded between the Jews under the Maccabean dynasty and the Republic. After the capture of Jerusalem by Pompey, B.C. 63, a number more of Jewish exiles swelled the number of the chosen people who had settled in the capital. Cicero when pleading for Flaccus, who was their enemy, publicly alludes to their numbers and influence. Their ranks were still further recruited in B.C. 51, when a lieutenant of Crassus brought some thousands of Jewish prisoners to Rome. During the civil wars, Julius Cæsar showed marked favour to the chosen people. After his murder they were prominent among those who mourned him.

Augustus continued the policy of Julius Cæsar, and showed them much favour; their influence in Roman society during the earlier years of the Empire seems to have been considerable. They are mentioned by the great poets who flourished in the Augustan age. The Jewish Sabbath is especially alluded to by Roman writers as positively becoming a fashionable observance in the capital.

A few distinguished families, who really possessed little of the Hebrew character and nationality beyond the name, such as the Herods, adopted the manners and ways of life of the Roman patrician families; but as a rule the Jews in foreign lands preferred the obscurity to which the reputation of poverty condemned them. Some of them were doubtless possessors of wealth, but they carefully concealed it; the majority, however, were poor, and they even gloried in their poverty; they haunted the lowest and poorest quarters of the great city. Restlessly industrious, they made their livelihood, many of them, out of the most worthless objects of merchandise; but they obtained in the famous capital a curious celebrity. There was something peculiar in this strange people at once attractive and repellent. The French writer Allard, in the exhaustive and striking volumes in which he tells the story of the persecutions in his own novel and brilliant way, epigrammatically writes of the Jew in the golden age of Augustus as “one who was known to pray and to pore over his holy national literature in Rome which never prayed and which possessed no religious books” (“Il prie et il étudie ses livres saintes, dans Rome qui n’a pas de théologie et qui ne prie pas”).

They lived their solitary life alone in the midst of the crowded city—by themselves in life, by themselves, too, in death; for they possessed their own cemeteries in the suburbs,—catacombs we now term them,—strange God’s acres where they buried, for they never burned, their dead, carefully avoiding the practice of cremation, a practice then generally in vogue in pagan Rome. Upon these Jewish cemeteries the Christians, as they increased in numbers, largely modelled those vast cities of the dead of which we shall speak presently.

They watched over and tenderly succoured their own poor and needy, the widow and the orphan; on the whole living pure self-denying lives, chiefly disfigured by the restless spirit, which ever dwelt in the Jewish race, of greed and avarice. They were happy, however, in their own way, living on the sacred memories of a glorious past, believing with an intense belief that they were still, as in the glorious days of David and Solomon, the people beloved of God—and that ever beneath them, in spite of their many confessed backslidings, were the Everlasting Arms; trusting, with a faith which never paled or faltered, that the day would surely come when out of their own people a mighty Deliverer would arise, who would restore them to their loved sacred city and country; would invest His own, His chosen nation, with a glory and power grander, greater than the world had ever seen.

There is no doubt but that the Jew of Rome in Rome’s golden days, in spite of his seeming poverty and degradation, possessed a peculiar moral power in the great empire, unknown among pagan nations.[2]

In the reign of Nero, when the disciples of Jesus in Rome first emerged from the clouds and mists which envelop the earliest days of Roman Christianity, the number of Jews in the capital is variously computed as amounting to from 30,000 to 50,000 persons.

The Jewish colony in Rome was a thoroughly representative body of Jews. They were gathered from many centres of population, Palestine and Jerusalem itself contributing a considerable contingent. They evidently were distinguished for the various qualities, good and bad, which generally characterized this strange, wonderful people. They were restless, at times turbulent, proud and disdainful, avaricious and grasping; but at the same time they were tender and compassionate in a very high degree to the sad-eyed unfortunate ones among their own people,—most reverent, as we have remarked, in the matter of disposing of their dead,—on the whole giving an example of a morality far higher than that which, as a rule, prevailed among the citizens of the mighty capital in the midst of whom they dwelt.

The nobler qualities which emphatically distinguished the race were no doubt fostered by the intense religious spirit which lived and breathed in every Jewish household. The fear of the eternal God, who they believed with an intense and changeless faith loved them, was ever before the eyes alike of the humblest, poorest little trader, as of the wealthiest merchant in their company.

I
THE FOUNDATION OF THE CHURCH IN ROME—“A”

Into this mass of Jewish strangers dwelling in the great city came the news of the wonderful work of Jesus Christ. As among the Jews at Jerusalem, so too in Rome, the story of the Cross attracted many—repelled many. The glorious news of salvation, of redemption, sank quietly into many a sick and weary heart; these hearts were kindled into a passionate love for Him who had redeemed them—into a love such as had never before been kindled in any human heart. While, on the other hand, with many, the thought that the treasured privileges of the chosen people were henceforward to be shared on equal terms by the despised Gentile world, excited a bitter and uncompromising opposition—an opposition which oftentimes shaded into an intense hate.

The question as to who first preached the gospel of Jesus Christ to this great Jewish colony will probably never be answered. There is a high probability that the “story of the Cross” was told very soon after the Resurrection by some of those pilgrims to the Holy City who had been eye-witnesses of the miracle of the first Pentecost.

There is, however, a question connected with the beginnings of Christianity in Rome which is of the deepest interest to the student of ecclesiastical history, a question upon which much that has happened since largely hangs.

Was S. Peter in any way connected with the laying of the foundation of the great Christian community in Rome; can he really be considered as one of the founders of that most important Church? An immemorial tradition persists in so connecting him; upon what grounds is this most ancient tradition based?

Scholars of all religious schools of thought now generally allow that S. Peter visited Rome and spent some time in the capital city; wrote his great First Epistle from it, in which Epistle he called “Rome” by the not unusual mystic name of “Babylon,” and eventually suffered martyrdom there on a spot hard by the mighty basilica called by his name.

The only point at issue is, did he—as the favourite tradition asserts—pay his first visit to Rome quite early in the Christian story, circa A.D. 42, remaining there for some seven or eight years preaching and teaching, laying the foundations of the great Church which rapidly sprang up in the capital?

Then when the decree of the Emperor Claudius banished the Jews, A.D. 49–50, the tradition asserts that the apostle returned to the East, was present at the Apostolic Council held at Jerusalem A.D. 50, only returning to Rome circa A.D. 63. Somewhere about A.D. 64 the First Epistle of Peter was probably written from Rome.[3] His martyrdom there is best dated about A.D. 67.

A careful examination of the most ancient “Notices” bearing especially on the question of the laying of the early stories of the Roman Church, determines the writer of this little study to adopt the above rough statement of S. Peter’s work at Rome. Some of the principal portions of these “notices” will now be quoted, that it may be seen upon what basis the conclusion in question is adopted. The quotations will be followed by a sketch of the traditional and other evidence specially drawn from the testimony of the very early Roman catacomb of S. Priscilla. This sketch, which is here termed the “traditional evidence,” it will be seen, powerfully supports the deduction derived from the notices quoted from very early Christian literature.

The Quotations

Clemens Romanus, A.D. 95–6. In the fifth chapter of the well-known and undoubtedly authentic Letter of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians, the writer calls the attention of the Corinthians to the examples of the Christian “athletes” who “lived very near to our own time.” He speaks of the apostles who were persecuted, and who were faithful to death. “There was Peter, who after undergoing many sufferings, and having borne his testimony, went to his appointed place of glory. There was Paul, who after enduring chains, imprisonments, stonings, again and again, and sufferings of all kinds ... likewise endured martyrdom, and so departed from this world.”

The reason why Clement of Rome mentions these two special apostles (other apostles had already suffered martyrdom) is obvious. Clement was referring to examples of which they themselves had been eye-witnesses. Paul, it is universally acknowledged, was martyred in Rome; is not the inference from the words of Clement, that Peter suffered martyrdom in this same city also, overwhelming?

Ignatius, circa A.D. 108–9, some twelve or thirteen years after Clement had written his Epistle to the Corinthians, on his journey to his martyrdom at Rome, thus writes to the Roman Church: “I do not command you like Peter and Paul: they were apostles; I am a condemned criminal.” Why now did Ignatius single out Peter and Paul? So Bishop Lightfoot, commenting on this passage, forcibly says: “Ignatius was writing from Asia Minor. He was a guest of a disciple of John at the time. He was sojourning in a country where John was the one prominent name. The only conceivable reason why he specially named Peter and Paul was that these two apostles had both visited Rome and were remembered by the Roman Church.”

Papias of Hierapolis, born circa A.D. 60–70. His writings probably date somewhat late in the first quarter of the second century. On the authority of Presbyter John, a personal disciple of the Lord, Papias tells us about Mark: he was a friend and interpreter of S. Peter, and wrote down what he heard his master teach, and there (in Rome) composed his “record.” This notice seems to have been connected by Papias with 1 Pet. v. 13, where Mark is alluded to in connexion with the fellow-elect in Babylon (Rome).

“It seems,” concludes Bishop Lightfoot, referring to Irenæus (S. Clement of Rome, ii. 494), “a tolerably safe inference, therefore, that Papias represented S. Peter as being in Rome, that he stated Mark to have been with him there, and that he assigned to the latter a Gospel record (the second Gospel) which was committed to writing for the instruction of the Romans.”

Dionysius of Corinth, A.D. 170, quoted by Eusebius (H. E. II. xxv.), wrote to Soter, bishop of Rome, as follows: “Herein by such instructions (to us) ye have united the trees of the Romans and Corinthians (trees) planted by Peter and Paul. For they both alike came also to our Corinth, and taught us; and both alike came together to Italy, and having taught there, suffered martyrdom at the same time.”

Irenæus, circa A.D. 177–90, writes: “Matthew published also a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own language, while Peter and Paul were preaching and founding the Church in Rome. Again after their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, himself also handed down to us in writing the lessons preached by Peter.”—H. E. III. i. 1.

Clement of Alexandria, circa A.D. 193–217 (Hypotyposes, quoted by Eusebius, H. E. vi. 14) tells us how, “when Peter had preached the word publicly in Rome, and declared the gospel by the Spirit, the bystanders, being many in number, exhorted Mark as having accompanied him for a long time, and remembering what he had said, to write out his statements, and having thus composed his Gospel, to communicate it to them; and that when Peter learnt this, he used no pressure either to prevent him or to urge him forwards.”

Tertullian, circa A.D. 200, adds his testimony thus: “We read in the lives of the Cæsars, Nero was the first to stain the rising faith with blood. Thus Peter is girt by another (quoting the Lord’s words) when he is bound to the Cross. Thus Paul obtains his birthright of Roman citizenship when he is born again there by the nobility of Martyrdom.”—Scorpiace, 15.

Tertullian again writes: “Nor does it matter whether they are among those whom John baptized in the Jordan, or those whom Peter baptized in the Tiber.”—De Baptismo, 4.

Tertullian once more tells us: “The Church of the Romans reports that Clement was ordained by Peter.”—De Præscriptione Hær. 36.

Tertullian again bears similar testimony: “If thou art near to Italy, thou hast Rome.... How happy is that Church on whom the apostles shed all their teaching with their blood, where Peter is conformed to the passion of the Lord, where Paul is crowned with the death of John (the Baptist), where the Apostle John after having been plunged in boiling oil, without suffering any harm, is banished to an island!”—De Præscriptione, 36.

Caius (or Gaius) the Roman presbyter, circa A.D. 200–20, who lived in the days of Pope Zephyrinus, and was a contemporary of Hippolytus, if not (as Lightfoot suspects) identical with him (Hippolytus of Portus), gives us the following detail: “I can show you the trophies (the Memoriæ or Chapel-Tombs) of the apostles. For if you will go to the Vatican or to the Ostian Way, thou wilt find (there) the trophies (the Memoriæ) of those who founded the Church.”

Caius is here claiming for his own Church of Rome the authority of the Apostles SS. Peter and Paul, whose martyred bodies rest in Rome.—Quoted by Eusebius, H. E. II. xxv.

Thus at that early date when Caius wrote, the localities of the graves of the two apostles were reputed to have been the spots where now stand the great basilicas of SS. Peter and Paul.

Eusebius, H. E. II. xiv., gives a definite date for the first coming of Peter to Rome, and his preaching there. The historian was describing the influence of Simon Magus at Rome. This, he adds, did not long continue, “for immediately under the reign of Claudius, by the benign and gracious providence of God, Peter, that powerful and great apostle who by his courage took the lead of all the rest, was conducted to Rome against this pest of mankind. He (S. Peter) bore the precious merchandise of the revealed light from the East to those in the West, announcing this light itself, and salutary doctrine of the soul, the proclamation of the kingdom of God.”

Eusebius also writes that “Linus, whom he (Paul) has mentioned in his Second Epistle to Timothy as his companion at Rome, has been before shown to have been the first after Peter that obtained the Episcopate at Rome.”—Eusebius, H. E. III. iv.

The traditional memories of Peter’s residence in Rome and his prolonged teaching there are very numerous. De Rossi while quoting certain of these as legendary, adds that an historical basis underlies these notices. Some of the more interesting of these are connected with the house and family of Pudens on the Aventine, and with the cemetery of Saint Priscilla on the Via Salaria.

To the pilgrims of the fifth and following centuries were pointed out the chair in which Peter used to sit and teach (Sedes ubi prius sedit S. Petrus), and also the cemeterium fontis S. Petri—cemeterium ubi Petrus baptizaverat. Marucchi, the pupil and successor of De Rossi, believes that this cemetery where it was said S. Peter used to baptize, is identical with parts of the vast and ancient catacomb of Priscilla. These and further traditional notices are dwelt on with greater detail presently when the general evidence is summed up.[4]

II
A SUMMARY OF LITERARY NOTICES

And now to sum up the evidence we have been quoting:

The Literary Notices have been gathered from all parts of the Roman world where Christianity had made a lodgment.

From Rome (Clement of Rome) in the first and second centuries and early in the third century.

From Antioch (Ignatius, Papias) (including Syria and Asia Minor) very early in the second century.

From Corinth (Greece) (Dionysius) in the second half of the second century.

From Lyons (Gaul) (Irenæus) in the second half of the second century.

From Alexandria (Egypt) (Clement of Alexandria) in the second half of the second century.

From Carthage (North Africa) (Tertullian) in the close of the second century.

These and other literary notices, more or less definitely, all ascribe the laying of the foundation stories of the Church of Rome to the preaching and teaching of the Apostles Peter and Paul. All without exception in their notices of this foundation work place the name of Peter first. It is hardly conceivable that these very early writers would have done this had Peter only made his appearance in Rome for the first time in A.D. 63 or 64, after Paul’s residence in the capital for some two years, when he was awaiting the trial which resulted in his acquittal.

Then again, the repeated mention of the two great apostles as the Founders of the Roman Church would have been singularly inaccurate if neither of them had visited the capital before A.D. 60–1, the date of Paul’s arrival, and A.D. 63–4, the date of S. Peter’s coming, supposing we assume the later date for S. Peter’s coming and preaching.

When we examine the literary notices in question we find in several of them a more circumstantial account of Peter’s work than Paul’s; for instance:

Papias and Irenæus give us special details of S. Mark’s position as the interpreter of S. Peter, and tell us particularly how the friend and disciple of S. Peter took down his master’s words, which he subsequently moulded into what is known as the second Gospel.

Tertullian relates that S. Peter baptized in the Tiber, and mentions, too, how this apostle ordained Clement.

Eusebius, the great Church historian to whom we owe so much of our knowledge of early Church history, writing in the early years of Constantine’s reign, in the first quarter of the fourth century, goes still more into detail, and gives us approximately the date of S. Peter’s first coming, which he states to have been in the reign of Claudius, who was Emperor from A.D. 41 to A.D. 54 (Eusebius, H. E. II. xiv.). The same historian also repeats the account above referred to of Mark’s work as Peter’s companion and scribe in Rome (H. E. II. xv.), adding that the “Church in Babylon” referred to by S. Peter (1 Ep. v. 13) signified the Church of Rome.

Jerome, writing in the latter years of the same century (the fourth), is very definite on the question of the early arrival of S. Peter at Rome—“Romam mittitur,” says the great scholar, “ubi evangelium prædicans XXV annis ejusdem urbis episcopus perseverat.” Now, reckoning back the twenty-five years of S. Peter’s supervision of the Roman Church would bring S. Peter’s first presence in Rome to A.D. 42–3; for Jerome tells us how “Post Petrum primus Romanam ecclesiam tenuit Linus,” and the early catalogues of the Roman Bishops—the Eusebian (Armenian version), the catalogue of Jerome, and the catalogue called the Liberian—give the date of Linus’ accession respectively as A.D. 66, A.D. 68, A.D. 67.

The early lists or catalogues of the Bishops of Rome, just casually referred to, are another important and weighty witness to the ancient and generally received tradition of the early visit and prolonged presence of S. Peter at Rome.

The first of these in the middle of the second century was drawn up, as far as Eleutherius, A.D. 177–90 by Hegesippus, a Hebrew Christian. Eusebius is our authority for this. This list, however, has not come down to us. It is, however, probable that it was the basis, as far as it went, of the list drawn up by Irenæus circa A.D. 180–90. This is the earliest catalogue of the Roman Bishops which we possess. Irenæus, after stating that the Roman Church was founded by the Apostles Peter and Paul, adds that they entrusted the office of the Episcopate to Linus.

In the Armenian version of the Chronicles of Eusebius, the only version in which we possess this Eusebian Chronicle, Peter appears at the head of the list of Roman Bishops, and twenty years is given as the duration of his government of the Church. Linus is stated to have been his successor. In the list of S. Jerome a similar order is preserved—with the slight difference of twenty-five years instead of twenty as the duration of S. Peter’s rule. The deduction which naturally follows these entries in the two lists has been already suggested. The Liberian Catalogue, compiled circa A.D. 354, places S. Peter at the head of the Roman Bishops—giving twenty-five years as the duration of his government. Linus follows here.

The Liberian Catalogue was the basis of the great historical work now generally known as the “Liber Pontificalis,” which in its notices of the early Popes embodies the whole of the Liberian Catalogue—only giving fresh details. The “Liber Pontificalis” in its first portion in its present form is traced back to the earlier years of the sixth century.

The traditional notices of the early presence of S. Peter in Rome are many and various. Taken by themselves they are, no doubt, not convincing—some of them ranking as purely legendary—though we recognize even in these “purely legendary” notices an historical foundation; but taken together they constitute an argument of no little weight.

Among the “purely legendary” we have touched upon the memories which hang round the house of Pudens, and the church which in very early times arose on its site.[5] Of far greater historical value are the memories which belong to the Catacomb of Priscilla, memories which recent discoveries in that most ancient cemetery go far to lift many of the old traditions into the realm of serious history.

The historical fact of the burial (depositio) of some ten or eleven of the first Bishops round the sacred tomb of the Apostle S. Peter (juxta corpus beati Petri in Vaticano), gives additional colour to the tradition of the immemorial reverence which from the earliest times of the Church of Rome encircles the memory of S. Peter.

From the third century onward we find the Roman Bishops claiming as their proudest title to honour their position as successors of S. Peter. In all the controversies which subsequently arose between Rome and the East this position was never questioned. Duchesne, in his last great work,[6] ever careful and scholarly, does not hesitate to term the “Church of Rome” (he is dwelling on its historical aspect) the “Church of S. Peter.”

This study on the work of S. Peter in the matter of laying the early stories of the great Church which after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 indisputably became the metropolis of Christianity, has been necessarily somewhat long—the question is one of the highest importance to the historian of ecclesiastical history. Was this lofty claim of the long line of Bishops of Rome to be the successors of S. Peter, ever one of their chief titles to honour, based on historic evidence, or was it simply an invention of a later age?

All serious historians now are agreed that S. Peter taught in Rome, wrote his Epistle from Rome, and subsequently suffered martyrdom there.

But historians, as we have stated, are not agreed upon the date of his first appearance in the queen city. Now the sum of the evidence massed together in the foregoing brief study, leads to the indisputable conclusion that the date of his coming to Rome must be placed very early in the story of Christianity, somewhere about A.D. 41–3.

Everything points to this conclusion. How could Peter be, with any accuracy, styled the “Founder of the Church of Rome” if he never appeared in Rome before A.D. 64? Long before this date the Church of the metropolis had been “founded,” had had time to become a large and flourishing Christian community. This estimate of the signal importance of the Church of Rome is based on various testimonies, among which may be ranked the long list of salutations in S. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, written circa A.D. 58.

All the various notices of the leading Christian writers of the first and second centuries in all lands carefully style him as such. Paul, it is true, in most, not in all these early writings, is associated with him as a joint founder: this in a real sense can also be understood; for although Paul came at a later date to Rome and dwelt there some two years, the presence of one of the greatest of the early Christian teachers would surely add enormously to the stability of the foundations laid years before. The teaching of the great Apostle of the Gentiles, continued for two years, was, of course, a very important factor in the “foundation work,” and was evidently always reckoned as such.

But even then, as we have seen, while the two apostles are frequently joined together as founders in the writings of the early Christian teachers, in several notable instances Peter’s work is especially dwelt upon by them.

Then again in the traditional “Memories” preserved to us, some of them of the highest historical value, it is Peter, not Paul, who is ever the principal figure. Paul rarely, if ever, appears in them. Great though undoubtedly Paul was as a teacher of the Christian mysteries and as an expounder of Christian doctrine, it is emphatically Peter, not Paul, who lives in the “memories” of the Roman Christian community.

The place which the two basilicas of S. Peter and S. Paul on the Vatican Hill and on the Ostian Way have ever occupied in the minds and hearts not only of the Roman people, but of all the innumerable pilgrims in all ages to the sacred shrines of Rome, seems accurately to measure the respective places which the two apostles hold in the estimate of the Roman Church.

The comparative neglect of S. Paul’s basilica in Rome when measured with the undying reverence shown to, and with the enormous pains and cost bestowed on the sister basilica of S. Peter, is due not to any want of reverence or respect for the noble Apostle of the Gentiles, but solely because Rome and the pilgrims to Rome were deeply conscious of the special debt of Rome to S. Peter, who was evidently the real founder of the mighty Church of the capital.

The writer of this work is fully conscious that the conclusion to which he has come after massing together all the available evidence, is not the usual conclusion arrived at by one great and influential school of thought in our midst; nor does it accord with the conclusion of that eminently just scholar-Bishop Lightfoot, who while positively affirming the presence of S. Peter in Rome, whence, as he allows, he wrote his First Epistle, and where through pain and agony he passed to his longed-for rest in his Master’s Paradise, yet cannot accept the tradition of his early presence in the metropolis.

The writer of this study has no doubt whatever that the teaching of the vast majority of the Roman Catholic writers on this point is strictly accurate, and that S. Peter at a comparatively early date, probably somewhere about the year of grace 42–3, came to Rome confirmed in the faith—taught—strengthened with his own blessed memories of his adored Master—the little band of Christians already dwelling in the capital of the Empire. Under his pious training the little band, in the six, seven, or eight years of his residence in their midst, became the strong nucleus of the powerful Church of Rome.

Then, most probably, he left Rome when the decree of the Emperor Claudius, A.D. 49, was promulgated: the decree which was the result of the disturbances among the turbulent Jewish colony,—disturbances no doubt owing to bitter and relentless opposition to the fast spreading of the Christian faith in their midst. As Suetonius (Claudius, 25) tersely but clearly tells us: “Judæos, impulsore Christo assidue tumultuantes Roma expulit.”

From the year 49, when he left the Queen City, S. Peter apparently was absent from the Church in which for some seven or eight years he had laboured so well and so successfully, continuing his work, however, in other lands. Then in A.D. 63–4 he returned, resumed his Roman work, wrote the First Epistle which bears his name, and eventually suffered martyrdom.

This conclusion, of such deep importance in early ecclesiastical history, has been arrived at—as the student of the foregoing pages will see—from no one statement, from no whole class, so to speak, of evidences, but from the cumulative evidence afforded by the massing together the statements of early writers, the testimony of the catacombs, the witness of tradition, and the voice of what may almost be accurately termed immemorial history.[7]

PART II

I
THE FOUNDATION OF THE CHURCH IN ROME—“B”

The Roman Church in the year of grace 61 was evidently already a powerful and influential congregation: everything points to this conclusion: its traditions, we might even say its history, and, above all, the notices contained in S. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans written not later than A.D. 58.

Virtually alone among the Churches of the first thirty years of Christianity does S. Paul give to this congregation unstinting, unqualified praise—very different to his words addressed to the Church in Corinth in both of his Epistles to that notable Christian centre, or to the Galatian congregation in his letter to the Church of that province; or even to the Thessalonians, the Church which he loved well, where reproach and grave warnings are mingled with and colour his loving words.

But to the Church of Rome, in which in its many early years of struggle and combat he bore no part whatever, his praise is quite unmingled with rebuke or warning. As regards this congregation (Rom. i. 8), Paul thanks God for them all that their faith is spoken of throughout the whole world. In the concluding chapter of the Epistle, some twenty-five specially distinguished members of the Roman congregation are saluted by name, though it by no means follows that S. Paul was personally acquainted with all of those who were named by him.

About three years after writing his famous letter to the Romans,—just referred to,—Paul came as a prisoner to the capital city. But although a prisoner awaiting a public trial, the imperial government gave him free liberty to receive in his own hired house members of the Christian Church, and indeed any who chose to come and listen to his teaching; and this liberty of free access to him was continued all through the two years of his waiting for the public trial. The words of the “Acts of the Apostles,” a writing universally received as authentic, are singularly definite here: “And Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house (in Rome), and received all that came unto him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him” (Acts xxviii. 30–31).

It was during these two years of the imprisonment that the great teacher justified his subsequent title, accorded him by so many of the early Christian writers, of joint founder with S. Peter of the Roman Church. The foundations of the Church of the metropolis we believe certainly to have been laid by another leading member of the apostolic band, S. Peter.[8] But S. Paul’s share in strengthening and in building up this Church, the most important congregation in the first days of Christianity, was without doubt very great.

At a very early period, certainly after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, Rome became the acknowledged centre and the metropolis of Christendom. The great world-capital was the meeting-place of the followers of the Name from all lands. Thither, too, naturally flocked the teachers of the principal heresies in doctrinal truth which very soon sprang up among Christian converts. Under these conditions something more, in such a centre as Rome, was imperatively needed than the simple direct Gospel teaching, however fervid: something additional to the recital of the wondrous Gospel story as told by S. Peter and repeated possibly verbatim by his disciple S. Mark. A deeper and fuller instruction was surely required in such a centre as Rome quickly became. Men would ask, Who and what was the Divine Founder of the religion,—what was His relation to the Father, what to the angel-world? What was known of His preexistence? These and such-like questions would speedily press for a reply in such a cosmopolitan centre as imperial Rome. Inspired teaching bearing on such points as these required to be welded into the original foundation stories of the leading Church which Rome speedily became, and this was supplied by the great master S. Paul, to whom the Holy Ghost had vouchsafed what may be justly termed a double portion of the Spirit. The Christology of Paul, to use a later theological term, was, in view of all that was about to come to pass in the immediate future, a most necessary part of the equipment of the Church of God in Rome.

The keynote of the famous master’s teaching during those two years of his Roman imprisonment may be doubtless found in the letters written by him at that time. Three of these, the “Ephesian,” “Colossian,” and “Philippian” Epistles, were emphatically massive expositions of doctrine—especially that addressed to the Colossians. From these we can gather what was the principal subject-matter of the Pauline teaching at Rome. His thoughts were largely taken up with the great doctrinal questions bearing on the person of the Founder of Christianity.

We will quote one or two passages from the great doctrinal Epistle to the Colossians as examples of the Pauline teaching at this juncture of his life when he was engaged in building up the Roman Church, and furnishing it with an arsenal of weapons which would soon be needed in their life and death contest with the dangerous heresies[9] which so soon made their appearance in the city which was at once the metropolis of the Church and the Empire.

“The Father, ... who hath translated us into the kingdom of His dear Son, ... who is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature: for by Him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by Him, and for Him: and He is before all things, and by Him all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the Church: who is the beginning, the first-born from the dead; that in all things he might have the pre-eminence. For it pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell; and, having made peace through the blood of His Cross, by Him to reconcile all things unto Himself; by Him (I say), whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven” (Col. i. 12–20).

And once more: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, ... and not after Christ. For in Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. And ye are complete in Him, which is the head of all principality and power.”

Preaching on such texts, which contain those tremendous truths which just at this time he embodied in his Colossian letter, did S. Paul lay the foundation of the “Christology” of the Church of Rome. With justice, then, was he ranked by the early Christian writers as one of the founders of the Roman Church, for he was without doubt the principal teacher of the famous congregation in the all-important doctrinal truths bearing on the person and office of Jesus Christ.

S. Peter, whose yet earlier work at Rome, we believe, stretching over some eight or nine years, we have already dwelt on, was evidently absent from the capital when S. Paul in A.D. 58 wrote his famous Letter to the Romans; nor had he returned in A.D. 61, when Paul was brought to the metropolis as a prisoner; but that he returned to Rome somewhere about A.D. 63–4 is fairly certain.

II
THE FIRE OF ROME, AND ITS RESULTS AS REGARDS CHRISTIANS—A.D. 64. HENCEFORTH THEY WERE REGARDED AS ENEMIES OF THE STATE

For a little more than thirty years, dating back to the Resurrection morning, with the exception of the occasion of that temporary and partial banishment of the Jews and Christians from Rome in the days of the Emperor Claudius, had the Christian propaganda gone on apparently unnoticed, certainly unheeded by the imperial government.

The banishment decree of Claudius, the outcome of a local disturbance in the Jewish quarter of the capital, was after a brief interval apparently rescinded, or at least ignored by the ruling powers; but in the middle of the year 64, only a few months after S. Paul’s long-delayed trial and acquittal and subsequent departure from Rome, a startling event happened which brought the Christians into a sad notoriety, and put an end to the attitude of contemptuous indifference with which they had been generally regarded by the magistrates both in the provinces and in the capital.

A terrible and unlooked for calamity reduced Rome to a state of mourning and desolation. The 19th July, A.D. 64,—the date of the commencement of the desolating fire,—was long remembered. It broke out in the shops which clustered round the great Circus; a strong summer wind fanned the flames, which soon became uncontrollable. The narrow streets of the old quarter and the somewhat crumbling buildings fed the fire, which raged for some nine days, destroying many of the ancient historic buildings. Thousands of the poorer inhabitants were rendered homeless and penniless. At that period Rome was divided into fourteen regions or quarters; of these three were entirely consumed; seven more were rendered uninhabitable by the fierce fire; only four were left really unharmed by the desolating calamity.

The passions of the mob, ever quickly aroused, were directed in the first instance against the Emperor Nero, who was accused—probably quite wrongfully—of being the incendiary: there is indeed a long, a mournful chronicle of evil deeds registered against the memory of this evil Emperor; but that he was the guilty author of this special outrage is in the highest degree unlikely. His wild life, his cruelties, his ungovernable passions, his insanity,—for no reader of history can doubt that in his case the sickness which so often affects an uncontrolled despot had with Nero resulted in insanity,—indeed, all his works and days, gave colour to the monstrous and absurd charges which a fickle and angry mob brought against the once strangely popular tyrant.

All kinds of wild stories connected with the fire were circulated; he had no doubt many remorseless enemies. Men said, Nero sitting high on one of the towers of Rome, watched with fiendish joy and exultation the progress of the devouring flames, and as Rome burned before his eyes, played upon his lyre and sung a hymn of his own composition, for he imagined himself a poet, in which he compared the burning of his Rome with the ruin of Troy.

Another legend was current, averring that the slaves of the Emperor’s household had been seen fanning the flames in their desolating course; another rumour was spread abroad which whispered that the mad and wicked Emperor desired to see Old Rome, with its narrow and crowded streets, destroyed, that he might be able to rebuild it on a new and stately scale, and thus, regardless of the immemorial traditions of the ancient city, to render his name immortal through this notable and magnificent work.

At all events these improbable stories more or less gained credence in many quarters, and the Emperor found himself execrated by thousands of thoughtless men and women who had suffered the loss of their all in the fire, and who were glad to vent their fury on one whom they once admired and even loved, though their admiration and love had been often mingled with that fierce envy with which the people too frequently view the great and rich and powerful.

Prompted by his evil advisers, among whom the infamous Tigellinus was the most conspicuous, the Emperor in the first instance accused the Jews of being the incendiaries: curiously enough the quarter of the city where they mostly congregated had been spared in the late conflagration. It was no difficult task to persuade the fickle people that the strange race of foreigners, who hated Rome and Rome’s gods, had avenged themselves and the wrongs they had suffered at the hands of the Roman nation, by firing the capital city.

Up to this time—in the eyes of most of the Romans—the Jew and the Christian were one people; they considered that if any difference at all existed, it was simply that the Christian was a dissenting Jew. Now apparently, after the burning of Rome, for the first time was any distinction made. It happened on this wise: the Jews had powerful friends in the court of the despotic Emperor. Poppæa the Empress, if not a Jewess, was at least a devoted proselyte of the chosen race. There is no doubt but that her influence, backed up no doubt by others about her person at the court, diverted the suspicions which had been awakened, from the Jews to the Christians. These, it was pointed out, were no real Jews, but were their deadly enemies; they were a hateful and hated sect quite improperly confounded with the chosen people. The Christians were now formally accused of being the real authors of the late calamity, and the accusation seems to have been generally popular among the masses of the Roman population. Our authorities for this popular hatred—we may style them contemporary—are Tacitus and Suetonius and the Christian Clement of Rome. The testimony of Pliny the Younger, who governed Bithynia under the Emperor Trajan, will be discussed later.

Under the orders of Nero—who turned to his own purposes the popular dislike to the new sect of Jewish fanatics, as they generally were supposed to be—the Christians were sought for. It turned out that there was a vast multitude of them in the city, “ingens multitudo,” says Tacitus; and Clement of Rome, the Christian bishop and writer, circa A.D. 96, also speaks of their great numbers. Many of the accused were condemned on the false charge of incendiarism, to which was added an accusation far harder to disprove—general hostility to society, and hatred of the world (odio generis humani).

A crowd of Christians of both sexes was condemned to the wild beasts. It was arranged that they should provide a hideous amusement for the people who witnessed the games just then about to be celebrated in the imperial gardens on the Vatican Hill—on the very spot where the glorious basilica of S. Peter now stands.

Nero, anxious to restore his waning popularity with the crowd, and to divert the strange suspicion which had fixed upon him as the incendiary of the great fire, was determined that the games should surpass any former exhibition of the like kind in the number of victims provided, and in the refined cruelty of the awful punishment to which the sufferers were condemned. He had in good truth an array of victims for his ghastly exhibition such as had never been seen before. A like exhibition indeed was never repeated; the hideousness of it positively shocking the Roman populace, cruel though they were, and passionately devoted to scenic representations which included death and torture, crime and shame. Numbers of these first Christian martyrs were simply exposed to the beasts; others clothed in skins were hunted down by fierce wild dogs; others were forced to play a part in infamous dramas, which ever closed with the death of the victims in pain and agony.

But the closing scene was the most shocking. As the night fell on the great show, as a novel delight for the populace, the Roman people being especially charmed with brilliant and striking illuminations, the outer ring of the vast arena was encircled with crosses on which a certain number of Christians were bound, impaled, or nailed. The condemned were clothed in tunics steeped in pitch and in other inflammable matter, and then, horrible to relate, the crucified and impaled were set on fire, and in the lurid light of these ghastly living torches the famous chariot races, in which the wicked Emperor took a part, were run.

But this was never repeated; as we have just stated, the sight of the living flambeaux, the protracted agony of the victims, was too dreadful even for that debased and hardened Roman crowd of heedless cruel spectators; the illuminations of Nero’s show were never forgotten; they remained an awful memory, but only a memory, even in Rome!

There is good reason to suppose that one of the lookers on at the games of that long day and sombre evening in the gardens of the Vatican Hill was Seneca, the famous Stoic philosopher, once the tutor and afterwards for a time the minister of Nero. Seneca had retired from public life, and in two of his letters written during his retirement to his sick and suffering friend Lucilius, encouraging him to bear his distressing malady with brave patience, reminds him of the tortures which were now and again inflicted on the condemned; in vivid language picturing the fire, the chains, the worrying of wild beasts, the prison horrors, the cross, the tunic steeped in pitch, the rack, the red-hot irons placed on the quivering flesh. What, he asks his friend, are your sufferings compared with sufferings caused by these tortures? And yet, he adds, his eyes had seen these things endured; from the sufferer no groan was heard—no cry for mercy—nay, in the midst of all he had seen the bravely patient victims smile!

Surely here the great Stoic was referring to what he had witnessed in Nero’s dread games of the Vatican gardens; no other scene would furnish such a memory at once weird and pathetic. The strange ineffable smile of the Christian in pain and agony dying for his God, had gone home to the heart of the great scholar statesman. Like many another Roman citizen of his day and time, Seneca had often seen men die, but he had never before looked on any one dying after this fashion!

From the days of that ever memorable summer of the year 64 until Constantine and Licinius signed the edict which in the name of the Emperors gave peace and stillness to the harassed Church, A.D. 313, roughly speaking a long period of two centuries and a half, the sword of persecution was never sheathed. For practically from the year 64, the date of the famous games in the Vatican gardens, there was a continuous persecution of those that confessed the name of Christ. The ordinary number of the ten persecutions is after all an arbitrary computation. The whole principle and constitution of Christianity on examination were condemned by the Roman government as irreconcilably hostile to the established order; and mere membership of the sect, if persisted in, was regarded as treasonable, and the confessors of Christianity became liable to the punishment of death. And this remained the unvarying, the changeless policy of the Government of the State, though not always put in force, until the memorable edict of Constantine, A.D. 313.

After the terrible scenes in the games of the Vatican gardens, the persecution of the Christians still continued. The charges of incendiarism were dropped, no one believing that there was any truth in these allegations; but in Rome and in the provinces the Christian sect from this time forward was generally regarded as hostile to the Empire.

The accusation of being the authors of the great fire had revealed many things in connexion with the sect; the arrests, the judicial inquiries, had thrown a flood of new light upon the tenets of the new religion, had disclosed its large and evidently rapidly increasing numbers. Most probably for many years were they still confused with the Jews, but it was seen that the new sect was something more than a mere body of Jewish dissenters.

It was universally acknowledged that the Christians were innocent of any connexion with the great fire; but something else was discovered; they were a very numerous company (ingens multitudo) intensely in earnest, opposed to the State religion, preferring in numberless instances torture, confiscation, death, rather than submit to the State regulations in the matter of religion.

For some time before the fire they had been generally disliked, possibly hated by very many of the Roman citizens, by men of different ranks, for various reasons; by traders who lost much by their avoidance of all idolatrous feasts; by pagan families who resented the proselytism which was constantly taking place in their homes, thus causing a breach in the family circle; by priests and those specially connected with the network of rites and ceremonies, sacrifices and offerings belonging to the temples of the old gods. But, after all, this widespread popular dislike to the sect was not the chief cause of the steady persecution which set in after the wild and intemperate scenes which followed the great fire.

For the first time the imperial government saw with whom they had to do. It was the settled policy of Rome steadily to repress and to stamp out all organizations, all self-governing communities, or clubs, as highly dangerous to the spirit of imperial policy; and as the result of the trials and inquiries which followed the fire of Rome, it found in the Christian community a living embodiment of this tendency which hitherto Rome had succeeded in crushing—found that in their midst, in the capital and in the provinces, an extra-imperial unity was fast growing up—an Empire within the Empire.

In other words, the whole of the principles and the constitution of Christianity were considered as hostile to the established order, and if persisted in were to be deemed treasonable; thus after the discoveries made in the course of the judicial proceedings which were instituted after the great fire, the Christians, even after their innocence on the incendiary charge was generally acknowledged, were viewed by the imperial authorities as a politically dangerous society, being an organized and united body having its ramifications all over the Empire; but after the hideous and revolting cruelties to which so many of them had been subjected in the famous Vatican games, the original charge made against them came universally to be considered as an infamous device of the Emperor Nero to divert public attention from himself, to whom, although probably falsely, the guilt of causing the fire was popularly attributed.

Still there is no doubt that although the alleged connexion of the Christian sect with the crime of incendiarism seems to have been quickly forgotten, from the year 64 onward “the persecution was continued as a permanent police measure, under the form of a general prosecution of Christians as a sect dangerous to the public safety.”

This, after a lengthened discussion of the whole question, is Professor Ramsay’s conclusion,[10] who considers it doubtful if any “edict,” in the strict sense of the word, was promulgated by the Emperor Nero; and this he deduces from the famous correspondence which took place between Pliny, the governor of Bithynia, and the Emperor Trajan, some fifty years after the events just related in the days of Nero.

The words of Pliny when he asked for more definite directions from Trajan in the matter of Christian prosecutions, apparently indicate that he considered the Christian question not as one coming under some definite law, but as a matter of practical administration.

The more general opinion, however, held by modern Church historians is that an edict against the Christians was promulgated by Nero, and that Domitian specially acted upon the edict in the course of the severe measures taken against the sect in the later years of his reign; the words of Melito of Sardis (second century), of Tertullian (beginning of third century), of the Christian historians writing in the fourth century and early years of the fifth century Sulpitius Severus and Lactantius, being quoted in support of this view.

The expressions used by Sulpitius Severus here are certainly very definite in the matter of the imperial edict. This historian founds his account of the persecution under Nero on “Tacitus,” and then comments as follows: “This was the beginning of severe measures against the Christians. Afterwards the religion was forbidden by formal laws, and the profession of Christianity was made illegal by published edicts” (Chron. ii. 29).

It is not, however, of great importance if the profession of Christianity was formally interdicted, or if a persecution was a matter of practical administration, the profession of the faith being considered dangerous to law and order, and deserving of death—as Ramsay supposes. The other conclusion is of far greater moment. It is briefly this:

The first step taken by the imperial government in persecution dates certainly from the reign of Nero, immediately after the scenes in the Vatican games, when a Christian was condemned after evidence had been given that he or she had committed some act of hostility to society—no difficult task to prove. Subsequent to Nero’s reign, a further development in the persecutions had taken place (probably in the time of Vespasian), in which all Christians were assumed to have been guilty of such hostility to society, and might be condemned off-hand on confession of the Name. This was the state of things when Pliny wrote to Trajan for more detailed instructions. The great number of professing Christians alarming that upright and merciful official, he asked the Emperor was he to send them all to death?

The leading feature of the instruction of the Emperor Trajan in reply to Pliny’s question, as we shall presently see, was, although Christians were to be condemned if they confessed the Name, they were not to be sought out. This “instruction” held good until the closing years of the Empire, when a sterner policy was pursued; while it is indisputable that under Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, a yet more hostile practice was adopted towards the Christians.

One great point is clear—that from the days of Nero the Christians were never safe; they lived as their writings plainly show, even under the rule of those Emperors who were, comparatively speaking, well disposed to them, with the vision of martyrdom ever before their eyes; they lived, not a few of them, positively training themselves to endure the great trial as good soldiers of Jesus Christ. During the first and second centuries, comparatively speaking, only a few names of these martyrs and confessors have come down to us: we possess but a few really well-authenticated recitals (Acts and Passions), but these names and stories do not read like exceptional cases;[11] irresistibly the grave truth forces itself upon us, that there were many heroes and heroines whose names have not been preserved—whose stories have not been recorded.

The sword of persecution ever hung over the heads of the members of the Christian flocks—ready to fall at any moment. The stern instructions, modified though they were by the kindly policy of some of the rulers of the State, were never abrogated, never forgotten; they were susceptible, it is true, of a gentler interpretation than the harsh terms in which they were couched at first seemed to warrant, but these interpretations constantly varied according to the policy of the provincial magistrate and the tone for the moment of the reigning Emperor; but we must never think of the spirit of persecution really slumbering even for one short year.

III
SILENCE RESPECTING PERSECUTION

It has been asked, How comes it that for much of the first and second centuries there is a remarkable silence respecting these persecutions which we are persuaded harassed the Christian congregations in the provinces as in the great metropolis? The answer here is not difficult to find.

The pagan writers of these centuries held the Christian sect in deep contempt;[12] they would never think the punishments dealt out to a number of law-breakers and wild fanatics worthy of chronicling; the mere loss of life in that age, so accustomed to wholesale destruction of human beings, would not strike them as a notable incident in any year.

While as regards Christian records, the practice of celebrating the anniversary days of even famous martyrs and confessors only began in Rome far on in the third century.

But, as we shall see, although we possess no Christian records definitely telling us of any special persecution between the times of Nero and the later years of Domitian, the pages of the undoubtedly genuine Christian writings of very early date, from which we shall presently quote, were unmistakably all written under the shadow of a restless relentless hostility on the part of the Roman government towards the Christian sect. The followers of Jesus we see ever lived under the shadow of persecution.

Never safe for a single day was the life of one who believed in the Name; his life and the life of his dear ones were never for an instant secure: he and his family were at the mercy of every enemy, open and secret. Confiscation, degradation from rank and position, banishment, imprisonment, torture, death, were ever threatening him. A hard, stern combat, indeed, was the daily life of every Christian disciple. Many came out as victors from the terrible trial; this we learn from such writings as the Shepherd of Hermas, but some, alas! we learn from that same vivid and truthful picture of Hermas, flinched and played the traitor when the hour of decision between Christ and the pagan gods struck, as it often, very often, did in the so-called quiet days of the Flavian Emperors.

But it is only from the general character and spirit of the early Christian writers that we gather this; it is only from the allusions scattered up and down these striking and pathetic pages, which after all had other and nobler work before them than to record the many sufferings and martyrdoms of the brethren, that we learn what was the character of the hard life the followers of Jesus had to lead. So far from exaggerating, these writers give a very imperfect account of the sufferings of that period.

But in spite of this dark shadow of danger under which the Christian always lived, a cloud which for two hundred and fifty years never really lifted; in spite of popular dislike and of public condemnation,—the numbers of the persecuted sect multiplied with startling rapidity in all lands, among all the various peoples massed together under the rule of the Empire, and called by the name of Romans. Their great number attracted the attention of pagan writers such as Tacitus, writing of the martyrdoms of A.D. 64; of Pliny, speaking of what he witnessed in A.D. 112; of Christian writers like Tertullian, giving a picture of the sect at the end of the second century.

In the middle years of this second century, only a little more than a hundred years after the Resurrection morning, when the Antonines were reigning, we know that there were large congregations in Spain and Gaul, in Germany, in North Africa, in Egypt and in Syria, besides the great and powerful Church in Rome.

All that we learn of the busy, earnest, strenuous life of these early Christian communities, of their noble charities, of their active propaganda, of their grave and successful contentions with the heretical teachers who successively arose in their midst, makes it hard to believe that they were ever living, as it were, under the very shadow of persecution which might burst upon them at any moment; and yet well-nigh all the writings of these early days are coloured with these anticipations of torture, confiscation, imprisonment and death,—a death of pain and agony. The Apocalypse refers to these things again and again—Clement of Rome in his grave and measured Epistle—Hermas and Ignatius, Justin and Tertullian, and somewhat later Cyprian writing in the middle of the third century—allude to these things as part of the everyday Christian life. They give us, it is true, few details, little history of the events which were constantly happening; but as we read, we feel that the thought of martyrdom was constantly present with them.

Now what was the attraction to this Christianity, the profession of which was so fraught with danger—so surrounded with deadly peril?

“Le candidat au Christianisme, était, par le fait même, candidat au Martyre,” graphically writes the brilliant and careful French scholar Duchesne. The Christian verily exposed himself and his dear ones to measureless penalties. Now what had he to gain by such a dangerous adventure?

It is true that martyrdom itself possessed a special attraction for some. The famous chapters of Ignatius’ Letter to the Roman Church, written circa A.D. 109–10, very vividly picture this strange charm. The constancy of the confessor, the calm serenity with which he endured tortures, the smiling confidence with which he welcomed a death often of pain and suffering—his eyes fixed upon something invisible to mortal eyes which he saw immediately before him,—all this was new in the world of Rome; it was at once striking and admirable. Such a sight, and it was a frequent one, was indeed inspiring—“Why should not I,” thought many a believer in Jesus, “share in this glorious future? Why should not I form one of this noble band of elect and blessed souls?”

Then again another attraction to Christianity was ever present in the close union which existed among the members of the community.

In this great Brotherhood, without any attempt to level down the wealthier Christians, without any movement towards establishing a general community of goods, the warmest feelings of friendship and love were cultivated between all classes and degrees. The Christian teachers pointed out with great force that in the eyes of the divine Master no difference existed between the slave and the free-born, between the patrician and the little trader; with Him there was perfect equality. Sex and age, rank and fortune, poverty and riches, country and race, with Him were of no account. All men and women who struggled after the life He loved, were His dear servants. The result of all this was shown in the generous and self-denying love of the wealthier members of the flock towards their poor and needy brothers and sisters.

This is conspicuously shown in the wonderful story of the vast cemeteries of the suburbs of Rome, where at a very early date the rich afforded the hospitality of the tomb to their poor friends.

Most of the so-called “catacombs” began in the gardens of the rich and noble, where the little family God’s acre was speedily opened to the proletariat and the slave, who after death were tenderly and lovingly cared for, and laid to sleep with all reverence alongside the members of the patrician house to whom the cemetery belonged, and which in numberless instances was enlarged to receive these poor and humble guests.

But, after all, great and different though these various attractive influences were,—and which no doubt in countless cases brought unnumbered men and women of all ranks and orders into the ranks of Christianity,—there was something more which united all these various nationalities, these different grades, with an indissoluble bond of union; something more which enabled them to live on year after year in the shadow of persecution—in daily danger of losing all that men most prize and hold dear; something more which gave them that serene courage at the last, which inspired the great army of bravely patient martyrs to witness a good confession for the Name’s sake. It was that burning, that living faith in the great sacrifice of their loving Master—the faith which in the end vanquished even pagan Rome—the faith which comes from no books or arguments, no preaching and no persuasion—from no learning however profound and sacred—from no human arsenal, however furnished with truth and righteousness.

It was that strong and deathless faith which is the gift of God alone, and which in a double portion was the gift of the Holy Ghost to the sorely tried Church in the heroic age of Christianity.

After the death of Nero, during the very brief reigns of Galba Otho and Vitellius, probably the persecution of Christians, owing to the disturbed state of Rome and the Empire, languished. When, however, the Flavian House in the person of Vespasian was firmly placed in power, the policy of the government of Nero, which held that the Christians were a sect the tendency of whose beliefs and practice was hostile to the very foundations and established principles of the Roman government, was strictly adhered to, and possibly even developed.

The followers of the sect were deemed outlaws, and the name of a Christian was treated as a crime.

There is a famous passage in Sulpicius Severus (fourth century) which most modern scholars consider to have been an extract from a lost book of Tacitus. It is an account of a Council of War held after the storming of Jerusalem, A.D. 70. In this Council, Titus the son and heir of Vespasian—the hero of the great campaign which closed with the fall of Jerusalem—is reported to have expressed the opinion that the Temple ought to be destroyed in order that the religion of the Jews and of the Christians might be more completely rooted up; for these religions, though opposed to each other, had yet the same origin. The Christians had sprung from the Jews, and when the root was torn up the stem issuing from the root would easily be destroyed. There is no doubt but that this report of Titus’ speech at the Council of War is an historical document of the utmost importance. It tells us exactly what was the feeling of the imperial Flavian House towards the Christians—they represented an evil which it was well to extirpate.

It is possible that in a mutilated passage of Suetonius a reference occurs to Vespasian’s actions at this period (in the year following A.D. 70) in respect to the Christians. The passage runs as follows: “Never in the death of any one did Vespasian (take pleasure, and in the case of) merited punishments he even wept and groaned.” This is clearly a reference to some class of individuals whose punishment Vespasian felt bound to accept, while he regretted it. “It is inconceivable that Vespasian, a Roman soldier of long experience in the bloody wars of Britain and Judæa, wept and groaned at every merited execution.... We think of the punishments which by the principle of Nero attached to the Christians ... the principle in question continued permanently, and Suetonius alluded to it on account of the detail, interesting to a biographer, that Vespasian wept while he confirmed its operation.”[13]

But a yet more precise statement, that persecution was actively continued under Vespasian, is to be found in the Latin Father, Hilary of Poitiers, who ranks Vespasian between Nero and Decius as a persecutor of the Faith.[14] Some critics have supposed this notice an error. Lightfoot, however, thinks it more probable that it was based upon some facts of history known to Hilary, but since blotted out by time from the records of history.[15]

Towards the end of Domitian’s reign, circa A.D. 95, the persecution became more bitter. Indeed, so severely were the Christians hunted out and prosecuted that the period had become memorable in history. Domitian is constantly mentioned as the second great persecutor, Nero being the first. The reason doubtless for this general tradition is that in A.D. 95, persons of the highest rank, some even belonging to the imperial family, were among the condemned; notably Flavius Clemens the Consul, and the two princesses bearing the name of Domitilla—all these being very near relatives of the Emperor.

The violent outbreak of persecution, fierce and terrible as it seems to have been in the last year and a half of Domitian’s reign, does not appear to have been owing to any special movement among the Christian subjects of the Empire which aroused attention and suggested distrust, but was solely owing to the Emperor’s private policy and personal feelings. There is nothing to show that any edict against the sect was promulgated in this reign. Since the time of Nero the persecution of Christians was a standing matter, as was that of persons who were habitual law-breakers, robbers, and such-like. Probably under the princes of the Flavian dynasty, as we have said, this policy of the government was somewhat developed throughout the Empire, and now and again, owing to local circumstances and the disposition of the chief magistrate, was more or less severe. It is said that some governors boasted that they had brought back from their province their lictors’ axes unstained with blood; but others were actuated with very different feelings.

In the case of the so-called Domitian persecution, the ill-will of the autocratic Emperor naturally intensified it. Various motives seem to have influenced the sovereign Lord of the Empire here.

Domitian was a sombre and suspicious tyrant, and no doubt his cruel action in the case of his relatives, the consul Flavius and the princesses of his House, was prompted by jealousy of those who stood nearest his throne, and the fact that they were found to belong to the proscribed sect gave him a pretext of which he was glad to avail himself. But his bloody vengeance was by no means only wreaked upon his own relatives. We learn from the pagan writer Dion Cassius (in the epitome of his work by the monk Xiphilin) and also from Suetonius, that he put to death various persons of high position, notably Acilius Glabrio who had been consul in A.D. 91. This Acilius Glabrio was also a Christian. The researches and discoveries of De Rossi and Marruchi in the older portion of the vast Catacomb of S. Priscilla have conclusively proved this.

There was another reason, however, for Domitian’s special hatred of the Christian sect. The Emperor was a vigilant censor, and an austere guardian of the ancient Roman traditions. In this respect he has with some justice been cited as pursuing the same policy as did his great predecessor Augustus, and, like him, he looked on the imperial cultus[16] as part of the State religion. Domitian felt that these ancient traditions which formed a part of Roman life were compromised by the teaching and practices of the Christian sect. No doubt this was one of the principal reasons which influenced him in his active persecution of the followers of Jesus.

But although he struck at some of the noblest and most highly placed in the Empire, especially, as it seems, those suspected of being members of the hated sect, he appears to have vented his fury also upon many who belonged to the lower classes of the citizens. Juvenal in a striking passage evidently alludes to his pursuit of these comparatively unknown and obscure ones, and traces the unpopularity which eventually led to his assassination to this persecution of the poor nameless citizen.[17]

Domitian was assassinated A.D. 96, and was succeeded by the good and gentle Emperor Nerva. The active and bitter persecution which Domitian carried on in the latter years of his reign, as far as we know, ceased, and once more the Christian sect was left in comparative quiet, that is to say, they were still in the position of outlaws, the sword of persecution ever hanging over their heads. The law which forbade their very existence was there, if any one was disposed to call it into action. The passion of the populace, the bigotry of a magistrate, or the malice of some responsible personage, might at any moment awake the slumbering law into activity. These various malicious influences, ever ready, were constantly setting the law in motion. This we certainly gather from Pliny’s reference to the “Cognitiones” or inquiries into accusations set on foot against Christians in his famous letter to the Emperor Trajan.

PART III
CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN PLINY AND TRAJAN

PLINY’S LETTER TO TRAJAN AND THE EMPEROR’S “RESCRIPT”—GENUINENESS OF CORRESPONDENCE

Introductory

A flood of light is poured upon the early history of Christianity in the correspondence which passed between the Emperor Trajan and his friend and minister Pliny the Younger, who had been appointed to the governorship[18] of Bithynia and Pontus, the district lying in the north of Asia Minor.

The letter of Pliny, containing his report of the trial and inquiry into the matter of the accused Christians of his province, and asking for direction, was written to the Emperor Trajan in the autumn of A.D. 111; and the reply of Trajan, which contained the famous rescript concerning the Christian sect—an ordinance which regulated the action of the government of Rome towards the disciples of Jesus for many long years—was dispatched a few months later.

The correspondence was quoted and commented upon at some length by the Latin Father Tertullian before the close of the second century. Eusebius again refers to it, translating the quotations of Tertullian from a Greek version of the celebrated Christian Father.[19]

For various reasons, some critics have thrown doubt upon the genuineness of these two famous letters. The main cause of the hesitation in receiving them is the strong evidence contained in the correspondence bearing upon the existence and influence and great numbers of the Christian sect at the beginning of the second century. That a pagan author should supply us with the information—and especially a pagan author of the rank and position which the younger Pliny held—the adversaries of the Faith misliked.

These very doubts, however, as in other cases of doubt respecting the authenticity of some of our Christian and pagan writings bearing on the facts of very early Christianity, have established the genuineness of the pieces in question, the doubts requiring an answer, and the answer involving a careful and thoughtful investigation. It is singular, in their scarcely veiled hostility to the religion of Jesus, how some scholars attempt to discredit all the references to the Christians in early heathen writers.

In this case the investigation has completely proved the genuineness of the correspondence in question. Bishop Lightfoot, in the course of his thorough and scholarly examination, does not hesitate to write that the genuineness of the important Letters “can now only be questioned by a scepticism bordering on insanity.”

Amongst other critics who completely brush away all doubts here, he quotes Aldus Manutius, Mommsen, and the French writer (no friend to Christianity) Renan. The same view is also unhesitatingly taken by Allard and Boissier in France, and Ramsay in England. In any controversy which may arise here obviously the attestation of Tertullian in the last years of the century in which the Letters were written is of the highest value.[20]

I
THE CHARACTER OF TRAJAN

When Domitian was assassinated, and Nerva was proclaimed Emperor, a new spirit was introduced into the occupants of the imperial dignity. Nerva represented the old conservative and aristocratic spirit of the Roman Senate. He only reigned a short two years, but his great act was the association in the supreme power of one who in all respects would and could carry out the ancient traditions of Roman government, of which Nerva was a true representative.

Nerva died early in 98, and his associate Trajan at once became sole Emperor. In many respects this Trajan was the greatest of the despotic masters who in succession ruled the Roman world. At once a renowned soldier and a far-seeing statesman, his complex personality is admirably and tersely summed up by Allard (Histoire des Persécutions, i. 145), who writes of him: “On eût cru voir le sénat romain lui-même prenant une âme guerrière et montant sur le trône.”

As a rule, writers of sacred history treat the memory of Trajan with great gentleness. The Christian writers in the second half of the second century shrink from seeing in him a persecutor of the Church. They were, of course, biassed in their judgment, being loth to think of a great Emperor like Trajan as a persecutor of their religion. As we have already remarked, the written Acts of Martyrs were very few during the first and second centuries; and the name and memory of the earliest brave confessors of the Name, save in a few very notable instances, quietly and quickly faded away; so the recollections of the second-century Fathers in the matter of the State policy in the past, with regard to Christianity, were somewhat vague and uncertain. Later, in the early and middle years of the fourth century, Eusebius, though in his time the fact of continuous persecution in the past had become generally known, tries to exculpate the memory of Trajan as a persecutor, but with very doubtful success.

This favourable and somewhat generous view of Trajan held its own through the early Middle Ages. A striking and beautiful story illustrative of these estimates is told of Pope Gregory the Great (A.D. 590–604) by both his biographers, Paul the Deacon (close of eighth century) and John the Deacon (close of ninth century). The Bishop of Rome once, walking through the Forum of Trajan, was attracted by a sculptured bas-relief representing the great Emperor showing pity to a poor aged widow whose only son had perished through the violence of the Emperor’s soldiers.

Struck by this proof of the just and loving nature of Trajan, the Pope, kneeling at the tomb of S. Peter, prayed earnestly that mercy might be showed to the great pagan emperor. The prayer, so runs the story, was granted; and it was revealed to Gregory that the soul of Trajan was released from torment in answer to his intercession. The beauty and noble charity which colour the legend are, however, spoiled and marred by the words of the traditional revelation which follow. The generous Pope, while hearing that his prayers were granted, was warned never again to presume to pray for those who had died without holy baptism.

Not a few modern scholars, however, read the famous interposition of Trajan at the time of Pliny’s request for guidance as manifesting a hostile spirit towards Christianity; so, to quote a few of the better-known writers, interpret Gieseler, Overbach, Aubé, Friedlander, Uhlhorn, etc., while Renan (Les Évangiles) perhaps more accurately writes: “Trajan fut le premier persécuteur systématique de Christianisme”; and again, “à partir de Trajan le Christianisme est un crime.”

The truth, however, really lies between these two divergent opinions. The “rescript” of Trajan promulgated no new law on the subject of the treatment of the Christian believers. It evidently presupposed the existence of a law, and that a very stern and very harsh mode of procedure. From it Trajan neither subtracted anything nor added anything; still, as has been very justly said, the humane and upright character of the Emperor and his minister Pliny—Pliny, by his evident, though carefully veiled, advice and suggestions based upon his protracted inquiries into the tenets and customs of the sect; Trajan, by his formal imperial “rescript”—secured some considerable mitigation in its enforcement.

The story of the correspondence between Pliny the Younger and the Emperor Trajan, which was fraught with such momentous consequences to the Christians of Rome and the Empire generally, is as follows:

When Pliny, about the middle of the year 111, came to the scene of his government,—the provinces of Bithynia and Pontus,—apparently somewhat to his surprise he found a very considerable portion of the population members of the Christian community. The religion professed by these people, Pliny was well aware, was unlawful in the eyes of the State, and the sect generally was unpopular; and evil rumours were current respecting its traditional practices.

The new governor knew of the existence of the sect in Rome, but little more. He was clearly aware that these Christians had been the object of many State persecutions and judicial inquiries, “cognitiones” he terms them, and no doubt knew something, too, of the public severity with which these adherents of an unlawful religion had been treated by the State when convicted of the crime of Christianity.

The horrors of the amphitheatre in the case of these condemned ones could not have been unknown to one like Pliny. But the great world in which Pliny lived and moved and worked, cared little for human life or human suffering in the case of a despised and outlawed community.

The Roman teacher and patrician of the days of Trajan held human life very cheaply. The amphitheatre games, to take one phase only of Roman life in the days of the Empire, were an evil education for Rome. The execution, the sufferings of a few score Christian outlaws, however frequently repeated, would attract very little attention in Pliny’s world.

But now in his new government he was brought face to face with grave difficulties occasioned by the practices and teaching of this Christianity. And when he discovered in addition how numerous a body these followers of the forbidden religion were, Pliny set himself in good earnest to investigate the Christian question.

More than fifty years had passed since S. Peter first preached the gospel and laid the foundation stories of the Christian Church in these northern provinces of Asia Minor. The religion of Jesus had rapidly taken root in these districts. This we gather from the First Epistle of Peter, which he wrote to the followers of Jesus in the north of Asia Minor from Rome in the closing years of his ministry; and now Pliny found in his province no novel faith growing up, but a faith which had taken deep root in the hearts of the population, not only in the towns, but also in the more remote villages (neque enim civitates tantum sed vicos etiam atque agros superstitionis istius contagio pervagata est), with the result that the old pagan cult was being gradually abandoned. The temples were being fast deserted (prope jam desolata templa), the sacred rites were being given up, and what evidently excited bitter complaints on the part of the traders who suffered, there was no longer any market for the fodder of the beasts sacrificed (pastum ... victimarum quarum adhuc rarissimus emptor inveniebatur).

From the report of Pliny to the Emperor, it is evident that there had been several judicial inquiries (cognitiones), conducted by him as the responsible governor of Bithynia and Pontus, into the charges brought against the adherents of the unlawful faith.

In the first “cognitio” the more prominent Christians were brought before him. These all at once avowed their religion. Three times they were interrogated by Pliny. As they persisted in the avowal that they were Christians, the provincials were at once condemned to death. Those who claimed Roman citizenship were sent to Rome for their sentences to be confirmed.

The publicity of these first inquiries stimulated further accusations; various degrees of guilt were alleged, and subsequently an anonymous paper was put before the governor implicating a whole crowd of persons.

Of these, some denied that they were, or ever had been, Christians. These, on offering incense before the image of the Emperor and cursing Christ, were at once liberated.

Others confessed, but professed repentance. These he reserved for the decision of the Emperor. It is not explicitly said that of this second and larger group of “accused,” some persisted in their adherence to the “Name.” There is no doubt that such were treated as in the first group, some being put to death; others, as Roman citizens, reserved for the imperial decision.

It was then that Pliny, especially disturbed at the numbers of accused Christians, determined upon a more searching investigation into the manners and customs of these numerous adherents of the unlawful religion. He would learn for himself more of the “detestable” rites and other crimes with which these persons were charged.

Two Christian deaconesses are mentioned as being examined under torture; others were closely questioned, and the result of the inquiries to Pliny was startling.

He satisfied himself that the monstrous charges were absolutely unproven. All their rites were simple, perfectly harmless, and unostentatious. Pliny in the course of his inquiry found that they were in the habit of meeting together, on a day appointed, before sunrise; that they would then sing together a hymn to Christ as God; that they would bind themselves by a solemn vow—sacramentum (Pliny was evidently not aware that the sacramentum in question was the Holy Eucharist; indeed the whole narrative is evidently told by one who very imperfectly grasped the Christian idea, although it is strangely accurate in many of the details). The purport of the vow was that they would commit neither theft nor adultery; that they would never break their word; never betray a trust committed to them.

The just magistrate was evidently deeply impressed with the result of his careful and searching examinations. This strange sect, he was convinced, was absolutely innocent of all those dark offences with which they were commonly charged—like another and more sadly notorious Roman judge sitting in another and more awful judgment-scene, who after hearing the case, from that time sought to release the pale prisoner before him. So at once after hearing the Christian story, Pliny too, convinced of the perfect innocence of the accused, altered his opinion concerning Christians; but for State reasons would not release them, and while acquitting them of all wrong-doing, in the ordinary sense of the word, chose to see an evil and exaggerated superstition colouring all their works and days.[21] Innocent though they were of anything approaching crime in the ordinary sense of the term, the Roman magistrate deemed the inflexible obstinacy of the Christian deserved the severest punishment that could be inflicted, even death; for when the individual Christian in question was examined, he proved to be immovable on questions of vital importance. He refused to swear by the genius of the Emperor. He would not scatter the customary grains of incense on the altar of Rome and Augustus, or of any of the pagan gods. His religious offence was inextricably bound up with the political offence. He stood, as it had been well expressed, self-convicted of “impiety,” of “atheism,” of “high treason.”

Still, after all these points had been taken into consideration, there is no doubt that Pliny was deeply moved by what he learned from his close examination of the Christian cause; and this new, this gentle, this more favourable estimate of his concerning the “outlawed” sect of Christians, was scarcely veiled in his official report of the case when he asked for the Emperor Trajan’s advice and direction.

He was, we learn, especially induced to write to the Emperor when he became aware of the vast numbers of Christians who had been, or were about to be, brought before his tribunal. The numbers of the accused evidently appalled him. How would the Emperor wish him to deal with such a multitude?

Very brief but very clear was the answer of Trajan to his friend and confidant the governor of Bithynia and Pontus. This answer contained the famous imperial “rescript”—which in the matter of the Christians was “to run” not only in Rome itself, but in all the provinces of the wide Empire, and which, as is well known, guided the State persecution of Christians for many a long year.

The “rescript” bore unmistakably the impress of Pliny’s mind on the subject; and severe though it was, it inaugurated a gentler and more favourable interpretation of the stern law in the case of convicted Christians than had prevailed from the days of Nero onward.

The following are the principal points of the “rescript.” In the first place—and this point must be pressed—no fresh law authorizing any special persecution of the Christians was needed or even suggested by Pliny. They had evidently for a long period, apparently from the days of Nero, been classed as outlaws (hostes publici) and enemies to the fundamental principles of law and order, and the mere acknowledgment on the part of the accused of the name Christian was sufficient in itself to warrant an immediate condemnation to death.

Trajan’s reply, which constituted the famous rescript, was studiedly brief, eminently courteous, but imperious and decisive. The friendly bias of Pliny’s report and unmistakably favourable opinion of the Christian sect, lives along every line.

He begins with a few graceful words approving Pliny’s action in the matter. (“Actum quem debuisti mi Secunde ... secutus es.”)