But the next emperor once again permitted the cult. The religions that Rome had the most problems with were monotheistic—Judaism and Christianity. Because these religions believed there was just one god, they prohibited worshiping other gods.
Their members refused to make offerings to Roman gods or take part in Roman religious festivals, which Rome considered a matter of showing loyalty. These religions tested Roman tolerance. In 63 B. Rome immediately recognized it had a problem because the Jews refused to pay homage to Roman gods.
Rome gave in and exempted Jews from this requirement. Rome did this in part because the Jews had helped Roman general Julius Caesar win an important battle several years earlier.
Soon Rome recognized Judaism as a legal religion, allowing Jews to worship freely. But Rome viewed the Jews with suspicion and persecuted them on several occasions. One of the most serious conflicts between Rome and the Jews began in Judea in A. The Roman governor of Judea unwisely decided to confiscate a large sum of money from the treasury of the Great Temple in Jerusalem.
He claimed he was collecting taxes owed the emperor. Rioting broke out, which Roman soldiers ruthlessly suppressed. This, in turn, enraged a nationalistic group of Jewish revolutionaries, called Zealots, who massacred the Romans in Jerusalem and attacked Roman troops elsewhere in the Roman province. Nero sent three legions to put down the rebellion.
By summer of the year 68, Rome had restored its control over most of the province. Two years later, the Romans retook Jerusalem and destroyed the Great Temple, the center of the Jewish religion. Fighting continued for a few more years until the Zealot fortress at Masada fell.
Following this revolt, Rome tried to prevent further uprisings by expelling Jews to different parts of the empire. But Jews rose in two more unsuccessful rebellions.
The first took place in — in several Mideast cities. The second took place in Jerusalem in when Emperor Hadrian announced he would build a shrine to Jupiter on the site of the destroyed Great Temple.
After crushing these challenges to their authority, the Romans dispersed Jews throughout the empire. But Judaism remained a legal religion and Jews continued to enjoy religious privileges.
Rome had good reasons to tolerate the Jewish religion. First, it was a well-established religion with a long history. Most important, Rome wanted to keep the people of Judea from revolting.
Neither of these reasons applied to Christianity. This new offshoot of the Jewish religion had little support at first among the people of Judea. In fact, many Jews would have been pleased if Rome had suppressed it. Yet when Rome first became aware of Christianity around A.
Thinking this sect might weaken the always bothersome Jewish religion, Emperor Tiberius asked the Senate to legalize the Christian faith and declare Christ a Roman god. But the Senate refused. Instead, it pronounced Christianity to be an "illegal superstition," a crime under Roman law. Although Christianity was now officially illegal, Tiberius still hoped this new religious sect would further his goal of pacifying the empire.
As a result, he ordered Roman officials not to interfere with the new religion, a policy that lasted about 30 years until the time of Nero. On the night of July 18, A. The fire spread quickly and for six days consumed much of the city, including Emperor Nero's palace. This lack of devotion could hardly go unnoticed because it would be conspicuous by its absence from family shrines, from non-participation in religious rites in associations, and from non-attendance at public festivals.
Although much of the evidence discussed derives from the second century, Christian antipathy to the imperial cults most probably goes back to the first century. It was impossible to ignore the imperial cults, since Herod the Great had ringed Judea with temples to Augustus before the time of Christ[9] and Caligula and Nero were resolutely active in cultivating divine honors during the time of Paul. Yes, the imperial cult was merely one facet of Roman religion, enmeshed beside and within other cults.
Honors which should be reserved for God alone could not be bestowed on men. Viewed this way, Christ-believers were persecuted because they neglected what some thought necessary worship of the gods , their meetings broke down the social orders between the classes hierarchies of power and privilege , they promoted controversy and clashes among Jewish communities a threat to peace , and they abhorred precisely what many adored Roman power and its benefactions.
The problem I have is that the imperial cult — not the cults of Roma , the Capitoline triad, nor local cults like Artemis, Serapis, or Diana — was always the litmus test of loyalty. Do not, therefore, permit anybody to be an atheist or sorcerer.
Brodd and J. Frey, D. Schwartz, S. Temporini and Wolfgang Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, , See Tertullian, Apol. Get newsletters and updates Close. The rather familiar picture of mutual suspicion and recriminations between Christians and pagans is presented in some detail as the background for a consideration of the strictly legal causes of the persecutions. The legal causes have been an object of special study by historians for some time now.
Three important interpretations of the evidence appeared in the later nineteenth century and have had varying influences on subsequent studies. One school of thought has emphasised the importance of the coercitio as a legal basis for the persecutions. The coercitio was the power of Roman Governors to punish in virtue of their ordinary power to enforce public order by means of their own discretion, without reference to particular legislation. This power derived quite naturally from their full executive and judicial power, or imperium.
A second, opposing school has stressed the continuing existence of a law explicitly against Christians as such during the period of persecutions. While these two schools have tended to dominate historians of the persecutions in the first half of this century, a third view has also existed.
This school has seen individual crimes under the common law as the basis for delation of Christians before Roman tribunals. According to this third interpretation, there was no single legal basis for the persecutions, neither coercitio in itself nor an institutum neronianum.
The proponents of a legal institutum neronianum have now been overburdened by the evidence against its existence. Not before the persecutions of the mid-third century were there imperial laws directing that Christians be condemned because of their religious beliefs; the important rescripts of Trajan and Hadrian, while mentioning Christians explicitly, were not against Christianity as a religion and were not intended by those Emperors as encouragement for legal attacks on Christians.
They suggest, in fact, that Christianity was not in itself a basis for persecution. The real basis was the popular suspicion, contempt, and hatred for the early Christians. Without this motivating force it is inconceivable that the persecutions could have occurred.
Christians were not necessarily culpable for the fire of A. While the first general epistle of Peter also illustrates Christian awareness of suffering at the hands of pagans, Tacitus is the best contemporary guide for determining the cause of the Neronian persecution; he noted that the Christians were condemned for odium generis humani. Many considerations are needed to give the answer.
First, let us consider the Jewish question. In the Book of Acts we find definite references to the mixing of Christians with the Jews; because the Christian mission was intended more for Jews than gentiles, the initial expansion of Christianity in the East was solely among the Jews.
From the pagan point of view conversion to Christianity involved submission to the Jewish way of conceiving the origins of the universe and much of the history of mankind. The Jewish customs and religion excited popular disfavour in general, the pagan attitude in the Hellenic East being more intolerant than western Roman opinion.
The reaction of the people of Thessalonica to the missions of Saint Paul was that as Jews these missionaries taught illegal practices. Popularly as well, the Jews were attacked, being considered atheists for not worshipping idols. The evidence of popular disapproval is such that at least one historian has felt justified in stating that the Neronian persecution was against the Jews—that Tacitus injected the Christians into his account of the persecution because of knowledge gained of them in his own time.
In any case, the regarding of Christians as an extreme sect of Judaism is shown by the Roman protection of them from the excesses of Jewish persecution.
And though the Roman authorities apparently distinguished between Christians and Jews as early as A. Many links between these two dubious sects were apparent to contemporary pagans.
As late as the Christians in Asia continued to observe the Passover, while the dating of Easter was commonly 14 Nisan throughout the Church during the first centuries. Attacking Jesus as a rebel Jew, Celsus in his De veritate said that Christ had started the sect by persuading people of the lower and ignorant classes to his belief; just as the Israelites were an offshoot of the Egyptian religion, Celsus reported, so was Christianity a despicable byproduct of Judaism.
The meaning of the placard is clarified by Tacitus, who gave credence to the following tale about the Jews. Wandering in the desert and apparently doomed to die of thirst before reaching the Promised Land, the Jews, said Tacitus, were saved by following a group of wild asses to water.
After the passage through the desert:. Moses, wishing to secure for the future his authority over die nation, gave them a novel form of worship, opposed to all that is practised by other men. Things sacred with us with them have no sanctity, while they allow what with us is forbidden. In their holy place they have consecrated an image of the animal by whose guidance they found deliverance from their long and thirsty wanderings Their worship is upheld by its antiquity; all their other customs, which are at once perverse and disgusting, owe their strength to their very badness.
The most degraded from other races, scorning their national beliefs, brought to them their contributions and presents. This augmented the wealth of the Jews as also did the fact that among themselves they are inflexibly honest and ever ready to show compassion, though they regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies They hold that the souls of all who perish in battle or by the hands of the executioner are immortal.
Hence a passion for propagating their race and a contempt for death. They are wont to bury rather than to burn their dead Even more indicative, however, of the self-perception of the Christians as being at least in some ways political was the term which they chose to apply to their organization— ecclesia. In the Greco-Roman world, ecclesia was unequivocally a political term which referred to the popular assembly of a city.
The Christians must have known the meaning of the term when they consciously made the decision to refer to themselves as the ecclesia of God. It is time to return, then, to the distinction between the Jews and the Christians which prompted the Romans to deal with these groups separately.
First of all, one notices a similarity in the rhetoric used by the Jews who clashed with Rome in A. The use of this language by either group was obviously threatening to Rome. Yet while the Jews had a basically theocratic outlook, it was different from that of the Christians because it was limited to Palestine. In contrast, the Christian kingdom of God encompassed the entire world.
This willingness to recruit the peoples of the entire empire through proselytizing for what promised to be a revolutionary new kingdom was undoubtedly more threatening to the Romans. In addition, it seems the early Christians were predominantly lower class citizens even more so than the Jews who, in banding together in small groups, further offended the political sensibilities of the Romans.
The Christians, it seemed, fit the political club description quite well. What, then, motivated the Romans to persecute religious sects especially the Christians during the Early Empire? One can assume that it was not merely caprice on the part of the pragmatic Roman rulership.
Rome perceived Christianity as a political threat. Rome had precedents to work from—Jesus, Paul, the Bacchae, the Jews. In the end, then, the Romans had practical political reasons for persecuting the Christians, and they acted on those reasons—not, however, very systematically, possibly because they did not perceive the political threat to be a large one.
As the wheels of history rolled on, however, it became quite clear that the threat was large. In retrospect, it seems the failure of the Romans to deal effectively with the rising star of Christianity while it was still low on the horizon eventually led to its rising to such a height that it had to be incorporated into the empire if the empire itself was not to be outshone.
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