There were many reasons for the persecution of the Christian church in the four centuries preceding the conversion of Constantine. Different reasons predominated at different times; no single reason or simple set of explanations can explain persecution in any given period. As a result, the most promising approach to the subject as a whole is an examination of the institutions involved: the imperial government, the local civic authorities and the church itself. This makes it possible to review the different concerns of each and the changes that occurred.

Scholars have had difficulty arriving at a consensus with regard to persecution because the sources are diffuse and often tendentious. Some account of these sources is therefore necessary before exploring the causes, effects and changing nature of the persecutions in more detail.

THE SOURCES

The sources for the persecution fall into three categories: statements by the imperial authorities and pagan writers; Christian apologetic works and other theoretical discussions of persecution; and the extant Christian martyr acts.

The first of these three categories is the least well represented. All that survives is the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan on the subject of the Christians when Pliny was governor of the province of Bithynia-Pontus (in northern Turkey) in 111 or 112; a rescript (a response to a written inquiry which had the force of law) from the emperor Hadrian to a governor of the province of Asia (western Turkey) in 122/123; libelli (certificates of sacrifice) preserved on papyri from the time of Decius' edict on sacrifices in 249/250; the text of Valerian's edict of 258 summarized in a letter of Cyprian and a number of documents connected with the great persecutions of 303-313 that are either quoted in Christian writers or can be reconstructed from their accounts. Finally, there are the fragments of authors such as Celsus (whose On True Doctrine is quoted extensively by Origen in his response, the Against Celsus ) and some passing remarks in Suetonius' biographies and Tacitus' Annals. As a whole, these texts reveal the attitude of the state towards the church and the steps that the imperial authorities thought would be effective against the church.

The Christian apologetic and historiographic tradition, which begins with the Gospels, is extremely complicated. The authors of these works seem to give straightforward explanations for persecution, such as the jealousy of the Jews or Nero's edict of 64 A.D.(Nero reigned from 54-68 A.D.), but these explanations often fall apart on close examination. The standard explanation from the second century onwards was that the "Christian name," the nomen Christianum (membership in the Church) was persecuted as a result of Nero's edict; persecution was an institutum Neronianum, a Neronian practice, that was only permitted by emperors who all agreed were evil. This explanation is unsatisfactory and was influenced by a tendency of Christian writers to interpret Roman history in the same terms as Jewish history had been presented in the Old Testament, that "good kings" honored Yahweh and "bad" did not. The other explanation that they offer, that persecution was the result of ignorance of Christian doctrine on the part of ill-educated pagans, is similarly too simplistic. Nonetheless, these works often shed valuable light on relations between the church and the imperial authorities and the most important of them, Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History, written in the early years of the fourth century, preserves a number of documents which are crucial for an understanding of the persecutions. Other works such as Tertullian's To the Martyrs and Concerning Flight in Persecution or Cyprian's Concerning the Lapsed reveal that persecution caused serious doctrinal problems. The question that they sought to answer was "Is persecution the work of the Devil or of God?" A person's behavior in time of persecution would be conditioned by the answer to this problem.

The martyr acts, accounts of the execution of individual martyrs or groups of martyrs, are the most difficult source, but when handled with sufficient care, also the most important. Care in their interpretation is essential as these acts vary greatly in their content. Some are rhetorical fictions which provide, once the gory details of a martyr's death are stripped away, no more than the fact of the martyrdom and its date-- and even these might not authentic. Others, such as The Passion of Pionius and his Companions contain vivid eye-witness accounts and even documents composed by martyrs as they lay in prison awaiting execution. The details which they present are of great value for reconstructing the attitudes of both the persecutors and the persecuted, and the doctrinal statements which many of them contain shed important light upon the tensions to which persecution gave rise within the church.

THE IMPERIAL GOVERNMENT

The Gospels and Acts show that the Jewish communities in Palestine and other cities of the Greek East drew Romans into the persecution of the church. Suetonius' obscure allusion to problems at Rome in the reign of Claudius between Jews and the "followers of Chrestus" suggests the same thing, although it is debated whether there "followers of Chrestus" were Christians (Suet. Claud. 25). The executions of Peter and Paul at Rome, before Nero issued his edict against the Christians in 64, may have been the result of complaints about their activity from the Jewish community. But these actions can only have had a tangential relationship to that edict. When a great fire ravaged Rome in 64, Nero attempted to shift the blame for the fire from himself onto another party and ordered the mass arrest and execution of Christians in Rome. This was the event which led later Christian writers to claim that persecution was a "Neronian institution." In fact, it is not likely that Nero's edict extended to Christians who lived outside of the city and it may have been no more than an extreme version of earlier edicts, of both Republican and imperial date, which banned or restricted the practice of certain cults with in Rome or Italy. As was the case with these earlier edicts, Nero's edict probably ceased to be enforced after the immediate crisis ended. It is certainly true that Pliny does not seem to be aware of the edict when he investigates Christianity in 111/112.

The opening lines of Pliny's letter to the Emperor Trajan (10.96 click here for the full text) reveal that he was not sure of either the specific reasons for the persecution of the church, or of the proper procedure for deciding the cases before him. He wrote, "I have never been present at the trial of Christians: I do not therefore know why or to what extend they are ordinarily punished or investigated. (2) I have been hesitating for a while, whether or not I should distinguish amongst them on grounds of age, or if the young ought not to be distinguished a bit from the more elderly; if mercy should be shown to the penitent, or if it should be of no benefit to a person, who was ever a Christian, to have ceased being one; if the simple fact of being a Christian (the nomen Christianum ) , even if no crime has been committed, ought to be punished, or only the crimes that are associated with the fact of being a Christian?" Thus Pliny knew that people had been tried for being Christians, and since we know that he spent most of his adult life in Rome and Italy, we may surmise that he means Christians had been tried at Rome during his mature years. He knew the charge against these people was that they were members of a religious sect that indulged in criminal activity. This is an important point. He knew that members of the sect were punished because of crimes that they were believed to be committing in his own time, not because of anything that had happened in the reign of Nero. The explanation for this may have been that the emperor Domitian had taken some action against the cult--though the evidence for this is open to dispute-- or it may have been that Pliny and all other Roman magistrates were charged with protecting the areas under their administration from "evil men." Whatever the case, it was membership in the cult that was at issue, and whether by being a member of that cult a person had broken the law. It is also clear from this letter that Pliny attempted to discover whether or not the Christians in his area were actively engaged criminal activity other than simply being Christian. He discovered that they were not. In the meantime he executed any Christians who were not Roman citizens if they refused his order to sacrifice to "our gods," the grounds being insolence in the face of his authority; and he sent Roman citizens who were guilty of the same offense to be tried at Rome. While he awaited Trajan's response he treated the church as an illegal private association.

Pliny's question was whether he should he treat Christians as guilty because of their beliefs or simply because the church was one of a number of the private associations (collegia) that Trajan had banned. Trajan's response made it clear that the practice of Christianity was defined as a religious offense and that, as a cult, it was illegal. A person charged with Christianity could be forgiven past membership in the cult if he recanted and offered sacrifice to the gods. Trajan added the further provision that Pliny, whose other duties were onerous enough, should not spend his time seeking out Christians and that he should not investigate charges against people which he found in anonymous denunciations (Pliny, Ep. 10. 97 ). The implication is that if someone came to Pliny in person and denounced another, the person denounced could be charged. This decision was restated by Hadrian in a letter of 122/123.

The practice of the Christian faith was therefore illegal because the Roman authorities thought that it involved the commission of crimes, but it was up to individual governors and other magistrates to act against Christians as they saw fit. They had a great deal to do: they had to maintain the tranquillity of their provinces, prevent riot and insurrection in the cities under their control, keep the highways free of brigands, and ensure that cities were able to pay their taxes. Most if not all governors probably felt that they had more important tasks than dealing with the Christians and, with the passing of time, some may even have come to feel that there was nothing wrong with the faith so long as its practitioners did not disturb the peace. In one case, a provincial governor even rescued a Christian congregation from brigands after its bishop had led it out into the desert to greet Christ at his second coming. Tertullian tells of another governor who let an unrepentant Christian go free after only "moderate torture" and of yet another who refused to act when he was confronted by a Christian community asking to be put to death. He suggested that they jump off cliffs or hang themselves instead (Ter. Ad Scap. 4.3; 5.1). It is a universal feature of the martyr acts that the magistrate presiding at the investigation of Christians always asks the prospective martyrs to recant. The authorities seem always to have been more interested in convincing Christians to apostatize than in executing them. To this end the punishments inflicted were more often flogging, imprisonment and exile rather than death.

This state of affairs continued until the middle of the third century. In 249, the emperor Decius (249-251) ordered all inhabitants of the empire to sacrifice to the ancestral gods and to obtain a certificate ( libellus ) proving that they had done so. Failure to sacrifice could result in exile, the confiscation of property, prison or death. The edict was not aimed at eradicating Christianity, but rather at ensuring the goodwill of the ancestral gods in a time of crisis. Nonetheless, it had a significant impact on some Christian communities. In North Africa, Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, took a very strong line against members of his congregation who either sacrificed (sacrificati) or fraudulently obtained libelli ( libellatici ). There seems to have been a great number of people who took one or the other of these options, perhaps believing that under the circumstances such a sacrifice was not a serious sin. We know of bishops who retained their sees after sacrificing, and obedience to the edict seems to have been so widespread in the east that the issue never arose as to the terms under which those who had sacrificed should be re-admitted to communion.

The edicts of Valerian (253-260) in 257 and 258 were very different matters. They represent the first empire-wide efforts to destroy the church. The first edict seems to have included the following provisions: Christians should honor the traditional gods of the empire (this did not mean that they had to cease to honor their own god, but only that they had to show respect for the others as well), clergy who would not obey the edict should be arrested and of church property confiscated. The second edict, which may have been motivated by the recalcitrance of members of the clergy who had been arrested, seems to have been concerned entirely with the treatment of unrepentant Christians. According to its terms all members of the clergy who persisted in the faith would be executed, male Christians who were members of the highest orders of society (the equestrian and senatorial) would suffer confiscation of their property and death if they persisted, and Christian women (presumably women of the same social classes) would suffer the confiscation of their property and exile. Members of the imperial household who had been or were Christians would be condemned to work in chains on the imperial estates. The reasoning behind these edicts is obscure. It is clear that they represented a radical departure from Valerian's earlier policy towards the church and it may be, as the bishop Dionysius of Alexandria suggested (Eus. HE 7. 10), that court politics had something to do with the decision to attack the church. In any event, the edicts did not remain in force for long. Valerian was captured by the Persians in the summer of 260 and his son Gallienus (253-268) issued an edict of toleration in the same year. This edict legalized the practice of Christianity and ordered the restoration of church property that had been confiscated under the earlier edicts.

In 260, therefore, Christianity was recognized as a legal cult in the empire and persecution came to an end for a generation. We even hear of Christian bishops asking the emperor Aurelian (270-275) to intervene in a dispute over the see of Antioch and to expel the bishop, Paul of Samosata. This state of affairs continued until the very last years of the reign of Diocletian (284-305).

Diocletian's decision to issue an edict of persecution is difficult to understand. Up to this point in his reign he had been openly tolerant of the church. Christians held high positions in his court and a Christian, Lactantius, held the prestigious chair in Latin rhetoric in his capital Nicomedia (in north-western Turkey). The reason may, in fact, lie in the politics of his reign, for Diocletian's edict seems to have come at the end of an elaborate campaign within the court to promote hostility to the church. This campaign appears to have been the work of the Caesar Galerius (an important feature of Diocletian's reign was the creation of a college of four emperors, the two senior emperors, or Augusti, were Diocletian and Maximian Herculius, the two junior emperors, or Caesares, were Galerius and Constantius, father of the future emperor Constantine). In the later years of Diocletian's reign Galerius appears to have exerted a tremendous amount of influence over the senior emperor, and he appears to have been a fervent anti-Christian. This also appears to have caused a split in the imperial college, for the persecution edicts-- as was also the case with other measures taken in these years-- were not enforced as vigorously by Maximian Herculius and Constantius as they were by Diocletian and Galerius.

The first edict was promulgated on February 23, 303. Its terms were as follows: Christian churches and houses where scripture was discovered were to be destroyed, copies of scripture were to be burned, church property was to be confiscated and meetings for Christian worship were forbidden; Christians who persisted in the faith would lose the capacity to bring actions in court; Christians whose status exempted them from physical coercion in courts ( honestiores ) would lose the protection of their status; Christian members of the imperial household would be enslaved. A few months later-- in the spring or summer of 303-- a second edict was issued, ordering the arrest of Christian clergy. This led to a crisis for the state as the prisons filled up, and in the autumn of 303 yet another edict was handed down, stating that Christian prisoners who sacrificed would be released. Finally, in January or February, 304, an edict was posted ordering all the inhabitants of the empire to sacrifice. None of this succeeded, in great measure because such measures depended upon the willingness of imperial officers to execute them and there were not many who went beyond token obedience. In fact, Constantius seems to have refused to act on them in anything more than the most cursory way and Maximian did not enforce any edict except the first.

Diocletian and Maximian abdicated in favor of Galerius and Constantius on May 1, 305, and this in effect ended what persecution there had been in the west since Constantius assumed supreme power there. When Constantine succeeded his father on July 25, 306 he issued a general edict of toleration in the part of the empire that he controlled (at first only Britain and Gaul). In the east, Galerius continued to enforce the edicts until 311, when he too issued a general edict of toleration a few months before his death. There were only two further outbreaks after that. Maximin Daia (Caesar under Galerius after 305 and Augustus in his own right after 311), influenced by a powerful anti-Christian lobby at court, engaged in a brief persecution between 311 and 312/313 when he issued an edict of toleration before going to war with Galerius' successor, Licinius. In July of 313, Licinius, who had defeated Maximin, issued a general edict restoring Christian property throughout the east (this edict, issued at Nicomedia, is often referred to as the "edict of Milan" because it was believed that it was the result of a meeting between Constantine and Licinius in that city during 312). Although Licinius restricted Christian worship before his final defeat by Constantine in 324, this edict effectively marked the end of imperial efforts to act against the Christian church. It was in the time of Constantine that the power of the imperial government came to be directed instead against Christian heretical sects in defense of what Constantine defined as orthodoxy, as well as, by gradual stages, traditional cult.

PERSECUTION AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT

In the first three centuries A.D. most outbreaks of persecution did not begin with the imperial authorities. They began as local pogroms inspired by a feeling on the part of the inhabitants of individual cities that the Christians in their midst were atheists whose presence upset the traditional gods. It was a reaction that is summed up best by Tertullian's observation ( Apol. 40.1) that, "if the Tiber rises to the walls, if the Nile does not rise to the fields; if the sky stands still, if the earth moves, if there is famine, if there is pestilence, the cry goes up, 'Christians to the lion'." It was the dislike of the provincials for the Christians in their midst that led Pliny to investigate the sect, and this often seems to have been the case elsewhere. Thus in 177 there was a serious outburst at Lyons which resulted in the death of a number of Christians. The incident began when a mob seized a group of Christians and dragged them to the town forum where the civic authorities asked them about their beliefs. When they confessed their faith, they were imprisoned to await the governor (who would be coming to the city in the course of his annual tour of the province). Thereafter, the governor sentenced unrepentant Christians before large and enthusiastic crowds (Eus. HE 5.1.7-10). The members of these crowds seem genuinely to have believed that the Christians were dangerous "atheists," and also to have believed the charges that were extracted from the slaves of some of the members of the congregation: that the Christians regularly committed incest and that their rites involved cannibalism (a misunderstanding of the Eucharist). The charge of atheism could move crowds to a great frenzy. It was leveled against Polycarp when he was sentenced to death at Smyrna in the 150s, crowds cried, "away with the atheists" during his trial and during an earlier execution ( P. Polycarp 3.2; 9.2). Mobs at Alexandria tried to force Christians whom they seized to sacrifice to the gods, and Alexander, priest of an oracular cult of Glycon, is said to have had Christians cursed as atheists at celebrations of the mysteries of his god. What is interesting in most of these cases is that the persecution appears to begin as a result of a vendetta on the part of one member of the pagan hierarchy against a specific group of Christians.

As the church became more familiar to people in general and Christians were more frequently people of high social status, such charges became less common, and the local authorities at times appear reluctant to engage in full scale persecution. It is clear from the Acts of Pionius, that Pionius' refusal to recant and the prospect of his death at the hands of the governor deeply upset the local magistrates. It is also clear that the officials charged with enforcing Valerian's edicts in North Africa made a real effort to convince Christians to apostatize and appear to have been extremely uncomfortable when they were faced with the prospect of executing Christians who were members of the highest levels of society. A local magistrate at Cirta, in North Africa, who was charged with enforcing Diocletian's first edict, appears to have been on familiar terms with the local Christians and averse to the use of violence in carrying out his orders. The local Christians were equaling averse to forcing him to do so. It seems to be a general rule that in the later part of the third century and early fourth century, as the state became more directly involved in the persecution of the faith, local authorities became less willing to join in and there were fewer anti-Christian riots.

The exception to this general rule appears in cases where entire communities were Christian. In such cases, however, it would appear that the local jealousies characteristic of the cities and towns of the empire were more important than issues of religion. From the time of Constantine onwards we hear much about towns such as Orcistus in Phrygia, which suffered at the hands of their neighbors during the persecution of Galerius and Maximin Daia and were rewarded for their faith under the new dispensation. In the fourth century, local pride came to be intertwined with issues of religion and a new chapter opened in the tale of inter-city violence in the Roman empire, as Christians destroyed temples and pagans fought back.

The total number of Christians who suffered death or imprisonment for their faith is difficult to estimate. Pliny's letter to Trajan suggests that he killed a number of people in the course of a routine investigation and the records of local pogroms suggest that from time to time individual Christian communities suffered heavy losses. Even though enforcement was erratic, the edicts of Decius, Valerian, Diocletian and his successors caused substantial casualties in some areas. But, the numbers were probably not enormous in absolute terms: most Christian communities were not large and no community is known to have been destroyed by a persecution. A figure of around 30,000- 50,000 victims in the centuries before Constantine, which would allow for an average of between 75 and 125 victims a year throughout the empire, may be roughly correct.

PERSECUTION AND THE CHURCH

As the attitude of the state and local authorities changed towards the church, so too did the attitude of the church towards persecution. From the earliest period, Christians who were willing to endure death, torture and imprisonment for the faith were greatly honored, and this rapidly evolved into various doctrines of martyrdom.

The use of the word martyr is such a common one in modern English usage that it is sometimes difficult to imagine a time when the word did not involve great self sacrifice. But, our word martyr ultimately derives from the Greek word martyros or witness. The term, in Greek, had no technical application for victims of injustice until the second century AD, when it is found referring to Christians executed by the Roman Government. As the word is simply used in virtual transliteration to describe the same phenomenon in Latin, it has, with considerable plausibility, been argued that word acquired its technical, Christian meaning, in Asia Minor during the second century AD, for it was there that many of the most important Christians communities developed. On the other hand, the Christian community in Rome appears to have been heavily Greek in precisely the same period. St. Paul wrote to his followers at Rome in that language, and one of the earliest non-canonical Christian works, the Shepherd of Hermas appears to have been composed in Greek, in Italy. The simple fact that a Greek word was used to describe a phenomenon in a Christian context does not, therefore, mean that the usage developed in the Greek speaking eastern part of the empire. It could quite possibly have evolved in Rome itself. The fact that Pliny appears to be aware of a specific way of testing Christians for their faith that was later closely associated with martyrdom in Christian accounts before his arrival in Bithynia may point in the same direction.

The cult of martyrs quickly came to play an important role in the church, and some movements, such as Montanism, placed a premium upon martyrdom. For any Christian, persecution was seen as a time to prove ultimate devotion, and in facing the authorities a Christian might feel that he was reenacting the Passion. The emotion is summed up most eloquently by martyrs imprisoned at Carthage in the late summer of 250: "what ... could, through God's favor, befall any man which might bring him greater glory or bliss than this: in the very midst of his executioners, undaunted, to confess the Lord God ... to become, by confessing the name of Christ, a partner of Christ in his passion; to have become, by God's favor, a judge of his own judge (Cyp. Ep. 31, 2, 3)." A number of Christians even went so far as deliberately to attract the attention of the authorities so that they might suffer for the faith. But this also led to problems within the Church.

One difficulty persecution caused the church (above and beyond the physical suffering of some of its members and the intellectual problems it raised about the nature of evil) was the challenge that martyrs posed to the established hierarchy of the church. Montanists certainly taught that martyrs were closer to God than the authorities of the church, and that attitude was also common in more conventional circles. Cyprian treated the question at length in his Concerning the Lapsed ( De lapsis, 15-21) and argued that the absolution granted by martyrs to those who had sacrificed or obtained libelli during the reign of Decius had no effect-- that penance had to be imposed by the duly constituted officers of the church. But this did not solve the issue, even in Cyprian's own province. At the time of the great persecution there is a great deal of evidence for efforts by the church to restrict the title of martyr and regulate the celebration of the cult. The early fourth century council at Elvira in Spain ruled that "voluntary martyrs," people who were killed while insulting traditional cult, could not be regarded as true martyrs. Mensurius of Carthage refused the title of martyr to people who did not try to evade the authorities. It would even appear that he forbade members of his congregation to bring food to such people when they were in prison. But his ruling did not go unchallenged; even a Christian, such as Lactantius, who subscribed to the doctrine that people should not offer themselves to the authorities, could not restrain his admiration for a man who was executed after tearing down a copy of Diocletian's first persecution edict (Lact. De mort. pers. 13.2-3). The problem did not end for the orthodox church until the end of the persecutions.

The second major problem was that persecution gave rise to schism. People responded differently to persecution, and while all might agree that "authentic martyrs" should be treated with the highest regard, not all could agree as to what constituted proper behavior on the part of their weaker brethren. Debate over this question became particularly vehement at the time of the Decian edict on sacrifices and even more so in the time of the Great Persecution. The great Donatist and Melitian disputes arose directly out of this issue: both sects challenged the orthodox church's more moderate treatment of those who were weak in the face of persecution. Such disputes were not easily quelled and were carried on with great vehemence, as may be seen in the statement of the schismatic bishop Majorian of Carthage at the time of his consecration in 311. He said, '" I am the real vine and my father is the gardener. Every barren branch of mine he cuts away; and every fruiting branch he cleans ( John 15.1-2). Thus I cast off the barren branches which have been cut, thus the incense burners, the traditores, who are hateful to god, may not remain in the church of god, unless, confessing their grief they are reconciled through penance. Hence it is not fitting to have communication with Caecilian, a heretic, ordained by traditores (von Soden, Urkunden, 6).

It was through the promotion of schism that persecution by the imperial authorities caused the most difficulty to the church. The quarrels which arose in the wake of the Great persecution did not end with the victory of Constantine. In fact, they led to the opening of a new chapter in the relationship between the Church and the empire. This was the violent persecution of heretical sects by the imperial government in defense of the orthodox faith.

Selected Secondary Works

T.D. Barnes, "Legislation Against the Christians," The Journal of Roman Studies 58 (1968), 32-50.

T.D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius. (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).

; G.W. Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge, 1995).

G.W. Clarke, The Letters of St. Cyprian. four vols. (New York, 1984-89).

W.H.C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church. (London, 1965).

R.J. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York, 1986).

; H. Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford, 1972 ).

G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, "Aspects of the Great Persecution," Harvard Theological Review 47 (1954 ) 73-113.

; G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, "Why were the Early Christians Persecuted," Past and Present 26 (1963)1-38.

G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, "Christianity's Encounter with the Roman Imperial Government," in The Crucible of Christianity. Judaism, Hellenism and the Historical Background to the Christian Faith ed. A.J. Toynbee (London, 1969).