Before the turn of the century, a man in Rome named Clement, who had known Peter and Paul, was selected to become the fourth bishop of the city.25 Clement was aware that his position was unique in the Church. It required diligent oversight of the other Christian communities scattered throughout the Empire, which is why he was greatly troubled by reports from the Christian community in Corinth (initially established by Saint Paul). Word had reached Rome that the Corinthians were openly rebelling against their priests. This uprising threatened not only to tear apart the Church in Corinth, but also to affect the Church’s evangelization mission, so Clement resolved to act quickly. He sent a firm and fatherly reprimand to the Corinthians that became known as the Epistle of Saint Clement of Rome. Clement focused his letter on the theme of order. Order, according to Clement, is the expression of the will of God and is good, whereas disorder is the expression of the will of the devil and is bad. The Corinthians were giving in to the temptations of the Evil One by their rebellion, which was weakening the unity of the Church and causing scandal among the pagans. Clement wrote, “Disgraceful, beloved, indeed, exceedingly disgraceful and unworthy of your training in Christ, is the report that the well-established and ancient Church of the Corinthians is … in revolt against the presbyters. And this report has reached not only us but also people that differ from us in religion.”26
Clement’s letter illustrates three fundamental Catholic doctrines. First, it affirms the apostolic teaching that the clergy derive their authority from God and not from the people. In other words, “the Church’s structure was sacramental not political.”27 Second, Clement reminds the Corinthians that the Church’s organization is apostolic. The apostles handed on their authority through ordination to other men in the communities they established. This is known as apostolic succession. Finally, Clement’s letter is the “first exercise of the Roman primacy after Saint Peter’s death” and proves the early Church believed in papal primacy and universal jurisdiction.28 Clement may have been writing on an internal matter of a particular church, but his letter clearly indicates he knew he had the authority to command the Corinthians to stop their rebellion. He wrote, “If some shall disobey the words which have been spoken by him [Christ] through us [Clement], let them know they will involve themselves in no small transgression and danger.”29 Saint John the Beloved was still alive at the time of the Corinthian uprising, but it was Clement, the bishop of Rome, rather than the living apostle, who wrote the admonition. The Corinthians acknowledged Clement’s epistle as authoritative; they ended their rebellion and restored the ousted priests upon receipt of the letter, which was still being read in the city a century later.30
What was the Church in the Roman Empire?
With the closing of the first century, we can clearly answer Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc’s question, “What was the Church in the Roman Empire?” Belloc first assessed what the Church was not. The Church was not an opinion, a fashion, a philosophy, or a theory; instead, she was a “clearly delineated body corporate based on numerous exact doctrines, extremely jealous of its unity and of its precise definitions, and filled, as was no other body of men at that time, with passionate conviction.”31 The Church was a distinct and unique organism within the Roman Empire. She was organized in a hierarchical structure centered on bishops, the chief of whom was the bishop of Rome. Most cults in the Empire were local and attached to specific places; however, the Church’s structure, doctrine, and worship were not dependent on geography but were the same throughout the Empire. At the end of the first century, there were fewer than 10,000 Christians, comprising only 0.0017 percent of the total imperial population of 60 million. By the end of the second century, the Church had grown to 200,000 members, though still less than 1 percent of the Roman population. At the time of the first Empire-wide persecution, initiated in 250 by the Emperor Decius (r. 249–251), there were more than one million Christians (2 percent of the imperial population). By the beginning of the fourth century, the Church was home to six million people, or 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empire.32 The Church came into conflict with Roman society because her teachings and lifestyle were in opposition to societal norms. Roman society “believed man to be sufficient to himself and all belief to be mere opinions.” Conversely, the Church “proposed statement instead of hypothesis, affirmed concrete historical facts instead of suggesting myths, and treated its ritual of ‘mysteries’ as realities instead of [merely] symbols.”33
Pagan Attacks on the Church
The growing Catholic population became a concern for certain pagan authors who were dumbfounded that people would join what they saw as such a nonsensical religion. They attacked the Church in order to dissuade Romans from joining this new religion. The three main critics of the Church and her teaching, who wrote various books, pamphlets, and tracts against her, were Celsus (second century), Porphyry (234–305), and Julian the Apostate (r. 361–363).34
Celsus, a second-century philosopher, wrote the first major pagan attack against the Catholic Church. Most of what we know about Celsus and his anti-Catholic work True Doctrine (c. A.D. 170) comes from the writings of the Catholic apologist Origen (185–254), who wrote a work known as Contra Celsum that refuted Celsus’s criticisms of the Church. Celsus utilized popular critiques as well as intellectual arguments in his attack on the Church. He viewed Jesus as a low-grade magician who duped people into believing he could actually perform miracles.35 Celsus considered Christians a revolutionary fad, a threat to the ancient culture and traditions of Rome. Romans believed that religion and the nation were linked — one could not exist without the other — therefore, an extraterritorial group like the Catholic Church was an odd, seditious, and potentially threatening institution. Celsus also believed the newness of the Faith made it untrustworthy. The only acceptable and authentic religions, in the eyes of Celsus, were those whose teachings had been passed down from multiple generations. “Greco-Roman society revered the past. The older something was, the better it was thought to be … [because] those who lived very long ago, were thought to have been closer to the gods.”36
Celsus extended his theological criticisms of the Church to foundational doctrinal teachings, such as the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and Jesus’ divinity. Celsus questioned the timing of the Incarnation, asking: “Is it only now after such a long age that God has remembered to judge the human race? Did he not care before?” He found the Incarnation unreasonable: “The assertion that some God or son of God has come down to earth as judge of mankind is most shameful, and no lengthy argument is required to refute it. What is the purpose of such a descent on the part of God? Was it in order to learn what was going on among men? Does he now know everything?”37 Celsus considered the resurrection of Jesus an unnatural and therefore suspect event. Celsus did not dispute the claim that a man could be God or that men should worship him, but he doubted Jesus’ divinity because the Savior ate normal human food and spoke in a normal human voice. According to Celsus, “A divine figure would have had an enormously loud speaking voice!”38 He opined that it would have been better for the Christians to worship Jonah or Daniel from the Old Testament, men who had accomplished astounding feats, rather than Jesus. Finally, Celsus attacked the Faith because he saw it as nothing more than an apostate group from Judaism. Celsus viewed Christian repudiation of circumcision and Jewish dietary laws as proof that the movement was illegitimate and that no self-respecting Roman should join it.39
Porphyry (234–305) was born in Tyre (modern-day Lebanon) on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and was a Neoplatonic philosopher. He wrote a scathing critique of the Catholic Church titled Against the Christians, which was refuted by a long list of Christian apologists and intellectuals, including Eusebius of Caesarea, Saint Jerome, and Saint Augustine. Porphyry’s anti-Catholic work is known only from these Christian writers because Emperors Constantine and Theodosius II ordered copies of his work to be burned in the fourth and fifth centuries.40 Porphyry attacked the Scriptures with literary and historical criticism, arguing that they did not provide a reliable historical account of Jesus. Porphyry believed such central Christian doctrines as the Incarnation and the Resurrection were fabrications. He was stupefied that Christians would believe Jesus was an incarnate god:
Even supposing