Surveying the death and destruction wrought on the family of God by the Roman persecutions leads to the question, “Why?” Why did God allow this massacre to take place? Why, in the very infancy of the Church, when she was seemingly at her most vulnerable, did the Lord allow such ferocious violence against his Mystical Body? Tertullian provides the answer: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of Christians.”86 The experience of the persecution laid the foundation for the eventual conversion of the Empire. The Church would grow from a hunted sect to an official state religion in just over three hundred years. The conversion of the Roman Empire, one of the most monumental events in the history of the world, was made possible by the witness of those early Christians who stood firm in the midst of persecution, motivated by their love of Christ and his Church.
1. xsThe Didache. Translated from the Greek text by Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1884, accessed September 18, 2018, http://reluctant-messenger.com/didache.htm.
2. See Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, revised edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 78.
3. For total population of the Empire, see Adrian Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 41. For percentage of the population who lived in cities, see Peter S. Wells, Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), 72.
4. See Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith (Rockford, IL: TAN Books and Publishers, Inc., 1992 [1920]), 22.
5. See Brennan Pursell, History in His Hands: A Christian Narrative of the West (New York: Crossroad, 2011), 81.
6. See Tim Gray and Jeff Cavins, Walking with God: A Journey through the Bible (West Chester, PA: Ascension Press, 2010), 287.
7. Examples include Domitian (age 30), Commodus (age 19), and Elagabalus (age 17). It is interesting to note that the United States Constitution (Article II, Section 1.5) stipulates that only those who have reached the age of thirty-five can assume the office of President. I am convinced the Founding Fathers were well aware of Roman history when they stipulated that particular age requirement.
8. Desmond Seward, Jerusalem’s Traitor: Josephus, Masada and the Fall of Judea (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009), 34 & 36.
9. Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, VI, Nero, li., quoted in Seward, Jerusalem’s Traitor, 37.
10. Nero’s law against the Faith would remain Roman law until the early fourth century. Nero’s persecution was limited to Rome; it was not Empire-wide.
11. Tacitus, Annals, XV, 44, quoted in Jean Comby, How to Read Church History: From the Beginnings to the Fifteenth Century, vol. 1 (New York: Crossroads, 2001), 38.
12. Ibid.
13. This was the same location where Joshua in the Old Testament commanded the sun to stand still so the Israelites could defeat the Amorites (see Jos 10:10).
14. Seward, Jerusalem’s Traitor, 78.
15. His other famous works are The Antiquities of the Jews (a history of the Jewish people from the creation accounts in Genesis to his own time) and The Life of Flavius Josephus (an autobiography).
16. Seward, Jerusalem’s Traitor, 200.
17. Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, Book 6, Chapter 3.4, trans. William Whiston, A.M. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2006), 737.
18. Genseric the Vandal took the menorah to Carthage in A.D. 455 when he sacked Rome. It was recovered by the Byzantine general Belisarius in 533 and sent back to Jerusalem by Emperor Justinian. Unfortunately, the menorah vanished after the Islamic invasion in the seventh century.
19. There is no known author of the Didache. It was discovered in a monastery in Constantinople in 1883. An excellent website with multiple translations of the Didache is http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/.
20. See Rod Bennett, The Apostasy that Wasn’t: The Extraordinary Story of the Unbreakable Early Church (El Cajon, CA: Catholic Answers Press, 2015), 52.
21. See Robert Louis Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 156–158.
22. Chadwick, The Early Church, 56.
23. Seward, Jerusalem’s Traitor, 264.
24. Previous emperors were deified after their deaths, never while alive.
25. Historians debate the dating of Clement’s Epistle. The original letter was lost sometime during the Middle Ages and the most recent copy is from the seventeenth century. The traditional view holds to a date of A.D. 96 because Eusebius of Caesarea indicated that Clement wrote the letter toward the end of Emperor Domitian’s reign. An alternative date of A.D. 70 was proposed by Msgr. Thomas J. Herron, who was the English language secretary in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in his book Clement and the Early Church of Rome: On the Dating of Clement’s First Epistle to the Corinthians. Msgr. Herron argues that since the letter favorably mentions Jewish temple practices, which seems odd if the Temple was destroyed, the letter must have been written before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in A.D. 70. Additionally, Msgr. Herron points out that the Epistle relies heavily on quotations from the Old Testament but not the Gospels, which is a curious omission if written in the year 96. Msgr. Herron deduces that Clement does not quote from the Gospels because his letter was written before them.
26. Saint Clement of Rome, The Epistle to the Corinthians, 47, trans. James A. Kleist, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1946), 38.
27. Benedict XVI, Wednesday General Audience on Saint Clement, Bishop of Rome, March 7, 2007, in Church Fathers: From Clement of Rome to Augustine (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 10.
28. Ibid., 8.
29. Saint Clement of Rome, The Epistle to the Corinthians, 59.
30. The epistle was revered throughout the early Church to the point where some considered it canonical, although it was not ultimately included in the canon of Scripture.
31. Belloc, Europe and the Faith, 35.
32. Data on the numbers of Christians is found in Robert Louis Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (New Have, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 65–66.
33. Belloc, Europe and the Faith, 38. This is also a sentiment embraced by the modern world.
34. Julian’s attack on the Church and her teaching is discussed in Chapter Three.
35. Roman society was tolerant of various practices, but magic was not one of them. The practice of magic was a criminal offense, and calling someone a magician was a grave insult. See Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, Second Edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 99. Additionally, the Roman legal system inflicted capital punishment on those convicted of practicing magic. The penalties included exposure to wild beasts, slitting the throat, or being burned alive. See the Sentential of Julius Paullus, 5, 23, 17, quoted in Gary Michuta, Hostile Witnesses: How the Historic Enemies of the Church Prove Christianity (El Cajon, CA: Catholic Answers Press, 2016), 64.
36. Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them,