Nero Persecutes the Christians

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Introduction
Down to the reign of Nero Christians in the Roman Empire were regarded by the ruling powers merely as a Jewish sect, harmless and guilty of nothing which could call for the interference of the State with their ways of life or of worship. They were therefore unmolested. But during the reign of the infamous Emperor in whom they saw antichrist and the actual embodiment of the symbolic monstrosities of the Apocalypse, the Christians began to be recognized as a separate people and from milder persecutions at first, under cover of legal procedure, they were soon subjected to outrages, tortures and deaths than which history has none more revolting and pitiful to record. In Kaulbach’s great painting of Nero’s persecution there is enough of portrayal and suggestion to add a terrible vividness to the ordinary historian’s word-pictures. The Emperor, surrounded by his boon companions, stands on his garden terrace to receive divine honors, while a group of suffering Christians — among them St. Peter, crucified head down and St. Paul, passionately protesting against the diabolical work — move to compassion a company of elderly men and a body of German soldiers who look upon the horrible spectacle of martyrdom.

This, the first persecution of the Christians, reached its culminating point of ferocity in A.D. 64, after Nero had been accused of kindling or conniving at the work of those who did kindle, the great fire in Rome. In order to divert attention, even if he could not turn suspicion, from himself, having charged the Christians with causing the conflagration, he ordered the atrocities which added a still darker stain to his personal and imperial record of shameless crime and savage inhumanity. First such as confessed themselves to be Christians were dealt with and from these information was extorted on which vast numbers were convicted, “not so much on the charge of burning the city as of hating the human race.”

Nero’s character and acts have been depicted by many writers and in famous works of art but not even the pencil of Kaulbach can make more keen the realization of those scenes enacted in this persecution than the thrilling narration of Farrar, which for picturesque eloquence, fired with dramatic intensity, has seldom been surpassed in English literature.

This selection is by Frederic William Farrar.

Time: 64-68 AD
Place: Rome

Nero was so secure in his absolutism, he had hitherto found it so impossible to shock the feelings of the people or to exhaust the terrified adulation of the senate, that he was usually indifferent to the pasquinades which were constantly holding up his name to execration and contempt. But now [1] he felt that he had gone too far and that his power would be seriously imperiled if he did not succeed in diverting the suspicions of the populace. He was perfectly aware that when the people in the streets cursed those who set fire to the city they meant to curse him. If he did not take some immediate step, he felt that he might perish, as Gaius had perished before him, by the dagger of the assassin.

[1: In his behavior at the burning of Rome.]

It is at this point of his career that Nero becomes a prominent figure in the history of the Church. It was this phase of cruelty which seemed to throw a blood-red light over his whole character and led men to look on him as the very incarnation of the world-power in its most demoniac aspect, as worse than the Antiochus Epiphanes of Daniel’s Apocalypse, as the Man of Sin whom — in language figurative indeed, yet awfully true — the Lord should slay with the breath of his mouth and destroy with the brightness of his coming, for Nero endeavored to fix the odious crime of having destroyed the capital of the world upon the most innocent and faithful of his subjects — upon the only subjects who offered heartfelt prayers on his behalf — the Roman Christians. They were the defenseless victims of this horrible charge, for though they were the most harmless, they were also the most hated and the most slandered of living men.

Why he should have thought of singling out the Christians has always been a curious problem, for at this point St. Luke ends the Acts of the Apostles, perhaps purposely dropping the curtain, because it would have been perilous and useless to narrate the horrors in which the hitherto neutral or friendly Roman government began to play so disgraceful a part. Neither Tacitus, nor Suetonius, nor the Apocalypse, helps us to solve this particular problem. The Christians had filled no large space in the eye of the world. Until the days of Domitian we do not hear of a single noble or distinguished person who had joined their ranks. That the Pudens and Claudia of Rom. xvi. were the Pudens and Claudia of Martial’s Epigrams seems to me to be a baseless dream. If the “foreign superstition” with which Pomponia Graecina, wife of Aulus Plautius, the conqueror of Britain, was charged and of which she was acquitted, was indeed, as has been suspected, the Christian religion, at any rate the name of Christianity was not alluded to by the ancient writers who had mentioned the circumstance. Even if Rom. xvi. was addressed to Rome and not, as I believe, to Ephesus, “they of the household of Narcissus which were in the Lord” were unknown slaves, as also were “they of Caesar’s household.”

The slaves and artisans, Jewish and Gentile, who formed the Christian community at Rome, had never in any way come into collision with the Roman government. They must have been the victims rather than the exciters of the messianic tumults — for such they are conjectured to have been — which led to the expulsion of the Jews from Rome by the futile edict of Claudius. Nay, so obedient and docile were they required to be by the very principles on which their morality was based, so far were they removed from the fierce independence of the Jewish zealots, that, in writing to them a few years earlier, the greatest of their leaders had urged upon them a payment of tribute and a submission to the higher powers, not only for wrath but also for conscience’ sake, because the earthly ruler, in his office of repressing evil works, is a minister of God. That the Christians were entirely innocent of the crime charged against them was well known both at the time and afterward. But how was it that Nero sought popularity and partly averted the deep rage which was rankling in many hearts against himself, by torturing men and women, on whose agonies he thought that the populace would gaze not only with a stolid indifference but even with fierce satisfaction?

Gibbon has conjectured that the Christians were confounded with the Jews and that the detestation universally felt for the latter fell with double force upon the former. Christians suffered even more than the Jews because of the calumnies so assiduously circulated against them and from what appeared to the ancients to be the revolting absurdity of their peculiar tenets. “Nero,” says Tacitus, “exposed to accusation and tortured with the most exquisite penalties, a set of men detested for their enormities, whom the common people called ‘Christians.’ Christus, the founder of this sect, was executed during the reign of Tiberius, by the procurator Pontius Pilate and the deadly superstition, suppressed for a time, began to burst out once more, not only throughout Judea, where the evil had its root but even in the city, whither from every quarter all things horrible or shameful are drifted and find their votaries.”

The lordly disdain which prevented Tacitus from making any inquiry into the real views and character of the Christians is shown by the fact that he catches up the most baseless allegations against them. He talks of their doctrines as savage and shameful when they breathed the very spirit of peace and purity. He charges them with being animated by a hatred of their kind when their central tenet was a universal charity. The masses, he says, called them “Christians”; and while he almost apologizes for staining his page with so vulgar an appellation, [2] he merely mentions in passing that, though innocent of the charge of being turbulent incendiaries, on which they were tortured to death, they were yet a set of guilty and infamous sectaries, to be classed with the lowest dregs of Roman criminals.

[2: There can be little doubt that the name “Christian” — so curiously hybrid, yet so richly expressive — was a nickname due to the wit of the Antiochenes, which exercised itself quite fearlessly even on the Roman emperors. They were not afraid to affix nicknames to Caracalla and to call Julian Cecrops and Victimarius, with keen satire of his beard. It is clear that the sacred writers avoided the name, because it was employed by their enemies and by them mingled with terms of the vilest opprobrium. It only became familiar when the virtues of Christians had shed luster upon it and when alike in its true form and in the ignorant mispronunciation “Chrestians,” it readily lent itself to valuable allegorical meanings.]

Continued.

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