Nero Persecutes the Christians – 2

But the haughty historian throws no light on one difficulty — namely, the circumstances which led to the Christians being thus singled out.

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Time: 64-68 AD
Place: Rome

But the haughty historian throws no light on one difficulty — namely, the circumstances which led to the Christians being thus singled out. The Jews were in no way involved in Nero’s persecution. To persecute the Jews at Rome would not have been an easy matter. They were sufficiently numerous to be formidable and had overawed Cicero in the zenith of his fame. Besides this, the Jewish religion was recognized, tolerated, licensed. Throughout the length and breadth of the empire no man, however much he and his race might be detested and despised, could have been burned or tortured for the mere fact of being a Jew. We hear of no Jewish martyrdoms or Jewish persecutions till we come to the times of the Jewish War and then chiefly in Palestine itself. It is clear that a shedding of blood — in fact, some form or other of human sacrifice — was imperatively demanded by popular feeling as an expiation of the ruinous crime which had plunged so many thousands into the depths of misery. In vain had the sibylline books been once more consulted and in vain had public prayer been offered, in accordance with their directions to Vulcan and the goddesses of Earth and Hades. In vain had the Roman matrons walked in procession in dark robes and with their long hair unbound, to propitiate the insulted majesty of Juno and to sprinkle with sea-water her ancient statue. In vain had largesses been lavished upon the people and propitiatory sacrifices offered to the gods. In vain had public banquets been celebrated in honor of various deities. A crime had been committed and Romans had perished unavenged. Blood cried for blood before the sullen suspicion against Nero could be averted or the indignation of heaven appeased.

Nero had always hated, persecuted and exiled the philosophers and no doubt, so far as he knew anything of the Christians — so far as he saw among his own countless slaves any who had embraced this superstition, which the élite of Rome described as not only new but “execrable” and “malefic” — he would hate their gravity and purity and feel for them that raging envy which is the tribute that virtue receives from vice. Moreover, St. Paul, in all probability, had recently stood before his tribunal and though he had been acquitted on the special charges of turbulence and profanation, respecting which he had appealed to Caesar, yet during the judicial inquiry Nero could hardly have failed to hear from the emissaries of the Sanhedrim many fierce slanders of a sect which was everywhere spoken against. The Jews were by far the deadliest enemies of the Christians and two persons of Jewish proclivities were at this time in close proximity to the person of the Emperor. One was the pantomimist Aliturus, the other was Poppaea, the harlot-empress. [1] The Jews were in communication with these powerful favorites and had even promised Nero that if his enemies ever prevailed at Rome he should have the kingdom of Jerusalem. [2]

[1: According to John of Antioch and the Chronicon Paschale, Nero was originally favorable to the Christians and put Pilate to death, for which the Jews plotted his murder. Poppaea’s Judaism is inferred from her refusing to be burned and requesting to be embalmed; from her adopting the custom of wearing a veil in the streets; from the favor which she showed to Aliturus and Josephus; and from the fact that Josephus speaks of her as a religious woman.]

[2: Tiberius Alexander, the nephew of Philo, afterward procurator of Judea, was a person of influence at Rome; but he was a renegade and would not be likely to hate the Christians. It is, however, remarkable that legend attributed the anger of Nero to the conversion of his mistress and a favorite slave.]

It is not even impossible that there may have been a third dark and evil influence at work to undermine the Christians, for about this very time the unscrupulous Pharisee Flavius Josephus had availed himself of the intrigues of the palace to secure the liberation of some Jewish priests. If, as seems certain, the Jews had it in their power during the reign of Nero more or less to shape the whisper of the throne, does not historical induction drive us to conclude with some confidence that the suggestion of the Christians as scapegoats and victims came from them? St. Clement says in his Epistle that the Christians suffered through jealousy. Whose jealousy? Who can tell what dark secrets lie veiled under that suggestive word? Was Acte a Christian and was Poppaea jealous of her? That suggestion seems at once inadequate and improbable, especially as Acte was not hurt. But there was a deadly jealousy at work against the new religion.

To the pagans, Christianity was but a religious extravagance — contemptible, indeed but otherwise insignificant. To the Jews, on the other hand, it was an object of hatred, which never stopped short of bloodshed when it possessed or could usurp the power and which, though long suppressed by circumstances, displayed itself in all the intensity of its virulence during the brief spasm of the dictatorship of Barcochebas. Christianity was hateful to the Jews on every ground. It nullified their law. It liberated all Gentiles from the heavy yoke of that law, without thereby putting them on a lower level. It even tended to render those who were born Jews indifferent to the institutions of Mosaism. It was, as it were, a fatal revolt and schism from within, more dangerous than any assault from without. And, worse than all, it was by the Gentiles confounded with the Judaism which was its bitterest antagonist. While it sheltered its existence under the mantle of Judaism, as a religio licita, it drew down upon the religion from whose bosom it sprang all the scorn and hatred which were attached by the world to its own special tenets, for however much the Greeks and Romans despised the Jews, they despised still more the belief that the Lord and Savior of the world was a crucified malefactor who had risen from the dead.

I see in the proselytism of Poppaea, guided by Jewish malice, the only adequate explanation of the first Christian persecution. Hers was the jealousy which had goaded Nero to matricide; hers not improbably was the instigated fanaticism of a proselyte which urged him to imbrue his hands in martyr blood. And she had her reward. A woman of whom Tacitus has not a word of good to say and who seems to have been repulsive even to a Suetonius, is handed down by the renegade Pharisee as “a devout woman” — as a worshipper of God!

Continued.

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