THE EARLY CHURCH

New Zealand Tablet, 26 February 1920, Page 9

THE EARLY CHURCH

(A Series of Lectures by Rev. P. J. Sheehy, Manly College) 111. BEGINNINGS OF THE PERSECUTIONS AGAINST THE ROMAN CHRISTIANS. So far in my lectures I have endeavored to establish by documentary evidence the fact that St. Peter came to Rome and founded there the flourishing Church so praised by St. Paul in his letter to the Romans, and last week I tried to give you some idea of the state of life and thought in the great imperial city during the first century. And as St. Peter, coming to Rome, would naturally turn first of all to his own countrymen, the Jews, I spoke of the place of the Jews throughout the Roman Empire, and in the city, during this eventful period. To-day I must take up the thread of events which culminated in his martyrdom in the reign of the Emperor Nero. I have said that the position of the Jews in the Roman Empire was one of extraordinary privilege. Succeeding Emperors increased these favors, and it was not till the middle of the first century that we find any trace of a break in this policy. St. Luke, in Acts xviii., 2, tells us that St. Paid came to the city of Corinth, "and finding there a certain Jew named Aquilla, born in Pontus, lately come from Italy, with Priscilla his wifebecause that Claudius had commanded all Jews to depart from Rome — came to them. And because he was of the same trade he remained and worked with them." The date of this Roman Edict of the Emperor Claudius is generally fixed at 49 B.C. A chance remark by a pagan writer throws further light thereon. Suetonius, in his life of the Emperor Claudius, says: "He expelled the Jews from Rome because they were continuously rioting under the ringleader Christos"— "Jiidaeos, impulsore Chresto, assidxie tumultantes Roma expulit" (Claudius 25). We can easily understand the mistake of this writer. I have said in a former lecture that the Jewish authorities at Jerusalem had organised a strong opposition to the early Christian propaganda amongst the Jews. St. Justin the martyr speaks of the picked men sent out for this purpose all over the Empire, and St. Paul mentions this opposition in various places. We have seen, too, that it was probably such Jewish tumults raised against St. Peter's preaching in Rome that caused him to shift his quarters from the neighborhood of the Ghettos along the Tiber to the Nomentan region outside the walls to the east of the city. These tumults would seem to have continued and increased in intensity until at last they broke out into most violent public riots between Jews and Christians, and thus aroused the attention of the imperial authorities. Mr. Allard, in his history of the Christian persecutions, says: —•

“A rising was a terrible matter amongst the turbulent dwellers in the suburbs, traditional enemies of Roman civilization, who were able in an instant, like gathering clouds, to swell out into innumerable battalions of prowlers, rag-pickers, and mendicants. The Roman police no doubt did not trouble itself to make a very careful inquiry on this occasion. It saw that public order was imperilled by . the Jewish action, that the cause of the agitation was

the name' of Christ, pronounced by one party with accents of adoration, by the others with menace and hatred.v, Maybe' the authorities did not inquire whether this 'Christus' or 'Chrestos' . was or was not .an actual living person, but, accustomed as they were to rapid and brutal action, especi- * ally towards the poor and "insignificant a nation 'born for slavery,' as Cicero says of the Jews—ordered the immediate expulsion ' of every Israelite from the city of Rome." (1., 20.) The spelling "Chrestos" for "Christus" was very common in early Roman records. It is found even in Christian writers as late as Lactantius. At such an early date as 49 A.D. the Roman secular authorities had not distinguished off very clearly between Jews and Christians. To their minds the Christians were but a sect, a party amongst the Jews. And so all were expelled. In such a general banishment we cannot suppose that so prominent a person as St. Peter, the acknowledged leader of one of the two parties, could possibly have been allowed to remain in Rome, and we are justified in accepting this event as supplying us both with the date of the departure and the reason which led to it. ■ • ■ .- Very indefinite are the indications left us of St. Peter's subsequent journeys. Consequent on his absence the Christians at Rome requested his disciple St. Mark to write for them a record of Peter's Roman preaching, and thus originated the Gospel of St. Mark. We find St. Peter at the Council of Jerusalem in 50 A.D. It is, moreover, likely that he made Antioch the centre of his missionary labors for some years (49-56 A.D.), and so arose the tradition of his seven years' Antiochine episcopate. He appears to have been at Corinth in 54 A.D., for when St. Paul wrote to the Corinthian Christians in 55 A.D. he reproached them for their party spirit. He mentions a party amongst these Christians calling themselves by the name of Cephas. Since many thus boasted of being Peter's disciples in Corinth, and looked to him as "a super-eminent apostle" (2 Cor. xii., 11), it argues a visit of some duration by St. Peter to that city. And so, in the second century, St. Peter was regarded, and is spoken of by the great Corinthian Bishop Dionysius as a founder of the Corinthian Church with St. Paul (Eusebius ii., 25). When St. Paul wrote his epistle to the Romans in 57 A.D., he told them that up to that time he was prevented from coming to see them. The probable reason was that it was a ride of this Apostle, and mavbe of the whole apostolic college, not to interfere in one another's work, not to build on another's foundations. And so writers conclude that Peter was again in Rome in 56 or 57 A.D., and perhaps for subsequent years too, for St. Paul's desire of seeing the Roman Church was not realised till 61 A.D., when he came to answer his appeal case before Caesar. In the year 62 A.D. or early in 63 A.D., St. Peter returned once more to Rome from a mission tour amongst the churches of Asia Minor. The epistle he addressed to those churches in 65 or 66 A.D. shows that he had been on such a tour in recent years. This last arrival of the Apostle in Rome accounts for what one or two of the early patristic writers —viz., that St. Peter came to Rome in -the reign of the Emperor Nero." - I think Origen and Lactantius are quoted to this effect. But in view of this explanation, the seeming inconsistency with other accounts of a much earlier visit vanishes. And now we come to an event which took place in Rome on July 19, 64 A.D., an event fraught with terrible consequences to the Christians. Before I come to describe it I must tell you how the Christians were looked on in Rome at this time. I have already spoken of bitter Jewish hatred for the new faith, and of the consequent rioting in Rome in 49 A.D. By the sixth decade of the first century this bitterness had been much accentuated. The men of the synagogues hated this new faith which for a number of years past had found shelter throughout the . Empire, as a tolerated religion, under the protection of the privilege accorded to Judaism. They hated it because its principles of Catholicism struck a blow at the very foundations of Jewish exclusiveness, and, in their eyes, Jewish converts to the faith were traitors to their race and its traditions. This hatred, ever increasing, explains the vindictive spirit with which St. Paul was pursued, as well as the fierce outbreak of fanaticism at Jerusalem which in 62 A.D. led to the stoning of its Bishop, St. James the Just. We may, I think, claim that there was no counterpart to this hatred on the Christian side. They were as yet living within hearing of the Master's voice Who bade them love their enemies. There is certainly, no trace of any Jewish hatred in St. Paul's writings. Despite the bad treatment he had received at their hands everywhere on his journeys, at Antioch, Pisidia, Thessalonica, Corinth, Ephesus, and Jerusalem, St. Paul always shows the strongest affection for his countrymen. In his preaching he ever held to the rule of "the Jew first."

It was not till the second century, when Gentile peoples were coming in numbers into the Church, that we find traces ■ of an irreconcilable racial hatred between Jew and Christian. In 62 A.D., however, it was not so. Probably the animosity of Roman Jews against their Christian fellow-countrymen was not so pronounced as that of the fanatics in Judaea, yet the words of the African writer Tertullian were always true, "Synagogue Judaeorum, fontes persecutionum" —the Jewish synagogues are ever the source of the persecutions. Anyhow, about the time we speak of the authorities and the common herd in Rome and through the Empire were beginning to distinguish off between Jew and Christian, and we find everywhere a beginning of those horrible anti-Christian calumnies which made such an uproar in the Roman world during the second and subsequent centuries. The language of Tacitus in his Annals and of Suetonius in his Life of Nero testifies that the charges commonly made against the Christians at this date were the same as those mentioned and refuted at a later date by the Christian apologists. Rumor had it, then, that the Christians were a secret society of criminals and anarchists, that they held impious orgies and horribly immoral feasts. Christian teaching concerning baptism of infants and the Holy Eucharist were distorted into charges of gross licence and murder meals, and the meetings of Christians held late at night or before the dawn in the Catacombs were looked on as illicit gatherings of dangerous plotters against the Roman State and authority. Such accusations had their origin, undoubtedly, in Jewish malice, and they were pointed so that the Roman secular authoritiesignorant as to the true nature of Christianity, but very swift to strike down anything that might weaken or endanger Roman rulewould be induced to attack the Christian body as specifically distinct from the Jews. And so we come to the great Roman fire of the night of July 19, 64 A.D. It broke out mysteriously at the end of the great Circus adjoining the Palatine Hill, amidst shops containing inflammable wares, and it raged in a strong wind for nine days with most disastrous results. Of the fourteen districts into which the city was divided, four only escaped uninjured. Three districts, or municipalities as we should nowadays call them, were totally destroyed. In the other seven only a few half-ruined house's remained. Nero, who was away at the time, returned to find his own palace buildings, filled with works of art," consumed by the flames. Between 400,000 and 500,000 people found themselves homeless and destitute. All subsequent tradition points to Nero as the originator of this disaster. In-the writings of contemporary and subsequent authors there is something approaching to unanimity on this point. Tacitus scarcely conceals his personal opinion. Pliny the Elder, writing in 79 A.D., charges Nero with this crime. And common rumor at the time attributed it to incendiaries carrying out Nero's orders! It was commonly believed that he wanted the old city burnt down with its dark, narrow, close-packed streets. It is certain that Nero rejoiced in the work of rebuilding, and he had already spent vast sums of money in this way when an opportunity offered of replacing in some parts of Rome the narrow, tortuous alleys of the city. Whatever of this, Nero, thoroughly frightened by the fierce anger of homeless citizens, threw himself' with tremendous energy into the work of coping with this emergency. He opened public buildings for "the people's use; he ran up temporary.shelters; he brought supplies of corn at low prices; the sibylline oracles were consulted and propitiations were offered to the gods. But all his efforts to stay the rumor and the anger against him were of no avail. Tacitus writes:—"Neither man's efforts to give relief, nor the largess of the prince, nor the propitiations of the gods were able to dissipate belief in the sinister report that the fire had been ordered. Wherefore, to efface the rumor, Nero contrived that the accusations should be brought against a set of people hated for their abominations, whom the populace called Christians, and subjected them to the most exquisite torments. The author of this name, one Christus, had in the reign of Tiberius been executed by the Procurator Pontius Pilatus; and the pernicious superstition, though repressed for the moment, began to break out afresh, not only in Judaea, the origin of that evil, but also in Rome, where all things horrible and shameful from every quarter collect together and are practised." (Anls. xv., 44.) It was not till early in the next year—6s A.D. —when the Emperor had exhausted all means of recovering popularity and diverting the suspicions of the crowd, that he gave orders for the attack on the Christians. Why he selected them can only be conjectured. Some modern writers think it possible that the suspicions of the Roman crowd had fallen upon the Jews objects of their hatred and contempt— the agents employed by Nero in this dark business; certainly their own ghetto across the Tiber was one of the uninjured quarters

of the city. The Jews ; on, their .part would not be slow to use the influence of Poppaea, the Emperor's wife, to suggest 'that the authorities should throw the blame on the Christians, a body from which they would be anxious to be dissociated, and on whom they would be anxious to wreak their spite. However this may have been, the charge of incendiarism, if ever preferred, was only a pretext; it was as malefactors and criminals that the Christians suffered. Nero was face to face with popular fury. There were stories abroad of his dressing in actor's clothes and, lyre in hand, chanting the story of the fire of Troy as he gazed on the blazing city. He must in some way or other find another object for the mob to vent their anger on; any excuse was good enough. Tigellimis, his chief of police, and the author and instigator of many of his crimes, managed these matters. At first some arrests were made. Then from various clues, papers, cross-examinations, numberless other Christians came into his clutches. Tacitus says in the chapter I have quoted from:—"An arrest was first made of all who avowed the crime, and then upon the information thus obtained an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of firing the city, as of a general hatred against mankind." What these first Christians, thus arrested, are supposed to have confessed we know not. Tacitus cannot mean that they confessed burning Rome, for he is almost explicit that Nero himself burned it. The words give rise to many surmises amongst writers, and we will not follow them up. Anyhow, soon the Roman prisons were full, and a public anti-Christian hunt was raised. Spies were out in all parts of the city and beyond, and chained gangs of Christians were every day being brought in by the police. Imprisonment, however, was not the only punishment in store for these unfortunate ones. Nero determined at once to gratify his own and the mob's lust for blood, and organised public games — loved by the Romansin the Vatican parks and gardens, the private property of the Emperor himself. Tacitus, in his Annals, Bk. xv., ch. 44, describes these games in a few brief words. After speaking of the "ingcns multitudo" arrested, -he adds: —"To their deaths mockeries were added, so that covered by the skins of wild beasts they were torn to pieces by dogs and perished, or were affixed to crosses, or set on fire, and when the day had fallen were burnt so as to serve as an illumination for the night. Nero had offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a public show in the circus. He mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer, standing in a car. Hence compassion began to arise, although towards criminals deserving the extremest forms of punishment, on the grounds that they were destroyed not for the public good, but to gratify a single man's savage cruelty." From this terse and forceful description of the pagan writer we may easily reconstruct the scene. The Vatican gardens were thrown open, and all Rome was there. The entertainment began with a long procession of the condemned, who filed round the circus. Now -at this time Nero had detected a plot of some Republicans to bring about his assassination, and had put down its authors with savage measures. Some forty-one prisoners were implicated in it. It is known as the Pisonian conspiracy, from the name of the chief conspirator. Of these, sixteen people suffered death; the rest were acquitted. And yet when in the 28th chapter of the Annals Tacitus speaks of this matter he says that Nero sent out bodies of soldiers in every direction and "in long succession troops of prisoners ill chains were dragged along and stood at the gates of the imperial gardens." "Continua hinc et vineta Tuphina train ac foribus hortorum adjaccre." In so small a conspiracy, comparatively speaking, who were these long, chained troops of prisoners? There is clearly a mistake in the proportion of the narrative. Is it not possible that the "immense multitude" arrested in ch. 44 are identical with the "continua ct vineta agmina" of ch. 58? it the two events were contemporaneous, Tacitus may have misread some record and turned Christian prisoners into Pisonian conspirators. This long procession was only to whet the blood-lust of the mob. Then followed, what was common in Roman games, the "venatio," or hunting. Numbers of unhappy Christian men and women dressed in the skins of wild animals were turned into the arena, and savage dogs were let loose on them to hunt them down and tear them to pieces. When the spectators tired of this horrible scene crosses were brought in and other poor wretches were fastened to them to be torn also by other wild beasts then let loose. A chance expression in the letter of Pope Clement written to the Corinthian Church in 96 A.D. gives us what was probably the next scene in this tragedy. The Pope says that amongst those who suffered on that dreadful day were many women who, feeble though they were in "body, yet obtained eternal rewards through suffer-

ling for the Faith as "Danaids" and "Dircae." The most likely interpretation of these words says that Nero organised a series of living tableaux, in which mythological legends ; were actually enacted. Batches of Christian Jwomen represented the daughters of Danaus . outraged by finen representing the sons of Aegyptus, and . finally put ffco death. These are the Danaids. A celebrated group now in the museum at Naplesand at this time in Rome represents the sons of Antipe fixing Dirce to the horns of la bull, in vengeance of her attempt to slay her mother. In subsequent Roman persecutions against the Christians this form of death was inflicted upon St.* Blandina, St. Perpetua, and St. Felicitas. Very probably this death was • assigned to a number of Christian maidens on this /day we speak of. These would be the "Dircae" mentioned by Pope Clement. Nero was artistic; he was of an actor's turn of mind this original idea was his peculiar contribution to the day's sport. The fashion caught on, and in later persecutions it was common to enact in living men and women scenes from the mythology of Greece and Rome. Thus we read of Ixion being fastened on a wheel; Icarus made to fly and killed in his fall; Hercules really burned; the arm of Musius Scaevola really consumed; Orpheus and Daedalus really torn to pieces. ' ... The day drew to an end and night fell. As the darkness came on a new and . horrible illumination was provided. All about the gardens, crosses and stakes had been set up, and on these were impaled numbers.of Christians clad in garments soaked in tar, turpentine, and other inflammable elements. All day long these impaled ones looked on at the tortures of their fellow-Christians, listened to their cries and to the brutal applause of the mob. Now their turn came to minister to Rome's amusement. Their garments were set on fire, and these living torches, stretching around the chariot course, lit up the darkness. Nerohimself, proud of his originality, did not disdain to come down from the imperial stand and, in the garb of a driver, mingle with the crowd of onlookers. No doubt the crowd applauded, for under the eye of a strong police guard it could not do otherwise. Yet as Tacitus tells us there were here and there murmurs of compassion amongst the crowd for so many sufferers sacrificed in this monstrous illumination. It must have been a scene of surpassing horror that could touch the hearts of a pagan Roman mob, used to savage exhibitions of blood and murder. In one of his epistles (78) the philosopher Seneca—a contemporary, the friend and teacher of Nero, but later on one of his many victims —writes to a friend Lucilius to bid him bear up bravely under his sickness and his pain. He writes: —"What are your sufferings compared with the flame and the rack? And yet in the midst of sufferings ..like that, I have seen men not only not groan : that is little; not only not complain: that is little; not only not reply: that too is little; but I have seen them smile and smile with a good heart." It is impossible not to connect such words with the Christian martyrs. No common malefactor could meet death like that. It needs the faith of a Christian who knows that through suffering lies his path to glory and to God. It is very probable that Seneca was in the' Vatican gardens on that night, and that the ■memory of the way in which the Christian martyrs met death was with him when he wrote that letter! They did not blaspheme nor complain nor groan. They went ito their terrible death with cheerful faces and with a smile on their lips. > The horrible scene draws to a close. The living torches, 'burning slowly, flickered and went out, leaving but a heap of ashes and half-burnt flesh. The sight-seers wend their way from the gardens and silence falls upon them. Then there crept out through the darkness a fresh crowd, men, women, and children, eager to gather up some relics of the brave dead. These half-gnawed bones and burnt flesh and ashes, this blood in pools here and there, are sad remnants of friends and dear ones. But henceforward they will be bright ornaments in the meeting-places of ! Christians. They will be inserted in tombs in the altars ' upon which the Holy Sacrifice will be celebrated. Such relics as could be gathered in a short time and with much fear were put into a great chest of stone. Along the Circus of Nero ran the Via Aurelia, and right across the road some Christian family had a plot of ground available for purpose of burial. There, on the morrow, this stone coffin was buried and later on a sepulchral monument was erected over these remains. St. Peter himself will later on be buried in this plot, thus consecrated by the tomb of the first Christian martyrs—and over these remains will later on arise the first and greatest Church in Christendom, St. Peter's. More than 1600 years later, July 28, 1626, when excavations were being made for the new baldachino over the altar tomb of St. Peter, the sad relics of this first persecution were brought to light once more. They were not disturbed, and still rest in the place where they were

originally laid. One Canon Hbaldi, of the Basilica of St. Peters, who was present on the occasion, wrote an extensive account of the excavations and the various archaeological discoveries made during the progress of the work. Here is a passage:—“They began to excavate for the second foundation opposite »the first, in front of the confession. Not more than three or four feet down there was discovered at the side a large coffin made of great slabs of marble, but since this did not much interfere with the site needed for the foundation, it -was thought sufficient merely to cut it back. "When its end had been cut off, they were surprised to see within ashes with many bones all adhering together and half-burned. These brought back to mind the famous fire in the time of Nero two years before St. Peter’s martyrdom.” (Published in full in Italian by Professor, Mariano Armellini in his work Tj<i chiese di Hornet-.) Such were the first athletes ■of the Christian Faith. In their horrible yet glorious death they laid deep the foundations of Christian civilisation and liberty. They vindicated freedom of conscience, the foundation of every civilised right. Their endurance is bevond praise.