In the year 64, a huge fire destroyed a large part of the city of Rome. Nero was Emperor at the time, and the rumor spread that he had started the fire himself, then “fiddled while Rome burned.” Nero was the sort of Emperor you could believe wild rumors about. He certainly did take advantage of the destruction: he built himself a gigantic palace on land cleared by the fire.

The Empire had no official policy on Christianity. There were local persecutions, but nothing so far had been dictated by the Emperor himself. But Nero needed someone to blame. Since the Christians were an unpopular cult, he accused them of setting the fire. Then he set about killing as many as he could get his hands on. Some were crucified in the usual way, but Nero could be much more imaginative than that. He liked to think of himself as an artist, and he applied all his creativity to the art of killing Christians.

Some of them were sewn up in animal skins and thrown to hungry wild dogs. Others were doused with pitch and became human torches for Nero’s garden parties. Even Tacitus, the pagan historian who hated Christians and thought they all deserved to die, was appalled by Nero’s cruelty. Tacitus pointed out that Nero’s methods had one effect no one had counted on: ordinary Romans started to have sympathy for the Christians, who met such horrible and unjustified punishments so heroically.

In the midst of these horrors, Peter and Paul both came to Rome—Paul in chains, Peter willingly. Eusebius tells us that they both died on the same day.

Peter was crucified. This time, he didn’t deny Jesus or try to run away. He made only one request: he asked his executioners to crucify him upside-down. He said he wasn’t worthy to die the same way as his Lord.

Paul, who was a Roman citizen, couldn’t be crucified. That was one of the privileges of being a citizen. Instead, he was beheaded—a quick, neat death, compared to the slow agony of crucifixion.

Nero’s persecution established a precedent for the persecutions to come. From now on, Christianity was a more-or-less illegal cult, and the punishment for it was death. But it also made the Christians much more visible, and it made them objects of sympathy. By creating so many martyrs, Nero may well have been responsible for thousands of conversions.

Nero’s persecution had set the official face of the Empire against the Christians. But the Romans had as yet no official policy against Christianity as such. For the next few decades, where persecutions broke out, they were usually responses to popular riots against the Christians—riots which the authorities blamed on the Christians.

So Christians lived in an uneasy uncertainty. They might live their lives in peace, or they might be called upon suddenly to give up everything for the sake of Christ. There was no way to know. And yet more and more pagans were turning Christian all the time. As the Good News spread outward from Palestine, it seemed to encounter everywhere huge numbers of people who had been waiting to hear it.

The persecutions stopped at the end of Domitian’s reign. Nerva, a virtuous and kindly Emperor, succeeded him, and he allowed all the Christians who had been exiled to return to their homes—including the ancient Apostle John, who returned to Ephesus from his exile on the remote island of Patmos. But virtuous and kindly Emperors didn’t usually last long, and in a little over a year Nerva was succeeded by Trajan, who renewed the persecutions. Still, Trajan wasn’t about to have a bloodbath on his hands, and he set the policy that would become the law for more than a century after him.

Trajan’s policy is preserved in a letter he sent to his friend Pliny, who had been sent to sort out problems in Bithynia in the year 111. Pliny had asked what to do about the Christians he found there. Trajan’s answer was very sensible, from the pagan point of view: “There’s no one rule that will cover every case. Don’t go looking for these people. But if someone points them out and they are found guilty, they must be punished; except that if the accused denies that he is a Christian, and proves he isn’t by worshipping the gods, he should be pardoned for reforming, no matter how suspicious he might have been. But no anonymous accusations can be admitted in evidence against anyone; they set a very bad precedent and don’t suit our modern ideas.”

In other words, the Roman government had a don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy for Christians. The government wasn’t going to go looking for them. And anonymous accusations—of which there had been plenty, sometimes in the form of posters hung up in the middle of the night—would not be allowed. The only way a Christian could be arrested was if one of his enemies was willing to accuse him, and risk the serious penalties that went with bringing false charges. Even then, the Christian had a way out. If he renounced Christianity, he would be pardoned.

So most Christians could live their lives in peace most of the time. The threat of death was always hanging over them, but it was seldom carried out. Christianity spread rapidly under those conditions: life was not impossible for the average Christian, but the heroic witness of the famous martyrs kept enthusiasm high. For there were famous martyrs, even under Trajan’s mild reign.

The Church wasn’t always persecuted. While Rome disdained Christianity, full-scale purges took place only sporadically. Especially bloody persecutions happened during the reigns of Domitian (81-95), Trajan (98-117), Antoninus Pius (138-161), Marcus Aurelius (161-180), Septimius Severus (193-211), Decius (249-251), Valerian (253-260), Diocletian (284-305), and Galerius (305-311). In between, some of the Emperors were sympathetic or at least indifferent to Christians, so there were long periods of peace. When Philip the Arab became Emperor in 244, rumor had it that he was actually a Christian. If that’s true, Philip deserves the honor of being called the first Christian emperor. Christian or not, he encouraged the Church to grow and prosper—which made the persecution under his successor, Decius, all the more terrible.

And in every persecution, the pagans made the same mistake. “Most Christians won’t be willing to die for their silly religion,” they seemed to think. “If we just show them we’re serious about it, they’ll come round to our way of thinking.” But it never worked that way. The Christians had an entirely different way of seeing things.

“Your cruelty is our glory,” the famous Christian theologian Tertullian wrote to the imperial authorities. And Rome could be ingenious in its cruelty. Thus, all the greater was the Church’s glory. St. Irenaeus described the shock of pagans who witnessed the willingness of Christians to endure lingering tortures and the “games” (as they were called, though being eaten by a lion had little sport in it) rather than renounce the cult of Jesus. Tertullian taunted the pagans that their most noble philosophies offered them nothing comparable to die for. Testing the resignation of Socrates, the famous Greek philosopher who was sentenced to death by poison, he found it wanting, when measured against the Christians’ eager embrace of death.

What the Romans couldn’t understand was that martyrdom was the ultimate imitation of Christ: accepting a cruel and unjust death, as Jesus did. There could be no greater proof of one’s faith than to choose death rather than apostasy. So the Christians recorded the trials and pains of the martyrs in almost unbearable detail. It was common teaching that the martyrs entered heaven immediately upon their death. Some of the early Christian writers taught that the martyrs earned a sort of “priesthood” by their endurance.

And that was true in a sense. A priest is one who offers sacrifice, and martyrs offered their lives in union with the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Two of the most famous martyrs of that age, St. Ignatius of Antioch and St. Polycarp of Smyrna, both used images of the Eucharist to speak of their dying. “I am the wheat of God,” St. Ignatius wrote to the Romans. “Let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ.” And while he was being burned at the stake, St. Polycarp made a speech that sounds like a eucharistic prayer: “I give you thanks that you have counted me worthy of this day and this hour, that I should have a part in the number of your martyrs…among whom may I be accepted this day before you as a rich and acceptable sacrifice, as you, the ever-truthful God, have foreordained.”

In 260, a new Emperor named Gallienus came to the throne. Things had been going rather badly for the Empire; the previous Emperor, Valerian, had been captured by the Persians. Gallienus revoked all the edicts against the Christians, and restored the property the previous emperors had taken from them. For the next four decades, Christians would live at peace in the Empire. Gallienus’ edict of toleration guaranteed their rights. It seemed as though Christianity had finally been accepted.

But if you think the story of the Roman persecution is over in 260, you haven’t read been visiting this blog very much! The worst was yet to come.

Read some books on the subject: Abbot Ricciotti’s The Age of Martyrs: Christianity from Diocletian (284) to Constantine (337), Herbert Musurillo’s The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford early Christian texts), and most especially Robin Darling Young’s In Procession Before the World: Martyrdom As Public Liturgy in Early Christianity.

Whenever I post on Christianity in ancient India, I see an avalanche of interest. There’s an abundance of plausible tradition concerning the Apostle Thomas’s work there. It’s affirmed by many of the Fathers and historians of antiquity. Modern historians, especially in India, have built libraries of evidence, judiciously sifted. Archeology, however, is problematic, since India’s climate is hostile to preservation (making it quite unlike, say, the deserts of Egypt). Paper, wood, pigment just don’t hold up.

Still, some excavations and underwater explorations have yielded results that favor the claims of the Thomas historians. The more the archeologists dig and dredge, the more we learn about Roman-Indian contact and sea trade — which seems to have been quite extensive. That was the point of last month’s links on the recent finds at the port of Muziris. Now comes a far more detailed analysis of the archeological data on Indo-Roman sea trade. The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology is providing, free for download, “Evidence for Indo-Roman Trade from Bet Dwarka Waters, West Coast of India.” It’s well illustrated with photographs of cool stuff pulled from the ocean and the ground.

Right around the time of Christ, sailors discovered the trade winds that made travel to India much more speedy and safe. Ships could then sail the open sea, rather than hugging the shoreline as they formerly had done. Some of us find the timing providential. Some of us believe that the same thought probably occurred to St. Thomas. We can be fairly certain that it occurred to St. Pantaenus and others who took the spice route in their evangelical travels.

If you’re interested in the subjects of Christianity, India, and St. Thomas, I recommend the histories by Mundadan and Menachery, both available in India but difficult to track down in the States. You can usually find copies for sale (and quick, reliable shipment) from Merging Currents, a bookseller I’ve written about here. We should encourage the work of these historians, who face heated and sometimes irrational opposition from Hindu nationalists. Such critics accuse Christianity of having “anti-national designs,” and they speak of the churches as “instrument of the Western powers.” Some even claim that St. Thomas’s apostolate was a late invention of the Portuguese colonizers — this in spite of the ample testimony from the patristic era.

They are extremists, of course, but they have recently been influential in setting the limits of politically correct speech. Yet this conflict is unnecessary, as more moderate voices have long recognized. In 1955, India’s president Dr. Rajendra Prasad celebrated the early arrival of Christianity on the subcontinent: “Remember, St. Thomas came to India when many of the countries of Europe had not yet become Christian, and so those Indians who trace their Christianity to him have a longer history and a higher ancestry than that of Christians of many of the European countries.” For Prasad, who was himself a devout Hindu and close associate of Gandhi, that historical likelihood was “a matter of pride.” For anti-Christian extremists today, it’s a threat to their political agenda, as is the evidence of other East-West trade and collaboration. When we read about it and spread the word, we’re taking a stand against prejudice, and making a stand with Christian historians who must work in difficult circumstances. But it’s a virtuous act that’s a pure pleasure. So read up!

John Chrysostom (349-407) was a talented young man, the son of a government official who died when John was still a baby, leaving his wife a widow and single mother at age twenty. John’s mother made great sacrifices so that her son could study under the world’s most famous professor of rhetoric, the pagan Libanios of Antioch. John became his star pupil.

At eighteen, John discerned a call to dedicate himself entirely to the service of the Church. He placed himself under the tutelage of the renowned Scripture scholar, Diodore of Tarsus. Soon, once again, John was the most brilliant pupil of his master.

He decided, however, that he was interested in contemplation more than career, and so he stepped out of track for clerical orders and, in early adulthood, went off into a mountain cave, where he lived a hermit’s life for two years, till his health gave out.

When John returned to Antioch, his bishop ordained him first a deacon and then a priest. For twelve years, he was the main preacher in the city’s cathedral church. There, he preached the homilies that earned him his fame. He also served as vicar general for the metropolitan see.

It was his fame as a preacher, however, that brought him to the attention of the wider Church, and especially the imperial court. Thus, when the patriarch of Constantinople died, the emperor unexpectedly summoned John from Antioch to the most powerful bishop’s throne in the East. John declined the honor. But the emperor ordered that John be taken by force or subterfuge, if necessary, and so he was.

John’s habitual honesty and integrity did not serve him well, by capital standards. He was a reformer and an ascetic, demanding much of others, but even more of himself. The clergy of Constantinople were not, however, eager to be reformed or to imitate John’s spartan lifestyle. Nor was the imperial family — especially the empress — interested in John’s advice about their use of cosmetics, their lavish expenses, and their self-aggrandizing monuments. John found it outrageous that the rich could relieve themselves in golden toilet bowls while the poor went hungry. He reached the limits of his patience when the empress went beyond the law to seize valuable lands from a widow, after the widow had refused to sell the property. (John did not miss the opportunity to cite relevant Old Testament passages, like 1 Kings 21.)

Ordinary people found inspiration, solace, and — no doubt — entertainment in the great man’s preaching. But the powerful were not amused. They arranged a kangaroo court of bishops to depose John in 403. In fact, a military unit interrupted the liturgy on Easter Vigil, just as John was preparing to baptize a group of catechumens. Historians record that the baptismal waters ran red with blood.

John was sent away to the wild country on the eastern end of the Black Sea. His health was never good, and his guards took advantage of this. In moving him to a new location, they forced him to go on foot. They marched him to death in September 407.

Yet, immediately, he received popular veneration as a saint. Within a generation, a new emperor was welcoming the return of St. John Chrysostom’s relics to Constantinople.

Chrysostom is not a name John received from his parents. It was the name he earned from the congregations who loved him. Chrysostomos means “Golden Mouth” in Greek.

There’s an excellent online clearinghouse of works by an about St. John. I’ve posted some excerpts of his homilies here, here, and here. A good biography of St. John is J.N.D. Kelly’s Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom-Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop.

PaleoJudaica points us to a Washington Post article about an exhibit soon to open in the capital. “In the Beginning: Bibles Before the Year 1000” begins in October at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. “The manuscripts on display will include material from the Dead Sea Scrolls, from the Aleppo Codex, from the Cairo Geniza, and from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. And both the Greek and the Coptic manuscripts of the Gospel of Thomas will be included.” All the Good News that fits. The exhibit is scheduled to run October 21 to January 7.

Had the pleasure last night to meet Danny Garland, grad student in theology and fellow patristiblogger. He and his wife, Laura, stopped by Pittsburgh’s cathedral to hear my co-author Chris Bailey talk about our book, The Grail Code: Quest for the Real Presence. I awoke today to find much good material from the Fathers on Danny’s blog. It’s mostly on loving the Church.

UPDATE: Danny’s added a ton of patristic material on Mary’s Perpetual Virginity.

A couple of weeks back, I posted a brief backgrounder on Marcion the heresiarch, all as an appetizer for Ben C. Smith’s launch of a series on biblical canons. Ben’s first posting, at the blog Thoughts on Antiquity, was fascinating. Now the second installment, on the Muratorian Canon, is up. Get to know this fragmentary document from the second century — the oldest surviving list of the New Testament books.

Ben also runs a website that’s dangerously useful for those of us with a Fathers fixation. It includes a clearinghouse of translations of the Apostolic Fathers, along with some secondary literature and, of course, the texts in the original languages. Ben’s own religious opinions are unique and a little idiosyncratic. But, judging by the quality of his work, you won’t find a more dedicated and open-minded seeker after truth. He makes me aware of what a lazy slug I really am. Pay him some mind. Put his work to good use.

It’s Mary’s birthday. Very early in Christian history, the apocryphal gospels recorded legends of Mary’s birth and childhood. The Church has probably celebrated her birth with a feast day since at least the early fifth century. The feast may have originated in Syria, where there was a great flowering of Marian devotion in the fifth century, after the Council of Ephesus confirmed the orthodoxy of her ancient title “Mother of God” (Theotokos).

Among the Fathers, the earliest witness to the feast day is St. Romanos the Melodist (who flourished 536-556). Romanos is known as “the Pindar of rhythmic poetry,” and his hymns remain liturgical standards in the Byzantine liturgy. Born in Syria, he served as a deacon first in Beirut and later in Constantinople. (I’m pleased to say that my alma mater, Penn State, now houses a world-class scholar of Romanos, Dr. William Petersen, director of the University’s Religious Studies Program.) Romanos wrote several hymns for the feast, drawing heavily from the legends of the apocrypha. We also have, from two centuries later, St. Andrew of Crete’s sermons for the feast. The Church of Rome adopted the day in the seventh century; it is found in the ancient Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries. Sergius I (687-701) prescribed a litany and procession for Mary’s birth.

I was unable to find online recordings or texts of St. Romanos’s hymns for the occasion. But I found a nice icon of St. Romanos, and two of his other Marian hymns: here and here.

UPDATE: Here’s some nice stuff on Mary’s birthday, including excerpts from those sermons of St. Andrew of Crete. I found the link in a comments field at Father Z’s place.

Today’s the feast of St. Anastasius the Fuller, who was martyred in 304 A.D. Just the facts from Catholic Forum: “Born a wealthy Aquileian noble. After reading Saint Paul’s advice to the Thessalonians that it’s best to work with your hands, he became a fuller at Split, Croatia. Martyred in the persecutions of Diocletian when he painted a cross on his shop door and openly practised his faith.” May he intercede for us who honor his memory today.

When I check the page hits for this blog, it’s clear that the thing that most excites visitors is the great antiquity of the Church’s liturgy — the most ancient forms of worship — the rites I discussed in great detail in my book The Mass of the Early Christians.

I share the fascination of those visitors who home in on the Didache, the Didascalia, the rites of Addai and Mari. But it’s good for us to temper our thrill with the caution of Pope Pius XII, in his 1947 encyclical on the liturgy, Mediator Dei. While he, too, took great interest in the patristic retrieval at mid-century, he warned Catholics against an “exaggerated and senseless antiquarianism”:

The liturgy of the early ages is most certainly worthy of all veneration. But ancient usage must not be esteemed more suitable and proper, either in its own right or in its significance for later times and new situations, on the simple ground that it carries the savor and aroma of antiquity. The more recent liturgical rites likewise deserve reverence and respect. They, too, owe their inspiration to the Holy Spirit, who assists the Church in every age even to the consummation of the world. They are equally the resources used by the majestic Spouse of Jesus Christ to promote and procure the sanctity of man.

62. Assuredly it is a wise and most laudable thing to return in spirit and affection to the sources of the sacred liturgy. For research in this field of study, by tracing it back to its origins, contributes valuable assistance towards a more thorough and careful investigation of the significance of feast-days, and of the meaning of the texts and sacred ceremonies employed on their occasion. But it is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device. Thus, to cite some instances, one would be straying from the straight path were he to wish the altar restored to its primitive tableform; were he to want black excluded as a color for the liturgical vestments; were he to forbid the use of sacred images and statues in Churches; were he to order the crucifix so designed that the divine Redeemer’s body shows no trace of His cruel sufferings; and lastly were he to disdain and reject polyphonic music or singing in parts, even where it conforms to regulations issued by the Holy See.

63. Clearly … unwise and mistaken is the zeal of one who in matters liturgical would go back to the rites and usage of antiquity, discarding the new patterns introduced by disposition of divine Providence to meet the changes of circumstances and situation.

Maria Lectrix has now podcasted, in its entirety, St. Cyprian’s third-century treatise “On the Lapsed.” She’s also posted some good background information on the unusual terms used by North Africa’s great martyr-bishop. Cyprian wrote during a time of intense persecution, when men and women could save their lives by renouncing their faith. All it took was a little, itty-bitty sacrifice to the emperor’s genius, and then you walked away with a libellus — a paper, a ticket — that gave you a free pass for the rest of your life. Says Maria Lectrix: “The certificates Cyprian refer to were some kind of signed affidavit that the bearer had made a sacrifice to the Emperor and wasn’t a Christian. Apparently, Cyprian wasn’t enamored of the fake ID method of avoiding persecution.”

Do listen to the audio, and pray courage for yourself and for me. We know neither the day nor the hour when we might be called upon to stand for the faith — or go into free fall. As in the days of the Roman Empire, so now we share our world with people who would force us, under threat of torture and death, to commit apostasy.

You can see one of those ancient certificates for yourself by clicking here. This one added some limited number of days to the lives of a woman and her daughter from the village of Theadelphia in Egypt. (Click on the image to view it in a larger format.)

Danny Garland reveals St. Jerome’s method of measuring success in work.