Christianity and Rome

In the paper

“Buddhists had their martyrs, but these were for the most part nameless or forgotten, except in generic narratives.”

• Also stated in: § The Martyrology · p. 9 · plain

  “By contrast, Christians celebrated and embraced their martyrs.”

In the paper

“The martyrs and the apologists should not be thought of as antagonistic; indeed, some apologists themselves became martyrs.”

In the paper

“They heard of the martyrs' agony in church each year on their feast days and believed that their exemplary devotion gave them special powers to intercede on behalf of sinners who prayed for their support.”

In the paper

“The fourth century saw a huge increase in martyrologies, accounts of a martyr's last days.”

• Also stated in: § The Martyrology · p. 9 · plain

  “By their very nature, these stories involved violent confrontations between the martyr and the authorities, with the description of the tortures involved sometimes bordering on the pornographic.”

• Also stated in: § The Martyrology · p. 9 · plain

  “In time, these stories became ever more elaborate and fantastic, with a repertoire of tropes and stock scenes, frequently involving a con ict between the saint and a magician sent against her or him by the pagans.”

In the paper

“In fact, until the mid-third century, such persecutions as occurred, including Nero's own, were localized responses to special circumstances (as Tertullian's complaint also suggests).”

• Also stated in: § Christian Organization · p. 11 · plain

  “Nero's persecution was brief and limited to the city of Rome itself; and such persecutions as did occur throughout the empire remained local and sporadic until the middle of the third century”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Tertullian

In the paper

“But the Roman historian Tacitus, who chronicled Nero's actions in his Annals about g7Ffty years later, writes that the emperor was popularly suspected of being responsible for the g7Fre and so decided to de ect blame by focusing on an obscure sect from the backwater region of Judea.”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Tacitus

In the paper

“this task was put in the hands of religious specialists.”

In the paper

“Brent Shaw has reckoned that Augustine alone delivered about 6,000 of them during the course of his career and that the number for North Africa as a whole over the course of the fourth century amounted to about 5 million.”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Shaw 2011

In the paper

“As Jan Bremmer has pointedly observed, the chief reason the intolerance argument has survived so long is that the scholars who use it rarely if ever look outside of Europe for comparative evidence.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Bremmer 2011

In the paper

“But the prestige of the Senate as an independent body capable of ratifying an emperor's authority gradually eroded; and even though its members remained the wealthiest and most powerful class in the empire, its ability as an institution to overawe the army collapsed in the third century under the strain of barbarian invasions in the north and a revived Persian empire in the east.”

In the paper

“in 251 CE , the church in Rome had, in addition to its bishop, 46 priests; 14 deacons and subdeacons; 42 acolytes; and 53 exorcists, readers, and custodians and was caring for 1,500 widows and paupers.”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Eusebius of Caesarea 1965

In the paper

“From earliest times, Christians assembled weekly (and sometimes daily) to renew bonds over a communal meal, during which time they heard readings from sacred books or martyrs' lives, accompanied by an explanatory or hortatory talk by a bishop or priest.”

In the paper

“Christian sacred texts contain a number of mixed messages. There is, for instance, not only the revolutionary commandment to return hatred with love, but also the equally imperative obligation to resist Satan and all his acts.”

In the paper

“Their organization was loose, and there was no recognized central authority like the medieval papacy, but it nevertheless had no parallel in other religions of the empire.”

In the paper

“The g7Frst top-down, empire-wide persecution was launched by the emperor Decius in 250 CE .”

• Also stated in: § Christian Organization · p. 11 · plain

  “His son and successor, the emperor Gallienus, ended that effort and also granted a legal right to the Christian community to own property for the conduct of religious worship.”

• Also stated in: § Christian Organization · p. 11 · plain

  “This 'little peace of the Church' lasted until the turn of the fourth century when the emperor Diocletian launched the last, and worst, of these empire-wide persecutions in 303 CE -ordering churches torn down, Christian sacred books destroyed, and Christian clergy imprisoned.”

In the paper

“A prominent part of both the dream narrative and the vision account is the close relationship they posit between the emperor and his new deity. Over the years, the story of this relationship becomes an ever more important part of the emperor's personal story.”

In the paper

“Gibbon recognized the importance of organization in his famous list of g7Fve reasons for the spread of the new religion, although he placed it at the bottom ('intolerance' was at the top).”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Gibbon 1909-1914

In the paper

“These specialists, in turn, developed methods for communicating with each other and mutual decision making, along with a recognized hierarchy that created something novel for ancient religion: an organization that was, by ancient standards, akin to a shadow government.”

In the paper

“This is one way to read Constantine's innovation of synods composed of all bishops in his jurisdiction, of which the Council of Arles in 314 CE and the epochal Council of Nicaea in 325 are the most famous.”

In the paper

“Events that we classify as 'natural disasters'-g7Fre, earthquake, ood-to ancients were signs of divine displeasure; they led to a search for causes, and one that lay close to hand was the presence of Christians, who refused to participate in traditional rites and denied the existence of the gods that they honored.”

In the paper

“Scholars are now more inclined to see a generalized religious turmoil as the motive force for these changes, creating a religious 'marketplace' in which Christianity was but one of a number of teachings responding to, as much as creating, this mood.”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Scholars

In the paper

“Their in uence was substantial-g7Frst, because their efforts at outreach kept the religion from withdrawing from a hostile world like the people of the Dead Sea Scrolls; and even more because the reg7Fned thinking that went into these arguments helped Christians articulate their beliefs to themselves in a way necessary to form the basis of a world religion.”

In the paper

“The rite of 'emperor worship' involved scattering a few grains of incense on an altar and uttering a prayer for his health and safety to his 'genius,' a personal deity whom we might think of as a patron saint-a harmless enough procedure that in moments of crisis might even be considered a kind of loyalty oath. But to Christians, it constituted prayer to a false god, and so put their immortal souls”

In the paper

“As the new legitimators of imperial power, bishops demanded and got the right to pass judgment on emperors.”

• Also stated in: § Imperial Ideology · p. 13 · plain

  “As the new legitimators of imperial power, bishops demanded and got the right to pass judgment on emperors.”

In the paper

“Even more than Buddhists, Christians also tapped into ascetic impulses to promote monastic life and generate their version of the 'holy man' in the person of the Christian saint.”

In the paper

“ancient Mediterranean religion was community based. Each polity had one or more deities with whom it had a special relationship; and when those deities were unhappy, their judgment was not passed on individuals but on the community as a whole.”

In the paper

“But the Christian claim that their man-god Jesus was also the transcendent deity of the philosophers was unique; and the thought that this deity had undergone the messy rigors of human birth, lived as a humble carpenter's son, and suffered death at human hands was, to Tacitus and his peers, both repulsive and idiotic.”

In the paper

“Nero branded the Christians as arsonists because of the Great Fire, and their refusal to honor local gods is what made them 'a most mischievous superstition' in the eyes of men like Tacitus.”

In the paper

“Every ancient state, from Rome to China, was also a religious institution, in the sense that a primary duty of its leaders was to maintain good relations with divine forces that played an active role in the outcome of human affairs.”

In the paper

“Roman religion was conducted by the same civic authorities who performed 'secular duties'; the emperor as pontifex maximus could not credibly ratify himself.”

• Also stated in: § Imperial Ideology · p. 13 · plain

  “Roman religion was conducted by the same civic authorities who performed what we now call secular duties, and the emperor as pontifex maximus could not credibly ratify himself.”

In the paper

“While Constantine's conversion to Christianity changed the deity, it did not change the ideology of the Roman empire.”

In the paper

“Of particular importance to the question posed here is the way Christians, like Buddhists, developed narrative strategies by which to confront and combat their hostile environment and tell their own story in their own way. These were the apology , the martyrology , and, perhaps most important of all, the sermon .”

In the paper

“Without them, Christians might easily have been absorbed into a dominant culture that set much lower requirements for participation.”

In the paper

“According to one estimate, simple acts of nursing, combined with the disruption of traditional social networks, could alone account for growth in Christian numbers during that period.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites one estimate

In the paper

“But over the centuries, Christians had developed an empire-wide organization completely independent of government control.”

In the paper

“Like Buddhists, Christians challenged both the existing order and existing values, proclaiming to a world oriented toward wealth and status Jesus's message that 'the last shall be g7Frst, ' and that it was impossible to serve two masters-God and Mammon, the personig7Fed deity of wealth (Matt. 6:24; 20:16).”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Matt. 6:24; 20:16

In the paper

“Indeed, Christians labored under a further disability: Roman ofg7Fcials did not consider their founder a sage like the Buddha but a criminal who had been executed in a fashion reserved for the lowest-born members of their society.”

In the paper

“it seems fair to say that the martyrs had more of an impact on Christians than on non-Christians-and that even among believers, their example was admired more often than it was followed.”

In the paper

“Both messages were crucial for the growth of the movement.”

In the paper

“On one hand, a common foe served to harden a congregation and unite its membership.”

In the paper

“Consequently, this in ux of new members was inherently destabilizing. Adult converts would necessarily bring with them a number of predispositions great and small that affected the way they understood their new faith, and thereby contributed to existing anxieties over heresy and sincerity.”

In the paper

“Although Constantine's conversion to Christianity changed the deity, it did not change the ideology.”

In the paper

“It may also explain why he took to calling himself a 'fellow bishop' when in the company of Christian leaders-consciously or unconsciously, he was looking for the same relationship with the bishops that emperors had enjoyed with the Senate, where they prided themselves on being merely the g7Frst among equals.”

In the paper

“It means that Christians entered their relationship with Constantine with a well-developed corporate identity of their own and an experienced leadership.”

In the paper

“although the Romans seem to have put greater stress on the importance of this stipulation, and their legalistic bent may well have provided at least some of the basis for the emperor Decius's demand that all citizens prove that they had performed imperial sacrig7Fce, leading to the g7Frst empire-wide persecution of Christians in 250 CE .”

In the paper

“There is an obvious analogy to the Mandate of Heaven with which Chinese emperors ruled. In both empires, divine support manifested itself in terrestrial success-peace, prosperity, and victory over enemies. In both, popular approval was also considered a result of divine blessing”

In the paper

“But over the centuries of their time in the wilderness, Christians had developed an organization that was empire wide and completely independent of government control.”

In the paper

“This external pressure had a stabilizing and a destabilizing effect, both of which served to strengthen the control of the bishop over his ock.”

In the paper

“In communicating a mass of new ideas, the Christian sermon had no precursor or equal. Nothing like it had existed. It had to be created.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Shaw 2011

In the paper

“More importantly, given the expense of copies of sacred texts, almost all instruction was oral, and the sermon was a prime vehicle for it.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Brown 2012
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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Dekkers 1990