Pagans and Christians in the City

by Steven D. Smith

  How Tolerant Were the Romans Really?

  We noted earlier the judgment of many modern historians that Roman authorities were admirably tolerant, particularly in matters of religion.121 Indeed, even the Christians could acknowledge the broad range of religious cults that flourished, and were freely allowed to flourish, under Roman rule. “Among every nation and people [subject to Roman rule], men offer whatever sacrifices and celebrate whatever mysteries they please,” Athenagoras acknowledged to the emperor. “The Egyptians reckon among their gods even cats, and crocodiles, and serpents, and asps, and dogs. And to all these both you and the laws give permission so to act, deeming . . . that it is necessary for each man to worship the gods he prefers.”122

  And yet, as we have also seen (and as Athenagoras bitterly complained), Romans also engaged, episodically, in the savage persecution of Christians—even though Christians professed allegiance to and even prayed for the emperors and for the most part behaved peaceably and responsibly. To be sure, the Roman policy of persecution was not gratuitously vindictive or malicious; it was, as we have seen, entirely rational (on pagan premises at least). Even so, does the Roman practice call for a revision of the familiar judgment of the Roman Empire as religiously tolerant?

  The question itself is elusive, and probably misconceived. A first observation, though, is that the Romans themselves would not have explained or defended their own practices in terms of toleration. For them, tolerance was not an ideal, or an established virtue. As J. A. North observes: “If there was tolerance it was not tolerance born of principle. So far as we know, there was no fixed belief that a state or individual ought to tolerate different forms of religion; that is the idea of far later periods of history. The truth seems to be that the Romans tolerated what seemed to them harmless and drew the line whenever there seemed to be a threat of possible harm; only, they saw no great harm in many of the cults of their contemporary world.”123

  Indeed, toleration did not come to be viewed as a positive value or virtue until relatively recently. Prior to a modern “transvaluation of values,” tolerance of error or wrongdoing would be viewed mostly as an indication of weakness, lack of integrity, or lack of courage. Thus, Ethan Shagan explains that “before the 1640s, the state’s prerogative to punish religious deviance was almost unanimously praised as moderate, while broad claims for religious toleration were almost unanimously condemned as extremist.”124

  And indeed, in other contexts, that earlier logic is readily understandable even today. A school principal who acquiesces in bullying, or a manager who puts up with sexual epithets, jokes, and innuendos in the workplace, will not gain sympathy by invoking the value of “toleration.” On the contrary, for such evils the contemporary attitude confidently and righteously prescribes “zero tolerance.”

  Still, granting that “religious toleration” is our value, not theirs, can we nonetheless describe the pagan world as religiously tolerant? Yes and no—but probably more no than yes. Roman paganism surely did manage to encompass and accommodate a vast diversity of deities and cults. But then again, it accommodated religions that were willing to accept its terms. Indeed, the Roman approach might more accurately be described as one not of tolerance but of a combination of indifference and assimilation—policies today not typically associated with toleration.

  Thus, for the most part, as J. A. North notes, Roman authorities simply didn’t care which deities people worshiped, or how. Jan Assmann observes generally that “it . . . makes no sense to talk of ‘tolerance’ with regard to the polytheisms of pagan antiquity, since here the criterion of incompatibility is missing; as far as other peoples’ religion is concerned, there is nothing that would need to be ‘tolerated.’ ”125 Moreover, the Romans did not so much tolerate diverse or foreign deities as annex them into the Roman system. In this vein, Rodney Stark suggests that rather than speaking of a collection of different religions, it is more cogent to think of Roman paganism as constituting a religious “system.”126 The cults devoted to the different gods and goddesses were parts of a single expansive religion, much in the way that different Catholics today might feel special attachments to a multitude of different saints while still belonging to the same capacious faith.

  To say this, though, is not to criticize the Romans for accommodating diverse cults only on Roman terms. What else could they do? What else could anyone do? Accept and accommodate strange religions on the basis of terms and assumptions they did not hold?

  In the end, it thus seems misconceived to evaluate Roman paganism in terms of toleration, either for praise or for blame. What we can say is that pagan religion had resources for including or accommodating a variety of deities and cults, but there were limits to what could be accommodated. In troubled times, at least, Christianity fell outside those limits. For pragmatic reasons it might sometimes be put up with, so to speak, but it could not really be respected or tolerated. In a similar way, Christianity had its own, different resources for permitting or accommodating various beliefs and religiosities, but again there were limits (as would become apparent after Christianity became the preferred religion of the empire). In the long run, Christian dualism—or its commitment to two cities, each with its proper jurisdiction—would evolve into acceptance of a “separation of church and state” that has functioned to permit a vast diversity of faiths and antifaiths to coexist more or less peacefully. But it would take centuries for that kind of separation to develop. And whether it can survive the erosion or rejection of its Christian foundations remains uncertain.127

  When we set aside unilluminating labels like “tolerance,” what seems clear is that although in the early centuries paganism and Christianity sometimes operated side by side as a matter of practical convenience or necessity, they did not manage to work out mutually acceptable terms of peaceful coexistence. Their experience stands as a testament to the difficulty of “just getting along”—a difficulty that persists today (as we will discuss in later chapters).

  1. Tertullian, “Apology,” in Selected Works (Pickering, OH: Beloved, 2014), 55.

  2. See above, 3–4.

  3. Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (New York: HarperCollins, 2013).

  4. Matt. 5:11 KJV.

  5. Matt. 27.

  6. Acts 7:57–60; 12:1–3; 14:4–6, 19; 16:19–24; 17:5–9; 21:30–32.

  7. 2 Cor. 1:1–10; Phil. 2:17–18; 2 Thess. 1:1–10; 2 Tim. 3:10–14.

  8. See, e.g., Steven J. Friessen, Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John: Reading Revelation in the Ruins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  9. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (London: Penguin, 2009), 134, 161; P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Chronicle of the Popes: The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Papacy over 2000 Years (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 12–16.

  10. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 1981), 6.

  11. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 7.

  12. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 9.

  13. Adrian Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 98–99.

  14. Eusebius, The Church History, trans. Paul L. Maier (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 1999), 175.

  15. Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. Michael Grant (London: Penguin, 1959), 365.

  16. In an introduction to Eusebius, The Church History, Paul Maier observes: “His sources, which Eusebius often quotes, paraphrases, or condenses . . . , need not be listed here, since he is always scrupulous about crediting the fonts of his information. His debt to Josephus, Hegesippus, Justin, Irenaeus, Dionysus of Alexandria, and others is open and acknowledged. He may have borrowed too heavily for modern tastes, but much of his material owes its very survival to its felicitous incorporation in Eusebius’s record. He found much of his material in the vast library at his own Caesarea, founded by Origen and tended by Pamphilus, and that at Jerusalem established by Bishop Alexander, which accounts
for the Greek and East emphasis in his pages” (16).

  17. E.g., Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 24; Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph of Christianity (New York: Penguin, 1999), 109–10.

  18. Eusebius, The Church History, 107, 120–22, 146–55, 289–315.

  19. Eusebius, The Church History, 289.

  20. Lactantius, On the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, Addressed to Donatus, ed. Alexander Roberts et al. (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2015), chap. 3, p. 8.

  21. See W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 181 (noting that while due-process protections might discourage official indictments, “there was no protection, however, against mob violence backed by all sections of opinion”). See also 294.

  22. Wilken, The Christians, 2–15.

  23. But see Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 120 (“By no means all Roman governors were executing Christians. One governor dismissed a case because he thought the accusation vexatious; another told a crowd of overenthusiastic would-be martyrs that if they wanted to die they should hang themselves or jump over a cliff”).

  24. “The Second Apology of Justin Martyr,” in The First and Second Apologies of Justin Martyr, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Cumming, GA: St. Polycarp, 2016), chap. 2, pp. 122–23.

  25. “Second Apology of Justin Martyr,” chap. 1, p. 121.

  26. Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 138.

  27. “Body Count of the Roman Empire,” last updated March 2011, http://necrometrics.com/romestat.htm.

  28. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, [1776] 1995), 1:515. More recent, but in a similar vein, is the work of Candida Moss. Moss’s eye-catching claim that persecution is a “myth” that was “invented” by the early Christians is deeply misleading, not only with respect to the historical facts but also with respect to the content of Moss’s own presentation. Thus, while arguing that Christian martyr stories are historically unreliable, she adds that this fact “does not mean . . . that there were not martyrs at all or that Christians never died. It is clear that some people were cruelly tortured and brutally executed for reasons that strike us as profoundly unjust.” Moss, The Myth of Persecution, 124–25. Her deflationary treatment of the persecutions depends largely on a series of baffling distinctions that serve to narrow what counts as “persecution” almost to the vanishing point. Thus, Moss distinguishes between “persecution” and “prosecution” (14, 159), and she excludes from the category of “persecution” punishments inflicted under general laws against subversion (as opposed to laws or edicts specifically targeting Christians) as well as punishments inflicted not from “blind hatred” but rather for what authorities believed to be legitimate reasons. See, e.g., 164 (“Just because Christians were prosecuted or executed, even unjustly, does not necessarily mean that they were persecuted. Persecution implies that a certain group is being unfairly targeted for attack and condemnation, usually because of blind hatred”).

  29. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:514.

  30. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:524.

  31. E.g., Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:526, 576–77.

  32. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:539.

  33. Matt. 22:21.

  34. Rom. 13:1, 5–7 NIV. To be sure, not all Christians embraced this logic. Steven Friessen argues that the Apocalypse of John conveys a different message—that “Roman imperial authority was demonic.” Friessen, Imperial Cults, 202.

  35. Tertullian, “Apology,” 54–55.

  36. Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians, trans. B. P. Pratten (Pickerington, OH: Beloved, 2016), 5.

  37. “First Apology of Justin Martyr,” in First and Second Apologies, chap. 17, p. 38.

  38. Tertullian, “Apology,” 1.

  39. Tertullian argued that even if Christian doctrines struck Romans as absurd, they “are just (in that case) like many other things on which you inflict no penalties—foolish and fabulous things, I mean, which, as quite innocuous, are never charged as crimes or punished.” Tertullian, “Apology,” 80–81.

  40. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 133–72.

  41. Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 111 (observing that Roman authorities’ policy toward Christianity “fluctuated, if we can trust our sources, from cruel oppression to legal protection to benign neglect”).

  42. Wilken, The Christians, 16.

  43. Eusebius, The Church History, 259.

  44. Cf. Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 133: “Inside people’s minds the most contrary beliefs might coexist, at some moment suddenly to be recognized as mutually intolerable. In that same fashion, Christians and pagans lived together for generations in the cities of the Empire, in peace disturbed rarely by spasms of frightful violence, both before and after 312.”

  45. See Douglas Boin, Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place for Themselves in Caesar’s Empire (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015).

  46. See above, 1–2.

  47. See Friessen, Imperial Cults, 25–131. See also 75: “Imperial cults permeated community life. Various temples and small shrines for the imperial family were found in towns and cities, and imperial cults were part of worship at many temples of other deities as well. Municipal imperial cults were part of many institutions besides temples, such as the agora, the bouleuterion [or assembly house], the gymnasium, and the baths. Festivals normally involved processions beyond the sites of the sacrifices themselves, so all public spaces were involved in such activities at different intervals. Imperial cults were an aspect of urban life encountered often and in diverse forms.”

  48. Friessen, Imperial Cults, 203.

  49. Bruce W. Winter, Divine Honours for the Caesars: The First Christians’ Responses (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 59.

  50. Winter, Divine Honours, 277 (emphasis added).

  51. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:459–60.

  52. Winter, Divine Honours, 196, 222; Boin, Coming Out Christian, 30.

  53. Winter, Divine Honours, 222–25.

  54. “Martyrdom of the Holy Martyrs Justin, Chariton, Charites, Paeon, and Liberianus, Who Suffered at Rome,” trans. M. Dods, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, 10 vols. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), vol. 1, http://www.clerus.org/clerus/dati/2001–02/19–999999/Tmarty.html.

  55. “Martyrdom of the Holy Martyrs,” 4.

  56. “Martyrdom of the Holy Martyrs,” 4.

  57. “Martyrdom of the Holy Martyrs,” 5.

  58. See Robert Louis Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 72–74.

  59. Winter, Divine Honours, 117, 243.

  60. Winter, Divine Honours, 192–95.

  61. Just when and how this divide occurred presents a complicated historical question. See generally James D. G. Dunn, Neither Jew Nor Greek: A Contested Identity, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015).

  62. Winter, Divine Honours, 286.

  63. Winter, Divine Honours, 286.

  64. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:460–61.

  65. Cf. Wilken, The Christians, 125 (“It was, however, not simply that Christians subverted the cities by refusing to participate in civic life, but that they undermined the foundations of the societies in which they lived”).

  66. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:518.

  67. See above, 3.

  68. Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 82.

  69. Matt. 28:19–20.

  70. Cf. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:451–52 (“It became the most sacred duty of a new convert to diffuse among his friends and relations the inestimable blessing which he had received, and to warn them against a
refusal that would be severely punished as a criminal disobedience to the will of a benevolent but all-powerful Deity”).

  71. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:562.

  72. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 7–8.

  73. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. and ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7.33, p. 307 (asserting that pagan gods are “demons: demons who, in the guise of spirits of the dead, or under the appearance of creatures of this world, desire to be thought gods”).

  74. Augustine, City of God, bks. 2, 4.

  75. Augustine, City of God 2.21, pp. 76–80. However, under a less ambitious definition, Augustine conceded that Rome had been a commonwealth (19.21, pp. 950–51; 19.24, pp. 960–61).

  76. Augustine, City of God, bks. 4, 6, 7. In one passage, for example, Augustine ridicules the pagan assignment of a variety of deities to assist in the consummation of a marriage—Jugatinus to help with the wedding; Domiducus to lead the bride home; Domitius to install her in the house; Manturna to ensure that she stays with her husband; Virginensis, Subigus, Prema, Pertunda, Venus, and Priapus to assist with different phases of the consummating intercourse. “Why fill the bedchamber with a swarm of deities when even the wedding attendants have departed?” Augustine asks mockingly: “If, at any rate, the man, labouring at his task, needed to be helped by the gods, might not some one god or goddess have been sufficient? Would not Venus alone have been equal to the task? . . . Why, when a newly married couple believe that so many gods of both sexes are present and viewing the proceedings, are they not so overcome with modesty that he is less aroused, and she made even more reluctant?” (4.9, p. 258).