{"id":1518,"date":"2013-02-28T07:50:45","date_gmt":"2013-02-28T13:50:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incongruentelements\/?p=1518"},"modified":"2013-02-28T07:50:45","modified_gmt":"2013-02-28T13:50:45","slug":"early-christians-werent-persecuted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incongruentelements\/2013\/02\/28\/early-christians-werent-persecuted\/","title":{"rendered":"Early Christians weren’t persecuted?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This news should go over like a lead balloon.<\/p>\n

In the immediate aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, a modern myth was born. A story went around that one of the two killers asked one of the victims, Cassie Bernall, if she believed in God. Bernall reportedly said \u201cYes\u201d just before he shot her. Bernall\u2019s mother wrote a memoir, titled \u201cShe Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall,\u201d a tribute to her daughter\u2019s courageous Christian faith. Then, just as the book was being published, a student who was hiding near Bernall told journalist Dave Cullen that the exchange never happened.<\/p>\n

Although Candida Moss\u2019 new book, \u201cThe Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom,\u201d<\/a> is about the three centuries following the death of Jesus, she makes a point of citing this modern-day parallel. What Bernall truly said and did in the moments before her death absolutely matters, Moss asserts, if we are going to hold her up as a \u201cmartyr.\u201d Yet misconceptions and misrepresentations can creep in so soon. The public can get the story wrong even in this highly mediated and thoroughly reported age \u2014 and do so despite the presence among us of living eyewitnesses. So what, then, to make of the third-hand, heavily revised, agenda-laden and anachronistic accounts of Christianity\u2019s original<\/em> martyrs?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Moss teaches at Notre Dame as professor of New Testament and early Christianity. She’s not going to be very popular amongst the church crowd. She…<\/p>\n

…challenges some of the most hallowed legends of the religion when she questions what she calls \u201cthe Sunday school narrative of a church of martyrs, of Christians huddled in catacombs out of fear, meeting in secret to avoid arrest and mercilessly thrown to lions merely for their religious beliefs.\u201d None of that, she maintains, is true. In the 300 years between the death of Jesus and the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, there were maybe 10 or 12 scattered years during which Christians were singled out for supression by Rome\u2019s imperial authorities, and even then the enforcement of such initiatives was haphazard \u2014 lackadaisical in many regions, although harsh in others. \u201cChristians were never,\u201d Moss writes, \u201cthe victims of sustained, targeted persecution.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She also dissects “first person accounts” as well as examines Roman records.<\/p>\n

Christians wound up in Roman courts for any number of reasons, but when they got there, they were prone to announcing, as a believer named Liberian once did, \u201cthat he cannot be respectful to the emperor, that he can be respectful only to Christ.\u201d Moss compares this to \u201cmodern defendants who say that they will not recognize the authority of the court or of the government, but recognize only the authority of God. For modern Americans, as for ancient Romans, this sounds either sinister or vaguely insane.\u201d It didn\u2019t help that early Christians developed a passion for martyrdom. Suffering demonstrated both the piety of the martyr and the authenticity of the religion itself, and besides, it earned you an immediate, first-class seat in heaven. (Ordinary Christians had to wait for Judgment Day.) There were reports of fanatics deliberately seeking out the opportunity to die for their faith, including a mob that turned up at the door of a Roman official in Asia Minor, demanding to be martyred, only to be turned away when he couldn\u2019t be bothered to oblige them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Link<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  This news should go over like a lead balloon. In the immediate aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-1518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interesting","tag-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incongruentelements\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incongruentelements\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incongruentelements\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incongruentelements\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incongruentelements\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incongruentelements\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incongruentelements\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incongruentelements\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incongruentelements\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}