Early Christianity
conversion, could protest their loyalty to the Roman empire and even seek its protection. The reasons for this diversity of expe ...
subject in his Martyrs of Palestine. Around the same time, Lactantius devoted his treatise On the Deaths of the Persecutors to r ...
overall depravity (2.25.1–2), while the account of Domitian’s anti-Christian measures was preceded by a description of his capri ...
Similarly, the portrait of the persecutions in Christian accounts (both ancient and modern) as a determined effort to expunge th ...
that government ran smoothly (Veyne 1990). Such elites were based mainly in urban centres: for this reason the cities of the emp ...
of a governor, holding his assize courts in the main cities, to condemn Christians to death (Bowersock 1995: 41–57). Of course, ...
if any impact (Humphries forthcoming c). Perhaps the most telling indication of the limits of persecution is the most obvious: i ...
in western Asia Minor records a letter from Decius thanking the city’s population for their expressions of goodwill on his acces ...
between natural disasters and persecutions was real enough. A letter from Firmilian, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, to Cypria ...
seen how the division between Christianity and Judaism was one where the boundaries were often hard to identify precisely (chapt ...
Sometimes they were the victims of violent pogroms. Yet they never experienced systematic persecution, as the Christians did (at ...
it was simply not right that a ‘new’, ‘hitherto unknown’, and ‘depraved’ sect should seek to overturn the benefits of Rome’s anc ...
rise to similar suspicions. Snippets of information about Christian rituals, such as the symbolic consumption of the body and bl ...
members of the social elite, such as aristocratic women – could be regarded as undermining the traditional values that bound soc ...
Galerius, after all, sought to justify the ‘great’ persecution as aiming to bring Christians back to soundness of mind (see p. 1 ...
emperor as supreme, or of governors, as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right’ (2.13–14). Th ...
and the Roman empire were similar. Such positive attitudes to Rome reached a climax with the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea, f ...
interpreting this as a signal of implied approval of Christianity: later in his reign Aurelian also resorted to persecution of t ...
renovating buildings for religious use at this time: other struc- tures were adapted for use as a Jewish synagogue, a temple of ...
accompanied by growing administrative sophistication, which saw the emergence of bishops as the key leadership figures within Ch ...
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