Sometimes they were the victims of violent pogroms. Yet they
never experienced systematic persecution, as the Christians did
(at least not until the empire itself became Christian). This is
because the Jews possessed something that the Christians did not:
an ancient heritage. The historian Tacitus, who wrote a hostile
portrait of the Jews in the early second century, observed that
Jewish practices, however repugnant they might be (for pagans),
were ‘sanctioned by their antiquity’ (Histories5.5). Like many
good, old-fashioned Romans, Tacitus was devoted to the mainte-
nance of the mos maiorum– long-standing traditions established
by the ancestors. Hence the Jews, however despicable he might
find them, deserved toleration because their social and religious
traditions originated in the dim, distant past. This was not some-
thing the Christians could claim. As the biographer Suetonius put
it, Christianity was ‘a new and malevolent superstition’ (super-
stitio nova ac malefica:Life of Nero16.2).
In the view of traditionalist Romans, one of the damning
features of Christianity was its origin in comparatively recent
historical times. Equally unfortunate, here was a religion that
regarded as divine a man who had been executed as a criminal
by a Roman governor (Tacitus, Annals15.44.3–4). Although most
Christians claimed the Jewish scriptures for themselves as their
Old Testament, the continued existence of Judaism after Jesus
served to emphasize for many pagans that Christianity was a
pernicious novelty. This had been the argument of the pagan
philosopher Celsus in the later second century; it was also made,
in the mid-fourth century, by the emperor Julian. The power of
tradition and antiquity could make life difficult for any cult when
it was confronted by Roman power. At some time around the year
300 (the precise date is the subject of disagreement), the emperor
Diocletian wrote to the proconsul of Africa ordering him to hunt
out the Manichaeans. This religion had been founded in the third
century by the Mesopotamian mystic Mani. It did not help that
the cult originated in the territory of Persia, one of Diocletian’s
bitterest enemies. But equally reprehensible was the novelty of
the religion: in his letter to the proconsul, Diocletian stated thatEARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE
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