ABSTRACT
Why were the early Christians so unpopular with their contemporaries andsubjected to political oppression and martyrdom? The question has been asked by scholars ever since the Enlightenment. Ludwig Mosheim writing his Ecclesiastical History Ancient and Modern at Göttingen in the 1750s asks, ‘how it was that the excellent nature of the Christian religion, its admirable tendency to promote both the welfare of the state and the private felicity of individuals’ (1767: 48) should have brought persecution on itself rather than the protection of the state. Gibbon asked the same question in slightly different words 20 years later. The Christian religion’s ‘Sanctity of its moral precepts and the innocent and obscure lives’ of the first Christians ‘should have been received with due reverence, even by the unbelieving world’ (1802: ch. xvi, opening sentence). Yet even though persecutions were comparatively rare – Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, for instance, could assert (as reported by Eusebius) that he had served Christ ‘eighty and six years’ before he was brought to trial before the Proconsul of Asia as a Christian (Historia Ecclesiastica 4.15.20)1 – there was always an underlying hostility towards the Christians. Tacitus in c. 115 ce describes them as a ‘race of people hated for their abominations’ and Christianity as a ‘deadly superstition’ (superstitio) at the time of the Neronian persecution in 64 (Annals 15.44.3), while even the heroism of the martyrs of Lyons, martyred in the amphitheatre of Lyons in August 177, evoked only uncomprehending pity among the Gallic provincials as their ashes were swept into the Rhone (HE 5.1.60, 62).
