The idea that Christians were thrown to the lions for sport is a caricature. The reality is more complicated, and more interesting. For most of the first two and a half centuries, Christians in the Roman Empire were not systematically hunted. Persecution was sporadic, local, and dependent on the actions of individual governors and mobs. When it came, it came with the full force of Roman law, and it was designed to terrorize.
The Legal Basis
The Roman state did not originally have a law against Christianity. Christians were prosecuted under more general categories: superstitio (excessive religion), atheism (denial of the gods), and odium generis humani (hatred of the human race).
The key document is Pliny the Younger’s letter to Trajan, around 110–112 AD. Pliny was governor of Bithynia-Pontus and had received anonymous accusations against Christians. He wrote to Trajan asking how to proceed. Trajan’s reply became the legal framework for the next century.
Trajan’s Reply to Pliny, c. 112 AD
“You have taken the right line, my dear Pliny, in examining the cases of those who were accused to you as Christians, for no general rule can be laid down as if it were a fixed standard. They are not to be sought out; but if they are accused and convicted, they must be punished — yet on this condition, that whoso denies himself to be a Christian, and makes the fact plain by his action, that is, by worshipping our gods, shall obtain pardon on his repentance, however suspicious his past conduct may have been.”
Trajan, in Pliny, Letters 10.97
The framework: do not seek out Christians, but if accused and convicted, punish them. Denial of Christ and sacrifice to the gods was sufficient for release. This was the legal situation until the empire-wide persecutions of the mid-third century.
The Great Persecutions
Persecution was not continuous. It came in waves, some local, some imperial.
The Major Persecutions
How Many Died?
The popular image of Christians thrown to lions in vast numbers is not historically accurate. Modern estimates of the total number of Christian martyrs over the 250 years before Constantine range from about 5,000 to 100,000. That is a substantial number, but it is not millions.
What mattered more than the numbers was the spectacle. Persecution was designed to be public. It was meant to terrorize other Christians into recanting and to reassure pagans that the gods were being honored. The torture and execution of a bishop like Polycarp, in front of a crowd, was a message to the whole city.
From the Roman perspective, the Christians were a genuine threat to civic order. The gods had blessed Rome for a thousand years, and the prosperity of the empire depended on their continued favor. Christians refused to participate in the civic religion, which many Romans understood as a form of atheism that would bring divine punishment on everyone. The persecution was not (at least not primarily) motivated by hatred of Jesus. It was motivated by a defense of the social order.
The Effect of Persecution
Persecution did not destroy the Christian movement. It did the opposite. Tertullian famously wrote that “the blood of the martyrs is seed” (semen est sanguis christianorum). The spectacle of Christians dying with courage for their faith impressed even hostile observers, and it drove Christians to define their faith more clearly.
But persecution also produced crises. Under Decius, thousands of Christians complied with the imperial decree and obtained their libelli. When the persecution ended, the question of what to do with the lapsi (those who had lapsed) became one of the most divisive debates in the early church. The Novatianist schism, in the mid-third century, was a direct result.
Why Persecution Matters
Persecution is one of the most important historical facts about the early Christian movement. It explains why Christians were so visible. It explains why the church developed a strong culture of martyrdom. It explains why the move from sporadic persecution to imperial toleration (under Constantine, 313 AD) was so transformative.
The reader who understands the legal and social context of Roman persecution will read the stories of the martyrs with more clarity. They are not the product of a church that had all the power. They are the product of a church that had none, and that refused to compromise anyway.
See the Martyrs page for the primary sources on Stephen, James, Peter, Paul, Ignatius, and Polycarp, and the Growth page for the demographic evidence.
