councils, the palace, senate and forum. We have left you nothing but the temples.”43
The Time of Major Persecutions
From the first to the fourth centuries, there were twelve major imperial Roman persecutions of the Catholic Church. Many of these were confined to Rome and the surrounding areas or particular provinces, but some were Empire-wide. At times, Christians were ignored by the state, although Nero’s law against the Church remained on the books. At other times, Christians were violently persecuted because they were an identifiable minority; or because they were suspected of nefarious activity (they necessarily maintained a certain secrecy due to their illegal status); or because Romans considered them antisocial, since they tended to live close together while rejecting elements of Roman society, such as the public baths, and spectacles like the gladiatorial games. Saint Justin commented, “The world suffers nothing from Christians but hates them because they reject its pleasures.”44 Frequently, imperial politics and affairs of state determined whether Christians were persecuted or left in peace. Christians were easy scapegoats, blamed for various regional and national events. Tertullian mocked the Roman tendency to scapegoat Christians when he wrote: “If the Tiber rises too high or the Nile too low, the cry is ‘the Christians to the lion.’ All of them to a single lion?”45
The Persecution of Trajan
Early in the second century, Emperor Trajan sent a man known as Pliny (called “the Younger” to distinguish him from his well-known uncle, Pliny the Elder, who had died in the blast of Mount Vesuvius in 79) to be the imperial legate in the province of Bithynia (modern-day Turkey). Pliny the Younger was instructed to conduct a financial audit, examine local governments, stop political disorder, and investigate the military situation. Soon after his arrival in the region, a group of butchers filed a complaint against Christians. The butchers were angry because the new sect was gaining converts, which impacted their business; pagan converts to the Faith refused to buy their sacrificial meat for use in the pagan temples. Pliny knew that Christians were an illegal sect, but wondered whether he needed to initiate a new persecution. He wrote a letter to Trajan, requesting instruction. The emperor responded with a benign neglect policy, telling Pliny to not actively pursue Christians if they were quiet and not public in the manifestation of their faith. But if the Christians caused trouble, Pliny was to arrest them.46 Trajan’s sensible policy, designed to limit the unnecessary involvement of the state in private affairs, was discarded several years later when a large earthquake rocked the city of Antioch in Bithynia. Aftershocks from the earthquake continued for days, causing the city to suffer terrible destruction and many deaths. Trajan had been visiting the city and was injured when the natural disaster struck. The people were angry. They believed the pagan gods had allowed the earthquake because the city housed a significant number of Christians.47 Trajan acquiesced to the blood lust of the people and ordered a persecution of Christians in the city. He arrested the long-standing and well-known bishop of the city, Ignatius. The elderly bishop, who had direct apostolic ties as a disciple of Saint John the Evangelist, had overseen the Antiochene Christian community for three decades. Trajan wanted to make an example of Ignatius, so he commanded the bishop be taken to Rome under armed guard and executed in the Flavian amphitheater. That decision proved providential for the history of the Church, since during his long journey to the capital Ignatius wrote letters to six Christian communities (the Ephesians, Magnesians, Trallians, Romans, Philadelphians, and Smyrnaeans), and to one fellow bishop, Saint Polycarp.
These letters not only provide detail into the life of the early Church, but also illustrate Ignatius’s deep love of Christ and the Church. His letters verify early Christian belief in the central doctrines of the Faith, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Divinity of Christ, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and the hierarchical structure of the Church (unified by the primacy of the bishop of Rome).48 Ignatius uses special language in his letter to the Romans, referring to the Roman Church as “worthy of God, worthy of honor, worthy of being called blessed, worthy of praise, worthy of success, worthy of veneration.”49 Ignatius was concerned that influential members of the Church in Rome might try to intervene on his behalf and prevent his martyrdom. He had embraced his cross and desired to fulfill the Lord’s plan for the end of this earthy life, writing, “God’s wheat I am, and by the teeth of wild beasts I am to be ground that I may prove Christ’s pure bread.”50 Ignatius also exhorted his fellow Christians to remain obedient to their bishops and priests. He gave the Church her name — the Catholic Church — when he wrote to the Smyrnaeans, “Where the bishop appears, there let the people be, just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”51 Ignatius’s letter to the Philadelphians contains one of the earliest references to the belief in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. The Sacred Liturgy was the center of Christian life in the early Church, and Ignatius exhorted his brothers and sisters to “take care, then, to partake of one Eucharist, for, one is the Flesh of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and one the cup to unite us with His Blood.”52 This man of deep faith and love for the Church arrived in Rome and was martyred by lions in the Colosseum in the year 116.53
Early Heresies
The early Church dealt not only with external Roman persecution, but also with internal persecution in the form of false teachings, known as heresies. One of the earliest falsehoods that sought to reshape the Church’s fundamental teachings was Gnosticism (from the Greek gnosis, which means “knowledge”). Gnostics held to a negative view of the material world and believed it was the creation of an evil god, whereas spiritual things were positive and the work of a benevolent god. The dualist construct of the Gnostics presented the history of the world as a battle between the God of Goodness and Light and the God of Evil and Darkness. They believed that human souls were good (because they were spiritual) but imprisoned in evil, material human bodies.
Gnosticism was an ancient belief that predated the Faith and proved resilient because it assimilated teachings of various religions in order to accumulate adherents. It attempted to present Jesus as a spiritual being who only appeared human (thus denying the Incarnation) and who came to earth to provide the way to free the spirit from the evils of the material world. Those who joined the group were promised this secret knowledge of Jesus. Gnostics did not practice baptism and did not hold to the centrality of the Eucharist, since a good spiritual god would never imprison his presence in an evil material object. Their rejection of the material world led to the renunciation of marriage and the sexual act between man and woman — that union, in their eyes, might result in a good soul’s imprisonment in an evil body in the form of an infant. Additionally, their view of material things led to the bizarre belief that the highest form of worship was suicide, which freed the good soul from the bad body.54
The early Christian bishop Irenaeus (140–202), born in Smyrna, was a disciple of Saint Polycarp, who in turn had been a disciple of Saint John the Evangelist. Irenaeus was the bishop of Lyons in the imperial province of Gaul (modern-day France). He was an exceptional scholar, educated at Rome in philosophy and literature. He oriented his writing on the tasks of defending “true doctrine from the attacks of heretics” and explaining “the truth of the faith clearly.”55 In Against Heresies, his elaborate five-part survey of Gnosticism, he accurately identified the core teaching of the heresy: the origin of evil.56 Gnosticism sought to explain why evil exists in the world by attributing evil to material things. Irenaeus refuted this tenet by illustrating that the origin of evil is the wrong use of free will. Evil exists because men and women, given free will by a loving Creator, choose to perform evil actions — there is nothing inherently evil about material things.
Irenaeus also included a list of the Roman pontiffs, beginning with Saint Peter and ending with the reigning pope at the time of his writing, Eleutherius (r. 175–189). Interestingly, only four of the thirteen popes listed were born in the city of Rome, which illustrates the universality of the Church at this early stage. Irenaeus also presented the features of a true Church, in order to help Christians and new converts discern
