have historical knowledge of the Great Persecution from three main sources: the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea and Lactantius (c. 250–c. 330), and the Acts of the Martyrs. Eusebius was an eyewitness to the persecutions in Palestine and Egypt. He wrote of the violence in his works Ecclesiastical History and The Martyrs of Palestine. Lactantius was a North African teacher of rhetoric who became the tutor to Constantine’s son Crispus. He wrote about the Great Persecution in his De mortibus persecutorum, positing the belief that emperors who persecuted the Church ended their lives in a violent and horrible fashion as punishment from God. The Acts of the Martyrs was a compilation of stories about the martyrs. Verbal transcripts of exchanges between arrested Christians and Roman officials, eyewitness accounts, and even imaginary narratives were utilized in crafting these works. These sources allowed later Christians to understand the ferocity unleashed by the Roman Empire on the Church in the early fourth century.
Christians who suffered through the Great Persecution were divided into groups, depending on how they responded during the crisis. Some refused to give in to the edicts requiring submission to the pagan gods and, as a result, were killed for the Faith. Known as martyrs (“witnesses”), these brave Christians suffered horrible deaths by fire, wild beasts, beheading, and other manners of painful death. Not every Christian arrested during the persecutions died, but many, known as the confessors, were imprisoned and suffered the tortures of racking, beating, scourging, or having their fingernails ripped out. Christian women were frequently sent to brothels. Men were oftentimes sent to the mines, where the tendon of their left foot was cauterized to prevent escape. Those who toiled in the mines also had their right eye ripped out, and the wound burned with a hot iron. Sometimes they suffered the horror of castration. Despite their harsh treatment, Christians in the mines (who were ministered to by clandestine aid from their brethren) continued to preach the Gospel and brought fellow prisoners to Christ. Unfortunately, under extreme stress, some Christians gave in to the dictates of the persecution edicts and apostatized. They were known as traditores (“traitors”) from the Latin tradere, “to hand over.” There were different classes of traditore — those who handed over copies of the sacred Scripture, those who handed over the sacred vessels used in the celebration of Mass, and those who revealed the names of Christians who had such items in their possession. The extensive destruction of copies of the Scriptures during the Great Persecution was remembered for centuries. Finally, some Christians, known as the lapsi, gave in during the persecutions and, after they ended, desired readmittance. The subsequent discussion of how to handle their request for return to communion dominated the early life of the Church, in essence centering on whether the Church was a “society of saints or a school for sinners.”81
The question of how to handle the lapsi was an issue after the first general persecution under Emperor Decius in the mid-third century. Pope Saint Cornelius (r. 251–253) believed it was his pastoral duty to restore to communion those who fell during the persecution. He thought their participation in the Eucharist, after a suitable period of penance, would strengthen them in the event of future attacks. Saint Cyprian (200–258), bishop of Carthage, also believed the Church should follow the road of mercy for the lapsi. During the Decian persecution, Cyprian had fled his see and was criticized for abandoning his flock. After the persecution ended, Cyprian focused on restoring unity in his diocese by urging mercy and patience, especially for the lapsi. He gathered fellow bishops in North Africa in a local council to discuss the lapsi. They decided that those who had received the libellus but did not personally sacrifice could be readmitted to communion after a period of penance. Those who had sacrificed were required to undertake a prolonged period of penance and could be reconciled on their deathbeds.82 When the persecution under Valerian began, Cyprian refused to leave Carthage and became the first African bishop martyred during the persecution. Both Cornelius and Cyprian imitated the Lord’s mercy in their dealings with the lapsi, and their example set the policy for the Church in later persecutions. Their emphasis on unity and mercy — as opposed to the rigorists, who wanted permanent expulsion of the lapsi — helped the Church settle this critical question. As a result, the Church honors their sanctity by a shared feast day (September 16) on the liturgical calendar.
The Great Persecution of Diocletian witnessed the martyrdoms of saints such as Agnes, a young virgin; Sebastian, a centurion; and Lucy, a young woman betrayed to the authorities by her betrothed. The killing was especially terrible in North Africa, where Eusebius recorded the extermination of entire towns populated by Christians. Indeed, he records that “so many were killed on a single day that the axe, blunted and worn out by the slaughter, was broken in pieces, while the exhausted executioners had to be periodically relieved.”83 The torments and methods of execution were horrific, as Eusebius describes in his Ecclesiastical History:
Immense numbers of men, women, and children, despising this transient life, faced death in all its forms for the sake of our Savior’s teaching. Some were scraped, racked, mercilessly flogged, subjected to countless other torments too terrible to describe in endless variety, and finally given to the flames; some were submerged in the sea; others cheerfully stretched out their necks to the headman’s axe; some died under torture; others were starved to death; others again were crucified, some as criminals usually are, some with still greater cruelty nailed the other way up, head down, and kept alive till they starved to death on the very cross.84
The Great Persecution ended because Diocletian wanted to retire to his cabbage farm in Dalmatia. He abdicated in 305, becoming the first emperor to voluntarily give up power. His caesar, Galerius, succeeded him in accordance with the dictates of the tetrarchy. Galerius reigned for a few years, until he died from the effects of venereal disease. Before he died, Galerius issued an edict of toleration of Christians, in the hopes that their prayers might assuage God to spare him during his illness (since prayers for his recovery to the pagan gods had had no effect on his health).85 This act of desperation provided for the freedom of worship and conscience for Christians in the Roman Empire, but did not yet provide the Church with legal rights to exist as a corporate body.
Surveying the death and destruction wrought on the family of God by the Roman persecutions leads to the question, “Why?” Why did God allow this massacre to take place? Why, in the very infancy of the Church, when she was seemingly at her most vulnerable, did the Lord allow such ferocious violence against his Mystical Body? Tertullian provides the answer: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of Christians.”86 The experience of the persecution laid the foundation for the eventual conversion of the Empire. The Church would grow from a hunted sect to an official state religion in just over three hundred years. The conversion of the Roman Empire, one of the most monumental events in the history of the world, was made possible by the witness of those early Christians who stood firm in the midst of persecution, motivated by their love of Christ and his Church.
1. xsThe Didache. Translated from the Greek text by Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1884, accessed September 18, 2018, http://reluctant-messenger.com/didache.htm.
2. See Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, revised edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 78.
3. For total population of the Empire, see Adrian Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 41. For percentage of the population who lived in cities, see Peter S. Wells, Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), 72.
4. See Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith (Rockford, IL: TAN Books and Publishers, Inc., 1992 [1920]), 22.
5. See Brennan Pursell, History in His Hands: A Christian Narrative of the West (New York: Crossroad, 2011), 81.
6. See Tim Gray and Jeff Cavins, Walking with God: A Journey through the Bible (West Chester, PA: Ascension Press, 2010), 287.
7. Examples include
