Candida Moss “The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented A Story of Martyrdom”   Harper one, 2013, 262 pp. (Plus addl. 33 pgs. of notes)

In The Myth of Persecution, Candida Moss, a leading expert on early Christianity and a professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame, documents how the early church exaggerated, invented, and forged stories of Christian martyrs and how the dangerous legacy of a martyrdom complex is employed in the U.S. today to silence dissent.

According to church tradition, before the Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal in the fourth century, early Christians were systematically persecuted by a brutal Roman Empire intent on their destruction. Allegedly, vast numbers of believers were thrown to the lions, tortured, or burned alive because they refused to renounce Christ.  Moss, however, exposes that the "Age of Martyrs" is a fiction—there was no sustained 300-year-long effort by the Romans to persecute Christians. Instead, these stories were exaggerations; they were rewritings of Jewish, Greek, and Roman noble death traditions; and some are forgeries designed to marginalize heretics, inspire the faithful, and fund churches and communities by the tourism attracted.

My Notes:

Pg 4:  Since the death of Jesus, hundreds of thousands of Christians have been hailed as martyrs.  A recent study estimates that over the course of the past two thousand years as many as seventy million Christians have allegedly died for their beliefs—more than the total number of fatalities in WWII. 

Pg. 7:  For the first three hundred years of its existence, the tradition maintains, Christianity was a persecuted and suffering religion.  In this so-called Age of the Martyrs, its members were allegedly hunted down and executed.  Women and children were thrown to the lions and boiled alive in cauldrons.  The history of early Christianity is a history of victimization and pain.  Yet, Christianity survived, and with the ascension of the Roman emperor Constantine in 313 CE Christians at last had the freedom to practice their religion in peace.

Pg. 9:  Martyrdom is easily adapted by the powerful as a way of casting themselves as victims and justifying their polemical and vitriolic attacks on others.  When disagreement is viewed as persecution, then these innocent sufferers must fight—rhetorically and literally—to defend themselves.  From Rick Santorum’s statement in 2008 that “Satan is attacking the great institutions of America” to Rick Perry’s campaign promise to “end Obama’s war on religion,” the idea that Christians are under attack is pervasive.  In 2012, Daniel R. Jenky, the bishop of Peoria, Illinois, during his sermon challenged his audience to practice “heroic Catholicism.”  He defined this as voting against the Obama administration and opposing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services mandate.  He implicitly compared Obama, Hitler, and Stalin: “Barack Obama—with his radical, pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda—now seems intent on following a similar path” as other governments throughout history who “have tried to force Christians to huddle and hide only within the confines of their churches.”  Jenky singled out the Nazi and Stalinist regimes ass antecedents to Obama’s health-care reforms.  He went on: “For 2,000 years the enemies of Christ have certainly tried their best.  The Church survived and even flourished during centuries of terrible persecution…”  If you are not with us, he implies, you are with the devil, Judas, Hitler, and Stalin.

Pg. 16:  Scholars of early Christianity agree that there is very little evidence for the persecution of Christians.  For the first two hundred and fifty year of the Christian era there are only six martyrdom accounts that can be treated as reliable.  And, when examined closely, even these six stories reveal they have been significantly edited and changed. 

Pg. 129:  Between the death of Jesus around 30 CE and the ascension of Constantine in 313, Christians died as a result of active measures by the imperial government only (1) immediately following the Great Fire of Rome in 64, (2) around 250, during the reign of Decius, (3) briefly during the reign of Valerian in 257-58, and (4) during the “Great Persecution” under the emperor Diocletian, which lasted from 303 to 305 and was renewed by Maximinus Daia between 311 and 313.  These dates represent the largest time span for active persecution in the period before Constantine.  This was fewer than ten years out of nearly three hundred.

Pg. 136:  We simply don’t know how any of the apostles died, much less whether they were martyred.  There are fifteen different versions of the deaths of the apostles Peter and Paul that were written before the end of the sixth century. 

Pg. 144:  In a famous episode in Asia Minor around 185 CE, a mob of Christians marched to the home of h governor and demanded to be executed.  The irritated governor told them that if they wanted to die, they had cliffs to leap off and ropes with which to hang themselves.  However, this is an isolated example, there are no records of incidents like this in other sources until the late fourth century. 

Pg. 163:  Although persecution was rare, dislike of Christians was fairly widespread, and some Christians were in fact put to death by Romans merely for being Christians.  However, Romans in contrast to the ancient Assyrians were known for being comparatively beneficent rulers.  It is worth examining what it was about Christians that was so objectionable to the Romans.  When we talk about persecution, we often assume that it has no basis in logic, that it is sustained by rumor, fear, prejudice, and irrationality.  Romans saw themselves not as persecutors, but prosecutors. 

Pg. 180:  In the ancient world, as today, superstition and religion were conceptually distinct categories.  We tend to think of superstition as nonrational, unproven, unscientific, and traditional, whereas religion is institutionalized and systematized.  The distinction has less to do with the content of religion and superstition than the way that people are evaluating that content.  (You may want to reread the above paragraph!)

Pg. 194:  The earliest record of Christians coming to see voluntary martyrdom as a bad thing came from Clement of Alexandria, a Christian philosopher who fled Alexandria out of fear of arrest around 202 CE.  He denounces voluntary martyrdom as something done by heretics.  The decisive shift came with Augustine in his City of God where he denounced voluntary martyrdom as suicidal and argued that the Bible prohibited it. 

Pg. 200:  This persecution complex becomes a real problem in settings where Christians are not the underdogs.  This danger was acutely realized during the Crusades.  In 1095 Pope Urban II called upon all Christians to join in a war against the Turks, promising a remission of sins for those who participated.  He stated in a speech that the new war “contains the glorious reward of martyrdom.” This began a series of religious wars, nine in total that lasted into the thirteenth century.  That Christians could see their actions, which ranged from warfare to pogroms, as holy war and martyrdom illustrates just how dangerous this worldview can be.  It’s a lesson that we should heed today.  There is always the possibility that we have no sense of our own position in a conflict.  Even though we cast ourselves as martyrs, we might be Crusaders.

Pg. 208:  The earliest followers of Jesus did not initially think about the fate of the dead.  They thought that Jesus would return, bringing about the end of the world, within their own lifetimes.  Jesus had told them, “There are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power” (Mark 9:1; Matt 16:28; Luke 9:27) 

Pg. 209:  Martyrs, as a reward, bypassed the interim period between death and the Day of Judgment.  They did not have to sleep in the ground or wait in purgatory or some other shadowy realm for the second coming.  Their fate was already positively decided.

Pg. 216:  The ideal of the persecuted church truly developed in the fourth century and later.  The credit seems to lie with historians like Eusebius of Caesarea, Christianity’s first great church historian, and with anonymous hagiographers who preserved, edited, and invented the overwhelming majority of the martyrdom stories we have today. 

Pg. 234:  The reasons of the explosion in martyrdom literature were largely connected to the emergence of the cult of the saints in late antiquity.  The tourist industry surrounding martyrs was in its infancy; by the end of the fourth century the presence of a saint’s remains in a town was enough to entice wealthy pilgrims to it.