The Faith Rome Could Not Kill
Please Pray For Us
By Norman L. Bliss
Volume One -A – Before the Fire
Volume One – B – Before the Fire
From the Ministry of Jesus to AD 303
Jesus, the apostles, Resurrection, Pentecost, Paul, Nero, destruction of Jerusalem, early martyrs, development of the New Testament, church growth, Decius and Valerian.
Volume Two – C – The Great Persecution
AD 303–313
Diocletian, Galerius, destruction of churches, burning of Scripture, imprisonment, torture, martyrs, Christians who surrendered their books, the traditores, Constantine, and finally the government saying, in effect, “Please pray for us.”
Volume Three – D – The Faith That Outlived Rome
Volume Three – E – The Faith That Outlived Rome
AD 313 to Today
Constantine, Nicaea, Christianity becoming powerful, fall of Rome, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Islam, Crusades, Reformation, science, missions, slavery, world wars, communism, modern persecution, Christianity today, and finally artificial intelligence and the future
Introduction
Imagine standing in the Roman Empire near the beginning of the fourth century.
Rome appears almost permanent.
Its armies cross continents.
Its roads stretch across the known world.
Its emperors command millions of people.
Its officials collect taxes, enforce laws, punish criminals, and govern enormous territories from Britain to North Africa and from Spain to the Middle East.
Its temples honor gods that Romans have worshiped for generations.
And somewhere inside this enormous empire is a religious movement that began with a crucified Jewish teacher.
That movement is Christianity.
To understand how strange that would have seemed, we have to return almost three hundred years.
Jesus of Nazareth lived in a small part of the Roman Empire called Judea and Galilee.
Rome had conquered the region long before his ministry began.
Roman officials held political power, while Jewish religious leaders continued to guide much of the religious life of the people.
The Jewish people believed in one God.
Rome was filled with many gods.
Those two worlds existed beside one another, but not always comfortably.
Then Jesus appeared.
He preached about the Kingdom of God.
He gathered followers.
He spoke about repentance, forgiveness, mercy, justice, faith, and eternal life.
Crowds followed him.
Some believed he was a prophet.
Others believed he was the Messiah.
His followers eventually made an even greater claim.
They believed Jesus was the Son of God.
Rome eventually executed him by crucifixion.
That should have destroyed his movement.
If Jesus had simply died and his followers had gone home, there would have been no Christian Church, no New Testament, no Great Persecution, no Constantine, no medieval cathedrals, no Protestant Reformation, and no Christianity today.
But his followers did not go home.
They claimed something extraordinary had happened.
They said:
Jesus had risen from the dead.
Whatever a reader personally believes about the Resurrection, its importance to history cannot be ignored.
The earliest Christians believed it.
They preached it.
They traveled because of it.
Some eventually died rather than deny it.
The message moved from Jerusalem into the wider Roman world.
One of Christianity’s greatest missionaries was a man who had once tried to stop it.
Saul of Tarsus, later known as Paul, traveled through cities of the Roman Empire establishing churches and writing letters to Christian communities.
Those letters would eventually become part of the New Testament.
The Roman Empire itself unintentionally helped Christianity spread.
Rome had built roads for soldiers and trade.
Christians used them.
Roman shipping carried goods across the Mediterranean.
Christian travelers used those routes.
Greek was widely understood throughout the eastern Roman world.
Christians used it to preach and write.
Cities created by Rome became places where churches could form.
In a strange way, the empire eventually used to persecute Christianity had already built much of the system Christianity used to spread.
But growth brought attention.
Christians refused to worship the traditional Roman gods.
They refused to treat the emperor as divine.
To Christians, there was only one God.
Jesus was Lord.
That statement could carry consequences in a society where religion, government, and loyalty to Rome were closely connected.
Christians were accused of being atheists because they rejected Roman gods.
Rumors spread about their private gatherings.
Some Romans considered them strange.
Others considered them dangerous.
Then persecution began.
It did not happen continuously everywhere.
That is important.
For nearly three centuries, there was no single uninterrupted Roman campaign to kill every Christian.
Sometimes Christians lived relatively peacefully.
Sometimes local officials ignored them.
Sometimes emperors targeted them.
Sometimes persecution became severe.
Nero became one of the first emperors connected with major Christian persecution after the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64.
Later came other periods of pressure and persecution.
Under Decius, people throughout the empire were ordered to sacrifice for Rome.
Under Valerian, Christian leaders were targeted.
Some Christians died.
Some survived.
Some gave in.
And still the Church grew.
Each generation created another generation.
The people who personally knew Jesus died.
Then those who knew the apostles died.
But Christian writings survived.
The Gospels circulated.
Paul’s letters circulated.
Churches copied them and passed them from one congregation to another.
Bishops and other church leaders became increasingly important.
Christian communities developed stronger organization.
By the late third century, Christianity was no longer simply a handful of frightened believers hiding in Jerusalem.
It had spread through cities across the empire.
There were Christian families.
Christian merchants.
Christian soldiers.
Christian government workers.
Christian clergy.
Christian intellectuals.
Christian widows.
Christian children.
Some congregations possessed buildings and property.
The movement Rome had once been able to dismiss had become much harder to ignore.
That brings us to the central tension of Volume One.
Christianity did not defeat Rome with weapons.
It did not overthrow Roman governors.
It did not conquer territory.
It simply continued existing.
Every attempt to frighten Christians into disappearing failed to make the faith disappear completely.
One believer taught another.
One family taught its children.
One manuscript was copied into another.
One church planted another church.
One martyr inspired another believer.
And slowly Christianity became something Rome would have to confront.
By AD 303, Emperor Diocletian and his fellow rulers would make a decision that changed Christian history.
They would attempt to break the Church.
Christian buildings would be demolished.
Christian Scriptures would be seized and burned.
Christian clergy would be arrested.
Eventually Christians would be commanded to sacrifice.
Rome possessed almost everything Christianity did not possess:
armies,
money,
courts,
prisons,
political authority,
and the power of the state.
Christianity possessed something Rome discovered was much more difficult to destroy:
belief.
Volume One is the story of how that belief traveled from Galilee to the far reaches of the Roman Empire.
It is the story of how twelve apostles became thousands of believers.
How a cross that represented Roman execution became Christianity’s greatest symbol.
How handwritten books survived.
How frightened communities became churches.
And how a faith born without political power eventually became important enough that the most powerful empire in the world decided it had to be stopped.
Volume One ends in AD 303.
The soldiers are coming. The Scriptures are about to burn.
And the Great Persecution is about to begin.