Judaism was recognized as an official religion, and as such was exempt. I'm not sure what you mean by Jewish persecution: already in Jesus' time Judea was a Roman province.
Why did the Romans prosecute the Christians?
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Judaism was recognized as an official religion, and as such was exempt. I'm not sure what you mean by Jewish persecution: already in Jesus' time Judea was a Roman province.
Yes - you could be condemned to serve as a gladiator, which was rare, or extremely rarely 'to the beasts', meaning whatever animal they had on hand. Both were unusual, though, and Roman citizens were in theory immune from capital punishment in all but the most severe (treason and parricide) crimes, and were immune from crucifixion in all cases. So most of the people condemned to the arena would have been slaves to begin with, or else captives from wars.
I think it's a bit misleading to imagine the Roman grain dole as a 'welfare state' that totally sustained people: 'unemployment' didn't really exist in Rome, it just happened that grain prices were always too high for ordinary people to afford. The dole was a matter of finding people whose income was below a certain amount and providing them with basic foodstuffs, first at a subsidy and later for free. So there wasn't a mass of idle unemployed people with nothing to do. Games absolutely were a means of rich people (and later emperors) courting popularity, but I prefer to read them as something which powerful people had to provide in order to keep the people on side - in other words, a manifestation of the power of the masses to exert control over what some of the elite did.
Not everybody had to worship the emperor; that idea comes from a letter of Pliny to Trajan, when he's being asked what to do about the (theoretically banned) Christians in his province - Trajan suggests only bothering with the ones who bring themselves or are brought to him, and allowing them to go if they deny being Christians and worship the emperor's statue.
It's from Ignatius' letter to the Romans, the single most important document in the development of the Christian theology of martyrdom.
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How much of that is fact and how much of it is allegory, though? It's hard to ignore the similarities to Daniel. On the other hand, it's hard to deny that Romans actually killed people this way.
I don't know of any reason to doubt that Ignatius is talking literally, though he certainly gives it all spiritual meanings. It's unknown how Ignatius actually died - all we have are his letters - though I don't think anyone doubts that he did meet his end in Rome as he anticipated, though the precise method isn't known.
The other important piece of evidence for this is the letter from Vienna and Lyons, which describes Christians being killed by wild animals among other means, though I don't think it specifies the species.
The other important piece of evidence for this is the letter from Vienna and Lyons, which describes Christians being killed by wild animals among other means, though I don't think it specifies the species.
It certainly displays a rather morbid deathwish. Which apparently is pleasing to God.
I don't know if that's entirely fair. Remember that that letter was written while he was being taken, under guard, on a long journey across the empire to be judicially murdered because he wouldn't compromise on what he believed in. It was obviously written under great psychological strain. How would you make sense of that situation if you were really in it?
Ah, that rather changes things. How much of the literature of martyrdom was composed under similar circumstances?
Another text a bit like this is the martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity, which incorporates the prison journal that Perpetua wrote as she prepared for death. Here again you can see the complex and overwrought emotional state that, understandably, someone in that situation would be in - as well as the use of various animals to kill the prisoners in particularly sadistic ways.
I think texts like this and Ignatius' letter, written by people preparing for death, are relatively unusual. There's a much larger corpus of "acts" of the martyrs written in the third person, some in quite a florid and literary style, some more like terse courtroom reports. But all of these were written, at least, under the threat of arrest and execution. It could have happened to these people at any time, even when it didn't.
I think texts like this and Ignatius' letter, written by people preparing for death, are relatively unusual. There's a much larger corpus of "acts" of the martyrs written in the third person, some in quite a florid and literary style, some more like terse courtroom reports. But all of these were written, at least, under the threat of arrest and execution. It could have happened to these people at any time, even when it didn't.
Christian fantasies can take mysterious ways indeed.
I find the letter rather well-composed. And the deathwish is explicitly mentioned, and seen as a service to God.
I find the letter rather well-composed. And the deathwish is explicitly mentioned, and seen as a service to God.
