The Second-Century Apologists. Alvyn Pettersen
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of Christians, however, were, in all probability, people of humbler origin, free men and women who might well have had at least some slaves. Some of these slaves, in all probability, also were Christians, people who along with the poor and the outcast had been attracted to Christianity because it offered them both a dignity, as children of God, and an otherworldly security, which this world denied them. In recognizing neither rich nor poor, free nor slave, but all one in Christ, the churches were therefore cutting across society’s distinctions, even divisions of class and profession. They were challenging a concept of stability to which Greco-Roman society generally adhered.
The family in which the paterfamilias exercised almost complete authority was integral to society then; so too was the distinction between “free” and “slave.” The church, however, struck at the family—a Christian mother was encouraged not to allow her non-Christian husband to rule unchecked over her children. Certain churches even allowed her to divorce such a husband. The church—even though there is early evidence of churches regularly stressing that being “one amongst equals” in the eyes of God should not be used to justify the breaking down of a household’s conventional hierarchy16—was also perceived as undermining the separation of “free” from “slave.” So, the church was thought by many in society to be striking at society’s general stability. In short, the church’s inclusivity, founded upon and informed by its belief in one God, cut across the social and economic homogeneity of second-century Greco-Roman society.
As noted, during the second century Christians seem not to have been pursued, neither systematically, nor continuously, nor for very long. When they were, some of the authorities before whom they were brought wished those accused of being Christians to deny their faith. So, for example, the proconsul, trying the arrested Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna in AD 156, repeatedly stated that, if Polycarp were to “curse Christ,” he would be released;17 and Pliny, in a letter of AD 112, reported to the emperor Trajan that he had tested that those accused of being Christians by requiring them to “curse Christ.”18 The majority, however, of the authorities before whom those accused of being Christians were brought did not demand a denial of faith. Rather, not appreciating the Christians’s strict monotheism, they required them to recognize the Christian God as one god amongst many others. They sought Christian involvement in not only Christian worship but also the empire’s cult, especially in its sacrificial system. Such they sought; and they were bemused when Christians resisted what they sought. This was partly because, as noted earlier, the empire understood religion in terms of rites and rituals, not ideas and beliefs, and so could not understand why Christian ideas and beliefs stood in the way of their being willing to engage in a sacrificial rite.
The empire’s bemusement was then deepened by the practices of the Jews and of those Christians, generically called gnostics. The Jews, the empire was aware, were willing to make a public act of sacrifice for the emperor, even though they were unwilling to sacrifice to the imperial cult; but Christians, perceived in some sense as an “offshoot” of Judaism, had no system of public sacrifices. Christians, the empire was told, did pray for the emperor; but the empire’s officials could see no obvious proof of this. To people accustomed to seeing religion as a formal, public duty, involving doing something very overtly, being told that Christians said a prayer in the privacy of a house church must have seemed somewhat unsatisfactory, certainly in contrast with the doing involved in the Jews’ public act of sacrificing for the emperor, if not wholly insufficient.
Some Christians, the empire was also aware, whilst they did not step forward to offer to sacrifice to the gods of the cults, did not, when required to sacrifice, refuse to sacrifice. What the empire did not appreciate was that these Christians, gnostics, unlike catholics, were of the opinion that the world of matter and of history was completely inconsequential. Some of these therefore abstained as rigorously as possible from the inconsequential world of matter and history. These gnostics would never sacrifice to the gods of the cults. Other gnostics, however, also believing that the world of matter and history was completely inconsequential, maintained therefore that they could be so lax in their relationship to matter that any historical act, sacrificing to the gods included, could be done, without that act, in any way whatsoever, affecting their salvation. Whereas catholic Christians would have viewed sacrificing to the gods of the imperial cults as committing the unforgiveable sin of crucifying again their already-crucified Savior,19 this latter group of gnostic Christians saw such an act as not even insignificant, but void of value. When faced with the readiness of such gnostic Christians, when asked, to sacrifice, civic authorities would not have easily understood why all Christians would not, when asked, offer sacrifices to the gods of the empire.
That incomprehension, especially when put alongside both a concentration upon rites and rituals rather than beliefs and syncretic, pluralist theologies, may help to explain, though not excuse, why prosecuting officials and their supporters sometimes forsook persuasion and took to threats in their attempt to elicit a sacrifice to the gods of their cults.
Vibia Perpetua, a twenty-two year old with an infant child at her breast, came from a religiously divided family. She, her brother, Dinocrates, and her slave, Felicitas, were Christian catechumens. Her father, mother, aunt, and other brother were pagans. In AD 202 or AD 203, Perpetua was brought before the procurator Hilarianus in Carthage and ordered to make a sacrifice.20 Pleas and threats ensued. Yet not even the pleas nor the threats of her father, the paterfamilias—whose will, pagans assumed, was always to be obeyed by his children—resulted in the desired obedience and sacrifice. So Perpetua and Felicitas were killed.
Some forty-six years earlier, in AD 156, Polycarp, the eighty-six-year-old bishop of Smyrna, although widely held in high esteem, was charged with being a Christian. On the way from the farm house in which he was found to the amphitheater in Smyrna where he was to be killed, the arresting police chief sought to persuade Polycarp to do something, anything, which might have saved his life. People searched for a convenient form of words that might have spared Polycarp. They suggested that he said, “away with the atheists,” by which they meant “away with the Christians who denied the gods of the empire.” He complied, saying, “away with the atheists,” by which he meant, “away with the pagans, who denied the one, true God of the Christians.” Subsequent demands of Polycarp he would not grant; and so he was killed.
Even allowing for the possibility that such accounts as these of Perpetua’s and Polycarp’s martyrdoms were written in such a manner as to encourage resistance to both smooth and harsh words which sought to lead Christians into ways that all Christians should resist, these accounts do suggest the degree of incomprehension on the part of pagan officials, demanding sacrifices, when faced with what they saw as Christian obstinacy. What Christians believed or did not believe, especially as “belief” or “faith” was thought to be the lowest form of cognition by those brought up on classical Greek philosophy, was of little concern. What was of concern to the local officials was a gesture, literally a gesture of honor to the cult, and an acceptance of a widely held religious tradition. One can almost hear their plaintiff cry, “We are not asking you to forsake the worship of your god. We are simply asking you to honor our gods as well.” For, in short, the official powers wanted peace and stability, not martyrs for a faith.
It was in this wider context that Christians began to write “apologies,” explaining and, to some extent, defending their worship and way of life. Their themes already are outlined in Bishop Polycarp’s conversation with the proconsul of Asia in the amphitheater in Smyrna in AD 156. In Polycarp’s looking “up to heaven and [saying], away with the atheists,” he was highlighting both the Christians’s commitment to the one God of the Gospels—“heaven,” to which Polycarp lifted his eyes, being a frequent circumlocution for “God”—and their resistance to that “atheism” that denied the one true God in its exchanging the worship of the Creator for that of creation, as embodied in the cultic statues before which sacrifices were offered. In offering the proconsul an opportunity to learn the doctrines of Christianity, Polycarp was seeking both to be open and transparent, not secretive, and to give the lie to the rumors that Christians engaged in immorality and cannibalism. In telling the proconsul that Christians “have been taught to render honor, as is proper, if it does not hurt