Nero is not my Hero
May 13th, 2009 | by Matthew Smith |I can’t say I know much about Nero apart from that he apparently played his fiddle while Rome burned. As far as early church history goes, he has the honour of being emperor in power when it became illegal to be a Christian in the Roman empire. There are no specific written decrees making Christianity illegal but we know that the Roman sport of executing and torturing Christians began shortly after the famous fire of Rome. Some speculate that Nero needed someone to blame the fire on because of conspiracy theories that he had ordered the fire himself. Christians were accused of being haters of people as part of the justification for their eradication. The persecution of Christians by Roman authority lasted about 200 years.
It is also believed that both Peter and Paul were executed in Rome during this time but again there are no actual records, just mentions in other documents written years later that may or may not be reliable.
I was going to write something obvious about Christians persecuting minority groups in modern times but I don’t think it compares at all to mentality or the brutality of the Roman Christian persecution. Maybe the crusades stack up.
I suppose you can draw some parallels between 9/11 and the burning of Rome with a similar flow on effect for an ethnic / religious group who were previously viewed with suspicion.
The strange thing is that Christianity continued to grow even when Christians were being persecuted, they took their religion underground and used secret codes to communicate. I wonder if the War on Terror has had a similar effect of counter-productively antagonising groups that might turn to terrorism whilst making the groups harder to track by driving them further into secrecy? It’s interesting to read the way Christians were demonised to justify their persecution. How much do we demonise those who we disapprove of today?
The next chapter looks at the secret life of Christianity during the Roman persecution.