Now As Then: the Persecution of The Faithful
We live in an age when ignorance reigns in the hearts of men. Young people are routinely subjected to a diet of revisionist history, and so substantially embrace the biases of their social studies teachers that they, blinded to the similarities between their own fascist tendencies and their ideological brethren, robustly resemble members of the Hitlerjugend or the Bund Deutsche Mädel.
Aged agnostics, and not particularly honest ones at that, accord more force to their doubt and often times bizarre near-conspiracy-theory beliefs than surrender those same weird biases to the cleansing perspective of history provided by reliable contemporaries of historical events. Modern armchair historians swat away ancient reports like annoying flies rather than understand that, not being troublesome insects, those same accounts could teach them something about themselves, something about their bigotry, for starters.
It might do them well, those armchair historians and fascist youngsters, to ponder the article cited below, lest their shameful attitudes expand and they become accomplices in the spread of anti-Christian attacks such those recent attacks in Sri Lanka.
The first-century Roman senator who wrote about Jesus’ crucifixion
John Burger
Apr 08, 2019
Tacitus describes Nero's persecution of Christians, and affirms the crucifixion of Christ.
Tacitus is known for his chronicles of the Roman Empire, but he was also a high official in Rome’s imperial administration. Among the many stepping stones he had in his career, there is one that, in light of Christian history, suggests why he might have included a certain Jesus of Nazareth in his famous history, the Annals.
In A.D. 88, at the age of 22, Tacitus “became a praetor and a member of the priestly college that kept the Sibylline Books of prophecy and supervised foreign-cult practice,” the Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us.
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Tacitus refers to the Christians of Rome in the context of the great Roman fire of A.D. 64. He says that to dispel rumors that Nero was to blame for the fire, he:
… fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.
He then describes the torture of Christians:
Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty, that they were being destroyed.
The 2018 film Paul, Apostle of Christ makes use of this detail. As St. Luke, portrayed by Jim Caviezel, furtively makes his way through the streets of Rome in order to visit the Christian community there, we catch a glimpse of a man tied to the side of a building, about to be set on fire in order to illumine the darkened streets.
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