C — Christianisme

Historical inquiries into Christianity.

Several scholars have expressed surprise at finding no trace of Jesus Christ in the historian Josephus, for everyone now agrees that the short passage mentioning him in his history is interpolated. Yet Josephus’ father must have been one of the witnesses to all Jesus’ miracles. Josephus was of priestly descent, related to Queen Mariamne, Herod’s wife; he enters into the greatest detail about all that prince’s actions, yet says not a word of either Jesus’ life or death. And this historian, who conceals none of Herod’s cruelties, does not mention the massacre of all the children ordered by him after news reached him that a king of the Jews had been born. The Greek calendar counts fourteen thousand children slaughtered on that occasion.

Of all the actions of all tyrants, this is the most horrible. There is no parallel in the history of the entire world.

Yet the best writer the Jews ever had, the only one esteemed by Romans and Greeks, makes no mention of this event, as extraordinary as it is appalling. He says nothing of the new star that appeared in the East after the Savior’s birth, a brilliant phenomenon that ought not to have escaped so enlightened a historian as Josephus. He is also silent about the darkness that covered the whole earth at midday for three hours at the Savior’s death; about the great number of tombs that opened at that moment, and the multitude of the just who rose from the dead.

Scholars continually express their surprise that no Roman historian spoke of these prodigies, which occurred under the empire of Tiberius, before the eyes of a Roman governor and a Roman garrison, who ought to have sent the emperor and senate a circumstantial account of the most miraculous event men had ever heard of. Rome itself must have been plunged into thick darkness for three hours; this prodigy ought to have been recorded in Rome’s annals and in those of every nation. God did not wish these divine things to be written by profane hands.

These same scholars also find certain difficulties in the history of the Gospels. They observe that in St. Matthew, Jesus Christ tells the scribes and Pharisees that all the innocent blood shed on earth must fall on them, from the blood of Abel the just to Zechariah, son of Barac, whom they killed between the temple and the altar.

There is, they say, no Zechariah killed in the temple in Hebrew history before the Messiah’s coming or in his time; but in Josephus’ history of the siege of Jerusalem one finds a Zechariah, son of Barac, killed in the middle of the temple by the faction of the Zealots. It is in chapter 19 of book 4. From this they suspect that the Gospel according to St. Matthew was written after Titus took Jerusalem. But all doubts and objections of this kind vanish as soon as one considers the infinite difference that must exist between divinely inspired books and the books of men. God wished to envelop his birth, life, and death in a cloud as venerable as it is obscure. His ways differ from ours in everything.

Scholars have also greatly tormented themselves over the difference between the two genealogies of Jesus Christ. St. Matthew gives Joseph’s father as Jacob, Jacob’s as Matthan, Matthan’s as Eleazar. St. Luke, on the contrary, says Joseph was the son of Heli, Heli of Mattat, Mattat of Levi, Levi of Janna, etc.

They also raise difficulties because Jesus is not Joseph’s son, but Mary’s. They further raise certain doubts about our Savior’s miracles, citing St. Augustine, St. Hilary, and others who gave the accounts of these miracles a mystical, allegorical meaning: the fig tree cursed and withered for bearing no figs when it was not fig season; the demons sent into pigs’ bodies in a country where pigs were not kept; the water changed into wine at the end of a meal when the guests were already flushed with drink. But all these scholarly criticisms are confounded by faith, which only grows purer for it. The sole purpose of this article is to follow the historical thread and give a precise idea of the facts no one disputes.

First, Jesus was born under the Mosaic law. He was circumcised according to that law, fulfilled all its precepts, celebrated all its feasts, and preached only morality. He did not reveal the mystery of his incarnation; he never told the Jews that he was born of a virgin. He received John’s blessing in the waters of the Jordan, a ceremony to which many Jews submitted; but he never baptized anyone. He did not speak of the seven sacraments; he established no ecclesiastical hierarchy in his lifetime. He concealed from his contemporaries that he was the Son of God, eternally begotten, consubstantial with God, and that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son. He did not say that his person was composed of two natures and two wills. He wished these great mysteries to be announced to men in the course of time by those enlightened by the Holy Spirit. As long as he lived, he departed in nothing from the law of his fathers. He showed men only a just man pleasing to God, persecuted by those who envied him and condemned to death by prejudiced magistrates. He wished his holy Church, established by him, to do all the rest.

Josephus, in chapter XII of his history, speaks of a sect of rigorous Jews newly established by a certain Judas the Galilean. “They despise,” he says, “the evils of the earth; they triumph over torments by their constancy; they prefer death to life when the cause is honorable. They have endured fire and sword and seen their bones broken rather than utter the slightest word against their legislator or eat forbidden foods.”

It appears that this portrait applies to the Judaites, not the Essenes. For here are Josephus’ words: “Judas was the founder of a new sect, entirely different from the other three,” that is, from the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes. He continues: “They are Jews by nation; they live united among themselves and regard pleasure as a vice.” The natural sense of this sentence shows that the author is speaking of the Judaites.

However that may be, these Judaites were known before Christ’s disciples began to form a considerable party in the world.

The Therapeutae were a society different from the Essenes and Judaites; they resembled the Gymnosophists of India and the Brahmins. “They have,” says Philo, “an impulse of heavenly love that throws them into the enthusiasm of the Bacchantes and Corybantes and brings them into the state of contemplation to which they aspire. This sect arose in Alexandria, which was full of Jews, and spread widely through Egypt.”

The disciples of John the Baptist also spread a little through Egypt, but chiefly through Syria and Arabia; there were also some in Asia Minor. The Acts of the Apostles (ch. 19) says that Paul met several in Ephesus. He asked them, “Have you received the Holy Spirit?” They answered, “We have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” He asked, “What baptism, then, have you received?” They answered, “John’s baptism.”

In the first years following Jesus’ death there were seven different societies or sects among the Jews: the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Judaites, Therapeutae, the disciples of John, and the disciples of Christ, whose little flock God guided along paths unknown to human wisdom.

The faithful received the name of Christians at Antioch around the year sixty of our common era; but in the Roman Empire they were known by other names, as we shall see later. Before this they distinguished themselves only by the names of brothers, saints, or faithful. God, who had descended to earth to be an example of humility and poverty, thus gave his Church the feeblest beginnings, guiding it in the same state of humiliation in which he had wished to be born. All the first faithful were obscure men, all worked with their hands. The apostle Paul testifies that he earned his living making tents. St. Peter raised from the dead the seamstress Dorcas, who made the brothers’ robes. The faithful assembled at Joppa in the house of a leather-dresser named Simon, as we see in chapter 9 of the Acts of the Apostles.

The faithful spread secretly through Greece, and some went from there to Rome among the Jews, to whom the Romans allowed a synagogue. They did not at first separate from the Jews; they retained circumcision, and, as has already been observed elsewhere, the first fifteen bishops of Jerusalem were all circumcised.

When the apostle Paul took Timothy with him, whose father was a Gentile, he circumcised him himself in the little town of Lystra. But Titus, his other disciple, refused to submit to circumcision. The brothers, Jesus’ disciples, remained united with the Jews until Paul suffered persecution in Jerusalem for bringing foreigners into the temple. The Jews accused him of wishing to destroy the Mosaic law through Jesus Christ. To clear him of this accusation, the apostle James proposed that Paul have his head shaved and go to purify himself in the temple with four Jews who had vowed to shave themselves. “Take them with you,” James told him (ch. 21, Acts of the Apostles), “purify yourself with them, and let everyone know that what is said of you is false, and that you continue to keep the law of Moses.”

Paul was nonetheless accused of impiety and heresy, and his criminal trial lasted a long time; but the very accusations brought against him make it evident that he had come to Jerusalem to observe Jewish rites.

He said these very words to Festus (chapter 25 of Acts): “I have sinned neither against the Jewish law nor against the temple.”

The apostles proclaimed Jesus Christ as a Jew who observed the Jewish law, sent by God to have it observed.

“Circumcision is useful,” says the apostle Paul (2nd Epistle to the Romans), “if you observe the law; but if you violate it, your circumcision becomes a foreskin. If an uncircumcised man keeps the law, he will be as one circumcised. The true Jew is he who is a Jew inwardly.”

When this apostle speaks of Jesus Christ in his epistles, he does not reveal the ineffable mystery of consubstantiality with God. “We are delivered by him,” he says (ch. 5, Epistle to the Romans), “from God’s wrath; God’s gift has spread over us through the grace given to a single man, who is Jesus Christ.”—“Death reigned through the sin of a single man; the just will reign in life through a single man, who is Jesus Christ.”

And in chapter 8: “We are God’s heirs and Christ’s co-heirs.” And in chapter 16: “To God, who alone is wise, honor and glory through Jesus Christ.”—“You belong to Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ to God.” (1st Corinthians, ch. 3.)

And (1st Corinthians, ch. 15, v. 27): “Everything is subjected to him, excepting, of course, God, who subjected all things to him.”

There has been some difficulty explaining the passage in the Epistle to the Philippians: “Do nothing from vain glory; in humility let each believe the others superior to himself; have the same feelings as Christ Jesus, who, being in the imprint of God, did not think to seize equality with God as his prize.” This passage seems thoroughly examined and brought into full light in a surviving letter from the churches of Vienne and Lyon, written in the year 117, a precious monument of antiquity. This letter praises the modesty of certain faithful: “They did not wish,” says the letter, “to take the great title of martyrs” for a few tribulations, “following the example of Jesus Christ, who, being imprinted with God, did not think to seize the quality of equality with God as his prize.” Origen also says in his commentary on John: Jesus’ greatness shone more when he humbled himself “than if he had seized equality with God as his prize.” Indeed, the contrary explanation is a manifest misreading. What would it mean to say, “Believe others superior to you; imitate Jesus, who did not think it a seizure, a usurpation, to make himself equal to God”? It would plainly contradict itself, give an example of greatness as an example of modesty, offend common sense.

Thus the apostles’ wisdom founded the infant Church. This wisdom was not impaired by the dispute that arose between the apostles Peter, James, and John on one side, and Paul on the other. The dispute occurred at Antioch. The apostle Peter, otherwise Cephas or Simon Barjona, ate with converted Gentiles, observing neither the ceremonies of the law nor its distinctions between foods. He, Barnabas, and other disciples ate indiscriminately of pork, strangled flesh, animals with split hooves that did not chew the cud. But when several Christian Jews arrived, St. Peter resumed with them abstinence from forbidden foods and the ceremonies of the Mosaic law.

This action seemed very prudent; he did not wish to scandalize his companions, the Christian Jews. But St. Paul rose against him somewhat harshly. “I resisted him,” he says, “to his face, because he was blameworthy.” (Epistle to the Galatians, ch. 2.)

This quarrel seems all the more extraordinary on St. Paul’s part because, having at first been a persecutor, he ought to have been more moderate, and because he himself had gone to sacrifice in the temple at Jerusalem, had circumcised his disciple Timothy, had performed the Jewish rites for which he then reproached Cephas. St. Jerome maintains that this quarrel between Paul and Cephas was feigned. He says in the first homily, volume 3, that they acted like two lawyers who grow heated and spar in court to gain greater authority over their clients. He says that Peter Cephas, being destined to preach to the Jews, and Paul to the Gentiles, pretended to quarrel—Paul to win the Gentiles, for the Gentiles, and Peter to win the Jews. But St. Augustine is not at all of this opinion. “I am sorry,” he says in his epistle to Jerome, “that so great a man should make himself the patron of falsehood, patronum mendacii…”

For the rest, if Peter was destined for the Judaizing Jews and Paul for foreigners, it is very probable that Peter did not come to Rome. The Acts of the Apostles makes no mention of Peter’s journey to Italy.

However that may be, it was around the year 60 of our era that Christians began to separate from the Jewish communion, and this brought them so many quarrels and persecutions from the synagogues scattered through Rome, Greece, Egypt, and Asia. Their Jewish brothers accused them of impiety and atheism and excommunicated them in their synagogues three times on the Sabbath. But God always sustained them amid their persecutions.

Little by little several churches formed, and the separation between Jews and Christians became complete before the end of the first century. The Roman government knew nothing of this separation. Neither Rome’s senate nor its emperors entered into these quarrels of a little party that God had so far guided in obscurity and was raising by imperceptible degrees.

We must see what state the Roman Empire’s religion was then in. Mysteries and expiations enjoyed credit almost everywhere on earth. It is true that the emperors, the great, and the philosophers had no faith in these mysteries; but the people, who dictate to the great in matters of religion, obliged them to conform outwardly to their worship. To put the people in chains, one must appear to wear the same chains oneself. Cicero himself was initiated into the mysteries of Eleusis. Knowledge of a single God was the principal doctrine announced at these mysterious and magnificent festivals. It must be admitted that the surviving prayers and hymns of these mysteries are the most pious and admirable things paganism possesses.

The Christians, who also worshiped only one God, found it easier on this account to convert many Gentiles. Some philosophers of Plato’s school became Christians. That is why the Church Fathers of the first three centuries were all Platonists.

The ill-considered zeal of some did no harm to fundamental truths. St. Justin, one of the earliest Fathers, has been reproached for saying in his commentary on Isaiah that the saints would enjoy all sensual blessings in a thousand-year reign on earth. He has been blamed for saying in his Apology for Christianity that God, having made the earth, left its care to angels, who fell in love with women and fathered children on them: the demons.

Lactantius and other Fathers have been condemned for fabricating oracles of the Sibyls. He maintained that the Erythraean Sibyl had composed these four Greek lines, here translated literally:

With five loaves and two fishHe will feed five thousand men in the desert,And gathering the pieces left over,He will fill twelve baskets with them.

The early Christians were also reproached for fabricating certain acrostic verses by an ancient Sibyl, each beginning in order with one of the letters of Jesus Christ’s name.

But this zeal of some Christians, which was not according to knowledge, did not prevent the Church from making the progress God intended for it. Christians first celebrated their mysteries at night in secluded houses and cellars; this gave them the title of light-fleeing, according to Minucius Felix. Philo calls them Gessaeans. Among the Gentiles, their most common names during the first four centuries were Galileans and Nazarenes; but Christian has prevailed over all the others.

Neither the hierarchy nor the customs were established all at once. Apostolic times differed from those that followed. St. Paul tells us in First Corinthians that when the brothers, circumcised or uncircumcised, were assembled and several prophets wished to speak, only two or three were to speak, and if anyone meanwhile had a revelation, the prophet who had taken the floor was to fall silent.

Some Christian communions that hold assemblies without a hierarchy still base themselves on this practice of the primitive Church. Everyone except women was then allowed to speak in church. What is now Holy Mass, celebrated in the morning, was the Supper, held in the evening. These practices changed as the Church grew stronger. A larger society required more regulations, and the prudence of the pastors adapted itself to time and place.

St. Jerome and Eusebius report that when the churches took form, five different orders were gradually distinguished: the overseers, Episcopoi, from whom came bishops; the elders of the society, Presbyteroi, priests; the servants, or deacons; the Pistoi, believers, initiates—that is, the baptized, who shared in the suppers of the Agape feasts; and the catechumens and energumens awaiting baptism. No one in these five orders wore clothing different from the others; no one was compelled to celibacy, witness Tertullian’s book dedicated to his wife, witness the apostles’ example. No representations, either paintings or sculpture, in their assemblies during the first three centuries. Christians carefully concealed their books from Gentiles, entrusting them only to initiates; catechumens were not even permitted to recite the Lord’s Prayer.

What most distinguished Christians, and lasted until very recent times, was the power to drive out devils with the sign of the cross. Origen, in his treatise against Celsus, admits at number 133 that Antinous, deified by the emperor Hadrian, performed miracles in Egypt through the power of charms and illusions; but he says devils leave the bodies of the possessed at the mere utterance of Jesus’ name.

Tertullian goes further. From the depths of Africa, where he lived, he says in chapter 23 of his Apology: “If your gods do not confess themselves devils in the presence of a true Christian, we willingly allow you to shed that Christian’s blood. Is there any clearer demonstration?”

Indeed, Jesus Christ sent his apostles to drive out demons. The Jews of his time also had the gift of expelling them; for when Jesus had delivered the possessed, sent the devils into a herd of pigs, and performed other such cures, the Pharisees said, “He drives out demons through the power of Beelzebub.” “If it is through Beelzebub that I drive them out,” Jesus answered, “through whom do your sons drive them out?” It is indisputable that the Jews boasted of this power: they had exorcists and exorcisms. They invoked the name of God, of Jacob, and of Abraham. They put consecrated herbs into the noses of demoniacs. Josephus reports some of these ceremonies. This power over devils, which the Jews have lost, was transmitted to Christians, who also seem to have lost it some time ago.

The power to drive out demons included that of destroying the operations of magic; for magic always flourished among all nations. All the Church Fathers testify to magic. St. Justin admits in book 3 of his Apology that the souls of the dead are often summoned, and draws from this an argument for the soul’s immortality. Lactantius, in book 7 of his Divine Institutions, says “that if anyone dared deny the existence of souls after death, the magician would soon convince him by making them appear.” Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Bishop Cyprian—all affirm the same thing. It is true that today everything has changed, and there are no more magicians than demoniacs; but there will be some whenever God pleases.

When Christian societies grew somewhat numerous, and several rose against the worship of the Roman Empire, magistrates dealt severely with them, and the people above all persecuted them. They did not persecute the Jews, who had particular privileges and kept to their synagogues; they allowed them to practice their religion, as is still done in Rome today. All the diverse forms of worship scattered throughout the empire were tolerated, though the senate did not adopt them.

But Christians, declaring themselves enemies of all these forms of worship, especially the empire’s, were exposed several times to cruel trials.

One of the earliest and most celebrated martyrs was Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, condemned by the emperor Trajan himself, then in Asia, and sent by his orders to Rome to be exposed to wild beasts, at a time when other Christians were not being massacred there. We do not know what accusation was brought against him before this emperor, otherwise renowned for clemency. St. Ignatius must have had very violent enemies. However that may be, the history of his martyrdom reports that the name of Jesus Christ was found engraved on his heart in golden letters; and from this Christians in some places took the name Theophores, which Ignatius had given himself.

A letter of his survives, asking the bishops and Christians not to oppose his martyrdom—whether because Christians were already powerful enough to deliver him, or because some among them had enough influence to obtain his pardon. Another very remarkable thing is that Rome’s Christians were allowed to come and meet him when he was brought to the capital, which plainly proves that it was the person being punished, not the sect.

Persecutions were not continuous. Origen says in book three against Celsus: “One can easily count the Christians who have died for their religion, because few have died, and only from time to time, at intervals.”

God took such great care of his Church that, despite its enemies, he arranged for it to hold five councils in the first century, sixteen in the second, and thirty in the third—that is, tolerated assemblies. These assemblies were sometimes forbidden when the false prudence of magistrates feared they might grow tumultuous. Few official records survive of the proconsuls and praetors who condemned Christians to death. These would be the only documents from which one could establish the accusations brought against them and their punishments.

We have a fragment of Dionysius of Alexandria in which he reports an extract from the register of a proconsul of Egypt under the emperor Valerian. Here it is:

“Dionysius, Faustus, Maximus, Marcellus, and Chaeremon having been brought to the hearing, the prefect Aemilianus said to them: ‘You have been able to learn, from my conversations with you and everything I have written to you, how much kindness our princes have shown you. I am willing to tell you again: they make your preservation and safety depend on yourselves, and your destiny is in your hands. They ask only one thing of you, which reason demands of every reasonable person: that you worship the gods who protect their empire, and abandon this other worship, so contrary to nature and good sense.’”

“Dionysius answered: ‘Not everyone has the same gods, and everyone worships those he believes truly to be gods.’”

“The prefect Aemilianus replied: ‘I see clearly that you are ungrateful men who abuse the emperors’ kindness toward you. Very well: you shall remain no longer in this city, and I send you to Cephro in the depths of Libya. That shall be your place of banishment, according to the order I have received from our emperors. Moreover, do not think of holding your assemblies there, or going to offer your prayers in those places you call cemeteries: this is absolutely forbidden you, and I shall permit it to no one.’”

Nothing bears more marks of truth than this official record. It shows that there were times when assemblies were prohibited. In the same way, among us Calvinists are forbidden to assemble in Languedoc; we have even sometimes had ministers or preachers hanged or broken on the wheel for holding assemblies despite the laws. In the same way Roman Catholics are forbidden to assemble in England and Ireland, and there have been occasions when offenders were condemned to death.

Despite these prohibitions imposed by Roman laws, God inspired several emperors with indulgence toward Christians. Even Diocletian, regarded by the ignorant as a persecutor—Diocletian, whose first year of reign still marks the beginning of the era of martyrs—was Christianity’s declared protector for more than eighteen years, to the point that several Christians held principal offices in his personal service. He even allowed a magnificent church to rise opposite his palace in Nicomedia, his residence. Finally, he married a Christian woman.

Caesar Galerius, unfortunately prejudiced against the Christians, of whom he believed he had reason to complain, induced Diocletian to have Nicomedia’s cathedral destroyed. A Christian more zealous than wise tore the emperor’s edict to pieces, and from this came that famous persecution in which more than two hundred people were condemned to death throughout the Roman Empire, not counting those whom the fury of the common people, always fanatical and always barbarous, may have killed in violation of legal forms.

There were so many martyrs at various times that we must take great care not to shake the truth of the history of these genuine confessors of our holy religion by a dangerous admixture of fables and false martyrs.

The Benedictine Dom Ruinart, for example, a man otherwise as learned as he was estimable and zealous, ought to have chosen his Authentic Acts with greater discretion. It is not enough for a manuscript to come from the abbey of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire or a Celestine convent in Paris, agreeing with a manuscript of the Feuillants, to make an act authentic. The act must be ancient, written by contemporaries, and must otherwise bear all the marks of truth.

He could have spared us the adventure of young Romanus, which occurred in 303. This young Romanus had obtained his pardon from Diocletian at Antioch. Yet he says that the judge Asclepiades condemned him to be burned; that Jews present at the spectacle mocked young St. Romanus and reproached the Christians because their God let them burn, although he had delivered Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the furnace; that immediately, in the clearest weather, a storm arose and put out the fire; that the judge then ordered young Romanus’ tongue cut out; that the emperor’s chief physician, happening to be there, obligingly performed the executioner’s office and cut his tongue out at the root; that the young man, who had previously stammered, instantly spoke with great fluency; that the emperor was astonished that anyone could speak so well without a tongue; and that the physician, to repeat the experiment, at once cut the tongue out of a passerby, who died suddenly of it.

Eusebius, from whom the Benedictine Ruinart took this tale, ought to have respected the true miracles performed in the Old and New Testaments—which no one will ever doubt—enough not to associate them with such suspect stories, which could scandalize the weak.

This last persecution did not extend throughout the empire. There was then some Christianity in England, which soon vanished, to reappear later under the Saxon kings. Southern Gaul and Spain were full of Christians. Caesar Constantius Chlorus greatly protected them throughout these provinces. He had a Christian concubine, Constantine’s mother, known as St. Helena; for no marriage between them was ever established, and he even dismissed her as early as 292, when he married the daughter of Maximian Herculius. But she had retained great influence over him and inspired him with a strong affection for our holy religion.

Divine providence prepared the triumph of its Church by ways that seem human. Constantius Chlorus died in 306 at York in England, when his children by a Caesar’s daughter were very young and could not claim the empire. Constantine had the confidence to have himself elected at York by five or six thousand soldiers, chiefly Germans, Gauls, and Englishmen. There was little likelihood that this election, made without the consent of Rome, the senate, or the armies, could prevail; but God gave him victory over Maxentius, elected at Rome, and finally delivered him from all his colleagues. It cannot be concealed that he first made himself unworthy of heaven’s favors by murdering all his relatives, his wife, and his son.

One may doubt what Zosimus reports on this subject. He says Constantine, troubled by remorse after so many crimes, asked the pontiffs of the empire whether there were any expiations for him, and they told him they knew of none. It is quite true that none had been available to Nero, and he had not dared attend the sacred mysteries in Greece. Yet taurobolia were practiced; and it is very hard to believe that an all-powerful emperor could not find a priest willing to grant him expiatory sacrifices. Perhaps it is even less credible that Constantine, occupied with war, his ambition, his projects, and surrounded by flatterers, had time to feel remorse. Zosimus adds that an Egyptian priest arriving from Spain, who had access to his court, promised him expiation of all his crimes in the Christian religion. It has been suspected that this priest was Hosius, bishop of Córdoba.

However that may be, Constantine entered into communion with the Christians, although he was never more than a catechumen and reserved baptism for the moment of his death. He had Constantinople built, which became the center of the empire and of the Christian religion. Then the Church assumed an august form.

It should be noted that as early as 314, before Constantine resided in his new city, those who had persecuted Christians were punished by them for their cruelties. Christians threw Maximian’s wife into the Orontes; they slaughtered all his relatives; in Egypt and Palestine they massacred the magistrates who had declared themselves most strongly against Christianity. Diocletian’s widow and daughter, who had hidden in Thessalonica, were recognized, and their bodies were thrown into the sea. One might wish Christians had listened less to the spirit of vengeance; but God, who punishes according to justice, wished Christian hands to be stained with their persecutors’ blood as soon as those Christians were free to act.

Constantine summoned and assembled at Nicaea, opposite Constantinople, the first ecumenical council, presided over by Hosius. There the great question agitating the Church concerning Jesus Christ’s divinity was decided. Some invoked the opinion of Origen, who says in chapter 6 against Celsus: “We present our prayers to God through Jesus, who stands between created natures and the uncreated nature, who brings us his Father’s grace and presents our prayers to the great God as our pontiff.” They also relied on several passages of St. Paul, some of which have been quoted. Above all they based themselves on these words of Jesus Christ: “My Father is greater than I”; and they regarded Jesus as the firstborn of creation, the purest emanation of the Supreme Being, but not precisely as God.

The others, who were orthodox, cited passages more in keeping with Jesus’ eternal divinity, such as this: “My Father and I are the same thing”—words their adversaries interpreted as meaning, “My Father and I have the same design, the same will; I have no desires other than my Father’s.” Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, and after him Athanasius, headed the orthodox; Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia, with seventeen other bishops, the priest Arius, and several other priests, belonged to the opposite party. The quarrel was poisoned from the beginning because St. Alexander called his adversaries Antichrists.

Finally, after many disputes, the Holy Spirit decided thus in the council, through the mouths of 299 bishops against eighteen: “Jesus is the only Son of God, begotten of the Father, that is, of the substance of the Father; God of God, light of light, true God of true God, consubstantial with the Father; we also believe in the Holy Spirit,” etc. This was the council’s formula. This example shows how much bishops outweighed simple priests. Two thousand people of the second order shared Arius’ opinion, according to two patriarchs of Alexandria who wrote the Chronicle of Alexandria in Arabic. Arius was exiled by Constantine, but Athanasius was also exiled soon afterward, and Arius was recalled to Constantinople. Yet St. Macarius prayed so fervently for God to make Arius die before this priest could enter the cathedral that God answered his prayer. Arius died on his way to church in 330. The emperor Constantine ended his life in 337. He placed his will in the hands of an Arian priest and died in the arms of the Arian leader Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia, having been baptized only on his deathbed and leaving the Church triumphant but divided.

The supporters of Athanasius and those of Eusebius waged cruel war on one another; and what is called Arianism was established for a long time in every province of the empire.

Julian the philosopher, surnamed the Apostate, wished to stifle these divisions and could not succeed.

The second general council was held at Constantinople in 381. It explained what the Council of Nicaea had not thought fit to say about the Holy Spirit, adding to the Nicene formula “that the Holy Spirit is the life-giving Lord, that he proceeds from the Father, and that he is worshiped and glorified with the Father and the Son.”

Only around the ninth century did the Latin Church gradually establish that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

In 431 the third general council, held at Ephesus, decided that Mary was truly the mother of God, and that Jesus had two natures and one person. Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, who wished the Holy Virgin to be called the mother of Christ, was declared a Judas by the council; and the two natures were confirmed again by the Council of Chalcedon.

I shall pass lightly over the following centuries, which are well enough known. Unfortunately, none of these disputes failed to cause wars, and the Church was always obliged to fight. To exercise the patience of the faithful, God also allowed Greeks and Latins to break irretrievably in the ninth century; he further allowed twenty-nine bloody schisms in the West over the see of Rome.

Meanwhile almost the whole Greek Church and the entire Church of Africa became enslaved under the Arabs, and afterward under the Turks, who raised the Mohammedan religion on the ruins of the Christian. The Roman Church survived, but always stained with blood through more than six hundred years of discord between the Western Empire and the priesthood.

Those very quarrels made it powerful. The bishops and abbots in Germany all made themselves princes, and the popes gradually acquired absolute dominion in Rome and over a country a hundred leagues across. Thus God tried his Church through humiliations, disturbances, and splendor.

In the sixteenth century this Latin Church lost half of Germany, Denmark, Sweden, England, Scotland, Ireland, Switzerland, and Holland. It has gained more ground in America through the Spaniards’ conquests than it lost in Europe; but with more territory it has far fewer subjects.

Divine providence seemed to destine Japan, Siam, India, and China to submit to the pope’s obedience, to compensate him for Asia Minor, Syria, Greece, Egypt, Africa, Russia, and the other lost states we have mentioned. St. Francis Xavier, who carried the Holy Gospel to the East Indies and Japan when the Portuguese went there seeking merchandise, performed a very great number of miracles, all attested by the Reverend Jesuit Fathers. Some say he raised nine dead people; but the Reverend Father Ribadeneyra, in his Flower of the Saints, confines himself to saying he raised only four. That is quite enough. Providence willed that in less than a hundred years there should be thousands of Roman Catholics on the islands of Japan. But the devil sowed his tares among the good grain. Christians formed a conspiracy followed by a civil war, in which they were all exterminated in 1638. Then the nation closed its ports to all foreigners except the Dutch, who were regarded as merchants, not Christians, and who were at first obliged to trample the cross to obtain permission to sell their goods in the prison where they are confined on arriving at Nagasaki.

The Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion was proscribed in China in recent times, but less cruelly. The Reverend Jesuit Fathers had not, it is true, raised the dead at the court of Peking: they had contented themselves with teaching astronomy, casting cannon, and being mandarins. Their unfortunate disputes with Dominicans and others so scandalized the great emperor Yongzheng that this prince, who was justice and goodness itself, was blind enough to forbid any further teaching of our holy religion, on which our missionaries could not agree. He drove them out with paternal kindness, providing food and transportation to the borders of his empire.

All Asia, all Africa, half of Europe, everything belonging to the English and Dutch in America, all the unconquered American tribes, all the southern lands, which form a fifth part of the globe, have remained the devil’s prey, to fulfill this holy saying: “Many are called, but few are chosen.” If there are about sixteen hundred million men on earth, as some learned men maintain, the holy universal Roman Catholic Church possesses roughly sixty million of them, which amounts to more than one two-hundred-and-thirtieth of the inhabitants of the known world.

Looking into the history of Christianity.

Several scholars have wondered why Josephus says nothing about Jesus Christ. Everyone now accepts that his short passage about Jesus was added later. Yet Josephus’s father should have witnessed all Jesus’s miracles. Josephus came from a family of priests. Queen Mariamne, Herod’s wife, was a relative of his. He tells us about Herod’s every action in great detail. But he has nothing to say about Jesus’s life or death. He doesn’t cover up any of Herod’s acts of cruelty. Yet he leaves out the slaughter of all the children. Herod ordered it after hearing that a king of the Jews had been born. The Greek calendar puts the number of children killed at fourteen thousand.

No tyrant has ever done anything more horrible. The history of the whole world offers no other example.

Yet the Jews’ best-ever writer never mentions this terrible, extraordinary event. He was the only Jewish writer the Romans and Greeks respected. He also leaves out the new star that appeared in the East after the Savior’s birth. A historian as well informed as Josephus should have known about something so bright. There’s nothing, either, about the darkness at the Savior’s death. For three hours, at midday, it covered the entire earth. He leaves out the many tombs that opened then, too. And he leaves out the crowds of good people who came back to life.

Scholars keep wondering why Roman historians all leave these wonders out. They happened during Tiberius’s reign, before a Roman governor and Roman troops. Surely they should have sent the emperor and senate a full report. Nobody had ever heard of anything more miraculous. Rome itself should have spent three hours in total darkness. Its records should have noted this wonder, as should every nation’s. God didn’t want secular writers to record these divine things.

These scholars also see some problems with the Gospel accounts. In Saint Matthew, they point out, Jesus Christ addresses the scribes and Pharisees. He says they must answer for all the innocent blood ever shed on earth. This starts with Abel, the righteous man, and ends with Zechariah, son of Barac. They killed him between the temple and the altar.

But, these scholars say, Hebrew history has no Zechariah killed in the temple before the Messiah came, or during his lifetime. Josephus does describe one in his account of Jerusalem’s siege. This Zechariah, son of Barac, was killed inside the temple by the Zealot faction. You’ll find him in chap. 19. of book 4. So they suspect Saint Matthew’s Gospel came after Titus took Jerusalem. But think how completely books inspired by God must differ from human books. All such doubts and objections disappear. God chose to hide his birth, life, and death in a cloud. We must respect that cloud as much as we find it dark. Nothing about his ways is like ours.

The two different family trees for Jesus Christ have also greatly troubled scholars. In Saint Matthew, Joseph’s father is Jacob, Jacob’s is Matthan, and Matthan’s is Eleazar. Saint Luke says instead that Joseph’s father was Heli, Heli’s was Mattat, Mattat’s was Levi, Levi’s was Janna, and so on.

They find another problem: Jesus is Mary’s son, not Joseph’s. They also question some of our Savior’s miracles. They cite Saint Augustine, Saint Hilary, and others who gave these stories mystical or symbolic meanings. There’s the fig tree Jesus cursed and withered for bearing no figs, though figs weren’t in season. There are the demons sent into pigs in a country where nobody kept pigs. There’s the water turned into wine as a meal ended, when the guests were already warmed by drink. But faith overcomes every scholarly criticism, and comes out purer. This article only aims to trace the history. It will give a clear picture of the facts nobody disputes.

To start with, Jesus was born under the law of Moses. That law required his circumcision, and he was circumcised. He kept every rule and celebrated every festival. He preached only about how people should behave. He didn’t reveal the mystery of God becoming human in him. He never told the Jews a virgin had borne him. John blessed him in the Jordan’s waters, a ceremony many Jews underwent. But Jesus himself never baptized anyone. He said nothing about the seven sacraments. While alive, he set up no ranks of Church officials. He kept the people of his day from knowing he was God’s Son, eternally begotten and sharing God’s substance. He also kept from them that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. He didn’t say he had two natures and two wills in his single person. He wanted those enlightened by the Holy Spirit to announce these great mysteries later. As long as he lived, he never departed from his ancestors’ law. All he showed people was a good man who pleased God. Envious people persecuted him, and biased judges sentenced him to death. He left everything else to the holy Church he had founded.

Josephus describes a new sect of strict Jews in chap. XII. of his history. A man called Judas the Galilean had started it. “They don’t care about suffering on earth,” he says. “They endure torture and overcome it. They’d rather die than live when the cause is honorable. They’ve endured blades and fire, and had their bones broken. They’d accept all that rather than say anything against their lawgiver or eat forbidden meat.”

This sounds like a picture of the Judaites, not the Essenes. Here’s what Josephus says: “Judas started a new sect, completely unlike the other three”—meaning “the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenes.” He goes on: “They’re Jewish by nationality. They stick together and see sensual pleasure as a vice.” Read in its natural sense, that sentence shows he means the Judaites.

At any rate, people knew of these Judaites before Christ’s followers became a sizable party in the world.

The Therapeutae were another group, separate from Essenes and Judaites alike. They resembled the Gymnosophists of India and the Brahmins. Philo says: “A rush of heavenly love sends them into a frenzy like the Bacchantes and Corybantes. It puts them in the state of contemplation they seek. The sect started in Alexandria, where Jews were everywhere. It spread over a great deal of Egypt.”

John the Baptist’s followers also spread a little way into Egypt. But most went to Syria and Arabia. There were some in Asia Minor as well. The Acts of the Apostles (ch. 19.) says Paul met several at Ephesus. “Have you received the Holy Spirit?” he asked. “We’ve never even heard of a Holy Spirit,” they answered. “Then whose baptism did you receive?” he asked. “John’s,” they replied.

In the first years after Jesus died, seven different groups or sects existed among the Jews. There were Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Judaites, Therapeutae, John’s followers, and Christ’s followers. God was leading Christ’s small flock down paths human wisdom couldn’t find.

The believers got the name Christians at Antioch around the year sixty of our common era. As we’ll see, people elsewhere in the Roman Empire used other names for them. Before that, they’d simply called themselves brothers, saints, or believers. God had come to earth to show humility and poverty by example. So he gave his Church the frailest possible start. He kept it in the same lowly condition he’d chosen at his birth. None of the first believers was a man of any standing. They all did manual work. The apostle Paul tells us he made tents for a living. Saint Peter brought Dorcas back from the dead. She was a seamstress who made clothes for the brothers. The believers met at Joppa, in the home of Simon the tanner. We read this in chap. 9. of the Acts of the Apostles.

Believers quietly made their way into Greece. From there, some traveled to Rome and joined the Jews there. The Romans let those Jews have a synagogue. At first the believers stayed with them and kept circumcision. As noted elsewhere already, Jerusalem’s first fifteen bishops had all been circumcised.

When Paul took Timothy along with him, he circumcised him himself at the small town of Lystra. Timothy had a gentile father. But Paul’s other disciple, Titus, refused to be circumcised. The brothers who followed Jesus stayed with the Jews until Paul was persecuted in Jerusalem for bringing foreigners into the temple. The Jews said he wanted to use Jesus Christ to destroy Mosaic law. To clear him, the apostle James suggested that Paul have his head shaved. He should then purify himself at the temple with four Jews who’d vowed to shave their heads. “Take these men along,” James said (chap. 21. Acts of the Apostles). “Purify yourself with them. Let everyone see that the stories about you are false, and that you still keep Moses’s law.”

Even so, Paul faced charges of impiety and heresy. His criminal case dragged on. But the charges themselves make it quite clear why he’d come to Jerusalem: to follow Jewish religious practices.

Here are his very words to Festus (chapter 25. of Acts:): “I’ve done nothing wrong against either Jewish law or the temple.”

The apostles presented Jesus Christ as a Jew who kept Jewish law. God had sent him to make people keep it.

“Circumcision helps if you keep the law,” the apostle Paul says (2ᵉ. Epit. to the Rom.). “Break the law, and your circumcision becomes no circumcision at all. If someone uncircumcised keeps the law, he’ll count as circumcised. Being a real Jew means being Jewish inside.”

In his letters about Jesus Christ, Paul doesn’t reveal the mystery, beyond words, of his sharing God’s substance. “He saves us from God’s anger,” Paul says (chap. 5. epistle to the Rom.). “God’s gift has reached us through the grace given to a single man, Jesus Christ.”—“A single man’s sin let death rule. Through a single man, Jesus Christ, the righteous will rule in life.”

And in chap. 8.: “We who inherit from God, and share Christ’s inheritance.” And in chap. 16.: “Honor and glory to God, the only wise one, through Jesus Christ.”—“You’re Jesus Christ’s, and Jesus Christ is God’s.” (1ᵉ. to the Corinth. chap. 3.)

And (1ᵉ. to the Cor. chap. 15. v. 27.): “Everything comes under his rule. That clearly leaves out God, who put everything under him.”

A passage in the letter to the Philippians has proved hard to explain. “Don’t do anything for empty praise. Humbly regard each other as better than yourselves. Think as Christ Jesus did. He bore God’s imprint, but didn’t see equality with God as something to grab.” A letter still survives from the churches of Vienne and Lyon, written in 117. This valuable ancient record seems to explore that passage fully and make it perfectly clear. It praises some believers for their modesty. “They wouldn’t claim the great title of martyrs,” it says, for a few hardships. “They followed Jesus Christ’s example. He bore God’s imprint, but didn’t see being God’s equal as something to grab.” Origen makes the same point in his commentary on John: “Jesus showed his greatness more by humbling himself than he would have by grabbing equality with God.” The opposite reading plainly gets the meaning backward. What would this mean: “Think others better than you. Copy Jesus, who didn’t think he was grabbing or usurping anything by making himself God’s equal”? It plainly contradicts itself. It gives an example of greatness to teach modesty. It goes against common sense.

That’s how the apostles wisely laid the foundations of the new Church. A quarrel didn’t spoil their wisdom. At Antioch, Peter, James, and John were on one side, Paul on the other. Peter, also called Cephas or Simon Barjona, had been eating with converted gentiles. With them, he ignored the law’s rituals and its rules about different meats. He, Barnabas, and other disciples freely ate pork and animals killed by strangling. They also ate animals with split hooves that didn’t chew the cud. Then some Jewish Christians arrived. Peter went back to joining them in avoiding forbidden meats and following Mosaic rituals.

That seemed a very sensible thing to do. He didn’t want to shock his fellow Jewish Christians. But Paul challenged him rather harshly. “I stood up to him face to face,” he says, “because he deserved blame.” (letter to the Galatians chap. 2.)

It’s especially strange that Paul should have picked this fight. He’d once persecuted people himself, so he should have been more restrained. He’d gone to offer a sacrifice in Jerusalem’s temple. He’d circumcised Timothy, his disciple. He’d followed the very Jewish practices he now blamed Cephas for following. Saint Jerome says Paul and Cephas only pretended to quarrel. In his first homily, tom. 3., he compares them to two lawyers. They get worked up and trade sharp words in court to gain more influence over their clients. Peter Cephas was supposed to preach to Jews, Paul to gentiles. So, says Jerome, they staged a quarrel to win people over: Paul the gentiles, Peter the Jews. Saint Augustine disagrees completely. In his letter to Jerome he says: “It saddens me that so great a man should defend lying, patronum mendacii…”

Besides, if Peter’s task was to reach Jews who kept Jewish practices, and Paul’s was to reach foreigners, Peter probably never came to Rome. The Acts of the Apostles says nothing about Peter traveling to Italy.

Whatever the case, Christians started leaving the Jewish religious community around 60 of our era. That brought on many quarrels and persecutions from the synagogues of Rome, Greece, Egypt, and Asia. Their fellow Jews accused them of impiety and atheism. In their synagogues, they excommunicated them three times each Sabbath. But God never stopped supporting them through persecution.

Churches gradually sprang up. Before the first century ended, Jews and Christians had split completely. Rome’s government didn’t know about this split. Neither the senate nor the emperors got involved in the disputes of this small party. God had kept it hidden so far, raising it little by little, too slowly to notice.

Now look at religion in the Roman Empire then. Almost everywhere in the world, people respected sacred mysteries and rituals to atone for wrongdoing. True, emperors, leading men, and philosophers didn’t believe in these mysteries. But in religion the people tell their rulers what to do. They made the powerful at least appear to follow their worship. To chain people up, you must look as if you wear their chains yourself. Even Cicero was initiated into the mysteries at Eleusis. These splendid, secret festivals chiefly taught belief in a single God. We have to admit that their surviving prayers and hymns are paganism’s most devout and admirable works.

Christians worshiped a single God too. That helped them convert many gentiles. Some philosophers who followed Plato became Christians. That’s why all the Church Fathers in the first three centuries followed Plato.

Some people’s thoughtless zeal did no harm to the basic truths. Critics have faulted Saint Justin, an early Church Father, for his commentary on Isaiah. He said the saints would spend a thousand years ruling on earth, enjoying every bodily pleasure. They’ve also blamed him for something in his defense of Christianity. God made the earth, he said, then left the angels in charge. These angels fell in love with women and had children by them. Those children are the demons.

Lactantius and other Fathers have been blamed for inventing sayings of the sibyls. He said the Erythraean Sibyl wrote four Greek lines. Here’s what they mean literally:

With five loaves and two fishHe’ll feed five thousand men out in the desert,Then gather up the pieces that are leftAnd fill twelve baskets with them.

People also accused the first Christians of faking acrostic verses by an ancient sibyl. The first letters of the lines, read in order, spelled Jesus Christ’s name.

But these Christians’ ill-informed zeal didn’t stop the Church’s God-given progress. At first they held their sacred rites at night, in out-of-the-way houses and cellars. That’s why, according to Minucius Felix, they were called lucifugaces—people who avoid the light. Philo calls them Gessaeans. For the first four centuries, gentiles mostly called them Galileans or Nazarenes. But “Christians” won out over every other name.

The Church didn’t get all its ranks and customs at once. Things in the apostles’ day weren’t like things later on. Paul tells us this in his first letter to the Corinthians. Brothers met together, circumcised and uncircumcised alike. If several prophets wanted to speak, only two or three were to do so. If someone else received a revelation while a prophet was speaking, that prophet had to stop.

Some Christian groups still follow this early Church custom today. They meet without a hierarchy. In those days, anybody but a woman could speak in church. Today’s Holy Mass is held in the morning. Back then it was the Supper, held in the evening. Customs changed as the Church gained strength. A bigger community needed more rules. The pastors sensibly adjusted to the time and place.

Saint Jerome and Eusebius describe how the churches got organized. Five ranks gradually took shape. The supervisors, Episcopoi, gave us bishops. The community’s elders, Presbiteroi, were the priests. The servants were deacons. The Pistoi were believers or initiates: baptized people who joined the Agape suppers. Catechumens and Energumens were waiting for baptism. Nobody in these five ranks dressed differently from the rest. Nobody had to give up marriage. Look at the book Tertullian dedicated to his wife, or at the apostles’ example. For the first three centuries, their meetings had no painted or sculpted images. Christians took great care to hide their books from gentiles. Only the initiated were trusted with them. Even catechumens couldn’t say the Lord’s Prayer.

What most set Christians apart was their power to drive devils out with the sign of the cross. This lasted until very recently. In his work against Celsus, number 133., Origen admits that Antinous worked miracles in Egypt through spells and illusions. The emperor Hadrian had made Antinous a god. But Origen says you need only speak Jesus’s name to make devils leave the people they possess.

Tertullian goes further. Writing from deep in Africa, he says in chap. 23. of his Apology: “If your gods won’t admit they’re devils when a real Christian is there, we’ll let you spill that Christian’s blood. Could any proof be clearer?”

Jesus Christ did indeed send his apostles out to drive away demons. Jews in his time had that gift too. Jesus freed people from possession, sent their devils into a herd of pigs, and performed other cures like these. The Pharisees said, “He uses Beelzebub’s power to drive out demons.” Jesus answered: “If I use Beelzebub to drive them out, who do your sons use?” There’s no doubt the Jews claimed this power. They had people who performed exorcisms, and rites for doing so. They called on God’s name, Jacob’s, and Abraham’s. They stuck sacred herbs into the noses of people possessed by demons. (Josephus describes some of these rites.) The Jews lost their power over devils, and Christians received it. For some time now, Christians seem to have lost it too.

Driving out demons also meant being able to undo magic. Every nation has always practiced magic. All the Church Fathers confirm it exists. In book 3. of his Apology, Saint Justin admits that people often call up dead people’s souls. He takes this as evidence that the soul never dies. In Liv. 7. of his Divine Institutes, Lactantius says “if you dared deny that souls exist after death, a magician would soon prove it to you by making them appear.” Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Bishop Cyprian all say the same. True, things have completely changed today. There aren’t any magicians or people possessed by demons now. But we’ll have them when God wishes.

As Christian communities grew and several challenged the empire’s worship, magistrates dealt harshly with them. The people, above all, persecuted them. They didn’t persecute the Jews, who had special privileges and kept to their synagogues. Jews were allowed to practice their religion, just as they still are in Rome. The senate didn’t adopt these other religions, but they were all tolerated across the empire.

Christians, though, declared themselves enemies of all these religions, especially the empire’s own. Several times, they went through terrible ordeals.

Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, was among the earliest and best-known martyrs. Trajan himself sentenced him while the emperor was in Asia. He ordered Ignatius sent to Rome to face the wild beasts. Yet Rome wasn’t slaughtering other Christians then. We don’t know what charges were brought before this emperor, otherwise known for mercy. Ignatius must have had some very fierce enemies. At any rate, the account of his martyrdom says they found Jesus Christ’s name engraved on his heart in gold letters. That’s why Christians in some places called themselves Theophores, a name Ignatius had used for himself.

We still have a letter in which Ignatius asks bishops and Christians not to stop his martyrdom. Perhaps Christians already had the power to free him. Or perhaps some had enough influence to get him pardoned. Another striking point is that Rome’s Christians were allowed to come out and meet him as he entered the capital. This clearly shows the punishment targeted the man, not his sect.

Persecution didn’t go on without a break. Origen says in book three against Celsus: “It’s easy to count how many Christians have died for their religion. Few have died, and only now and then, with gaps between.”

God cared so much for his Church that its enemies couldn’t stop its councils. It held five in the first century, 16 in the second, and 30 in the third. That means these were meetings the authorities allowed. Sometimes magistrates banned them, fearing unrest through misplaced caution. Few records survive from the proconsuls and praetors who sentenced Christians to death. Those records alone could establish what charges they faced and how they were executed.

A surviving fragment by Dionysius of Alexandria quotes an extract from an Egyptian proconsul’s court records under Valerian. Here it is:

“Dionysius, Faustus, Maximus, Marcellus, and Chaeremon came before the court. The prefect Aemilianus said: ‘Our conversations and all my letters should have shown you how kindly our rulers have treated you. I’ll gladly tell you again. They’ve left your safety and survival up to you. Your fate lies in your own hands. They ask just one thing, something reason demands of any reasonable person. Worship the gods who guard their empire. Give up this other worship, so much at odds with nature and common sense.’”

“Dionysius replied: ‘We don’t all have the same gods. Each of us worships those he thinks are really gods.’”

“The prefect Aemilianus answered: ‘I see you’re ungrateful. You take advantage of the emperors’ kindness. Well then, you’re not staying in this city. I’m sending you to Cephro, deep in Libya. The emperors have ordered me to exile you there. And don’t think you can hold meetings there or go and pray in those places you call cemeteries. That’s strictly forbidden. I won’t let anyone do it.’”

No record has a stronger ring of truth. It shows that meetings were banned at certain times. It’s the same with our ban on Calvinist gatherings in Languedoc. We’ve sometimes even hanged ministers or preachers, or broken them on the wheel, for holding meetings against the law. England and Ireland likewise ban Roman Catholic gatherings. There too, people have sometimes been sentenced to death for breaking the ban.

Despite these bans in Roman law, God moved several emperors to go easy on Christians. Even Diocletian openly protected Christianity for over eighteen years. Ignorant people call him a persecutor. They still use his first year of rule as the start of the era of martyrs. Yet several Christians held high office around him. In Nicomedia, where he lived, he even allowed a splendid church right across from his palace. And he married a Christian.

Unfortunately, Caesar Galerius became prejudiced against Christians. He thought he had reason to complain of them. He got Diocletian to order Nicomedia’s cathedral pulled down. A Christian, more eager than wise, tore up the emperor’s decree. That started the famous persecution. Over two hundred people across the entire Roman Empire were sentenced to death. That doesn’t include any killed outside legal proceedings by the mob’s fury. The common people are always fanatical and brutal.

There were so many martyrs at different times that we must take great care with their history. These people truly bore witness to our holy religion. Mixing in fables and false martyrs is dangerous: it can shake belief in the truth.

Take the Benedictine Dom Ruinart, otherwise a learned, worthy, and zealous man. He should have been more careful in choosing his Authentic Acts. A manuscript may come from Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire abbey, or a Celestine convent in Paris. It may agree with a Feuillant manuscript. That doesn’t make the account genuine. It must be old, written by people alive at the time. And it must show all the marks of truth.

He needn’t have included young Romanus’s adventure in 303. Diocletian had pardoned Romanus at Antioch. Yet Ruinart says the judge Asclepiades sentenced him to burn. Some Jews watching made fun of young Saint Romanus. They taunted the Christians: their God let them burn, though he’d saved Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the furnace. Suddenly a storm came out of a perfectly clear sky and put out the fire. The judge then ordered Romanus’s tongue cut out. The emperor’s chief doctor happened to be there. He obligingly did the executioner’s job, cutting the tongue out at its root. At once the young man, who’d stammered before, could speak freely. The emperor was amazed he could speak so well without a tongue. To repeat the experiment, the doctor immediately cut out a passerby’s tongue. The passerby died on the spot.

Ruinart the Benedictine got this tale from Eusebius. Eusebius should have shown more respect for the real miracles of the Old and New Testaments, which nobody will ever doubt. He shouldn’t have put such suspicious stories alongside them. They might unsettle people whose faith is weak.

This last persecution didn’t reach every part of the empire. Some Christianity existed in England then. It soon faded away, later returning under the Saxon kings. Southern Gaul and Spain had Christians everywhere. Caesar Constantius Chlorus did much to protect them throughout these provinces. His concubine was a Christian: Constantine’s mother, known as Saint Helena. No marriage between them was ever established. In fact, he sent her away in 292 when he married Maximian Herculius’s daughter. But Helena still had great influence over him. She’d given him a strong affection for our holy religion.

God’s providence used seemingly human means to prepare his Church’s victory. Constantius Chlorus died at York in England in 306. His children by a Caesar’s daughter were still too young to claim the empire. Constantine boldly got five or six thousand soldiers at York to elect him. Most were Germans, Gauls, and Englishmen. Rome, the senate, and the armies hadn’t consented. There seemed no chance that this election would stand. But God let him defeat Maxentius, who’d been elected at Rome. Eventually God rid him of every fellow ruler. We can’t hide the fact that Constantine first made himself unworthy of heaven’s favors. He murdered all his relatives, his wife, and his son.

There’s room to doubt what Zosimus says about this. After so many crimes, he says, Constantine was troubled by remorse. He asked the empire’s high priests if any rites could make amends for him. They said they knew of none. True, there’d been none for Nero. He hadn’t dared attend the sacred mysteries in Greece. But people did practice the bull sacrifices called Taurobolia. It’s hard to believe an all-powerful emperor couldn’t find a priest willing to offer a sacrifice of atonement. Perhaps it’s even harder to believe he had time for remorse. War, ambition, and plans filled his life; flatterers surrounded him. Zosimus adds that an Egyptian priest came from Spain and gained access to Constantine. He promised that Christianity could atone for all his crimes. People have suspected this priest was Hosius, bishop of Córdoba.

Whatever happened, Constantine shared communion with Christians, though he never went beyond being a catechumen. He put baptism off until he was dying. He built his city of Constantinople. It became the center of both the empire and Christianity. The Church now had an imposing presence.

Notice what happened as early as 314, before Constantine settled in his new city. Christians punished those who’d cruelly persecuted them. They threw Maximian’s wife into the Orontes and cut the throats of all his relatives. In Egypt and Palestine, they massacred the magistrates who’d most openly opposed Christianity. Diocletian’s widow and daughter hid at Thessalonica. They were recognized, and their bodies were thrown into the sea. We might wish Christians had listened less to the urge for revenge. But God punishes according to his justice. Once Christians could act freely, he wanted their hands stained with their persecutors’ blood.

Constantine called the first council of the whole Church and brought it together at Nicaea, opposite Constantinople. Hosius presided. They settled the great question troubling the Church: was Jesus Christ divine? Some turned to Origen, who says in chap. 6. against Celsus: “We bring our prayers to God through Jesus. He’s between created natures and uncreated nature. He brings his Father’s grace to us. As our high priest, he brings our prayers to the great God.” They also cited several passages in Saint Paul, including some given above. Above all, they relied on Jesus Christ’s words: “My Father is greater than me.” To them, Jesus was creation’s firstborn, the purest outflow from the Supreme Being. But he wasn’t, strictly speaking, God.

The others held the orthodox view. They quoted passages that better supported Jesus’s eternal divinity, such as: “My Father and I are the same thing.” Their opponents took that to mean: “My Father and I want and intend the same things. I don’t want anything my Father doesn’t want.” Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, led the orthodox side, and Athanasius led it after him. Against them stood Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia, with seventeen other bishops, the priest Arius, and several more priests. The quarrel turned nasty from the start. Saint Alexander called his opponents Antichrists.

After much arguing, the Holy Spirit gave the council’s decision through 299 bishops against eighteen: “Jesus is God’s only Son, begotten of the Father—that is, from the Father’s substance. God from God, light from light, true God from true God, sharing the Father’s substance. We also believe in the Holy Spirit, etc.” That was the wording the council adopted. It shows how much more weight bishops carried than ordinary priests. Two patriarchs of Alexandria wrote the Chronicle of Alexandria in Arabic. According to them, two thousand people of the second rank agreed with Arius. Constantine sent Arius into exile, but soon sent Athanasius away too, and recalled Arius to Constantinople. Saint Macarius begged God to kill Arius before he could enter the cathedral. He prayed so hard that God granted his prayer. Arius died on his way to church in 330. Constantine died in 337. He entrusted his will to an Arian priest and died in the arms of the Arian leader, Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia. He’d waited for his deathbed to be baptized. He left the Church victorious, but split.

Athanasius’s followers and Eusebius’s fought a cruel war against each other. What we call Arianism took hold for a long time in every province of the empire.

The philosopher Julian, nicknamed the Apostate, tried to stop these divisions. He couldn’t.

The second general council met at Constantinople in 381. It explained what the Council of Nicaea had chosen not to say about the Holy Spirit. To Nicaea’s wording it added: the Holy Spirit is the Lord who gives life. He proceeds from the Father. We worship and glorify him with the Father and the Son.

The Latin Church only began to settle this around the ninth century. It gradually ruled that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both Father and Son.

At Ephesus in 431, the third general council ruled that Mary really was God’s mother. Jesus had two natures in a single person. Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, wanted to call the Holy Virgin the mother of Christ. The council called him a Judas. The Council of Chalcedon upheld the two natures again.

I’ll move quickly through the centuries that follow; they’re fairly well known. Sadly, every one of these disputes led to wars. The Church always had to fight. To test the believers’ patience, God also let Greeks and Latins split for good in the ninth century. In the West, he let 29 bloody schisms break out over Rome’s papal throne.

Meanwhile, almost all the Greek Church and all the African Church were enslaved. The Arabs did it first, then the Turks. They built the Mohammedan religion on the wreckage of Christianity. The Roman Church survived, but stayed stained with blood. The Western Empire and the priesthood fought for over six hundred years.

Those very fights gave it enormous power. In Germany, bishops and abbots all made themselves princes. Little by little, popes gained complete control of Rome and a country a hundred leagues across. So God tested his Church with humiliation, upheaval, and grandeur alike.

In the sixteenth century, the Latin Church lost half of Germany, plus Denmark, Sweden, England, Scotland, Ireland, Switzerland, and Holland. Spanish conquests gave it more land in America than it had lost in Europe. But even with more land, it has far fewer subjects.

God’s providence seemed to intend Japan, Siam, India, and China to obey the pope. That would repay him for losing Asia Minor, Syria, Greece, Egypt, Africa, Russia, and the other states mentioned earlier. Saint Francis Xavier took the Holy Gospel to the East Indies and Japan when the Portuguese went there to trade. He worked a huge number of miracles. The Reverend Jesuit Fathers vouch for them all. Some say he brought nine dead people back to life. But Father Ribadeneyra’s Flower of the Saints only claims four. That’s plenty. Providence saw to it that Japan’s islands had thousands of Roman Catholics in less than a hundred years. But the devil planted weeds among the good grain. The Christians plotted a conspiracy. A civil war followed, and they were all wiped out in 1638. Japan then shut its ports to every foreigner except the Dutch. People saw them as traders, not Christians. At first they had to tread on the cross to get permission to sell their goods. They sell them inside the prison where they’re shut up when they land at Nagasaki.

China has lately banned the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion too, but less cruelly. True, the Reverend Jesuit Fathers hadn’t brought anyone back from the dead at Peking’s court. They’d settled for teaching astronomy, casting cannons, and becoming mandarins. Their unhappy quarrels with Dominicans and others so shocked the great emperor Yongzheng that he banned the teaching of our holy religion. This prince was justice and goodness itself, yet he was that blind. Our own missionaries couldn’t agree about the religion. He sent them away with a father’s kindness, giving them food and transport all the way to his empire’s borders.

All Asia and Africa, and half of Europe, have stayed in the devil’s clutches. So has everything the English and Dutch own in America, every unconquered American horde, and all the southern lands—a fifth of the globe. This bears out the holy saying: “Many get the call, but few are chosen.” Some scholars put earth’s population at about sixteen hundred million. The holy, Roman, Catholic, universal Church possesses about sixty million people. If those scholars are right, that’s more than a two-hundred-and-thirtieth of the people in the known world.