“I do find it a puzzling quality of liberal Christians that they tend to get excited when something that had been a cherished belief or practice of the Church is shown to have been false,” says Rod Dreher, commenting on a new book by a Notre Dame historian who says that the early Church’s stories of martyrdom were false. According to the Amazon description, presumably supplied by the publisher:
In The Myth of Persecution, Candida Moss reveals that the “Age of Martyrs” is a fiction—there was no sustained three-hundred-year-long effort by the Romans to persecute Christians. Instead, these stories were pious exaggerations; highly stylized rewritings of Jewish, Greek, and Roman noble death traditions; and even forgeries designed to marginalize heretics, inspire the faithful, and fund churches.
Rod is concerned with the uses to which Candida Moss’s history, true or false, is put — which is of course the same concern Moss applies to the stories of martyrdom — in particular to advance “the perverse joy with which many liberal Christians meet the scholarly dismantling of their religion and religious tradition.” It doesn’t disprove her arguments, as he points out, though it does give one reason to interrogate them, as academics like to say.
What’s sauce for the goose, etc.: if the early Christians exaggerated or invented stories to advance their cause, modern scholars may deny them to advance theirs. HarperOne knows what sells. Neither early Christian nor modern scholar (nor modern publisher) will necessarily be actively dishonest, but simply bending to the pressures their world presents them and reading the evidence through the biases their situation provides them. Scholars, for example, can slip into thinking that because some people could have benefitted, or did benefit, from a story that they made up the story. The method invites the conclusion.
What we do know certainly makes the stories plausible, even if examination may reveal that some of them may not be true. As people are always pointing out, Christians have persecuted Christians a lot through history, especially when political or dynastic or commercial interests were involved. See England in the sixteenth century, for one example of ecumenical killing. And as we know from the news, other ideologies and religions — Communist regimes and Muslim governments and societies in particular — persecute Christians today and have been, in the case of the Communist regimes, doing it for a century. That the Romans would from time to time and in various places have marked out the Christians and locked them up or killed them seems more likely than not.
Update: I should have said in the opening line “. . . who said (if her publisher is to be believed) that . . .”. Publishers do exaggerate for effect, but still, authors are also responsible for the publishers they choose.
February 20th, 2013 | 7:52 am
Hmmm, does Ms. Moss know the history of the English martyrs, for example, all well-documented? The English Parliament kept great files. As to the earlier persecutions, I guess she does not believe in the infallibility of the people of God regarding the honouring of the cults of particular saints. That seems odd for a liberal…
February 20th, 2013 | 8:17 am
If one reads the back-cover blurbs of this book provided at Amazon, one can see the real agenda here. To destroy the “dominant narrative” of Christian martyrdom in the Roman Empire is to destroy the current “dominant narrative” of Christian persecution today. Moss seems to say that Christians are not and have never been collectively persecuted. The reason why Christians don’t often play well with others today is that they have a persecution complex. If people can just see individual martyrs as individuals who never had anybody out to get them, we’d all be happy and well-adjusted and wear “Coexist” t-shirts.
Moss is moving from Oxford University Press and Yale University Press in her first two books to HarperOne with this title. That should give us all a clue as to the tenor of The Myth of Persecution.
February 20th, 2013 | 9:54 am
Possibly helpful here is Daniel Larison’s take. Here’s an excerpt:
February 20th, 2013 | 10:00 am
The only way to judge this book will be to read it. It is simply not fair to judge a book by what is posted on Amazon, even though that is supplied by the publisher. Flap copy and other promotional material is generally created by marketing and advertising copywriters, and may or may not be approved by authors.
If our view of the persecution of Christians by the Romans is historically inaccurate, then we ought to know the truth. What significance it has for Christian claims of persecution in the present day seems minimal or nonexistent to me. Whether and to what extent the Romans persecuted Christians has absolutely nothing to do with the core claims of Christianity.
HarperOne and Zondervan (both part of HarperCollins) are perfectly respectable publishers of religious titles.
February 20th, 2013 | 10:23 am
David Nickol: And no one is judging the book. And everyone agrees we need to know the truth. And we didn’t deny the publisher is “respectable.” Good grief.
February 20th, 2013 | 10:24 am
I agree with David that someone has to read the book to judge it. I will leave that to reviewers. Perhaps one will tackle it in First Things hard copy.
That said, I find the book description on Amazon absurd. One can certainly judge that. Are the stories of some saints exaggerated? Of course. Some are no more than legend and the Church recognizes that, having revised the Church calendar to downplay doubtful saints. But the idea that Christians have not been persecuted? That’s patent historical nonsense.
February 20th, 2013 | 10:26 am
Larison nails this–I’ve not found a single book arguing that Christians were consistently persecuted by Rome from the time of Christ to the time of Constantine. What I’ve found is innumerable books documenting the history of how Christians were sporadically and intermittently persecuted (often in horrifying ways) by emperors who felt that Christianity threatened the Roman Empire… which it did.
February 20th, 2013 | 10:31 am
I’ll admit, my background on this specific case amounts to this single post, but Ms. William’s quote from Mr. Larison seems most accurate. I’m taking a class on this subject right now, and it’s certain that persecutions took place–just, as Larison points out, it was never sustained or empire-wide, and no historian (Church or Classical) would argue otherwise. This is due largely to the nature of the Roman Empire itself more than anything else.
February 20th, 2013 | 10:31 am
As Mr. Nickol warns, one should read the book first before judging. But I notice an interesting parallel between the thesis of the book and that of Holocaust deniers. It smacks of a contemporary ideological agenda driving the investigation of history and not the other way around.
February 20th, 2013 | 10:59 am
“The first general persecution of Christians began in January 250. . . . In popular imagination the early Church is portrayed as undergoing repeated and ruthless persecution. In truth, suppression of Christianity in the Roman Empire was spasmodic and infrequent, usually prompted by local circumstances.” Robert Wilken, The First Thousand Years, p. 65.
The book in question–whatever it says–is probably leveraging what historians know for the popular Wowzer! effect. Happens all the time.
February 20th, 2013 | 11:25 am
The traditional reckoning of the Ten Persecutions shows clearly enough that Roman persecution was not continuous and, often enough, local.
However, until 313, the Church was a “collegium illicitum” an illicit organization. The Imperial government, liberal in matters of belief and worship, was paranoid about clubs and societies of all sorts. There were no persecutions under Hadrian, but even he refused permission for the formation of a volunteer fire-brigade at Nicomedia, in the wake of a disastrous fire in that city. He feared it might turn into a political club.
February 20th, 2013 | 11:35 am
So, the academy seems to have had enough of the Historical Jesus after creating a Jesus to meet their needs, or having no Jesus at all, and has now moved on to the historical martyrs movement.
As an historian, I am convinced that all the HJ movement gave us were ways to deny the core of Christianity, especially the Resurrection.
Moving on to the historical martyrs is the next gambit. If they did not exist, if there was no persecution, if the stories are “just fiction” how can you believe what any of the Early Church wrote?
It is one more way of deconstructing Christianity.
And, sorry Mr. Nickol, eventually they will have found a way to reasonably, and with scholarly language, complete with Ph. D.’s, to deconstruct the core.
There is an end game in the academy. It was apparent when I was doing my studies, so it should not be surprising to see it still at work.
Now, I will read the book.
February 20th, 2013 | 3:03 pm
Michael PS:
Really? How cool! I love coming to this website and reading nuggets like that.
Michael PS, how do you know this stuff?
February 20th, 2013 | 3:18 pm
Ummm. . . maybe it started with Pilate?
February 20th, 2013 | 4:06 pm
What’s ironic is this, from the back cover description:
” Moss urges modern Christians to abandon the conspiratorial assumption that the world is out to destroy the church and, rather, embrace the consolation, moral instruction, and spiritual guidance that these martyrdom stories provide.”
So not only is it not true, somehow we should still keep on drawing moral instruction from it. This is what I never understand about liberal Christianity. You go to the trouble of debunking it, and still expect people to use it as a source of morality and inspiration.
February 20th, 2013 | 5:30 pm
Here’s an excerpt from the 14 January 2013 Publishers Weekly review:
“Drawing on close readings of traditional martyr stories and on deep historical research, she convincingly demonstrates that little evidence exists for the widespread persecution of Christians by the Romans. Only six accounts of martyrdom from these years–including the well-known stories of Perpetua and Justin Martyr–can be considered reliable, and even these, she observes, were significantly modified over time to reflect later theological ideas important for establishing the authority of the Christian church. By the time the church historian Eusebius writes down many of these stories in the fourth century, they have become rhetorical tools used to ‘exclude and suppress other groups, to identify them with demonic forces, and to legitimize violence against them.’ Moss raises significant questions that help us reconsider the nature and role of martyrdom in any religion.”
February 20th, 2013 | 6:27 pm
NB: Candida Moss is a member of the Notre Dame Theology department, not History.
February 20th, 2013 | 7:42 pm
You go to the trouble of debunking it, and still expect people to use it as a source of morality and inspiration.
Dave Dutcher,
That seems to me a perfectly reasonable approach that is taken all the time by even the most “conservative” Catholics in many instances. The creation stories in Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve were taken literally for well over a thousand years. After their “debunking” as not literally true, Catholics have not thrown out the opening chapters of Genesis. The infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke cannot be reconciled, but they have not been discarded. I think it is terribly unfair to judge this book without reading it, but it seems from the little we know the author is saying the stories were created or embellished to be inspirational. Christian tradition (small t, as opposed to Catholic Tradition) is filled with legends and stories that no one takes to be true. It is not discarded as “debunked.”
February 20th, 2013 | 10:52 pm
It is simply not fair to judge a book by what is posted on Amazon, even though that is supplied by the publisher. Flap copy and other promotional material is generally created by marketing and advertising copywriters, and may or may not be approved by authors.
Candida Moss seems to be enthusiastically on board as a participant in the promotional material — watch her video promo.
February 21st, 2013 | 2:43 am
Based on Ann Williams excellent comments above, one can reasonably infer that this book, may very well be one long, and rather tedious straw man fallacy. If Daniel Larison is correct, it’s hard to see how it could be anything else. Of course, as many have already noted, we should read the book, before formulating any conclusions.
Perhaps Candida Moss’s going to provide evidence that the stories currently accepted by most scholars as factual, don’t really have a strong factual basis after all. Perhaps she accepts the consensus, of most scholars, as noted by Larisen, that there was no “systematic” persecution, but she goes further, and is arguing that most, if not all, of the tales of Christian persecution are without legitimate empirical evidence, or a sound argumental basis (e.g., the documents are not to be trusted, or the deductions based on the documents are not to be trusted). If this very radical claim, is her thesis, she has her work cut out for her, to say the least, since many, if not most of the stories of Christian persecution, are shown to be historically accurate.
February 21st, 2013 | 3:48 am
Nobody.really
“Michael PS, how do you know this stuff?”
Scottish Advocates have to study Roman Law
February 21st, 2013 | 8:54 am
It’s always a marvel how one may discover such modifications without having earlier versions to hand. One way is to suppose a priori that any element of a story that supports theological developments was concocted in order to support theological developments.
February 21st, 2013 | 10:14 am
Thanks for posting the video Ann. The Professor certainly clears up any doubts about her having a political agenda. She finds no systematic persecution in ancient Rome and none today. She declares Right Wingers are wrong. I guess she is not aware of the ongoing persecution of the Church in Egypt, Iraq, Iran, …..
February 21st, 2013 | 10:23 am
David Nickol:
It’s not the same. Due to the word limit, maybe an example would be clearer. Are you familiar with the story of the angels of Mons?
That also was taken as truth by many people, to the point where the novelist behind it, Arthur Machen, needed to set the record straight. I think we can admit a difference in kind between it and Genesis; one is divinely inspired, and differs on the matter of timetable. The other was a pure fictional creation for edification.
The latter can’t be held in any spiritual sense though once you know it’s fiction. This is the difference in kind. Much of liberal Christianity believes said events are fictions, but somehow expects inspiration to be derived from it. As if a person claimed to be healed, was proven not to be, and said “Well, but you should be inspired and edified anyways.”
February 21st, 2013 | 10:40 am
It’s always a marvel how one may discover such modifications without having earlier versions to hand.
Ye Old Statisticians,
You seem to be dismissing textual criticism, redaction criticism, form criticism, etc. These are all well accepted among mainstream Biblical scholars, and there is no reason the same methods can’t be applied to later documents.
February 21st, 2013 | 10:42 am
Ye Olde Statistician
This is a favourite trick of textual critics. Something in the received text (for which there is actual manuscript evidence) is branded a corruption or interpolation and replaced with a conjectural reading for which there is none.
Of course, what seems plausible to one editor is rejected by another.
Even poor Cinderella, we are told, should have a fur (vair) slipper, instead of a glass (verre) one. It is a pure conjecture, of course, going back to Balzac. But what do such conjectures have to do with scholarship?
February 21st, 2013 | 11:25 am
Well, this topic is old. German historian Karl Heinz Deschner already documented the gross exagerations and forgeries made by the first christians concerning the persecution during the roman empire (see his work, in many volumens, specially I, called A Criminal History of Christianity).
Robert:
Are you really going to compare the persecutions christians suffered in the hands of the romans with the Hollocaust?
February 21st, 2013 | 11:44 am
Much of liberal Christianity believes said events are fictions, but somehow expects inspiration to be derived from it.
Dave Dutcher,
I tell the following story so often that I am plagiarizing one of my old messages, but it describes a key moment in my awareness of these issues. Over 30 years ago, when I was reading Saint Mark by D. E. Nineham, a volume in the Pelican New Testament Commentaries, and got to Mark 2:23-24:
One sabbath he was going through the grainfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck ears of grain. And the Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are you doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?”
When I read the first line of the commentary, it made me laugh out loud. It said, “It is idle to ask what the Pharisees were doing in the middle of a cornfield on a sabbath day.” The question—and so many others like it—had never occurred to me! This was my first encounter with modern Biblical criticism and exegesis. The commentary continued:
The process of oral tradition has formalized the stories, hence the considerable element of truth in the comment: “Scribes and Pharisees appear or disappear just as the compiler requires them. They are part of the stage-property and scenery, like ‘the house’ and ‘the mountain’.”
Do we have to believe that Jesus was really passing through a grainfield and was caught red handed picking grain by the Pharisees to get the point of this story? I certainly don’t think so.
February 21st, 2013 | 11:54 am
She declares Right Wingers are wrong. I guess she is not aware of the ongoing persecution of the Church in Egypt, Iraq, Iran, …..
Allen Roth,
I am sure she is aware of the persecution of Christians in any number of the places they are suffering. But what I understand her to be saying is that there is no systematic persecution of Christians. The Catholics who complain that they have been forced out of the adoption business in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., are first of all not persecuted, but even if it were persecution, one could hardly say, “Of course Christians are persecuted! Look at Egypt, Iran, and Massachusetts!” The conservetive idea that there is a “war against Christmas” cannot be seen to be just one aspect of the world’s desire to torment Christians and placed in the same category as the ill treatment of Christians in Muslim countries.
February 21st, 2013 | 12:04 pm
But what do such conjectures have to do with scholarship?
Michael P.S.,
But every Bible (and every modern edition of Shakespeare) is the result of this kind of scholarship. Wikipedia tells us, “John Mill estimated the number of variations in the New Testament text at 30,000 based on “nearly 100 manuscripts.” Eberhard Nestle estimated this number as 150,000–200,000 variants. Bart D. Ehrman has estimated that there are “between 200,000–400,000 variants several million pages of manuscripts.”
Few Old Testament scholars would deny that the Torah is an edited version from at least four sources (J, E, P, D). Any good commentary can point out places where the seams are showing. And it is clear to most New Testament scholars that Mark and a sayings source called Q were used by Matthew and Luke to write their gospels. This kind of scholarship is very basic and very well accepted (even by Pope Benedict XVI). Of course conjecture can be taken too far, but that doesn’t invalidate careful scholarly work in textual criticism.
February 21st, 2013 | 12:30 pm
textual criticism, redaction criticism, form criticism, etc.
It’s my background in mathematics and the physical sciences. Too much of that seems like assumptions in, turn the crank, and assumptions pop back out.
February 21st, 2013 | 12:39 pm
caught red-handed
Oddly, it had never occurred to me that everyone was standing right there in the grain field at that particular moment, since such a criticism might easily be leveled once the pharisees had caught wind of it. We don’t suppose that ibn Rushd answered al-Ghazali by standing at his shoulder while he was writing; or that Obama commented on something Romney had done by being at Romney’s elbow when he did it. It is the weird expectation that all texts are complete and entire videotapes.
February 21st, 2013 | 12:42 pm
number of variations in the New Testament text at 30,000
estimated this number as 150,000–200,000 variants.
“between 200,000–400,000 variants several million pages of manuscripts.”
I hope you realize how this sounds to a statistician.
February 21st, 2013 | 2:12 pm
David Nickol
I have no objection at all to textual criticism dealing with variant readings in different manuscripts, identifying the hyparchitypes of those manuscripts and so on.
What I do object to is a purely conjectural reading, without any basis in any of the manuscripts at all.
February 21st, 2013 | 2:22 pm
Oddly, it had never occurred to me that everyone was standing right there in the grain field at that particular moment, since such a criticism might easily be leveled once the pharisees had caught wind of it.
Ye Olde Statistician,
Matthew 12:1-2, recounting the same incident, could hardly be more clear about the Pharisees witnessing Jesus and the disciples:
I think most Catholics would not have a problem accepting that the truth of the story is not that the Pharisees caught Jesus and the disciples red handed, but that a dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees is dramatized by the telling of a conflict in a cornfield. Yet the objection here seems to be that to say Jesus was never caught by the Pharisees picking grain in a cornfield on the Sabbath is “debunking,” and once the story has been “debunked,” it should be discarded instead of looking for the truth the author intended to convey.
In reality, debunk (to expose the sham pretensions or exaggerated claims of) is the wrong word for this kind of exegesis. The intent is not to deny what the author intended to convey, but to reveal it.
February 21st, 2013 | 2:44 pm
Since Prof. Moss’s book will not be released until 5 March, here’s an excerpt from publicity for a speech she is scheduled to give early next month at Berkeley, CA’s First Congregational Church:
“In The Myth of Persecution, Candi[d]a Moss, a leading scholar of Christian history and Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame, argues that the widely heralded ‘Age of Martyrs’ is pure fiction. Examining the true history of religious persecution from its origins to its ongoing idealization in Christian culture she finds that the early church not only inflated but outright invented stories of martyrdom as a means to fight heresy, inspire the faithful, and fund individual churches.
The rhetoric of persecution endures today, especially in the language of the religious and political right. Christians continue to fall back on this tradition of martyrdom to compel their fellow ‘soldiers’ to fight the ongoing war against their faith. Pointing out examples ranging from Mitt Romney’s accusation that President Obama is waging a ‘war on religion’ to Rick Santorum’s claim that the gay community ‘had [g]one out on a jihad’ against him, Moss reveals how this dangerous legacy has legitimized year[s] of aggression, prejudice, vitriol, and even violence.”
http://events.sfgate.com/berkeley_ca/events/show/296935267-candida-moss-the-myth-of-persecution-how-early-christians-invented-a-story-of-martyrdom
February 21st, 2013 | 3:54 pm
What Candida Moss is saying sounds very much to me like something conservatives say about various minorities trying to claim “victim status.” Only here it is some Christians—not all, just some—trying to claim a kind of general victimhood for Christians and Christianity.
It’s as if somehow it gives Christians who don’t like the HHS contraceptive mandate more standing to object to it and be credible because Christians are persecuted in Lebanon. People of all religions have more religious freedom in the United States than anywhere else in the world, yet some Christians see themselves as a persecuted minority rather than a very free and powerful majority. It is no that there aren’t some very real issues involving religious freedom currently being hashed out. Of course there are. But even if the current version of the contraceptive mandate holds, it will be preposterous to say “freedom died in America.”
February 21st, 2013 | 4:03 pm
Actually, I always puzzled over eating grain directly from the stalk. Who knew?
The notion that the anti-Jesus party had some sort of “truth squad” following him around looking for “gotcha” sound-bites is surely not beyond imagination. Nor that a road might go through the fields that surrounded most villages and some disciples might snatch some grains to chew on as they strolled past. I don’t know if they even had to leap a fence to so it. (Medieval manses were not fenced, afaik.) IOW, the story may or may not be one of those “composite” anecdotes that modern journalists are prone to fabricate to illustrate their Pulitzer prize-winning stories, but there is nothing in the tale that has ever struck me as implausible.
February 21st, 2013 | 5:05 pm
What I do object to is a purely conjectural reading, without any basis in any of the manuscripts at all.
Michael PS,
I understand what you are saying, but of course even if there is only one copy of a text, there may be many things we can reasonably deduce about it. Reading a newspaper article, for example, one might catch an obvious typographical error, or detect that something is missing or out of order. Woody Allen has a funny piece about some allegedly ancient scrolls in which he mentions in passing that some question their authenticity because of several occurrences of the word Oldsmobile. We can certainly recognize literary allusions in a text even if there is only one copy. We can also deduce that if there is a passage or a theme strikingly similar to something in an older document, the author of the newer document has probably incorporated material from the older document.
February 21st, 2013 | 10:24 pm
Here is Moss in her own words. I am looking forward to David Nickol’s apology.
February 22nd, 2013 | 3:28 am
Eunapius, in his Life of Ædesius, famously describes the Christian veneration of the relics of the martyrs, “The heads salted and pickled of those infamous malefactors who for the multitude of their crimes have suffered a just and ignominious death, their bodies still marked by the impression of the lash and the scars of those tortures which were inflicted by the sentence of the magistrate, such are the gods which the earth produces in our days. Such are the martyrs, the supreme arbitrators of our prayers and petitions to the Deity, whose tombs are now consecrated as the objects of the veneration of the people.”
It is worth noting that, in this passage, so redolent with horror and contempt, Eunapius does not dispute the fact of the persecution of Christians, but applauds it.
February 22nd, 2013 | 11:37 am
I am looking forward to David Nickol’s apology.
Devinicus,
I have nothing to apologize for. My fundamental point is still the same. Don’t judge a book by its promotional material. I said it “may or may not be accurate.” It appears to be accurate from what I have seen so far, but nobody has yet read the book. You may not like the case she claims to make in the book, but you can’t know whether she successfully argues her point unless you read the book. Some people here are trying to preemptively discredit the book, and that is simply not fair. The book needs to be read to be judged.
I don’t know enough to comment on the history of the persecution of Christians by the Romans, but I am perfectly open to her argument about the contemporary claims of Christian persecution. Christian claims to be a persecuted minority in the United States are nonsense.
February 22nd, 2013 | 9:22 pm
But contemporary claims of Christian persecution are as bad if not worse than the past. Of Western ones, maybe not, but it is odd to try and debunk the past when we see before our eyes wide-scale persecution over hundreds of years. If anything, it should make us in the west nervous that we are a brief historical anomaly, and that in the past marytrdom might have been under-reported, not exaggerated.
February 23rd, 2013 | 4:56 am
Ye Olde Statistician
In my part of Scotland, the headlands (the margins left for the plough to turn) are used as field paths and, indeed, there is a legal right to do so. I always assumed this was what the disciples were doing. No countryman would walk through a field of ripe grain, which would mean treading down the stalks
David Nickol
I wish they would imitate the great textual critics of the 19th century, like Karl Lachman (1793-1851), simply noting corruptions or lacunae, without attempting to reconstruct the text by inspired guesswork.
I would add that a single MS is simply worthless. Even if it is autograph, we would never know it and, if it is not, it could depart from the original to any extent – “Testis unus, testis nullus” [One witness is no witness] should apply to textual criticism, as well as law.
February 28th, 2013 | 5:58 am
She does have an agenda (watch the video). Luckily not everyone is asleep: http://siouxcitydeacon.blogspot.jp/2013/02/the-myth-of-early-christian-persecution.html
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