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dc.contributor.authorMiddleton, Paul*
dc.date.accessioned2019-01-25T14:31:42Z
dc.date.available2019-01-25T14:31:42Z
dc.date.issued2021-06-30
dc.identifier.citationMiddleton, P. (2021). Were the early Christians really persecuted? In O. Lehtipuu, & M. Labahn (Eds.). Tolerance, intolerance and recognition in early Christianity early Judaism (pp. 229-250). Amsterdam University Press.en_US
dc.identifier.isbn9789462984462
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10034/621812
dc.description.abstractIn their writings, the Early Christians presented themselves as a suffering community, facing intolerance and misunderstanding from Jew and Gentile alike, to the extent that in Acts, the Jewish community in Rome are made to declare of early Christianity, ‘we know that people everywhere are talking against this sect’ (Acts 28.22). However, historians generally recognise that while members of the early Church undoubtedly did face some harassment, there was no empire-wide policy against Christianity until well into the third century, and even then, these were short lived. Where Christians experienced persecution, it tended to be localised, sporadic, and random, and resulted from pockets of prejudice rather than any official imperial interest in the Church. If we see those who take at face value the deutero-Pauline claim that ‘all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted’ (2 Tim 3.12) as representing a ‘maximalist’ view of persecution, then, in direct contrast, what might be termed a ‘minimalist’ account is gaining popularity among scholars. Minimalists go beyond the view that Christians faced ‘periodic persecution’, and conclude that in all significant respects, the Christian narrative of persecution is a constructed myth. Moreover, they tend to turn Christian charges against their pagan neighbour of intolerance back onto the early Church, arguing that in a Roman environment of general imperial tolerance towards varieties of beliefs and practices, it was Christian intolerance and intransigence that led to their appearances before magistrates. However, this was not persecution in any meaningful sense, but prosecution. Both maximalist and minimalist accounts of early Christian experiences of suffering construct a context in which a generally tolerant group encounter an intolerant ‘other’. Depending on which approach is adopted, either Christians or Romans were the ‘victims’ of intolerance. In light of this apparent scholarly paradigm shift, I return to the basic question: were the early Christians persecuted? First I outline the formerly dominant ‘persecution paradigm’, arguing that this way of presenting Christian experience is already promoted in New Testament texts. Next, I evaluate recent revisionist ‘minimalist’ accounts, noting that the idea Christians invented—or at least exaggerated—the extent of the persecution can be found as far back as the eighteenth century. These re-evaluations offer an important and valuable corrective to the maximalist approach. However, minimalists, I argue, tend to simply replace a one-sided Christian reading of history with an equally skewed Roman perspective. Instead, I offer a reading which might be categorised as ‘modified minimalism’, in which I sidestep the persecution/prosecution dichotomy, and conclude that while it is certainly the case that Romans would have understood their (albeit limited) actions against Christians as prosecutions designed to protect the integrity of the State, Christians experienced those actions, not without reason, as persecution. I argue that Christians and Romans were indeed ‘tolerant’ of the other—just not where it mattered!en_US
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.publisherAmsterdam University Pressen_US
dc.relation.urlhttps://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789462984462/tolerance-intolerance-and-recognition-in-early-christianity-and-early-judaismen_US
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/en_US
dc.subjectEarly Christianityen_US
dc.subjectPersecutionen_US
dc.subjectMartyrdomen_US
dc.titleWere the Early Christians Really Persecuteden_US
dc.typeBook chapteren_US
dc.contributor.departmentUniversity of Chesteren_US
dc.date.accepted2018
or.grant.openaccessYesen_US
rioxxterms.funderunfundeden_US
rioxxterms.identifier.projectunfundeden_US
rioxxterms.versionAMen_US


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