by Adi Schlebusch
It is a well-known fact that 11 of the 12 apostles were martyred for the sake of their witness to the gospel. What is often overlooked, however, is the fact that it wasn’t necessarily the message of redemption as such that got under the skin of the Roman authorities of the first century, but rather the fact that the apostles attributed supreme authority to Christ. In other words, more than anything else it was the apostles’ confession of Christ’s Lordship which the authorities of the day considered a threat to their own political authority. The church historian Larry Hurtato describes the primary cause of the persecution of the early followers of Jesus as follows:
"Rather consistently in the accounts of the martyrs, the demand placed upon them was to compromise their commitment to the exclusive and universal lordship of Jesus. The test before Christians who were brought to the stake or tortured to death by other means was whether they would fit their reverence for Jesus within the larger religious scheme of the Roman environment, or would die as witnesses to his unique status and rights over them."[1]
It wasn’t therefore the fact that first-century Christians attended church, used the sacraments, read the Bible, did charity or sang hymns that the Roman authorities regarded as criminal. It was much rather the fact that they realized that the apostolic confession regarding the Lordship of Jesus Christ threatened their own political authority. If the apostles had simply spiritualized the gospel and proclaimed it to have no practical bearing upon the socio-political domain—they would never have been persecuted in the first place.
It was precisely the fact that both the Christians and Roman authorities of the first century realized that the resurrection of Christ has significant socio-political implications which led to the conflict between the two. We must always remember that the Roman Empire at the time did in fact have a policy of religious freedom. The ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism was, for example, tolerated within the borders of the empire along with Greco-Roman paganism, since it was widely understood that the religion posed no threat to the Roman state.[2] With Christianity it was radically different, of course. In Christ’s claim to complete Lordship over all of creation, Roman authorities rightly identified a very real socio-political threat. The gospel does, after all, proclaim in Romans 14:8 as well as I Corinthians 3:23 and 8:6 that we belong to Jesus Christ with all of our being. This leaves no room for any man-made authority over our lives. Any authority parents have over their children, or governments have over their subjects can only be derived from Christ’s absolute authority. The Roman government realized that the gospel demanded that they recognize Christ’s authority as higher than their own—something they were unwilling to do—and this was the primary reason that first-century Christians were persecuted.
The author is a senior researcher at the Pactum Institute.
[1] Larry Hurtato, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 625.
[2] De Jong, A. 1997. Traditions of the Magi: Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin Literature (Leiden: Brill), p. 310.