Convert, Be Persecuted or Die!

 Unlike Judaism that learned “to argue for Heaven’s sake,” Christianity took a different path when conflicts over beliefs arose. The information below is from Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against the Sacred from Moses to Salman Rushdie by © Leonard W. Levy; University of North Carolina Press; Chapel Hill, NC; p. 44.

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“By popularizing the heinous character of blasphemy and heresy, the bishops made those transgressions against the faith acceptable as crimes against church and state. Athanasius’s litany of hate and his references to the “crime of heresy and the “crime” of blasphemy also helped fix a course for the future. Theodosius followed that course with legislation. Christian truth did not yet come from an executioner’s torch or ax, for the ordinary penalty consisted of the imposition of civil disabilities. First the church anathematized the offender, then turned him over to the state. Heretics lost their property and their civil rights, contrary to the Scriptures. Religious intolerance soon became a Christian principle in the West.

 

By 380 CE, imperial edicts deprived all heretics and pagans of the right to worship, banned them from civil offices, and exposed them to heavy fines, confiscation of property, banishment, and in certain cases death. In 385 CE, the first instance of capital punishment for heresy occurred when the pious Roman Catholic Bishop Pricillian of Spain, and six of his followers, were tortured and decapitated with the approval of a Church Council of Trier.

 

In Alexandria, Christians under the patriarch Cyrillus engaged in murderous attacks against Novatian schismatics and in 415, kidnapped the foremost Platonic philosopher of her time, Hypatia -- stripped her in a church, and tore her limb from limb. Rome did not approve of lynch law, which lacked the obligatory formalities. The Theodosian code, by contrast, had official sanction, both secular and ecclesiastical.

 

By 435, there were sixty-six laws against Christian heretics plus many others against pagans. The purpose of persecution was to convert the heretics and heathen, thus establishing uniformity.”

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You may remember my previous articles about how Roman Catholic Bishop Augustine of Hippo reinterpreted the Story of the Garden of Eden. The serpent, a wild animal created by Yahweh and named by Adam, was changed to Satan in Augustine’s story. By 435, when Christians were governed by the 66 laws, correctly teaching that story would have been a criminal offense.

 

For the next 1,400 years Roman Christianity was the only Christianity in the West. Fear of challenging its institutional interpretations and beliefs based on those interpretations became part of many cultures – and fear is still part of many believers’ belief systems and realities. Including facts in belief systems often does away with old fears.

 

Shalom,

Jim Myers

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