The beginning of the early Church (Causes and the history of persecution of Christians in the I–II century)

Abstract

This publication is a continuation of the essay on the history of the formation of the early Christian Church, based on first-hand evidence, involving a wide range of views of domestic and foreign research on the history of the early Church. Among the reasons for the persecution of the Christians, the author sees a socio-political, rather than religious stance of the Roman state of the I-II centuries, which was the result of a religiously mundane pragmatism of a pagan society, logged in a principle incompatibility with Christianity as a religion of the spirit. Based on the evidence of the Roman historians Tacitus, Eutropius, Suetonius, Severus Sulpicius, Hegesippus, Lactantius, Dio Cassius, and on the letters of Pliny the Younger to Trajan, and the ecclesiastical writers Tertullian, Eusebius of Caesarea, St. Apologist Melito of Sardis, the article describes the persecution that took place under the emperors Nero, Domitian, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. The author comes to the conclusion that, with the exception of the rescript of Trajan, the Roman Empire in the I-II centuries had no general law that would regulate the relationship of State and Church, and that the initiative for persecution came primarily not from the emperors, but from the pagan masses, who encouraged government officials to take measures against the Christians.