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First Martyrs of the Church of Rome
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Join Dr. John Sehorn and Mary McGeehan to discuss the First Martyrs of the Church of Rome. Killed under Emperor Nero in AD 64, the First Martyrs offer us a powerful witness of fidelity to Christ.
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Podcast Host
You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustan Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live and share their faith.
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Mary McGhehan
Hi. Welcome to Catholic Saints. My name is Mary McGhehan. I work here at the August Institute, and today I'm joined with Dr. John Seehorn. Thank you for being with us. Dr. Seehorn is the academic dean at the Graduate school here and a professor of theology. So today's episode, we're going to talk about the first martyrs of the Church of Rome. What can you tell us about them?
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Dr. John Seehorn
Well, yeah. Good.
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Mary McGhehan
Let's begin.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah, no, no, that's exactly the right place to start. So, on June 30, the church commemorates the first martyrs of the Church of Rome. And this refers specifically to the Christians who lost their lives under persecution by the Emperor Nero.
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Mary McGhehan
Okay. What was the time period of Nero?
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah. So. Well, this particular event happened in the year 64. We can date it. Very well. So in July of the year 64, there was just a devastating fire that broke out in the city of Rome. I think it burned for five days before it was. Before it was put out. And what's interesting is that there were rumors that Nero himself. Excuse me, was behind it. Right. And it does seem to be the case that he sort of took advantage of the ground that it cleared to build himself a palace. So it didn't seem totally implausible. Although he was out of town when it happened, so that doesn't mean he couldn't have arranged it, but we know he didn't like that. Sounds a little suspicious. Yeah, it does sound a little bit suspicious. Well, because there were these rumors going around that Nero himself was culpable for this absolutely tragic fire. He decided to find a scapegoat. And so actually, our only kind of historical record of this persecution, there are Christians who write about it later, but the only one that tells us about the fire and about kind of what caused the persecution is in the Roman historian Tacitus. And it's not very long, so I'm just going to read it, if that's okay.
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Mary McGhehan
Please. That'd be great.
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Dr. John Seehorn
All right, so let's see. It says, neither human resourcefulness. Sorry. By the way, this is from his work, the Annals. And this is the Oxford World Classics translation of the Annals. And this is found in book 15 of this work. It says, neither human resourcefulness nor the emperor's largesse nor appeasement of the gods could stop belief in the nasty rumor that an order had been given for the fire. Right. So Nero has to do something else to dispel the gossip. Nero therefore found culprits on whom he inflicted the most exotic punishments. These were people hated for their shameful offenses whom the common people called Christians. The man who gave them their name, Christus, or Christ, had been executed during the rule of Tiberius. Right. That was the emperor at the time of Christ, and by the procurator Pontius Pilate. The pernicious superstition. He's referring here to Christianity. The pernicious superstition had been temporarily suppressed, but it was starting to break out again, not just in Judea, but the starting point of that curse, but in Rome as well, where all that is abominable and shameful in the world flows together and gains popularity.
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Mary McGhehan
Wow, strong words.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah. And then he goes on. This is where he actually describes what Nero did. And so at first, those who confessed were apprehended, and subsequently, on the disclosures they made, a huge number were found guilty. Right. So they're rounding up Christians more because of their hatred of mankind than because they were arsonists. As they died, they were further subjected to insult. Covered with hides of wild beasts, they perished by being torn to pieces by dogs, or they would be fastened to crosses, and when daylight had gone, burned to provide lighting at night. Nero had offered his gardens as a venue for the show. And he would also put on circus entertainments, mixing with the plebes in his chariot's outfit. His charioteer's outfit was. Or standing up in his chariot. As a result, guilty though these people were, and deserving exemplary punishment, pity for them began to well up because it was felt that they were being exterminated not for the public good, but to gratify one man's cruelty. Now, the cruelty of Nero and his possible insanity and so forth are pretty well known. But what I find really striking here is just leaving aside Nero, the contempt with which Tacitus writes about the Christians, and he hates Nero, and he doesn't even like Rome. He thinks Rome has become decadent. Right. You got that line about how in Rome everything that's abominable and shameful in the world flows together and gains popularity. Right. And yet he absolutely despises. He deplores Christians. Right. Refers to their hatred of mankind, their.
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Mary McGhehan
The curse of Judea.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah, this curse, Right. He's just referring to Christianity as, like, this scourge that it came out of Judea. Right. So he's accurate. He has some accurate information about where it came from. He refers to their shameful offenses. Right.
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Mary McGhehan
So was he a Pagan? Was he a pagan?
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Dr. John Seehorn
Oh, Tabasetus was totally a pagan. Yeah.
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Mary McGhehan
Okay. So he didn't like Nero and he didn't like Christians. And so he was just writing from. I don't know if it's never neutral, but this more pagan perspective of Christians.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Well, and it's amazing, right, that he's somewhat dismayed. He's dismayed at Nero's excessive cruelty, not because he himself pities Christians, he thinks they deserve it, but because it was so excessive that the other people started to pity the Christians, the other Romans started to pity the Christians.
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Mary McGhehan
Wow. Okay. Why was there such hatred towards Christians? What was some of his prejudices? I think you said Tacitus said Christians are guilty or their hatred of mankind.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Their hatred of mankind, yeah.
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Mary McGhehan
Wow. Why was there such prejudice against Christians?
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah, that's okay. That's really good. And there's probably too much actually to talk about here, and we have to kind of connect certain dots and so forth. Tacitus. So I'll talk a little bit more broadly about early Greco Roman pagan views of Christians, negative views of Christians, many of which I do think we see echoed here in Tacitus. So, for example, he says that these people commit shameful offenses. And this seems to align with things that we continue to hear throughout the second century and into the third. These rumors that Christians were practitioners of cannibalism and of incest. Right. Now, why cannibalism and incest? Well, because if you sort of hear garbled, distorted rumors about the Eucharist. Right. About eating the Son of God. Right. Then you can see where, you know, a mind that's inclined to think the worst and maybe, you know, rumors start to get embellished and so on and so forth.
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Mary McGhehan
Interesting.
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Dr. John Seehorn
So that's one thing this was a stock accusation of Christians, is that they were cannibalistic, which, as a side note,
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Mary McGhehan
is a great defense for the Eucharist,
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Dr. John Seehorn
for the Catholic Church and the centrality of it. Yeah, absolutely. And then with incest, Christians have always used this familial language, referring to each other as brother and sister and talking about having. They talk about love all the time, the kiss of peace and so on. So it seems to be these sort of distortions. And that goes back to our Lord. Right. If you think about in his trial before the Sanhedrin, when they bring forward these false witnesses who are garbling things that Jesus really did say. Right. So Jesus really did say, destroy this temple and I'll rebuild it in three days. And they didn't realize who's speaking the temple of his body. We hear that in John chapter two. But in the Synoptics, when we read about his trial, they're bringing forth these witnesses who are saying that he said he would destroy the temple. Right. And so, you know, from the beginning, we get these sort of distortions of what Jesus said and then of what his followers do.
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Mary McGhehan
Yes. I'm thinking of that simple child's game of telephone where it starts at the source and then you pass them over.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah, of course. Yeah. And of course we still struggle with this. Right. When we think about hatred among different groups and, you know, what's unknown can be frightening. And then, you know, what's misunderstood can easily be distorted in the worst possible ways. And we have this terrible tendency to assume the worst. Right. Instead of doing what charity demands, which is always to impute the best motives to others. The other thing I do want to point out that Tacitus said is something you mentioned, Mary, which is their hatred of mankind. That's a really astonishing thing. And again, it would take a lot of work, I think, to kind of untangle exactly what Tacitus meant by that. But I think again, that fits into a wider criticism of Christianity, that they are a kind of threat to the social order of the Roman Empire, to the fabric of society. Well, in what sense? Well, for one thing, Christians preach quite stridently a morality that is way out of step with enlightened Roman opinion. In fact, elsewhere to Tacitus talks about how much he despises Jews for a number of different reasons, one of which is that they keep all their children.
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Mary McGhehan
Oh, interesting.
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Dr. John Seehorn
That they don't practice abortion and they don't practice infanticide, that they don't expose unwanted infants. And he thinks any civilized person does these things. Right. They also insist on sexual morality in a way that was virtually unheard of in the Greco Roman context. Right. And you know, that can be offensive to people when we have these teachings that indeed are hard. Right. If you're in a culture that actually prizes the opposite of these teachings. And then I think even more deeply their insistence with Jews on the. The oneness of God. Right. That the God of Israel is the only true God and that the gods of the nations are not. Right. Or are demons. Right. And if you understand the way that civil religion was simply mixed into it, was woven into the social and political life of the Roman Empire, you start to understand why this could be seen as a real threat, something that is actually undermining social order. Right. And of course, Christians, this is why you have this tradition of the apologists who mount defenses for why what they're doing, in fact, is not deleterious to the social order, but actually can strengthen it and can purify it and can even elevate it into something unexpected.
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Mary McGhehan
Yes, indeed. That's a good reminder that the Christians, if we are living it right, we are going against the grain. And it's interesting to see from the very beginning, the first martyrs of the Church of Rome had this reputation as well, of. Of just going against the grain and being that salt. Salt in the world. How many martyrs? How many of them died? Do we know a number that we don't know?
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Dr. John Seehorn
No, we don't know.
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Mary McGhehan
And you said the fire. So the fire lasts five days. They didn't die in the fire. They died as scapegoats for causing the fire.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Cause the fire. That's right, yeah. I mean, one possible early reference to them is found in the letter of Pope St. Clement to the Church in Corinth. And early on, he talks about the deaths of both Peter and Paul and then how they were surrounded by a throng of the elect. And then it's even possible there's a couple of female names in the text, but scholars have no agreement about what he's referring to. It's possible, although I don't actually think it's likely, that he's naming two specific Christian women who were martyred, but we don't really know much about the numbers. I do think that if you want to get close to finding names for them, you should turn to the end of the book of Romans, St. Paul's letter to the Romans, where he's writing to the same community just a decade or so earlier.
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Mary McGhehan
Yes. No, that is fascinating to ponder. That they had read the book or the letters that St. Paul wrote to them and not too long after gave their lives for the Church is fascinating. Are there other scriptural references of these martyrs?
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Dr. John Seehorn
Well, not directly. You know, so at the end of first Peter, in 1 Peter 5, 13, I think Peter, who's actually writing to Christians in Asia Minor in modern day Turkey, says, she who is in Babylon greets you. Okay. Now, the she there seems to refer to the church, the ecclesia. Right. Which is a feminine noun and refers to the church in Rome. Sorry. And then I should say in Babylon. Well, that seems to refer to Rome. Right. Babylon is sort of the quintessential pagan empire that oppresses God's people in the Bible. And you see other similar conflations in the Bible between Assyria and Babylon and Persia. Because the point is that it's all the same reality of men who exalt themselves against God and against his elect, just like Lucifer did in the beginning. Right. And so if Rome has turned itself against Christians, then in that sense, Rome becomes Babylon. And so many people think that this is a reference to, not only to the church in Rome. Right. But by calling it Babylon, it indicates that the heat was getting turned up there. Right, Interesting. Yeah. And, you know, are there other historical references to it? Many people think that Nero is being referred to in the Book of Revelation. Right. With the number 666. This seems to be a gematria, where you have numerical values that correspond to the letters and Nero and Caesar. So Nero Caesar adds up to 666.
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Mary McGhehan
Oh, wow.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah. So there's actually a lot we could talk about with this persecution in Revelation. But what I find really interesting, since we were just mentioning Peter and Paul, who both were also. It's not clear whether they died in this particular outbreak of persecution, but they both are said to have died under Nero. Right. Paul through beheading since he was a citizen, and Peter through being crucified. And then, according to tradition, upside down. But what's interesting is we celebrate this feast on June 30th, which is the
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Mary McGhehan
day after what, the solemnity of St. Peter and Paul.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah, exactly. And so the Church invites us sort of liturgically to consider these feasts in connection with each other. And this has been a powerful thing for me in thinking about this feast over the years, because not only are Peter and Paul going to die under the same emperor, and possibly even in this sort of outbreak of persecution that Tacitus records, but both Peter and Paul, of course, had had ministries in Rome. This is why the Roman see is the throne of the successor of St. Peter. The fathers love to talk about how Peter and Paul sanctified the city of Rome through the shedding of their blood, but also to think about how each of them, in their own way, whatever their prophetic premonitions about the coming persecution, might have been how they prepared the Christians in Rome for this experience. So I think let's think just first about Paul, who didn't found the city of Rome, but who wrote this letter to the Romans because they were having difficulty themselves achieving the unity in Christ that we're meant to have, especially between Jewish believers and Gentile believers. But if you think about some of the passages in Romans, in light of what was going to happen, it becomes very powerful. Right. So one of them. I won't read, because everyone should read it themselves. It's the first reading at Mass. If you use the special readings for this feast, that's the end of Romans chapter 8, starting in verse 31 and going to the end in verse 39. It's a wonderful passage. Everyone should read that in their Bibles. But I want to turn a little bit earlier in Romans 8 to when Paul says this, he says, you did not receive. This is starting in verse 15. You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship. When we cry abba, Father, it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our Spirit that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs. Heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with Him. I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. Right. And just to think about that passage that surely many of these first martyrs of Rome had heard read and had meditated on over and over and treasured. Right. As this gift from the Apostle Paul. And how many of them must have been thinking of those very words when they were being tortured, when they were being killed, and to recognize that they had been given the spirit of the Son of God and that their sonship is not something that Nero could take away.
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Mary McGhehan
Yes. No, that is beautiful. And you hear the phrase martyrs. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, particularly in Rome. As you mentioned, Paul and Peter were martyred there. And I just, I ponder that mystery of why is that true? Why is the blood of the martyrs the seed of the Church? And I think to what you're saying, it shows how sometimes very literally we are called to lay down our life. I mean, we're always called to lay down our life. But how literally we could be called to die for the Lord and not just, you know, emotional, but sometimes a physical death in obedience to being a Christian today. So beautiful. And I particularly the blood of these first martyrs of the Church of Rome seem to have a special honor being Rome, being just the heart of our Church as well.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Absolutely.
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Mary McGhehan
Any additional thought or meditation on these martyrs of how they can inspire us today as we live our lives as Catholics?
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah, I mean, I mentioned the Book of Revelation earlier, and one of the things that strikes me in that text, which does contemplate the reality of red martyrdom, but especially in the letters of our Lord to the seven churches of Asia in chapters two and three, Just the kind of sense of the daily grind of being faithful. Right. So the first martyrs of the Church of Rome, you know, I mentioned how Peter also prepared them, especially through what's written in Mark, which records Peter's preaching in Rome and the urgency there of this call to take up the cross. And when we were reading from Tacitus, I was thinking of that how those whom Nero crucified literally, we're called to literally follow that. But that also even in Mark, there's this sense that this is something to do every day. And in a way, it's a different kind of challenge to recognize how we're asked to take up our cross and bear witness and therefore to be martyrs to the gospel, to bear testimony to Christ every day, even in these ways that don't seem extraordinary and that might seem almost futile or not possibly meaningless, but that, that too is a seed that can fall on the ground and die and be united to our Lord's sacrifice. And that can also bring, you know, growth that we might not even see in our lifetimes.
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Mary McGhehan
Yes. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. Well, thank you, Dr. Seehorn, and thank you for joining us on this episode of Catholic Saints and First Martyrs of the Church of Rome pray for us.
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Podcast Host
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