“I do not recognize any empire of this present age. I serve that God whom no person has seen, or can ever see with these eyes. I know only one Lord — the king of kings, the ruler of all nations.” — Speratus, martyr, Carthage, 180 A.D.
There is a story we tell ourselves about why the early Christians were persecuted. We say it was because they believed in Jesus. We say Rome hated faith, hated mystery, hated the resurrection. We comfort ourselves with this story because it keeps the danger at a comfortable distance — a danger located in what you believe privately, in the chambers of your heart.
But the Romans were not, in fact, particularly bothered by what people believed in private. The empire was a crowded, cosmopolitan civilization bursting with foreign gods — Egyptian Isis, Persian Mithra, Syrian Baal. The Romans were not theological purists. They were political pragmatists. What drove them to arrest, torture, and execute men and women who had broken no law against any other person was not the resurrection doctrine. It was something far more structural, far more threatening to the order of the world: the early church had formed itself into a community that answered to a different Lord than Caesar, and that community organized its entire common life accordingly.
When Speratus stood before the Roman proconsul Saturninus in Carthage and refused to swear by the genius of the emperor, he was not making a private devotional statement. He was making a political declaration. He was saying, publicly and with full knowledge of the consequences: there is a Lord above your lord, a kingdom above your kingdom, and I and my community live by that kingdom’s rules. The proconsul understood perfectly what was at stake. That is why he had Speratus beheaded the same day.
A Community That Ran on Different Logic
To understand why the early church was dangerous, you have to understand what it actually did — not what it believed in the abstract, but how it organized its shared life.
The early Christians formed communities of radical economic sharing. According to the testimony of their own writings and the grudging admissions of their pagan critics, these communities held their material goods as functionally common property. Wealthy women of rank gave away their estates and became beggars, not out of ascetic contempt for matter, but out of love for specific sisters and brothers who needed food. The church at Rome — a relatively small congregation by the standards of a world capital — was providing regular material support to fifteen hundred destitute persons by the middle of the third century. “The godless Galileans,” even the hostile Emperor Julian was forced to admit, “feed our poor in addition to their own.”
This was not charity in the sense we have domesticated the word — a private, voluntary act of generous individuals toward unfortunate strangers. It was a communal practice, structurally embedded in their gatherings. The table-servers at the Lord’s Supper and the community meal (the Love Feast) were simultaneously responsible for distributing the gathered goods to the poor of the city. The liturgy and the economics were the same act. Worship and redistribution were performed by the same hands in the same gathering.
Their conviction went even further. According to the early church teachers, private ownership of property was understood as a consequence of sin — not natural or divinely ordained, but a distortion of the Creator’s intent. Material goods, like light and air and water, belonged in principle to all. This was not theoretical for them. Wealthy members who wished to join the community were expected to bring their wealth into the common life, not merely donate a portion of it. The philosopher Hermas described the Spirit-filled community as a building into which the rich could be fitted only “after they had stripped themselves of their wealth for the sake of their poorer brothers and sisters.” Wealth was considered dangerous to its possessor, not because matter is evil, but because inequality was understood as a wound in the body of Christ.
They Refused to Kill
The early church, before the catastrophe of Constantine’s so-called conversion in the early fourth century, maintained a nearly universal consensus against participation in military violence. Origen, one of the greatest minds of the second and third centuries, declared flatly that no Christian could exercise the power of the sword against anyone. Tertullian, the fierce Latin apologist, argued that the professions of judge and soldier — which required killing — were simply incompatible with Christian identity.
This was not an abstract pacifism of principles. It was a concrete communal practice. Christians refusing military service were known throughout the empire. When they came before magistrates, as many did, they gave a reason: they had a different Lord, a different politics, a different understanding of what it meant to be human in relation to enemies. They were not conscientious objectors in the modern bureaucratic sense — filing paperwork with the state for an exemption. They were confessors, publicly naming the authority they lived under and the authority they refused.
The Roman state grasped this clearly. Roman law, dating to the most ancient Twelve Tables, forbade unauthorized religious assemblies precisely because independent religious communities were understood as political threats — organizations that could produce bodies unavailable to the state’s purposes. The second-century jurist Julius Paulus codified it bluntly: those who introduce new religions by which “the minds of the people could be disturbed” were to be deported or put to death. Religion that was not state religion was, by definition, a political offense.
The Christians knew this. They wrote about it plainly. Tertullian, describing the accusations leveled against Christians in his Apology, lists the charges as they were actually laid: “sacrilege and high treason,” “enemies of public life,” “desecrators of temples,” “criminals against the religion of Rome.” Not because they had harmed anyone. But because they “do not sacrifice and do not believe in the same gods as the State.” Their crime was political non-conformity enacted through communal liturgical life.
No Borders Among the Members
There is a third dimension of the early church’s dangerous life that rarely gets discussed: it had no ethnic or national borders between its members.
In a world organized entirely by the logic of kinship, tribe, and civic belonging, the early Christian communities were genuinely international in a way that nothing else in the ancient world was. Jewish and Gentile members ate at the same table. Greek and Syrian, slave and free, Roman citizen and provincial subject. Paul’s letter to the Galatians stakes out the theological claim: in Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, no slave nor free, no male and female — a claim so radical that modern readers have largely tamed it by spiritualizing it into irrelevance. But in the communities Paul actually planted, this was a social and political fact. The collection Paul organized for the poor in Jerusalem — gathered from the churches in Macedonia, Achaia, and Asia Minor — was a concrete act of transnational solidarity that crossed every boundary the empire used to organize and contain its populations.
This transnational character made the church even more threatening than any single ethnic or regional resistance movement could be. The empire could deal with ethnic separatism — it had dealt with Jewish nationalism twice, brutally, in 70 and 135 A.D. What it could not so easily absorb was a community whose loyalty crossed every such boundary, whose members in one city felt the imprisonment of their sisters and brothers in another city as their own imprisonment, and organized practical support accordingly. Cyprian, the third-century bishop of Carthage, described how free Christians felt pain over the imprisonment of fellow members “as their own imprisonment” — the “duty of faith” compelling them to ransom prisoners because in every suffering brother they saw Christ himself.
What Rome Was Actually Afraid Of
The pagan Celsus, writing a sustained attack on Christianity in the late second century, described the church with nervous precision as forming “among themselves secret societies that exist outside the system of laws” — “an obscure and mysterious community founded on revolt.”
He was not wrong. Not about the revolt — the early Christians were not revolutionaries in the sense of plotting armed insurrection, and they were clear-eyed about this distinction. They knew that the structures of the present age could not be abolished by human opposition and violent insurrection, which could be easily crushed. What they were doing was deeper and, in a sense, more dangerous: they were building a community whose entire common life — its economics, its refusal of violence, its erasure of ethnic borders, its allegiance to a Lord above Caesar — constituted a running demonstration that the present order was not ultimate, not sacred, not the last word on how human beings must live together.
They called themselves “strangers” and “pilgrims” in the present order. They called themselves citizens of a different politeia — a word that means, specifically, a political community with its own constitution, its own practices, its own way of ordering common life. They claimed that their overseers and teachers were morally superior to the magistrates and rulers of the existing cities — not as a boast, but as a statement of fact about what kind of community they were and what kind of human beings that community was producing.
Origen puts it most exactly, writing against Celsus: the church of Jesus had a different politeia from that of the worshippers of demons. Different citizenship. Different governance. Different economy. Different relationship to violence. Different relationship to the boundaries of the human family.
That is why they were killed.
The Question It Puts to Us
When Speratus walked to his beheading in Carthage in 180 A.D., he did not die for a personal spiritual experience. He did not die for a quiet time and a journal. He died because he belonged to a community whose practices put it into structural conflict with the dominant order — a community that shared resources, refused to kill, crossed every ethnic border, and lived by the conviction that Caesar was not, in fact, Lord.
The Roman state understood this community’s existence as a political threat. It was right.
The question every generation of Christians must answer is not whether they have a personal relationship with Jesus. The question is whether they have a common life that puts them into the same kind of structural conflict that got Speratus killed.
A church whose politics are limited to how its individual members vote, or what its members privately believe about cultural issues, is not the kind of church the Roman empire considered worth persecuting. The early Christians were persecuted not for their inner lives but for their common life. Not for what was in their hearts but for what their bodies did — together, as a community — in relation to the powers of their age.
The witness of Carthage, of Lyon, of Rome — that witness was not individual. It was ecclesial. It was a way of life. And it was ungovernable.
To be continued