In July of A.D. 64, during the tenth year of the Roman emperor Nero’s reign, a great fire consumed much of the city of Rome. The fire raged out of control for seven days—and then it started again, mysteriously, a day later. Many in Rome knew that Nero had been eager to do some urban redevelopment. He had a plan that included an opulent golden palace for himself. The problem was that so many buildings were standing in his way—many of them teeming wooden tenements housing Rome’s poor and working class.
The fire seemed too convenient for Nero’s purposes—and his delight in watching the blaze didn’t relieve anyone’s suspicions. If he didn’t exactly fiddle while Rome burned, he at least recited his poems. Nero needed a scapegoat, and an upstart religious cult, Jewish in origin and with foreign associations, served his purposes well. Nero, who was a perverse expert at human torment, ordered that some of its members be tortured—to the point that they would confess to any crime. Once they had confessed, he had still others arrested.
He must have known, however, that the charges would not hold up. So he condemned the Christians not for arson, or treason, or conspiracy, but for “hatred of humanity.”1
To amuse the people, the emperor arranged for the execution of these Christians “criminals” to be a spectacle—entertainment on a grand scale. The Roman historian Tacitus (who had contempt for the new religion, but greater contempt for Nero) described in gruesome detail the tortures that took place amid a party in Nero’s gardens:
Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames. These served to illuminate the night when daylight failed. Nero had thrown open the gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the costume of a charioteer or drove about in a chariot. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty, that they were being punished.2
That is all we know about the first Roman martyrs. We know none of their names. Tacitus didn’t tell us why they were willing to die this way rather than renounce their faith. Yet, this should be an important question for us to consider. Why did the martyrs do this? What prepared them to face death so bravely? To what exactly did they bear witness with their death?
The first generation of the Church was characterized by several unmistakable signs. St. Luke tells us that the first Christians, one and all, “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship [koinonia], to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42).
This is a precious snapshot, because we do not know as much about those first Christians as we would like to know. They were a small group, not especially wealthy, without social or political status, and often operating underground. What’s more, over the next 275 years, imperial and local governments tried fairly regularly to wipe out all traces of Christianity—destroying not only the Christians’ bodies but their books and their possessions as well. What we have left are the handful of documents that survived—mostly sermons, letters, and liturgies—as well as a few other scraps of parchment or painted wood, and the shards of pottery that the desert sands have preserved for us.
Yet, what we see in those surviving documents and what we find in the archaeological digs confirm all that we learn in the Acts of the Apostles, especially the detail that the first Christians “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (2:42). One phrase especially—the breaking of bread—recurs in many of the scraps we have from those first centuries, and it always refers to the eucharistic liturgy, the Lord’s Supper.
Our first Christian ancestors devoted themselves to the Eucharist, and that is perhaps the most important way they showed themselves to be Christians. No other Christian practice is so well attested to from those early years. No doctrine is so systematically worked out as the doctrine of the Eucharist.
It was when the early Christians gathered for the Eucharist that all this—their common life, their charity, their fidelity to the teaching of the apostles—happened most clearly, directly, and intensely. They experienced fellowship with each other and together heard the apostles’ teaching, and they broke the bread in the accustomed way, as they said the customary prayers.
So it was in the newborn Church. The Church took its identity from its unity in belief and charity, which was sustained by the Eucharist.
Christianity spread rapidly through the Roman Empire. One modern sociologist estimates that, in the centuries that concern us here, the number of believers increased at a rate of 40 percent per decade. By the middle of the fourth century, there were thirty-three million Christians in an empire of sixty million people.3
That meant that the Eucharist was celebrated everywhere. And the fact that it was celebrated everywhere was itself a favorite theme of the earliest Fathers of the Church. Justin the Martyr commented in the Dialogue with Trypho that, by the year 150, “There is not one single race of men … among whom prayers and Eucharist are not offered through the name of the crucified Jesus.”4 Justin is one of many ancient fathers who applied the Old Testament prophecy of Malachi to the liturgy: “From the rising of the sun to its setting my name is great among the nations, and in every place incense is offered to my name, and a pure offering” (1:11). Those lines found their way into many eucharistic prayers, where they remain even to this day.
As the Church moved outward from Jerusalem, this is what believers did: they offered the Eucharist. The early histories tell us that when the apostle Jude established the Church in the city of Edessa, his first task was to ordain priests and to teach them to celebrate the Eucharist.
This is what the early Church was about. Everything that was good in Christian life flowed naturally and supernaturally from that one great eucharistic reality: from the Christians’ sacramental experience of fellowship and communion, of the teaching of the apostles, of the breaking of the bread, and of the prayers.
But there was another dominant reality in the ancient Church. It is something that appears just as often in the archaeological record and in the paper trail of the early Christians. That something is martyrdom. Persecution.
Martyrdom occupied the attention of the first Christians because it was always a real possibility. Shortly after Christianity arrived in the city of Rome, the emperor Nero discovered that Christians could provide an almost unlimited supply of victims for his circus spectacles. The emperors needed to keep the city’s populace amused, and one way to do so was by providing spectacularly violent and bloody entertainment.
The Christians’ moral code made them none too popular with their neighbors, so the pagan Romans were more than willing to cheer as the Christians were doused with pitch and set on fire, or sent into the ring to battle hungry wild animals or armed gladiators. It was all in a day’s fun in ancient Rome. Over time, Nero’s perverted whims settled into laws and legal precedents, as later emperors issued further rulings on the Christian problem. Outside the law, mob violence against Christians was fairly common and rarely punished.
The Christians applied a certain term to their brothers and sisters who were persecuted and killed. They called them “martyrs”—which means, literally, “witnesses in a court of law.” And to the martyrs they accorded a reverence matched only by their reverence for the Eucharist.
In fact, the early Christians used the same language to describe martyrdom as they used to describe the Eucharist. We see this in the New Testament Book of Revelation, when John describes his vision of heaven. There, he saw “under the altar the souls of those who had been slaughtered for the word of God and for the testimony they had given” (6:9). There, under the altar of sacrifice, were the martyrs, the witnesses.
That image brings it all together. For, in those first generations of the Church, the most common phrase used to describe the Eucharist was “the sacrifice.” Both the Didache (a document of the mid-first century) and St. Ignatius refer to it as “the sacrifice.” And yet martyrdom, too, was “the sacrifice.”
And so, in A.D. 107, when Ignatius described his own impending execution, he used eucharistic terms. He said he was like the wine at the offertory. He wrote to the Romans, “Grant me nothing more than that I be poured out to God, while an altar is still ready.” Later in the same letter he wrote: “Let me be food for the wild beasts, through whom I can reach God. I am God’s wheat, ground fine by the lion’s teeth to be made purest bread for Christ.”5 Ignatius was bread and he was wine; his martyrdom was a sacrifice. It was, in a sense, a eucharist.
Ignatius’s good friend St. Polycarp also died a martyr’s death. Polycarp was bishop of Smyrna, and had been converted by the apostle John. His secretary described the bishop’s martyrdom, once again, as a kind of eucharist. Polycarp’s final words are a long prayer of thanksgiving that echoes the great eucharistic prayers of the ancient world and today. It includes an invocation of the Holy Spirit, a doxology of the Trinity, and a great Amen at the end.
When the flames reached the body of the old bishop, his secretary tells us that the pyre gave off not the odor of burning flesh but the aroma of baking bread.6 In yet another martyrdom, then, we find a pure offering of bread—again, a eucharist.
The eucharistic images in Ignatius and Polycarp echo again in the future writings and histories of the martyrs. Even in the court transcripts, presumably taken down by pagan Romans, the Christians reply to the charges against them with lines from the liturgy, lifting up their hearts to God. And when they are sentenced, they say Deo gratias—“thanks be to God.”
The story of the martyr Pionius is told, verbatim, in the words of the eucharistic prayer: “and looking up to heaven he gave thanks to God.”7 The Greek word for “thanks” is eucharistesas. So we might read it as, “Looking up to heaven, he offered the Eucharist to God,” even as the flames consumed him. In a similar way, the priest Irenaeus cried out, in the midst of torture, “With my endurance I am even now offering sacrifice to my God to whom I have always offered sacrifice.”8
So pervasive is this eucharistic language in the early Church’s account of martyrdom that one of the great scholars of Christian antiquity, Robin Darling Young of the University of Notre Dame, has spoken of the ancient Church as having two liturgies: the private liturgy of the Eucharist and the public liturgy of martyrdom.9
But what is it about martyrdom that makes it like the Eucharist? Well, what has Jesus done in the Eucharist? He has given himself to us, and he has held nothing back. He gives us his body, blood, soul, and divinity. He gives himself to us as food. And that is love: the total gift of self. That is the very love the martyrs wanted to emulate. Jesus had given himself entirely for them. They wanted to give themselves entirely for him—everything they had, holding nothing back. If Jesus would become bread for them, they would allow the lions to make them finest wheat for Jesus.
So, martyrdom was a total gift of self; the Eucharist was a total gift of self. In the Eucharist, Jesus gave himself to Christians. In martyrdom, Christians gave themselves back to him.
But there’s a problem here. Very few of the ancient Christians died for the faith. What about the rest? What was their gift? How did they live the Eucharist?
Not long after Christianity was legalized in A.D. 312, St. Jerome noted that some believers were already growing nostalgic for the good old days of the martyrs. But Jerome put a halt to such fantasies. He told his congregation, “Let’s not think that there is martyrdom only in the shedding of blood. There is always martyrdom.”10
There is always martyrdom. For most of the early Christians, the martyrdom came not with lions or fire or the rack or the sword. It came not at the hands of a mob or a gladiator. For most of the early Christians, “martyrdom” consisted in a daily dying to self in imitation of Jesus Christ.
Jesus told them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves … daily” (Luke 9:23). So the Christians denied themselves, in imitation of Jesus. What did this mean, in practical terms? It meant that they would never eat lavishly as long as others were going hungry. They would never keep an opulent wardrobe while others dressed in rags. They would never hold back their testimony to the faith as long as any of their neighbors were living in sin or in ignorance of the love of Jesus Christ. In the early years of the third century in North Africa, Tertullian noted that even the pagans were impressed by the Christians’ selfless giving: “It is our care of the helpless, our practice of loving kindness that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents, who say, ‘See those Christians, how they love one another.’”11
There was always martyrdom, even though the martyrs who were thrown to the lions or crucified or beheaded were very few in number. Countless others gave witness through the giving of themselves, until they had nothing left to give. St. Paul had, long before, addressed this in his Letter to the Romans, where he wrote: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Romans 12:1).
In the midst of Nero’s horrors, Peter and Paul both came to Rome—Paul in chains, Peter willingly. Eusebius tells us that they both died on the same day.12
Peter was crucified. This time, he didn’t deny Jesus or try to run away. He made only one request: he asked his executioners to crucify him upside down. He said he wasn’t worthy to die the same way as his Lord.
Paul, who was a Roman citizen, couldn’t be crucified—that was one of the privileges of being a citizen. Instead, he was beheaded—a quick, neat death compared to the slow agony of crucifixion.
Nero’s persecution established a legal precedent for the persecutions to come. From then on, Christianity was a more or less illegal cult, and the punishment for it was death. Rome’s enforcement, however, waxed and waned in severity over the next 260 years. Especially bloody persecutions happened during the reigns of Domitian (81–95), Trajan (98–117), Antoninus Pius (138–61), Marcus Aurelius (161–80), Septimius Severus (193–211), Decius (249–51), Valerian (253–60), Diocletian (284–305), and Galerius (305–11). Even between persecutions, however, Christians were never quite safe. Government personnel could change at any moment with the death or promotion of a governor, and mob violence, which often went unpunished, could erupt at any time.
Still, the extreme cruelty of Nero’s Christian “spectacles” served a useful and providential purpose. It made the Christians much more visible, and it made them objects of sympathy, at least to some Romans. By creating so many martyrs, Nero may well have been responsible for thousands of conversions. History would repeatedly prove the truth of Tertullian’s maxim: “The blood of the martyrs is seed”13—the seed of the Church. 
A Closer Look …
The Popes and Rome
In the Acts of the Apostles, we see the center of Christian activity shift from Jerusalem to Rome. The capital of the Roman Empire was the ultimate earthly destination of the two great apostles, Peter and Paul.
Ancient traditions are unanimous in recording that both Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome. The earliest Christians made pilgrimages to the apostles’ tombs there and left pious graffiti along the way. Visitors to Rome can still view these scrawled messages today.
Simon Peter had received authority when Jesus pronounced him the “rock” on whom he would build his Church (Matthew 16:18). In the years after Pentecost, Peter served as the spokesman, judge, teacher, preacher, and healer in the community. This authority remained with him until his death, and it transferred to the men who succeeded him as bishop of Rome.
Before the end of the first century, Pope St. Clement of Rome wrote fatherly letters to reprove and instruct the Christians in distant Corinth. The letters were read in the liturgy at Corinth for centuries.
Less than ten years later, St. Ignatius, who succeeded Peter as bishop of Antioch, wrote letters of instruction to many churches, but deferred only to one Church: the Church of Rome.
At the end of the second century, St. Irenaeus confirmed the primacy of Rome and the papacy. The bishop of Lyons cited “that tradition derived from the Apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul … which comes down to our time by means of the successions of the bishops. For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its preeminent authority—that is, the faithful everywhere inasmuch as the apostolic tradition has been preserved continuously by faithful men everywhere.”14 Irenaeus also supplied a complete list of popes, from Peter to his own day.
Throughout the era of the Church Fathers, many great saints appealed to the pope for help and for judgment: St. Athanasius, St. Basil of Caesarea, St. Jerome, St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine, and St. Cyril of Alexandria, among others. Theodoret of Cyr put the matter eloquently: “If Paul, the herald of the Truth, the trumpet of the Holy Ghost, had recourse to the great Peter, in order to obtain a decision from him for those at Antioch who were disputing about living by the Law, much more do we small and humble folk run to the Apostolic See to get healing from you for the sores of the churches. For it is fitting that you should in all things have the pre-eminence, seeing that your See possesses many peculiar privileges.”15
Sts. Peter and Paul have always shared a single feast day. On that feast day in 441, Pope St. Leo the Great preached a homily rejoicing that he could trace his own lineage in an unbroken line to the greatest of the apostles. Modern popes can make the same claim.
“These are the men,” said Leo, “through whom the light of Christ’s gospel shone on you, O Rome, and through whom you, who were the teacher of error, were made the disciple of Truth. These are your holy Fathers and true shepherds, who gave you claim to be numbered among the heavenly kingdoms. … They promoted you to such glory … the head of the world through St. Peter’s Holy See.”16
Mary and the Early Church
The Church’s first expressions of Marian devotion were beautiful and memorable. They have been passed intact from generation to generation, and are still used today. Mary is in the early creeds and in St. Ignatius of Antioch’s professions of faith. In the middle of the second century, St. Justin described her as the “New Eve.”17 Like the first Eve, Mary was mother of all the living—now those who are alive in Christ. The earliest recorded Marian prayer was in use in Egypt in the third century (and possibly earlier). Catholics still pray that prayer today: “We fly to your patronage, O holy Mother of God. Despise not our petitions in our need, and keep us from all danger. O ever glorious and faithful Virgin Mary!” The oldest surviving images of Mary are in the catacombs, the early Christian burial chambers, in Rome. Those paintings show her holding the infant Jesus in her arms. The earliest known report of a Marian apparition also comes from the third century, when she appeared to St. Gregory the Wonderworker.
It was difficult for outsiders to understand the early Christians. They prayed for the emperor, but unlike other patriotic citizens, they refused to offer sacrifices to his guardian spirit, his “genius.” They loved everyone, even as they taught that everyone was a sinner (thus earning Nero’s charge of “hatred of humanity”). Rejected by pious Jews, they claimed to be heirs to a spiritual Israel.
So the early believers were misunderstood by both pagans and Jews. Wild rumors flew about the Christians’ secret ceremonies. Both pagans and Jews charged them with cannibalism, infanticide, and (of course) disloyalty to the emperor. We’ve just seen how Nero found the Christians a convenient target when someone had to be blamed for the fire in Rome. If people believed that the Christians were cannibals, it was easy to believe that they were arsonists, too.
But at the beginning of the second century, a movement of Christian teachers spoke up to set the record straight. These teachers are known as the “apologists.” Perhaps the greatest of their first generation was St. Justin, who was born about the year 100.
The apologists set out to give reasoned explanations of Christian doctrines. (An “apology” in this sense is not the admission of a fault, but a speech or writing that defends some idea.) They were not so much preachers as debaters. Amid a hostile and confused culture, they methodically explained and defended all that Christians really believed.
Justin was well prepared for this task. As a young man, a pagan of Samaria, he was an intense seeker looking for wisdom in all the usual places in the ancient world. He studied philosophy, rhetoric, history, and poetry. He pushed his inquiries to ultimate questions, to first principles, but no master in any of the philosophy schools was able to satisfy him. (Justin abandoned one philosopher who demanded cash in advance from his disciples.)
One day Justin was walking along a beach, where he met an old man. Soon the two were deep in a discussion of the ultimate questions. Justin identified himself as a philosopher.
“Does philosophy, then, make happiness?” asked the old man.
“Surely,” said Justin, “and only philosophy.”
“What, then, is philosophy?” the man asked. “And what is happiness?”
“Philosophy,” replied Justin, “is the knowledge of what really exists, and a clear perception of the truth; and happiness is the reward of such knowledge and wisdom.”
“But what do you call God?” said the old man.
From there, the old man led Justin to see that, if he sincerely sought truth and the God who really exists, he needed to consult the prophets of ancient Israel. “They alone,” said the mysterious stranger, “both saw and announced the truth … not influenced by a desire for glory, but filled with the Holy Spirit. Their writings still exist, and whoever reads them gains much in his knowledge of … all a philosopher ought to know.”1
Justin went off at once to find these books, and on reading he found much more: “Immediately a flame was kindled in my soul; and I was possessed by a love of the prophets, and of those who are friends of Christ…. I found this philosophy alone to be safe and profitable.”2 Tradition says he was baptized in Ephesus.
Studying Christian doctrine, Justin discovered that much of what he had learned about Christianity from the pagans was utterly false. He was further distressed that these rumor campaigns were leading to the persecution of Christians. So he dedicated himself to the refutation of these errors, explaining and defending his adopted faith before pagans and Jews. Two of his “apologies” are addressed to the emperor Antoninus Pius and the Roman Senate.
Justin still identified himself as a philosopher, and he still wore the traditional philosopher’s cloak. He saw everything that was good and true in pagan philosophy as a glimpse of the truth and goodness of God revealed in Jesus Christ.
Justin’s First Apology gives us one of the clearest descriptions we have of what the Mass was like in the early and middle 100s—roughly a century after Christ’s resurrection—and it is a description that looks very familiar:
On the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we said before, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given, and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons. And they who are well to do, and willing, give what each thinks fit; and what is collected is deposited with the president, who succors the orphans and widows and those who, through sickness or any other cause, are in want, and those who are in bonds and the strangers sojourning among us, and in a word takes care of all who are in need.
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