The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

Candida Moss

mar 2013 · Harper Collins

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An expert on early Christianity reveals how the early church invented stories of Christian martyrs—and how this persecution myth persists today.

According to church tradition and popular belief, early Christians were systematically persecuted by a brutal Roman Empire intent on their destruction. As the story goes, vast numbers of believers were thrown to the lions, tortured, or burned alive because they refused to renounce Christ. But as Candida Moss reveals in The Myth of Persecution, the “Age of Martyrs” is a fiction.

There was no sustained 300-year-long effort by the Romans to persecute Christians. Instead, these stories were pious exaggerations; highly stylized rewritings of Jewish, Greek, and Roman noble death traditions; and even forgeries designed to marginalize heretics, inspire the faithful, and fund churches.

The traditional story of persecution is still invoked by church leaders, politicians, and media pundits who insist that Christians were—and always will be—persecuted by a hostile, secular world. While violence against Christians does occur in select parts of the world today, the rhetoric of persecution is both misleading and rooted in an inaccurate history of the early church. By shedding light on the historical record, Moss urges modern Christians to abandon the conspiratorial assumption that the world is out to get them.

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Candida Moss is professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame. A regular contributor to The Daily Beast, Moss has appeared on The O'Reilly Factor, CBS News, FOX News, the History Channel, National Geographic, and the Travel Channel, and has served as an expert commentator for the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other national media outlets.