Suffering in 1 Peter

In the last post I alluded to 1 Peter 4:3-4, where it seems like the kind of abuse Christians would have received would include social ostracism, slander, threats, or potential mob retaliation. Indeed, it has become the general consensus that Christians experienced sporadic and local hostility rather than official state suppression.

The reason for this consensus is that, although there were Christian martyrs in the first few centuries, the evidence for an empire-wide persecution campaign comes in the reigns of Decius (ca. 249-251 CE) and Diocletian (ca. 284-305 CE) when participation in the Roman public cult was legislated. Nero may have scapegoated Christians for the fire in Rome, but his torture and execution of Christians was confined to Rome (Tacitus, Annals 15.44). There are some anecdotes about how Domitian exiled John to the island of Patmos (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.30.3) or put the grandsons of Jesus’s brother Jude on trial (Hegessipus, in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.20.1-7). Trajan confirms to Pliny that the stubborn refusal of Christians to observe the imperial cult is a punishable offense, but does not encourage seeking them out or accepting anonymous accusations (Pliny, Letters 10.96-97).

However, there is a middle ground approach that has challenged some of my own earlier thinking in this area. Check out the article by Travis B. Williams “Suffering from a Critical Oversight: The Persecutions of 1 Peter within Modern Scholarship” CBR 10.2 (2012): 271-288. There was always the ever-present fear that hostilities could escalate into public accusations that could be heard in a court of law. I will one day get to reading his PhD dissertation “Contextualizing Conflict: The Persecutions of 1 Peter in their Anatolian Setting” that was revised in Persecution in 1 Peter. Differentiating and Contextualizing Early Christians Suffering (Supp NovT 145; Brill; Leiden, 2012).