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In The Myth of Persecution, Candida Moss, a leading expert on early Christianity, reveals how the early church exaggerated, invented, and forged stories of Christian martyrs and how the dangerous legacy of a martyrdom complex is employed today to silence dissent and galvanize a new generation of culture warriors. According to cherished church tradition and popular belief, before the Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal in the fourth century, 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. These saints, Christianity's inspirational heroes, are still venerated today. Moss, however, exposes that 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 taught in Sunday school classes, celebrated in sermons, and employed 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. Moss urges modern Christians to abandon the conspiratorial assumption that the world is out to get Christians and, rather, embrace the consolation, moral instruction, and spiritual guidance that these martyrdom stories provide.
Persecution of Christians in the Middle East has been a recurring theme since the middle of the nineteenth century. The topic has experienced a resurgence in the last few years, especially during the Trump era. Middle Eastern Christians are often portrayed as a homogeneous, helpless group ever at the mercy of their Muslim enemies, a situation that only Western powers can remedy. The Politics of Persecution revisits this narrative with a critical eye. Mitri Raheb charts the plight of Christians in the Middle East from the invasion of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799 to the so-called Arab Spring. The book analyzes the diverse socioeconomic and political factors that led to the diminishing role and numbers of Christians in Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan during the eras of Ottoman, French, and British Empires, through the eras of independence, Pan-Arabism, and Pan-Islamism, and into the current era of American empire. With an incisive exposé of the politics that lie behind alleged concerns for these persecuted Christians--and how the concept of persecution has been a tool of public diplomacy and international politics--Raheb reveals that Middle Eastern Christians have been repeatedly sacrificed on the altar of Western national interests. The West has been part of the problem for Middle Eastern Christianity and not part of the solution, from the massacre on Mount Lebanon to the rise of ISIS. The Politics of Persecution, written by a well-known Palestinian Christian theologian, provides an insider perspective on this contested region. Middle Eastern Christians survived successive empires by developing great elasticity in adjusting to changing contexts; they learned how to survive atrocities and how to resist creatively while maintaining a dynamic identity. In this light, Raheb casts the history of Middle Eastern Christians not so much as one of persecution but as one of resilience.
Excerpt from The Persecution and the Appreciation: Brief Account of the Trials and Imprisonment of Moses The hall was filled to overflowing with intelligent men and women, and many persons who came late were unable to gain admis sion. It was a fervent and heartfelt greeting to the brave old worker for the betterment of humanity, and a strong and emphatic protest against his persecution and imprisonment on the false and absurd charge of circulating improper literature through the mail. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
The age of martyrs is not a thing of the past … Churches burned. Christians beheaded. Faith communities driven underground. Governments forcing silence upon those who profess fidelity to the Gospel. These experiences are not confined to members of the early Church or to the missionaries and converts in far-off pagan lands centuries ago. The persecution of Christians is happening right now-and it is closer to home than you may realize. Moral theologian and news analyst Dr. Thomas Williams incisively juxtaposes the still relatively unknown global Christian persecution of today with that of previous epochs, describing it in its various forms and providing insight into what it means for the Church and for society at large. Dr. Williams shows how Christian persecution has been with us since the time of Jesus, and how modern attacks against Christians spring from six primary sources: atheism, radical Islam, Hindu nationalism, totalitarianism, academia, and Satanism. He provides valuable advice on how these outrages can be remedied and explains what Christians can do to prepare for what is to come.
What does the bible say about persecution of Christians? Many New Testament studies focus on persevering in faith to the end and responding even to perpetrators of persecution with love and forgiveness. Yet while there are unifying principles, the New Testament is filled with a range of experiences of and reflections on Christian persecution - texts that it is crucial to engage with in order to fully appreciate the bewildering array of experience and strongly held viewpoints amongst believers today. In When Christians Face Persecution, Chee-Chiew Lee explores the New Testament authors' theological understanding of persecution. She offers a thorough look at the biblical foundations, covering their responses to early Christian persecution, their evaluation of these responses, and how they encourage or persuade their recipients to persevere in their faith. Lee also brings these writings together to offer an integrated theology of facing persecution, reflecting on how the understanding of early Christian writers can be applied to the persecution of Christians today. When Christians Face Persecution is a valuable study that will enrich your knowledge of biblical teaching on persecution, and its continued relevance in the twenty-first century. It offers engaging theological synthesis as well as contextual reflection, and it invites you to a deeper understanding of the breadth of theological perspectives contained with the New Testament.
In Feeling Persecuted, Anthony Bale explores the medieval Christian attitude toward Jews, which included a pervasive fear of persecution and an imagined fear of violence enacted against Christians. As a result, Christians retaliated with expulsions, riots, and murders that systematically denied Jews the right to religious freedom and peace. Through close readings of a wide range of sources, Bale exposes the perceived violence enacted by the Jews and how the images of this Christian suffering and persecution were central to medieval ideas of love, community, and home. The images and texts explored by Bale expose a surprising practice of recreational persecution and show that the violence perpetrated against medieval Jews was far from simple anti-Semitism and was in fact a complex part of medieval life and culture. Bale’s comprehensive look at medieval poetry, drama, visual culture, theology, and philosophy makes Feeling Persecuted an important read for anyone interested in the history of Christian-Jewish relations and the impact of this history on modern culture.
James A. Kelhoffer examines an often overlooked aspect of New Testament constructions of legitimacy, namely the value of Christians' withstanding persecution as a means of corroborating their religious identity as Christ's followers. The introductory chapter defines the problem in interaction with sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital. Chapters 2-10 examine the depictions of persecuted Christians in the Pauline letters, First Peter, Hebrews, Revelation, the NT Gospels, and Acts. These exegetical analyses support the conclusion that assertions of standing, authority, and power claimed on the basis of persecution play a significant and heretofore under-appreciated role in much of the NT. It is also argued that depictions of persecution can have both positive implications for the persecuted and negative implications for the depicted persecutors in constructions of legitimation.An epilogue considers later examples of early Christian martyrs and confessors, as well as John Foxe's Book of Martyrs . The epilogue also addresses the ethical and hermeneutical problem of asserting the withstanding of persecution as a basis of legitimacy in ancient and modern contexts. This problem stems from the observation that, although the NT authors present their construals of withstanding persecution as a basis of legitimation as if they were self-evident, such assertions are actually the culmination of numerous presuppositions and are therefore open to dissenting viewpoints. Yet the NT authors do not acknowledge the possibility of competing interpretations, or that oppressed Christians could someday become oppressors. Accordingly, this exegetical study calls attention to an ethical and hermeneutical problem that the NT bequeaths to the modern interpreter, a problem inviting input from ethicists and other theologians.