Legislation against the Christians

TLDR

Existing scholarship on the legal basis of pre‑250 Christian persecutions in the Roman Empire is extensive yet largely unhelpful, and no comprehensive, unbiased review of primary Senate or imperial actions has yet been undertaken, leaving scattered evidence that is hard to assess. The study aims to systematically present primary evidence for the legal basis of Christian condemnation before 250, free from later hagiographic or modern interpretive bias. The authors rely on Ulpian’s compilation of imperial rescripts on Christian punishment found in the seventh book of his De Officio Proconsulis. The chapter’s content is absent from Justinian’s commissioned Digest.

Abstract

The modern bibliography on the subject of the juridical basis of the persecutions of the Christians in the Roman Empire before 250 is vast, contentious—and in large part worthless. For no-one has yet attempted to gather together in a small compass and to scrutinize without preconceptions all the primary evidence for specific actions or legal enactments of the Senate or of emperors before Decius which directly concerned the Christians, or which were directly rendered necessary by them. Ulpian collected the imperial rescripts relating to the punishment of Christians in the seventh book of his De Officio Proconsulis . This chapter has left no discernible trace in the Digest commissioned by the Christian emperor Justinian. The evidence which remains, therefore, is scattered and often difficult to evaluate. What follows is an attempt to present clearly the primary evidence for the legal basis of the condemnation of Christians before 250 without the accretions of later hagiography or of modern interpretations.