Historicity of Jesus - 2

[Husky]

For context on the references to Diocletian, here's a reminder:

http://freetruth.50webs.org/B3b.htm#Diocletian

The Diocletian persecution of 303-305CE - under Emperor Diocletian



Diocletian (284-305) was the ablest and finest Roman Emperor since Hadrian, and he allowed remarkable freedom to Christians for nearly twenty years. They were permitted to build a large church near his palace at Nicomedia, and his wife and daughter joined the [Christian] sect.

[color="#800080"](i.e. christianism tries to insinuate itself into imperial power via the wife and daughter of the Roman Emperor Diocletian.

It would have more luck later on when it latched onto Italian barmaid Helena who became mistress to a Roman Emperor and thereby spawned that other unholy christo-terror Constantine.)[/color]



The Christian orator Lactantius, who lived at Nicomedia and was employed by the Court, tells his usual untruthful stories about the change of the Emperor's mood in his Deaths of the Persecutors, but reveals, incidentally, that the numerous Christian officials of the Court were insolent, on religious grounds, to the Emperor (making the sign of the cross at the sacrifices) and his mother, and that when Diocletian, whose life-aim was the restoration of the Empire to its old strength, ordered the destruction of their chapel, they tore down his edict and were suspected of having set fire to the palace. The Christian religion being still illicit in Roman law, Diocletian, who, though of humble origin, had a strong feeling of imperial dignity, issued a series of decrees ordering that the churches be destroyed and the copies of the Scriptures given up, and that all must offer sacrifice (burn a few grains of incense) or produce an official certificate that they had done so.

-- A Rationalist Encyclopaedia, by Joseph McCabe



Fiction: about 40,000 martyrs

Until modern times Christian literature counted a mass of martyrs under Diocletian that ran to something like 40,000, and Rome claimed a large share of these heroes.

-- A Rationalist Encyclopaedia, by Joseph McCabe



Facts: a score (20) of martyrs in the whole empire - none in Rome, and a few hundred suicidal Christians executed.

[Catholic historian] Duchesne (History of the Christian Church, 3 vols., 1904) laboriously finds about a score of genuine martyrs in the whole Empire, including three at Rome, but the leading (and strictly orthodox) Catholic authority on martyrs, the Jesuit Fr. Delehaye, supported by his colleagues, does not find a single genuine contemporary record of a martyrdom at Rome (Prof. Ehrhard, Die altchristliche Literatur, 1900, 556).

-- How Christianity Grew Out of Paganism, by Joseph McCabe



It is impossible to estimate how many were executed--these were largely zealots who demanded death--in the Empire, though the documents passed by modern experts suggest only a few hundred, but in Rome itself the apostasy was extraordinary. The Pope led the betrayal, and Diocletian's wife, Prisca (who nevertheless appears as three different lady-martyrs in the pious fiction), and daughter promptly quitted the Church. Pope Marcellinus is still "Saint and Martyr" in Catholic official literature, but the chief modern Catholic historian, Mgr. Duchesne, proves that he died in bed, and the official Papal Chronicle admits that he abjured the faith.

-- A Rationalist Encyclopaedia, by Joseph McCabe

Of course christianism had its revenge on the imperial apostates: in time, Constantine would gruesomely murder Prisca and daughter and all their kids. (Of course the faithful Constantine was quite even-handed: he did that to others besides.)



In its finally successful attempt to take over Rome, christianism would convert not just peripherals like Mrs Emperor and Ms Emperor but the Emperor itself. Helena was a christian when Constantine's dad met her. She raised Constantine a christian, so he was secured for christianism since the start.