It remained for Athenagoras, around 168, to find the appropriate technical terms for these imaginary offences: alongside “Oedipean mating”, “the Thyestean feast”.(8) The name is highly significant: the children of Thyestes were killed by his brother Atreus and served up to him at a banquet. If the cannibalistic feasts in which Christians were believed to indulge could be called “Thyestean”, that means that the supposed victims were not adults but children. And that is confirmed both by Minucius Felix and by Tertullian.(9)
Tertullian might make fun of such beliefs, but they were really no laughing matter. They were very widespread, both in the geographical and in the social sense. Christian apologists referred to them as flourishing in all the main areas where Christians were to be found — north Africa, Asia Minor, Rome itself; and not only amongst the unlettered populace, either. In the 160s M. Cornelius Fronto made a speech accusing the Christians of infanticide, cannibalism and incest — and Fronto was not only a famous orator and an influential senator but the tutor and adviser of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. In fact, these rumours constituted a mortal threat to the Christian community. It is quite possible that Fronto influenced Marcus Aurelius in his persecution of the Christians, which was severe. And in the frightful persecution which struck the Christians at Lyons towards the end of his reign these same accusations certainly played an important part.(10)
This persecution, which took place in 177, is exceptionally well documented; for one of the survivors sent a full account to the churches of Asia and Phrygia, and this has been preserved in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius(11) The Christian community at Lyons was at that time still quite small. It consisted largely of Greek-speaking immigrants from Asia Minor whose spiritual home, to which they turned in their hour of need, was still in Asia Minor; but it also included some Romano-Gallic converts. These Christians belonged to various social strata — some were highly respected physicians and advocates, rich enough to own slaves, while others were themselves slaves — but together they formed a close-knit minority clearly marked off from the pagan population around them.
The immediate motive for the persecution may well have been simple self-interest on the part of the leading citizens of Lyons. Normally, the expenses of the gladiatorial games in the provinces of the Empire fell largely on the rich landowners. A few months before, a measure had been introduced by Marcus Aurelius and the senate which enabled these local notables to purchase condemned criminals for use as ritual sacrifices at the games. Condemned criminals could be purchased at a very much lower cost than the hire of a gladiator. It has been pointed out that the public torture and execution of Christians could well commend itself to the leading citizens of Lyons and to the Gallic priests, as an even more expedient operation — one which would not only provide ritual sacrifices at minimal expense, but at the same time eliminate an alien and potentially troublesome group.(12)
However that may be, the authorities and the populace collaborated in the persecution. Officially banned from public places and in effect outlawed, the unfortunate Christians were hounded by the mob, beaten and stoned in the streets; after which they were arrested and thrown into prison. At this point pagan slaves belonging to the prisoners were arrested and tortured to obtain incriminating statements; and in the end some asserted that their masters killed and ate children and indulged in promiscuous and incestuous orgies. They would never have voiced such accusations without prompting — which suggests that the persecutors had from the start planned to saddle the Christian community with these crimes. Certainly once these charges were uttered, they set the tone for the rest of the proceedings. As Professor Frend has remarked, “for many of the pagans these revelations confirmed their worst suspicions. Popular rage knew no bounds, and the few moderate-minded individuals who had previously tried to protect their Christian friends felt themselves deceived and let matters take their course. . Few seem to have had any doubt that the Christians were in fact cannibals. Hence, the final punishment, the refusal of burial. . ”(13) For, contrary to normal Roman practice even in cases of treason, the bodies of the executed were not buried but were burnt, and the ashes scattered in the Rhône.
The Christians were horribly tortured first, both in prison and in the amphitheatre. But nothing could induce them either to deny the faith they held or to admit to crimes they had never committed. As one of them, called Attalus, was being roasted alive in an iron chair, he still cried to the crowd: “What you are doing is indeed to eat men, but we do not eat men, nor do we do anything else wicked.”(14) And the woman Biblis also cried out under torture: “How would such people eat children. .?”(15)
Some of the specific accusations which were brought against Christians had previously been brought against other communities or groups.
In the great city of Alexandria, Greek and Jewish communities lived side by side in a state of perpetual tension; and some time in the first century B.C. the Alexandrian Greeks started a rumour that the god of the Jews had the form of a donkey.(16) The idea may have been inspired by the fact that the name Yahweh somewhat resembled the Egyptian word for “donkey”; in any case it became a stock theme of anti-Jewish satire. In the first century A.D. the Greek writer Apion embroidered on it.(17) According to him a Greek called Zabidos contrived to enter the Temple in disguise and to steal the donkey’s head that was worshipped there; and he added that some two centuries earlier, when the Seleucid monarch Antiochus Epiphanes broke into and plundered the Temple, he too removed a donkey’s head of great value, which had been the central object of Jewish worship.
In the ancient world it was of course not uncommon for a god to be symbolized by a sculptured animal — even apart from the Egyptian gods, there was Graeco-Roman Pan. But few animals were as poorly regarded as the donkey, “that most abject of all animals”, as Minucius Felix calls it; and a cult centred on a donkey-god could only be ridiculous and shameful. That is why Apion told his stories; for Apion was an Alexandrian Greek and the leading anti-Jewish publicist of his day. And for generations after Apion’s time similar tales concerning the Jews continued to circulate in Alexandria. As late as the fourth century Epiphanius knew of a book possessed by Alexandrian Gnostics which treated the theme in a particularly colourful way. It told how Zachariah saw in the Temple a being which was both man and donkey. When he described what he had seen to the Jews, they killed him.* Those Gnostics maintained that because of this incident it had been decreed that the high priest should wear bells, so that when he entered the Temple to do priestly service, the being who was worshipped there would be warned in time to hide himself and the secret of his donkey-shape would be preserved.(18)
*
The reference is presumably to Zachariah, son of Baruch, who was murdered in the Temple, along with the high priest Ananias, by the Zealots in A.D. 67.