James Corke-Webster: Persecution from the Ground Up

Despite disagreement over the extent of the persecution of Christians under the Roman Empire, almost all scholarship has been united by a “top down” perspective – that is, it is primarily interested in the actions and motivations of Roman emperors and government. This paper proposes instead a “bottom up” approach, which seeks to understand how persecution worked on the ground for the subjects of empire in the Roman world. Its hypothesis is that Christian suffering owed less to specific targeting by the Roman authorities and more to the routine violent jostling for position and status of minority groups within Roman provincial communities. The key agents of persecution were thus not the Roman authorities – who are better understood as mechanisms of persecution – but Christians’ fellow community members. "Persecution" was therefore simply normal delation – identification of Christians by their neighbours, associates, business partners, etc – that made use of changing opportunities in the provincial Roman judicial system. The experience of persecution must consequently also be understood as fear not primarily of the authorities but of their fellow ordinary provincials.