So I was having a conversation the other day about religion and peace throughout history, and the dude essentially brought my eyes to a huge list of supposed crimes that Christianity committed throughout history, starting from the reign of the first Christian emperor Constantine. The list, which you can read here, was almost immediately high on my suspicions given the fact that the website promoting it (jesusneverexisted.com) may be described as the manifestation of historical incompetence. After some more research, I found that the list actually comes from a book titled Demolish Them by someone named Vlasis Rassias. This book is so obscure that I can’t find it on Amazon, Google Books, or its publisher. It appears to have been self-published in Greek in 1994. Anyways, it’s good to have available refutations of this kind of nonsense, so here we are.
The first crime it lists is, apparently, Christians denouncing pagan worship. This is a crime? Then, the author then reveals his approval for the internet myth that the Council of Nicaea established the divinity of Christ (it didn’t, what came out of this council was a creed, 20 canons and a letter to the Church of Alexandria, all of which you can read here). Then, the stakes quickly elevate. Rassias tells us;
359 In Skythopolis, Syria, the Christians organise the first death camps for the torture and executions of the arrested non-Christians from all around the empire. [bold not mine]
That’s right, during the reign of Constantius II, Christians established a death camp for anyone who wasn’t a Christian (presumably Rassias wants us thinking of the Soviet gulags and Nazi concentration camps at this point). The problem is with all this … it’s just fiction. I tracked down the source for the events of Scythopolis in AD 359 to the account described by Ammianus Marcellinus (a 4th-century soldier and historian) in his Res Gestae, 19.12.1-20. The account is too long to quote entirely (you can read it here if you want to), but the first two sections alone are enough to rule out the preposterous claim that it was a death-camp for non-Christians. In fact, it was a tribunal established by the Roman secretary Paulus, on the direction of Constantius II, to try people for treason against the emperor. Ammianus writes;
Yet in the midst of these anxieties, as if it were prescribed by some ancient custom, in place of civil wars the trumpets sounded for alleged cases of high treason; and to investigate and punish these there was sent that notorious state-secretary Paulus, often called Tartareus. He was skilled in the. work of bloodshed, and just as a trainer of gladiators seeks profit and emolument from the traffic in funerals and festivals, so did he from the rack or the executioner. [2] Therefore, as his determination to do harm was fixed and obstinate, he did not refrain from secret fraud, devising fatal charges against innocent persons, provided only he might continue his pernicious traffic. (Res Gestae 19.12.1-2)
Paulus, as it happens, was called “the chain” in his days for his brutality and history of fabricating evidence in order to convict innocents. Not only isn’t this a non-Christian death camp, but at one point a pagan philosopher was brought in to and tortured on the grounds that he was making sacrifices to the pagan gods so that they would grant him imperial power in return (which means he was accused of wanting to become emperor himself, which would necessarily require displacing Constantius). Eventually, Paulus was convinced that the accusations being made were not, in fact, correct, and so let the philosopher go.
Also Demetrius, surnamed Cythras, a philosopher of advanced years, it is true, but hardy of body and mind, being charged with offering sacrifice several times, could not deny it; he declared, however, that he had done so from early youth for the purpose of propitiating the deity, not of trying to reach a higher station by his investigations; for he did not know of anyone who had such aspirations. Therefore, after being long kept upon the rack, supported by his firm confidence he fearlessly made the same plea without variation; whereupon he was allowed to go without further harm to his native city of Alexandria. (Res Gestae, 19.12.12)
Which proves this wasn’t a non-Christian death camp. So the article is wrong. The biggest problem with this article is that it simply offers no sources for its claims, which makes it close to impossible to fact-check it. There are a number of instances, however, where we can investigate its claims, and almost always, the turn out to be ridiculously false.
One example is that it claims in AD 335 the emperor Constantine ordered the crucifixion of all people who claimed to be able to do magic or tell the future. Except, Vassias forgets, the 5th century historian Sozomen (Ecclesiastical History I, 8.13) and possibly the 4th century historian Aurelius Victor (De Caesaribus, 41.4) say that Constantine banned the practice of crucifixion. It’s true, however, that Ammianus claimed any practice of magic was punished by death under Constantius II, but historians discount his account as unreliable since, of course, he was a pagan himself who not only hated Constantius II, but was actively trying to evoke the sense of a reign of terror during Constantius II’s reign. Matthew Dickie, Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Illinois in Chicago, in an analysis of how magic and soothsaying was treated during the 4th century Christian emperors concludes that the emperors cared little for any harmless acts of magic and were more concerned with pagans trying to use magic to harm others and learn of the future (which was used to obtain prophecies about the death of the emperor). See pp. 242-247 in Dickie’s 2003 book Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World (or click here).
The list claims that on the same year of 335, Sopatrus, a pagan philosopher was “martyred” for his paganism. Eunapius, a 4th century author in his Lives of the Sophists provides a a lengthy account of Sopatrus and how he met his death. Apparently, the city of Constantinople, due to its size, required enormous sums of grain in order to be sustained from the surrounding lands of Rome, including Egypt, Asia, Phoenicia and Syria. However, the city itself, so Eunapius says, is not well fitted for the arrival of ships to transport these grains unless a strong wind blows south. At one point, as Constantinople lacked these winds and it was becoming increasingly difficult for grain to arrive at Constantinople, and since the supply of food began declining to the city, Eunapius says that Constantine was no longer able to satisfy his people. Several men, envious of Sopatrus — since he was a philosopher Constantine greatly enjoyed — took this opportunity to claim that Sopatrus was using his magic to scatter the winds and reach imperial power for himself. Constantine, convinced, had Sopatrus executed. This sounds much less like pagan martyrdom (if Constantine had disliked paganism so much, it’s difficult to understand why he had Sopatrus as one of his favorite philosophers to begin with) and more to do with an insecure emperors doubts. Roman emperors, throughout their history, have a tediously lengthy record of killing anyone they suspect with defection in any form (for example, Claudius killed 35 senators during his reign). Once again, it’s very difficult to evaluate any of the crackpot claims on that website simply because of the fact that it offers zero sources for anything it’s saying. That, on its own, is enough to discount the list.
Scientific Christians Thoughts 