Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (15 page)

By the time Marcus Aurelius became emperor in 161, he and his advisers had begun to take Christians seriously as a threat. Around 165
C.E.
, M. Cornelius Fronto, an African orator who had risen to great prominence in Rome and was Marcus’ teacher, close friend, and senior adviser, gave a widely publicized speech characterizing Christians as criminally minded people whose
meetings were covers for secret rituals involving “people of both sexes, and all ages,” including children, in group orgies:

Once the lights are out, Fronto went on, the guests fall upon one another in unrestrained orgies.

Marcus might have heard, too, from another close friend, Rusticus, his former philosophy teacher and now prefect of Rome, of a recent case in which he had interrogated seven accused Christians led by Justin—the same one who had petitioned Marcus—who called himself a “Christian philosopher.” Surprised that all seven adamantly refused to offer sacrifice, even when facing the death sentence, Rusticus had asked, “If you are whipped and beheaded, do you believe that you will go up to heaven?” Justin had replied, “Not only do I
think
it; I am absolutely certain.”
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Rusticus might have reported how he then lost patience, gave them a final warning, and, when they spurned it, immediately ordered his soldiers to whip them and cut off their heads. Stories like this led Galen, Marcus’ personal physician, to grudgingly admire the courage he had seen some of them show, although he thought they were fools to believe in miracles and dead people raised. Marcus himself, less forgiving of those accused of atheism and disloyalty to Rome, noted in his private journal that what some admired as courage was nothing but theatrical bravado.

When increasing pressure and more frequent arrests failed to
stop the movement from growing, another member of Marcus’ circle, the Platonic philosopher Celsus, wrote a serious critique to expose it.
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Celsus might have intended to answer the two manifestos that Justin had written and published before his execution,
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for he carefully investigated Christians and read their writings extensively. In his hugely influential attack,
The True Doctrine,
Celsus wrote that what alarmed him most was the sense of a hostile, breakaway faction forming—and growing dangerously—within the empire. Since Celsus devoutly worshipped the gods and supported the emperors, he despised Christians for aiming their message at disaffected and marginal people, appealing primarily to slaves, gullible women and children, pickpockets, thieves, and prostitutes. Yet who else, he asked, would believe their bizarre stories about the crucified Jew whom they worship as God? Who else would listen to the “terrors they invent” to scare people into believing, when they say that “God will come down and bring fire like a torturer”
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to judge and punish everyone who rejects their teaching? Above all, Celsus ridiculed their threats of divine judgment:

Celsus accuses them of having joined a “secret society” and cut themselves off from the rest of civilization, acting as if “outsiders are not to be trusted, and that they themselves must remain
perpetual apostates from the approved religions.” Finally, he warns that if everyone were to adopt the Christians’ attitude, there would be no rule of law; legitimate authority would be abandoned.
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Christians who defended the movement from such attacks sometimes confirmed the worst fears of critics like Celsus. Tertullian, the African convert, outraged when he saw Christians being killed in the sports arena in his home city of Carthage, praised “our own John” for picturing Rome as Babylon, “proud of her power, and victorious over the saints,”
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but damned and doomed. Tertullian marveled at God’s power made visible to thousands of spectators in Carthage on an unforgettable spring day, March 7, 203, when the twenty-two-year-old convert Perpetua walked steadily, with focused gaze, into the amphitheater to die for refusing to sacrifice to Rome and her gods.
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While the crowd shouted and jeered, Perpetua and her doomed companions, Saturus and Saturninus, infuriated them even more by defiantly signaling, “You condemn us today; tomorrow God will condemn you!”
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While in prison, Perpetua wrote in her diary dreams that came to her—dreams infused with imagery from John’s Book of Revelation. In one, she faced an enormous and terrifying dragon and dared step on its head as she climbed a ladder toward heaven; in another, she saw herself in the arena, having turned into a man, fighting in single-handed combat with the devil.
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Whoever wrote the introduction to Perpetua’s prison diary—and many believe that it was Tertullian—declared that the visions she received in prison, the healings she performed, and her courageous martyrdom along with her companions proved that the spirit of God was upon them, as it was upon the “new prophets,” Montanus and his
followers, whom the martyrs had admired. Who, having witnessed the superhuman courage that even Perpetua’s slave Felicitas, along with Saturus and Saturninus, displayed during these ordeals could deny the martyrs’ conviction that the Holy Spirit was shining through them?

Shortly after these executions, Tertullian himself joined the New Prophecy movement, inspired by John’s Revelation, which had given courage to Perpetua and her companions throughout their ordeal. Tertullian, like Justin and Irenaeus, championed the writings that these martyrs especially loved—the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation. Tertullian wrote for insiders that what spectators saw in the sports arena could not compare with the great spectacle he could hardly wait to see:

Writing his own impassioned defense of the Christians,
The Apology,
Tertullian expresses fierce ambivalence toward the empire.
Like Justin, at first he insists that Christians are the empire’s best and most loyal subjects:

But after defiantly adding that Christians pay taxes only because Jesus told them to do so
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and that they subject themselves to “the powers that be” because Jesus’ apostle Paul had told them that “all powers that exist are ordained by God for your good,”
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Tertullian, like Justin, turns to threats. He warns that “there is another and greater necessity for us to pray for the emperors and for the complete stability of the empire,” since “we know that a powerful shock impends over the whole earth—the final end of all things, threatening terrible sufferings”—horrors that have been delayed only because “we [Christians] pray for the delay of the final end.”
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Defending “the new Christian society” as a model community,
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Tertullian asks, if Roman magistrates allow subject nations to worship their own gods, why not allow Christians to do the same? Since Roman magistrates tolerate all kinds of foreign cults—Egyptian, Greek, and Persian—why not the cult of Christ? Tertullian would surely have known the answer to this preposterous suggestion, having risked his life to join the Christians, while cosmopolitan Roman citizens, even emperors, joined multiple cults with impunity.

How, then, did joining Christianity differ from joining any other religious group? To answer this question, let’s consider what was written by another member of Marcus’ circle, the brilliant and adventurous African philosopher Apuleius, a disciple of Plato fascinated by religion and magic, who made a practice of joining exotic cults. Like Justin and Tertullian, Apuleius was a spiritual seeker, who wrote that as a young man, “moved by religious fervor and passion to know the truth,” he investigated religious groups of all kinds: “I was initiated into various Greek mysteries … and learned mysteries of many kinds, many rituals and diverse ceremonies.”
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Although sworn to not reveal the secrets of what happened in such initiations, he became famous for speaking in public about “how many mysteries I knew,” including those of the Roman god Liber; the Persian god Mithra; the Greek god of healing, Asclepius; and his favorite, the Egyptian goddess Isis.

Apuleius wrote the only firsthand account we have of initiation into Isis’ mysteries, but instead of a straightforward report, he offered the kind of dramatic, witty, and moving story his contemporaries had come to expect from a man whose private life had turned into a public spectacle in a packed courtroom. We know only his side of the story, which he told in court. He had been accused of practicing criminal magic after he induced a lonely widow, perhaps twice his age and enormously wealthy, to marry him and sign over her entire fortune to him. When the widow’s son, formerly his friend and fellow student, furiously pressed charges, then suddenly died during the trial, his uncle immediately accused Apuleius of using magic—or poison—to murder the young man whom he had cheated of his inheritance.

At his trial, Apuleius scoffed at charges that he was a man of
great vanity who kept his hair carefully coiffed and wrote erotic poetry to young boys, and that after he arrived in the city, relatively poor, and met the widow, witnesses had seen him buying special ingredients to make aphrodisiacs and performing magic spells at night. Ridiculing his accusers, Apuleius declared that being tall and handsome was hardly a crime; and as for erotic poetry, the emperor Hadrian, famously in love with the young slave boy Antinous, had written the same kind of poems, and so had the great philosopher Plato; so he was happy to stand with them, guilty as charged. Furthermore, he declared, being a philosopher, he found poverty no shame and was, in fact, indifferent to wealth; besides, he said, charges of making aphrodisiacs and practicing magic to get rich were easy ones to throw at any successful and charismatic man.
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Apuleius freely admitted, however, that he had learned magic and practiced magical arts; after all, he declared, Persian magic “is nothing but worship of the gods.”
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The secret rituals he practiced were, he insisted, compatible with his philosophical vocation, since they involved priestly secrets and divine wisdom. And while he laughed at the charge that he had bought fish parts to make aphrodisiacs, he allowed the courtroom audience to infer that his magic was not only sophisticated but effective, while aiming derision—and a veiled threat—against his accusers: “I am surprised that they are not afraid to attack a person they admit is so powerful.”
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As for his marriage, Apuleius first said that his accusers had exaggerated his wife’s age—she was not a day over fifty-five— then he suggested that she was closer to forty (although he left this vague) and declared that “I married for love, not money.”
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Later, however, suggesting that she was sick as well as old, he
hinted that it hadn’t taken magic to induce the woman to marry a handsome young man; he was, indeed, quite a catch, and she was lucky to have found him.

Acquitted for lack of evidence, Apuleius wrote a famous satirical novel that gives a comic version of his “quest for secret wisdom,” culminating in an account of his initiation into the cult of the goddess Isis. Earlier in the story, however, Apuleius savagely ridicules two foreign cults—that of the Syrian goddess Magna Mater (“Great Mother”) and that of the Christians. Often called
The Golden Ass,
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his novel begins as his fictional protagonist, Lucius, sets out to learn magic and falls in love with a barmaid who allows him to spy on her mistress by looking through a bedroom keyhole as she strips naked to perform magic spells. But Lucius says that, as he watched, he turned into an ass—not metaphorically, but into an actual donkey with shaggy ears, a tail, and, as he liked to mention, a huge penis. Lucius then tells how he cavorted as a beast through dangerous and comic adventures, even having been bought, beaten, and abused by frenzied devotees of Magna Mater. Speaking as the ass forced to carry her image on his back in a ritual procession, Lucius caricatures her worshippers as madmen who castrate themselves, dress in wild colors, paint their faces, and, like whirling dervishes, dance in her honor while stabbing their arms with daggers to make the blood flow as they whip themselves into a frenzy.

Breaking loose and fleeing from these maniacs, the ass was then sold to a baker, whose wife had been seduced by another bizarre foreign cult—apparently the cult of Jesus. Lucius tells how this woman, her heart filled with evil “like some filthy latrine,” despised