num_pages: 320
description: In The Myth of Persecution  Candida Moss a leading expert on early Christianity reveals how the early church exaggerated invented and forged stories of Christian martyrs and how the dangerous legacy of a martyrdom complex is employed today to silence dissent and galvanize a new generation of culture warriors. According to cherished church tradition and popular belief before the Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal in the fourth century early Christians were systematically persecuted by a brutal Roman Empire intent on their destruction. As the story goes vast numbers of believers were thrown to the lions tortured or burned alive because they refused to renounce Christ. These saints Christianity's inspirational heroes are still venerated today. Moss however exposes that the Age of Martyrs is a fictionthere was no sustained 300-year-long effort by the Romans to persecute Christians. Instead these stories were pious exaggerations; highly stylized rewritings of Jewish Greek and Roman noble death traditions; and even forgeries designed to marginalize heretics inspire the faithful and fund churches. The traditional story of persecution is still taught in Sunday school classes celebrated in sermons and employed by church leaders politicians and media pundits who insist that Christians wereand always will bepersecuted by a hostile secular world. While violence against Christians does occur in select parts of the world today the rhetoric of persecution is both misleading and rooted in an inaccurate history of the early church. Moss urges modern Christians to abandon the conspiratorial assumption that the world is out to get Christians and rather embrace the consolation moral instruction and spiritual guidance that these martyrdom stories provide.
language: English
title: The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom
publisher: HarperOne