THE LEGAL BASIS FOR THE TREATMENT OF CHRISTIANITY, 30-312 C.E. (ROMAN LAW, PERSECUTION)

The Problem. For many years scholars have endeavored to explain the legal basis for the treatment of Christianity in the period, 30 C.E.-312 C.E. There are many different theories but no consensus has been reached. Part of the problem is that the documentary evidence is scarce and potentially misleading. Also, opinion has been divided by questions of a proper definition of law as it applies to the function of law and the legal status of Christianity in the Roman Empire. It is the purpose of this dissertation to examine the problem in a new way and to propose an answer that is based on more uniformly analyzed data.;The Thesis. The case analyses indicate that Christians were treated under the standard Roman legal practices of the period. The evidence demonstrates that as early as Trajan (112 C.E.), laws, in the form of imperial constitutions, promulgated by rescript, established a legal basis for the prosecution of people who would not conform to Roman rites. Christians were treated under those laws.;The Method. The research method employed is to analyze those documents that claim to be reports of the trials of Christians. Using research theories and methods developed in Anthropology of Law, it is possible to reconstruct from these materials the cases in which Christians appeared before a Roman official. A standard set of questions is asked of 83 individual cases. The answers provide a uniform data base which is analyzed and tabulated to discover the legal basis for the treatments recorded. This kind of analysis sheds new light on this perplexing problem. The results of the case study analyses are then compared to a definition of law drawn from both Anthropology of Law and Philosophy of Law. The purpose of this comparison is to discover if the treatments can be considered legal when judged by a proper standard of legality.