The Effect of Persecution on Religious Communities: An Experiment in Comparative History

Two early 4th-century Christian communities splintered into mutually hostile factions after the imperial government rescinded Diocletian’s edicts against them. Although we often assume that a community that suffers together will bond more tightly together, this did not happen in Carthage, North Africa, which split over the so-called Donatist challenge. Nor did it happen in Alexandria, Egypt, which fractured over Arius’ theology. While granting that persecution casts suspicion on people linked to the oppressors, we still assume that all early 4th-century Christian communities were uniformly estranged from imperial power. First, I argue that this assumption is unfounded: some people in Carthage and in Alexandria had demonstrably closer connections than others to the imperial court. These differences make sense if we accept recent arguments that Christians attained full legal status under the emperor Gallienus (260‒267). Next, I show that in both Carthage and Alexandria, those with closer connections to the imperial court were the first to face charges of heresy or schism. In other words, some members of the broader Christian community perceived those with court connections as people whose allegiances were ambiguous at best and who were therefore not ‘true’ Christians. This situation proved particularly challenging for the emperor Constantine to manage, even though he proclaimed himself a member of the Christian community after 312.