Candida R. Moss > Quotes

“The myth of Christian martyrdom and persecution needs to be corrected, because it has left us with a dangerous legacy that poisons the well of public discourse. This affects not just Christians, but everyone. We cannot use the mere fact that we feel persecuted as evidence that our cause is just or as the grounds for rhetorical or actual war. We cannot use the supposed moral superiority of our ancient martyrs to demonstrate the intrinsic superiority of our modern religious beliefs or ideological positions. Once we recognize that feeling persecuted is not proof of anything, then we have to engage in serious intellectual and moral debate about the actual issues at hand.”
― Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“When, in 2012, Newt Gingrich was asked about how his religious beliefs would affect his conduct should he become president, the Republican nominee hopeful answered, "One of the reasons I am running is there has been an increasingly aggressive war against religion and in particular against Christianity" in the United States. For a potential president to state that he sees himself as a wartime candidate who will defend his party against other citizens is astonishing. There is not even a pretense here of "united states".”
― Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“The rhetoric of persecution legitimates and condones retributive violence. Violence committed by the persecuted is an act of divinely approved self-defense. In attacking others they are not only defending themselves; they are defending all Christians.”
― Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“Although we can understand how people who were part of a widely disliked minority group might think that they were assailed by the devil, the idea is still dangerous. We should be worried by a powerful church that sees its dissenters as inspired by Satan. The Christians who lived during the reign of the emperor Constantine and later did not extend to pagans the toleration they had asked for generations before. They destroyed pagan shrines and temples, and stories of Christian mobs attacking Roman prefects and swarming around pagan religious centers are surprisingly common. With the legalization of Christianity, Christians turned—in the words of historian Hal Drake—from lambs into lions.53 Their violence was legitimized by the fact that they were Christian and in a martyr-led war against Satan. There was, for some, no difference between dying as a martyr under Decius and dying while trying to destroy a pagan temple. In the words of the fifth-century monk Shenoute, “There is no crime for those who have Christ.”54”
― Candida R. Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“During the Reformation, one of Martin Luther’s chief complaints about the Catholic Church was that it was full of corruption and fraud. He argued that the cult of the saints, in particular, was riddled with forged relics and superstitious practices. It is rumored that Luther’s epiphany about the Catholic Church came as he ascended the legendary Scala Sancta in Rome in 1510. These “Holy Stairs” are believed to have been the very steps on which Jesus ascended to be tried by Pilate in Jerusalem. To this day pilgrims who ascend the stairs on their knees are granted an indulgence that knocks nine years off their time in purgatory for each of the twenty-eight steps. Luther purportedly became so disillusioned with indulgences and relics after this event that he famously complained, “What lies there are about relics! . . . How does it happen that eighteen apostles are buried in Germany when Christ had only twelve?”
― Candida R. Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“Claims of being persecuted are used in order to exclude and suppress other groups, to identify them with demonic forces, and to legitimize rhetorical and perhaps also literal violence against them. From the very beginning Christian claims to membership in a historically persecuted group and the formation of the myth of persecution were strategic. This myth of persecution was, paradoxically enough, a way to marginalize others. Ironically, if modern Christians are the heirs of early church traditions about martyrs, it is this myth that they have preserved. Just like Christian writers in late antiquity, we continue to use the claimed experience of persecution to justify our attacks on others and legitimize our opinions.”
― Candida R. Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“For slandering someone in a song, for instance, the penalty was to be clubbed to death.”
― Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“It is simply anachronistic to divide ancient motivations into the religious and the political. They were tangled up together. For us, the state is—in theory—exclusively political and should not interfere in questions of personal belief, religion, faith, or God. In reality religion and politics are thoroughly entangled with one another, but we idealize the separation of church and state and the freedom of individuals to practice their religious traditions. For ancient Romans the state”
― Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“Scholars hypothesize that this idea of delayed judgment and eschatological reward developed because these promises of immediate reward were constantly unfulfilled. As a result and in order to avoid the conclusion that God was either notoriously unreliable or fundamentally incompetent, the idea of future eschatological reward and punishment emerged.”
― Candida R. Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“The circumstances under which Christians came to see voluntary martyrdom as a bad thing are equally interesting. Chronologically speaking our earliest objector is Clement of Alexandria, a Christian philosopher who fled Alexandria out of fear of arrest around 202. Clement denounces voluntary martyrdom as something done by heretics: We . . . say that those who have rushed on death (for there are some, not belonging to us, but sharing the name merely, who are in haste to give themselves up, the poor wretches dying through hatred to the Creator)—these, we say, banish themselves without being martyrs, even though they are punished publicly.7”
― Candida R. Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“A defensive insensitivity that refuses to acknowledge the sufferings of those with whom we disagree is far too often where this obsession with persecution leads us.”
― Candida R. Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“The view that the history of Christianity is a history of unrelenting persecution persists in modern religious and political debate about what it means to be Christian. It creates a world in which Christians are under attack; it endorses political warfare rather than encouraging political discourse; and it legitimizes seeing those who disagree with us as our enemies. It is precisely because the myth of persecution continues to be so influential that it is imperative that we get the history right.”
― Candida R. Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“In a famous episode in Asia Minor around 185, a mob of Christians marched to the home of C. Arrius Antoninus, the governor of Asia, and demanded to be executed. The governor, no doubt irritated by the interruption, sent the Christians away, telling them that if they wanted to die, they had cliffs to leap off and ropes with which to hang themselves. If he had been following the guidelines in the Pliny–Trajan correspondence, he could have had the Christians executed, and yet this particular administrator could not be bothered to arrange trials. Not every Roman administrator was interested in Christians; many just wanted to see them go away.”
― Candida R. Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“The problem is what happens when this vision of the world is translated into settings in which Christians are not the underdogs. In situations where Christians have the military, political, and financial power to take steps against their “demonically inspired” enemies, this worldview can legitimize all kinds of violence. Once a group, idea, or person is labeled evil, then any measures can be used in opposition, even if these measures themselves involve torture, imprisonment, and execution. The fact that these stories envision actual physical possession by the devil only makes the problem worse. In a world in which one’s enemies are no longer people but agents of evil, those people are completely dehumanized. They are no longer deserving of compassion, forgiveness, understanding, or empathy. No one clamors for basic human rights for demons. Early Christian martyrdom stories set a precedent for later generations of Christians to see the world in this way. Once a group claims to be persecuted, they invoke (whether explicitly or implicitly) the idea that their opponents are acting for the devil.”
― Candida R. Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“Iphigenia turns to her bereft mother, Clytemnestra, and reshapes her death as a sacrifice on behalf of Greece, called here Hellas: Listen, mother, to what I have been thinking. I have decided to die. I want to do this gloriously, by yielding and doing away with my low-mindedness. Come, mother, look at it with my eyes and see how nobly I speak. All of majestic Hellas looks upon me now. It is through me that the ships will be able to sail and the Phrygians [that is, the Trojans] will find their grave. And if barbarians do something to women in the future, it is through me that they will be prevented from seizing them from happy Hellas. . . . All this I will secure by dying, and mine will be the blissful glory that I brought Hellas freedom. . . . I offer my body for Hellas. Sacrifice me and destroy Troy. That will be my monument for ages to come. That will be my children, my husband, my glory.9”
― Candida R. Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“PRIOR TO CHRISTIANITY THERE were only two clear-cut instances of Romans targeting specific groups because of their religious orientation. The first was the extermination of the Druids, a subset of the Celts who lived in Gaul and Britannia, modern-day France and Britain.”
― Candida R. Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“In his third-century BCE collection of Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, the Greek writer Diogenes Laertius is keen to include in his biographies stories about how his protagonists died.”
― Candida R. Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“Capital punishment was a regular occurrence in the ancient world, and the methods of execution were similarly brutal. The Twelve Tables describes being beheaded, crucified, buried alive, drowned at sea, beaten to death, hanged, and impaled. In a show of characteristic fairness, the method of execution was tailored to fit the crime. Arsonists, for example, were often burned alive.”
― Candida R. Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“The issue is just as devastating for modern scholars who pronounce the merits of Gnosticism. Since the 1980s a succession of historians of religion have rightly pointed out that the Gnostics were unfairly maligned by their ancient critics. The “Gnostics” (if the term is even appropriate) were philosophical Christians who sincerely and intellectually asked and answered questions about the nature of the world, the identity of Christ, and the human condition. The portrayal of the Gnostics as the archetypical heretics out to destroy the true church through the production of invidious heretical teachings is overblown, inaccurate, and the result of ancient polemic written by the orthodox, historical victors. Harvard New Testament scholar Karen King has even demonstrated that there really was no coherent group of “Gnostics” in antiquity and that our belief that this group existed is also the product of paranoid orthodox invective.35”
― Candida R. Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom