Before Jerusalem Fell

80 BEFORE JERUSALEM FELL
Writing of St. Martin elsewhere, Severus extols his sainted life
by noting that even though he did not suffer martyrdom, he would
gladly have done so. He then chooses two of the worst persecutors of
the Church to exalt Martin’s willingness: “But if he had been permitted,
in the times of Nero and of Decius, to take part in the struggle
which then went on, I take to witness the God of heaven and earth
that he would freely have submitted.”68
The apocryphal Acts of John th Son of Zebedee follows in the
tradition of hatred and loathing of Nero. It speaks of Nero as “the
unclean and impure and wicked king.”G9
From such evidence many modern historians feel the terror and
dread among the early Christians.
Foremost in the rank of those emperors, on whom the church looks
back with horror as her persecutors, stands Nero, a prince whose
conduct towards the Christians admits of no palliation, but was to the
last degree unprincipled and inhuman. The dreadful persecution
which took place by order of this tyrant, commenced at Rome about
the middle of November, in the year of our Lord 64. . . .
. . . .
This dreadful persecution ceased but with the death of Nero. The
empire, it is well known, was not delivered from the tyranny of this
monster until the year 68, when he put an end to his own life.70
Nero was especially feared by Christians (of whom Clement of
Alexandria was one!):
An early Church tradition identified St Paul’s “man of sin” and ‘son
of perdition” and “mystery of iniquity” with the Emperor Nero; and
of St Augustine’s contemporaries some believed that he was still alive
in the vigour of his age, others that he would rise again and come as
Antichrist. Lactantius, St Chrysostom, St Jerome, and other Christian
writers accept and repeat the theory that Nero is the Antichrist to
come. The horrors of the first martyrdoms combined with the Nerolegend
to produce the Christian tradition, and I doubt if the belief is
any more dead today than in the eleventh century, though it cannot
68. Sulpicius Severus, Gtters 3 (To Deacon Aurelius).
69. See Hort, Apocalypse, p. xix.
70. John Laurenee von Mosheim, Hi.stoy of Christiani~ in the First Three Centurks (New
York: Converse, 1854) 1:138, 139.