Nero's torches
Christians blamed for the Rome fire
On the night of July 18th, 64 AD, fire breaks out in the merchant shops beneath the Circus Maximus. The wind is up. Rome is a city of timber and thatch and narrow streets packed together for miles, and the fire finds all of it.
It burns for six days. Then it flares again and burns for three more. When it is finally out, ten of Rome's fourteen districts have been damaged or destroyed. Hundreds of thousands are homeless. The city that had ruled the world for centuries is a field of ash.
The emperor Nero was not in Rome when it started. He returned and organized relief efforts, opened his own gardens to the homeless, brought in food. But the rumors had already started — that he watched it burn from a tower while playing his lyre, that he started it himself to clear land for his new palace.
Nero needed someone to blame. He chose the Christians.
They were already unpopular — a strange sect that refused to worship the imperial gods, that met in secret, that spoke of eating flesh and drinking blood. The accusations were easy to make and impossible to disprove.
The historian Tacitus, no friend of Christianity, records what happened next with visible discomfort. Christians were arrested, convicted not of arson but of hatred of the human race. They were torn apart by dogs. They were crucified. They were set on fire at night to serve as torches in Nero's gardens.
Nero offered his gardens as a public spectacle. He drove his chariot through the light of burning human beings.
Tacitus writes that even the Roman crowd, which had no sympathy for Christians, felt pity. The punishment exceeded any guilt.
“Even for criminals who deserve extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man's cruelty, that they were being destroyed.”
— Tacitus, Annals XV.44, c. 116 AD
“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Paul wrote those words from Rome, probably within a few years of the fire. He may have known some of the people who burned in Nero's gardens.
Neither death nor life. He was not being poetic. He was writing from inside an empire that was actively testing the claim.
The people who died as Nero's torches were not heroes in the Hollywood sense. They were ordinary believers — the same kinds of people who filled the Jerusalem church, who ate together and shared what they had. They did not choose the fire. The fire chose them.
And the church did not end. It never ends this way. Nero is gone. The church is still here.
Nero is gone. The church is still here. That is the whole answer.