Bibles burned in the streets
Diocletian's edict against Christians
The emperor Diocletian has been on the throne for nineteen years and has generally tolerated the Christians. He has Christian servants in his palace. His wife and daughter may have been believers. He has built the empire back from near-collapse and sees himself as a restorer of Roman greatness.
Something changes in the winter of 302–303 AD. The historical arguments are complex — the influence of his co-emperor Galerius, reports of Christians in the army refusing certain ritual obligations, an oracle that may have been manipulated. Whatever the cause, on February 23, 303 AD, Diocletian issues the first of four edicts against the Christians.
The church in Nicomedia — the imperial capital in Asia Minor, directly across from the palace — is demolished by imperial troops. The following day the edict is posted. Every Christian must hand over their scriptures to be burned. Churches are to be demolished. Christians are stripped of legal standing. They cannot bring suits in court, cannot hold office, cannot be freed from slavery.
Subsequent edicts go further: Christian clergy are to be imprisoned, then tortured until they sacrifice to the Roman gods, then executed.
The persecution that follows is the most systematic in the church's history. It lasts for ten years. Thousands die. Thousands recant. Thousands hand over their scriptures — these are called traditores, the ones who hand things over, which is where the English word traitor comes from.
And thousands hide their scriptures in walls and under floors and in the desert caves of Egypt and North Africa, where some of them will be found seventeen centuries later, perfectly preserved.
“He who abandons what he knows will not find what he does not know.”
— Cyprian of Carthage, c. 250 AD
“It happened, when Jehudi had read three or four leaves, that the king cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was in the brazier, until all the scroll was consumed in the fire that was in the brazier.”
Kings have been burning scriptures since Jeremiah's time. It has never worked.
Diocletian's edict assumed that destroying the books would destroy the belief. It underestimated the depth at which the words had already taken root — in communities who had memorized them, in teachers who could reproduce them from memory, in the scattered network of believers across the empire who would find ways to preserve and copy and hide and share.
You cannot burn what people have already become.
The word that has taken root in a person is different from the word sitting on a shelf. Diocletian came for the shelves. He could not reach what was already inside.
How deep do the words go in you? Deep enough that no one can take them?