Why 307 AD Was the Worst Year to Be a Christian

The year 307 AD, especially in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, may have been the worst time and place to be a Christian in the history of Christianity. Perhaps it was even worse than the year 64 AD, when the Roman Emperor Nero severed the heads of Christians, stuck them on poles, dipped them in kerosene, and lit them on fire to use as torches for his imperial garden parties.

The year 307 AD was even worse than 250 AD, when the Roman Emperor Decius issued a universal decree requiring every person in the empire to perform a sacrifice to the Roman gods. Those who refused faced immediate and intense imperial punishment, and one would be considered lucky if their sentence involved only torture.

The result of Decius’s decree was that countless Christians were martyred in cold blood, including the Pope at the time, Pope Fabian. Clearly, these were not good times to be a Christian, but welcome to the year 307 AD, a time when Christianity was under the most brutal authoritarian attack and when hope seemed to be rotting away with every passing day.

This is the story of the Great Persecution of Diocletian. The political atmosphere of Rome in the third century was marred by civil war starting in 235 AD, when the Roman Emperor Alexander Severus was murdered by his own troops.

This launched one of the darkest, bloodiest, and most unstable eras in Roman history, known by historians as the Crisis of the Third Century. In the following years, more than twenty emperors ruled within a fifty-year span, meaning emperors during this period ruled for an average of just three years before being killed by their own soldiers or rival political opponents.

To add to the chaos, Rome was constantly being invaded by outside civilizations. The Goths raided the Balkans and Asia Minor, and the Persians captured Emperor Valerian in 260 AD. It was the first time in Roman history that a sitting emperor was taken prisoner, which was seen as the ultimate sign of weakness.

This caused pro-Roman propagandists to spread myths and legends that the Persians used Emperor Valerian as a human footstool until they grew tired of him. At that point, they allegedly stripped him of his skin while he was still alive and then stuffed and displayed his skin as a trophy.

This story is probably not historically accurate, but it does reflect how Romans viewed their emperors, as there was simply no room for weakness. If an emperor displayed weakness, his reputation would be tarnished forever, and just when people thought things couldn’t possibly get worse, whole cities were sacked, trade routes collapsed, and Roman legions were stretched thin everywhere throughout the empire.

Countless wars drained the treasury, which heavily devalued the currency and caused crushing inflation across the provinces. Roman money became utterly useless, so much so that the local population reverted to bartering for basic everyday goods.

Local officials were of no help due to extreme corruption, but it was hard to blame them because they were just as desperate as everyone else. To add even more fuel to the flames, awful diseases like the Plague of Cyprian ravaged the population for a good thirteen-year period.

The Roman Empire was in complete anarchy, and nobody knew exactly how this chaos would end, but one thing is for sure: this extreme bout of misfortune only served to leave one question in everyone’s mind. Why? Why was this happening to the greatest empire on Earth?

There had to be a reason, and the empire’s misfortunes came to be seen as a spiritual crisis just as much as a political one. Traditional Roman religion was built on the idea that following the conventional religious rituals properly would, in turn, cause the Roman gods and goddesses to impart divine blessings on the people.

In other words, religious piety equaled imperial protection, so Rome couldn’t help but look at their awful state of affairs and conclude that something horribly wrong spiritually had been taking place within their midst. People began turning to mystery religions, astrology, magic, and new cults promising salvation, doing anything really to attempt to pacify the angry gods.

One particularly small but rapidly growing group of atheists started getting more and more empire-wide fame, and unfortunately, it was not for a good reason. The group of atheists in question was called Christians, and yes, you heard that correctly: Christians were seen as atheistic and unpatriotic because they refused to worship the traditional Roman gods and refused to worship the emperor as divine.

Christians were viewed with much disfavor among the Roman elites and were even seen by some as the primary reason the gods were so angry. By the end of the third century, Christians made up only around five to ten percent of the Roman Empire, meaning they were still very much in the minority.

However, when you have an empire of between fifty to sixty million people, five to ten percent equals out to be around two and a half to six million Christians. This was definitely not an insignificant number, so Rome by the mid-third century wasn’t just politically unstable; it was spiritually terrified.

By the year 284 AD, one patriotic Roman elite sought to restore the mos maiorum, the ancient Roman way. This man was none other than the infamous Roman Emperor Diocletian, who would go on to attempt to wipe Christianity off the face of the Earth.

The reign of Diocletian officially ended the fifty years of chaos and brought the Crisis of the Third Century to a definitive close. Diocletian was a career soldier from the Balkans who was tough, capable, deeply superstitious, and completely obsessed with restoring Roman law and order.

To do this, he reorganized the Roman government into something Rome had never seen before and something that would ultimately be one of the most consequential decisions for the history of Christianity. He took the unprecedented action of dividing the Roman Empire into two sections, East and West, and instated not two, but four rulers.

This new form of government, created by Diocletian in 293 AD, is called the Tetrarchy, and it was organized in a very specific hierarchy. Diocletian ruled as an Augustus, or senior emperor, in the East, with his protege and son-in-law Galerius as Caesar, or junior emperor.

Diocletian instated Maximian as the Augustus in the West, and Constantius Chlorus, Maximian’s subordinate and trusted general, served as his Caesar. The two Caesars, or junior emperors, were the designated heirs to the Augusti, so if either Diocletian or Maximian were to die, their Caesars would automatically take their place and designate new Caesars under them.

In theory, this was an excellent idea, and Diocletian believed this form of government would quell the endless civil wars that plagued so much of the third century. The Tetrarchy decentralized power away from the city of Rome, which was now symbolically sacred but no longer the practical center of government.

This change in government also created new provinces by splitting larger ones into smaller units, which multiplied taxation offices and military command outposts. Again, in theory, Diocletian’s Tetrarchy wasn’t a bad idea, and unity under this system would now be purely ideological since power rested in the hands of four individuals instead of just one.

Roman propaganda of this period portrayed all four rulers as one harmonious entity guided by the gods, and they were even depicted as wearing the exact same armor. Diocletian believed wholeheartedly that he was restoring the ancient Roman way, where phase one was to reorganize the governmental structure of power, and phase two was to restore dedication to traditional Roman religion.

Diocletian wrapped himself in heavy divine imagery, meaning that he, as the Augustus in the East, was portrayed as the living embodiment of Jupiter, while Maximian, the Augustus in the West, was portrayed as Hercules. Religion during the reign of Diocletian became fused with political identity and unity, as Diocletian thought the culture of Rome—that which made Rome the greatest civilization in the history of the world—had been neglected, and he would stand for it no longer.

In order to better understand Diocletian and his religious edicts that terrorized Christians, we must first understand a few things about Roman religion. Starting under Octavian, who is more popularly known by his title Caesar Augustus, the empire enacted something called the Imperial Cult around the year 27 BC.

The Imperial Cult under Octavian was essentially an organized way that the people of Rome could worship the divine spirit of the emperor. Augustus was very cautious about this because he didn’t want to claim to be a literal god in real life, as that was something more aligned with what you might find in a highly monarchical society, and during Octavian’s reign, Rome was extremely against the idea of having a king.

Therefore, Augustus, under the Imperial Cult, allowed the worship of his essence, which can be thought of as the divine spirit of the office itself. The Imperial Cult also allowed the worship of Rome and the emperor together, while recognizing that after death, the emperor ascended to the status of full deification.

In other words, during life, the emperor had a spirit of divinity within but wasn’t yet a god, and at death, the emperor would officially become a real divine being. The Imperial Cult can be described as a political religion, which coincided with the differing regional worship of the traditional Roman gods.

Traditional Roman god and goddess worship wasn’t anything like a modern-day religion today, as there were no official canonized holy scriptures, no universal creeds, no liturgical methods of worship, and there wasn’t even a fixed list of gods and goddesses that must be worshipped. These things varied wildly from region to region, and the religious flavor could change rather drastically depending upon when and where you were.

So, when historians say traditional Roman religion, it must be understood that this wasn’t a monolithic belief system, but that wasn’t seen as a bad thing. Indeed, these differing local flavors of religion were highly regarded, especially among the elites of society, considering they believed the state gods and goddesses directly influenced real events here on Earth.

The Romans didn’t usually care what god or gods you prayed to or worshipped, as long as you also asked them to bless the emperor and the empire as a whole. The keyword here is usually, meaning it didn’t matter until it suddenly did, and as we will see, Christians would soon find out the horrible consequences of not worshipping the emperor.

The Imperial Cult has a long, fascinating history which doesn’t need to be fully examined here, but it is important to note that at first, under Octavian, and really whenever Rome was functioning well, the Imperial Cult was wildly successful. It unified the country and was comforting because people genuinely believed that the emperor was ruling under the guidance of his divine essence.

However, something interesting happens when Rome finds itself in shambles and when emperor turnover occurs every few years, as the idea of a divine emperor becomes incredibly cheap. When everyone is a god, no one is, and what good is there in having a divine emperor when he is powerless to effectively govern his people?

Furthermore, what proof is there that an emperor has a divine spirit when he is murdered in cold blood by a political rival just a few years after achieving his high rank? Civil war tarnished the reputation of not only the status of the emperor but of the entire Imperial Cult complex.

When Diocletian came to power in 284 AD, the old Imperial Cult was a hollow shell of its former self, devoid of any real value or respect. Thus, the challenge before Diocletian was simple: how do you make people believe again, not just in the emperor, but in Rome’s sacred destiny?

His conclusion was to rebuild the Imperial Cult from the ground up, and to do this, Diocletian called himself Dominus et Deus, which translates to Lord and God. His regime would no longer be called the Principate, as it was with Augustus; it was now called the Dominate.

The emperor was no longer merely ruling for the gods; he was ruling as the direct instrument of the gods themselves. Remember, Rome grew to hate kings, so the original Imperial Cult was designed to walk the fine line between divinely inspired leadership and full-blown divinity.

Diocletian changed all of that by wearing jeweled robes and a crown, something that was considered entirely un-Roman just a few years earlier. Access to him became strictly controlled, meaning no one spoke directly to the emperor, and instead, you prostrated yourself before him.

In other words, to approach the emperor was to approach the divine, and logically, it would follow that to disobey the emperor was to offend and disobey the gods themselves who ruled through him. This was the world Diocletian was in the midst of creating: a reorganized governmental structure under the Tetrarchy, an intensified version of the Imperial Cult in the hopes of generating deeper respect and confidence in the Roman government, and a call back to worship the traditional gods of Rome.

He preached a message of zero tolerance for anything novel and anything that carried the scent of disloyalty and anti-patriotism. This, as you can probably imagine, is where Diocletian clashed with the Christians head-on, as they refused to worship the emperor or the empire, and they certainly didn’t worship any of the traditional Roman gods.

Many of them did say that they would pray to God for the well-being of the empire and the emperor, but in Diocletian’s eyes, this simply wasn’t good enough. Diocletian was a very superstitious man who is often cited as consulting oracles, soothsayers, and prophets, and whenever an oracle turned out to be false, he openly blamed the Christians as the reason they didn’t work.

He believed their lack of respect for the Imperial Cult and the traditional Roman gods caused the deities to send curses instead of blessings. Diocletian came to believe the main issue with Rome was this stubbornly hard-headed and rapidly growing group of Christians.

By Diocletian’s day, Christians were becoming so numerous that ignoring them became virtually impossible, and they were even serving in high ranks within Diocletian’s own palace guard. Pagan officials saw this as spiritual pollution of the empire’s leadership, which could not be tolerated.

The straw that seems to have finally broken the camel’s back came in the year 302 AD, when a mysterious fire broke out in Diocletian’s palace in Nicomedia. It could be dismissed as happenstance if it happened only once, but it happened twice in a short span of time.

Pagans close to Diocletian accused Christians of arson and sorcery, and Diocletian became convinced the gods were angry, which only served to enrage him even more. Diocletian consulted his protege Galerius, who was his Caesar serving under him, and believe it or not, Galerius was even more against the Christians than Diocletian was.

Galerius demanded an empire-wide purge of all Christians and all things related to Christianity, which would be, in effect, a systematic religious genocide. Diocletian hesitated at first due to the fear of widespread civil unrest, but eventually, he gave in to Galerius’ demands, and the era of the Great Persecution began.

On February 24th, 303 AD, Diocletian issued the first of what would become the four edicts of the Great Persecution. The first edict set into law that all Christian churches must be destroyed, all Christian scriptures must be burned, church valuables must be confiscated, and Christians must lose their basic legal rights.

Loss of legal rights meant they could no longer bring lawsuits to court, they could no longer hold public office, and those currently holding office must lose their rank and freedom. The second edict, issued in the summer of 303 AD, escalated things in a dramatic fashion.

It set into law that all Christian clergy, including bishops, deacons, and even local parish priests, must be arrested if found. Those who were found and arrested were forced to sacrifice to the Roman gods under the threat of extreme torture, which gutted the church’s leadership almost instantly.

In Nicomedia alone, where Diocletian’s residence was and where he spent most of his time, hundreds of church clergy were imprisoned. The situation grew so severe that jails were filled to the brim, causing Diocletian to release common criminals to make room for the Christians. Jails essentially became a place shared by the most hardened villains and members of church leadership.

The third edict came in late 303 AD, which was partly an unexpected turn of fate and an attempt at mercy if the Christians complied, but if they didn’t comply, this edict made things even worse than before. This edict promised amnesty for any imprisoned Christian who would sacrifice to the gods, but if they refused, the torture became even worse, and execution was now an option on the table.

As awful as the situation now was, many Christians rose to the occasion and still refused to follow Roman orders. Those who held firm became known as the confessors, and those who gave in were known as the lapsi.

This became such a common occurrence in early fourth-century Christianity that it actually started to cause a deep divide within the church itself. Questions were raised among the hiding Christian groups as to what they should do with the lapsi once the persecution ended.

Some churches thought the lapsi had denied Christ and were therefore not strong enough in their faith to remain connected to the church. Many congregations simply excommunicated the lapsi, causing them to start churches of their own for those who still believed but whose fear overtook them when their lives were on the line.

Other churches weren’t so strict and allowed both confessors and lapsi to partake in their community together. So, by the end of the year 303 AD, not only were Christians being hunted down by the most powerful people in the Roman Empire, but their churches were fighting one another, causing a massive, self-inflicted divide.

Christianity was splintering, and it started looking like it was on its last legs. How could any organization, religion, or cult survive something like this? The only hope in sight, the only way they could see a way out of this mess, would be if a new political revolution caused the overthrow of the entire Tetrarchy.

However, the Great Persecution was not yet finished, and the final, most brutal edict was yet to come. In early 304 AD, the fourth edict was made the law of the land, and it was considered the ultimate nuclear option.

It required every single person in the empire—man, woman, and child—to offer sacrifices to the Roman gods in a public ceremony on the threat of being killed on the spot. This edict wasn’t just directed at Christians; it was an empire-wide purge of all that wasn’t traditionally Roman through and through.

What followed depended heavily upon the specific region and the emperor in charge of that territory. In the East, with Diocletian and Galerius, the persecution was absolutely brutal, and perhaps worst of all, it wasn’t short-lived.

It was a long, sustained, and systemic persecution with no end in sight. Bishops were horribly tortured before being executed, and in Palestine, Eusebius of Caesarea, the famous fourth-century church historian, recorded that Christians were burned alive, torn apart by wild beasts, publicly mutilated, and drowned.

It got so bad in Egypt that this period actually has a unique name in the Coptic Church tradition, as they call this era the Era of the Martyrs, which would go on to become the name and start of their calendar dating system, Anno Martyrum. In Syria and Asia Minor, entire congregations were executed or sold into slavery.

Eusebius tells us that Christians were subject to having their eyes gouged out, their tendons severed, being roasted over iron spits, torn apart on racks, or even having molten lead poured directly into their open wounds. With all of this torment and pain, how could things get any worse?

Well, they did. In the next two years, from 305 to 307 AD, the Christians’ only hope—that Diocletian would die and a new government would step in and reverse their misfortunes—this hope, their last hope, would die right in front of their eyes.

Things were looking positive in late 304 AD because Diocletian’s health began to fail rapidly. The hope was that his death would cause a shift in the power structures of the empire and cause an empire-wide revolution that would change the fortunes of Christians forever.

This is actually ultimately what happened, but not in 304 AD. To the shock of everyone in 305 AD, the emperor Diocletian did something that had never been done in the history of Rome up to that point: he resigned from office.

He moved Galerius into his position as the Augustus of the Eastern Empire, who, as you might recall, hated the Christians even more than Diocletian did. Galerius was a fanatically traditionalist pagan who had one singular goal when he became Augustus: to completely eradicate the Christian religion from the face of the Earth.

Under Diocletian, the persecution of Christians was legalistic and a matter of bureaucratic government policy, but under Galerius, it became deeply personal, with systemic hunting, torture, and public execution becoming the absolute standard. Armed forces were tasked with the sole purpose of going Christian hunting across the provinces.

Galerius reissued the edicts and even expanded them, forcing all provincial governors to hunt and root out all Christians, and this time, it was not just the clergy, but all of them. Men, women, children, babies, and anyone connected to a church in any capacity was to be hunted and destroyed.

Torture became the main weapon of compliance for all, and if you can believe it, the torture became even worse than before. Now, as part of the psychological torment, families were forced to watch each other’s punishments in public squares.

Children were forced to watch their parents be skinned alive, burned slowly, or publicly stripped and beaten. Those who refused to watch were decapitated or burned alive on the spot without a trial.

Some historical accounts suggest that some cities saw hundreds of public tortures every single day. In 305 AD, when Galerius became the Augustus, he appointed his nephew Maximinus as Caesar, and Maximinus was conditioned to hate the Christians just as much as Galerius.

There was literally no end to the Great Persecution in sight. Maximinus ordered certificates of sacrifice for every citizen to verify that they had worshipped the gods, and he created a network of local religious police to check compliance.

He encouraged local communities of average Roman citizens to organize these ad hoc mob militias to hunt Christians down and violently attack them. By 307 AD, the state of Christianity was in complete shambles, only made worse by the fact that pretty much all of Rome was also in economic and social shambles.

However, Galerius’ campaign began backfiring significantly. The economy tanked, manpower drained due to being relentlessly occupied by executions, and civil unrest reached its absolute peak.

Pagan priests claimed that the Roman gods were still mad despite all the Christian blood being spilled, and entire provinces were thoroughly demoralized. This, in 307 AD, was officially the worst place and worst time to ever be a Christian.

The year 307 AD was only four years into the Great Persecution, which lasted until 311 AD, but something absolutely shocking happened in 307 AD as well. It certainly shocked Galerius, but it also shocked Roman citizens so much that they became obsessed with the Christian cause.

Despite it being the worst conceivable environment for Christianity, the religion started to grow at an unprecedented rate. In 307 AD, arguably the worst phase of the Great Persecution, the bravery of many Christians being willing to endure suffering, torture, and death created a massive conversion boom in the underground churches of the Eastern Empire.

Martyrs were seen as heroes of the faith, and pagans began converting to Christianity in record numbers. Christianity was gaining new followers faster than Rome could kill them.

Galerius’s plan to exterminate the Christian religion literally backfired, and he poured fuel on the flames instead of putting them out. He helped Christianity grow while hurting himself and his regime.

The Eastern Empire fell apart, and his popularity rating was at an all-time low. Now, according to our best source on this phase of history, which comes to us from the ancient church historian Lactantius, he states that Galerius was struck with a horrific and humiliating disease.

He describes it as a deep ulcer in the lower part of the body, eating into his very bowels, breeding worms, and emitting an insufferable stench. Galerius was in such agony that toward the end of his life, he begged the Christians—those whom he had once hunted—to pray to their God for him.

It was in this desperate state that he finally admitted defeat and issued the Edict of Tolerance in 311 AD, officially ending the era of the Great Persecution. Christianity had successfully survived its most challenging and bloody trial in history.

What happened next must have been absolutely inconceivable just a few years prior to the peace. In 312 AD, Constantine rose to prominence and won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge on October 28th, 312 AD.

Then, in February of 313 AD, the Edict of Milan was issued by Constantine in the West and Licinius in the East, which officially granted full religious freedom to everyone. It ordered that Christian property and churches be returned immediately, and it recognized Christianity as a legitimate, legal religion within the empire.

The history of the Great Persecution shows that diamonds are made in times of extreme pressure, that faith is one of the most powerful forces in this world, and that it can overcome just about any obstacle. This survival laid the foundation for the next major chapter of history, which included the rise of Constantine, the solidification of the Edict of Milan, and the historic gathering at the Council of Nicaea.