T he effort to promote anti-Israel sentiment in all forms has gotten to the point where activists are now regurgitating anti-Christian propaganda from the third and fourth centuries.
It’s every bit as ridiculous as it sounds.
On February 25, a mentally disturbed man self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. His dying words were “Free Palestine.”
Following the man’s death, certain pro-Palestinian activists, along with some in the press, have sought to characterize his suicide as righteous and praiseworthy. This effort has included the suggestion that, on top of being supremely noble, self-immolation is also a conventional form of political protest, a time-honored tradition among political dissidents for 2,000 years.
Time magazine even published an article on February 26 that claimed, “Self-immolation was also seen as a sacrificial act committed by Christian devotees who chose to be burned alive when they were being persecuted for their religion by Roman emperor Diocletian around 300 A.D.”
The article was greeted with criticism and incredulous laughter as Time staffers appeared to struggle to understand the difference between martyrdom imposed by the state versus self-immolation. One would think that the “self” in “self-immolate” would be a (shall we say) dead giveaway, but one would be wrong.
Amazingly, the story takes an even weirder turn.
Apparently embarrassed by the online criticism, Time then updated its story to include a hyperlink to a 2012 New Yorker article, which reads: “From the historian Eusebios, we know with greater certainty of a more interesting instance of auto-cremation in antiquity: around 300 A.D., Christians persecuted by Diocletian set fire to his palace in Nicodemia [sic] and then threw themselves onto it—presumably, to express their objections to Roman policy and not to the emperor’s architectural taste.”
The chief problem here is that Eusebius recorded no such thing about this event in Nicomedia (not “Nicodemia”).
Here’s what the early Christian historian stated in his Ecclesiastical History: “I know not how it happened, but a fire broke out in the imperial palace at Nicomedia, in these days, which, by a false suspicion reported abroad, was attributed to our brethren as the authors; in consequence of which, whole families of the pious here were slain in masses at the imperial command, some with the sword, some also with fire. Then it was said that men and women, with a certain divine and inexpressible alacrity, rushed into the fire.”
The New Yorker article, in addition to revising Eusebius’s historical account, which leads to the conflation of an act of piety performed under duress with the act of self-immolation, posits the laughable suggestion that the early Christians attacked the emperor’s home in protest of “Roman policy.” What policy would that be? Taxation? Diocletian’s decision to move the capital of the Western Roman Empire from Rome to Mediolanum?
Worse than this, the New Yorker passage is a verbatim recitation of actual, genuine imperial Roman anti-Christian propaganda. Christians were accused, with no proof, of setting fire to the palace, for which they suffered greatly. This was par for the course; the early Christians were regularly blamed, tortured, and then killed for Rome’s woes.
In the historian Philip Schaff’s History of the Christian Church, he writes of early-fourth-century Christian persecutions (emphasis my own): “In 303 Diocletian issued in rapid succession three edicts, each more severe than its predecessor. Maximian issued the fourth, the worst of all, April 30, 304. Christian churches were to be destroyed; all copies of the Bible were to be burned; all Christians were to be deprived of public office and civil rights; and at last all, without exception, were to sacrifice to the gods upon pain of death. Pretext for this severity was afforded by the occurrence of fire twice in the palace of Nicomedia in Bithynia, where Diocletian resided.”
In a follow-up footnote, Schaff stresses disagreement over the cause of the fires, though there is no disagreement over who paid the price. He writes, “Lactantius charges the incendiarism on Galerius who, as a second Nero, endangered the residence for the purpose of punishing the innocent Christians. Constantine, who then resided at the Court, on a solemn occasion at a later period, attributes the fire to lightning . . . but the repetition of the occurrence strengthens the suspicion of Lactantius.”
Incidents such as the palace fire were often used as justifications, no matter how flimsy, for the “rivers of blood” that flowed under emperors such as Diocletian. The empire regularly invented or caused such incidents to further its propaganda campaigns against the Christian population, citing acts of “sabotage” and “subterfuge” as justification for the mass murder of Christ-followers.
That such propaganda should appear as a straight-faced fact many centuries later in the pages of the New Yorker is nothing short of remarkable.
That such propaganda should then be cited in 2024 to normalize even the most unhinged protests against Israel, which is home to a famously scapegoated people, a people who historically have been the victims, on a monstrous scale, of the type of state-sponsored persecution suffered by the early Christian martyrs, is a bitter irony.