Editor’s Ink -- By: William David Spencer

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 22:1 (Winter 2008)
Article: Editor’s Ink
Author: William David Spencer


Editor’s Ink

William David Spencer

Eighteen hundred years ago, a cell group of Christians was arrested during the persecution of a.d. 202-203 that accompanied a brief stopover at Rome of the pugnacious Roman emperor Lucius Septimius Severus. At Antioch on January 1, 202, Severus had declared his son Bassianus (nicknamed “Caracalla,” or “greatcoat” for the military outfit he habitually wore) joint counsel with him and returned to Rome, only to set out for a trip to Africa in 203-04.

The leader of the cell group, twenty- to twenty-one-year-old Vibia Perpetua, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, had recently given birth and was still nursing her infant son. While awaiting execution, she and her catechetical teacher Saturus kept a record of their experiences. Perpetua recounted visits by her desperate pagan father, agony at the separation from her child and joy at his return, the intercession and support of other Christians, the visions she was afforded, and tremendous courage she and her companions displayed, shored up, as they were, with God’s grace.

The diary was smuggled out of prison, copied, and distributed among the churches, and still is extant today in various collections, making it one of the earliest and most reliable first-person accounts of the courage of martyrs of the early church (my copy is Rosemary Rader’s edition in Patricia Wilson-Kastner, et al., A Lost Tradition: Women Writers of the Early Church [Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1981]). It is striking for the mildness of its language, lack of complaint or rhetoric against her persecutors, and absence of hysterics. Perpetua is revealed as a brave, pleasant, calm, mature individual whose concern is for the wellbeing of her family, encouragement of her friends, and absolute loyalty and outspoken devotion to her God. She is exactly the kind of person the emperor should have been valuing in his empire. She is valiant, unassuming, realistic, and completely loyal to her convictions. She stands today as a paradigm of the kind of virtue that characterizes the most serious of our faith: generous to others and unswerving in her dedication to God.

Sadly, Severus chose his favorites poorly. His real enemy and the actual enemy of the state was not Perpetua and her fellow Christians; it was his own son Caracalla, his joint consul. Severus heaped titles on him and kept gracing him with the names of illustrious emperors, such as Marcus Aurelious Antoninus and Augustus. But this bestial individual, similar to a stock and self-caricatured villain in a silent movie, was both gross in appearance and in temperament. One of the most cruel and ruthless of emperors, his conduct so broke his father’s heart on a joint campaign they waged in Britain against the Scots that we are to...

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