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According to ancient sources, after the Great Fire of 64 AD ravaged Rome for six days, rumours started spreading that the emperor Nero had started the blaze himself. Nero, wanting to shut down the suspicions, blamed the Christians for the fire, had them arrested, tortured, and executed, turning them into infamous candles even in his own gardens. This became known as the Neronian persecution. According to tradition, the apostles Paul and Peter were executed under Nero during this time. So infamous were the Neronian persecution that the very name Nero became synonymous with tyranny, decadence, and anti-Christian animus.

Nero Signs Decree Condemning Christians from the Movie Quo Vadis

But what if it never happened? What if our sources are inaccurate and anachronistic in their depiction of Nero as the first and worst persecutor of Christians?

The respected Roman historian Brent Shaw wrote a provocative article arguing that the Neronian persecution never happened. Shaw concludes:

“There are no sound probative reasons to accept the mirage, however appealing it might be, that Christians were attacked by the Roman state as a special group and were martyred under Nero, and no good evidence, contemporary or even later, that links them with the Great Fire in 64 C.E. There is even less good evidence to sustain the Christian fiction of Nero as ‘the first persecutor’. There is no evidence — I mean none at all — to indicate that the emperor would have been capable of forming such a conception or that he would ever have executed such an imperial policy. It is completely anachronistic. The whole incident and its surrounding ‘historical’ addenda should be excised from histories of the early Church, and the sooner the better.” (96-97)

The Neronian persecution: Fact or Fiction? That is what I’m going to look at in this post!