DECIUS' PERSECUTIONS AND THE CHURCH IN THE MIDDLE OF THE 3rd CENTURY: MARTYRS AND AUTHORITIES
The article is devoted to the circumstances of Decius' publication edict about general sacrifice, which was issued six months later after the emperor had come to power in AD 249. The edict provoked the first persecution of Christians across all the empire. Unnoticed by the Roman historians, the circumstances of the event became known due to the writings of Christian authors, who assumed Decius to be a persecutor of believers. The content and purpose of the edict has still been debated in the scholarship. Christian interpretation of the Emperor's policy has been criticized since the end of the 19th century. The discovery of the certificates issued to donors, which content shows that the sacrifice to the emperor was made by the entire population of the state, precluded that the edict was directed against Christians. According to new interpretation, its aim was to present the sacrifice of the Emperor as a revival of “traditional Roman religion”. However, this idea also faced criticism because sacrifices were made not only in the traditional temples of the Roman gods. The fact that Christians in the middle of the 3rd century weren't threat to Rome, is noteworthy. Decius, who came to power in a bloody civil war, had domestic political opponents among the usurpers, supporters of the deposed Philip the Arab, and other malcontents. The information presented in the article is based on the whole complex of few in number sources, especially on the hagiographic tradition, and develops the hypothesis that the religious policy of Decius was a qualitative development of the imperial cult, which accidental, but inevitable, victims were Christians.