The Great Fire of Rome and Nero's Persecution of Christians

The event

In July AD 64, a fire broke out in Rome that burned for over a week, destroying or badly damaging most of the city's fourteen districts. Rumors quickly spread that Nero himself had ordered the fire set, whether to clear land for his own building projects or simply out of a twisted artistic impulse — rumors Nero was desperate to silence.

According to the Roman historian Tacitus, writing decades later with no sympathy whatsoever for Christians, Nero found his scapegoat in Rome's Christian community, already viewed with suspicion by the wider public as a strange, secretive sect. Tacitus describes believers being 'covered with the skins of beasts' and torn apart by dogs, crucified, or 'doomed to the flames and burnt to serve as a nightly illumination' in Nero's own gardens — a level of calculated cruelty that, Tacitus notes, actually stirred a measure of public pity for the victims despite Roman hostility toward the group itself.

This moment marks a turning point: what had been sporadic local hostility toward the church now became, for a time, official imperial policy, backed by the machinery of the state. It is against this backdrop of state-sponsored violence that the church's ancient tradition places the martyrdoms of both Peter and Paul, and it gives vivid, extra-biblical confirmation of exactly the kind of hostility Jesus had already warned His followers to expect: 'If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you' (John 15:18).

Scripture references

• John 15:18-20
• 1 Peter 4:12-16

Other witnesses

• Tacitus, Annals 15.44

Further reading

• Catholic Encyclopedia (1913): Nero
• Christian History Magazine 27: Persecution in the Early Church — free full issue