Time Magazine Claims that Fourth-Century Christians Engaged in Self-Immolation as a Means of Political Protest. Let's Look at Their Evidence.

 On 25 Feb. 2024, U.S. airman Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire and died outside Washington’s Israeli embassy in protest of the Israel-Hamas conflict. The following day Time Magazine posted a piece by Solcyré Burga and Simmone Shah entitled “The History of Self-Immolation as Political Protest,” Time Magazine (Feb. 26, 2024). In the article Burga and Shah assert:

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.

My first thought as someone who taught Church History for many years, was “What on earth might they be referring to? Although I thought that there may have been some Christian, sometime, somewhere who may had done so, it certainly never was a Christian practice. More often in the early Church it was other people burning Christians not Christians burning themselves. It was true that Christians were often very fearless in facing such ordeals, but I had never heard of an instance where a Christian had voluntarily self-immolated, never mind one doing it as an act of political protest.

As a child of the Vietnam era, I, along with my whole generation, had the memory and terrible image of the 11 June 1963 self-immolation of the Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức, as immortalized in Malcolm Browne’s photograph, indelibly etched in my memory. So, I doubted I would have afterword missed a reference to a Christian doing the same thing in my reading of Church History. As is always the case when reading journalistic descriptions of history, or for that matter their descriptions of most things, I suspected that the authors had probably made a mistake. But then again, maybe I had missed something. So where did this strange claim come from?

The self-Immolation of Thích Quảng Đức (Photo: Malcolm Browne)

Happily, Burga and Shah link the claim to their source, an article by James Verini titled “A Terrible Act of Reason: When Did Self-Immolation Become the Paramount Form of Protest?” The New Yorker (May 16, 2012). Verini writes:

[F]rom 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 and then threw themselves onto it—presumably, to express their objections to Roman policy and not to the emperor’s architectural taste.

It is regrettable that Burga and Shah relied on such a source, because Verini seriously distorts what Eusebius [the standard English spelling] said. The setting of the passage was the issuing of Diocletian’s 303 edict for the destruction of Christian’s churches, the seizure of their Scriptures, and of their property. Diocletian’s aim was to eliminate Christianity from the Roman Empire. Since Nicomedia—not, as Verini has it "Nicodemia"—was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire at the time, the Christians there had a bad time of it. A great many were martyred. Their feast is celebrated in the Eastern Church on December 28 and the account of their sufferings features an incident where soldiers surrounded a church on Christmas day offering any who were willing to renounce Christ by making offerings to the gods could come out. The church was then set fire to and everyone inside died. The traditional number is 20,000, which many consider exaggerated. Here is one account:

On the Feast of the Nativity of Christ in the year 302, when about 20,000 Christians had assembled at the cathedral in Nicomedia, the emperor sent a herald into the church. He told the Christians that soldiers were surrounding the building, and that anyone who wished to leave had to offer sacrifice to the pagan gods. Anyone who defied the emperor would perish when the soldiers set fire to the church. All those present refused to worship the idols. As the pagans prepared to set fire to the church, Bishop Anthimus, baptized all the catechumens and communed everyone with the Holy Mysteries. All 20,000 of those praying died in the fire.

 The event is illustrated by this picture from the Menologion of Basil II (Ms. Vat gr 1613, p. 279). Also here.

Nicomedian Christians burned to death by imperial troops while in Church 

Menologion of Basil II, Ms. Vat.gr. 1613, p. 279

This is an incident in which Christians were burned alive, not an act of self-immolation. It was also an event that purportedly took place before Diocletian’s 24 Feb 303 edict aimed at eliminating Christianity from the Empire. Then again this is from a later account and not from Eusebius, whom Verini identifies as his source. So what does Eusebius say?

In the first place he does not say that Christians set fire to Diocletian’s palace in Nicomedia. Indeed he explicitly denies it:

And with him [Anthimus, the Bishop of Nicomedia who was beheaded] was associated a large number of martyrs all together; for, I know not how, in the palace at Nicomedia a fire broke out in those very days, and through a false suspicion (hyponoian pseudē) the rumour went around that it was the work of our people. (Eusebius, Church History 8.6.6 ET: J. E. L. Oulton).

Perhaps Verini imagines that he can somehow read behind the text to know what “really happened.” Had he wanted to speculate about that he could have done so by suggesting that perhaps Eusebius’ account was bias. There is no reason to suppose it was, and certainly no way to prove it was. But is it too much to ask Verini to accurately report what Eusebius actually said, as opposed to what the journalist, separated by more than a millennium and a half from the event—Eusebius was a contemporary of it—imagined happened?

Verini goes on to claim that after the Christians had allegedly set the palace ablaze, they next “threw themselves onto it,” and burnt to death. Nothing like this is reported by Eusebius. But perhaps we can guess the muddle that stands behind Verini’s telling. After the Christians were falsely accused of setting the palace on fire, as they had earlier been falsely accused by Nero of starting Rome on fire, great numbers were executed by various means, including fire, as the passage quoted above from Eusebius goes on to explain:

[A]nd by the imperial command the God-fearing persons there, whole families and in heaps, were in some cases butchered with the sword; while others were perfected by fire, when it is recorded that men and women leaped upon the pyre with a divine and unspeakable eagerness. The executioners bound a multitude of others, and [placing them] on boats threw them into the depths of the sea. (Eusebius, Church History 8.6.6, ET: J. E. L. Oulton).

Perhaps the idea that the Christians immolated themselves in the palace fire came from a misreading of the reference to women leaping on the pyre.  

Finally Verini’s claims that the reason the Christians supposedly self-immolated in the palace fire, he gives as their alleged motivation that they presumably wanted “to express their objections to Roman policy and not to the emperor’s architectural taste.” Words fail one to adequately describe this fanciful reason Verini gives. But suffice it to say that his claims about what Eusebius said about what the fourth- century Christians of Nicomedia did are entirely without foundation. And, given that Burga and Shah base their claim on Verini, it is without foundation as well.

Curiously, Vernini was not the first to misread this passage from Eusebius. Anton J. L. van Hooff, in his book From Autothanasia to Suicide: Self-killing in Classical Antiquity (London: Routledge,1990), 57, writes: “under Diocletian the arch-persecutor Christians were accused of having set fire to the imperial palace in Nicomedia. According to Eusebios they ostentatiously jumped into the burning building." The fact that van Hooff is a scholar rather than a journalist makes the misreading more surprising. 

It is possible that van Hooff is Verini's source, since both use the unusual (for English) spelling of Eusebius' name.  But even more so because both give the same second example, which is not mentioned by Burga and Shah.  To quote Verini:

In the sixth century, with Rome sacked and Christianity the official religion of its successor state, Byzantium, a group of heretics known as the Montanists took up the practice, gathering in churches and setting them on fire in protest of changes to the liturgy.

Now compare this with van Hooff: 

In the fervour of their religious convictions, stubborn Montanists shut themselves in their churches during persecution by the most orthodox emperor Justinian and burned themselves with the buildings. (p. 57) 

In contrast to what both authors say about Eusebius, in this case there actually is an ancient text behind the claim.    The source is the sixth-century author Procopius who tells of the Emperor Justinian's attempt to force-convert the members of the sects to Orthodoxy while at the same time plundering their property and churches: 

So…while many [of the various sectarians] were being destroyed by the soldiers and many even made away with themselves, thinking in their folly that they were doing a most righteous thing, and while the majority of them, leaving their homelands, went into exile, the Montani, whose home was in Phrygia, shutting themselves up in their own sanctuaries, immediately set their churches on fire, so that they were destroyed together with the buildings in senseless fashion, and consequently the whole Roman Empire was filled with murder and with exiled men.  (Procopius, Analecta XI.23, ET:  H.B. Dewing)

The Emperor Justinian who, according to Procopius, tried to force the
Montanists to convert. San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy, c. 550. Photo: © R. Huggins

 In considering this passage it becomes clear that if van Hooff is Vernini's source, the latter runs into trouble whenever he goes off script.  Neither van Hooff nor Procopius say anything about the action having been a "practice" among of the Montanists.  Nor did either imply the drastic act was intended to "protest of changes to the liturgy." Indeed, by the time of Justinian the Montanists had been separated from the Orthodox church for centuries, and therefore would have had little interest in changes in Orthodox liturgy.  This is a case where Christians actually did take their own lives, but it was an act of desperation to avoid the inevitability of being forced to convert and having what they supposed were holy things entrusted to them plundered.  So again, this second example has nothing to do with voluntary self-immolation to make a political point.