The Myth of Persecution:

How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom ?

by Candida Moss?

HarperOne, 320 pages, $25.99

The tedium of repeated déj vu in this sad little volume did at least send me back to Gibbons Decline and Fall . It is as if a publisher came to Candida Moss, a professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Notre Dame, with a proposal for a quick buck, relying on the political twitter of the times: Youre an expert: Reframe Gibbons notorious chapter on the Romans and the Christians with some contemporary scholarship and cultural fillips, and we can put out a nifty pamphlet thatll sell.

And Moss has read her Gibbon. Its all here, borrowed from the eighteenth-century master of an English prose far more wicked in its irony than Mosss: the fraudulent numbers of the persecuted and killed, the artful pen of later Christian tricksters who embellished both the past and the inner vices of the early Churchs faithful, the self-serving formation of a culture of righteous resentment and hostility by pusillanimous Christians, and, of course, the proposal that the fictions and attitudes they engendered turned the Church into the worlds worst persecutor . . . . Continue Reading »