Christians in the Catacombs
The Romans punished runaway slaves, criminals, and Christians by making them fight wild animals. But what was wrong with being a Christian?
In the Roman Empire, it was a crime to be a Christian, because Christians would not sacrifice to the emperor.
The Roman emperors kept control over their people by saying, “Obey us, because we are gods!” The emperors claimed to be descended from Jupiter, the king of the gods. Special feast days were held every year in honor of the emperors. At these celebrations, all Romans were supposed to worship the emperor and promise to obey only him.But Christians refused to do this. “We only worship our God!” they told other Romans. “We refuse to bow down to someone who is only a man! The emperor is not God. We will pray for him, but we will not worship him.”
The Roman emperors were furious. If the Christians disobeyed them, other Romans might be brave enough to do the same. So the emperors ordered Christians arrested and put in jail. Many Christians were put in prison. Others were forced to fight lions.
The Christians were frightened by this persecution. So they stopped holding their meetings in public. Instead, they dug underground passages beneath Rome and beneath other cities in the Roman Empire. They held their religious meetings in these underground passages, in secret. The passages were called catacombs. Down in the catacombs, the Christians also buried their dead. The underground tunnels were dark and damp. Stones lined the floors. They were lit only by torches. Shadows lurked in every corner. But when the Christians were underground, they were safe.
This secrecy soon made people even more suspicious of the Christians. What were they doing down there, underground? Rumors started to fly around. Maybe the Christians were calling down floods and famine on the rest of the Roman Empire.
Maybe they were planning to overthrow the government! “We must wipe out this new and harmful religion,” one Roman senator wrote to another. “Otherwise, Romans will cease to worship the emperor.”Of course, the Christians weren’t calling down famines or trying to overthrow the government. They were just meeting peacefully together to talk about Jesus and his teachings. They protested to the emperors that they were doing nothing wrong.
But the Roman emperors kept right on throwing them in jail. Soon Christians were even afraid to say to people they didn’t know, “I am a Christian! Are you?” If they told the wrong person they were a Christian, they might end up in jail.
So they decided on a secret symbol. It looked like a fish. When a Christian met someone she didn’t know, she might draw a fish on a wall, or in the sand at her feet, or on the edge of a piece of paper. If the other person was a Christian, he would draw a fish too. Then both Christians knew that it was safe to talk to each other.
Today, you can still see the catacombs that the Christians dug below the cities of the Roman Empire. Some of the catacombs have tombs of ancient Christians in them. Others have pictures that the Christians drew of Jesus. Archaeologists have found fish carved on the walls as well—secret messages that the Christians sent to each other.
