Nero and the Blood of the Martyrs

Today's Scripture

The risen Jesus speaks to a church about to be arrested. Paul writes from a Roman death cell. Hold both passages together today.

Revelation 2:10 — "Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Behold, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison, that you may be tested, and for ten days you will have tribulation. Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life."

2 Timothy 4:6-8 — "For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day."

The Big Idea

In AD 64, the emperor Nero needed someone to blame for a catastrophe, and he chose the Christians. The killing that followed took the lives of Peter and Paul — and it did not work. A "martyr" is just the Greek word for witness, and the deaths of these witnesses preached louder than their lives ever had. Rome discovered something strange: this faith grows when you cut it.

Reflection

The night Rome burned

In July of AD 64, fire tore through Rome for days, gutting ten of the city's fourteen districts. Rumors spread that Nero himself had ordered the blaze to clear land for his building projects. The emperor needed the suspicion pointed somewhere else — fast.

You know how this works. When something goes wrong in a school or an office, blame slides toward whoever is already disliked and least able to fight back. In Rome, that was the Christians: a strange new group who skipped the temples, met before dawn, and talked about eating their Lord's body and blood. Outsiders heard rumors and called it wickedness.

The Roman historian Tacitus — no friend of Christianity — recorded what Nero did:

"Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace." — Tacitus, Annals

Tacitus goes on to describe believers wrapped in animal skins and torn by dogs, crucified, or set on fire to light Nero's gardens at night. Human beings used as torches. Even Tacitus, who despised Christians, admits the cruelty stirred pity in the crowd.

Why were Christians so easy to blame? Outsiders had garbled everything they heard. The Lord's Supper — "eat my body, drink my blood" — became rumors of cannibalism. Calling fellow believers "brother" and "sister" fed ugly gossip about their gatherings. And because they denied Rome's gods, they were called, of all things, atheists. When a city wants a scapegoat, it does not stop to check its facts.

None of this should have surprised the church. Jesus had told his friends exactly what was coming: John 15:18-20 — "If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you... A servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you." The apostle John, who heard those words at the table, ended up writing Revelation from Patmos, a prison island, calling himself "your brother and partner in the tribulation" (Revelation 1:9). Every promise in that book — including "be faithful unto death" — came from a man paying for his faith as he wrote.

Two old men and a cup poured out

According to the early church's consistent memory, Nero's persecution claimed the two greatest apostles. Peter was crucified — tradition says upside down, at his own request, because he felt unworthy to die exactly as his Lord had. Paul, a Roman citizen, was beheaded. Writing from Rome only thirty years later, Clement preserved the church's memory of it:

"Peter, who by reason of unrighteous jealousy endured not one nor two but many labours, and thus having borne his testimony went to his appointed place of glory." — Clement of Rome, First Epistle of Clement

"Having borne his testimony" — there is that word again. Witness. Paul saw his own death the same way. "I am already being poured out as a drink offering" (2 Timothy 4:6). A drink offering was wine tipped out completely beside the altar — no sips saved, nothing left in the cup. Paul is saying: my life is not being taken from me. It is being offered, down to the last drop, to the God who is worth it.

Look at his scorecard, too. Not "I won" — "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith" (2 Timothy 4:7). God does not grade his servants on outcomes they cannot control. He honors finishing. And the crown of righteousness, Paul adds, waits "not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing" (2 Timothy 4:8) — which includes ordinary believers who will never face an executioner.

This way of dying had a pattern, and the pattern started early. When Stephen became the church's first martyr, Acts 7:59-60 records his final words: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit... Lord, do not hold this sin against them." No curse. No call for revenge. He died praying for his killers — which is exactly how Jesus died. From Stephen to Peter to the believers in Nero's gardens, the martyrs did not just die for Christ. They died like him.

The strategy that backfired

Rome's logic was simple and usually effective: kill the leaders, terrify the followers, and the movement evaporates. Instead, Christianity grew faster. A generation later, Tertullian threw the failure in the empire's face:

"The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed." — Tertullian, Apology

Why would watching people die attract anyone? Because the watching crowds saw something they could not explain: ordinary people — slaves, mothers, old men — facing death without hatred and without despair. Fear is how every empire controls people. A person who has stopped fearing death has slipped out of the empire's grip entirely, and everyone in the stadium could see it.

And it was not only how Christians died. It was how they lived between the executions. They nursed the sick during plagues when others fled the city. They fed widows and orphans, including pagan ones. They treated slaves and the poor as honored family. The watching city slowly realized that the people Nero had called monsters were the best neighbors it had. Persecution put the church on a stage — and what the audience saw was love.

Jesus had already explained the math: John 12:24 — "unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." Buried seed, multiplied harvest. He said it first about his own death, and then it kept proving true in his people. He had even told them to expect joy in it: Matthew 5:11-12 — "Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you... Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven."

Paul, who lived this for decades before it killed him, described the strange durability of the persecuted church: 2 Corinthians 4:8-9 — "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed." Centuries later, Dietrich Bonhoeffer — who would himself be executed in a Nazi prison camp — compressed all of it into one sentence:

"When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

That sounds grim until you hear it the way the martyrs did. Jim Elliot, a young missionary killed in Ecuador in 1956, had written in his journal years before:

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." — Jim Elliot, journal entry, 1949

The martyrs were not throwing their lives away. They were trading something they could not keep — a few more years — for something no emperor could touch.

Faithful unto death, because he was first

Where did that kind of courage come from? Not from gritted teeth. Look again at Revelation 2:10: "Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life." The one speaking has credentials. The book opens by naming him "Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth" (Revelation 1:5). The word is martys — Jesus is the faithful martyr. He does not send his people anywhere he has not already gone.

That is the heart of it. The martyrs were not earning God's love by dying bravely; they were responding to a love that had already died for them. John Stott put it this way:

"I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?" — John Stott, The Cross of Christ

Nero's victims were not dying for a theory. They were dying for a Lord who had been tortured by the same empire, under a governor named Pilate, and had walked out of his grave. Tim Keller summarizes the good news that made them unbreakable:

"The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope." — Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage

Notice what this means for the rest of us, who feel more fear than courage when we read these stories. The martyrs' secret was not a personality type. It was a person. The same Lord who held Peter upside down on a cross holds every believer who faces a smaller arena — a hostile classroom, a mocking coworker, a family that does not understand.

People who know they are loved like that cannot be blackmailed by death, or by anything smaller than death either. The crown of life is not a payment for the brave. It is a gift from the King who already wore the thorns.

Going Deeper

Find a cup today and fill it with water. Before you drink, hold it for a moment and pray Paul's sentence back to God: "Let my life be poured out, not hoarded." Then do one small, concrete pouring-out before bedtime — write to or pray by name for a persecuted believer (organizations like Open Doors list real names and countries), or give up an hour you were saving for yourself to serve someone in your house. Small offerings train us for larger ones.