The death of Christians in the Roman Colesseum, torn apart by wild animals or quartered by Roman gladiators, was part of the cultural narrative in the 1950s. That has changed. Not only does mention of the Christian martyrs risks cancelling, but the more zealous of the left are asserting it never happened. It is just Christian propaganda. Contradicting long held facts about the past is a common strategy of the Marxists when something does not fit their agenda.
Well-known Italian historian, Roberto de Mattei, has an excellent essay about the Christian martyrs in the latest edition of Remnant Newspaper. Bringing the Christian martyrs back into the frame is long overdue.
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Martyrs of the Colosseum Assist Us in Battle
Written by Roberto de Mattei | Remnant Columnist
THERE IS NO place in the world that expresses the redemptive power of the Cross like the Colosseum, where the Christian martyrs triumphed over the Roman Empire by their deaths. It should not surprise us therefore that anti-Christian hatred, which is renewed throughout the ages, has come today to the point of denying that the blood of the martyrs was ever shed at the Colosseum at all.
The Flavian Amphitheater, or the Colosseum as it was called in the Middle Ages and later because of the greatness of its size, is the work of the Flavian emperors. The construction was begun by the Emperor Vespasian and inaugurated by his son Titus in the year A.D. 80; later work was carried out by Domitian, the younger brother of Titus and the last emperor of the Flavian dynasty. The amphitheater was built for the gladiatorial games, in which the pagan world reached the peak of supreme cruelty. However, beginning with the edict of Nero in A.D. 67, Christianity was proscribed by the Empire, and three centuries of bloody persecutions began, which concluded only with Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313. Domitian was, after Nero, the first great persecutor, and under his reign the Colosseum began to be the scene of the martyrdom of Christians.