The early church was clearly opposed to participation in war.

All Christians before the mass apostasy of A.D. 249-251 who considered Christian participation in war opposed it on ethical grounds. The army contained some lukewarm Christians, but their exceptions prove the rule.

The earliest sources are mid-second century: Justin Martyr, Christian insertions into the Sibylline Oracles and the Acts of John. Among the improvements in character and behavior noticed upon conversion to Christianity, Justin detailed that people who used to murder each other now refrain from making war on their enemies. Justin spoke of the Roman army as consisting wholly of pagans without any Christians being soldiers. In its Christian edition, the Sibyl puts people who make wars into the same category as those who dishonor their mothers, plot against their brothers, and betray their friends. The Acts of John 36 consigns warmongers to hell, along with tyrants, murderers and robbers.

Shortly afterward, the pagan philosopher Celsus criticized Christians for not participating in the armed forces. He feared their pacifism would lead to barbarian conquest if too many Roman men became Christians and would destroy the Christian religion itself. Thus, even pagans of the period recognized noninvolvement in wars as official Christian policy.

Sometime before A.D. 236, Bishop Hippolytus in central Italy ranked war as a sin with murder, revenge, idolatry, selling a free brother into slavery and separating oneself from God. Dating from A.D. 217, his Apostolic Tradition sets out the livelihoods disqualifying applicants for church membership. It excludes idol-makers, prostitutes, pimps, gladiators and pagan priests along with military commanders. Soldiers desiring to become Christians must be taught not to kill and even to disobey if ordered to kill. Christians already in the church who try to join the army were to be expelled, as despisers of God. Even enlisting and taking the military oath were forbidden, in addition to killing in war.

Dating from Syria in the first third of the third century, another church manual likewise condemned government officials who were “defiled with wars” in the same passage as idol-makers, murderers, oppressors of the poor, false accusers, idolaters and extortionists.

Tertullian’s De Corona 11 considers “whether warfare is proper at all for Christians.” A Carthaginian, Tertullian was a clergyman and the founder of Latin Christian literature. His writings mentioned in this article date between A.D. 197 and 220. He asked rhetorically, implying negative answers: “Shall it be held lawful to make an occupation of the sword, when the Lord proclaims that he who uses the sword shall perish by the sword? And shall the son of peace take part in the battle when it does not become him even to sue at law? And shall he apply the chain and the prison and the torture and the punishment who is not the avenger even of his own wrongs? … How will a Christian man war, nay, how will he serve even in peace, without a sword, which the Lord has taken away?” Tertullian declared outright that Christ “in disarming Peter unbelted every soldier.”

But what of a man who is converted when already a soldier? In reply to Christians who cited Scripture to justify participation in war, Tertullian stated: “Of course, if faith comes later and finds any preoccupied with military service, their case is different, as in the instance of those whom John used to receive for baptism, and of those most faithful centurions, I mean the centurion whom Christ approves, and the centurion whom Peter instructs; yet, at the same time, when a man has become a believer, and faith has been sealed, there must be either an immediate abandonment of it, which has been the course with many; or all sorts of quibbling will have to be resorted to in order to avoid offending God, and that is not allowed even outside of military service.”

Moreover, we must remember that the New Testament does not state that the centurions were permitted to continue in the army in good faith. The Bible is silent on the point, such elaboration being irrelevant to the thrust of the pericopes.

In his reply to Celsus’ attacks, Origen in the late 240s conceded that Christians did not serve in the armed forces, which Origen sought to justify and explain. The greatest Bible scholar and teacher of his time, Origen was professor at the foremost Christian educational institution of the day (at Alexandria, Egypt) and later founded his own in Palestine. He was best placed to represent the consensus of Christian teaching in his time because he traveled throughout the eastern Mediterranean as a theological consultant at the invitation of local pastor-bishops.

Origen asserted that Christians have been taught such that “they would not, although able, have made war even if they had received authority to do so.” Further, he writes: “We no longer take up ‘sword against nation,’ nor do we ‘learn war any more,’ having become children of peace, for the sake of Jesus, who is our leader, instead of those whom our fathers followed.”

The proper defense against barbarian hordes, Origen wrote, is prayer. If all Roman men became Christians, as Celsus had feared and Origen hoped, there would be no military or civil calamity, because Christian prayer would prevent invasion by foreign conquerors or, if not, they would themselves become Christians and therefore pacifists.

To quote Origen succinctly: “None fights better for the king than we do. We do not indeed fight under him, although he require it; but we fight on his behalf, forming a special army—an army of piety—by offering our prayers to God. … If all the Romans, according to the supposition of Celsus, embrace the Christian faith, they will, when they pray, overcome their enemies; or rather, they will not war at all, being guarded by that divine power which promised to save five entire cities for the sake of 50 people.”

As for the divinely-sanctioned warfare in the Old Testament, Origen drew a distinction between the Jewish constitution received from Moses and the Christian constitution received from Christ. Their political sovereignty gone in the Christian era and without a land or government of their own, Jews have no right to war on their enemies. Christianity was instituted to end war and bloodshed by God’s people, and Christians therefore abstain from them. For Christians to fight in any war, wrote Origen, would fundamentally overturn their very constitution itself.

In two biblical commentaries Origen wrote that Christians do not or ought not to do anything “factious and warlike.” He also preached: “If, therefore, you wish to be made worthy to pursue the inheritance from Jesus and if you wish to claim a portion from him, you must first end all wars and abide in peace.”

There was a discrepancy between official church teaching and the actual practice of some individuals, just as there is today. Except for the New Testament examples cited above, all but one instance from our period come from Tertullian.

One such was “The Thundering Legion.” Details of the incident remain under debate, but what matters for our purposes is that Christians for a few generations afterward believed it to be true. Sometime in the A.D. 170s the Imperial XIIth Legion was in distress due to a drought and a surrounding enemy. The Christian Legionnaires prayed for rain, with the result that a downpour relieved the Romans’ dehydration and frightened off its enemy. Christians of the era touted this as proof that God answers Christians’ prayers. Besides Tertullian, the only near-contemporary mention is the report attributed to the Legion’s commander, the Roman Emperor himself.

Tertullian dismissed Christians that participated in the military as quibblers, inferior exegetes, servants of two masters, rejecters of the prophecies and “turn their backs on the Scriptures.” Christ, he wrote, gave a new law in which all people are to beat their swords into plough­shares and their lances into sickles and nation not to take up the sword against nation and “no more learn to fight” or avenge oneself by a sword.
The pseudonymous report of the Emperor actually fortifies the proposition that Christians in our era of study were in conscience pacifists and non-combatants. It states that the Christian Legionnaires “began the battle, not by preparing weapons or arms or bugles, for such preparation is hateful to them, on account of the God they bear about in their conscience.”

Church fathers, a New Testament apocryphon and at least one pagan during the first quarter-millennium A.D. and in such diverse localities as Italy, Carthage, Palestine, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere in the Roman Empire were unanimous that no Christian could participate in war while none wrote to the contrary.

David W.T. Brattston lives in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.