How did the Roman authorities come to such a conclusion?  That is one of the greatest mysteries of universal history, and no one will ever be able to clear it.  If the explanation of the disaster as accepted by the people was absurd, the official explanation was still more so.  The Christian community of Rome, the pretended volcano of civil hatred, which had poured forth the destructive fire over the great metropolis, was a small and peaceful congregation of pious idealists.

A great and simple man, Paul of Tarsus, had taken up again among them the great work in which Augustus and Tiberius had failed:  he aimed at the remaking of popular conscience, but used means until then unknown in the Graeco-Latin civilisation.  Not in the name of the ancestors, of the traditions, of ideals of political power, did he seek to persuade men to work, to refrain from vice, to live honestly and simply; but in the name of a single God, whom man had in the beginning offended through his pride, in the name of the Son of God, who had taken human form and volunteered to die as a criminal on the cross, to appease the Father’s wrath against the rebellious creature.  On the Graeco-Roman idea of duty, Paul grafted the Christian idea of sin.  Doubtless the new theology must have seemed at first obscure to Greeks and Romans; but Paul put into it that new spirit, mutual love, which the dry Latin soul had hardly ever known, and he vivified it with the example of an obscure life of sacrifice.

Paul was born of a noble Hebrew family of Tarsus, and was a man of high culture.  He had, to use a modern expression, simplified himself, renounced his position in a time when few could resist the passion for luxury, and taken up a trade for his living; with the scanty profit from his work as a tent-maker, alone and on foot he made measureless journeys through the Empire, everywhere preaching the redemption of man.  Finally, after numberless adventures and perils, he had come to Rome and had, in the great city frenzied by the delirium of luxury and pleasure, repeated to the poor, who alone were willing to hear him:  “Be chaste and pure, do not deceive each other, love one another, help one another, love God.”

If Nero had known the little society of pious idealists, he surely would have hated it, but for other motives than the imaginary accusations of his police.  In this story St. Paul is exactly the antithesis of Nero.  The latter represents the atrocious selfishness of rich, peaceful, highly civilised epochs; the former, the ardent moral idealism which tries to react against the cardinal vices of power and wealth through universal self-sacrifice and asceticism.  Neither of these men is to be comprehended without the other, because the moral doctrine of Paul is partly a reaction against, the violent folly for which Nero stood the symbol; but it certainly was not philosophical considerations of this kind that led the Roman authorities to rage against the Christians.  The problem, I repeat, is insoluble.  However this may be, the Christians were declared responsible for the fire; a great number were taken into custody, sentenced to death, executed in different ways, during the festivals that Nero offered to the people to appease them.  Possibly Paul himself was one of the victims of this persecution.