Before Jerusalem Fell

78 BEFORE JERUSALEM FELL
showing, an immense number were involved in the same fate. ”w
Clement of Rome (first century) speaks of Nero’s persecution as one
that claimed “a vast multitude of the elect . . . through many
indignities and tortures.”59
The mid-second century Christian pseudepigraphic work Ascension
of Isaiah “foretells” Beliar’s reign (i.e. Nero) :60 “Beliar . . .
shall descend . . . in the form of a man, a lawless king, a slayer of
his mother, who . . . will persecute the plant which the Twelve
Apostles of the Beloved have planted. . . . He will act and speak in
the name of the Beloved and say ‘I am God and before me there has
been none else.’ And all the people in the world will believe in him,
and will sacrifice to him. ”G1
Tertullian (A.D. 160-220) heaps disdain upon Nero: “Consult
your histories. There you will find that Nero was the first to rage with
the imperial sword against this school in the very hour of its rise in
Rome. But we glory – nothing less than glory – to have had such a
man to inaugurate our condemnation. One who knows Nero can
understand that, unless a thing were good — and very good — it was
not condemned by Nero. “62 Eusebius (A.D. 260-340) echoes this
hatred of Nero:
When the rule of Nero was now gathering strength for unholy objects
he began to take up arms against the worship of the God of the
universe. It is not part of the present work to describe his depravity:
many indeed have related his story in accurate narrative, and from
them he who wishes can study the perversity of his degenerate madness,
which made him compass the unreasonable destruction of so
many thousands, until he reached that final guilt of sparing neither
his nearest nor dearest, so that in various ways he did to death alike
his mother, brothers, and wife, with thousands of others attached to
his family, as though they were enemies and foes. But with all this
there was still lacking to him this – that it should be attributed to him
58. Tacitus, Anruds 15:44.
59. I Clem+mt’6:1.
60. Beliar here is almost universally recognized to be Nero. See J. P. M, Sweet,
Reuelatwn. Westminster Peliean Commentaries (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1979), p.
218; and George Edmundson, 7% Church in Rome in ihe First Century (London: Longman’s,
Green, 1913), p. 48.
61. Ascm”on of Isaiah 41 Ill
62. Tertullian, Apolo~ 5:3.