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The Modern Gladiatorial Shows
By E. Calvin Beisner
Anyone who has seen movies about the Roman Empire is probably familiar with the gladiatorial shows. The exciting combat, the courage and skill, and the danger provide breathtaking entertainment.
What appears on the screen, of course, is mere fantasy. The cameras record the ingenious pretenses of directors and actors, not the real struggles of men and beasts. But the real gladiatorial shows were among the first social problems Christianity had to confront when it became dominant in the Roman Empire.
In the shows, thousands of men, women, and wild beasts were sacrificed from sunrise to sunset merely to provide entertainment for Roman citizens—and often to provide a means for offended rulers to wreak vengeance on their adversaries. Curiosity and the taste for violence drew enormous crowds whose chief hope was to see carnage.
The gladiators themselves might be condemned criminals, military captives, or professional fighters. Or they might be Christians thrown into the jaws of half-starved lions or tigers. The emperor Domitian arranged for battles to the death between dwarves and women. During the four-month festival following Trajan's conquest of Dacia in A.D. 107, at least ten thousand gladiators fought for their lives in the arenas simply to provide entertainment.
According to Church historian Philip Schaff, "Public opinion favored these demoralizing amusements almost without a dissenting voice. Even such a noble heathen as Cicero commended them as excellent schools of courage and contempt of death. . . . Pagans had not proper conception of the sanctity of human life; and even the Stoic philosophy, while it might disapprove of bloody games as brutal and inhuman, did not condemn them as the sin of murder."[1]
The Christian Church could take no such easy attitude toward the games. Its opposition was grounded on two convictions: that human life was sacred and should not be made a matter of sport, and that those who witnessed such vicious sport corrupted themselves morally.
Thus the Church forbade converts, even with the threat of excommunication, from attending the gladiatorial shows. Tatianus called the shows "terrible feasts, in which the soul feeds on human flesh and blood."
Tertullian launched a particularly powerful attack on the spectacles. He warned catechumens (new converts) that the shows excited wild and impure passions, anger, fury, and lust, all of which were opposite the spirit of Christianity.
"What a man should not say," Tertullian insisted "he should not hear. All licentious speech; every idle word is condemned by God. The things which defile a man in going out of his mouth, defile him also when they go in at his eyes and ears. The true wrestlings of the Christian are to overcome unchastity by chastity, perfidy by faithfulness, cruelty by compassion and charity."
In early generations, Christians' opposition to the shows was of little avail. The empire was dominated by paganism, vicious and mean. But when Christianity began to dominate the empire in the fourth century, legislation began to reflect its values. The bloody gladiatorial games were, as Schaff puts it, "banished . . . from the civilized world."
The Church made a difference in those days.
One night my wife, searching through the radio dial, came across a television station that broadcasts its audio signal over radio. At first the program sounded interesting. Then the voices turned strident. Fear crept in. Suddenly a woman was being—well, raped at best, murdered perhaps, and more likely both raped and murdered. Deborah changed the station.
Today we don't actually kill people in producing our entertainment. But we still are entertained by death and brutality, blood and violence and sadism.
"What a man should not say he should not hear," Tertullian said. "The things which defile a man in going out of his mouth, defile him also when they go in at his eyes and ears."
But millions of Christians all over the world watch transfixed day after day while murders and rapes and beatings are portrayed for them on the modern equivalent of the Roman amphitheater.
What would the early Church say to us?