Did Domitian persecute Christians?

The emperor of Revelation

Titus Flavius Domitianus ruled Rome from AD 81 to 96, after his father Vespasian and his brother Titus. He was a capable administrator and a suspicious autocrat who executed senators he distrusted. Suetonius says his officials’ letters began with a new formula, dominus et deus noster, “our lord and god” (Domitian 13), and the poet Martial used the title in verse (Epigrams 5.8). In September 96 palace staff stabbed him to death. The Senate condemned his memory, and his name was chiseled off monuments.

He is also the answer to a common question: who was emperor when Revelation was written? Irenaeus, around 180, dates John’s vision to the end of Domitian’s reign (Against Heresies 5.30.3), and most scholars accept a date near AD 95. A minority prefer AD 68 or 69, just after Nero; the debate is in who wrote Revelation.

What Christian writers said

• Melito of Sardis, around 170, told Marcus Aurelius that only Nero and Domitian, urged on by malicious men, had tried to slander the Christian teaching (quoted in Eusebius, Church History 4.26.9).
• Tertullian, in 197, called Domitian a bit of a Nero for cruelty, but said he soon stopped and even recalled those he had banished (Apology 5).
• Eusebius, around 325, made him the second persecutor. He says Flavia Domitilla, a niece of the consul Flavius Clemens, was exiled to the island of Pontia for her faith, and that Domitian questioned two grandsons of Jude, the brother of Jesus, then let them go when he saw their farmers’ calloused hands (Church History 3.17–20).

What Roman sources say

No Roman writer mentions Christians under Domitian. Cassius Dio tells of the purge of AD 95: Domitian executed his own cousin, the consul Flavius Clemens, and banished Clemens’s wife, Flavia Domitilla, to the island of Pandateria. The charge was “atheism,” on which many others who had drifted into Jewish ways were condemned, some to death, others to the loss of their property (Roman History 67.14). Suetonius adds that Clemens was killed on the slightest suspicion (Domitian 15).

Were they Christians? Christians later thought so, and a great catacomb on the Via Ardeatina in Rome still bears Domitilla’s name. But “Jewish ways” may mean just that. Domitian collected the special tax on Jews harshly; Suetonius saw an old man of ninety examined in court to prove whether he was circumcised (Domitian 12). His successor Nerva struck coins reading fisci Iudaici calumnia sublata: an end to false accusations over the Jewish tax. And around AD 112 Pliny, governor of Bithynia, admitted he had never attended a trial of Christians and did not know the rules (Letters 10.96), which suggests no standing law against them.

What Revelation shows

John writes from Patmos, where he is “because of God’s Word” (Revelation 1:9). One martyr has a name.

I know your works and where you dwell, where Satan’s throne is. You hold firmly to my name, and didn’t deny my faith in the days of Antipas my witness, my faithful one, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells.

Christians in Smyrna expect prison “for ten days” (2:10). That is pressure from neighbors, local courts and the cult of the emperors in Asia, not an imperial manhunt. And the book answers the emperor’s title directly: around the throne, the elders sing “Worthy are you, our Lord and God” (4:11). Most historians today, among them Leonard Thompson and Brian Jones, see no empire-wide persecution under Domitian. They see a hated emperor, remembered by hostile senators and by Christians who needed a second Nero.