Christians Ran Toward the Plague

Twice, about a hundred years apart, a plague tore through the Roman Empire.

The first came around the year 165 and burned for fifteen years. The second hit around 250. Nobody alive then could name either disease, and to this day we barely can. The first was probably smallpox, though even that is a guess. The second has never been identified at all. What we know is not what they were. What we know is what they did.

They emptied cities. At the peak, ancient writers claimed thousands were dying in Rome every single day. Hold those numbers loosely, because they come down to us secondhand and the ancient world was bad at counting. But cut them in half, cut them again, and you still have the same picture. Carts of the dead. Homes where no one was left to answer the door. A world that had never seen anything like it and had no idea how to make it stop.

So people did the only thing that made sense. They ran.

When the sickness came into a house, most people fled it. The sick got carried out to the street, sometimes still breathing, and left there, because keeping them inside felt like inviting death to stay. The dead were handled like garbage, if they were handled at all. One bishop who lived through the second plague wrote that people were throwing out their own loved ones before they had even died.

You can't entirely blame them. There was no medicine for it. There was no one whose job it was to nurse a dying stranger, because no such job existed. Rome had temples and games and armies, and nothing at all that looked like a system for caring for the sick poor. When the plague came, the common instinct was the understandable one: get away from it. Even Galen, the most famous doctor of the age, left Rome during the first outbreak.

That is the backdrop. A dying world, running for the exits.

And into that, the Christians walked the other way.

What the eyewitness saw

Our best account comes from a man named Dionysius, the bishop of Alexandria, who lived through the second plague and wrote about it in a letter to his churches. He had watched both responses side by side in the same city, and the contrast stunned him.

The believers, he wrote, took charge of the sick. They visited the houses everyone else was fleeing. They held people no one would touch. They stayed, and they nursed, and a great many of them caught the disease off the very people they were tending and died of it. Dionysius described it as drawing the sickness of their neighbors onto themselves. He watched them catch the disease from the very people they were nursing and die of it, and he called those deaths the equal of martyrdom.

Understand what that actually was. It was not brave in a dramatic, one-afternoon way. It was slow. You went into the house knowing the odds, you gave someone water and cleaned them and stayed with them for days, and a week later it was your turn, and someone else had to come sit with you. They did it anyway. Over and over, until it killed them.

They didn't stop at their own

Here is the part that should stop you.

They did not only care for other Christians.

Down in Carthage, during that same second plague, the bishop there, a man named Cyprian, gathered his church and told them that loving their own sick was not enough. His deacon, an eyewitness named Pontius, recorded what happened next. The Christians organized. The ones with money funded it, the ones with strength did the labor, and together they took on the care of the whole city. The sick who were not believers. The dead nobody would bury. The households of the very people who, in those exact years, were running the empire that arrested and killed Christians for their faith.

Sit with that. The emperors of that decade were persecutors. They were hunting the church. And the church nursed their society through the plague anyway, and buried their dead, and asked nothing for it.

Even the enemy admitted it

Now, you could push back on all of this. Dionysius and Pontius were Christians writing about Christians. Of course they made their own side look good. Fair enough. So let me hand you a hostile witness.

A century later, an emperor named Julian tried to kill Christianity off and bring the old Roman gods back. He hated the church. He called Christians "Galileans" as an insult. And in a letter to one of his pagan priests, trying to figure out why his revival kept failing, he let something slip. He complained that these Galileans supported "not only their own poor but ours as well," and that everyone could see it, and that it was one of the main things fueling their growth.

That is the enemy talking. Trying to compete, and admitting he was losing, because the Christians were out-loving him in public where the whole world could watch.

I should be honest about one thing here, because there is a version of this story that gets oversold. Some writers have run the math and argued that all this nursing gave Christians a big survival edge that mathematically explains how the church took over the empire. That part is a model, not a fact, and serious historians have argued about the numbers. So I am not going to hang the point on the arithmetic. I do not need to. The arithmetic is disputable. The testimony is not, and even a pagan emperor who despised them confirmed it.

Why would anyone run toward that

So why did they do it? Why walk into the one house on the street everyone else had abandoned?

Not because they were fearless. They were not. They were people, and the thing killing everyone killed them too, and they knew it going in.

They did it because of what they believed, and the belief changed the math on the two things that make a man run.

The first thing that makes you run is death. And these were people who had staked everything on the claim that death was not the end of them. Cyprian wrote a whole letter during the plague telling his people not to grieve like those who had no hope, because for the believer, dying was not losing, it was going home. When you actually believe that, the sick house loses its worst power over you. It can still kill you. It just can't threaten you the way it threatens a man with nothing on the other side.

The second thing that makes you run is that the dying stranger is nothing to you. And the Christians had been handed a completely different account of who that stranger was. He was made in the image of God. He was the neighbor they were commanded to love, and the enemy they were commanded to love too. And their Lord had spent His own life walking toward exactly the people everyone else walked away from, putting His hands on the ones the world called untouchable.

Most of all, they believed He had told them where He would be. Not in the temple. In the sick man.

"The King will answer and say to them, 'Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.'"

Matthew 25:40, NASB 1995

Now, honest readers argue about that verse. Some take "the least of these brothers of Mine" to mean anyone in need. Others read it more narrowly, as Jesus describing how the world treats His own people, not humanity in general. I am not going to settle that here. But notice that the early church did not wait for it to be settled. They had already been told, plainly and with no argument about it, to love the neighbor, love the enemy, and welcome the stranger, and they read all of it as pointing one direction. Toward the sick man, not away from him.

So that is how they took this too. When you go into the plague house and hold the dying man no one else will touch, you are not just being kind. You are touching Christ. That is a reason a person will die for. It turns out to be about the only kind of reason a person will die for.

The question it leaves you

Here is where it gets uncomfortable, because most of us are never going to be asked to walk into a plague.

But the plague was just the loud version of a test you get handed every week in quiet ones.

There is always someone on your street everyone else has quietly written off. There is always a person it would cost you something to move toward, and cost you nothing to avoid. And every time, the same two instincts fire that fired in 250. Protect yourself. And the other one is not really my problem.

The early church did not out-argue Rome. It out-loved it, in public, at a cost, in the exact moment when love was most expensive and least required. The world watched Christians run toward the thing it was running from, and it never quite forgot what it saw.

You are not going to be asked about the plague.

You are going to be asked about the person in front of you that it would be easier to walk away from. Same test. Smaller print. Go toward them.