The Church That Raised the Empire's Throwaway Babies

In the year 1 BC, a man named Hilarion sat down in Alexandria to write his pregnant wife a letter.

It is a sweet letter, mostly. He tells her not to worry. He tells her he will send money as soon as he is paid. He asks her to take good care of their little one. When she had written that she was afraid he might forget her, he answers, how could I forget you, and tells her again not to worry. It is the letter of a man who misses his family.

And then, tucked into the middle of all that tenderness, in the same easy tone, comes this. If you have the baby before I get back, he writes, and it is a boy, keep it. If it is a girl, throw it out.

We still have that letter. It was dug out of the sands of Egypt and it sits in a collection of ancient papyri, and it is one of the most quietly horrifying things you will ever read, precisely because it is not horrified. There is no cruelty in Hilarion's voice. He is not a monster in his own mind. He loves his wife and he loves his son and he casually orders the death of his daughter, and he does it in the same breath, and then he goes right back to telling her not to worry.

That was the Roman world. And that is what makes this story worth telling.

What Rome did with the babies it did not want

The practice was called exposure.

When a baby was born in the Roman world, it was not automatically yours to keep. It was laid on the ground, and the father decided. By custom he would lift the child up, and lifting it up meant, I accept this one, it lives, it is mine. Or he would not lift it up, and the child was carried out and left. On a roadside. At a dump. Outside a temple. Left there to die of cold and hunger, or to be picked up by someone else, which was often worse, because the someone else was frequently a slave dealer or a brothel keeper who had learned that the trash heaps of a city were a reliable place to find free inventory.

You did not have to be a cruel person to do this. You just had to have a reason. The baby was sickly. The baby was deformed. The baby was illegitimate. The baby was a girl, and you already had a girl, or you wanted the dowry money for something else. Or times were hard and the baby was simply one mouth more than the family wanted to feed. All of these were considered ordinary, sensible reasons, and respectable people gave them without shame.

Listen to how a Roman philosopher could talk about it. Seneca, one of the great moral teachers of the age, a man people still quote for wisdom, wrote that we drown children who are born weak or deformed, and he listed it right alongside putting down mad dogs and sick sheep, as a reasonable thing a reasonable person does to keep the herd healthy. Rome's oldest laws, as Cicero reports them, had directed that a badly deformed infant simply be killed quickly. This was not the fringe. This was the mainstream, taught by the philosophers and written into the law.

I want to be careful and honest here, because there is an overheated version of this story that says the streets of every Roman city were literally carpeted with dying infants. We cannot prove numbers like that, and I am not going to pretend we can. What we can prove is the ethic. Exposure was legal, it was common enough to be unremarkable, and the best minds of the age defended it as sound judgment. A father could throw his daughter away and lose no standing with his neighbors at all. That much is not in dispute, and it is damning enough without exaggerating it.

The people who would not do it

Into that world came a stubborn minority who simply would not play along.

And I want to be accurate about who they were, because the honest version is better than the flattering one. The Christians did not invent the idea that a baby has worth. They inherited it. They got it from the Jews, who had been refusing to expose their children for centuries before the church existed. The Jewish historian Josephus wrote that their Law forbade a woman to destroy the child in her womb or to kill it once it was born. And you can hear it confirmed from the other side, in the mouth of a Roman who despised the Jews. Tacitus, sneering at Jewish customs, noted with distaste that among them it was considered a crime to kill any late-born child. When even your enemies notice you refuse to throw babies away, you have made yourself strange in a memorable way.

The church took that inherited conviction and carried it straight into the pagan world. One of the oldest Christian writings we have outside the New Testament, a little handbook of the faith called the Didache, put it in plain commands for new converts: do not murder a child by abortion, and do not kill a newborn.

And they said it out loud, to power. Around the year 155, a Christian named Justin wrote a defense of the faith addressed to the emperor himself, and he told the emperor flatly that Christians refused to expose their children. Then he added the part that should still make us wince. He said Christians had watched what happened to the exposed, and that nearly all of them, boys and girls alike, were picked up and raised for prostitution. He said Christians would not expose a child in part because they could not bear the thought that a baby they abandoned might be found, kept alive, and used that way, and that their own hands would be guilty of it.

That is the refusal. But the refusal is only half of it.

They went and picked them up

Because the Christians did not merely decline to throw their own babies away. They went out and gathered up the babies other people had thrown away.

They took the exposed into their homes. They raised the discarded as their own children. The foundling on the dungheap that the world had written off as garbage, the church picked up and called a son or a daughter. This grew into their known practice, of a piece with a faith that told them to care for the orphan and the abandoned, and it ran directly against everything their society considered normal.

I have to be honest about the limits of what we can say here, because the honest version is still plenty. We do not have registries. We cannot count how many babies the church rescued, and anyone who gives you a precise number is guessing. The record is loud about the command and silent about the tally. What is documented beyond doubt is not a statistic but a posture: these were people known, by themselves and by their enemies, as the ones who took in what everyone else abandoned.

And I want to be just as honest about the ending, because this is where the story usually gets oversold. The church did not end infant exposure overnight, and it did not do it single-handedly. It took centuries. For a long time all Christians could do was refuse, and rescue, and keep insisting a throwaway baby was a human being. The law came along slowly and unevenly. It was not until roughly three and a half centuries into the church's life that killing an infant was finally treated as the crime of murder in Roman law, and even then, the practice took generations more to die out. The church changed the moral air first, one rescued child and one stubborn conviction at a time, and the law crawled after it. Real change usually moves at exactly that speed, and it is worth remembering the next time we want a culture to turn on a single afternoon.

Why would anyone pick up a stranger's dying baby

So why did they do it? Why take in a sickly, abandoned infant that was nothing to you, that would cost you food and years and trouble, that the whole world agreed you were free to leave in the ditch?

Because they had been handed a completely different answer to the question of what that baby was.

To Rome, the exposed infant was a reject. A failed product. Not yet a person in any way that counted, and easily disposed of. To the Christian, that same infant was something the Roman had no category for at all.

It was made in the image of God.

"God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them."

Genesis 1:27, NASB 1995

Read the last line of that with Hilarion's letter in your mind. Male and female He created them. The God of the Christians had stamped His own image onto the girl Hilarion told his wife to throw out, just as much as onto the son he told her to keep. There was no such thing, in this account, as a child too female to be worth keeping. The thing on the dungheap was not a reject. It was an image-bearer of the living God, and treating it like garbage was not thrift. It was blasphemy against the God whose likeness it wore.

They believed God had been personally involved in making that baby, in the dark, before anyone knew if it would be wanted.

"For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother's womb. I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made."

Psalm 139:13-14, NASB 1995

And most of all, they believed their Lord had told them exactly where He was to be found. He had pulled little children into His arms when His own followers tried to shoo them away, and He had said something that turned the whole Roman calculation upside down.

"Whoever receives one child like this in My name receives Me; and whoever receives Me does not receive Me, but Him who sent Me."

Mark 9:37, NASB 1995

Do you see what that does to a dungheap? When a Christian bent down and picked up the baby the world had thrown away, they believed they were picking up Christ Himself. The most powerless, useless, discarded thing in the entire empire, a girl left to die on the trash, turned out to be the very place the King had promised to be. Rome saw a reject. The church saw the face of God, and could not walk past it.

One more thing has to be said plainly, though I will say it calmly, because it is where this history reaches straight into our own arguments.

Those early Christians did not draw the line we draw between the baby not yet born and the baby just born. When the Didache forbade killing a child, it forbade it in the womb and out of it in the very same sentence, because to them it was one act with two timings. Killing a child. I am not going to turn a first-century catechism into a modern policy speech. I am just going to report what it said and let it sit there, because it says something we do not always want to hear: the church's stubborn refusal to throw children away never had a start date on the calendar. It went all the way down.

Who are yours

Here is why this is not just an old story about a cruel empire that thankfully no longer exists.

Every age has its throwaway people. Every society draws up a quiet list of who is one mouth too many, who is too costly, too broken, too inconvenient, too far gone to be worth the trouble of keeping. The names on the list change. The list never goes away.

Ours has names on it too. The child in the womb who arrived at a bad time. The old woman whose care has gotten expensive and whose mind is going. The disabled kid whose life a doctor quietly suggests is not worth living. The foster child nobody will take because he comes with too much baggage. The addict everyone has stopped answering. Every one of them is someone our own age has decided, in its polite and reasonable way, that it is allowed to leave on the roadside.

And the oldest instinct of the church, older than its cathedrals, older than its power, was to walk out to the roadside and pick up what the world threw away.

"Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world."

James 1:27, NASB 1995

The Christians who scandalized Rome did not do it by winning an argument about the value of life. They did it by going and getting the babies. By opening their homes and their arms and their food to the very people the world had written off, and by absorbing the cost of it without being asked.

That is the call this history hands you. Not to admire the early church from a safe distance. To go find whoever your own society has left on the dungheap, and to bend down, and to pick them up, because they bear the image of God, and because Christ said that when you receive one such child, you are receiving Him.

Rome threw its children away.

The church went and got them. Go do likewise.