Christian "Self-Immolation"?

Probing a Popular Report

Dear Friends,

Step into my study. Shall I fill you a pipe? Pour you a dram? Excellent!

I am sure by now you heard about the 25-year-old military serviceman who committed suicide by burning himself alive outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. in solidarity with the Palestinian cause? No, I don’t want to talk about the conflict between Israel and Hamas. I bring it up because the incident raised an interesting question that can only be tackled in … well, a study. Like this one we are sitting in.

You see, Time Magazine wanted to inform everyone that there is a long history of “self-immolation” as a form of protest. Mostly it occurs as a form of protest in the Far East, as cremation and burning is so very consonant with the spirit/matter dualism of its various religions (e.g., Hinduism, Buddhism). But the authors (Solcyré Burga and Simmone Shah) went further afield, claiming that one can even find in Christianity examples of self-immolation as a form of protest. Here is their specific claim:

Self-immolation was also seen as a sacrificial act committed by Christian devotees who chose to be burned alive when they were being persecuted for their religion by Roman emperor Diocletian ​​around 300 A.D.

That certainly raised some eyebrows. “Chose to be burned alive”? This actually induced unmitigated mockery amongst the Christian Twitter-verse. And don’t get me wrong: I would usually be first in line to make fun of the usual abject ignorance of mainstream media reporters, but I was a bit more cautious with this than most—well, everybody—mainly because the claim is very … specific. They did not say that early Christians in general “chose” to be burned. They refer specifically to the Diocletian persecution. Moreover, they include a link, which is reproduced above.

That link takes us to an article in The Atlantic, which is the source for their claim. Written by James Verini, it is entitled, “A Terrible Act of Reason: When Did Self-Immolation Become The Paramount Form of Protest?” Verini also makes a very specific claim:

However, from the historian Eusebios, we know with greater certainty of a more interesting instance of auto-cremation in antiquity: around 300 A.D., Christians persecuted by Diocletian set fire to his palace in Nicodemia and then threw themselves onto it—presumably, to express their objections to Roman policy and not to the emperor’s architectural taste.

Now that is something we can actually sink our teeth into. We have a source, Eusebius (Eusebios is a Greek, rather than the usual Latin rendering). We have a time and place: A.D. 300 in Nicodemia, a city in Asia Minor or modern-day Turkey. The accusation is that Christians set fire to the palace and then threw themselves into it.