Justinian persecution done with legal backing

Justinian’s laws of 534 actually provided jurisprudence as backbone for his persecutions.

Sources of Procopius are important to consider.

Emperor Justinian wanted to reform the jurisprudence of the Roman

Empire. 

He said former emperors made errors but did not correct it and now he wished to do it “with the assistance of Almighty God” namely, to revise the many constitutions, as well as codes after them, plus those they added themselves and “to combine them in a single Code, under our auspicious name”.

About the laws itself one has to make some points. 

Any rape action against a deaconess of the church is punishable by death. Justinian said “ravishers of virgins, widows, or deaconesses, consecrated to God, shall suffer the penalty of death, as having committed the worst of crimes. They shall, without granting them the right to plead an exception, subject them to the most severe penalties,and condemn them to the punishment of death.”

No judge may make the punishment lighter.

At the end of Title III he claims that no Jew should hold a slave who is a Christian. Justinian concluded Title III with “Violators of this law shall not only be punished with a pecuniary fine, but also with the penalty of death.” 

In this requirement, if a pagan slave suddenly becomes Christianized, the Jew lost all his rights if the slave just leaves instantly. One cannot miss the discriminatory aspects in this law. It is the ecclesiastical teeth of the Code. 

When politics and religion mix, 

the jurisprudence bites. 

In the section on Heretics, Justinian invented his bite of the law as well. He held that heretics may not bring witnesses to the court so he favored the Christians above the heretics as far as jurisprudence is concerned. He said “We therefore order that the right to be a witness, along with all other lawful acts, shall be forbidden to the Manicheans, the Borborites, and the Pagans, as well as to the Samaritans, the Montanists, the Tascodrogites, and the Ophytes. We desire that the privileges of giving testimony in court against orthodox persons shall only be forbidden to other heretics, in accordance with what has been already decided.”

Acceptance of the errors of heretics is forbidden in the law of Inheritance as Justinian said at Title V paragraph 12 “that no one who accepts the error of heretics can receive an estate, a legacy, or a trust.” 

Severe punishments were not necessarily designed by Justinian to the Jews because of circumcising a Christian slave in Title X but Justinian was the one who scooped up the imperial decrees regarding this matter with previous emperors and one can conclude that he, without revising it, agreed with it.

The punishment is death. 

*The same with the next Title XI on the illegality of pagan sacrifice at pagan temples. On the 18th of October 530 Justinian said in Codex I3.44 “Whatever the holy canons prohibit, these also we by our own laws forbid.”