Fact check: Early Christians always obeyed the law
They did; except when it came to rescuing abandoned children.
In Rome, it was not simply allowed – it was actually a legal obligation to discard deformed or disabled infants at birth; the Twelve Tablets, which were the basis for all Roman law, following Aristotle’s advice believe it or not (Politics 7:1335B) made it obligatory to discard deformed infants at birth. Cicero mentions this law in passing, in a discussion of civic unrest.
Then, after it had been quickly killed, as the Twelve Tables direct that terribly deformed infants shall be killed, it was soon revived again, somehow or other, and at its second birth was even more hideous and abominable than before.1
The Twelve Tablets are no longer extant. But other sources also attest to this horrific law.
Infants who might be adopted by others were discarded inside the city, but those who were were left on the hills outside the city were being intentionally euthanised.
The early Christians, disobeying the law, were known for collecting discarded newborn babies from the hills outside of Rome and taking care of them. Sometimes they could do little more than bury them; inscriptions in the catacombs attest to this2. But in Augustine’s Epistle to Boniface he says that sometimes young Christian women found these children and adopted them:
sometimes foundlings which heartless parents have exposed in order to their being cared for by any passer-by, are picked up by holy virgins, and are presented for baptism by these persons, who neither have nor desire to have children of their own.
The practice of caring for orphans continued into the Middle Ages.
But when it started, it was illegal3.
Early Christian practice affirms what Exodus 1:2-8 also teaches: that in medical matters, where the law is unjust and is killing people, Christians ought to disobey the law in order to save a life.
Cicero De Legibus 3:IX 20, quoting the 12 Tablets. https://archive.org/details/cicero-in-28-volumes.-vol.-16-loeb-213/page/484/mode/2up
Diehl Inscriptiones Latinae Christianae Veteres, II 142-143
Encyclopedia of Early Christianity pp.498-499, published 2014, Downers Grove Illinois. https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780830829439/page/498/mode/2up
The law is Justice. When 'the law' is unjust, disobedience becomes a duty for all just people - because codified injustice is just errant rulemaking, or "NOT LAW". See the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's "Letter from the Birmingham Jail", for more on this. https://letterfromjail.com/
When a law justifies the killing of the innocent, whether it is newborns or the aged, that law should be disobeyed by the godly. Despite all the power of the state against them, the righteous and the evil will have to answer to the Lord. As will everyone that chooses expediency over righteousness. I have come to believe that this is another time of test to winnow the faithful from those that just mouth the words. When doing wrong is so much easier than doing right I think that the Children of God are being tested.