What’s really interesting about this is that the persecution Christians experienced early on was sporadic and not spread uniformly across the empire. Nero’s persecution, which is a huge trope in the mythology of Christian persecution, was limited to a couple months, to the city of Rome, and affected only a handful of people. Two later periods of persecution didn’t extend altogether to more than a couple decades, and even then the effects were not uniformly felt.

Yet somehow we find a myth of Christian persecution in the early years as pervasive and severe. The fact is, that when Christians came into power in the empire, they welded the sword far more extensively against “pagans” than Rome had ever wielded it against them.

They made Christianity a mandatory State religion, and the penalty for not going along with that was torture and death.

That’s not even to get started on the internecine violence centered around Christians slaughtering one another over minute points of doctrine. The number of Christians who killed one another in the early years of the Church over tiny differences in the definition of the triune nature of God is pretty instructive.

Early bishops brought gladiators with them to Church councils. Lots of people are familiar with the Council of Nicaea for example, but few people are aware that one of its most prominent features was physical violence as church leaders had their agents beat the shit out of supporters of other church leaders. Murder went down too at Nicaea and other councils.

All this to say that the trope of Christians being persecuted is a pretty neat mess of a myth.

Roman-era Christians did far more persecuting than the pre-Christian Roman state ever did to them.

This is something I wish modern Christians would acknowledge, but I don’t suppose that’s going to happen.