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In 186 BC, the Roman senate issued a decree that severely restricted the Bacchanals, ecstatic rites celebrated in honor of Dionysus. Livy records that this persecution was due to the fact that "there was nothing wicked, nothing flagitious, that had not been practiced among them" and that a "greater number were executed than thrown into prison; indeed, the multitude of men and women who ...
A. N. Sherwin-White records that serious discussion of the reasons for Roman persecution of Christians began in 1890 when it produced "20 years of controversy" and three main opinions: first, there was the theory held by most French and Belgian scholars that "there was a general enactment, precisely formulated and valid for the whole empire, which forbade the practice of the Christian religion.
If it is genuine, Pliny's letter is the earliest pagan account to refer to early Christians and provides a key description of Roman administrative process and problems, [5] [6] and also provides valuable evidence as to the attitudes of the Roman authorities with regard to early Christianity. [27]
Conversions tore families apart: Justin Martyr tells of a pagan husband who denounced his Christian wife, and Tertullian tells of children disinherited for becoming Christians. [10] Traditional Roman religion was inextricably interwoven into the fabric of Roman society and state, but Christians refused to observe its practices.
Roman investigations into early Christianity found it an irreligious, novel, disobedient, even atheistic sub-sect of Judaism: it appeared to deny all forms of religion and was therefore superstitio. By the end of the Imperial era, Nicene Christianity was the one permitted Roman religio; all other cults were heretical or pagan superstitiones. [187]
[73] [74] Conversions tore families apart: Justin Martyr tells of a pagan husband who denounced his Christian wife, and Tertullian tells of children disinherited for becoming Christians. [75] Despite this, for most of its first three centuries, Christianity was usually tolerated, and episodes of persecution tended to be localized actions by ...
In the year before the First Council of Constantinople in 381, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire when Theodosius I, emperor of the East, Gratian, emperor of the West, and Gratian's junior co-ruler Valentinian II issued the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, [1] which recognized the catholic orthodoxy [a] of Nicene Christians as the Roman Empire's state religion.
Christian thought played a supportive role, as did the literati, a group of ambitious intellectuals who had contempt for those they thought beneath them, by verbally legitimizing those attitudes and actions. [4]: 131, 146 This contributed to a turning point in Judeo-Christian relations in the 1200s.