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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.
[20] The same gods whom the Romans believed had protected and blessed their city and its wider empire during the many centuries they had been worshipped were now demonized [21] by the early Christian Church. [22] [23] The Romans protected the integrity of religions practiced by communities under their rule, seeing it as inherently correct to ...
Traditional Roman religion was inextricably interwoven into the fabric of Roman society and state, but Christians refused to observe its practices. [ 11 ] [ notes 1 ] In the words of Tacitus , Christians showed "hatred of the human race" ( odium generis humani ). [ 13 ]
Early Christians were persecuted at the hands of both Jews, from whose religion Christianity arose, and the Romans who controlled many of the early centers of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Since the emergence of Christian states in Late Antiquity , Christians have also been persecuted by other Christians due to differences in doctrine which ...
Christians have sometimes been accused of idolatry, especially with regard to the iconoclastic controversy. [159] However, Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christian forbid worship of icons and relics as divine in themselves, while honouring those represented by them is accepted and philosophically justified by the Second Council of Constantinople.
Furthermore, anti-Christian sentiment of the first century was not expressed by the Roman authorities alone, but also by the Jews. As Christianity was, at that time, a sect which was largely emerging from Judaism, [4] much of this sentiment was the result of anger from the well established Jewish faith towards a new and revolutionary faith.
In his mathematical modelling, Rodney Stark estimates that Christians made up around 1.9% of the Roman population in 250. [82] That year, Decius made it a capital offence to refuse to make sacrifices to Roman Gods, although it did not outlaw Christian worship and may not have targeted Christians specifically. [83]
On the contrary, "in the East Roman or Byzantine view, when the Roman Empire became Christian, the perfect world order willed by God had been achieved: one universal empire was sovereign, and coterminous with it was the one universal church"; [18] and the church came, by the time of the demise of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, to merge ...