Were Early Christians Really Persecuted? Historian Reveals the Surprising Truth.

[dmallind]

32. Not my specific expertise, but correctly understood this makes sense

Read what he says - that there were haphazard and intermittent persecutions. So you can't "debunk" this by citing some examples. But there was no major long-term official pogrom. IIRC one such actually was implemented under Diocletian around 300CE or so, but by that time the empire was becoming increasingly fractious and fragmented and it wasn't really put in action all that uniformly. One of his lietenants - Galerius or sometging like that - was indeed a dedicated anti-Christian though and went at it with gusto in areas under his control. By 312 it ended for obvious reasons.

Before that though other than Nero and Marcus Aurelius (strangely) Rome was pretty universally tolerant to religions qua religions, and only got stroppy when the religious minorities caused secular trouble. Nero used them as patsies to shift blame from himself, and the normally quite enlightened Marcus Aurelius just saw them as a threat.

Were Christians fed to lions? Sure - just like convicts, POWs, uppity slaves etc - and the Christians so killed were also those who again caused secular trouble for the most part. Death by wild animal was a popular public execution method. It was never specifically or mostly targeted at Christians. Numbers are hard to pin down, but it's almost certain that the Christian Constantine killed more Christians slapping down Donatist an Arianist heresies than the pagan Diocletian, Nero and Marcus Aurelius ever executed however.