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

[LibertyLover]

87. The main reason the Romans tried to get rid of the Druids

was because the Druids were shoring up the Britons and Gaulish tribes as they tried to resist Roman conquest. It was pretty much purely political. One of the reasons why Julius Caesar wrote nasty things about the Druids was to get the Roman public behind his attempts to eliminate them. In the main the Roman empire was pretty laissez-faire about religions. So long as you honored the emperor by burning some incense to his statue once a year or so, they didn't care who or what your religion was. Because the Jews would not, indeed could not, worship the emperor, they were legally exempt under most emperors' reigns from the need to sacrifice to the emperor. So long as Christianity was classed by the Romans as a subset of Judaism, early Christians fell under this legal exemption too. It was only when both Jews and Christians agreed that Christianity was its own religion that trouble started. Christian religion was termed "superstitio" by the empire and there were some persecutions. Reading late Roman empire history rather than early Christian history, you find that the persecutions were not as brutal, widespread, inclusive and awful as originally billed.