PART ONE. The evil Rome as the real and the real false prophet revealed to me by our Lord Jesus Christ

“Christians moved their activities from the streets to the more secluded domains of houses, shops and women’s apartments…severing the normal ties between religion, tradition and public institutions like cities and nations”.^[18]:119 This ‘privatizing of religion’ was another primary factor in persecution.^{[19]:3[18]:112,116,119} They sometimes met at night, in secret, and this aroused suspicion among the pagan population accustomed to religion as a public event; rumors abounded^[18]:120,121 that Christians committed flagitia, scelera, and maleficia— “outrageous crimes”, “wickedness”, and “evil deeds”, specifically, cannibalism and incest(referred to as “Thyestian banquets” and “Oedipodean intercourse“)— due to their rumored practices of eating the “blood and body” of Christ and referring to each other as “brothers” and “sisters”.^[20][21]:128

Edward Gibbon wrote:

By embracing the faith of the Gospel the Christians incurred the supposed guilt of an unnatural and unpardonable offence. They dissolved the sacred ties of custom and education, violated the religious institutions of their country, and presumptuously despised whatever their fathers had believed as true, or had reverenced as sacred.^[22]

Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence(Christian heroes and martyrs, 1895)

Christianity practised inclusivity not found in the social caste system of the Roman empire and was therefore perceived by its opponents as a “disruptive and, most significantly, a competitive menace to the traditional class/gender-based order of Roman society”.^{[18]:120–126} Gibbon argued that the seeming tendency of Christian converts to renounce their family and country and their frequent predictions of impending disasters instilled a feeling of apprehension in their pagan neighbours.^[23]

Much of the pagan populace believed that bad things would happen if the established pagan gods were not properly worshipped and reverenced.^[24][25] By the end of the second century, the Christian apologist Tertullian complained about the widespread perception that Christians were the source of all disasters brought against the human race by the gods. ‘They think the Christians the cause of every public disaster, of every affliction with which the people are visited. If the Tiber rises as high as the city walls, if the Nile does not send its waters up over the fields, if the heavens give no rain, if there is an earthquake, if there is famine or pestilence, straightway the cry is, “Away with the Christians to the lions!”‘^[26]