The atrocities of the evil Rome as the real and the real false prophet revealed to me by our Lord Jesus Christ

According to the Christian apologist Tertullian, some governors in Africa helped accused Christians secure acquittals or refused to bring them to trial.^[21]:117 Overall, Roman governors were more interested in making apostates than martyrs: one proconsul of Asia, Arrius Antoninus, when confronted with a group of voluntary martyrs during one of his assize tours, sent a few to be executed and snapped at the rest, “If you want to die, you wretches, you can use ropes or precipices.”^[21]:137

During the Great Persecution which lasted from 303 to 312/313, governors were given direct edicts from the emperor. Christian churches and texts were to be destroyed, meeting for Christian worship was forbidden, and those Christians who refused to recant lost their legal rights. Later, it was ordered that Christian clergy be arrested and that all inhabitants of the empire sacrifice to the gods. Still, no specific punishment was prescribed by these edicts and governors retained the leeway afforded to them by distance.^[29] Lactantius reported that some governors claimed to have shed no Christian blood,^[30] and there is evidence that others turned a blind eye to evasions of the edict or only enforced it when absolutely necessary.

Government motivation

When a governor was sent to a province, he was charged with the task of keeping it pacata atque quieta—settled and orderly.^[21]:121 His primary interest would be to keep the populace happy; thus when unrest against the Christians arose in his jurisdiction, he would be inclined to placate it with appeasement lest the populace “vent itself in riots and lynching.”^[21]:122

Political leaders in the Roman Empire were also public cult leaders. Roman religion revolved around public ceremonies and sacrifices to their gods and goddesses personal belief was not as central an element as it is in many modern faiths. Thus while the private beliefs of Christians may have been largely immaterial to many Roman elites, this public religious practise was in their estimation critical to the social and political well-being of both the local community and the empire as a whole. Honouring tradition in the right way – pietas – was key to stability and success.^[31] Hence the Romans protected the integrity of cults practised by communities under their rule, seeing it as inherently correct to honour one’s ancestral traditions; for this reason the Romans for a long time tolerated the highly exclusive Jewish sect, even though some Romans despised it.^[21]:135 Historian H. H. Ben-Sasson has proposed that the “Crisis under Caligula” (37-41) was the “first open break” between Rome and the Jews.^[32] After the First Jewish–Roman War (66-73), Jews were officially allowed to practice their religion as long as they paid the Jewish tax. There is debate among historians over whether the Roman government simply saw Christians as a sect of Judaism prior to Nerva‘s modification of the tax in 96. From then on, practising Jews paid the tax while Christians did not, providing hard evidence of an official distinction.^[33] Part of the Roman disdain for Christianity, then, arose in large part from the sense that it was bad for society. In the 3rd century, the Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry wrote: