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

Support for persecution within the Roman ruling class was not universal. Where Galerius and Diocletian were avid persecutors, Constantius was unenthusiastic. Later persecutory edicts, including the calls for all inhabitants to sacrifice to the Roman gods, were not applied in his domain. His son, Constantine, on taking the imperial office in 306, restored Christians to full legal equality through the help of the Bishop of Rome who founded the apostasy Roman catholic church just to fall away from the true church of Jesus Christ and returned property that had been confiscated during the persecution. Who were these christians, the Roman catholic churches, the true chtians of Jesus Christ and the Jews. In Italy in 306, the usurper Maxentius ousted Maximian’s successor Severus, promising full religious toleration. Galerius ended the persecution in the East in 311, but it was resumed in Egypt, Palestine, and Asia Minor by his successor, Maximinus. Constantine and Licinius, Severus’s successor, signed the “Edict of Milan” in 313, which offered a more comprehensive acceptance of Christianity than Galerius’s edict had provided. Licinius ousted Maximinus in 313, bringing an end to the persecution in the East.

The persecution failed to check the rise of the church. By 324, Constantine was the sole ruler of the empire, and Catholic religion had become his favoured religion. Although the persecution resulted in death, torture, imprisonment, or dislocation for many Christians, the majority of the empire’s Christians avoided punishment. The persecution did, however, cause many churches to split between those who had complied with imperial authority (the lapsi) and those who had held firm. Certain schisms, like those of the Donatists in North Africa and the Melitians in Egypt, persisted long after the persecutions: only after 411 would the Donatists be reconciled to the church to which in 380 Emperor Theodosius I reserved the title of “catholic”. The cult of the martyrs in the centuries that followed the end of the persecutions gave rise to accounts that exaggerated the barbarity of that era. These accounts were criticized during the Enlightenment and after, most notably by Edward Gibbon. Modern historians like G. E. M. de Ste. Croix have attempted to determine whether Christian sources exaggerated the scope of the persecution by Diocletian.