For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[Confused Ape]

And yet Pliny tells us that they cursed christ and sacrificed to the emperor. We have definitive dates for Pliny ( 110-112 AD).

Maybe they were the sensible ones who didn't want to be punished.

The Romans had a different definition of superstition.

Once distinguished from Judaism, Christianity was no longer seen as simply a bizarre sect of an old and venerable religion; it was a superstitio (a superstition).[21] Superstition had for the Romans a much more powerful and dangerous connotation than it does for much of the Western world today: to them, this term meant a set of religious practices that were not only different, but corrosive to society, "disturbing a man's mind in such a way that he is really going insans" and causing him to lose humanitas (humanity).[22] The persecution of "superstitious" sects was hardly unheard-of in Roman history: an unnamed foreign cult was persecuted during a drought in 428 BCE, some initiates of the Bacchic cult were executed when deemed out-of-hand in 186 BCE, and measures were taken against the Druids during the early Principate.[23]
Even so, the level of persecution experienced by any given community of Christians still depended upon how threatening the local official deemed this new superstitio to be. Christians' beliefs would not have endeared them to many government officials: they worshipped a convicted criminal, refused to swear by the emperor's genius, harshly criticized Rome in their holy books, and suspiciously conducted their rites in private. In the early third century one magistrate told Christians "I cannot bring myself so much as to listen to people who speak ill of the Roman way of religion."[24]

I don't think this reported attitude is too fanciful when viewed against later history. Once the Roman faction got into power, other Christian sects were branded heretical and all other religions were false.