As is customary, xtians are full of shit.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/candida-mo...01880.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/candida-mo...01880.html
Quote:Intriguingly, when we look at the ancient evidence for the treatment of early Christians a very different picture emerges. The vast majority of our ancient sources for persecution in the first century were written in the second century and beyond. The stories about the deaths of the apostles, for instance, were written as late as a hundred years later and modeled on the fanciful genre of ancient romance novels.
Even the earliest, most ostensibly trustworthy martyrdom stories have been edited and reworked. The authors of these accounts borrowed from ancient mythology, changed the details of events to make the martyrs appear more like Jesus, and made the Roman antagonists increasingly venomous. The motivations of these later authors and editors, who have gone unheralded by history but who shaped our understanding of the world, are arguably more fascinating than the martyrdom stories themselves. No doubt there are kernels of truth at the heart of some of some of the stories, but we do not have evidence of persecution.
The Roman evidence is also ambiguous. If Nero did target Christians after the great fire of Rome in 64 C.E. -- and the are good reasons for thinking he did not -- his treatment of them stemmed less from a desire to harm Christians than it did from his need to deflect blame from himself. Ancient Romans who spread the story about Nero saw his actions as contemptible and unjust.
Archeological evidence reveals that on those occasions when Christians did die en masse it was the result of general legislation intended to defend and fortify the empire. Christians were not named directly in imperial legislation until the second half of the third century, and it was only from 303-305 C.E., in the reign of the Emperor Diocletian, that we see anything resembling the brutal persecution of popular imagination. Christians did die. And Christians were occasionally persecuted, but should two years of persecution under Diocletian lead to nearly 2,000 years of Christian persecution complex?
