Who are persecuted Christians?

Answer 1

A:

It is part of Christian lore that Christians are persecuted and always have been, with numerous martyrs put to death during early Roman times, but this is far from the truth.

Any Christians in North Korea could expect to be persecuted by this oppressive Communist regime, but the risks for Buddhists would be far greater. Some persecution of Christians occurs occasionally in Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East, but the official position of Islam is that Christians, as people of the Book, should be free to worship as they please.

Certainly, there was occasional and local, unofficial persecution of the early Christians of the Roman Empire, but it is estimated that widespread official persecution of Christian totalled no more than about twelve years, over the course of approximately three centuries. Origen, who, from his experience as well as reading, was intimately acquainted with the history of the Christians, declared that the number of martyrs was not great. Edward Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), in explaining the tradition of early Roman persecution, says the ecclesiastical writers of the fourth or fifth centuries ascribed to the magistrates of Rome the same degree of implacable and unrelenting zeal which filled their own breasts against the heretics or the idolaters of their own times. Christians of this period needed to justify their own actions in persecuting others, by claiming that persecution of Christians had been far more common in the past.