Why did the Romans despise Christians?

Answer 1

Early Christians were a sect of Judaism.

Eventually the Jewish people disclaimed Christian sects as deviant, and made it clear to the Romans that they were no longer part of the Jewish community which had been accepted by the Romans as a lawful religion within the Roman Empire.

The Romans were always alert to revolution, with the fractious Greeks strongly in their sights as fomenters of revolts. The majority of early Christians were Greeks, which didn't help their status in the eves of Roman governors. After the split with the Jewish people, Christians met in private houses for religious celebrations. In the religions of the time, people normally went to the temples to celebrate the gods. The Romans looked for a reason why the Christians didn't do this.

The normal Greek method of fomenting a revolution was to plan in secret. To avoid the participants ratting on a plot, they would commit a sacrilege punishable by death so any potential informant would also be subject to the death penalty. When stories of the Christians meeting in private and committing the sacrilege of eating and drinking human flesh and blood began to circulate, the Roman governors assumed that a revolutionary plot was in the making, and so harsh penalties were enacted.

This continued for some years until the Romans realised that this was not for real, and Emperor Trajan ordered cessation of persecutions. There were however subsequent flare ups in later years for various reasons.

This changed as Christianity spread and solidified. When Constantine became emperor, he looked for a unifying religious force to parallel the secular power. Although himself a follower of Mithraism, he selected Christianity as it had by then an organised structure of bishops through which he could control it, and so it came into collusion with the official state. The halo of Christianity came from this fusion - the imperial cult of the Invincible Sun provided the sun's disc as a background to the heads of Jesus, Mary etc, and eventually devolved into the halo.

This fusion did not sit quietly or permanently, as the Christians themselves were deeply divided amongst themselves to add to the suspicions of the other widespread sects parallel and equal to the Christian sects - such as Mithras, Isis and Serapis.

Christianity eventually triumphed, killing opposition sectarians off, destroying their temples and absorbing their religious titles and practices, and shifting the traditional birthday of Jesus from 6 January to 25 December to sit on top of the hard-to-stamp out feast of the Saturnalia.

Answer 2

beacouse they were painful or something

:D