Why did the Romans persecute the Christians?

Answer 1

The Christians were initially the Nazorean Sect of Judaism. In the 90s CE Judiasm expelled them, and they drew attention from the Romans as doing strange and suspicious things - meeting in private houses instead of temples like honest worshipers, and tellingly were reported to have ceremonies of eating human flesh and drinking human blood. Such secretive and uncivilised behavior was repugnant to the Romans and suggestive of a plot for revolution.

The Romans were tolerant of all religions, realising that the gods were all the same, just with different names. However when it came to revolutionary activity, they reacted harshly as they had earlier done with the Bacchanalians, who were organising a takeover and were stamped out. Similarly, the emperor Domitius set about eliminating the threat of the secretive Christians until a few years later emperor Trajan realised that they were not revolutionary and put a stop to persecution.

Persecutions arose in later centuries in different areas of the Empire for various reasons, mainly political, until Constantine put an end to it and legalised it. A century later, it became the Christians persecuting other religions.

Answer 2

Because they were afraid that the Christians worshiping one god would anger the gods and bring bad things.

The Romans worshipped many God's. To have let Christianity flurish meant that many Romans may have been coverted thereby renouncing their God's as being false. This the Roman's could not allow. But as history has shown Rome and all if Italy are now Christian, at least the majority are.

Answer

There is no statement in history that definitively says why the Romans persecuted the Christians, so any answer is going to be opinion.

The reason I find the above dissatisfying is that the Romans historically persecuted Christians more than people of other religions, most notably the Jews, who also refused to worship the Emperor, but were excused from doing so.

There was an aspect to Christianity that the Roman Emperors and other wealthy Romans might have found frightening. It was that Christians taught that in the afterlife, the rich would be humbled and the humble would be elevated. Rome had a history of problems with slaves revolting. The old laws were so strict that if a slave killed his master, all slaves owned by that master had to be crucified, and this illustrates their fears. Given these teachings of the afterlife, Christianity, unlike Judaism, was very likely viewed as a religion that encouraged slaves to defy their masters.

Answer

Nero was in danger of being accused of arson for the Great Fire, and so he needed a scapegoat. This is the reason he chose Christians.

Answer 3

The Christians were initially the Nazorean Sect of Judaism. In the 90s CE Judiasm expelled them, and they drew attention from the Romans as doing strange and suspicious things - meeting in private houses instead of temples like honest worshipers, and tellingly were reported to have ceremonies of eating human flesh and drinking human blood. Such secretive and uncivilised behavior was repugnant to the Romans and suggestive of a plot for revolution.

The Romans were tolerant of all religions, realising that the gods were all the same, just with different names. However when it came to revolutionary activity, they reacted harshly as they had earlier done with the Bacchanalians, who were organising a takeover and were stamped out. Similarly, the emperor Domitius set about eliminating the threat of the secretive Christians until a few years later emperor Trajan realised that they were not revolutionary and put a stop to persecution.

Persecutions arose in later centuries in different areas of the Empire for various reasons, mainly political, until Constantine put an end to it and legalised it. A century later, it became the Christians persecuting other religions.

Answer 4

There is no real evidence of the Romans persecuting Christians before at least 97 CE, and only sporadic periods of persecution even after that. Professor Keith Hopkins (A world full of gods: the Strange Triumph of Christianity) says that although in its early years Christianity was both illegal and at loggerheads with the state, it was largely ignored until the three purges of 250, 257 and 303- 311.

A Christian tradition holds that Nero persecuted the Christians living in Rome because he blamed them for the Great Fire, but historians have been unable to find any evidence of such persecution or even a reason for Nero to want to blame them unjustly. Earl Doherty says that the alleged persecution of Christians following the great fire in Nero's Rome was never mentioned by Christian commentators for the next several centuries.

When it occurred, persecution was usually because Christians refused to worship the gods, thereby risking divine wrath. Some Romans felt that the gods could be appeased by punishing Christians who overtly refused to worship them. Sometimes emperors supported one side or the other for political reasons.

The fourth-century Christian Donatists refused to recognise the authority of the Roman emperor and his armies, and welcomed persecution. A splinter group, the Circumcellions, even attacked the temples of the pagan majority. After initially persecuting the Donatists on behalf of the orthodox Christians, Constantine ordered that they no longer be persecuted.

During the mid-fourth-century reign of Julian the Apostate, when the empire briefly returned to non-Christian rule, some Christians offerred themselves for martyrdom, but were refused. They were told that if they wanted to die, they should perform the act themselves.

From the late fourth century onwards, Christianity had become the official religion of Rome and was in a position to persecute pagans and Mithraists. It seems that persecution does not choose its victims - whichever religion is more powerful at the time persecutes the less powerful.