Why did Rome consider Christianity such a threat when other religions were tolerated?

Answer 1

A:Edward Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) gives the example of the Jews, who rejected with abhorrence the Roman gods but still enjoyed the free exercise of their unsocial religion, and says there must have existed some other cause which exposed the disciples of Christ to those severities from which the Jews were exempt. The Jews were frequently guilty of rebellion, but to the Romans the Christians were guilty of greater disloyalty. By the latter part of the third century, it seemed that the Christians not only renounced the gods and institutions of Rome, but had constituted a distinct republic to be suppressed before it had acquired any military force. The Church was already governed by its own laws and magistrates, was possessed of its own public treasury and was intimately connected to all its parts by the frequent assemblies of the bishops, to whose decrees their numerous and.opulent congregations yielded an implicit obedience. This led to increasing suspicion on the part of the authorities, especially as individual Christians began to refuse military duty.

Nevertheless, the antipathy between Christians and the Roman authorities should not be exaggerated. Gibbon says that Christianity enjoyed long periods of peace in the Roman Empire, and the evidence for this is that Christians built churches and attended their worship openly throughout most of the pagan era. Euan Cameron (Interpreting Christian History) tells us the Christian writers of the fourth and fifth centuries created the legends of a brutal and cruel pagan empire when the Christians began their final, savage persecution of the pagans, justifying their actions by creating stories of persecution previously suffered by Christians under pagan rule.