Christ Conspiracy_ The Greatest Story Ever Sold - Acharya S [5]
... the earliest unambiguous Christian reference to persecution under Nero is a statement made by Melito, bishop of Sardis, about AD 170. It would be surprising if a "great multitude" of Christians lived at Rome as early as AD 64 ... The evidence for persecution under Domitian is [also] admitted to be very slight indeed.9
What persecutions the Christians did suffer were not as gross as portrayed by propagandists in either number or severity:
These punishments [of Christians] lacked the public finality of the death sentence: until, 180, no governor in Africa was known to have put a Christian to death. In the late 240s, Origen insisted with rare candour that "few" Christians had died for the faith ... They were "easily numbered," he said. 10
And, as the editor of Eusebius's The History of the Church states:
In fact, up to the persecution under the Emperor Decius (250-51) there had been no persecution of Christians ordered by the Emperor on an imperial scale.
To bolster their claims of massive martyrdom, pious Christians began around the ninth century to forge the martyrdom traditions. As Walker relates:
The martyrs of the famous Roman "persecutions" under such emperors as Nero and Diocletian, seven centuries earlier, were largely invented at this time, since there were no records of any such specific martyrdoms. Names were picked at random from ancient tombstones, and the martyr-tales were written to order. In reality, it was the Christian church that did much more persecuting and made many more martyrs than Rome had ever done, because religious tolerance was the usual Roman policy. 12
To weave their martyr-tales, the conspirators used the Jewish apocryphon the Fourth Book of Maccabees, which described gruesome "martyrdom" by torture: "The tale told in the 4 Maccabees was widely read by Greeks and early Christians and served as a model for Christian martyrdom stories."13 The methods described in Fourth Maccabees are disturbingly similar to those used by the later Catholic Church:
... the guards had produced wheels, and joint-dislocators, and racks, and bone-crushers, and catapults, and cauldrons, and braziers, and thumb-screws, and iron claws, and wedges, and branding irons ... 14
The author of Fourth Maccabees goes on to describe the most foul torture imaginable, including the infamous "racks" being used to tear limbs from the body, as well as the flesh being stripped off and tongues and entrails ripped out, along with the obligatory death by burning. These techniques were later adopted with tremendous enthusiasm by the Christians themselves, who then became the persecutors. As Wheless says:
When the Christians were weak and powerless and subjected to occasional persecutions as "enemies of the human race," they were vocal and insistent advocates of liberty of conscience and freedom to worship whatever God one chose; the Christian "Apologies" to the Emperors abound in eloquent pleas for religious tolerance; and this was granted to them and to all by the Edict of Milan and other imperial Decrees. But when by the favor of Constantine they got into the saddle of the State, they at once grasped the sword and began to murder and despoil all who would not pretend to believe as the Catholic priest commanded them to believe.'5
The melodramatic portrayal of the early Christian movement as consisting of righteous "Mom and Pop" Christians being driven underground and ruthlessly persecuted is not reality, nor are the stories of massive martyrdom. What is reality is that from the fourth century onward, it was the Christians who were doing the persecution.
The Myth of the Rapid Spread of Christianity
It is widely believed that Christianity spread because it was a great idea desperately needed in a world devoid of hope and faith. Indeed, the myth says that Christianity was such a great idea that