Most of the people who visit Rome make a pilgrimage to the Coliseum and within those wind-swept walls they are shown the hallowed ground where thousands of Christian martyrs fell as victims of Roman intolerance.
But while it is true that upon several occasions there were persecutions of the adherents of the new faith, these had very little to do with religious intolerance.
They were purely political.
The Christian, as a member of a religious sect, enjoyed the greatest possible freedom.
But the Christian who openly proclaimed himself a conscientious objector, who bragged of his pacifism even when the country was threatened with foreign invasion and openly defied the laws of the land upon every suitable and unsuitable occasion, such a Christian was considered an enemy of the state and was treated as such.
That he acted according to his most sacred convictions did not make the slightest impression upon the mind of the average police judge. And when he tried to explain the exact nature of his scruples, that dignitary looked puzzled and was entirely unable to follow him.
A Roman police judge after all was only human. When he suddenly found himself called upon to try people who made an issue of what seemed to him a very trivial matter, he simply did not know what to do. Long experience had taught him to keep clear of all theological controversies. Besides he remembered many imperial edicts, admonishing public servants to use “tact” in their dealings with the new sect. Hence he used tact and argued. But as the whole dispute boiled down to a question of principles, very little was ever accomplished by an appeal to logic.
In the end, the magistrate was placed before the choice of surrendering the dignity of the law or insisting upon a complete and unqualified vindication of the supreme power of the state. But prison and torture meant nothing to people who firmly believed that life did not begin until after death and who shouted with joy at the idea of being allowed to leave this wicked world for the joys of Heaven.
The guerilla warfare therefore which finally broke out between the authorities and their Christian subjects was long and painful. We possess very few authentic figures upon the total number of victims. According to Origen, the famous church father of the third century, several of whose own relatives had been killed in Alexandria during one of the persecutions, “the number of true Christians who died for their convictions could easily be enumerated.”