not gonna RT what inspired this because it's a POC with a small following and I think they're mistaken rather than malicious but:

Rolling my eyes really hard at Christians talking about "centuries of persecution" they suffered at the hands of the Roman Empire.

Formal, state-sponsored suppression started in 250. The Edict of Milan was in 313.

That's 63 years.

It was officially the state religion in 380.

Did Nero persecute Christians for being Christians before that? Hard to say, given that Tacitus is the only independent mention of that and no one's found any evidence of anti-Christian laws during that time period.

Sporadic mob violence, yes, but not official state policy.

And almost all of the descriptions of persecution under Domitian, etc. come from Eusebius, who's looking more and more to modern scholars like he greatly exaggerated or even made his accounts.

And, like, the big supposedly anti-Christian incident during the reign of Domitian was the execution of Flavius Clemens and banishment of his wife Flavia Domitilla, supposedly for being Christian.

Again, this is coming from Eusebius.

According to non-Christian contemporaries like Cassius Dio, the couple was either too sympathetic toward Jews or possibly converts to Judaism who refused to pay the extra Roman taxes on Jews.

Oh, and the formal state persecution of Christians that began in 250?

Probably not *aimed* at Christians. Decius was trying to go back to the Good Ol' Days and restore Traditional Roman Values by requiring everyone to sacrifice to Roman gods.

Jews got an exemption because Judaism was an officially recognized religion and Jews living in Rome had managed to work out a deal in which they offered prayers for the emperor's well-being as a substitute.

Valerian and Diocletian? Yup. Killed Christians, destroyed Christian property and writings, purged the army of Christians, etc.

But also, martyrdom was trendy for them and Christians did things like present groups of themselves to governors and demand to be executed for being Christian.

One governor in Asia obliged by executing a few of them, but then when the rest demanded to be executed as well...

...he's said to have gotten annoyed and told them to jump off a cliff if they wanted to die so much.

Eventually it got so bad that early bishops had to tell them that you didn't get the "crown of martyrdom" for dying while attempting to destroy pagan temples.

And at some point (hard to find dates), Roman officials seem to have decided that rather than being simply a fringe sect of Judaism (which was an officially recognized religious), Christianity was a "superstitio," a superstition.

Now, that might sound pretty mild, since we largely talk of "superstitions" as things like "don't walk under a ladder"--irrational, perhaps, but not really a big deal.

For the Romans, though, this was a classification that referred to something more like insanity, that was harmful to society.

One can understand, with Christians presenting themselves to officials and demanding to be executed, why they might reach that opinion.

Most sources are strangely reluctant to offer any estimate of how many Christians were actually martyred by Rome (they tend to simply go with "countless" or "innumerable").

The most frequent number I can find is 2-7 million.

That sure sounds like a lot, until you trace it back to its origin and find out that it's actually the *estimated number of Christian graves* in Rome over the first 3 centuries of Christian presence there.

In other words, they're counting every Christian *buried* in Rome as a martyr.

I guess dying of disease or old age is the same as being martyred.

In conclusion, formal persecution of Christians in Rome lasted barely over half a century, martyr numbers are based on number of graves, Christians were literally showing up at governors' offices and demanding to be martyred, and they became the state religion almost immediately.