Posted: Feb 14, 2018 10:54 am
Greyman wrote:To be precise, that was a bit over 200 years of intermittent and sporadic mob-lead violence followed by a decade of empire-wide, not-so-rigorously enforced, persecution for being impious and atheistic, after which practice of the religion was legalised since it was considered less a threat to the stability of the empire than the effort to enforce the proscription.Thomas Eshuis wrote:Just how do you suppose that such a message survived nearly 300 years of gruesome Roman opposition?
Indeed, I pointed this out in that discussion.
Greyman wrote: Not particularly hard for the message to survive since the persecutions themselves inspired the writting of early apologetics.
The back-and-forth Catholic vs Protestant persecutions were far more gruesome but also ended with "well then, we'll just have to agree to disagree," rather than any loss of message.
