The traditional history of Christian martyrdom is mistaken. Christians were not constantly persecuted, hounded, or targeted by the Romans. Very few Christians died, and when they did, they were often executed for what we in the modern world would call political reasons. There is a difference between persecution and prosecution. A persecutor targets representatives of a specific group for undeserved punishment merely because of their participation in that group. An individual is prosecuted because that person has broken a law. It may be unfortunate, it may be unfair, but it is not persecution, and it is very far from the myth of how Christians were treated by the Romans. This is not an inconsequential detail. The myth of persecution assumes that the other demonically inspired party is deliberately and continually trying to attack the church. But, as we will see, although prejudice against Christians was fairly widespread, the prosecution of Christians was rare, and the persecution of Christians was limited to no more than a handful of years.

1. On the Roman side, there is very little historical or archaeological evidence for the widespread persecution of Christians. Even the so-called Decian persecution in 250 CE was about political uniformity, not religious persecution. Nothing in our evidence for Decius’s legislation mentions targeting Christians. Before Decius, the prosecution of Christians was occasional and prompted by local officials, petty jealousies, and regional concerns. That Christians saw themselves as persecuted and interpreted prosecution in this way is understandable, but it does not mean that the Romans were persecuting them. This interpretation does not match up with the political and social realities: Christians were ridiculed and viewed with contempt, and they were even sometimes executed, but they weren’t the subjects of continual persecution. The vast majority of these stories, however, were written long after the events they purport to describe. There are literally hundreds of stories describing the deaths of thousands of early Christian martyrs, but almost every one of these stories is legendary. There are many pious reasons why someone might choose to fabricate a story about a martyr, and there are plenty of examples of genuine errors, but for those interested in the history of martyrdom, fabrication causes a problem. The problem with forged martyr stories was so widespread that in the seventeenth century a Dutch Jesuit priest named Héribert Rosweyde began to sort through the European manuscripts that preserved the earliest stories of the martyrs.
2. Most were forged:

Bart Ehrman agrees that Christians exagerrated the persecution: https://youtu.be/fcm-X7g-8p4

1. Bart D. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World (Simon & Schuster: 2018):
2. At the outset I need to stress that organized opposition to the Christians came, for the most part, in isolated incidents. The church did not experience perennial violent persecution. The idea that Christianity was an illegal religion under constant surveillance by the state apparatus that inflicted martyrdom on many thousands of believers, forcing the church underground into the Roman catacombs – all this is more the stuff of Hollywood than of history. Christianity was not declared illegal in the empire before the middle of the third century. There were no empire-wide laws or decrees issued by the central authorities in Rome that proscribed the faith. Christians did not, as a rule, go into hiding. For the most part, they lived perfectly normal lives in the midst of other religions. That catacombs were not meeting places for Christians forced to congregate in clandestine cells for fear of violent persecution. Persecution itself was rare, and there were relatively few casualties.

Were the Early Christians Really Persecuted? (Prof. Paul Middleton)

Historians generally recognise that while members of the early church undoubtedly did face some harassment, there was no empire-wide policy against Christianity until well into the third century, and even then, these were short lived. Where Christians experienced persecution, it tended to be localised, sporadic, and random (Barnes, “Legislation,” and de Ste Croix, “Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted?”), and resulted from pockets of prejudice rather than any official imperial interest in the church. Minimalists go beyond the view that Christians faced “periodic persecution,” and conclude that in all significant respects, the Christian narrative of persecution is a constructed myth (Hopkins, “Christian Number”).

The Myth of Persecution

This trio argued, in influential pieces, that the supposed legal basis for the persecution of Christians was problematic; there was in fact no proscription of the name Christian, and there was little in the way of state-sponsored persecution (Barnes, “Legislation”; de Ste Croix, “Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted?”; Sherwin White, Roman Society). Other so-called imperial persecutions were often nothing more organised than local mob violence. Barnes, in particular, complained that tainted with hagiography and presupposition, the literature on the subject of the juridical basis of the persecutions of Christians was “to a large degree worthless! (Barnes, “Legislation,” 32)”. Others have also offered revisionary histories, with Keith Hopkins going so far as to suggest that Christians “manufactured” the persecutions, “Christians needed Roman persecutions, or at least stories of persecu tions rather more than Romans saw the need to persecute [them …] The Christians nurtured a sense of danger and victimisation” (Hopkins, “Christian Number,” 198). While it is only in the last few decades that the revisionist position has become the scholarly consensus, this general view is found as far back as the eighteenth century in Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon argues that the early Christians exaggerated both the number of martyrs and the varieties of torture inflicted upon the church. The main targets of Gibbon’s invective are the “monks of succeeding generations” who in their solitude “invented torments of a much more refined and ingenious nature” (Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 335).

Gibbon does not dispute there was violence inflicted on the Christians, but in the main, Romans “frequently declined the odious task of persecution”; they were reluctant persecutors. It was, Gibbon suggests, the Christians’ obstinacy and provocation that forced the Romans to act against them (Decline and Fall, 250). For Gibbon, Christianity was more violent and more intolerant than any of their Roman adversaries:

We shall conclude this chapter by a melancholy truth which obtrudes itself on the reluctant mind; that, even admitting, without hesitation or inquiry, all that history has recorded, or devotion has feigned, on the subject of martyrdoms, it must still be acknowledged that the Christians, in the course of their intestine dissensions, have inflicted far greater severities on each other than they had experienced from the zeal of infidels (Middleton, “Enemies”).

Indeed, even the Christian martyr texts appear to support the view first expressed by Gibbon that the Romans were sometimes reluctant persecutors. On a number of occasions Roman prosecutors attempt to persuade Polycarp to save himself: “Now what harm is there for you to say ‘Caesar is Lord’ (κύριος καῖσαρ), to perform the sacrifices […] and thus save your life?” (Mart. Pol. 8.2). Two further attempts are made to dissuade Polycarp from bringing destruction on himself. In the amphitheatre, the governor asks him to “swear by the fortune of Caesar, and repent (μετανόησον),” and later he explicitly promises to let Polycarp go free if he will swear and curse Christ (λοιδόρησον τὸν Χριστόν). The officials appear to be concerned about executing such an old man, and clearly do not want to see him die. But Polycarp makes his famous response: “For eighty-six years I have been his servant and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme against my king and saviour?”

In other stories, Roman officials are found to rebuff direct action by Christians trying to get themselves executed. Tertullian describes an incident where the Christians of Asia presented themselves to the bemused proconsul Arrius Antonius demanding to be martyred. “On ordering a few persons to be led forth to execution, he said to the rest, ‘O miserable men, if you wish to die, you have cliffs and nooses!’” (Tertullian, Scap. 5.1). These incidents are advanced as evidence of Roman toleration that is thwarted only by Christian intransigence, it is worth reflecting that even these confrontations – in which the Romans appear to be attempting to save the Christians’ lives – have a theological function in the context of the martyr narrative. Clearly, anyone who ends a martyrology still alive has obviously failed in some way, or as I have expressed it elsewhere, once a martyr act has begun “to fail to be martyred is to fail to be Christian” (Middleton, “Suffering,” 175). Therefore, the idea of the reluctant persecutor is perhaps not as secure as might be supposed, even from the evidence of the Christians’ own writings. A martyrology loses its drama if there is no opportunity for the martyr to save their life, and so the “compassionate” or “reluctant” prosecutor is a necessary element in the narrative drama, and probably a literary construct.

1. Were Christians Really Persecuted?
2. Atheism was a serious concern. Since eschewing cultic worship risked bringing misfortune on a town or even the empire, Christians gained the reputation of odium humani generis, haters of the human race, which made them the targets of suspicion. If a group was suspected of hatred of humanity and of disloyalty to the emperor, there was an easy way to allay such fears: sacrifice to the gods and to the image of the emperor. Romans allowed the people of the empire freedom to follow their own customs and gods. All they asked in return was a modicum of civic loyalty. To refuse to engage in the imperial cult when asked to do so would be interpreted as an extraordinary act of disloyalty. Justin and Irenaeus maintained that Christians obeyed or prayed for the emperor (Justin, 1 Apol. 17; Irenaeus, Haer. 24). As Moss writes of the Decian persecution: That Christians experienced and interpreted Decius’s actions as persecu tion does not mean that Decius himself intended to persecute them. If we are going to condemn the Romans for persecuting the Christians, then surely they need to have done it deliberately or at least have been aware they were doing it (Moss, Myth of Persecution, 150). While most of our evidence for persecution comes from Christian sources, there are a number of pagan writings which appear to suggest significant actions took place against the Christians. While Tacitus and Suetonius describe events long since passed, Pliny’s famous letter to Trajan is a first hand account of a governor dealing with Christians.

While there was no state-sponsored persecution of Christians, their rejection of local cults resulted in sporadic bouts of pressure or violence. However, Christians then imperialised these experiences of suffering, that is, they read them as originating from a single imperial source, and interpreted them as persecution. Any resultant execution they declared to be martyrdom. It seems that local magistrates or governors exacerbated this imperalisation by employing the sacrificial test, not because they wanted to promote the emperor cult, but as a simple test of loyalty in which any reasonable person would be happy to participate. Pliny did not know very much about the Christians, but he did know that they had been tried before, and he had heard they would not curse Christ or offer sacrifice to the gods or emperor. Importantly for Pliny, this test served a dual purpose; not only did it flush out Christians, it confirmed they were disloyal, seditious, and impious, thus deserving of punishment. Pliny does not appear to be inventing the “sacrifice test.” Although he has never been present at trials of Christians, he appears to have heard about them before, including that they will not sacrifice, or curse Christ. This test to find out whether or not a defendant was a Christian would have been interpreted by Christians as a setting in which they were invited to confess or deny Christ, resulting in saving or losing their lives. For the view that a test of identification is the test of loyalty that would provide a context for the sayings in Mark 8:34–38, 13:9–13, Peter’s denial (Mark 14:66–72), Q 12:4–5, as well as 2 Tim 2:11–13, Heb 6:4–6, and possibly 1 John 2:22–24, see Middleton, Violence of the Lamb, 39–64.

See also: https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/religion/1998-hopkins.pdf