why did rome consider christianity such a threat when other countries tolerated it?

Question

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Answer 1

There is a good deal to be said on this question. The Romans had their own well established religion, purified by their legendary king, Numa, centuries ago. But any religion, however strange, was welcome so long as it did not claim to be the sole way to the truth. To the Romans, with their many gods, monotheism was strange, which they therefore called the Jewish superstition. Besides they were by far the most powerful nation of the time, and could not believe that an obscure rleigious figure from Judaea could be the Messiah. Marcus Aurelius, the philosophically enlightened emperor, disapproved of the "sheer oppositon" of the Christians, who, following Paul, generally refused meat which had been offered to what they denounced as idols. Cicero, a contemporay of Julius Caesar, wrote learned books expounding the practices of Roman religion. Augustus, in whose time Jesus was born, inaugurated a great age of peace and of architectural (he "found Rome brick and left it marble") and literary ( Virgil, Horace) achievement, which meant that Romans considered themselves especially blessed, without any any need for an imported religion and one (and this is important) which considered all other religions false or at best partial. And Christians were considered the source of civil dissension in the Empire. Finally, in the 4th century, Constantine converted to Christianity, which then became the official religion of the Empire. Edward Gibbons' great work "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" looks at Christianity in relation to Rome in a critical spirit. But the Emperor Julian took the eastern Empire (the Western Empire had indeed fallen) back to its ancestral religion and became known as the Apostate.

Answer 2

Rome was accustomed to polytheistic cultures in which it could be expected that subjects would venerate the Emperor as a god.
It is true that Jews also had this problem. but Rome had some recognition of the fact that Jewish refusal to venerate the Emperor was due to their monotheism, not because they didn't recognize Roman political authority.
I think that Christians were seen as a greater threat because they spread their religion everywhere they went (Jews didn't, not to the same extent); they were not limited to a certain ethnic group; and because they were a new and unfamiliar movement. The increasing irrationality of the Roman emperors didn't help.
At the time Christianity started, the Roman Republic was already starting to decline. Jesus was born during the reign of Augustus, the first emperor, the heir of Julius Caesar. Augustus was the one who started the worship of the emperor as a god, so this may have created a direct competition between the two new religious practices.

Answer 3

The Romans did not consider Christianity to be a threat per se. They were quite accommodating in their religious views in fact. The Romans saw their Empire as a blessing from the gods. Therefore, they tried to behave in such a way as not to offend their deities.

The problem, though, was the Christians would not participate in the rites of the Roman worship. They (Christians) thought that the Roman gods were idols, undeserving of their worship. That's where the problem lay. From the Roman viewpoint, by not participating in the Roman rites, Christians were undermining the Empire itself. The Roman viewpoint had nothing to do with Christian monotheism per se.

Furthermore, persecution of Christians was sporadic and mostly half hearted. We see this in a letter from a Roman adminstrator, Pliny the Younger, to Emperor Trajan. Pliny tells Trajan that there are some intransigient Christians in his province and asks what to do about them. Trajan replies that Christians were not to be sought out. There were no be no secret testimonies against them. So you see, this was no Inquisition on the scale the Christians unleashed in the 15th century. Christians were by and large left to their own devices.

Answer 4

When the Christian religion was first brought to Rome after the crucifixion of Christ, Roman authorities were impartial to its beliefs. Serving as a central source of love and hope for a better life in the afterworld, Christianity gained considerable interest by the poor and servant class. The Roman authorities became increasingly disgusted with Christian followers, seeing them as a threat to the power of the state and senate.

Answer 5

Christianity (and different non-Islamic religions) are unlawful in Saudi Arabia. yet that may not the norm; maximum predominantly-Islamic international locations do not outlaw different religions. i understand for a actuality that there are Christian church homes in a minimum of those international locations: Iran Iraq Egypt Pakistan So i assume the question must be restated as: might desire to the US be merely as restrictive because of fact the worst of the international places? I might desire to think of not. As a usa that values freedom, i don't think of we could put in a limit like that with out being hypocritical. specific, Islamic international places (a minimum of a few of them) might nicely be a team of illiberal *****; does that advise we would desire to consistently be merely as undesirable?

Answer 6

They were scared because Christians were growing and the romans didnt like because they were scared to that they will over power