Dr. David Gwynn

But imprisonment isn't a Roman punishment, not long term.

Running a jail takes resources.

You don't want to do that.

So there's no question there was genuine violence.

People did suffer.

But the greatest impact of the Great Persecution on the Christians is psychological as much as it is physical.

Because people like Eusebius of Caesarea, who was born in 260, had got to the age of 40 without ever experiencing persecution.

So it's a major shock to the Christians who've grown up since Valerian's time, who've never met this kind of imperial hostility.

So you do see that in both Lactantius and Eusebius, just the psychology of its impact.

But the reason, more than anything else, that it failed, two reasons.

One, the strength of the church.

Six million people is too many.

This is whatever Diocletian would like to achieve, not a totalitarian state, because it just doesn't have the resources to be one.

This isn't a 20th century situation like Nazi Germany.

So to try and carry out this kind of scale of persecution logistically was very difficult.

But more important than that, the vast majority of the population of the Roman Empire did not want it to happen.

And this is the key difference to how Christians were treated back in, say, Nero's time in the first century AD, when they were odd, they were suspect.

Stories were going around that Christians practice cannibalism or incest.

Those kind of stories aren't circulating in 300.

Instead, everyone's seen the third century crisis.