14 - Persecution Part 1

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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All right, 14th episode of Church History.

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Like I said, I think last time we did like right at 52. We're not going to get through that fast this time.

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We're moving a little more slowly. Maybe it's because I've gotten older. I don't know, but we're moving a little more slowly.

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As we mentioned last time, if you can remember last time, we mentioned that the next subject in our study would be that of the issue of persecution.

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And especially that this would be rather relevant to our day. Not only do we have a long history of persecution in the

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Church, we have many believers experiencing persecution today.

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Obviously in the outward form, we have persecution of Christians in horrific places like North Korea, in certain sections of China.

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It's interesting, Chinese persecution is very similar to Roman persecution.

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It sort of depends on who's in charge in what area and what day of the year it is. It's very similar along those lines.

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But obviously there's tremendous persecution of Christians in Muslim lands.

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Again, in some Muslim lands there's minimal persecution and others much more.

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Sometimes in places like Pakistan, it depends on which province you're in. That has always been sort of the history of persecution.

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But we also see new kinds of persecution in our day. Legal persecution, persecution based upon what

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I would call societal heresy, where secularism becomes the de facto religion of the society.

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And so it was a fascinating thing to see pictures of police.

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And this wasn't Christian persecution. It was actually, well, to be honest with you, a persecution of Muslims in France.

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Did you see the pictures a few weeks ago? A French police on French beaches demanding that Muslim women remove the burkini, which is basically a burka for going to the beach in.

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So obviously it covers everything, but not enough to allow for air to get through or something because you're not broiling.

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And they had passed laws, and it had nothing to do with security. It had nothing to do with, well, we want to make sure we can see faces.

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You're not hiding it. No, no, no. France is a secular state, and they don't just say that.

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They say it outwardly in print. You go back to Robespierre and the

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French Revolution and the Reign of Terror and stuff that wasn't even taught very well when

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I was in school, and I don't think almost anybody today has a clue. We'll have to have our resident historian do a thing on the

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French Revolution sometime. I'm not sure how much time you spent on that, but oh, my goodness. I'm sorry?

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Fifty -two episodes on the French Revolution, yeah, okay, and the Reign of Terror and Robespierre, who lost his head to his own movement.

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Let's just say that secularism, once it is given unfettered authority, it's a frightening thing, and unfortunately most young people, well, most people in our society don't seem to get that anymore and don't understand that and are ignoring history, but anyway, it's a relevant subject, and as we see strong movements in our own society for the criminalization of thought, the criminalization of holding to perspectives that do not toe the line with the worldview of the elite in society, we have much to learn from the fact that the history of the true followers of Jesus Christ has been a history of persecution, and when you read the

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Gospels, it's exactly what Jesus said it was going to be. It's amazing how often we're like, oh, we just can't believe this is happening, when you have these long sections of Scripture saying, do not marvel, do not be surprised that the world hates you.

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It hated me first, and I guess we just don't want to hear those things or remember those things or whatever else it might be.

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So there's much to be learned. We're not the first Christians to face the subject. The fact that there were different kinds of persecution in the early church and that there are going to be different kinds of persecution today, there will be increasingly, in my opinion, different kinds of persecution that we ourselves will be facing.

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Very important to realize this and to recognize this, and maybe something we can learn. Like I said, when we started church history, it's the one time we can sort of hold a mirror up to ourselves and we can ask, all right, if we believe

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Christ's promise, these could build His church. There have been people with the Scriptures and the Spirit of God in the past.

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How did they handle these things? And we can learn from their mistakes as well as maybe being challenged to go, well, if we think they're mistaken, why do we think they're mistaken?

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And how could we do better? These are some of the questions that we would have. And so, in essence, as you look at the history of the church from the time of Christ onward, from A .D.

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30 to A .D. 250, what you have is local, occasional persecution.

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And it can take different types. At first, in those places where the

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Jews have authority, you have persecution from Jewish individuals or the

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Jewish hierarchy. And so you have Saul of Tarsus and you have the stoning of Stephen and you have the forbidding by the

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Sanhedrin of anyone to speak in Jesus' name and things like that. And then once the

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Romans get a clue somewhere around the year 50 that this

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Christian movement is different from Orthodox Judaism, then you start getting

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Roman persecution as well. Up until that point, you even see in Acts where some of the

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Roman rulers are like, don't bring this before me.

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This is some type of argument amongst you all. You all go argue about these things someplace else. And they sort of saw

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Judaism and Christianity. Christianity is just a little sect, a new sect of Judaism. And there had already been developed an understanding between Judaism and the

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Romans concerning what they could and could not do. So once that protection of being a

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Jewish sect was removed, then Christianity was exposed to the full fury of the

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Roman Empire. But again, that persecution waxed and waned and was very frequently very much localized.

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And so there was a general statement from the leadership of the

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Roman state from about 50 onwards, and especially after Nero, that Christianity was a religio illicita.

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Religio illicita, an illegal religious gathering.

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Now, a Notre Dame scholar about three years ago, well, maybe two years ago, put out a book basically questioning the reality of Christian persecution.

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She wrote her book. I read it as soon as it came out. And I didn't spend much time on it because anybody who reads it realizes what she's done is she's redefined what persecution is.

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Instead of dealing with it from a meaningful historical perspective, she just redefined persecution that way, defined it out of existence.

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But there's a tremendous amount of evidence of this, not just from Christian sources, but from non -Christian sources as well.

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And we know that during periods of time, for example, toward the end of the second century, around 180 -ish in Lyon, there was an intensification of persecution at that particular time.

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And you would have, just as you had in the martyrdom of Polycarp and Ignatius, you have people being burned or beheaded or fed to the lions as sport and game.

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But this would happen in a particular area, primarily under the direction of a particular person and authority over a certain region.

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And so you might have grave persecution here, and the very next principality or the next province, no persecution at all, or minimal persecution.

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And two provinces over, you might be able to build a church building and have decades of relative peace.

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But it was always hanging over the church, that if someone gets into power in this area, all of this could change, both directions.

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You'd be praying, if you're under persecution, that someone else get in power, and then things would relax for a while. And the other way, if you're not under persecution, you're always worrying that someone's going to get into power, who's going to start persecuting you.

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So it was always sort of like the sword hanging over the head, until AD 250, and that's when the persecution becomes empire -wide under Decius.

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And this continues for a little over 60 years.

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And so for about six decades, there is a concerted empire -wide emphasis upon trying to stamp out the

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Christian religion, and this all comes to an end in what's called the

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Peace of the Church in AD 313. And so let's start with the first major Roman persecutor, and that is the

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Emperor Nero. We've all heard of Nero.

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He reigns from 54 to 68. And you've heard about Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

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Well, between July 18th and the 25th, and then starting again on the 26th through the 29th.

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See, fires in the olden day were not a couple hours. In a built -up city -type situation, they could be week -long conflagrations, if you can imagine what that looked like and smelled like and everything else.

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The great fire of July 18th through the 25th, and 26th through the 29th, and look at that,

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I've somehow managed to delete what year it was. I think it was around 64?

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64 or 65, somewhere around there. I'll have to look it up. For some reason, I somehow deleted it out of my notes. Ten of Rome's 14 sections were gutted.

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So can you imagine? Now, you've got to realize, we think of Rome, and for some reason, because of its centrality and things like that, we think it was bigger than Phoenix or something like that.

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That's not the case. Especially land -wise,

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Phoenix is just massive. I mean, you can start out far side of Sun City West on a freeway at 65 miles an hour, and an hour and 20 minutes be in the

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Southeast Valley, and you're still in the quote -unquote Phoenix area. It's ridiculous. That would have been a country in this day.

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Not a city. So, obviously, things were considerably more condensed and packed in in ancient

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Rome, and everybody knew that Nero had wanted to do major remodeling of Rome, and it just so happened that the sections of Rome that burned were the very sections that Nero wanted to burn.

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And it's pretty obvious, historically, that Nero was behind it, or at the very least, didn't care that it happened, and sort of found it to be fortuitous.

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But when the fire takes place, there's obviously a huge outcry from the people who lose everything, as well as the many thousands of casualties that would take place as well in a situation like that.

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And so, as is well known, he blamed it upon the Christians.

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Now, who could get away with something like that? Well, sadly, politics has been politics for a long, long time.

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And truthfulness in political discourse has always been the rarity, not the norm. And scapegoating others, nothing new.

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And so, why would the Christians, however, be a good group to blame?

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Well, because their beliefs were so reprehensible to the

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Roman people. Why were they reprehensible? They wouldn't swear to the genius of Caesar.

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They wouldn't say Kaiser Kurios. They were called atheists. They were called atheists, not because of the way we use the term today, that there is no

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God at all, but because they said the gods did not exist.

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There is only one God. And, yeah, the Jews were like that too, but the Jews had been around a long time and had sort of become accustomed.

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There were things being whispered about these Christians. They had a love feast, the agape feast.

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And they didn't let other people participate in this. So, obviously, it became real easy to make allegations of sexual impropriety.

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Something was going on in those secret meetings. And they also talked about eating the body of their god.

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And that's really cannibalism. That's weird. So it's really easy to marginalize people you don't know anything about, believe things about them that might or might not be true, but in all probability aren't, and we should probably know that, but hey, that's how it works.

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And so Nero blames this strange new cult, which is how it was viewed not only by the

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Romans, but by the Jews as well, for starting these fires. Why?

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Who knows. But political lies have never needed to have a real basis in truth anywhere.

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And so there is a persecution that begins. Nero himself was quite simply insane.

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I mean, I think any analysis of Nero has to come to that conclusion.

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He killed his brother. He killed his mother.

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He killed two wives. He killed the very famous writer and I don't know how you describe

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Seneca. He wrote on many, many subjects, but he killed

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Seneca. And then at the ripe old age of 32 years of age, he killed himself.

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So Nero is obviously loonier than can be, but it was quickly suspected

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Nero was behind the fires, so he accused the Christians. That begins the persecution.

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Peter and possibly Paul died in this persecution. We don't know, but the dates seem to line up about right for that taking place, which took place in the region of Rome.

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Some Christians theorized that Nero was the beast. I've heard of various ways of adding his name up to 666 or 616.

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I've heard both. Most of you are probably aware that 616 is one of the early textual variants of the number of the beast in Revelation chapter 13.

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It is the story is told and it doesn't seem to be just by Christians, but by other sources as well that he was so evil that he would have he was known once to have had a garden party and to light the party for his guests in the gardens he took

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Christians and wrapped them in animal skins and had them fixed to poles and then lit on fire.

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And so their burning carcasses in the animal skins would provide the light as he would ride his chariot through the garden amongst his guests with bits and pieces of human body falling around him.

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What's amazing to me, to be honest, when you look at many of the emperors is how long it took for Rome to fall.

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Things moved much more slowly in the ancient world than they do today. Part of it is simply the reality of communication.

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Travel and communication. We can travel so much faster now than in the past and we can communicate with so many more people.

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Ideas can be promulgated so much more quickly than they could in the past that it's amazing given the level of corruption that the empire lasted as long as it did.

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It was a clear decline from this time period forward definitely, but it still lasted a number of hundreds of years.

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You would not expect that today. In today's world, things change much more quickly

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I think than they did in the past. So Nero begins things, but it's a localized thing.

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In fact, there really isn't much more official, as in from the emperor persecution until Domitian, who reigns from 81 to 96.

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So there's about a 15 year gap there. But Domitian went to new heights in promoting the imperial cult with himself as the head.

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He demanded that he be confessed as the Lord and God of all who were under the control of the

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Roman Empire. Interestingly enough, that's a gramble -sharp construction and it's used

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Jesus in 2 Peter 1 .1 maybe as a response to that.

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If Peter lived longer than that, who knows. We don't know when Peter died or when Paul died. It's all theoretical as far as tradition might say.

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This happened at such and such time. All were made to swear the oath by the genius of the emperor.

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He had statues of himself placed in many temples throughout the empire. Persecution broke out in many places for both

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Jews and Christians could not offer the demanded sacrifice. John's exile to Patmos most likely took place at this time.

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As the imperial cult grows as there is more and more of a focus upon the emperor individually, the role of the

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Senate diminishes, etc., etc., then the state is basically saying there can be no compromise here.

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If we are going to remain the great empire that we are, then we need to be united in our solidarity in what brings us together and gives us cohesion and that is found in the person of the emperor.

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We go through history and we find this happens all the time.

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Possibly at this time period, a lot of people again, we don't have dates. There are some people who believe all the

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New Testament books were pre -70. There are some who believe all the Gospels were. Even John was, but most scholars would date at least the

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Revelation right at this time period and certainly the historical interpretation has been that John was on the

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Isle of Patmos in exile when he received that and that would have taken place during this particular time period.

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After Domitian, we have Trajan. He was less fanatical than Domitian had been. Still, he was still under Trajan.

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The profession of Christianity was a capital offense. There are letters and discussions from around this time period about what to do in regards to people being accused of being

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Christians. Obviously, it would be a very useful thing politically.

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Well, we actually have a very close parallel today. We know that in Pakistan today, one of the most common ways that Muslims take advantage of Christians, let's say you have a neighbor who's a

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Christian and you've got a dispute over the boundary marker between your property. All you have to do is threaten to say that you heard that the

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Christian profane Muhammad burned the Quran, whatever else. And that person may well find themselves under a pile of rocks that has happened.

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Horrible videos exist of mobs stoning even women accused of profaning the

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Prophet or burning the Quran or whatever else it might be. Often, Christians, sometimes not, sometimes

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Muslims. That type of accusation, especially if it happens to be made somewhere around Friday when everybody's getting out of the mosque after the sermon and are all hyped up, can result in horrific things.

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So, there's a lot of discussion about, well, how do we handle a

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Roman citizen who is accused by someone else of being a Christian? And basically, the answer is, well, even by this point in time, they had learned no true

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Christian will deny Christ. So if someone denies him and curses him, let him go.

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If they're willing to offer the sacrifice, they're willing to deny Christ, curse Christ, no basis for the accusation because no

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Christian will do that. Even the Romans knew that at this particular point in time, which is rather interesting.

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So, after Trajan, for about 60 years, things just sort of go along as they were with, again, some areas, there's more and more.

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Christianity continues to grow, so there's more and more resistance to it, as we'll see in people like Celsus and others when we look at the apologists a little bit later on.

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But we're just looking at the Roman leadership right now. And so the next interesting person to look at is a fellow that you've heard of before called

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Marcus Aurelius, the stoic Emperor 161 to 180, played so brilliantly in the movie

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Gladiator, even though they totally messed up all the history. It's still made for a great story, but it was all fiction, actually.

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Well, in the sense that, I mean, there was a Marcus Aurelius and there was a General Maximus. They just never met because they weren't born, didn't live in the same century.

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So you just sort of move history around a little bit to make it a little more interesting. So Marcus Aurelius, the stoic

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Emperor, while persecution had been sporadic up to this time, under Marcus Aurelius it became more acute.

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Anti -Christian literature began to come out at this time, including, as I mentioned,

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Celsus's book The True Doctrine, which really is the first published anti -Christian work.

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And it's funny to compare it with what is so often produced today.

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A lot of the same stuff. Very, very similar in its approach, its argumentation, the existence of straw man argumentation, things like that.

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But, you know, the enemy is not all that imaginative. And so Celsus, you know, a lot of mockery and that included.

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And then, of course, for years you have Christians writing responses to Celsus.

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Of course, you know, you write a book back then and it's not like you then hit send and you post it on Facebook and within a day it's got 3 ,000 shares and how many thousands of readers.

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Things happen much more slowly. You might write a book 20 years after the original was written and it would still have a very relevant audience.

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Books today, if they're going to last 20 years, are rare. And so much of what is written today no one's going to have a clue about 20 years from now.

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Things have changed greatly. Marcus Aurelius, interestingly enough, proposed laws against evangelization.

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Hey, we've got to shut these Christians up. If we can't argue against their arguments or if there's just too many foolish people amongst us to believe their arguments, then we just need to say they can't say this stuff anymore.

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We will limit their speech. In 177,

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I mentioned this just a few moments ago, a great persecution broke out in Lyon, in Gaul.

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It was at this time that Justin Martyr earned his last name. We'll talk about Justin Martyr a little bit later on, but he was not named

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Justin Martyr during his life for obvious reasons. Can you imagine mom names the kid prophetically?

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We're going to call him Justin Martyr. It didn't work out quite that way.

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This is the time period in which Justin Martyr earned his last name. Tertullian remarked sarcastically during this time period, if the

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Tiber rises too high or the Nile too low, the cry is, the Christians to the lion. All of them to a single lion?

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The point being that the Roman Empire was scapegoating

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Christians. Now, this is the only time in history that Christians have ever been scapegoated, right?

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Well, no. None of us are being thrown to lions, but I can think of a real obvious example of this in our own culture today.

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It has become a meme, a thing that you can watch on television and hear in the university classrooms that the

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Christian view of homosexuality is responsible for all these terrible social ills that afflict the homosexual community.

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It's the Christian's fault. The idea that there might actually be something about that behavior that is self -destructive, the fact that they have a 20 year less lifespan, can't look at that.

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No, it's all the Christian's fault. It's all the Christian's fault. It's repeated so often that if you try to challenge it, you're a bigot, you're a homophobe, you're a hater, you have to be shut down.

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Did you all see the new thing on YouTube, YouTube Heroes?

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Have you all seen this? I only heard about it this week.

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There's a hue and cry about it. Maybe there'll be enough of a hue and cry about it that it won't happen, but they're starting a program for people to basically become the

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Nazi brown shirts. You will get points for commenting on videos and helping people with videos, but also for flagging videos and finding inappropriate content on YouTube.

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And you actually will get points for flagging videos for being inappropriate.

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Well, on what standard? Well, that's always the issue, isn't it? I've been pretty amazed ever since I started talking about the

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Hebrew -Israelite thing. I'm really surprised YouTube has been able to handle the load of uploaded videos that basically have the title somewhere along the line,

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James White is Satan. That's in there somewhere. All sorts of videos of me with horns, pitchforks, roasting in hell, 666 on my forehead.

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It's just unbelievable. Dozens of them a week. I guess

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I could really get lots of points for spending my days on YouTube flagging videos.

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I don't think they're going to be taking those down. But I could certainly see how Google slash

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YouTube would put an end to the dividing line where I'm talking about homosexuality or the profaning of marriage or Islam or any of those things.

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I could see all that happening. I've said for a long time, eventually we're going to be pushed off into what

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I would call the Christian ghetto. Someone's going to get smart enough to start a Christian version of Facebook.

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Call it something else, but it'll be similar. It'll become an echo chamber. We're all talking to ourselves.

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Then, unless Ted Cruz is successful in keeping the Obama administration from doing the idiocy it's supposed to do in a matter of days and turning the

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Internet over to the UN we know what the UN is going to do about things like this as well.

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Nothing new. It's scapegoating and that kind of thing.

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It's been happening for a long, long, long time. If the timer rises too high or the nile too low, the cry is the

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Christians to the lion. That will solve everything. After Marcus Relius we have

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Septimus Severus 193 -211 forbade all new conversions to Christianity in the year 202.

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Septimus Severus 193 -211 forbade all new conversions to Christianity.

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That always works. No, it doesn't. It was during his reign that Tertullian said, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

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The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Origen, a man who we'll be talking about later on Origen's father

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Leonides died a martyr in 202. Origen himself desired to follow his father in death.

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When his father left the home Origen wanted to go with him to die with his father. But his mother knowing how modest a young man

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Origen was managed to keep him at home by hiding his clothes.

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So mom was smart and said I don't want to lose them both so I'm going to hide

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Origen's clothes. And that was the only way that he didn't die with his father

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Leonides in 202. When Severus died persecution ceased with one short exception from 235 to 238 for the next 50 years.

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So there's a period of relative peace after Septimus Severus' death in 211.

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But it begins again under Decius he was only emperor for a few years 249 to 251.

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But Decius began true empire wide persecution. He felt that Christian monotheism was the reason for the decline of the

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Roman Empire. The reason. So he ordered that all receive the libelus, the certificate they had offered sacrifice to the emperor.

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So we have examples of the libelus from history. We have copies of the libelus.

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It was a document that you would receive when you offered the pinch of incense upon the altar to the emperor.

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Swear by the genius of the emperor. Say Kaiser Kurios and it was your documentation and it would be what you would utilize to demonstrate your faithfulness, your patriotism.

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I mean this was now a situation was you are a traitor to Rome.

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You are a traitor to your nation if your ultimate allegiance isn't to the nation but to this

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Jesus character. At this point without any modifications or need for clarification it is state versus church.

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It is state versus the faith. It is ultimate authorities straight on, straight up under Odysseus.

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So once again I have read articles just in the past few years from individuals who argue that religion and specifically monotheistic religion is the primary problem creating violence in the world today because polytheistic religion allows paganism polytheism, mysticism all these things allow us all to put the same bumper sticker on our car that says coexist.

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Which makes everybody so much kinder in traffic and it is just a wonderful thing when we all have the same coexist sticker on our car.

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And the argument really is if you are a polytheist then your

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God isn't the only God and your God isn't even the main God. And there is no main

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God. And so as long as you can have polytheism paganism, anything like that then there is no ground for anybody to say this is the truth.

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This is the one way. And you see in their mind they don't see any difference between us and our proclamation and the

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Taliban. Both are based upon the exact same error and that is there is one

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God who has revealed one way and all will be judged on the basis of this one truth.

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And so from their perspective a true cultural harmony worldwide, global harmony it doesn't matter about cultural harmony anymore it's all one big world now

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The only way that is ever going to happen is if we get rid of this foolishness regarding monotheism and there being one truth, one objective truth, so on and so forth.

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Not new but retreaded and repackaged. Valerian 253 -260 continued

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Decius' policy of empire -wide persecution. Clergy were ordered killed if they did not sacrifice.

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All right of Christian assembly was taken away under Valerian. Diocletian 284 -305 was the final persecuting emperor and the most fierce.

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He established a co -regency with Maximian in the east Galerius in the central regions and Constantius in the west.

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So what you have is sort of the attempted division of the empire into three sections with co -regencies because it's easier to rule over a smaller area than a bigger area.

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So you've got Maximian is in the east well, for you, east

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Galerius in the central regions, Constantius in the west. Galerius was rabidly anti -Christian.

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In 303 Diocletian with no small encouragement from Galerius undertook to extinguish

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Christianity. He forbade all Christian worship. All Christian churches and books had to be destroyed. All clergy were arrested unless they sacrificed.

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For the next year this was extended to all Christians. This lasted until 311 when Galerius, having fallen ill, rescinded the persecution and asked

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Christians to pray for his health. Yeah, that happens when the body fails and you're about to croak.

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It is during this time period then, just a brief number of months prior to my debate with Bart Ehrman back in 2009

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I think, somewhere around there an article came out, some documents from Egypt had been translated, papyrus documents from Egypt had been translated and one of them was a

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Roman government document which listed the items taken from a

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Christian church in Egypt as a result of the application of these laws right at the beginning of the 4th century and it listed various items, you know, a silver bowl, this many of this, this many of that, that much money, etc.

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And it also mentioned the scrolls, not the scrolls, but the books. And, you know, the

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Romans didn't necessarily know exactly what the Christian scriptures were all the time sometimes they might have confused

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Tertullian's writings for scripture or whatever, but they're basically looking for the Christian scriptures. And it listed, if I recall correctly, 300 books from this one church.

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Now if we figure that minimally half of those were actually the scriptures themselves these were all burned and it also mentioned that over 300 churches in Egypt had been sacked by the

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Romans in that time period. So we're talking thousands and thousands of manuscripts. It's amazing that we have as many manuscripts as we have in light of the fact that during this time period the

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Romans were specifically seeking to destroy Christian manuscripts and obviously were successful in the vast majority of instances in so doing.

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So finally Constantine comes to power in the west in 306. He attacked his rival

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Maxentius in Rome in 312. He defeats him in miraculous fashion at the

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Milvian Bridge and in 313 Constantine issues the Edict of Toleration, which we call the

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Peace of the Church, the end of formal persecution at least under the lands controlled by Constantine there's still about another year or so before that becomes fully empire -wide.

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But that severest time of persecution is 250 to about 311, 313 depending on where you were.

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And that story about Constantine, I don't have time to go into it right now,

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I'll try to remember later on, but this is where allegedly Constantine has a vision of the cross in the sky and is told in this sign conquer and so he has his soldiers put the cross and the shields and Maxentius is in Rome and he's safe behind the

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Tiber River. All he's got to do is stay there but for some crazy reason he marches out to take on Constantine and is defeated at the

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Milvian Bridge and that's why it was considered miraculous. And this begins truly the very complicated story of the interaction and connectedness of the state and church.

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Up to this point it's been boom -ba -boom -ba -boom -ba -boom. Now with Constantine, what happens when this ceases and this happens?

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Big story. Big, big story. But there's the from the bird's eye emperor's view now we've got to go back and go, okay, during all that time, how did the

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Christians respond to all of that? What happened in the church?

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Because I said almost nothing created more division than persecution did amongst Christians. And so we'll look at that next time.

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Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for this time. Again, the opportunity to think back and yet to hopefully receive light from what has happened in the past.

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We thank you for preserving your church through all these ages. We ask that even in our age we will be faithful to you in all things.