Christians were given preferential treatment by the state.
Not always, they weren't. For three hundred years, the Romans tried to eliminate Christianity. Why couldn't they?
en.wikipedia.org
...from the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus in his annals.
Nero looked around for a scapegoat, and inflicted the most fiendish tortures on a group of persons already hated for their crimes. This was the sect known as Christians. Their founder, one Christus, had been put to death by the procurator, Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius. This checked the abominable superstition for a while, but it broke out again and spread, not merely through Judea, where it originated, but even to Rome itself, the great reservoir and collecting ground for every kind of depravity and filth. Those who confessed to being Christians were at once arrested, but on their testimony a great crowd of people were convicted, not so much on the charge of arson, but of hatred of the entire human race.-- Book 15, Chapter 44 |
