Attest

One of the most notable aspects to consider is that no attempts to target Christian communities throughout the entire Roman Empire can be verified before the late third century AD. While authors such as P. Allard and C. Callewaert have theorized that an empire-wide law against Christianity must have existed from the first century onwards, and that this measure formed the legal basis for trials against Christians from that point on, no solid evidence for such legislation exists. Empire-wide laws were relatively rare in the Roman Empire, and it is particularly telling that all attested measures against Christians dated to the period before AD 250 were both temporary in nature and limited to specific regions, or even individual cities. Evidence for more centralized measures only appears towards the end of the third century, and the most convincing example, the emperor Diocletian’s so-called ‘Great Persecution’, only occurred in AD 303–304. Such a fragmentary approach seems rather odd if the Roman authorities had taken active steps to ban the movement throughout the Roman world, which would likely have resulted in more far-reaching actions. In addition, there is no real consensus on when the supposed law would have been issued, in large part due to the fact that not a single available source explicitly references the measure, or indeed its contents.