Since its inception, Christianity had periodically been persecuted by Roman authorities. For more than two hundred years, these persecutions were relatively infrequent and sporadic, and they were never promoted from the highest levels, the imperial government in Rome. That changed in 249 CE, when the Roman emperor Decius sponsored an empirewide persecution to isolate and root out the Christians.8 Fortunately for the Christians, Decius died two years later, and the persecution by and large ceased, for a brief time.
