This article offers a new approach to the study of the persecution of the early Christians. Past scholarship on this topic has offered explanations built around inter-religious animosity, which are here exposed as the inevitable result of unquestioned assumptions about those responsible. It offers instead a hypothesis that the driving agency for the violence Christians suffered came from their immediate communities, and even from their fellow Christians. It tests this via three case studies spanning the first three centuries ce and the extent of the Roman empire. In closing, it explores the wide-ranging consequences of a new model — based on local, social tensions rather than homogenized, antagonistic religious ideologies — for early Christian persecution (both its rationale and its reality), early Christianity more widely (scholars’ continuing commitment to binary distinctions between both ‘Rome’ and ‘Christianity’, and the pre- and post-Constantinian periods), and the history of religions as a whole (our assumptions about the dynamics between minority groups and the state, and our privileging of religion in explaining historic violence).

中文翻译：

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谁迫害了早期的基督徒？

这篇文章提供了一种研究早期基督徒受迫害的新方法。过去关于这一主题的学术研究提供了围绕宗教间敌意的解释，这里将其暴露为对责任人毫无疑问的假设的必然结果。相反，它提供了一个假设，即基督徒遭受暴力的驱动因素来自他们的直接社区，甚至来自他们的基督徒同胞。它通过跨越公元前三个世纪和罗马帝国范围的三个案例研究来检验这一点。最后，它探讨了一种新模式的广泛后果——基于当地的社会紧张局势，而不是同质化的、敌对的宗教意识形态——对早期基督徒的迫害（其基本原理和现实），