The Near-Extinction of Christianity:
The closest Christianity ever came to being eradicated was during the reign of Emperor Diocletian.
He administratively went through the empire and found an anomaly, a group of people that didn’t behave the way they were supposed to.
They didn’t worship the emperor like everyone else, they didn’t visit the pagan temples and engage in sexual immorality, and they didn’t sacrifice to the Greek pantheon of gods that so dominated the way of life.
They were anomalies, and so Diocletian decided to eliminate them.
First, he went through and found the meeting places, anywhere the church gathered together, and tore them down.
Then he went in and arrested the Christian leaders, killing every one of them he could find.
Then he searched out and destroyed every copy of the Scriptures he could get his hands on so that not a single, complete copy of the Scriptures survived from before the fourth century.
Diocletian came closer to exterminating Christianity than any other emperor, and there were at least thirty of them who tried.
This began at the time John was writing down the Revelation of Jesus Christ, and during this persecution, the struggling believers in Smyrna received a letter from Jesus.
From FTGC-47d – https://youtu.be/2P0gDcymrW8
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