The Myth of Persecution, by Candida Moss
Candida Moss unravels a common misperception: that Christianity faced murderous government-sanctioned persecution for its first three centuries, a period in which “the blood of the martyrs” supplied seed for the growing church. Grounded in ten years of research on martyr traditions, Moss’s basic position will surprise few historians. Though early Christian texts assign martyrdom a constitutive role in the church’s story, non-Christian sources refuse to corroborate this picture.