e Christian Acts, we hear but of little, two persons only
being killed. We learn also that "many thousands of Jews" belonged to
the new sect, and were propitiated by Christian conformity to the law;
and that, when the Jews rose against Paul--not as a Christian, but as a
breaker of the Mosaic law--he was promptly delivered by the Romans, who
would have set him at liberty had he not elected to be tried at Rome. If
we turn to the conduct of the Pagans, we meet the same blank absence of
evidence of persecution, until we come to the disputed passage in
Tacitus, wherein none of the eye-witnesses are said to have been
concerned; and we have, on the other side, the undisputed fact that,
under the imperial rule of Rome, every subject nation practised its own
creed undisturbed, so long as it did not incite to civil disturbances.
"The religious tenets of the Galileans, or Christians, were never made a
subject of punishment, or even of inquiry" ("Decline and Fall," vol.
ii., p. 215).

This view of the matter is thoroughly corroborated by Lardner: "The
disciples of Jesus Christ were under the protection of the Roman law,
since the God they worshipped and whose worship they recommended, was
the God of the heavens and the earth, the same God whom the Jews
worshipped, and the worship of whom was allowed of all over the Roman
Empire, and established by special edicts and decrees in most, perhaps
in all the places, in which we meet with St. Paul in his travels"
("Credibility," vol. i., pt. I, pp. 406, 407. Ed. 1727). He also quotes
"a remarkable piece of justice done the Jews at Doris, in Syria, by
Petronius, President of that province. The fact is this: Some rash young
fellows of the place got in and set up a statue of the Emperor in the
Jews' synagogue. Agrippa the Great made complaints to Petronius
concerning this injury. Whereupon Petronius issued a very sharp precept
to the magistrates of Doris. He terms this action an offence, not
against the Jews only, but also against the Emperor; says, it is
agreeable to the law of nature that every man should be master of his
own places, according to the decree of the Emperor. I have, says he,
given directions that they who have dared to do these things contrary to
the edict of Augustus, be delivered to the centurion Vitellius Proculus,
that they may be brought to me, and answer for their behaviour. And I
require the chief men in the magistracy to discover the guilty to the
centurion, unless th