It was well-known that Christian were persecuted. That they had willingly endured persecution should say a lot!
Tacitus (Annals 15.44:2–5), and Suetonius (Nero 16.2), had reported about the first statewide persecution of Christians under Nero (AD 64).
www.livius.org
More correctly it is well BELIEVED that Christians were persecuted as early as the reign of Claudius but ancient documents that have been discovered in the past 100 years have found that the expulsion from Rome by Claudius in 49 CE and the persecution by Nero in 64 CE were late created myths. The Christian-preferred Latin of this sentence in Suetonius is as follows:
Iudaeos impulsore Christo assidue tumultuantis Roma expulit
At least one recovered document shows that some scribe altered the letter "e" in order to make it an "I", which tells the reader that the original Latin of this passage must have been the following:
Iudaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantis Roma expulit
This latter version with the word
Chrēsto, not
Christo, is what the earliest extant manuscripts provide. Josh McDowell and other fundamentalists assert that the letter 'correction' was just making the text correct, and despite the fact that the two words are evidently related through the roots χρίω and χράω, "Chrēsto," the ablative of
Chrestus, is not an "another spelling of Christ." These terms represent Latinizations of two different Greek words that sound quite similar:
Chrēstos, sometimes a proper name, means "good," "righteous" or "useful"; while
Christos is defined as "anointed" or "messiah." Hence, although an earlier generation of scholars believed that this Suetonian passage reflected the uprisings of Jews against Christians in Rome, we are not certain at all that this purported "reference" in Suetonius has anything to do with Christ and Christians.
For some reason, none of the early patriarchs mention the Neronian persecution of Christians until the 4th century the story is found in fake letters between Seneca and Paul. Pliny the Younger, who is often cited as 'proving' the existence of Jesus, in his letter to the Emperor Trajan asks for advice on how to deal with the group of Christians in his province. His father, Pliny the Elder, had never written anything about Nero persecution of Christians despite writing an entire book on Nero's time on the throne. So why did the Younger ask for help in dealing with these weird people that he knew nothing about if the Neronian persecutions were such a big deal in the Empire?
The passage from
Tacitus Annals, 15:44
Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.
It is the phrase, "even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful . . . find their centre. . ." that causes one to think, OH maybe a Roman Senator wouldn't have written those words when his intended readers were of similar social status. Some scholars, noting the failure of other Roman authors to refer to the persecution of Christians by Nero, think the entire passage [15:44] is a late interpolation by a Christian apologist.