Today, I was thinking about the early Christian martyrs. Christians tend to glorify those who the Roman Empire killed for following Jesus/Yeshua. In fact, many of them have been made saints. The image of defiant Christians being fed to lions in the Colosseum is one of my earliest Sunday School memories.
But were all of them even "Christian?" How many of them were actually "heretics" by modern standards ... followers of sects/branches of early Christianity that were later pruned from the tree by the orthodox Church, such as Ebionites, Arians, Marcionists, Montanists and the like? It seems unlikely that the Romans would have limited their persecution to those who focused upon the teachings of Saul/Paul.
But were all of them even "Christian?" How many of them were actually "heretics" by modern standards ... followers of sects/branches of early Christianity that were later pruned from the tree by the orthodox Church, such as Ebionites, Arians, Marcionists, Montanists and the like? It seems unlikely that the Romans would have limited their persecution to those who focused upon the teachings of Saul/Paul.