The Archbishop of Athens and Greece said something about the Parthenon being holy and except for Christians, people started wondering what was he talking about. Of course he tried to present himself as a leader of the Greek nation and said something that is impossible to believe. Christians had to build a church inside the Parthenon, because even more than two centuries after the reign of Constantine Apostata, people were attached to those temples and their traditional religion. The video shows a brief history of Parthenon and the Church had the nerve to question the fact that the Christians destroyed the nude sculptures.
An article asked rhetorically the Archbishop if he had forgotten about this and all crusaders came to write their irrational comments. One was that if was inevitable that Christians murdered everybody and destroyed everything as they had suffered persecutions for three centuries. Apart from being the Religion of Love, apart from being the best religion with the worst followers as they actually say, I wondered why should one want to persecute Christians, an unknown small group among many others. Christians say because of the emperor worship. However Jews didn't have to do that, Samaritans probably neither, so why the Christians? Because at the time of Decius, when Christianity entered a new phase, some people appeared and provoked their martydom.
oxfordbiblicalstudiesemperor worship
The cult of Roman emperors, living and dead, became the State religion throughout the empire, though it originated as a simple act of thankfulness for the peace and stability brought by Rome. Temples were erected in honour of Julius Caesar soon after his death (44 BCE) and to Augustus in his lifetime, e.g. at Pergamum. This explains the reference to ‘Satan's throne’ (Rev. 2: 13). In this city, as elsewhere, the cult developed because local people wanted it not in order to flatter the establishment but out of genuine gratitude for the benefits brought by Rome, and it was not felt to be a substitute for existing religions. Nevertheless, as the feelings of gratitude faded, the imperial cult became more and more a test of loyalty to the regime. The consequence was that refusal to perform the outward rituals was bound to incur penalties. Both Jews and Christians were conscientiously unable to burn incense to any human being: Jews, after some initial persecution, got exemption from Claudius; but Christians suffered when the Church's numbers expanded sufficiently to attract the State's hostile attention (1 Pet. 4: 16). Failure to give divine honours to the emperor or ‘to swear by the genius of Caesar’ was not the only ground for persecution; but the anti‐Christian writer Celsus (about 178 CE) warned Christians of the perils of their lack of civic sense and of their disloyalty to an empire from which they derived many material benefits.
Around the third century, with some exceptions. Martyrdom was hugely important in early Christian theology. The first Christians believed that Jesus’s promise, “Ye shall indeed drink of the cup that I drink of,” was an invitation to martyrdom. Dying for the faith guaranteed immediate passage to heaven, where martyrs sit on a throne next to God himself. Early Christians buried their deceased loved ones near the graves of martyrs, hoping that they could somehow hitch a ride to paradise. Initially, there was no taboo against actively seeking martyrdom. The North African writer Tertullian praised thousands of Carthaginian Christians who supposedly approached the Roman governor en masse to request execution—the governor is said to have declined—and there were reports of similar incidents. Beginning in the third century, however, Christian theologians argued that this kind of behavior shouldn’t be glorified. Within a few decades, the orthodox Christian view was that voluntarily seeking execution was suicide, not martyrdom.Source
Moss - How did early Christians think about martyrdom? Candida R. Moss
