CHRISTIAN RELIGION AND CHRISTIANS HAVE BEEN AND CONTINUE TO BE THE MOST PERSECUTED PEOPLE SINCE THE YEAR 284 CE

30 CE-TODAY CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — The persecution of Christians began and continues to the present day. Early Christians were persecuted for their faith at the hands of both Jews and Romans who controlled many of the lands across which early Christianity was spread.

30 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — Early Christianity began as a sect among Second Temple Jews, and according to the New Testament account, Pharisees, including Paul of Tarsus prior to his conversion to Christianity, persecuted early Christians. The early Christians preached the second coming of a Messiah which did not conform to their religious teachings. However, feeling that their beliefs were supported by Jewish scripture, Christians had been hopeful that their countrymen would accept their faith. Despite individual conversions, the vast majority of Judean Jews did not become Christians.

37 CE-68 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — Persecution of the Christians in the Roman Empire under Emperor Nero (37 CE-68 CE) grew and grew. Nero used Christians as victims in the Coliseum in many horrendous methods of murder to entertain himself and the Romans. In 64 CE, a great fire broke out in Rome, destroying portions of the city and economically devastating the Roman population. Some people suspected that Nero himself was the arsonist as Nero sang. So “to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace.” Prior to the fire Nero had already inflicted horrible punishments and deaths on Christians, using the excuse of their supposed superstitions. Nero convicted many Christians for “hating the human race.” The goal of Nero and succeeding 11 Emperors was to destroy all Christians.

41 CE-44 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — When Agrippa I, who already possessed the territory of Antipas and Phillip, obtained the title of King of the Jews, in a sense re-forming the Kingdom of Herod, he was reportedly eager to endear himself to his Jewish subjects and continued the persecution in which James the Greater lost his life, Peter narrowly escaped and the rest of the apostles took flight.

44 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — The Roman procuratorship began and those leaders maintained a neutral peace, until the procurator Festus died and the high priest Annas II took advantage of the power vacuum to attack the Church and executed James the Just, then leader of Jerusalem’s Christians. The New Testament states that Paul was himself imprisoned on several occasions by Roman authorities, stoned by Pharisees and left for dead on one occasion, and was eventually taken as a prisoner to Rome. Peter and other early Christians were also imprisoned, beaten and harassed.

44 CE-336 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — The goal of Nero and succeeding 11 Emperors of Rome was to destroy all Christians. They all persecuted Christians trying to eliminate them, but they saw terrible backlash and harm to the Empire and its reputation. The Christian religion continued to grow. If anything the persecution instead made the original religion or the church even stronger, as it grew and grew. It seemed to be threatening the very stability of Rome itself. Then Constantine changed the strategy from direct attack of Christians to subversion and takeover of the religion that they saw was headed to dominate Rome.

70 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — The great Jewish revolt, spurred by the Roman killing of 3,000 Jews, led to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the end of Second Temple Judaism brought the slow rise of Rabbinic Judaism. Jews had insulted and slandered and murdered many Christians and according to an old church tradition the early Christian community had mostly fled Jerusalem before the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. They fled to the region of Pella (Greek Macedonia).

70 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — After the end of Second Temple, Judaism saw a slow rise of Rabbinic Judaism, as the rabbi Talmud of random oral beliefs of the rabbis were passed along, and later written down in 30 volumes.

98 CE-117 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — Roman Emperor Trajan (53 CE-117 CE) ruled Rome from 98 CE to 117 CE and continued the policy of persecution of Christians if they refused to worship the emperor and the gods, but they were not to be sought out.

132 CE-136 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — Two different Christian oral traditions state Simon bar Kokhba, the leader of the second Jewish revolt against Rome (132 CE-136 CE) who was proclaimed Jewish Messiah, persecuted the Christians if they did not deny and blaspheme Jesus Christ. Another, Eusebius, said Bar Kokhba harassed Christians because they refused to join his revolt against the Romans. This was a key divided of Early Christianity and Judaism.

161 CE-180 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — Irenaeus (130 CE-202 CE) was a Greek cleric noted for his role in guiding and expanding early pre-formalized Christian communities in what is now the south of France. He came from Smyrna, now Izmir in Turkey, where he heard the preaching of Polycarp, who a follower of John the Evangelist. Irenaeus was chosen as bishop of Lyon (was called Lugdunum) and his best-known work is On the Detection and “Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis” or gnosticism, in particular that of Valentinus. He countered the lies of the gnostic sects that claimed secret wisdom. He advocated for the scriptures handed down from the apostles, and the teaching of the apostles’ successors. He was the earliest surviving witness to recognise all four gospels as essential. From 161 CE-180 CE Emperor Marcus Aurelius was persecuting the Christians of Lyon when Irenaeus was a priest of the Church of Lyon. The clergy suffered imprisonment for their faith. Irenaeus sent a letter to Pope Eleutherius in 177 CE about the persecution in Lyon and while Irenaeus was in Rome, another persecution took place in Lyon. One traditional account of killing is the Persecution in Lyon in which Christians were purportedly mass-slaughtered by being thrown to wild beasts under the decree of Roman officials for reportedly refusing to renounce their faith according to St. Irenaeus. A religious peace followed the persecution by Marcus Aurelius. Almost all Irenaeus writings were directed against Gnosticism, titled Adversus haereses (Against Heresies). Irenaeus alludes to coming across Gnostic writings, and holding conversations with Gnostics, and this may have taken place in Asia Minor or in Rome and Gnostics present near Lyon: he writes that there were followers of ‘Marcus the Magician’ living and teaching in the Rhone valley. In 190 CE he reported that Christian communities of Turkey (Asia Minor) practiced the pagan celebration of Easter. The Catholic Church simply later simply incorporated Easter by assigning it to Christs rebirth.

185 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — While this may be a myth, it is said that some early Christians sought out and welcomed martyrdom. The proconsul of Asia, Arrius Antoninus, was approached by a group of Christians demanding to be executed. “The proconsul obliged some of them and then sent the rest away, saying that if they wanted to kill themselves there was plenty of rope available or cliffs they could jump off.” The 2nd-century text Martyrdom of Polycarp relates the story of Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, who did not desire death, but died a martyr, bound and burned at the stake, then stabbed when the fire miraculously failed to touch him.

235 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — Persecutions of Christians under the direction of the Emperor for not worshipping the Emperor and under the reign of Emperor Decius (201 CE-251 CE), served 249 CE-251 CE issued a decree requiring public testimonial of allegiance to the Emperor in a public sacrifice. He sent out roving commissions to cities and villages to supervise the execution of those who refused. Punishment included simply burning incense to Roman gods or if refused then arrest, imprisonment, torture, and executions. Christians fled to safe havens in the countryside and some purchased their certificates, called libelli. The Christian church never forgot the reign of Decius whom they labelled as that “fierce tyrant”.

284 CE-311 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — Diocletian Persecution was the largest Roman mass murders of Christians and covered the reign of Diocletian (244 CE-311 CE) as Roman emperor from 284 CE to 305 CE and Galerius (250 CE-311 CE) Roman Emperor from 305 CE to 311 CE. Galerius finally ended the Diocletianic Persecution of Christians in the year of his death 311 CE. Over 20,000 Christians are thought to have died during Diocletian’s reign. One of the most prominent martyrs during the Diocletian persecution was Saint George, a Roman soldier who loudly renounced the Emperor’s edict, and in front of his fellow soldiers and tribunes claimed to be a Christian by declaring his worship of Jesus Christ.

300s CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — A form of the Christian religion was legalized by the Edict of Milan, and it eventually became the State church of the Roman Empire. But Christian missionaries as well as converts to Christianity have been the target of persecution ever since the emergence of Christianity, sometimes to the point of being martyred for their faith.

337 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — The new Emperor Constantine realized he had to use a different strategy used by his 12 predecessors. So, instead of attacking the Christians and the church from the outside he decided to legalize it and parasitically take it over from within. He wanted to build ancient pagan superstitions, symbols, and polytheism into the Christian church and use it politically to his benefit. The Church became a non-Christian entity that was closer to Roman paganism inside a Christian Shell. This new perverted religion eventually was adopted as the Roman national religion. After that persecutions of Christians were sporadic and locally inspired. The Romans still hated the concepts and beliefs of the Early Christian Religion, but most such beliefs were removed from the Roman Catholic Church.

500 CE-1400 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — Bibles were made illegal except in the hand of priests who used Latin versions of the bible to prevent people from reading the bible themselves. The clergy abused their power of the bible to threaten anyone who read the bible that they were going to eternal hell and damnation. Only through the clergy were Christians allowed to receive the official WORD, and this meant offerings and funding of the Church.

516 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — In Yemen a Jewish warlord, Joseph Dhu Nuwas or “Yousef Asa’ar”, fought his war because Christians in Yemen refused to renounce Christianity. Villagers were offered the choice between conversion to Judaism or death and that 22,000 Christians were then massacred. Inscriptions documented by Yousef himself show the great pride that he expressed after killing more than 22,000 Christians in Zafar and Najran. The king himself reported in excruciating detail to his Arab and Persian allies about the massacres that he had inflicted on all Christians who refused to convert to Judaism. This particular persecution is described and condemned in the Qur’an in its 85th chapter.

614 CE-637 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — Several months after the Persian conquest of Jerusalem, a riot occurred, and the Jewish governor of Jerusalem Nehemiah was killed by a band of young Christians while making plans for the building of the Third Temple. The Judeo-Persian reaction was ruthless and besieged Jerusalem for 19 days, eventually, digging beneath the foundations of the Jerusalem, they destroyed the wall and on the 19th day of the siege, the Judeo-Persian forces took Jerusalem and mass murdered 17,000 Christians. Strategos wrote that the Jews offered to help them escape death if they “become Jews and deny Christ”, and the Christian captives refused. From the many excavations carried out in the Galilee, it is clear that all churches had been destroyed during the period between the Persian invasion and the Arab conquest in 637 CE. The church at Shave Ziyyon was destroyed and burnt in 614 CE.

832 CE-837 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — Caliph al-Mamun led Muslim mobs to loot properties of Copts and destroyed churches. He massacred many Copts (Christians) including many monks and destroyed monasteries.

1064 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — Seljuk Turks under Alp Arslan killed many Armenian Christians part of the Muslim conquest of Anatolia. On some occasions such as the Siege of Irbil, thousands of Christian civilians were massacred.

1198 CE-1216 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — “Anyone who attempts to construe a personal view of God which conflicts with the Church dogma must be burned without pity.” — Pope Innocent III (1198 CE-1216 CE) and anyone who rejected the Church biblical dogma was a labeled a heretic and was tortured or murdered. Persecution of Christians were acts historically committed against Christians because of their faith. The Waldensians were one such pre-Protestant persecuted movement founded by Peter Waldo in Lyon around 1173 CE separated from the Catholic Church. The movement and quickly spread to the Cottian Alps between what is today France and Italy and today is centred on Piedmont in Northern Italy. Small communities are also found in Southern Italy, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, the United States, and Uruguay. Waldensian teachings quickly came into conflict with the Catholic Church. By 1215 CE, the Waldensians were declared heretical and subject to intense persecution; the group was nearly annihilated in the 1600s CE. The Waldensians influenced early Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger. Upon finding the ideas of other reformers similar to their own, they quickly merged into the larger Protestant Reformation. A great many of the victims of the Catholic Inquisitions were Christians trying to avoid the pagan Catholic teachings by using the pre-Roman takeover of the Church that included pagan symbols like dragons, gargoils, demons, and other pagan symbols that still decorate Catholic Churches across Europe, such as Norte Dame in Paris. When standing at the base of the Notre Dame when you look up gargoyles decorate the church and look down on you since Notre Dame was erected in 1163 CE. These are half-man, half beast demons carved out of stone. These crouching monsters, of pagan origins, carry rainwater from the roof and out of the gargoyle’s mouth. In Ancient Egyptian architecture, gargoyles were prominently sculpted in the form of a lion’s head and similar monsters are seen on pagan Greek temples. There are 39 remaining gargoyles on the Temple of Zeus. Like in pagan religions the Catholic Church wanted to scare people with realistic images of a damned afterlife portraying pain and suffering as the demons loom over the flock. The gargoyles are represented by demons and monsters. The pagan symbols include two types of Chimera — a two-footed dragon, and the Stryga, known as the “spitting gargoyle” and these are Grotesque in appearance and even today offer a frightful display that must have been terrifying for Paris residents and visitors of the 1100s CE, being sold heaven over hell.

1200s CE-1517 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — The Mamluk dynasty persecuted and forced a majority of Copts to convert to Islam. Mamluks destroyed most of the churches and killed an estimated 300,000 Copts over the 1200s CE. Maronite and Greek Orthodox communities were expelled from the coastal areas in the same period and their settlements were destroyed.

1300s CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — Timur (Tamerlane), a Muslim warlord of Turco-Mongol descent, conquered Persia, Mesopotamia and Syria, and decimated the civilian population. Timur had 70,000 Assyrian Christians beheaded in Tikrit, and 90,000 more in Baghdad. Tamerlane instigated large-scale massacres of Christians in Mesopotamia, Persia, Asia Minor and Syria. Most of the victims were indigenous Assyrians and Armenians, members of the Assyrian Church of the East and Orthodox Churches, which led to the decimation of the hitherto majority Assyrian population in northern Mesopotamia and the abandonment of the ancient Assyrian city of Ashur. Other massacres were perpetrated by Helugu Khan against the Assyrians, particularly in and around the ancient Assyrian city of Arbela (modern Erbil).

1570 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — The Ottomans killed 20,000 Greek Cypriots in Nicosia, and every church, public building and palace was looted. Only women and boys who were captured to be sold as slaves were spared.

1600s CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — Christianity was banned for at least a century in China by the Kangxi Emperor of the Qing Dynasty.

1614 CE-1637 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — In Japan Tokugawa Ieyasu assumed control and disliked Christian activities so the Tokugawa shogunate finally decided to ban Catholicism, in 1614 CE and demanded the expulsion of all European missionaries and the execution of all converts. This marked the end of open Christianity in Japan. The Shimabara Rebellion, led by a young Japanese Christian boy named Amakusa Shiro Tokisada, took place in 1637 CE. After the Hara Castle fell, the shogunate’s forces beheaded an estimated 37,000 rebels and sympathizers and the entire complex at Hara Castle was burned to the ground and buried together with the bodies of all the dead.

1792 CE-1793 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — The Dechristianization of France during the French Revolution conducted by various Robespierre-era governments of France beginning with the start of the French Revolution and one small region lost between 100,000 to 300,000 Christians in just one cleansing massacre by Jacobin Atheists. The French desecrated and pillaged most churches, even removing all statues, plates, crosses, bells, and other iconography from places of worship. This was done under the Cult of Reason and subsequently the Cult of the Supreme Being. The climax was reached with the celebration of the Goddess “Reason” in Notre Dame Cathedral in 1793 CE when under threat of death, imprisonment, military conscription or loss of income, about 20,000 constitutional priests were forced to abdicate or hand over their letters of ordination and 6,000 – 9,000 were coerced to marry, many ceasing their ministerial duties. By the end of the decade, approximately 30,000 priests were forced to leave France, and thousands who did not leave were executed. Most of France was left without the services of a priest, deprived of the sacraments and any nonjuring priest faced the guillotine or deportation to French Guiana. Also in 1793 CE Vendeans took up arms and a French army massacre of 6,000 Vendée prisoners, many of them women, took place after the battle of Savenay, along with the drowning of 3,000 Vendée women at Pont-au-Baux and 5,000 Vendée priests, old men, women, and children killed by drowning at the Loire River at Nantes in what was called the “national bath” – tied in groups in barges and then sunk into the Loire. With these massacres came a ‘scorched earth’ policy with farms destroyed, crops and forests burned and villages razed. There were many reported horrible atrocities and a campaign of mass killing universally targeted at residents of the Vendée. By 1796 CE, the estimated Vendean dead numbered between 117,000 and 500,000, out of a population of around 800,000. Some historians call these mass killings the first modern genocide, specifically because intent to exterminate the Catholic Vendeans was clearly stated by these Jacobin Atheists.

1784 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — After the Treaty of Mangalore in India, Tipu gained control of Canara and issued orders to seize the Christians in Canara, confiscate their estates, and deport them and ordered the destruction of 27 Catholic churches. According to Thomas Munro, a Scottish soldier of Canara, around 60,000 to 70,000 Christians, or 92% of the entire Mangalorean Catholic community, were captured with only 7,000 escaping from a total of 80,000. They were forced to climb nearly 4,000 feet through the jungles of the Western Ghat mountain ranges and the journey took six weeks, causing 20,000 to die. Some say 30,000 of them were forcibly converted to Islam. The young women and girls were forcibly made wives of the Muslims living there and later distributed and sold into prostitution. The young men who offered resistance were disfigured by cutting their noses, upper lips, and ears. According to Mr. Silva of Gangolim, a survivor of the captivity, if a person who had escaped from Seringapatam was found, the punishment under the orders of Tipu was the cutting off of the ears, nose, the feet and one hand. The Archbishop of Goa wrote in 1800 CE, “It is notoriously known in all Asia and all other parts of the globe of the oppression and sufferings experienced by the Christians…during the usurpation of that country by Tipu Sultan from an implacable hatred he had against them who professed Christianity.”

1838 CE-1849 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — An estimated 100,000 people in Imerina died as a result of the tangena ordeal, constituting roughly 20% of the population. Malagasy Christians would remember this period as “the time when the land was dark”. Persecution of Christians intensified in following years, deemed the worst of these years by British missionary to Madagascar.

1876 CE-1878 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — During the Bulgarian Uprising against Ottoman rule, and the Russo-Turkish War (1877 CE-1878 CE), the persecution of the Bulgarian Christian population was conducted by Turkish soldiers. Over 15,000 non-combatant Bulgarian civilians were killed by the Ottoman army. During the war, whole cities including the largest Bulgarian one (Stara Zagora) were destroyed and most of their inhabitants were killed, the rest being expelled or enslaved. The atrocities included impaling and grilling people alive. Similar attacks were undertaken by Turkish troops against Serbian Christians during the Serbian-Turkish War (1876 CE-1878 CE).

1894 CE-1896 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — A series of ethno-religiously mass murdering at least 325,000 (at least 50,000 orphaned children) were motivated by Anti-Christian pogroms known as the Hamidian massacres were conducted against the ancient Armenian and Assyrian Christian populations by the forces of the Ottoman Empire. The motives for these massacres were an attempt to reassert Pan-Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, resentment of the comparative wealth of the ancient indigenous Christian communities, and a fear that they would attempt to secede from the tottering Ottoman Empire. The massacres mainly took place in southeastern Turkey, northeastern Syria and northern Iraq by Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The death toll is estimated to have been as high as 325,000 people, with a further 546,000 Armenians and Assyrians made destitute by forced deportations. The Turkish troops looted the remains of the Assyrian settlements. Unarmed Assyrian women and children were raped, tortured and murdered.

1900s CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — Atheistic Secular Humanism turned out to be the most viciously intolerant worldview of them all. Communist regimes in USSR and China mass murdered more Christian people in this century than in all previous centuries combined.

1900s CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — Christians have been persecuted by various groups, including the Islamic Ottoman Empire in the form of the Armenian Genocide, the Assyrian Genocide and the Greek Genocide, as well as atheistic states such as the Soviet Union and North Korea. During World War II members of some Christian churches were persecuted in Nazi Germany for resisting Nazi ideology.

1909 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — The Adana massacre of 30,000+ Christians occurred in the Adana Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire and included the massacre of Armenian and Assyrian Christians in the city of Adana and its surrounds in a series of anti-Christian pogroms throughout the province.

1915 CE-1921 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — The Young Turks government mass murdered 3.4 MILLION (mostly Christians) of the collapsing Ottoman Empire and persecuted Eastern Christian populations in Anatolia, Persia, Northern Mesopotamia and The Levant. The 3.4 million deaths were divided between roughly 1.5 million Armenian Christians, 0.75 million Assyrian Christians, 0.90 million Greek Orthodox Christians and 0.25 million Maronite Christians and groups of Georgian Christians were also killed. The massive ethno-religious cleansing came to be known as the Armenian Genocide, Assyrian Genocide, Greek Genocide. The Genocide led to the devastation of ancient indigenous Christian races who had existed in the region for thousands of years.

1917 CE-1930 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — Soviet Ashkenazi persecution resulted in the intentional murder of at least 500,000 Orthodox followers by the government of the Soviet Union some put that number in the tens of millions. Under the doctrine of state atheism in the Soviet Union, a “government-sponsored program of forced conversion to (scientific) atheism” was conducted by the Communists. The Communist Party destroyed churches, mosques and temples, ridiculed, harassed, incarcerated and executed religious leaders, flooded the schools and media with anti-religious teachings. The state established atheism as the only scientific truth. Soviet authorities forbade the criticism of atheism and agnosticism. Militant atheism became central to the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a high priority policy of all Soviet leaders.

1917 CE-1989 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — The total number of Christian victims under the Soviet regime ranges from 12 million to 66+ million. The Communist regime confiscated church property, ridiculed religion, harassed believers, and propagated atheism in the schools. It is estimated that 500,000 to millions of Russian Orthodox Christians were martyred in the gulags by the Soviet government. Along with execution, some other actions against Orthodox priests and believers included torture, being sent to prison camps, labor camps or mental hospitals. Demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 1931 CE under the USSR’s official state atheism during which many “church institution[s] at [the] local, diocesan or national level were systematically destroyed.” The main target of the anti-religious campaign in the 1920s CE and 1930s CE was the Russian Orthodox Church, which had the largest number of faithful. A very large segment of its clergy, and many of its believers, were shot or sent to labor camps. Theological schools were closed, and church publications were prohibited. Between 1927 CE and 1940 CE, the number of Orthodox Churches in the Russian Republic fell from 29,584 to less than 500.

1936 CE-1939 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — During the Spanish Civil War clergymen and entire Christian religious communities were executed by communists and anarchists. The death toll included hundred(s) of thousands of victims and also the clergy including 13 bishops, 4,172 diocesan priests and seminarians, 2,364 monks and friars and 283 nuns, for a total of 6,832 clerical victims. In addition to murders of clergy and the faithful, destruction of churches and desecration of sacred sites and objects were widespread. In Barcelona, out of the 58 churches, only the Cathedral was spared, and similar desecrations occurred almost everywhere in Republican Spain.

1950s CE: CHINA PERSECUTION — Mao was involved in the death of 40 million to 80 million people. There were at the time around 900,000 Christians (Protestants) in China. It is difficult to get estimates of the Christian death toll during the Communist Revolution.

1987 CE-2007 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — Iraqi 1987 CE census counted 1.4 million Christians, but by 2006 CE the number of Assyrian Christians dropped to between 500,000 and 800,000, of whom 250,000 lived in Baghdad. By 2007 CE UNHCR estimated that 2.2 million Iraqis had been displaced to neighboring countries, and 2 million were displaced internally, with nearly 100,000 Iraqis fleeing to Syria and Jordan each month.

2000s CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — Missionary organization Open Doors (UK) estimates that over 200 million Christians face persecution, particularly in Middle Eastern countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

2018 CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — The Holy See has reported that over 100,000 Christians are violently killed annually because of some relation to their faith. Christians suffer numerically more than any other faith group or any group without faith in the world. Of the world’s three largest religions Christians are allegedly the most persecuted with 80% of all acts of religious discrimination being directed at Christians who only make up 33% of the world’s population.

TODAY CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — North Korea leads the 50 countries in which Christians are most persecuted according to a watchlist by Open Doors. It is currently estimated that more than 50,000 Christians (20% of Christians in the nation) are locked inside concentration camps because of their faith, where they are systematically subjugated to mistreatment such as unrestrained torture, mass-starvation and even imprisonment and death by asphyxiation in gas chambers. In 2014 CE, 2,400 Christians were murdered according to estimates.

TODAY CE: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS — The annual death toll of Christians continues to rise as 165,000 CHRISTIANS PER YEAR ARE MASS MURDERED EACH YEAR from persecution by secular and religious zealots. In 2013 CE the murder of Christians doubled. Of the 198 nations on earth 131 are persecuting Christians and are at physical risk. The Middle east is perhaps the worst but also China, Egypt, India, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Burma are also major risk nations for Christians. — Rupert Shortt in Christianophobia. “There is now a serious risk that Christianity will disappear from its biblical heartland.” — Shortt due to rise of radical Islam.