| spdk1 said: ah ok, sorry I was under the impression that you thought there was no persecution at all, my bad. |
Nope. As in the case with all religions, whenever governments take it on and try to support it, they have the annoying tendency to do persecution on the behalf of their religion of choice. Constantine took what the Roman Empire did to Christians early and then turned it against the those who had teachings different than what the establishment liked by the government has (I guess closing down places with temple prostitution can be seen as persecution). Similar happened with the Inquisitions where governments in European states tried to purge heretics to try to strengthen their own power.
The first few centuries had Christians persecuted by the Roman Empire, because they refused to do emperor worship. They were in no position to persecute others. Oh, you see letters getting upset internally at people who had no ties through relationships of those who knew the apostles, via multiple generations.
I would say by the time the persecution came the other way, Christian doctrine was set for the most part. The greatest controversy had to do over Arianism, which pretty much had Jesus as the Son of God, but said that he wasn't eternal (Western attempts to counter this resulted in a permanent schism with the East, due to changing of the creed). Then the rest of the arguments, which mostly were in the East, had to do with the nature of the humanity and divinity of God, and splitting of hairs and miscommunications between languages, where the Coptics left.
There is a lot more here, where even those in what are considered to be orthodox, and normal Christian theology, were put in a place of being put in prison, because they disagreed with how the Emperor understood the nature of Christ. There was a case of a Byzantine emperor, for example, deciding he would end up destroying icons, because he thought they were idolatry, because his empire was suffering and thought maybe they were a reason why. And then you have the Western Crusaders sacking Constantinople, also (the Pope wrote a letter condeming the Crusaders for that behavior). And the beat goes on.
