This being the Dope, I’m surprised no one’s yet jumped in to address this. There’s no documented evidence that Christians were martyred in the Flavian Colosseum. That is, killed there specifically for their faith; Christians might have featured among the criminals publicly executed during festivals, or during gladiatorial combat.
(My emphasis)
@Slow_Moving_Vehicle I might have been too quick then to use the word Colosseum. Maybe they weren’t killed exactly there. But the Romans still persecuted the Christians, didn’t they? Then the Romans (who were apparently impressed by strength and fortitude), were so impressed by the Christians and their determination that Constantine (now again, I could be wrong about that name) embraced Christianity.
Right 
?
There’s nothing to reconcile. According to the Gospel of John (the only Gospel in which this story is found), Jesus was asked for his opinion in order to test him. He certainly didn’t have any authority in the matter, and the woman couldn’t have been punished in any way without a trial before the Sanhedrin.
But there’s a lot of doubt as to whether this story was part of the original text of John, or only added centuries later.
This story is missing from four early manuscripts of John dating from the 2nd-4th century. The first mention of the story in another text is in the 4th century, and the earliest surviving manuscript to contain it is from the 5th century.
Thanks, that is certainly different from the way I usually see it portrayed where the mob is standing there stones in hand, and Jesus saves her life by convincing the mob to let her go.
If the artist is trying to depict a scene from the Bible, details have to be added so that the viewer understands the reference. The accusers are shown wielding stones because the story is about throwing stones, even though no actual stones are in it.
The Romans absolutely persecuted Christians. The scope and scale of some of the persecutions were likely exaggerated–remember it was frequently Christians, and often Christian monks, who are responsible for a lot of late/mid Roman Empire history surviving into the modern times. They would have had a vested interest in making sure recollections of persecutions painted the Pagan Emperors in as negative a light as possible in many circumstances. For example, Emperor Domitian (ruled 81 - 96) was commonly associated with various tales of severe persecution of Christian in the early Church era; modern scholars since the 1930s or so have found little real evidence to support this and think it was probably very exaggerated.
Wrong. Well, wrongish. Romans did persecute Christians (just not in the Colosseum, which was my point). Whether or not some Romans were impressed at the bearing of some Christians, I don’t know - as @Martin_Hyde pointed out, many records of these persecutions came from Christian chroniclers; hardly objective sources. In any case, that had nothing to do with Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, the sincerity of which is debated by historians; at least some think it was for reasons of realpolitik.
Is there any chance you could give us the name of the show so we could check on the actual wording of the claim?
It’s been a while and I don’t think I DVR’d it either. Plus it was a rather spur-of-moment thing too. I was Channel surfing, and there it was. Sorry.
It was about the true Jesus Christ though. Maybe someone else can help?
The Science Channel?
Is that the ghosts channel, aliens channel, or gold mining channel?