Question: What is the total world population of the target of the Great Persecution in 303?

full_context: Document 1: Christian: Today, about 37% of all Christians live in the Americas, and about 26% live in Europe, 24% of total Christians live in sub-Saharan Africa, about 13% in Asia and the Pacific, and 1% of the world's Christians live in the Middle east and North Africa. About half of all Christians worldwide are Catholic, while more than a third are Protestant (37%). Orthodox communions comprise 12% of the world's Christians. Other Christian groups make up the remainder. Christians make up the majority of the population in 158 countries and territories. 280 million Christian live as a minority.
Document 2: Christian: As of the early 21st century, Christianity has approximately 2.4 billion adherents. The faith represents about a third of the world's population and is the largest religion in the world. Christians have composed about 33 percent of the world's population for around 100 years. The largest Christian denomination is the Roman Catholic Church, with 1.17 billion adherents, representing half of all Christians.
Document 3: Religion in ancient Rome: After the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD, Emperor Nero accused the Christians as convenient scapegoats, who were later persecuted and killed. From that point on, Roman official policy towards Christianity tended towards persecution. During the various Imperial crises of the 3rd century, “contemporaries were predisposed to decode any crisis in religious terms”, regardless of their allegiance to particular practices or belief systems. Christianity drew its traditional base of support from the powerless, who seemed to have no religious stake in the well-being of the Roman State, and therefore threatened its existence. The majority of Rome’s elite continued to observe various forms of inclusive Hellenistic monism; Neoplatonism in particular accommodated the miraculous and the ascetic within a traditional Graeco-Roman cultic framework. Christians saw these ungodly practices as a primary cause of economic and political crisis.
Document 4: State church of the Roman Empire: Nicene Christianity became the state church of the Roman Empire with the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD, when Emperor Theodosius I made it the Empire's sole authorized religion. The Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodoxy, and the Catholic Church each claim to be the historical continuation of this church in its original form, but do not identify with it in the caesaropapist form that it took later. Unlike Constantine I, who with the Edict of Milan of 313 AD had established tolerance for Christianity without placing it above other religions and whose involvement in matters of the Christian faith extended to convoking councils of bishops who were to determine doctrine and to presiding at their meetings, but not to determining doctrine himself, Theodosius established a single Christian doctrine (specified as that professed by Pope Damasus I of Rome and Pope Peter II of Alexandria) as the Empire's official religion.
Document 5: Religion in ancient Rome: Constantine successfully balanced his own role as an instrument of the pax deorum with the power of the Christian priesthoods in determining what was (in traditional Roman terms) auspicious - or in Christian terms, what was orthodox. The edict of Milan (313) redefined Imperial ideology as one of mutual toleration. Constantine had triumphed under the signum (sign) of the Christ: Christianity was therefore officially embraced along with traditional religions and from his new Eastern capital, Constantine could be seen to embody both Christian and Hellenic religious interests. He may have officially ended – or attempted to end – blood sacrifices to the genius of living emperors but his Imperial iconography and court ceremonial outstripped Diocletian's in their supra-human elevation of the Imperial hierarch. His later direct intervention in Church affairs proved a political masterstroke. Constantine united the empire as an absolute head of state, and on his death, he was honored as a Christian, Imperial, and "divus".
Document 6: Religion in ancient Rome: In 380, under Theodosius I, Nicene Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire. Christian heretics as well as non-Christians were subject to exclusion from public life or persecution, though Rome's original religious hierarchy and many aspects of its ritual influenced Christian forms, and many pre-Christian beliefs and practices survived in Christian festivals and local traditions.
Document 7: Christianity in the United States: All Protestant denominations accounted for 51.3%, while the Catholic Church by itself, at 23.9%, was the largest individual denomination. A 2008 Pew study categorizes white evangelical Protestants, 26.3% of the population, as the country's largest religious cohort; another study in 2004 estimates evangelical Protestants of all races at 30 -- 35%. The nation's second - largest church and the single largest Protestant denomination is the Southern Baptist Convention. The United Methodist Church is the third largest church and the largest mainline Protestant denomination in the United States. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter - day Saints (Mormons) is the fourth - largest church in the United States and the largest church originating in the U.S. The Church of God in Christ is the fifth - largest denomination, the largest Pentecostal church, and the largest traditionally African - American denomination in the nation. Among Eastern Christian denominations, there are several Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches, with just below 1 million adherents in the US, or 0.4% of the total population.
Document 8: Romanus of Caesarea: Saint Romanus of Caesarea (also known as Romanus of Antioch) is venerated as a martyr. In 303 or 304, at the beginning of the Diocletian persecution, a deacon called Romanus of Caesarea in Palestine suffered martyrdom at Antioch. He was taken prisoner, was condemned to death by fire, and was bound to the stake; however, as Emperor Galerius was then in Antioch, Romanus was brought before him. At the emperor's command Romanus' tongue was cut out. Tortured in various ways in prison he was finally strangled.
Document 9: Protestantism: Today, Lutheranism is one of the largest branches of Protestantism. With approximately 80 million adherents, it constitutes the third most common Protestant confession after historically Pentecostal denominations and Anglicanism. The Lutheran World Federation, the largest global communion of Lutheran churches represents over 72 million people. Additionally, there are also many smaller bodies such as the International Lutheran Council and the Confessional Evangelical Lutheran Conference, as well as independent churches.
Document 10: Anti-paganism influenced by Saint Ambrose: Saint Ambrose influenced the anti-paganism policy of several late Roman emperors including Gratian, Valentinian II and Theodosius I. Under the influence of Saint Ambrose, Theodosius issued, in the year 391, the "Theodosian decrees," a declaration of war on paganism, and the Altar of Victory was removed by Gratian. Ambrose prevailed upon Gratian, Valentinian and Theodosius to reject requests to restore the Altar.
Document 11: Constantine the Great and Christianity: Constantine's decision to cease the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire was a turning point for early Christianity, sometimes referred to as the Triumph of the Church, the Peace of the Church or the Constantinian shift. In 313, Constantine and Licinius issued the Edict of Milan decriminalizing Christian worship. The emperor became a great patron of the Church and set a precedent for the position of the Christian emperor within the Church and the notion of orthodoxy, Christendom, ecumenical councils, and the state church of the Roman Empire declared by edict in 380. He is revered as a saint and isapostolos in the Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodox Church, and various Eastern Catholic Churches for his example as a ``Christian monarch. ''
Document 12: Protestantism: In Europe, there has been a general move away from religious observance and belief in Christian teachings and a move towards secularism. The Enlightenment is largely responsible for the spread of secularism. Several scholars have argued for a link between the rise of secularism and Protestantism, attributing it to the wide-ranging freedom in the Protestant countries. In North America, South America and Australia Christian religious observance is much higher than in Europe. United States remains particularly religious in comparison to other developed countries. South America, historically Roman Catholic, has experienced a large Evangelical and Pentecostal infusion in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Document 13: Protestantism: There are more than 900 million Protestants worldwide,[ad] among approximately 2.4 billion Christians.[ae] In 2010, a total of more than 800 million included 300 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, 260 million in the Americas, 140 million in Asia-Pacific region, 100 million in Europe and 2 million in Middle East-North Africa. Protestants account for nearly forty percent of Christians worldwide and more than one tenth of the total human population. Various estimates put the percentage of Protestants in relation to the total number of world's Christians at 33%, 36%, 36.7%, and 40%, while in relation to the world's population at 11.6% and 13%.
Document 14: Africa: Africans profess a wide variety of religious beliefs, and statistics on religious affiliation are difficult to come by since they are often a sensitive topic for governments with mixed religious populations. According to the World Book Encyclopedia, Islam is the largest religion in Africa, followed by Christianity. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, 45% of the population are Christians, 40% are Muslims, and 10% follow traditional religions. A small number of Africans are Hindu, Buddhist, Confucianist, Baha'i, or Jewish. There is also a minority of people in Africa who are irreligious.
Document 15: Diocletianic Persecution: The Diocletianic or Great Persecution was the last and most severe persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. In 303, the Emperors Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, and Constantius issued a series of edicts rescinding the legal rights of Christians and demanding that they comply with traditional Roman religious practices. Later edicts targeted the clergy and ordered all inhabitants to sacrifice to the Roman gods (a policy known as universal sacrifice). The persecution varied in intensity across the empire -- weakest in Gaul and Britain, where only the first edict was applied, and strongest in the Eastern provinces. Persecutory laws were nullified by different emperors at different times, but Constantine and Licinius's Edict of Milan (313) has traditionally marked the end of the persecution.
ground_truth: approximately 2.4 billion
sub_queries: who was targeted in the great persecution that began in 303 Answer: Christians
What is the total population of Christians in the world? Answer: approximately 2.4 billion