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There are verses that call for cooperation with and forgiveness of state authorities, though they may be oppressive.
But, in the time of Jesus or at least the writing of the Gospels, it's just as if not more likely that it meant Jews, actual neighbors who persecuted Christians who tried to stay in the same communities. Paul admits he tried to destroy the Church and he likely wasn't the only one. It's dubious if the Romans recognized it as anything other than a cult led by a rabble rouser.
I don't think you're wrong about the Jews as primary antagonists, at least up to the destruction of the Second Temple. Still, by 70 AD, Peter and Paul had been martyred by Rome. We also see a certain prototype in the Passion account. Jesus asks forgiveness for the Roman soldiers, and now in the nearly 2000 years of martyrs since, where we have their last words, we at least very often read of them forgiving and asking forgiveness for their murderers.
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The first historical pagan reference to Christianity is from ~112 CE by Pliny the Younger, governor of northern Turkey, asking the Emperor his advice on dealing with recalcitrant Christians. Suetonius also mentions Jewish riots in Rome during the reign of Claudius instigated by a man named "Chrestus" (possibly Christ), which resulted in their expulsion. Tacitus famously describes how Nero fed Christians to the lions after burning Rome.
The Roman problem with Christians was that they refused to participate in local and state cultic sacrifices, which was the kind of thing that brought disasters and plagues and general suffering from the gods. Unlike Judaism, Christianity was also obviously a new religion, so it didn't get any respect for being ancient. Also, the Romans thought they were getting up to weird stuff in their private sessions, like having giant orgies and eating babies.
Rome didn't really have a formal criminal system. The governor was basically allowed to do whatever he wanted in the name of keeping the peace. So Christianity was rarely "illegal", but they caused general disturbances and that led to persecution.
Technically true because Josephus doesn't call it Christianity, but Josephus writes about Jesus in around 93AD, saying that he was hailed as the Messiah and that he was executed by Pilate. This implies the existence of a group of people doing the hailing - i.e. Christians.
Josephus wasn't a pagan. The flavian testimony is useful for confirming that Jesus was a real person and Pilate killed him. It doesn't tell us much about how Roman authorities viewed Christians though, which mostly appears to be as a minor annoyance.
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The testimonium flavianum is a forgery: because a jew wouldn't have written that, because the paragraphs before and after flow better together without it in the middle, because Origen didn't know about it when, if it did exist at the time, he would have and because all surviving copies of the antiquities with it go through Eusebius who is coincidentally also the first one to use it.
I know there are recent attempts to rescue it but they are bullshit.
It's generally considered to be partially accurate with Christian interpolations ("He was the Christ", etc). Origen mentions, at least, the passage about James the brother of Jesus. Josephus's original passage on Jesus, with the theology stripped out, would not have been useful for apologetics, so it's unsurprising that no one mentioned it for a while.
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Notice in this story that he didn't already know what to do and, iirc, was basically told by Trajan to not go looking for problems just handle them when they came up.
But you're right. I was thinking that the systematic persecutions came much later under Diocletian which long postdates the Gospel's likely dates (and that at the time of their writing the Romans were just hostile towards Jews in general and had no reason to pick apart their endless ideological debates*), which is true. But forgot about Nero's opportunistic behavior. That shows they were at least known and/or distrusted by pagans as well.
* Which explains some of their conciliatory gestures.
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Jews in the Bar Kochba Rebellion killed many Christians that refused to join them in the revolt against the Romans.
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The most famous example Jesus used was a Samaritan, who were the Jews' outgroup.
Yeah some people here have a deranged understanding of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The 'neighbor' is a member of the hated outgroup, and not respected members of the ingroup.
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