This is almost right, Mike, and thanks for being even-handed in pointing it out. I'm curious, though, about how "persecuted" got scare quotes, since there can be no doubt at all that the early church was badly persecuted by the Romans. Nero used hundreds as human torches in his gardens, for example. I think we can safely remove the scare quotes from a word that describes that, don't you?MikeNovack wrote: ↑Tue Sep 02, 2025 2:00 pmActually, Rome didn't do that (not during the first coupe hundred years of Christianity). Rome was trying to economically exploit its empire. Pretty much always at war somewhere, but with economic wars, can expect both sides to be rational, weighing costs. They tried at all costs to avoid religious wars since for religion, nobody counts the cost. Laws were strict protecting "religious freedom" which is what got the early Christians "persecuted". << not for BEING Christians but doing things like "witnessing" in the middle of some other religion's ceremony -- Roman authorities dealt with that VERY harshly as they did not want the offended sect taking to the streets to get revenge on Christians >>Gary Childress wrote: ↑Mon Sep 01, 2025 8:01 pm (Rome being a totalitarian empire at the time). Do you really think the Romans would NOT oversee the assembly of the Bible to make God sound like a demanding emperor? How much of the Bible sorted through by the imperial clergy do you estimate is the truth about the creator of all that is?
This was a period where there was much competition for what would become "the religion" of Rome.
The big change came with Constatine (early 300's CE). Nicea, defining the official line of Christianity was during his rule.
You're right that most wars were not inherently religious, but were rather flavoured with religion as a further incentive to things like political, economic, territorial or resource conquest. That's always been the case: every war needs an ideological "explanation" or proffered "motivation" to "sanctify" the inexcusable. Marxism has most often supplied that, in the modern world, and it's self-declared anti-religious. But other ideologies have served that function as well: one might think of the Buddhists in Myanmar or the Anti-Colonialists in Africa. All wars need an ideological sponsor, it seems...and it's actually rarely turned out to be anything close to even merely nominal Christianity. Statistically, Islam's number 1 among the religious sponsors of wars, and Marxism's way out ahead of everybody else in the secular sphere, including all religions, by orders of magnitude.
But the early Christians were definitely persecuted by the State, and interestingly, for being "Atheists." And why would that be? Because they didn't believe in enough gods, and their disbelief was considered a slam against all the Roman ones. They only believed in one God. Rome required polytheism. So it was not that Christians were barging in and "witnessing in the middle of some other religion's ceremony" -- you won't find evidence of that. It was that they refused participation in the civic religion of Rome, which meant that they were considered inherently contrary to Rome's most passionate commitments.
However, you're right again about the big change coming with Constantine. It was at the Battle of Milvian Bridge that historians tell us Constantine either a) had a vision," or b) saw a strategic opportunity to unify his troops by melding two antithetical 'religions' into one, depending on which historian one consults -- Roman paganism uniting with nominal Christianity to form a perverse hybrid that would become known as "the Roman Church," or now, "Catholicism," which means, "the single universal, (and hence, legitimate) church." Ironically, this hybrid remains separate from another large claimant, the "Orthodox," which means "the single church that has the doctrinal truth." So both Catholicism and Orthodoxy are, essentially, slams against each other -- one claiming universality, the other claiming purity. But both are syncretistic meldings of paganism with nominal Christianity, rather than a sort of "pure stock" of Christian theology.
But of course, neither the Catholics nor the Orthodox are anything like the early church. The early church was, then, persecuted and non-institutional, a group of marginalized individuals hiding in catacombs, one that only gradually attained the kinds of numbers that would make it interesting to the State. It wasn't until the fourth century that we get the first attempt to change it into a syncretistic and political entity...and there's good evidence that a sizeable percentage of Christians never joined any such project, because the State churches found continuous cause to persecute all dissenter "sects" from then on.
The big lesson might be this: fusion with State and political power has never been a good thing for Christianity.
