For a month or two I've been reading this book about the history of the early Christian church whenever I have a few minutes of downtime here and there (like waiting for my laptop to boot up or when I'm running backups). I've always wondered how Christianity became this whopping religion that had such clout in the medieval world. Obviously, this was helped when the Roman emporer Constantine made Christianity the official religion of Rome. But I could never figure out what happened before that. I mean, I was tought in school and Sunday school that early Christians were severely persecuted and fed to lions, so how can such a religion ever prosper to the point that a friggin' emporer could convert? Well, the book helped out a bit. It turns out that official persecution was intermittent until 313 when Constantine proclaimed Christianity was OK. I think it was only about 20 years total for that first 300 years. And it was mostly directed at Church leaders who were supposed to give up their sacred documents. Everybody else was required to just make a public sacrifice to the Roman gods, and if you didn't go, then nobody really came looking for you. For the common person, they were only persecuted if they did something obvious to bring it on themselves. I'm not saying it wasn't horrible for early Christians, I'm just saying the picture they paint in church is far from accurate.

Anyway, the main reason persecution was intermittent was because Christianity was so popular, which meant there are Christians merchants and civil servants. When persecution occurred, then the Roman economy suffered, and the emporer couldn't raise sufficient armies to fight the Turks or barbarians. So when external threats arose, persecution ended.

The Christians basically had about 40 years after the death of Jesus to grow before Nero burned Rome and blamed it on the Jews, which in turn blamed it on the Christians (which was considered just a radical Jewish sect in those days). That was the first time people were fed to the lions. Jews were pissed off because the Christians were growing so rapidly, mostly because they were inclusive, appealed to Platonic philosophy, and didn't require circumcision. The Greek-speaking world saw it as a rational alternative to the official Roman paganism.

But how did Christians ever come up with the idea of a pope? As rediculous as it sounds, the pope only became a worldwide leader until the mid 400s with Leo I. Before that, Roman bishops tried to enforce a church heirarchy based on foundation by Peter or Paul. But the problem with this is that once the Roman capitol was moved to Constantinople, the church there was automatically an authority even though neither Peter nor Paul had anything to do with it. The first hint of Roman authority was in a letter by Clement in 96. He was trying to say that churches should follow the example of the Roman church, but a mistranslation caused later people to think that he was saying other churches should obey Rome. Later bishops attempted to enforce this primacy, and Rome did have some authority, especially in the West, but really nobody cared. Then Leo I at the council of Chalcedon in 451 really hit it home that everyone should obey Rome, and since such things were written down in the canon of the council, it was basically Christian law from then on.

I could go on and on, because it was a pretty interesting book. It was not a good read, though. The book assumes you know a lot already about the history of the Roman Empire, which I do not. Anyway, now I'm moving on to this book of revisionist history. I've only read two pages, but I already think Columbus was an asshole!