Christian Rome Discussion

Constantine had a lot of guts—and I am not referring to his waistline! If he knew anything about history—particularly Egyptian history—he must have had a lot of second thoughts about what he was doing.

Consider Akhenaten. He and his wife decided they would turn Egypt from polytheism to monotheism. They decided to throw out the worship of all the other gods, and instead, they wanted everyone to worship the Aten, the Sun God. Furthermore, Akhenaten decided to move the seat of his government out of old, pagan Thebes and create a completely new city, which he called Amarna. There, he and his wife tried to set Egypt on a new theological course, disenfranchising all the old priests of the old faiths and setting themselves up as the leaders of the new religion.

The only problem was, their attempt failed--miserably.

The evolution of Christianity from an outlaw sect to the official, exclusive religion of the Roman Empire is surely one of history's strangest stories. Considering how strongly Christians were persecuted and villified in the years following the death of Jesus, we surely could not have expected that particular religion to have gained such widespread acceptance. The mere fact that the Romans went from being profoundly polytheistic to profoundly monotheistic in a period of about 300 years is surprising enough in itself.

So, here's my question for this week: Constantine's religious revolution succeeded. Why did he succeed where Akhenaten failed?

Set aside, for a moment, your own personal religious convictions. Don't argue that Christianity succeeded because it is the one and only true faith—I think you'd get an argument from the Jews, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Daoists, the Hindi, and a lot of other people, too. Instead, focus on history. Why was Akhenaten's experiment with monotheism almost doomed to failure from the start and Constantine's was more successful?

Remember that your post must contain at least 200 words to earn all the points. You must also use at least five of the red vocabulary terms from this week's study unit. And remember, too, that your focus here should be on why Constantine succeeded, not why Akhenaten failed, although you will want to use what you remember of Akhenaten's experience as a contrast..

These are the vocabulary for this Unit:

  1. Abraham
  2. Sarah
  3. Isaac
  4. Hagar
  5. Ishmael
  6. Second Temple
  7. eschatology
  8. Torah
  9. pentateuch
  10. Kingdom Movement
  11. Stephen
  12. Saul
  13. Zealots
  14. Josephus
  15. Masada
  16. Ignatius
  17. synoptic gospels
  18. Tertullian
  19. Origen
  20. Constantine
  21. Trajan’s Column
  22. Hadrian’s Wall
  23. Baths of Caracalla
  24. Zenobia
  25. Arch of Constantine
  26. Old St. Peter’s
  27. Church of the Holy Sepulchre
  28. Byzantium
  29. Vespasian
  30. Diocletian
  31. Milvian Bridge
  32. basilica
  33. apse
  34. nave
  35. aisle
  36. clerestory
  37. narthex

This is the reading material for the assignment:

Introduction

This unit begins by surveying the origins of Christianity within the Roman Empire between the reign of Augustus through the reign of Constantine. Among other topics, we look at the history of the Jews, the contributions of Paul, the persecution of the Christians, and the development of early Christian art and architecture.

The Narration: Part One

Humanities 250: Ideas and Values in the Humanities. Hi, this is Richard Felnagle speaking, and this program is the overview for the unit on Christian Rome.

In the eighteenth century, a British historian and Parliamentarian named Edward Gibbon published what is arguably the best known history book ever written. Certainly, it has the best known title. The book is called The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

This book is still much admired today for its scholarship and for its eminent readability—and it is available from any number of sites on the Web for free if you’d like to look at yourself—but in this book, Gibbon offered up two ideas that are not so admired these days. First, he argued that the Roman Empire fell in the year 476 AD. He also suggested that while there were many causes for that fall, one of the big ones was the pernicious influence of Christianity. According to Gibbon, Christianity pretty much sucked the life out of the empire. I quote now from the book . . .

[ . . . ] the introduction, or at least the abuse, of Christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of the military spirit were buried in the cloister; a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.

And he goes on from there—believe me! Now, history is just somebody’s opinion, and Gibbon was certainly entitled to his opinion, but most historians today disagree, me included. First, we need to get over this idea that Rome fell in 476.

In point of fact, the Roman Empire stayed in business uninterrupted, continuously until the year 1453. In that year, the Empire formally closed its shop, or, more to the point, had it closed for them by the Muslim general Mehmet, known as Mehmet the Conqueror. He used some of the biggest cannon ever seen on the planet up to that time to blow holes in the mighty walls protecting Constantinople, the last outpost and final resting place of the Roman Empire. When those walls fell, the Roman Empire fell with it, but that’s a story for another day.

What happened in 476 is that for the first time, administrative control of the city of Rome passed out of the hands of the Roman Empire and into the hands of a German officer with the almost unpronounceable name Odoacer. Or maybe it’s pronounced Odovacar. I’ve seen it both ways.

However you pronounce it, he was a German mercenary who had been trained by the Romans, and he was no barbarian. He spoke Latin, and he was fully as civilized as any Roman at the time. He captured Rome and had the official paraphernalia of office returned to the Romans at Constantinople. The Emperor at the time put up no fuss at all. He appointed Odoacer a patrician and acknowledged his authority, so it was business as usual.

See, it didn’t really mean anything because by that time, the city of Rome was no longer the capital of the Empire. About two hundred years before, the head office of the empire had been moved to the east, to Constantinople.

That happened because a general named Constantine had become Rome’s first Christian emperor, and he had decided that he needed a new capital city. Part of the reason was strategic—the western part of the empire was becoming increasingly harder to defend. Rome was, to be honest, no longer secure. But also, Rome was an old pagan city, and as Rome’s first Christian emperor, Constantine probably realized that it was going to be hard to make Rome Christian with all that pagan chutchkey on every street corner, not to mention the old Colosseum, a constant reminder of the brutal repression of the Christians that had gone on for more than two hundred years.

So, Constantine looked east, where he found an old Greek city called Byzantium. Largely abandoned, it was nevertheless a piece of prime real estate on the shore of the Bosporus, neatly situation between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and he decided to build his new Christian city there.

Thus, Constantinople became the first planned Christian city in the world. Today, Constantinople is called Istanbul. And you can’t go back to Constantinople because . . . well, you get the picture.

So what had caused Constantine to become a Christian emperor? Well, the years following the reign of Augustus had not been good ones for Rome.

Rival generals were constantly fighting each other to see who could take control of the empire, and that’s what Constantine was doing one day in the year 312—preparing to attack Rome so he could take control of the empire—when he saw a miraculous apparition in the sky, a flaming sword on which were written the words, “By this conquer.” That next day, he did, so he decided that his victory must have been God’s will, so he decided to become a Christian.

If I’m not mistaken, his wife and mother had already converted, so it wasn’t that much of a leap for him. Christianity had been a very divisive force in the empire, but Constantine may just have just decided: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em! In other words, he saw Christianity as a possible force that could be used to unite the empire under his leadership.

Apparently, he didn’t know or care that Akhenaton and Nefertiti had tried the same gig in Egypt—starting a new monotheistic religion and making themselves the head priests—but their attempt had not gone well.

Now, how did it happen that Constantine’s wife and mother had already signed on?

Well, for that, I think we have to credit Christianity’s first two great pitchmen, one who consciously did everything he could to promote Christianity and one did everything he could to stamp it out. But in either case, the results in both cases were the same. But to understand those two guys, we have to step backward a couple of millennia and talk about the origins of the Jews.

The Jews, of course, are a very old people, dating back to the Babylonian days. Somewhere around the year 2000 BC, a prophet named Abraham was given a personal invitation by God to lead his people out of Babylon and start a new faith. If Abraham and his people played ball, then God would reward them. Playing ball meant worshipping only one God: i.e., God, and obeying some obscure dietary laws and a few other things. Abraham was agreeable. Among his other problems, he and his wife, Sarah, were childless, and God promised them he would see to it that they had children. Sarah, who was getting on in years, didn’t relish the idea of becoming a mother, so she gave Abraham her handmaiden, a woman named Hagar, and soon Hagar presented Abraham with the promised son: Ishmael. Later, though, Sarah did become pregnant, and she presented Abraham with a son named Isaac.

Eventually, God decided to try to test Abraham’s faith, and he ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham reluctantly but dutifully obeyed, but at the last moment, an angel intervened, and Isaac’s life was spared.

The Jews, by the way, regard Isaac as the head of their line, and the Muslims regard Ishmael as their distant ancestor. So both Judaism and Islam are linked by having the same great, great, great, great, great grandfather, Abraham.

For a while, Abraham’s descendants and followers lived in Palestine and prospered, but somewhere around 1500, a large number of these people wandered into Egypt, which was then having problems with the people we know as the Hyksos. The Egyptians eventually overcame the Hyksos and made slaves out of them, and while they were at it, they made slaves out of the Jews, too. But around 1240 BC, another prophet, Moses, played by Charlton Heston, led them out of Egypt and into the Sinai peninsula, where he received the Ten Commandments.

The first two of these are particularly significant. The first is the command to worship no other gods, and the second one is not to make any images of God and/or to worship any such images. These are both commandments that define how this religion was going to be different from all the others because they were polytheistic. However, the Jews were not done being a captive people.

Eventually, the Jews found their way back to Palestine, and around 1000 BC, they established a kingdom, but around 900 BC, that kingdom split in two. The northern kingdom was called Israel, and its capital was at Samaria. The southern kingdom was called Judah, and its capital was at Jerusalem. But collectively, they were all known as Judeans, or Jews.

In 722 BC, the northern kingdom was captured by the Assyrians, and in 586 BC, the Babylonians captured the Kingdom of Judah and destroyed the temple in Jerusalem.

The Babylonian captivity lasted forty years, and then the Jews were allowed to return to Judea, and at that time they built the second temple in Jerusalem. In 332, Judea was captured by Alexander the Great and added to his kingdom, and in 63 BC, the Romans conquered Judea and added it to their empire.

The Jews were not happy at being acquired in this way, and they resisted the Romans as firmly as they had resisted the Greeks, but the Romans were bigger and meaner. In the year 66 AD, the resistance erupted into a full-blown rebellion, which the Romans eventually put down, but not before they burned the temple in Jerusalem, a point to which we shall return later in this overview.

In the meantime, a new movement had begun among the Jews, a movement called the Kingdom Movement.

These people believed that the end of the world was coming and God was going to send another prophet to establish His kingdom on earth. During this time, several young prophets appeared and preached and attracted followers. One of these “Kingdom” prophets was the man we know as Jesus.

Now, as was the custom throughout the Roman empire, the Jews controlled their own local affairs, and the Romans were primarily a military presence. But all this “Kingdom” talk made the Jewish leaders in authority uneasy because their power was being compromised, and the “Kingdom” movement made the Romans equally uneasy because it sounded as though a revolution were being planned against them.

Eventually, Jesus and his followers began attracting too much attention, and Jesus was put to death by the particularly unpleasant means of crucifixion—which is actually a lingering death by asphyxiation. However, martyring the leader of a radical movement is never a good idea, and instead of crushing the “Jesus” movement, the murder of Jesus only publicized the movement and strengthened the resolve of its followers.

And then, rumors began to spread that Jesus had been more than mortal and that he had come back from the dead to address his followers. Certain other miraculous events were reported, such as the events on Pentecost, when Jesus’ followers were all suddenly possessed and began speaking in tongues.

As the Jesus movement continued to grow and gain strength, the Romans continued to try to suppress it. Enter our first pitchman, a character named Saul. That’s not the name you know him by, but we’ll get to his other name presently.

End of Part One

The Narration: Part Two

Saul was a Jew, but he had been brought up in the Roman world. Being Roman, at that time, was really not such a bad thing. Rome was still the biggest and best thing around, and Saul was like many Jews who were willing to make certain compromises to co-exist with the Romans. Eventually, Saul took a job helping to persecute the Christians, as they were beginning to be known. He probably hoped to curry favor with the Romans and with the Jewish establishment in the process. And he was very good at his job, but one day, he was stopped dead in his tracks with a blinding light and an unearthly voice that said to him, “Saul! Why do you persecute me!” Convinced that Jesus had spoken to him, Saul quickly changed directions and decided that instead of persecuting the Christians, he would become one of them and seek to promote the faith. For that purpose, he changed his name to Paul, and he quickly became one of Christianity’s most eager supporters.

Now, the Augustan age was over, and the emperors who followed him were, for the most part, losers and loonies. Rome was kind of going down the tubes., rather like the way the Periclean Age ended suddenly with the Athenians’ disastrous decision to go to war with the Spartans. Many people thought the end of the world was coming any day. And Paul came to an important conclusion.

Given that Jesus might indeed be coming back any moment to start the Kingdom of God on earth, it was important that as many people as possible be “saved” right away. He recognized that the Romans would have trouble accepting the new religion if they had to become Jews first. So, he began to advocate the idea that you didn’t have to be a Jew in order to be a Christian.

Specifically, you didn’t have to be circumcised—something that a lot of Roman men didn’t want—and you didn’t have to follow the Jewish dietary laws, which meant that you could have all the pork and shellfish that you liked. Some of the original disciples disagreed—after all, Paul was not one of their number. He as a Johnny Come Lately—who was he to be making decisions like these?