“Christians were strangers”
“Apart from the small and ethnically circumscribed exception of the Jews, the ancient world had never known an exclusivist faith, so the rapid success of early Christianity is a historical anomaly. Moreover, because some form of Christianity is a foundational part of so many peoples’ lives and identities, the Christianisation of the Roman empire feels perennially relevant — something that is ‘about us’ in a way a lot of ancient history simply is not. Of course, this apparent relevance also obscures as much as it reveals, especially just how strange Rome’s Christianisation really was…
Paul was a Christian, perhaps indeed the first Christian, but he was also a Roman. That was new. Even if the occasional Jew gained Roman citizenship, Jews weren’t Romans. As a religion, Judaism was ethnic, which gave Jews some privileged exemptions unavailable to any other Roman subjects, but it also meant they were perpetually aliens. In contrast, Christianity was not ethnic…
In a cosmopolitan Roman empire, where cities sucked in expendable labour from the countryside, and where artisans and craftsmen had to travel a very long way from home, that kind of community could not be taken for granted or created casually. Christians would and did look after one another, sometimes exclusively so…
From a fringe movement, Christianity had become a central fact of urban life. Yet the religion’s normalisation made it suddenly vulnerable in the middle of the third century, when — thanks to dynastic instability, epidemic disease and military incompetence — imperial government went into a potentially terminal decline…
By placing the authority of the Roman state and the imperial office to police and enforce right belief, Constantine created a model that would have a long and ambiguous history. Councils of bishops, ostensibly informed by the Holy Spirit, would henceforth define what was orthodox…
As social advancement came to depend on being a Christian, and as the civic calendar of non-Christian beliefs was increasingly dismantled, the majority of urban Romans actively thought of themselves as Christians by the end of the fourth century.”
