The rise of Christianity

          The explosive growth of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire cannot be adequately explained without understanding the person of Paul of Tarsus and the part he played in its spread.  For most of his life Paul was a strict observant Jew who even persecuted Christians immediately following the death of Jesus.  But on a journey to Damascus he converted to the movement he fought so hard to put down, giving the followers of Christ the single most important moment in regards to the spread of their beliefs.

Paul preaching in Athens, or Rome,
or Corinth, or Chicago.

          Paul was the perfect person to bring the new religion to a Greco-Roman world where paganism had been entrenched for centuries, and the techniques he used to present it helped it seamlessly unfurl across the Mediterranean.  He was wealthy, educated, and, most importantly, fully Hellenized.  In the enormous Empire, where hundreds of cultures thrived in relative social autonomy, the filler that held everything together under ingenious Roman political administration was Hellenism.  The fact that Paul was so well versed in the intellectual traditions of ancient Greece meant that, to those he preached to, Christianity wasn’t just another back-country religion.  He spoke to the people with ideas they understood.  The textbook notes that he stressed the common humanity in Christ’s teachings in order to take advantage of the Stoicism present in Athens.  Paul also often used a formal approach to preaching; he first met with community leaders before going to the people.  Paul brought the message of Christ to Jews and Gentiles alike, as well as being completely open to preaching salvation to women as easily as men.  The foundation he built allowed for subsequent missionaries to exploit the contacts he made and use families and their contacts to convert new followers.  When Christianity gained a foothold in Rome, the highly sophisticated transportation network in place meant that missionaries had easy access to the rest of the empire, not to mention the thousands of yearly visitors sure to come to the capital of the civilized world.

          The people of the Roman world took to the teachings of Christ for many reasons.  The message of universality that Paul presented fit in well with the empire’s own political philosophy of oneness.  But the main reason was that the lessons of Jesus, and Paul’s interpretations of them, struck a chord in the hearts of the working class men and women.  Jesus promised his followers a paradise to come, and this appealed to the hard life of a Roman commoner.  Also, Christianity offered the people a sense of community and belonging that was often missed in a system of ruling class taxation.

If not for Jesus, this awesome
tat would not exist.

          By the time of Constantine, Christianity had developed into a full blown religion, complete with rituals, organization, and hierarchy.  But it was Constantine’s own actions that brought the faith into the mainstream.  He did this by openly proclaiming the religion legitimate, and also by banning any further persecutions of Christians.  This paved the way for Theodosius to make Christianity the official religion of the empire at the end of the fourth century.  While this fit in nicely in the east where the faith was more grounded and monarchies more easily accepted, in the west much of the population struggled with the transition from a pagan principate to a theocratic autocracy.  Arguments and confrontations developed among the faithful over the nature of Christ and his teachings – disputes that didn’t exist in the much more flexible polytheism of ancient Rome.  This in turn weakened the empire and gave way to barbarian invasions.  And although Christianity would even triumph here, among the pagans to the north, the western Roman Empire became a casualty in its ever expanding sphere of influence.