Knowing the biblical history associated with Jesus (I.e. Pontius Pilate crucifying him to appease the Jews), how did Roman Catholicism end up becoming the dominant religion in the Roman world? It seem like they’d want to distance themselves from that, sort of like how it would be kind of awkward for Jews to accept Jesus as the messiah, ya know?
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ELI5 How did the Roman empire end up Christian
> Knowing the biblical history associated with Jesus (I.e. Pontius Pilate crucifying him to appease the Jews)
That’s the version that has reached modern day. There were only 3 things early Christinaities (plural) agreed on: Jesus was a charismatic and popular Jewish teacher who was executed by crucifixion during Passover after causing some sort of mess in the temple of Jerusalem. Everything after that is debatable. We don’t even know what he said. We don’t even know the parables attributed to him were even said by him.
Not even the existence of Pontius Pilates at the scene of crucifixion can be confirmed, it can be roughly assumed it happened when he was governor of Judea, but that’s it. It didn’t mean he was there are the stage. We don’t even know why Jesus was crucified, what we know is that Passover was a time that executions of Jews were more common than on typical days because due to the nature of the gathering, it was a magnet for troubles and riots so it needed Romans to exert more control on the region to make sure things did not go nuts quickly.
> how did Roman Catholicism end up becoming the dominant religion in the Roman world?
It didn’t. Roman Catholicism came from the church schism in 1054 AD, where the united church split in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox.
But you mean when it became Christian. Christianity was an exclusive religion, you had to give up your loyalty to any other faith to convert to it. This didn’t happen to pagan religions, cultures blending together and taking from each other was the norm. There was even this idea that people pretty much worshipped the same gods under different names so when Romans said Celts like to worship Mercury a lot, they meant Lugh. Germanic people seems to agree with this way of thinking for when they adopted Roman week, they just renamed Roman weekdays which were named after Roman gods, with Germanic gods. Like Tyr/Mars for Tuesday, Mercury/Odin for Wednesday, Jupiter/Thor for Thursday, Venus/Frigg for Friday. They didn’t always like each-others traditions, but when they did, they saw no problem with adopting them for themselves.
Christianity had rules, don’t do this, don’t do that, and while it is not really possible to truly kill the process of syncretism (lots of saints are sanctified pagan gods for example, you can’t just erase culture out of people, they will adopt it), it really put a lot of limits on how people should believe, which led to a lot more uniformity in Christianity compared to pagan beliefs, and thus more power to spread. That’s not to say that Christianity was uniform and I’ll talk about that below, but compared to pagan beliefs it appeared to be.
> It seem like they’d want to distance themselves from that, sort of like how it would be kind of awkward for Jews to accept Jesus as the messiah, ya know?
There were once hundreds of versions of Christianities, there was no canon yet, and the distinction between Jewish and Christian was not clear. Today, you cannot believe Jesus is the Messiah and be Jewish, back then you could. Today Christians believe Jesus is God, back then you could believe Jesus was just a prophet, Jesus was the son of God but not God, or Jesus was part God, and still be a form of Christian. They’d fight all the time and say the other was wrong or heretic, but they were pious in their belief of Christianity and saw themselves as Christian. And the Biblical Canon did not exist either, everybody pretty much had their own books, their own copies, their own stories. They were more diverse than Christians today, and still leas diverse than pagans.
However, Judaism did distance itself after the creation of the Christian canon, because the Christian canon chosen by the Church Fathers was anti-semitic, and it would be even more notable today if the Epistle of Barnabas had survive, that’s a part of the biblical canon that fell out of canon somewhere along the way.Along with the Shepherd of Hermas, which is the complete opposite, unfortunate that story is not in the canon anymore, one of the most humble stories in the whole library. Or Enoch, Noah’s grandfather who literary turns Super ~~Saiyan~~ Angel. Not in European Christian canon at least, he is still popular in the Ethiopian church.
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