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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Rome was very open to worshiping many Gods. They usually “translated” local gods/pantheons into being equivalent to their own gods/pantheon. They were highly tolerant of other cults because they feared angering local gods as they tried to rule. This also makes sense politically as conquering the local people is hard enough without immediately replacing their religion too. Being tolerant of the local’s faith makes it easier to live alongside them. This is why Christianity was allowed to form and grow. Yes, many specific Christians were persecuted, but the religion on the whole was considered either irrelevant or [humorous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexamenos_graffito) early on.
In Roman politics pretty much every politician venerated and claimed some sort of relationship to Apollo. Apollo was very prestigious to be associated with for leaders, but anyone who was anyone had some sort of tenuous link to him. By the time Constantine became a major political power Christians represented probably 10-15% of the population in the city of Rome itself. No major politician had ever claimed authority or allegiance to the Christians. The early church spread quite a bit through women who would convert first, and then later convert their families.
The Edict of Milan made the Christian church legal and tolerated in 313. Supposedly Constantine had converted in 312, but the first sources that cite this incident specifically were written posthumously. Eusebius wrote about it in 324, but he had been writing about Constantine since 313 and only first mentioned it in 324. I find this a little suspicious.
To me, it seems more likely that his conversion happened slowly and later in life. The story of his conversion at the battle was a little bit of mythmaking to justify his consolidation of power later in life. He utilized the church to gain greater cultural control of the Empire in much of a similar way as Augustus did 3 centuries prior. By changing the religious nature of the Empire, he made it his empire, and not just the Roman empire.
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