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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The Roman Empire was too big to be micro managing everyone everywhere, so they gave large autonomy to each region as long as they kept paying their taxes.
One of those regions was Judaea, where the Jews lived and Jesus (which was also Jew) was born too. It was officially ruled by its governor (Pontius Pilate – Roman) but the *de facto* ruling was handed off to the Jews, in the person of their King (Herod, by the time Jesus was born)… And yeah, they even let the Judaean King call himself King. That’s how hands-off they were.
But there was no Judaean army/soldiers, so when it came to actually enforcing the law it was the Roman Soldiers doing it, which is why Pontius (the Roman Governor of Judaea) did the whole “I wash my hands out of this”. The implication being that he didn’t understand why they wanted to kill a man who had done nothing wrong in his eyes.
So yeah, the Roman Empire was never really invested in religion at all… Until Constantine converted to Christianism and made it the official religion of the empire.
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