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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In the days of early Christendom, most religions were stuff you had to go looking to join
Christians were actively recruiting
One of the tenets of Christianity is to “make disciples of all the nations”, so Christians had the motivation to proselytize throughout the empire. However, because Christianity was monotheist, and unlike Judaism, was intent on spreading their religion, the Romans viewed it as a threat to their polytheistic state religion. To deal with this threat, they began persecuting Christians.
However, the Christians also believed that persecution and death as a result of their faith would lead them to heaven. Consequently, those that would be remembered as early saints and martyrs gladly accepted the death sentences imposed by the Romans. Consequently, the masses who witnessed these deaths saw that these Christians really believed what they preached, and the religion further spread, particularly amongst the lower classes who were attracted to the idea of all being equal in the eyes of an all loving God who would allow them into the same paradise for kings and commoners alike.
Eventually, with the spread amongst the lower classes, the Roman military saw more and more recruits who were Christian, and it was basically an open secret. This culminated in the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, where one of the emperor’s vying for power at the time, Constantine, claimed to have had a vision promising victory if his soldiers painted a Christian symbol on their shields. They won the battle, Constantine eventually became the sole emperor, and he passed the Edict of Milan in 313 A.D. which legalized the practice of Christianity in the empire.
With Christianity now legalized, Roman citizens could publicly practice their religion alongside Greco-Roman pagans. However, Greco-Roman paganism had already been on a decline before Christian legalization, and so Christianity continued to spread until it was adopted as the official religion of the empire by Emperor Theodosius I with the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 A.D.
El5: it became politically expedient to control Christianity thru the State than to let them form a base of power outside of the state.
Abt 300 CE, Rome had just come out of a crisis of internal strife and civil wars caused by the military gaining more and more influence over the Imperial politics. The Mystery Cult of Mithras was also popular in the Roman military at this time, which also appealed to the lower classes of Roman society.
The early Christians were basically a group who’s ideas ran counter to Roman ideas: providing hope of a better situation to women, slaves, and other oppressed peoples. And they were also gaining influence after the Crisis of the Third Century.
It may be a cynical interpretation, but the most expedient way to undercut both the military that overstepped their bounds and another group from gaining influence by espousing counter cultural ideas among the lower classes, is to take leadership of one group (Christianity) and disperse the center of government control….both things that Constantine did by accepting Christianity as a state religion and splitting the Empire into East and West.
tl:dr:
Christianity became the more popular religion and the ruling class embraced it to more easily exert control over the population.
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.
The Roman pantheon of Gods were portrayed as being more directly involved in the affairs of man, which would have become increasingly harder to believe as that never occurred. Christians had the solution: a single God responsible for everything but so checked out you’ll never see him. There’s even a guy claiming to be a relative galavanting around the empire. Trust him, bro.
You may not notice but you are asking multiple questions here.
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.
It was a movement that started slowly and built its way up over the centuries until it kind of had a critical mass. One interesting aspect is that its spread was really more of a bottom-up rather than top-down (i.e. the masses adopted it before the people in charge). Though we only really think about Christianity, the Roman Religion, Judaism and a couple other religions as the main ancient religions, there were actually a lot of religious movements that would pop up every few years and then burn out quickly. Christianity was one of many movements, but it stuck around.
So why did it end up being so popular? Well, the big thing was that it had a pretty appealing, positive message. The ancient world kind of sucked – most people lived pretty rough lives just barely scraping by as farmers or laborers. Any minor accident or sickness could result in death. Christians came to communities and preached, “Hey, don’t worry about all this stuff. Your life sucks but your suffering isn’t for nothing. If you have faith and do good things, you will go to heaven.” And they also ran charities that would take care of the sick and poor. This message and their social services naturally appealed to marginalize groups – lower classes, slaves, and women. It may shock you, but many other religions in the ancient world didn’t really have a similar message – most of them just kind of explained the mysteries of the universe, but didn’t promise this nice eternal salvation thing. Anyway, that last group (women) is important, because, this may shock you, but women were the ones raising children. So if a mom was sympathetic towards Christians, it would probably rub off on her children as well.
So with an appealing message and a willingness to set up social services for the needy, early Christianity gradually made its way around the Mediterranean. For the most part it was tolerated, but went through eras where it was harshly targeted by the authorities, but these often did more harm than good since Christians were often sympathetic to commoners. “Sure, they’re kind of weird, but all they really do is run charities that take care of sick and poor people. They don’t seem that dangerous.” Eventually, the Christian population became large enough that it was a significant minority of the Empire. At this point, Emperors themselves started being Christian and the spread was endorsed by the Empire itself.
Emperor Constantine needed to unify the empire he’d just won by conquering. The best way to do that was to pick an obscure religion that hadn’t been popular by any of the major groups he’d fought and promote it by weaving tales of miracles and visions. Get everybody onboard with the new religion and build a new Empire.
Later it helped when one of the popes bribed Attila the Hun with gold to go away and spread more stories of miracles, thereby establishing one pope over the other rival candidates.
Politics. At first the Roman Empire persecuted Christians, originally because it was similar to Judaism which was giving them all sorts of problems, then later as it moved away from Judaism to it’s own thing, because if it’s secretive nature and exclusionary nature to any other religions.
Over time though Christianity became more and more popular. This led to further persecution as it was seen as a political threat to the empire, but when that didn’t do much to stop it’s popularity it was more of if you can’t beat them join them.
So the persecutions lessened and the popularity got enough that it got into the Emperor’s court. The notable Emperor for Christianity was Constantine I, who some think it was his mother who introduced him to Christianity. After a major battle was won where Constantine had his forces display a symbol of Christianity on their shields (I can’t remeber is it was the cross or the Greek letters of Chi and Rho), the Emperor ended any and all official persecution of Christianity. With it now being allowed to officially be practised in the open, and it’s sanction by the Emperor, the popularity of Christianity exploded. So much so that Constantine I was the fist emperor to convert to Christianity, however it was on his deathbed. Some scholars believe that Constantine’s embrace of Christianity was more political than one of actual faith, seeing the writing on the wall and not wanting to get onto the wrong side of the people.
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