In the following guidebook, we learn that the main reason Christianity was successful in the first two centuries, is because it incorporated Greco-Roman (or Indo-European) mythologies about the nature of the gods and humans, along with it being a uniquely missional proselytizing religion combined with being a monotheistic exclusivist religion, which made it superior to any other religion of the time.
Christianity was also more powerful than the other pagan religions, in the minds of many pagan converts, because Roman pagans became convinced that the Christian God was more useful and powerful than the pagan gods when it came to providing divine favor. In other words, many Gentile Romans converted to Christianity because they believed that the Christian God could provide more favorable results in life than the pagan gods. This made me think of Constantine's vision where he believed he was told, "In this sign (the cross or Christ's name) you will conquer."
As Bart Ehrman puts it (from a section below):
Pagans, as a rule, worshipped their many gods because the gods were powerful and could provide for humans what humans could not provide for themselves out of their own resources: rain, crops, health, safe childbirth, victory in war, life, peace, happiness, and so on. ... Divine power also explains why pagans began to convert to worship the Christian God: It was a matter of who was better able to provide what was needed in life. Christians succeeded in convincing pagans that Christ and his Father were more powerful than their gods; that they alone could provide what is needed for this life; and that they could, in fact, provide eternal life. Once they were convinced of this, pagans converted. There did not need to be massive conversions between the days of Paul and the days of the emperor Constantine to make Christianity a major player on the religious scene by the early 4th century. Usually, it is estimated that about 5 percent of the empire had converted at that time. .... So far as we know, there were no other religions like Christianity in the ancient world, that is, religions that were both missionary and exclusivistic. Judaism may have been exclusive, but it was not missionary; a number of Greco-Roman religions were missionary, but they were not exclusivistic. Christianity succeeded, in no small part, precisely because it alone among the religions of antiquity insisted on the exclusivity of its views. Because converts needed to renounce their former religions, Christianity destroyed all other religions as it grew.
From How Jesus Became God Course Guidebook by Professor Bart D. Ehrman by thegreatcourses.com:
Loc 170-200:
Apollonius of Tyana
About 2,000 years ago, a remarkable man was born in a remote part of the Roman Empire. His mother was told that he would not be a mortal but, in fact, would be divine. She gave birth to him in a miraculous way. As an adult, this man collected disciples around him who came to believe that he was the Son of God. And he did miracles to prove dead. At the end of his life, he ascended to heaven. This man was Apollonius of Tyana, a pagan philosopher active some 50 years after Jesus and widely known in his own day. We know about the life of Apollonius from the writings of his later follower Philostratus, who based his account, he tells us, on earlier eyewitness reports. Later, there were debates between the followers of Jesus and the followers of Apollonius, concerning which was the Son of God and which was a fraud. We see these debates in a battle of words between the pagan Hierocles and the Christian Eusebius. But it is important to note that these were not the only two miracleworking Sons of God in the ancient world. There were, in fact, a was widely known throughout antiquity. To understand how ancient people could believe that a human could be a god or a god could be a human, we need to know more about religion in the Greco-Roman world.
Ancient Polytheism from Jews and, eventually, Christians. Scholars sometimes call these Greco-Roman religions “pagan,” which in this context does not have a derogatory connotation. Greek and Roman polytheists had thousands of different religions, but they had numerous features in common.
- function, purpose, and place imaginable.
- Such worship pleased the gods, and in return, they could help ...
- Polytheist religions did not maintain that there was a vast chasm that separated the divine from the human realms. This is the common conception today, especially in the Western religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), but it was not a widely held view in antiquity.
For ancient Greeks and Romans, the divine realm and the human realms were heavily populated, and both humans and divinities...sometimes overlapped; thus, gods could be, in some sense, human, and some humans could be, in some sense, divine. It may be easiest to imagine the divine realm for ancient pagans as a kind of pyramid, with the very top spot occupied by the one ultimate god; the next tier, by the great gods of Greece and Rome; the next, by local and less powerful divinities; the next, by daimonia (spirit beings less powerful than the gods but more directly involved ... Below that tier were the humans, who themselves could be ranked in terms of their power, intelligence, and beauty. In this understanding, there is not a chasm separating the divine and human realms but a kind of continuity.
Models of Divine Men
In this ancient view of the divine realm, gods could sometimes be or become humans, and humans could sometimes be or become gods. There were three basic models for “divine men” in this world. Sometimes it was understood that gods could and would come down to earth in human form to make a temporary visit for purposes of their own. Sometimes it was understood that a person was born from the sexual union of a god and a mortal; thus, that the person was, in some sense, part divine and part human. Sometimes it was understood that a human was elevated by the gods to their realm, usually after death, and at that point divinized, made into a god.
Gods Becoming Human
There are numerous stories in the ancient myths about gods temporarily assuming human form to meet, speak, and interact with humans. These stories in many ways are similar to later Christian beliefs about Christ being a preexistent divine being who came to earth as a human, only later to return to the heavenly realm. The pagan stories, of course, can be found in ancient Greek and Roman mythology. One interesting example that serves to illustrate the point is the account told by the Roman author Ovid of the temporary “incarnation”of Jupiter and Mercury and their meeting with the poor elderly couple Philemon and Baucis. Incarnation sometimes did that, according to the mythical tales related by Ovid. Ovid was one of the great authors of Roman antiquity, who narrated stories that had been passed down for centuries, especially in his book Metamorphoses. In the story we are interested in, Jupiter, the chief god, and Mercury, the messenger of the gods, temporarily took on human form and visited a region of Asia Minor. Only Philemon and Baucis, a sweet elderly couple, welcomed the gods into their home. As a result, even though everyone who had rejected the gods was to be destroyed, these two were given any wish they desired. They asked to be made head of the gods’shrine and to die in unison. Here, we have a tale of gods who visit humans, in human form, for a relatively short time. They are indistinguishable from other humans; they interact with humans; and their interactions bring both judgment and blessing. Ovid’s Story and the New Testament The story of Jupiter and Mercury appears to lie behind an interesting account found in the New Testament, in the book of Acts, an account of the missionary activities of Jesus’s followers after his death Traveling in the same region of Asia Minor, the apostles Paul and Barnabas are mistaken, by a miracle they perform, as Zeus and Hermes. (Zeus was the Greek version of the Roman Jupiter; Hermes, the Greek version of Mercury.) The people in this region remembered the story of Philemon and Baucis and did not want to replicate the mistake of those who were judged by the gods. These two stories show one of the ways that ancient people imagined how something like divine men could exist: Gods could assume, temporarily, the guise of humans in order to visit people and interact with them.
... Humans Born of the Gods
In the ancient world, it was not uncommon for an exceedingly powerful or intelligent person to be thought of as more than human. In some cases that status was because he was not, in fact, a mere mortal but had one of the gods as his father. This was the case with Alexander the Great, rumored to be the son of Zeus. o A humorous account of such a birth is told by the Roman playwright Plautus in his work Amphitryon. Here, Alcmena, the mother of Hercules, is made pregnant by Zeus’s Roman counterpart, Jupiter. The god disguises himself to resemble Alcmena’s husband, Amphitryon, in order to spend a long night frolicking in her arms. o It is not clear that anyone actually believed that this story was history, but it was seen as a plausible view: Sometimes gods had sex with women, and the result was a demigod, part god and part human.
Apotheosis
A third way a human could also be or become divine involves a process known as apotheosis into a god. We have seen an instance of this already in Ovid’s story of the elderly couple Philemon and Baucis. More commonly this divinization of a human involved great philosophers or, more commonly still, incredibly powerful rulers. The Roman historian Livy tells of how Romulus, the founder the divine realm as a god at the end of his life. The Roman biographer Suetonius discusses the idea that Julius Caesar was thought to have been made a god after he died. In Caesar’s case, it is not surprising that his adopted son, Octavian (who was later to become Caesar Augustus, the had become a god. If his father was a god, what did that make Octavian?
The Cult of the Emperor
With Caesar Augustus, we have the beginning of the emperor cult, the practice of honoring emperors, both dead and living, as gods. Note that the word cult is not derogatory in this context but refers to the care of the gods. ... Thus, the Roman orator Quintilian speaks of gods who were born divine and of other gods who had “won immortality by their valor,” that is, those who had been made gods because of their amazing deeds. In the Roman world, this normally happened after an emperor had died, based on a vote of the Senate, seen to ratify an emperor’s divine status. But it often happened for living emperors, as well, as can be seen, for example, in an inscription from Pergamum dedicated to the god Augustus Caesar or one in Miletus dedicated to the emperor Caligula, who is called the god Sebastos. How are we to understand this adoration of the emperor as a divine being? The older view of scholarship was that we should not take it seriously. In this view, those said to be gods were known to be as human as anyone else. The emperor cult was simply political In other ancient societies, such as Egypt, it was thought that the ruler—the pharaoh—was an embodiment of a god. ... propaganda, which no one ever really believed, that encouraged people to worship their leaders as divine. Logically, if the ruler is divine, then he cannot be disobeyed. Recent scholarship has reevaluated this older view and offered a different perspective. There is little evidence that of Rome itself and rarely by the emperors. These were grassroots movements, in which rulers were revered for their superhuman power and authority. o Whether or not people actually believed in their hearts that the emperors were gods is impossible to know. However, the emperors were certainly treated as gods, for example, by them and by having temples built and dedicated to them ... thus, they had divine-like power. And as we have seen, they, too, could be called god. This adoration of divine rulers was not restricted to Rome. It can be seen clearly in an inscription dedicated to the ruler of Syria, Antiochus, and his wife Laodice in gratitude for their overcoming a foreign power. The city Teas set up cult statues of the two, an inscription in which they were placed on the same level as the local god Dionysus and said to be “common saviors of our city.”
Divine Humans
In short, Jesus was not the only divine man in the ancient world. Some were thought to have been gods who came down to earth temporarily in human form. Others were thought to have been literally the son of a god, the divine product of the union of a god and a mortal woman. Still others were thought to have been taken up into heaven at the end of their lives to live and rule in the divine realm. Jesus, as we will see, was thought to be all three of these things by different Christians in different times and different places.
... Divine Beings in Ancient Judaism
It is true that Judaism was distinctive among all the religions of the Greco-Roman world in insisting that only one God was the true divinity worthy of worship. In fact, by the time of Jesus, most Jews were monotheists, believing that there was only one God and that the gods of the pagans did not actually exist. But it had not always been that way in Judaism. For centuries, many Israelites were not monotheists but henotheists; they believed that other gods existed, but they were not to be worshipped, as evidenced already in the Ten Commandments. Eventually, a strain of monotheism developed within ancient Israel, as evident in such passages of the Hebrew Bible as Isaiah 45. If that was the case in the days of Jesus, is it true, then, that there could be no other divine beings who interacted with humans? Was there just God in heaven and we mortals on earth? In point of fact, even Jews who were monotheists still believed in other divine beings, that is, hyper-intelligent beings who were superhuman; who lived in the divine realm, not here on earth; and who were far more powerful than mere mortals. Among these mentioned in the Bible.
Divine Beings as God
Sometimes, the Bible speaks of one of these other divine beings coming to earth in the shape of a human, and sometimes, these other divine beings who appear as humans are actually called God appears on earth in human or other form. Already in the book of Genesis, the father of Israel, Abraham, is said to have an encounter with three “men.” Later in the story, two of these men are revealed to be angels, and the third is God. In Exodus 3, God appears as a burning bush, commanding Moses to bring the Israelites out of Egypt. occurs in Exodus 3 at the burning bush. Here, Moses is addressed by the “Angel of the Lord,” who is then later called “the Lord.” This Angel of the Lord also sometimes appears to humans as himself a human. We see an example in Genesis 16, when the Angel of the Lord speaks with and rescues a woman named Hagar from near death from exposure. In other passages of the Bible, we are told that angels are either sons of God or God himself and that they become human. This is implied in the famous passage in Job 1, when the “sons of God” appear before God in his divine council. Angels are explicitly called gods in Psalm 82. In other Jewish traditions, angels are said to become human, as in the text known as the Prayer of Joseph. In addition, and equally striking, we are told in some Jewish texts that humans can become angels. This is clearly laid out in 2 Baruch 51 and 2 Enoch 22. In sum, in the Jewish tradition, there are divine beings other than God who are called gods; these divine beings can become human; God himself sometimes appears temporarily in human form; and humans themselves can sometimes become angelic beings.
Beings Born of Divine Union
Moreover, we also have stories in the Jewish tradition of beings who are born to the union of divinities and humans. This is the point of the bizarre passage in Genesis 6, where the “sons of God” take wives among the “daughters of men” and produce semi-divine offspring. This story is expounded in the book of 1 Enoch, a later Jewish text that understood the offspring to be malevolent giants. The idea that other beings besides the one true God could be called gods is found not only in the pagan but also in the Jewish tradition, and just as pagans thought gods could temporarily become human and that some people were born to the union of divine and human beings, so, too, did many Jews in the days of Jesus.
Loc. 1300-1600:
Early Christianity in the Roman Empire
To make sense of Constantine’s conversion, we need to consider a brief history of the relationship of the Christian religion to the Roman Empire. As we have seen, the earliest Christians were a group of Jews who came to believe that Jesus had been exalted to heaven when God raised him from the dead. These earliest Christians began to seek converts among their fellow Jews. As far as we know, this led to some opposition among nonChristian Jews but no opposition, at least at the outset, from Roman would have considered them an internal Jewish affair. But eventually, with the missionary efforts of the apostle Paul and others like him, Gentiles began to convert to the Christian faith, believing that Christ had died, had been raised from the dead, and had been exalted to heaven. As the church became increasingly Gentile, it became decreasingly Jewish.
Pagans and Early Christians
There are three key questions we need to ask and answer about pagans and their relationship to early Christians: Why did pagans worship the gods they did? Why did they persecute Christians for worshipping their own God? What compelled some pagans to convert to the Christian faith ... As it turns out, the answer to all three questions is the same. It all has to do with ancient understandings of divine power. Pagans, as a rule, worshipped their many gods because the gods were powerful and could provide for humans what humans could not provide for themselves out of their own resources: rain, crops, health, safe childbirth, victory in war, life, peace, happiness, and so on. Christians were persecuted not because they considered Jesus God or because they insisted on worshipping him and God the Father, but because they refused to worship the gods who were powerful enough to make life livable, happy, and prosperous for other members of the empire. If the gods are the ones who make life possible and successful, and all they require are simple, occasional acts of worship, then anyone who refused to worship them must be the cause of disasters, such as droughts, famines, earthquakes, military defeats, and so on. Because the Christians were the ones who refused to worship the state gods, they were the cause of problems in the community; that is why they were persecuted. Divine power also explains why pagans began to convert to worship the Christian God: It was a matter of who was better able to provide what was needed in life. Christians succeeded in convincing pagans that Christ and his Father were more powerful than their gods; that they alone could provide what is needed for this life; and that they could, in fact, provide eternal life. Once they were convinced of this, pagans converted. There did not need to be massive conversions between the days of Paul and the days of the emperor Constantine to make Christianity a major player on the religious scene by the early 4th century. Usually, it is estimated that about 5 percent of the empire had converted at that time. If that’s the case, then the faith that started out with only a small group of Jesus’s followers would have needed to grow ... So far as we know, there were no other religions like Christianity in the ancient world, that is, religions that were both missionary and exclusivistic. Judaism may have been exclusive, but it was not missionary; a number of Greco-Roman religions were missionary, but they were not exclusivistic. Christianity succeeded, in no small part, precisely because it alone among the religions of antiquity insisted on the exclusivity of its views. Because converts needed to renounce their former religions, Christianity destroyed all other religions as it grew. The steady conversions to Christianity often made the pagans’ former families and friends even angrier, which meant that persecutions ratcheted up as the church grew in size and importance. ...
Christian Persecutions
Contrary to what is often imagined, the Roman emperors were rarely involved directly with the persecution of Christians. under Nero (64 C.E.), a persecution that was localized and that was not an attempt to attack Christians for being Christian. Similar things could be said about persecutions during the time of Trajan (112 C.E., as seen in the letters of Pliny the Younger) and Marcus Aurelius (177 C.E., as seen in the Letter of Lyons and Vienne). persecution instituted by an emperor did not occur until 249 C.E., under the emperor Decius. Luckily for the Christians, it lasted only for a couple of years, until the death of Decius in 251 C.E. What is called the Great Persecution occurred under the Roman emperor Diocletian, starting in 303 C.E. Diocletian sought to rid the empire of the growing Christian presence. The emperor Nero tried to shift in 64 C.E. from himself to the Christians, thus instituting a localized persecution. Constantine’s Conversion Just three years later, in 306 C.E., Constantine became the emperor, and six years after that, in 312 C.E., he converted to Christianity. We have an account of his conversion in a biography of Constantine written by Eusebius, who was his contemporary. According to these accounts, Constantine was deeply disturbed .... receive divine assistance for his military cause. Constantine claimed that the night before the battle, he had a dream of the cross and was told in his dream that this was the sign that would give him victory. He had the sign embossed on his soldiers’s hields, went into battle, and emerged victorious. From then on, Constantine considered himself a follower of Christ. There are disputes over whether this was a “genuine” conversion or not, because there are some signs that Constantine continued to worship other divinities, especially the god of the sun, but it appears that his commitment to the Christian religion was genuine. ... Constantine saw to it that persecutions were put to an end. He donated large tracts of land to the church and ... he promoted the worship of the God Christ to the state gods. ... rather than being a god who was worshipped, [Constantine] was a servant of God who urged his subordinates to worship Christ. Now, rather than being the Son of God in competition with Christ, the emperor became the servant of God in subservience to Christ. It is wrong to say that Constantine made Christianity the state religion. That would not happen until the emperor Theodosius at the end of the 4th century. But Constantine certainly made Christianity a favored religion. And by intervening in internal church affairs, such as the Arian controversy, he guaranteed that Christian concerns would be the concerns of the entire empire. In the next lecture, we will consider why Constantine may have been so invested in solving this controversy, which on the surface may have seemed simply to involve a rather technical theological point of whether Jesus was a god who came into being before the world or whether he had always existed alongside God the Father.
... Agenda of the Council
Even though the Council of Nicea was the most momentous and important church council in the history of Christianity, its agenda and decisions are widely misunderstood today. People often think that the Christian leaders at the council “invented” the New Testament by deciding which Gospels, epistles, and so on would be considered Scripture. But the bishops at the Council of Nicea did not discuss which books should be accepted into the canon. People also often think that the Council of Nicea is when Jesus began to be considered God. Sometimes, it is said that a vote was the Son of God and that it was a close vote. Of course, that’s not true either. We have already seen that Jesus was considered the Son of God in the Christian faith, soon after his death, as his own disciples declared that he had been taken up into heaven and exalted to the level of divinity. Jesus is called the Son of God and even God in the writings of the New Testament, and he was considered God by all the proto-orthodox and most of the heretical Christians that we know about in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. ...
Constantine’s Concern
Even before the council met, the emperor Constantine was concerned about this question, not because he was theologically Constantine was concerned because he saw in Christianity a potentially unifying force in his fractured empire. The empire was vast and was culturally, politically, and religiously fragmented. In contrast, Christianity emphasized oneness: There is one God, one Son of God, one church, one faith, one hope, and so on. Christianity was a religion of unity. Constantine believed it could be used to unify the empire. But the problem was that this religion of unity was itself split; thus, Constantine saw the need to heal the split if the Christian church was to bring real religious unity to the empire. Eusebius’s biography of the emperor, The Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine, preserves a letter that Constantine himself sent to Arius and Alexander to try to get them to see eye to eye on the theological issue dividing them and their followers. He is quite forthright that his concern is that Christians should be united in their beliefs. Further, he considered the issue at stake to be petty and trivial. Constantine had the letter hand-delivered to the two opponents by Ossius, an important bishop of Cordova, Spain. After delivering the letter, Ossius came back by a land route that took him through Antioch, Syria. While there, he attended a conference of church bishops that met to debate the Arian issue and in which Arius and his views were condemned by the majority. The supporters of Arius at this conference were told, however, that they would have a chance to defend their position. Thus, the Council of Nicea was born.
A Worldwide Gathering of the Church
The term ecumenical comes from a Greek word that means “world.” These councils were not merely local in nature but were worldwide, meaning that leaders from around the world attended in order to determine what Christian beliefs were to be adhered to by believers everywhere. The Council of Nicea was originally scheduled to meet in Ancyra, a city in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), but it was eventually moved to Nicaea, also in Asia Minor. The vast majority of the 318 bishops who attended came from the eastern part of the empire: Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, and so on. Western Christians were not well represented; in fact, not even the bishop of Rome, Sylvester, came but sent two legates in his place. Still, the decisions of the council were considered binding on all Christians everywhere, in no small part because the emperor ...
The Nicene Creed
After debating the issues back and forth, the council decided against the views of Arius and his followers. It was not, in fact, a close vote. All but 20 bishops agreed with these decisions. And after Constantine himself twisted their arms, 17 of those 20 agreed to sign off on the concluding statement. This statement was a creed that expressed the now-orthodox position and anathematized (that is, uttered a divine curse against) anyone who thought differently. Several points in the creed are worth emphasizing: ... Because it was the nature of Christ as God that was the major point of contention, the creed’s statements about Christ are far more lengthy, involved, and nuanced than anything said about God the Father or the Holy Spirit. Christ in this creed is not a subordinate deity to God. He is “of one substance” with the Father. The word used here is homoousios ... According to the creed, Christ is completely equal with God and himself the “true God”; there was never a time when he did not exist.
Christ of the Nicene Creed
The Christ who emerged from the Council of Nicea is obviously a far cry from the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was an itinerant apocalyptic preacher from the backwaters of rural Galilee, who offended the authorities and was unceremoniously [crucified]. Now, he was confessed to be God himself, equal with the Father from eternity past. Whatever he may have been in real life, Jesus had now become fully God. ...
We might think that with the declarations of the Council of Nicea, Jesus was fully, substantially, and eternally God, and that was the end of the story. But of course, every ending marks a implications. They involve Christians in relation to the pagan world, to Jews, and to themselves. Results of Constantine’s Conversion The results of Constantine’s conversion and his intervention in Christian affairs obviously had an enormous effect on the broader Roman world. Now, rather than being a persecuted and relatively small minority within the empire, Christianity began to assert itself as a favored religion, with masses of conversions; by the end of the 4th century, nearly 50 percent of the empire was Christian. At that time, in less than 60 years after the Council of Nicea, the Christianity the religion of the state for all practical purposes. ... The emperors were no longer the enemies of Christ and persecutors of his people; they were the worshippers of Christ and patrons of his people. From that time on, Christianity was destined to become the religion of the West. This never would have happened had Jesus not come to be considered God. Christianity would have remained a small group of Jewish followers of Jesus who continued to think of him as an important teacher of the Law of Moses, which they would have followed and insisted that other members of their sect follow. Christianity would never have broken out of its Jewish matrix, converted masses of Gentiles, converted the Roman emperor, or become the dominant religion of Western culture and civilization. We never would have had the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, or arguably, the Enlightenment. That Jesus became God had historical, cultural, social, political, and economic effects that can scarcely be calculated.
Rise of Anti-Semitism
Some of the effects of Jesus’s becoming God were directly related to the Jewish people, most of whom retained their own religion and, of course, refused to acknowledge that Jesus was in any sense God. There was nothing in Jesus’s earthly proclamations that made him stand out as in any way non-Jewish. He and his followers kept the Jewish Law, followed Jewish customs, and studied the Jewish Scriptures. His followers believed, during his life, that he was the Jewish king of the coming kingdom, but they did not think that he was starting a new religion. ... Jesus’s followers maintained that the belief in the death and Resurrection of their messiah was essential for salvation. In their view, Jews who rejected that message rejected their own salvation, which meant that they were alienated from God and doomed for eternal destruction. Non-Christian Jews were soon seen as hard-hearted and rebellious against God. It was not long before Christians began to declare that because Jews had rejected God, God had rejected them. Thus began the long history of Christian anti-Judaism ... We can see the beginnings of this history already within the pages of the New Testament, where Jews are often characterized as the opponents of Christ, as hard-hearted sinners against God, and even as children of the devil. This kind of polemic against Jews came to more vehement expression in the second Christian century, as can be seen, for example, in a sermon discovered in modern times, delivered by a bishop of the city of Sardis named Melito. This sermon is an attack on Jews for rejecting the one God had sent to them for their own salvation. More than that, because Christ was God, Melito believed that Jews, who were responsible for his death, were guilty of murdering God. ... It is one thing for a small, persecuted minority to lash out against others with its powerless rhetoric. But what happened when this belief in Jesus as God came to be the religion of the state? What happened when it became the majority opinion and had the power of empire to back it up? The answer is that the rhetoric used earlier to attack Jews verbally was transformed into political power, so mistreatment, and in mob violence. Jews became legally marginalized under Christian emperors and made second-class citizens with restricted legal rights and limited economic possibilities. By the end of the 4th century, it became illegal for a Christian to convert to Judaism, for a Christian to marry a Jew, and for Jews to build or even repair a synagogue. Accompanying these forms of legislation were acts of violence against Jews, such as the burning of synagogues, which even if not sponsored by the state authorities, were tacitly condoned. Once those who believed that Jesus was God were given secular power, they used that power against their long-time enemies, the Jews who rejected the Christ. ...
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