Elain Pagels, in her book Beyond Belief, mentioned the great revolution of Constantine, a hero to Protestants and Catholics today.
quote:
Furthermore, while transforming the status of Christians, Constantine's revolution changed the status of Jews. As Timothy Barnes,one of the foremost contemporary historians of these events, writes, "Constantine translatedChristian prejudice against Jews into legal disabilities."79 He forbade Jews to enter Jerusalem,except on the one day a year they were to mourn for having lost it, and ordered them not to seekor accept converts to Judaism. Moreover, Constantine "prescribed that any Jew who attempted forcibly to prevent conversion from Judaism to Christianity should be burned alive."80
To strengthen his own alliance with church leaders and to unify fractious Christian groups into
one harmonious structure, Constantine charged bishops from churches throughout the empire to
meet at his expense at Nicaea, an inland city, near a large lake, to work out a standard formulation
of Christian faith. From that meeting and its aftermath, during the tumultuous decades that
followed, emerged the Nicene Creed that would effectively clarify and elaborate the "canon of
truth," along with what we call the canonthe list of twenty-seven writings which would become
the New Testament. Together these would help establish what Irenaeus had envisioneda
worldwide communion of "orthodox" Christians joined into one "catholic and apostolic" church.
After the Nicean Council was finished being discussed, Pagels shows us that Constantine outlawed non Roman Christianity (like Jewish Christianity).
quote:
Eventually the Nicene Creed, approved by the bishops and endorsed by Constantine himself,
would become the official doctrine that all Christians henceforth must accept in order to
participate in the only church recognized by the emperorthe "catholic church." A year before
the bishops met at Nicaea, Constantine had tried to legislate an end to "heretical sects," which, by
one estimate, may have included about half the Christians in the empire.88 The emperor ordered
all "heretics and schismatics" to stop meeting, even in private houses, and to surrender their
churches and whatever property they owned to the catholic church. Although many Christians
associated with teachers such as Valentinus, Marcion, and the prophet Montanus ignored the
law,89 and magistrates often failed to enforce it, such legislation lent enormous support to the
network of catholic churches.
We humans have come a long say since Martin Luther called for all Jews to be forcibly converted while their synagogues get burnt down.
Pope Francis and the Catholics deserve credit for where they are NOW.
Give due credit that we all were born in the 20th/21st century and not the 4th or 16th.
(Though the 4th century still had a lot of ancient texts around, and it wasn't so bad AT THE START)
Progress is not cheap. Lot of people died before we got to this point.
But we are here.
™ Version 4.2
