Were Christians martyrs to pagan intolerance?
Quite the opposite: it was the first Christians who began to divide citizens between Christians and pagans. Until the adoption of Christianity as the only official cult, no one identified others by their religion...
Today religion is no longer defining us in the West.
It has been a long road back to pagan tolerance since the first Christian rulers issued laws condemning those who were not Christian to death. Christianity was imposed in its beginnings: baptism or execution. That would explain its rapid extension...
Wasn't Christianity closer to what human rights are today?
That is what Edward Gibbon tells us when he states that Christianity prevailed because it was much more progressive and anticipated human rights.
Saint Paul overcame Jewish nativism: anyone could now become a Christian.
That is another interested reading from the Christian ideologues and historians themselves, but if you read the few texts that survived, such as those of Porphyry or Celsus, the burning ordered by the Christians, such as some of Julian, the emperor nicknamed by them "apostate" ...
Weren't most early Christians slaves redeemed by their faith?
...Juliano already pointed out that the ten commandments (you will not kill, you will not steal, you will honor your parents...) were all already incorporated into the majority of pre-Christian laws.
Wasn't slavery the norm before Christianity?
There is no historical evidence that Christianity or Christian rulers prohibited slavery...
That's not what we were taught.
What they did prohibit the slaves from being anything other than Christians and forced them to worship only one God: the Christian. And Juliano already points out that this imposition was regressive. Saint Paul states that “if you are a slave, you must remain one.”
Does that single quote prove that Christianity was slave-owning?
There is no historical evidence that Christian rulers ended slavery; on the contrary, those who escaped were punished more.
Do you also deny that Christians were martyrs in circuses?
Some were and, indeed, that is true: Christian rulers prohibited gladiator fights...
Well, you finally admit something...
...But only because they were too expensive. But there are also Christian sources, true, that affirm that they were cruel.
Why are we Christians, then? Just because of the fear of our ancestors?
History does not always prevail for reasons, but also for coincidences. And Constantine, who imposed Christianity, had the enormous merit or luck or both of surviving 30 years in a profession, that of emperor, as risky as that of gladiator, while Julian barely lasted two. And 30 years are already enough to establish a lasting cult...
...Bimillennial: won't it have some virtue?
Constantine had the task of uniting an empire, a God, an emperor...
The European Union is still the resurgent echo of that empire: it did not do so badly.
Constantine is also interesting: he had supernatural visions – something natural then – and the sun stopped for him, nothing new either under the Roman sun, as it stopped for Augustus or Aurelius, who see gods, also those of the enemy, just when They are interested in agreeing.
Why make a pact with the God of the poor Jews, then already defeated and dispersed?
For politics, and that is why today we find coins of his empire in which he is seen next to Christ on the cross and, next to both, the God Apollo and the three on Olympus... when he agreed to a truce.
How many centuries did it take to eradicate paganism from the empire to its ends?
Centuries, in fact. Consider that in the year 420 an imperial edict was promulgated condemning the pagans to be “struck down by the avenging sword”…
Why is Julian the Apostate so popular and investigated by historians today?
Because it embodies the perfect counterfactual history with fascinating questions: what would have happened if Julian had lived as long as Constantine? What would Europe be like today if it had not been Christian for 2,000 years?
Just for what could have been and wasn't?
These questions also explain what happened in the end. And the emperor Julian was educated in Christianity and rejected it to return to the Hellenic cults: he was an imperial Christian pagan. It is a pity that almost all of his writings were destroyed and we hardly know about him and his thoughts because of what Christians wrote against him.
