The Triumph of Christianity

How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World

Bart D. Ehrman

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781501136719
• eBook ISBN: 9781501136726
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History

The “marvelous” (Reza Aslan, bestselling author of Zealot), New York Times bestselling story of how Christianity became the dominant religion in the West.

How did a religion whose first believers were twenty or so illiterate day laborers in a remote part of the empire became the official religion of Rome, converting some thirty million people in just four centuries? In The Triumph of Christianity, early Christian historian Bart D. Ehrman weaves the rigorously-researched answer to this question “into a vivid, nuanced, and enormously readable narrative” (Elaine Pagels, National Book Award-winning author of The Gnostic Gospels), showing how a handful of charismatic characters used a brilliant social strategy and an irresistible message to win over hearts and minds one at a time.

This “humane, thoughtful and intelligent” book (The New York Times Book Review) upends the way we think about the single most important cultural transformation our world has ever seen—one that revolutionized art, music, literature, philosophy, ethics, economics, and law.

Chapter 1

The Beginning of the End: The Conversion of Constantine

Few events in the history of civilization have proved more transformative than the conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity in the year 312 CE. Later historians would sometimes question whether the conversion was genuine. But to Constantine himself and to spiritual advisors close to him, there appears to have been no doubt. He had shifted from one set of religious beliefs and practices to another. At one point in his life he was a polytheist who worshiped a variety of pagan gods—gods of his hometown Naissus in the Balkans, gods of his family, gods connected with the armies he served, and the gods of Rome itself. At another point he was a monotheist, worshiping the Christian god alone. His change may not have been sudden and immediate. It may have involved a longer set of transitions than he later remembered, or at least said. There may have been numerous conversations, debates with others, and reflections within himself. But he dated the event to October 28, 312. At that point he began to consider himself a Christian.¹

The results were tremendous, but not for the reasons often claimed. It is not that Constantine eventually made Christianity the state religion. Christianity would not become the official religion of Rome until nearly eight decades later, under the reign of Emperor Theodosius I. And it is not that Constantine’s conversion was the single decisive turning point in the spread and success of the Christian religion, the one moment that changed all history and made the Christian conquest a success. At the rate it was growing at the time, Christianity may well have succeeded otherwise. If Constantine had not converted, possibly a later emperor would have done so—say, one of his sons. Instead, what made Constantine’s conversion revolutionary was that the imperial apparatus that before then had been officially opposed to Christianity and worked hard, in some regions of the empire, to extirpate it completely suddenly came to support it, promoting Christianity instead of persecuting it. Constantine did not make Christianity the one official and viable religion. He made it a licit religion, and one that enjoyed particular, even unique imperial privileges and funding. This support did indeed advance the Christian cause. The recognition that this faith was now favored from on high appears to have contributed to the already impressive numbers adding to the growth of Christianity, including the conversion of increasing numbers of imperial and local elites whose resources had until then funded (and thus made possible) the religious practices of their pagan world.

As important as Constantine’s conversion was to the welfare of the Christian movement, it is surprisingly difficult to describe what he converted from. Modern historians of religion who speak of conversion can mean a variety of things by it.² Possibly it is simplest to keep the meaning broad and use the term to refer to a decided shift away from one set of religious practices and beliefs to another. That certainly happened with Constantine. At a moment that seemed, at least later in hindsight, to be clear and well-defined, he stopped being a pagan and became a Christian.

Conversion was not a widely known phenomenon in antiquity. Pagan religions had almost nothing like it.³ They were polytheistic, and anyone who decided, as a pagan, to worship a new or different god was never required to relinquish any former gods or their previous patterns of worship. Pagan religions were additive, not restrictive.

Christians, on the other hand, did require a choice. Converts were expected to forgo the worship of all the other gods and revere the Christian god alone. Only Judaism had similar expectations and demands. Among pagans—that is, among the 93 percent or so of the world that by custom, habit, and inclination worshiped multiple gods—worshiping a range of divine beings was not a religion that anyone chose. It was simply what people did. Being a pagan meant participating in the various religious activities associated with the official state gods, local municipal gods, personal family gods, and any other gods that were known to be involved with human experience. For everyone except Jews, and then Christians, this was more a way of life than a conscious decision. It was a matter of doing what everyone had always done, very much like participating in the life of the local community, with the exception that most people were involved with only one community but could be engaged in the worship of a virtually incalculable number of gods.

For that reason paganism should not be thought of as a solitary “thing” but as hundreds—thousands—of things.⁴ Those who practiced traditional religions—in other words, just about everyone—would never have recognized themselves as participating in something called “paganism” or, indeed, any kind of “ism.” There was not a thing there, nothing that could be named so as to sum up the totality of all the non-Jewish religious observances or beliefs or cultic practices of prayer and sacrifice ubiquitous in the culture. No pagan would have understood what it would mean to call themselves pagan. They were simply acting in time-honored ways of worshiping the gods.

Constantine, like everyone else who was not raised Jewish or Christian, participated in this worship. But he gave it up to follow the one god of the Christians. The narrative of how Constantine became a Christian is both intriguing and complex. It involves issues that we today would consider strictly social and political and other issues that we would consider strictly religious. But in the early fourth century—as in all the centuries of human history before that time—these two realms, the sociopolitical and the religious, were not seen as distinct. They were tightly and inextricably interwoven. On just the linguistic level, there were no Greek or Latin terms that neatly differentiated between what we today mean by “politics” and “religion.” On the practical level, the gods were understood to be closely connected with every aspect of the social and political life of a community, from the election of officials, to the setting of the annual calendar, to the laws and practices that governed social relations, such as marriage and divorce, to the administration of civil justice, to the decisions and actions of war, to all the other major decisions of state. The gods were active in every part of social and political life, and the decisions made and actions taken were done in relation to them.

On the imperial level this meant that it was widely known—and genuinely believed by most—that it was the gods who had made the empire great. The empire responded by sponsoring and encouraging the worship of the gods. Doing so would promote the commonweal. There was no sense that there was, should be, or could be a separation of church and state.

Starting in the mid-third century, the emperors themselves sensed this full well and acted accordingly. That is why, some years before Constantine converted, the Christian religion had been persecuted by order of the state. The Christians refused to worship or even acknowledge the gods of the empire, claiming in fact that these were evil, demonic beings, not beneficent deities that promoted the just cause of the greatest empire the world had ever known. The refusal to worship was seen by others to be dangerous to the well-being of the empire and thus to the security of the state. And so the decision to persecute—which seems to us, perhaps, to be a strictly religious affair—was at the time inherently sociopolitical as well. The Christians were to be removed like a cancer from the body politic. No emperor came to believe this more firmly—in no small part because of the alarming growth of this cancer—than Constantine’s predecessor on the throne, Diocletian, who instigated the most vicious empire-wide persecution ever seen. Constantine himself was later to rescind the demands of this persecution. But while it was still in process, he converted.

This conversion proved to be a linchpin of imperial history, not just for the fate of the Christian religion but also for the workings of the Roman state. We will look at the persecution of Diocletian in a later chapter, and at the broader biography of Constantine in another. For now, we are interested specifically in his conversion and how it radically changed the balance of power, both for the persecuted Christians and for the running of the Roman government. To make sense of the conversion we need to understand some of the political and religious backdrop to the story.

CONSTANTINE’S RISE TO POWER

By the end of the third century CE, the empire was too vast and complex to be ruled by one emperor. It reached from Britain to Iraq and entailed virtually all areas connected to the Mediterranean, north into modern Europe, south into North Africa and Egypt, and east into Palestine and Syria, all the way to Persia. For many years it had been riven by internal disputes and foreign invasions. The year 284 CE is usually cited as the end of the major upheavals collectively known as the “Crisis of the Third Century,” a half century filled, internally, with imperial assassinations and usurpations involving some twenty-one legitimate emperors and thirty-eight usurpers. In addition, the empire had, for a time, been fractured by two breakaway states, one in the far west and one in the east. These had literally fragmented the empire and made the actual “Roman” state a slice of its former self. That is not to mention the incursions on the northern borders by barbarian hordes.⁵

The brilliant emperor-general Aurelian (ruled 270–75 CE) had defeated and reintegrated the breakaway states, but it was not until the reign of Diocletian that a fuller sense of order was restored internally, and with it a relatively secure border on the frontier. Diocletian was one of the truly great political administrators of Roman antiquity. His predecessors, including Aurelian, had never managed to bring any semblance of stability: Diocletian’s eight immediate predecessors had all been murdered, some of them within weeks or even days of taking the throne. He himself was to enjoy a reign of over twenty years. Diocletian was the first emperor of Rome to abdicate voluntarily.

Diocletian is best known to casual readers of Roman history as the great persecutor of Christians. This he certainly was, as we will see more fully in chapter 7. But, even more, he was an insightful and creative leader and administrator. Among other things, he devised the first sensible system for the transfer of power from one emperor to the next. Despite its theoretical virtues, however, the system broke down just over a year after the first transfer occurred, and Constantine himself played a definitive role in that collapse, leading to his own assumption of imperial power in a reign that was second only to that of the great Caesar Augustus himself in both length and historical consequence.

From the time of Augustus, the first of the Roman emperors, the major political problem at the pinnacle of power had always been the succession. Once an emperor died, who was to succeed him? Augustus himself—unlike many of those who came in his wake—certainly had plans, and they always involved heirs who actually shared his bloodline. But one by one these potential successors died—or, if we believe the rumors, were assassinated—until virtually the last man standing was Augustus’s stepson Tiberius. As emperor, Tiberius too had no legitimate heirs to the throne, and so the world inherited Gaius, otherwise known as the infamous Caligula. The succession went from there, not always happily.

Diocletian decided that there had to be a better way. He himself reigned with an iron fist for nearly a decade before carrying out his design. He devised a system of succession based not on dynastic ties but on merit. It was a plan to keep the empire completely unified, but ruled through a college of four emperors, an administrative unit known as the Tetrarchy (“rule of four”). There would be two senior emperors, each labeled an Augustus. Beneath each of them would be a junior emperor called a Caesar. The Caesars would be chosen based on their experience and qualifications. They would not be blood relatives of the Augusti.

And so it happened. Diocletian became the senior emperor of the East, with a military man named Galerius as Caesar; another military officer, Maximian, became senior emperor of the West, with Constantius—the father of Constantine—as his Caesar. Even though each emperor had principal responsibility for a distinct set of provinces, the empire was not technically divided into four units. Instead, the four were construed as co-rulers of a unified empire. The decisions of one were affirmed by the four; the conquests and victories of one were credited to the others. There were four emperors, but the empire was one.

Most important was the rule of succession that Diocletian devised. When an Augustus died or abdicated, his Caesar would then “move up” and assume his vacated position, and a new Caesar would be chosen by the most senior of the two Augusti.⁶ This new junior emperor would not be the natural son of the newly elevated Augustus but a figure uniquely qualified for the position. And so, in theory, the system could continue indefinitely, since successors would always be chosen—well in advance—for their abilities to perform the tasks of office, not because of the accidents of birth. It was a completely novel and rather ingenious conception.

It was also doomed to failure. The children of current rulers could hardly be expected to accept the new system passively, and they didn’t.

Because of health issues, after a long and successful reign of over two decades, Diocletian decided to retire from office on May 1, 305. For the sake of a smooth succession, he compelled his rather unwilling co-Augustus, Maximian, to do the same, to make way for the two Caesars, Galerius and Constantius, to rise to the senior offices. For their replacements, according to the principles that Diocletian had devised, two Caesars were chosen as junior emperors: Maximin Daia (not to be confused with the outgoing Augustus Maximian) to serve with Galerius in the East, and Severus to serve with Constantius in the West. There was now a “Second Tetrarchy.”

At the time it may have seemed like a smooth and unproblematic transition, and in a sense it was—until one of the new Augusti died. Then the plan of succession based on qualifications ran afoul of both the dynastic principle and the army.

The background to the story involves the new Augustus of the West, Constantius, and his son Constantine.⁷ Constantine had risen through the ranks of military and political service over the years, as was natural for a scion of such a high-ranking official. He had served as a junior military officer in the court of Diocletian and then, for a brief time, under Galerius. When Galerius was promoted to be the new Augustus of the East, he realized the potential problem with Constantine, who could well expect an appointment to the level of Caesar in accordance with the traditional dynastic principle. But Constantine was not named to the position and almost certainly harbored some resentment and, possibly, some hope of remedy. If later reports are to be believed, Galerius’s solution to this potential problem was to remove Constantine from the scene by regularly putting him in harm’s way during various military endeavors. One later account, probably apocryphal, claims that Galerius, for his own amusement, once assigned Constantine to fight a lion one-on-one.

Constantine emerged from these attempts unscathed. Soon after Constantius was elevated to the level of Augustus, he requested his son’s transfer to his own service. Whether out of relief or in a moment of weakness, Galerius ceded to the request. In later propaganda we are told that Constantine fled as quickly as he could—before Galerius could change his mind—and, taking the fastest and only state-sponsored imperial route on horseback, hamstrung the horses left behind at each way station to prevent Galerius from fetching him back on second thought.

Constantine, in any event, made it to Gaul, where his father was stationed, and joined him in his military campaigns on the borders, accompanying him to Britain to beat back incursions coming across Hadrian’s Wall. It was there that Constantius took ill and died on July 25, 306.

That is when the dominoes began to fall. In designating his successor in the Tetrarchy, Constantius did not choose one of his great military commanders based on personal merit but instead selected his son Constantine—returning precisely to the rule of dynastic succession that Diocletian had wanted to avoid. The problem is that Maximian, the rather reluctantly retired Augustus of the East, also had an adult son, named Maxentius, who had, along with Constantine, felt slighted by being bypassed for a place in the imperial college at his father’s abdication. Once Maxentius saw that Constantine’s army had invoked the dynastic principle by acclaiming him ruler, he pushed to receive the same privilege. With his urging, the Praetorian Guard in the city of Rome proclaimed him emperor. He assumed control of Rome and Italy, and now the “Rule of Four” had become five. To complicate matters further, Maxentius brought his father Maximian out of retirement to assist him, so that now the five were six. But not for long.

CIVIL WAR WITH MAXENTIUS

The emperors Galerius, Severus, and Constantine all—rightly—considered Maxentius a usurper, and knew they needed to dispose of him. There was no choice but civil war. It was not easy or swift. Galerius, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgments
• Time Line
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Beginning of the End: The Conversion of Constantine
• Chapter 2: Back to the Beginning: The Conversion and Mission of Paul
• Chapter 3: The Religious World of Conversion: Roman Paganism
• Chapter 4: Reasons for the Christian Success
• Chapter 5: Miraculous Incentives for Conversion
• Chapter 6: The Growth of the Church
• Chapter 7: Christians Under Assault: Persecution, Martyrdom, and Self-Defense
• Chapter 8: The First Christian Emperor
• Chapter 9: Conversion and Coercion: The Beginnings of a Christian Empire
• Afterword: Gains and Losses
• Appendix
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright