The Pokey Finger of God

The State Cult Hypothesis: “Christianity was primarily the result of a competition between the state cults of Diocletian and Constantine. It was the efforts of Constantine to defeat Diocletian’s Tetrarchy, co-opt the Persian cultural invasion, and subsequently unify the Roman Empire that resulted in the creation of Christianity.”
Constantine was a keen student of history, and [...]

[Read more →]

Here’s something I’ve enjoyed greatly this last week: Stephen Williams’ Diocletian and the Roman Recovery. This book from 1985 was apparently one of the first biographies of the man written in English.
The genius here is the clear and concise comparison between the Empire under the “Good Emperors” and the Empire under “Crisis”. Williams provides several [...]

[Read more →]

I’m starting to become overwhelmed (again) with revising my understanding of 1st-4th Centuries CE. On one hand, I can still clearly point to the council of Nicea in 325AD and say that this was the place at which Constantine (re-)created Christianity. On the other, I’m completely befuddled regarding which characters were real and which were [...]

[Read more →]

Since discovery of PRF Brown’s site[1], I have burned a good many hours both reading and thinking. It’s clear that the “Eusebian Fiction Postulate”[2] has forced me to re-examine what I thought I understood about early church history. I have been relatively pleased, so far, to find that it seems to make more sense, given [...]

[Read more →]

This whole Constantine series has been riddled with errors, and the more I re-read them, the more problems I find. In this first one, I totally trash the Roman Emperors portion of the quiz.
1. Big C was the last Tetrarch of the Roman Empire
In a sense, he was never really an official Tetrarch, having usurped [...]

[Read more →]

Fourth Century Christianity
The History Department of Wisconsin Lutheran College under the direction of Dr. Glen L. Thompson, presents a number of hard-to-find texts, insightful charts, and much relevant documentation regarding the first century of Roman Christianity.
Awesome stuff.

[Read more →]

A recent religion post contained something of a broad statement. It was a conclusion I had drawn without the benefit of third-party confirmation. What I had said was that the term “Christian” did not just apply to those who followed the “Jesus Movement”, but also those who followed any of a dozen Hellenized, Asian mystery [...]

[Read more →]

A recent revelation in my religious studies has taken more than the usual amount of time to digest. The resulting effervescent fountain of nested implications has kept me busy for a while.
Possibly the biggest question for me has always been based on a need to understand how the whole of Western Europe voluntarily abandoned dozens [...]

[Read more →]

Despite over 1500 years of political and cultural dominance in the West, it continues to astound me the number of people who insist that Christians in the West today suffer from any sort of minority persecution. The “True Believer Is the Victim” ploy plays as well in Peoria as in LA, so why not make [...]

[Read more →]

Another one of those questions that got me started as a child, was “How did Christianity get to be so popular?” The more I learned about it, the less I liked it, and I couldn’t get over the fact that the Roman persecution should have driven the whole thing out of existence very early on.
It [...]

[Read more →]