History Of Christianity

"Let us think of all those great ones who suffered under the Inquisition, or who had to conceal their luminous knowledge under the mask of folly or under the most complicated symbols, the key to which—unfortunately for humanity—is almost lost. Let us remember also about those numerous great books, full of light and goodness, the loss of which is irreparable and was considered by the best minds of all later epochs as the greatest misfortune. It is an accepted thing to be indignant about the burning of the Alexandrian Library, but many hypocrites will prefer to be silent about the string of fires lit by the Inquisition which through centuries steadily consumed at the stake the pearls of human genius!... Believe me, the spirit of the Inquisition is still strong. If Christ appeared on Earth today, possibly he would escape crucifixion and the stake, but He would hardly escape severe life imprisonment, with the stamp of Antichrist upon Him. I suggest that you reread Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor.""

"The Grand Inquisitor...addresses Him in these words: "'It is Thou! ... Thou!' ... Receiving no reply, he rapidly continues: 'Nay, answer not; be silent! ... And what couldst Thou say? ... I know but too well Thy answer.... Besides, Thou hast no right to add one syllable to that which was already uttered by Thee before.... Why shouldst Thou now return, to impede us in our work?... But art Thou as well aware of what awaits Thee in the morning?...to-morrow I will condemn and burn Thee on the stake, as the most wicked of all the heretics..."

"Thus, we should find that the law of Reincarnation was rejected by the Council of Constantinople in the sixth century A.D., in spite of the fact that the Gospel itself contains words of Christ that have obvious reference to the law of Reincarnation. If people would take the trouble to study seriously the fundamental Teaching of Christ, and if possible in the original language of the Gospels instead of being satisfied with the school textbooks, they would discover a new meaning in the words, and the true, great Image of Christ would be revealed to their spiritual sight. Long ago it was said by all the Great Teachers that ignorance is the worst crime. And so it really is. What if not the darkness of ignorance bred the Inquisition? The Inquisition is the most frightful, ineradicable stain on the golden vestments of the Christian Church."

"He pauses at the portal of the old cathedral, just as a wee white coffin is carried in, with tears and great lamentations. The lid is off, and in the coffin lies the body of a fair-child, seven years old... 'He will raise the child to life!' confidently shouts the crowd to the weeping mother. The officiating priest... looks perplexed, and frowns... The procession halts, and the little coffin is gently lowered at his feet. Divine compassion beams forth from His eyes, and as He looks at the child, His lips are heard to whisper once more, 'Talitha Cumi'--and 'straightway the damsel arose.' The child rises in her coffin...and, looking round with large astonished eyes she smiles sweetly..."

"A terrible commotion rages among them, the populace shouts and loudly weeps, when suddenly, before the cathedral door, appears the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor himself... He pauses before the crowd and observes. He has seen all. He has witnessed the placing of the little coffin at His feet, the calling back to life. And now, his dark, grim face has grown still darker; his bushy grey eyebrows nearly meet, and his sunken eye flashes with sinister light. Slowly raising his finger, he commands his minions to arrest Him..."

"The following extract is a cutting satire on modern theology generally and the Roman Catholic religion in particular. The idea is that Christ revisits earth, coming to Spain at the period of the Inquisition, and is at once arrested as a heretic by the Grand Inquisitor."

"He comes silently and unannounced; yet all--how strange--yea, all recognize Him, at once! The population rushes towards Him as if propelled by some irresistible force; it surrounds, throngs, and presses around, it follows Him.... Silently, and with a smile of boundless compassion upon His lips, He crosses the dense crowd, and moves softly on. The Sun of Love burns in His heart, and warm rays of Light, Wisdom and Power beam forth from His eyes, and pour down their waves upon the swarming multitudes of the rabble assembled around, making their hearts vibrate with returning love."

"The persecution of the miserable witches and sorcerers, the mediums and the obsessed, was a mere screen. The Inquisition was created to establish unrestrained rule over the poor, frightened population. The most effective means of achieving this was robbery and the annihilation of all those who aspired to bring light into the darkness of the Middle Ages—those who were too independent, who dared to talk about the General Good, who protested against this kingdom of the devil, personified in the representatives of the Inquisition. The establishment of the Inquisition was a horrible caricature of Divine Justice."

"No little group has ever faced greater odds. The Wall Street Journal, in an article critical of the strategy of the opponents, described the forces arrayed against us as: "The full force of an administration whose southern chief needed to establish his civil credentials; and the combined pressure of powerful unions, numerous women's groups, scores of civil rights organizations, and for the first time, intensive lobbying by organized religion." That last line does not apply to all of the men of cloth in this country, nor to those of any one creed or faith. Thousands of them did not permit themselves to have their vestments dragged in the mire of political turmoil. All religious faiths have some expression of peace and good will in their creeds and support the rights of property. But there were many ministers who, having failed completely in their effort to establish good will and brotherhood from the pulpit, turned from the pulpit to the powers of the federal Government to coerce the people into accepting their views under threat of dire punishment. While there is a great deal of difference in the methods applied, the philosophy of coercion by the men of cloth in this case is the same doctrine that dictated the acts of Torquemada in the infamous days of the Spanish Inquisition."

"Today, we experience a dreadful spiritual crisis, a terrible, all-corrupting atheism, which results from narrow, lifeless sectarianism and from choking dogmatism, as well as from the fall of morality among the representatives of churches. We have never spoken, nor will we speak against any religion or church, as it is better to have some religion or church than none at all. But we will always protest against lack of tolerance, morality and knowledge. Priests are necessary, but they should be real spiritual leaders and should be progressive and not continue to exist in the chains of the dark ignorance of the Middle Ages. The spirit of the Inquisition is still very strong. Do you think that if Christ came again on earth now He could avoid crucifixion? At best, would He escape lynching, or imprisonment for life, with the title of Antichrist?"

"Two signs of the authenticity of the Teaching are: first, striving for the Common Weal; second, acceptance of all previous Teachings which are congruous with the first sign. It must be noted that the primary form of a Teaching does not contain negative postulates. But superstitious followers begin to fence in the Covenants with negations, obstructing the good. There results the ruinous formula: “Our creed is the best,” or, “We are the true believers; all others are infidels.” From this point it is a single step to the Crusades, to the Inquisition, and to seas of blood in the name of Those Who condemned killing. There is no worse occupation than forcible imposition of one’s creed."

"It was after the time of Origen’s disciples that the false religion of the priesthood began to spread."

"By sanctifying cruelty, early Christianity set a precedent for more than a millennium of systematic torture in Christian Europe. If you understand the expressions to burn at the stake, to hold his feet to the fire, to break a butterfly on the wheel, to be racked with pain, to be drawn and quartered, to disembowel, to flay, to press, the thumbscrew, the garrote, a slow burn, and the iron maiden (a hollow hinged statue lined with nails, later taken as the name of a heavy-metal rock band), you are familiar with a fraction of the ways that heretics were brutalized during the Middle Ages and early modern period. During the Spanish Inquisition, church officials concluded that the conversions of thousands of former Jews didn’t take. To compel the conversos to confess their hidden apostasy, the inquisitors tied their arms behind their backs, hoisted them by their wrists, and dropped them in a series of violent jerks, rupturing their tendons and pulling their arms out of their sockets. Many others were burned alive, a fate that also befell Michael Servetus for questioning the trinity, Giordano Bruno for believing (among other things) that the earth went around the sun, and William Tyndale for translating the Bible into English. Galileo, perhaps the most famous victim of the Inquisition, got off easy: he was only shown the instruments of torture (in particular, the rack) and was given the opportunity to recant for “having held and believed that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center and moves.”"

"Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an unthinking habit; it had a moral rationale. If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one’s savior is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life: better a few hours now than an eternity later. And silencing a person before he can corrupt others, or making an example of him to deter the rest, is a responsible public health measure. Saint Augustine brought the point home with a pair of analogies: a good father prevents his son from picking up a venomous snake, and a good gardener cuts off a rotten branch to save the rest of the tree. The method of choice had been specified by Jesus himself: “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” Once again, the point of this discussion is not to accuse Christians of endorsing torture and persecution. Of course most devout Christians today are thoroughly tolerant and humane people. Even those who thunder from televised pulpits do not call for burning heretics alive or hoisting Jews on the strappado. The question is why they don’t, given that their beliefs imply that it would serve the greater good. The answer is that people in the West today compartmentalize their religious ideology. When they affirm their faith in houses of worship, they profess beliefs that have barely changed in two thousand years. But when it comes to their actions, they respect modern norms of nonviolence and toleration, a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful."

"In antiquity, when communicating the commandments of God it was customary to cover the face. Later, people tried to overcome matter by proclamation of powers they had not yet mastered. Of course, this gave birth to the Inquisition. The essence of the Inquisition was persecution of the unusual."

"The Inquisition was established not just for the persecution of pitiful witches and sorcerers (mostly mediums), but for the annihilation of all the differently minded people, and all personal enemies of the representatives of the church, the latter having decided to obtain absolute power. First of all, among the so-called enemies of the church were the most enlightened minds, those who were working for the General Welfare, and the true followers of the Testaments of Christ. Indeed, the easiest way to destroy the enemy was by accusing him of being in league with the devil. This devilish psychology the so-called "Guardians of the purity of Christian Principles" attempted to instill into the consciousness of the masses in every possible way. Small wonder that in those days the visions of the nuns and monks had the stamp of the Satanic influence, as they were full of devilish images and all sorts of ugly temptations."

"In the name of Christ great crimes have been committed. Therefore, Christ nowadays clothes Himself in other garments. One must discard all the exaggerations. We are not speaking of slightly embellished works only, as even through the volumes of Origen corrections were slipped in. Therefore, it is time to change conditions in the world."

"During the last three centuries, there has been, by virtue of the Inquisition, a greater enjoyment of peace, and happiness, in Spain, than in the other nations of Europe."

"When we reflect, that the Inquisition, by its restrictions, and authority, would have prevented the French revolution,—it is hard to say, whether the Sovereign, who, wholly, and without reserve, gave up this instrument, would not, in reality, be doing an injury to humanity."

"I cannot agree with your statement: "The merit of the Inquisition was that by burning about ten million witches and sorcerers it prevented the masses from participating in black magic and nocturnal orgies dedicated to Satan," etc. Indeed not! By killing millions of its victims the Inquisition created a most dreadful evil obsession... No, the Inquisition was established not just for the persecution of pitiful witches and sorcerers (mostly mediums), but for the annihilation of all the differently minded people, and all personal enemies of the representatives of the church, the latter having decided to obtain absolute power. First of all, among the so-called enemies of the church were the most enlightened minds, those who were working for the General Welfare, and the true followers of the Testaments of Christ. Indeed, the easiest way to destroy the enemy was by accusing him of being in league with the devil."

"καταμάθετε δὲ τοὺς ἑτεροδοξοῦντας εἰς τὴν χάριν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τὴν εἰς ἡμᾶς ἐλθοῦσαν, πῶς ἐναντίοι εἰσὶν τῇ γνώμῃ τοῦ θεοῦ. περὶ ἀγάπης οὐ μέλει αὐτοῖς, οὐ περὶ χήρας, οὐ περὶ ὀρφανοῦ, οὐ περὶ θλιβομένου, οὐ περὶ δεδεμένου ἢ λελυμένου,οὐ περὶ πεινῶντος ἢ διψῶντος."

"For the first 250 years following the birth, ministry, and death of Christ, the Roman Empire was not an especially nice place to be a Christian. Romans had traditionally been enthusiastic collectors of gods, including the Olympian pantheon and various mystery cults from the east. So to begin with, there was little enthusiasm for this odd Jewish sect, whose members sought to keep alive the memory of the carpenter’s son who had caused a brief stir in Jerusalem during the governorship of Pontius Pilate. The first generations of Christians were scattered among the cities of the Mediterranean, in sporadic communication with one another but in no position to grow their numbers. Ardent believers like the apostle Paul (Saint Paul) traveled far and wide, preaching and writing famous letters to all who would listen (and some who would not), describing the miracle of Christ’s sacrifice. But in an empire that made gods of everything from the sun and planets to its own emperors, and liberally borrowed from the religious practices of those whom it conquered, men like Paul were nothing new; there was little indication during his lifetime in the first century A.D. that his enthusiastic wanderings and writings would eventually plant Christ’s name in the hearts of literally billions of people during the next two thousand years of world history. In A.D. 112, Pliny the Younger wrote to the emperor Trajan to describe a legal investigation he had undertaken in Bithynia (modern Turkey) following complaints against local Christians. Having tortured a number of them, including young girls, Pliny wrote, he had only really been able to establish that they followed a “bad . . . and extravagant superstition” that “is spread like a contagion.”"

"Ταπεινοφρονούντων γάρ ἐστιν ὁ Χριστός, οὐκ ἐπαιρομένων ἐπὶ τὸ ποίμνιον αὐτοῦ."

"The apostles ... did not seek excessive gain by exploiting each other. ... One was not rich while another was destitute, nor did one overeat while another starved. The generosity of those who were well off made good what others lacked, this willingness to share eliminating every anomaly and establishing equality and fairness. ... Inequality still existed, produced not as it is now by the mad struggle for social status, but by a great desire to live more humbly than others. Envy, malice, arrogance and haughtiness were banished, along with all that leads to discord."

"The name [Christians] was derived from Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, suffered under Pontius Pilate, the procurator of Judæa. By that event the sect, of which he was the founder, received a blow, which, for a time, checked the growth of a dangerous superstition; but it revived soon after, and spread with recruited vigour, not only in Judæa, the soil that gave it birth, but even in the city of Rome, the common sink into which every thing infamous and abominable flows like a torrent from all quarters of the world."

"The contextual studies of human skeletal remains in the eastern Mediterranean offer a significant avenue for understanding early Christians and their burial practices. Early Christian cemeteries found in association with churches and basilicas demonstrates definite change in burial practice from the preceding era. The body was positioned in a regular manner in this period burials were single or multiple, and the practice of secondary burial was observed. Unusual funerary deposits point to war, epidemic disease such as plague, or changing cultural practices associated with the treatment of deceased newborn or stillborn infants. While demographic data shows some local variation, there are also many similarities in Christian populations such as the relative ages at death of males and females (28.5 years and 30.7 years, respectively), disease patterns, and chronic health conditions."

"Objects, art, and architecture of an explicitly "Christian" character appear for the first time in the archaeological record in the second and third centuries. While the corpus of known artifacts from this era remains very small and has not increased appreciably in recent decades (e.g. Snyder's 2003 compendium of pre-Constantinian remains is hardly different from the original edition in 1985), Longnecker's recent study of the ubiquity and significance of the cross before Constantine (2015) highlights the potential value in reexamining older material. The paucity of material reflects real demographic factors such as the small number of Christians in this period as well as the relatively limited group of Christian elite who might produce the sort of material signature that archaeologists typically detect. But the absence of evidence may also point to the nature of representation in these early communities, their adherence to Mosaic proscriptions against iconic art, and their blending with the social worlds they inhabited (Finney 1997; Jensen 2000). Indeed, the creation of a distinctly Christian iconography (Bisconti 1999; Rutgers 2000, 82-117; Snyder 2003, 2) and purpose-built places of worship often involved very minor or subtle changes to existing forms (Bisconti, Chapter 11; Britt, Chapter 15). That Christians appear at all in the material culture of this period points to the numerical and material growth of the church, as the catacombs and burial sites in Rome and other places attest (Fiocchi Nicolai, Chapter 4). While it remains very difficult to discern religious identity in the material culture of this period, the emergence of distinctly Christian art or objects nonetheless speaks to common patterns of belief, community, and liturgy."

"Texts number among the earliest extant Christian artifacts and reveal important details about the authors and communities that produced them. Even the physical features of manuscripts themselves can reveal in their material, form, and symbols a wealth of information (Hurtado 2005). Early Christian texts, however, have frequently appeared without substantive archaeological context or provenience, and are regularly the subject of forgery. Scholars have often had to date major discoveries such as the Oxyrhynchus Logia, the well-known Nag Hammadi codices, and numerous new papyrus fragments from Egypt to the first two centuries of Christianity on the basis of evidence internal to the texts (Brooks Hedstrom, Chapter 34). A similar lack of stratigraphic context bedevils the study of inscriptions from Christian burials and catacombs. Letter forms and language date a series of Christian funerary inscriptions in Phrygia and Lycaonia in Asia Minor to the second century indicating that Christian communities felt sufficiently secure to identify with their faith publicly (Talleon, Chapter 26)."

"If late Roman amulets are to be believed, than the dangers talking early Christians and their neighbors were manifold and omnipresent. The texts and images on amulets offer protection from disease, pain, aggressive magic, physical attack, and demonic onslaught, as well as other threats to body and soul. Such apotropaic objects were particularly employed when the dangers were beyond the control of individuals, states, or institutions, and when the precise threat was as yet unknown. The texts, forms, and images employed on amulets give shape on the thoughts and concerns that occupied the waking hours and anxious nights of early Christians - subjects that rarely appear in more public artistic media. Importantly for the study of early Christianity, protective amulets display what are thought to be some of the earliest appearances of distinctively Christian symbols, some dated as early as the late second to third century, where they appear alongside Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Jewish names and symbols. The appearance of Christian symbols among other ritually potent, religiously diverse symbols suggests the gradual emergence of a popular perception that the Christian God and associated celestial beings, saints, names, and symbols were effective when deployed for defense against maleficent forces."

"As Christianity gradually took root and became better known, tensions arose in relation to the pagan environment partly because Christian circles consciously broke with pagan religiosity and behavior, and partly because the new religion was misunderstood. In order to counter the criticism and accusation leveled by the society in which they lived, a number of apologetic writings were composed from the mid-second century onward."

"Mortuary contexts also provide some of the earliest evidence for a Christian visual culture. From the first part of the third century, Christian catacombs featured art depicting biblical scenes of resurrection, salvation, and redemption (Lazarus, Susanna, Daniel in the lions' den, the sacrifice of Isaac), alongside both Christian symbols and pagan images that could convey new meanings (Bisconti, Chapter 11; cf. Bisconti 1999, 100-30 for an overview of common themes). Scholars have likewise long recognized the link between earliest Christian sculpture and themes present in funerary contexts (Kristensen, Chapter 18; Jensen 2000). Parani (Chapter 17) discusses how the earliest lamp forms of the third century with scenes of Noah, Jonah, and the Good Shepherd paralleled funerary art in other media and evoked the Christian concept of redemption and resurrection. Perhaps these mortuary contexts account for the appearance of Christian imagery in other media, although the emergence of amulets with Christian imagery as early as the third or even second centuries seems to indicate a somewhat different purpose; harnessing the power of the Christian god in their daily affairs (Cline, Chapter 19). Despite the troubling absence of secure archaeological contexts, the evidence does point to distinct forms of Christian material culture emerging by the third century that often point to the theological reflection on Christ's victory over death."

"The scientific work of archaeologists adds a significant piece to our reconstruction and understanding of these early Christian martyria. Material culture fills in numerous gaps left by the literary record and provides a necessary corrective to analysis based wholly on the textual record. Indeed, the best work in early Christianity integrates archaeology with other forms of evidence. Archaeology thus contributes a critical piece to a holistic view of the early Christian cult of the martyrs and the means by which Christians created sacred spaces for venerating these martyrs."

"Our source material is far from furnishing a complete picture of how Christians in late antiquity viewed children’s nature, characteristics, and qualities, but we can reconstruct certain aspects of this picture. We have seen how Jesus’ saying about the child as paradigmatic citizen of the kingdom of God was interpreted. According to the fathers, Jesus used small children as examples because they are simple, innocent and pure in a moral sense. This means that they are not sexually active; they have not yet developed sexual desire; they are not plagued by anger and grief; and they are indifferent to the wealth and positions that are associated with honor and status in this world. Besides this, children obey their parents. It is primarily in the Eastern fathers-Origen, John Chrysostom, and especially Clement of Alexandria-that we find such ideas, but we also find in Tertullian the idea that the child is taken as a model because it is not plagued by sexual desire."

"Indeed, early Christian texts such as the Didache and Barnabas incorporate the Jewish tradition about the “two ways” where abortion and expositio are condemned as murder. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the fact that the doctrine of the “”two ways” condemned abortion, expositio, and infanticide: this tradition became an integral part of catechetical instruction and thus helped form early Christian attitudes. We can therefore say that by the beginning of the third century, there was a well established critical attitude to all forms of the murder of children-whether abortion, expositio, or other methods of killing. “Critical” is really too mild a word: these practices were utterly condemned. There already existed a certain measure of opposition to these practies among Roman moral philosophers, and some forms of the limitation of the number of children (including expositio) were rejected by the ruling authorities in some Italian cities, as reflected in the alimenta program mentioned above. Nevertheless, the early Christian attitude represents a considerable intensification of this criticism. The Christian writers go much further in backing up their arguments by means of fundamental principles; we also perceive a greater zeal and commitment, since they understood this question, theologically and ethically, as a matter of living in accordance with the will of God. On the deepest level, the question of refraining from murder was a question of salvation or damnation. I therefore find it difficult to see the Christian critique of expositio as nothing more than an echo and development of other critical voices in contemporary society. The intensity and extent of the Christian critique represents an intensification of existing criticism of Roman praxis and legislation in these fields."

"As the history of research shows, studies on children and childhood in early Christianity are beginning to see the light of day. However, though the studies published up to now provide illuminating discussions of various aspects of this topic, only the work by William A. Strange, and partly the essay by Gillian Clark combine several perspectives, and thus seek to give a general account of how Christians in the early church thought about children and how children were treated. I have already expressed my substantial agreement with these finding, but I have pointed out that many important aspects related to children and childhood receive only a superficial treatment, while some go virtually unmentioned in these work; besides this, only a relatively brief section of Strange’s book deals explicitly with the post-New Testament period. This means that we still need a book offering a comprehensive examination of children and childhood in early Christianity."

"While Strange’s study is the only monograph published on children in the early church, there is also an unpublished doctoral thesis from 1993 by Sarah Currie, which deals with certain aspects of children in early Christianity. Currie states that the “thesis is a study of the interaction between children and ritual practices of antique Christianity” and concludes by stating that “the child” was placed “at the centre of Christian practice, both in its making of symbols and in its everyday reproduction of a community.” A significant part in her argumentation is the way the church fathers used the gospel commands to present children as symbols for appropriate Christian behavior, and how the early church used the metaphor of children in Christian formation and in the construction of Christian identity It is, however, questionable whether Currie’s conclusions are adequately supported by the metaphorical use of children, and of children as examples for adults."

"Given the general attitudes toward children and their place in society in the cultural environment of Christians in antiquity, it should have been remarkable if the church fathers in general had had a heavy focus on children in their writing. There are, in fact, no writings that introduce concern for children and their needs as a subject on the theological agenda. John Chrysostom’s treatise, De Inani Gloria, comes closest to having children and their needs as a main theme. Chrysostom provides advice on child rearing, emphasizing the parents’ grave responsibility to bring up their children in the Christian faith and socialize them into a proper, Christian way of life. However, this treatise, together with sections of a couple of other writings by the same author is almost unique in its focus on children. As a rule, we have to make use of incidental comments about children and childhood in material from this period. In this respect, research on children in the early church faces the same challenges that confronted studies about women in early Christianity. Neither the role of women nor children’s place in society and the church were topics discussed on their own. Because no systematic accounts are provided by ancient sources, modern scholars have to rely on more or less accidental references in the literature."

"If Christians had in fact practiced expositio to any great degree, this would have been so well-known in local society that the apologists’ argument would have been completely implausible; and the fact that the exposure of children does not feature in polemic within the church indicates, to the very least, that this was not very widespread practice. No source in the time before Constantine tells us that Christians practiced the exposure of children. This does not allow us to infer that it never happened, but it suggests that it was a rare occurrence. The situation with regard to abortion was somewhat different. Abortion is more hidden, and this means that it can be employed by the apologists without there being any necessary agreement between the text and the societal reality. And, in fact, we possess Christian texts addressing members of the church from the first half of the third century that indicate that Christians did practice abortion."

"Early Christianity was primarily an urban movement. The original meaning of the word pagan (paganus) was "rural person," or more colloquially "country hick." It came to have religious meaning because after Christianity had triumphed in the cities, most of the rural people remained unconverted."

"There were three main movements within early Christianity. Two did not succeed: Jewish Christianity -- centered in Jerusalem and founded by Jesus' disciples -- and Gnostic Christianity. The third, Pauline Christianity, flourished and evolved into the Christian Church. It was surrounded by a mosaic of other competing religions within the Roman Empire, including Judaism, the Greek state religion, Mithraism, the Roman state religion, and various Mystery religions. With the exception of Judaism, most or all of the competing religions allowed women to have abortions and allowed parents to kill new-born babies by strangulation or exposing them as methods of population control. There are many writings, letters and petitions of early Christian philosophers and Church Fathers which equated abortion with infanticide and condemned both as murder."

"[I]n the words of Friedrich Engels, "Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed peoples: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome" After all, the Bible often directly addresses the poor and downhearted and promises that they will be compensated in heaven, where the "first shall be last, and the last, first." Despite this 'evidence', a consensus has formed among historians of the early church that regardless of biblical assurances to the lower classes, the early Christians were drawn mainly from the ranks of the privileged. E.A. Judge identified the early Christians as recruited mainly from among "a socially pretentious section of the population of big cities." and Abraham Malherbe concluded that the language used by early Christian writers clearly reflects a literate, educated audience. In his detailed study of the church in Corinth in the first century, Gerd Theissen identified wealthy Christians, including members of the "upper classes." Many other historians of the early church have expressed similar views."

"More to the point, what was the lesson that the first Christians drew from the crucifixion? Today such a barbarity might galvanize people into opposing brutal regimes, or demanding that such torture never again be inflicted on a living creature. But those weren’t the lessons the early Christians drew at all. No, the execution of Jesus is The Good News, a necessary step in the most wonderful episode in history. In allowing the crucifixion to take place, God did the world an incalculable favor. Though infinitely powerful, compassionate, and wise, he could think of no other way to reprieve humanity from punishment for its sins (in particular, for the sin of being descended from a couple who had disobeyed him) than to allow an innocent man (his son no less) to be impaled through the limbs and slowly suffocate in agony. By acknowledging that this sadistic murder was a gift of divine mercy, people could earn eternal life. And if they failed to see the logic in all this, their flesh would be seared by fire for all eternity. According to this way of thinking, death by torture is not an unthinkable horror; it has a bright side. It is a route to salvation, a part of the divine plan. Like Jesus, the early Christian saints found a place next to God by being tortured to death in ingenious ways. For more than a millennium, Christian martyrologies described these torments with pornographic relish."

"This analysis demonstrates the disparity between the rabbinic discourse, the Christian and Roman rulings, and the theological and exegetical discourse. It shows how Christians remodeled their biblical heritage according to Greek and Roman legal concepts, namely the Roman adoption and the Greek epiklerate, and treated it as part of inheritance law and child-parent relationships, whereas the rabbis used different adaptations and treated it as part of matrimonial law and sexual relationships. This discussion therefore recontextualizes the legal discourse, positioning the Christian approach to levirate marriage as a complex case of legal transplant and adaptation of a legal heritage."

"The early Christians also extolled torture as just deserts for the sinful. Most people have heard of the seven deadly sins, standardized by Pope Gregory I in 590 CE. Fewer people know about the punishment in hell that was reserved for those who commit them: "Pride: Broken on the wheel. Envy: Put in freezing water. Gluttony: Force-fed rats, toads, and snakes. Lust: Smothered in fire and brimstone. Anger: Dismembered alive. Greed: Put in cauldrons of boiling oil. Sloth: Thrown in snake pits." The duration of these sentences, of course, was infinite. By sanctifying cruelty, early Christianity set a precedent for more than a millennium of systematic torture in Christian Europe. If you understand the expressions to burn at the stake, to hold his feet to the fire, to break a butterfly on the wheel, to be racked with pain, to be drawn and quartered, to disembowel, to flay, to press, the thumbscrew, the garrote, a slow burn, and the iron maiden (a hollow hinged statue lined with nails, later taken as the name of a heavy-metal rock band), you are familiar with a fraction of the ways that heretics were brutalized during the Middle Ages and early modern period."

"A number of books and articles deal with issues related to the question of children and childhood in the early church, for examples on expositio (exposure of children), orphans, infant baptism and upbringing . However, only a few publications focus on the way in which children were understood and how they were treated in general. The fact that nearly all these studies were published in the last decade is a clear indicator, as suggested above, of growing scholarly interest in this subject."

"Students and scholars of the New Testament of Late Antique religion have consequently been on their own in constructing a framework that links historical interpretation with archaeological practice. The reader has much to gain from W. H. C. Frend's historical overview of early Christian archaeology (1996), Grayson Snyder's compilation of archaeological sources before the reign of the emperor Constantine (2003), and the growing studies of specific periods (e.g., Charlesworth 2006; Horsley 1996; Magness 2011) and cities and regions (e.g., Burns and Jensen 2014; Magness 2012; Nasrallah, Bakirtzis, and Friesen 2010). The steady output of a generation of historians of art and architecture had led to foundational treatments of Christian buildings and visual culture (e.g., Jensen 2000; Krautheimmer 1965; Mathews 1999; White 1996; Yasin 2012b), as well as a comprehensive encyclopedia of Christian Art and Archaeology (Finney 2017). The development of medieval archaeology in the West, Byzantine archaeology in the Levant and Near East, and Late Antique archaeology has likewise produced a sizable corpus of publications that establish the broader social, religious, political and economic contexts of Late Antiquity and early Byzantium from material evidence (see, e.g., the Late Antique Archaeology series edited by Luke Lavan and Rutger et al. forthcoming). Regional approaches shaped by sectarian, national, colonial, and disciplinary interests have also contributed to our understanding of the early Christian world. Despite a strong academic and popular interest in the archaeology of early Christianity, there exist no comprehensive handbooks that synthesize archaeological evidence specifically related to early Christianity and survey debates in the field."

"Leaving his beloved teacher Origen behind in Caesarea Maritimma about the year 240, bound for his distant home in the province of Pontus, Gregory of Neocaesarea (Niskar) turned to a catastrophic flight of rhetoric: I may be going to prosecute no safe journey, as it sometimes fares with one who quits some safe and peaceful city; and it is indeed but too likely that, in journeying, I may fall into the hands of robbers, and be taken prisoner, and be stripped and wounded with many strokes, and be cast forth to lie half-dead somewhere. Many miles of road lay ahead of him. Edward Gibbon would say of the Roman roads of the Antonine age that they 'united the subjects of the most distant provinces by an easy and familiar intercourse'; but however 'easy and familiar' these roads supposedly were, cities were much safer. For the modern historians of the early churches cities have had a similar appeal. Christianity, Thomas A. Robinson notes, 'was, supposedly an urban religion'. Noting how widespread this view is ('almost every recent scholar of the early church' had held it), Robinson cites powerful names - Ramsay MacMullen and W.H.C. Frend - before naming Wayne A. Meeks (in The First Urban Christians) as the historian 'primarily responsible for the now near-universal assumptions of the urban character of early Christianity'."

"The early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators"' But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide, and gladiatorial contests.Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an arch supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are."

"Robinson has snatched away the comfort of the urban thesis. The idea that at the time of the Edict of Milan (313) some 10 per cent of the population of the Roman empire was Christian, 6 million persons out of a population of 60 million, has been (he observes) commonly put forward as a working assumption for the size of the Christian movement. But the Roman empire was largely rural with as few as 10 per cent of the population living in cities. If the rural Christian population approximated to zero, the cities would then have to be thought to be (at least) largely Christian - which ample evidence shows that they were not. Therefore, the numbers usually cited in recent work for the size of the Christian population cannot stand; and neither can the claim of no substantial number of Christians in rural areas. The model normally drawn on in studying the growth of early Christianity, therefore, is no longer plausible. Like Gregory, the historian must leave the 'safe and peaceful city' behind."

"The public veneration of saints in the Christian Church is known to have existed in the 2nd century. As will be shown below, it developed in local communities; it was based on the saint's tomb; it was a consequence of the general belief that a martyr who shed his blood for Christ was certainly in Heaven and able to exercise intercessory prayer on behalf of those who invoked him. It has often been asserted that the cult of saints was both a borrowing from and a substitute for the polytheistic cults of the ancient Graeco-Roman world. In its crude form the theory is completely unconvincing, especially when the nature of the cults is considered and placed in its context of Christian doctrine, worship, and life. But it can readily be conceded that many eternal elements such as anniversaries, shrines, incubation, and iconography have all been at the very least deeply influenced by pagan Mediterranean models. Nevertheless, the cults of saints originated in the beliefs and practice of Jewry and early Christianity."