10-02-2012, 05:00 PM
Quote:Gosh, Tim, calling them "holy joes"? What does that mean, anyway? :unsure: We might get the impression you have an antichristian mindset. :wink:
Bingo!
Quote:By 45-50, there existed a significant population of Christians in the city of Rome itself, as indicated by Paul's epistle to the same from around that date.
The epistle to the Romans doesn't imply a very big christian population. There may have been several hundred or a few thousand but I doubt they were over 1% of Rome's population, if that, at the time.
Quote:There were many forces acting on the demise of the empire, not the least of which was the continued expansionist notions of the government making it impossible to send "Roman" soldiers to guard all the frontiers,
This wasn't a problem in the second century, the Empire's territorial high water mark.
Quote:Empires take money to continue, and money came from expanding and looting neighboring nations. There was nowhere else they could easily find anyone to extract more funds to keep things running.
But they had plenty of money coming in from provinces in the early Imperial period and even later.
