Christianity in the roman empire.

[Jona Lendering]

Even more deplorable is your statement about the church “persecuting” pagans to stimulate its growth. The Church did not persecute pagans.

I strongly agree. The death of Hypathia is the obvious counter-example, but it must be noted that this was exceptional, and I am not sure whether the over-enthusiastic Alexandrian mob had orders from the Patriarch to follow the intelligent woman. Besides, I can not find a second example of a martyr for Paganism.

If the Church was intolerant, it was against fellow-Christians. Much more energy was devoted to the fight against Arianism than to the struggle against Paganism. And this is not just born out by our Christian sources, but is also proved externally: Arians, Nestorians, and so-called Monophysites settled in the Sassanian Empire, but there is no evidence for Pagan emigrants.

It should also be noted that to most Pagans, conversion was easy. Pagan intellectuals had, since the second century, developed ideas that behind the multitudes of divinities was one single God, and in the fourth century, Christianity presented itself in this fashion too. Becoming a Christian did not exclude the possibility to keep to certain Pagan cult practices. There was no thought police - yet: of course, by the end of the fifteenth century, the Inquisition had been founded.

Final remark: I deliberately let out the Church's attitude towards those Pagans who venerated, to judge from their material culture, Dionysus and the other gods, had "pagan" names, and lived in Palestine. After the fourth century, they were increasingly Judaised. It seems that Church and State unitedly acted to create a Jewish nation, even though its members had become fully integrated into Pagan society. I stress "seems" because this is the Schwartz hypothesis, and although I was impressed by his book Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B. C. E. to 640 C. E., I cannot judge the quality of his arguments.