Christianity in the roman empire.

[Jona Lendering]

I'm a Christian but I would stand up for Timotheus's post/opinion.

I considered writing something along the same lines, but decided that David, as a moderator, might know more than we do. There may have been complaints that were more reasonable than I can right now imagine. That being said, I agree that Tim's remark was within what I consider, with what I know now, to be the limits of decent debate.

I think that the view of what ‘the Christian church’ could do is a bit clouded by a view of the later Medieval Roman Catholic church, and it’s role in politics of the time. And even then the Pope was not an absolute ruler with direct power to command millions. :wink:

Exactly. Perhaps it must be stressed that this view of the later Church has little resemblance to reality. It is for a large part constructed from polemics by (a) the Reformers and (b) the Enlightenment, which remained plausible because the Roman Catholic Church in the nineteenth century did indeed become extremely conservative. One of the greatest surprises of the past half century of scholarship was, I think, the discovery that the Spanish Inquisition was never the ruthless organization that it had become in the eyes of Protestants and authors like Voltaire (recommended reading: Henri Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition).