Constantine | Christianity and Empire | Paula Fredriksen
Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance
https://www.bu.edu/religion/files/pdf...
PAULA FREDRIKSEN
MORE CHRISTIANS WERE persecuted by the Roman Empire after
Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 312 than before. Within a century of
that momentous event, bishops had become the impresarios of urban violence,
directing the Christian mob’s destruction of synagogues and great pagan temples
from Minorca to the edges of Persia, while the imperial government shut down
traditional public cults in North Africa and in Rome itself. By the reign of the
emperor Justinian, from 527 to 565, recalcitrant pagans risked crucifixion by the
Christian state. And yet Christianity was a religion that prided itself on its
passivism, and on its ethic of an expansive love extended even to enemies; a
religion whose spokesmen, during the long centuries of its own persecution, had
tirelessly argued that true belief cannot be coerced; a religion whose founder,
Jesus of Nazareth, had himself died by Rome’s hand. Why, then, did the emperor
decide to throw his prestige and his patronage behind such a faith? And how did
Christians come so readily to avail themselves of the powers of coercion?
Historians since Gibbon, when addressing these two questions, have linked their
answers. Focusing their inquiry on the inner or spiritual quality of Constantine’s
conversion, they have divided between seeing him as either a sincere (if naive)
believer or a crafty opportunist exploiting the political possibilities of his new
religious allegiance. Their various reconstructions depend upon their view of the
evidence that Constantine continued to support and to appeal to traditional
polytheist cults in the years after 312
The Council of Nicea in 325 CE marked a bad day for the Jews under Roman rule. Constantine, emperor and honorary bishop (though there's some disagreement as to whether he ever actually became a Christian), declared Christianity to be the official religion of Rome. He viewed the Jews as the false Israel which had refused to accept Jesus as the Savior. Laws were made against them.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/...
At the Council of Nicaea, Constantine read out the letter that he would subsequently send to churches everywhere:
“When the question arose concerning the most holy day of Easter it was decreed by common consent to be expedient, that this festival should be celebrated on the same day by all, in every place…
“And truly, in the first place, it seemed to every one a most unworthy thing that we should follow the custom of the Jews in the celebration of this most holy solemnity, who, polluted wretches, having stained their hands with a nefarious crime, are justly blinded in their minds…
“It is fit, therefore, that rejecting the practice of this people, we should perpetuate to all future ages the celebration of this rite, in a more legitimate order…
“Let us then have nothing in common with the most hostile rabble of the Jews.” (In “How the Church Lost the Way,” by Steve Maltz, Saffron Planet, 2009).
“Let us then have nothing in common with … the Jews” sums up one of the key ideas behind much subsequent legislation against them and the sad state of anti-Semitism we see today.
https://free.messianicbible.com/featu...