Roman influence on Christianity

As we discussed this week Christianity went from a minority religion to a major religion in Rome. The person that helped with this huge shift from repressing Christian to accepting them was Constantine. His adoption of the religion started the acceptance of the religion and it continue to gain popularity when he started to give Christians benefits such as tax breaks. Until Constantine Christianity was seen as a cult. It also gained popularity because people could chose to be Christians, they were not forced to. Christianity started to become a powerful part of society in Rome. This religion however was so foreign to the Romans because they were used to having many gods for many different thing and Christianity believes in one god who is all powerful. The buildings that were built to be churches ended holding government meeting during time when church was not being held. Also Christianity started to form itself around the Roman government model. The early churches modeled their leadership positions after the Roman government. There is many other ways that Christianity became "Romanized" it is even said that Christian holidays such as Easter and Christmas were changed so that they correlated with popular Roman festivals of the day. Many of these details (i.e. when to celebrate Christmas and Easter.) were debated out at the Council of Nicaea in which Constantine sat as the debate settler. He would let two parties argue their points and then would decide which one he felt was right.




http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/sbrandt/nicea.htm