mountainman

The "conversion" of Constantine.


Here is how Arnaldo Momigliano states the case:

Duvduv

Even if the conversion (on the death bed is true) how would that all by itself explain the supposed ascendancy of the "Christians" in the early 4th situation? And if it was a legend, the question is all the more poignant.

Toto

It wasn't the conversion that was significant by itself. Constantine made Christianity a legal religion and gave it state support.

There is also some dispute about this conversion. Constantine's mother was a Christian, so he was probably raised a Christian.

Duvduv

So the entire extent of the "Christianization" of the empire at that point is believed to simply be the fact that his mother was a Christian (but he wasn't?) until he was baptized at his death, and provided state funding for Christians?

Toto

If you are going to doubt so many things, you should at least doubt that Constantine was not baptized until his deathbed.

Constantine's legalization and state funding for Christianity only make sense if Christianity had gotten some sort of hold on the population before that. For the period before Constantine, there is a study by sociologist Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal, Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (or via: amazon.co.uk), which describes the process.

rlogan

No. People who have been studying this area have whole menus of positions on related matters when they are looking at any particular piece of evidence, and are capable of changing all those defaults to consider this new piece of evidence with.

This tactic in mathematics is called Bayes' Rule, where you have all these priors, incorporate the evidence, and the merged result is called the "posterior distribution".

It is a repeated game context where the priors themselves must undergo whole regime changes as evidence mounts in one direction or another.

You can't get frustrated that answers do not come as "yes" or "no", and one cannot be flippant about dismissing one thing or another without seeing how the coherent whole is affected by it.

Doug Shaver

All sources are biased. If that meant we couldn't believe anything they said, no history could be written. What you do with bias is compensate for it as best you can. You don't use it as an excuse for dismissing the source as worthless.

Besides, Eusebius is not our only source of information about Christianity, in either his own time or earlier times. He is simply the first Christian we know about who at least claimed to be writing a history of his religion. Historians can get useful information out of documents written by people who don't any such claim. What they cannot, and do not attempt, to do is get that information by assuming an equivalence between "Christian" and "liar."

Duvduv

No, I wouldn't say it is worthless at all. There is a lot of interesting stuff to be sifted out but to rely on it for an accurate description of historical events without a grain of salt wouldn't make sense. A church historian is hardly an unbiased source.

Doug Shaver

True, but irrelevant to my comments. I have never suggested that we should do so.

You have already raised the issue of bias. I addressed it, and I don't appreciate your apparent pretense that I didn't.

Duvduv

I wasn't. I was just restating the point, that's all.