The Triumph Of Christianity: How A Forbidden Religion Swept The World, Ehrman - B

                                                       "The ancient triumph of Christianity proved to be the single greatest cultural transformation our world has ever seen." Christianity supplanted religions that had survived for thousands of years,  insisting that only the worship of Jesus Christ was allowed. By changing the world and the way people looked at it, Christianity reset the course of history. The concept of dominance of one person over another was replaced with the ideas of equality and  service to others. From this flowed societies with a concern for the sick, poor and marginalized. "This effected the history of the West in a way that simply cannot be calculated." The pivotal point in the success of the religion was its adoption by Constantine. "Few events in the history of civilization have proved more transformative than the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity in the year 312 CE." Thus, Christianity went from being persecuted to enjoying imperial privileges and became the official religion of the empire 80 years later.
                                                           The one other conversion just as significant preceded Constantine's by three centuries, and that was of Paul soon after the death of Jesus. Paul believed he was called by God to bring the religion of Jesus to the gentiles of the world. He thus greatly expanded the possibilities of the new religion by bringing it beyond the Jews of the empire. He spread the word from Galilee to Greece and the Balkans.  "The death and resurrection of Jesus brought a salvation that was not tied to explicit Jewish identity; ...the salvation of Christ was as efficacious for gentiles as well as Jews; ....pagans who came to believe in Christ did not first have to convert to Judaism". The Jews never could accept Christ because it was beyond their comprehension that a lower class carpenter, a criminal brutally executed by the Romans, could be their messiah. It fell to the former pagans to adopt the new religion in increasing numbers.  Paganism itself was a characterization that Christians adopted to refer to the polytheists of the empire who were neither Jews or Christians. The new faith spread because of the evangelistic actions of its new adherents and its requirement of exclusivity meant it would not be absorbed into the polytheistic world by becoming a new add-on. Christian proselytizers raised the concept of an afterlife and effectively used a fear of hell and its very specific forms of eternal punishment to bring newcomers into the fold. From the time of Constantine, when Christianity claimed a small percent of the empire, the faith grew to encompass half of the 60 million people of Rome by 400 CE.  When he built Constantinople, Constantine had many of the pagan statues and idols throughout the empire melted down for use in adorning his new city. Later in the century, Theodosius I proscribed animal sacrifice, and pagan cults and proclaimed Christianity the state religion.
                                                           "However one evaluates the measure of the case, whether Christianization of the West was a triumph to be treasured or a defeat to be lamented, no one can deny it was the most monumental cultural transformation our world has ever seen,"